My Einstein: Essays by Twenty-four of the World's Leading Thinkers on the Man, His Work, and His Legacy
 
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From Publishers Weekly For "generations of ambitious young Jewish kids like me," observes Lawrence M. Krauss, Albert Einstein provided the inspiration to pursue the study of theoretical physics. Several of these scientists share their thoughts in an anthology edited by Brockman, a literary agent and editor of popularizing science books (What We Believe but Cannot Prove). But not every contributor is a physicist, and not every piece relates directly to Einstein: historian George Dyson (son of physicist Freeman Dyson) was babysat by the great man's personal secretary, while New York Times science writer George Johnson looks back at the books that introduced him to relativity. For some, Einstein looms as an iconic figure, while others actually met Einstein during his later years at Princeton. The overall tone is respectful, even reverential. The Einstein who emerges possesses no surprising characteristics, making the book seem a light afterthought to a year of celebrating 2005 as the centenary of Einstein's world-changing papers on relativity. (July 25) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com He was a sexy flirt. He admitted to having difficulties with mathematics. He was only 12 when he decided that "the stories of the Bible could not be true and became a fanatical freethinker." His theory of relativity, which changed the way we view the world, "came from thinking about what it would be like to ride along on a beam of light." "The story goes that [he] liked to sleep ten hours a night -- unless he was working very hard on an idea; then it was eleven." All these observations appear in My Einstein: Essays by Twenty-four of the World's Leading Thinkers on the Man, His Work, and His Legacy, edited by John Brockman (Pantheon, $25), whose own devotion to "relative" thinking can be discerned in the title of his previous book, By the Late John Brockman. The essayists include Jeremy Bernstein, Gino C. Sergré and Maria Spiropulu, and the titles of their pieces range from the vaudevillian ("Einstein, Moe, and Joe") to the tantalizing ("The Greatest Discovery Einstein Didn't Make"). My Einstein delivers even more than its lengthy title promises. Philosopher Marcelo Gleiser's contribution helps explain why Einstein's ideas "became an obsession to so many. . . . In a world torn apart by the bloodiest war of all time, this Jewish scientist was proclaiming the existence of a reality wherein space and time are unified in a four-dimensional space-time, where space may contract and time may slow down, where matter is nothing but lumped-up energy. Who wouldn't want to step out of the miserable state that Europe was in in the early 1920s and into the rarefied atmosphere of a world beyond the senses?" The Radicalism of Albert Einstein Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Submitted On:

09 Sep 2007

File Author:

Brockman, John (Editor)

File Size:

8.84 MB