Einstein: His Life and Universe | 
 enlarge | Author: Walter Isaacson
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Category: Book
List Price: $17.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  201 reviews
Sales Rank: 1045
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 704
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.1 x 2
ISBN: 0743264746
Dewey Decimal Number: 530.092
EAN: 9780743264747
ASIN: 0743264746
Publication Date: May 13, 2008
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Amazon.com
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.
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 196 more reviews...
 Remember...he's a rebel! July 21, 2008
One of the biggest problems with this biography is its length. I agree that 550 pages isn't excessive for the most iconic intellectual of the 20th century, but the book is plagued by the constant repetition of information that was already given, presumably for emphasis. This wouldn't be a problem if there were an enormous number of characters, or if the facts were of special interest, but often the information has already been clearly articulated and was of obvious importance when it was first mentioned. Thus a book about one of the most important men in 20th century science becomes about 75 pages too long at a paltry 550 pages. By comparison Martin Gilbert's biography of Winston Churchill is over 1000 pages long (the short version) and every page is captivating and relevant. Nevertheless, the book does provide a serviceable account of Einstein's life, despite a few flaws that only become onerous as one slogs towards the conclusion.
Another irritating habit of the author's is the repeated interludes where he ruminates on the qualities which contributed to Einstein's revolutionary achievements in theoretical physics, which serve mainly to disrupt the narrative flow and are for the most part uninteresting. Many of these could be summed up if the author just wrote 'Remember, he's a rebel!' every fifty pages or so. Isaacson also seems to glide through the second world war, only giving the most cursory attention to Einstein's opinions on the bloodiest conflict of the century and the near extermination of Einstein's European brethren. I don't think it's overly presumptuous to expect that Einstein's reaction to the most infamous atrocity in modern history might merit a few more pages.
I think I'll stop here before I make this book sound worse than it actually is. As mentioned before it is for the most part interesting, despite bloating. Three and a half stars, rounded down to 3 for spite.
 Sorting out the genius, the man, and the state of modern science July 21, 2008
Writing about Einstein's standing in the history of modern science requires wide and deep knowledge of diverse disciplines of knowledge, let alone the highly demanded writer's discretion in filtering out public propaganda from objective factual information. This author earns an "A" in his objective analysis of how Albert Einstein, the man, has demonstrated his genius in answering the pressing questions of the twentieth century's modern science.
The book describes in vivid details the timeframe when Einstein engaged in academic research. The genius of the Einstein was not born in vacuum. Einstein's generation was confronted with the new findings of subatomic particles, artificial radiation, and electromagnetism. Einstein's first defined mission was to tackle the puzzle of ether as a medium for propagating radiation. Einstein brilliantly capitalized on the experiment of the constancy of the speed of light, regardless of the Earth's rotation, and devised the theory of relativity with the conservative restraint that Newton's classical mechanics remains a valid subset of relativistic mechanics.
Adhering to Newton's doctrine, Einstein again reconciled Plank's quanta with Newton's postulate that light was both corpuscular and particulate. Thus, Einstein hit two birds with one stone: the quanta. Einstein defended the Maxwellian wave theory of electromagnetism as a time-averaged interpretation of Newtonian particulate nature of radiation. With both Plank's quanta, Kirchhoff's blackbody radiation, and Lernard's photoelectric effect, Einstein was able to seal his genius in the history of modern science as the discoverer of the law of quantization of radiation.
As the previous greater theoreticians; Newton and Maxwell had proven their genius by relying on the experimental works of Copernicus and Faraday, Einstein followed the same path by capitalizing on Kirchhoff's and Lenard's experimental findings of the nature of interaction of radiation and matter. The book demonstrates the atmosphere of sharing knowledge in Europe in the early 1900's that engaged Einstein to the earnest interactions of the greatest scientific minds of his time.
The First World War signaled the end of Einstein's greatest contribution to science. With the defeat of Germany, Einstein was on the run for safe haven. Though America offered Einstein such sanctuary, the American nuclear and atomic research was government-run and excluded the non-conformist scientists such as Einstein. Einstein's genius dried up by the indiscriminate governmental exclusion of his new homeland. Immigration to the new land, offered Einstein the financial security and the public fame minus the scientific prosperity. Einstein ran away from Nazism and Fascism yet to confront McCarthyism and racial tension in America.
The book sheds light of the personal limitations that hindered Albert Einstein in maintaining healthy family relation. Einstein's entanglements in international and local politics at the expense of catching up with modern advances in nuclear physics was paralleled by his alienation of his ex-wife and ill son and his stubborn adherence to unify gravitation and electromagnetism despite his lack of follow up of any new experimental breakthroughs. For twenty years after arriving in America, Einstein never traveled overseas except to get a visa from Bermuda, never drove an automobile, and squandered the wise years of old age in beating up Mathematics for the sake of chilling Physics.
The book clearly rebuts the aura that Einstein was the greatest mathematicians and explains how Einstein relied on his colleagues to devise the theory of General relativity. The book sheds light on Einstein's struggles with endless errors and miscalculation that squandered many decades of his old age in seeking a unified field theory that reconciles the particulate nature of radiation with gravitation. Furthermore, the writer did not shy away from the controversy of awarding Einstein the Nobel Prize for the work pioneered by Philipp Lenard, while the theory of relativity remained a philosophical puzzle. Even Einstein had poked holes in his own theory while attacking Quantum mechanics for spooky actions at distances. Niels Bohr's explanation that objects entangled in actions serve a defined quantum function explains how all objects in the universe serve specific quantum function by lieu of their entanglement in gravitational actions. An explanation that defeats the main argument about the relativistic nature of time postulated by Einstein.
Finally, the book leaves the objective reader with many questions: whether or not Einstein's neglect of his personal appearance, his content with marrying his cousin, refusing to see his own ill son Edwards and his estranged ex-wife, refraining from travel, shutting off his mind to new developments in science, indulging in smoking despites his doctor's advice, and sticking to his guns on relying solely on mathematics to solve physical puzzles; were in any way signs of his overall detachment both from science and life? Whether or not the public reverence of Einstein falls within the realm of glorifying superstars, elevating them to superhuman status, and has contributed to Einstein's mental freezing? Whether of not spoiling scientists with extravagant privileges undermines their ability to excel in their field of search for knowledge?
Though Einstein lived long enough to enjoy the demise of Nazism and Fascism, the success of tapping into the nuclear energy, he died few years before the invasion of space became reality, the wide proliferation of the solid-state computers, laser applications, particle accelerators, discovery of the genetic codes, the end of McCarthyism and the triumph of the civil rights movement.
Mohamed F. El-Hewie.
Author of
"Essentials of Weightlifting and Strength Training"
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Excellent book about Einstein very enjoyable read. July 16, 2008
It seems that the other reviewers have exhausted all superlatives in describing this book. I feel that this volume far more than any other I have read is an extremely enjoyable read, fairly represents Einsteins world views and gives you a great perspective on the life and times of this great man.
Some of the science discussions in the book will leave you wanting but this is an biography and not a text book. All in all a very enjoyable read filled with new insights on one of the most creative mind in history.
best einstein book out there July 16, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is hands down the best Einstein book available today. The author goes above and beyond any expectations i had. He some of the best research i have ever seen in a book. VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!
I have read several Einstein books and this is the absolute best. It covered everything i have read in the other books and went far beyond that.
The author (Isaacson) makes this book very easy to read and follow (although he does use a lot of scientific terms, which he has to). I really couldnt put the book down.
If you're looking for an excellent book about the life of Einstein from first-hand research this is your book. And the price can't be beat. I thought i would be spending 30+ but its less than 20 anywhere. ENJOY!
It's a wonderful life July 9, 2008
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
What a superb job Issacson has done with this truely great man. Somehow the author has been able to give us a glimse at the Einstein sole and I loved what I saw. Every American should read this book especialy at this time in their history. Get a picture at what sort of society true intellegence can envisage before you let it slip further away.
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