The book is intended to serve as lecture material for courses on relativity
at undergraduate level. Although there has been much written on special
relativity the present book will emphasize the real applications of relativity.
In addition, it will be physically designed with the use of box summaries so
as to allow easy access of practical results. The book will be composed of
eight chapters. Chapter 1 will give an introduction to special relativity that
is the world without gravity. Implications will be presented with emphasis on
time dilation and the Doppler shift as practical considerations. In Chapter 2,
the four-vector representation of events will be introduced.

The bulk of this chapter will deal with flat space dynamics. This will require
the generalization of Newton's first and second laws. Some important astronomical
applications will be discussed in Chapter 3 and in Chapter 4 some engineering
applications of special relativity such as atomic clocks will be presented.
Chapter 5 will be dedicated to the thorny question of gravity. The physical
motivation of the theory must be examined and the geometrical interpretation
presented. Chapter 6 will present astronomical applications of relativistic
gravity. These include the usual solar system tests; light bending, time delay,
gravitational red-shift, precession of Keplerian orbits. Chapter 7 will be
dedicated to relativistic cosmology. Many of the standard cosmological concepts
will be introduced, being mathematically simple but conceptually subtle.
The concluding chapter will be largely dedicated to the global positioning system
as an engineering problem that requires both inertial and gravitational relativity.
The large interferometers designed as gravitational wave telescopes will be
discussed here.

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