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Special relativity has a distinct poignancy to it; sometimes those who have the privilege of studying it closely feel they are consuming a hearty meal in a warm cafe while those not so blessed huddle outside like hungry children, watching through a frosted glass. Giulini (physics, U. of Freiburg) gives those with no more than high- school mathematics a place at the feast, without condescension, building understanding from a brief review of the origins and significance of special relativity to the history of its development through theory and experimentation. Giulini then steps through fundamental concepts, including the notions of similarity, time dilation and length contraction, aberration and the Doppler effect, and mass, momentum, and kinetic energy, culminating in the "most famous equation of all physics" and its application to electrodynamics. He then describes the consequences and applications of special relativity and key experiments.
E-Book Content
Special Relativity causal future ne co ht lig re tu fu complement pa st lig ht co ne causal causal past Special Relativity A First Encounter 100 YEARS SINCE EINSTEIN Domenico Giulini Department of Physics, University of Freiburg, Germany 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Pub