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connie_leavitt_rees's review against another edition
4.0
I decided to read this book because it is one that my husband read as a teenager, and it really influenced his understanding of physics. I quite enjoyed reading this. It was almost like having a conversation with my husband—a lot of the explanations were familiar to me. This book is old, but I still found it to be a useful explanation of Relativity. I’m not going to pretend that some of it still didn’t go over my head, because it did, but I gained some great understanding of the idea of Einstein’s Universe as described in his theories. I even had a couple of light bulb moments. I think Nigel Calder did a great job explaining Relativity, and I can see why this was such an influence on my husband’s understanding. There is definitely more to the story than what is in this dated work, but I think this still remains relevant as a non-mathematical explanation of Relativity and an enumeration of early experiments testing the theory.
maxvandervelden's review against another edition
4.0
Absoluut geen beginners boek zoals velen in de comments doen blijken. Complexe materie rondom de relativiteitstheorie. Super interessant, had vijf sterren gekregen als ik alles kon begrijpen. Had het gevoel dat het soms wat makkelijker uitgelegd kon worden.
greymatter_24's review against another edition
3.0
This book gives very vivid, intuitive descriptions of some of the very odd predictions that result from a relativistic view of time and space. Any deeper understanding of these issues is to some extent circumvented by a lack of math. Calder explicitly avoids any mathematics, but even though this is a "Layman's Guide" to relativity, it would have been nice to get some sense of why relativity predicts what it does. The chapter ordering is weird as well. You never get a sense of how Einstein arrived at his results. What problems was he thinking about that led him to abandoned the absolute model? These are discussed in part, but not in a linear way that allowed the reader to connect some of the dots on their own. The 2005 Afterword was a really nice find at the end of my edition of the book. It was exciting to get to the end of a book describing the state of human understanding of the universe and find that there is more to be discovered.
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