e=mc2
A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation
Author: David Bodanis
I am always weary when I pick up books with pull-quotes of previous popular critics – like the John Polanyi’s from the Globe and Mail “Exhilarating. E=mc2 is to be treasured.” I cannot help but wonder if the book will live up to such blatant marketing-ploys promising instant enlightenment. The author David Bodanis, an academic at Oxford is able to deliver on those claims. His concise account surrounding the development of popular science’s biggest breakthrough of the 20th century; the preface details his muse of the book as Cameron Diaz – whom queried as to the meaning of e=mc2 in a television interview.
“It got me thinking. Everyone knows that e=mc2 is really important, but they don’t know what it means, and that’s frustrating, because the equation is so short that you’d think it would be understandable.”