Customer Reviews

General Relativity from A to B

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This still ranks as one of my favorite relativity books. There is virtually no math to speak of. Yet, the author in a very descriptive way, will take you from Aristotelian view to the Galilean view and finally to the relativistic paradigm. Concepts such as events, event horizons, interval etc. are explained quite beautifully. The idea of the interval and the physics and geometry of the same is shown in a most interesting way.

The chapters are organized very well and the writing is very good. To follow the text a certain degree of concentration is required because the diagrams need to be checked as one proceeds.

This text is quite suitable for junior high and high school students not to mention college graduates who wish to know something beyond the cursory in relativity theory.

I happened to come across this book at a used bookstore in 1979. Very few of my friends were even aware of this book. It was one of those sleepers so much so that a while back this volume had gone out of publication. However, now it's back, thank God. If you want a non-technical but quite thorough peek into Special Relativity get this book. If you are one of those who would prefer a tad more math and a less wordy introduction go with James A. Smith's An Introduction To Special Relativity, published by Dover.

For anyone who wishes to gain a deep and true understanding the meaning of General Relativity's space-time, this a book to read. And that this understanding is gained with mathematics no more sophisticated than high school geometry and algebra tells you that the author is not only a master, but also a superb expositor, of this subject. A highschooler having a passion for Physics to a Graduate Student struggling to "internalize" the meaning of her complex equations will be delightfully enlightened reading this book.

The author presents fundamental ideas of theory of relativity in a non-mathematical form using conversation approach to readers with little science background. The book is highly descriptive and the reader is bound to get bored since this is a discussion of about basic ideas about space and time using two-dimensional space-time diagrams. The first part of the book describes the notion of space and time in terms of Aristotelian and Galilean view points. The second half describes how the idea of spatial distance and elapsed time (interval) are incorporated into space time as geometrical entity. The author uses a general framework in this book for explaining general relativity. This is done by describing an event and assemble them into space-time (in a space-time diagram) and describe what is going-on in the physical world in terms of collection of events, and relationships between events is evaluated using measuring instruments such as light pulses and clocks. The intrinsic relationship between two events is described by interval (measured by physical experiences of observers). From the interval, one determines how light goes and how clock move and tick. The author eventually explains how equating intervals leads to relationship between `real' physical measurements. The interval is a sort of misty thing that stands in the background and integrates into space-time. In the final chapter the author discusses an application of general relativity to understand the properties of blackholes: It is here that the readers appreciate the importance relativity. The reader must have patience to read this book and he/she must be prepared to read chapters 5 and 6 second and perhaps third time to understand the underlying concept. If you do not have patience you will be lost and you will dislike this book

This book is not a college book on relativity. it is written for curious mind who wants to know something about the relativity and author gives a very layman introduction to it.It starts with space-time concept of Aristotelian, Galilean view and than slowly enters into relativistic view. A lot of space has been delegated to definition and explanation of the concept of Iterval and than jumps into physical meaning of the concepts. It is only as the author says from A to B and no more.

For the last month, this book has been a great lunch-time companion. My favorite aspect of this book is not the fact that it explains relativity at a very deep level, but that it explains, at a very deep level, how a scientist thinks. I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys concentrated thinking (this book demands it!) I'm going to try to get my own son to read it.

This really is a great book on general relativity. While it is not mathematically intensive, it is not just a simple introduction as one of the reviews here stated. While it's not a college course on the subject, I believe this book would enlighten many who have studied general relativity and give them some insights they didn't have before. Physics, after all, does translate to real concepts in the physical world. I never accepted the notion that certain things could only be known if you have a mathematical background (which I do have.) Ultimately, the math must mean something in the physical world and it's just a matter of teaching it properly, using the right metaphors, etc. This book does that very very well. I've read it a few times and will read it again in the future. There are certainly other aspects of general relativity that you can expand on, and there it certainly gets much more involved and complicated than what's presented here, but this is really a gem.

This is a quirky book with an interesting idiosyncratic take on general relativity. It has a good, intelligible story-line that starts with the Aristotelian view of space and time, then moves on to Galileo and then to Einstein.

The heart of the book is the following construction. Suppose we have two events in spacetime, p and q. Define something called the "interval" between p and q by the following measurement procedure. (What I'll give is just one of the five cases he describes, the one in which no light ray can get from p to q or from q to p.) Let observer O, who has a clock, emit a photon that can be received at q. Let O then visit p, recording the elapsed time t2. O then resets his clock to zero. Meanwhile, the photon received at q is re-emitted back toward O. Finally, after an additional time t1, O receives the second photon. Define the interval as the product t2t1.

The definition of the interval is cute because it's extremely spartan. It requires almost no preliminary mathematical apparatus such as coordinate systems. On the other hand, I felt that Geroch didn't properly motivate the definition. He just pulls it out of his hat, says that nobody can ever know why this particular definition is appropriate for our universe, and only much later provides any reasoning that would allow the reader to see why it should be that way. He also has to introduce some approximations which are kind of ugly and not very clear (about p and q being sufficiently nearby). There's a lot of ugly case-splitting (five different cases, depending on whether p is in q's timelike lightcone, etc.).

The contact with experiment is very weak. You can tell that Geroch is a theorist.