johanley / relativity-quotes

Quotations from textbooks on special and general relativity.

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Quotations from textbooks on the subject of relativity (special and general).

I have scanned about 40 textbooks, looking for items of interest to me.

This was an interesting and useful exercise. I learned some important points that I wasn't aware of before. The moral is to never rely on a single textbook. The best technique is likely to study one good book closely, and then scan many other books looking for different points of view.

An important point is that the scanning can actually be done rather quickly. There's a natural filter that can be used to your advantage. In physics books, most of the content is in equations. But most points of interest are discussed in extensive written comments, outside of the equations. So the technique is to simply focus on the (relatively sparse) blocks of non-trivial text, instead of the equations.

Source file: quotes.txt

Structured data file, UTF-8 encoding, typed in manually. No repeated data. The source file uses ad hoc symbols to denote the need for special processing of the text:

  • pre(...) is meant to preserve white space
  • em(...) is meant for emphasis/italics

Generated files

I have code that talks to the above source file, and generates a PDF, suitable for printing. That code is not included here. Only the data is included here. However, I do include the output of the code, as derived files in the 'generated' directory.

quotes_flat_file.txt

This repeats data (author name, title). One quote per line.

quotes_book.pdf

Final output as a printable PDF. The quotations are in alphabetical order by the author's last name. The PDF can be printed in book form. I have printed it using lulu.com.

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Quotations from textbooks on special and general relativity.

License:BSD 2-Clause "Simplified" License