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Another book on Relativity for the layman! Why? What's different about it?
There have been many books on Einstein's theory, written by authors who are highly expert in this field and who have gone to an immense amount of trouble to explain it with great logical clarity, yet in simple terms that should be comprehensible to any reasonably intelligent person even if he has had no scientific education. And still these books have left most of their readers bewildered. Why? After discussions with dozens of students I think I can answer that question. The difficulties that really trouble the layman are not those which you would logically expect. The Relativity expert, no matter how diligent and sympathetic, is unlikely to discover these difficulties, even more unlikely to know how to cope with them.
I am definitely not one of these Relativity experts. What I know of the subject has been learnt laboriously from their works. But I think I can claim to be an expert in something different–in the art of teaching science to the non-scientist. That has been my job since 1950.
I introduced Relativity amongst my courses in 1958. And since then I have been teaching it to carpenters and clerks, housewives, miners and insurance agents–to all sorts of people who have no special qualifications for learning the subject (and others like teachers and professional engineers who have limited qualifications). At first I taught it badly. But the customs of the Adult Education world enabled me to learn by my mistakes.
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