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Talking about relativity
193 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1971
6 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 29, 2023
One thing that I have come to realize and know about myself is that I freak out at things I don't understand (in a good way) which makes me want to know everything about it from the start to the most recent developments (I know this is sometimes not a good method but what can I do).
So the story begins with me attending the second class of General Relativity, where I was both amazed and freaked out; amazed at how beautiful it is and freaking out about the details and elements which were new to me and I didn't know about them, such as the metric tensors, Einstein tensor, Einstein notation and so on... so I rushed to the fakultatbibliothek (Faculty's Library in German) and looked for anything about Relativity in both criteria of textbooks and other general popular science books, after a thorough search, I came across this coverless book with a rather different title and I just picked it up without thinking too much about it... I got hooked.
It is an old book (published in 1971), old enough to see that Synge had no idea that in the next century human beings will be able to detect the Gravitational Waves and the finding of a black hole. It is quite mesmerizing to witness the development of human beings (Mostly in Physics) from a century ago to today. Sometimes I wonder to myself what would happen if somebody like Synge was resurrected and saw all these discoveries made that they thought would be nearly impossible, and the next thought I have is that maybe this will happen to me too, maybe in a hundred years things that we think are nearly impossible or impossible will be facts of the day. This worries me that I will not be able to see that day, but that is the way of Nature. (Except if we find a way to store our consciousness and install it on some look alike robot or something... I'm way over my head here.)
One of the things in this book that really captured my thought was the distinction of the Real World and the Model (or Mathematical) World. One is real, and the other is the way we have constructed to understand the real world. All this comes with a handy set of consequences on us human beings and one of them being Pygmalion Syndrome in which one cannot distinguish between the real world and the model world, falls into the swirling vortex of theory and abstract. The case of very fundamental Concepts in Physics requires a strong ability of constructing an M-World that will help to find a better explanation to the R-World, Without being able to do so one fails to capture the beast and often becomes prey to it. I believe this is true in every hunt for answers to fundamental concepts. So does Einstein and every other physicist, actually the change of a concrete understanding or a theory most of the time comes when one changes features and parameters of their M-world and try to align it better with the real world. The obvious example is the change of gravitational theories from Newton to Einstein and I can reassure you that the difference is huge, the shift from Newtonian Gravity to Einstein's Gravity is so interesting that it excites you about the way we deal with M-Worlds of ours.
I can never not be excited about the elements of GR and SR too but mostly GR. The fabric of space-time, time as a coordinate, the curvature of space-time, Einstein's Notation, Metric tensors and so on.
Relativity is Exquisite, like the girl I loved, but also very hard to completely understand, but I'm on my way there.
I can say this book - despite being old - is a very good book to get on track of what this whole fuss is about in a very academic way, yet open to people with no background in physics, and they also can at least capture a slight idea of what it REALLY is about not just some balls orbiting and rolling around each other in a curved space, and also get a more inclusive understanding of time, how most of us when we think of time we think of it in the Newtonian frame of absolute time and why it is wrong.
The more I know about relativity, the more understand how this sentence relates more to me: Einstein on toast and me a PseudoNobel Laureate.
So the story begins with me attending the second class of General Relativity, where I was both amazed and freaked out; amazed at how beautiful it is and freaking out about the details and elements which were new to me and I didn't know about them, such as the metric tensors, Einstein tensor, Einstein notation and so on... so I rushed to the fakultatbibliothek (Faculty's Library in German) and looked for anything about Relativity in both criteria of textbooks and other general popular science books, after a thorough search, I came across this coverless book with a rather different title and I just picked it up without thinking too much about it... I got hooked.
It is an old book (published in 1971), old enough to see that Synge had no idea that in the next century human beings will be able to detect the Gravitational Waves and the finding of a black hole. It is quite mesmerizing to witness the development of human beings (Mostly in Physics) from a century ago to today. Sometimes I wonder to myself what would happen if somebody like Synge was resurrected and saw all these discoveries made that they thought would be nearly impossible, and the next thought I have is that maybe this will happen to me too, maybe in a hundred years things that we think are nearly impossible or impossible will be facts of the day. This worries me that I will not be able to see that day, but that is the way of Nature. (Except if we find a way to store our consciousness and install it on some look alike robot or something... I'm way over my head here.)
One of the things in this book that really captured my thought was the distinction of the Real World and the Model (or Mathematical) World. One is real, and the other is the way we have constructed to understand the real world. All this comes with a handy set of consequences on us human beings and one of them being Pygmalion Syndrome in which one cannot distinguish between the real world and the model world, falls into the swirling vortex of theory and abstract. The case of very fundamental Concepts in Physics requires a strong ability of constructing an M-World that will help to find a better explanation to the R-World, Without being able to do so one fails to capture the beast and often becomes prey to it. I believe this is true in every hunt for answers to fundamental concepts. So does Einstein and every other physicist, actually the change of a concrete understanding or a theory most of the time comes when one changes features and parameters of their M-world and try to align it better with the real world. The obvious example is the change of gravitational theories from Newton to Einstein and I can reassure you that the difference is huge, the shift from Newtonian Gravity to Einstein's Gravity is so interesting that it excites you about the way we deal with M-Worlds of ours.
I can never not be excited about the elements of GR and SR too but mostly GR. The fabric of space-time, time as a coordinate, the curvature of space-time, Einstein's Notation, Metric tensors and so on.
Relativity is Exquisite, like the girl I loved, but also very hard to completely understand, but I'm on my way there.
I can say this book - despite being old - is a very good book to get on track of what this whole fuss is about in a very academic way, yet open to people with no background in physics, and they also can at least capture a slight idea of what it REALLY is about not just some balls orbiting and rolling around each other in a curved space, and also get a more inclusive understanding of time, how most of us when we think of time we think of it in the Newtonian frame of absolute time and why it is wrong.
The more I know about relativity, the more understand how this sentence relates more to me: Einstein on toast and me a PseudoNobel Laureate.
May 18, 2020
Unique approach. Great explanations. It's a great read for people who are interested in Physics and want to learn about Relativity in its true flavor.
They start with the idea of going through General Relativity before Special, to explain how very different it is from Newtonian Physics. He explains how the way they teach us in schools... going from Newton to Special Relativity, with a sort of notion/prejudice(?) that Special Relativity is a refined/modified form of Newtonian Physics... is flawed. How irreconcilable the two world views are. And how that transition from Newton to Einstein historically was such, that you needed to start talking in Newtonian concepts for people to start understanding what you're trying to say. But that the true Einsteinian theory does not hold the concepts of distance and time as presented in Newtonian Physics (at least, not in the flavor that we understand them).
The concepts are presented in an extremely clear manner... especially the part where he explains what it means to live in a four-dimensional world. And the curvature of spacetime. And particles in collision. This book truly talks Physics.
They start with the idea of going through General Relativity before Special, to explain how very different it is from Newtonian Physics. He explains how the way they teach us in schools... going from Newton to Special Relativity, with a sort of notion/prejudice(?) that Special Relativity is a refined/modified form of Newtonian Physics... is flawed. How irreconcilable the two world views are. And how that transition from Newton to Einstein historically was such, that you needed to start talking in Newtonian concepts for people to start understanding what you're trying to say. But that the true Einsteinian theory does not hold the concepts of distance and time as presented in Newtonian Physics (at least, not in the flavor that we understand them).
The concepts are presented in an extremely clear manner... especially the part where he explains what it means to live in a four-dimensional world. And the curvature of spacetime. And particles in collision. This book truly talks Physics.
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