Opinion

E=MC²

Written by: David Bodanis
Published by Pan Books

In 1905, Albert Einstein, in an addendum to a larger work, with no fanfare at all, included an equation that has since become his greatest legacy, if only because it's the bit that everyone can quote. E=MC² has an almost simplistic feeling about it that makes even people who haven't the slightest understanding of the individual elements think that they 'get it'. Of course, the rest of the special theory of relativity is generally glossed over… For the purposes of this book, Bodanis tends towards the assumption that even the people who think they understand E=MC² really don't, and that it's his job to explain it to them.

Declaration of perspective: I'm not a scientist by any stretch, but I'm interested in the science going on in the world around us, and how it has been identified and described by the people who are. I'm assuming (possibly erroneously) that this makes me part of the book's target readership.

As pop-science books go, this is one of the least impressive I've ever read. The structural conceit that Bodanis adopts, embodied in the sub-title "A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation", is at least an original approach, giving him the opportunity to explore the antecedents not only of Einstein himself, but also of the individual components of the equation (what was understood by the term 'Energy' at the time, for instance), and then the application of the equation by Einstein's successors. The execution of this conceit, however, is absolutely dreadful.

To begin with, the path Einstein took towards ideas that would reshape the way the universe is understood is glossed over entirely - if this book is to be believed, while working in the Patent Office, Einstein took a few walks and then went home to write up the Special Theory of Relativity. Likewise, the growth of understanding energy, mass, and the speed of light, not to mention the '=' and '2' signs before Einstein's time is sketchy in the extreme, covering centuries of time with scant attention to context or the reader's intelligence. Lavoisier's ground-breaking experiments on the conservation of mass, for instance lead to the intelligent description that some of the bits of the gas in the air "must have flown down and stuck to the metal"! Even if this description is meant to convey the kind of perception of the time, wouldn't the addition of a simple line to put in into modern terms of understanding been useful?: "Today, this process is known as oxidation."

Possibly the most offensive part of this section though is the explanation of how the speed of light squared came to be the crucial factor. In essence, what Bodanis says is that Einstein settled on squaring C (or V as it was at the time), because if he didn't, he got the wrong answer. The circularity of his presentation is astounding - was this book never seen by an editor?

Countless further circularities and contradictions ensue: Bodanis seems to be equating nuclear fission with fusion when he discusses the reaction at the heart of the atom bomb and then goes on to discuss how the suns "explodes the equivalent of many millions of such bombs every second"; he discusses (another conceit) E=MC²'s 'work' throughout the latter stages of the book, in examples such as the exploding of the A Bomb and the functioning of a smoke detector, but becomes so wrapped up in this further conceit that he loses any sense of logic or context: For example, the explosion of the bomb over Hiroshima is described in the phrase "E=MC²'s first work on Earth was done", yet elsewhere describes the formation of volcanoes billions of years ago as having been 'powered by the constant E=MC²-derived heat beneath". It's almost as if he's suggesting that the equation wasn't true before it existed as a written statement - that Einstein 'invented' it the way someone might invent a new technology - yet is constantly confounded by the fact that if the equation is true, then it always has been.

This book also suffers from the same issues that tend to affect all pop-science books - that it has to gloss over some potentially interesting but tangential material (the dynamics of Michael Faraday and Humphrey Davey's professional rivalries, for example), but one of the biggest issues I have with the book is that of its 336 pages, the Appendices and Notes start at page 221. So over a third of the book is expansion and explanation of the other two-thirds. Why not simply have written the primary content more fully? Could it be that the author is keen for the book to be seen as a serious work of scholarship, and not 'just' a pop-sci shelf-filler? If so, he'd have done better by granting his readership some intelligence and not writing down to them.

One important thing does manage to cut through Bodanis' dreadful style and apparent mis-presentation of the science, though. Sadly, it's nothing to do with the equation that the book is ostensibly about, and everything to do with the glaring chauvanism and snobbery of the scientific community that for centuries overlooked, put down, and often blatantly stole the ideas of those whose gender or class were not of the 'right sort'. There's a book in there somewhere. One I'd rather be reading.