Relativity by Albert Einstein, Routledge, £7.99, ISBN 0415253845
“SURPRISINGLY accessible”, says the blurb. I wonder whether “moderately
baffling” was considered, or “not quite as horrifyingly incomprehensible as I’d
expected”?
But then this is Einstein’s Relativity. It’s the man’s own effort,
written in 1916, to popularise his ideas—the special and general theories
of relativity, the notions of time dilation and Lorentz contraction, the
space-time continuum, non-Euclidean geometry and the finite but unbounded
Universe. Of course, it’s hard. I would have been disappointed otherwise. What’s
the use of reading Einstein if you can’t feel smug about it?
I’m being a bit unfair. Although he includes some equations…
