For December I decided to stretch my brain and try to learn the Theory of Relativity by reading Einstein’s book Relativity: The Special and The General Theory.  I think that book required more pausing-to-think-or-do-research than any other book I’ve tried to read.

Since it seemed to me like some of the book’s content would be a lot easier to understand in video format, I started creating a (very amateur) video explanation of each chapter.  My intent with the videos was to help myself to understand the book better, and I thought that in the future I might be be able to create less-amateur versions to help others.

Early in the month I realized that I wouldn’t have time to produce a video explanation of the entire book.  So I stopped creating videos and reverted to just reading.

A bit later in the month I realize that the entire book was more than I could get through in a month, so I decided to just focus on the first (and less complex) section on “special relativity”.

In the end I didn’t manage to get to the end of the “special relativity” section of the book either.  I simply wasn’t able to dedicate the time that was necessary for my lowly brain to really understand it.  I hope to come back to it in the future when I can dedicate more time to it.

A great resource where I was able to get many questions answered is http://www.physicsforums.com/