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'Relativity: Special, General, Cosmological' by Rindler

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'Relativity: Special, General, Cosmological' by Rindler Physical Sciences Educational Reviews Volume 8 Issue 1 p43 REVIEW: Relativity: special, general and cosmological by Wolfgang Rindler I have never heard anyone talk about relativity with a greater care for its meaning than the late Hermann Bondi. The same benign clarity that accompanied his talks permeated Relativity and Common Sense, his novel introductory approach to special relativity. Back in the Sixties, Alfred, Brian, Charles and David - I wonder what they would be called today - flashed stroboscopic light signals at each other and noted the frequencies at which they were received as they moved relative to each other. Bondi made of the simple composition of frequencies a beautiful natural law that you felt grateful to find in our universe’s particular canon. He thus simultaneously downplayed the common introduction of relativity as a rather unfortunate theory that makes the common sense addition of velocities unusable (albeit under some extreme rarely-experienced conditions), and renders intuition dangerous, and to be attempted only with a full suit of algebraic armour. A few years ago, I tried to teach a course following Bondi’s approach, incorporating some more advanced topics such as uniform acceleration. I enjoyed the challenge (probably more than the class did), but students without fluency in hyperbolic functions were able to tackle interesting questions about interstellar travel, which seemed an advantage. Wolfgang Rindler is no apologist for relativity either and his book is suffused with the concerns of a practicing physicist. Alongside Bondi’s book, this was the key recommendation on my suggested reading list and, from the contents of the new edition, would remain so on a future course. When I was an undergraduate, I think we learnt the transformations (of coordinates and velocity) mechanically, tried to understand their content by following the beautiful problems and elegant spacetime diagrams in Taylor and Wheeler’s Spacetime Physics, and then chickened out under exam conditions and became computing machines again. At that time, Rindler’s book (then called Essential Relativity) had a narrower focus than it does now, but was no less authoritative. Relativity has the subtitle Special, General and Cosmological, so that it potentially covers everything from an introductory Level 1 ideas of physics course to a Masters level module in, for instance, general relativity, gravitational waves or theoretical cosmology: the style is so pleasant that this is genuinely feasible. Amongst the features of this book that I like so much are the details. You’ll see the runner attempting to squeeze an overlong pole into a barn by exploiting length contraction or careering over a suddenly hazardous drain in many texts but you might not have been aware that the resolution of the paradoxes of these problems arose out of a class discussion stimulated by one of Rindler’s students. There is even a rather nice short memoir written by the student concerned – James Gilson – at http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/physics/pdf/0703/0703134v1.pdf. Reading this memoir will also comfort the reader that Rindler’s transparent mastery of his material comes at the end of much deep thought about its meaning. One other example which I particularly liked was problem 7.29 on the energy of a parallel plate capacitor – easy to state but with an interesting resolution. You really learn something in doing these problems and if you have time to attempt them, you’ll enjoy relativity as something that actually informs your physical understanding: as a student, until the (non-relativistic) question was posed in relativity, I hadn’t even thought how the free back end of the pole discovers how to stop when the front end hits the wall of the barn. This second edition of Relativity has updated sections, principally in the final chapters on cosmological models that mean, for instance, that those who want to follow the dynamical consequences of dark energy are well served. Unlike one of its equally illustrious rivals - Misner, Thorne and Wheeler’s Gravitation – Rindler’s Relativity will not endanger your excess baggage limit on a long flight and should prove a constantly enlightening travelling companion. J L Collett School of Physics, Astronomy & Mathematics University of Hertfordshire AL10 9AB .
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