Customer Reviews

Albert Einstein: Historical and Cultural Perspectives

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Einstein is certainly one of the most beautiful and concise thinkers of all time. His most famous equations contain fewer than ten characters and can be jotted down in a few seconds. Their implications are still being drawn out by physicists and mathematicians. What many people fail to understand is that Einstein was also an incredibly deep and poetic student of metaphysics and spiritual life. Such sayings as "God does not play Dice," and "God is crafty, but He is not malicious," are both deep and whimsical. This book celebrates this complementary cultural side of the Great Man.

This book does not avoid the complexities of quantum mechanics, special and general relativity, but the reader can easily skip over the equations. The reader who comes away wanting more can turn to Abraham Pais' biography of Einstein, Subtle is the Lord, and Alice Calaprice's compendium of Einstein's sayings.

This book is an excellent introduction to Einstein - if one happens to be a theoretical physicist with an IQ of 186. In other words, this book is abstruse in the extreme. The essays describing Einstein's theories depend heavily on formulas and equations. This begs the question, "so what is the book for?" Other sections of the book dealing with Einstein and the Bomb draw from Einstein's letters, which is good, but the letters really speak for themselves anyway. The section I thought might interest me, Einstein's perspective on language and thought, turned out to be a bunch of psychobabble that obviously comprises someone's ill-conceived thesis. The tone of the book, furthermore, is sickeningly sycophantic. We all recognize Einstein as a great man. What a pity that this book doesn't bring us any closer to knowing why. The picture on the cover, however, is precious. It looks like Inspector Clouseau on the trail of the dreaded Library Fine Evader. I do not recommend this book to any but scholars who've already read everything else on the subject.