In this fascinating, accessible introduction to one of the most revolutionary developments in modern physics, Einstein scholar Banesh Hoffmann recounts the successive insights that led to both the special and general theories of relativity.Using simple examples from everyday life, the author presents entertaining, nontechnical demonstrations of what relativity actually means and how it has revolutionized our ideas of time and space. Starting with the geometrical and cosmological ide...

From his unusual beginning in "Defining a vector" to his final comments on "What then is a vector?" author Banesh Hoffmann has written a book that is provocative and unconventional. In his emphasis on the unresolved issue of defining a vector, Hoffmann mixes pure and applied mathematics without using calculus. The result is a treatment that can serve as a supplement and corrective to textbooks, as well as collateral reading in all courses that deal with vectors.Major topics include...

“Hoffmann does more than convey the emotional impact of Einstein’s science on Einstein. He tries to make the general reader see the problems that concerned Einstein and understand the kinds of theories he constructed to solve them... This calls for scientific popularization of a high order... Hoffmann [...] does it very effectively.” — Martin Klein and Robert Merton, The New York Times“... succeeds in catching some of Einstein’s wholeness, the genius and t...

This remarkable study is a model of what the biography of a scientist should be. Its author, a noted scientist himself, was a friend of and collaborator with Albert Einstein. On these pages, we come to know Albert Einstein as the “backward” child; the academic outcast; the reluctant world celebrity; the exile; the pacifist; the philosopher; the humanitarian; the tragically saddened “father” of the atomic bomb; and above all, the unceasing searcher after scientific truth. At the same time, ...