Persiguiendo a Einstein by Antonio and Eduardo Acín: From Intuition to Gravitational Waves
An enjoyable explanation of how physics progressed in the twentieth century. Persiguiendo a Einstein (Chasing Einstein) sets out Einstein’s work and legacy as simply as possible, from his intuitions to the detection of gravitational waves.
Authors: Antonio Acín and Eduardo Acín
Title: Persiguiendo a Einstein: de la intuición a las ondas gravitacionales
Format: Spanish hardcover
Language: Spanish (no English edition found)
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/B01EZV5SNS (ASIN B01EZV5SNS)
Relativity Made Intuitive
Complicated concepts are simplified so that anyone interested can grasp, intuitively, the special and general theories of relativity. With the help of mathematical models and diagrams, we get an idea of the peculiar way this genius saw the universe.
Imagination First
For Einstein, imagination was more important than knowledge: knowledge is limited, while imagination encircles the world.
Einstein and the Quantum
Quantum mechanics is still a field full of unknowns. Einstein died without seeing its later advances or accepting its view of the subatomic world. His famous line, "God does not play dice", shows his reluctance to embrace so ambiguous a field: for him, a science based on statistical estimates and probabilities could not be the last word, and wave-particle duality was hard to explain logically. Quantum mechanics was, to Einstein, counter-intuitive and far from scientific rigour.
From Aristotle to Galileo
According to a review in the science magazine Mètode, the book begins long before Einstein, with Aristotle’s everyday observations about motion and Galileo’s discovery of inertia and of the principle of relativity: the laws of mechanics are the same for observers at rest or moving at constant speed. The authors’ aim is to show that relativity, far from being incomprehensible, follows from a few intuitive principles about nature, applied rigorously to the end.
Light, Time and Space
The book then explains why the constancy of the speed of light, established by electromagnetism and the experiments of Michelson and Morley, seemed to contradict Galileo’s principle, and how Einstein resolved the conflict by changing our ideas of space and time. Using the classic thought experiment of a "light clock", the authors show simply why moving clocks run slow and moving objects contract.
Gravity and Gravitational Waves
The chapters on general relativity explain how mass and energy curve space-time, and present the theory’s classic tests: the anomaly in Mercury’s orbit and the bending of starlight observed during the solar eclipse of 1919, which made Einstein world-famous overnight. The story ends with the detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO observatories, announced in 2016, a century after Einstein predicted them.
Extras for Curious Readers
Boxes on topics such as the role of relativity in GPS and a visit to Flatland, the two-dimensional world imagined by Edwin Abbott, add variety, and appendices with simple calculations, a glossary and suggestions for further reading make it useful for secondary-school students and their teachers. Antonio Acín is a physicist specialising in quantum information, which explains the book’s attention to quantum entanglement.
Einstein and the Quantum World
The final chapter turns to Einstein’s role in quantum physics. It was his explanation of the photoelectric effect, not relativity, that earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1921. Yet he never accepted the probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics: his famous remark that God "does not play dice" comes from a 1926 letter to the physicist Max Born. In 1935, with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, he published a paper intended to show that quantum theory was incomplete. Experiments from the 1980s onwards, notably by Alain Aspect, supported quantum mechanics instead, but the paper drew attention to entanglement, now the basis of quantum computing and cryptography.
Who Is It For?
Spanish-speaking readers who want to understand relativity without heavy mathematics. It is available only in Spanish.
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