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Reviews
Relativity: The Special and the General Theory - 100th Anniversary Edition by Albert Einstein
gossy's review against another edition
4.0
I was not expecting to enjoy reading this, but I actually really did!
Don’t get me wrong, it was a challenge to read. It’s a two hour audiobook that probably took me a good 8 hours of listening to get through, between all the frequent rewinding as I read plus reading it a second time after feeling like I missed a lot on the first go. And that doesn’t even factor in all the times I paused it to wander away and let ideas turn over in my head for a day or two. (And I still don’t quite get chapters ~22–24.)
But it was an enjoyable and incredibly satisfying challenge, and I think that Einstein truly did do an excellent job of explaining things to the non-mathematician.
I think the biggest issue is that it did at times feel like he assumed the reader would have at least some background idea of the postulates or specific definition of the general theory of relativity, because he never explained it nearly as explicitly as he did the special theory. There were a few other things like that as well — times when certain concepts would be taken as foregone conclusions in ways that didn’t seem to match his careful explanations of other concepts.
I don’t know for certain if I just missed something, if its an artifact of the audiobook skipping a diagram or appendixes or footnotes, or if he was writing in response to or dialogue with another work that is unfamiliar to me. I might see if I can find a physical copy of the book some time.
I’m also glad that I’d recently read “Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field” before reading this. It really helps to contextualize a lot of the concepts in this book!
Don’t get me wrong, it was a challenge to read. It’s a two hour audiobook that probably took me a good 8 hours of listening to get through, between all the frequent rewinding as I read plus reading it a second time after feeling like I missed a lot on the first go. And that doesn’t even factor in all the times I paused it to wander away and let ideas turn over in my head for a day or two. (And I still don’t quite get chapters ~22–24.)
But it was an enjoyable and incredibly satisfying challenge, and I think that Einstein truly did do an excellent job of explaining things to the non-mathematician.
I think the biggest issue is that it did at times feel like he assumed the reader would have at least some background idea of the postulates or specific definition of the general theory of relativity, because he never explained it nearly as explicitly as he did the special theory. There were a few other things like that as well — times when certain concepts would be taken as foregone conclusions in ways that didn’t seem to match his careful explanations of other concepts.
I don’t know for certain if I just missed something, if its an artifact of the audiobook skipping a diagram or appendixes or footnotes, or if he was writing in response to or dialogue with another work that is unfamiliar to me. I might see if I can find a physical copy of the book some time.
I’m also glad that I’d recently read “Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field” before reading this. It really helps to contextualize a lot of the concepts in this book!
maya_moksha's review
informative
medium-paced
3.0
Very informative. I appreciated gaining a greater of the formulas behind the theory.
jbelang85's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.25
One of the most difficult short reads I’ve ever had. Supposedly written for non-physicists, it is very complex. If you take your time with it, I think most people can understand it. I do feel it would have benefited in the last 50 pages or so from some diagrams.
siren_oleander3's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
kevin_shepherd's review against another edition
5.0
“Thanks to my fortunate idea of introducing the relatively principle into physics, you and others now enormously overrate my scientific abilities, to the point where this makes me quite uncomfortable.” -Albert Einstein, 1908
What puny grasp I have on relativity does not lend itself well to writing any kind of comprehensible review. This in spite of the fact that Einstein went to considerable effort to make this book accessible to non-physicists. If you need a visual of my inadequacy, picture Penny attempting to review a scientific paper on Super-Asymmetry authored by Sheldon Cooper and Amy Farrah Fowler. It’s almost that bad.
“The principle of relativity can generally be phrased as: The laws of nature perceived by an observer are independent of his state of motion . . . by combining the principle of relativity with the results of the constancy of light in a vacuum, one arrives by a purely deductive manner at what is called today relativity theory.” -A.E., 1914
What puny grasp I have on relativity does not lend itself well to writing any kind of comprehensible review. This in spite of the fact that Einstein went to considerable effort to make this book accessible to non-physicists. If you need a visual of my inadequacy, picture Penny attempting to review a scientific paper on Super-Asymmetry authored by Sheldon Cooper and Amy Farrah Fowler. It’s almost that bad.
“The principle of relativity can generally be phrased as: The laws of nature perceived by an observer are independent of his state of motion . . . by combining the principle of relativity with the results of the constancy of light in a vacuum, one arrives by a purely deductive manner at what is called today relativity theory.” -A.E., 1914