This book bridges the huge gap between popular science and mathematical treatments of Einstein's theories. It explains special and general relativity, gravity, black holes, and gravitational waves, also presenting current ideas about dark matter and dark energy. The explanations are entirely non-mathematical, using many color pictures and clear concepts. In this way, the reader is led to a much deeper understanding than any popular science book can provide.
The author has written this book for everyone who wants to go beyond superficial descriptions of relativity's remarkable phenomena, but is not equipped to read the professional literature and complicated math behind the theory. By providing a complete description in terms of concepts and pictures, the book answers many questions about why the theory works as it does. For example, it explains why and how momentum and pressure are related to gravity; why and how mass causes spacetime to curve and how curvature tells objects how to move; it also reveals the origin of the ring seen around the first ever image of a black hole. Not least, the reader will learn in detail how gravitational waves are produced and measured.
Since their conception, the theories of relativity have appealed to the public's imagination. Thanks to this book, readers now have the opportunity to convert their fascination with the topic to a deep understanding.
Author(s): Wouter Schmitz
Series: The Frontiers Collection
Publisher: Springer
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 420
City: Cham
Contents
1 Introduction
2 What is (the) Matter?
2.1 The Postulates of Special Relativity
2.2 Why We Are Waves
2.3 Wave Dynamics
3 On the Velocity of Massless Waves
3.1 Maxwell’s Speed of Light
3.2 Generic Speed of Light
3.3 Elasticity of the Vacuum
3.4 The Problem of the Ether
4 On the Velocity of Massive Waves
4.1 Wave Velocity
4.2 A Game with Rope and Springs
4.3 Consequence 1: You Cannot Go Faster Than Light
4.4 Consequence 2: The Relation Between Frequency and Wavelength Depends on the Mass
4.5 Consequence 3: Mass = Inertia
4.6 Consequence 4: Other Potential Differences Can Create “Mass”
4.7 Consequence 5: Mass Can Be Changed into Energy
4.8 Example: Photons in a Plasma
4.9 What These Consequences Say
4.10 Length Contraction and Time Dilation of Waves
4.11 Doppler Effect
4.12 Conclusions Regarding the Way We Perceive Distance in Spacetime
4.13 The Postulates of Special Relativity
4.14 About Higgs
5 The Relative, the Absolute, and the Paradoxical
5.1 Why Would a Distance in Space Care About Our Waves?
5.2 The Clash of the Observers
5.3 The Twin Paradox
5.4 Einstein’s Train
5.5 Extreme Energies and the Continuity of Spacetime
5.6 Conclusion
6 The Minkowski Metric
6.1 Defining the Metric
6.2 Origin of the Minkowski Metric
6.3 Coordinates in Minkowski Spacetime
6.4 Simultaneity
6.5 The Light Cone
6.6 Causality of Spacetime
6.7 Boosts
6.8 Interpretations of the Minkowski Metric
6.9 The Debate: Contracting Waves Versus Contracting Space
6.10 Bell’s Paradox of the Accelerating Spaceships
7 The Equivalence Principle
7.1 Two Different Meanings of “Mass”
7.2 Inertial Mass = Gravitational Mass
7.3 The Equivalence Principle
7.4 Can Gravity Bend a Light Beam?
7.5 How Does Mass Curve Spacetime?
7.6 Speculating About the Structure of the Vacuum
7.7 Inertia and How Spacetime Tells Mass How to Move
7.8 Perception or Reality?
7.9 Conclusion
8 The Curvature of Spacetime
8.1 What is a Curved Space?
8.2 Riemannian Manifolds
8.3 Making Curved Space from a Series of Flat Spaces
8.4 How to Curve Spacetime
8.5 Energy Conservation and Gravity
8.6 Geodesics
8.7 Tidal Forces
9 How Waves Change Shapes and Volumes
9.1 Changing Volumes and Changing Shapes
9.2 Waves as a Source of Gravitation
9.3 Conceptual Understanding of the Einstein Equation
9.4 Schwarzschild Metric
10 The Effects of Curvature
10.1 The GPS System
10.2 Gravitational Redshift and Doppler Effect
10.3 Geodesics Revisited
10.4 Mercury’s Orbit
10.5 Orbits of Light
10.6 Geodetic Precession
10.7 Frame Dragging
11 A Journey to the Centre of a Black Hole
11.1 Mass Limits and Collapsing Stars
11.2 Pinching the Light Cone
11.3 The Singularity
11.4 Hawking Radiation and the Unruh Effect
11.5 Thermodynamics and Entropy of a Black Hole
11.6 Rotating Black Holes
11.7 Charged Black Holes
12 Black Hole Phenomena
12.1 Gravitomagnetism and Jets
12.2 Analysing the Photos of the Black Hole in M87
12.3 The Black Hole in Our Own Galaxy
12.4 Black Hole Simulations in Analogue Physics
12.5 Wormholes and White Holes
13 Gravitational Waves
13.1 Symmetry in Spacetime
13.2 The Production and Propagation of Gravitational Waves
13.3 The Effect of Gravitational Waves
13.4 Observations and a Further Test of Einstein’s General Relativity
13.5 What Gravitational Waves Tell Us About the Nature of Spacetime
13.6 The Measurement Approach and Detectors
14 All that Matters in the Dark Universe
14.1 The Expanding Universe
14.2 Observations and Characteristics of Dark Matter
14.3 Dark Energy and the Cosmological Model
14.4 Observations and the Hubble Controversy
14.5 The Big Bang
15 Emergent Gravity and Conclusion
15.1 The Emergence of Spacetime and Gravity from Quantum States
15.2 Conclusions
References
Index
