Customer Reviews

Secrets of the Old One: Einstein, 1905

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

 

 

I just read this book and very much enjoyed it. I am a theoretical physicist and last year gave several public lectures on Einstein's work of 1905. I wish I had had this book at hand then. It "suffers" the "Adam and Eve problem", as my sister and I used to denote my father's approach to answering our questions: Bernstein starts way at the beginning and gives a lot of physics background to the questions Einstein tackled. I believe this gives a much deeper and enjoyable understanding. I even learned some new things about Copernicus. The treatment of relativity is very lucid and I think at an excellent level for the general public. Bernstein uses some high-school math but nothing beyond using the Pythagorean theorem for the distance between two points. This enables him to capture the essence and also the profundity of Einstein's arguments. It is fair to say that without math one will always only scratch the surface. I was surprised to see how well Bernstein could explain the content of the relativity with so little math.

The only down side of the book is that there is a fair number of typos in the second half, which will hopefully be corrected in the second edition.

The author of this book is a gifted writer. His clarity of expression is significantly above average. In this book, he discusses both historical issues as well as very technical ones, all pertaining to Einstein's 1905 papers. The historical snippets, which include several mini-biographies of various scientists, make for extremely pleasant reading. On the other hand, regarding the technical discussions, we have what I perceive as a mixed bag: some of them are quite clear from beginning to end, while others, although they start off very clear, seem to be missing a few important details before their conclusions are suddenly presented. Consequently, readers who want to learn some of the technical details on special relativity, etc., while minimizing their likelihood of becoming confused, should look elsewhere; there are many excellent books at all levels on these topics. On the positive side, this book does have a lot of information that would not likely be included in, say, a textbook; thus, it would likely complement a more technical source very nicely. Unfortunately, the book contains many typographical errors that, in the long run, can become quite annoying. But overall, this is a pleasant read, although it can be heavy going at times. This book would likely appeal to science buffs who are more interested in science history than in complete, although popularized, scientific expositions of Einstein's 1905 papers.

I read other biographies of Einstein but none of those gave me the "insider's view" of him that this book did. If you like reading about the interior lives of scientists or are interested in learning more about Albert Einstein, than you must include this book in your library. One star off because it was too short, alas.

The arguements are not as simple to follow as claimed.