Introduction to Special Relativity

Rating:
Summary: The Elegance of the Mathematics Revealed
Review: Special Relativity is really nothing more than an application of linear algebra, but this book shows that upon reflection it becomes a particularly elegant application of linear algebra. I have never come across a book which makes this so obvious.

This book should be accessible to advanced undergraduates, those who have the level of mathematical sophistication required of your upper level undergraduate classes.

Rating:
Summary: wonderful
Review: The author has the knack of always saying just exactly the needed words to connect the math with the physics. After reading every line of this book very carefully I can say that at last I understand special relativity.

Rating:
Summary: The best introduction to Special Relativity (in English)
Review: This textbook is, probably, the best introduction to special relativity in English language.

Professor Rindler presents a skilful introduction to flat spacetime using four-tensors and allowing the neophyte to get leisurely acquainted with the nondefinite metric of Minkowskian spacetime through several worked and insightful examples -- not to mention the most interesting collection of problems, presented at the end of each chapter, that I have encountered in a textbook at this introductory level.

Having said that, I must add two remarks.

My first remark is that I cannot understand the reason why textbooks in English (as this one) insist in deriving the Lorentz transformation using Einstein's second postulate on the speed of light: as already pointed out by Jean-Marc Levy-Leblond (Am. J. Phys., Vol. 44, pp. 271-277, 1976), this second postulate is not only superfluous but also epistemological misleading -- see, e.g., the French textbook by J. Hladik and M. Chrysos (Introduction a la Relativite Restreinte, Dunod, Paris, 2001) which can be bought at Amazon.fr.

My second remark is that I think Hestenes' geometric algebra -- see, e.g., his article in Am. J. Phys., Vol. 71, pp. 691-714, 2003 -- is the most appropriate mathematical tool to present special relativity, even at the undergraduate level. You can check this out in his book "New Foundations for Classical Mechanics" (2nd ed., Kluwer, 1999), namely in Chapter 9.