How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet and Deciphered the Universe
Thomas Levenson: Hunt for Vulcan (2015, Head of Zeus)
224 pages
English language
Published Sept. 6, 2015 by Head of Zeus.
"The captivating, all-but-forgotten story of Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and the search for a planet that never existed."--Amazon.com.
Feels like an episode of Cosmos narrated by Neil deGrasse Tyson
In The Hunt for Vulcan, Thomas Levenson, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tells us a lot more than the forgotten story of Vulcan. He has written an engaging, fascinating and fast-paced book, a delightful story for anyone interested in science and/or history of science.
This was good, and very interesting. While it's still looking and comparing Newtonian physicist with Einstein's relativity, it's just focusing on one particular bit, and going into more detail of that - we go from the finding of the theory of gravity, use it to explain certain issues in the solar system by actually predicting and then finding another planet, but then figuring that answer is the answer to yet another problem, the problems with the orbit of Mercury in the math. But another planet, named Vulcan (as in the title), wasn't the problem here, and it took a while for plenty of scientists to finally let that sink in. Then comes Einstein, and his general theory of relativity gives the answer to it. It was good, thorough, but short and to the point.
