Special Relativity
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Beschreibung
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 spacetime. The closing chapters focus on the energy-momentum tensor of a continuous distribution of mass-energy and its covariant 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.
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.
Serves as a textbook at intermediate level between college-level introductions and more advanced textbooks requiring many prerequisites Includes topics that are not usually included in standard textbooks on special relativity such as, for example, the theory of measurement in Minkowski spacetime Has a chapter devoted to modern applications of Special Relativity, such as GPS, PET scanners, and other medical instruments Contains a section with numerous exercises to practice the theory in each chapter Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
Autor*in
Valerio Faraoni
Themen in »Special Relativity«
Covariant Tensors Doppler Effect Global Positioning System Levi-Civita Symbol Lorentz Transformation Minkowski Spacetime Perfect Fluids Positron Emission Tomography Relativistic Optics Spacetime Diagrams Undergraduate Textbook Special Relativity
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From the reviews:
“The book is one of the best texts in special relativity designed for readers between the college-level and advanced level. … A number of useful and new examples is added at the end of every chapter of the book. … A very useful table of constants is added at the end of the book. … The book represents one of the best conspects in special relativity and is useful for professors of special relativity. It is good for students and every other reader.” (Alex Gaina, zbMATH, Vol. 1277, 2014)()