This week I'd like to study E=mc2

I mean the great book by that name which finally makes everything stunningly clear.

History of me and E=mc2:
I started trying to understand it my first semester in college (1954) with one of the first paperbacks ever published: George Gamow's  One, Two, Three...Infinity and never got it. And I would squint and think hard and write down equations on a notepad as I read. Then give up. Then try again. That's a long time. Chances are good that you weren't even born when I started. Your mom, either. I even took some math and physics classes but honorably flunked out. It's just not what I'm good at. (I said less kind things to myself, about myself, back then.)

Nothing. Uh unh. I'd give up for a few years but then I'd try again. (I even dated physicists! With slide rules in their shirt pockets!) I thought terrible thoughts: Is it possible that the theory of relativity is actually boring? Hard to believe.

I even knew that E=mc2 wasn't really what made Einstein famous, it was something about the light from a star bending as it came past the sun, and how they had to wait for an eclipse. That's very interesting and unexpected and peculiar, but still....um, surely there was some significance to this I was missing. 

But who am I? Just someone with too many interests and too few IQ points, apparently. Those physicists I dated swore they understood it all, but didn't really try very hard to explain it to me. I was your average 18 yr old co-ed, and they didn't see that I needed anything extra, certainly nothing in my brain. (It was the '50's remember. Before Betty Freidan and Simone de Beauvoir.)

So you can imagine what I felt when I first found David Bodanis's book on a bookstore shelf and opened to the Preface. The first sentences in the book were these:

"A while ago I was reading an interview with the actress Cameron Diaz in a movie magazine. At the end the interviewer asked her if there was anything she wanted to know, and she said she'd like to know what E=mc2 really means. They both laughed, then Diaz mumbled that she'd meant it, and then the interview ended.
   "You think she did mean it?" one of my friends asked, after I read it aloud. I shrugged, but everyone else in the room -- architects, two programmers, and even one historian (my wife!) -- was adamant. They knew exactly what she intended: They wouldn't mind understanding what the famous equation meant, too."

Well, I'm here to say I love David Bodanis, have been through this book countless times, collar innocent bystanders by reading to them from its pages, can't fall asleep when I take it to bed at night because it's so astonishingly interesting and lucid. I've started cartooning it so I can teach it to my very curious almost-7-year-old grandson - and I can do it! The cartooning that is. :-)

Okay, well I'm hoping this is a fitting opening post for School For Scanners (in response to the post I got on Facebook today -- see 'comments) And please leave some comments, too. We Scanners need to talk to each other.

In the name of the joy of learning, I remain

Your Fellow Scanner,

Barbara Sher
www.geniuspress.com

School For Scanners!

And yet another blog - but I wanted to hold this name because I've always wanted to have a school for Scanners, devoted to encouraging all the interests any Scanner might have -- and inciting them to have even more. And specialists can happily continue to go their own way. :-)