Albert Einstein鈥檚 Vision by Barry Parker, Prometheus, $28, ISBN 1591021863 Reviewed by Marcus Chown
THERE is barely a field of physics or astrophysics in which Einstein has not left an indelible mark. His ideas have echoed down the years, continually spawning new discoveries, from masers to black holes, from the big bang to the accelerated expansion of the universe, from Bose-Einstein condensates to gravitationally lensed quasars.
In Albert Einstein鈥檚 Vision, Barry Parker celebrates the remarkable fecundity of Einstein鈥檚 scientific imagination. He describes the great intellectual leaps of the special and general theories of relativity. And he discusses Einstein鈥檚 attacks on quantum theory 鈥� the probabilistic theory of the world of atoms and their constituents.
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Quantum theory bugged the hell out of Einstein. 鈥淚 have thought a hundred times as much about the quantum problems as I have about general relativity,鈥� he once told physicist Otto Stern.
Einstein鈥檚 refusal to accept quantum theory fatally handicapped him in his attempts to discover a 鈥渦nified theory鈥� to describe all of physics. The irony is that, even in being wrong, he was later proved right. The search for the fabled 鈥渢heory of everything鈥� is now a central theme in physics.
Parker, in his survey of Einstein鈥檚 myriad contribution to science, even describes Einstein鈥檚 little-known inventions. How many quiz aficionados know that Einstein and his student, Leo Szilard, invented refrigerators without moving parts, including one bought and marketed by AEG, the German equivalent of General Electric?
My only quibble with Parker鈥檚 stimulating and engaging book is that the glossary is over-compressed and sloppy. What is the layperson to make of 鈥淏oson: particle with integral spin鈥� or the circular definition of 鈥淚nterference: the interfering of superimposed waves鈥�? And some entries, such as 鈥淨uasar: a star-like object with a large red shift that is a strong source of radio waves鈥�, are not even correct. Quasars may appear star-like but are actually as un-star-like as it is possible to be. What鈥檚 more, roughly 90 per cent are 鈥渞adio-quiet鈥�.