`A coherent account of almost everything of scientific significance that Einstein did…Unique and indispensable.’ Science

`The definitive life of Einstein.’ Brian Pippard, Times Literary Supplement

Here, surely, is the biography that Einstein would have wanted.’ Roger Penrose, Times Higher Education Supplement Bronk Professor of Physics at the Rockefeller University.Review from previous edition `A really superb biography of Einstein and all his work. About the Author: Abraham Pais is Detlev W. The book shows that these have been times of progress and stagnation, of order and chaos, of clarity and confusion, of belief and incredulity, of the conventional and the bizarre also of revolutionaries and conservatives, of science by individuals and by consortia, of little gadgets and big machines, and of modest funds and big money. But the advances have certainly not come smoothly. In alternating technical and nontechnical sections, this magisterial survey richly conveys what has been discovered about the constituents of matter, the laws to which they are subject, and the forces that act on them.

Along this incompletely traveled 'road inward,' scientists have established markers that later generations will rank among the principal monuments of the twentieth century. Between 18, the period he covers, the smallest distances explored have shrunk a hundred millionfold, Pais notes. Pais, a noted physicist, was personally involved in many of the developments he describes, and thus Inward Bound, like his earlier book, is filled with unique insights into the world of big and small physics. The book attempts to relate not only what has happened over the last hundred years but why it happened the way it did, what it was like for those scientists involved, and how what at the time may have seemed a series of bizarre or unrelated events, now with hindsight emerges as a logical sequence of events. In this groundbreaking new volume, Pais undertakes a history of the physics of matter and of physical forces since the discovery of x-rays. Reviewers hailed the book as 'a monument to sound scholarship and graceful style', 'an extraordinary biography of an extraordinary man', and 'a fine book'. Abraham Pais's Subtle Is the Lord was a publishing phenomenon: a mathematically sophisticated exposition of the science and the life of Albert Einstein that reached a huge audience and won an American Book Award.

Subtle Is the Lord by Abraham Pais