Crown Publications - Book Review - Einstein: His Life and Universe

So much has been written about Einstein that one wonders what more could be added. However a large number of Einstein papers were released in 2006 and Walter Isaacson has made use of these to fill out details of his personal life as well as his scientific achievements.
Einstein is a difficult character to pin down. In his personal life he was essentially a simple man yet confident, even arrogant, about his work. He was a bright student yet could not get a university teaching post and was not even short-listed for a high school teaching post. He has probably received more media coverage than any other scientist, yet his scientific reputation rests mainly on four papers, which revolutionized physics and were produced in 1905 while working as a patent examiner

His papers, on the photo electric effect and black body radiation using the concept of radiation quanta, solved several problems and helped found quantum mechanics. Ironically he was unhappy about later quantum theory developments pioneered by Bohr and others.
The paper explaining the Brownian movement solved a long standing problem and corroborated the molecular theory of matter which was a matter of dispute at the time.

His paper on Special Relativity changed physicists' view of space, time, motion and gravity. His famous equation, E = Mc2 was a footnote to this paper. His only other major contribution came ten years later with the extension of his relativity theory to accelerating bodies in his 1916 paper ‘The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity'. All this Isaacson covers in detail.
The next nearly 40 years were spent in a fruitless attempt to produce a Unified Field Theory to incorporate gravitational and electromagnetic forces. Subsequent efforts by physicists to produce ‘A Theory of Everything' have been no more successful.
In spite of his reticence, he was never very far from the limelight for a number of reasons. Charlie Chaplin best summed it up at a movie premiere where they were both cheered: "They cheer me because they all understand me and they cheer you because no one understands you."

Isaacson covers other aspects of his life in detail, his marriage and messy divorce, the controversy over the award of the Nobel Prize, his tours of America, his pacifism and his later disillusionment with it, his move to America and taking American citizenship and his letter to President Roosevelt which eventually led to the Manhattan Project.
He also examines Einstein's personal philosophy including his rebelliousness and questioning of authority as well as his lament later in life, ‘To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate made me an authority myself.'
He supported Zionism and did a fund-raising tour of America with Chaim Weizmann and was later offered the presidency of Israel. While acknowledging his Jewish tradition, he did not believe in a personal God but saw in science the manifestation of mysteries.

If there is a fault with this book, it is the amount of repetitive detail; it runs, with notes and index, to 675 pages, but for those who wish to know about the life and work, warts and all, of a physicist who changed physics forever, this is the book.