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A review by gossy
Relativity: The Special and the General Theory by Albert Einstein
4.0
I was not expecting to enjoy reading this, but I actually really did!
Don’t get me wrong, it was a challenge to read. It’s a two hour audiobook that probably took me a good 8 hours of listening to get through, between all the frequent rewinding as I read plus reading it a second time after feeling like I missed a lot on the first go. And that doesn’t even factor in all the times I paused it to wander away and let ideas turn over in my head for a day or two. (And I still don’t quite get chapters ~22–24.)
But it was an enjoyable and incredibly satisfying challenge, and I think that Einstein truly did do an excellent job of explaining things to the non-mathematician.
I think the biggest issue is that it did at times feel like he assumed the reader would have at least some background idea of the postulates or specific definition of the general theory of relativity, because he never explained it nearly as explicitly as he did the special theory. There were a few other things like that as well — times when certain concepts would be taken as foregone conclusions in ways that didn’t seem to match his careful explanations of other concepts.
I don’t know for certain if I just missed something, if its an artifact of the audiobook skipping a diagram or appendixes or footnotes, or if he was writing in response to or dialogue with another work that is unfamiliar to me. I might see if I can find a physical copy of the book some time.
I’m also glad that I’d recently read “Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field” before reading this. It really helps to contextualize a lot of the concepts in this book!
Don’t get me wrong, it was a challenge to read. It’s a two hour audiobook that probably took me a good 8 hours of listening to get through, between all the frequent rewinding as I read plus reading it a second time after feeling like I missed a lot on the first go. And that doesn’t even factor in all the times I paused it to wander away and let ideas turn over in my head for a day or two. (And I still don’t quite get chapters ~22–24.)
But it was an enjoyable and incredibly satisfying challenge, and I think that Einstein truly did do an excellent job of explaining things to the non-mathematician.
I think the biggest issue is that it did at times feel like he assumed the reader would have at least some background idea of the postulates or specific definition of the general theory of relativity, because he never explained it nearly as explicitly as he did the special theory. There were a few other things like that as well — times when certain concepts would be taken as foregone conclusions in ways that didn’t seem to match his careful explanations of other concepts.
I don’t know for certain if I just missed something, if its an artifact of the audiobook skipping a diagram or appendixes or footnotes, or if he was writing in response to or dialogue with another work that is unfamiliar to me. I might see if I can find a physical copy of the book some time.
I’m also glad that I’d recently read “Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field” before reading this. It really helps to contextualize a lot of the concepts in this book!