God's thoughts

Albert Einstein became a house hold name in the early 1920s after proposing that the universe is curved, that gravity is not a force, as Newton believed, but a curved field (space-time) created by the presence of mass, as described by his general theory of relativity.

Einstein’s theory predicted that space should not be stable; it should either be expanding or contracting; however, and uncharacteristically, he refused to believe his own equations and instead he introduced a fiddle factor, a “cosmological constant” to keep his universe at bay  - like all astronomers for thousands of years, he had assumed that the size of the universe was not changing. It wasn’t until the late 1920s when Hubble showed that the universe was, indeed, expanding.

Later, Einstein described the cosmological constant as the greatest blunder of his career. Einstein had also refused to accept much of the implications associated with quantum theory. In fact, he spent the rest of his life looking for a "unified field theory," calling his search an attempt to understand "God's thoughts" when the cosmos was created.

Einstein never did complete his unified field theory, but his "cosmological constant," a concept he invented and then discarded, his greatest blunder, may prove to be a crucial component.

Drawing on newly discovered letters of Einstein, many translated here for the first time as well as countless interviews with prominent mathematicians, cosmologists, physicists, and astronomers, Amir Aczel takes the reader on a fascinating journey into the strange geometry of space-time and into the mind of a genius, and more so, perhaps into the heart of science's greatest mystery. Although Einstein's work requires familiarity with advanced mathematics, this makes only a minor portion of his book.