Essential Relativity: Special, General, and Cosmological

✍ Scribed by Wolfgang Rindler (auth.)

• Publisher: Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
• Year: 1977
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 298
• Series: Text and Monographs in Physics
• Edition: 2
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

In retrospect, the first edition of this book now seems like a mere sketch for a book. The present version is, if not the final product, at least a closer approximation to it. The table of contents may show little change. But that is simply because the original organization of the material has been found satisfactory. Also the basic purpose of the book remains the same, and that is to make relativity come alive conceptually. I have always felt much sym­ pathy with Richard Courant's maxim (as reported and exemplified by Pascual Jordan) that, ideally, proofs should be reached by comprehension rather than computation. Where computations are necessary, I have tried to make them as transparent as possible, so as not to hinder the progress of comprehension. Among the more obvious changes, this edition contains a new section on Kruskal space, another on the plane gravitational wave, and a third on linearized general relativity; it also contains many new exercises, and two appendices: one listing the curvature components for the diagonal metric (in a little more generality than the old" Dingle formulas "), and one syn­ thesizing Maxwell's theory in tensor form. But the most significant changes and additions have occurred throughout the text. Many sections have been completely rewritten, many arguments tightened, many "asides" added, and, of course, recent developments taken into account.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-xv
The Rise and Fall of Absolute Space....Pages 1-22
Einsteinian Kinematics....Pages 23-53
Einsteinian Optics....Pages 54-60
Spacetime and Four-Vectors....Pages 61-74
Relativistic Particle Mechanics....Pages 75-95
Relativity and Electrodynamics....Pages 96-104
Basic Ideas of General Relativity....Pages 105-125
Formal Development of General Relativity....Pages 126-192
Cosmology....Pages 193-244
Back Matter....Pages 245-286

✦ Subjects

Classical and Quantum Gravitation, Relativity Theory;Mathematical Methods in Physics