The popular reception of relativity in Britain
Presenter: Katy Price
Published: July 2013
Age: 14-19 and upwards
Views: 1346 views
Tags: Einstein
Type: Lectures
Source/institution: Royal Society
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How did it feel to open a newspaper in November 1919 to be greeted by headlines about ‘Light Caught Bending’ and a ‘Revolution in Space and Time’? Einstein’s relativity reached a wide public audience in the context of social change. The theory’s intense difficulty and abstraction could not prevent it from becoming tangled up with the aftermath of war, rising Labour power, new media technologies of cinema and radio, and changing sex relations. Journalists, science writers and authors of popular fiction rose to the challenge of negotiating the significance of this new theory ‘which everybody is talking about and nobody understands.’
