Über die spezielle und die allgemeine Relativitätstheorie (Gemeinverständlich)
The same text, told at every level, in every language and look shown here. Pick, then listen or download.
The same player the product gives for your own book: the voice, the drawings as they are drawn, the text.
Einstein’s own account of relativity, written in 1916 for readers without higher mathematics: what space, time and motion mean once the speed of light is the same for everyone.
This is a sample: 4 of 29 sections. · Made in 170 min
Here is how geometry is built. It starts from a few basic notions, such as plane, point and straight line, which we picture more or less clearly, and from a few simple statements about them, the axioms, which we are willing to accept because the pictures make them feel obvious.
A satellite navigation receiver measures its distance to several satellites and then applies plain geometry, the same geometry of segments and points, to turn those distances into a place on the map.
Now to the question of where a thing is. Every spatial description of the place of an event or an object, Einstein says, consists in naming the point of a rigid body with which the event coincides. That rigid body is the reference body.
Measuring physics does this with the Cartesian coordinate system. Picture three rigid flat walls, each perpendicular to the other two, joined into one rigid body, like the two walls and the floor meeting in the corner of a room.
But a path, even with its reference body named, is not yet a description of motion. A complete description must say how the body changes its place with time; for every point of the path we must state at what time the body is there.
Now put the two together. The visible fixed stars are bodies to which the law of inertia should apply with great accuracy; they are as far removed from everything as any body we can see. Take a coordinate system rigidly attached to the Earth, the three walls of the earlier part, fixed to the ground.
Examples for: a curious adult with school physics; add one modern instance per idea, such as GPS satellite clocks
The lectures retell the German text of Project Gutenberg #77850, the 1917 Vieweg edition. The author died in 1955; the work is in the public domain. The retelling, the drawings and the voice are made by AI and checked against the book by a second model; nothing was edited by hand. How AI is used.
The lectures are free to read, share and quote with a link to this page.
Upload a textbook or any difficult book. The first five minutes are free.
Upload a book