The Elements of Relativity

ISBN-13: 9780199658633 / Angielski / Twarda / 2018 / 336 str.

David Wittman

Opis

This undergraduate textbook introduces relativity to a non-technical audience. The "thinking tools" approach allows readers to understand at a much deeper level than popular treatments, and end-of-chapter problems (always lacking in popular books) help build and cement that understanding.

Recenzje

The Elements of Relativity is unique: Wittman writes for students who lack a detailed physics background but who still wish to learn about the nature of space-time, black holes, and astronomical phenomena like gravitational lensing. The book successfully builds the necessary physics fundamentals at a reasonable pace to allow the reader to tackle the most sophisticated concepts by the end of the book. Highly recommended.

O autorze

David M. Wittman is a professor at the University of California, Davis. He has discovered millions of galaxies as co-PI of the Deep Lens Survey, which was awarded over 100 nights on 4-m telescopes to study a representative sample of the universe. But discovering millions of galaxies was just the easy part. He analyzed the galaxies' shapes to reveal subtle distortions caused by the gravitational fields of foreground masses, an effect called weak gravitational lensing. He was the first to detect cosmic shear, or weak lensing by the large-scale structure of the universe. He was also the first to detect a cluster of galaxies through its gravitational effects alone, and the first to combine source redshift information with lensing to probe structure in three dimensions (tomography).