Relativity Matters ― From Einstein's Emc2 to Laser Particle Acceleration and Quark-gluon Plasma

This book presents Special Relativity (SR) in a language deemed accessible to students without any topical preparation - avoiding the burden of geometry, tensor calculus, and space-time symmetries – and yet advancing in highly contemporary context all the way to research frontiers.

The narrative takes into consideration the way Einstein saw SR after 1915 as a part of the more general scientific context, with the newly formulated General Relativity (GR) influencing the way SR was now understood. This is complemented by the current perspective and connected to present day research topics. Overall, SR is presented such that nothing remains a paradox or just apparent, but rather is explained.

Complete with exercises, worked examples and many discussions, a text of similar character, content, scope, has not been presented before.

Johann Rafelski is a theoretical physicist working at The University of Arizona in Tucson, USA. Born in 1950 in Krakow, Poland, he received his Ph.D. with Walter Greiner in Frankfurt, Germany in 1973. Rafelski arrived at CERN in 1977, where in a joint effort with Hagedorn he contributed greatly to the establishment of the relativistic heavy ion collision, and quark-gluon plasma research fields. Moving on, with stops in Frankfurt and Cape Town, to Arizona, he invented and developed the strangeness quark flavor as the signature of quark-gluon plasma.