Tag Archives: Albert Einstein

Einstein and Relativity – Paul Strathearn ***

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This is part of author Paul Strathern’s ‘Big Idea’ series, with each book in the series aiming to provide a condensed, readable introduction to a particular scientist’s life and work. The format is the same each time, so we also have, for instance, ‘Darwin and Evolution’, ‘Curie and radioactivity’ and ‘Newton and Gravity’.

This offering on Einstein really is very short – at under 90 pages, it can be read in about 90 minutes. Still, Strathern manages to get in a good overview of the major episodes of Einstein’s life, encompassing his political activities and his ultimately unsuccessful work towards the end of his career on unification, and we get some insights into Einstein as a person.

Clearly, given the length of the book, you will need to go elsewhere to get a full account of relativity. But, again, the book does well to fit in what it does into such a small amount of space. We get brief but useful explanations of the special and general theories, Einstein’s thinking whilst coming up with each, and the context within which the breakthroughs were made. And via discussions of the Michelson-Morley experiment, the differences between Galilean relativity and Einstein’s relativity, and the action at a distance problem in Newton’s theory of gravitation, the truly revolutionary nature of Einstein’s theories comes through.

The book is easy to read throughout and would be particularly good for those new to popular science, and as something to look at before going on to, say, Walter Isaacson’s detailed Einstein: his life and universe. All in all, this is a useful summary of the man and his ideas, which definitely has a place in the popular science genre.

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Review by Matt Chorley

The Ultimate Quotable Einstein – Alice Calaprice (Ed.) ***

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There is no doubt that Albert Einstein had a way with words. He was an expert with the sound bite long before the concept existed. In this fat little book, Alice Calaprice has collected together a vast number of his quotable snippets to delight the Einstein fans.

Just looking at the Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Quotations shows how quotable (and what a wit) Einstein was. He has 37 entries compared with 10 for Rutherford (no slacker) and 7 for the ultimate science wit Richard Feynman. And that’s where the doubt creeps in. Feynman was, without doubt, even better at coming up with little gems – yet we don’t get equivalent books for him. At the moment on TV, a grotesque animation of Einstein is being used to advertise bread. He is more than a scientist, he is a brand. The only real reason for producing a book like this is because Einstein has fans. It wouldn’t be going too far to call the action of putting this collection together hagiography.

This being the case, it’s hard to be too enthusiastic about the result. It would have been much better, for instance, if it had far fewer dull quotes but gave a lot more context. Ultimately, I just don’t see what this book is for. You would have to be a real fan to read it from cover to cover, and it’s not really a reference book for any practical use. An oddity beyond doubt.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Einstein’s Universe: the layperson’s guide – Nigel Calder ****

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Einstein’s Universe is a short and useful book which outlines special and general relativity, and how Einstein’s framework for understanding space and time has remained intact and been continually confirmed since he first gave it to us.

This would be a good start for anyone knowing very little about relativity. Nigel Calder goes through the main aspects and predictions of the special and general theories in short, readable sections, and at the beginning of each chapter there are a few helpful sentences that state plainly what’s going to be talked about. The only equation in the book is E = mc2, and the explanation of the origin of this is better than in most places. The section on how gravity affects time is particularly good for those new to the concept.

The book was originally written in 1979 and, apart from a new afterword, everything remains the same in the 2005 edition now available. This is not really a problem, however, for a book which explains the basics of its subject that are still valid. And having understood these basics, readers would be in a good position to go on to something slightly more technical, like Russell Stannard’s Relativity: A Very Short Introduction or Bruce Bassett’s Introducing Relativity.

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Review by Matt Chorley

The Essential Einstein – Albert Einstein ****

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His Greatest Works is a collection of Einstein’s writings spanning approximately 50 years, which Stephen Hawking edited and provided with commentary. What makes this collection so valuable is that it brings together short and long pieces by Einstein that focuses mainly on relativity.

Hawking kicks off with a paper from 1905. One which revolutionized our understanding of space and time. The Second paper, only just three pages long, proposing the equivalence of mass and energy: E=mc2.

For me this was the first time I really understand how this theory was developed and that it didn’t just fall out of the sky. I think this book is an excellent collection of important papers that certainly lives up to the title. However it is a very hard read and you would need a higher level of mathematics.

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Review by Berry den Hartog (Community review)

Einstein’s Mistakes – Hans C. Ohanian ****

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This is, without doubt, one of the most fascinating popular science books I have ever read. When I first saw the title, I was filled with dread, because the bookshelves are filled with crank titles that try to take on Einstein and prove him wrong. But this is quite different. It’s a carefully constructed exploration of Einstein’s life and scientific work, built around the errors in his work that are often glossed over in presenting the triumph of his great ideas.

The only slight concern about the approach is that this does result in a rather smug feel to the book, a sort of ‘aren’t I clever, I can tell you where Einstein went wrong’ aura that isn’t helped by occasional descents into loose language (apparently Van Gogh became a great artist ‘when he went bonkers.’) Building the book around Einstein’s mistakes is an excellent idea, but sometimes it results in excessive weight being put on a relatively small point, such as an assertion in the original Special Relativity paper that allegedly drove a lone yachtsman mad.

However there certainly is a wealth of material here that I have never seen before, or not seen presented anywhere near so well. We see some historical examples of error that don’t get enough mention, such as Galileo’s strange idea that the tides were caused by the rotation of the Earth, or Newton’s fudged experimental values which somehow managed to match his theoretical predictions exactly, even when he got those predictions wrong.

Perhaps the best example from Einstein himself was a wonderful mistake called the Principle of Equivalence. This was the idea that started him on the stunning ideas about curved spacetime that lie beneath general relativity. I have often seen this principle, stating that a gravitational field and acceleration are equivalent, so in a closed box you couldn’t tell if you were feeling gravity or being accelerated (say by a rocket), used to introduce general relativity, just as Einstein did. Unfortunately this principle is flawed. It was the inspiration behind general relativity, but it happens to be wrong. Now that is interesting!

My biggest worry about the book is that in the one aspect of Einstein’s work I do know in a lot of detail, the EPR paper of 1935, Hans Ohanian gets things horribly wrong. He seems to think that the paper’s arguments against quantum theory are based on the uncertainty principle, a common mistake because the paper mentions both position and momentum. But mistake it is. In fact Einstein later emphasized this, commenting that his attitude to the use of position and momentum was ‘Ist mir Wurst’, literally ‘is sausage to me’, or approximately ‘I couldn’t care less.’ Either of the measurements was sufficient, because the argument is nothing to do with uncertainty. Now it’s an easy enough mistake to make, as it has been made by several other books – but it does throw some doubt on whether any of the other assertions about Einstein’s mistakes are equally flawed. I’m inclined to give Ohanian the benefit of the doubt.

Whatever, it is an intriguing book. It’s probably best left to those with some previous experience of physics, at least to high school level, because the details of the errors can be quite subtle – but it’s well worth the effort. Recommended.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Einstein: His Life and Universe – Walter Isaacson *****

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While it seems a statement of the obvious, this book is about Albert Einstein. It is not really about his famous equation E=mc2 although that is part of it. Neither is the book about Special or General Relativity, which is also part of it. This book is about the man, his youth, his family, his friendships and his relationships and not the least about his scientific genius and his discoveries. From his earliest childhood, to his miracle year of 1905 to his Nobel Prize to his political activism, Walter Isaacson discusses these diverse topics is an erudite yet thoroughly readable and entertaining book.

There are a few parts of the book that really stand out. Isaacson strives to explain those things that are most perplexing about Einstein. These include his statements about God and his stubbornness in refusing to accept quantum mechanics. He had been a steadfast believer that equations without physical meaning were not worthwhile yet in his later years; his struggle to develop a unified theory brought him away from physical meaning and more towards pure mathematics. Perhaps the most enjoyable parts of the book were those that discussed his relationships with his contemporaries such as Max Born and Niels Bohr.

Isaacson does a masterful job of being objective. Where Einstein’s brilliance in science shone through Isaacson described it yet where Einstein was incredibly naïve about politics, Isaacson described this too. And lest we think that the author idolized Einstein, his section on his failed relationships with women shows that the author saw Einstein as a mere mortal. Isaacson also has done the best job of any book I have read so far that explains the notion of curved space-time. He even takes a detour into non-Euclidean geometry, explaining how a triangle can have more than 180 degrees. No matter how much you suffered through high school or college physics, this book will open your eyes onto the brilliance that was Einstein. And for those of you who could deal with the physics here is another side of the man that you did not learn about in school

Some people might say that too much of his personal life is in the book but for these people I would say that there are a lot of books about Einstein’s science that might better serve them. One of these might be Kip Thorne’s Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy. I didn’t get a lot out of that book as the physics was too complicated so I recommend that one read Einstein’s biography first.

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Review by Stephen Goldberg

The Elegant Universe of Albert Einstein – Tom Barnes et al ***

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Like all books that are collections of essays – in this case, a series of talks given on New Zealand national radio – there is a certain degree of dislocation to this book – but it works better than many, as most of the sections are lucid and readable in their own right. The main disadvantage is a tendency to leap from topic to topic with the fragile linking theme of the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s great year 1905 (although the book didn’t come out until 2006).

So we get topics from a brief history of the universe and the history of our knowledge of the age of the Earth, to relativity, quantum theory and more, including the often difficult interaction between science and religion.

Some of these topics only have a very tangential link to Einstein – in fact only one strongly covers Einstein’s work, and includes a potted biography of the man. This is where the segmented nature of the book comes out strongest as there is also a mini-biography in the introduction – you’d think the author of the introduction would have been aware of the overlap.

Generally the subjects are covered in a very approachable fashion. The first (the brief history of the universe one) suffers from occasional moments of wince-making whimsy – for example, the author Matt Visser says ‘These days, when your child wanders up to you and says, “Dear parental unit, why does the sun shine?”‘ Only the very desperate would find ‘dear parental unit’ anything other than cringe-worthy. The other section that is a little weak is the second by Hamish Campbell on the age of the earth. This lists the naming of the different periods at tedious length and is rather stodgy. But the rest of the pieces read very well.

I particularly enjoyed Paul Callaghan’s ‘Journey to the Heart of Matter’ section on the discovery of the nature of matter (inevitably, and why not, strongly featuring the work of New Zealand’s biggest scientific star, Ernest Rutherford) and the final section by John Stenhouse, called ‘Galileo’s Dilemma’. Stenhouse steers a careful course, identifying where (for instance) the Catholic church went very wrong with Galileo but also being clear that not all problems ascribed to religion (such as the fictional insistence on a flat earth in medieval times) really existed. It’s too easy for scientists who are very vocal against religion, like Richard Dawkins, to paint things just as black and white as any religious fundamentalist – this section gives a much more balanced view.

All in all, it’s an enjoyable little taster around aspects of the physical sciences that can be loosely tied in to Einstein. Each section then needs opening up further with a whole book on the subject – but it’s a good starting point.

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Review by Brian Clegg

What Einstein didn’t know about Time – Keith Ashworth **

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Let’s start with the good stuff. Keith Ashworth has assembled a detailed alternative to special and general relativity (and something of a variant on quantum theory as well). This is to be applauded – no scientist should be unhappy when someone challenges one of the big theories of the time. What’s more, although for a number of reasons detailed below this appears to be a self-published book, it is very professionally done with a good jacket and presentation.

When all things are taken into account, this has to be one of the strangest popular science books ever written. It is not so much a history of science book, as a personal vendetta. You would think that Einstein had personally done something extremely unpleasant to Keith Ashworth from the vehemence with which he attacks the man and his theories. Compare this with many modern biographies of Newton, which certainly don’t pull the punches in making it clear what an unpleasant person he was, nor do they fail to show where his science was plain wrong, but you don’t get a feeling of distaste about the person covered. With this book it appears to be personal – Ashworth really doesn’t like Einstein and it shows.

Apart from taking on the man, Ashworth’s main point is to disprove special and general relativity. This is not a task for the faint hearted, so I wondered what Ashworth’s credentials were – there are no biographical details in the book (the flap that would normally provide them only gives a credit for the illustrations) so it is difficult for the reader to judge where he is coming from. On enquiring, Ashworth has secondary school physics. In itself this isn’t a problem for a popular science writer. Bill Bryson, for example wouldn’t claim to know anything about science, yet his A Short History of Nearly Everything is excellent. However, there are worrying flaws that emerge early on in What Einstein.

One is Ashworth’s history of science. In his introduction, complaining about the adulation that Einstein has received, he comments that Einstein is still revered as a genius ‘equal in stature to the more circumspect great men of science typified by Galileo and Newton.’ While there’s no doubt these two were the great amonst greats, to call either of them circumspect shows a lack of knowledge of history of science. Galileo was one of the most blatant self-publicists in science, while Newton’s vitriolic attacks on other scientists were hardly the mark of a circumspect man. The unease soon also stretches to Ashworth’s solidity in physics. He repeatedly refers to relativity in early chapters as if the relativity in ‘special relativity’ referred to the relativity of space and time, rather than the same context as Galilean relativity. After slating Aristotle (fairly) he speaks of centrifugal force, a misunderstanding that perpetuates Aristotle’s ideas of motion, as if it had the same validity as centripetal force, and he repeatedly seems to miss the basis on Maxwell’s derivation of the electromagnetic nature of light that require it to move at constant speed.

It would be tedious to mention every suspect comment but take this one, trying to show that the symmetrical nature of relativity is false: ‘… when he first became obsessed with relative motion [Einstein] would often facetiously enquire about a train’s departure time by asking some bewildering question such as “What time does the station leave the train?” Although he regarded such banter as the key to understanding relativity, it never troubled him that the passengers on the platform, unlike those on the train, are not subject to any perceptible additional force due to the station’s acceleration relative to the train.’ Given that the people are on the Earth, which has rather more mass than the train, it’s hardly surprising that the force (proportional as it is to mass) they feel is imperceptible. It doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

The book starts with a couple of chapters of biography on Einstein, which (if you accept the animosity) matches the generally told story, before launching into its first theoretical chapter on the nature of relativity. There’s a lot of theory. The book has 389 pages before you get to the index and these are tight packed with relatively small text. Points are made at great length, often with nowhere near enough context and rather too much working for a popular science book – if it weren’t for the constant attacks on Einstein, and the emotive adjectives and adverbs, it feels in places more like an elementary textbook than a popular science title. Unfortunately on a fairly regular basis there is a statement that suggests the author doesn’t really understand the subject, and is basing his arguments on a false premise. So, for example, in his description of time dilation he says ‘Astonishingly, when Einstein had claimed that the faster one moves relative to the speed of light, the slower time passes… he had negligently failed to realise than one cannot move relative to speed.’ This totally misses the point. The relative velocity is relative to another observer, not ‘relative to the speed of light.’ Similarly he argues against time dilation as if the time dilation occurs in the frame of reference of the person for whom the dilation is observed, rather than the frame of reference of the ‘fixed’ observer. This certainly renders special relativity nonsensical – but it’s not what Einstein said.

I feel a strange dichotomy about this book. In one sense it was a real page turner. As Ashworth reveals his distaste for time dilation and the other implications of the constant speed of light, I am mentally saying ‘how is he going to get round this? How will he attempt to disprove all the many experiments that have verified relativity, from time shifts in atomic clocks to the mesons that only manage to get through our atmosphere because time dilation vastly extends their lifespan from our viewpoint?’ The answer is by either ignoring the questions, coming up with strange reasons that the results matched Einstein’s predictions, or saying, for instance that the GPS satellite network didn’t have to correct for relativity effects – which it did. Similarly, the author seems to totally misunderstand quantum theory, appearing to think that the uncertainty is about measurement, not inherent in the nature of quantum particles. Which presumably means he thinks other outstanding geniuses like Richard Feynman also got it wrong. Sadly, this book doesn’t manage any elucidation of either Einstein’s character or the realities of relativity, because the author’s ideas don’t carry any weight.

Although a glossy, well produced book, there are one or two giveaways that suggest it’s self-published. The website of the ‘publishing company’ is named after the book and only seems to have published one title. The lack of author details adds to the suspicion, as do one or two other technical peculiarities in the book’s prelims. Just being published by an established publisher doesn’t make a book’s content worthwhile. Just take a look in the astrology section of any bookshop. But this adds to the concern that this book really isn’t very helpful to anyone trying to understand science. As mentioned above, you don’t need to be a great scientist to write popular science. But if you aren’t, it helps to be a good writer, and to be explaining other people’s science, not attempting to devise your own.

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Review by Martin O'Brien