Re:C.S. Lewis on the Reading of Old Books
by enriquto on Monday December 03, 2018 @04:35PM
(#18593329)
Some old articles in physics are surprisingly concise. There is no point in reading a modern 300 page book on special relativity when you can just read "on the electrodynamics of moving bodies" which is 23 pages and self-contained.
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Re:C.S. Lewis on the Reading of Old Books
by whatshisface on Monday December 03, 2018 @05:14PM
(#18593697)
I can't speak for the specific book you're talking about, but there are definitely a lot to say about relativity that has been discovered since the time of Eisenstein.
Re:C.S. Lewis on the Reading of Old Books
by FiatLuxDave on Monday December 03, 2018 @05:40PM
(#18593885)
While it is true that more has been discovered about relativity since Einstein's time, that doesn't mean there isn't value in reading Einstein. When you approach an idea which is new to you, it's good to read something written for newcomers. When Einstein wrote, everyone was a newcomer. As such, his work is remarkably approachable considering how difficult the subject is.
While now I tend to think about special relativity using Minkowski space (which I find to be the easiest mental construct for me), my 12-year-old self found all that stuff in Einstein's Relativity about trains and clocks very helpful in building intuition about relativity.
Re:C.S. Lewis on the Reading of Old Books
by whatshisface on Monday December 03, 2018 @08:29PM
(#18595036)
As a counterpoint, I thought (and still think to this day) that the trains and clock stuff is hard to follow, but I understood it easily as soon as I saw it in terms of coordinates.