Customer Reviews

Einstein: A Hundred Years of Relativity

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This is a review of "Einstein: A Hundred Years of Relativity," by Andrew Robinson.

For the last three or four years, I have both actively and passively searched for a good introductory book on Einstein, something that is accessible to me as an intelligent non-scientist, but that is broader in scope than I take most of his biographies to be. I want a good, clear explanation of special and general relativity, but I also want to know more about the pacificist and cultural icon, about Einstein as a humanist. No one book has filled the niche. Either you find good discussions of his physics, or you find books on his love life, or you find books that are beautifully produced but have very little substance.

As the centennial of the "miraculous year" of 1905, 2005 has seen a bumper crop of books on Einstein, many of them poorly conceived and some richly priced. But this book is just what I've been looking for for the last few years.

The Editorial Review is wrong in stating that all entries are new except for Einstein's last interview. In fact, a few pages from Einstein's autobiography are also included--and that indicates one reason why this book is so well done. It is divided into two parts; the first has seven chapters on "The Physicist"; the second has eight chapters on "The Man." All of these are written by Andrew Robinson. But interspersed with this biographical-chronological-topical layout are essays by other authors. Einstein contributes a few pages to Part One and a few to Part Two. But there are also four essays by others in Part One and five essays by others in Part Two. It's thrilling to read Stephen Hawking on the history of relativity and Philip Glass on his operatic take on Einstein. The book is not hagiographical. Freeman Dyson's preface mainly discusses the embarrassing (for Einstein) peculiarity that Einstein did not believe in black holes.

The book is full of other goodies. Though the text is more than one finds in a typical coffee-table book, the illustrations are of that beauty and quantity. It's an illustrated book with well-chosen pictures, always with captions. There are notes in the back, a detailed chronology of his life, and a (non-annotated) bibliography. The whole is made authoritative not only by the caliber of its contributors, but by its use of Einstein's archives housed at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

The only way this book could be better is if there were more of it; sometimes the discussions feel rushed and compressed. Also, despite Robinson's literary credentials, I'm not partial to his somewhat awkward, hypertactic writing style.

Published in 2005, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Einstein's miracle year of 1905, this book is a rare treat presented in two parts. Part one deals with Einstein's legacy in physics as seen by his closest associates and admiring colleagues. Part II deals with Einstein the man: his personal life, his political and religious views. It closes with Einstein's final interview and the author's comments on what his life and discoveries all mean. Altogether, it is a fitting tribute to the great man.

In the introduction, Freeman Dyson, a friend and Princeton colleague, summaries the paradox that was Einstein the scientist using as an example Einstein's refusal to accept one of the important consequences of his own theory of relativity: the predicted existence of black holes. Einstein submitted a flawed paper claiming their non-existence, and never changed his mind. Later in his life, he also took a similar stance regarding another of his developments, the quantum theory. Regarding it, in one of his most famous quips he is quoted as having said that: "god does not play dice with the universe."

Chapter 1 is a quick review of Newtonian physics in which the author swiftly takes us through the Greeks, Copernicus, Kepler, Tyco Brahe, Galileo on to Newton with his laws of motion. Significantly, Newton "posited" the existence of gravity without fully understanding it. Thus, Newton's universe was not so much a paradigm shift as the first coherent paradigm of the universe at all. Its primary weakness was that it depended on absolute time and space, which at bottom assumes the existence of a space-time frame of reference that is at rest. This of course was one of the weaknesses that led Einstein to exploit Newton's theory to good effect in his special theory, and later further explored and refined in the general theory. Newton also got in trouble with his "corpuscular theory of light," forcing all those who embraced it into having also to posit the existence of the strange phenomenon of the "ether" as the medium through which light necessarily had to travel. The implausibility of the ether opened up the floodgates to James Clerk Maxwell's rather incredible work, which arguably was indeed the paradigm shift that was needed for Einstein's ideas to take root and to flourish. Maxwell's equations changed the way reality was perceived: from a framework of "material points" to one of "continuous fields."

Chapter II takes us through Einstein's graduation from the Swiss Polytechnic in Zurich. There the young Einstein was growing into a "hard case:" again separated from his family, had become an undisciplined dreamer, "stateless," and with little or no respect for authority (including his teachers at the Polytechnic), but who despite this, was a voracious reader "up on" all of the latest scientific materials. This mixture of personal habits and attitudes landed him not in his preferred role of teacher at the institute, but as a bureaucrat at the Federal Swiss Office for Intellectual Property -- the Patent Office. And as the saying goes, "the rest is history."

Steven Hawking then gives a brief but very revealing history of Relativity. It begins with the Michelson-Morley experiment, which finally dispatched Newton's idea of the "ether" into oblivion and immediately launched Einstein into a frenetic period of creative theorizing. The crowning gem of this period was his radical proposal of the universal constancy of light. This proved to be the Rosetta Stone of relativity. The rest was really no more than tying up the loose ends, which Einstein did in grand style with his now famous equation E=mc^2. The chapter ends with the much more complicated notions that led to the general theory.

Chapter III described the events of 1905, dubbed "the miraculous year." By May of 1905, Einstein had sketched out four papers that would revolutionize our understanding of the universe. The least well-known of his work during this period on the "black body problem of light," would later earn him the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Imagine this: In the span of six months, a 26-year old patent officer, with no contacts with the rest of the physics profession, and whose papers cited no previous scientific authors, had single-handedly formulated the basis for the quantum theory, the theory of Brownian motion, the Special theory of Relativity, and had developed a draft of a paper on the General theory of Relativity. In short, in no more than six months, he had revolutionized our understanding of the universe.

Chapters IV and V deal with the "fallout" of the two most controversial papers of 1905, the General theory and quantum mechanics. Chapter IV deals with the agonizing development of the General Theory of Relativity, the crown jewel of Einstein's work. There were no easy parts to either the general theory, or quantum mechanics, both of which unlike the other papers, got strong "blowback" from the established physics community. However, Einstein held fast and weathered the storm with confidence that his theories would eventually prove to be correct. He was right.

Arguably Einstein should have been considered for a Nobel Prize for any one of his 1905 papers, or even for them collectively, but even as late as 1922, he was not being considered for any of them because of the controversial nature of both the quantum paper and the one on the General theory. In fact, only in 1907 was he promoted in his patent office job. At the time of his promotion, no mention was made of his most famous outside work that was revolutionizing the world of science.He remained at the Patent Office for seven years before leaving to take a lowly teaching job.

The rest of part I of the book is about how physics and the world changed as a result of Einstein's theories, and his own failed search for the "holy grail" of physics, a theory of everything. And while there are certainly better discussions of the latter of these, none are as interesting or as pumped with historical significance as this one.

The second half of the book, chapters 8 to the end, covers in modest detail Einstein's personal and non-scientific public life. And while it is all interesting there do exist better sources for those who wish to know these details. I have read and reviewed several of those books and thus quickly skimmed through the last half of the book. Overall it is a wonderful read. Five stars.

Very well planned, full of meaningfull illustrations, accurately written and revised,this book deserves special attention of everyone interested in Einsteins's personal life and scientific production. Recommended with enthusiasm.

This is a nice overview of Einstein's physics and his personal life, published to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of his 1905 "miracle year" papers that changed the face of physics. The book is divided into two parts, one concentrating on what he did and the other on his life beyond his physics. The physics chapters not only cover his work on relativity, but also cover his work on Brownian motion, the idea of the quanta and his objection to the concepts of the versions of quantum mechanics that were developed during the 1920's and 30's. The chapters on his personal life are devoted to specific topics, rather than covering it in a comprehensive manner, so the details are not covered to the degree that they are in a full-scale biography. Overall, the book is divided into 15 chapters, with the first part of each chapter consisting of a contribution by the author, followed by short excerpts from articles by experts on the same subject. These chapters cover topics such as: The Miraculous Year, General Relativity, Arguing about Quantum Mechanics, Personal and Family Life, Nuclear Saint and Demon and Einstein's Enduring Magic. The book is lavishly illustrated, but these illustrations and photographs are printed on the same paper as the text. This paper is, however, of high enough quality to render the photographs reasonably legible, although they are not as quite as clear as they would have been if they were of glossy paper.

Unfortunately, since fractional stars are not allowed I cannot give the book the 4.5-star rating that I feel is most appropriate. I do not see it as being clearly a five-star book because, from my vantage point, the book does not provide any new information about Einstein or his physics. It was written to take advantage of the celebration of his 1905 work and like most of the many books that have sought to do likewise it is just a restatement of what has appeared in many other books. However, this book does a better job at this than most in this genre. Another factor to consider is the fact that this book is a collection of essays, rather than a more unified whole, and I feel that this down rates the book a bit. By and large the essays are generally good, and I feel are best suited for someone who knows the basics of Einstein's life and physics. Also of concern is the fact that the book is also marred by errors, small errors, but errors nonetheless. Let me cite two. The book states that Einstein's first PhD thesis was rejected. This is wrong, Einstein withdrew it after his thesis advisor told him that it might not be accepted and if this were the case Einstein would forfeit the fee that was required with its submission. You could consider this as a rejection, but it was not rejected per se, Einstein withdrew it. A more serious error was the assertion that Einstein's 1911 calculation of the bending of starlight by the sun was based on Newton's law of gravitation. This is completely false. Einstein used an early (and incorrect) version of General Relativity that employed Euclidean geometry for the calculation. While this approach yielded the same incorrect value as a calculation based on Newton's gravity, Einstein's approach based on different physics. In fact, Einstein was unaware that Newton had predicted that gravity would bend light or that Johann Georg von Soldner, using Newton's laws of gravitation, had calculated the amount of bending about 100-years before Einstein did his calculation. In fact, in 1911 Einstein got the same result as Soldner, a value that was low by a factor of two, compared to the measured value and the one that Einstein got using his corrected 1915 version of General Relativity. Are these very critical errors? No, but they do point to a lack of scholarship, or at least a lack of attention to detail, on the part of the author.

I would recommend this book for someone who wants a nice illustrated "coffee table" overview of Einstein's life and physics. However, I think that Calle's "Einstein for Dummies" does a better job at providing the basic facts of Einstein's life and does a much better job at describing Einstein's physics in a very understandable manner. Calle does an excellent job of providing a background primer that enables one the get a good feeling for what Einstein did and why it was so important. In contrast, I was not very impressed by the degree to which the book being reviewed here makes Einstein's physics understandable for someone with little or no background in this area. The treatment in this book was not bad, it is just that there are better ones. However, this book does look much nicer on a coffee table because it contains a wealth of photographs and illustrations.

So, since I cannot give the book 4.5-stars, I have to settle on 4 or 5. In my opinion the rating should depend upon the prospective reader. I would rate it 4-stars for someone, like myself, who has a good knowledge of Einstein's life and physics (4-stars because of a lack of new information and the annoying errors) or for someone with no knowledge of Einstein's life or physics (because of the fact that the book consists of essays instead of being a unified whole and the relatively poor treatment of Einstein's physics). I would however, rate the book 5-stars for those in the middle; those with a basic knowledge of Einstein's life and physics because they are likely to get the most from the book. All in all, this is a good four-star book and a nice (although not the best) introduction to Einstein, his physics and what this has meant to the world.

This beautiful, hardcover coffee-table book, whose text is as delightful as its scores of photographs, retails for $29.95--not the $35 that Amazon advertises. It is an amazing value in this day when trade paperbacks often retail for $24.95 and higher.