Customer Reviews

Space-Time Structure (Cambridge Science Classics)

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I've turned to this thin book far too many times to count. It was also a life-saver when I was learning General Relativity because of its clear and careful exposition. Schrodinger was doing this back when nobody was quite sure what the deal was with, e.g., index notation, and he took pains to lay out the benefits -- but also the limits -- of that system. See, for example, his discussion of the derivative operator, something that is almost always glossed over.

I'm in the middle of my dissertation now, and every now and then I hit on a subtlety in GR that my advisor has missed but I caught from reading this book.

Don't get thinking that this is Schrodinger's book on the unified field. It is more like the lecture notes of a very intelligent man figuring out what on Earth this truly new version of gravity is all about.

In the end of course this book is too slim to live on its own as a GR text. You will need to carry around a bigger, more comprehensive tome to get through your studies. As a handguide and emergency sense-maker, however, it has few equals.

I am an advanced undergraduate physics student who has started to go through Space-Time Structure. It seems to be a very good book, but the section introducing tensors was not as lucid as it could be. If you already know tensors or have a good book like Shaum's Outline of Tensor Calculus, then it can be a very useful introduction to the affine viewpoint of relativity that Schrodinger promotes. The discussion of nonsymmetric unified field theories is introductory and it would be necessary to look up the references it cites to get a more in depth understanding of them.

This book presents the results of Schroedinger's work in Ireland in which he explored the manifold of possibilities for unified field theories along the general lines pursued by Einstein. The main accomplishment was in constructing such a theory from just the connection, with metric derived as a consequence, using no ad hoc assumptions. I extended this work in my 1977 Master's thesis. While this kind of theory has gone out of style, it is still an exciting pursuit and Schroedinger's writing is clear and compelling.

I'm twelve right about now, and I have my own theory of time.Time (the fourth dimension) is arranged on separate lines, like thefirst dimension. The fifth dimension is arranged in time planes and the sixth in time cubes. The fourth dimension, however, is simpler than those. Imagine infinite lines in space, each stacked one on another. These we will call "time lines". From these infinite lines spread more infinite lines. We'll call these "destiny lines". Then there are more and more destiny lines branching from those destiny lines, and so on and so forth. They get very complicated. Time lines are the original paths of time. Destiny lines are the lines of time determined by what happens along the time lines. Sounds confusing? Well, anything you do creates a new destiny line. As I write this, I am creating a new destiny line. The future may be different if I didn't write this at all. Time planes are the collection of one timeline and all destiny lines spreading from it. Time cubes are the colletion of all time planes. It's kinda weird ;)