In clear, understandable terms, physicist Richard Wolfson explores the ideas at the heart of relativity and shows how they lead to such seeming absurdities as time travel, curved space, black holes, and new meaning for the idea of past and future. Drawing from years of teaching modern physics to nonscientists, Wolfson explains in a lively, conversational style the simple principles underlying Einstein's theory.Relativity, Wolfson shows, gave us a new view of space and time, opening the door to questions about their flexible nature: Is the universe finite or infinite? Will it expand forever or eventually collapse in a "big crunch"? Is time travel possible? What goes on inside a black hole? How does gravity really work? These questions at the forefront of twenty-first-century physics are all rooted in the profound and sweeping vision of Albert Einstein's early twentieth-century theory. Wolfson leads his readers on an intellectual journey that culminates in a universe made almost unimaginably rich by the principles that Einstein first discovered.

Preface ix
 1 The Self-Creating Universe and Other Absurdities 3(8)
 2 Tennis, Tea, and Time Travel 11(7)
 3 Moving Heaven and Earth 18(18)
 4 Let There Be Light 36(19)
 5 Ether Dreams 55(13)
 6 Crisis in Physics 68(10)
 7 Einstein to the Rescue 78(8)
 8 Stretching Time 86(23)
 9 Star Trips and Squeezed Space 109(18)
 10 The Same Time? 127(12)
 11 Past, Present, Future, and Elsewhere 139(10)
 12 Faster than Light? 149(15)
 13 Is Everything Relative? 164(10)
 14 A Problem of Gravity 174(29)
 15 Into the Black Hole 203(26)
 16 Einstein's Universe 229(12)
 Appendix: Time Dilation 241(4)
 Glossary 245(8)
 Further Readings 253(4)
 Index 257