Nearly half the essays in this book are about Einstein, and the way he searched for a unified Weltbild - a coherent image of all reality. His lifelong task as a scientist was to puzzle out the cosmic jigsaw. He succeeded in finding a link between the pieces labelled 'electromagnetism' and 'mechanics' and showed that the piece labelled 'gravitation' belonged next to the one labelled 'geometry', but he failed to fit them all together with a single formula. The advance of physics since Einstein's heyday has not really solved that particular problem, even though two new forces have been uncovered and one of them is closely connected with electromagnetism.

LRB 21 May 1987 | PDF Download