It's About Time: Understanding Einstein's Relativity

n. david mermin

In It's About Time , N. David Mermin asserts that relativity ought to be an important part of everyone's education--after all, it is largely about time, a subject with which all are familiar. The book reveals that some of our most intuitive notions about time are shockingly wrong, and that the real nature of time discovered by Einstein can be rigorously explained without advanced mathematics. This readable exposition of the nature of time as addressed in Einstein's theory of relativity is accessible to anyone who remembers a little high school algebra and elementary plane geometry.

The book evolved as Mermin taught the subject to diverse groups of undergraduates at Cornell University, none of them science majors, over three and a half decades. Mermin's approach is imaginative, yet accurate and complete. Clear, lively, and informal, the book will appeal to intellectually curious readers of all kinds, including even professional physicists, who will be intrigued by its highly original approach.

Genres physicssciencenonfictionacademicphilosophy

208 pages, Hardcover

First published September 12,2005

This edition

Format: 208 pages, Hardcover
Published: October 2, 2005 by Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691122014
ASIN: 0691122016
Language: English

About the author

n. david mermin

Nathaniel David Mermin (born 1935) is a solid-state physicist at Cornell University best known for the eponymous Mermin–Wagner theorem, his application of the term "Boojum" to superfluidity, and for the quote "shut up and calculate!" (in the context of the interpretation of quantum mechanics).

In 1976, Neil Ashcroft and Mermin published a textbook on solid-state physics. As a proponent of Quantum Bayesianism, Mermin described the concept in Nature.

In 2003, the journal Foundations of Physics published a bibliography of Mermin's writing that included three books, 125 technical articles, 18 pedagogical articles, 21 general articles, 34 book reviews, and 24 "Reference Frame" articles from Physics Today.

[from Wikipedia. check the original article also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_M...]