In 1920 Scientific American offered $5,000 for the best 3,000-word explanation of relativity, and the world’s amateurs and experts alike took the challenge. Einstein’s Theories of Relativity and Gravitation collects the winning essay and the best of the rest, edited by J. Malcolm Bird into a many-angled portrait of the theory as intelligent readers first grasped it.
The variety of approaches is the charm: everyone from engineers to philosophers has a go at the fourth dimension. Download the free EPUB and watch a civilisation learn relativity in real time.