Gravity

by John Archibald Wheeler

Book Overview

Driven by the belief that gravity makes the closest connection between the world we see around us & the inner-most workings of the universe, distinguished physicist John Archibald Wheeler applies Einstein's battle-tested theory to both familiar & exotic phenomena.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0716750163
• ISBN13: 9780716750161
• Release Date: January 1990
• Publisher: Scientific American Library
• Length: 257 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 8.8" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Able to "see" spacetime

This is a beautiful, poetic, and generous book. I found that after reading and mulling over each section, I could eventually visualize how space was behaving under the influence of mass, and could also see why one needed to choose one's point of view carefully to understand the physics.The book is intended as an introduction to general relativity, without much tensor formalism, but it does not neglect the geometrical underpinnings. It presents a very nice way to get at the physics, with creative and light-hearted diagrams.I'm not so sure that Wheeler's own poems, which introduce many of the chapters, are a great success, but I admire and salute him for including them. Even his poetry helps to open additional doors to understanding general relativity. A book that is truly beautiful.

Awesome: from an MSEE

The interrelation of gravity and spacetime is a formidable subject to describe; the author does so with excellence. The diagrams and charts reinforce the understanding.Unfortunately when a key subject left me rather clueless, (Boundary of a Boundary) I spent quite a few frustrated hours being uncertain on whether or not to continue reading without the support of the material on those pages. As it turned out, the subject became clearer once I read on and returned again. I never did grasp it as completely as the rest of the book.The book contains the most enlightening description of transverse wave propagation I've ever seen. It also helps solidify one's understanding of interval and relativity.Not a book to be read overnight.

The author's mind has no boundary....

This author is one of the most briliant, the most optimistic, and the most enthusiastic writer in all of physics, and in this book, his competence as a physicist and his deep fascination with the physical world is brought out dramatically. He is clearly a man who is feeling a powerful sense of exhiliration of the discoveries now taking place in all areas of knowledge. His foundation and his theme in the book is a simple geometric principle, namely that the boundary of a boundary is zero. He then guides the reader, assumed to have a rudimentary knowledge of mathematics, in a splendid presentation of the power of this principle in gravitational physics. The first chapter is an overview of the history behind the subject, via the work of people who contributed to our current understanding of gravity. And then, with a masterfull use of diagrams he gives the reader a taste of the simplicity of the equivalence principle and the need to tack on an additional dimension (time) to the 3-dimensional space of everyday experience. The Pound-Rebka experiment is discussed as one that illustrates the idea of the spacetime interval, and the role of time dilation is discussed via the possibility of practical space travel. And such enthusiasm in his dialog: "the universe will grow ever more exciting", he says, and looking at the developments now taking place in today's science, he is indeed correct. Chapter 4 gives a fascinating overview of what the author calls the boomerang, which illustrates the action of curvature on nearby test masses. This thought experiment involves the motion of a spacecraft through an imaginary tunnel through the Earth. The author analyzes the motion from the standpoint of Newtonian physics and general relativity. Curvature as the "grammar of gravity" is the topic of the next chapter, with illustrations of the paths of ants on spaces of zero, positive, and negative curvature. A very intuitive treatment of parallel transport around a closed path on a curved surface is given. The tides are discussed as a natural manifestation of the gravitational influence of the Moon on Earth. Must difficult for a layman to understand is how spacetime acts on masive objects, but the author explains it brilliantly in the next chapter, taught via the concept of "momenergy". This entity is a 4-vector, and the author uses it to show how its creation in a spacetime region can be written as the sum of 8 terms, reflecting the fact that the "boundary" of a four-dimensional block in spacetime consists of eight three-dimensional cubes. That the contents of these cubes sum to zero is the famous "boundary of a boundary is zero", which is discussed in the next chapter. This chapter is one of the best explanations ever given (at this level) of the physics behind spacetime curvature and massive objects. The actual mathematical quantification of curvature is detailed in chapters 8 and 9, using elementary mathematics. The author discusses nicely the famous Scharwzschild

A stunner of a book

This is truely an amazing book. Wheeler does for General Relativity what Hawking did for Cosmology in "A Brief History of Time", and in some sense they are similar books. However Wheeler has a unique, quirky style of writing that makes the book an entertaining adventure to read.Wheeler is able to pull off a major accomplishment: He explains Einstein's General Relativity in a clear, straightforward manner, with a minimum of math. It's "conventional wisdom" that General Relativity is seriously serious stuff, the domain of hardcore Physics geeks. That doesn't faze Wheeler. He leads the reader along, gleefully pointing out the scenery, making it all look quite simple and understandable. And then all of a sudden, when you least expect it, you find he's derived and presented Einstein's field equations with only a teensy-tiny bit of algebra! Even if you know this stuff already, his presentation makes you think about it with a new perspective.And did I mention the illustrations? They are really exceptional.If you have any interest or dealings with GR, ya gotta have this book!