One of the pop-physics books I’ve read recently was Amanda Gefter’s much-discussed Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn. I was going to post a review of it back in March, but literally the day I was planning to write it, I got email from an editor at Physics Today asking if I had any books I’d like to review for them. So it ended up there instead of here:
Amanda Gefter’s Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn comes with a super-sized subtitle: “A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything.” It’s a mouthful, but also rather fitting for a book that manages to be many things simultaneously. The book is a personal memoir, a popular-level introduction to cosmology, a collection of interviews with a host of major figures in theoretical physics, and a self-referential story of how it came to be written. It’s heady mix that occasionally threatens to fly apart at the seams, but Gefter holds it all together, and the end result is thoroughly charming.
Unfortunately, the review is paywalled at the moment. They do, however, offer a “preview” function that as it turns out displays all but the last paragraph or two of the text, so you can get a pretty good idea of what I thought of the book and why…