Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn: A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything

A wonderful journey, both personal and scientific

Amanda Gefter's book tells the story of her and her father's journey to understand the deepest mysteries of physics and existence. In many ways it's comparable to Jim Holt's book "Why does the world exist?" although Holt's book is bigger on philosophy while Gefter's is bigger on the physics. The major questions asked in both the books are the same: How did something arise from nothing? In Gefter's book the related question of what role observers play in the making of the universe also looms large. Gefter's style is highly accessible and entertaining and at times she sounds like a close friend telling you how exciting physics is. Her infectious enthusiasm for science and questions enlivens every page of the narrative. The book is really two books in one. The first part recounts the personal story of her and her father's thirst to understand the origin and meaning of the universe. Gefter's father comes across as a brilliant man, a non-physicst (although a medical doctor) with an unquenchable passion for deep scientific mysteries and a deep, thoughtful imagination. It's a quality that he seems to have passed on to his daughter in spades. He was the one who got Gefter interested in such questions and read physics books with her into the wee hours of the morning, he was the one who attended conferences with her - sometimes using dubious but harmless credentials - and he was the one who encouraged her to follow her heart, to switch careers and talk to the world's leading physicists purely out of intellectual curiosity. Conversations, phone calls and emails between him and his daughter make constant appearances in the book and it's obvious that without him Gefter might have possibly ended up doing something very different. Fathers like him should be cloned and presented to children as role models. The second part of the book - which is well-interspersed with the personal journey - contains the scientific meat. In it Gefter crisscrosses the country attending physics conf...