by Bernard Schutz, Cambridge University Press. Hardback ISBN 0521455065, £30 ($45).
This beautifully produced book is evidently the result of a labour of love by physicist Bernard Schutz, who refers to it as “the book” in the dedication to his daughters. There is a sense that this, more than his advanced textbooks, is the book that Schutz always wanted to write. In it he provides an introductory guide to gravity and general relativity, not only for undergraduates but also for the general reader who yearns for more detail than is often found in more “popular” books on these topics.
The title reveals the structure of the book. Chapter by chapter, Schutz begins with gravity on Earth and then moves out into the solar system, to the stars and galaxies beyond, to finish with the Big Bang and questions currently at the frontiers of research in gravity. On the way the reader first encounters the work of Galileo and Newton and finds out how Einstein stands on their shoulders, then learns how the Sun and other stars live and die, and moves on to discover neutron stars and black holes – exotic objects that now figure frequently in the news as well as in science fiction.
There are many books that cover the same topics, but rare are those that attempt to be simultaneously engaging and didactic. As with Steven Weinberg’s The Discovery of Subatomic Particles (Cambridge University Press 2003), Schutz writes for people who not only want to be amazed but who also want to know how it is that scientists know all the amazing things they talk about on beautifully made documentaries. As the author says, “this book is not a ‘gee-whizz’ tour of the universe: this is a book for people who are not afraid to think”. There is no calculus, no advanced mathematics, but there are equations that require a little high-school algebra. Moreover, recognizing that we live in the computer age, Schutz provides a website to support the book with programs that can be downloaded, and modified, to provide the results of complex calculations and solutions to exercises that are part of the “investigations” presented in the book.
