Relativity. Special, general, and cosmological (Q2743216)

This is an expanded version of the author's book ``Essential Relativity'' (1969; Zbl 0198.31102). It is a standard introduction to special and general relativity, and it contains a lot of exercises which the reader really should at least try to solve himself to get a better understanding of the details. The emphasis is on the differential geometric part of relativity, and several good figures help in understanding this. From the special relativity part, the Lorentz transformations and relativistic optics are given in many details. In the general relativity part, curvature and black holes, but also gravitational waves are discussed, whereas the cosmological part essentially restricts itself to the isotropic Friedmann models. Unfortunately, the book does not have a reference list, and the cited sources are distributed as footnotes over the whole book. The appendix presents useful formulas for calculating the Einstein tensor if the metric is given in diagonal form. The index is helpful, too. One of the items is ``Rindler space'', a notion representing a misnomer: it should be better called ``Rindler coordinates for flat space-time''.