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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So who actually deserves the primary credit for the final mathematical equations? The Einstein-Hilbert priority issue has generated a small but intense historical debate, some of which seems at times to be driven by passions that go beyond mere scientific curiosity. Hilbert presented a version of his equations in his talk on November 16 and a paper that he dated November 20, before Einstein presented his final equations on November 25. However, a team of Einstein scholars in 1997 found a set of proof pages of Hilbert’s article, on which Hilbert had made revisions that he then sent back to the publisher on December 16. In the original version, Hilbert’s equations differed in a small but important way from Einstein’s final version of the November 25 lecture. They were not actually generally covariant, and he did not include a step that involved contracting the Ricci tensor and putting the resulting trace term, the Ricci scalar, into the equation. Einstein did this in his November 25 lecture. Apparently, Hilbert made a correction in the revised version of his article to match Einstein’s version. His revisions, quite generously, also added the phrase “first introduced by Einstein” when he referred to the gravitational potentials.

Hilbert’s advocates (and Einstein’s detractors) respond with a variety of arguments, including that the page proofs are missing one part and that the trace term at issue was either unnecessary or obvious.

It is fair to say that both men—to some extent independently but each also with knowledge of what the other was doing—derived by November 1915 mathematical equations that gave formal expression to the general theory. Judging from Hilbert’s revisions to his own page proofs, Einstein seems to have published the final version of these equations first. And in the end, even Hilbert gave Einstein credit and priority.

Either way, it was, without question, Einstein’s theory that was being formalized by these equations, one that he had explained to Hilbert during their time together in Göttingen that summer. Even the physicist Kip Thorne, one of those who give Hilbert credit for producing the correct field equations, nonetheless says that Einstein deserves credit for the theory underlying the equations. “Hilbert carried out the last few mathematical steps to its discovery independently and almost simultaneously with Einstein, but Einstein was responsible for essentially everything that preceded these steps,” Thorne notes. “Without Einstein, the general relativistic laws of gravity might not have been discovered until several decades later.” 87

Hilbert, graciously, felt the same way. As he stated clearly in the final published version of his paper, “The differential equations of gravitation that result are, as it seems to me, in agreement with the magnificent theory of general relativity established by Einstein.” Henceforth he would always acknowledge (thus undermining those who would use him to diminish Einstein) that Einstein was the sole author of the theory of relativity. 88“Every boy in the streets of Göttingen understands more about four-dimensional geometry than Einstein,” he reportedly said. “Yet, in spite of that, Einstein did the work and not the mathematicians.” 89

Indeed, Einstein and Hilbert were soon friendly again. Hilbert wrote in December, just weeks after their dash for the field equations was finished, to say that with his support Einstein had been elected to the Göttingen Academy. After expressing his thanks, Einstein added, “I feel compelled to say something else to you.” He explained:

There has been a certain ill-feeling between us, the cause of which I do not want to analyze. I have struggled against the feeling of bitterness attached to it, with complete success. I think of you again with unmixed geniality and ask you to try to do the same with me. It is a shame when two real fellows who have extricated themselves somewhat from this shabby world do not afford each other mutual pleasure.

90

They resumed their regular correspondence, shared ideas, and plotted to get a job for the astronomer Freundlich. By February Einstein was even visiting Göttingen again and staying at Hilbert’s home.

Einstein’s pride of authorship was understandable. As soon as he got printed copies of his four lectures, he mailed them out to friends. “Be sure you take a good look at them,” he told one. “They are the most valuable discovery of my life.” To another he noted, “The theory is of incomparable beauty.” 91

Einstein, at age 36, had produced one of history’s most imaginative and dramatic revisions of our concepts about the universe. The general theory of relativity was not merely the interpretation of some experimental data or the discovery of a more accurate set of laws. It was a whole new way of regarding reality.

Newton had bequeathed to Einstein a universe in which time had an absolute existence that tick-tocked along independent of objects and observers, and in which space likewise had an absolute existence. Gravity was thought to be a force that masses exerted on one another rather mysteriously across empty space. Within this framework, objects obeyed mechanical laws that had proved remarkably accurate—almost perfect—in explaining everything from the orbits of the planets, to the diffusion of gases, to the jiggling of molecules, to the propagation of sound (though not light) waves.

With his special theory of relativity, Einstein had shown that space and time did not have independent existences, but instead formed a fabric of spacetime. Now, with his general version of the theory, this fabric of spacetime became not merely a container for objects and events. Instead, it had its own dynamics that were determined by, and in turn helped to determine, the motion of objects within it—just as the fabric of a trampoline will curve and ripple as a bowling ball and some billiard balls roll across it, and in turn the dynamic curving and rippling of the trampoline fabric will determine the path of the rolling balls and cause the billiard balls to move toward the bowling ball.

The curving and rippling fabric of spacetime explained gravity, its equivalence to acceleration, and, Einstein asserted, the general relativity of all forms of motion. 92In the opinion of Paul Dirac, the Nobel laureate pioneer of quantum mechanics, it was “probably the greatest scientific discovery ever made.” Another of the great giants of twentieth-century physics, Max Born, called it “the greatest feat of human thinking about nature, the most amazing combination of philosophical penetration, physical intuition and mathematical skill.” 93

The entire process had exhausted Einstein but left him elated. His marriage had collapsed and war was ravaging Europe, but Einstein was as happy as he would ever be. “My boldest dreams have now come true,” he exulted to Besso. “ General covariance. Mercury’s perihelion motion wonderfully precise.” He signed himself “contented but kaput.” 94

CHAPTER TEN

DIVORCE

1916–1919

With Elsa June 1922 The Narrow Whirlpool of Personal Experience As a - фото 238

With Elsa, June 1922

“The Narrow Whirlpool of Personal Experience”

As a young man, Einstein had predicted, in a letter to the mother of his first girlfriend, that the joys of science would be a refuge from painful personal emotions. And thus it was. His conquest of general relativity proved easier than finding the formulas for the forces swirling within his family.

Those forces were complex. At the very moment he was finalizing his field equations—the last week of November 1915—his son Hans Albert was telling Michele Besso that he wanted to spend time alone with his father over Christmas, preferably on Zugerberg mountain or someplace similarly isolated. But simultaneously, the boy was writing his father a nasty letter saying he did not want him to come to Switzerland at all. 1

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