This book was much more my idea of a 'science for the masses' sort of a book. I have just reviewed A Natural History of Color negatively because it was hard to follow and too dense, and this book was the polar opposite. It had plenty of juicy detail, but it was written lightly, and in an easy style so when Sean Runnette read it to me so nicely, I was able to follow it even when driving and partly- or mostly-focused on traffic. To me that makes a big difference since I'm rarely sitting listening to books in an armchair.
The book follows the historical pursuit and discovery of relativistic physics, naturally discussing Einstein who opened this field, but there are many other contributors. Einstein, for example, is mostly closely associated with the famous formula E=mc⊃2, but the fact is that he was not the first to derive that equation!
Approximations to it had been expressed earlier by people like John Henry Poynting and Fritz Hasenöhrl, and Henri Poincaré came very close to the actual equation citing m = E/c⊃2, although he found paradoxes in his approach. Italian Olinto De Pretto also published the equivalent of Einstein's formula , effectively expressed as E=mv⊃2 where 'v' is the speed of light. Pretty much all of these people were dealing with a universe which contained aether - or so they believed. Einstein dispensed with aether because he correctly rejected its existence, but he was so widely read it is hard to believe that he was not aware of the equation before he ever wrote it down himself.
The book goes on to discuss gravity and acceleration, issues involving theoretic math versus practical physics particularly in relation to plans for developing a gravity wave detector. There are chapters on collapsing stars, singularities, black holes, and John Wheeler, the accidental radio detection of the cosmic background radiation, and dark matter. It ive sag rea thisotry fo the work, visits many of the contributors and tells a great story. I commend it fully as a worthy read or listen.
