Think for a moment about the people in your workplace. Have you ever considered that one of your coworkers might forever revolutionize our understanding of the universe, bending space and time in his or her mind? Can you imagine any of them attaining a celebrity status superceding that of any current star of the cinema, for nothing other than their sublime intellect?
In 1902 the employees in a small patent office in Bern, Switzerland, not far from the fabled Zytglogge clock tower, certainly could never have ventured that they had such an individual toiling among them. The recently hired, third-class technical expert, a 23-year-old high school dropout who scarcely made it through college due to his recurrent truancy, didn't seem the man to overturn our view of the cosmos in a mere three years' time. There were no hints that this government clerk struggling for promotion to support his pregnant girlfriend, who made perhaps the most prodigious use of spare time in history, would later be deemed Time's Person of the Century. No one could have anticipated that his name and visage would become archetypes for genius—that he would be "Einstein."
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Albert Einstein is a man we all know, but whom most of us know little about. We recognize the legend but don't typically contemplate the human who gave rise to it. Last year the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which Einstein helped inaugurate, released the last extant parcel of private letters to and from the late theoretical physicist. Some 3,500 previously unseen pages, revealing intimate details of Albert Einstein's life, were made available to scholars for the first time. Walter Isaacson's Einstein: His Life and Universe is the first of the inevitable spate of new biographies that will attempt to incorporate all we know about the man under the disheveled mane (Einsteinphiles won't have to wait long for the second; this spring a well-regarded German biography by Jürgen Neffe is being updated to accommodate the revelations and will be released in the US).
Biography is often the construction of informed voyeurism, and there is no lack for either information or personal stories about Einstein. Many of his former acquaintances and loved ones long ago published accounts of his life. But to write the complete biography of a physicist of such resounding intellect and importance, a person must be either extremely well versed in his science or a masochist. Walter Isaacson is a masochist, and he is, thankfully, a very talented one.
Isaacson is a career newsman with an adept journalist's eye for a good story. He was managing editor at Time for several years (including the issue in which Einstein was named Person of the Century) before becoming the CEO of CNN. Today he is the president and CEO of the Aspen Institute and also a board member for several corporations. He has written two other biographies of formidable men, Benjamin Franklin and Henry Kissinger.
In writing about Einstein, Isaacson exudes both a crisp precision and profundity that belie the difficulty of the physics Einstein created. He magisterially guides us through the man's expansive body of work that prefigured most modern physics. Isaacson accomplishes this by using a mere two equations: one of which you can surely guess, and another that has been completely undervalued and merits mentioning.