SPECIAL RELATIVITY - A FIRST ENCOUNTER

Special relativity has a distinct poignancy to it; sometimes those who have the privilege of studying it closely feel they are consuming a hearty meal in a warm cafe while those not so blessed huddle outside like hungry children, watching through a frosted glass. Giulini (physics, U. of Freiburg) gives those with no more than high- school mathematics a place at the feast, without condescension, building understanding from a brief review of the origins and significance of special relativity to the history of its development through theory and experimentation. Giulini then steps through fundamental concepts, including the notions of similarity, time dilation and length contraction, aberration and the Doppler effect, and mass, momentum, and kinetic energy, culminating in the "most famous equation of all physics" and its application to electrodynamics. He then describes the consequences and applications of special relativity and key experiments.