How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog in Nature Physics

The Subject: header pretty much says it all: How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is reviewed in Nature Physics. I am inordinately pleased with the existence of this-- not because I expect it to sell a significant number of books, but because a serious technical publication recognized it as worth writing up, despite the silly title.

Of course, Nature being Nature, it's paywalled, so you can only read the full thing via the above link if you have institutional access, or know a nice person who will email you a copy when you ask for it on Twitter. The review itself is about what I would expect-- the reviewer, Roger Jones, is a little uncertain about the talking-dog conceit, and dings me for incomplete labeling of some diagrams-- but generally pretty good.

Amusingly, Jones also says that I'm the victim of poor timing, since the publishing schedule didn't allow a more substantial discussion of the OPERA result, which broke while we were in the proof stages of the process. This is funny, because his review is also a victim of timing-- when he wrote it a few weeks ago (presumably), that would've looked like a better criticism of the book than it does after last week's news about problems with the OPERA measurement. (See Matt Strassler's latest update for more detail on the current state of affairs...)

There was a point when I could've made a more substantive change to include additional stuff about the OPERA results, but I elected not to, because the whole thing was too provisional to say much about. I'm fairly happy with that decision at the moment, though if OPERA fixes their problems and still finds the same result, I might tip back the other way. Oh, well. Something for the Second Edition, should I ever be so lucky...