Skip to main content

Einstein: the man and his mind - Gary Berger and Michael DiRuggiero ****

Sometimes a book gets labelled a coffee table book as an insult, suggesting it's thin on content if visually attractive. Gary Berger and Michael DiRuggerio's photographic exploration of Einstein is a indubitably a coffee table book, but in its highest form. It's huge (34 x 26 cm) and contains a collection of beautiful imagery.

As I understand it, the book contains highlights from the private Berger Collection in North Carolina. The result is like a massive, well-produced catalogue for an exhibition. We get a page with an image on, with a facing page describing what's seen. Some of these images are striking photographs of Einstein, a good few of which I've never seen before. Others seem more mundane. One, for example, labelled 'The Most Valuable Find', is a Prussian Academy paper pamphlet based on a talk Einstein gave in 1915 on the link between the oddity in Mercury's orbit and the predictions of the general theory of relativity.

Apparently, when Einstein saw his calculations matched observation of Mercury's orbit, he had palpitations and remarked to his friend Arnold Sommerfeld 'it is the most valuable find that I have made in my life.' I don't think many would agree (unless he meant the general theory as a whole, rather than the Mercury observation in isolation), and it's not a visually exciting artefact - it's just a buff-coloured cover of a document - but this illustrates well the kind of small, but interesting contribution to the Einstein story we can find here.

To give a little contrast, another quite interesting example is a photograph of Einstein from 1932, showing him in America, shaking hands with two young children in the snow. It doesn't tell us anything profound, but again it's a small insight into Einstein, the man. Large chunks of the book are given over to letters and a swathe of photographs of Einstein in his later years - sadly there are very few from the period before 1920 when he made practically all his valuable contributions to physics. The photos here are primarily Einstein the celebrity, rather than Einstein the working scientist.

This is a remarkable book. I've given it four stars because I've never seen anything quite like it. I don't honestly imagine many people will want to do much more than leaf through it: it's priced for libraries rather than individual purchase, and mostly that's where it belongs. But for those who simply love everything about Einstein - or wanting some quirky material to give inspiration for a piece they're writing about him - it's a fascinating find.
Hardback:   
  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more