Skip to main content

Einstein in Time and Space - Samuel Graydon ****

This book is pure marmite (for non-UK audiences, this implies you'll either love it or hate it). It takes a radically different view to building a biographical picture of Albert Einstein, which is just as well, because it's easy to imagine with the number of books on him there are out there that the man has been covered from every possible (and several improbable) angles already.

Rather than produce a straightforward linear work, Samuel Graydon gives us '99 particles' - short articles ranging from a page to around six pages long. The articles are chronological, but each acts as a separate entity, commenting on some event or aspect of Einstein's life. Graydon describes it as a 'mosaic biography', basing the approach on Craig Brown's 'Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret.'

The result is a mix than can both delight and occasionally feel bewildering. We get a 'particle', for example, that consists solely of a picture of Einstein's hands and some details from his (failed) health examination for Swiss national service. Others describe, for example, one by one his 1905 papers, putting across their meaning concisely and effectively. Many provide snapshots of the man, his many contradictions, and his relationships with members of his family - this includes an unnerving letter from the 20-year-old daughter of Elsa Löwenthal (who would soon become Einstein's second wife), suggesting that Einstein was torn between marrying her or her mother.

Although Graydon is science editor of the distinctly highbrow Times Literary Supplement, this is written more in the American biographical style than academic British - the 'particles' have a chatty feel and provide an easy read. All in all, then, it's a worthy addition to the groaning Einstein biographies shelf that will appeal to many who might not bother with a traditional scientific biography, with sufficient focus on the man and his relationships that even those who are usually put off by science will find it appealing.

I do need to add one extra point. I don't like marmite - and, equally, this book wasn't really for me. I can see absolutely that the approach will be really appealing to many, but I like a good narrative, preferring more structure, rather than assembling a picture from fragments - narrative shape is inevitably lacking from a book like this, as is any opportunity to dig into the science at anything more than a surface level. I also found that some of the openings of the 'particles' tried a bit too hard to be atmospheric. So, for example, one opens 'It's Christmas time in Cambridge, 1933. In the Senior Combination Room at Trinity College, five men sit around the old fireplace, smoking long clay pipes in accordance with seasonal tradition.' Hmm. 

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free hereShort
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...
Post a Comment
Read more

In Seach of Sea Dragons - Matthew Myerscough ****

It's common advice to would-be authors of narrative non-fiction to open with something dramatic - Matthew Myerscough certainly does this with the story of his being trapped under an avalanche on Snowdon (while his girlfriend, also carried away remains on top of the snow unhurt). It certainly is dramatic, but seemed entirely disconnected from the reason I got the book, which was to read about fossil collecting.  Luckily, though, in the second chapter we get into a more conventional 'how I got interested in fossils as a boy'. Having recently reviewed Patrick Moore's autobiography and noting that astronomy was one of the few sciences where amateurs can still make a contribution, it came to mind that palaeontology is another - Myerscough is a civil engineer by trade, but just as amateur astronomers can find new details in the skies, so amateur fossil hunters have been searching for these relics for centuries. When I give talks in junior schools, the two topics that guarant...
Post a Comment
Read more

Robot-Proof - Vivienne Ming ****

As Vivienne Ming makes apparent, there seem largely to be two views of AI's pros and cons, both of which are almost certainly wrong. It's either doom-saying 'It'll destroy life as we know it' or Pollyanna-ish 'It'll do all the boring work and we can all be wonderfully creative and live lives of leisure.' Instead, Ming gives us a clear analysis of the likely trajectory for the workplace, particularly for the IT industry. She describes three 'equally flawed, intellectually lazy strategies' to deal with the impact of AI. The first is substitution and deprofessionalisation, using AI to allow cheaper 'AI-augmented technicians' to replace more expensive professionals, producing more low wage jobs and fewer mid-range. This does save money but leaves a company at risk of being easily outcompeted. The second is what Ming describes as the '"A-Player" Hunger Games', the approach favoured by Silicon Valley. This sees the growing rif...
Post a Comment
Read more