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The Road to Relativity: The History and Meaning of Einstein’s “The Foundation of General Relativity”
by Hanoch Gutfreund and Jürgen Renn
Princeton University Press, 2015 (($35))
Any devotee of Einstein will relish the chance to parse this annotated facsimile of the physicist's original manuscript on general relativity. The authors provide a full English translation and painstakingly explain, page by page, Einstein's text and equations, which lay out his theory and the path he took to derive it. Their cogent descriptions and the accompanying illustrations and documents open a fascinating window onto Einstein's otherwise inaccessible opus.
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