A Relatively Painless Guide to Special Relativity

This impenetrable primer by Drexel University physics professor Goldberg (The Universe in the Rearview Mirror) explores “how space and time work.” He explains that relativity is about “how we measure the distance between two points... in space and time” and delves into how it affects the physics of light, momentum, and electromagnetism. The explanations are highly technical, as when he walks through the complex mathematical notation for expressing a particle’s position in spacetime and the matrix devised by German mathematician Hermann Minkowski to account for time in equations. Brief moments of accessibility are peppered throughout—such as the overview of how scientists have attempted to calculate the speed of light since Galileo, whose unsuccessful experiment from the early 1600s involved flashing a lamp from the top of a hill at an observer a mile away—but they’re overwhelmed by jargon-filled examinations of Lorentz transformations (converting between one frame of reference and another) and doppler shifts (the phenomenon in which the frequency of waves depends on what direction the emitter is moving in). Though Goldberg aspires to write for undergraduate physics students and readers who “have read qualitative or popular science versions of relativity and wanted to delve deeper,” this is likely too complicated for the latter group. It’s “painless” in name only. (July)