Essential Relativity: Special, General, and Cosmological (Texts and Monographs in Physics) [Hardcover]

Wolfgang Rindler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1977 | ISBN-10: 038707970X | ISBN-13: 978-0387079707 | Edition: 2

From the reviews of the second edition: "It is the book par excellence for the nonrelativist who is at home with mathematics...What gives the book its outstanding quality is Professor Rindler's profound understanding of the ideas behind the formulas and his remarkable ability to share this understanding with the reader. In graceful prose he makes deep things simple. Under his guidance the basic concepts come vividly to life and acquire a force of their own so that the mathematics takes on a secondary role...With its combination of substantial mathematics, insight, and physical down-to-earthedness, the book is a delight in every way." American Mathematical Monthly

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 284 pages
• Publisher: Springer-Verlag; 2 edition (May 1977)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 038707970X
• ISBN-13: 978-0387079707
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,634,188 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very well written, February 16, 2002

By 

Dr. Lee D. Carlson (Baltimore, Maryland USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Essential Relativity: Special, General, and Cosmological (Theoretical and Mathematical Physics) (Paperback)

As a modern textbook in the theory of relativity, this book is rare, in that its goal is to give the reader a conceptual introduction to the theory, and not just mathematical formalism. The author also does not hesitate to include some philosophical argumentation wherever needed. It is written for the advanced undergraduate, and will prepare such a reader for more advanced reading in the subject.

The first chapter of the book is the best, for it is a comprehensive discussion of the origins of the theory of relativity as one that rejected the assertion that space and time were absolute. The author also gives an interesting historical discussion of Lorentz's ether theory, wherein Lorentz hypothesized that bodies moving through the ether undergo a contraction, and he discovered a time transformation that implied that clocks moving through the ether run slow. As the author points out, Lorentz thought such considerations were purely mathematical, and not important physically. In addition, in the section on Mach's principle, the author discusses briefly the work of Dennis Sciama who showed that the 1872 gravitational theory of F. Tisserand included Mach's principle. I was not aware of this work, and it motivated me to do further reading on the subject. The author also gives several examples to show that Mach's principle is not physically vacuous, but has observational consequences.

Chapter two overviews the kinematic consequences of the special theory of relativity. The most interesting part of this discussion was the section on the formulation of special relativity without assuming the invariance of the speed of light. The author shows that the principle of relativity implies that either all inertial frames are related by Galilean transformations, or all are related by Lorentz transformations with the same (postive) velocity (squared).

A discussion of optical effects follows in chapter 3. One unexpected and interesting result in this chapter is that a moving sphere has a circular outline to all observers because of length contraction.

Some of the mathematical formalism needed in special relativity is overviewed in chapter four. The class of four-vectors and four-tensors is defined, and the light cone geometry discussed in detail.

The relativistic mechanics of point particles is covered in chapter five. Such a theory is cast in the language of four-vectors, and the author explains nicely the mass-energy equivalence, analyzes scattering from a relativistic standpoint in the center of momentum frame, and shows how Newtonian mechanics is altered in the relativistic realm. He also spends a little time on relativistic continuum mechanics, via the energy tensor of the simplest continua: dust.

The connection between relativity and electrodynamics is outlined in chapter six. The material is standard and found in most books on relativity.

The author begins the study of general relativity in chapter seven with some elementary considerations of the differential geometry of curved surfaces and also Riemannian spaces. The author endeavors, rightfully, to explain the mathematics in a way that is intuitive as possible, rather than hitting the reader with highly abstract formalism.

He then presents the mathematica foundations of general relativity in chapter eight. After a brief review of tensor calculus, the author considers the gravitational field equations in a vacuum, emphasizing their nonlinearity. This is followed by a detailed discussion of the famous Schwarzschild solution. In addition, he considers a particular exact solution of the Einstein field equations in a vacuum, namely a plane-fronted gravitational wave. Although not physical, this solution illustrates some important properties of general gravitational radiation.

The author ends the book with a fairly detailed overview of cosmology. The difficulties in the pre-relativistic cosmology are discussed, one of the more interesting being the consideration of the Newtonian gravitational field inside a cavity resulting from the removal of a finite sphere from a static universe. Recognizing that Poisson's equation does not have a constant solution led to the alteration of the Newtonian potential and thus a modification of the Poisson equation. As the author observes, this move to get a static Newtonian universe is formally the same as what Einstein did via the introduction of the cosmological constant in his field equations (also to get a static universe). The author also considers the Robertson-Walker, Milne, and Friedman universe, and compares these to what is known observationally.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars subtle approach to SR and GR, July 14, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Essential Relativity: Special, General, and Cosmological (Texts and Monographs in Physics) (Paperback)

Although not the most comprehesive text on
the subject (see Thorne's tome, Gravitation),
Essential Relativity is perhaps the most
fulfilling book from which to learn both special and general relativity on a graduate school level.
Flipping through the pages, one cannot help
but notice that it often reads like a novel.
For the student or the adventurous, a wide
variety of problems are found in an appendix.
The author's background in differential geometry
is very evident in his excellent explanations
of difficult concepts.

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Relativity in the style of Feynman's Lectures, July 18, 1998

By 

henrique fleming - See all my reviews

This review is from: Essential Relativity: Special, General, and Cosmological (Theoretical and Mathematical Physics) (Paperback)

This is a wonderful book, very amusing and thought provoking. Without trying to be comprehensive, it sheds much light on the basics of the theory, as well as of the mathematics. His discussion of Mach's principle is brilliant, and ends with a proposal of an experiment to test it with satellites! Very good at computations too, boasting tables for computing the curvature tensor from the metric tensor which are very useful.