PHYSICS: E=MC2 BY DAVID BODANIS

Physics=MC2 by David Bodanis



Physics: E=MC2 by David Bodanis

Introduction

The book E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation is written by David Bodanis. The book was published by Berkley Trade in 2001 and consists of 337 pages.

In this book, David Bodanis offers an easily clutched gloss on equation. Mass, he writes, "is simply the ultimate type of condensed or concentrated energy," whereas the energy "is what billows out as an alternate form of mass under right circumstances (Bodanis, 2006).

Introduction to the book

Most people know that this celebrated equation has something to do with the theory of relativity of Einstein, but most scientists do not know what it means. This work of science is very meaningful, but somewhat limited to popular science, and adorns with anecdote and biography, that the equation and its place in history is lost. Oxford, professor of Bodanis (The Secret Family) shows what happened to Einstein on the road to discovery, which scientists made others to carry out and how the equation created the atomic bomb. The second part deals separately with the components of the equation (E = mc, and "square"), meaning that physics covers 18 and 19 century. "" E "is for Energy" opens with Michael Faraday, whose unusual religious beliefs helped him discover that electricity and magnetism were the same strength. "'M' is for Mass" brings French chemist Lavoisier, who established the law of conservation of matter.

Bodanis then turns to Einstein's life and work. The middle third of the book covers the exploration of the atom and the manufacture of the atomic bomb, the cast of characters here includes Marie Curie, Lise Meitner and Enrico Fermi. A final section considers how E = mc2 powers the sun, and how our sun and all others will eventually run out of gas. Capsule biographies here include a share of the English astronomer Cecilia Payne, who would not let institutional sexism prevent him from finding the hydrogen in the sun. Bodanis's writing accessible to the point of quackery: seek and deserve many readers who do not know physics.

The analysis of the book

This is a book about a mathematical formula that most people - even those that are science-phobic - can recite, but almost no one can explain in the least degree of consistency. If pressed for details, many of us may draw a straight line between the small stroke of genius Albert Einstein and the detonation of nuclear weapons half a century later in the desert of New Mexico and on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That being the case, the formula E = mc2 evokes conflicting ideas about its meaning as a scientific device. We might think, first, the young Einstein, toiling away as a patent clerk in Switzerland frustrated, write a short document that breaks the science of physics with only five symbols.

Viewed this way, the formula helps us tell a heroic story about the ways in which outsiders and misfits often contribute unexpectedly in the ...