Product Description: The field of kinematics -- the science of motion -- has long been neglected and misrepresented. Despite rich traditions rooted in ancient times, modern physical kinematics never became a professional discipline. No journals or academic societies were founded to support its development and study and most physicists took the science of motion for granted...read more

Universally recognized as bringing about a revolutionary transformation of the notions of space, time, and motion in physics, Einstein's theory of gravitation, known as "general relativity," was also a defining event for 20th century philosophy of science. During the decisive first ten years of the theory's existence, two main tendencies dominated its philosophical reception. This book is an extended argument that the path actually taken, which became logical empiricist philosophy of science, greatly contributed to the current impasse over realism, whereas new possibilities are opened in revisiting and reviving the spirit of the more sophisticated tendency, a cluster of viewpoints broadly termed transcendental idealism, and furthering its articulation. It also emerges that Einstein, while paying lip service to the emerging philosophy of logical empiricism, ended up siding de facto with the latter tendency.Ryckman's work speaks to several groups, among them philosophers of science and historians of relativity. Equations are displayed as necessary, but Ryckman gives the non-mathematical reader enough background to understand their occurrence in the context of his wider philosophical project.

Product Description: "A Broader View of Relativity" shows that there is still new life in old physics. The book examines the historical context and theoretical underpinnings of Einstein's theory of special relativity and describes Broad Relativity, a generalized theory of coordinate transformations between inertial reference frames that includes Einstein's special relativity as a special case...read more

Albert Einstein's three-hundred most important publications are explained in this examination of his literary output, setting them into the context of his life, science, and world history to provide a unique perspective on Einstein's genius and his humanity.

Product Description: John Stachel, the author of this collection of 37 published and unpublished articles on Albert Einstein, has written about Einstein and his work for over 40 years. Trained as a theoretical physicist specializing in the theory of relativity, he was chosen as the founding editor of The Collected papers of Albert Einstein 25 years ago, and is currently Director of the Boston University Center for Einstein Studies...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Featuring a new introduction, an exploration of quantum physics and relativity theory is presented for the layperson reader in an accessible and occasionally whimsical format. By the author of The Seat of the Soul. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

Product Description: Using simple examples from everyday life, an Einstein scholar offers entertaining, nontechnical demonstrations of the meaning of relativity theory. Starting with the geometrical and cosmological ideas of the ancient Greeks, he traces the theory's development from its basis in work by Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, and others...read more

Product Description: An analysis of one of the three great papers Einstein published in 1905, each of which was to alter forever the field it dealt with. The second of these papers, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", established what Einstein sometimes referred to as the "so-called Theory of Relativity"...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: An explanation of the development of relativity theories, from the ideas of Ernst Mach to the work of Stephen Hawking. The book contains wide-ranging discussions on the role of the search for conceptual simplicity in directing the evolution of space-time physics.

Product Description: A detailed account of Einstein's childhood and formative years focuses on the intellectual climate of Germany where, before 1919, his trailblazing work on the special and general theories of relativity received widest notice. The author explores the response to the theories by pure mathematicians, who did not have to face the prospect of a fundamental revision of their basic principles, and by physicists and astronomers, who did...read more