Victorian Relativity

About this book

One of the articles of faith of twentieth-century intellectual history is that the theory of relativity in physics sprang in its essentials from the unaided genius of Albert Einstein; another is that scientific relativity is unconnected to ethical, cultural, or epistemological relativisms. 'Victorian Relativity' challenges these assumptions, unearthing a forgotten tradition of avant-garde speculation that took as its guiding principle 'the negation of the absolute' and set itself under the militant banner of 'relativity'.