E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation - Hardcover

Bodanis, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0333780337 ISBN 13: 9780333780336

Publisher: Macmillan, 2000

Synopsis

Most people know that Einstein's equation is important but they don't usually know why. This book takes an approach to the equation that concentrates not on the biography of Einstein but on the biography of the equation itself. David Bodanis looks at the ancestors of the equation, the three elements - e, m and c - before they end up together in Einstein's equation in Berne, 1905. From there he follows the course of the equation through the 20th century, focusing on the people who developed Einstein's work and its consequences. Without the equation for instance there would have been no atomic bomb, no lasers, no Internet and no science of black holes.

About this title

Review

E = mc2. Just about everyone has at least heard of Albert Einstein's formulation of 1905, which came into the world as something of an afterthought, but far fewer can explain his insightful linkage of energy to mass. David Bodanis offers an easily grasped gloss on the equation: mass, he writes, "is simply the ultimate type of condensed or concentrated energy," whereas energy "is what billows out as an alternate form of mass under the right circumstances."

Just what those circumstances are occupies much of Bodanis's book, which pays homage to Einstein and, just as important, to predecessors such as Maxwell, Faraday, and Lavoisier, who are less well known than Einstein today. Balancing writerly energy and scholarly weight, Bodanis offers a primer in modern physics and cosmology, explaining that the universe today is an expression of mass that will, in some vastly distant future, one day slide back to the energy side of the equation, replacing the "dominion of matter" with "a great stillness"--a vision that is at once lovely and profoundly frightening.

Without sliding into easy psychobiography, Bodanis explores other circumstances as well: namely, Einstein's background and character, which combined with a sterling intelligence to afford him an idiosyncratic view of the way things work--and a view that would change the world.--Gregory McNamee

Review

'Bodanis himself seems like an intellectual thermonuclear explosion, a kind of Jonathan Miller on speed... This is an outstanding introduction to relativity by a gifted practitioner of popular science1 Independent

Edition details

• Publisher: Macmillan
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0333780337
• ISBN 13: 9780333780336
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: Plates
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336