Einstein's Cosmos FROM THE PUBLISHER
Einstein remains one of the greatest, and most beloved, scientists of all time, but his work and his legacy are frequently misunderstood. Thanks to Michio Kaku's insight and his ability to explain in everyday language the densest scientific concepts, Einstein's Cosmos is a new way to appreciate Einstein's life and ideas.
SYNOPSIS
Kaku (physics, City University of New York) has written a physicists' biography of a physicist--recounting the facts of Einstein's life but spending little energy analyzing, debating, or speculating on his personal life. Instead, the subjects he makes accessible to a lay audience are those of the most interest to physicists: the astonishing depth and subtlety of Einstein's theories, and especially the deceptively simple physical intuitions that guided them. Einstein's life is skillfully woven into the explication of his theories, but the structure of the book reflects Kaku's intention. The first part is dominated by special relativity, with additional material on pre-Einsteinian physics and Einstein's early years; the second is concerned with general relativity; and the third is about Einstein's attempts to unify general relativity and quantum physics, as well as his experiences in World War II. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
This latest entry in the Great Discoveries series (edited by Jesse Cohen and complements another, more focused study that's appearing this season, Edmund Blair Bolles's Einstein Defiant (Forecasts, Feb. 23), which takes a detailed look at Einstein's role in the development of quantum physics. Kaku, host of the nationally broadcast radio program Explorations, presents a well-sketched-out yet concise account of Einstein's life. Kaku excels, as did his subject, in drawing word pictures that illustrate in everyday language complicated subjects like the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and special and general relativity. The public and the press were always drawn to Einstein because he presented his theories in language that the average person could understand. Even when writing for his colleagues, as Kaku points out, he strove for simplicity of expression: his equation describing the structure of the universe is only an inch long. For a half-century after Einstein's death, the standard account was that he had frittered away the last years of his career trying to find a unified field theory, hanging on like a drowning man to the bark of determinism while the Copenhagen school sailed off in many directions by applying probabilistic methods to the inner workings of the atom. In his final chapter, Kaku shows that in fact Einstein's activities in his final years anticipated recent advances such as detecting gravitational waves, "supersymmetry" and even the attempt to reconcile science with religion. This accessible biography is recommended to readers eager, but never quite able, to understand what this relativity business is all about. (Apr.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Theoretical physicist Kaku (Visions, 1997, etc.) looks at the preeminent scientific genius of the 20th century. The author divides Einstein's career into three sections. The first spans his childhood and education, concluding with the formulation of Special Relativity in one of five papers the 26-year-old published in his "miracle year," 1905. (The other four were just as stunning, offering physical proof of the existence of atoms and laying the foundations of quantum theory.) Kaku (Physics/CUNY) briefly addresses such questions as the contributions to these discoveries made by Einstein's first wife, Mileva, and the fate of their daughter Liserl. The second section covers the period when Einstein worked on the theory of General Relativity. During those years he moved to Germany, expressed pacifist sympathies during WWI, and established himself as the world's leading man of science. As a consequence of these activities, he also began to attract the attention of anti-Semites who eventually found a powerful voice in Nazism. The third period, beginning in 1925, saw Einstein at work on the never-to-be-completed Unified Field Theory, an attempt to reconcile relativity with the discoveries of quantum theory. Many of his fellow scientists at this point believed he had fallen out of touch with the frontiers of physics, represented by the quantum theory he himself had helped launch. Kaku argues that despite Einstein's well-known criticisms of quantum theory, his quest was not to refute it but to integrate it into a larger picture that would include relativity. The fact that many current physicists are attempting a similar integration supports Kaku's contention, backed by substantial evidence, thatEinstein's thought was ahead of his time to the very end of his life. A good nontechnical introduction to Einstein's work and a nice addition to Norton's Great Discoveries series.
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