Simply Einstein: Relativity Demystified

[lightreads]

Simply Einstein: Relativity Demystified by Richard Wolfson

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
Warning: This review contains complaints about a lack of higher mathematics. If that is going to squick you, flee now.



I picked this up because it's been over five years since I studied physics in an organized fashion, and it's a lot like a second language in that you use it or you lose it. So I started at the beginning again. This book is good – very good, even, and I recommend it highly to anyone with an ounce of curiosity about, you know, the cosmos and reality and stuff.



But because it's so foundational, it works almost entirely through example by analogy and simile. And I'm kind of weird, so I've always found physics by analogy (you're in an elevator in orbit and you drop a rubber ball!) to be counter-productive. The analogy sort of . . . gets in the way for me so I don't get at the fundamental truth. Which is why I didn't grock physics until I got through calculus and they could explain it to me that way. At which point, vistas opened up like magic.



So it's a really good book – lucid and logical and careful. And it's really nicely aware of how understanding General Relativity in particular is a trick of consciousness. It doesn't matter how much you know if you can't reorder your conceptions of 'true' and 'real.' Which is awesome, it just wasn't the book for my consciousness.


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