The Blue Streak

About the Book

The hacker's approach to Special Relativity grew out of an attempt to demystify the puzzling features of the theory to intelligent but intuition-blocked lay persons by a strategy aimed at this particular handicap:

1. The insufficiently understood basic concepts, the most obstinate stumbling blocks, are explained at length first.
2. The four-dimensional cornerstone of the theory, the all-important Invariant, is presented as a geometric structure analogous to the Diagonal of a box-like Frame of Reference to which Time is subsequently added as the Fourth Dimension.
3. The exposition of the theory of Special Relativity is primarily intuition-oriented while remaining also geometrically conceptualized and mathematically developed. It is built up from scratch around First Principles starting out with our primitive notions of Space, Time and Motion which are then continually updated and refined.
4. The conceptual tools and terminology for investigating Linear Motion at Uniform Velocity are provided in a step-by-step fashion and always visualized by suitable illustrations.
5. The Spacetime "terrain" (curved but not spherical) and its "domains" (Past, Present and Future) are defined, mapped and explained.
6. The standard topics of Special Relativity are individually elaborated in the already introduced step-by-step fashion and its mathematical results, the equations, are not just displayed in print as usually done in undergraduate textbooks but are actually derived from familiar situations using only elementary algebra, the simplest possible math for the task. These derivations are additionally written out fully in longhand for the benefit of those still inexperienced or whose math has all gone to rust.

The Theory of Relativity is covered in sufficient detail to make this book an optional supplement in a college-level physics course. It can also serve as a source of information and insight in high-school and adult science clubs but, above all, it was meant to be a self-study manual, a virtual class room at home, a do-it-yourself tutoring aid.

Besides standard fare, two speculative topics are included: (1) a "Faster than Light" chapter dealing with its chief reputed consequence, the reversal of Time Arrow once the travel speed has "crashed" the "Light Barrier," and (2) a tentative description of a very-very fast moving object caught by our wide-open eyes or by a super-fast shutter speed camera.

The book and its intended readership are described in the Preface. Basic concepts and a brief historical background of the theory are given in the Introduction. In Chapters I-XV, you'll find the main topics and in the Postscript, there are additional comments pertinent to, but reaching above and beyond, the contents of this book.

About the Author

As a post-WWII refugee in the British Zone of Germany at the age 17, and still two years away from a complete high school education, I dreamed of a career in engineering. This seemed unrealistic at the time. Medical education seemed remotely but more attainable in the long haul. After settling in the USA, I finally graduated from one of the five medical schools in Philadelphia, PA., finished internship and three more years of residency training.

I spent 34 undistinguished but rewarding years in medical practice and VA employment, retiring in 1996 to a "second career" in the pursuit of my abandoned but not neglected interests in the physical sciences. During the past years I kept up with physics, chemistry, astronomy, cosmology and expanded my mathematical horizons. The strange matters of relativity and the atom were special attractions and I gathered a lot of piecemeal facts and ideas about them.

After I stumbled upon Herman Bondi's small paperback "Relativity and Common Sense," everything including the complex number mathematics suddenly fell into place and I progressed to the detailed technical literature, asked questions and worked out the answers.

In my attempts to explain special relativity to a few friends I discovered that apart from the usual rustiness in math, the greatest obstacle to understanding the theory was a stubborn intuition block that could be overcome only by a focused attention to basic assumptions.

It still took me a year to get a preliminary draft between covers with much more effort going into finalizing the exposition, detailed mathematical derivations written out in longhand and 276 illustrations inserted into a total of 247 pages.

You'll find that the coverage of standard topics is completely orthodox. Personal opinions and philosophical ramifications are found only in the Postscript. Doppler acoustics is taken up in some detail because of its relevance to the Michelson-Morley experiment and its marked difference from the fundamentally relativistic Doppler optics. I doubt that you can find a better explanation of Lorentz contraction or any other concept anywhere else at the advanced high school or standard undergraduate level.

Two speculative topics were included: The first one considers the reversal of the Time Arrow as the main consequences of the hypothetical faster-than-light motion. Nearly all math is omitted here in favor of an argument by spacetime mapping method. The second speculative topic is about the visual appearance of a near-light-velocity object as presented to our slow-response vision and to a picosecond shutter-speed camera.