The Road to Relativity

"The feeling a physicist has in reading Einstein's handwritten manuscript on general relativity must be like what a pianist would feel upon seeing a draft of Bach's Goldberg Variations. What kind of human creativity can produce something like this? Gutfreund and Renn provide the context for the paper, and the English translation enables readers not fluent in German to see it as a whole. This book is a little treasure."--Jeremy Bernstein, Aspen Center for Physics "We have in The Road to Relativity an approachable, precise, and riveting account of one of the great intellectual voyages of the last hundred and fifty years. I commend this book to anyone fascinated by gravity and the shape of the universe, to be sure, but also to anyone passionate about one of the great odysseys of modern science."--Peter Galison, Harvard University "Gutfreund and Renn have compiled a wonderful book, a real primer to Einstein's long and complex journey to the general theory of relativity. In this well written distillation of several decades of historical-scientific scholarship, we find not only Einstein's own papers, concisely and clearly explained, but also a rich tapestry of the contextual background to the revolutionary transformations in theoretical physics initiated by an entire generation of scientists in the early twentieth century."--Diana Kormos Buchwald, Einstein Papers Project, Caltech "This book takes you on a wonderful journey of discovery. Its centerpiece is Einstein's handwritten exposition of the general theory of relativity, written shortly after the decisive breakthrough of November 1915. In their splendid introduction and insightful commentary, Gutfreund and Renn tell the story of how Einstein found his new theory of space-time and gravity, making both the theory itself and Einstein's arduous path to it come alive for general readers."--Michel Janssen, University of Minnesota "This is a lovely book and an excellent way to mark the centennial of Einstein's general relativity. The facsimile reproduction of Einstein's manuscript is wonderful to behold, and Gutfreund and Renn have done a superb job of guiding nonspecialists through Einstein's argument and placing the work in a broader intellectual and historical context."--David Kaiser, author of How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival "The centenary of Einstein's theory of gravitation is a fitting moment to recommend one of the greatest landmarks in the history of physics. The historical introduction and page-by-page annotations provide a careful narrative of Einstein's path from special to general relativity."--Michael D. Gordin, author of Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War