Relativity

I’ve been attempting to read Relativity, by Einstein. It’s subtitled “A clear explanation that anyone can understand.”

The thing is–no. It clearly is not an explanation everyone can understand. The preface clearly states, “The work presumes a standard of education corresponding to that of a university matriculation examination…” Despite that fact that I have, in fact, matriculated from a university (even if it was Whitewater), the book makes no goddamn sense.

At first, I blamed my severely lacking theoretical physics skills. There had to be something extremely complex that I was missing. After all, Einstein wrote the damn book–I’m pretty sure he knew the subject matter.

After reading the same sentences over and over for a while, trying to glean any sort of meaning from them, it occurred to me–Einstein knew what he was talking about; the guy who translated the book from German didn’t know his ass from the 2×4 I want to beat him with. His wording sounds like he tried to copy Einstein sentence by sentence whether or not English syntax fit. The result are unreadable third-of-page-long sentences that take four readings to become clear. Here’s an example:

If, in the pursuance of our habit of thought, we now supplement the propositions of Euclidean geometry by the single proposition that two points on a practically rigid body always correspond to the same distance (line-interval), independent of any changes in position to which we may subject the body, the propositions of Euclidean geometry then resolve themselves into propositions on the possible relative position of practically rigid bodies.

It’s not just me, here, right? In my opinion, that literary abomination ought to be split into a bare minimum of two sentences.

The copy I have came from a used bookstore. It’s the 15th edition, published in 1961. I’m going to pick up a new copy, preferably one translated in the current century.

Hopefully the guy who translated my current copy is long dead.