The world-line. Albert Einstein and modern physics

This book is an entertaining and formula-free presentation of modern physics from the 19th century to present. The life of Albert Einstein and his scientific works are drawn as red fathom through the text. The author explains central terms and results of modern physics in populary-scientific form from the historical perspective. To the reader in humorous form an imagination is mediated how modern physics has been developed. We learn from the exciting effects of the ether, we hear from faraday and magnetic needles, from Maxwell's prediction of the electromagnetic waves, from heinrich Hertz and from the photoelectric effect. Was the Michelson-Morley experiment a measurement success or an unsuccess? Why has Einstein abandoned the ether? How has Einstein in the miraculous year 1905 revolutionated physics and why he has begged Newton for excusement? Exist atoms? What is motion? What is light and what is to be understood under ''now'' and ''here''? Light deviation or non-deviation? How act the tidal forces? And above all: How has Einstein answered these questions. We meet Poincare, Lorentz and Hilbert, Boltzmann and Bohr, Minkowski, Planck, de Broglie, Hubble and Weyl, Gamow, Hahn and Meitner, Kapiza and Landau, Fermi and many other famous scientists. What had Eddington against Chandrasekhar and what had Einstein against black holes? Why should space tourists and dream tourists make holiday not on the Loch Ness but on the safe side of a black hole? Why inveighed Pauli against Einstein? Is the concern with the atomic-bomb formula right? Smeared matter, big bang and cosmic background radiation, gravitational waves and double pulsars, the cosmological constant and the expansion of the universe are further themes, which keep the reader in breath and let no mental vacuum arise