Naples Daily News                                       

By KEN MOORE
Staff Writer

Produced and compiled by academics, "The Bible According to Einstein" is a down-to-earth yet thought-provoking tome that ingeniously relates modern scientific truths and theorems as they interact with mainstream religious philosophies.
    Surprisingly, there is more agreement than conflict between science and religion. And there is an abundance of comparisons to make even religious zealots comfortable.
    In fact, the book may do for popular science what the Bible has done for Judeo-Christian religions. This "bible" is even organized like the Holy Bible, with old and new testaments comparing chapters and psalms with modern science. The new book contains, for instance, the books of Darwin, Psalms, Prophets and others.
    Yet, this book which was scheduled for release on Sept. 30, is neither written by nor in any way representative of the work of the late Albert Einstein, who died in 1955 at the age of 76. But is does intersperse his brilliant scientific achievements, as well as those of other scientists, with popular religious beliefs.
    It also quotes Einstein: "Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind."
    So the book gives readers a truly dazzling juxtaposition of history, nature, laws and philosophy in an expository style of narrative that is sometimes poetic, often metaphorical and typically biblical.
    The old testament of this new bible narrates the story of genesis and the evolution of the universe. It begins with scientific and religious versions of how the Earth came to be -- science's Big Bang and the Earth's seven-day creation attributed to God.
    In the Bible: "In the beginning, the World was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep  .   .   .  "
    In "The Bible According to Einstein": "In the 'Beginning,' there was no beginning  .   .   .  there was no time and there was no space. The Universe was in a quantum state with wild fluctuations  .   .   .  "
    The book goes on to discuss the emergence of human beings -- religion's Adam and Eve and science's evolutionary process from which apes became man.
    Chock-full of profundity, one chapter cites the speed of light: "Thou shall never be a witness of the present, for the speed of light is finite. What the eye sees is in the past."
    To emphasize that: "And in 1960, it came to pass that, in a laboratory, two scientists measured the wavelength of some laser light  .   .   .  (and it) did agree with calculations from the Einstein theory. And a prophesy of a prophet was confirmed."
    That said, Chapter VI describes the discovery of a supernova, although the explosion in space just witnessed in 1987 had actually occurred 160,000 years earlier.
    Throughout, the book extols Einstein as a prophet of science.

"In the Beginning, there was no beginning  . . .  there was no time and there was no space." -- The Bible According to Einstein

    "And on March 14, 1879, in Ulm, Germany, Albert Einstein, the scientific version of a prophet and a saint, was born." Later: "Hence, in the span of just eleven years, much of the 'old testament' of physics was rewritten. Thus, Albert Einstein rewrote the gospel of Sir Isaac Newton  .   .   .  "
    Following the scientific psalms, the book offers up "The Ten Commandments of Science," citing nature, gravity, geometry, space, electromagnetism, electricity, nuclear physics, quantum mechanics and a plethora of scientific notions.
    In "The Final Word," the book offers: "So know the Universe as it be now. And know that it be vast and black. And know that it be full of countless galaxies but that most of it be void  .   .   .  "
    "The Bible According to Einstein" is, then, a mainstream work aimed at spreading the word of science much as the word of God was spread by the Bible.