ALBERT EINSTEIN

Einstein The Life and Times by Ronald Clark ;Published by Harper ; Pages 896; Price U.S. $ 25/95.

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The book under review is a biography of Albert Einstein. The author Ronald Clark was a British author of biography, fiction and non-fiction. He was a war correspondent during the Second World War and followed the war until the end, and remained in Germany to report on the major War Crimes trials. Clark has written excellent biographies of J. B. S. Haldane, the Huxleys and Henry Tizard.

When his parents moved to Italy in 1893, Einstein dropped out of school and renounced both his German citizenship and his Jewish faith. He applied to study at the Zurich Polytechnic, an advanced Swiss technical institute. However, he failed the entrance examinations and was not accepted until spending a year of preparation at a Swiss secondary school. Between 1896 and 1900, he participated in a teachers' training program at the Zurich Polytechnic, where he met his lifelong friends Marcel Grossman and Michele Angelo Besso, as well as his first wife, Mileva Maric. Following the completion of his program in 1900, Einstein went on to work as a teacher and tutor in a series of posts in Germany and Switzerland. He finally settled in Bern, Switzerland, in 1902, where he received a job as a technical expert in a patent office.

For most of Einstein's life, he worked as a University Professor. He began at the University of Bern in 1909, but also taught at Prague and Zurich before ultimately settling at the University of Berlin and the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1915. Although his wife Mileva and their sons initially lived in Berlin with him, the couple separated shortly thereafter and in 1919 obtained an official divorce. Einstein remarried that same year, to his cousin Elsa Lowenthal, and lived with her until her death in 1936.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Einstein became increasingly active in politics and international affairs. He was a strong supporter of Zionism and travelled on a lecturing tour to the United States in 1922 to raise money on behalf of a new Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In addition to his Zionism, Einstein was also a militant pacifist. He was critical of nationalism and committed to the idea of a single world government without any need for armed forces. Throughout the 1920s, he participated in numerous peace campaigns and wrote articles on international peace and disarmament. However, when Hitler's National Socialist party came to power in Germany in 1933, Einstein began to rethink his rigid pacifist stance. When the Nazis began targeting him in their anti-Semitic propaganda, Einstein resigned from the Prussian Academy of Sciences and accepted a full-time position at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. Einstein departed further from his pacifism during World War II, when he actively participated in the war effort, working for the US Navy and writing a letter to President Roosevelt in 1939, in which he urged him to accelerate the nation's nuclear weaponry development. However, Einstein never advocated the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan and worked until his death in 1955 in a campaign for international peace and nuclear disarmament.

Einstein's greatest contributions to physics were his synthesis of mechanics and electrodynamics through his relativity theory, and his challenge to Newtonian physics through his quantum theory.

Einstein's achievements influenced philosophy, art, literature, and many disciplines. Einstein transformed the image of the scientist in the twentieth century. He was far more than the physicist who confidently claimed that space and time were not what they seemed to be. He passionately indulged in pacifism, and as passionately rejected it when Hitler began to show that he really meant what he said about the Jews and the master race.
Clark has drawn an extraordinarily moving portrait of a man who was one of the great tragic figures of our time. It is the picture of a man who while still young abandoned much of life with the passion of the convinced monastic, and who was thrust back into it by the unobliging pressures of history. And in science the greatest physicist of three centuries, or possibly of them all, found himself after middle age pushed by the advance of quantum mechanics into a backwater, "a genuine old museum-piece," as he himself wrote.

Clark has drawn on a immense amount of new material. But he has never lost sight of the man who was one of the greatest contradictions of our times: the German who hated the Germans; the pacifist who changed his mind; the ambivalent Zionist who was asked to head the Israeli state; the physicist who believed in God.

Einstein’s life since the very beginning, his hatred towards Germany, his work in Switzerland and then academics in Germany again, his family leniency towards religions and spirituality, his love for physics, his journey during world wars and inclination towards Zionism in later years of life is all majestically portrayed in the book.

Einstein summarised his feelings about his role in the creation of the atomic bomb—a little before he died:

“I made one great mistake in my life… when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made; but there was some justification – the danger that the Germans would make them.”

Sixty five years after his death , Einstein is remarkably alive in contemporary science. His work is still the acknowledged base of new research results in an astonishing variety of problems in physics, cosmology and to some extent also in chemistry.

During the last decade it has turned out that some of the most exciting frontiers lie exactly in that branch where Einstein, with few followers but with the obstinacy of a prophet, did his work in his last decades, namely in general relativity theory.

Today's theory of knowledge carries his fingerprints, partly because his early publications on relativity and quantum physics helped shape the modern style of doing science—moving ahead with daring, free imagination, but keeping one's rope anchored in a few places to the rock of basic principle.

Einstein's chief importance today lies in the fact that his legacy still provides much of the power and direction for modern science and epistemology. ”

Clark offers details of the all--too--familiar story.

He regale us with anecdotes about Einstein's lively wit and independence. There is a cast of thousands, kings and commoners who happened to interact with Einstein and who shared with him the elations and horrors of the first half of the last century.

There is also a special chapter on Einstein's role in alerting Roosevelt in August, 1939, to the possibility realistically perceived,--- as it turned out—that the Germans would combine their scientific headstart on nuclear fission work with their access to uranium ore and their ambitions for world conquest and so would be tempted to make a nuclear weapon that, on scientific principles, was generally known to be a possibility.

However, the world was going into a nuclear age whether or not Einstein had signed the letter to Roosevelt. Ironically, after December, 1941, Einstein was carefully kept insulated from research on the A‐bomb — “in view of the attitude of people here in Washington who have studied his whole history,” . Einstein got wind of what went on, enough to worry greatly about a postwar weapons race. His plan was to inform and rally scientists in the major countries to press for the internationalisation of military power and Clark.

Emerging from Clark's Einstein is seen as a towering, creative figure in science and history of science.

One one occasion connected with the Nobel Prize in 1922, Einstein had to furnish an essay about himself for official publication. He wrote only 14 lines. In 1946 he wrote his famous “Autobiographical Notes”—and devoted virtually all his space to his conceptual development in science and epistemology. Therefore it is an autobiography containing the names of such intellectual ancestors as Hume, Kant and Mach, Newton, Faraday and Maxwell but not of any of his family relatives.

While Einstein's science is proverbially difficult, the essence of Einstein's discoveries is in fact accessible without much mathematics.

Einstein's character was full of ambiguities, tensions and polarities which sometimes produced results that now make amusing reading. Einstein's disinterest in making quite sure he will not turn up incorrectly dressed for some formal occasion is not unrelated to his ability to adopt an unconventional point of view when it is needed to expose the key fault in some hoary old problem of science.

There is of course the folkloric image itself—that of the wisest of old men, who even looked as if he had witnessed Creation itself, but who at the same time also is the almost Childlike person. There is the legendary ability to concentrate, often for years, on a single basic problem, regardless of contemporary schools or fashion; and, opposite to that, is his ever‐ready openness to deal, after all, with the barrage of requests for help and personal involvements that appealed to his fundamental humanity and vulnerability to pity.

Einstein is the apostle of rationality, characterised by clarity of logical construction. His personal philosophy, of liberal agnosticism and his withering contempt for established religious authority of any sort are well‐known—and, at the same time, he has also a clear personal religiosity. As he says in one of his letters: “I am a deeply religious unbeliever.”

The key to his genius. may well lie in the mutual correspondence between his style in thought and act on one side and the chief unresolved puzzles of contemporary science on the other.

To one of his assistants, Einstein said: “What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.”

The legendary simplicity of the man was an integral part of his personality.

This is an outstanding biography of a great scientist and a greater human being.It is noteworthy for its precision and perception

P.P.Ramachandran

10/05/2020.