and it took several tries before he succeeded. While working there, he struggled to finish his Ph.D. Things were tough, and he finally took on a position at the Swiss patent office. As a result, when he graduated he really didn’t have any professors that would vouch for him or help him get a job at a university.

Being a non-conformist, he had trouble making friends in school and alliances in college. It was a very rewarding read.Įinstein did his most significant and crowning work early in his life. I picked Isaacson’s without hesitation after reading Steve Jobs by Isaacson last year. Bibliography, index, notes.There are countless biographies written about Einstein.

This is a magnificent work: a tribute to Einstein’s life and his universe. His command of both the science and the historical context are brilliant. Isaacson’s depiction of Einstein’s development of the general theory of relativity in 1915 almost reads like a thriller. Included in the reams of documentation for this book are personal papers that have only recently been released and which inform Einstein’s early years.Įven for its completeness, the biography is not heavy-handed. An astounding number of paragraphs in the text contain first-person quotes or references to personal correspondence. Relying scrupulously on primary sources, Isaacson details the ideas, pressures, relationships, and political context that surrounded Einstein. Similarly, Einstein’s politics were based on the idea of creating and empowering a one-world government.įollowing this overarching theme of Einstein’s life, Isaacson’s book is a unifying force in our understanding of Einstein. His theory of the photovoltaic effect, for which he won the Nobel Prize, brought together ideas of quanta and the nature of light.

His theory of general relativity connected the dissimilar ideas of gravity and electromagnetism. Einstein was compelled to explore ways to bring together disparate parts of science. Throughout this most-encompassing biography of Albert Einstein, Walter Isaacson continually returns to a theme that pervaded Einstein’s life: that of unification.

Einstein his life and universe review