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A review by ashrafulla
Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel by Helen Dukas, Banesh Hoffmann
4.0
The author provides a vividly romantic biography of Einstein. Einstein's thought processes are treated as naturally beautiful poetry, to mimic how the author and Einstein think about the physical theories Einstein worked on. There is a childlike sense of looking at how pretty, extraordinary, or remarkable a theory is. At times this is off-putting for me, but in general it fits the theme of the book. The book starts talking about Einstein as a child thinking about the physical phenomena around him. That thread continues throughout the book.
The actual physics is described at the highest level so expect this to just whet your appetite. Now I want to delve into gravitational theory even though I don't know anything about it. This is the biggest benefit of the book. It makes you want to be a physicist, or at least a scientist.
The descriptions of Einstein's contemporaries are very good. There is no sense of a "bad person." Rather, there are a lot of very smart, very flustered, very inquisitive people. They have a gift of intellect and pair with a deep seated desire to find out what makes nature tick. Those feelings start going to the reader when you read the book. That's not just Einstein. It's also Dirac and Bohr and Planck and Leibniz and even Newton.
Sometimes I didn't like the language, but I still loved the book.
The actual physics is described at the highest level so expect this to just whet your appetite. Now I want to delve into gravitational theory even though I don't know anything about it. This is the biggest benefit of the book. It makes you want to be a physicist, or at least a scientist.
The descriptions of Einstein's contemporaries are very good. There is no sense of a "bad person." Rather, there are a lot of very smart, very flustered, very inquisitive people. They have a gift of intellect and pair with a deep seated desire to find out what makes nature tick. Those feelings start going to the reader when you read the book. That's not just Einstein. It's also Dirac and Bohr and Planck and Leibniz and even Newton.
Sometimes I didn't like the language, but I still loved the book.