Simply Einstein by Richard Wolfson, W. W. Norton, $24.95, ISBN 0393051544 Reviewed by Marcus Chown
YOU don’t have to be Einstein to understand relativity. That is the bold claim of American physicist Richard Wolfson.
He is, of course, right that relativity is founded on incredibly simple ideas that can be written down in a couple of sentences. Nevertheless, the implications of those ideas for space, time, matter and energy are so profoundly bizarre that our brain cells soon succumb to overload when we encounter them.
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I have yet to see any explanations of time dilation, Lorentz contraction, E = mc2 and all the rest that are as easy to follow as Wolfson makes out. His account in Simply Einstein, however, is head and shoulders above most, and is a good place to start.