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Title: Einstein: His Life and Universe
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Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
List Price: $32.00
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| Einstein: His Life and Universe by Simon & Schuster Inside the man | Isaacson appears to have truly stepped inside the head of this great man. His explanations of the science are understandable to those who are not professional physicists, but more importantly, we get to see the man behind the famous equations. What was he really like? How was this super-star also a human being? What were his imperfections?
Isaacson has done a fantastic job with this book - it is very readable and difficult to put down as a result. | | Einstein: His Life and Universe by Simon & Schuster The Best .... | | I have read Biographys about Einstein before but this was by far the Best ,the Author has such a natural way to describe the inner workings of a Complexed Genius. | | Einstein: His Life and Universe by Simon & Schuster Universe Man | Walter Isaacson's biography of Time's "Person of the 20th Century", Albert Einstein, welcomes us to the world of one of history's most famous scientists. So well known that his name is nearly a common noun synonym for genius, but still misunderstood on many fronts, Einstein emerges much more intact than most famous people subjected to a biography of this length. He wasn't a great father for most of his life, perhaps shockingly so in one case. At one time a revolutionary figure in his field, he became quite conservative in his views late in his career, with his major contribution coming tangentially as others answered his objections to more modern theories of uncertainty and reality. Often thought of as the father of the atomic bomb, Einstein played a very minor role, other than to recognize the awesome potential of E = mc2 and making the effort to communicate his concern to those who needed to know in the volatile days leading up to World War II. The story of the emigration of Einstein and other German scientists is chilling in its implication. Had they stayed and developed the bomb for Hitler, the world might be a much different place today.
A book about a theoretical physicist has a good chance to sail right over the general reader's technical ability to understand it. Isaacson does a good job of keeping that part of the story near the ground, presenting concepts and Einstein's famous "thought experiments", but essentially no higher mathematics. I did better with E = mc2 and issues of uncertainty and reality presented later in the book than with the theory of relativity. Isaacson does his best work examining Einstein's conceptual mind--his career-long search for a unified field theory that would explain all the major forces in the universe, and his long dedication to a unified form of world government that would mediate the risks inherent with nationalism and mechanized, even nuclear, weapons. The stories about Einstein's family life, while humanizing and revealing, were the least interesting to me, though they did convey Einstein's basic humility with his place in the cosmos.
It took me quite awhile to read this book, but I'll give it five stars, particularly for biography readers and those with a scientific bent.
| | Einstein: His Life and Universe by Simon & Schuster Just What The Doctor Ordered | I picked this book up in its audio form as something to listen to when I was on the road. Turns out that I unwittingly purchased the "abridged" edition and, in retrospect, I'm glad I did. I wasn't looking for an incredibly in-depth look at the brilliant theoretical physicist, nor certainly at his groundbreaking work. As it turns out, I got just about all that I could handle (and was not too overwhelmed) in the abridged version.
This work can be divided into two clear avenues; one dealing with the history and details of Einstein's personal life, the other attempting to present and explain his work. The two are intertwined in a very efficient and well presented manner.
I am of above average intelligence, though not scientific by nature. While I was able to roughly follow parts of the narrator's descriptions of relativity and quantum mechanics, at other times I was completely lost. Luckily, the deep stuff was "relatively" confined and not so drawn out as to lose continuity.
One of Einstein's greatest strengths was his ability to explain his incredibly complex theories in ways more understandable to laymen, using examples involving trains, lightning bolts, falling elevators, etc. It was through these "thought experiments" and not through complex labratory work that most of his theories were developed.
As with most great men, Einstein was not without his faults, and the author willingly points them out. In doing so, Einstein comes across not as a bad person, but more as a typically flawed human being. He was certainly an amazing person and one of the most scientifically gifted theoreticians in history.
While I cannot attest to the readability of the unabridged text (and suspect that the science could be overwhelming), the abridged audio version, which consists of six CDs encompassing seven hours of narration, can be highly recommended. | | Einstein: His Life and Universe by Simon & Schuster Einstein, the Greatest Scientist of the century | | More than any book on Einstein, this delves into his human side. This fascinating man was a complex matrix of human success and failure, and perhaps near super human characteristics. | | Einstein: His Life and Universe by Simon & Schuster 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. | | Einstein: His Life and Universe by Simon & Schuster Amazon.com | 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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