The biography of the most influential scientist of the twentieth century -- on audio.
In Isaacson's account, Einstein is a revolutionary and a rebel, a non-conformist from boyhood days. His character, creativity, and imagination are related, and they drive both his life and his work. In Issacson's marvelously clear biography, we watch Einstein over the many decades of his life and we understand something of how the mind of a genius worked. Isaacson writes with such precision and patience that we grasp what for many of us has always been a mystery -- Einstein's great discoveries which revolutionised physics.
Einstein's life story encompasses the vast sweep of modern history. As a Jew, like many of the era's pre-eminent scientists, he fled the Nazis, and ended up spending the rest of his days, the second half of his life, at Princeton University. His tale is the story of modern science, from the infinitesimal to the infinite. We are still living in his universe. Photoelectric cells and television, nuclear power and lasers, space travel and even semiconductors all bear Einstein's fingerprints. He signed the letter to President Roosevelt suggesting a project to build an atom bomb during World War II.
Einstein's theories also reflect the disruption of certainties and moral absolutes in the charged modernist atmosphere of the early 20th century: Picasso, Joyce, Freud, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and others were breaking conventional bonds.
Einstein, however, was not truly a relativist. God does not play dice, he famously remarked. His work was a quest for absolutes. For some, miracles serve as evidence of God's existence. For Einstein, he said, it was the absence of miracles that reflected divine providence. The fact that the world was comprehensive, that it followed laws, was worthy of awe, and for Einstein this was the defining quality of a 'God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists.' This conviction infused his life with an unending desire to find that harmony. Although his great discoveries were long over, Einstein lived a full and apparently contented old age.
