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| Author(s) |
Ellis, G. (ed.) Lanza, A. (ed.) Miller, J. (ed.) |
|---|---|
| Title | The Renaissance of General Relativity and Cosmology |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
| Year of publication | 1993 |
| Reviewed by | Paul Blaga |
This book contents the proceedings of a meeting held at SISSA, Trieste, between 13-15 April 1992, to celebrate the 65th birthday of Dennis Walter Sciama. A great number of worldwide top scientists, experts in general relativity and cosmology attended the meeting, their talks giving a survey of the most important new developments from this fields.
Very few individuals (if any) contributed so much in the last forty years to the development of relativity and cosmology, by means of their entire activity, as Sciama did. He made a lot of important contributions to the understanding of inertia, relativity with spin and torsion, the thermodynamics of black holes, the dark matter theory, to mention only few domains. But I have to mention that Sciama is, also, a great teacher. He is one of the founders of the groups of research in relativity from the universities of Cambridge and Oxford, and, in the last years, from the SISSA, at Trieste, in Italy. Many of the greatest experts in the field are former students or colleague of Sciama. Last, but not least, he is an excellent author of popular science. His books on the foundations of general relativity and cosmology are generally considered as classics.
As I said in the beginning of my review, the book contains a number of survey papers on some key topics in modern relativity and cosmology. Between the topics touched, let me mention: black holes, active galactic nuclei, galactic structure, dark matter and large scale structure.
The book will be of a great interest for experts and graduate students in physics, astronomy and applied mathematics interested in general relativity and cosmology.
The book is excellent produced. Each paper is accompanied by a list of references. There is no index.