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EINSTEIN'S GREATEST MISTAKE

Name: EINSTEIN'S GREATEST MISTAKE
Author: David Bodanis
ISBN: 978-0-544-80856-0

A BIOGRAPHY

by David Bodanis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2016

Shorter than the best biographies of Einstein (by Walter Isaacson and Dennis Overbye) but still engaging and with more...

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A brief biography of “the greatest mind of the modern age” and his revolutionary ideas.

The 2005 PBS Nova episode “Einstein’s Big Idea” was based on science writer and former Oxford professor Bodanis’ bestselling book. Here, the author takes a similar cinematic approach: the narrative is swift, focusing on personalities and simplifying complex ideas, which often works but occasionally converts science to the usual TV magic show. Bodanis passes quickly over his subject’s early years, including 1905, when Einstein published four groundbreaking papers. The author emphasizes that if Einstein had never been born, a contemporary would have made those discoveries, but it might have taken generations and several geniuses to duplicate his 1915 paper that converted the simple concepts of special relativity into the fiercely complex unification of mass, energy, space, and gravity that was general relativity. “What Einstein discovered,” writes Bodanis, “in the chill of wartime Berlin, was the greatest breakthrough in understanding the physical universe since Newton: an achievement for all time.” Einstein’s equations predicted an expanding universe. Since the 1915 universe was considered static, he added a “cosmological constant” to correct it, only to discard it when astronomers later discovered it was expanding. Although this was a mistake, Bodanis convincingly argues that it provoked a greater mistake. Einstein created general relativity from his own thoughts. On the single occasion he accepted scientific evidence, it was wrong. When quantum mechanics became accepted after 1920, he dissented. Certain that all matter obeyed precise laws, he rejected increasing evidence that subatomic particle behavior defied common sense. By the 1930s, this rejection placed him outside mainstream physics, where he remained, largely ignored, until his death.

Shorter than the best biographies of Einstein (by Walter Isaacson and Dennis Overbye) but still engaging and with more emphasis on the difficulties the scientist faced when physics moved away from the classical view he never abandoned.

Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-544-80856-0

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Review Posted Online: July 14, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
PASSIONATE MINDS
by David Bodanis

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ELECTRIC UNIVERSE
by David Bodanis

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E=MC2
by David Bodanis

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)