Einstein A to Z Book

Readable, informative, and handy

This is a good introduction to the life of Albert Einstein, beloved physicist and Time magazine Man of the 20th Century.

Biographies about Albert Einstein can be divided into two categories: those written before 1987 when his papers and voluminous correspondence were made public, and after when the peccadillos of his life became more widely known. Authors Karen C. Fox and Aries Keck treat us to more than a few of those peccadillos, including his offer to marry either his cousin Elsa Lowenthal or her daughter Ilse, remarking that he was in love with both women, but wanted to have a child with Ilse!

Einstein biographies can also be categorized according to what the biographer chooses to emphasize, Einstein's private life or his scientific accomplishments, or both. In this book you can choose by letter which part of Einstein's life you want to read about. The alphabetical entries begin with "Absentmindedness" and end with "Zionism." In between are such entries as "Cosmological Constant," "Einstein, Mileva Maric" (Einstein's first wife), "Jokes about Einstein," the "Michelson-Morley Experiment," "Princeton," "Twin Paradox," etc.. In all there are 114 entries, a Timeline, an Introduction, a Selected Bibliography, and an Index. The entries are like little self-contained essays. They are well-written, informative and without any kind of bias while revealing that Einstein is definitely a man worth writing about.

Here's an Einstein joke. Einstein's driver used to sit in the back of the lecture hall while Einstein lectured. He sat there so many times that he said he could probably give the lecture himself. One day Einstein took him up on the idea, and the driver gave a flawless lecture with Einstein watching from the back of the room. At the end there was a question, and the lecturer said that "...the answer to that question is so simple, I bet that even my driver, sitting up at the back could answer it." (p. 148)

Sometimes I like to compare Einstein to other great scientists much as some people compare baseball players. What are the greatest baseball players of all time? I won't hazard an opinion, but my three greatest scientists are Einstein, Newton and Darwin in no particular order. Certainly Einstein is the most celebrated. Reading this "biography" makes that clear.

I was struck with just how human the authors make Einstein appear with his very human failings as a father and a husband along with his nearly superhuman accomplishments as a physicist. I was especially struck with Einstein's stubborn streak. Even at the time of his death in 1955 he still did not fully accept quantum mechanics, being especially disenchanted with the notion of "entanglement," which he called "spooky action at a distance." This is somewhat ironic since Einstein, along with his good friend Niels Bohr (with whom he had many spirited, even heated, discussions), Max Born, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, and others were the architects of QM.

What makes this book so agreeable is how handy it is for dipping into and finding something out about Einstein and his work, and how gracefully and informatively it is written.

One last point. Fox and Keck do mention Einstein's famous disdain for socks. They speculate that he didn't like to wear them not merely because he didn't care about his appearance, "but possibly because they were physically uncomfortable." (p. 59) Maybe, but since I gotten older and have had time to think long and hard on this most interesting subject, I can report that the real reason that Einstein didn't like to wear socks is he didn't like to bend over and pull them on or push them off. If you've even tried to put on a tight pair of socks, you know what I mean.

Bottom line: fun to read, nontechnical with just enough science for the layperson to appreciate.

--Dennis Littrell, author of "The World Is Not as We Think It Is"