By Eric Poisson and Clifford M Will
Cambridge University Press
Hardback: £50 $85
E-book: $68
Also available at the CERN bookshop
I heard good things about this book before I got my hands on it, and turning the pages I recognized a classic. Several random reads of its 788 large, dense pages offered a deeper insight into a novel domain, far away from my daily life where I work with the microscopic and cosmological worlds. On deeper inspection, it was nearly all that I hoped for, with only a couple of areas where I was disappointed.
The forward points out clearly that the reader should not expect any mention of cosmology. Yet the topic of the book has a clear interface with the expanding universe via its connection to our solar system, the so-called vacuole Einstein–Straus solution. Another topic that comes in too short for my taste is that of Eddington’s isotropic (Cartesian) co-ordinates. They appear on pages 268–269, and resurface in a minor mention on page 704 before the authors’ parametrized post-Newtonian approach is discussed. While this is in line with the treatment in the earlier book by one of the authors (Theory and Experiment in Gravitational Physics by C M Will, CUP 1993), it seems to me that this area has grown in significance in recent years.
The book is not about special relativity, but it is a topic that must of course appear. However, it is odd that Box 4.1 on pages 191–192 on “Tests of Special Relativity” relies on publications from 1977, 1966, 1941 and 1938. I can feel the pain of colleagues – including friends in particle and nuclear physics – who have worked hard during recent decades to improve limits by many orders of magnitude. And on page 190, I see a dead point in the history of special relativity – authors, please note. Lorentz failed to write down the transformation named after him by Poincaré, who guessed the solution to the invariance of Maxwell’s equations, a guess that escaped Lorentz. However, Einstein was first to publish his own brilliant derivation.
We know that no book is perfect and complete, entirely without errors and omissions. So the question to be asked is, how useful is this book to you? To find the answer, I’d recommend reading the highly articulate preface available, for example, under “Front Matter” on the publisher’s website. I quote a few words because I could not say it better: “This book is about approximations to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, and their applications to planetary motion around the Sun, to the timing of binary pulsars, to gravitational waves emitted by binary black holes and to many real-life, astrophysical systems…this book is therefore the physics of weak gravitational fields.”
Personally, I found in the book what I was looking for: the technical detail of the physics of large objects such as planets and stars, which can be as many times larger than the proton as they are smaller than the universe. I could not put the book down, despite its weight (1.88 kg). Some might prefer the Kindle edition, but I would hope for a shrunk-silk volume. Whichever you choose or is available, in dollars per page this book is a bargain. It is a great read that will enrich any personal library.
