Eintein: his life and universe. (W. Isaacson)

Walter Isaacson (2007) Einstein: his life and universe.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd.

Summary
Well … Einstein's life, his work and its effects! (1879 - 1955)

My comments
I read Einstein because I'm trying to understand cosmology - the study of how the universe began, what it's made of and how it works. Einstein was a theoretical physicist who made many enormous contributions to cosmology. His work in the first few decades of the last century overturned the prevailing scientific truths about the world we live in and the universe in which it exists. For instance, Einstein's theories of relativity revolutionised how we think about relationships between gravity, space and time; they led him to propose that the universe is expanding years before astronomer Edwin Hubble demonstrated it; and his discovery that tiny amounts of matter can be converted into huge amounts of energy explained where the sun's energy comes from and, thirty years later, led to the creation of the first atomic bomb.

As his ideas became known outside of scientific circles, Einstein acquired fame unprecedented for a theoretical physicist. Even more remarkable, Einstein's equation summarising that relationship between matter and energy - E = mc2 - achieved a popular fame of its own and is the only scientific equation that many people know.

Einstein was more than a theoretical physicist, albeit the greatest one of his time. He actively supported the creation of the state of Israel and collaborated with Dr. Chaim Weizmann - Israel's first President - in establishing the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. On Weizmann's death in 1952, Einstein was invited to become Israel's second President, but declined because, he said, he had 'neither the natural ability nor the experience to deal with human beings' (Time Online. 1952).

Einstein was born and raised as a Swiss citizen, but in 1914 he became a German citizen. In the early 1930s, he advocated pacifism and resistance to war, while also publicly opposing the rise of Nazism and helping various Jewish colleagues to escape it. These activities made him a marked man in Germany, so in 1933 he renounced his German citizenship and emigrated to America, where he became inaugural Professor of Theoretical Physics at Princeton. He became a United States citizen in 1940 and lived there until he died in 1955.

Einstein is the first biography of Einstein that I've read, so I can't compare it with the others that preceded it. Walter Isaacson has been chairperson and CEO of CNN and Managing Editor of Time magazine. He has written biographies of the eighteenth century US physicist and civic activist Benjamin Franklin and of former US Secretary of State (under Nixon) Henry Kissinger.