This page contains the lecture notes for a 10-lecture, second year, course on Special Relativity. The course consists of a modern introduction to Special Relativity, covering the postulates, the Minkowski diagram, the invariant interval, and relativistic kinematics.
The URL for this page is
http://purl.org/nxg/text/special-relativity -- please use
this persistent URL when citing the page.
Public version 1.0.
These notes cover, in some detail, a 10-lecture course on Special Relativity, for the second-year Astronomy class, which I delivered in sessions 2000-1 and 2001-2; this was part of the Astronomy course offered by the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the University of Glasgow. In the spirit of MIT's Open Courseware, and using the licence promoted by the Creative Commons, I'm making them publicly available here. See the licence below.
From this page you can download the notes for each of the four blocks of the Special relativity course. These four blocks are
The
`dangerous bend' symbol
introducing certain paragraphs is intended
to indicate passages you might want to skip on a first reading. They
typically contain technical detail for the curious reader, or subtle
points which are interesting but might distract from the flow of the
arguments, or even alternative ways of thinking about the material
around them. Think of them as extended footnotes.
I am distributing these notes as PDF files: you should be able to read and print these out without difficulty, but if you have any trouble, mail me and let me know. To view and print out the PDF files, you need some program which can read them. You may already have a copy of Adobe's Acrobat reader installed on your machine (or some other application which can read PDF files, such as the MacOS X Preview application); if not, you can you can download Acrobat free from Adobe
The PDF and Postscript files below are intended to be printed out on a double-sided printer; the nearby links marked `single' are for printing out on a single-sided printer, the links in the `screen' column are versions intended to be read on-screen.
| Section | A4 | ...single | USletter | ...single | Screen |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part 1: Introduction | pdf/ps | pdf/ps | pdf/ps | pdf/ps | |
| Part 2: The axioms | pdf/ps | pdf/ps | pdf/ps | pdf/ps | |
| Part 3: The Lorentz Transformation and the Invariant Interval | pdf/ps | pdf/ps | pdf/ps | pdf/ps | |
| Part 4: Vectors, kinematics and dynamics | pdf/ps | pdf/ps | pdf/ps | pdf/ps |
These notes are made available under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence, of the Creative Commons. The
summary and full text of the licence are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0.
$Log: index-public.html,v $ Revision 1.7 2008/07/31 10:13:03 norman Remove the reference to non-public notes. Apart from anything else, the index-teaching.html link somehow got out, was visible off-campus, and was cited somewhere else. Revision 1.6 2005/09/01 14:11:09 norman Add abstract, PURL, reference to GU astronomy course Fix some XML validation errors Revision 1.5 2005/07/13 22:58:09 norman Minor HTML consistency changes Revision 1.4 2004/10/05 22:13:04 norman Added CSS reference -- no content changes Revision 1.3 2004/01/12 17:39:25 norman minor clarifications Revision 1.2 2003/05/22 14:58:25 norman Modified the CC-supplied RDF at the top, so that there's no longer any element content (which shows up in browsers). RDF validated with <http://www.w3.org/RDF/Validator/> Revision 1.1 2003/02/23 23:05:00 norman Initial version, cut down from original index.html. Asserts CreativeCommons licence, and provides links to lots of versions.