Science: general issues
September 2007
Een visuele inleiding
Bais wrote a cute pictorial monograph that smoothly takes you to the very heart of the theory that shook the foundations of science a century ago. Einstein’s 1905 papers on special relativity marked a turning point in our understanding of such fundamental notions a space, time, mass and energy.
In an elegant sequence of easy to follow steps through a splendid series of spacetime diagrams Sander Bais gives you the thrill of discovering Einstein’s sublime but extremely counter intuitive reality yourself. The chapters cover subjects like , the postulates, simultaneity, causality, contractions and dilations, and energy and momentum. Discover in a pictorial way why moving clocks run slow, why things cannot move faster then the speed of light, or why mass and energy are equivalent… A delightful journey for the curious mind, the critical student, and the teacher who wants to inspire, but also for all those who want to recapture this beautiful body of knowledge.
This book is not as much a philosophical or historical reflection on special relativity, as a manual that with a few words brings you the essential contents of this unique theory. A guided tour full of thought provoking riddles, paradoxes and brainteasers that might keep you awake, fortunately their many back-of- the-envelope resolutions are also included.
This book is as close to a do-it-yourself relativity kit as you can get. The author nicely exploits the fact that one image can say a lot more than a full page of algebra, and where algebra is hard to remember some of Bais’ diagrams are hard to forget.
