Reimagining Time by Tanya Bub & Jeffrey Bub

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

REIMAGINING TIME A Light-Speed Tour of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity TANYA BUB & JEFFREY BUB

Praise for TOTALLY RANDOM

A fascinating introduction to the core concepts of special relativity. The unique illustrated format and elegant writing will appeal to readers who have not encountered these ideas before — Chad Orzel, author of HOW TO TEACH QUANTUM PHYSICS TO YOUR DOG

A book about relativity that puts the pictures in Einstein’s head into the heads of its readers.

Like many people interested in the theory of relativity, the artist, philosopher and humorist Tanya Bub had never read Einstein's original work, somehow assuming she would be better off with more modern takes on the subject. But after idly clicking on a link to the 1905 paper Einstein had written when he was 24 years old – a first stab at explaining to the world his revolutionary ideas on space, time and matter – she ended up spending two years absorbed in his imaginative vision of the world.

What particularly struck her was that Einstein used words and maths to draw pictures in his readers’ minds. As she worked through his paper, she sketched in little diagrams and doodles to help her keep track of the thread of his argument and understand the rationale behind his equations. Soon her imagined scenarios became more elaborate, with props ranging from trains, mirrors and light guns to balloons, ice-cream cones and baseballs. Much to her surprise it turned out that the pictures could also generate numbers – the same values usually calculated with abstract mathematical equations. But here the pictures made intuitive sense because they came with a story.

In REIMAGINING TIME, Tanya Bub teams up with her father, the distinguished physicist Jeffrey Bub, to explain relativity in a way that’s never been done before. It’s a deliciously visual, wildly creative journey that reveals astonishing truths about the world we inhabit: time is relative, lengths get shorter with motion, the Universe has a speed limit, energy and mass are interchangeable, and gravity is the same thing as acceleration. The result: a quirky, funny accessible blend of science and art that goes to the heart of one of science’s most revolutionary discoveries.

TANYA BUB is the founder of 48th Ave Productions, a web-development company. She has degrees in philosophy of science from McGill University and fine arts from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver.

JEFFREY BUB is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland. He studied physics with David Bohm at Birkbeck College, London, and philosophy of science with Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos at the London School of Economics.

Tanya and Jeff’s first book together, TOTALLY RANDOM: Why Nobody Understands Quantum Mechanics (Princeton University Press, 2018), was voted best quantum physics book of 2018 by Ethan Siegel of Forbes magazine (‘If you ever wondered about quantum entanglement and why it's so weird, this book is perhaps the best, simplest explainer of how it actually works’).

Agent: Peter Tallack

Publisher: Yale University Press Publication: 15 April 2021 Length: 192 pages

All rights available excluding World English Language (Yale University Press), Korea (Darun)