e=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation (Paperback)

The book's great strength is in its use of accessible examples to illustrate the science. I've struggled with descriptions of the theory of relativity before and lost them about the time that the train starts stretching as it passes the stationery observer. David Bodanis builds up visual examples with easy to follow logic. He has an instinctive understanding of the layman's instinctive 'difficult' questions that block their understanding and he does not shirk them.

I picked up on this book following its namecheck in Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything". Their styles are similar and if you liked that you will like this.

Basically I hated this book. It's explanations are often wrong and always awkward, which is especially annoying as there are many good books out there (e.g. books like 'Science Matters'). His biographies are glancing and one dimensional and again so often wrong and misleading. Do not buy this book.

When you read the Preface of this book, the author tells us he was inspired to write it, following a comment made by a Hollywood starlet in a movie magazine. This sets the tone for the rest of the book. Pure flim flam.

The Bodanis approach includes giving us salacious details on the love life of Voltaire's mistress. His dumbing down of basic chemistry includes a description of Lavoisier's oxidation experiments as "some of the gases must have flown down and stuck to the metal".

With the speed of light as the critical element to his story he persists throughout the book in giving its speed in miles per hour (670 million). To impress us he squares it and gives us all the zeroes. Wouldn't he be doing everybody a favour if he introduced scientific notation and even occasionally referred to the International System for units of measurement? After all, those French guys 220 years ago did come up with metres and kilograms, without which modern science would be impossible. Those relationships between mass, time and energy (which is what this book is meant to be all about) are unlikely to have been realized without the introduction of the metric system.

His description of radioactivity is almost comic when we have radiation "squirting out" of Marie Curie's uranium ores. We are told poor Marie's fate was sealed when "radioactive dust slams into the DNA of her bones". We are given no mention of her inhaling all the radon gas emanating from that radium she so famously discovered. It is the effects of this radon that is now generally acknowledged as the most probable cause of her death.

In many places in the book he confuses nuclear fission and fusion, at one point drawing similarities between the processes at work in a star and what makes a uranium bomb work. For example, he writes "our sun explodes the equivalent of many millions of such bombs every second"

The most fundamental fallacy in the book is the way Bodanis links directly Einstein's equation of 1905 and the unleashing of man-made nuclear energy in the early 1940's. The Special Theory of Relativity of which the famous equation is central had nothing to do with the development of the A-Bomb. The essence of Einstein's argument (and equation) is that energy has inertia, and inertia has energy. There was no reference in his work as to how the energy may be released; yet Bodanis persists in referring to "the full power of Einstein's equation" when he talks about the events of 1905.

Glaring contradictions are found throughout the book. On page 169 Bodanis writes " when that great mushroom cloud appeared E=mc^2's first work on planet Earth was done". A chapter or so later when talking about natural process at work within the earth he gives us " Volcanoes exploded upward - powered by the constant E=mc^2 derived heat beneath".

The sad irony of this book is seeing a significant topic dealt with in such a lightweight manner. Worthwhile (and readable) science books for general audiences do exist. The superficial, error-ridden and vacuous crassitude of this book is most disappointing.