According to Daniel Styer, the Library of Congress has nearly 900 books about relativity and I suspect that even more have been published. He then asks whether his “slim volume” can hope to add anything to the subject. His answer is that the present book is neither simply a description nor a technical (mathematical) but rather a “rigorous but nontechnical” treatment of special relativity “intended for the general audience, that is, for both scientists and nonscientists.” The result, Relativity for the Questioning Mind, admirably hits this mark. Like Styer, I dove into relativity as a teenager. For me it was Lillian Lieber’s The Einstein Theory of Relativity. That book, perhaps more than anything else, influenced my future career as a physicist. Even though I’ve forgotten the details of Lieber’s text, I suspect that Styer’s book would have reinforced this impression and, perhaps, hastened my foray into physics.
Styer...
