Inertia And Gravitation
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Gravitation and Inertia
Author: Ignazio Ciufolini
language: en
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Release Date: 1995-08-13
This book is on Einsteinś theory of general relativity, or geometrodynamic. It may be used as an introduction to general relativity, as an introduction to the foundations and tests of gravitation and geometrodynamics, or as a monograph on the meaning and origin of inertia in Eistein theory
Inertia and Gravitation
Author: Vesselin Petkov
language: en
Publisher: Minkowski Institute Press
Release Date: 2012-12-18
This book fills a gap in the literature. So far there has been no book which deals with inertia and gravitation by explicitly addressing open questions and issues which have been hampering the proper understanding of these phenomena. The book places a strong emphasis on the physical understanding of the main aspects and features of inertia and gravitation. It discusses questions such as: Are inertial forces fictitious or real? Does Minkowski's four-dimensional formulation of special relativity provide an insight into the origin of inertia? Does mass increase relativistically? Why is the inertial mass equivalent to the gravitational mass? Are gravitational phenomena caused by gravitational interaction according to general relativity? Is there gravitational energy? Do gravitational waves carry gravitational energy? Can gravity be quantized?
Inertia and Gravitation
This book focuses on the phenomena of inertia and gravitation, one objective being to shed some new light on the basic laws of gravitational interaction and the fundamental nature and structures of spacetime. Chapter 1 is devoted to an extensive, partly new analysis of the law of inertia. The underlying mathematical and geometrical structure of Newtonian spacetime is presented from a four-dimensional point of view, and some historical difficulties and controversies - in particular the concepts of free particles and straight lines - are critically analyzed, while connections to projective geometry are also explored. The relativistic extensions of the law of gravitation and its intriguing consequences are studied in Chapter 2. This is achieved, following the works of Weyl, Ehlers, Pirani and Schild, by adopting a point of view of the combined conformal and projective structure of spacetime. Specifically, Mach’s fundamental critique of Newton’s concepts of ‘absolute space’ and ‘absolute time’ was a decisive motivation for Einstein’s development of general relativity, and his equivalence principle provided a new perspective on inertia. In Chapter 3 the very special mathematical structure of Einstein’s field equations is analyzed, and some of their remarkable physical predictions are presented. By analyzing different types of dragging phenomena, Chapter 4 reviews to what extent the equivalence principle is realized in general relativity - a question intimately connected to the ‘new force’ of gravitomagnetism, which was theoretically predicted by Einstein and Thirring but which was only recently experimentally confirmed and is thus of current interest.