Einstein's universe
by Nigel Calder · first published 1979
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"The classic account of how the greatest mind of recent times altered the way we see the world, now updated with a new afterword for Einstein Year, which celebrates the centenary of his first groundbreaking ideas." "The universe that Albert Einstein built is an astonishing skyscape of bent starlight, high-speed astronauts, black holes, stormy galaxies and exploding spacetime. Today it seems more certain than ever that we live in the cosmos he described - yet often we still fail to understand it. Nigel Calder's landmark book has been acclaimed for making Einstein's theories of relativity access
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…you can see quasars even though they are billions of light-years away (the radiation heats the surrounding material and it is very bright.) Besides general physics reading, I can recommend the book "Einstein's Universe" to help build a general understanding of both special and general relativity, with particular regard to matters such as mass-energy equivalence.
on “Gravity Is Not Like the Other Forces” ↗…edge-on to our view from earth, so I made Jupiter a capital O, and the moons were lowercase letters. I printed this out on a thermal printer (like a wide receipt). Cosmos was the rage on TV and I had read Einstein's Universe by Nigel Calder. I had a telescope and a microscope, so the micro and macro were very real to me. I suspect if you grew up on tablets and only built things on a 3D printer scale, you don't have that unbridled…
on “Is Math Big or Small?” ↗