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Master of the Universe

By COREY S.
POWELL

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Credit Pacific & Atlantic Photos (1928)

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In the ocean of biographies, Albert Einstein is the white whale: impossible to ignore, almost as difficult to capture,
symbolic as all hell. Who could resist going after the man whose name and face have become synonymous with
genius?
And go after him they do, those literary Ahabs. Amazon.com already lists more than 200 Einstein biographies and
memoirs, including the superlative 1971 portrait by Ronald Clark. And here come two more. Walter Isaacson, the
former managing editor of Time magazine, concocts a hearty, slightly populist take on Einstein. Jrgen Neffe, a
German journalist and biochemist, embarks on a more probing, if somewhat dour, exploration in an expanded
version of a biography originally published in Germany in 2005, here crisply translated by Shelley Frisch. Both
authors justify themselves in part by incorporating recently unearthed bits of Einsteiniana, including a trove of
personal letters released by Hebrew University last year. At a deeper level, though, these books owe their existence
not to new scholarship but to an old frustration. A half-century after Einsteins death, his theories and the mind that
spawned them remain as baffling as ever to most of the public.
Isaacson opens by introducing the five landmark papers Einstein published in 1905, when the 26-year-old Bern

patent clerk turned the world of physics on its head. Two of the papers put forward novel analyses of the size and
motion of atoms clever, but a sideshow to the March 1905 On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the
Production and Transformation of Light, which established the basis of quantum mechanics. Five years earlier, Max
Planck had suggested that objects emit and absorb radiation in discrete units of energy, or quanta, but he had
treated the idea primarily as a mathematical formalism. Einstein showed that, applied literally, Plancks quanta
would explain a mystery called the photoelectric effect, by which light drives electric current out of certain materials
(think of a solar cell). This proposal was far more incendiary than it sounded a flame that would consume
classical physics, in Isaacsons words. If light is made of particles, then its behavior can be treated statistically and
the world can no longer be described by strict laws of causality a concept so unsettling that Einstein later recoiled
from it with his protest that God does not play dice with the universe.
The fourth 1905 paper, which introduced Einsteins special theory of relativity, was inspired by a thought problem he
had stewed over since adolescence: what would a light beam look like if you could catch up and ride alongside it?
The standard thinking suggested that you would see a bizarre bit of electromagnetic field frozen in place but
oscillating like mad an answer that made no sense to him, because it suggested that the behavior of light would
depend on an observers motion relative to some unknown, unseen frame of reference. Instead, Einstein proposed
a radical solution. No matter how fast you move, he reasoned, the beam of light always appears to be fleeing at the
speed of light. This argument applies across the board: the laws of physics are the same to all observers, regardless
of their state of relative motion. Such a thing is possible only if space and time can bend to preserve the consistent
appearance of physical laws. There is no absolute grid that defines here, no universal definition of now. Issacson
quite aptly calls this one of the most elegant imaginative steps in the history of physics.
Neffe locates the defining moment of Einsteins life at a later point: Nov. 6, 1919, the day when a joint session of
Britains Royal Society and Royal Astronomical Society announced it had confirmed Einsteins grandest idea, the
general theory of relativity. According to the theory, gravity has the power to bend light, so two teams of astronomers
had attempted to measure the effect on stars adjacent to the sun during a solar eclipse. Sir Frank Dyson, the
Astronomer Royal, announced that the results left no doubt about the validity of Einsteins prediction. (Years later it
came out that the results in fact left considerable doubt, but Einsteins boosters like the man himself intuitively
felt that the theory must be correct.) The Times of London declared the finding one of the most momentous, if not
the most momentous, pronouncements of human thought. Within days other salivating media around the world
followed suit. In an instant, Neffe writes, Albert Einstein was reborn as legend and myth, idol and icon of an entire
era.
The general theory of relativity was a stunning elaboration on special relativity. The first theory applied only to
observations made by someone moving at a constant speed. Its successor allowed for the way the laws of physics
appear to someone accelerating or decelerating the more general case. Again, a thought problem proved
crucial. When a worker falls off the roof, he momentarily does not feel the pull of gravity. Why? In that prosaic
question, Einstein perceived a stark physical truth, the equivalence between gravity and acceleration. The worker
normally feels weight because of gravity, which is really just a constant downward acceleration. If nothing resists it,
as during a fall, that feeling goes away. Einstein flipped the situation around and considered a man in an elevator
floating in space. Accelerate the elevator upward and he, too, would feel a downward acceleration not just similar
to gravity, but indistinguishable from it. Gravity is not a force pulling us down onto the planet, as Newton pictured it.
Rather, it is more accurately thought of as a warp, induced by Earths mass, that causes our path through spacetime to push us against the ground. Gravitation is geometry, in Neffes words. It defines the shape of space and
time; without matter, space and time would have no meaning.
These are some of the most powerful ideas in all of science, and both Isaacson and Neffe present them with brio
and insight. Neffe does an especially thorough job tracing their origins in Einsteins early obsessions, and he shows
how completely the latest cosmic theories are constructed atop general relativity. Unfortunately, his theme-driven
structure gets distractingly convoluted in places. Isaacsons more straightforward chronological approach and
conversational style are much livelier. If any 600-page book about relativity can be described as a page-turner,

Einstein: His Life and Universe is it.

The two books diverge more seriously in their interpretation of the personality behind the science. Isaacsons
Einstein is a resilient humanist who managed to adapt to tough political realities without sacrificing his core beliefs in
freedom and social equality. Neffes Einstein is more of a nave idealist, repeatedly drawn to (and burned by) illadvised causes. After attaining United States citizenship in 1940 and becoming an outspoken one-worlder after
World War II, Einstein was closely monitored by J. Edgar Hoovers F.B.I. To Isaacson, Einstein rose above these
suspicions and became a true American, one who considered his opposition to the wave of security and loyalty
investigations to be a defense of the nations true values. To Neffe, who views the United States from a distinctively
German perspective, Einstein shed any illusions about a freedom-loving America and spent his last years
increasingly isolated from both colleagues and countrymen.
The disparate moods extend to the inevitable dishing about Einsteins love life. We now know that before their
marriage, Einstein and his first wife, Mileva Maric, had an illegitimate daughter, named Lieserl, whom he abandoned
to an unknown fate. He had multiple affairs, including one with Margarita Konenkova, a reputed Soviet spy.
Einsteins marriage to Maric, a fellow student from the Zurich Polytechnic whose own hopes for a significant
scientific career were frustrated, was stormy and at times astonishingly cruel. His second marriage, to his cousin
Elsa, was often resolutely pragmatic. Isaacson generally emphasizes Einsteins compensating warmth, while Neffe
focuses on the chill. A telling moment comes in the two accounts of perhaps the most squalid of the recent
revelations: a letter from Elsas daughter, Ilse, claiming that Einstein had dallied with both mother and daughter and
left it to them to decide which would become his bride. Neffe hastily denounces Einsteins behavior as one of the
most humiliating ways in which a man could treat a woman. Isaacson has the good sense to examine the sole
source of the story: a letter that Ilse wrote to her unsteady boyfriend, whom she quite possibly was trying to bait with
a salacious fabrication.
I wish Isaacson had had the courage to take another step back and, in the spirit of Einstein, ask the big underlying
question: what do these feet-of-clay stories really tell us about Einsteins mind, and about the broader nature of
genius? Each revelation about his romantic misadventures has generated a chorus of gleefully clucking news
coverage. But why is it so thrilling to learn that Einstein was a human being who sometimes made foolish or
impulsive decisions? There is a whiff of the Us magazine ethos at work here: Einstein hes just like us!
In truth, Einstein was not even like other physicists. I have no special talents, he once insisted to his friend Carl
Seelig. I am only passionately curious. But as Isaacson points out, passionate curiosity was Einsteins special gift.
He brooded over fundamental mysteries of nature that most of his colleagues ignored, and dissected them with the
kind of relentless questioning more commonly associated with a small child. He maintained his focus for astounding
durations: 10 years on special relativity, eight on general relativity, and more than three decades on the unified field
theory that he hoped would knit together all of physics.
All of this was not effortless. Neffes description of Einstein as a man of profound, shocking loneliness may be an
exaggeration, but it touches on the very real price he paid for his singular imagination. Isaacson, in a self-proclaimed
effort to make Einsteins ideas accessible to a responsible citizenry, writes that the pursuit of science is an
enchanting mission, as the sagas of its heroes remind us. Einsteins relentless dedication to the life of the mind was
not just enchanting, however; it eroded his marriages, distanced his children, even dissuaded students who could
continue his work.
Todays research environment, with its emphasis on collaboration, consistent publication and competition for
funding, is in many ways antithetical to the way Einstein worked. The physicist Lee Smolin has noted that no
scientists today call themselves Einsteinians, because most of us have neither the courage nor the patience to
emulate Einstein. For the few out there who do, the new Einstein biographies can function as a call to greatness.
For the rest of us, the most precious thing they offer is a taste of what Einstein called the cosmic religious sense, a
connectedness to universal truth that he considered the highest expression of being human.