Walter Isaacson - Einstein - His Life and Universe

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**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.
### Amazon.com Review
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*.**
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**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.
* * *
**More to Explore**
*Benjamin Franklin: An American Life*
*Kissinger: A Biography* **
**The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made* ***
* * *
### **From Publishers Weekly**
**Acclaimed biographer Isaacson examines the remarkable life of "science's preeminent poster boy" in this lucid account (after 2003's *Benjamin Franklin* and 1992's *Kissinger*). Contrary to popular myth, the German-Jewish schoolboy Albert Einstein not only excelled in math, he mastered calculus before he was 15. Young Albert's dislike for rote learning, however, led him to compare his teachers to "drill sergeants." That antipathy was symptomatic of Einstein's love of individual and intellectual freedom, beliefs the author revisits as he relates his subject's life and work in the context of world and political events that shaped both, from WWI and II and their aftermath through the Cold War. Isaacson presents Einstein's research—his efforts to understand space and time, resulting in four extraordinary papers in 1905 that introduced the world to special relativity, and his later work on unified field theory—without equations and for the general reader. Isaacson focuses more on Einstein the man: charismatic and passionate, often careless about personal affairs; outspoken and unapologetic about his belief that no one should have to give up personal freedoms to support a state. Fifty years after his death, Isaacson reminds us why Einstein (1879–1955) remains one of the most celebrated figures of the 20th century. *500,000 firsr printing, 20-city author tour, first serial to *Time*; confirmed appearance on *Good Morning America*. (Apr.)*
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. **

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For good measure, Flexner proceeded to write an official letter to the president. “I felt myself compelled this afternoon to explain to your secretary,” Flexner said, “that Professor Einstein had come to Princeton for the purpose of carrying out his scientific work in seclusion and that it was absolutely impossible to make any exception which would inevitably bring him into public notice.”

Einstein knew none of this until Henry Morgenthau, a prominent Jewish leader who was about to become treasury secretary, inquired about the apparent snub. Dismayed to discover Flexner’s presumption, Einstein wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, his political soul mate. “You can hardly imagine of what great interest it would have been for me to meet the man who is tackling with gigantic energy the greatest and most difficult problem of our time,” he wrote. “However, as a matter of fact, no invitation whatever has reached me.”

Eleanor Roosevelt answered personally and politely. The confusion came, she explained, because Flexner had been so adamant in his phone call to the White House. “I hope you and Mrs. Einstein will come sometime soon,” she added. Elsa responded graciously. “First excuse my poor English please,” she wrote. “Dr. Einstein and myself accept with feelings of gratitude your very kind invitation.”

He and Elsa arrived at the White House on January 24, 1934, had dinner, and spent the night. The president was able to converse with them in passable German. Among other things, they discussed Roosevelt’s marine prints and Einstein’s love for sailing. The next morning, Einstein wrote an eight-line piece of doggerel on a White House note card to Queen Elisabeth of the Belgians marking his visit, but he made no public statements. 19

Flexner’s interference infuriated Einstein. He complained about it in a letter to Rabbi Wise—on which he put as his return address “Concentration Camp, Princeton”—and he sent a five-page litany of Flexner’s meddling to the Institute’s trustees. Either they must assure him that there would be no more “constant interference of the type that no self-respecting person would tolerate,” Einstein threatened, or “I would propose that I discuss with you severing my relationship with your institute in a dignified manner.” 20

Einstein prevailed, and Flexner backed off. But as a result, he lost his influence with Flexner, whom he would later refer to as one of his “few enemies” in Princeton. 21When Erwin Schrödinger, Einstein’s fellow traveler in the minefields of quantum mechanics, arrived as a refugee in Princeton that March, he was offered a job at the university. But he wanted instead to be tapped for the Institute for Advanced Study. Einstein lobbied Flexner on his behalf, but to no avail. Flexner was doing him no more favors, even if it meant depriving the Institute of Schrödinger.

During his short stay in Princeton, Schrödinger asked Einstein if he was indeed going to come back to Oxford later that spring, as scheduled. He had called himself a “bird of passage” when heading off to Caltech in 1931, and it was unclear, perhaps even in his own mind, whether he saw this as a liberation or a lament. But now he found himself comfortable in Princeton, with no desire to take wing again.

“Why should an old fellow like me not enjoy peace and quiet for once?” he asked his friend Max Born. So he told Schrödinger to pass along his sincere regrets. “I am sorry to say that he asked me to write you a definite no,” Schrödinger informed Lindemann. “The reason for his decision is really that he is frightened of all the ado and the fuss that would be laid upon him if he came to Europe.” Einstein also worried that he would be expected to go to Paris and Madrid if he went to Oxford, “and I lack the courage to undertake all this.” 22

The stars had aligned to create for Einstein a sense of inertia, or at least a weariness of further wandering. In addition, Princeton, which he called a “pipe as yet unsmoked” on his first visit in 1921, captured him with its leafy charm and its neo-Gothic echoes of a European university town. “A quaint and ceremonious village of puny demigods strutting on stiff legs,” he called it in a letter to Elisabeth, the queen mother of Belgium since the death of the king.“By ignoring certain social conventions, I have been able to create for myself an atmosphere conducive to study and free from distraction.” 23

Einstein particularly liked the fact that America, despite its inequalities of wealth and racial injustices, was more of a meritocracy than Europe. “What makes the new arrival devoted to this country is the democratic trait among the people,” he marveled.“No one humbles himself before another person or class.” 24

This was a function of the right of individuals to say and think what they pleased, a trait that had always been important to Einstein. In addition, the lack of stifling traditions encouraged more creativity of the sort he had relished as a student. “American youth has the good fortune not to have its outlook troubled by outworn traditions,” he noted. 25

Elsa likewise loved Princeton, which was important to Einstein. She had taken such good care of him for so long that he had become more solicitous of her desires, particularly her nesting instinct. “The whole of Princeton is one great park with wonderful trees,” she wrote a friend. “We might almost believe that we are in Oxford.”The architecture and countryside reminded her of England, and she felt somewhat guilty that she was so comfortable while others back in Europe were suffering. “We are very happy here, perhaps too happy. Sometimes one has a bad conscience.” 26

So in April 1934, just six months after his arrival, Einstein announced that he was staying in Princeton indefinitely and assuming full-time status at the Institute. As it turned out, he would never live anywhere else for the remaining twenty-one years of his life. Nevertheless, he made appearances at the “farewell” parties that had been scheduled that month as fund-raisers for various of his favorite charities. These causes had become almost as important to him as his science. As he declared at one of the events, “Striving for social justice is the most valuable thing to do in life.” 27

Sadly, just when they had decided to settle in, Elsa had to travel back to Europe to care for her spirited and adventurous elder daughter, Ilse, who had dallied with the romantic radical Georg Nicolai and married the literary journalist Rudolf Kayser. Ilse was afflicted with what they thought was tuberculosis but what turned out to be leukemia, and her condition had taken a turn for the worse. Now she had gone to Paris to be nursed by her sister, Margot.

Insisting that her problems were mainly psychosomatic, Ilse resisted medications and turned instead to prolonged psychotherapy. Early during her illness, Einstein had tried to persuade her to go to a regular doctor, but she had refused. Now there was little that could be done as the whole family, absent Einstein himself, gathered by her bed in Margot’s Paris apartment.

Ilse’s death devastated Elsa. She “changed and aged,” Margot’s husband recalled, “almost beyond recognition.” Instead of having Ilse’s ashes deposited in a crypt, Elsa had them put in a sealed bag for her. “I cannot be separated,” she said. “I have to have them.” She then sewed the bag inside a pillow so that she could have them close to her on the trip home to America. 28

Elsa also carried back cases of her husband’s papers, which Margot had earlier smuggled from Berlin to Paris using French diplomatic channels and the anti-Nazi underground. To help get them into America, Elsa enlisted the help of a kindly neighbor from Princeton, Caroline Blackwood, who was on the same ship home.

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