This is a fine little book; a famous little book; and a
clever little book.
I came upon this book late, even though I had heard of the
book before, but I didn’t pay enough heed to the hype to start reading earlier.
This book is a neat exercise in thought experimentation by a
physicist. He is having a little fun as well as showing off his physics chops.
Even though I knew what Lightman is trying to do, I was
surprised slightly when he jumped straight into the tales of relativity. The
stories were, at first, seemingly unrelated to one another, it isn’t until a
little further up the road that the theme of the stories established
themselves. Thus begins a short but charming ride through the theory of
relativity as illustrated through vignettes starring the citizenry of the good
people of Bern. The story moves along with dates serving as names of the
chapters and Lightman weaving the sequence of tales as he uses the stories to
explain the physics.
The book is structured so that there is no structure. It is reminiscent
of Italo Calvino’s books. The stories come at you in short quick bursts with
seemingly no connection between them, but in the end there is an overriding
theme to it all.
The beauty of the book is that you can enjoy the gentle
tales and be charmed by the oddities built within the stories or you can add
another dimension to the tales by actually understanding the specifics of the
theory of relativity and drawing the parallels between the stories and the
relativity. I had an inkling about the physics, having been exposed to it
during my undergrad days but I am obviously not an expert in the dark arts of
theoretical physics, yet I thoroughly enjoyed the book beyond just the charming
stories.
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