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Einstein's Mistakes: The Human Failings of Genius |
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Amazon Sales Rank: 36169
Publication Date: 2008-09-08
Publisher: W. W. Norton
ISBN: 0393062937
Type: Hardcover
Number Of Pages: 256
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Fresh insights into aspects of Einstein we don't usually consider: his mistakes and the role they played in the discovery of his theories.
Although Einstein was the greatest genius of the 20th century, many of his ground-breaking discoveries were blighted by mistakes, ranging from serious misconceptions in physics to blatant errors in mathematics. For instance, Einstein's first theoretical proof of the famous formula E = mc² was incomplete and only approximately valid; he struggled with this problem for many years, but he never found a complete proof (better mathematicians did). In this provocative forensic biography, Hans Ohanian dissects this and other mistakes and places them in the context of Einstein's turbulent life and times. Einstein was often navigating in a fog of irrational and mystical inspirations, but his profound intuition about physics permitted him to reach his goal despite—and sometimes because of-the mistakes he made along the way. Einstein's uncanny ability to use his mistakes subconsciously as stepping-stones toward his revolutionary theories was one hallmark of his genius. 25 illustrations.
Average Rating: 
Review: 2008-11-05
A distorted view of Einstein's work
First, I confess that I haven't read most of the book. However, I
have read enough of it to decide that I don't want to waste any more
of my time by reading the rest of it.
Einstein, being human, undoubtedly made mistakes. However, in the
portions of the book that I have read, most of the alleged mistakes
actually are cases where Einstein merely made the sort of
approximations that physicists often make in order to simplify a
problem, or the author Ohanian misunderstood what Einstein said, or
the mistake in physics was made by Ohanian, not Einstein.
For brevity, I will discuss only one example, chosen because Ohanian
mentions it first and emphasizes it in several places as supposedly
driving Donald Crowhurst into madness. Ohanian objects to the
stipulation that light travels (in a vacuum) at the same speed in
opposite directions. However, it is necessary to stipulate something
about the equivalence of opposite directions (for the speed of signals
or the effect of motion on clocks) in order to define simultaneity.
Otherwise, the statement that two events at different locations are
simultaneous would be meaningless, and the one-way speed of light
would be undefined. (The round-trip speed of light is well defined.
Ohanian ignores the distinction here.) Ohanian claims that
simultaneity can be determined unambiguously by transporting clocks,
but he ignores the fact that one of the results of relativity is that
any measurement of time is affected by motion.
In the above case, Einstein was proposing a method of defining
simultaneity. He then showed that it did not produce a definition of
absolute simultaneity, but one that depended on the relative motion of
observers, if the speed of light is the same for all observers. This
relativity of simultaneity is an important part of special relativity.
It's amazing that Ohanian ignores it.
Review: 2008-11-02
Something for everyone
I was worried that I'd need to brush up on my long-forgotten college math and physics to understand this book, but the book is itself a bit of a brush-up course. And what's especially remarkable is that it's understandable, at different levels, by people with almost any scientific background, or none at all. People who understand tensor calculus (or who know what it is!) would, I'm sure, get more out of the book than I did, but with only a layman's concept of relativity, I was able to follow a good many of the points he makes about Einstein's mistakes (such as his failure to consider tidal effects in the Equivalence Principle).
Except for E=mc squared (and Newton's F=ma), there's hardly an equation in sight. And a lot of the book is totally non-technical: many of Einstein's mistakes involved women, rather than math or physics, and this aspect of his life is not slighted. The book examines the "Einstein phenomenon" and how Einstein managed his well-deserved reputation as the scientist of the century. And (unless it's a hat) the author has the most marvelous haircut I've ever seen on a physicist!
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Amazon List Price: $24.95
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