Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the second edition
- Preface to the first edition
- 1 Special relativity
- 2 Vector analysis in special relativity
- 3 Tensor analysis in special relativity
- 4 Perfect fluids in special relativity
- 5 Preface to curvature
- 6 Curved manifolds
- 7 Physics in a curved spacetime
- 8 The Einstein field equations
- 9 Gravitational radiation
- 10 Spherical solutions for stars
- 11 Schwarzschild geometry and black holes
- 12 Cosmology
- Appendix A Summary of linear algebra
- References
- Index
1 - Special relativity
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the second edition
- Preface to the first edition
- 1 Special relativity
- 2 Vector analysis in special relativity
- 3 Tensor analysis in special relativity
- 4 Perfect fluids in special relativity
- 5 Preface to curvature
- 6 Curved manifolds
- 7 Physics in a curved spacetime
- 8 The Einstein field equations
- 9 Gravitational radiation
- 10 Spherical solutions for stars
- 11 Schwarzschild geometry and black holes
- 12 Cosmology
- Appendix A Summary of linear algebra
- References
- Index
Summary
Fundamental principles of special relativity (SR) theory
The way in which special relativity is taught at an elementary undergraduate level – the level at which the reader is assumed competent – is usually close in spirit to the way it was first understood by physicists. This is an algebraic approach, based on the Lorentz transformation (§ 1.7 below). At this basic level, we learn how to use the Lorentz transformation to convert between one observer's measurements and another's, to verify and understand such remarkable phenomena as time dilation and Lorentz contraction, and to make elementary calculations of the conversion of mass into energy.
This purely algebraic point of view began to change, to widen, less than four years after Einstein proposed the theory. Minkowski pointed out that it is very helpful to regard (t, x, y, z) as simply four coordinates in a four-dimensional space which we now call spacetime. This was the beginning of the geometrical point of view, which led directly to general relativity in 1914–16. It is this geometrical point of view on special relativity which we must study before all else.
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- A First Course in General Relativity , pp. 1 - 32Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
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