I found the selection from Hoffmann’s
Albert Einstein
to be a bit tedious to read. The thought experiments with the Aclab and the Gravlab were easy enough to follow, but the whirlwind tour of events that followed Einstein’s sudden notoriety were a little less easy to follow. Having these accounts written seems more worthwhile to me from a history of science standpoint than, for example, learning about Einstein’s music room in an apartment where he lived for a time; these accounts are either consequences of or lead to the scientific revolution that Einstein presented.I found it interesting that Einstein played an important role of the development of quantum mechanics, yet he eventually denied that it was true, reflected in his now well known phrase, "God does not play dice."
Skimming over Ferris’ The Red Limit, it looked liked it would be a easier selection to read (partially because of its larger print). It also covered topics that, though still difficult to grasp (like the extreme distances between galaxies in an expanding universe), are easier to understand than, say, quantum mechanics.
The materials covered in The Red Limit overlap with the materials I am covering in my Astronomy 103 lecture (in fact, I think our professor for Astro 103 showed as slides some of the pictures that appear in
The Red Limit
).I personally found The Red Limit to be vastly more interesting than any of the other works we have read for the class.