The Private Lives of Albert Einstein

Rating:
Summary: Essential Einstein reading....
Review: It is inevitable that Albert Einstein's "private lives" will fall under the dissection knives of historians and biographers. There are already dozens of excellent biographies of Einstein on the market, ranging from the extremely scientific to the extremely personal. As the Einstein Papers Project continues to explore the personal correspondence of this remarkable scientist, we can expect the personal revelations to continue. Einstein, as were all great figures of history, was a very complicated person, and a very human one.

In this work, the authors take a very personal look at his life between the high school years and the publication of special relativity. Specifically, it focuses on his first marriage, to Mileva Maric'. Much about this relationship was kept intentionally hidden for years by Einstein's secretary Helen Dukas, and scientist Otto Nathan, who became the de facto protectors of the "Einstein image." Since they had known him in the era of his marriage to his cousin Elsa, they understandably sought to minimize and downplay any factors from his younger years that might reflect negatively upon him, and a failed first marriage, with an illegitimate child, could certainly be seen as less than flattering.

Highfield and Carter's book draws heavily on the work of the Einstein Papers scholars Stachel, Renn, and Schulmann. Einstein's voluminous correspondence from those years has shed much new light on such questions as the fate of the daughter Liseral, but without providing definitive answers. Considerable time is also spent on the issue of Mileva's role in the development of special relativity - topic that exploded with the force of a bomb in recent years.

Einstein has been dead for nearly half a century now, and it is certain now that his private life will be subjected to as intense scrutiny as has special and general relativity. This book, along with Overbye's "Einstein in Love" take a respectful but straightforward approach. Any Einstein admirer or general fan of the history of science should read this book.

Rating:
Summary: The myth of Albert Einstein
Review: It is inevitable that Albert Einstein's "private lives" will fall under the dissection knives of historians and biographers. There are already dozens of excellent biographies of Einstein on the market, ranging from the extremely scientific to the extremely personal. As the Einstein Papers Project continues to explore the personal correspondence of this remarkable scientist, we can expect the personal revelations to continue. Einstein, as were all great figures of history, was a very complicated person, and a very human one.

In this work, the authors take a very personal look at his life between the high school years and the publication of special relativity. Specifically, it focuses on his first marriage, to Mileva Maric'. Much about this relationship was kept intentionally hidden for years by Einstein's secretary Helen Dukas, and scientist Otto Nathan, who became the de facto protectors of the "Einstein image." Since they had known him in the era of his marriage to his cousin Elsa, they understandably sought to minimize and downplay any factors from his younger years that might reflect negatively upon him, and a failed first marriage, with an illegitimate child, could certainly be seen as less than flattering.

Highfield and Carter's book draws heavily on the work of the Einstein Papers scholars Stachel, Renn, and Schulmann. Einstein's voluminous correspondence from those years has shed much new light on such questions as the fate of the daughter Liseral, but without providing definitive answers. Considerable time is also spent on the issue of Mileva's role in the development of special relativity - topic that exploded with the force of a bomb in recent years.

Einstein has been dead for nearly half a century now, and it is certain now that his private life will be subjected to as intense scrutiny as has special and general relativity. This book, along with Overbye's "Einstein in Love" take a respectful but straightforward approach. Any Einstein admirer or general fan of the history of science should read this book.

Rating:
Summary: The myth of Albert Einstein
Review: This a very good book. Two able researchers put their heads together and did all the research. The result is a fascinating picture of a rather unhappy man who had his moment of glory and spent the rest of his life chasing a wild goose--a unified theory. I wouldn't say they shattered the myth of Einstein, but they do point out that he might have had some help with relativity and did very little in physics in the last 30 years of his life--all the time he spent at Princeton, in fact--except deny the truth of quantum physics, probably the most elegant theory ever devised by the human mind.

My (small) problem with this book is that the authors expect us to believe that Einstein, a PhD in physics, 1) had never heard of Brownian motion prior to his paper on molecules in 1905; and 2) published his paper on relativity in 1905 with no footnotes or attributions because he "was unaware of the need to give credit where it was due" (p. 105). Really.

This book did a lot to support my long-held view that Einstein's reputation is vastly overrated. He was a great physicist during the first part of of the 20th century, but there were many others, and he built on the work of many others who went before him and others who worked with him.