penguin classics

RELATIVITY

albert einstein

, one of the greatest thinkers of the twentiethcentury, was born in 1879 in Ulm, Germany, to German-Jewishparents. As a young adult, he moved to Switzerland, where he be-came a citizen and where he published his ﬁrst great theories in theearly 1900s, while working as a patent clerk. It was as a professorat the University of Berlin that he ﬁnished the general theory of relativity in 1915–17. Later, Einstein left Germany and came tothe United States to join the Institute for Advanced Study atPrinceton. In his later years he became more interested in social is-sues and penned several books, including

About Zionism

, on thestate of Israel. He died in 1955 at the age of seventy-six.Educated as a physicist at Cambridge University,

nigel calder

began his full-time writing career on the original staff of

New Sci-entist

magazine, and later became its editor. In 1966 he left thatjob to devote himself independently to his own writing. Calder’ssubjects have ranged from particle physics to social psychology.One of his many books is the best-selling

Einstein’s Universe

,which Penguin reissued in an updated form in 2005 in celebrationof the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s ﬁrst groundbreaking theo-ries. He lives in Sussex, England, with his wife, Liz, an artist andformer teacher of Italian.