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I have tried several books on SR, Kleppner and Kolenkow, Morin, Irodov, Ohaninan, Schwarts, Griffiths, Chow, Purcell, French, Coiller, Brian Greene's course, and others that I can't remember at the moment.

The problem with all these texts is that they are too basic, giving no attention to the basics, homogeneity of space and time, and isotropy of time. But as soon as you pick up a grad-level book, or try to understand GR, these ideas create the biggest challenge to understanding the subject. This all becomes highly apparent when you try to derive Maxwell's equations from SR.

From my mail to an author:

For example, Morin and Brian Greene in their respective book and online course (https://worldscienceu.com/courses/special-relativity-world-science-u/) start with highly intuitive ways of looking at the Lv/c^2 term by stating that this is caused due to lack of clock synchronization, which is pretty reasonable considering their framework and approach. However, this approach begins to fail when we go into "tough" problems of kinematics. Not to mention that this does not even begins to make sense for the dynamics. On the other hand, all other books get too technical right at the beginning, the phrases like "Lorentz group is a special case of Poincare group having this symmetry..." mean nothing to me.

My current level in SR is that I can solve most of the problems in the above-mentioned books and have a basic understanding of tensors. If there are any resources addressing these concerns of mine then please share.

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  • $\begingroup$ Have you looked at the MITOCW course on relativity? I recall looking at the lecture notes and being pleasantly surprised as--similar to you--many SR resources seem absolutely horrible. Take a look: ocw.mit.edu/courses/8-033-relativity-fall-2006/pages/… $\endgroup$
    – Silly Goose
    Commented Feb 14, 2023 at 20:45
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    $\begingroup$ Why do you think Maxwell’s equations are derivable from Special Relativity? They are certainly compatible, but there are an infinite number of possible theories of electromagnetism that are compatible with SR. One example is the Born-Infeld model. Another is the Euler-Heisenberg Lagrangian. You need additional assumptions beyond SR, such as linearity, to get Maxwell’s equations, and then you’re left with the question of whether there should be magnetic monopoles in the theory or not. $\endgroup$
    – Ghoster
    Commented Feb 14, 2023 at 21:39
  • $\begingroup$ @Ghoster If you try to apply d'Alembertian directly to Gauss law in the SR framework then indeed you need to make an explicit assumption about the linearity of Maxwell tensor, which Ohanian justified by saying it is Taylor expansion of a more general tensor, if any, while Schwartz said: "God didn't want to complicate the things". However, if you apply relativistic force law directly to Coloumb's law then you don't need such assumptions as done by Haskell, richardhaskell.com/files/… $\endgroup$
    – GedankenExperimentalist
    Commented Feb 14, 2023 at 22:01
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    $\begingroup$ does this not answer your question? $\endgroup$
    – ZeroTheHero
    Commented Feb 14, 2023 at 22:04
  • $\begingroup$ Since SR is a special case of GR, I would proceed to Frederic Schuller's lectures on General Relativity. They are extremely mathematical, but they assume almost no prior knowledge: everything is developed step by step. If you want to understand relativity, there is nothing better. Watch the first lecture to get the idea/style, and the 13th lecture (of 24) to see how the math is used to understand the physics. If you like these, then start back at the beginning and go through the whole thing. $\endgroup$
    – Ben H
    Commented Feb 15, 2023 at 1:15

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