دانلود کتاب آلبرت انیشتین – زندگی و علم او

The seed of this book was sowed in 1970 when I was in the reeducation school in China, which had launched a campaign to criticize Einstein and his relativity, as Germany did in the 1920s–1930s and the Soviet Union did in the 1950s. Ten years later, thanks to China’s opening-up, I came to the United States. I have been teaching college physics and relativity theory for the last thirty seven years. My long journey of learning about Einstein—his life and his science—is reflected in this book. I enjoyed Einstein’s exquisite self-deprecating jokes. I was fascinated by the subtle beauty and profound simplicity of the God of Spinoza and Einstein—the history of physics is the history of the unification of fundamental laws of nature. Einstein’s legacy of Message to Posterity and President Roosevelt’s legacy of Four Freedoms demonstrated: socialism and liberal democracy shared some common ground in the 1940s. World leaders today should do the same. I hope, dear readers, you reach at least one, if not all, of the three goals of the book—entertaining, informing, and educating. Writers of popular science are warned: steer afar from mathematics; it will scare the reader away. Let me follow Einstein’s nonconformity and say: an equation is, like a picture, worth a thousand words. You do not need more than high school math to grasp the fundamentals of Newtonian mechanics. To understand Einstein’s concept of curved four-dimensional spacetime and general relativity, you may need AP or college-level mathematics. Simply write down the 2D metric matrix of the globe and view the spherical surface as curved 2D space imbedded in our 3D space. You will be able to comprehend what curved 4D spacetime means and why it is so hard to visualize it. It is because we humans live in 3D space, and our eyes, ears, and fingers can only sense in three directions. I strongly urge you, nonetheless, dear readers: do not give up. Stick to your equations, utilizing imagination and analogy. One hour, two hours,… Suddenly, you will feel sublime happiness, and you will cry out: “Eureka! Eureka! I got it!” I thank Dr. Hanoch Gutfreund, the former President of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Director of the University’s Einstein Center, and Dr. Paul Sparrow, the Director of the FDR Presidential Library and Museum, for fruitful discussions about Sect. 12.2 of Chap. 12 of this book. I acknowledge stimulating discourse with Professor Tao Zhou on the history and current trend of the Bohr-Einstein debate. I acknowledge the helpful suggestions by Dr. Angela Lahee, Professor Shigu Chen, Professor Moses Fayngold, Professor Andres Jerez, Mr. Xiren Zhang, and Mr. Peter Peng. I would like to especially thank Ms. Iris Chin Keeney for illustrations and cover art and Mr. Anthony Keeney for editing assistance and photography. I thank my wife Rose for her unwavering support through the years when this book was written.