M. Nordmann has presented Einstein's principle in words which lift the average reader over many of the difficulties he must encounter in trying to take it in. Remembering Goethe's maxim that he who would accomplish anything must limit himself, he has not aimed at covering the full field to which Einstein's teaching is directed. But he succeeds in making many abstruse things intelligible to the layman. Perhaps the most brilliant of his efforts in this direction are Chapters V and VI, (...) in which he explains with extra- ordinary lucidity the new theory of gravitation and of its relation to inertia. (shrink)

The hour-galss.--Anomalies of the seasons and days.--The reform of the calendar.--The stars and the daughters of the sun.--The masters of time at work.--Einstein or Bergson?--Strange consequences of the relativity of time.