Skip to main content

E=mc2: A biography of the world’s most famous equation – David Bodanis *****

David Bodanis is a storyteller, and he fulfils this role with flair in E=mc2. The premise of the book is simple – Einstein himself has been biographed (biographised?) to death, but no one has picked out this most famous of equations, dusted it down and told us what it means, where it comes from and what it has delivered. Allegedly, Bodanis was inspired to write the book after hearing see an interview with actress Cameron Diaz in which she commented that she’d really like to know what that famous collection of letters was all about.
Although the book had been around for a while already when this review was written (September 2005), it seemed a very apt moment to cover it, as the equation is, as I write, exactly 100 years old. So when better to have a biography?
Bodanis starts off by telling us about the individual elements of the equation. What the different letters mean, where the equal sign comes from and so on. This is entertaining, though he seems to tire of the approach on the final straight, brushing aside the origins of the 2 for “squared” with the comment that it went through about as many permutations as “=”, without bothering to tells us what, where and when. But after this, the book settles down to a more people-driven history approach, first over the derivation of square laws, then taking us through Einstein’s formative period, then moving on to the first realization of the potential power of nuclear fission, to its wartime deployment and the role of E=mc2 in the heart of the sun.
What this book does exquisitely is find the details of history, the personal, individual quirky details, the make things so much more interesting. There’s been much written about the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb, but much less, for instance, about the raid on a Norwegian heavy water factory that was instrumental in slowing down the development of a German nuclear weapon during the Second World War. Similarly, Bodanis delights in finding historical characters, often women, who have been significant in science but rarely get the exposure of their more famous counterparts – for instance Lise Meitner and Cecilia Payne.
There is one concern here. Bodanis is so focussed on making the story easy to digest and flow effortlessly, that he can be a little cavalier with the facts, or over-simplify the science. When describing the evolution of the “squared” part of the equation, he is at his worst. He makes confusing statements, in one paragraph saying “If a five pound ball is going at 10 mph, it has 50 units of energy. Then in the next paragraph “If a five pound ball is going at 10 mph, it has 5 times 102, or 500 units of energy. While he goes on to describe the experimental proof of the latter, he slips from saying the energy “is mv2″ to a more accurate “is proportional to mv2″, without explaining this shift. He the effectively says that it’s c2 in E=mc2 because it’s similar in some hand-waving way, without explaining why.
The occasionally sketchy approach to the science is certainly a weakness, but it is more than adequately countered by the excellent historical storytelling, giving a freshness to what would otherwise be an over-told story. Well worth looking out. Happy birthday E=mc2/

Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...