Very Special Relativity: An illustrated Guide

  • Sander Bais
Harvard University Press: 2007. 144 pp. $20.95, £13.95 067402611X 9780674026117 | ISBN: 0-674-02611-X

Sander Bais's Very Special Relativity is a brief overview of Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of space and time, an esoteric topic that one would presume to be directed at a narrow audience. But this book would not be out of place on a coffee table, with its handsome design, thick, coloured papers and imaginative graphics that match the high standard of its content. We expect art books, not science texts, on our coffee tables, assuming that in science it is the ideas that matter, not the visual presentation.

Here, the elegant illustrations help Bais lead the reader from Einstein's postulates through the ideas of simultaneity, inertial frames, time dilation and relativistic energy and momentum, eschewing the usual admonitions against equations. The author's clever idea of pairing every page of text with a space–time diagram (a graphical tool actually used by relativists) to illustrate the concepts and mathematics suits the geometrical basis of its subject perfectly. It allows Bais to stop just short of using calculus — although the definitions of things such as 'slope' and 'tangent' are taken for granted, and he does allow a dp/dt to slip in when discussing momentum and forces. He manages to navigate all the way to E=mc2 and to give us a taste of Einstein's even more miraculous work of the following decade, his general relativity theory of gravitation.

Very Special Relativity is aimed at an under-served market: keen high-school students will welcome it because it extends beyond qualitative discussion of 'modern' physics and popular-science books. With its brainteaser problems, it should also work as an undergraduate introductory textbook. Readers who haven't exercised their mathematical and geometric muscle since they were in school might find it tough going.

It is rare for science books to rate as objects in their own right, but Very Special Relativity is a lovely little object. You could easily imagine a web-based version of it, with a bit of animation to serve its pedagogical needs. Still, there is some quality about the hard covers and high resolution that even my 26-inch screen wouldn't be able to capture. No longer is there an excuse for physics textbooks to be expensive, boring, thick or stuffed with equations in order to qualify as good teaching material.