Galloping with Light – Felix Alba-Juez ***

I’m more than a little wary of self-published books, especially ones with subtitles like ‘Einstein, relativity and folklore’, but this looked like a book that would be different from the masses – and it is. It’s not one of the interminable ‘Einstein was wrong’ books, but rather one that tries to really give an in-depth understanding of Einstein’s ideas to the general reader.

Unfortunately, Felix Alba-Juez seemed far too obsessed with the definitions of words to give us useful insights into what is going on. In the first chapter he bangs on and on about nuclear power not being based on E=mc2. It’s certainly true that, contrary to popular belief, the equation isn’t a central part of the effort to make a nuclear bomb. But his repeated assertion that the idea of converting mass to energy is folklore totally misses the point, probably because of his obsessive pursuit of the term inertia, something that in some senses doesn’t exist but is merely a reflection of Newton’s second law. There is conversion between different forms of mass-energy in nuclear reactions, and for convenience we conventionally label some aspects of this as matter and some as energy. It’s not folklore, it’s scientific convention. It’s hard not to think ‘get a life.’

Similarly in the second chapter, Alba-Juez gets all heated about the famous Einstein quote about time passing quicker with a pretty girl than sitting on a stove, suggesting that this throw-away line is generally considered an attempt to explain relativity to the common man. But it’s obviously not that. Come on, the acronym of the supposed journal is JEST. It was always supposed to be a joke – has the author no sense of humour?

And so it goes on. While the philosophical musings about the words used in relativity are mildly interesting to those who already know the area quite well, and there is a lot of good basic science in here, I can’t recommend this as a science book for the general reader. Perhaps because it’s a translation, it is just too turgid and heavy handed. Although a lot of relativity is explained, the approach is often through extremely wordy and impenetrable prose. My undergrad textbook on relativity, which I still have (A. P. French) is often more readable.

The book, with its densely packed text (the layout has too little white space), doesn’t fill the reader with the delight of science but instead is like sitting through a rather dull and decidedly nit-picking science lesson. It’s an interesting idea, but the execution disappoints.

Paperback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

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 ...

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...

Search This Blog