A terrific historical and conseptual approach.
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I consider this book as one of the greatest treasures resting with other books on my bookcase. Even though it hardly make use of mathematics, it succeeds in explaining the reasons led to the Special and General Theory of Relativity by following a purely physical way of reasoning. It truly opened my mind and considerably helped me to get a real physical feeling of ideas as abstract as time dilation and length contraction. The greatest part of the book deals with the historical facts that step by step gave birth to the theories of relativity. This fact shouldn't discourage you because first of all even the chapters that are dedicated to Newtonian physics will give you tremendous joy when seen form the eyes of such a great scientist and last but not least a theory can not be well understood if it is cut off from the historical progress that transformed the endless experiments and conjectures to a revolutionary, compact and self consistent theory of physics. I dare to make a comparison of Born's writing style with that of R.Feynman who tried to convey the physical thinking underling the seemingly abstract mathematical formalism. I fully recommend this book which the reader will enjoy till the last page.
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Historical importance of Born on Relativity
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The original German edition of this book dates from 1920, the English translation dating from 1924 (the red-covered Dover edition). It's a decidedly original piece that made a real attempt to come to grips with the ambivalence of the subject, and in particular introduces the idea that e/m wave crests are events that observers in relative motion can agree about. This isn't true, bur it isn't obvious it isn't true, and the whole idea seems to have been fruitful in provoking thinking about anti-realism in Born's assistants - first Pauli who produced his own book on relativity in 1921 and unlike Born did not feel he had to revise it; then Heisenberg in another direction. Unfortunately when it became time to reprint it in 1962 Born refused to sanction it in its original form so the current edition is perfectly respectable and correct but in my view has lost some of the verve and interest of the original; like most books on relativity you don't feel quite satisfied but you're not quite sure why. It's good, though: Born was a protean figure with the gift of attracting brilliant assistants and seeing them given the maximum credit for their contributions, to the extent that his own role tends to be forgotten, and some of this generosity affects the quality of his writing. But like others I feel there would be a place for a new publisher (maybe Folkestone books?) to republish Dover books that have gone out of print; one thinks of O'Rahilly's highly original (and surely wrong?) take on e/m theory. Where can one get it now? It's disappeared like Born's red edition.
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Best one yet
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Born does one of the best jobs of anyone of explaining relativity to the interested person. The first half deals primarily with Newtonian mechanics and he later applies this under more extreme circumstances to bring out Einstein's theory. Born also addresses this subject very well mathematically (which is good, because otherwise no one could understand the subject), although his variables may be confusing initially as he uses letters which are not convention. All in all it was probably the best book on relativity that I've read, and that's pretty good.
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An excellent review of classical physics and relativity
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Born spends the first half of the book developing an historical perspective of the time at which Einstein was grappling with Relativity. He leads us through all the major domains of Physics and arrives at Einstein's point of departure. In the second half of the book, a full and complete review of Relativity is given. Extensive use of physics equations is made throughout the book however for the reader looking purely for the historical perspective these can be safely assumed.
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