Thursday 9 May 2019
Fresh off their success last year with "My First Book of Quantum Physics by Seddad Kaid-Salah Ferron and Eduard Altarriba (Button Books)", Seddad and Eduard are back with "My First Book of Relativity" published by Button Books.
It's never too early to start exploring big ideas.
"My First Book of Relativity" introduces complex science to children through bright illustrations and amusing text.
Albert Einstein's theory of relativity is one of the cornerstones of modern physics but it requires a total rethink of our notions of time and space.
Strange things happen in a relative universe: length and time are not fixed and depend upon your frame of reference. If you move at high speed, time slows down, space contracts and weight increases.
So a period of time for someone on Earth that lasts for hundreds of years may only be a couple of hours for someone travelling in a rocket close to the speed of light.
It's mind-boggling stuff, but the theory of relativity has a real impact on our world today. A car's GPS navigation system, for example, uses information received from orbiting satellites and is designed to account for the fact that time ticks at a different rate on these satellites than it does on the ground.
Without allowing for relativity's effects, after just a day, your whereabouts according to GPS could be up to 8km from your actual location! (Hey, ours seems to do that anyway, or is that just us?)
Sum this book up in a sentence: Brilliantly detailed, yet kid friendly, with loads of awesome cartoonish illustrations to make some pretty mind-bogglingly complicated concepts seem easy, this is another fab slice of science.
"My First Book of Relativity" by Kaid-Salah Ferron Sheddad and Eduard Altarriba is out now, published by Button Books (kindly supplied for review).
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