Einstein's thought for the day

[AdamSmith]

[RA1]

Very interesting, but wasn't Einstein still in Germany in 1932 where he needed much more than an "invisible community"?

Best regards,

RA1

[AdamSmith]

By 1932 he was pretty well decided that it was past time to get out of there (see among many sources Ronald Clark's majesterial bio Einstein: The Life and Times, also of course Walter Isaacson's more recent Einstein: His Life and Universe). During a visit to the U.S. in Feb. 1933 he decided not to return to Germany, went to Belgium where he turned in his German passport to the German embassy and renounced his citizenship, lived temporarily in England, then came to the U.S. permanently in October.

[AdamSmith]

The book review linked above:

Books of The Times

The Scale of Einstein, From Faith to Formulas

By JANET MASLIN

Published: April 9, 2007

EINSTEIN: HIS LIFE AND UNIVERSE

By Walter Isaacson.

675 pp. Simon & Schuster. $32.

The story of Albert Einstein’s life calls for a protean biographer, not to mention a fearless one. Conveying the magnitude of Einstein’s scientific achievements is tough enough, but that’s just the start. His geopolitics, faith, cultural impact, philosophy of science, amorous affairs, powers of abstraction and superstar reputation are all part of this subject. So are the two world wars through which Einstein lived and the internecine physics-world struggles in which he became embroiled.

Then there are the odd quirks and the pricelessly prophetic anecdotes, as when one Zurich classmate of the budding genius went home to tell his parents that “this Einstein will one day be a great man.” Many of these need to be included, and matters of scale make this job dauntingly difficult too. Einstein’s earth-shaking concept of general relativity is directly juxtaposed, in Walter Isaacson’s confidently authoritative “Einstein: His Life and Universe,” with a set of household rules that the great man wrote to keep his first wife at bay. “You will stop talking to me if I request it,” this document asserted. “You will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way.”

Mr. Isaacson deals clearly and comfortably with the scope of Einstein’s life. If his highly readable and informative book has an Achilles’ heel, it’s in the area of science. Mr. Isaacson had the best available help (most notably the physicist Brian Greene’s) in explicating the series of revelations Einstein brought forth in his wonder year, 1905, and the subsequent problems with quantum theory and uncertainty that would bedevil him.

But these sections of the book are succinctly abbreviated. Paradoxically that makes them less accessible than they would have been through longer, more patient explication. Still, the cosmic physics would be heavy sledding in any book chiefly devoted to Einstein’s life and times, and Mr. Isaacson acknowledges that. “O.K., it’s not easy,” he writes, “but that’s why we’re no Einstein and he was.”

In his introduction to “Einstein,” Mr. Isaacson sounds dangerously as if he is again trumpeting the virtues of a founding father (his last book was a biography of Benjamin Franklin). “Tyranny repulsed him, and he saw tolerance not simply as a sweet virtue but as a necessary condition for a creative society,” he proclaims. Whiffs of a textbook tone are similarly alarming. (“Einstein would become a supporter of world federalism, internationalism, pacificism, and democratic socialism, with a strong devotion to individual liberty and freedom of expression.”) But over all this is a warm, insightful, affectionate portrait with a human and immensely charming Einstein at its core.

“Oh my! That Johnnie boy!/So crazy with desire/While thinking of his Dollie/His pillow catches fire.” That was a poem written by the love-struck future patent clerk of Bern, Switzerland (he would spend seven years in that job while writing his greatest scientific papers) to Mileva Maric, the first of two women he would marry. (To dissolve this union, the ever-confident Einstein offered Maric the money from a Nobel Prize he had not yet won.) It reveals a different side of Einstein than his famous “On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light” did.

But in Mr. Isaacson’s artfully seamless account, the genius and the flirt are remarkably well reconciled. And that first marriage was based on both. “I can already imagine the fun we will have,” he wrote to Maric about a prospective vacation. “And then we’ll start in on Helmholtz’s electromagnetic theory of light.”

Mr. Isaacson does a similarly graceful job of integrating Einstein’s science with his broader philosophical concerns, especially the global worries that plagued him with the approach of the Second World War. Even as a committed pacifist he remained primarily a scientist and revised his opinions as fate required. “For a scientist, altering your doctrines when the facts change is not a sign of weakness,” Mr. Isaacson underscores.

And the man who had once listed his religion as “Mosaic” when applying for a professorship in Prague became much more thoughtful about Judaism in later years. Whatever Einstein’s precise faith, Mr. Isaacson says, “his beliefs seemed to arise from the sense of awe and transcendent order that he discovered through his scientific work.”

With the help of many witty, candid letters, Mr. Isaacson offers a wonderfully rounded portrait of the ever-surprising Einstein personality. Equally important is the Einstein myth, and the material on this subject is even more entertaining. Einstein horrified his colleagues by enjoying his vast celebrity. (“Einstein’s personality, for no clear reasons, triggers outbursts of a kind of mass hysteria,” the German consul reported to Berlin as the great man made one of his rock-star visits to New York.) He also stymied the press in its efforts to keep up with his accomplishments. Mr. Isaacson has great fun with the reportorial frenzy that surrounded each new pearl of Einsteinian wisdom. Among the headlines that appeared in The New York Times: “Unintelligible to Laymen” and “Stars Not Where They Seemed or Were Calculated to Be, but Nobody Need Worry.”

Mr. Isaacson is also keenly attuned to the intellectual crises hidden by the hoopla. As Einstein aged, he changed from a fierce young iconoclast to a pillar of science, resistant to advances in the very quantum ideas that he himself had brought forth. “The intellect gets crippled,” he said of growing older, “but glittering renown is still draped around the calcified shell.” Here as throughout the book Mr. Isaacson asks the right questions. (“So what made Einstein cede the revolutionary road to younger radicals and spin into a defensive crouch?”) And he answers them with the clear, broad grasp of complex issues that make this book an illuminating delight.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/09/books/09masl.html

[RA1]

By 1932 he was pretty well decided that it was past time to get out of there (see among many sources Ronald Clark's majesterial bio Einstein: The Life and Times, also of course Walter Isaacson's more recent Einstein: His Life and Universe). During a visit to the U.S. in Feb. 1933 he decided not to return to Germany, went to Belgium where he turned in his German passport to the German embassy and renounced his citizenship, lived temporarily in England, then came to the U.S. permanently in October.

Yes, I read Issaacson's book, which I thought read like a term paper. Still, I enjoyed it. Knowing one needs to leave, deciding to do so and then accomplishing same are three different things. Gratified that, although Einstein's personal life was often in shambles or at least mixed up, he was able to escape.

He was an early hero of mine and still is.

Best regards,

RA1

[AdamSmith]

Yeah, I recall we discussed here when it came out how Isaacson's book read that way: amateurish and patched together, as you say somewhat like an undergraduate rush job. Odd, as his Franklin book read a lot better, I thought.

[RA1]

I also enjoyed the BF book. By then, I think I was more used to WI's style.

May I repeat one of my favorite stories about AE? One day, at Princeton, Mrs. Einstein was being interviewed by someone from the media, who asked, Mrs. Einstein, do you understand the theory of relativity? No, I don't, replied Mrs. E, but I do understand Albert. I thought that lovely.

Best regards,

RA1