Review: RELATIVITY: THE SPECIAL AND GENERAL THEORIES by Albert Einstein

Just a mention of the Theory of Relativity or of Albert Einstein is enough to scare most people. It scared me for a long time. When I finally read it, though, I found out it wasn't that scary at all. 

This is a short book, and entirely lacking in math until the end. That was my biggest fear; math has never come easily to me, and I just never learned to do anything beyond basic algebra. It turns out, though, that most of the book is a word picture, and is not that hard to follow.

I'm not saying that I'm as smart as Einstein. I'm saying that he communicated his ideas very clearly, which is also a sign of genius, since it doesn't matter what you think if you can't tell people. This is an idea that, like evolution, has been taken out of its context and applied where it was never meant to be. It's a foundational idea of Western culture, though, and as such needs to be understood. I recommend it.