What does E=mc2 actually mean? Dr. Brian Cox and Professor Jeff Forshaw go on a journey to the frontier of twenty-first century science to unpack Einstein's famous equation. Explaining and simplifying notions of energy, mass, and light-while exploding commonly held misconceptions-they demonstrate how the structure of nature itself is contained within this equation. Along the way, we visit the site of one of the largest scientific experiments ever conducted: the now-famous Large Hadron Collider, a gigantic particle accelerator capable of re-creating conditions that existed fractions of a second after the Big Bang. A collaboration between one of the youngest professors in the United Kingdom and a distinguished popular physicist, Why Does E=mc2? is one of the most exciting and accessible explanations of the theory of relativity.
Learn about Einstein's theory of relativity from a physics Nobel laureate and one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century (New York Review of Books) in six memorable lessons
It was Richard Feynman's outrageous and scintillating method of teaching that earned him legendary status among students and professors of physics. From 1961 to 1963, Feynman delivered a series of lectures at the California Institute of Technology that revolutionized the teaching of physics. In Six Not-So-Easy Pieces, taken from these famous Lectures on Physics, Feynman delves into one of the most revolutionary discoveries in twentieth-century physics: Einstein's theory of relativity. The idea that the flow of time is not a constant, that the mass of an object depends on its velocity, and that the speed of light is a constant no matter what the motion of the observer, at first seemed shocking to scientists and laymen alike. But as Feynman shows, these tricky ideas are not merely dry principles of physics, but things of beauty and elegance. No one -- not even Einstein himself -- explained these difficult, anti-intuitive concepts more clearly, or with more verve and gusto, than Feynman. Filled with wonderful examples and clever illustrations, Six Not-So-Easy Pieces is the ideal introduction to the fundamentals of physics by one of the most admired and accessible physicists of all time. There is no better explanation for the scientifically literate layman. -Washington Post Book WorldWhich of these bizarre phenomena, if any, can really exist in our universe? Black holes, down which anything can fall but from which nothing can return; wormholes, short spacewarps connecting regions of the cosmos; singularities, where space and time are so violently warped that time ceases to exist and space becomes a kind of foam; gravitational waves, which carry symphonic accounts of collisions of black holes billions of years ago; and time machines, for traveling backward and forward in time.
Kip Thorne, along with fellow theorists Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, a cadre of Russians, and earlier scientists such as Oppenheimer, Wheeler and Chandrasekhar, has been in the thick of the quest to secure answers. In this masterfully written and brilliantly informed work of scientific history and explanation, Dr. Thorne, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at Caltech, leads his readers through an elegant, always human, tapestry of interlocking themes, coming finally to a uniquely informed answer to the great question: what principles control our universe and why do physicists think they know the things they think they know? Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time has been one of the greatest best-sellers in publishing history. Anyone who struggled with that book will find here a more slowly paced but equally mind-stretching experience, with the added fascination of a rich historical and human component.
Winner of the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science.
A handsome annotated edition of Einstein's celebrated book on relativity
After completing the final version of his general theory of relativity in November 1915, Albert Einstein wrote Relativity. Intended for a popular audience, the book remains one of the most lucid explanations of the special and general theories ever written. This edition of Einstein's celebrated book features an authoritative English translation of the text along with commentaries by Hanoch Gutfreund and J rgen Renn that examine the evolution of Einstein's thinking and cast his ideas in a modern context. Providing invaluable insight into one of the greatest scientific minds of all time, the book also includes a unique survey of the introductions from past editions, covers from selected early editions, a letter from Walther Rathenau to Einstein discussing the book, and a revealing sample from Einstein's original handwritten manuscript.This book is written for high school and college students learning about special relativity for the first time. It will appeal to the reader who has a healthy level of enthusiasm for understanding how and why the various results of special relativity come about.
All of the standard introductory topics in special relativity are covered: historical motivation, loss of simultaneity, time dilation, length contraction, velocity addition, Lorentz transformations, Minkowski diagrams, causality, Doppler effect, energy/momentum, collisions/decays, force, and 4-vectors. Additionally, the last chapter provides a brief introduction to the basic ideas of general relativity, including the equivalence principle, gravitational time dilation, and accelerating reference frames.
The book features more than 100 worked-out problems in the form of examples in the text and solved problems at the end of each chapter. These problems, along with the discussions in the text, will be a valuable resource in any course on special relativity. The numerous examples also make this book ideal for self-study.
Very little physics background is assumed (essentially none in the first half of the book). An intriguing aspect of special relativity is that it is challenging due to its inherent strangeness, as opposed to a heavy set of physics prerequisites. Likewise for the math prerequisite: calculus is used on a few occasions, but it is not essential to the overall flow of the book.
The latest volume in the New York Times-bestselling physics series explains Einstein's masterpiece: the general theory of relativity
He taught us classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, and special relativity. Now, physicist Leonard Susskind, assisted by a new collaborator, André Cabannes, returns to tackle Einstein's general theory of relativity. Starting from the equivalence principle and covering the necessary mathematics of Riemannian spaces and tensor calculus, Susskind and Cabannes explain the link between gravity and geometry. They delve into black holes, establish Einstein field equations, and solve them to describe gravity waves. The authors provide vivid explanations that, to borrow a phrase from Einstein himself, are as simple as possible (but no simpler).
An approachable yet rigorous introduction to one of the most important topics in physics, General Relativity is a must-read for anyone who wants a deeper knowledge of the universe's real structure.
From the age of Galileo until the early years of the 20th century, scientists grappled with seemingly insurmountable paradoxes inherent in the theories of classical physics. With the publication of Albert Einstein's special and general theories of relativity, however, traditional approaches to solving the riddles of space and time crumbled. In their place stood a radically new view of the physical world, providing answers to many of the unsolved mysteries of pre-Einsteinian physics.
Acclaimed as the pinnacle of scientific philosophy, the theories of relativity tend to be regarded as the exclusive domain of highly trained scientific minds. The great physicist himself disclaimed this exclusionary view, and in this book, he explains both theories in their simplest and most intelligible form for the layman not versed in the mathematical foundations of theoretical physics.
In addition to the theories themselves, this book contains a final part presenting fascinating considerations on the universe as a whole. Appendices cover the simple derivation of the Lorentz transformation, Minkowski's four-dimensional space, and the experimental confirmation of the general theory of relativity. Students, teachers, and other scientifically minded readers will appreciate this inexpensive and accessible interpretation of one of the world's greatest intellectual accomplishments.