- See http:// en .wikipedia .org/ wiki/ Theory _of _relativity. This site is an excellent
primer on relativity, and has references that take you much deeper (click on the
links to the main articles). - B. Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (New York: Vintage, 2004), p. 502. This is an
absolutely wonderful book, as is another book by the same author that will be
referenced in note 7. Greene is a top-notch physicist and an expositor with a
sense of humor. Nonetheless, there are portions of the book that I had to work to
understand. This isn’t surprising; this stuff isn’t simple. As a local used-car
salesman frequently remarked in his TV ads, while pointing out the virtues of
a 1985 Chevy, “Flat worth the money!” - B. Greene, The Elegant Universe (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999). This is the first
of the two Greene books—it treats some of the same topics as Fabric, but goes
much more deeply into relativity and string theory. However, between Elegant
and Fabric, five years elapsed, and a lot happened in string theory, so a reasona-
ble plan is to look at this book first (after all, it was written first), and then follow
up with the other. - Greene, Fabric of the Cosmos, p. 352.
- I. Newton, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687). For obvious rea-
sons, everyone refers to it as Principia. You know you’ve encountered a mathe-
matical logician if you say “Principia” and he or she thinks you’re referring to
the classic work in mathematical logic by Betrand Russell and Albert N. White-
head—best known for the fact that it takes them eight-hundred-plus pages to get
around to 1 1 2. - See http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Kaluza. This was basically Kaluza’s one mo-
ment of glory. Like Cantor, he had a good deal of difficulty getting a professor-
ship in the German university system—despite Einstein’s support.
152 How Math Explains the World