Einstein: His Life and Universe

by Walter Isaacson

his nonconformist personality, his instincts as a rebel, his curiosity, his passions and detachments—intertwined with his political side and his scientific side.

his thirty years as a revolutionary and his subsequent thirty years as a resister,

Einstein also came to symbolize the perception that modern physics was something that ordinary laymen could not comprehend, “the province of priest-like experts,” in the words of Harvard professor Dudley Herschbach.

As he once declared, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

“To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself.”

“It is important to foster individuality,” he said, “for only the individual can produce the new ideas.”

“I very rarely think in words at all,” he later told a psychologist. “A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.”

“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.”

“Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle.”

Soon the flight of his mathematical genius was so high that I could no longer follow.”

“When a person can take pleasure in marching in step to a piece of music it is enough to make me despise him. He has been given his big brain only by mistake.”

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

“The Jew who abandons his faith,” he once said, “is in a similar position to a snail that abandons his shell. He is still a snail.”

Boltzmann responded by revising the Second Law so that it was not absolute but merely a statistical near-certainty. It was theoretically possible that millions of perfume molecules could randomly bounce around in a way that they all put themselves back into a bottle at a certain moment, but that was exceedingly unlikely, perhaps trillions of times less likely than that a new deck of cards shuffled a hundred times would end up back in its pristine rank-and-suit precise order.

It reinforced one of his ingenious talents: the ability to conduct thought experiments in which he could visualize how a theory would play out in practice. It also helped him peel off the irrelevant facts that surrounded a problem.

“From the succession of ideas and impressions we form the idea of time,” Hume wrote. “It is not possible for time alone ever to make its appearance.” This idea that there is no such thing as absolute time would later echo in Einstein’s theory of relativity. Hume’s specific thoughts about time, however, had less influence on Einstein than his more general insight that it is dangerous to talk about concepts that are not definable by perceptions and observations.

Einstein embraced his concept of an amorphous God reflected in the awe-inspiring beauty, rationality, and unity of nature’s laws. But like Spinoza, Einstein did not believe in a personal God who rewarded and punished and intervened in our daily lives.

These harmonic oscillators could absorb or emit energy only in the form of discrete packets or bundles. These packets or bundles of energy came only in fixed amounts, determined by Planck’s constant, rather than being divisible or having a continuous range of values.

For Planck, a reluctant revolutionary,

Einstein showed that even though one collision could not budge a particle, the effect of millions of random collisions per second could explain the jig observed by Brown.

In other words, Einstein wanted to assert that he had produced a theory that was deduced from grand principles and postulates, not a theory that was constructed by examining physical data (just as he had made plain that his light quanta paper had not started with the photoelectric effect data gathered by Philipp Lenard).

The special theory of relativity that Einstein developed in 1905 applies only to this special case (hence the name): a situation in which the observers are moving at a constant velocity relative to one another—uniformly in a straight line at a steady speed—referred to as an “inertial reference system.”

“A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way,” Einstein once said. “But,” he hastened to add, “intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.”

“The whole paper is a testament to the power of simple language to convey deep and powerfully disturbing ideas,” says the science writer Dennis Overbye.

Instead, it means that measurements of time, including duration and simultaneity, can be relative, depending on the motion of the observer. So can the measurements of space, such as distance and length. But there is a union of the two, which we call spacetime, and that remains invariant in all inertial frames. Likewise, there are things such as the speed of light that remain invariant.

“The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength,” he said. “They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.”

“His conviction that the universe loves simplification and beauty, and his willingness to be guided by this conviction, even if it meant destroying the foundations of Newtonian physics, led him, with a clarity of thought that others could not match, to his new description of space and time.”

the courage that Marić displayed by entering and competing in the male-dominated world of physics and math is what should earn her an admired spot in the annals of scientific history. This she deserves without inflating the importance of her collaboration on the special theory of relativity.

Only one professor on the faculty committee supported hiring him without requiring him to write a new thesis, “in view of the important scientific achievements of Herr Einstein.” The others disagreed, and the requirement was not waived. Not surprisingly, Einstein considered the matter “amusing.” He did not write the special habilitation or get the post.

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

“Heisenberg has laid a big quantum egg,” he wrote. “In Göttingen they believe in it. I don’t.”