´Deeply researched and profoundly absorbing . . . Matthew Stanley traces one of the greatest epics of scientific history . . . An amazing story´ Michael Frayn, author of Tony Award-winning Copenhagen
In 1916, Arthur Eddington, a war-weary British astronomer, opened a letter written by an obscure German professor named Einstein. The neatly printed equations on the scrap of paper outlined his world-changing theory of general relativity. Until then Einstein´s masterpiece of time and space had been trapped behind the physical and ideological lines of battle, unknown.
Einstein´s name is now synonymous with ´genius´, but it was not an easy road. He spent a decade creating relativity and his ascent to global celebrity owed much to against-the-odds international collaboration, including Eddington´s globe-spanning expedition of 1919 - two years before they finally met. We usually think of scientific discovery as a flash of individual inspiration, but here we see it is the result of hard work, gambles and wrong turns.
Einstein´s War is a celebration of what science can offer when bigotry and nationalism are defeated. Using previously unknown sources and written like a thriller, it shows relativity being built brick-by-brick in front of us, as it happened 100 years ago.
´Riveting . . . Stanley lets us share the excitement a hundred years later in this entertaining and gripping book. It´s a must read if you ever wondered how Einstein became ´Einstein´´ Manjit Kumar, author of Quantum