Volume 50, Number 17 · November 6, 2003
Clockwork Science
By Freeman Dyson
Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps:Empires of Time
by Peter Galison
Norton, 389 pp., $23.95
Today the name of Einstein is known to almost everybody, the name of Poincaré to almost nobody. A hundred years ago the opposite was true. Then, Albert Einstein was a newly appointed technical expert, third class, examining patent applications in the Swiss patent office in Bern, having failed in his efforts to find an academic job, while Henri Poincaré was one of the leading figures of the French scientific establishment, famous not only as a great scientist but as the author of popular books that were translated into many languages and kept the public informed about the dramatic progress of science during the early years of the twentieth century. A hundred years ago, Einstein and Poincaré were both working hard at one of the central problems of science, trying to find a correct theory to describe how fast particles behave in electric and magnetic fields. Poincaré had published several papers on the subject which Einstein may or may not have read. Einstein had published nothing.
Review, 3733 words
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