Einstein — His Life and Universe

Why it’s on the list: Walter Isaacson’s biography, the first written with access to Einstein’s personal correspondence, argues that the physics and the personality were the same trait: a constitutional resistance to received authority, which produced special relativity at twenty-six and later left him isolated in his refusal to accept quantum indeterminacy.

Where I heard about it

• Spotted at Barnes & Noble, San Bruno — February 2019 (Books photo album)

• Li Lu — on Li Lu’s Recommended Book List, entry 4 in the Biography and Others section, cited as Simon & Schuster 2008. The list also carries Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and The Innovators.

About this edition

It was released when Einstein’s letters were opened in 2006. It is strong on the 1905 papers as intellectual events and unsentimental about the private cost — the first marriage, the children, the distance. Li Lu’s closing section is mostly lives — Franklin, Mellon, the Warburgs, Einstein — and reads as the bibliography’s answer to how the earlier sections get metabolised; two entries from Isaacson suggest the interest is in the biographical form itself: how a particular mind arrives at a non-consensus view and then holds it.

Connections

• Li Lu’s Recommended Book List — the bibliography this came from.
• Walter Isaacson — author, with three entries on the same list.
• Albert Einstein — subject.
• Science — the 1905 papers and the later quarrel with quantum mechanics.