Book Review
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Physics in Perspective
Book Review Jonathan Lyonhart*
Ron Cowen, Gravity’s Century: From Einstein’s Eclipse to Images of Black Holes, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019, 192 pages, $26.95 (hardcover) Ron Cowen’s latest work bookends ‘‘gravity’s century’’ between Arthur Stanley Eddington’s confirmation of relativity in 1919 and the success of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) in 2017, documenting a hundred years of trial, error, and unprecedented success for Albert Einstein’s theory of gravitation. Reading like a love letter—partly to Einstein, partly to gravity itself as if it were a Greek god personifying an idea—Cowen’s narrative is meticulous yet personal, broad with intermingling theory and human drama, yet narrow enough to focus that drama upon gravity and nothing else. Chapters 1 and 2 provide a useful summary of Einstein’s personal and professional journey to special and general relativity, with an especially helpful elaboration upon the principle of equivalence, not settling for just the usual elevator analogy but going above and beyond with a multiplicity of different explanations to hammer the point home. Cowen also provides the historical background leading up to the century, weaving lengthy tales of Pythagoras, Euclid, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Bernhard Riemann, Ja´nos Bolyai, and Nikolai Lobachevsky seamlessly into the narrative of geometry that culminated with Einstein. In less capable hands, the multiplicity of characters, concepts, and details would have been wearying, but Cowen’s retelling is so linear, relatable, and narrative-driven that he mostly pulls it off. I did not need to know that Riemann was shy, sickly, and had a ghastly fear of public speaking, but it certainly kept things interesting. Chapter 3 explores early attempts to confirm relativity, including unusually meticulous biographical descriptions of members from both the West African and Brazilian teams working with Eddington, as well as the minutiae of the technology employed, how it was shipped, and so on. Chapter 4 explores how Einstein realized his theory allowed for the gravitational collapse of the universe, and so postulated a seemingly ad hoc cosmological constant to maintain the peace. Georges Lemaıˆtre soon suggested the expansion of spacetime, and that if one * Jonathan Lyonhart wrote his PhD thesis (Cambridge University, 2020) on the philosophy of space and time in historical perspective, with particular reference to Isaac Newton’s view of divine space. He is currently working on a monograph about cosmology, religion and metaphysics, expected 2021.
Book Review
Phys. Perspect.
simply reversed that expansion they could postulate a singularity at the beginning of all things, which his opponents mockingly dubbed the ‘‘Big Bang.’’ Later it was realized that more mass was needed than was currently visible in order to prevent the dissolving of galaxies as they flung through space, leading to the postulation of an invisible, dark matter. In turn, a similarly ‘‘dark’’ energy was needed to explain why spacetime’s acceler
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