This book gave me a composite overview of Einstein’s life beyond the details of his scientific genius. Isaacson’s book gave an outstanding narrative, was filled with photos and relevant documents, and captured me as a engaged reader. Einstein was a complex man whose public and private life were intermeshed with purpose and passion. The author described Einstein’s early life and bent toward what he called “thought experiments” in which he embraced “imagination” as his greatest tool. Isaacson told of his subject’s education, his relationships personal and professional. He wrote of Einstein’s Jewish background and his aversion to formal religion or, for that matter, to any religion. He spoke of Einstein’s early pacifist/isolationist bent to an altered position of bomb control advocate after the Nazi atrocities and eventual use of the atomic bomb on Japan. The author also gave a good description of Einstein’s two marriages and children and the relationships with them. These were fascinating but are not covered in this review.
Einstein loved music and music was a passion his whole life. He would frequently play the violin wherever he found opportunity. “Music never ceased to be one of Einstein’s ruling passions. For him it provided a direct connection with the sense of the harmony that lay behind the universe…The beauty of this harmony he could feel not only in music, but also in his study of physics.”
Of course, the genius of Albert Einstein was best displayed in his scientific mind and scientific contributions. His special and general relativity stand out as revolutionary and these among other discoveries are the core of the book’s presentation.
In his special theory of relativity Einstein presented a completely different notion of space and time. “Based purely on thought experiments—performed in his head rather than in a lab—he had decided to discard Newton’s concepts of absolute space and time.” Einstein determined that as speed increased, time would slow. As a corollary of Special Relativity, “almost an afterthought Einstein added that there must be a direct relationship between the mass of a body and the energy contained within it”. Thus the energy of a body emitting radiation/mass decrease relationship of E=mc2.
Einstein didn’t like it that applications should only be applied to special cases. Therefore he made a quest to generalize relativity so that it could be applied to accelerated motion. He then came up with a new general theory of relativity. He determined an equivalence principle whereby “the effects of being in a gravitational field are equivalent to those of being accelerated upward”. Also from this theory he determined that gravity should curve a light beam.
Pressed by a journalist to condense his theory into one sentence (he had tried in vain to do it in one book), Einstein replied that, “his work…dealt with space and time in terms of physics. Its end result was a gravitational theory.” Even in the shortness of the reply it was more than one sentence and could not come close to summarizing the concept.
The Quantum Theory reveals that light has a dual nature of waves and particles. The Quantum Mechanics theorists postulated that because of the dual nature that there was an element of probability or chance in the way that photons were emitted and electrons behaved. Einstein had fundamental qualms about abandoning strict causality and accepting some things that happen by chance. This caused years of debate and Einstein’s pursuit of answers for the rest of his life. “He found the notion of God playing dice with the universe an incredible one.”
This would bring us to think that Einstein believed in God. Well he did, based on the observations he had made in science and in particular the universe itself. However, he did not agree that God was personal and participated in the events of human life. He expressed this when asked if he believed in God, “he believed like the Dutch philosopher Spinoza, in a God whose existence could be determined in the harmonious beauty of the natural laws, he had established, but who did not intervene in the day-to-day affairs of mankind.” Einstein would be considered a Deist as was Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Very sad…
When asked in 1952 by Israel’s ambassador to become the next president, Einstein rejected it. “…his life had taught him to be objective, leaving him to feel he lacked the ability and experience necessary to deal with people and to assume an office…He liked to say precisely what he believed, rather than cloak his thoughts in diplomatic language, and he was not cut out to be either a statesman or a figurehead.”
Here is a quote from Albert Einstein that politicians of today should consider: “Whoever is careless with truth in small matters cannot be trusted in important affairs.”
In conclusion the author’s description of Einstein’s legacy is a fitting tribute:
“Decades after his death, all of Einstein’s great discoveries remain durable, and we are still living in his universe, one defined on the macro scale by his theory of relativity and on the micro scale by his quantum theory. His fingerprints are all over the technologies that have defined our times, from lasers and DVDs to atomic power and fiber optics, to space travel and even semiconductors. From the infinite to the infinitesimal—from the largest concept imaginable, the expansion of the Universe, to the very smallest one, the emission of photons from the nucleus of an atom—Einstein’s creativity continues to define the vast sweep of what we know about our cosmos, and about everything in it.”
Einstein was a pretty amazing man and Walter Isaacson gave us a pretty amazing biography in is short colorful book.