 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by 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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Average Customer Rating:   A great overview of the scientific process in action This biography of Einstein life was a great introduction into the scientific process and into Einstein's discoveries. I enjoy the mix of gossip about his life and the science that he was preforming along the way. Einstein's Relativity work was explains in a way to not go into to much detail, but left the reader with a good understanding. I found that this explanation of Relativity allowed me to understand it a little more and gave me the desire to research it more outside the book. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in science most in physics. Great Biography, Pretty Good Science This was an enjoyable and very easy read. I loved the author's writing style: it was crisp, fast paced and moved the story along well.
Einstein's life is explained fairly, certainly in a sympathetic light, but the author doesn't gloss over his flaws or ignore his mistakes either. Felt like a very complete look at Einstein's life.
The descriptions of relativity and Einstein's other scientific theories are good, but not great. Someone without any scientific background will not feel overwhelmed. Having read Brian Green's Fabric of the Cosmos recently, I found his explanaitions to be clearer and easier to understand than those in this book, however. Someone with a more scientific background may have a different view, though.
From this book, I felt like I got an excellent understanding of Einstein's life, and a pretty good look at his universe. To really get a good handle on Einstein's theories, I think something more is necessary.
Overall, enjoyable and definately recommended. I read the Kindle version of the book and it is well formatted. Even Einstein can't live up to being Einstein... I was impressed with the amount of research that Walter Isaacson put into this book. He obviously worked not only to accurately capture who Einstein was, but also did a credible job of explaining Einstein's discoveries for a non-scientific audience.
Where the book left me wanting was not the rendition, but the subject matter itself. There should be some expectation here; Einstein is larger than life and there is bound to be some disappointment once the pedestal is removed. To someone who studied Physics in college as I did (and yet has few advantages in understanding Einstein's work over everyone else), Einstein holds rock-star status. However, I found that were I offered dinner with past figures of my own choosing, Einstein likely would not make my short list. Gift selection We bought this as a gift for a friend who loves to read and wanted a book about this man. amazing I bought this for my 16 year old he loved it and now is considering Astro physics for college major.He said was a great read so if you know so in to physics and such you wont regret this purchase! |  |
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