Imagine that you are floating in space in a space suit (…) Suddenly you discover two people who look like humans are approaching you at great speed. The two are wearing strange spacesuits, their faces covered with helmets. Surely they are extraterrestrial, you think (…) Liked and jealous too, you broadcast a couple of them to express your admiration. To your great surprise, you were told that they would be happy to meet you, but as much as they were interested, they wouldn’t move an iota. exactly the contrary, Your presence If so, who hastened to overtake them quickly. Both are right. and she too.”
Who is skipping who?
French physicist Christophe Galvard, who received his Ph.D. with Stephen Hawking, describes the principle of relativity in loose words: Without an excellent reference system, the laws of nature have the same form for all observers. In the scene described, this means that it is not possible to determine who is now moving.
This knowledge, which Galileo Galilei already possessed, led Albert Einstein to the special theory of relativity. Galvard was able to explain the background of the theory as well as the most famous formula in physics on only 89 pages of large print: E = mc2. He begins with the discovery of the finite speed of light and Maxwell’s statement that light is an electromagnetic wave. He then explains how the application of the principle of relativity to Maxwell’s equations (which describe the behavior of those same waves) revolutionized our understanding of space and time: thus distances and durations are not the same for all observers, but depend on perspective.
From there, the author makes his way to mass, which also changes Einstein’s theory with increasing speed, and then ends up with the famous formula E = mc2. At the end he mentioned some implications of the theory of special relativity, such as the theoretical prediction of antimatter and the use of nuclear energy. Galvard’s style is casual and fun throughout, although his explanations are a bit succinct in places – which is not surprising given the book’s brevity. There are also some nice illustrations, but one would like more. For example, the author shows that events in space and time can be represented together in the so-called Minkowski diagram without explaining it.
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