In this post, we will see the book Lectures In Relativity And Gravitation – A Modern Look by Anatoly Logunov.

About the book

The book includes some lectures on the basics of relativity theory,

or as it is generally called the special theory of relativity. Relativity

theory has been created by the outstanding scientists Lorentz,

Poincare, Einstein, and Minkowski. These giants, I

think, have virtually completed the theory, and what came after was

interpretation, once correct, once not, but nearly always superficial.

In modern textbooks and monographs relativity theory is sometimes

presented in a trivial and limited manner. Not infrequently the

authors fail to bring out the principal and get tangled in secondary

problems. One may gather, reading those texts, that the theory is

just a collection of recipes, which are sometimes hard to grasp for their

limitedness. That is why I begin with the relativity postulate (Section

1.3), which cannot be proved and simply follows from analysis

of experimental results. It should be adequately absorbed so that it

might then be applied to specific phenomena.

What is covered by the lectures could have been accomplished

long ago, after Minkowski’s work, and he might have expounded all

this himself, had he not died so untimely. However dogmatism and

faith — two things that have at all times been foreign to science although

constantly by plagued it — have had their effect. So, nearly to these

days they have drastically reduced the level of understanding and,

as a consequence, have narrowed the domain of application of relativity

theory. Only after assimilating the basics of Minkowski’s work, and

what is presented in sufficient detail in the lectures, one can arrive

at the general formulation that the theory of relativity is the discovery

of a unified pseudo-Euclidean geometry of space-time for electromagnetic

phenomena and its generalization, as a hypothesis, to all

forms of matter.

It is shown in the lectures that clock synchronization, a topic

that is generally attached all too much importance in texts on relativity,

is a partial question. As regards the postulate on the constancy

of the velocity of light, even if given a correct formulation, as in these

lectures, it plays a limited role, since it only makes sense for inertial

reference frames. Outside these frames there is no use for it.

On the other hand, the views of the pseudo-Euclidean geometry

of a unified space-time are more general and fundamental. They allow

us in put into a similar perspective both inertial and accelerated

frames of reference and to formulate the generalized relativity principle.

The extension of the scope of special relativity theory is not only of

fundamental but also of applied importance, since we can now look at phenomena under some extreme conditions.

The book has grown out of a course read at the physics department

of Moscow University in 1983-84. Hence some inevitable redundancies,

for which the author offers his apologies. The last chapter overs some new results in the relativistic theory of gravitation.

Translated from the Russian by Alexander Repyev

Thanks to @hawakajhonka for making the book available.

You can get the book here.
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