The Perfect Theory: A Century of Geniuses and the Battle over General Relativity
*Starred Review* Einstein pulled no punches when he met Belgian theorist Georges Lemaître in 1927: “Your physics,” the German titan told his colleague, “is abominable.” But Ferreira highlights the irony in this confrontation: Lemaître only starts the parade of geniuses mining Einstein’s theory for unanticipated cosmological insights. Of course, the history of this fertile theory begins with Einstein himself, the lowly patent clerk whose daring thought-experiments lead to a radically new space-time physics in which gravity bends light. Though eclipsed for decades by quantum mechanics, Einstein’s theory—crystallized in 10 elegant field equations—ultimately enthralls a phalanx of conceptual pioneers. Whether capturing the echoes of the Big Bang, glimpsing the phantom shadows of dark matter and dark energy, plumbing neutron stars, pondering possibilities for time travel, or testing the limits of string theory, these pioneers take Einstein’s formulas as their sure guide. Predictably, strong-willed scientists clash over their reading of these fiendishly entangled formulas: Eddington versus Chandrasekhar over black holes, Hawking versus Bekenstein over cosmic entropy, Oppenheimer versus Wheeler over stellar-collapse singularities, Gödel versus Robertson over rotating space-time. More such clashes seem certain in a twenty-first century poised for yet more audacious thinking about relativity. No book better prepares armchair physicists for the intellectual excitement ahead! --Bryce Christensen