First published in 1972, Ronald W. Clark's definitive biography of Einstein, the Promethean figure of our age, goes behind the phenomenal intellect to reveal the human side of the legendary absent-minded professor who confidently claimed that space and time were not what they seemed. Here is the classic portrait of the scientist and the man: the boy growing up in the Swiss Alps, the young man caught in an unhappy first marriage, the passionate pacifist who agonized over making The Bomb, the indifferent Zionist asked ...
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First published in 1972, Ronald W. Clark's definitive biography of Einstein, the Promethean figure of our age, goes behind the phenomenal intellect to reveal the human side of the legendary absent-minded professor who confidently claimed that space and time were not what they seemed. Here is the classic portrait of the scientist and the man: the boy growing up in the Swiss Alps, the young man caught in an unhappy first marriage, the passionate pacifist who agonized over making The Bomb, the indifferent Zionist asked to head the Israeli state, the physicist who believed in God.
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I read this book in 1978 while finishing a graduate degree in chemistry. It is a well written book and very readable. The duality of Einstein's nature was the irony of his life: born in Germany, rejected his citizenship twice; a pacifist who argued for the atomic bomb; a non practicing Jew who became a Zionist; contributed to quantum theory but rejected quantum mechanics. Having read this book multiple times it is interesting what might have happened if Einstein had not come to the US. Would we have lost him in the camps? Einstein also had a sense of humor and when Walter Matthau portrayed him in the Movie IQ it was outstanding. Clark does a masterful job of also cultivating the relationships between Einstein and his fellow scientists. They did not always agree.
