Presenting an Interactive Jupyter eBook on Relativity Theory

I will present an overview of an interactive electronic textbook I have developed on Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity. Based on an original PDF text by my late colleague Prof. Rexford Adelberger, I have expanded his content into a 14-chapter Jupyter Book on four-vectors, spacetime, relativistic dynamics, electromagnetism, and a brief introduction to the ideas of General Relativity. I use VPython to create interactive animated illustrations that allow the user to change parameters like the relative speed between reference frames, or to rotate the simulation and view it from different angles. I have used this textbook in two classes so far (Fall 23 and 24) at the sophomore level. I also required students to develop homework sets in Jupyter Notebooks so they could program their own spacetime diagrams and Lorentz Transformations. I will show examples of how the book works and share student reactions. In closing, I will preview a second volume on particle physics, using a discovery-based approach that will allow the reader to follow in the footsteps of 20th Century Physics to develop the Standard Model. Together, these two volumes could be used as a interactive textbook for an Introduction to Modern Physics course.