Abstract

Early in my college career, I was perusing the science section of my favorite bookstore in Albuquerque —the Living Batch, where the really smart hippies hung out—when my eye was caught by the spine of a little paperback called The Universe and Dr. Einstein. Priced at ninetyfive cents, it promised to be “the clearest, most readable book on Einstein’s theories ever published.” On the cover was a tantalizing portrait of a well-tanned Einstein, his wild shock of hair blowing in the cosmic wind. Behind him loomed the night sky, shining with constellations and mathematics. This was clearly the man who knew the answers and they would be imparted to me, a mere humanities major, in a book that was only 118 pages long. I bought it on the spot