He found hints of those universal truths in his violin playing, especially Beethoven. But most of all he found hints, a great satisfying assurance, in his personal sort of religion. He did not believe in God per se, but felt there had to be some kind of harmonising principle behind the patterns of the cosmos. “The fanatical atheists,” he wrote, “are creatures who cannot hear the music of the spheres.”
==
The other side of the equation
Review By David Bodanis
Published: August 4 2007 01:13 | Last updated: August 4 2007 01:13
Einstein: His Life and Universe
By Walter Isaacson
Simon and Schuster £25, 675 pages
FT bookshop price: £20
The popular Einstein story is impossible to resist. A young man fails his mathematics exams yet becomes the world’s greatest scientist. He works in obscurity. When he publishes his great papers, he’s ignored. Despite all this – and his autism – he triumphs. But he does so only with the help of his wife, a key source of his ideas.
It turns out that none of that is true. The reality, however, is even better. American biographer Walter Isaacson is a bit too respectful of his material. He writes in a polite, almost awe-struck tone and goes on for so many hundreds of pages that the reader begs for a bit more selection. But his new book is still fun to read.
Einstein was actually an excellent maths student, mastering calculus by 15. His father and uncle nurtured his curiosity. Once, when Einstein was ill as a child, his father bought him a compass. How, possibly, did its needle move? Something hidden was behind things, but neither of them could work out what.
Coming from a family of such inquiring minds meant that Prussian-style schooling was impossible to take. Einstein hated most of his teachers in Germany for their discipline and teaching by rote. His resistance to authority was a problem at university. His main physics professor taught dully and Einstein didn’t hide his dissatisfaction. Although he graduated well, the professor refused to write recommendations for academic jobs.
Einstein ended up in a patent office in Bern. But even that wasn’t as isolated as has often been portrayed. He assessed electrical machinery – as hi-tech then as the evaluation of Silicon Valley start-ups today. As for his supposed autism, he excelled at making friends. He put people at ease with jokes and stories. He’d even nabbed his university’s one female physics student as a wife.
There was severance from all his friends and colleagues in 1905, however, when he put his ideas together in a flurry of papers. One culminated with his equation E=mc2. It asserted that two realms that everyone had thought of as separate – mass and energy – were actually one and the same. Mass, he proposed, could be turned into energy. He even suggested that radioactive metals might one day have their inner power unleashed this way.
His wife was a good physics student, but didn’t come up with the idea. The suggestion that she did seems to have come from Serb nationalists in the 1960s (she was originally Serbian).
Within months, his papers were recognised by leading physicists. A few years later he had left the patent office far behind. In time his own creativity faded and he ended up repeating the same approaches. But in his years of success he got closer than anyone to discovering the universe’s deep truths.
He found hints of those universal truths in his violin playing, especially Beethoven. But most of all he found hints, a great satisfying assurance, in his personal sort of religion. He did not believe in God per se, but felt there had to be some kind of harmonising principle behind the patterns of the cosmos. “The fanatical atheists,” he wrote, “are creatures who cannot hear the music of the spheres.”
David Bodanis is the author of ‘E=mc2: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation’ (Macmillan)
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Comments