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 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

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

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms.  On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines  when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...
Post a Comment
Read more