Narrow Relativity I

Introductions in Italian

  • A1) Edwin F. Taylor, John Archibald Wheeler - Spacetime physics- 2nd ed. (1992) online https://www.eftaylor.com/spacetimephysics/ — Local Copy transl.it. Physics of Space Timeo (2018) john Wheeler: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler
  • A2) Daniel F. Styer - Relativity for the Questioning Mind - (2011) transl.it. Really Understanding Relativity (2012) home Daniel Styer: https://www2.oberlin.edu/physics/dstyer/
  • A3) Elio Fabri - Teaching relativity in the 21st century. From Galileo’s “navilio” to the expansion of the Universe, aIF Notebook No. 16, April-June 2005 online https://www.sagredo.eu/Q16/ — Local Copy
  • A4) Max Born, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (1962) transl.it. La sintesi einsteniana (1976)
  • A5) Sean Carroll,Space Time and Motion (2024)
  • A6) Richard Feynman - Six less easy pieces. einstenian relativity, symmetry, space-time. (2004) (six lectures extracted from Feynman’s Lectures on Physics)

Introductions in Italian

Disclosure in Italian

  • C1) Giorgio Chinnici - Absolute and Relative. Relativity from Galileo to Einstein and Beyond (2015)
  • C2) Simone Baroni - Understanding Time and Space. A Journey into Einstein’s Relativity (2023)
  • C3) Amedeo Balbi - Chasing a ray of light. Discovering the theory of relativity (2021)
  • C4) Clement V. Durell, “Readable Relativity” (1960) transl. it. “Relativity with the four operations,” 2nd ed.

English introductions

  • D1) David J. Morin - Special Relativity. For the Enthusiastic Beginner (2017)
  • D2) N. David Mermin - It’s About Time: Understanding Einstein’s Relativity(2019)
  • D3) Robert L. Mills - Space, Time and Quanta (1994) - Part I (Space and Time)
  • D4) Ralph Baierlein - From Newton to Einstein. the Trail of Light, (2001)

If one has to recommend only one book for studying the theory of special relativity it is A1, “Physics of Space Time,” by John Wheeler and Edwin Taylor. Wheeler, one of the most important scientists of the 20th century, should need no introduction. Pioneer in nuclear physics, general relativity, quantum gravity, geometrodynamics, master of Nobel laureates (from Feynman to Thorne), invented geons, quantum foam, the term “black hole,” the Participatory Anthropic Principle, the “It from Bit” Principle (Everything is information, there is no physical reality without first an information structure). Co-author of the Apple Book (the Gravitation, with Misner and Nobel laureate Thorne, his student), a Bible for prophets of general relativity. The treatment in Physics of Spacetime is rigorous and thorough, but does not require any special prior knowledge of mathematics, nor physics.The second English edition is free online, with a copy also on this site, and has been translated and published in Italian.The sequel, on the theory of general relativity, Exploring Black Holes, is also free online, but unfortunately has not been translated.

A somewhat less demanding and complementary alternative is to start with A2, Really Understanding Relativity, by Daniel Styer, professor of physics at Oberlin, a famous College for Liberal Arts (among the first in the world, in the early 19th century, to be open to women, Negroes, Indians and minorities as well). This also requires little math but does not just give a vague idea of Einstein’s theory, but tries to make it thoroughly understood.

This volume by Elio Fabri (professor emeritus Univ. and Normale di Pisa) is primarily aimed at teachers of secondary schools,but it can also be profitably used by any high school student.Based on courses on the teaching of modern physics taught at AIF-SIF (Associazione per l’Insegnamento della Fisica, Italian Physics Society) it is not readily available in print as an AIF notebook. But it can be downloaded for free online, with a copy also on this site.

Nobel laureate Max Born’s popular work is many years old but is still very valid because of its approach, reflected in the Italian title, the Einsteinian synthesis: to present the theory of relativity not as an unexpected revolution but as the natural evolution of three centuries of the history of scientific thought. In fact, the first five chapters are devoted to an introduction to classical physics (mechanics, electromagnetism, optics) and only the last two to Einstein’s theories. The level is suitable for any high school student. A text to which I am very fondly attached, because it is one of the first books I read when I was a boy attending precisely the scientific high school, and it was a real enlightenment.

Another Nobel laureate, Richard Feynman (Wheeler’s former student), is the author of a very nimble little volume entitled Six Less Easy Pieces, and it contains a selection six lectures extracted from the legendary course Feynman’s Physics, like the companion Six Easy Pieces (one guesses from the title that it should be read possibly before this one). The six lectures, of course, require no special prerequisites:

  1. Carriers
  2. Symmetry in physical laws
  3. The Theory of Restricted Relativity
  4. Relativistic energy and momentum
  5. Space-time
  6. The curved space

Another classic of popularization, which is almost 70 years old but does not show it, the introduction by Durell, a high school mathematics teacher (among his students Freeman Dyson came close to a Nobel Prize), which from the Italian title makes it clear that to understand relativity restricted four elementary operations, or a little more (early high school algebra), is enough.

I could have cited many other popular books on the subject, including those by Einstein himself, Bertrand Russell, by Steven Hawking, Carlo Rovelli, and so on. But in my personal and humble opinion, I do not find them as useful as these ones I have listed.

Rather if one gets by with English one can access many other publications on the subject. Few books are translated into Italian, they are also often translated very poorly, and original publications in our language are really rare. so by reading in English, it is much easier for a reader to find the text that suits him or her best, where he or she can go deeper into the subject. Among my favorites are texts by David Morin, David Mermin, Robert Mills.

  • David Mermin is an eminent American theoretical physicist, professor emeritus at Cornell Univ., a scholar of condensed states of matter and quantum computing, and a great popularizer, with a regular column in the popular Physics Today magazine. It’s about time (It’s now) contains a clear, lively, and informal exposition of special relativity that takes an original approach to introducing readers to the nature of time. It is accessible to anyone who remembers a little high school algebra and geometry (such as the texts cited above by Styer, Born, Durell,…). It attempts to explain profound concepts even to the curious who have no technical scientific training.
  • David Morin is a professor of Physics at Harvard Univ. His passion for teaching has led him to write many rigorous yet clear textbooks on Algebra, Probability, Classical Mechanics, Electricity and Magnetism, and Waves. All of his volumes are accessible to a junior high school student encountering certain science subjects for the first time. No exception is his work on Special Relativity, which is comprehensive, profound, and crystal clear, even on concepts in other texts that are poorly explained or not covered at all. Originally the material was contained in one chapter of the Introduction to Classical Mechanics, but Morin later improved and expanded it to the 450 pages of the latest edition.
  • Robert Mills’ name is linked to the Yang-Mills non-Abelian gauge invariance theories, one of the fundamental components of the model standard of elementary particles and fundamental interactions. In the late 1980s, Prof. Mills, emeritus of theoretical physics at The Ohio State University, accepted a challenge, an educational experiment. To explain modern physics to people who had never before taken a physics course: college freshmen, recent high school graduates. the basic idea was that young people who were motivated and fascinated by seeing the most advanced discoveries in the most rapidly advancing fields would enroll en masse in science faculties, and become more enthusiastically engaged in the traditional courses of the early years (general physics, mechanics, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, waves,…) after seeing where they could go on the frontiers of research. Mills divided the first-semester course into three mini-courses: Relativity (special and general, with a sprinkling of classical and statistical physics), Quantum Mechanics, and Particles and Force Fields. The scientist prepared the material assuming that the students knew high school math (algebra, analytic geometry, trigonometry,..) well enough, a little derivatives and integrals, but nothing more. In fact, he included a quick review of all the necessary prerequisites. The first part, the one we are interested in here, on special relativity, remains among the best introductions to the subject