A Rollercoaster Ride with "Big Al."

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	• Einstein: His Life and Universe Walter Isaacson Simon & Schuster, 2008 - 704 pages average customer review:based on 213 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Einstein: His Life & Universe

I think that this is a very interesting and wellwritten book; informative and entertaining. I would certainly recommend it to my family and friends.

A classic

Biography and phisics, the life and the ideas of Einstein in their birth and development are masterfully analysed and outlined.

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Quick read

Fascinating book, very well written. It's amazing how quickly I was able to devour this book. Highly recommend.

Review #169

This book was well-written and quite interesting. The author obviously understands the science and was able to describe physics and relativity in a way that this reader, a biologist, was able to understand. I would have liked more detail on Einstein's work in the decade 1905-1915, but I suppose the book might then have become unmanageably large. Details not in the text were often found in the notes, which were very helpful. I thought the episode with David Hilbert was somewhat appalling. Here we have Einstein giving a lecture on relativity and Hilbert, who was in the audience, then tries to scoop Einstein and beat him to the correct equations. Perhaps that was acceptable practice a century ago, or in the field of physics, but now to try to beat somebody out of credit for his or her own work would be seen as unethical.

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A Rollercoaster Ride with "Big Al."

This is a great book about Einstein and how science gets done, or sometimes doesn't get done. As for Big Al's eccentricities and quirks, I would sum them up as being a combination of self-indulgence and a great work ethic. That is not so rare, but the way Einstein carried it off created a peculiar stereotype for scientists that often hits the mark.

Compared to his contemporaries, Einstein had an unusual number of brilliant insights. However, it was Leibniz who first observed that there can be no preferred frame of reference (not mentioned in this book). The fact that there is no absolute space or time (same thing) was really a working hypothesis that was good enough for a couple centuries. When Einstein worked out the theory, he was not so much making a breakthrough as dragging physics away from lame philosophy and back to science, where it belongs.

But then Einstein made the same sort of mistake by postulating determinism, despite his own pioneering work on Brownian motion. And he did not clue into the fact that the equations of motion of classical mechanics (and thus also general relativity) are nonlinear and hence admit chaotic solutions. (A small asteroid with a chaotic rotation has recently been found.) In his day a few astronomers and mathematicians were beginning to appreciate chaotic dynamics, including Henri Poincaré, who fell short of developing relativity himself (this is in the book). So Einstein spent much of his final years spinning his wheels looking for a unified field theory to fall out of a mathematical formalism rather than relying on the geometric intuition that had made him famous.

Physics is still in the rut where Einstein left it, but it has gotten much deeper in the form of string theory. (See: The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next.) The future of physics, I predict, lies in a dynamical theory, one that explains quantum behavior as the stable resonances of nonlinear wave equations. The practitioners will use petaflop supercomputers rather than the backs of old envelopes, but that is the penalty of progress. Charming eccentrics replaced by Dilbertesque computer nerds.

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