Loving Faster than Light
Romance and Readers in Einstein's Universe
In November 1919, newspapers around the world alerted readers to a sensational new theory of the universe: Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. Coming at a time of social, political, and economic upheaval, Einstein's theory quickly became a rich cultural resource with many uses beyond physical theory. Media coverage of relativity in Britain took on qualities of pastiche and parody, as serious attempts to evaluate Einstein's theory jostled with jokes and satires linking relativity to everything from railway budgets to religion. The image of a befuddled newspaper reader attempting to explain Einstein's theory to his companions became a set piece in the popular press.
"Loving Faster than Light" focuses on the popular reception of relativity in Britain, demonstrating how abstract science came to be entangled with class politics, new media technology, changing sex relations, crime, cricket, and cinematography in the British imagination during the 1920s. Blending literary analysis with insights from the history of science, Katy Price reveals how cultural meanings for Einstein's relativity were negotiated in newspapers with differing political agendas, popular science magazines, pulp fiction adventure and romance stories, detective plots, and esoteric love poetry".Loving Faster than Light" is an essential read for anyone interested in popular science, the intersection of science and literature, and the social and cultural history of physics.
Reviews
"'Loving Faster than Light' is a very well-written, insightful examination of one of the essential problems of the history of science – how does elite, esoteric knowledge get read, used, modified, and owned by those outside the professional scientific community? Katy Price focuses on one of the defining scientific ideas of the twentieth century – relativity – and skillfully demonstrates the many genres and styles through which it was adopted and changed. An excellent book that brings together a number of disciplinary approaches" – Matthew Stanley, New York University
"In this witty and often lyrical book, Katy Price recaptures the heady moment when the public first learned of Einstein's revolutionary vision of the cosmos. She shows how ordinary people made sense of the theory of relativity by thinking through its implications for their own concerns – about social status, money, gender, romance, and more. Price's literary sophistication offers historians an innovative model for reading popular science. In the tradition of James Secord's 'Victorian Sensation', this book breaks new ground for the history of science and its publics" – Deborah R. Coen, Barnard College, Columbia University
"'The latest craze is Mr. Einstein's Relativity Theory', D. H. Lawrence remarked in 1923; 'everybody catches fire at the word Relativity'. Katy Price reveals just how far and how fast – and how strangely – that fire spread through the 1920s and beyond. Examining, in her words, how 'Einstein's relativity entered British fiction as a social phenomenon, like shorter dresses or the telephone', 'Loving Faster than Light' offers a wide-ranging and fascinating exploration of the popular culture of the time" – Randall Stevenson, University of Edinburgh
