Introduction to Spacetime: A First Course on Relativity by Bertel Laurent (PDF)

Description

The theory of relativity is tackled directly in this book, dispensing with the need to establish the insufficiency of Newtonian mechanics. This book takes advantage from the start of the geometrical nature of the relativity theory. The reader is assumed to be familiar with vector calculus in ordinary three-dimensional Euclidean space.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐The pedagogy of special relativity has started to see some much needed innovation in the last 20 years, especially in the geometrically oriented books for non-scientists by Mermin and Takeuchi. This book brings that innovation to the upper-division physics curriculum by presenting special relativity in coordinate-free language.The book is crisp and concise, and has been honed by five years of teaching experience.Unfortunately, there’s a lot of bad news as well.World Scientific is essentially a vanity press, with extremely low editorial standards, and their influence (or lack of it) shows through in this book. Three out of the first five sentences in chapter 1 have mistakes in grammar or punctuation.There are no end-of-chapter problems, which makes this book impossible to use in college courses.The subtitle is “a first course on…,” and yet the foreword says, “This book contains a course on relativity for those who already believe in it.” This is contradictory; if it’s your first course, you don’t yet know what the theory says, so you can’t “already believe in it.”It has weak contact with experiment. An example of both the weak contact with experiment and inattention to detail is that the Hafele-Keating experiment is referenced with a paper that actually was a prospective one, not the paper published after the experiment was actually done.The style is extremely austere. There are almost no examples or applications. E.g., Laurent discusses mass-energy equivalence and threshold effects in reactions without ever giving a single example such as particle-antiparticle annihilation or pair production.

⭐This is a book on the understanding of relativity. Unlike many such books, it does not spend a lot of time and energy on why relativity became an extension of Newton’s theories. It presumes that the reader has enough belief that using this limited space to repeat these arguments isn’t necessary.This book is based on material that was taught in a course given at the Stockholm University. It is one of the very few books simple enough for the advanced amateur to understand that goes into the concept of tensors. This is the approach used by Einstein in the original development of his theories.Many books concentrate on the description of relativity using rather imprecise general verbage, what Einstein called ‘thought experiments.’ Einstein did a lot more than think about relativity, he put a solid mathematical foundation under his thoughts using the then new developments in tensors. (It also has come to light that Einstein’s wife at the time, Mileva Maric, was probably better at math than was Einstein and may have contributed significantly to the overall theory.)

⭐This material of this book was successfully used in a course of special relativity for advanced undergraduates at the University of Stockholm by the late professor Bertel Laurent, one of Oskar Klein’s best students. When he sadly passed away shortly before retirement the manuscript was transformed into a book by his enthusiastic friend Stig Flodmark.The book is unusual in that it does not discuss the historical, philosophical, and experimental background that most book dwell on a lot. Instead special relativity is clearly and simply presented with modern coordinate free (index free) notation as a correct and accepted theory of physics. I recommend it strongly as a concise, pedagogical, and compact course book with a modern point of view.

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