Glimpse of Einstein a head trip

Duane Davis, Speical To The Rocky

Friday, April 13, 2007

Albert Einstein is everybody's favorite genius. And though we don't always, or even often, possess a clue as to what, exactly, his theories mean, we all know that his contributions to science, summarized and symbolized for us by the brief and elegant shorthand of his famous equation, "E=mc2," changed our world, for both good and bad.

I won't pretend that this new biography, Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson has made it any clearer to me how that equation for the conversion of mass and energy led to the atomic bomb. An English major in college, I took Math For Dummies and still didn't have enough fingers and toes to keep up with the instructor.

This confession aside, I nonetheless found the book engaging and even educational. Isaacson, an accomplished biographer, has given us a fine, affectionate and determinedly lucid account of both Einstein's life and thought - this latter of which you will have already guessed is a fairly difficult trick to pull off.

Ironically, the first challenge an Einstein biographer faces is the very fact of how famous his subject is: regardless of how little we may understand his science, most of us know something about the man himself. His famous images, the iconic black and white photos blown up to poster size and thumbtacked to the walls of budding geniuses the world over, have made Einstein's one of the most recognizable faces in history. And most of us have in the back of our heads two or three of the many folk tales of the man.

One of this book's strengths is the way in which Isaacson gently corrects our hero-worship, while at the same time demonstrating that Einstein, warts and all, was truly a towering figure of our time, a man of extraordinary intelligence who, though prey to some of the usual human flaws, was, well, a hero.

Some of these corrections are only mildly disappointing. For example, Isaacson points out that "One widely held belief about Einstein is that he failed math as a student," pointing out that this so-called fact "even made it into the famous Ripley's Believe It or Not! newspaper column." Einstein himself, in 1935, when shown this particular column, laughed and said, "I never failed in mathematics . . . Before I was fifteen I had mastered differential and integral calculus."

Well, it was a lovely story and seemed to hold out the hope to all of us who struggled in our own math classes that maybe someday we too would realize our "genius" and come up with a formula for something besides another strawberry daiquiri.

This is not to say, however, that Einstein was anything like a conventionally good student. He was, for one thing, a high-school dropout, of sorts - a fact that reflects what Isaacson contends was one the most important clues to Einstein's character: his lifelong dislike for, and defiance of, authority. He was, Isaacson writes, "a rebel with a reverence for the harmony of nature." But that rebelliousness would, for years, get him into trouble with the very people he needed to be on good terms with in order to advance his career.

As early as 1901, while still in his early 20s and very far from being famous or even accepted as a scientist, Einstein crowed, "Blind respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth" - a statement which, Isaacson notes, "would prove a worthy credo, one suitable for being carved on his coat of arms if he had ever wanted such a thing."

It was just this attitude, however, that kept doors closed to him in the academic world even after what Isaacson calls Einstein's "Miracle Year" of 1905 when, in five short months of furious speculation, he produced a series of papers that would revolutionize our understanding of the shape and nature of physical reality. In the years following, it began to dawn on scientists that while we continued to move about quite comfortably in a classical "Newtonian" universe, another universe, "Einsteinian," loomed ahead of us: far scarier, far more mysterious, far more difficult for a layman to grasp.

Generally known as the Special Theory of Relativity, these papers were followed a few years later by the equally important - and just as difficult to grasp - General Theory of Relativity. But Isaacson guides us through Einstein's weird world of bent light and curvatures of space-time with cool clarity and unflappable calm. He is as adept at placing Einstein in the stream of ideas and theories that eddied about in the intellectual currents of the day as he is at detailing Einstein's marital infidelities and intramural squabbles with rival theorists.

Our enduring fascination with Einstein obviously comes not just from our awe at his intelligence. We all run into plenty of folks much smarter than we are every day - but most of them aren't destined to change the world.

Isaacson relates a marvelous story that sums up, for me, what made Einstein "Einstein." Einstein and his second wife, Elsa, were in America in 1931 and visited the observatory at Mount Wilson: "It was a sunny day, and Einstein merrily played with the telescope's dials and instruments. Elsa came along as well, and it was explained to her that the equipment was used to determine the scope and shape of the universe."

Elsa reportedly replied, with a nonchalance maddening to the math-challenged like me: "Well, my husband does that on the back of an old envelope."

Duane Davis is a Littleton freelance writer .