A Stubbornly Persistent Illusion

Starred review from December 31, 2007
It's hard to imagine a better guide to the work of Albert Einstein than Hawking, one of the world's most renowned physicists and popular science writers, whose own A Brief History of Time
has sold more than nine million copies. Though there are plenty of popular books about Einstein's theories, Hawking is right when he insists that the “most lucid, not to mention entertaining proponent of Einstein's ideas has always been Einstein himself.†Even those with a minimal background in math and science will come away with a keen understanding of the towering genius and his transformative work on the nature of space, time and light. Included are Einstein's seminal papers on special and general relativity, and his 1916 Relativity, the Special and General Theory
, which explains the theory in simple, straightforward terms accessible to any high-school graduate with a knowledge of basic algebra. Einstein's pioneering work in modern quantum theory, from his 1905 discovery of photons to his later, critical opinions of the generally accepted quantum theory (in excerpts from his 1950 book, Out of My Later Years
), is also considered. Hawking adds a brief but effective introduction to each section, making this gem of a collection really shine.