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Purchase this book from Amazon UK US
PBS/Channel Four drama-documentary
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Promised Notes
A little masterpiece: delightful, surprising, and thought-provoking - a piece of literary artistry. I found it so engrossing that I finished it in one go.
-William H. McNeill,author of Plagues and Peoples, and The Rise of the West
...The plot and subplots read like a Frederick Forsyth novel, but they are all true.
- Glasgow Herald
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From the introduction:
A few years ago I was reading an interview with the actress Cameron Diaz in a movie magazine. At the end the interviewer asked her if there was anything she wanted to know, and she said she'd like to know what E=mc2 really means. They both laughed, then Diaz mumbled that she'd meant it, and then the interview ended.
'You think she did mean it?' one of my friends asked, after I read it aloud. I shrugged, but everyone else in the room was adamant. They knew exactly what she intended: They wouldn't mind understanding what the famous equation meant, too.
It got me thinking. Everyone knows that E=mc2 is really important, but they usually don't know what it means. That's frustrating, because the equation is so short that you'd think it would be understandable. |
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There are plenty of books that try to explain it, but who can honestly say they understand them? Even first-hand instruction doesn't always help, as Chaim Weizmann commented when he took a long Atlantic crossing with Einstein in 1921: 'Einstein explained his theory to me every day,' Weizmann said, 'and on my arrival I was fully convinced that he understood it.'
I realized there could be a different approach. Instead of technical diagrams of rocketships and light flashes, I could write a personal biography of the equation. Everyone knows that a biography entails stories of the ancestors, childhood, adolescence and adulthood of your subjects. It would be the same here.
The stories along the way turned out to be as much about passion, love and revenge, as they are about cool scientific discovery. There's Michael Faraday, a slum boy desperate for a mentor to lift him to a better life, and Emilie du Châtelet, a woman trapped in the wrong century, trying to carve out a space where she wouldn't be mocked for using her mind. There's Knut Haukelid and a team of fellow young Norwegians, forced to attack their own countrymen to avert a greater Nazi evil; Cecilia Payne, an Englishwoman who finds her career destroyed after daring to glimpse the sun's fate in the year six billion A.D.; also a 19 year old Brahmin, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who discovers something even more fearful, out in the beating heat of the Arabian Sea in mid-summer. Through all their stories – as well as highlights from Newton, Heisenberg and other researchers - the meaning of each part of the equation becomes clear.
Even people who approach physics and mathematics with trepidation will be fascinated and enlightened by this dazzling book....This is a clearly written, astonishingly understandable book that celebrates human achievement.
- Parade
By the end of the astonishing E=mc2, a dedicated reader will...feel quite at ease dining with Nobel Prize winners. It's a lucid, even thrilling study. I didn't know I could know so much.
- Fay Weldon, Book of year, Washington Post
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