Relativity Visualized: The Gold Nugget of Relativity Books

by Lewis Carroll Epstein

Book Overview

Perfect for those interested in physics but who are not physicists or mathematicians, this book makes relativity so simple that a child can understand it. By replacing equations with diagrams, the book allows non-specialist readers to fully understand the concepts in relativity without the slow, painful progress so often associated with a complicated scientific subject. It allows readers not only to know how relativity works, but also to intuitively...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 093521805X
• ISBN13: 9780935218053
• Release Date: January 1985
• Publisher: Insight Press, Inc.
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A first-class book

This book was a revelation when I read it; I didn't think physics books could be this clear! By replacing equations with diagrams, this book allows non-specialist readers to fully understand the concepts in relativity without the slow, painful progress so often associated with this sort of book. If you want just one book on relativity, that will allow you not only to know how relativity works, but to intuitively understand it, then this is definitely the book for you. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Truly lives up to the title

I have tried to read several books on the subject of relativity. I am very interested in it as a hobby and have read zillions of explanations of relativity. I read about passing space ships, traveling twins and whistling trains. However, I never truly understood what is was all about, until I came across this book. When I read chapter 4, I couldn't help but giggle aloud and shout "Eureka" all through it, because now I felt I really understood it. For the first time EVER. The illustrations are so vivid, the diagrams so clear and the explanation so simple that anybody can understand it. If you are interested in Einstein's theories, get this book. You won't be disappointed, garantueed.

wonderful book on conceptualizing special relativity

I'm not a physicist or physics major, but I do like reading physics on a lay-level. When I hit special relativity in college physics, it was no surprise--because I'd read Epstein's book and gotten past the biggest hurdle, being able to conceptualize what's going on. (I can tell you that as far as math goes, special relativity at this level isn't difficult at all as long as you don't get your frames of reference screwed up...which I usually do.)And that's where Relativity Visualized excels: helping you get your brain around these strange, strange, STRANGE ideas. No math. A little geometry, and believe me, you don't need to remember much from HS geometry to make sense of this, if you're curious about relativity. While I've no complaints about my college prof's treatment of relativity :-) this would have helped the poor freshman engineer in my class who, upon learning why the twin paradox isn't a paradox, said in bewilderment, "But that's stupid!" It isn't--it's just hard to accept.

A must-read for anyone interested in relativity

As a Ph.D. in astrophysics, I studied relativity as part of my professional education. I've read many textbooks and popularizations. This is simply the best popularization, bar none. Anyone should be able to understand it. Even the professional physicist is likely to learn something, if not about the substance of relativity, then about how to teach it to undergraduates. Outstanding!

Relativity as Geometry, Like Perspective in Painting

Epstein is the best teacher of this difficult subject you will ever encounter. His book breaks new ground in relating space, time, and mass in a geometrical way that is -- at last -- simple to visualize. Albert Einstein's own book on relativity, though a model of clarity, does not provide this all-important geometric model of four dimensional space/time. Epstein has understood everything that is difficult for us about relativity at a gut level, and thoroughly demystifies it, without ever making the kind of deep conceptual errors to which authors of "popular" books on physics are apt to be prone. Through the simplest kind of geometry diagrams and inspired thought experiments, he shows that relativity's famous paradoxes are all simply tricks of perspective characteristic of a universe that has four spatial dimensions, not three. Relativistic "special effects" are exactly analogous to perspective effects in painting, but involve time and a fourth dimension. This geometric interpretation of relativity is the only way to grasp it other than algebraically, and therefore it is the only route that does not involve significant mathematics. Even to the mathematically inclined, it may provide an eye-opening intuitive "ah-hah!" that the equations never elicited. Not since Minkowski proposed his original geometric interpretation of Einstein's special relativity has there been such a cogent advance in our perspective (literally) on the shape of space, and its relation to time and mass, the three measurable quantities related by relativity. The reader who finds this book stimulating should also look at H.S.M. Coxeter's "Regular Polytopes", the definitive introduction to the Euclidean geometry of more than three dimensions, which will give him the power to actually visualize the fourth dimension, if any book can. In tandem these two writers lay relativity and its fourth dimension bare.