Customer Reviews

Physical Relativity: Space-time Structure from a Dynamical Perspective

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This is masterly review of physical relativity from Harvey Brown has worked more than anyone on alternative Lorentz transformations for example and the precise assumptions underlying them, an immense amount of experience underlies such parts of this book, and an immenses ammount of thorough historical research. I would have been delighted if Harvey had said more about some things, e.g. the present fashion to avoid or deny the change of mass with speed; a subject strangely ignored. e.g. the definitions of and behaviour of standard lengths in general relativity. but perhaps a similarly definitive account of such are works in progress, I sincerely hope so.
G E STEDMAN
'An orthodox understanding of the Bible with Physical science'

The author of Physical Relativity offers a historical and critical discussion of the special and general relativity ideas. Although one
appreciates his insight, the book in the end fails to impress.

In particular, the book is useless to those who do not know relativity theory since a clear and direct discussion of relativity is nowhere to be found.

The book disappoints even experts in Relativity since one has to read in between the lines in order to understand what is the author's point of view throughout his essay. A point of view very rarely expressed in a concise and direct manner.

In the end, it appears that the author does not consider that Relativity theories refer to an ontologically independent physical agent of spacetime geometry.
Instead, he thinks that spacetime geometry is an artifact of
macroscopic dynamical effects of more fundamental quantum theories of
basic interactions in physics like quantum gravity and quantum electrodynamics.

Although an expert in relativity could find such a point of view worth thinking about, for the majority of readers, the book would look too cryptic in order to be enjoyable.