Description
A text intended to acquaint undergraduates with the standard details of special relativity and the foundations of general relativity. The authors are capable (have been associated with the Institute for Advanced Studies, the Universities of Texas and Cambridge), and their text derives from lectures presented at the U. of Cape Town. Their approach is geometrical, and the book abundantly/effectively illustrated. Provides instructors with a useful alternative to (for example) Taylor and Wheeler's Spacetime physics (W.H. Freeman, 1963), though some will take exception to its tempo; one encounters Lorentz transformations only in the last of the four chapters devoted to the special theory, and the bulk of the book tends to make the subject seem more complicated than it is. Exercises punctuate the text at frequent intervals, appendices, reasonbly priced, no bibliography. (NW) Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
