albert einstein biography walter isaacson

In the end, he made do with the Swiss patent office.Īnd a good thing too, says Isaacson. He was even rejected by the Swiss army for having flat feet and varicose veins. 'I will soon have graced every physicist from the North Sea to the southern tip of Italy with my offer,' he wrote mournfully on one occasion. So he spent months applying unsuccessfully for academic posts across Europe. Having displayed 'a sassy attitude' at the Zurich Polytechnic, where he studied physics, Einstein was his year's only graduate not to be offered a job. Yes, he had an insolent streak, no one could doubt that, but it cost him dearly, though not without long-term beneficial consequences. On this last point, Einstein was probably misguided. Yet Isaacson, a former chief executive of CNN and biographer of both Henry Kissinger and Benjamin Franklin, has triumphed over expectation, producing a thorough exploration of his subject's life, a skilful piece of scientific literature and a thumping good read.Īccording to Isaacson, we should regard Einstein not as an august scientific priest, but 'as a rebel with reverence for the harmony of nature', a scientist who rated imagination far higher than knowledge and an individual whose motto, at least in his early years, was 'Long live impudence! It is my guardian angel.' Certainly, another telling of Einstein's life story, only a couple of years later, must surely seem unnecessary and ambitious. Nothing, surely, could have been left out, you would have thought.

Every utterance, every scrap of paper produced by the great man was examined and debated in 2005. Journals, biographies, exhibitions, even plays and operas, were produced to mark the centenary. You can therefore understand what all the fuss was about.

Not bad for a 26-year-old patent office clerk. This was the year in which Albert Einstein wrote a set of scientific papers, including one containing the equation E=mc2 that changed our understanding of the universe and became the cornerstones of quantum mechanics and general relativity - the twin intellectual pinnacles of the 20th century. In 2005, astronomers and cosmologists celebrated - in style - the 100th anniversary of their annus mirabilis: 1905.

Albert einstein biography walter isaacson