violin, 8, 9, 21, 57–58, 163, 217, 228–29
W
Weber, Heinrich, 8–9, 16, 220
Weizmann, Chaim, 110
Whitehead, Alfred North, 104
Wien, Willy, 188–89
Winteler, Marie, 8, 11, 14, 228
Z
Zangger, Heinrich, 56, 70, 235
Zeitschrift für Physik, 127–28, 130, 134
About the Author
DAVID BODANIS studied mathematics, physics, and history at the University of Chicago and for many years taught the Intellectual Tool-Kit course at Oxford University. The author of many books, including the New York Times bestseller The Secret House and E=mc2, which was adapted as the PBS NOVA documentary Einstein’s Big Idea, Bodanis is also a futurist and business adviser. He lives in London.
Learn more at www.davidbodanis.com
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Footnotes
* The terms used by early scientists had subtly different meanings from what they have now. To Lavoisier and others in the late eighteenth century, it was natural to think in terms of matter, what we today would think of as the number of atoms in an object. Gradually that changed, and by the early twentieth century the concept was understood in terms of the conservation of mass. What’s the difference? “Mass” is most easily thought of as the measure of an object’s resistance to acceleration. A pen is easily accelerated, a big mountain isn’t, and so the latter has more mass. The twist is that the two different views are closely related: mountains are hard to accelerate not least because they have more atoms inside.
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* The appendix goes into this in more detail. In particular, we’ll see that it’s not just space that gets curved, but time as well.
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Einstein's Greatest Mistake Page 27