General Relativity: A Concise Guide For Beginners

This book is the second in a series dealing with Einstein’s theory of relativity, the first of these being “Special Relativity: A concise guide for beginners”. In 1905 Einstein had produced his special theory of relativity, in which he explained how the speed of light is constant for all observers. However this was a theory that was not fully understood or accepted by many of Einstein’s intellectual contemporaries, some of whom sought to discredit it. There were indeed problems which Einstein himself knew he had to address. For example, how could Einstein justify his notion of a fixed speed for a beam of light falling in a gravitational field? As explained in this book, reconciling the constant speed of light with gravity, led to an even greater understanding of the nature of space and time. Most of the descriptions in the book are given in terms of diagrams and simple thought experiments, without much recourse to the difficult mathematics that usually accompanies this fascinating topic.