Customer Reviews

Relativity and the Nature of Spacetime (The Frontiers Collection)

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In almost all books about Special Relativity, the foundations are presented without explanation, just in a dogmatic way or as results of the disagreement between experience and theory and calculations start with students full of doubts, getting them crazy about of "what time is what?", "what velocity is what?, etc.

This book follows another totally different way, building Special Relativity step by step, using deep thinking and squeezing the internal coherence of the theoretical physics and comparing with experience, getting a grasp in the new ideas that is always desired.

Petkov develops new interpretations and shed new light to a subject that is usually presented as something rather bored, old fashioned and just a matter of academic exercise.

This way allows self learning and is ideal for teaching. The discussion of the implications of Galilean postulates is just beautiful and the philosophical implications are profound and coherent.

I use this text when I teach Special Relativity and usually spend four or six hours discussing the ideas there presented and I am sure that my students not only can calculate but they know what they are calculating.

Dr. Carlos Leiva

I teach cosmology, therefore I found this book very useful. The examples and pictures are so suggestive that it its easy to understand almost every hard consequences of relativity.