Ray Monk in London Review of Books:
‘Why is it that nobody understands me and everybody likes me?’ Albert Einstein’s question, quoted in the New York Times in 1944, acknowledges the great mystery of his celebrity. He was a popular, instantly recognisable figure during his lifetime, and has remained so more than seventy years after his death. Yet the theory of relativity, the work for which he is best known, is still, more than a hundred years after its formulation, beyond the grasp of all but a tiny minority.
Many attempts have been made to explain relativity to non-scientists, among them several by Einstein himself, beginning with Relativity: The Special and General Theory (1916, first published in English in 1920). It is still in print today, though despite having had so many readers it has not succeeded in persuading the general public to abandon fundamental intuitions about space, time, mass, motion and gravity in favour of the deeply counterintuitive view of the physical world put forward by Einstein. Our minds and imaginations remain stubbornly Newtonian. Most of us find it hard to shake the instinctual belief that an apple falls to the ground because it is pulled there by the force of gravity, the same force that keeps the planets in their orbits.
More here.
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