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*.**
* * *
**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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. Einstein to Harry Truman, with fifteen lines of equations on the other side, Jan. 11, 1953, AEA 41-551.

7

.

New York Times

, Jan. 13, 1953.

8

. Marian Rawles to Einstein, Jan. 14, 1953, AEA 41-629; Charles Williams to Einstein, Jan. 17, 1953, AEA 41-651; Homer Greene to Einstein, Jan. 15, 1953, AEA 41-588; Joseph Heidt to Einstein, Jan. 13, 1953, AEA 41-589.

9

. Einstein to William Douglas, June 23, 1953, AEA 41-576; William Douglas to Einstein, June 30, 1953, AEA 41-577.

10

. Generosa Pope Jr. to Einstein, Jan. 15, 1953, AEA 41-625; Daniel James to Einstein, Jan. 14, 1953, AEA 41-614.

11

. Einstein to Daniel James, Jan. 15, 1953, AEA 60-696;

New York Times

, Jan. 22, 1953.

12

. Einstein, Acceptance of the Lord & Taylor Award, May 4, 1953, AEA 28-979. In a letter to Dick Kluger, then a student editor of

The Daily Princetonian,

he wrote: “As long as a person has not violated the ‘social contract’ nobody has the right to inquire about his or her convictions. If this principal is not followed free intellectual development is not possible.” Einstein to Dick Kluger, Sept. 17, 1953, in Kluger’s possession.

13

. Einstein to William Frauenglass, May 16, 1953, AEA 41-112; “Refuse to Testify Einstein Advises,”

New York Times

, June 12, 1953;

Time

, June 22, 1953.

14

. All of these editorials ran on June 13, 1953, except the Chicago editorial, which ran on June 15.

15

. Sam Epkin to Einstein, June 15, 1953, AEA 41-409; Victor Lasky to Einstein, June 1953, AEA 41-441; George Stringfellow to Einstein, June 15, 1953, AEA 41-470.

16

.

New York Times

, June 14, 1953.

17

. Bertrand Russell to

New York Times

, June 26, 1953; Einstein to Bertrand Russell, June 28, 1953, AEA 33-195.

18

. Abraham Flexner to Einstein, June 12, 1953, AEA 41-174; Shepherd Baum to Einstein, June 17, 1953, AEA 41-202.

19

. Richard Frauenglass to Einstein, June 20, 1953, AEA 41-181.

20

. Sarah Shadowitz, “Albert Shadowitz,”

Globe and Mail

(Toronto), May 26, 2004. The author is the subject’s daughter.

21

. Sayen, 273–276; Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Committee on Government Operations, “Testimony of Albert Shadowitz,” Dec. 14, 1953, and “Report on the Proceedings against Albert Shadowitz for Contempt of the Senate,” July 16, 1954; Albert Shadowitz to Einstein, Dec. 14, 1953, AEA 41-659; Einstein to Albert Shadowitz, Dec. 15, 1953, AEA 41-660. Shadowitz was cleared in July 1955, two years after his testimony, after the fall of McCarthy.

22

. Jerome and Taylor, 120–121.

23

. Bird and Sherwin, 133, 495.

24

. Ibid., 495.

25

. James Reston, “Dr. Oppenheimer Suspended by A.E.C. in Security Review,”

New York Times

, Apr. 13, 1954. On Sunday, Apr. 11, Joseph and Stewart Alsop, in their

New York Herald Tribune

column, had speculated that “leading physicists” were now a target of security investigations, but they did not mention Oppenheimer by name.

26

. Pais 1982, 11; Bird and Sherwin, 502–504.

27

. Johanna Fantova’s journal, June 3, 16, 17, 1954, in Calaprice, 359.

28

. Einstein to Herbert Lehman, May 19, 1954, AEA 6-236.

29

. Johanna Fantova’s journal, June 17, 1954, in Calaprice, 359.

30

. Einstein to Norman Thomas, Mar. 10, 1954, AEA 61-549; Einstein to W. Stern, Jan. 14, 1954, AEA 61-470. See also Einstein to Felix Arnold, Mar. 19,1954,AEA 59-118:“The current investigations are an incomparably greater danger to our society than those few communists in the country could ever be.”

31

. Johanna Fantova journal, Mar. 4, 1954, in Calaprice, 356; Einstein to Queen Mother Elisabeth of Belgium, Mar. 28, 1954, AEA 32-410.

32

. Theodore White, “U.S. Science,”

The Reporter

, Nov. 11, 1954. White went on to write

The Making of the President

series of books.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: THE END

1

. Johanna Fantova journal, Mar. 19, 1954, in Calaprice, 356.

2

. Einstein eulogy for Rudolf Ladenberg, Apr. 1, 1952, AEA 5-160.

3

. Einstein to Jakob Ehrat, May 12, 1952, AEA 59-554; Einstein to Ernesta Marangoni, Oct. 1, 1952, AEA 60-406; Einstein to Queen Mother Elisabeth of Belgium, Jan. 12, 1953, AEA 32-405.

4

. Einstein interview with Lili Foldes,

The Etude

, Jan. 1947; Calaprice, 150. Information about his repeated playing of this record was given to me by someone who knew Einstein in his later years.

5

. Einstein to Hans Muehsam, Mar. 30, 1954, AEA 38-434.

6

. Einstein to Conrad Habicht and Maurice Solovine, Apr. 3, 1953, AEA 21-294; Einstein to Maurice Solovine, Feb. 27, 1955, AEA 21-306.

7

. Sayen, 294.

8

. Einstein to Hans Albert Einstein, May 1, 1954, AEA 75-918.

9

. Einstein to Hans Albert Einstein, unfinished letter, Dec. 28, 1954, courtesy of Bob Cohn, purchased at Christie’s sale, Einstein Family Correspondence.

10

. Gertrude Samuels, “Einstein, at 75, Is Still a Rebel,”

New York Times Magazine

, Mar. 14, 1954.

11

. Johanna Fantova journal, 1954, in Calaprice, 354–363.

12

. Wolfgang Pauli to Max Born, Mar. 3, 1954, in Born 2005, 213.

13

. Einstein to Michele Besso, Aug. 10, 1954, AEA 7-420.

14

. Einstein to Louis de Broglie, Feb. 8, 1954, AEA 8-311.

15

. Einstein 1916, final appendix to the 1954 ed., 178.

16

. Bertrand Russell to Einstein, Feb. 11, 1955, AEA 33-199; Einstein to Bertrand Russell, Feb. 16, 1955, AEA 33-200.

17

. Einstein to Niels Bohr, Mar. 2, 1955, AEA 33-204.

18

. Bertrand Russell, “Manifesto by Scientists for Abolition of War,” sent to Einstein on Apr. 5, 1955, AEA 33-209, and issued publicly July 9, 1955.

19

. Einstein to Farmingdale Elementary School, Mar. 26, 1955, AEA 59-632; Alice Calaprice, ed.,

Dear Professor Einstein

(New York: Prometheus, 2002), 219.

20

. Einstein to Vero and Bice Besso, Mar. 21, 1955, AEA 7-245.

21

. Eric Rogers, “The Equivalence Principle Demonstrated,” in French, 131; I. Bernard Cohen,“An Interview with Einstein,”

Scientific American

(July 1955).

22

. Whitrow, 90; Einstein to Bertrand Russell, Apr. 11, 1955, AEA 33-212.

23

. Einstein to Zvi Lurie, Jan. 5, 1955, AEA 60-388; Abba Eban,

An Autobiography

(New York: Random House, 1977), 191; Nathan and Norden, 640.

24

. Helen Dukas, “Einstein’s Last Days,” AEA 39-71; Calaprice, 369; Pais 1982, 477.

25

. Helen Dukas, “Einstein’s Last Days,” AEA 39-71; Helen Dukas to Abraham Pais, Apr. 30, 1955, in Pais 1982, 477.

26

. Michelmore, 261.

27

. Nathan and Norden, 640.

28

. Einstein, final calculations, AEA 3-12. The final page can be viewed at www.alberteinstein.info/db/ViewImage.do?DocumentID=34430&Page=12.

EPILOGUE: EINSTEIN’S BRAIN AND EINSTEIN’S MIND

1

. Michelmore, 262. Einstein’s will, which was witnessed by the logician Kurt Gödel, among others, gave Helen Dukas $20,000, most of his personal belongings and books, and the income from his royalties until she died, which she did in 1982. Hans Albert received only $10,000; he died while a visiting lecturer in Woods Hole, Mass., in 1973, survived by a son and daughter. Einstein’s other son, Eduard, received $15,000 to assure his continued care at the Zurich asylum, where he died in 1965. His stepdaughter Margot got $20,000 and the Mercer Street house, which was actually already in her name, and she died there in 1986. Dukas and Otto Nathan were made literary executors, and they guarded his reputation and papers so zealously that biographers and the editors of his collected papers would for years be stymied when they attempted to print anything verging on the merely personal.

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