August 2025: I’m currently working on this page, to hold references and other resources for the Relativity series …
Online Resources
- Sean Carroll’s No-Nonsense Introduction to General Relativity
This is a short (about 20 page) introduction to GR.
- Sean Carroll’s Lecture notes on GR
To get a “sort of pre-print version” of Carroll’s GR text book. You have to scroll down to where it says “Lecture Notes” and open that up. Then you can download PDFs of each chapter individually.
The whole set of notes is supposed to exist, but it keeps moving around. As of Aug 6, 2025 there’s a copy here:
https://sites.astro.caltech.edu/~george/ay21/readings/carroll-gr-textbook.pdf - Leonard Susskind’s 2008 General Relativity Course Videos
Leonard Susskind’s 2012 General Relativity Course Videos
I’m not sure, but I seem to remember that I actually liked the 2008 series better.
Problem Sets
- Our small problem set from the 2019 Denver Meetings
- UBC Special Relativity problem set with solutions
- 300 Problems (with solutions) in Special and General Relativity
by Mattias Blennow and Tommy Ohlsson
This is a book I bought some time back. I’m thinking I can either
copy or transcribe exercises from it as we go.
Books Mike and Tina have
At this point we’ve got a small library of books on SR and GR. It’s too bad we can’t just pass these around physically. But I can post info from any of these if there’s something in particular that anyone is interested in. (Aug 13th: I’m still in the process of working on this section and putting notes about the books. If you have any questions or you’re thinking of buying something, email me.)
Special Relativity
- Beiser – Modern Physics
300 level physics textbook. Section on SR. Nothing special. - David Bohm – Special Relativity
This is kind of a classic, and reasonably basic. - Jürgen Freund – Special Relativity for Beginners
This is the best book I’ve seen if you’re just starting out with
Special Relativity. It goes into a lot of detail and has quite a
few problems with solutions. It’s been translated from
German and sometimes it’s not quite clear that he’s saying, but
that doesn’t crop up too often. - Wolfgang Rindler – Introduction to Special Relativity
Another classic (though it appears to be out of print?)
But I don’t think this is really a book for beginners.
(This is the Rindler that the Rindler Horizon is named after.) - John Taylor – Classical Mechanics
400 level mechanics textbook.
This is a great textbook for classical mechanics, and has a
short but really good section on SR. If you’re in the market
for a general textbook on CM I highly recommend it!
(This is where the “relativistic snake” cam from.)
General Relativity
Note that most of the GR books start out with a reasonably
comprehensive review of special relativity.
- Sean Carroll Spacetime and Geometry
- Ta-Pei Cheng Relativity, gravitation, and cosmology
- Sidney Coleman Lectures on Relativity
- Peter Collier – A Most Incomprehensible Thing
This is the book we used for the original GR meetings in Denver.
I have mixed feelings about it, but it’s cheap and everyone who
came to those meetings probably has a copy. If you want to
seriously study GR this should not be your only book. - Dalarsson Tensor Book
- Eddington Space, Time and Gravitation
- Einstein (and others) The principle of relativity
- Joel Franklin Advanced Mechanics and General Relativity
- Misner, Thorne and Wheeler Gravitation
- Dwight Neuenschwander Tensor Calculus
- Schrödinger Space-Time Structure
- Schutz – A first course in general relativity
This has been a mainstay of introductory GR classes for a
long time. At one point you could get a cheap copy of the
paperback version, but I don’t see anything like that when
I look right now.
Other
- John Bell – Speakable and Unspeakable
Here is a PDF of the article we care about How to teach special relativity
where he resurrects the Dewan and Beran problem below. Only the
first two pages are pertinent to this discussion.
- Harvey Brown Physical Relativity
- Sean Carroll – The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: space, time and motion
If you don’t have much of a background in physics I really highly
recommend this book. Carroll have done about the best I can imagine
in writing an essentially “popular physics” book that actually
teaches you something (including “doing the math” but in as simple
a way as possible). The book starts out with some basic principles of
physics and works it’s way up to a “sketch” of General Relativity.
Of course it becomes less easy as the difficulty of the material
increases. But I don’t think there’s an easier “intro” to GR anywhere.
Warning: There are at least two “Biggest Ideas” books by Carroll.
So if you buy this make sure to get the one that says “space, time,
and motion.” - Dewan and Beran’s 1959 paper | Page 1 | Page 2
This is the article I plan to talk about, which claims to show that
the spacetime perspective can’t account for the effects of acceleration.
These (not very good) images of the two pages are all I could find.
But they are readable.
- Tristan Needham – Visual Differential Geometry and Forms
- Lawrence Sklar – Space, Time, and SpaceTime
- Lawrence Sklar – Philosophy and Spacetime Physics
- Tim Maudlin Philosophy of Physics – Space and Time
- Andrew Pressley – Elementary Differential Geometry
