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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It was not until the beginning of September that he finally made it to Switzerland. Mari картинка 235felt it would be proper for him to stay with her and the boys, despite the strain. They were, after all, still married. She had hopes of reconciling. But Einstein showed no interest in being with her. Instead, he stayed in a hotel and spent a lot of time with his friends Michele Besso and Heinrich Zangger.

As it turned out, he got a chance to see his sons only twice during the entire three weeks he was in Switzerland. In a letter to Elsa, he blamed his estranged wife: “The cause was mother’s fear of the little ones becoming too dependent on me.” Hans Albert let his father know that the whole visit made him feel uncomfortable. 56

After Einstein returned to Berlin, Hans Albert paid a call on Zangger. The kindly medical professor, friends of all sides in the dispute, tried to work out an accord so that Einstein could visit his sons. Besso also played intermediary. Einstein could see his sons, Besso advised in a formal letter he wrote after consulting with Mari картинка 236, but not in Berlin nor in the presence of Elsa’s family. It would be best to do it at “a good Swiss inn,” initially just with Hans Albert, where they could spend some time on their own free of all distractions. Over Christmas, Hans Albert was planning to visit Besso’s family, and he suggested that perhaps Einstein could come then. 57

The Race to General Relativity, 1915

What made the flurry of political and personal turmoil in the fall of 1915 so remarkable was that it highlighted Einstein’s ability to concentrate on, and compartmentalize, his scientific endeavors despite all distractions. During that period, with great effort and anxiety, he was engaged in a competitive rush to what he later called the greatest accomplishment of his life. 58

Back when Einstein had moved to Berlin in the spring of 1914, his colleagues had assumed that he would set up an institute and attract acolytes to work on the most pressing problem in physics: the implications of quantum theory. But Einstein was more of a lone wolf. Unlike Planck, he did not want a coterie of collaborators or protégés, and he preferred to focus on what again had become his personal passion: the generalization of his theory of relativity. 59

So after his wife and sons left him for Zurich, Einstein moved out of their old apartment and rented one that was nearer to Elsa and the center of Berlin. It was a sparsely furnished bachelor’s refuge, but still rather spacious: it had seven rooms on the third floor of a new five-story building. 60

Einstein’s study at home featured a large wooden writing table that was cluttered with piles of papers and journals. Padding around this hermitage, eating and working at whatever hours suited him, sleeping when he had to, he waged his solitary struggle.

Through the spring and summer of 1915, Einstein wrestled with his Entwurf theory, refining it and defending it against a variety of challenges. He began calling it “the general theory” rather than merely “a generalized theory” of relativity, but that did not mask its problems, which he kept trying to deflect.

He claimed that his equations had the greatest amount of covariance that was permissible given his hole argument and other strictures of physics, but he began to suspect that this was not correct. He also got into an exhausting debate with the Italian mathematician Tullio Levi-Civita, who pointed out problems with his handling of the tensor calculus. And there was still the puzzle of the incorrect result the theory gave for the shift in Mercury’s orbit.

At least his Entwurf theory still successfully explained—or so he thought through the summer of 1915—rotation as being a form of relative motion, that is, a motion that could be defined only relative to the positions and motions of other objects. His field equations, he thought, were invariant under the transformation to rotating coordinates. 61

Einstein was confident enough in his theory to show it off at a weeklong series of two-hour lectures, starting at the end of June 1915, at the University of Göttingen, which had become the preeminent center for the mathematical side of theoretical physics. Foremost among the geniuses there was David Hilbert, and Einstein was particularly eager—too eager, it would turn out—to explain all the intricacies of relativity to him.

The visit to Göttingen was a triumph. Einstein exulted to Zangger that he had “the pleasurable experience of convincing the mathematicians there thoroughly.” Of Hilbert, a fellow pacifist, he added, “I met him and became quite fond of him.” A few weeks later, after again reporting, “I was able to convince Hilbert of the general theory of relativity,” Einstein called him “a man of astonishing energy and independence.” In a letter to another physicist, Einstein was even more effusive: “In Göttingen I had the great pleasure of seeing that everything was understood down to the details. I am quite enchanted with Hilbert!” 62

Hilbert was likewise enchanted with Einstein and his theory. So much so that he soon set out to see if he could beat Einstein to the goal of getting the field equations right. Within three months of his Göttingen lectures, Einstein was confronted with two distressing discoveries: that his Entwurf theory was indeed flawed, and that Hilbert was racing feverishly to come up with the correct formulations on his own.

Einstein’s realization that his Entwurf theory was unraveling came from an accumulation of problems. But it culminated with two major blows in early October 1915.

The first was that, upon rechecking, Einstein found that the Entwurf equations did not actually account for rotation as he had thought. 63He hoped to prove that rotation could be conceived of as just another form of relative motion, but it turned out that the Entwurf didn’t actually prove this. The Entwurf equations were not, as he had believed, covariant under a transformation that uniformly rotated the coordinate axes.

Besso had warned him in a memo in 1913 that this seemed to be a problem. But Einstein had ignored him. Now, upon redoing his calculations, he was dismayed to see this pillar knocked away. “This is a blatant contradiction,” he lamented to the astronomer Freundlich.

He assumed that the same mistake also accounted for his theory’s inability to account fully for the shift in Mercury’s orbit. And he despaired that he would not be able to find the problem. “I do not believe I am able to find the mistake myself, for in this matter my mind is too set in a deep rut.” 64

In addition, he realized that he had made a mistake in what was called his “uniqueness” argument: that the sets of conditions required by energy-momentum conservation and other physical restrictions uniquely led to the field equations in the Entwurf. He wrote Lorentz explaining in detail his previous “erroneous assertions.” 65

Added to these problems were ones he already knew about: the Entwurf equations were not generally covariant, meaning that they did not really make all forms of accelerated and nonuniform motion relative, and they did not fully explain Mercury’s anomalous orbit. And now, as this edifice was crumbling, he could hear what seemed to be Hilbert’s footsteps gaining on him from Göttingen.

Part of Einstein’s genius was his tenacity. He could cling to a set of ideas, even in the face of “apparent contradiction” (as he put it in his 1905 relativity paper). He also had a deep faith in his intuitive feel for the physical world. Working in a more solitary manner than most other scientists, he held true to his own instincts, despite the qualms of others.

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