A wonderful reminder that Einstein's monumental role in the development of contemporary science is even more profound than...
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) is as famous for his paradigm-shifting theories of relativity as he is for his grudge against quantum mechanics, but Stone's (Physics/Yale Univ.) engaging history of Einstein's ardent search for a unifying theory tells a different story.
Einstein's creative mind was behind almost every single major development in quantum mechanics. From his role in identifying the quantization of energy and its role in thermodynamics to his Nobel-winning insight into the photoelectric effect and the quantum properties of light, Einstein's theories would form the major core of modern quantum mechanics. Often hailed as an outsider and an eccentric genius, Einstein's reluctance to embrace quantum theory is partly entrenched in the cultural and political upheaval of the early and mid 20th century. The author adeptly weaves his subject’s personal life and scientific fame through the tumult of world war and, in accessible and bright language, brings readers deep into Einstein's struggle with both the macroscopic reality around him and the quantum reality he was trying to unlock. After the early success of his famous equation e=mc2 and his special relativity paper of 1905, which brought him relative financial stability and admission to Europe's academic inner circle, his genius flourished, and he developed esoteric theories of indistinguishable quantum particles and wave fields as probability densities. Einstein accepted these concepts as mathematical certainties but could not accept their communal link to quantum mechanics. Stone suggests that it was a combination of instinctual resistance to an indeterminate quantum realm and a suspicion of scientific epistemology that led to his rejection of the theory that would radically alter the field he pioneered.
A wonderful reminder that Einstein's monumental role in the development of contemporary science is even more profound than history has allowed.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-691-13968-5
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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