It was 1733 when the poet and philosopher Voltaire met Emilie du Chatelet, a beguiling and married aristocrat who would one day popularize Newton s arcane ideas and pave the way for Einstein s theories. In an era when women were rarely permitted any serious schooling, this twenty-seven-year-old s nimble conversation and unusual brilliance led Voltaire, then in his late thirties, to wonder, Why did you only reach me so late? They fell immediately and passionately in love.
Through the prism of their tumultuous fifteen-year relationship we see the crumbling of an ancient social order and the...

In Electric Universe, David Bodanis weaves tales of romance, divine inspiration, and fraud through a lucid account of the invisible force that permeates our universe. In these pages the virtuoso scientists who plumbed the secrets of electricity come vividly to life, including familiar giants like Thomas Edison; the visionary Michael Faraday, who struggled against the prejudices of the British class system; and Samuel Morse, a painter who, before inventing the telegraph, ran for mayor of New York on a platform of persecuting Catholics. Here too is Alan Turing, whose dream of a marvelous...

"What Bodanis does brilliantly is to give us a feel for Einstein as a person. I don't think I've ever read a book that does this as well . . . Whenever there's a chance for storytelling, Bodanis triumphs." --Popular Science

"Fascinating." --Forbes

Widely considered the greatest genius of all time, Albert Einstein revolutionized our understanding of the cosmos with his general theory of relativity and helped lead us into the atomic age. Yet in the final decades of his life, he was ignored by most working scientists, and his ideas were opposed by...