Black Hole: How an Idea Abandoned by Newtonians, Hated by Einstein, and Gambled on by Hawking Became Loved
by Marcia Bartusiak.
Yale University Press, 237 pp., $27.50
The Hunt for Vulcan: . . .And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe
by Thomas Levenson.
Random House, 229 pp., $26.00
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid
in night:
God said, Let Newton be!—and
all was light.
It did not last: the devil, shouting
“Ho.
Let Einstein be,” restored the
status quo.
—Alexander Pope,
with a continuation by J.C. Squire
1.
On Thursday, November 25, 1915, Albert Einstein, no longer a patent clerk and by then a respected university professor, presented his fourth and final lecture in a series at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin.…