No figure towers over the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century more compellingly than Albert Einstein. Nearly fifty years after his death, his very image has taken on the status of an icon. But who, really, was this man who forever transformed our sense of our place in the universe?
Overbye's book is the first biography of the great physicist to focus on his life during the first two decades of the century, when he invented relativity with its elastic view of space and time, and first glimpsed the quantum chaos in the heart of atoms - the most far-reaching ideas of modern history.
But as Albert Einstein took his first steps towards immortality, his private life was collapsing around him. Despite his brilliance, he was also a young man in love - not only with the exhilarating vistas of physics, but with the extraordinary woman who was to become his wife. Mileva Maric was a brooding and gifted Serb mathematician who was intellectual collaborator and emotional adversary.
Drawing upon hundreds of unpublished letters and a decade of research, Overbye reveals Einstein as a self-styled bohemian, a poet, a violinist and a self-confident, charismatic whirlwind who left personal and professional turmoil in his wake. 'Einstein In Love' is a brilliant biography that at last separates the man from the myth, and restores humanity to the scientist who has come to represent an almost abstract embodiment of genius.
