Book Review: Einstein, by Walter Isaacson
by J. Burton LeBlanc
December, 2007
The book “Einstein” written by Walter Isaacson is an intellectual achievement.
For the purposes of this review, references to the mathematical and physics accomplishments shall be omitted. Largely because they are beyond my ken. But also, because the book is so replete with nuggets and insights into the life of Einstein that were to a large extent, unrevealed, or at least not emphasized, that stress will be placed on them.
With respect to the inception of his career, he wrote to a friend, “I was originally supposed to become an engineer, but the thought of having to expend my creative energy on things that make practical everyday life more refined, with a bleak capital gain as the goal, was unbearable to me. Thinking for its own sake, like music!”
Among his first ventures into physics he became fascinated by field theories in which he found harmony and simple beauty.
“He had the brashness needed to scrub away the layers of conventional wisdom that were obscuring the cracks in the foundation of physics, and his visual imagination allowed him to make conceptual leaps that eluded more traditional thinkers.”
Newton had conceived the particle theory of light.
Einstein noted, “It appeared beyond question that light must be interpreted as a vibratory process in an elastic, inert medium filling up universal space.”
“A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way,”Einstein said , but added, “But, intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience”.
Einstein said that his path toward the theory of relativity began with a thought experiment at age 16 about what it would be like to ride at the speed of light alongside a light beam. This produced a paradox, and troubled him for the next ten years.
“Einstein’s 1905 burst of creativity was astonishing. He had devised a revolutionary quantum theory of light, helped prove the existence of the atom, explained Brownian movement, upended the concept of space and time, and produced what would become science’s best known equation.”
Icy silence seemed to follow the publication by a patent examiner of scientific articles.
“His life was a constant quest for unifying theories.”
Einstein continually sought work as a teacher, but no one would hire him, even as a high school teacher.
Four years after he had revolutionized physics he was offered a professorship at the University of Zurich.
“So, now I too am an official member of the guild of whores,” he explained to a colleague.
He had become a confirmed theorist rather than an experimental physicist. He did not like lab work.
When his two sons were young, Einstein would bounce them on his knee, but as they grew older, he became somewhat aloof from them, especially Eduard, who suffered increasingly severe mental illness.
He had the ability to tune out all distractions that sometimes included his family and children. When working he was even impervious to noise.
To Mach or Hume, reality existed only if it could be observed.
Einstein “increasingly sounded like a scientific realist, someone who believed that an underlying reality existed in nature that was independent of our ability to observe or measure it.”
Einstein was involved with numerous women in his life. There was Marie Winteler who had turned eighteen in 1895. She was a daughter of Jost Winteler with whose family Einstein boarded and had just completed teacher training. Although the romance thrilled both families it did not lead to marriage. His first experience in that sphere came with Mileva Maric, who was not particularly physically attractive, whom he met when they attended the Polytechnic Institute. She was Serbian, short and had a limp.
“Slightly rebellious toward bourgeois expectations, they were both intellectuals who sought as a lover someone who would also be a partner, colleague and collaborator. ‘We understand each other’s dark souls so well, and also drinking coffee and eating sausages, etcetera’, Einstein wrote her.”
She was also Einstein’s intellectual companion.
“ ‘How happy and proud I will be when the two of us together will have brought our work on the relative motion to a conclusion!’ Einstein had written his lover Mileva Marie’ back in 1901.” They were married and had two sons.
As their marriage fell apart, Einstein courted Elsa Einstein who was his cousin on both sides. They had a fairly long affair. Einstein was reluctant to divorce and remarry, which he ultimately did. They had a rather long and seemingly successful marriage. There is no doubt Elsa enjoyed her role as the wife of a man who had then become world famous.
Einstein had written to Elsa, “I have to have someone to love, otherwise life is miserable.”
When Elsa had written Einstein that he was “henpecked” by Marie, he had written back, “I categorically assure you that I consider myself a full-fledged male. Perhaps I will sometime have the opportunity to prove it to you.”
“In 1923, after marrying Elsa he had fallen in love with his secretary, Betty Neumann. Their romance was serious and passionate, according to newly revealed letters.”
“After he built the house in Caputh, a succession of women friends visited him there, with Elsa’s grudging acquiescence.” Toni Mendel, a wealthy widow with an estate on the Wanasee, came sailing with him. They went to the theater together and once when she picked up Einstein in her chauffeured limousine, Elsa got in a furious fight with him and would not give him any pocket money.
“He also had a relationship with a Berlin socialite name Ethel Michanowski. She tagged along on one of his trips to Oxford, in May 1931, and apparently stayed in a local hotel.” She also sent him gifts.
He also had a public relationship with a blonde Austrian named Margaret LeBach. On one visit she left a piece of clothing in Einstein’s sailboat, which caused a family row. Elsa’s daughter had urged her to terminate that relationship, but Einstein “ had let it be known that he believed that men and women were not naturally monogamous.”
“In the end, she [Elsa] decided that she was better preserving what she could of their marriage. In other respects, it suited her aspirations.”
The most important other woman in Einstein’s life was one who was completely discreet, protective, loyal, and not threatening to Elsa who came to work in 1928 as his secretary.
“Even Mileva Maric, who had gone back to using her maiden name after the divorce, started using the name Einstein again and was able to establish a strained but workable relationship with him.”
Einstein said, “Striving for social justice is the most valuable thing to do in life.”
Certainly, one of the most interesting aspects of Einstein’s life was his involvement in what may be considered the political sphere.
British Commander Oliver Locker Lampson an adventurer par excellence who was an early advocate of opposition to the Nazis introduced Einstein to Winston Churchill, who was out of power at the time. After lunch in the gardens at Chartwell, he wrote Elsa, “He is an eminently wise man.”
Locker-Lampson also brought Einstein to Austen Chamberlain and Lloyd George whose guest book when signing, in the space for home address wrote only, or “without any”.
On January 24, 1934, Einstein and Elsa had dinner at the White House with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and spent the night.
“The president was able to converse with them in passable German. Among other things, they discussed Roosevelt’s marine prints and Einstein’s love for sailing.”
Leo Szilard, the Hungarian physicist had known Einstein in Berlin in the 1920’s.
He had been working at Columbia University on ways to create a nuclear chain reaction, an idea he had conceived while waiting at a stoplight in London.
“When he heard of the discovery of fusion using uranium, Szilard realized that element might be used to produce this potentially explosive chain reaction.”
He had begun to worry that the Germans might buy uranium supplies from the Belgian Congo. When he remembered that Einstein was friendly with the Belgian queen mother, he tracked him down where he was sailing on Long Island.
Szilard, sitting on the front porch of a rented cottage, explained how an explosive chain reaction could be produced in uranium layered with graphite by the neutrons released from the nuclear fission. “I never thought of that!”, Einstein interjected. He quickly grasped the implications.
Einstein suggested that they send the proposed letter to a Belgian minister he knew.
A few days later Szilard was talking to Alfred Sachs, who suggested that the letter be sent to Roosevelt.
Szilard and Edward Teller sent drafts to Einstein.
In the final letter that Einstein signed and sent to Roosevelt he stated that “it is my duty to bring to your attention the following facts and recommendations. It may be possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future".
“This new phenomena would also lead to the construction of bombs…” He went on to say that whole ports could be destroyed and recommended that some permanent contact be set up between the administration and the group of physicists working on chain reactions in America.
It is one of the ironies of history that as the Manhattan Project progressed, Einstein was excluded by J. Edgar Hoover from participating therein. Einstein was later to lament, “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb, I never would have lifted a finger.”
Einstein’s interest in the role of governments in the lives of its citizens was sincere.
Above all, he cherished the freedom to express one's thoughts without restriction, since he believed that some of the best ideas in science, government and life often came from descendents.
Einstein was a one worlder.
“As in science, so it was in world politics for Einstein, he sought a unified set of principles that would create order out of anarchy.”
“For the remaining ten years of his life, his passion for advocating a unified governing structure for the globe would rival that for finding a unified field theory that could govern all the forces of nature.”
He said, “It is unthinkable that we can have peace without a real governmental organization to create and enforce law on individuals in their international relations.”
“The only truly effective way to control atomic arms, he believed, was by ceding the monopoly on military power to a world government.”
“The secret of the atomic bomb is to America what the Maginot Line was to France before 1939,” he told Newsweek. “It gives us imaginary security, and in this respect it is a great danger.”
“Einstein’s advocacy of an empowered world authority was based not on gooey sentiments but on the hardnosed assessment of human nature. ‘If the idea of world government is not realistic,’ he said in 1948, ‘then there is only one realistic view of our future: wholesale destruction of man by man’.”.
“The explanation that Einstein himself most often gave for his mental accomplishments was his curiosity. As he put it near the end of his life, ‘I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious.’”
One day during the 1930’s Einstein had invited a poet, Saint-John Perse to discuss how a poet worked. The poet spoke of the role played by intuition and imagination. “It is the same for the man of science,” Einstein responded with delight. “It is a sudden illumination, almost a rapture. Later to be sure, intelligence analyzes and experiments confirm or invalidate the intuition. But initially there is a great forward leap of the imagination.”
“There was an aesthetic to Einstein’s thinking, a sense of beauty. And one component to beauty, he felt, was simplicity. He had echoed, Newton’s dictum, ‘Nature is pleased with simplicity.’“
“Einstein’s life and work reflected the disruption of societal certainties and moral absolutes in the modernist atmosphere of the early twentieth century. Imaginative nonconformity was in the air.”
“Beneath all of his theories, including relativity, was a quest for invariants, certainties, and absolutes. There was a reality underlying the laws of the universe, Einstein felt and the goal of science was to discover it.”
From this book one can grasp the significance of Einstein’s life in its combination of brilliant mental ability, a genuine desire to improve the world and the lot of its inhabitants, set against a very human life with its customary frustrations.