Book Review: "Einstein: His Life and Universe" by Walter Isaacson

Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007)

5 Stars out of 5

Walter Isaacson

680 pages

"Long live impudence! It is my guardian angel." 

"God does not play dice with the Universe."

"As a scientist, altering your doctrines when the facts change is not a sign of weakness"

                                                                                   - Albert Einstein 

Walter Isaascon has written a masterful biography of Albert Einstein (“Einstein: His Life and Universe”), a scientist that surely belongs in Humanity’s Top Three: Aristotle, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein. Each of these three uniquely intelligent, creative individuals is the true personification of the definition of “genius” – at least of the scientific inquiry sort. However, it is a different definition that springs to my mind after reading Isaacson’s highly readable biography of Einstein, and that is “irony”. I am going to base this comment on Merriam-Webster’s third definition of the word: “incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result”. So, what is so ironic about Albert Einstein? The list is not too long but it is to a degree instructive about the man that re-defined a universe previously so well defined by Isaac Newton that most physicists in the early 20^th century never thought a re-definition was necessary let alone conceived of what that new definition would be like.

Isaacson begins his discussion of Einstein with Albert’s early years where the young prodigy is shown displaying little promise as a compliant German student – he would prove his academic ability in school but never his conformity. Einstein was born in Ulm Germany in 1879. He had a normal childhood with two parents of Jewish ethnicity and a little sister than adored him, Maja. His father and uncle restricted as they were from certain occupations and certain levels of higher education in Germany due to their Jewish background worked as “tradesmen” in the field of power generation. Einstein’s father Hermann was an average engineer but a very poor businessman. His unsuccessful efforts in the field of power and light generation in Munich led him to sell his factory and move the family to Pavia Italy leaving Albert to finish his studies at a Munich gymnasium (German equivalent of a US high School). However, young Einstein’s rebelliousness would now begin to assert itself. He hated the German teaching regimen of rote learning almost as much as he hated watching Prussian militaristic influence in local parades. These early events would serve as vivid early warnings of the iconoclastic Einstein that would break into world prominence in the early 20^th century.

One of the ironies (tragedy might be the better word here) in Einstein’s early years was the fact that Hermann Einstein’s family were not practicing Jews but they were still treated as the unwanted second class citizens that Germany barely tolerated - this was some 43 years before Hitler would gain power; anti-Semitism may have reached it heights or more properly depths under Hitler, but he certainly did not invent it in Germany. This attitude against the Jews would follow Einstein throughout his years in Germany, Czechoslovakia and Switzerland when prior to his eventual fame as a theoretical physicist he would not be able to get a job following graduation with his teaching diploma. Indeed, he would be the only unemployed graduate in his cohort from the Swiss Federal Polytechnic (later the ETH for those of you who know this venerable institution) in Zurich. Worse yet for Einstein he would find an enemy on the staff at the Polytechnic that likely played a major role in Einstein’s frustrating attempts to find a job; this enemy would be the first of several to plague Einstein through the years.

The need for a job was acute for Einstein for while at the Polytechnic he fell in love with a Serbian physics student, Mileva Marić. She and Einstein would have three children, though the first child, Lieserl would be given up for adoption and lost to history. The other two, both boys, were Hans Albert and Eduard; Hans Albert would become a Professor of Engineering in America, while the unfortunate Eduard would be committed to an asylum for the mentally ill as he entered his twenties. Poor Mileva would not graduate from the Polytechnic though she tried several times to do so. Instead, she would become Einstein’s wife and helper as he prepared his seminal papers for his annus mirablis of 1905.

Einstein’s marriage to Mileva would begin in 1903 and officially end with a divorce in 1919, though they had separated five years before when Einstein began a romantic relationship with his cousin Elsa Löwenthal. Einstein married Elsa in 1919; they remained married until her death in 1936. Einstein’s romantic life provides one more example of irony. Here was a man that would in time be famous for his love of Mankind, his pacifism, and his kindly attitude to all that knew him. And here also was a man that would cheat on both of his wives and who would have a distant and troubled relationship with his two sons, and would (apparently based on late discovered correspondence) persuade (or at least apparently be indifferent to) Mileva to give Lieserl up for adoption. How ironic that one of the leading proponents for the rights of Man in the first half of the 20^th century would prove to be such a poor husband and father.

Following Einstein’s graduation from the Polytechnic he looked fruitlessly for two years to find a position, any kind of position. In time, through the influence of one of his close friends, Marcel Grossman and Grossman's father, Einstein would eventually gain a slot at the Swiss Patent Office as an examiner. Einstein had already renounced his German citizenship in order to avoid German military service. He would now obtain his Swiss citizenship (an item Einstein prized amongst his favorite possessions) in order to get the patent office job. Again, a kind of irony intrudes during this period in the Patent Office. For it is certain that while Einstein felt some dismay at not gaining a teaching position following graduation, his job at the Patent Office was such that he could excel at it and do so by working for a mere 2-3 hours a day. Einstein would then have many free hours each day to think – something he almost surely would not have had, had he actually obtained a teaching position. These gift hours would give the somewhat still non-verbal Einstein time to do what he would do best: think and to think using pictures. He would think by formulating thought problems: what is the nature of light (wave vs. particle), what is the connection between time and space. He would also compose a lesser work, a far safer work on capillary action that would earn his long sought Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Zurich in 1905.

It is thought by Isaacson that this happy coincidence of genius, lots of free time, of thinking in pictures and of Einstein’s viewing the world with a distinctly iconoclastic viewpoint would combine to create the storm of creativity that Einstein would release upon the world of Physics in 1905. He would write four seminal papers: photoelectric effect (for which he would eventually win the Nobel Prize in 1921 and would lead him into a life-long fight with the concept of quantum mechanics), Brownian motion, special relativity, and the relationship between mass and energy (symbolized most simply as the equation he is most identified with by the public; E=mc²). All of this was done by the age of 26. It would also lead him from the Patent Office to a position as a lecturer at the University of Bern and then finally to the first of his many positions as a Professor of Theoretical Physics; the first being at the University of Zurich in 1909.

His work on the photoelectric effect would in many ways be as groundbreaking as his work on Special Relativity and his work a decade later on General Relativity. All of these subjects would prove to be instrumental in moving the world of Physics away from a strict Newtonian view of the universe. For Einstein, he would adopt for life the approach he delineated in his second big piece of work on relativity which utilized extensive mathematics in order to describe General Relativity. (This overt reliance on math stood in stark contrast to Einstein's previous adherence to the views of Ernst Mach's “logical positivism”; a philosophy which states something must be either verifiable by deductive logic or direct observations; a philosophy that strongly informed Einstein's views when he devised Special Relativity. That is to say, Einstein did not need advanced math to define the world of Special Relativity, deductive reasoning would do so, but without question he did so for the world of General Relativity.) Einstein would in these various groundbreaking theses describe energy, mass and time in ways heretofore un-thought of; to do so, he would employ his rebellious point of view regarding the acceptance of things as they were simply because conventional wisdom said they were so. Therein lay two of the biggest ironies of Einstein’s life: the iconoclasm that served him so well in describing light as a particle or using relativity to describe the universe, would fail him utterly when it came to accepting quantum mechanics as defined by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, and secondarily, his switch from the non-mathematical approach in Special Relativity to a highly mathematical (particularly one relying on Field equations) approach in defining General Relativity would drag him into a life-long approach to creating a unifying theory using field equations. Both of these endless tilts at his personal windmills would end in failure as Quantum Mechanics would gain worldwide acceptance by all but Einstein and a few of his contemporaries (Max Planck is an another ironic example, as he too would play a key role with his calculations in making a case for a theory that he too could not accept).

Einstein would continue to work his entire life in the realm of theoretical physics. And while he fought the Quantum Mechanics’ concept of chance playing such a significant role in reality and as a result for calling into the question the concept of strict causality, Einstein continued to play a long running role in developing QM. In conference after conference, in letter after letter to Bohr or Heisenberg, Einstein would revert to his time-honored habit of posing thought questions in an effort to discredit QM. Bohr and Heisenberg would in many cases be taken aback, but in each case (usually) Bohr would think through Einstein’s implications and questions and refine the QM theory to overcome Einstein’s challenges, and in the process strengthen the QM model further. (Should I note that by fighting QM, Einstein made it a stronger theory and that this is one more irony in Einstein’s long list of such occurrences?)

Possibly the best part of Isaacson’s biography of Einstein is when he turns from science to Einstein’s years following 1920. In these years, Einstein would gain a notoriety that rivaled, even exceeded the fame of most of the world’s popular celebrities. Each of Einstein’s trips to the US, and each of this new papers released after he moved to The Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1933 were greeted by the American people or press in a manner similar to the arrival of an Oscar winning movie or Hollywood legend. Einstein would add to this hoopla with his charming personality and marked penchant for quotable quotes. Many of these quotes would employ Einstein’s views on God and religion. It was clear that he was not a religious man in the American convention of the 20^th century; he was a form of a deist; he was probably far more in line with 18^th century Americans, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. And yet, there was a deep under-current within Einsteinian thought that clung tenaciously to the view that there did exist things and concepts that were by definition unknowable to man.  

The last irony I will mention is connected to Einstein’s pacifism. He had long argued publicly for many actions by the public to resist the draft, war and militarism. He was a widely respected scholar and his work in the world of Physics help him gain the attention and respect of much of the world as he propounded his ideas on pacifism. It is hard to imagine then the reaction of his former colleagues in their war on war (so to say) when he wrote a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt to encourage him and the US government to start a project on developing the atomic bomb. Here was a world famous pacifist arguing for the bomb. And then in the height of ironies, he was denied clearance to work with Fermi and the others on the Manhattan project because of his past public statements about war resistance; he could not be trusted to work on the very project he proposed!

As strange as it may seem, there are even more incongruities, ironies and oddities littering Einstein’s life. However, the main point is that this seminal man, Zionist, pacifist, advocate for civil rights, violinist and physicist accomplished so much in his life, it is close to impossible to believe it was all done by one man. To Isaacson’s immense credit, he covers Einstein’s life with great care and attention to the man, his beliefs and his deeds. It is an absolute given that the sections in the biography devoted to physics are often difficult to fully grasp (per Isaacson, "we're no Einstein and he was"), but Isaacson with the help of noted String Theorist Brian Greene (an especially noteworthy writer of physics for the lay reader) goes a long way to explaining concepts that were so baffling to the public of the early 20^th century that Einstein would endlessly give speeches and responses to questions asking him to explain relativity (he would also write a book on the topic that went into many re-printings). The other sections of the book on Einstein’s family and public life are as enlightening and as entertaining as the science sections. Both parts of Einstein’s life are balanced throughout the book in a way as to keep the reader engaged. The only weakness of the book is perhaps one related to a question that may not be answerable: what was it that made Einstein the unique historical figure in Physics that he was? Isaacson essays an answer that is based on Einstein’s combination of native intelligence, his propensity to think in pictures and his ardent desire to think free from restrictions. It is a hard question to answer, a hard man to fully understand, but this a wonderful book that works through all of these topics.

This book is a must read for any scientist or non-scientist interested in science. It is also a must read for any reader interested in learning about one of the Top Ten Most Significant Humans in History, or less hyperbolically as Isaacson summed him up as a man and "a rebel with a reverence for the harmony of nature".