EINSTEIN WROTE BACK: MY LIFE IN PHYSICS
Canadian edition
An entertaining memoir about the peculiar and competitive world of modern physics.
(Adapted from the publisher's book jacket)
John W. Moffat was a poor student of math and science. That is, until as a young man in the early 1950s in Copenhagen he read Einstein's famous paper on general relativity and Einstein's current work seeking a unified theory of gravity and electromagnetism. Realizing that he had an unusual and unexplained aptitude for understanding complex physics and mathematics, Moffat wrote two papers based on Einstein's unified field theory. Soon, he found himself being interviewed by Denmark's most famous physicist, Niels Bohr, and giving a seminar on unified theory at the Niels Bohr Institute. When he faced derision and criticism of Einstein's current research by the audience of physicists at the Bohr Institute, Moffat went home and wrote a letter to Einstein that would change the course of his life.
Einstein replied to Moffat and they exchanged a series of letters in which they discussed both technical matters relating to the scientific papers and their views on the current state of physics. This correspondence led to Moffat being interviewed by influential physicists in Britain and Ireland, including Erwin Schrödinger. Their recommendations resulted in Moffat being enrolled in the PhD physics program at Trinity College, Cambridge, the first student in the College's 400-year history to be enrolled without an undergraduate degree.
Moffat and Einstein did not continue their correspondence, as the great man died shortly after Moffat began his studies. However, Moffat continued, over the next fifty years, to modify and expand on Einstein's theory of gravity.
Einstein Wrote Back tells the story of Moffat's unusual entry into the world of academia and documents his career at the frontlines of twentieth-century physics as he worked and studied under some of the greatest minds in scientific history, including Niels Bohr, Fred Hoyle, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac, Erwin Schrödinger, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Abdus Salam, among others.
Taking readers inside the classrooms and minds of these "giants" of modern science, Moffat affectionately exposes the foibles and eccentricities of these great men, as they worked on the revolutionary ideas that, today, are the very foundation of modern physics and cosmology.
Buy the book | Published by Thomas Allen
REINVENTING GRAVITY
Canadian edition
FROM THE PUBLISHER
A bold revision of one of the most successful theories of all time: Einstein's general theory of relativity. Physicists have long known that something is wrong with gravity. Einstein's relativity and the theory of quantum mechanics are fundamentally incompatible, which has prompted the last 30 years of work in string theory and quantum gravity. However, John Moffat has identified a bigger problem: not only does Einstein's theory not work in the world of the very small; it does not seem to work in the world of the very large either. Moffat has developed a modified theory of gravity, or MOG, that can explain the behaviour of our universe as well as Einstein's, without resorting to dubious, yet long-claimed excuse for the existence of invisible "dark matter." Now, for the first time, Reinventing Gravity introduces general readers to Moffat's groundbreaking new ideas about the universe.
Buy the book | Published by Thomas Allen
U.S. edition
U.S. edition published by Harper Collins