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Einstein: His Life and Universe (Hardcover)
by Walter Isaacson
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Biography |
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| MSL Pointer Review:
An awesome book about a man who was larger than life: a thorough portrait of Einstein, which also draws out the flawed human in this great man. |
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Author: Walter Isaacson
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pub. in: April, 2007
ISBN: 0743264738
Pages: 704
Measurements: 9.4 x 6.4 x 2.2 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00809
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0743264730
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- Awards & Credential -
It ranks the #13 in books out of millions on Amazon.com as of June 4, 2007. |
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- MSL Picks -
"Human beings in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free but are as causally bound as the stars in their motions."
Walter Isaacson's sweeping new book about one of the great minds in life is a tribute to Albert Einstein through his life and his work. For those of us who know the renowned physicist through equations and reputation, Isaacson fills in the rest. Einstein's creativity and his ability to think far past others added so many dimensions to the arena of science while his personal life was just as rich with detail. In this book, the author reveals a dashing history.
Dr. Albert Einstein (1879-1955) began his life as a German Jew in Ulm in the late nineteenth century. His father is a businessman in the electronics field. Einstein was a genius who was also a born rebel. He did well scholastically in school disdaining the strict Prussian rote learning in German education. Einstein was a man in love with imagination, curiosity and an intense desire to seek out why things work and the secrets of the cosmos we all inhabit. His genius was a combination of high intellectual abilities linked with an imagination that forced him to seek for answers. Einstein was creative; moody; a loner and a lover of women. He had several affairs in his life. His first marriage to a fellow physics student ended in divorce. Einstein loved his two sons and gave his wife the money he won for the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics. He later married a cousin with whom he lived until her death. He became an American citizen in 1940. Einstein fled from Hitler's Germany living the last 22 years of his life as a professor at the Advance Institute at Princeton. He is the father of quantum physics though he later disagreed with scientists like Heisenberg on this aspect of science. His theory of relativity made him famous. He became friends with such luminaries as Charlie Chaplin, Sigmund Freud, Niels Bohr, Madam Curie; Robert Oppenheimer and Eleanor Roosevelt.
Einstein was gentle, loving and eccentric. He often wore no socks, old clothing and had trouble finding his keys. Einstein could be isolated and grumpy but overall the impression of him is a great genius who loved humanity in the mass. Einstein is famed for his remark "God does not play dice with the universe" but was a secular Jew who did not practice the faith. He turned down an offer to become the President of the State of Israel. Most of his great work was accomplished before his 40th birthday while working at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern.
Einstein enjoyed walking, bicycling and playing violin. He loved the music of Mozart and had a limited social life with close friends. Einstein was complex and a man of incredible genius. He lives as a giant of science. In Einstein: His Life and Universe, Walter Isaacson does a masterful job at displaying the real Einstein, warts and all, for us to examine.
- From quoting C. M Mills
Target readers:
General readers
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- Better with -
Better with
A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash (Paperback)
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Walter Isaacson, the president of the Aspen Institute, has been the chairman of CNN and the managing editor of Time magazine. He is the author of Kissinger: A Biography and Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and daughter.
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From the publisher
How did Einstein's 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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CHAPTER ONE
THE LIGHT-BEAM RIDER
"I promise you four papers," the young patent examiner wrote his friend. The letter would turn out to bear some of the most significant tidings in the history of science, but its momentous nature was masked by an impish tone that was typical of its author. He had, after all, just addressed his friend as "you frozen whale" and apologized for writing a letter that was "inconsequential babble." Only when he got around to describing the papers, which he had produced during his spare time, did he give some indication that he sensed their significance.
"The first deals with radiation and the energy properties of light and is very revolutionary," he explained. Yes, it was indeed revolutionary.
It argued that light could be regarded not just as a wave but also as a stream of tiny particles called quanta. The implications that would eventually arise from this theory - a cosmos without strict causality or certainty - would spook him for the rest of his life.
"The second paper is a determination of the true sizes of atoms." Even though the very existence of atoms was still in dispute, this was the most straightforward of the papers, which is why he chose it as the safest bet for his latest attempt at a doctoral thesis. He was in the process of revolutionizing physics, but he had been repeatedly thwarted in his efforts to win an academic job or even get a doctoral degree, which he hoped might get him promoted from a third- to a second-class examiner at the patent office.
The third paper explained the jittery motion of microscopic particles in liquid by using a statistical analysis of random collisions. In the process, it established that atoms and molecules actually exist.
"The fourth paper is only a rough draft at this point, and is an electrodynamics of moving bodies which employs a modification of the theory of space and time." Well, that was certainly more than inconsequential babble. 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. It would become known as the Special Theory of Relativity.
What he did not tell his friend, because it had not yet occurred to him, was that he would produce a fifth paper that year, a short addendum to the fourth, which posited a relationship between energy and mass. Out of it would arise the best-known equation in all of physics: E=mc2.
Looking back at a century that will be remembered for its willingness to break classical bonds, and looking ahead to an era that seeks to nurture the creativity needed for scientific innovation, one person stands out as a paramount icon of our age: the kindly refugee from oppression whose wild halo of hair, twinkling eyes, engaging humanity, and extraordinary brilliance made his face a symbol and his name a synonym for genius.
Albert Einstein was a locksmith blessed with imagination and guided by a faith in the harmony of nature's handiwork. His fascinating story, a testament to the connection between creativity and freedom, reflects the triumphs and tumults of the modern era.
Now that his archives have been completely opened, it is possible to explore how the private side of Einstein - his nonconformist personality, his instincts as a rebel, his curiosity, his passions and detachments - intertwined with his political side and his scientific side. Knowing about the man helps us understand the wellsprings of his science, and vice versa. Character and imagination and creative genius were all related, as if part of some unified field.
Despite his reputation for being aloof, he was in fact passionate in both his personal and scientific pursuits. At college he fell madly in love with the only woman in his physics class, a dark and intense Serbian named Mileva Maric´. They had an illegitimate daughter, then married and had two sons. She served as a sounding board for his scientific ideas and helped to check the math in his papers, but eventually their relationship disintegrated. Einstein offered her a deal. He would win the Nobel Prize someday, he said; if she gave him a divorce, he would give her the prize money. She thought for a week and accepted. Because his theories were so radical, it was seventeen years after his miraculous outpouring from the patent office before he was awarded the prize and she collected.
Einstein's life and work reflected the disruption of societal certainties and moral absolutes in the modernist atmosphere of the early twentieth century. Imaginative nonconformity was in the air: Picasso, Joyce, Freud, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and others were breaking conventional bonds. Charging this atmosphere was a conception of the universe in which space and time and the properties of particles seemed based on the vagaries of observations.
Einstein, however, was not truly a relativist, even though that is how he was interpreted by many, including some whose disdain was tinged by anti-Semitism. Beneath all of his theories, including relativity, was a quest for invariants, certainties, and absolutes. There was a harmonious reality underlying the laws of the universe, Einstein felt, and the goal of science was to discover it.
His quest began in 1895, when as a 16-year-old he imagined what it would be like to ride alongside a light beam. A decade later came his miracle year, described in the letter above, which laid the foundations for the two great advances of twentieth-century physics: relativity and quantum theory.
A decade after that, in 1915, he wrested from nature his crowning glory, one of the most beautiful theories in all of science, the general theory of relativity. As with the special theory, his thinking had evolved through thought experiments. Imagine being in an enclosed elevator accelerating up through space, he conjectured in one of them. The effects you'd feel would be indistinguishable from the experience of gravity.
Gravity, he figured, was a warping of space and time, and he came up with the equations that describe how the dynamics of this curvature result from the interplay between matter, motion, and energy. It can be described by using another thought experiment. Picture what it would be like to roll a bowling ball onto the two-dimensional surface of a trampoline. Then roll some billiard balls. They move toward the bowling ball not because it exerts some mysterious attraction but because of the way it curves the trampoline fabric. Now imagine this happening in the four-dimensional fabric of space and time. Okay, it's not easy, but that's why we're no Einstein and he was.
The exact midpoint of his career came a decade after that, in 1925, and it was a turning point. The quantum revolution he had helped to launch was being transformed into a new mechanics that was based on uncertainties and probabilities. He made his last great contributions to quantum mechanics that year but, simultaneously, began to resist it. He would spend the next three decades, ending with some equations scribbled while on his deathbed in 1955, stubbornly criticizing what he regarded as the incompleteness of quantum mechanics while attempting to subsume it into a unified field theory.
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| View all 8 comments |
A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-04 00:00>
Well written book for the lay person. Reveals many interesting aspects of Einstein's life and works. His works are presented in such a way that you don't need to be a physicist to enjoy the book. |
D. Buxman (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-04 00:00>
In my experience, biographies of great scientists often leave the reader in a fog of technical complexity. While this book is not "Physics in One Simple Lesson," Walter Isaacson did a wonderful job of telling the story of the man and making the scientific aspects sufficiently understandable to be useful in grasping the magnitude of Einstein's intellect. This book is meticulously researched and sourced, yet written in a witty and entertaining way that makes reading it a pleasure. The central lesson that I was left with was the importance of independent thinking in any context. Einstein made it clear that conventional wisdom is often neither practical, nor wise. I was struck by his resiliance in his early years and his good humor in really tough times. I also appreciated the fact that the author was willing to examine all aspects of Eintein's personality, both favorable and unfavorable. |
Kerry D. Sullivan (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-04 00:00>
Walter Isaacson paints an extraordinarily engaging and likeable portrait of the most brilliant scientist in the last three hundred years.
While Einstein's scientific accomplishments are laid out well and placed in excellent context (though I don't pretend to understand them much), Isaacson's portrait of him as a brave, profoundly moral, ideosyncratic, and immenently likeable person caught my imagination even more - probably because I can understand the inherent bravery and goodness in standing up to German Nazism, McCarthyism, and Racism, even if I can't quite get my mind around Einstein's scientific accomplishments. (Einstein had a way of being on the right side of history even -perhaps especially - in areas beyond his technical expertize.)
Isaacson admires his subject unabashedly. He captures his warts, but without fixating on them. And Einstein's unassuming humility and enjoyment of life as it came to him shine through. I closed the book with the thought that almost anyone who reads it would put the good doctor on their short list of historical characters they would most like to drink a beer with - and thank for making the world a better place. |
W. Jamison (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-04 00:00>
Besides giving new insights into this life and those around him a tremendous effort with the assistance of folks like Brian Greene and high school teachers make this a great way to learn science. Young people should read this book. It makes physics fun and understandable. Why not use it as a textbook? It certainy would not replace a text book but it applies narration to the developments putting them into a context more easily remembered. |
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