Stanley Matthew Livres

In 1916, Arthur Eddington, a war-weary British astronomer, opened a letter written by an obscure German professor named Einstein. The neatly printed equations on the scrap of paper outlined his world-changing theory of general relativity. Until then Einstein's masterpiece of time and space had been trapped behind the physical and ideological lines of battle, unknown. Einstein's name is now synonymous with 'genius', but it was not an easy road. He spent a decade creating relativity and his ascent to global celebrity owed much to against-the-odds international collaboration, including Eddington's globe-spanning expedition of 1919 - two years before they finally met. We usually think of scientific discovery as a flash of individual inspiration, but here we see it is the result of hard work, gambles and wrong turns. Einstein's War is a celebration of what science can offer when bigotry and nationalism are defeated. Using previously unknown sources and written like a thriller, it shows relativity being built brick-by-brick in front of us, as it happened 100 years ago.

The story of relativity - showing how science really works, and how Einstein became famous In 1916, Arthur Eddington, a war-weary British astronomer, opened a letter written by an obscure German professor named Einstein. The neatly printed equations on the scrap of paper outlined his world-changing theory of general relativity. Until then, Einstein's masterpiece of time and space had been trapped behind the physical and ideological lines of battle, unknown. Many Britons were rejecting anything German, but Eddington realized the importance of the letter: perhaps Einstein's esoteric theory could not only change the foundations of science but also lead to international co- operation in a time of brutal war. Einstein's name is now synonymous with 'genius', but it was not an easy road. He spent a decade creating relativity and his ascent to global celebrity, which saw him on front pages around the world, also owed much to against-the-odds international collaboration, including Eddington's crucial expedition of 1919 -- which was still two years before they finally met. We usually think of scientific discovery as a flash of individual inspiration, but here we see it is the result of hard work, gambles and wrong turns -- in this case subject to the petty concerns of nations, religions and individuals. Einstein's War is a moving human story of a pair on opposite sides of history who came together for science. It sheds light on science through history, and the physics is more accessible as a result: we see relativity built brick-by-brick in front of us, as it happened 100 years ago.

James Clark seemingly has everything that a man could ever want. His wife, Sarah Jane, is 40 years old but has long legs and a firm body. His advertising agency is bringing in lots of cash. And he has two wonderful children and a great home in the mining town of Charleston, West Virginia. But James is also the sort of man who brings his sister-in-law into his bed, flirts with other women and engages in unethical business practices. Even worse, he doesn't see anything wrong with his behavior. Sarah Jane urges her husband to go to marriage counseling with Pastor Douglas, but he refuses, knowing that she will never leave him. The pastor, however, ends up affecting the couple's relationship in ways they never would have imagined. As Sarah Jane works on her marriage, her husband focuses on work, filming a commercial for a coal company. Soon, he's not just fighting with his wife but also a conservancy group that is against everything that James and his clients represent. James can't believe it, but everything begins slipping away. To hold onto his life, he must do all that he can to redeem himself in "Making Love with God."

During the Victorian period, the practice of science shifted from a religious context to a naturalistic one. It is generally assumed that this shift occurred because naturalistic science was distinct from and superior to theistic science. Yet as Huxley's Church and Maxwell's Demon reveals, however, most of the methodological values underlying scientific practice were virtually identical for the theists and the naturalists: each agreed on the importance of the uniformity of natural laws, the use of hypothesis and theory, the moral value of science, and intellectual freedom. Matthew Stanley explores the overlap and shift between theistic and naturalistic science through a parallel study of two major scientific figures: James Clerk Maxwell, a devout Christian physicist, and Thomas Henry Huxley, the iconoclast biologist who coined the word agnostic. What Stanley's analysis of these figures reveals is that the scientific naturalists executed a number of strategies over a generation to gain control of the institutions of scientific education and to reimagine the history of their discipline. Rather than a sudden revolution, the similarity between theistic and naturalistic science allowed for a relatively smooth transition in practice from the old guard to the new