Customer Reviews

Relativity in Rotating Frames: Relativistic Physics in Rotating Reference Frames (Fundamental Theories of Physics)

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At $360, I assume the target market for this book is a small number of university libraries. That makes the book somewhat of a dinosaur, in the sense that the publisher seems locked into a 20th-century mindset in which distributing printed matter is inherently expensive, and books with a small audience therefore need to sell for a princely price. This book would be a good candidate for print on demand, or for purely electronic distribution.

With this kind of exorbitant price tag, I would at least expect that the book would be carefully edited. In fact, almost every paper in the book is written in horrible English. In the round-table dialog at the end, the editors even seem to have managed to garble the words of Ashby, who I presume is a native English speaker, so that he is transcribed as speaking ungrammatically. If Springer wants to fight a rear-guard action to defend old-fashioned, low-tech print publishing, they should show some respect for that tradition's standards. Isn't it traditional to hire a copy editor before you send a book to production and offer it for sale at $360?

There are some useful and interesting papers here, but many are either redundant or flaky, and similar or superior material is often available for free via nonprofit sites like arxiv.org and livingreviews.org. The editors have tried a little too hard to make the subject seem like one that is still the subject of active research, a century after Einstein and Ehrenfest first discussed it. Most of the disagreements between the authors are essentially just disagreements about definitions or philosophy. Given that the GPS system uses relativity in a rotating coordinate system (as described by Ashby's contribution), it seems hard to believe that there is really as much controversy as one would believe in taking this anthology at face value.