Einstein

Einstein by Walter Isaacson

Category: Biography Grade: A

I couldn't put this one down. Take what was probably one of the most brilliant scientific minds of all time in an outspoken German Jew in the first half of the 20th century and it's not hard to see why you'd get an incredible story. If you look at the people, in history, who advanced our understanding of the world the most, there are only a handful of candidates - maybe Galilleo, Newton, Watson & Crick (DNA) and, of course, Albert Einstein. Even today, half a century after his death, his face is still one of the recognizable on the planet. But, while everybody knows him as the formulator of the Special and General Theories of Relativity, most people didn't know much about his life. With the popularity of Isaacson's book, hopefully, that will change.

To most of us, the fascinating parts of the book are the biographical parts. Don't get me wrong - there's a lot of science in this book. Between Einstein's inherent ability to make the complex understandable and a surprising knack by Isaacson to make the pictures even clearer, the science became much more comprehensible than I expected. There's a lot about relativity, the lack of an "absolute" definition of time and space and, even, quantum theory, that I understand far better after reading the book. That said, you have to adjust your reading style for this book to jump in to fast forward whenever the science gets over your head. I pride myself on being a pretty smart guy, but there were parts of this book where I had no clue what was being discussed. Everybody will have there own point where the concepts start to blur - just skip those sections.

What you're left with is the story of brilliant non-conformist who lived during interesting times. Einstein is probably the only scientist who ever achieved the status of international rock star. He was universally known and loved in an age before television. On his initial visits to the United States, he was greeted with parades and parties. Part of his appeal was that his science, while not always understood, was very highly publicized. He also, of course, looked the part of the "mad scientist". Closely related to his science were the relationships he maintained with some of the great names (in science, at least) of the times -- Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger and Oppenheimer, among others. It would have been amazing to have been seated at the table when these minds started discussing not only the nature of the cosmos, but politics, literature and just about everything else. These people, especially Einstein in his youth, were willing to make leaps of knowledge that overthrew centuries of accepted belief. Then you watch, as he grew older, Einstein flip from the rebellious creator of the relativity theory to the reactionary protector of that theory in the face of quantum theory.

The book also shows the personal side of Einstein's life. In his early life, contrary to legend, Einstein was actually a reasonably good student. The "genius who flunked math" turns out not to be true at all. Some of the other "legends", however, are real - most of his best work, including the Special Relativity Theory and the famous equation relating energy to matter, was done in a single year of his life, 1905, while he was very junior clerk at the Swiss Patent Office. He held that lowly job because it was the only one he could get, thanks to a connection, after several years of post-graduate unemployment. He was married twice - the second time to a first cousin. He was very outspoken when it came to politics -- he was, for most of his life a socialist, but his early pacifism was thrown out when faced with Hitler. He was a lifelong proponent of a world government as the only way to deal with a militarized, and especially a nuclear, world. He was a non-practicing Jew, really a deist, who became an ardent Zionist, but one who believed the Jewish moral character would be defined by how the Zionists treated their Palestinian neighbors. He was even, on the death of Chaim Weizmann offered the presidency of Israel, which he declined.

The picture you come away with is of a brilliant man who, amazingly for all the celebrity, was a genuinely nice and kind man. I know that sounds a little trite, but he seemed to be straightforward, open and down-to-earth through his entire life.

A quick word about the author -- this isn't the first of Isaacson's books that I've read or that has become a best seller. He's previous popular biography was Benjamin Franklin, An American Life. He rights in a clear, but insightful way and seems to have a knack for making the complex, whether its quantum theory or international politics of the 19th century, easy to grasp. I do now want to go back and read some of his older books, especially one called The Wise Men about the group led by Dean Acheson that defined U.S. foreign policy for the second half of the 20th century. His other book is a biography of Henry Kissinger. I'm amazed at a talent that can write over such a wide range. It's likely, especially now that David Halberstam is gone, that Isaacson could emerge as one of the premier historians/biographers for the next couple of decades.