Einstein: His Life and Universe
by Walter Isaacson
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Book Summary Information
Author: Walter IsaacsonEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Deckle Edge
Published: 2007-04-10
ISBN: 0743264738
Number of pages: 704
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
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Book Reviews of Einstein: His Life and Universe
Book Review: The man behind the science!
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a great biography of one of the greatest and most recognizable icons of our age. Since my early days in school I recognized the face of Einstein and knew that he was the smartest man in the world. I also knew the formula E=mc2 but had no idea what it meant, nor what it stood for except that it had something to do with the speed of light. It was a simple and easy formula to look at, and one that was easily memorized. I knew nothing of the life of Einstein or his real contributions to science.
I found out what E=mc2 was all about just two years ago when I picked up a book by David Bodanis entitled, "E=mc2, a biography of the world's most famous equation." I finally understood what this famous formula that I had memorized since an early age was all about. Now through Isaacson's biography of Einstein, I finally know the man!
The author has a great writing style that makes Einstein come alive through the pages. His writing captivates you, and you'll find yourself reading throughout the night. He not only explains how Einstein's mind worked; his early years; his marriages; his politics...but also delves into the science of Einstein. You'll get to finally understand his theory of relativity and what E=mc2 is all about. Being a science buff, this made this biography more appealing. I love discovering the mysteries of our universe, and who else to read than the man who discovered them? For example, Einstein's equations predicted that the universe is dynamic--expanding or contracting. This contradicted the prevailing view that the universe was static. In 1929 astronomer Edwin Hubble found that the universe was indeed expanding, thereby confirming Einstein's work. Einstein also predicted the `Black Holes'. We are still living in Einstein's Universe--his fingerprints are all over.
Einstein was a rebel and nonconformist from boyhood. Isaacson relates a story of the child Einstein crying when seeing a German army marching by in perfect synchronization. Nothing could be more horrifying to this fiercely independent mind than such mindless collective action. He once remarked in 1901, "A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth." He embraced a morality and politics based on respect for freedom of spirit and individuality. He was against violence and wars, and was against compulsory military duty. He resigned his German citizenship in order not to attend the military, and was for a long while a man without a country. He was stateless until 1901, when he was granted Swiss citizenship. Like Socrates, he referred to himself as a citizen of the world.
Tyranny repulsed him, and he saw tolerance as a necessary condition for a creative society. Though later in life he was associated with the atomic bomb, he never had anything to do with its development. True, his theories made possible the atomic bomb, but being mistrusted by the American government--wrongly accused of being a communist by the FBI, who had a long file on him--he was not included in the Manhattan project. However, it was Einstein who wrote President Franklin D. Roosevelt and persuaded him that the Germans might be developing an atomic bomb, and that the US should quickly develop one before them. Some historians believe that if it wasn't for Einstein, the US might have not developed the atomic bomb during World War II. But Einstein was wrong: the Germans were nowhere near developing an atomic bomb. He later stated that if he had known Germany wasn't going to be able to develop the atomic bomb, he would have never prompted the United States to develop this weapon of mass destruction.
Einstein was on vacation when he heard the news that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Japan. Almost immediately he was part of an international effort to try to bring the atomic bomb under control, forming the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists. He also warned that a World Government should be formed to keep nations in check. Einstein backed Oppenheimer and opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb, instead calling for international controls on the spread of nuclear technology. Einstein was increasingly drawn to antiwar activities.
What made Einstein come up with such out-of-this world theories that went against all known science at the time? In fact, he pretty much made Newtonian science obsolete. According to Einstein, his genius was due to his slow learning. Einstein used to say that his slow learning made him ponder over a problem much longer than the average person--much much longer! For example, he used to wander whether anything was faster than the speed of light; and what would a light beam look like if you could run alongside it? If light were a wave, then the light beam should appear stationary, like a frozen wave. Even as a child, though, he knew that stationary light waves had never been seen, so there was a paradox. He would spend entire days pondering this problem. Einstein also says that his fascination with a compass he was given as a gift when he was five years old made him inquisitive and scientifically minded. "What was this invisible force that was driving the compass needle to always point north?" he would ask himself. Einstein questioned conventional wisdom and marveled at mysteries that struck others as mundane.
Einstein became deeply religious at age 12, even composing several songs in praise of God and chanting religious songs on his way to school. This began to change, however, after he read science books that contradicted his religious beliefs. Later in life when asked if he believed in a God, he said that he believes in a God that would not punish his creation. He believed there was an "old one" who was the ultimate lawgiver. He did not believe in a personal God that intervened in human affairs but instead believed in the God of the 17th-century Dutch Jewish philosopher Benedict de Spinoza--the God of harmony and beauty. He wrote: "I'm not an atheist and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages....The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God."
Contrary to popular belief, Einstein did not flunk at math. In fact, he was a brilliant mathematician! Because of his exceptional math scores, he was allowed into the polytechnic. He was also not a mad professor who secluded himself in his lab. Einstein was in fact a playboy of sorts, and had many lovers. He is also believed to have fathered a few children he never knew about. There is also a popular belief that Einstein's wife, Mileva Maric, produced much if not all of his mathematics for his theory of relativity before their divorce. Read this book to correct misconceptions you might have had about Einstein.
The author describes Einstein's early marriage and his first daughter that till today no one knows who she is or how (and when) she died. The chapters on Einstein as a father and family man were fascinating.
An interesting and amazing fact is that Einstein could not secure a teaching job at a university for many years after he had discovered the theory of relativity and the formula E=mc2. Was it because he was a Jew? He was labeled as a bad teacher by many of his colleagues and former teachers. Another interesting fact is that Einstein did not win the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 for his work on relativity, but for his explanation of the photoelectric effect.
Despite his association with the Zionist cause, Einstein's sympathies extended to the Arabs who were being displaced by the influx of Jews into what would eventually be Israel. His message was a prophetic one. "Should we be unable to find a way to honest cooperation and honest pacts with the Arabs," he wrote Weizmann in 1929, "then we have learned absolutely nothing during our 2,000 years of suffering." If the Jews did not assure that both sides lived in harmony, he warned friends in the Zionist movement, the struggle would haunt them in decades to come. He was labeled naïve (Hardcover, p. 381). Einstein was later offered the presidency of Israel, but he refused it.
On a funny note, Einstein was asked to appear alongside actor Charlie Chaplin during the Hollywood debut of the film `City Lights'. When they were mobbed by thousands, Chaplin remarked, "The people applaud me because everybody understands me, and they applaud you because no one understands you." Einstein asked Chaplin, "What does it all mean?" Chaplin replied, "Nothing."
What was Einstein's biggest blunder? It was not the cosmological constant, as he once remarked. Einstein did not believe in quantum physics, and opposed this new and emerging science. Einstein would engage in a series of historic private debates with Niels Bohr. Through a series of sophisticated "thought experiments," Einstein tried to find logical inconsistencies in the quantum theory, particularly its lack of a deterministic mechanism. Thus his famous quote, "God does not play dice with the universe." To which Neils Bohr is famously quoted as telling him, "Einstein, stop telling God what to do!" In 1935 Einstein's most celebrated attack on the quantum theory led to the EPR (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen) thought experiment. According to quantum theory, under certain circumstances two electrons separated by huge distances would have their properties linked, as if by an umbilical cord. Under these circumstances, if the properties of the first electron were measured, the state of the second electron would be known instantly--faster than the speed of light. This conclusion, Einstein claimed, clearly violated relativity. Experiments conducted since then have confirmed that the quantum theory, rather than Einstein, was correct about the EPR experiment.
Einstein's other blunder was his obsession, beginning in 1925, with discovering a unified field theory--an all-embracing theory that would unify the forces of the universe, and thereby the laws of physics, into one framework. Einstein preferred simple, elegant theories to complex ones. No such theory has ever been found. However, many leading physicists today are trying to finish Einstein's ultimate dream of a "theory of everything."
Einstein is generally considered the most influential physicist of the 20th century. His face has become a symbol for genius; his name has become a synonym for genius. The author asks, "Would Einstein have been so famous if he looked different?" This is the man who once remarked, "Imagination is more important than knowledge." This is a book everyone should read!
Summary of Einstein: His Life and Universe
By the author of the acclaimed bestseller Benjamin Franklin, this is the first full biography of Albert Einstein since all of his papers have become available.How did his mind work? What made him a genius? Isaacson's biography shows how his scientific imagination sprang from the rebellious nature of his personality. His fascinating story is a testament to the connection between creativity and freedom.
Based on newly released personal letters of Einstein, this book explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk -- a struggling father in a difficult marriage who couldn't get a teaching job or a doctorate -- became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe. His success came from questioning conventional wisdom and marveling at mysteries that struck others as mundane. This led him to embrace a morality and politics based on respect for free minds, free spirits, and free individuals.
These traits are just as vital for this new century of globalization, in which our success will depend on our creativity, as they were for the beginning of the last century, when Einstein helped usher in the modern age.
As a scientist, Albert Einstein is undoubtedly the most epic among 20th-century thinkers. Albert Einstein as a man, however, has been a much harder portrait to paint, and what we know of him as a husband, father, and friend is fragmentary at best. With Einstein: His Life and Universe, Walter Isaacson (author of the bestselling biographies Benjamin Franklin and Kissinger) brings Einstein's experience of life, love, and intellectual discovery into brilliant focus. The book is the first biography to tackle Einstein's enormous volume of personal correspondence that heretofore had been sealed from the public, and it's hard to imagine another book that could do such a richly textured and complicated life as Einstein's the same thoughtful justice. Isaacson is a master of the form and this latest opus is at once arresting and wonderfully revelatory. --Anne Bartholomew
Read "The Light-Beam Rider," the first chapter of Walter Isaacson's Einstein: His Life and Universe.
Five Questions for Walter Isaacson
Amazon.com: What kind of scientific education did you have to give yourself to be able to understand and explain Einstein's ideas?Isaacson: I've always loved science, and I had a group of great physicists--such as Brian Greene, Lawrence Krauss, and Murray Gell-Mann--who tutored me, helped me learn the physics, and checked various versions of my book. I also learned the tensor calculus underlying general relativity, but tried to avoid spending too much time on it in the book. I wanted to capture the imaginative beauty of Einstein's scientific leaps, but I hope folks who want to delve more deeply into the science will read Einstein books by such scientists as Abraham Pais, Jeremy Bernstein, Brian Greene, and others.
Amazon.com: That Einstein was a clerk in the Swiss Patent Office when he revolutionized our understanding of the physical world has often been treated as ironic or even absurd. But you argue that in many ways his time there fostered his discoveries. Could you explain?
Isaacson: I think he was lucky to be at the patent office rather than serving as an acolyte in the academy trying to please senior professors and teach the conventional wisdom. As a patent examiner, he got to visualize the physical realities underlying scientific concepts. He had a boss who told him to question every premise and assumption. And as Peter Galison shows in Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps, many of the patent applications involved synchronizing clocks using signals that traveled at the speed of light. So with his office-mate Michele Besso as a sounding board, he was primed to make the leap to special relativity.
Amazon.com: That time in the patent office makes him sound far more like a practical scientist and tinkerer than the usual image of the wild-haired professor, and more like your previous biographical subject, the multitalented but eminently earthly Benjamin Franklin. Did you see connections between them?
Isaacson: I like writing about creativity, and that's what Franklin and Einstein shared. They also had great curiosity and imagination. But Franklin was a more practical man who was not very theoretical, and Einstein was the opposite in that regard.
Amazon.com: Of the many legends that have accumulated around Einstein, what did you find to be least true? Most true?
Isaacson: The least true legend is that he failed math as a schoolboy. He was actually great in math, because he could visualize equations. He knew they were nature's brushstrokes for painting her wonders. For example, he could look at Maxwell's equations and marvel at what it would be like to ride alongside a light wave, and he could look at Max Planck's equations about radiation and realize that Planck's constant meant that light was a particle as well as a wave. The most true legend is how rebellious and defiant of authority he was. You see it in his politics, his personal life, and his science.
Amazon.com: At Time and CNN and the Aspen Institute, you've worked with many of the leading thinkers and leaders of the day. Now that you've had the chance to get to know Einstein so well, did he remind you of anyone from our day who shares at least some of his remarkable qualities?
Isaacson: There are many creative scientists, most notably Stephen Hawking, who wrote the essay on Einstein as "Person of the Century" when I was editor of Time. In the world of technology, Steve Jobs has the same creative imagination and ability to think differently that distinguished Einstein, and Bill Gates has the same intellectual intensity. I wish I knew politicians who had the creativity and human instincts of Einstein, or for that matter the wise feel for our common values of Benjamin Franklin.
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