I'd encourage everyone to read Einstein's book on relativity: <a href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/315/books/Albert%20Einstein/Albert%20Einstein%20-%20Relativity.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/315/books/Albert%20Einstein/Albert%2...</a><p>His writing style is beautifully simple and the content is therefore easy for anyone to read and understand.
My favourite book on special relativity is <i>Spacetime Physics</i> by Taylor and Wheeler. It's intuitive, clearly written and well laid out, with an Edward Tufte style column of text running along the main body that stops you getting lost in the equations.<p>Some parts of the first edition are available online:
<a href="http://www.eftaylor.com/special.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.eftaylor.com/special.html</a>
<a href="http://www.eftaylor.com/pub/spacetime/STP1stEdThruP20.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.eftaylor.com/pub/spacetime/STP1stEdThruP20.pdf</a>
From the "Completeness of Quantum Theory" chapter (on one theory of the determinability of quantum systems): "If an atom has a probability of one half of radioactive decay over an hour, then all that really means is that its wave function describes an ensemble of many different atomic systems, half of which decay in an hour. Whether one particular atom in the ensemble will decay in one hour is definitely determinable. However we will not be able to discern it if all we know is the quantum wave associated with it. Whether it decays or not depends upon properties of that system that have been smoothed away by the quantum wave and thus are unknown to us. It is our ignorance of these smoothed away properties that makes a probabilistic assertion the best we can do."<p>HN, what does "Whether it decays or not depends upon properties of that system that have been smoothed away by the quantum wave" mean?! What properties exactly, and smoothed away how? Just by the fact that observing the system causes a change within the system and therefore changes the quantum waves?
While this looks like a very fascinating book/course, does anyone have a recommendation for learning general relativity rapidly in a way that abuses mathematical knowledge? I want to brush up on tensor math and variational calculus and use it as a motivating core topic.<p>I'm looking for the tersest complete guide from Newtonian physics to GR. Single author would be best, but I imagine it's not possible.
John Norton (the author) is an amazing historian and philosopher of science. People might be interested in some of the other "goodies" on his website -- <a href="http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies/" rel="nofollow">http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies/</a> -- and perhaps some of his papers as well.
If you like this, you will also like this:<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-World-Physics-Everyone/dp/067401832X" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-World-Physics-Everyone/dp/0674...</a>