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Relativity and Common Sense
by Hermann Bondi
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Dover Publications (1980-07-01)
ISBN: 0486240215
EAN: 9780486240213
Dewey Decimal #: 500
Binding/Media: Paperback - 177 pages
SKU: 01186
Condition: Used: Very Good
Comments: Pages clean with some tanning, few small creases on cover.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
Radically reoriented presentation of Einstein’s Special Theory and one of most valuable popular accounts available. 60 illus.
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Customer Reviews
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it worked for me
Rating  (5)
Date: 2009-06-17
I have read several relativity-for-the-layman books, including Einstein's own work, and this one got the points across to me the best. After digesting this book I could convincingly explain the time dialation (and coriolis effect) on a cocktail napkin. I think for the lay person, understanding of this stuff can be highly personal: dependent upon if the teacher "speaks to" you. In my case, Bondi spoke my language.
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Excellent book for the right audience
Rating (5)
Date: 2008-01-17
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Previous reviewers who rated this book less than four stars have simply misunderstood the purpose of this book. It uses a novel approach to present the special theory of relativity to an audience of non-physicists who are not afraid of a few - very few - equations, as in the proverbial "educated high school graduate." Hence Bondi uses numerical examples to avoid many equations. The book is not meant to be a college textbook or complete treatise on relativity!
Bondi's approach makes relativity seem almost obvious. The earlier chapters, which some felt were irrelevant, are designed to contrast sound with light, which may be more familiar, or at least less surprising. There is a lot of physics in this book
Some may be misled by a statement in John Durston's preface: "Professor Bondi derives Relativity from Newtonian ideas." One cannot derive relativity from Newtonian mechanics. But Newtonian concepts can be used to advantage.
My only caveat is that there are several unfortunate typos, especially Eq. (20) on page 123.
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An illustration of Special Theory of Relativity
Rating  (4)
Date: 2004-05-11
2 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
This is one of the first books which use common sense approach to the understanding of special theory of relativity using illustrations, drawings and diagrams. At one time this theory was considered mysterious, which is in fact obvious and clear-cut extension of ordinary ideas to the realm of high velocities. The author first presents Newtonian ideas followed by the concept and characteristic effects of special relativity in a non mathematical language. Then he introduces Lorentz Transformation (LT) in chapter 10, which involves systems of coordinates moving relative to each other and then uses LT to establish the basics of the theory. Readers with very limited mathematical background should have no trouble in understanding the elementary aspects of the relativity. This is a cute little book (177 pages, size 7.92'' x 5.36"), which is classified into three parts. The first part introduces the classical mechanics; concepts of force, momentum, angular momentum, velocity of light and uniqueness of light. The second part deals with the peculiarities of high speeds, relationship of inertial (uniformly moving, constant velocity) and moving observers and the need for theory of relativity to understand high speed situation and a brief introduction to Lorentz Transformation. The final part discusses the consequences of traveling faster than light, acceleration (non-inertial motion) and high velocities on mass. Chapters 8 and 9 are crucial to the common sense approach to the understanding of relativity. The reader may need time and patience to read these two chapters to understand relativity. Chapter 11 discusses some interesting consequences of special relativity; for travels faster than light there is no link between cause and effect, in other words that effect could precede cause. This book is very affordable and useful; I encourage the reader to consider adding this book to his/her personal library.
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Something of a con job, but interesting, even informative
Rating  (2)
Date: 2004-05-07
3 out of 5 customers found this reveiw helpful
The basic theme of this book about relativity and common sense is so far stretched that one could call this a con job. Like the editor must have warned Bondi to stay away from equations so as not to turn off the average potential reader thumbing the pages, but we have pages and pages of mental figuring with three characters with individual names to boot. Where he is really caught is in a diagram that is supposed to indicate the obviousness of a 30 degree rotation around the origin. Here 1/2 and the square root of 3 divided by 2 manage to show up, with absolutely no explanation at all. Apparaently he was afraid to say sin(30) = 1/2. Thus somebody who really did not know that would have absolutely no clue about how this self-evident diagram really worked! Thus, as I say, it is con job. A preposterous attempt to link relativity and common sense, like everybody should think in microseconds of light, not feet. (Just try to explain to some youngster how a 8.5 x 11 inch paper is in fractions of a microsecond.) Anything else to Bondi being "degenerate" thinking. I guess he manged to fool even himself. Yet, he does have his own way of looking at it, so if the subject of relativity usually results in drawing a blank sooner or later, well, this approach has a certain merit as a novel way of approaching the subject. It is possible to learn something from him.
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Time Lost Forever
Rating  (1)
Date: 2003-03-06
7 out of 11 customers found this reveiw helpful
There's no doubting Bondi's credentials or the potentiality of his thesis on the common-sense derivation of special relativity from Newtonian physics, but Bondi fails on two basic fronts:1) The bulk of his presentation relies on a cumbersome supposition (graphical and otherwise) involving several characters moving through space and time to prove that time is a route-dependent quantity. If the reader wants to truly understand Bondi's theory, he or she should plan to sit down with a chalk board or a paper and pen in order to keep the character's names and their travels straight. 2) The basis for the presentation is so tedious that eventually one reaches the point of sensory overload and, as a result, ends up accepting the conceptual foundation of Bondi's theory as is -- which is no different than taking Einstein's special theory of relativity at face value. In other words, for this reader, Bondi fails to convincingly derive special relativity from Newtonian physics.
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