The Curious History of Relativity: How Einstein's Theory of Gravity Was Lost and Found Again

Good history, bad science While most of the book was well written and imaginative, I was a bit frustrated with it at some parts. What I did like was the authors telling of Einstein's personal and intellectual development during his most formidable years of 1905 through 1920. This easily rivals the other current batch of Einstein books, and surpasses the more mainstream release. The stories...more

Good history, bad science While most of the book was well written and imaginative, I was a bit frustrated with it at some parts. What I did like was the authors telling of Einstein's personal and intellectual development during his most formidable years of 1905 through 1920. This easily rivals the other current batch of Einstein books, and surpasses the more mainstream release. The stories told, the examples given, and the creativity in which the life of Einstein is laid before us are superb. Unfortunately, this all comes to a crashing halt when the author decides to air what could only be seen as a personal grievance that almost all relativists are bungling, baffling scientists only following the subject because they are being paid to do so. The author goes on to continually insult when it is implied that half of a century of frustration could have been easily avoided if velocities had not have been added together. What the author seems to miss here is that the key to special relativity is that observers disagree on what those velocities are because they differ on what distances and time mean. This failure of understanding of the subtly of the science shows a lack of grasp on the overall subject. What I was left with after reading this book was a belief that the author did not intuitively understand general relativity. Instead, the image of the deflections experienced as a ball rolls across a rumpled landscape is meant to describe the effect of the deflections of the Earth's gravity to explain the curvature of space time. So in essence, the author uses gravity to explain gravity -- which is neither explanative nor helpful to the average readers overall understanding. If my complaints were to end here I would have given it 4 stars for good storytelling, but I cannot. The largest complaint I have is that the author kept insisting that the theory itself was almost lost from the 1930s to the 1940s and only reemerged with the discovery of black holes in the 1960s. This completely misses the fact that most of the world's physicists were a bit involved in World War II and completely skips all of the work that Chandrasekhar and Oppenheimer did. Moreover, black holes were not the saving grace for the theory, instead the theory was the reason that the understanding of black holes emerged. Overall, I was left with a bad taste of misunderstood science that overpowered some wonderful storytelling. I would still recommend this book as a biographical novel about the life of Einstein during his most venerable years, but warn those who would use this as their primary source for understanding the knowledge of the science therein   hide