Special Relativity

by Valerio Faraoni

This book offers an essential bridge between college-level introductions and advanced graduate-level books on special relativity. It begins at an elementary level, presenting and discussing the basic concepts normally covered in college-level works, including the Lorentz transformation. Subsequent chapters introduce the four-dimensional worldview implied by the Lorentz transformations, mixing time and space coordinates, before continuing on to the formalism of tensors, a topic usually avoided in lower-level courses. The book’s second half addresses a number of essential points, including the concept of causality; the equivalence between mass and energy, including applications; relativistic optics; and measurements and matter in Minkowski space-time. The closing chapters focus on the energy-momentum tensor of a continuous distribution of mass-energy and its co-variant conservation; angular momentum; a discussion of the scalar field of perfect fluids and the Maxwell field; and general coordinates. Every chapter is supplemented by a section with numerous exercises, allowing readers to practice the theory. These exercises constitute an essential part of the textbook, and the solutions to approximately half of them are provided in the appendix.

322 pages, Paperback

First published August 15, 2013

Reviews

[Timothy M · Rating 3 out of 5]

I used this book as part of a self study program in physics. I found the first 3 chapters well done. Chapter 4 introduces the formalism of tensors. I found I needed to delve deeper into tensor math to really understand what was going on (I used The Schaum Outline on Tensor Calculus). IT is in the latter half of the book that one really needs the tensor background, because Chapter 6 and beyond is a rapid fire run through "applications". In many instances, I felt these chapters were too short and poorly motivated. A big plus is the fact that there are exercises for the reader, and solutions are provided (albeit not for every problem). An errata would be useful, since I found what I believe were a number of errors (eg Chapter 10, Ref 7, the first author's name is Buniy, not Buny which was needed to verify parts of the solution of Problem 10.9 which is not provided in the text)