I took no formal physics classes in high school, so it feels intimidating to take on a book about the greatest physicist of the 20th century. But the more I read, the more I realize that I was unwittingly toying with physics in my mind, even as a teenager. In chemistry class, for example, as I was learning about atoms and electrons and their orbits, I wondered how scientists knew that such tiny particles existed and what they looked like, since they were too tiny to be seen. Einstein provided the proofs of their existence. Regarding relativity, I remember taking a train trip with the ballet company and conducting an experiment. I wanted to know if I jumped on the train and could stay in the air long enough, if the train would move out from beneath me so that I would land behind where I jumped originally. It seemed not, though I wasn’t certain that it wasn’t because I couldn’t stay in the air long enough.
Einstein provides me with an answer.
