Einstein: His Life and Universe | 
| Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
Category: EBooks
List Price: $17.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  196 reviews
Sales Rank: 280
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 704
Dewey Decimal Number: 530.092
ASIN: B000PC0S0K
Publication Date: April 10, 2007
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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
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 191 more reviews...
 "Einstein" July 6, 2008
Absolutely brilliant! Walter Issacson takes one to the heart of the great Einstein by making him accessible to the arm chair intellectual!
I even was able to understand the mathmetical offerings thanks to his great explanations!
I continue to be a devoted fan of Amazon!
Thank you
Great Science, Great History, Great Biography!!! July 4, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
First I read Isaacson's "Benjamin Franklin." Then I attended a lecture and book signing in New Orleans where the author delivered a wonderful lecture on Einstein after which he autographed my book. After that, how could I not read it?
Walter Isaacson is a brilliant man and a superb biographer! He truly understands Einstein's science and presents it in a way that is understandable to us mortals (well, almost). Any failures to understand the science though were totally mine....not the author's, and I certainly gained a much improved understanding of relativity, general relativity, quantum mechanics, etc. from having read this book. (Actually, I was reminded why I changed my intended college major from physics to other arenas during my freshman year.) I also gained a new knowledge of and appreciation for the other scientific luminaries of the early twentieth century as well as for the politics of scientific academia.
Beyond the science, Isaacson thoroughly explains Einstein the man. It is interesting to see how Einstein's early struggles to enter academia actually allowed him to think unconventionally and to develop the groundbreaking theories that made him famous. The book explores how his deep feelings for mankind could coexist in a personality that struggled with close personal relationships as well as how such an amazing scientific mind could sometimes be simplistic and naive in geo-political matters. Einstein's transition from pacifist to reluctant advocate of armament was also instructive. The perspectives of twentieth century history, Einstein's "rock star" status, his role in advocating the nuclear bomb, his religious views, his sense of being Jewish, his relationships with his family and peers and many other aspects of his life and personality are all covered well and entertainingly.
Who would think a biography of a scientist could be so interesting? While the actual science is sometimes a bit ponderous, it is necessary for the story, and Isaacson presents it well. The rest reads like a novel and, at several points near the end, is actually laugh out loud funny. I cannot recommend this book enough!!!
 Great subject. Dumb author. July 1, 2008
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
This biography's attempt to turn the theories of the greatest mind of the twentieth century into a function of personality is pathetically pedestrian and inane. A pity.
 Einstein: His Life and Universe June 27, 2008
Informative book on the life and mind of Einstein. A bit over my head at times but still loved it.
A joy even for the scientifically illiterate June 21, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
As the title of this review indicates I am ashamed to admit I am a scientific illiterate. I barely got through high school Chemistry and Trigonometry. As such I was reluctant to try this book. But I loved Isaacson's work on Franklin, and as such decided to give this a try. I could not put this book down. The greatest attribute I can pay to this book is that while parts of it were unfathomable to me, I persevered through them with the knowledge that soon I would again be enjoying Isaacson's incredible narrative. This book is not simply a biography. Nor is it, as I wrongly anticipated, an incomprehensible analysis of advanced scientific thought. Rather it is a look at the burning issues of the 20th Century (Nationalism, Socialism and Communism, Appeasement and the rise of Nazism, Hiroshima, McCarthyism...) through the life of its greatest thinker.
If, like me, you are among the unenlightened regarding Physics and high level Math, do not be intimidated by this book. You too will wade through relativity, electromagnetism, and the search for a unified field theory, knowing that soon you will be back to a more understandable summary of a wonderful life.
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