Bodanis, David. E=MC2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation (2000)
Vivid, readable and compelling

This is science history framed as a biography about Albert Einstein's famous equation, and an especially good read. Bodanis begins with Einstein in the Bern Patent Office in 1905, and then goes back in time to examine each of the elements in Einstein's equation in turn, starting with energy, followed by the equals sign, then mass, and then the speed of light (where I learned that the "c" is for "celeritas," from the Latin for "swiftness" and not for centimeters--silly me, I always thought "c" represented the speed of light in centimeters!) and finally, squared.

There are a number of stories woven into the narrative beginning with the story of Michael Faraday, who demonstrated the link between electricity and magnetism, and his mentor Humphrey Davy who tried to steal the priority from him. Other stories include that of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier whose fanatical insistence on exacting measurements led the world to the realization of the conservation of energy, a man who received his thanks by being beheaded during the French Revolution. And there is that of Ole Roemer, who with the help of Jupiter's satellite Io, was able to calculate the speed of light (despite denials from an embarrassed Jean-Dominique Cassini, who believed that light propagated instantaneously). There is the tale of Emilie du Chatelet, beloved of Voltaire, who persuaded everyone that Leibniz was right, that energy equals mass times velocity squared, not simply mass times velocity as Newton had it. Bodanis recalls how she became with child at age forty and feared for her life because the "Doctors of the time had no awareness that they should wash their hands or instruments." She gave birth but died of an infection a week later.

The biography reaches its climax in the Manhattan Project. Bodanis gives a short but compelling story about how J. Robert Oppenheimer guided the US project to success, and a corresponding story about how the German effort under the direction of Werner Heisenberg failed. Along the way we get glimpses of other scientists involved in nuclear energy and radioactivity, including Ernest Rutherford, Enrico Fermi, James Chadwick, Lise Meitner, Otto Hahn, Arthur Stanley Eddington and others. Fred Hoyle makes an appearance as does Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. Bodanis paints some of the scientists in a most unflattering light, especially Hahn and Heisenberg, while glorifying others, notably Meitner, Chandra and Fermi. His sketch of Oppenheimer is balanced and vivid.

Bodanis has the gift of making everything interesting, especially the personalities, but also the science itself. His description of the atomic bombs that were dropped on the Japanese cities and how they worked makes for compelling reading. In the Chapter "America's Turn" I learned that not everybody in the Allied Command agreed with Truman's decision to use the bomb: "Even Eisenhower, who'd had no qualms about killing thousands of opponents when it was necessary to safeguard his troops, was strongly hostile to it..." (p. 161).

Some of the most interesting writing is in the footnotes, beginning on page 237. Here I found a most elegant digression on the Uncertainty Principle (pp. 273-74). And on page 280, Bodanis makes a vivid distinction between the naked properties of U238 (fifty pounds together are warm to the touch) and U235 (fifty pounds together leave a crater). And on page 275 he recalls the use of female slaves by the Germans during WWII: "...the I. G. Farben combine purchased 150 women from the Oswiecim [Auschwitz:] concentration camp, after complaining about a price of 200 marks (then $80.00) each, and killed all of them in experiments with a soporific drug."

A number of black and white prints complement and enhance the text; an appendix, "Follow-up of Other Key Participants" shines more light on the scientists; and there is a useful 18-page "Guide to Further Reading" following the notes This is an highly informative excursion into the history of science made truly delectable by a gifted writer.

Great read. Felt a lot more informed about world now. Best part of the book is the ease with which author engages non science background readers. I was particularly impressed by some characters like Lise Meitner, Micheal Faraday etc. Thorouly enjoyed all through and strongly recommend everyone to pick this one.

This is one of the better explorations of Einstein's work on mass-energy equivalence, especially if you're less interested in the maths and more interested in what E=mc2 actually means. It's very readable, assumes little prior knowledge and does a great job of exploring the meaning of each element of the equation - what are E, m and c? He even explains where = came from.

Bodanis writes well and does as good a job of visualising and explaining some pretty abstract concepts. He wanders a little at times, and perhaps judges Werner Heisenberg a little more harshly than necessary, but it's still an outstanding book in a very crowded genre.

I'll say it - biographies are generally a bore, so you would think that a biography about a physics equation would be worse than televised Bingo. Instead, Bodanis presents a rather unexpected dive into an equation, its origins, its meaning, and its consequences. He delves into all sorts of interesting tangents, like the origin of the "=" sign, and explains everything in a down to Earth manner. I learned that this equation has a rich history of drama, war, and power. Dangerous covert operations were conducted just to keep the right kind of water out of the wrong hands. It turns out that this simple equation is a lot more interesting than it first looks.

I recommend this book for anyone with a casual interest in science history.

This is a book of a different sort. I tend to lean more towards short stories and fantasy, but this author proved he could capture my attention with science. The main reason for his success was that this book is not about complicated math and physics only an honor student can comprehend. This book is about the stories of the people who contributed to Einstein's development of his theory. Bodanis takes each portion of the equation "E," "m," "c," "2," and even the "=" and he tells how someone in history thought of it and pushed the world a little closer to Einstein's theory, until ultimately Einstein himself pulled it all together. At the same time Bodanis draws you in to the lives of these contributors; the world around them and why their discoveries were important. You do not have to be a scientist to understand this book, but you will walk away from it with a better understanding of the equation.

The book is definitely for non-physicists and it takes a new approach to describing the equation, the Theory of Relativity (General and Special), and how the equation is applied. The first section takes each of the components of the equation and gives a brief history, often by way of a scientist who worked on that particular component. The next sections follow the "life" of the equation from its early days through current applications - from discussions of space-time to the atomic bomb to black holes to a mention of the unifying theory.

Having read several books on similar topics, I found this to be a fun and interesting approach. Given that it focuses on the people as well as the equation, and does not get to into the tech-y aspects of the physics and math behind the equation, it has more of a gossipy quality to it. Now, if you are looking for a "popular" book on physics that really gets into describing complex things for the (somewhat informed) masses, this book may not be for you. But, it you would like something that takes a light-hearted approach to how the universe works, give it a try.

You may even get an evil chuckle out of seeing that Otto Hahn "lost" his element on the periodic table and Lise Meitner got one!

This book is not what's advertised. It's mostly (counting pages) about the building of the first nuclear bomb. If you're into war history, you may like this book. If you want to learn about the equation E=mc^2, try reading a real science book. Which this is not.

The author writes like an outsider looking in. I didn't feel like he had a firm grasp of the physics. He uses really poor analogies to try and describe the physics to the layperson instead of just explaining the physics like it is. Such half-wrong analogies are worse than useless because it later takes time to cure the lay reader of the resulting misconceptions. Why plant them in the first place?

The book even ends on an anti-intellectual tone, where it's claimed Einstein was a "profit" bringing down knowledge from "on high". This is the absolute opposite of the truth. Physics is accessible to anyone who is interested enough to spend the time and energy it takes to learn.

The author's apparent lack of expertise is also on display in the many subtle mistakes in the book. For example, he says that GPS satellites need a "relativistic fix" because the satellites are "traveling so fast". Sure, there's a 7 microsecond delay due to special relativity from their twice daily orbit around the Earth. But that's ignoring the larger, 45 microsecond delay due to general relativity from the Earth's gravity well! (source)

I would go so far as to say this book contains "scientism". I hate that word and it's almost exclusively used inaccurately by Creationists. But it happens to fit what this book has in it. It's claimed, over and over again, that the bombs dropped on Japan were somehow due to the equation. Which they weren't. The discoveries of radioactivity and the theory behind radioactive criticality had nothing to do with the equation. That equation explains where the energy comes from in terms of a conservation law (mass/energy). But it's ridiculous to say the equation "allowed", "enabled", or "caused" nuclear bombs to detonate over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since it's the thesis of the book, this poor philosophy is repeated throughout the book. Each time I read that the equation "made" something possible, or that something happened as "a result of" the equation, I wanted to stab out my eyes with an ice pick.

Call it 2.5 stars.

This book falls somewhere in no-man's-land for me. It simplifies science for accessibility, but in doing so it loses much of the power to awe that science has. The author starts by giving definitions for each part of Einstein's famous equation, telling what it is and its role in the formula. Then the middle third of the book goes into great detail about the development of atomic weapons: the first human-based application of the concept of turning mass into energy. The final section covers (very briefly) the main examples of nuclear fission and fusion in the natural world, from radium's discovery to smoke detectors to medical isotopes to the sun's awesome energy.

Unfortunately, these latter portions of the book are told with such simplicity that they fall flat. In his attempt to keep concepts simple, the author misses the chance to emphasize how really amazing E = mc^2 is. The wonder of science is stripped away, rather than accentuated by the tale being told.

I say the book falls in no-man's-land because, although accessible to any reader at any age or level of scientific knowledge, those interested in the subject and the science can surely find a better, more lively explanation and discussion of the subject elsewhere. It's not a bad book per se--it's just not a great one, either.

I'd give this a 3.5. I found the beginning to be a little slow, but once the book moved more into people's lives and the rush for the A-bomb things really picked up. One thing to note is the enthusiasm of the author. I never expected to see so many exclamation points in a book about science, but maybe that's just because I lack imagination. While at times Bodanis seems to lay it on a little thick, there are parts of the book in which I genuinely shared his enthusiasm. Learning about the practical uses of E=mc2 is something many books leave out, but understanding what exactly is going on inside a nuclear warhead really was fascinating. I also loved hearing about the torrid affairs that affected many of the contributing scientists, especially the ladies. I guess if you were free/rich enough to be a British female scientist in the 17th/18th century, you probably had the freedom to do just about whatever the hell you wanted (and boy did they!). Get passed the first 1/4 of the book and the ridiculous number of times this man says E=mc2 followed by an exclamation point, and you'll enjoy this book quite a bit.

It sounds like a book about physics, but it's really more about the lives of the scientists that revolved around this famous equation. Some of them -- Faraday, Lavoisier, Maxwell -- laid the foundations leading up to Einstein's pivotal theory. Some of them -- Oppenheimer, Chandrasekhar -- follow up on it. Bodanis acknowledges as well the accomplishments of women like Emilie du Chatelet, Lise Meitner and Cecilia Payne, all of whom faced additional challenges because they were women doing serious, sometimes crucial, work in a "man's world." The overall treatment creates a history, rather than a physics text. Bodanis explains basic theory in terms simple enough that you don't need a math or physics background to get the gist of it. And that's fine, because the focus here is on the progress (for good or ill) of the human species and our understanding of the universe.

This book is well written and the information is presented in an easily understandable manner. It felt like a kindly uncle was explaining physics to his not so bright nephew. I enjoyed it a great deal and felt I achieved a better understanding of the complex equation.

Bodanis' new look at an old equation resulted in a surprisingly fantastic book. Not only did it trace the ancestry of E=mc2, but it provided the best biography of women in the early sciences that I have read to date. Through reading Bodanis' perspective on the collaboration of a theory that allowed us to understand how energy turns into matter and matter into energy, I came to unexpectedly love scientists Emilie du Châtelet, Cecilia Payne, and others in deeper way than before. Though I already loved Voltaire, I love him even more after reading this book. Some of the stories told in this book read like a novel. These stories continue to stay with me and haunt me, taking up a lot of real estate in my brain. When a book has such a strong hold on me the entire time I am reading it and beyond, it is such a gift.

What an unexpected treasure. This is now an absolute favorite of mine!