Experimental Blog #105

Comments on "God's Equation" - Einstein, Relativity, and the Expanding Universe by Amir D. Aczel and "Einstein's Cosmos" - How Albert Einstein's Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space and Time by Michio Kaku

The author of the first book, Amir Aczel, is a well known mathematician, and the author of the second book, Michio Kaku, is a well known physicist.

Both authors write about the works of Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell, and his 8 partial differential equations, and how the works of these two people form the beginning for the developement of Albert Einstein's relativity theories. Then things become even more complicated; with 4 dimensional space-time, differential geometry or tensor calculus, which is the mathematics of curved surfaces in any dimension, "symmetry", "covariance", and many other very technical matters.

In the early 20th century it turned out that the clarity of the "Newtonian clockwork universe" was actually an illusion, although still an extremely useful and a mostly very dependable illusion. After all, America has sent people to the Moon and back, safely, and more than once, while not using any Einsteinian physics or equations.

Albert Einstein's relativity theories and quantum theory, or mechanics, although both very bewildering and not at all clear for most people, and both essentially completed by 1916 or the late 1920s, eventually produced much fantastic technology with world-wide use and application.