The Man Who Read God's Mind

Was there really a time when reporters besieged a celebrity's home, forced him to go into hiding to escape their hounding, filled newspapers with leaks and speculations—and the celebrity was not a politician, not a movie star, but a theoretical physicist? And the leaks and speculation centered not on political scandal or illicit affairs but progress toward the unification of the theories of two physical forces, electromagnetism and gravitation?

There was, but only because there was Albert Einstein. Like no scientist before or since—arguably, like no scholar in any field—Einstein won popular adulation for intellectual firepower and breakthroughs in fields that few people had even heard of, much less understood. A quartet of papers in the "miracle year" of 1905 proposed the special theory of relativity, provided proof of the existence of atoms, put quantum mechanics on a solid empirical foundation and unveiled what would become the most famous equation in science, E = mc², any one of which would have secured his reputation in the physics pantheon. Crowds in the thousands greeted him on his tours across America. Israel's leaders bowed to public pressure to offer him the presidency of their young country in 1952, even as the leaders of his adopted one viewed him with suspicion: Einstein's FBI dossier grew to 1,427 pages and, denied a security clearance, he was not permitted to know about the work of the Manhattan Project even though his letter to President Roosevelt had helped launch it.

No wonder, then, that entire volumes have been devoted to each and every sliver of Einstein's work and life, down to a search for his illegitimate daughter (her fate remains lost to history). The excellent "Einstein Files" by journalist Fred Jerome exposed the McCarthy-era efforts to tar him as a communist (he was not, and in fact had been critical of Soviet Russia since at least 1932 and made a point never to visit, though he was so profligate in lending his name to causes that some turned out to be communist fronts), while scholars, relatives, colleagues and Einstein himself wrote full biographies. Even his affair with a Russian spy in the early 1940s has been chronicled. Walter Isaacson, who was managing editor of Time when the magazine named Einstein its "person of the century" in 2000 and is now president of the Aspen Institute, has devoured it all.

The delightful result, "Einstein: His Life and Universe," is not just a repackaging of the best of the best, however. The most comprehensive English-language biography of Einstein for a general readership, it also reflects letters and other papers from the Einstein archives at Hebrew University in Jerusalem which were released last July. (Historians are up to volume 10 of a projected 30.) The new bits include no bombshells, though the letters from the wife he was divorcing and from his alternately angry and plaintive sons, whom he essentially abandoned when he separated from their mother, humanize this icon even further, revealing the pain Einstein felt when his older boy rejected him. Isaacson weaves it all into a seamless narrative of the man he calls "a loner with an intimate bond to humanity, a rebel who was suffused with reverence ... an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk [who] became a mind reader of the creator of the cosmos."

Einstein is an irresistible biographical subject because his achievements were an outgrowth of his personality, "as if part of some unified field," as Isaacson rightly puts it. A revolutionary and nonconformist, Einstein boycotted classes of professors he found tedious and rejected the standard, experimental approach to physics in favor of thought experiments, the most notable of which—asking what light would look like if you rode beside a beam—led to the special theory of relativity. That overthrew the Newtonian dogma that space and time are absolute and fixed entities. Instead, he showed mathematically that what you observe depends on where you stand in space and time, with the result that to a stationary observer a clock moving at high velocity slows down and lengths shrink.

Isaacson brings out something that scholars have only recently grasped, and which most textbooks get wrong: Einstein did not discover special relativity because of the Michelson-Morley experiment. This 1887 study failed to detect the ether, which was thought to fill all of space and act as an absolute frame of reference. Instead, Einstein started with elegant principles and an intuitive sense of physics, and reasoned his way to his discovery. To the public, it underlined Einstein's genius, that he could sit in his study (or at his desk at the Swiss patent office) with only a notebook and pen, and, through pure thought, discern the mysteries of the cosmos. To the stuffy old men of European science, it seemed more like philosophy than physics or, what would soon be worse, "Jewish science."