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Comment by bra-ket | Hacker News Reader

Great article, what intro books would you recommend on 1) special or general relativity for an advanced (engineering) undergrad

and 2) books on spacetime math/geometry/tensor algebra and its applications beyond modern physics.

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I would highly recommend reading this collection of essays compiled into a book titled "Einstein's Theories of Relativity and Gravitation" There was a competition for anyone to explain Einstein's work for the layman and a lot of people wrote essays to win the $5000 prize, this book has the top essays that were chosen and really helped me get a grip on the idea of relativity.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Einstein_s_Theories_of_...

Thanks! As the book (from 1922) seems to be out of copyright, here's a link to the PDF copy I found on archive.org.

https://archive.org/details/einsteinstheorie0000bird

Mr. Tomkins in Wonderland by George Gamow of Alpher, Bethe, Gamow fame -

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WIKOFLRQuc8

That's not advanced undergrad certainly :) .. but I found the following great to learn from. Especially the treatment of momentum and the stress energy tensor really worked for me -

  https://www.amazon.com/First-Course-General-Relativity/dp/0521277035

If you liked the article, note that the author has the whole book:

https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Galaxy-Humanity-Discovered-Uni...

“Beyond The Galaxy: How Humanity Looked Beyond Our Milky Way And Discovered The Entire Universe”

Einstein’s relativity: the special and general theory is very readable and very insightful. Instead of explaining how the math works first he goes about explaining how he came to put these theories together, which makes the math come pretty naturally

The actual papers that Einstein wrote weren't that hard to read, that's why he got so successful after all.

For a more recent treatment, the works of Carlo Rovelli are all about more human scale applications or implications of the theory.

Taylor’s and Wheeler’s “Spacetime Physics” is quite approachable and easy to read introduction to Special Relativity that has hardly any math beyond basic algebra.

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