Special Relativity (Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics)

This book offers an essential bridge between collegelevel introductions and advanced graduatelevel books on special relativity.It begins at an elementary level, presenting and discussing the basic concepts normally covered in collegelevel works, including the Lorentz transformation. Subsequent chapters introduce the fourdimensional worldview implied by the Lorentz transformations, mixing time and space coordinates, before continuing on to the formalism of tensors, a topic usually avoided in lowerlevel courses. The books second half addresses a number of essential points, including the concept of causality; the equivalence between mass and energy, including applications; relativistic optics; and measurements and matter in Minkowski spacetime. The closing chapters focus on the energymomentum tensor of a continuous distribution of massenergy and its covariant conservation; angular momentum; a discussion of the scalar field of perfect fluids and the Maxwell field;and general coordinates.Every chapter is supplemented by a section with numerous exercises, allowing readers to practice the theory. These exercises constitute an essential part of the textbook, and the solutions to approximately half of them are provided in the appendix.