Special Relativity: From Einstein To Strings

SPECIAL RELATIVITY from Einstein to Strings The traditional undergraduate physics treatment of special relativity is too cursory to warrant a textbook. The graduate treatment of special relativity is deeper, but often fragmented between different courses such as general relativity and quantum field theory. For this reason physics students need one book that ties it all together. With this in mind, this book is written as a textbook for the self-learner whose physics background includes a minimum of one year of university physics with calculus. More advanced mathematical topics, such as group theory, are explained as they arise. The readership is expected to include high school and college physics educators seeking to improve and update their own understanding of special relativity in order that they may teach it better, science and engineering undergraduates who want to extend their cursory knowledge of relativity to greater depth, and physics graduate students looking for a simple unified treatment of material that usually appears in the graduate physics curriculum in a somewhat disconnected fashion. The main difference between this book and existing books on special relativity is that it extends the topic list beyond the standard basic topics of spacetime geometry and physics, to include the more current and more advanced (but still accessible) topics of relativistic classical fields, causality, relativistic quantum mechanics, basic supersymmetry, and an introduction to the relativistic string. Another difference is that in most cases the dimension of space is allowed to be arbitrary. A companion CD-ROM contains Flash animations of key examples and problems discussed in the book. Understanding relativity requires that the student be able to visualize relative motion from different points of view, making animated diagrams preferable to static diagrams where relative motion has to be decoded from complicated symbols labeling each observer. P A T R I C I A S C H W A R Z received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the California Institute of Technology. Her research specialty is spacetime geometry in general relativity and string theory. She is also an expert in multimedia and online education technology. Her award-winning multimedia-rich web site at http://superstringtheory.com is popular with the public and is used widely as an educational resource across the world. J O H N S C H W A R Z, the Harold Brown Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology, is one of the founders of superstring theory. He co-authored a two-volume monograph Superstring Theory with Michael Green and Edward Witten in 1987. He is a MacArthur Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. SPECIAL RELATIVITY From Einstein to Strings PATRICIA M. SCHWARZ AND JOHN H. SCHWARZ Pasadena, California cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Informat