Loving Faster than Light
Romance and Readers in Einstein’s Universe
- Contents
- Review Quotes

A Note on Money
1 Light Caught Bending: Relativity in the Newspapers
2 Einstein for the Tired Business Man: Exposition in Magazines
3 Cracks in the Cosmos: Space and Time in Pulp Fiction
4 A Lady on Neptune: Arthur Eddington’s Talkative Universe
5 A Freak Sort of Planet: Dorothy L. Sayers’s Cosmic Bachelors
6 Talking to Mars: William Empson’s Astronomy Love Poems
Conclusion: Dreaming the Future
Notes
Bibliography
Index
“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.”
“‘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.”
“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.”
Literature and Literary Criticism: British and Irish Literature
Physical Sciences: History and Philosophy of Physical Sciences
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