THE breezy title of this book conceals the authors’ ambition. To get at the origins of E=mc2, the poster-child for Einstein’s special theory of relativity, they must delve into deep principles of science and wield a good deal of mathematics. They do it well, aside from a few too many digressions and an over-optimistic attitude that “you will have a go with the maths even if you have no prior experience at all”. It means some of the crucial exploration of relativity is tangled up with a simultaneous attempt to explain the basics of algebra.
Nevertheless, they have…
