Books of Interest For Ay/Ph 259
Here are the names of the various books that I have at one time or
another passed around in class.
- Synge and Schild, Tensor Calculus. Good index intensive book.
- Schouten, Ricci Calculus. The pinnacle of index shuffling.
Look at this and weep.
- Schouten, Tensor Analysis for Physicist. The first place where
honest pictures of 1-forms and twisted 1-forms appears.
- Dava Sobel, Longitude.Nice account of the struggle to
make acceleration independent clocks, most of the problem being
bureaucrats and astronomers.
- Jan Koenderink. Solid shape.Very nice graphics.
- CTJ Dodson and T Poston.Tensor geometry.Modern tensor analysis
with lots of computer generated pictures and awful typography.
- Theodore Frankel. Gravitational Curvature. One of the few
mathematics books that uses twisted differential forms.
- S. Parrott. Relativistic Electrodynamics and Differential Geometry.
I have not read this carefully but it looks very good.
- Hans Reichenbach. The Philosophy of space and time. Good
philosophy of science, nice discussion of curved space, wrong on Schwarzschild
singularity in an informative manner.
- Richard P. Feynman. The Feynman Lectures on Gravitation. Notes
from a one time GR class taught in 1962-3. Horribly overpriced, poorly
produced (books in TeX do not have to be ugly unless the publishers are
total cheapskates; see Connes Noncommutative Geometry for a well
done TeX book using Lucida Bright fonts), designed as the usual rip off
the library and split publication. Feynman would not have liked this.
Still the material is golden so buy it before it goes out of print.
- Ignazio Ciufolini & John Wheeler. Gravitation and Inertia.
the New Testament of Geometrodynamics.
- Edwin Taylor & John Wheeler. Spacetime Physics. A classic,
must own, on special relativity. In its second edition.