Rating: 2/5
Review:
Deplorably inaccurate physics
The publisher/author sent me a free e-copy of this book for
review. I'm sorry to say that I didn’t
like it, and the physics in particular is so badly wrong that it made me very cross.
The book is intended as a brief introductory biography of
Albert Einstein. As a summary of the
events in Einstein's life it is adequate if a little plodding; I found the
style rather dry and clunky but it is readable.
There are two comparatively lengthy sections at the end on Einstein's
religious and political beliefs which listed a lot of known opinions but didn't
offer much in the way of real insight. However, in a brief sketch like this that is
defensible.
What is most certainly not defensible is the
"explanations" of the physics, which are confused, inaccurate and
largely just plain wrong. For example,
introducing Galileo's insights into relative motion (*not* relativity, as
stated in the book), Alexander Kennedy asserts that if a cannonball is dropped
from the top of the mast of a moving ship, the person who drops it will see it
fall at the base of the mast, while a stationary observer on shore will see it
fall some distance from the mast. This
is self-evident nonsense. Of course the
cannonball wouldn't land in two different places on the deck at the same time;
quantum particles might, cannonballs certainly don't – and to attribute this piece of idiocy to
Galileo, one of the finest observational scientists ever to have lived, is
simply insulting. It gets worse from
there; I won't even attempt to go into the inaccuracies and eventual utter
absurdity of the subsequent "explanation" of Einstein's work on
Relativity, and the extremely brief section on gravity, acceleration and
General Relativity had me muttering "no, no, no!" with my head in my
hands.
I'm sorry to be harsh, but anyone writing a biography of
Einstein, however brief and non-technical, needs some understanding of the
rudiments of his work; misleading nonsense like this is just not acceptable. I have given the book two stars because some
of the other biographical information is adequate, but for an introduction to
Einstein I'd suggest trying one of the many fine available biographies of the
man and giving this a miss.
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