General Relativity Coursebook

1905 was Einstein’s magical year. In that year, he published three articles, on light quanta, on the foundations of the theory of Special Relativity, and on Brownian motion, each one separately worthy of a Nobel prize. Immediately after his work on Special Relativity, Einstein started thinking about gravity and how to give it a relativistically invariant formulation. He kept on working on this problem during the next ten years, doing little else.

Einstein's Space-Time: An Introduction to Special and General Relativity is a textbook addressed to students in physics and other people interested in Relativity and a history of physics. The book contains a complete account of Special Relativity that begins with the historical analysis of the reasons that led to a change in our manner of regarding the space and time.

“General Relativity Without Calculus” offers a compact but mathematically correct introduction to the general theory of relativity, assuming only a basic knowledge of high school mathematics and physics. Targeted at first year undergraduates (and advanced high school students) who wish to learn Einstein’s theory beyond popular science accounts, it covers the basics of special relativity, Minkowski space-time, non-Euclidean geometry, Newtonian gravity, the Schwarzschild solution, black holes and cosmology. The quick-paced style is balanced by over 75 exercises (including full solutions), allowing readers to test and consolidate their understanding.