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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In particular, Mari картинка 177worried that her husband’s fame would make him colder and more self-centered. “I am very happy for his success, because he really does deserve it,” she wrote in another letter. “I only hope that fame does not exert a detrimental influence on his human side.” 42

In one sense, Mari картинка 178’s worries proved unwarranted. Even as his fame increased exponentially, Einstein would retain a personal simplicity, an unaffected style, and at least a veneer of genial humility. But viewed from a different reference frame, there were transformations to his human side. Sometime around 1909, he began drifting apart from his wife. His resistance to chains and bonds increasingly led him to escape into his work while taking a detached approach to the realm he dismissed as “the merely personal.”

On one of his last days working at the patent office, he received a large envelope with an elegant sheet covered in what seemed to be Latin calligraphy. Because it seemed odd and impersonal, he threw it in the wastebasket. It was, in fact, an invitation to be one of those receiving an honorary doctorate at the July 1909 commemoration of the founding of Geneva’s university, and authorities there finally got a friend of Einstein to persuade him to attend. Einstein brought only a straw hat and an informal suit, so he stood out rather strangely, both in the parade and at the opulent formal dinner that night. Amused by the whole situation, he turned to the patrician seated next to him and speculated about the austere Protestant Reformation leader who had founded the university: “Do you know what Calvin would have done had he been here?” The gentleman, befuddled, said no. Einstein replied, “He would have erected an enormous stake and had us all burnt for our sinful extravagance.” As Einstein later recalled,“The man never addressed another word to me.” 43

Light Can Be Wave and Particle

Also at the end of the summer of 1909, Einstein was invited to address the annual Naturforscher conference, the preeminent meeting of German-speaking scientists, which was held that year in Salzburg. Organizers had put both relativity and the quantum nature of light on the agenda, and they expected him to speak on the former. Instead, Einstein decided that he preferred to emphasize what he considered the more pressing issue: how to interpret quantum theory and reconcile it with the wave theory of light that Maxwell had so elegantly formulated.

After his “happiest thought” at the end of 1907 about how the equivalence of gravity and acceleration might lead to a generalization of relativity theory, Einstein had put that subject aside to focus instead on what he called “the radiation problem” (i.e., quantum theory). The more he thought about his “heuristic” notion that light was made up of quanta, or indivisible packets, the more he worried that he and Planck had wrought a revolution that would destroy the classical foundations of physics, especially Maxwell’s equations. “I have come to this pessimistic view mainly as a result of endless, vain efforts to interpret . . . Planck’s constant in an intuitive way,” he wrote a fellow physicist early in 1908. “I even seriously doubt that it will be possible to maintain the general validity of Maxwell’s equations.” 44(As it turned out, his love of Maxwell’s equations was well placed. They are among the few elements of theoretical physics to remain unchanged by both the relativity and quantum revolutions that Einstein helped launch.)

When Einstein, still not officially a professor, arrived at the Salzburg conference in September 1909, he finally met Max Planck and other giants that he had known only through letters. On the afternoon of the third day, he stepped in front of more than a hundred famed scientists and delivered a speech that Wolfgang Pauli, who was to become a pioneer of quantum mechanics, later pronounced “one of the landmarks in the development of theoretical physics.”

Einstein began by explaining how the wave theory of light was no longer complete. Light (or any radiation) could also be regarded, he said, as a beam of particles or packets of energy, which he said was akin to what Newton had posited. “Light has certain basic properties that can be understood more readily from the standpoint of the Newtonian emission theory than from the standpoint of the wave theory,” he declared. “I thus believe that the next phase of theoretical physics will bring us a theory of light that can be interpreted as a kind of fusion of the wave and of the emission theories of light.”

Combining particle theory with wave theory, he warned, would bring “a profound change.” This was not a good thing, he feared. It could undermine the certainties and determinism inherent in classical physics.

For a moment, Einstein mused that perhaps such a fate could be avoided by accepting Planck’s more limited interpretation of quanta: that they were features only of how radiation was emitted and absorbed by a surface rather than a feature of the actual light wave as it propagated through space. “Would it not be possible,” he asked, “to retain at least the equations for the propagation of radiation and conceive only the processes of emission and absorption differently?” But after comparing the behavior of light to the behavior of gas molecules, as he had done in his 1905 light quanta paper, Einstein concluded that, alas, this was not possible.

As a result, Einstein said, light must be regarded as behaving like both an undulating wave and a stream of particles. “These two structural properties simultaneously displayed by radiation,” he declared at the end of his talk, “should not be considered as mutually incompatible.” 45

It was the first well-conceived promulgation of the wave-particle duality of light, and it had implications as profound as Einstein’s earlier theoretical breakthroughs. “Is it possible to combine energy quanta and the wave principles of radiation?” he merrily wrote to a physicist friend. “Appearances are against it, but the Almighty—it seems—managed the trick.” 46

A vibrant discussion followed Einstein’s speech, led by Planck himself. Still unwilling to embrace the physical reality underlying the mathematical constant that he had devised nine years earlier, or to accept the revolutionary ramifications envisioned by Einstein, Planck now played protector of the old order. He admitted that radiation involved discrete “quanta, which are to be conceived as atoms of action.” But he insisted that these quanta existed only as part of the process of radiation being emitted or absorbed. “The question is where to look for these quanta,” he said. “According to Mr. Einstein, it would be necessary to conceive that free radiation in a vacuum, and thus the light waves themselves consist of atomistic quanta, and hence force us to give up Maxwell’s equations. This seems to me a step that is not yet necessary.” 47

Within two decades, Einstein would assume a similar role as protector of the old order. Indeed, he was already looking for ways out of the eerie dilemmas raised by quantum theory. “I am very hopeful that I will solve the radiation problem, and that I will do so without light quanta,” he wrote a young physicist he was working with. 48

It was all too mystifying, at least for the time being. So as he moved up the professorial ranks in the German-speaking universities of Europe, he turned his attention back to the topic that was uniquely his own, relativity, and for a while became a refugee from the wonderland of the quanta. As he lamented to a friend, “The more successes the quantum theory enjoys, the sillier it looks.” 49

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