Word: einsteins
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...specific historical setting. One treats of Greek education in antiquity, early Chinese civilization, and other pre-Newtonian subjects. The other slips into a discussion of specifically modern crises and attitudes in science; Pascal and Maxwell give way to Bohm, Schrodinger, and Charles Darwin A long and careful piece on Einstein near the end of the first volume signals the shift from traditional to contemporary concerns. At the close of the second is a melange of little treatises on comets, albatross and so forth, which will be read by anyone who has enjoyed what came before...
...validity of his scientific work. Eddington, it seems, will prove to be farsighted mostly because he deserved to be farsighted. "His work is graced by a poet's sympathy, illumined by a poet's sense of truth and unity," Newman writes. The same could be said of Einstein and Schrodinger; Newman has made what is only a necessary condition for greatness into a sufficient...
...done much better on the few occasions when he treats his subjects at length. His favorite sort of topic is covered by two major articles in the first volume, one on Einstein and the other (by far the longest piece in the set) on the nineteenth-century mathematician William Kingdon Clifford. Scientific American readers will recognize neither of these: the Clifford piece was the introduction to a 1946 edition of Clifford's The Common Sense of The Exact Sciences, and the excellent survey of Einstein's more important work came out as a separate article three years...
...most acute thinking in mathematics with regard to the relation between geometry and physics. Lord Russell has recalled that his own early work was done in ignorance of Clifford's, but ventured that Clifford in the 1870's was thinking ahead of the best minds of his day. In Einstein's time the geometry of the real world lost its reliability as a frame of reference and became properly a part of physics itself. One can infer from both Newman and Russell that this inversion, an alien notion to most nineteenth-century thinkers was already half-formed in Clifford...
Newman takes the space and the care of look thoroughly into Clifford's presuppositions; the result is a thoughtful and interesting sketch. The selection on Einstein is shorter but no less satisfying. Einstein's own questions are dealt with fairly in a coherent outline of his discoveries and some of his own classic illustrations. The editor and the expositor in Newman have somehow blended perfectly here...