before we start talking in general about albert einstein’s books, can you give us a brief summary of the importance of einstein and his work? You are the author of a biography of Albert Einstein called Einstein: One Hundred Years of Relativity which was republished this year to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the theory of general relativity.
relativity is generally considered his greatest achievement and comes in two forms: special relativity (1905) and general relativity (1915), one hundred years ago this month. he also made important contributions to quantum mechanics. he was one of the first to propose wave-particle duality and probably the first person to do so in quantum theory. he also worked on statistical thermodynamics. he was a pioneer in physics, but, beyond science, he was a real contributor to the development of political ideas in the 20th century. he worked very closely with the Zionist movement. He was a great opponent of Nazi Germany and later of McCarthyism in the United States when he moved there.
You are reading: Books about albert einstein
there must be literally hundreds of albert einstein books. Was it daunting for you to approach someone of such importance and interest?
i think there are about 1700 albert einstein books in the library archives about him and different aspects of him. It was daunting, I think it’s inevitable, but I had expert help. The book is primarily a biography, but there are contributions from three Nobel Prize winners on different aspects of his life and some other contributions from people in other fields. this collection of shorter pieces is integrated into my text on his life and ideas. my father was a physicist so I grew up with physics and actually my father’s last book was a student book on special relativity. I can’t claim to understand physics the way my father did, and I think I’m much more attracted to Einstein’s life than just his physics.
and of those 1700 albert einstein books, we asked you to choose only five! your first choice is albert einstein: a biography of albrecht fölsing published in 1997. what makes this biography so good?
is complete, for starters. It’s a very big book, one of the most important on Einstein’s life. fölsing is a physicist by training, so he is able to bring clear explanations of physics to life. He is extremely good at citing Einstein’s writings and commentaries in an illuminating way. what makes the book unique is that the author is German, when most biographers come from the English-speaking world. he is able to bring einstein’s ambivalence towards germany in both physics and politics and bring it to life in a rather subtle way. having a german writing about einstein is particularly interesting.
Just to illuminate that, could you briefly outline the arc of Einstein’s life for us?
He was born in Germany in 1879 and grew up there until he was 16 when he went to join his parents in Italy. he was not happy with the German educational system: he was not a very willing student in an authoritarian educational system. in fact, his whole life was a battle against authority in different forms. later in life he said, and it’s one of my favorite quotes of his, “to punish me for my disregard for authority, fate has made me an authority.” finally, he was educated in switzerland and that’s where he really belongs. He maintained Swiss nationality throughout his life, until he went to the United States and became a US citizen when he was quite old, in 1940. Therefore, he is not a German national, even though he was born there. /p>
“He was not very successful in his relationships with his university professors.”
The Swiss atmosphere was very productive for his physics, which began around 1905 with special relativity and some other key work. He stayed in Germany until 1933, when the Nazis came to power, and he had to leave. he spent a little time in europe, including britain in the early 1930s. he finally left europe for good, never to return, in 1933. he lived in princeton, new jersey, at the institute for advanced study, sort of ivory tower. that suited him very well. he could only think and did not have to do any teaching. He lived in Princeton until his death in 1955. In that period he was not as successful as a physicist, but became much more involved in political causes such as the atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb, pacifism and Zionism. As a Jew, he was very interested in the founding of Israel and took an active role in it.
One of the most intriguing things about his life story is the fact that when he did his first really significant groundbreaking work in physics, he wasn’t working as a physicist, was he? he was working in a patent office and didn’t really have any contact with other top physicists at the time.
That’s right. That will always be one of the most intriguing aspects of Einstein and his life. He was a patent clerk in Bern and worked at the patent office for several years from 1902. After 1909/1910, he finally took up a position as a professional academic physicist and moved to various institutions in Europe. Probably his most productive years are those in which he was a patent clerk. That said, he came up with general relativity when he was a physics professor in Berlin. Furthermore, at the patent office, although he was not known in the academic world, he had some contact with academic physicists such as Max Planck, who was a key supporter of relativity. but we must remember that he was always involved with those two worlds.
Are there any clues about the origin of his revelations? did his unconventional origins play a role in that?
yes. it’s hard to pin that down, but from a young age, from his teens onwards, he was a big believer in self-education. like many geniuses, he was not particularly successful in his university education. He attended a famous institution, in Zurich, but always rebelled against his academic education, constantly reading the latest research on his account. he wasn’t working with other people at all. he was not very successful in his relations with his university professors. he was a rebel and because he was so passionate about physics, his best ideas really came from his own reading and thinking. From his earliest days as a teenager, he believed in what he called “thought experiments”. he was not involved at all with laboratories, these experiments were all in his head. one of the most famous concerns chasing a ray of light. When he was 16 or 17 years old, he imagined if he could reach a beam of light and what that would mean.
did that help you see things that other physicists didn’t, because you were free to think your own way?
yes, for starters, he did. but it is important to recognize that he was always comparing his ideas with experimental results and, after his miraculous year of 1905, attending conferences and engaging through correspondence with leading authorities. he worked alone, there is no doubt about that, but he also had many sounding boards. he had friends with whom he tested his ideas and they often disagreed, in some cases quite violently, and that improved his thinking. at one point he had a collaborator who was a mathematician and together they published some work on general relativity. that is the only collaborative work that was published. afterwards, he always published alone.
Let’s dig a little deeper into the science with your next pick, which is Einstein 1905: John Rigden’s 2005 Standard of Greatness. This book by Albert Einstein is about the so-called “miraculous” year. can you tell us a bit about that?
einstein published five articles that year. all of them are considered of great value. The article that Einstein considered to be the most revolutionary of his work in 1905 was actually on quantum theory. there was another article on brownian motion. he showed that the phenomenon of Brownian motion, which had been known for nearly 100 years, was actually due to atoms bombarding particles. this was considered proof of the atomic theory of matter by his fellow physicists, the first time atoms were actually shown to exist. then the last of the five articles was probably about the most famous equation in science: e=mc2. This grew out of his first paper on relativity and was published in late 1905. As everyone knows, E=MC2 is the basis for what happens to nuclear power and the atomic bomb later in the century.
This is the principle that energy and mass are two aspects of the same thing. so if you split the mass, you will release huge amounts of energy, which is what powers nuclear power and the atomic bomb.
yes, and c is the speed of light. so with e=mc2, you can immediately see that the amount of energy is huge from a small amount of matter because c is a very large number. so e=mc2 implies a large amount of energy from a small amount of matter through the process of atomic fission and fusion that einstein did not know about in 1905. fission was not discovered until later, just before WWII worldwide, in fact.
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Let’s talk then about the theory of special relativity, which was one of the papers of this miraculous year. Can you explain that theory to us?
is a response to newton’s idea of absolute time and absolute space which einstein rejected after deep thought. John Rigden expresses it very well in his book. he says, “a world with absolute space existing apart from absolute time would become a world where space and time merge.” this theory of relativity led to the concept of space-time, which is a key thought in general relativity. it is not easy to explain relativity in a nutshell, but it rejects absolute time and space, leading to the idea that all motion must be defined relative to a coordinate system, and that different coordinate systems must be compared. general relativity was much more complete, it included gravitation and acceleration. In fact, Einstein’s big idea about general relativity was that gravitation and acceleration were equivalent and that we should build our idea of the universe on that thought, instead of regarding them as independent, as Newton did.
general relativity is what we often see illustrated by a rubber sheet with marbles distorting the sheet. it’s okay?
yes, the curvature of the rubber sheet is a way of expressing, not literally, it is a symbol, the curvature of space-time. the experimental demonstration of general relativity came later. Probably the most famous aspect of the experimental test is the bending of a light ray by the sun’s gravitational field. In 1919, during an astronomical expedition led by Sir Arthur Eddington, a British astronomer, it was observed that the light emitted by distant stars was bent by the Sun’s gravitational field. after that expedition, physicists began to take general relativity much more seriously. there was also other experimental evidence, but that was the beginning of the idea that general relativity was correct. Before that, it was unproven and Einstein asked astronomers to look for it. That’s what happened in 1919. Astronomers were able to support his theory with observations.
so, after we had proof of general relativity, how was science different? how did the universe look different? what are the implications of that for the way we see the world now?
The whole idea of the big bang has largely been explained in terms of general relativity. this came much later than einstein, of course he was already dead by then. general relativity also explains the existence of black holes. Einstein did not believe they existed, but since the 1960s experimental evidence has been found that they do. The entire structure of space and time that Newton envisioned, an absolute coordinate system, has been abandoned in favor of a curved space-time formulation. that’s really the result of einstein’s work.
Going back to the miraculous year of 1905, which is the central theme of Rigden’s book. his achievements in so many jobs in such a short time seem almost superhuman. but he was only human, right? Do we risk exaggerating the genius of him sometimes?
He was certainly very human and had many flaws as well as an extraordinary scientific imagination. Scholars have closely watched what Einstein was doing in the years up to 1905, there isn’t enough evidence to be sure. there were some letters to his wife, and he published a little. there is this feeling that he came out of nowhere. he obviously he didn’t. no genius works out of a sudden eureka moment and it doesn’t, not even with einstein. the problem is that we don’t really know exactly what he was reading and how his thought process worked. what we do know is that he published in 1905 and that he was fascinated by the contradictions of physics. he imagined chasing a beam of light in his mind and asked what a beam of light would look like if you caught up with it and concluded that it is a physically impossible situation. that, according to Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetism, there was no such thing as catching a ray of light. from that he concluded that light always moves at a constant speed, regardless of what coordinate system you were using to measure it. no matter how fast an observer moved, light would always move at a constant speed faster than the observer.
“einstein’s great idea about general relativity was that gravitation and acceleration were equivalent and that we should build our idea of the universe on that thought.”
another contradiction that fascinated him had to do with magnetism and electric charge. he imagined that if a stationary observer were looking at a stationary charge, there would be no magnetic field that could be observed with a compass. But, if you held the charge stationary and then the observer started moving, by Maxwell’s definition of electromagnetism, he would observe a magnetic field with a compass. So which one was true? Was there or was there not a magnetic field? he said that is a contradiction, we have to solve it. and he solved it, with his theory of relativity.
There’s often a temptation to walk away from the contradiction, but it seems like you just faced it head-on.
yes, he did. it was fruitful for her imagination. she liked contradictions and found them stimulating. That’s one of the strengths of Rigden’s book. With virtually no math, he manages to show how Einstein perceived various contradictions and then used them to create these various articles during that year. rigden is very good at explaining it in clear language with historical anecdotes nicely integrated into the text.
let’s talk about your next choice of albert einstein books, which is the born-einstein letters, 1916-1955, republished in 2005. this is a collection of correspondence between einstein and his friend, the german physicist , max born. what do they talk about in the letters?
It was a long friendship. It started with physics, but developed into a relationship with many other nuances related to politics, ethics, and the state of Germany during those years. they both won nobel prizes, so when we read them we are exposed to a couple of very smart people who write about science. Throughout the cards, you get these human asides: It’s a unique mix of science and humanities. they frequently disagreed and most famously disagreed on quantum theory. In a letter from Einstein to Born he says, ‘The old man doesn’t play dice. I cannot accept the possibility that chance rules the universe.” and born never agreed to that. until the end of the correspondence, they are discussing the role of probability in physics.
They are also talking about the first world war and how they react to that and about Judaism. both are Jewish but have different attitudes towards Judaism. and they are talking about the Nazi period, of course. During that time, Born escaped from Germany and went to Edinburgh and became a teacher. Einstein had gone to the United States, so they did not meet. after 1933, they corresponded but didn’t have any personal contact, which is a good thing, since it means their ideas are on paper rather than just talking to each other. we learn a lot born edits the letters and has many comments where he replies after einstein’s death. Einstein’s stepdaughter wrote to him about his last days in the hospital, saying, “He left this world with no sentimentality or regret.” born says, “we lost our dearest friend when he died,” but “without sentimentality or regret.” is the keynote of the lyrics. Einstein can be quite inhuman. he doesn’t have normal human reactions to some things, including, for example, the death of his second wife. his family life was not particularly happy. he divorced his first wife and had a very difficult relationship with his children. this goes into the book a lot because born is a warmer personality than einstein. the contrast is interesting.
You say he didn’t have normal human reactions to things. what type of personality is then?
Physics dominated his life. the second aspect that dominated his life was humanity. he had a great passion for supporting what he considered to be just political causes. he himself said that this was not associated with a love of individuals. he always said, “I know I’m quite distant from the world in relation to people”, even with the born ones and some of the other close friends of his. he didn’t want to rest him or his life on the “merely personal.” that appears in an essay when he is 50 years old. he was very much in favor of the idea of a world government. after the second world war, he thought that he was the only hope for world peace and to avoid another war. there should be a military-style organization in which the great powers take a role and prevent war. he was unsuccessful, but he strongly supported it for a while.
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Let’s move on to your next albert einstein book pick: fred jerome’s einstein file, published in 2002. this is a book about an investigation into how the fbi, led by j. Edgar Hoover spied on Einstein for 23 years. what exactly happened?
It began in the 1930s when Einstein moved to the United States. he had very mixed feelings about russia and about communism. he had some sympathies for socialism but was not a communist. but the fbi and many right-wing americans thought he was. therefore, even after he became an American citizen in 1940, they regarded him with suspicion. He wrote a letter to President Roosevelt in 1939 advocating the construction of an atomic bomb, along with some other physicists, which was taken seriously by the US government and Roosevelt. Eventually, the Manhattan Project got off the ground, in part because of Einstein’s interest in the subject. obviously other factors were also involved, einstein was not the only influence, but it was quite important. but even though he was involved in supporting this project, he was not allowed access to any secret documents. the army, which ran the manhattan project, did not give him security clearance. but it seems the fbi didn’t know that and when they started compiling their file in the 1940’s they assumed einstein might be a spy with access to secret information about the atomic bomb project and acted accordingly.
“long before many people realized the risk that nazi germany posed to world peace, einstein recognized it.”
j. Edgar Hoover was convinced he was a security risk and might be leaking information to the Russians. When the Klaus Fuchs espionage case occurred around 1950, Hoover became even more convinced that Einstein was a risk. But what finally tipped the scales for Hoover was that Einstein gave a television broadcast in 1950 where he openly told the entire United States that the hydrogen bomb, which President Truman had just announced as a project, could poison the atmosphere and it would be a total disaster, which should not be followed. Hoover then became passionately convinced that all of Einstein’s movements should be tracked and that all of his political associations should be included in this file. he hoped to prove that einstein was a communist and that he could be deported from the united states. that was a serious project of the fbi and the immigration service for five years between 1950 and his death in 1955.
And this didn’t come to light until relatively recently, with freedom of information requests?
It didn’t come out until the 1990s. It’s pretty unsettling, actually, to think that the fbi could have kept the secret for so long. In fact, some FBI agents, even though they were employed by the agency, were unaware of this secret file. Hoover knew that, if published, it would cause a tremendous embarrassment to the United States government: this world-famous scientist was being hunted as a possible spy. he managed to keep the secret, but I think how it was kept in the decades after the ’50s and ’60s is extraordinary and quite alarming.
was this campaign a complete failure? Or is there evidence that he could have damaged Einstein’s reputation or legacy in some way?
Ironically, I think he probably persuaded Einstein, because he knew he was under surveillance, he didn’t know the details, but he knew he was being watched, to go out and make a very public statement in the press in 1953 in support of the intellectuals who opposed the joseph mccarthy campaign. McCarthy reacted very strongly to this, calling Einstein an “enemy of America.” he later changed it to “a disloyal American”, but never retracted that statement. Einstein thought that he might have to go to jail because he was advising people not to testify before congressional committees about his political views. he said that American intellectuals needed courage, otherwise they would become slaves. that’s what he felt the US government was trying to do during the red flag of the 1950s.
It was a very brave thing to come out and say in that climate.
it was. it’s quite poignant to read his own private opinions and concerns, but he was quite old by then. he was prepared to stand up because he felt that the situation had become so much like nazi germany in the 1930s. he really felt that, having lived through the rise of nazi germany, he had a duty to warn americans that the same It could happen with McCarthyism. I think it’s fair to say that he was a real factor in McCarthy’s downfall. only one factor, but he was important. After McCarthy’s downfall, Hoover realized that there was no point in pursuing Einstein any longer. The entire file was closed by the FBI just before Einstein’s death, but it is 1,800 pages long. One irony is that much of the archive consists of associations Einstein had lent his name to, but very little consists of his views.
as fred jerome points out, if hoover had been more of an einstein reader, he would have found far more evidence of his radicalism than by looking at his political associations. but he didn’t do that. he relied entirely on guilt by association and they could never prove, by that method, that einstein was a security risk, because he wasn’t. He had sympathies that were completely at odds with Hoover’s, but he had no access to nuclear secrets and never visited the Soviet Union. a lot of people did, but einstein always refused. he was invited many times but opposed many aspects of stalin and the soviet regime. people tried to encourage him to go. There was even a false report that he had visited, which some Americans used against him. but it was a false report. he did not visit the soviet union.
let’s turn to einstein’s political writings, which hoover was unable to read, in einstein on politics edited by david rowe and robert schulmann from 2007. what image do we get of this book of albert einstein, then, of his political views ?
This is the first book that really collects everything, so it’s valuable. there were a couple of books before that, but this is the first collection where everything that matters is there: letters, public statements, all of course in English (many of them originally in German). The general attitude has always been that Einstein was politically naive. I do not think that’s true. when you see what he did and what he stood for, you can’t call him naive. he was a committed pacifist until 1933 and made a series of provocative speeches on pacifism. after acknowledging what the Nazis stood for, he immediately changed his mind and said that there was no possibility of resisting Nazism without military force. he was prophetic. Long before many people realized the risk Nazi Germany posed to world peace, Einstein recognized it and argued that Western countries would eventually have to arm themselves and fight back.
he was not naive about israel. he supported the founding of israel but insistently told the israelis that they would have to find an ethical solution to their relationship with the arabs. otherwise the entire state would fail and they had a duty to do so. he never changed his mind and when he was invited to be president of israel in 1952, shortly before his death, he refused saying ‘i have no talent for politics and i would have to say things to my jewish compatriots in israel to make it happen’ they did he probably doesn’t want to hear about his relationship with the Arabs.’ again, he was probably right. whether he may have influenced events more than he did by becoming president, we’ll never know. but he certainly was taken seriously by the Israelis as a thinker and an activist. then, on the subject of world government, in 1945, he made sense. the united nations had just started but they were already fighting in the security council. Einstein said that the only way to control nationalism was to have a central military authority. He tried to involve both the United States and the Soviet Union, the British and other nations, following the model of the Austro-Hungarian empire under which he had grown up. he gave a speech at a nobel prize winner’s anniversary dinner in new york, saying, “the war is won but the peace is not.” there was about two or three years of campaigning for a world government with other physicists and thinkers. Of course it failed, but that was, I guess, inevitable in the cold war.
Is this book just of historical interest, to find out what he thought, or do Einstein’s thoughts resonate with us today?
When you read his collected writings, you can’t help but see that there was a connection between his personal integrity and his political views that we all struggle with: how we behave as individuals and how we behave as a collective. his honesty and his courage make me think. and he wrote well. he had a biting style, his writing is not woolly and he also had a sense of history. he also had a wonderful sense of humor. that is reflected in virtually everything he writes about politics and human behavior. sometimes it was quite caustic, but often it was just ironic. I’m sure you’ve seen an end-of-life photograph of him sticking his tongue out at photographers. I think brashness and defiance of authority are the defining characteristics of his political statements. I find it, in general, admirable.
That’s something that seems to run through his scientific thinking and his political views.
He was a rebel, against orthodoxy of all kinds. we haven’t touched on the last 30 years of him as a physicist, which are a bit notorious. he was trying to unify electromagnetism and gravitation; in other words, extend general relativity to an even more universal understanding of the universe. he didn’t succeed, but in my book i have a contribution from steven weinberg, the particle physicist, who says that even though einstein failed, we should admire his determination to continue and not accept quantum theory as the final theory. . he said “I cannot accept that as the final theory of physics, there must be something beyond”. he returned to show his challenge to orthodoxy because almost all physicists thought they had lost. and some of them said so, bohr in particular. Niels Bohr arrived at Princeton in 1939, and Einstein had many opportunities to meet him and talk to his old friend. but he didn’t want to because they didn’t agree so radically on the physics. They spent a lot of time ignoring each other. Bohr was very upset about that, but Einstein was determined not to reopen this old debate, so he kept his distance from it.
How should we remember Einstein?
like a unique genius. I’ve written two books on genius and I can’t think of anyone else who has managed to combine science and decent human behavior in the way he did. and also as a humorous man. I really admire his jokes…
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