“Whereas Newton thought that gravity was a force, Einstein showed that gravity arises from the shape of space-time,” explains Encyclopedia Britannica. Instead, it’s a concept that explains the geometric nature of gravity. (Or maybe it is, and my high school science classes were woefully inadequate?) General relativity can’t be summed up in one pithy sentence like Newton’s first law of motion-an object at rest stays at rest, and an object in motion stays in motion. This seems like a basic question, but it’s not. So, here are the answers to some of the biggest questions I had: HISTORICAL REFERENCES IN A BEND IN THE STARS EXPLAINED WHAT IS EINSTEIN’S THEORY OF GENERAL RELATIVITY?

(More on that later.) My only quibble with A Bend in the Stars is that it doesn’t have an afterword in addition to Barenbaum’s Q &A explaining the science or history in the book in more detail, and I had a lot of questions by the time I finished reading. After an incident involving a dead Russian, Miri sends Baba away while she sets out to retrieve her brother so they can all flee Russia together.Ī Bend in the Stars is a good book. Meanwhile, Miri and their grandmother, Baba, face increasing tensions at home in Kovno. The professor, Vanya hopes, will take pictures of the eclipse for Vanya to measure.

So, Vanya voluntarily joins the army so he can be near the port where a professor from America is supposed to arrive. But before the eclipse arrives, WWI breaks out. (Einstein’s initial calculations were incorrect.) In order to test the theory, however, Vanya needs to measure “the bend in the stars” in photographs he hopes to obtain of an upcoming eclipse. Vanya is on the brink of fixing Einstein’s field equations for general relativity. The book begins in 1914, just before the start of WWI. A Bend in the Stars by Rachel Barenbaum is about Vanya, a physicist on a quest to prove Einstein’s theory of general relativity, and Miri, Vanya’s sister and Kovno’s first female surgeon.