Review by RJ published in the Irish Times, SATURDAY, APRIL 20-21, 1973

LAY READERS wishing to get a feel for the implications of the General Theory Of Relativity will be captivated by this book, 'which succeeds in conveying both the internal beauty and the historical context of the work. It also conveys a picture of the man as a human being, a scientist, an artist and a person who was politically aware in a positive manner.

In a brief review, one can only touch upon the work. Few remember that it was not for his Theory of Relativity that he was awarded the Nobel Prize (in 1921) but for his theoretical explanation of the photo-electric effect in terms of a 'quantum of radiation' of which the energy depended on the frequency (ie colour) of the light. In 1921, Relativity was still too controversial.

This particular prizewinning work was only one of a group of remarkable pieces of original thinking which emerged from the Patent Office in Bern round about the year 1905. (Einstein didn't make the grade as regards academic appointments.) The others included the equivalence of mass and energy and the Special Theory of Relativity, which got rid of the concepts of absolute space and time and provided a satisfactory explanation for the null result of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment which attempted to measure the rate of drift of the earth through the (then postulated) 'aether'.

An element of this 'Special Theory' was the 'Fitzgerald Contraction' proposed by Prof GF Fitzgerald of TCD in or about 1898; this however, had the status of an 'ad hoc hypothesis' to explain away an embarrassing result. Einstein developed a theory in which this fitted naturally, with few basic assumptions.

Not being at home in the Prussian military atmosphere, Einstein took out Swiss citizenship. This granted him a certain immunity from the effects of the 1914-18 war, which he sat out in Berlin, having by this time achieved academic eminence. Here he showed political principle. Max Planck and 92 others signed a jingoistic German manifesto of intellectuals. Einstein, in relative isolation with three others, signed a 'Manifesto to Europeans' calling for co-operation among the scholars of the warring nations for the sake of the future of Europe.

From the depths of darkest imperialist barbarism in 1916 Einstein emerges with the General Theory of Relativity, providing thereby an explanation of gravitational force in terms of the underlying geometrical structure of the universe, conceived in a four-dimensional space-time. The 'square law' of Newton comes out to be, in essence, the same as the squares of Pythagoras. It becomes evident why Newton's law is not a cube, or the power of 2.5, a fact which hitherto had been accepted on a pragmatic basis.

Across the boundaries of war-torn Europe the excitement of this discovery percolated: de Sitter in Holland by 1917 was already experimenting with relativistic cosmologies; Eddington in England was able to drum up support by 1919 for an astronomical expedition to observe an eclipse and to verify one of the crucial predictions of the theory: the bending of starlight by passage through the gravitational field of the sun.

The way in which post-war Europe reacted to these discoveries, almost with hysteria, resulted in massive popularisation and world acclaim for Einstein. This stood him in good stead in the black thirties and forties, when he was able to use his influence help get many other Jewish intellectuals out of Germany.

To the end of his days he sought to extend the General Theory of Relativity satisfactorily to include the electromagnetic forces. He found many promising leads, but the theory never jelled satisfactorily. As for the quantum-mechanical world, which he had had a hand in setting up with his 1905 photo-electric work, and subsequently consolidating in the 1920s, with Bose (the 'Bose-Einstein Statistics'), he distrusted it profoundly. He argued for classical causality against the 'complementary principle' of Bohr and the Copenhagen School. (This argument was replayed by our JL Synge at the Irish physicists conference in Galway on April 8th, where the GOM referred to correspondence with Max Born and train-conversations with Compton; he unrepentantly struck to a pure Einstein position. There are profound implications in this for the philosophy of science).

Einstein in 1940 was one of the handful who realised the significance of the Hahn-Strassman experiments on uranium fusion, in 1939. He was instrumental, though a pacifist, in drawing to Roosevelt's attention the danger that the Nazis might make an atom bomb, thereby making the allied nuclear effort inevitable. He was appalled by Hiroshima and with Bertrand Russell in 1955 issued his last political statement to mankind - renounce war or destroy the race. Previous to this, he had sheltered by his influence progressive intellectuals who were persecuted by the McCarthy investigations. Despite pressure, and despite a strong emotional link with the Jewish refugees from Nazism, he avoided involvement with the infant State of Israel, although he had been associated with Weizmann in the twenties in fund-raising for the Jewish National Fund.

Einstein will forever rank among the giants as regards human intellectual achievement. Banesh Hoffmann's book will, I hope, convey something of this to many lay readers, thus helping to reduce the probability that in a new Dark Age his books will be ritually burned, as they were in 1933 in Germany.

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Copyright Dr Roy Johnston 1999