“Adesk or table, a chair, paper and pencils”, was what Albert Einstein asked for in 1933 when he took up his new job at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Then he remembered one last item: “Oh yes, and a large wastebasket, so I can throw away all my mistakes.” In the next two decades before his death in 1955 there were plenty of them, but he knew he had earned the right to make them as he searched for his holy grail – a unified field theory.
In this fascinating and elegantly written book, science writer Graham Farmelo explains that Einstein was seeking an ambitious new schema that united electromagnetism and general relativity, his theory of gravity, using only his imagination and mathematics. It was a project that left him increasingly out of step with younger colleagues who were busy exploring the new vistas of particle and nuclear physics opened up by experiments that eventually led, in the 1970s, to the so-called Standard Model that describes quarks, gluons, neutrinos and all the other particles and forces that act between them.
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