Edwin E. Slosson's lively, conversational guide makes Einstein's relativity feel like a scientific adventure, beginning with the 1919 eclipse observations that appeared to confirm the bending of starlight and startled the world into rethinking Newton. Framed as a witty exchange with a skeptical reader, the book turns hard ideas into vivid puzzles: why motion can be known only relative to something else, why the ether seemed necessary and then impossible, and how experiments by Michelson, Morley, Lodge, and others helped upend older notions of fixed space. From train and ship analogies to mirrors, measuring rods, and clocks, Slosson shows how perspective alters size, shape, distance, and even time itself. He explains Einstein's 1905 breakthrough, including the constancy of light and the relativity of motion, and links it to Mercury's orbit and the bending of light by gravity. The discussion widens into non-Euclidean geometry, higher dimensions, Flatland, and the strange promises and deceptions of science, cinema, and psychic claims, all underscoring a single idea: common sense is not enough to map the universe. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.
