Cheap Spacetime Physics (Physics Series) (Book) (Edwin F. Taylor, John Archibald Wheeler) Price

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Customer Reviews of Spacetime Physics (Physics Series)

Not only is John Wheeler a consummate theoretician, he is also a gifted teacher. The solved examples were carefully chosen to elucidate key points. The remaining exercises will help the reader understand special relativity in great depth.

The first edition of _Spacetime Physics_ was written before the classic general relativity text _Gravitation_ by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler. The same brilliant exposition methods were used in the much thicker general relativity text. Both books belong in every physicist's library.

Is it really that Bad?
As a student in the same physics class of those people who placed 1-star reviews, I feel obliged to defend this book a little bit. Yes, it is sometimes not the most rigorous book on this planet. Yes, it does sometimes get a bit wordy. For all these weaknesses however, I still found it to be a very good introduction to relativity. Unlike many books which go the other way around, this book begins with the idea of an invariant spacetime interval and goes from there into deriving the Lorentz equations. It also does an excellent job of explaining many of the paradoxes which seem to undermine relativity and how these problems have been handled. These paradoxes formed the basis for many homework questions, some of which I found to be as helpful for learning relativity as the chapters themselves. If you are looking for a strong thoretical introduction to special relativity, this may not be the book for you. If you're a non-major who is just interested in the subject, I would recommend it, just with the reservations I mentioned above on the rigor.

Ideas First
This book is a courageous attemp to make special relativity more intuitive, easier and .. well fun. As such it could have been written only by two first class scientific minds and masters of physics like Taylor & Wheeler. The thing is... great scientist tend to have a distorted sense of what is fun and, more important, what is easy...Some points in the book could have been explained in a clearer and less wordy way. I find the author's obsession with trying to explain everything geometrically a bit disturbing. But don't get me wrong, this text is a great accomplishment as it manages to give a clear, effective introduction to one of the most puzzling areas of physics, without burdening you with heavy math and tons of formulas. And what is most important, it makes you understand that in physics what is important is .. IDEAS.. not terse expositions, formulas, mathematical rigor.. as important as they are as aid to express ideas and obtain results.
Definetely a recommended read for anyone with a serious interest in special relativity. Only, don't let this be your only book on the subject.