General Relativity

relativity chosen by Woodhouse, marvellous faithfulness to historical developments, in particular Einstein's own writings, characterizes the entire treatment. On p.7, already, the weak and strong equivalence principles are presented and analysed in a succinct and historically rooted fashion. The former, going back to Galileo's pendulums (Woodhouse correctly says "pendula," of course) and famously connected with Eotvos' experiment, entails that inertial mass and gravitational mass are the same; and the latter says that there are no obvservable differences between the local effects of gravity and acceleration. Woodhouse's brief discussion of these observable differences between the local effects of gravity and acceleration. Woodhouse's brief discussion of these incomparable axioms underlying Einstein's revolution is a gem of exposition, covering the historical sweep of the attendant experiments (he even mentions a planned space experiment, "STEP," which will test the latter principle to within one part in 1018) and conveying what is to come as a result of these stipulations. Finally, I want to draw special attention to pp.23-27, where Woodhouse does a phenomenally good job of explicating the subject of tensors in Minkowski space, a subject which has always been a bit unsettling to me who was raised to visit tensor products in their homological algebraic home and I cannot resist mentioning Problem 1.5 on p.13, dealing with "Einstein's birthday present." It's a fine book, beautifully written and clear, and I highly recommend it. [Reviewed by Michael Berg, 20.1.2007] "Woodhouse ! lets the physical intuition behind relativity inform every step of its logical development, making his treatment as digestible as any in print. He does introduce ab ovo what differential geometry he needs, and he takes the whole theory far enough to develop general relativity's most exciting predictions, black holes and gravity waves, all in less than half the number of pages one might expect. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals." (D. V. Feldman, CHOICE, Vol. 44 (11), July, 2007) "The book is an outgrowth of a lecture course given over many years by the author and his colleagues to final-year applied mathematicians at the Mathematical Institute in Oxford, UK. The book is well-written and easy to follow because the author constructs the necessary apparatus layer-by-layer, from the bottom up, carefully motivating and justifying every new concept. Exercises are given at the end of every chapter ! and numerous examples appear throughout the text. ! its expository style is very appealing." (David A. Burton, General Relativity and Gravitation, Vol. 39, 2007)