Einstein

by Isaacson, Walter

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  ———. 1970b. “The First Phase of the Bohr-Einstein Dialogue.”Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 2: 1–39.

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  ———. 1999. “A New Cataclysm of Thought.”Atlantic Monthly , Jan.

  ———. 2005. The Discoveries. New York: Pantheon.

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  ———. 1984. Imagery in Scientific Thought. Boston: Birkhäuser.

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  ———. 1999. Insights of Genius. New York: Springer-Verlag.

  ———. 2001. Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty That Causes Havoc. New York: Basic Books.

  ———. 2005. Empire of the Stars. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

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  ———. 2006a. “Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity and the Problems in the

  Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies That Led Him to It.” Available at www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/homepage/cv.html.

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  ———. 2003. “Errors and Insights: Reconstructing the Genesis of General Relativity from Einstein’s Zurich Notebook.” In Holmes et al. 2003, 253–268.

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  ———. 2000. “The Construction of the Special Theory: Some Queries and Considerations.” In Howard and Stachel 2000.

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  ———, ed. 1956b. Helle Zeit, Dunkle Zeit: In Memoriam Albert Einstein. Zürich: Europa-Verlag.

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  ———. 2000. Exploring Black Holes. New York: Benjamin/Cummings.

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  ———. 2005. A World without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein. New York: Basic Books.

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  NOTES

  Einstein’s letters and writings through 1920 have been published in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein series, and they are identified by the dates used in those volumes. Unpublished material that is in the Albert Einstein Archives (AEA) is identified using the folder (reel)-document numbering format of the archives. For some of the material, especially that previously unpublished, I have used translations made for me by James Hoppes and Natasha Hoffmeyer.

  EPIGRAPH

  1. Einstein to Eduard Einstein, Feb. 5, 1930. Eduard was suffering from deepening mental illness at the time. The exact quote is: “Beim Menschen ist es wie beim Velo. Nur wenn er faehrt, kann er bequem die Balance halten.” A more literal translation is: “It is the same with people as it is with riding a bike. Only when moving can one comfortably maintain one’s balance.” Courtesy of Barbara Wolff, Einstein archives, Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

  CHAPTER ONE: THE LIGHT-BEAM RIDER

  1. Einstein to Conrad Habicht, May 18 or 25, 1905.

  2. These ideas are drawn from essays I wrote in Time, Dec. 31, 1999, and Discover, Sept. 2004.

  3. Dudley Herschbach, “Einstein as a Student,” Mar. 2005, unpublished paper provided to the author. Herschbach says, “Efforts to improve science education and literacy face a root problem: science and mathematics are regarded not as part of the general culture, but rather as the pro
vince of priest-like experts. Einstein is seen as a towering icon, the exemplar par excellence of lonely genius. That fosters an utterly distorted view of science.”

  4. Frank 1957, xiv; Bernstein 1996b, 18.

  5. Vivienne Anderson to Einstein, Apr. 27, 1953, AEA 60-714; Einstein to Vivienne Anderson, May 12, 1953, AEA 60-716.

  6. Viereck, 377. See also Thomas Friedman, “Learning to Keep Learning,”New York Times, Dec. 13, 2006.