The Meaning of Relativity (5th edn)
- Albert Einstein
Special Relativity: A First Encounter
- Domenico Giulini
Einstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness
- John S. Rigden
What, another three books on Einstein? At the last count on http://www.amazon.com there were 498 currently in print, and the proliferation of titles such as The Private Albert Einstein, Einstein in Love and Einstein's Daughter should ensure that no corner of his life is left untouched.
As a refreshing change, The Meaning of Relativity, Special Relativity and Einstein 1905 deal exclusively with science. All three are valuable additions to the Einstein canon. The Meaning of Relativity, the master's own presentation based on lectures given at Princeton University in 1921, reappears in a reprinting of the final (1953) edition, which included as an appendix his parting thoughts on his last abortive bid to unify the gravitational and electromagnetic forces. This was in fact a revival, with modifications, of his earliest attempt, begun in 1925 but soon abandoned because, as he admitted in 1927: “As a result of numerous failures, I have come to the conclusion that this road does not lead us closer to the truth.” It is curious that none of his later works mentions this early attempt. Not too much should be made of this; Einstein was always sparing with references (this entire book has just one). Yet one cannot help wondering: could it have slipped his mind that he had been down this path before?
Brian Greene's easy-to-read 24-page introduction touches on several developments since Einstein's time. One of these is superstring theory, which carries forward Einstein's quest for unification. Another is the recent discovery that the cosmic expansion is accelerating, with its strong implication that Einstein's self-styled “greatest blunder” — the cosmological constant — was perhaps not such a dumb idea after all.
Giulini's book Special Relativity has a narrower focus, concentrating exclusively on Einstein's special theory of relativity. It is particularly strong on experimental tests and ramifications of the theory, and on the evolution of relativistic ideas, from Galileo and Newton, through the nineteenth-century aether theorists, and up to A. A. Michelson, Edward Morley, George FitzGerald and Hendrik Lorentz.
Have Lorentz and Henri Poincaré received less than their due in this great conceptual revolution? I think Giulini puts the case fairly: “In retrospect, special relativity seems palpably close in 1905, after all the preliminary works of Voigt, Hertz, FitzGerald, Lorentz, Larmor and Poincaré. But apparently it needed an unprejudiced newcomer to take the final step.”
The mathematical demands of these two volumes are not heavy (Giulini uses nothing beyond high-school algebra), but they do require close attention from the reader. In a lighter vein is John Rigden's enjoyable contribution, Einstein 1905. This is a month-by-month chronicle of 1905, Einstein's annus mirabilis, in which appeared in quick succession his four epoch-making papers on the photon hypothesis, brownian motion, special relativity and E = mc2. Rigden explains the underlying ideas in clear, elegant, non-mathematical prose. Amusingly, of all of Einstein's 1905 works, the one most cited today is none of the above (they are scarcely cited at all), but his PhD thesis on the determination of molecular dimensions. This is because the methods he used for it have been widely applied to such problems as the motion of sand particles in cement mixes and of aerosol particles in clouds. As Rigden remarks: “When a paper is so important that it could be cited in almost every paper, it is cited in almost no paper”.
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Israel, W. Relativity revisited. Nature 433, 196–197 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/433196a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/433196a
