Einstein in Time and Space
A Life in 99 Particles
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Walter Isaacson’s Einstein meets Craig Brown’s 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, in this engaging and innovative biography of the famous physicist told in ninety-nine dazzling vignettes.
Most of us would agree that Albert Einstein’s name is synonymous with “genius” and that his likeness is often used as a shorthand for all scientists, appearing everywhere from cartoons to textbooks. He has become more myth than man. That being the case, how best to capture his essence?
In Einstein in Time and Space, talented young science journalist Samuel Graydon answers that question with an illuminating mosaic—99 intriguingly different particles that cumulatively reveal Einstein’s contradictory and multitudinous nature. Glimpsed among these shards: a slacker who failed every subject but math, a job seeker who couldn’t get hired, a lothario who courted many women, and a charmer who was the life of the party. As brilliant as he was inconsistent, Einstein was simultaneously an avid supporter of the NAACP and the fight for civil rights and someone capable of great prejudice. He was loved by many, known by few, and inspirational to a generation of young physicists. Graydon reveals every corner of Einstein’s world: the false reporting that rocketed Einstein to fame nearly overnight, his effect on people he met merely in passing, even the remarkable posthumous journey of the famed physicist’s brain.
An entertaining and unique story of a man who redefined how we view our universe and our place within it, “this mosaic biography [is crafted with] illuminating skill, style, candor and charm.”—Times Literary Supplement).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Graydon, the science editor at the Times Literary Supplement, debuts with an insightful compendium of "short chapters of varying styles that deal with a particular moment or aspect of Einstein's life." The vignettes explore the Nobel Prize winner's career, discussing how a 1905 conversation with engineer and friend Michele Angelo Besso helped Einstein crack his theory of relativity and how the physicist's unsuccessful attempts to develop a "theory of everything" toward the end of his life alienated him from skeptical colleagues. Other entries focus on Einstein's personal life, discussing his distaste for alcohol, the mystery of what happened to his daughter Lieserl (Graydon suggests she may have died from scarlet fever when she was 19 months old, or else was given up for adoption, since Einstein had not yet married her mother), and the affairs Einstein pursued during both of his marriages. Some selections are substantial and cover Einstein's theories and his response to the Nazi takeover of his native Germany, while others are more pithy—"particle" 14 consists of a single paragraph on the health examination that found Einstein "unfit to serve" in Switzerland's army after he became a citizen in 1901. It adds up to a competent whistle-stop tour of Einstein's life.
