Theory of Relativity, Reprint

p { text-align: justify; } "The book On the Special and General Theory of Relativity holds a special place in Einstein’s oeuvre as the only work in which he explained the essence of his theories to a wide readership. Its first edition (1917) contained the special theory of relativity from 1905 and the general theory of relativity from 1915, when he formulated his gravitational field equations. However, Einstein returned to the book and supplemented it with appendices reflecting his view of the progress of relativistic physics. He soon expanded it to include a simple derivation of the Lorentz transformation and an explanation of Minkowski’s four-dimensional world. From 1920 onwards, the book included a more extensive treatise on the experimental verification of the theory of relativity, which responded in particular to Eddington’s famous observation of 1919. A further addition was an appendix on the structure of space on a large scale, in which Einstein comments on Friedmann’s theoretical discovery of the expansion of the universe and Hubble’s observations of the redshift of galaxies, which confirmed it. He returned to his work for the last time towards the end of his life, adding an appendix on the problem of space in 1952. In his book, Einstein presented the theory of relativity in an impressively concise and physically well-founded form. He succeeded in building a bridge from the special theory of relativity to the general theory, which is admired as a magnificent demonstration of the power of rational thought. This publication by VUTIUM Publishing House includes not only a reprint of the first Czech edition, which was published in 1923 by František Borový with a foreword by Albert Einstein himself and translated by Václav Štíbr, but also the later additions. The book is accompanied by the essays “Einstein a Hundred (and Fifteen) Years On” by Jan Novotný and “Gravitational Waves, or What Einstein Could Have Added to His Book but Did Not” by Jiří Podolský.