Andrew Smith's Reviews > Light Falls: Space, Time, and an Obsession of Einstein

I recently listened to an audiobook in which singer/songwriter Paul Simon talked about how his father always felt that he was undereducated. Keep in mind, he was talking about a man who’d achieved a PhD. qualification late in his life. But I share that feeling with Simon’s father and with a greater merit. I was schooled at the local grammar school, and after achieving a set of very average O level results, I abandoned A level studies to start work at the age of seventeen. I picked up professional qualifications along the way, and yet I couldn't rid myself of the feeling I was undereducated. After forty years of working for essentially the same company (a bank that went through a number of mergers/takeovers during my time with them), I realised I’d had enough of them at the same time they potentially reached the same conclusion about me. We parted ways.

Ever since, through reading (and listening to) books, I’ve attempted to fill gaps in my knowledge. What could have made me a better manager/leader/innovator? I’ve consumed books about many successful people: famous politicians, brilliant businessmen, and other high achieving historical figures. Could I ever have been more than just an average sportsman? Ok, let’s binge on bio’s and technical instruction books. Oh, and what about the sciences, always a particularly weak area for me? After all, I’d given up on physics, chemistry, and biology very early in my scholastic life. Well, in truth, my reading in this area has been pretty limited, but at least my ambition to learn more led me to this book.

Of course I’d heard of the theory of relativity. Who hasn’t? But what does it mean? I really had no idea. Something to do with mass, light, speed, gravity, and the curving or warping of space I was to learn. All this with good dose of complex mathematics thrown in for good measure. It’s all very clever, though the detail really flew straight over my head. But just how Einstein develops and fine-tunes his theory (or really theories, as there’s also quite bit here concerning wider cosmological issues) over the course of a decade or more really is a good story, and very well told too.