Space, Time and Gravitation: An Outline of the General Relativity Theory

Classic

This may have been published a long time ago, but the presentation is excellent. It does not have the images which are now possible with computer graphics, but it presents the concepts in a structured and logical manner. I wish I had known about this book fifty years ago. It would have helped with my studies then - but I can carry them out now. Better late than never!

Ottimo testo, con un'interessante descrizione della geometria dello spazio-tempo attraverso intuitivi schemi grafici e diagrammi. E' un libro essenzialmente divulgativo, una base scientifica superiore lo rende leggibile, anche se per la piena comprensione di alcuni passaggi è necessario andare altrove a cercare chiarimenti.

This is a highly recommended, second book to be read right after Lieber's "The Einstein Theory of Relativity".Written by a master who takes you through the theory, step by step and with an illuminating explanatory power.See my complete review in the comments about "The Principle of Relativity" (Einstein, Lorentz, Weyl, Minkowski).

Could not read it. A photocopied document. Boring.

Loved the content, but Kindle format for this book (like his "Philosophy of Space and Time") is terrible!When Einstein formulated the general theory of relativity, he transformed gravity into geometry. That was but one of the big insights of relativity, but it is the one that most matters here. In the few decades following GR's 1915 debut (Eddington wrote this in 1920) a number of physicists (Eddington among them) thought that if gravity can be mapped to geometry, perhaps the electro-magnetic force could be also? These were the first attempts at a "unified theory" of all physical forces, and in this book, Eddington explicates his particular version of it. In the end, the attempts all failed, but the literature is valuable none-the-less. Eddington is a very good writer and his explanation of the relation between gravity and space-time curvature is worth the read.That's the good news. The bad news is that this Kindle edition is very poorly constructed. There is some math here, but it is impossible to follow any of it (even if you are otherwise qualified to do so) because every special mathematical symbol used in logic and physics has been mis-transformed. Even pi, not to mention any super or sub-script, integration and summation symbols, etc. In short, every single symbol is scrambled into ordinary characters and thereby rendered unreadable. I assume the physical copies are all ok in this regard, but the Kindle version came out horribly!Even if you just want to see what the man has to say and would ignore the math anyway, there is some effort to be made. For example there is no separation between pages and their end notes (of which there are plenty). The notes end up falling in the middle of the page looking like ordinary paragraphs. Luckily they can be spotted thanks to a preceding '*' and you learn to read these and then, in the next line, continue with the previous text.All in all I found Dr. Eddington's style an enjoyable read, but the formatting issues make the Kindle version a bit problematic.