Both Baum and Sheehan and I drew heavily on the work of the historian Robert Fontenrose, whose paper on the claims of Vulcan sightings is the comprehensive guide to the professional and popular accounts of the pursuit of the hypothetical planet in the second half of the nineteenth century. Finally, N. T. Roseveare’s Mercury’s Perihelion is a meticulous technical account of the different explanations proposed for Mercury’s orbit from the discovery of the excess perihelion advance to Einstein’s ultimate solution—and beyond, to proposed and (so far) unsuccessful attempts to construct alternatives to general relativity with which nature agrees.
On Albert Einstein and the path to general relativity, I owe many debts—please see the acknowledgments for those who shared their time with me over many years’ obsession with this extraordinary figure. In preparing this account, three books were especially helpful. The first is what remains, after more than three decades, the best one-volume technically literate biography of Einstein, Abraham Pais’s Subtle Is the Lord. Subsequent research by scholars working through the Einstein papers has turned up a significant amount of new information on the precise development of Einstein’s thinking on a number of topics, but Pais’s work remains the essential starting point for any comprehensive consideration of his friend’s full range of scientific inquiry and achievement. Albrecht Fölsing’s Albert Einstein is an exemplary account of the life, and it offers a version of the scientific journey that is much more accessible than Pais’s. Similar in scope, Walter Isaacson’s Einstein is both the most up to date and the most fun to read of the major popular biographies; if you’re not looking for a mathematical introduction (go to Pais for that), this is where you start an Einstein journey.
Finally, there are two more books that I relied on very heavily, both mine. The research that enabled me to write Newton and the Counterfeiter and Einstein in Berlin came into play here, and as noted earlier, passages in Chapter One, Part Three, and the Postscript first appeared in different forms in those works.
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