United Nations, 489, 496
Universal Studios, 374
universe:
alternative histories of, 459–60
Big Bang theory of, 355
dark energy in, 356
expansion of, 253, 353–56, 372, 510
galaxies of, 254, 353–56, 442
limits of, 252–54
metric of, 353–54
rotation of, 510–11
Untermyer, Samuel, 425
Uppsala, University of, 310–11
uranium, 469, 471–73
Urey, Harold, 526
Utrecht, University of, 175, 176
Vallentin, Antonina, 441
Variak, Vladimir, 185
Veblen, Oswald, 297–98, 397, 426
vectors, 194
velocity, 107–9, 114, 118–19, 127–31, 145, 148, 189, 192, 201
” Venona” secret cables, 633n
Versailles Treaty (1919), 303
Viennese Academy, 234
Viereck, George Sylvester, 385–87
Villa Carlotta, 64
Viollejules, 24, 25
viscosity, 102, 105
volume, 98, 101–3
Wagner, Richard, 11–12, 38
Waldorf Hotel, 375
Walker, Evan, 136
Walker Jimmy, 370
Wallace, Henry, 504
Walsh, David, 295
War Bonds, 482
Warburg, Emil, 174
War Resisters’ International, 414–17
War Resisters’ League, 375, 376, 400, 402, 499
Washington, George, 529
Washington Post, 295–96, 528
Waste Land, The (Eliot), 280
water waves, 92, 109–10
Walters, Leon, 402, 436, 441, 443
wavelengths, 65, 94–95, 97, 111, 322, 323, 331
wave mechanics, 329–30, 331, 347, 454–55, 456
wave theory, 1, 19, 24, 26, 34, 46, 47–48, 94–95, 97–98, 109–12, 119, 155–57, 170, 318, 323, 329, 578n
Weber, Heinrich, 25, 32, 33–34, 47–48, 55, 60–61, 115, 169, 177
weight and weightlessness, 145–46, 190
Weimar Republic, 284
Weinberg, Steven, 340–41, 356
Weisskopf, Victor, 407
Weizmann, Chaim, 290, 294, 295, 298–99, 300, 303, 381, 409, 413–14, 520
Wells, H.G., 132, 377
Wertheimer, Max, 116, 241–42
Wesleyan University, 343
Westmoreland, 424, 425–26
Weyl, Hermann, 298, 337, 339, 351
Weyland, Paul, 284–86, 287, 288–89
“What I Believe” (Einstein), 387, 391
“What Is the Theory of Relativity?” (Einstein), 267
Wheeler, John Archibald, 220, 251, 325, 469, 515
White, Theodore, 533
Whitehead, Alfred North, 261
“Why do They Hate the Jews?” (Einstein), 445
“Why Socialism?” (Einstein), 504
Wieman, Carl E., 329n
Wien, Wilhelm, 48, 115–16, 149, 168, 310
Wigner, Eugene, 407, 471–73, 475, 476, 480
Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany, 386
Williams, Charles, 526
Williams, John Sharp, 295
Winteler, Anna, 27, 62, 231, 237, 418, 517, 540, 636n
Winteler, Jost, 27, 29, 38, 67, 69, 205, 240
Winteler, Maria Einstein “Maja,” 8, 11, 12, 16, 17, 23, 24, 39, 49, 50, 59, 66, 74, 75, 85, 140, 141, 234, 236–37, 268, 343, 427, 443, 517–18, 636n
Winteler, Marie, 27, 28, 40–42, 43, 44, 46, 51, 52
Winteler, Paul, 27, 234, 236–37, 443, 517, 518, 636n
Winteler, Rosa, 27
Wise, Stephen, 430, 431, 436, 520
Witelson, Sandra, 547–48
Woman Patriot Corporation, 399–401, 420, 477–78
World Antiwar Congress (1932), 379, 478
world government, 209, 301, 479, 487–500, 541, 631/2
World Peace Council, 524–25, 531
World War 1, 188, 204, 205–9, 224, 227, 233, 239–40, 250, 251, 256–57, 274, 277, 283–84, 290, 376, 377, 408, 539
World War II, 386, 475, 491, 539
World Without Time (Yourgrau), 511
World Zionist Organization, 290
Wright, Orville, 618/2
X-rays, 111, 435
Yearbook of Radioactivity and Electronics, 144, 145, 148, 189
Yeshiva University, 636/2
Young, Thomas, 329
Yourgrau, Palle, 511
Youth Peace Foundation, 376, 404–5
Ypres, Battle of, 206
Zackheim, Michele, 86, 88
Zangger, Heinrich, 170, 175–76, 177, 180, 184, 185, 201, 202, 207, 209, 210, 211, 212, 217, 220–21, 228, 229, 231, 233, 234, 236–37, 266, 272, 277, 316
Zionism, 281–84, 289–301, 302–3, 306, 307–8, 376, 381, 409, 412–14, 520–23, 526, 541
Zürcher, Emil, 236
Zurich, University of, 101–3, 150–53, 158–63, 167, 239, 365
Zurich Notebook, 196–98, 214, 592n, 594n
Zurich Polytechnic, 2, 24, 25–26, 30, 31, 32–49, 54–56, 60, 115, 150–51, 158, 175–83, 239, 276–77, 372
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Walter Isaacson is the CEO of the Aspen Institute. He has been chairman and CEO of CNN and managing editor of Time magazine. He is the author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and Kissinger: A Biography, and he is the coauthor with Evan Thomas of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. He lives with his wife and daughter in Washington, D.C.
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
Numbers in roman type refer to illustrations in the insert; numbers in italics refer to book pages.
AP/Wide World Photos: 1
The Granger Collection, New York: 2, 4, 14
© Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, 2007: 3, 23
Private Collection: 5, 18, 22, 33, 76, 90, 123, 336
Courtesy of: The Albert Einstein Archives, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel: 6, 13, 16, 281, 309
© Bettmann/Corbis: 7, 10, 24, 225
Besso Family, courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives: 8
© Corbis: 9, 19
Photo Deutsches Museum: 11, 20
AFP/Getty Images: 12, 508
© Underwood & Underwood/Corbis: 15
Couprie/Hulton Archive/Getty Images: 17
Photograph by Willem J. Luyten, Academische Historisches Museum, Leiden, courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives: 21
Ullstein Bilderdienst/The Granger Collection, New York: 25, 26, 27, 50, 249
E. O. Hoppe/Mansell/Time-Life Pictures/Getty Images: 28
New York Times Co./Getty Images: 29
Erika Britzke: 30
American Stock/Getty Images: 31, 35
Hulton Archive/Getty Images: 32, 37, 8
Keystone/Getty Images: 34
Alan Richards, Princeton University Library: 36, 535
Esther Bubley/Getty Images: 38, 425
Courtesy of the Archives, California Institute of Technology: ix
Photo: akg-images, London: 107
Imagno/Getty Images: 263 The New York Times: 264, 265
Akademie der Kunst Baukunstarchiv: 357
Santa Barbara Historical Society: 384
Time-Life Pictures/Getty Images:394
March of Time/Time-Life Pictures/Getty Images: 471
Photo by Philippe Halsman © Halsman Estate: 487
Alfred Eisenstaedt, Time–Life Pictures/Getty Images: 524
© The Albert Einstein Archives, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel: 543
Ralph Morse, Time–Life Pictures/Getty Images: 544
Luke Frazza, AFP/Getty Images:605
1 His parents, Pauline and Hermann Einstein
2 In a Munich photo studio at age 14
3 Bottom left at the Aarau school, 1896
4 With Mileva Mari, ca. 1905
5 With Mileva and Hans Albert, 1905
6 Eduard, Mileva, and Hans Albert, 1914
7 With Conrad Habicht, left, and Maurice Solovine of the “Olympia Academy,” ca. 1902
8 Anna Winteler Besso and Michele Besso
9 At the patent office in Bern during the miracle year, 1905
10 In Prague, 1912
11 Marcel Grossmann, who helped with math at college and for general relativity
12 Hiking in Switzerland with Madame Curie, 1913
13 With the chemist Fritz Haber, assimilationist and marriage mediator, July 1914
14 Watched over by Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann in New York, April 1921
15 Meeting the press in New York, 1930
16 With Elsa at the Grand Canyon, February 1931
17 The 1911 Solvay Conference
18 The 1927 Solvay Conference
19 Receiving the Max Planck medal from its namesake, 1929
20 In Leiden: Einstein, Ehrenfest, de Sitter in back; Eddington and Lorentz in front; September 1923
21 With Paul Ehrenfest and Ehrenfest’s son in Leiden
22 Niels Bohr and Einstein discussing quantum mechanics at Ehrenfest’s home in Leiden, 1925, in a photo taken by Ehrenfest
23 Werner Heisenberg
24 Erwin Schrödinger
25 Max Born
26 Philipp Lenard
27 Vacationing on the Baltic Sea, 1928
28 Connecting to the cosmos
29 With Elsa and her daughter Margot, Berlin 1929
30 Margot and Ilse Einstein at the house in Caputh, 1929
31 In Caputh with his son Hans Albert and grandson Bernhard, 1932
32 At the Mt. Wilson Observatory near Caltech, discovering that the universe is expanding, January 1931
33 Sailing against the prevailing currents, Long Island Sound, 1936
34 Welcoming Hans Albert to America, 1937
35 Margot, Einstein, and Helen Dukas being sworn in as U.S. citizens, October 1940
36 Receiving a telescope in the backyard of 112 Mercer Street, underneath the picture window built for his study
37 With Kurt Gödel in Princeton, 1950
38 Princeton, 1953
* The official name of the institution was the Eidgenössische Polytechnische Schule. In 1911, it gained the right to grant doctoral degrees and changed its name to the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, or the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, referred to as the ETH. Einstein, then and later, usually called it the Züricher Polytechnikum, or the Zurich Polytechnic.
* The phrase “valiant Swabian,” used often by Einstein to refer to himself, comes from the poem “Swabian Tale” by Ludwig Uhland.
* The letters were discovered by John Stachel of the Einstein Papers Project among a cache of four hundred family letters that were stored in a California safe deposit box by the second wife of Einstein’s son Hans Albert Einstein, whose first wife had brought them to California after she went to Zurich to clean out Mileva Mari’s apartment following her death in 1948.
* Once married, she usually used the name Mileva Einstein-Mari. After they were divorced, she eventually resumed using Mileva Mari. To avoid confusion, I refer to her as Mari throughout.
* A person “at rest” on the equator is actually spinning with the earth’s rotation at 1,040 miles per hour and orbiting with the earth around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour. When I refer to these observers being at a constant velocity, I am ignoring the change in velocity that arises from being on a rotating and orbiting planet, which would not affect most common experiments. (See Miller 1999, 25.)
* More precisely, 186,282.4 miles per second or 299,792,458 meters per second, in a vacuum. Unless otherwise specified, the “speed of light” is for light in a vacuum and refers to all electromagnetic waves, visible or not. This is also, as Maxwell discovered, the speed of electricity through a wire.
* If the source of sound is rushing toward you, the waves will not get to you any faster. However, in what is known as the Doppler effect, the waves will be compressed and the interval between them will be smaller. The decreased wavelength means a higher frequency, which results in a higher-pitched sound (or a lower one, when the siren passes by and starts moving away). A similar effect happens with light. If the source is moving toward you, the wavelength decreases (and frequency increases) so it is shifted to the blue end of the spectrum. Light from a source moving away will be red-shifted.
* Later, upon his father’s death, he became Max von Laue.
* The German phrase he used was “der glücklichste Gedanke,” which has usually been translated as “happiest” thought, but perhaps in this context is more properly translated as “luckiest” or “most fortunate.”
* Added to her 1903 physics prize, she thus became the first person to win Nobels in two different fields. The only other person to do so was Linus Pauling, who won for chemistry in 1954, and then won the 1962 Nobel Peace Prize for his fight against nuclear weapons testing.
* She was born Elsa Einstein, became Elsa Löwenthal during her brief marriage to a Berlin merchant, and was referred to as Elsa Einstein by Albert Einstein even before they married. For clarity, I refer to her as Elsa throughout.
* Although the school had been renamed, Einstein continued to call it the Polytechnic (“Polytechnikum”) and, for clarity, I will continue to use this name.
* See chapter 7. For purposes of this discussion, we are referring to a uniformly and rectilinearly accelerated reference frame and a static and homogeneous gravitational field.
* I am using the numbers in Einstein’s original calculations. Subsequent data caused it to be revised to about 0.85 second of arc. Also, as we shall see, he later revised his theory to predict twice the bending. An arc-second, or second of arc, is an angle of 1?3,600 of a degree.
* Here’s how it works. If you are at some point in curved space and want to know the distance to a neighboring point—infinitesimally close—then things can be complicated if you have just the Pythagorean theorem and some general geometry to use. The distance to a nearby point to the north may need to be computed differently from the distance to one to the east or to one in the up direction. You need something comparable to a little scorecard at each point of space to tell you the distance to each of these points. In four-dimensional spacetime your scorecard will require ten numbers for you to be able to deal with all the questions pertaining to spacetime distances to nearby points. You need such a scorecard for every point in the spacetime. But once you have those scorecards, you can figure out the distance along any curve: just add up the distances along each infinitesimal bit using the scorecards as you pass them. These scorecards form the metric tensor, which is a field in spacetime. In other words, it is something defined at every point, but that can have differing values at every point. I am grateful to Professor John D. Norton for helping with this section.
* For clarity, I refer to the boy by both of his given names, Hans Albert, although his father invariably referred to him simply as Albert. At one point, Einstein wrote a letter to his son and signed it “Albert” instead of “Papa.” In his next letter, he awkwardly began, “The explanation for the curious signature on my last letter is that, in my absentmindedness, instead of signing my own name, I frequently sign for the person to whom the letter is addressed” (Einstein to Hans Albert Einstein, March 11 and 16, 1916).
* Einstein’s salary after tax was 13,000 marks. Inflation was beginning to set in, and the value of the German mark had fallen from 24 cents in 1914 to 19 cents in January 1918. One mark at the time would buy two dozen eggs or four loaves of bread. (A year later, the mark would be worth only 12 cents, and when hyperinflation began to rage in January 1920 only 2 cents.) Mari’s stipend of 6,000 marks in January 1918 was thus worth about $1,140, or just under $15,000 in inflation-adjusted 2006 dollars. His proposal was to increase this by 50 percent.
* Chapter 14 describes Einstein’s revision of this view in a 1920 lecture in Leiden.
* See chapter 14 for Einstein’s decision to renounce the term when he discovered the universe was expandi
ng.
† Described in chapter 14.
* The word Einstein used was Stammesgenossen. Although Stamm generally means tribe, that translation can have some racial overtones. Some Einstein scholars have said that translations such as “kindred” or “clan” or “lineage” might be clearer.
* I have used the translation preferred by Abraham Pais. Einstein’s words in German were, “Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber boshaft ist er nicht.”
* Governor Channing Cox had been thrust a version of the test earlier that week, and his first three responses were: Where does shellac come from? “From a can.” What is a monsoon? “A funny-sounding word.” Where do we get prunes? “Breakfast.”
* Robert Andrews Millikan would win the Nobel Prize the following year, 1923, for experimental work on the photoelectric effect he had done at the University of Chicago. By then he had become director of the physics lab at the California Institute of Technology, and in the early 1930s he would bring Einstein there as a visiting scientist.
* See page 119 for Newton’s thought experiment about whether water rotating in a bucket in empty space would be subject to inertial pressure and thus press against the sides of the bucket. See page 251 for Einstein’s 1916 view, which he was now revising, that an empty universe would have no inertia or fabric of spacetime.
Walter Isaacson Great Innovators e-book boxed set: Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Einstein Page 224
