Einstein: His Life and Universe
By Walter Isaacson
Simon & Schuster, 680 pages, $32
Einstein
By Jurgen Neffe, translated from German by Shelley Frisch
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 461 pages, $30
One day in May 1905, Albert Einstein announced to his friend and sounding board, Michele Besso: “Thank you. I’ve completely solved my problem.” Years of deep thought on fundamental tensions in physics culminated in his eureka moment in developing the special theory of relativity. In a flurry of productivity, he also wrote a paper that opened the door to quantum mechanics and two other important papers on the molecular theory of matter. In a single year, he completely upended our understanding of the universe.
At a time when academia was just absorbing the importance of a more mathematically driven theoretical physics, Einstein jumped another step forward: He arrived at fundamental physical postulates through “thought experiments” and conceptual analysis. The physics community had never seen anything like it, and even years later some disparaged it as philosophy. His approach was so radical that Einstein never earned a Nobel Prize for either special or general relativity; it took him until 1922 to win, and that was for showing that light consisted of quantum packets of energy as well as having wavelike behavior.
Walter Isaacson’s “Einstein: His Life and Universe” and Jurgen Neffe’s “Einstein,” translated by Shelley Frisch, help us understand this crucial historical figure and his contributions as never before. Both authors make use of private letters unsealed just a year ago, and while the biographies differ in emphasis and tone, each is informative and accessible.
Any biographer of Einstein faces various challenges, the first of which is obvious: how to explain his accomplishments to a lay reader. Many popularizations of Einstein leave the reader with little more than a clutch of slogans, such as, “Space tells time how to move, time tells space how to bend.” In contrast, Isaacson and Neffe convey a clear sense of Einstein’s key intellectual breakthroughs and their significance. Neffe had training in biochemistry, a distinguished career in journalism and a long association with an institute for the history of science, which makes him well-suited to bridge the gap between physics and the reader.
He is particularly good at providing the larger context of the history of science. He recounts, for example, the first estimation of the speed of light in 1676 and the 1725 discovery that its speed is a constant, before moving on to 19th Century physics. Furthermore, he presents this history as Einstein absorbed it through books in his youth, which “described the quest for the speed of light like a detective story.”
Isaacson is also a distinguished journalist, but he lacks Neffe’s scientific background. In order to understand Einstein’s work, he educated himself with the help of some of the top physicists, historians and philosophers of science in the country. The result is truly impressive. He eschews the broader scientific context that Neffe includes and, except to discuss Galileo and Newton, largely confines himself to scientific developments during and since the 19th Century.
The trade-off is a more-thorough treatment of the immediate background and development of Einstein’s thoughts. For example, he contrasts the inductive and deductive approaches in science and states:
“Einstein had a good feel for experimental findings, and he used this knowledge to find certain fixed points upon which he could construct a theory. But his emphasis was primarily on the deductive approach.”
While both biographies are strong, Isaacson’s excels at retracing Einstein’s intellectual journey from theoretical problems to their solutions.
Another challenge facing the Einstein biographer is how to see through the legend. A distorted image of Einstein first reached the world when his theory of general relativity was confirmed in 1919. Einstein was a rare phenomenon: a celebrity scientist. Enthusiastic crowds cheered him in parades and packed public lectures on relativity. Einstein discovered a penchant for celebrity, which only enhanced the legend, and he was happy to use his fame for what he took to be noble political ends. A life-long social democrat, he lent his name to radical pacifism, Zionism, world federalism, individual liberty and freedom of expression, though his views on the first three changed substantially as the world changed. He was not afraid to take an unpopular stance: In 1953, his statements in opposition to McCarthyism led the Chicago Tribune to call him a “jackass.”
The half-century since Einstein’s death has further filtered his distorted image down to a disheveled scientist lost in realms of thought, a gentle, humble, avuncular man and a voice of moral conscience in a century of world wars and nuclear weapons. How does one correct for aberrations and reconstruct Einstein the person?
Neffe and Isaacson draw from vast archives, including 3,500 pages of recently released private letters, mostly in Einstein’s hand. What Neffe and Isaacson reveal may startle readers, for Einstein is fully human, with weaknesses and vices and plenty of dirty laundry. As a child, he was indeed slow to speak, but contrary to fable, he excelled at mathematics. He was also a proficient violin player and was more interested in reading books than playing with others. He was self-absorbed and capable of holding a cool distance, a characteristic that aided his withdrawal into work and was consciously used by him to escape during emotional turmoil. He was an independent thinker, ambitious, supremely self-confident and even arrogant in his youth. But for the future of physics, as Isaacson states, Einstein’s “insouciant ability to tune out the conventional wisdom was not the worst fault to have.”
In 1896, at age 17, Einstein entered college in Zurich, where he became romantically involved with Mileva Maric, a Serbian woman four years his senior who was also enrolled in physics. They were rebellious students who chose to study what pleased them. Einstein’s independent streak was undoubtedly crucial to making him a scientific revolutionary, but in 1900 he barely graduated, while Maric failed.
Things turned distressing when Maric became pregnant in 1901. Einstein’s dissertation was rejected, and financial pressure mounted as he struggled to find employment. He finally obtained a job at a patent office, a position he would have lost had it been discovered that he was having an illegitimate child or cohabitating. In 1902, Maric gave birth to a girl named Lieserl while staying with her parents back home. Maric moved back without Lieserl, and Einstein and Maric married in 1903. Neither Einstein or Maric ever revealed their secret; the child’s existence was only discovered in 1986.
It is hard to judge their decisions from our remove. It is disturbing, however, that Einstein seems to have neglected Maric in her time of need. Einstein’s behavior raises deeper issues about his relationship to Maric, a woman of exceptional intelligence and determination whose dreams of being a physicist derailed as her husband earned unimaginable fame. There were years of bitter quarrels with her over children and money, and quarrels with the children themselves, whom he neglected. Einstein had left her for another woman, remarried and went on to have a series of affairs that caused his second wife grief. The letters evoke the overreactions and irrationality characteristic of many divorces; neither Einstein nor Maric comes off well.
Isaacson gives a careful but sympathetic treatment of these deeply personal issues. He portrays a complex man who at times lacked empathy and neglected those near him, yet one who had important lifelong friendships and a warmth for humanity in general. We can see in Isaacson’s account how the different sides of Einstein were bound into one person.
Neffe is decidedly less sympathetic and seems more concerned with deflating the myth and settling accounts. Sometimes he appears unfair. For example, concerning Einstein’s apparently sincere expressions of love to different women, he concludes that “Einstein’s correspondence with women invariably reveals that he regarded them almost as playthings.” Regardless, Einstein supplies plenty of grist for Neffe’s mill, and both Isaacson and Neffe dispel any misconceptions one might have about Einstein’s personal character.
A final challenge for the biographer is Einstein’s genius. What is a genius, and what did Einstein’s consist in? Was his brain different from other brains, a suggestion that inspired the doctor who performed his autopsy to abscond with it? What was unique to his thinking? Einstein himself said he was not more gifted than anyone else, just more curious and tenacious than the average person. But Isaacson also emphasizes, for example, Einstein’s ability “to visualize the physical reality that was painted by the brush strokes of mathematics.” The question of genius quickly expands into a broader analysis of what made his achievements possible. What effect did his early reading have on his discoveries, and how much help did he have from those around him? What cultural and social conditions contributed to his revolutionary thoughts? As Neffe says, “Einstein never saw himself as part of a team,” and we tend not to as well. How much of his genius is a simplifying story that ignores the complexities of the way science works, and how much of it can be rightly attributed to him?
Here, too, Isaacson and Neffe differ in approach, the latter more critical. Neffe believes that the notion of a solitary genius is a relic that “has little bearing on reality in complex systems of human interaction.” Whenever he can, Neffe raises the possibility of debts to those who surrounded Einstein, a man he describes as having been the right person in the right place at the right time. “Luck,” he says, “was his constant companion.”
There is no doubt about Einstein’s good fortune. But what made him the right person? Isaacson’s and Neffe’s biographies provide insight into the influences to which Einstein was exposed, from electrical generators to philosophy, that contributed to his great advances. They also help us understand why he resisted quantum mechanics and why he unproductively and quixotically pursued a unified field theory until his death.
Neffe’s biography is shorter, which may appeal to some, and it is arranged thematically, which provides a more disjointed story but is helpful to those interested in particular features of Einstein’s life. The author seems more concerned with cutting the myth down to size than walking a mile in Einstein’s shoes. In contrast, Isaacson has written a sympathetic biography that traces the arc of this unique life and to a remarkable degree manages to convey what it might have been like to be Einstein. While long, it reads very well — I found it hard to put down. Neffe’s biography, despite being shorter, includes worthwhile details that Isaacson passes over.
Both do a superb job of describing how the real and all-too-human person, with his particular intellectual and personal characteristics and his specific education and influences, brought all of us to a radically new understanding of the forces that shape the universe.
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Daniel Sutherland is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
