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| Subtle Is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein |
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List Price: $24.95
Our Price: $22.49
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Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 530.092
EAN: 9780192806727
ISBN: 0192806726
Label: Oxford University Press, USA
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 576
Publication Date: 2005-11-03
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Studio: Oxford University Press, USA
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Editorial Reviews:
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2005 has been designated "World Year of Physics" to celebrate the publication of Einstein's Theory of Relativity one hundred years ago. In commemoration of this landmark anniversary, Oxfor University Press brings Abraham Pais' major work on Einstein's life and work to a whole new generation of readers. Since the death of Albert Einstein in 1955 there have been many books and articles written about the man and an numbe of attempts to "explain" relativity. Throughout the preparatio of this book, Pais has had complete access to the Einstein Archives and the invaluable guidance of the late Helen Dukas--formerly Einstein's private secretary Written with Pais' intimate and incomparable knowledge of Einstein, Subtle is the Lord will delight an dinspire anyone fascinated by the man whose revolutinary ideas have defined modern physics.
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| Spotlight customer reviews: |
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Writing in Honey
Comment: I had to skip over most of the mathematical formulas in this book other than to note that there was a little fine tuning going on in crunching the numbers that all physicists have to do in the course of their research.
I appreciated Einstein's concept that philosophizing was like *writing in honey: it all turns to mush.* Perhaps modern science has been too Westernized to find a unified field theory without have to revert to a grand unifier such as Spinoza intimated. I was glad to see that Einstein was attracted to Spinoza, who was known as a God-intoxicated atheist.
A good read for those who want to learn more of the Divine Man.
Customer Rating:
Summary: An excellent read if you love physics
Comment: This is a well-written and entertaining biography of one of the world's greatest and most famous physicists: his life, his times, and especially his science. As other reviewers have correctly emphasized, this book does not shy away from mathematical formulas and details of the physics. While it does contain a lot of "traditional biographical" information, there is a heavy emphasis on the science -- which is great if you love physics and have the background, but I doubt many would enjoy that part.
The author (Pais) was an eminent theoretical physicist who knew Einstein near the end of Einstein's life.
Among the interesting tidbits I learned: Contrary to the lore I had always heard, Einstein was a top-notch student. Also, back in his day it was much harder than today to get a job in physics research, and university positions didn't pay well either. Even Einstein had trouble initially finding an academic job ! Of course, when he (working at a patent office) published a series of ground-breaking papers on theoretical physics, his academic career took off. It was also interesting to learn how little he knew about the scientific literature and how much he invented and re-invented physics on his own, especially when he was in isolation in the patent office. It seems all the great ones work that way, R. Feynman being another example that comes to mind.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Comment: The science...the physics is there for those who really want to know. There are no shortcuts or dumming it down. But the heart and the soul is also there of this truly brilliant mind. Over the years I've read this book several times, in fact, have had to order it three times, because every time I loan it to someone, it is never returned to me (I guess they liked it too.)
Customer Rating:
Summary: A scientific biography for physicists
Comment: I have really enjoyed reading A. Pais' biography of Einstein. The book is a very detailed scientific biography. And I would like to stress this point: if you are looking for anecdotes or gossips this is not your book. The main goal of the author is to expose the ideas and scientific achievements of Einstein, explaining in detail his theories. This is a taugh book for someone without a physics background, because Pais has written a book on the physics of the last century, with a detailed account of the origin and development of relativity and quantum theories. And it uses all the mathematical concepts physicists are familiar with.
Otherwise, this is the best biography of Einstein I have read.
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Summary: A beautiful and challenging book !
Comment: This is a beautifully written book. I have been intrigued by the personality of Albert Einstein since my childhood (when I saw a postage stamp with his portrait and the famous equation "E=mc^2"), and I always wanted to know what exactly has made him so famous. During my school years I loved to read books about physics, and always enjoyed lessons of physics in school. By that time I thought that I have really good grasp of physics, but still it seemed strange to me why, when the special theory of relativity was explained well enough in many accessible books, the general theory was only mentioned as "the greatest achievement of human mind", but it was never explained in detail, only some of its consequences, like the precession of Mercury's orbit or starlight bending by the Sun, were described, but nobody explained from where these 43" or 1,75" came from ! When in 1989 I bought this book, I enjoyed reading about the details of Einstein's biography, but I was quite shocked that most of the equations in the part about the general relativity were completely beyond my understanding. This fact had been irritating me for a number of years, until in 2002 I have decided to take the plunge and try to learn the general relativity properly. This has been a tough going and took almost two years, but by the end I could really understand what the terms, like the metric tensor, Christoffel symbols or R^i_jkl do really mean, or why R_ij-(1/2)*g_ij*R=k*T_ij, and I was also absolutely stunned by the beauty of this theory. This prompted me not only to read lots of other books about the relativity (MTW, Weinberg, Wald, Hawking & Ellis and many others), but also to learn the classical electrodynamics, quantum mechanics, and now I'm trying to learn the quantum field theory - all this thanks to this excellent book !
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