Physics

I read Einstein in Love by Dennis Overbye four years ago.  It was an interesting examination of Einstein’s early life, up through his marriage to Mileva Marić.  Einstein: His Life and Universe was written after the release of Einstein’s archives, and is a more complete biography of the man.  It makes a nice companion volume, revealing much of Einstein’s life in his own words.

I listened to the audio version of this book, read by Edward Herrmann.  He did justice to the German pronounciations, and made listening to the unabridged 21 hours a pleasure.  Having read other biographies of Einstein, I knew the basic outline of his life.  What was interesting about Isaacson’s treatment was his placement of Einstein’s theoretical work into historical context.

For example, I was aware that he knew Marie Curie, but not that he had a long-standing friendship and correspondence with Schrödinger (of cat fame), nor a cordially contentious relationship with Bohr.  I knew of his encouragement of FDR to develop the atom bomb, but not of his pacifism.  And I’m still wrestling with the idea that he was a determinist, and therefore didn’t believe in free will.  On top of all that, he did thought experiments in his head to figure out the properties of light.   And while he won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921, it wasn’t for E=mc² or relativity, but rather for his discovery of the photoelectric effect.

The one required undergraduate course I took was stodgy and didn’t cover anything as modern as Einstein. Despite that, I have a soft spot for the history of science, and this book satisfies it very well.