Relativity: The Special and General Theory Paperback – 3 July 2007

Difficult read, but what a prize to understand it!

Considering the information contained in this book, the Kindle version was astounding value for money. Thank you for producing this book that was ten times easier to read than I had expected. Everyone who is a scientist should read it.

This is a classic text. It’s not the best book ever written about Relativity, but it’s one of the most interesting because of the wonderful insight it gives us into the way that Einstein himself thought about it.But it would have been nice if someone involved with the Kindle edition had proof-read it before publishing it. I’ve never read a book so absolutely stuffed with typesetting errors. There’s at least one typo on almost every page. It’s really awful. I imagine that it was scanned from an original print copy by a machine, and then no one bothered to check it at all before offering it to the public.So: five stars for the book, no stars for the edition. Giving it four stars overall.

When physicists insist on writing nonsense, it is helpful to get it from the horse's mouth, so to speak. With relativity we have to get our heads around the idea that no matter how fast we are moving, we will always measure the speed of light relative to ourselves as exactly the same. This defies the common sense of our daily experience. But, using everyday language and practically no mathematics, Einstein leads us to accept this experimentally confirmed truth in the only way it can be accepted: that our time and our space lengthen or shorten such that the light around us travels at 300,000 of our km per one of our seconds. OK. I'm sure he's right. But, he does another thing in this book which I found most valuable, and that is that he firmly ties the discussion of relativity to empirical reality, so that in the end we might accept relativity with no more fuss than we accept a 30 cm rule for measuring distances and drawing straight lines. One returns to the undergraduate texts much strengthened.

I couldn't fault it: carefully written with the non-scientist, albeit intelligent reader, it was a joy to appreciate the part played by the mind experiments for which Einstein was so famous. Highly recommended.

Trying to understand why it is written in old style English, surely it was translated from German? Makes it very difficult to read and understand.

The biographical notes. The translation was good even including some amusing linguistic differences no doubt to retain some from the original text by Einstein. Nevertheless I did find some explanations unclear requiring me to refer back to previous pages for definitions.

Excellent book with a lot of useful explanation, that's why I've given it five stars.The mathematics is a bit more problematic, but that's down to me, not the book.