Einstein: His Life and Universe (book review) (article) by David A. Schwinghammer on AuthorsDen

Einstein questioned authority as a young man and was not a good student, making it difficult to get a teaching job. As a young man Einstein rebelled against established authority, defying his parents, teachers, and militaristic German society, going so far as to renounce his citizenship. When he enrolled in Zurich Polytechnic his disdain for his teachers was readily apparent. Because he skipped so many classes in favor of studying on his own, he barely passed his exams. This came back to haunt him when these same professors spurned his applications for an assistantship, and that's how he wound up working at the patent office. Isaacson stresses the idea that it was Einstein's rebelliousness and contempt for authority that led to his great discoveries. Few scientists had the chutzpah to question Newton's concept of space and time. Because Einstein did he was able to formulate his theories of special relativity and general relativity. It was only when Einstein became an authority figure himself that he ran into problems. He insisted that God "would not play dice by allowing things to happen by chance." Thus, he spent the rest of his life trying to find a theory that would combine his general relativity and electromagnetism. When weak and strong nuclear forces were discovered, he ignored them, just as he did quantum mechanics, a theory that he helped formulate. According to some of the reviews I've read, Isaacson aims at the layman in his analysis of Einstein's theories. Despite this admirable goal, his stand-alone discussions of special and general relativity as well as The Uncertainty Principle and such terms as "synchronicity" and the "equivalence principle" were a bit tedious; however, I did finally get the idea behind E equals MC squared. Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared is illustrated by using the mass of a raisin. Mass times 186,000 miles a second doubled could power the city of New York for an entire day. I was also not aware that Hubble discovered the first galaxy, outside of the Milky Way, as recently as 1924. Isaacson also addresses the idea that Mileva Maric, Einstein's first wife, deserves some credit for his discoveries. Isaacson tries to show that she was no more than a sounding board. Einstein was so obsessed by science that he discussed it in his love letters. The story begins to pick up when Einstein moves to Princeton. That's where we begin to see the absent-minded professor begin to emerge. He was also the first "rock-star" scientist as journalists and ordinary citizens clamored to get near him. Isaacson shows that it was Einstein's personality that led to his renown. He had a certain flair for publicity and he had a sly sense of humor. One illustration would be a time when he was lecturing in London, and it was rumored that the Nazis had put out a contract on him. He was given two female body guards sporting hunting shotguns. Einstein said, "The beauty of my bodyguards would disarm a conspirator sooner than their shotguns." Einstein spent over twenty years at the Institute for Advance Studies in Princeton, where he became a legend not only for his science but also for his eccentricities. Once, on one of his ramblings, he forgot where he lived and had to call the Institute for directions. He lived there on Mercer Street with several women, his second wife Elsa, his aide Helen Dukas, and later his stepdaughter Margot and his sister Maja. As the years went by both Elsa and Maja adapted Einstein's fly-away hairdo. An interesting anecdote pertains to Maja. She was a vegetarian but she loved hotdogs. When she began to decline in the late forties, Einstein convinced her they were vegetables. The story of Einstein's letter to President Roosevelt concerning the development of the Atom Bomb is well known, but he was a pacifist well before the war and worked passionately for world peace and a world government. He also put his money where his mouth was when it came to discrimination. When Marian Anderson, the famous contralto, came to Princeton for a concert she was denied a room at the Nassau Inn. Einstein invited her to stay at his house on Mercer Street. Einstein was also one of the early critic of McCarthyism, and the FBI had a heavy file on him as he unwittingly lent his name to several Communist front organizations. He worried that America was losing its democratic spirit. Some even accused him of being an atheist. Einstein responded, "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and doings of mankind." Einstein was an individual right up until the day he died of a burst aneurysm, an incomplete equation at his bedside.
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