What to Tell Your Dog About Einstein

Regular blogging has been interrupted this week not only because I jetted off to southern MD but because this week was the due date for the manuscript of the book-in-progress. It’s now been sent off to my editor, and thus begins my favorite part of the process, the waiting-to-see-what-other-people-think part.

I’m pretty happy with it, though it’s a bit longer than it was originally supposed to be. This is no doubt partly due to the fact that I’m too close to the thing at the moment, and can’t see the obvious places where I could cut material, but that’s why professional editors get the big bucks…

Anyway, between travel, a sick SteelyKid, and a day-long giant sigh of relief, blogging has been light. I hope to have some substantive stuff next week, though. We’ll see. In the meantime, here’s the table of contents for the just-sent-in draft manuscript:

• INTRODUCTION 3
• CHAPTER 1: RELATIVE DOG MOTION: THE DESCRIPTION OF MOTION 10
• CHAPTER 2: FAKE PROOFS AND FAILED EXPERIMENTS: HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF RELATIVITY 39
• CHAPTER 3: TIME DILATES WHEN YOU’RE CHASING BUNNIES: RELATIVISTIC TIME DILATION 63
• CHAPTER 4: HONEY, I SHRANK THE BUNNIES: LENGTH CONTRACTION 91
• CHAPTER 5: SLOUCHING TOWARD INVARIANCE: SPACETIME INTERVALS AND DIAGRAMS 114
• CHAPTER 6: 299,792,458 M/S ISN’T JUST A GOOD IDEA, IT’S THE LAW: VELOCITY, MOMENTUM, FORCE, AND THE SPEED OF LIGHT 156
• CHAPTER 7: LOOKING FOR THE BACON BOSON: E=MC2 191
• CHAPTER 8: EVERYTHING IS RELATIVE IN THE MAGIC CLOSET: THE EQUIVALENCE PRINCIPLE 225
• CHAPTER 9: WARPING THE UNIVERSE: GENERAL RELATIVITY AND BLACK HOLES 263
• CHAPTER 10: EVERYTHING RUNS AWAY: GENERAL RELATIVITY AND THE EXPANDING UNIVERSE 303
• CHAPTER 11: THE UNIFIED THEORY OF CRITTERS: UNIFICATION OF FORCES 336

Numbers at the end of lines are the starting page number, of course. The whole thing is 365 double-spaced pages, including all the figures. Estimated word count is 91,000, down from about 97,000 before my last round of edits.

When I was reading through the whole thing, I was struck by the number of pop-culture references, many of them deliberate, some unconscious. These include explicit shout-outs to Terry Pratchett, William Butler Yeats, and Daniel Keys Moran, The Triplets of Belleville, and Casablanca and also more oblique references to Seasme Street, Buckaroo Banzai, The Princess Bride, among others. My brain is a weird place, sometimes.

There will almost certainly be a good deal of work before the book reaches its final form. For now, though, it’s off my desk, and I can catch up on all the things I’ve been neglecting during the recent big push to finish.