Relativity Books

Einstein: His Life and Universe

Walter Isaacson

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Total reviews: 218 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

By the author of the acclaimed bestseller Benjamin Franklin, this is the first full biography of Albert Einstein since all of his papers have become available.

How did his mind work? What made him a genius? Isaacson's biography shows how his scientific imagination sprang from the rebellious nature of his personality. His fascinating story is a testament to the connection between creativity and freedom.

Based on newly released personal letters of Einstein, this book explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk -- a struggling father in a difficult marriage who couldn't get a teaching job or a doctorate -- became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe. His success came from questioning conventional wisdom and marveling at mysteries that struck others as mundane. This led him to embrace a morality and politics based on respect for free minds, free spirits, and free individuals.

These traits are just as vital for this new century of globalization, in which our success will depend on our creativity, as they were for the beginning of the last century, when Einstein helped usher in the modern age.

Flatland: A Romance Of Many Dimensions

Edwin A Abbott

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Total reviews: 160 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A 2D and 4D Classic Text 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Originally written with a Victorian theme, it is now a must-read classic for anyone who enjoys reading about the fourth dimension. The story is about a two-dimensional being (called A Square) living in a two-dimensional world (hence the title, Flatland). As a three-dimensional being imagining this two-dimensional world, you come to realize that you can understand higher-dimensional space through lower-dimensional analogies. In fact, A Square meets a three-dimensional being (A Sphere), and takes a journey beyond the second dimension. Although some readers may enjoy the book for its historical and Victorian period merits, math lovers can enjoy the book for its geometric insight.

If you are curious about the fourth dimension, you should also read:

- Spaceland: A Novel of the Fourth Dimension, Rudy Rucker's novel of the fourth dimension
- Flatterland: Like Flatland, Only More So, a continuation of the geometric idea from Flatland
- The 4th Dimension: Toward a Geometry of Higher Reality, Rudy Rucker's classic introduction to the fourth dimension
- The Visual Guide to Extra Dimensions: Volume 1: Visualizing the Fourth Dimension, Higher-Dimensional Polytopes, and Curved Hypersurfaces, a modern geometric introduction to the fourth dimension

Editorial Review:

This highly original and entertaining short novel (which has been in print continually since its original publication in 1884) tells the story of A. Square, an inhabitant of the two-dimensional world Flatland. Touching on themes of humanity's insatiable quest for truth, authority's tendency to squash radical ideas born from this quest, and the necessity of curiosity, "Flatland" is an odd and charming little book whose impact far surpasses its concise prose.

Reinventing Gravity: A Physicist Goes Beyond Einstein

John W. Moffat

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Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Einstein's gravity theory—his general theory of relativity—has served as the basis for a series of astonishing cosmological discoveries. But what if, nonetheless, Einstein got it wrong?

Since the 1930s, physicists have noticed an alarming discrepancy between the universe as we see it and the universe that Einstein's theory of relativity predicts. There just doesn't seem to be enough stuff out there for everything to hang together. Galaxies spin so fast that, based on the amount of visible matter in them, they ought to be flung to pieces, the same way a spinning yo-yo can break its string. Cosmologists tried to solve the problem by positing dark matter—a mysterious, invisible substance that surrounds galaxies, holding the visible matter in place—and particle physicists, attempting to identify the nature of the stuff, have undertaken a slew of experiments to detect it. So far, none have.

Now, John W. Moffat, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, offers a different solution to the problem. The cap­stone to a storybook career—one that began with a correspondence with Einstein and a conversation with Niels Bohr—Moffat's modified gravity theory, or MOG, can model the movements of the universe without recourse to dark matter, and his work chal­lenging the constancy of the speed of light raises a stark challenge to the usual models of the first half-million years of the universe's existence.

This bold new work, presenting the entirety of Moffat's hypothesis to a general readership for the first time, promises to overturn everything we thought we knew about the origins and evolution of the universe.

The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics

Gary Zukav

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 114 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Voodoo Physics 1 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Talk about gluten for punishment I read this twice. I swear the person that wrote this does not have a TV which expels his lace of contemporary physics let alone any depth. There are references to the "New Physics" is that like "New Age"?

90% of the matter must be missing from this book. Or how else can he take physics out of context and make such fantastic leaps to religions that he knows little of. He even twists the religion around to serve some unknown purpose.

Many people say they did not understand physics until this book; Surprises, you still do not. You now know what Zukav wished physics was. Take anti-mater for instants that does not mean the opposite of mater. And the relationship between particles has no correlation with the relationship of dogs and cats.

At least get it straight before mixing it up. Try reading some of these:
"The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski". The book available everywhere as are the DVD's.

The Upanishads by Eknath Easwaran (Editor), Michael N. Nagler (Photographer)

Or just about any mainstream material on physics and religion.

Then if you still want to mix worlds into one read someone saner:
The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism by Fritjof Capra.

Editorial Review:

Gary Zukav has written "the Bible" for those who are curious about the mind-expanding discoveries of advanced physics, but who have no scientific background.  Like a Wu Li Master who would teach us wonder for the falling petal before speaking of gravity, Zukav writes in beautifully clear language--with no mathematical equations--opening our minds to the exciting new theories that are beginning to embrace the ultimate nature of our universe...Quantum mechanics, relativity, and beyond to the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect and Bell's theorem.

Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (Penguin Classics)

Albert Einstein

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 77 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A qualified recommendation 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

As at least one reviewer has noted there are several editions of this book. (This exact edition is also available in paperback.) Definitely get this one (or another 15th edition) because it is the 1952, fifteenth edition, which is the last one that Einstein prepared and is the one that contains all five of his appendices. My local bookstore has several editions put out by different publishers. Side by side were two, one was a 1916, third edition, that contained only three appendices and the other was the complete 1952, fifteenth edition, which actually cost a dollar LESS than the incomplete version. The 1916 version is in public domain, so the publisher does not have to pay anything to the Einstein estate. Thus, the publisher makes more money from purchasers who are not savvy enough to realize that they are getting an inferior edition for the same or even a higher price than a complete one. Caveat emptor.

The four stars do not in any way refer to my view of Einstein or his work. Were they the basis of the review I would have given it five stars. I am qualifying my recommendation because I believe that only some readers will find the book to be suitable for their needs. Thus, I am giving it only four stars because this book is too elementary for someone studying relativity in a graduate course but too complex for someone with little or no physics background. Thus, the readership is somewhat limited.

Pros:
1) This book is Einstein's classic presentation of his special and general theories of relativity, prepared for a general audience. As such, it has interesting historical value as well as being illuminating for some readers. The fifteenth edition contains all of Einstein's corrections and all of his appendices.
2) A reasonably good presentation of the special theory.
3) Good for someone with a physics background (engineers, physicists at the BS or MS level, chemists, etc.) It is, however, too elementary for someone studying relativity at a graduate level. For them, it is primarily useful as a historical document. They would probably get more from Einstein's papers than from this book, which was written for the general public.
Cons:
1) The bulk of this book was written in 1916, in German, and then translated into English. As such, it is somewhat convoluted in places and generally has the typical flavor of 19th century prose.
2) I feel that while the special theory is presented in a reasonably straightforward manner the general theory is not. Einstein uses a little math here, but it is insufficient for a physicist and is probably incomprehensible for someone with little or no math or physics background. I believe that Martin Gardner's book "Relativity Simply Explained" is a better choice for someone with little or no science background. It does a very much better job of explaining the general theory for a general audience.
3) While Einstein explains how the basic assumptions of his theories differ from those of classical physics, these differences are not, in my opinion, highlighted sufficiently. I recommend Isaacson's recent biography of Einstein for those who want these differences more clearly delineated. Isaacson clearly shows why Einstein's theories were so radical a departure from those of Newton.

All in all, this is a good book for the right audience.

Editorial Review:

The Nobel Prize-winning scientist’s presentation of his landmark theory

According to Einstein himself, this book is intended "to give an exact insight into the theory of Relativity to those readers who, from a general scientific and philosophical point of view, are interested in the theory, but who are not conversant with the mathematical apparatus of theoretical physics." When he wrote the book in 1916, Einstein’s name was scarcely known outside the physics institutes. Having just completed his masterpiece, The General Theory of Relativity—which provided a brand-new theory of gravity and promised a new perspective on the cosmos as a whole—he set out at once to share his excitement with as wide a public as possible in this popular and accessible book.

A Stubbornly Persistent Illusion: The Essential Scientific Works of Albert Einstein

Stephen Hawking

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."--Albert Einstein

Best-selling author and physicist Stephen Hawking assembles the most groundbreaking works by Albert Einstein together into one volume. From the text that revealed the famous "Theory of Relativity"--renowned as the most important scientific discovery of the 20th Century--to his significant works on quantum theory, statistical mechanics, and the photoelectric effect, here are the writings that changed physics, and subsequently, the way we view the world.

Einstein also thought deeply on both political issues and religious thought, so many of Einstein's philosophical essays are included. Hawking provides introductions to each work, which provides both historical and scientific perspective. From the papers that shaped modern scientific thought to Einstein's later musings on his landmark findings, A Stubbornly Persistent Illusion is a collection of Einstein's most important work, with commentary from our greatest living physicist.

Relativity Demystified

David McMahon, Paul M. Alsing

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Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

This book helps readers learn relativity at the speed of light! Now anyone can grasp Einstein's great theory of relativity - without formal training, unlimited time, or a genius IQ. In "Relativity Demystified", theoretical physicists (and student-savvy authors) David McMahon and Paul Ansing provide an effective, illuminating, and entertaining way to learn the essentials and formulas of Einstein's theories. With "Relativity Demystified", you master the subject one step at a time - at your own speed. This unique self-teaching guide offers problems at the end of each chapter and part to pinpoint weaknesses, and a 100-question final exam to reinforce the entire book.This fast and entertaining self-teaching course makes it much easier to: master theoretical physics at your own pace; learn the formulas and principles of special and general relativity from hundreds of worked examples; use practical mathematical tools for solving relativity problems; receive layperson's explanations for Schwarzhild spacetimes, black holes, gravitational radiation, and actual current research; perform better in one of the scariest courses of all; and, take a final exam and grade it yourself!Simple enough for beginners but challenging enough for those who already know something about relativity, "Relativity Demystified" is the best self-teaching tool or brush-up you can find!

Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe (P.S.)

Simon Singh

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Total reviews: 72 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A Good Start, but a Truly Useful History of How this Important Scientific Theory Developed is Still Needed 4 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

What is the origin of the universe? What does the nighttime sky say about the manner in which this universe has evolved? How have astronomers sought to learn the answer to these and other fundamental questions? "Big Bang: The Origins of the Universe," by physicist turned journalist Simon Singh, seeks to provide answers to these questions. It is a broad, useful overview that serves well as an introductory text for neophytes and students, but it will be disappointing to scholars of all stripes. For example, its title may mislead too many readers. Anyone seeking a cosmological discussion of the origins and evolution of the universe--and there are many very good books on this subject and a broad audience reading them--they will be disappointed with Singh's work. Instead of cosmology of the type offered by such popular science writers as James S. Trefil, John Gribbin, Brian Greene, or Paul Davies, this is a history--and a singularly linear one at that--of how the theory of the Big Bang emerged in the science community in the early part of the twentieth century and eventually came to be accepted as the standard method of explaining the origins of the universe.

After two introductory chapters that lay out a generalized version of cosmology from the ancients to the beginning of the twentieth century and a discussion of Einstein and his place in astrophysics Singh relates how the notion of a Big Bang gained a foothold in the scientific discipline. He emphasizes how hotly disputed this prospect was at first, suggesting as it does that all of the matter of the universe might have been rolled into a infinitesimally small point that exploded with such force that matter moved outward, setting in motion the forces that create stars, galaxies, planets, and eventually life. Offered first by the Belgian priest and scientist, Georges Lemaitre, this concept of an explosive beginning to the universe found few adherents because of a dearth of supporting evidence. For many scientists, such a "creation" also smacked of religious ideology. The observations of Edwin Hubble on the expanding universe in the 1920s provided some of the first undisputable evidence that something violent had taken place at some point in the history of the universe.

Over time, as scientific data mounted, the Big Bang gradually gained support in key scientific communities and eventually became the standard explanation of how the universe has evolved. Most of this change came in the heady years following World War II when new technologies offered startling new scientific understandings. Among the most important of these capabilities involved the radio telescope and advances in spectroscopy, employed by a myriad of researchers to collect data about the universe, to explore the chemistry of stars. They discovered that the uneven distribution of galaxies in the universe called into question other modes of explanation. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson proved to be the critical scientists in collecting and interpreting this data, finding that background radiation existed in the cosmos and gaining the Nobel Prize in 1978 for this discovery. Others followed. NASA's COBE satellite in the early 1990s discovered background radiation of varying densities clumped in various parts of the universe that could have fostered the formation of galaxies. NASA scientist John Mather received the Nobel Prize in 2006 for his path breaking work with COBE. Others dated the origins of the universe to 13.7 billion years ago, with a margin of error of +/- 200 million years.

A central actor in this story was the eminent British astronomer Fred Hoyle, who coined the term "Big Bang" as a derisive label for the theory. Hoyle became the theory's most vocal and obvious critic, and offered an alternative theory labeled the "Steady State" universe that sought to counteract the "Big Bang" model. Central to his theory was a timeless universe in which matter was continuously being created and annihilated. For more than two decades his theory garnered the lion's share of support from cosmologists, but over time the weight of countervailing evidence swung against the "Steady State" model.

Hoyle refused to give up on his theory despite mounting evidence supporting the "Big Bang," however, and Singh makes much of his intransigence. One of Singh's major conclusions is explained thus: "Death is an essential element in the progress of science, since it takes care of conservative scientists of a previous generation reluctant to let go of an old, fallacious theory and embrace a new and accurate one" (p. 75). In Singh's estimation, Hoyle and his theory died together. This is an unfortunate conclusion on many levels. While there are always diehard advocates of any theory, scientific or other, in most instances scientists are persuaded by compelling evidence and that is what happened in the case of the "Big Bang." The process of scientific advancement is much more complex than waiting for the advocates of an alternative explanation to die off. It involves alteration of models over time to take into account new data and understandings. It may, but does not always, involve the overthrow of a dominant paradigm after the facts no longer support it as Thomas S. Kuhn famously analyzed in "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (University of Chicago Press, 1962). There are also many instances of how scientists were more open-minded than Hoyle. For one, Harold Urey abandoned his model for the capture theory to explain the origins of the Moon when evidence went against him during the Apollo era, as historian of science Stephen G. Brush noted in "Fruitful Encounters: The Origin of the Solar System and of the Moon from Chamberlin to Apollo" (Cambridge University Press, 1996). Singh's facile explanation is both less illuminating than the complex processes of scientific discovery and incorporation of it into the body of knowledge. He does a disservice to scientists and their scientific pursuits with such easy explanations.

While "Big Bang: The Origins of the Universe" is an entertaining and sometimes enlightening work, it could have been so much more. A sophisticated history of how scientists formulated, evolved, and adopted the "Big Bang" model of the universe is a noble endeavor deserving of serious scholarly attention. We have the beginnings of it in Singh's book, but historians of science have yet to tackle this important subject in their research. Potentially, the history of how the Big Bang gained primacy as a scientific explanation of the universe's origins could be a study as significant of the replacement of the Ptolemaic with the Copernican model of the solar system as explained by Kuhn. I await such a path-breaking study.

Editorial Review:

A half century ago, a shocking Washington Post headline claimed that the world began in five cataclysmic minutes rather than having existed for all time; a skeptical scientist dubbed the maverick theory the Big Bang. In this amazingly comprehensible history of the universe, Simon Singh decodes the mystery behind the Big Bang theory, lading us through the development of one of the most extraordinary, important, and awe-inspiring theories in science.

Six Not-So-Easy Pieces: Einstein's Relativity, Symmetry, And Space-Time

Richard P. Feynman

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Total reviews: 23 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

No twentieth-century American scientist is better known to a wider spectrum of people than Richard P. Feynman (1918–1988)—physicist, teacher, author, and cultural icon. His autobiographies and biographies have been read and enjoyed by millions of readers around the world, while his wit and eccentricities have made him the subject of TV specials and even a theatrical film. The spectacular reception of the book and audio versions of Feynman’s Six Easy Pieces (published in 1995) resulted in a worldwide clamor for “More Feynman! More Feynman!” The outcome is these six additional lectures, drawn from the celebrated three-volume Lectures on Physics. Though slightly more challenging than the first six, these lectures are more focused, delving into the most revolutionary discovery in twentieth-century physics: Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. No single breakthrough in twentieth-century physics (with the possible exception of quantum mechanics) changed our view of the world more than that of Einstein’s discovery of relativity. The notions that the flow of time is not a constant, that the mass of an object depends on its velocity, and that the speed of light is a constant no matter what the motion of the observer, at first seemed shocking to scientists and laymen alike. But, as Feynman shows so clearly and so entertainingly in the lectures chosen for this volume, these crazy notions are no mere dry principles of physics, but are things of beauty and elegance. No one—not even Einstein himself—explained these difficult, anti-intuitive concepts more clearly, or with more verve and gusto, than Richard Feynman.

The Story of Science: Einstein Adds a New Dimension

Joy Hakim

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Sometimes it can seem like science just comes fully formed--a textbook can tell us the Milky Way is a galaxy, the Sun is 93 million miles away, or gravity bends light. But such a book often leaves out some of the most interesting stuff about that hard-won knowledge: how anyone ever figured it out, and even why anyone was wondering about it to begin with.

It turns out that those stories--the stories of the how and the why--are some of the most interesting in all of history. Those stories are full of adventure and bravery, boldness and luck, and the discoverers are often those willing to stand up and call false what everyone else believes to be true. At the end of the nineteenth century, for example, Lord Kelvin, one of the time's preeminent physicists--and the sort of guy who everyone else listens to, just because--declared that all that was left to do in physics was to make more and more precise measurements of the world. Within a couple decades of Kelvin's pronouncement, Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and others would show just how wrong he was.

Joy Hakim's The Story of Science: Einstein Adds a New Dimension culminates with their discoveries: the quantum world, the theory of relativity, and nuclear physics. These discoveries created our modern world, from solar-powered calculators to cell phones to global positioning systems and the atomic bomb, and opened our eyes to the expanding Universe, the Big Bang, and much more.

A science book unlike any other, Einstein Adds a New Dimension pairs a gripping narrative style with informative sidebars; hundreds of charts, maps, and diagrams; suggestions for further reading; and excerpts from the writings of great scientists.