Space, Time And Gravitation: An Outline Of The General Relativity Theory (1920) Paperback – October 17, 2007

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.

"However successful the theory of a four-dimensional world may be, it is difficult to ignore a voice inside us which whispers 'At the back of your mind, you know that a fourth dimension is all nonsense.' I fancy that that voice must often have had a busy time in the past history of physics. What nonsense to say that this solid table on which I am writing is a collection of electrons moving with prodigious speeds in empty spaces, which relatively to electronic dimensions are as wide as the spaces between the planets in the solar system! What nonsense to say that the thin air is trying to crush my body with a load of 14 lbs. to the square inch! What nonsense that the star-cluster, which I see through the telescope obviously there now, is a glimpse into a past age 50,000 years ago! Let us not be beguiled by this voice. It is discredited."

One of the most famous astronomers of the 20th century, Arthur Eddington, was so enamored by Einstein's theory of gravitation that he took up the crusade by measuring the deflection of starlight by the sun and thus was the first experimentalist to verify a vital part of the theory.He believed Einstein's creation to be a beautiful geometrical theory which should be at least qualitatively understood by everyone. The result of this belief was "Space, Time and Gravitation" which was written for the intelligent educated lay person.The book is well written and insightful and I heartily recommend it.

Eddington was one of the "early understanders" of General Relativity and I always enjoy reading his explanations of GR and cosmology in their early days. In this book he manages to explain GR without using painfully abstruse mathematics, which allowed me to focus on the abstractions without getting tangled in the details.Some of his ideas have fallen out of fashion and sometimes he goes off at tangents. But it's a delightful book - and occasionally a little of his mischievous humor sneaks out.

I bought both the paperback and kindle edition of this book. The kindle edition is not done very well. The equations are hard to read even if you adjust font size and words per page. Often the equation will be one letter wide for the whole page. Amazon needs to work harder on kindle editions of books containing equations. Some of the equations are so small they cannot be read. Others like this book do not show partial derivatives in an understandable form.

for research

Don't recall ordering

5 stars

Could not read it. A photocopied document. Boring.

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!

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).

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.