Daniel Little's Reviews > Einstein's Universe

This book gives very vivid, intuitive descriptions of some of the very odd predictions that result from a relativistic view of time and space. Any deeper understanding of these issues is to some extent circumvented by a lack of math. Calder explicitly avoids any mathematics, but even though this is a "Layman's Guide" to relativity, it would have been nice to get some sense of why relativity predicts what it does. The chapter ordering is weird as well. You never get a sense of how Einstein arrived at his results. What problems was he thinking about that led him to abandoned the absolute model? These are discussed in part, but not in a linear way that allowed the reader to connect some of the dots on their own. The 2005 Afterword was a really nice find at the end of my edition of the book. It was exciting to get to the end of a book describing the state of human understanding of the universe and find that there is more to be discovered.