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Relativity Visualized "The Gold Nugget of Relativity Books"
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Manufacturer: Insight Press
Author: Lewis Carroll Epstein
Publisher: Insight Press
Average Customer Rating:
Our Price:
You Save: $ 26.95 ( 100% )
Manufacturer: Insight Press
Author: Lewis Carroll Epstein
Publisher: Insight Press
Average Customer Rating:
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Relativity Visualized "The Gold Nugget of Relativity Books" Description
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 530.11
EAN: 9780935218053
ISBN: 093521805X
Label: Insight Press
Manufacturer: Insight Press
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 206
Publication Date: 2000-06-01
Publisher: Insight Press
Studio: Insight Press
Dewey Decimal Number: 530.11
EAN: 9780935218053
ISBN: 093521805X
Label: Insight Press
Manufacturer: Insight Press
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 206
Publication Date: 2000-06-01
Publisher: Insight Press
Studio: Insight Press
Editorial Review of Relativity Visualized "The Gold Nugget of Relativity Books"
Perfect for those interested in physics but who are not physicists or mathematicians, this book makes relativity so simple that a child can understand it. By replacing equations with diagrams, the book allows non-specialist readers to fully understand the concepts in relativity without the slow, painful progress so often associated with a complicated scientific subject. It allows readers not only to know how relativity works, but also to intuitively understand it.
Customer Reviews of Relativity Visualized "The Gold Nugget of Relativity Books"
Customer Rating: 
Review Summary: A flawed intro to relativity
Review: This book provides a basic look at the What of relativity... but is seriously flawed when explaining the Why. And this is very problematic in a book that is constantly claiming that it's "showing" you why a fact about relativity is true. Epstein keeps "proving" things but when you really look at it he hasn't proven anything at all and you don't really understand relativity any better. For example, he loves schematic diagrams, and showing how something is true because it looks a certain way in a diagram. But just drawing something in a diagram and saying, "See, that's the way time works because that's how the line looks on the diagram" proves nothing. Why does the diagram represent reality? And why must the diagram be drawn in exactly the way he did? And the "diagram proofs" are just a symptom of the bigger problem here: a lack of valid argument to back up conclusions, and an overall lack of rigor throughout the book, from the terms used to the methods utilized for demonstration. Read this book if you are new to relativity and want to get an initial grasp of what it's about and the kind of phenomena it entails. But don't make the mistake of being fooled into thinking you're really undertsanding relativity, because for the most part you're not.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Helps developing a feel for relativity
Review: This book is a precious aid to help you develop your intuition about both special and general relativity. If you, like me, are someone who relies and feels comfortable more with intuition then reasoning, memory and abstractions, you have probably experienced quite a bit of discomfort studying and thinking about relativity. In other areas of physics, even quantum physics, you might have been able to come up with some sort of intuitive feel, but relativity, just a big void and a sense of "what this guys are taking about?". It's just about the fact that light velocity and strong gravitational fields are so outside of our reach that our intuition has nothing to work with, not even the "little balls" of particle physics.
Well this book is really helpful in starting to develop a visual and "gut" feel about relativity. Sometimes the drawings get a bit too fancy and confused, and you should avoid the pitfall of being led to believe you areally understand relativity just because you made something out of this book, but still it's a worthy, interesting and unusual read that will surely add something to your understanding.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Einstein would have loved it
Review: This is the best introductory book on relativity, period. What makes it different from others is how much it emphasizes a visual approach to the subject. The diagrams are not there merely to help you understand the main text; they are an integral part of the main text.
Even if you understand the basic concepts of relativity, you will probably learn something new. Consider, for instance, the following passage: "The reason you can't go faster than the speed of light is that... everything, including you, is always moving at the speed of light. How can you be moving if you are at rest in a chair? You are moving through time." Accompanying diagrams then clearly show how this is so, and how time dilation follows from it.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: You will 'get' relativity after reading this book.
Review: The theory of Relativity was Einstein's conceptual framework for explaining some weirdnesses physicists had uncovered about the way light waves, fast-moving objects, objects in heavy gravitational fields, etc. behave. Relativity is hard to understand partly because their behavior is hard to grasp -- it defies both one's normal intuition and the rules of Newtonian mechanics. So first off this book excels in explaining exactly what the weirdness is, what it was that had physicists scratching their heads in confusion and disbelief.
But Relativity is also hard to understand because of a lack of a simple explanation, a way of picturing what's going on. And this is the true value of this book, that it provides this type of concept.
By analogy, if you follow the motions of the planets with a telescope, you see them speeding up, slowing down, even reversing direction, in a way that would be hard to justify on simple principles... until you make the sun rather than the earth the stationary frame of reference. Then all that seemingly complicated motion reduces to simple elliptical orbits. And more importantly, this explanation gives you the sense of "getting it" conceptually. It's that kind of idea -- what the author calls a "myth" -- that this book uniquely provides for Relativity.
The ideas presented not only make Relativity comprehensible, they also hold up quantitatively (e.g. how much does one's clock slow down, how much does a body shrink, etc.)
Galileo's helio-centric writings got him into trouble with the Church, and he was forced to recant. In effect he said that he didn't mean that the Earth rotated around the Sun, only that the math is simpler with the Sun as a frame of reference. That the motions of the planets were calculable, but not comprehensible, was sufficient for the Church to spare his life.
To this day, Quantum physics remains mathematically rigorous and in perfect agreement with experiment, but no one understands it. It is my fondest wish that someone some day will come up with a conceptual touchstone for grasping Quantum physics that is as powerfully intuitive as what this author has come up with for Relativity.
I do have one caveat, which is that this book does not distinguish between Special and General Relativity. He never mentions uniform vs. accelerated motion. Although he does seem to explain some phenomena that I thought fell into General Relativity, I also thought I recognized one or two places where his explanation breaks down if General Relativity were taken into consideration.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Ideal introduction to relativity
Review: I owe a lot to this book. I've since gone on to read more advanced books on relativity, quantum physics, and string theory. What makes this book special is that it will make relativity an intuitive concept. As relativity is a foundation for so many other things, I needed a book which would give me a rock solid foundation. The book made relativity so simple that a child would understand it. And not only understand it, but be utterly convinced that it is correct. I now understand how relativity works about as well as I do the law of conservation of energy, as an example.
After you read this, you will want to move on, and I recomment "Quantum Reality". It's not simple like this book, though. I haven't found any books that do for quantum physics what Epstien does for relativity.
Review Summary: A flawed intro to relativity
Review: This book provides a basic look at the What of relativity... but is seriously flawed when explaining the Why. And this is very problematic in a book that is constantly claiming that it's "showing" you why a fact about relativity is true. Epstein keeps "proving" things but when you really look at it he hasn't proven anything at all and you don't really understand relativity any better. For example, he loves schematic diagrams, and showing how something is true because it looks a certain way in a diagram. But just drawing something in a diagram and saying, "See, that's the way time works because that's how the line looks on the diagram" proves nothing. Why does the diagram represent reality? And why must the diagram be drawn in exactly the way he did? And the "diagram proofs" are just a symptom of the bigger problem here: a lack of valid argument to back up conclusions, and an overall lack of rigor throughout the book, from the terms used to the methods utilized for demonstration. Read this book if you are new to relativity and want to get an initial grasp of what it's about and the kind of phenomena it entails. But don't make the mistake of being fooled into thinking you're really undertsanding relativity, because for the most part you're not.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Helps developing a feel for relativity
Review: This book is a precious aid to help you develop your intuition about both special and general relativity. If you, like me, are someone who relies and feels comfortable more with intuition then reasoning, memory and abstractions, you have probably experienced quite a bit of discomfort studying and thinking about relativity. In other areas of physics, even quantum physics, you might have been able to come up with some sort of intuitive feel, but relativity, just a big void and a sense of "what this guys are taking about?". It's just about the fact that light velocity and strong gravitational fields are so outside of our reach that our intuition has nothing to work with, not even the "little balls" of particle physics.
Well this book is really helpful in starting to develop a visual and "gut" feel about relativity. Sometimes the drawings get a bit too fancy and confused, and you should avoid the pitfall of being led to believe you areally understand relativity just because you made something out of this book, but still it's a worthy, interesting and unusual read that will surely add something to your understanding.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Einstein would have loved it
Review: This is the best introductory book on relativity, period. What makes it different from others is how much it emphasizes a visual approach to the subject. The diagrams are not there merely to help you understand the main text; they are an integral part of the main text.
Even if you understand the basic concepts of relativity, you will probably learn something new. Consider, for instance, the following passage: "The reason you can't go faster than the speed of light is that... everything, including you, is always moving at the speed of light. How can you be moving if you are at rest in a chair? You are moving through time." Accompanying diagrams then clearly show how this is so, and how time dilation follows from it.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: You will 'get' relativity after reading this book.
Review: The theory of Relativity was Einstein's conceptual framework for explaining some weirdnesses physicists had uncovered about the way light waves, fast-moving objects, objects in heavy gravitational fields, etc. behave. Relativity is hard to understand partly because their behavior is hard to grasp -- it defies both one's normal intuition and the rules of Newtonian mechanics. So first off this book excels in explaining exactly what the weirdness is, what it was that had physicists scratching their heads in confusion and disbelief.
But Relativity is also hard to understand because of a lack of a simple explanation, a way of picturing what's going on. And this is the true value of this book, that it provides this type of concept.
By analogy, if you follow the motions of the planets with a telescope, you see them speeding up, slowing down, even reversing direction, in a way that would be hard to justify on simple principles... until you make the sun rather than the earth the stationary frame of reference. Then all that seemingly complicated motion reduces to simple elliptical orbits. And more importantly, this explanation gives you the sense of "getting it" conceptually. It's that kind of idea -- what the author calls a "myth" -- that this book uniquely provides for Relativity.
The ideas presented not only make Relativity comprehensible, they also hold up quantitatively (e.g. how much does one's clock slow down, how much does a body shrink, etc.)
Galileo's helio-centric writings got him into trouble with the Church, and he was forced to recant. In effect he said that he didn't mean that the Earth rotated around the Sun, only that the math is simpler with the Sun as a frame of reference. That the motions of the planets were calculable, but not comprehensible, was sufficient for the Church to spare his life.
To this day, Quantum physics remains mathematically rigorous and in perfect agreement with experiment, but no one understands it. It is my fondest wish that someone some day will come up with a conceptual touchstone for grasping Quantum physics that is as powerfully intuitive as what this author has come up with for Relativity.
I do have one caveat, which is that this book does not distinguish between Special and General Relativity. He never mentions uniform vs. accelerated motion. Although he does seem to explain some phenomena that I thought fell into General Relativity, I also thought I recognized one or two places where his explanation breaks down if General Relativity were taken into consideration.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Ideal introduction to relativity
Review: I owe a lot to this book. I've since gone on to read more advanced books on relativity, quantum physics, and string theory. What makes this book special is that it will make relativity an intuitive concept. As relativity is a foundation for so many other things, I needed a book which would give me a rock solid foundation. The book made relativity so simple that a child would understand it. And not only understand it, but be utterly convinced that it is correct. I now understand how relativity works about as well as I do the law of conservation of energy, as an example.
After you read this, you will want to move on, and I recomment "Quantum Reality". It's not simple like this book, though. I haven't found any books that do for quantum physics what Epstien does for relativity.