Customer Reviews

The Grip of Gravity: The Quest to Understand the Laws of Motion and Gravitation

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

For me, a well-written science history contains three things. It establishes the context for the discoveries and developments. It accurately describes the relevant details of the experiments so that the results, interpretations and conclusions can be understood. Finally, it discusses the implications of the developments. The author accomplishes all three to my satisfaction in this book.
The story of gravity involves many subplots. Each part contributes a piece to the developing concept of gravity. The author skillfully weaves the pieces into a coherent story. Along the way he presents details that challenge common misconceptions about gravity, clarifies myths about the familiar personalities who have demystified aspects of gravity and introduces less familiar but influential contributors to our still-evolving understanding of gravity.
The book is comprehensive enough to satisfy my requirements for a well-written science history, but not so over-burdened with detail that it becomes cumbersome to follow the main plot. It reads like a suspense story for a reader who's interested in science history.

Gravity is one of those fundamental forces that have engaged the brightest brains over centuries of scientific endeavor. The Grip of Gravity by Prabhakar Gondhalekar does a fine job of taking us through the history and development of scientific understanding about gravity, from Aristotle to the modern day, to clarify our present day ideas about what gravity actually is and how those ideas developed.

The book starts right at the origin of the quest to understand what gravity might be, over two thousand years ago, and then takes us through the experiments of Galileo and his thoughts on inertia. Then he describes how Newton reconciled gravity with the equivalence principle of inertia so he could produce his famous formulas that still enable the prediction of orbits of planets and how objects fall on the Earth.

Gondhalekar then takes us through the modern thinking of Einstein, with gravity being thought of as a distortion in the space-time continuum, to create gravitational wells that attract all mass to each other. It concludes with some of the latest thinking of the theory of gravity and how scientists are still trying to determine what might be the fundamental cause of gravity. Perhaps the answer will be the long awaited `Theory of Everything'.

I found Gondhalekar's book a fairly straightforward read until the introduction of string theory but I suspect I would start to struggle at that point no matter how good the writer. Gravity is a fundamental force of nature that we are still trying to understand but along the way Gondhalekar explores how gravity relates to the speed of light, the Hubble constant, dark matter and black holes.