Books: An Odd Litle Science Book

Way back in high school, I found a very odd book on relativity in the library. It was very thorough, getting right into the tensor math, but it was typeset almost like poetry -- one phrase per line, in a sans-serif font (though not Helvetica) -- and filled with surreal, Rudy Rucker-esque illustrations. I worked through all the math I could handle, but I didn't have enough tensor calculus to get through the whole thing.


A few months back, a science mailing list I'm on was in the middle of a big flame-war about relativity -- the usual "Einstein makes me uncomfortable, so he can't be right" sort of thing -- and I kept wishing I had a copy of the book around, as it was both the most thorough and easiest to follow non-textbook on the subject I'd ever run into. (Larry Gonick's chapter(s) on relativity in The Cartoon Guide to Physics were pretty good, but didn't get nearly as deep into the subject.)

Well, I was in Pages (a great independent bookstore in Toronto, which will unfortunately be closing its doors at the end of this month) looking for Neil deGrasse Tyson's new book, The Pluto Files (which I didn't find) and spotted a paperback that hadn't been there last time I was in: The Einstein Theory of Relativity: A Trip to the Fourth Dimension. I popped it open and immediately realized it was the book that I'd read way back then. I had forgotten the title and author's name, but there was no mistaking the format and illustrations.

It turns out it was written in 1945 by Lillian R. Lieber, with illustrations by Hugh Gray Lieber. It's definitely one of the oddest serious science books I've ever run into. In many ways, it feels like one of those books that tries to explain how quantum physics explains the author's favourite form of mysticism -- like the ones Fred Alan Wolf would put out -- with odd typography and illustrations (and USE of
CAPITALIZED WORDS), but it also completely ignores the old publisher's adage about "ever equation cuts your audience in half": by that rule, I must be the only person ever to have read it.

To give you a feel for the book, here is the conclusion, aka THE MORAL, typeset approximately as below:

Since man has been
so successful in science,
can we not learn from
THE SCIENTIFIC WAY OF THINGKING,
what the human mind is capable of,
and HOW it achieves SUCCESS:

I. There is NOTHING ABSOLUTE in science.
Absolute space and absolute time
have been shown to be myths.
We must replace these old ideas
by more human
OBSERVATIONAL concepts.

II. But what we observe is
profoundly influenced by
the state of the observer,
and therefore
various observers get
widely different results --
even in their measurements of
time and length!

III. However,
in spite of these differences
various observers may still
study the unvierse
WITH EQUAL RIGHT
AND EQUAL SUCCESS,
and CAN AGREE on
what are to be called
the LAWS of the universe

IV. To accomplish this we need
MORE MATHEMATICS
THAN EVER BEFORE,
MODERN, STREAMLINED, POWERFUL
MATHEMATICS.

V. Thus a combination of
PRACTICAL REALISM
(OBSERVATIONALISM)
and
IDEALISM (MATHEMATICS)
TOGETHER
have achieved SUCCESS.

VI. And,
knowing that the laws are
MAN-MADE,
we know that
they are subject to change
and we are thus
PREPARED FOR CHANGE.
But these changes in science
are NOT made WANTONLY,
BUT CAREFULLY AND CAUTIOUSLY
by the
BEST MINDS and HONEST HEARTS,
and not by any casual child who
thinks that
the world may be changed as easily
as rolling off a log.

Has anyone else ever seen this book?