Einstein: His Life and Universe

by Walter Isaacson

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.

If he did not have that electrified halo of hair and those piercing eyes, would he still have become science’s preeminent poster boy? Suppose, as a thought experiment, that he had looked like a Max Planck or a Niels Bohr. Would he have remained in their reputational orbit, that of a mere scientific genius? Or would he still have made the leap into the pantheon inhabited by Aristotle, Galileo, and Newton?

an appreciation for the methods of science is a useful asset for a responsible citizenry. What science teaches us, very significantly, is the correlation between factual evidence and general theories, something well illustrated in Einstein’s life.

A society’s competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity.

As a young student he never did well with rote learning. And later, as a theorist, his success came not from the brute strength of his mental processing power but from his imagination and creativity.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

His success came from questioning conventional wisdom, challenging authority, 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. Tyranny repulsed him, and he saw tolerance not simply as a sweet virtue but as a necessary condition for a creative society. “It is important to foster individuality,” he said, “for only the individual can produce the new ideas.”

It was an old Jewish custom to take in a needy religious scholar to share the Sabbath meal; the Einsteins modified the tradition by hosting instead a medical student on Thursdays.

“Praised be this science! Praised be the men who do it! And praised be the human mind, which sees more sharply than does the human eye.”

“A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.”

“An academic career in which a person is forced to produce scientific writings in great amounts creates a danger of intellectual superficiality,” he said.

The most influential of these, Einstein later said, was the Scottish empiricist David Hume (1711–1776). In the tradition of Locke and Berkeley, Hume was skeptical about any knowledge other than what could be directly perceived by the senses. Even the apparent laws of causality were suspect to him, mere habits of the mind; a ball hitting another may behave the way that Newton’s laws predict time after time after time, yet that was not, strictly speaking, a reason to believe that it would happen that way the next time. “Hume saw clearly that certain concepts, for example that of causality, cannot be deduced from our perceptions of experience by logical methods,” Einstein noted. A version of this philosophy, sometimes called positivism, denied the validity of any concepts that went beyond descriptions of phenomena that we directly experience.

“intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.”

Einstein’s inconsistent statements over the next fifty years about the influence of Michelson-Morley are useful in that they remind us of the caution needed when writing history based on dimming recollections.20

phenomenon, called time dilation, leads to what is known as the twin paradox. If a man stays on the platform while his twin sister takes off in a spaceship that travels long distances at nearly the speed of light, when she returns she would be younger than he is. But because motion is relative, this seems to present a paradox. The sister on the spaceship might think it’s her brother on earth who is doing the fast traveling, and when they are rejoined she would expect to observe that it was he who did not age much.

every beleaguered student wants to elicit someday from condescending professors.

Once again, he was deducing a theory from grand principles and postulates, then deriving some predictions that experimenters could proceed to test.

Calculating the actual distance between two points on the map in Greenland is different from doing so for points near the equator. Riemann worked out ways to determine mathematically the distance between points in space no matter how arbitrarily it curved and contorted.

Years later, when his younger son, Eduard, asked why he was so famous, Einstein replied by using a simple image to describe his great insight that gravity was the curving of the fabric of spacetime. “When a blind beetle crawls over the surface of a curved branch, it doesn’t notice that the track it has covered is indeed curved,” he said. “I was lucky enough to notice what the beetle didn’t notice.”

World War I The chain reaction that pushed Europe into war in August 1914 inflamed the patriotic pride of the Prussians and, in an equal and opposite reaction, the visceral pacifism of Einstein, a man so gentle and averse to conflict that he even disliked playing chess. “Europe in its madness has now embarked on something incredibly preposterous,” he wrote Ehrenfest that month. “At such times one sees to what deplorable breed of brutes we belong.”

In April 1915, modern chemical warfare was inaugurated when some five thousand French and Belgians met that deadly fate at Ypres, with Haber personally supervising the attack. (In an irony that may have been lost on the inventor of dynamite, who endowed the prize, Haber won the 1918 Nobel in chemistry for his process of synthesizing ammonia.)

Einstein also became an early member of the liberal and cautiously pacifist New Fatherland League, a club that pushed for an early peace and the establishment of a federal structure in Europe to avoid future conflicts. It published a pamphlet titled “The Creation of the United States of Europe,” and it helped get pacifist literature into prisons and other places. Elsa went with Einstein to some of the Monday evening meetings until the group was banned in early 1916.

“What drives people to kill and maim each other so savagely?” Einstein asked. “I think it is the sexual character of the male that leads to such wild explosions.”

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

“One of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness,” Einstein said. “Such men make this cosmos and its construction the pivot of their emotional life, in order to find the peace and security which they cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.”25

“All true democrats must stand guard lest the old class tyranny of the Right be replaced by a new class tyranny of the Left,” he said. Some on the left insisted that democracy, or at least multiparty liberal democracy, needed to be put aside until the masses could be educated and a new revolutionary consciousness take hold. Einstein disagreed. “Do not be seduced by feelings that a dictatorship of the proletariat is temporarily needed in order to hammer the concept of freedom into the heads of our fellow countrymen,” he told the rally. Instead, he decried Germany’s new left-wing government as “dictatorial,” and he demanded that it immediately call open elections, “thereby eliminating all fears of a new tyranny as soon as possible.”52

“Newton, forgive me,” Einstein later wrote, noting the moment. “You found the only way which, in your age, was just about possible for a man of highest thought and creative power.”

he soon developed a theory that his fame was, for all of its annoyances, at least a welcome sign of the priority that society placed on people like himself: The cult of individual personalities is always, in my view, unjustified… It strikes me as unfair, and even in bad taste, to select a few for boundless admiration, attributing superhuman powers of mind and character to them. This has been my fate, and the contrast between the popular estimate of my achievements and the reality is simply grotesque. This extraordinary state of affairs would be unbearable but for one great consoling thought: it is a welcome symptom in an age, which is commonly denounced as materialistic, that it makes heroes of men whose ambitions lie wholly in the intellectual and moral sphere.

One problem with fame is that it can engender resentment. Especially in academic and scientific circles, self-promotion was regarded as a sin. There was a distaste for those who garnered personal publicity,

A few months later, at the beginning of January 1921, an obscure Munich party functionary picked up the theme. “Science, once our greatest pride, is today being taught by Hebrews,” Adolf Hitler wrote in a newspaper polemic.25 There were even ripples that made it across the Atlantic. That April, the Dearborn Independent, a weekly owned by automaker Henry Ford, a strong anti-Semite, blared a banner headline across the top of its front page. “Is Einstein a Plagiarist?” it accusingly asked.26

in 1921, he made a leap not of faith but of commitment. “I am really doing whatever I can for the brothers of my race who are treated so badly everywhere,” he wrote Maurice Solovine.29 Next to his science, this would become his most important defining connection. As he would note near the end of his life, after declining the presidency of Is-rael, “My relationship to the Jewish people has become my strongest human tie.”

“Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not.”*

“Nature hides her secret because of her essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse.”

“The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think,”

“Until a generation ago, Jews in Germany did not consider themselves as members of the Jewish people,” he told a reporter on the day he was leaving America. “They merely considered themselves as members of a religious community.” But anti-Semitism changed that, and there was a silver lining to that cloud, he thought.

Before the war the mark had been worth 24 cents, but it had fallen to 2 cents by the beginning of 1920. At that time a mark could buy a loaf of bread. But then the bottom fell out of the currency. By the beginning of 1923, the price of a loaf went to 700 marks and by the end of that year cost 1 billion marks. Yes, 1 billion. In November 1923, a new currency, the Rentenmark, was introduced, backed by the government property; 1 trillion old marks equaled 1 new Rentenmark.

Upon arrival in Ceylon, the Einsteins were whisked away by a waiting rickshaw. “We rode in small one-man carriages drawn at a trot by men of Herculean strength yet delicate build,” he noted in his travel diary. “I was bitterly ashamed to share responsibility for the abominable treatment accorded fellow human beings but was unable to do anything about it.”

“To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself.”20

Einstein made his own contribution when he received in June of that year a paper in English from a young physicist from India named Satyendra Nath Bose. It derived Planck’s blackbody radiation law by treating radiation as if it were a cloud of gas and then applying a statistical method of analyzing it.

Ernst Mach’s dictum that theories should avoid any concepts that cannot be observed, measured, or verified.

“It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is,” Bohr declared. “Physics concerns what we can say about nature.”62

the spring of 1927, Einstein used the 200th anniversary of Newton’s death to defend the classical system of mechanics based on causality and certainty. Two decades earlier, Einstein had, with youthful insouciance, toppled many of the pillars of Newton’s universe, including absolute space and time. But now he was a defender of the established order, and of Newton.

American newspapers were somewhat at a loss. The New York Herald Tribune decided to print the entire paper verbatim, but it had trouble figuring out how to cable all the Greek letters and symbols over telegraph machines. So it hired some Columbia physics professors to devise a coding system and then reconstruct the paper in New York, which they did.

“Belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science.”37

Einstein’s great strength as a theorist was that he had a keener ability than other scientists to come up with what he called “the general postulates and principles which serve as the starting point.”

Isaac Newton’s declaration in book 3 of the Principia: “Nature is pleased with simplicity.”

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.”

“What do you think of Adolf Hitler?” Einstein replied, “He is living on the empty stomach of Germany. As soon as economic conditions improve, he will no longer be important.”

Einstein struck a more serious pose when he addressed the Caltech student body near the end of his stay. His sermon, grounded in his humanistic outlook, was on how science had not yet been harnessed to do more good than harm. During war it gave people “the means to poison and mutilate one another,” and in peacetime it “has made our lives hurried and uncertain.” Instead of being a liberating force, “it has enslaved men to machines” by making them work “long wearisome hours mostly without joy in their labor.” Concern for making life better for ordinary humans must be the chief object of science. “Never forget this when you are pondering over your diagrams and equations!”53

“One does not make war less likely to occur by formulating rules of warfare,”