A Stubbornly Persistent Illusion: The Essential Scientific Works of Albert Einstein, Edited by Stephen Hawking
The advances of the twentieth century brought new ways of seeing the universe. This collection, edited by Stephen Hawking, gathers Albert Einstein’s essential scientific work, from relativity to the relationship between mass and energy.
Author: Albert Einstein (1879–1955)
Editor: Stephen Hawking (1942–2018)
Title: A Stubbornly Persistent Illusion (2007)
Format: English paperback (Running Press), 481 pages
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/076243564X (ASIN 076243564X)
A Restless Mind
From his youth Einstein had an insatiable curiosity and was fascinated by Euclid’s geometry. Building on Newton’s law of universal gravitation, he developed his own way of understanding the world, explaining facts that experiment revealed and that the models of classical physics could not account for.
Relativity Against the Grain
Maxwell’s field equations and the theory of relativity go hand in hand in explaining phenomena the classical models could not. Relativity demanded great powers of abstraction, and many people of the time held on to the prevailing ideas and at first rejected it. The reviewer notes that Gauss was among the pioneers of non-Euclidean geometry, the kind of geometry that later supported Einstein’s view.
From Newton to E = mc²
The universe seemed governed by Newton’s laws, but the discovery of electric and magnetic fields complicated the model. Einstein reconciled Maxwell’s laws with mechanics, explaining behaviour that had seemed inexplicable. He also showed the relationship between energy and mass, reaching the famous equation E = mc². Quantum physics, meanwhile, remains a mystery that contradicts intuition.
Where the Title Comes From
The title comes from a letter Einstein wrote in 1955, a few weeks before his own death, to the family of his lifelong friend Michele Besso, who had just died. Einstein wrote that for physicists like them, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. It is a moving phrase, and it captures the way relativity overturned our everyday intuitions about time.
Hawking as Guide
Stephen Hawking (1942–2018), who held Newton’s former chair as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, selected the texts and wrote introductions explaining their significance and the context in which Einstein produced them. This volume belongs to a series of anthologies he edited, along with On the Shoulders of Giants, devoted to the great works of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton and Einstein, and God Created the Integers, on the history of mathematics.
The Miracle Year
The collection includes papers from 1905, Einstein’s "miracle year", when, while working as a clerk in the Swiss patent office, he published groundbreaking work on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion and special relativity, followed by the short paper that led to the equation E = mc². It also contains his general theory of relativity, completed in 1915–16, as well as essays in which he discusses science, philosophy and society in a more personal voice.
How to Read It
The original papers contain mathematics that will challenge most general readers, but the essays and Hawking’s introductions can be enjoyed without it. Many readers start with those and then dip into the papers to get a feel for how Einstein thought.
Einstein the Essayist
The non-technical pieces show a different side of Einstein: the humanist who wrote about religion, freedom, education and the responsibility of scientists, and who worried about nationalism and nuclear weapons. His prose is clear and often witty, and these essays help explain why he became not just a great physicist but a moral voice admired around the world. They make a good place to begin.
Who Is It For?
Readers with some mathematics who want to go to the sources, guided by Hawking’s commentary. The Spanish edition the reviewer read is titled La gran ilusión.
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