Skip to main content

Einstein Relatively Simple - Ira Mark Egdall ***

This review has turned out entirely different from the way I expected after the first chapter or two of Ira Mark Egdall's exploration of the special and general theories of relativity. Frankly, I was all set to give up, as I initially found the book very irritating, but I'm glad I continued, because it turned out to be like a good friend. Just as you like the friend despite their irritating habits, so there was enough here to make it worth suffering a little - at least, if you are part of the right kind of audience.

 Let's get the irritating bits out of the way. Because the book is trying to be popular science, it includes a reasonable amount of biography, but it is pretty lightweight. The most glaring example is that we read 'He and his wife Mileva Marić were becoming increasingly estranged during this period. Nonetheless, Albert fathered a second child with Mileva, their son Eduard, in July of 1910.' No, that would be their third child. Poor old Lieserl doesn't get a mention. I also found the way that Edgall goes out of his way to use US units rather than scientific units, without even offering both (except on one single occasion, which makes me wonder if the publisher took them out) frustrating. Seeing the speed of light in miles per hour was just weird.

 Perhaps the worst aspect was the author's determined attempt to drive the reader mad by repeated misusing the word 'per'. This Latin term has very specific uses in English, such as 'miles per hour'. But it is really painful when the author regularly uses it to mean 'taking the view of' or 'according to'. On one spread alone we get 'Per Einstein, you see my watch...', 'Per Einstein's theory...', 'Per special relativity, the length of an object...' and 'Per Einstein's formula...' I visibly flinched each time this happened, and never got over it.

 All in all, the book feels like a de-mathematised text book, with a bit of historical context sprinkled in, while the examples are made cringingly embarrassing by the attempt to make them 'friendly' by putting in childish characters like Surfer Sally and Crash the rocket jockey. It's a bit like trying to make a limo out of a racing car by stripping out all the powerful stuff and adding in faux leather seats. You end up with something that isn’t satisfying for either requirement.

 However, here's the weird thing. By about half way through the special theory section I discovered that I was finding the book interesting, and though there was lots that was familiar, there were also some examples I'd never seen before. What's more Egdall genuinely does have an ability to present his subject in a way that isn't too dry, only optionally includes equations (though I found them very useful) and really enhances the understanding. All the way through the general theory I continued to appreciate what I was getting.

So here's the payoff. This isn't really a popular science book. Ignore the so-so biography and it's real nature shines through: an easy reader textbook. And that is something that could genuinely be of interest to, say, an engineer who wants to pick up some basics of relativity, a science graduate who has forgotten half he was taught, or someone who has started with popular science books but wants something with a bit more teeth. This might be a quite narrow market, but the book fits into it brilliantly, and really delivers 100 per cent for that kind of reader - for them it's highly recommended. As long as they can cope with the 'per's.
Paperback:  

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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more