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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One of his strengths as a thinker, if not as a parent, was that he had the ability, and the inclination, to tune out all distractions, a category that to him sometimes included his children and family. “Even the loudest baby-crying didn’t seem to disturb Father,” Hans Albert said. “He could go on with his work completely impervious to noise.”

One day his student Tanner came for a visit and found Einstein in his study poring over a pile of papers. He was writing with his right hand and holding Eduard with his left. Hans Albert was playing with toy bricks and trying to get his attention. “Wait a minute, I’ve nearly finished,” Einstein said, as he handed Eduard to Tanner and kept scribbling his equations. “It gave me,” said Tanner, “a glimpse into his immense powers of concentration.” 8

Prague, 1911

Einstein had been in Zurich less than six months when he received, in March 1910, a solicitation to consider a more prestigious job: a full professorship at the German part of the University of Prague. Both the university and the academic position were a step up; however, moving from the familiar and friendly Zurich to the less congenial Prague would be disruptive for his family. For Einstein, the professional considerations outweighed the personal ones.

He was again going through difficult periods at home. “The bad mood that you noticed in me had nothing to do with you,” he wrote to his mother, who was now living in Berlin. “To dwell on the things that depress or anger us does not help in overcoming them. One must knock them down alone.”

His scientific work, on the other hand, was giving him great pleasure, and he expressed excitement about his possible new opportunity. “It is most probable that I will be offered the position of full professor at a large university with a significantly better salary than I now have.” 9

When word of Einstein’s possible move spread in Zurich, fifteen of his students, led by Hans Tanner, signed a petition urging officials there “to do your utmost to keep this outstanding researcher and teacher at our university.” They stressed the importance of having a professor in “this newly created discipline” of theoretical physics, and they extolled him personally in effusive terms. “Professor Einstein has an amazing talent for presenting the most difficult problems of theoretical physics so clearly and so comprehensibly that it is a great delight for us to follow his lectures, and he is so good at establishing a perfect rapport with his audience.” 10

The Zurich authorities were so eager to keep him that they raised his salary from its current 4,500 francs, which was the same as he made as a patent examiner, to 5,500 francs. Those attempting to lure him to Prague, on the other hand, were having a more difficult time.

The faculty department at Prague had settled on Einstein as its first choice and forwarded the recommendation to the education ministry in Vienna. (Prague was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and such an appointment had to be approved by Emperor Franz Joseph and his ministers.) The report was accompanied by the highest possible recommendation from the best possible authority, Max Planck. Einstein’s theory of relativity “probably exceeds in audacity everything that has been achieved so far in speculative science,” Planck proclaimed. “This principle has brought about a revolution in our physical picture of the world that can be compared only to that produced by Copernicus.” In a comment that might later have seemed prescient to Einstein, Planck added, “Non-Euclidean geometry is child’s play by comparison.” 11

Planck’s imprimatur should have been enough. But it wasn’t. The ministry decided that it preferred the second-place candidate, Gustav Jaumann, who had two advantages: he was Austrian, and he was not Jewish. “I did not get the call to Prague,” Einstein lamented to a friend in August. “I was proposed by the faculty, but because of my Semitic origin the ministry did not approve.”

Jaumann, however, soon discovered that he was the faculty’s second choice, and he erupted. “If Einstein has been proposed as the first choice because of the belief that he has greater achievements to his credit,” he declared, “then I will have nothing to do with a university that chases after modernity and does not appreciate merit.” So by October 1910, Einstein could confidently declare that his own appointment was “almost certain.”

There was one final hurdle, also dealing with religion. Being a Jew was a disadvantage; being a nonbeliever who claimed no religion was a disqualifier. The empire required that all of its servants, including professors, be a member of some religion. On his official forms, Einstein had written that he had none. “Einstein is as unpractical as a child in cases like this,” Friedrich Adler’s wife noted.

As it turned out, Einstein’s desire for the job was greater than his ornery impracticality. He agreed to write “Mosaic” as his faith, and he also accepted Austro-Hungarian citizenship, with the proviso that he was allowed to remain a Swiss citizen as well. Along with the German citizenship that he had forsaken but that would soon be foisted back on him, that meant he had held, off and on, three citizenships by the age of 32. In January 1911, he was officially appointed to the post, with a pay twice what he had been making before his recent raise. He agreed to move to Prague that March. 12

Einstein had two scientific heroes he had never met—Ernst Mach and Hendrik Lorentz—and he was able to visit them both before his move to Prague. When he went to Vienna for his formal presentation to the ministers there, he called on Mach, who lived in a suburb of that city. The aging physicist and preacher of empiricism, who so deeply influenced the Olympia Academy and instilled in Einstein a skepticism about unobservable concepts such as absolute time, had a gnarly beard and gnarlier personality. “Please speak loudly to me,” he barked when Einstein entered his room. “In addition to my other unpleasant characteristics I am also almost stone deaf.”

Einstein wanted to convince Mach of the reality of atoms, which the old man had long rejected as being imaginary constructs of the human mind. “Let us suppose that by assuming the existence of atoms in a gas we were able to predict an observable property of this gas that could not be predicted on the basis of non-atomistic theory,” Einstein asked. “Would you then accept such a hypothesis?”

“If with the help of the atomic hypothesis one could actually establish a connection between several observable properties which without it would remain isolated, then I should say that this hypothesis was an ‘economical’ one,” Mach grudgingly replied.

It was not a full acceptance, but it was enough for Einstein. “For the moment Einstein was satisfied,” his friend Philipp Frank noted. Nevertheless, Einstein began edging away from Mach’s skepticism about any theories of reality not built on directly observable data. He developed, said Frank, “a certain aversion to the Machist philosophy.” 13It was the beginning of an important conversion.

Just before moving to Prague, Einstein went to the Dutch town of Leiden to meet Lorentz. Mari картинка 183accompanied him, and they accepted an invitation to stay with Lorentz and his wife. Einstein wrote that he was looking forward to having a conversation on “the radiation problem,” adding, “I wish to assure you in advance that I am not the orthodox light-quantizer for whom you take me.” 14

Einstein had long idolized Lorentz from afar. Just before he went to visit, he wrote a friend: “I admire this man like no other; I might say, I love him.” The feeling was reinforced when they finally met. They stayed up late on Saturday night discussing such issues as the relationship between temperature and electrical conductivity.

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