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Einstein: His Life and Universe
by: Walter Isaacson

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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 530.092
EAN: 9780743264747
ISBN: 0743264746
Label: Simon & Schuster
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 704
Publication Date: May 13, 2008
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Sales Rank: 1703
Studio: Simon & Schuster

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Product Description:
By the author of the acclaimed bestseller Benjamin Franklin, this is the first full biography of Albert Einstein since all of his papers have become available.

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.

Amazon.com Review:
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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Customer Reviews

Average Rating:

Rating: - Great peek into the brain and being of the man
Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R97YEZJZMMBZG My personal opinion and impression of this complicated life story

Rating: - A must-read if you are interested in the history of science
Walter Isaacson has done a masterful job of retracing Albert Einstein's life, including his earliest childhood, his miracle year of 1905, the development of general relativity and his political activism. This book is an erudite yet thoroughly readable and entertaining look at the man.

His genius was in being able to see physical meaning to equations; to him an equation was a representation of physical reality. His weakness was in not accepting quantum mechanics, to which can be attributed his famous quote about God and dice. Most enjoyable about the book were his exchanges with the quantum scientists such as Max Born and Niels Bohr. Isaacson was completely objective, illustrating his strengths in science, his weaknesses in relationships, and his naïveté in politics.

The author also was able to communicate the difficult scientific concepts necessary for understanding physics today. Indeed ... Read More

Rating: - Einstein liked to hang out in coffee houses and drinking coffee
I liked learning about his life and what he did for fun. This was an amazing book. It went well with me after reading The Black Swan. Similar stuff in a way. [...]

Rating: - A life of science and faith -- in the comprehensibility of the universe
A wonderful biography of a unique, fascinating and enthralling person. The author brings freshness to this much-written subject by drawing on voluminous personal correspondence that remained sealed for 50 years following Einstein's death. The book is a remarkable achievement by being both highly readable and accessible, and providing scientifically sound explanations for the lay person of complex concepts of physics. As a history of science, of the early 20th century, and as a perspective on one of the most engaging and innovative personalities ever, this book is total education and refreshment. Especially moving is the fundamental thread of Einstein's personality as a lifelong quest for unifying principles, married to unsentimental devotion to reason, logic and a faith in the comprehensibility of the universe. (Good luck with that one.)

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