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Science » Lives of Scientists » Albert Einstein

The best books on albert einstein, recommended by andrew robinson.

Einstein: A Hundred Years of Relativity by Andrew Robinson

Andrew Robinson , author of a biography of Albert Einstein, picks and talks through the five best Albert Einstein books and discusses the life and times of the 'unique genius.'

Interview by Jo Marchant

Albert Einstein: A Biography by Albrecht Folsing

Einstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness by John S. Rigden

The Born-Einstein Letters,1916-1955 by Albert Einstein and Max Born

The Einstein File by Fred Jerome

Einstein on Politics by David Rowe and Robert Schulmann

1 Albert Einstein: A Biography by Albrecht Folsing

2 einstein 1905: the standard of greatness by john s. rigden, 3 the born-einstein letters,1916-1955 by albert einstein and max born, 4 the einstein file by fred jerome, 5 einstein on politics by david rowe and robert schulmann.

B efore we start talking generally about Albert Einstein books , can you give us a brief outline of the significance of Einstein and his work? You’re the author of a biography of Albert Einstein called Einstein: A Hundred Years of Relativity that was republished this year to coincide with the centenary of the theory of general relativity. 

There must be literally hundreds of Albert Einstein books. Was it daunting for you to tackle someone of so much significance and interest?

And out of those 1700 Albert Einstein books, we’ve asked you to pick just five! Your first choice is Albert Einstein: A Biography by Albrecht Fölsing published in 1997. What makes this biography so good?

It’s comprehensive, for a start. It is a very big book — one of the biggest on Einstein’s life. Fölsing is a physicist by training so he is able to bring clear explanations of the physics into the life. He’s extremely good at quoting Einstein’s writings and comments in an illuminating way. What makes the book unique is that the author is German, when most biographers come from the English-speaking world. He is able to present Einstein’s ambivalence towards Germany both in physics and in politics and bring that to life in quite a subtle way. To have a German writing on Einstein is particularly interesting.

Just to illuminate that, could you briefly sketch the arc of Einstein’s life for us?

He was born in Germany in 1879 and grew up there until he was 16 when he went to join his parents in Italy. He was unhappy with the German educational system: He was not a very willing student in an authoritarian education system. In fact, his whole life was a battle against authority in different forms. Later in life he said—and it’s one of my favourite quotes from him —“To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate has made me an authority myself.” Finally, he was educated in Switzerland and that’s where he really belongs. He kept Swiss nationality throughout his life, until he went to the United States and became an American citizen when he was quite old, in 1940. So, he is not German by nationality, though he was born there.

“He was not very successful in his relationships with his university lecturers.”

The Swiss atmosphere was very productive for his physics, which started in about 1905 with special relativity and some other key work. He stayed in Germany until 1933, when the Nazis came to power, and he had to get out. He spent a little time in Europe, including in Britain in the early 1930s. Finally, he left Europe forever—never to return—in 1933. He lived in Princeton, New Jersey, at the Institute for Advanced Study, a sort of ivory tower. That suited him very well. He could just think and didn’t have to do any teaching. He lived in Princeton right up to his death in 1955. In that period he wasn’t so successful as a physicist — but became much more involved in political causes like the atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb, pacifism, and Zionism. As a Jew, he was very interested in the founding of Israel and took an active role in that.

One of the most intriguing things about his life story is the fact that when he did his first really significant revolutionary work in physics, he wasn’t working as a physicist was he? He was working in a patent office and didn’t really have contact with other top physicists at the time.

That’s right. That’s always going to be one of the most intriguing aspects of Einstein and his life. He was a patent clerk in Bern and worked in the patent office for a number of years from 1902. After 1909/1910, he finally takes a position as a professional, academic physicist and moves to various institutions around Europe. Probably his most productive years are those years when he was a patent clerk. Having said that, he came up with general relativity when he was a professor of physics in Berlin. Also, at the patent office, although he was not known in the academic world, he had some contact with academic physicists like Max Planck who was a key supporter of relativity. But we should remember that he was always involved with those two worlds.

Are there any clues as to where his revelations came from? Did his unconventional background play a part in that?

Yes. It’s difficult to pin that down but from an early age—from his teens onwards—he was a great believer in self-education. Like many geniuses, he was not particularly successful in his university training. He attended a famous institution—in Zurich—but was always rebelling against his academic education, constantly reading the latest research on his own. He was not working with other people at all. He was not very successful in his relationships with his university lecturers. He was a rebel and, because he was so passionate about physics, his best ideas really came from his own reading and thinking. From his earliest days as a teenager he was a believer in what he called ‘thought experiments.’ He wasn’t involved with laboratories at all, these experiments were all in his head. One of the most famous ones concerns chasing a light ray. When he was 16 or 17, he imagined whether you could catch up with a light ray and what that would mean.

Did that help him to see things that other physicists didn’t, because he was free to think in his own way?

Let’s dig a little bit more into the science with your next choice which is Einstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness by John Rigden from 2005. This Albert Einstein book is about the so-called ‘miraculous’ year. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Einstein published five papers that year. All of them are considered of great value. The paper that Einstein regarded as the most revolutionary of his work in 1905 was actually about quantum theory. There was another paper about Brownian motion. He showed that the phenomenon of Brownian motion—which had been known for almost 100 years—was actually due to atoms bombarding particles. This was considered proof of the atomic theory of matter by his fellow physicists — the first time that atoms had really been proved to exist. Then, the last of the five papers concerned probably the most famous equation in science: E=mc2. This came out of his first paper on relativity and was published at the end of 1905. As everyone knows, E=mc2 is the basis for what happens with nuclear energy and the atomic bomb later in the century.

This is the principle that energy and mass are two aspects of the same thing. So, if you split apart mass, you’re going to release huge amounts of energy which is what drives nuclear energy and the atomic bomb.

Yes, and c is the speed of light. So, with E=mc2, you can immediately see that the amount of energy is enormous from a small amount of matter because c is such a large number. So, E=mc2 implies a very large amount of energy from a small amount of matter through the process of atomic fission and fusion which Einstein didn’t know about in 1905. Fission was not discovered until later — just before the Second World War , in fact.

Let’s talk about the theory of special relativity, then, which was one of the papers in this miraculous year. Can you talk us through that theory?

It’s a response to Newton’s idea of absolute time and absolute space which Einstein rejected after thinking about it deeply. John Rigden puts it quite well in his book. He says, “A world with absolute space existing apart from absolute time would turn into a world where space and time are joined”. This theory of relativity led to the concept of space-time which is a key thought in general relativity. It’s not easy to explain relativity in a few words, but it rejects absolute time and space, leading to the idea that all motion had to be defined relative to a coordinate system — and that different coordinate systems had to be compared. General relativity was much more comprehensive, it included gravitation and acceleration. In fact, Einstein’s great idea about general relativity was that gravitation and acceleration were equivalent and that we must build our idea of the universe on that thought, rather than regarding them as independent, as Newton did.

General relativity is what we often see illustrated with a rubber sheet with marbles on it distorting the sheet. Is that right?

Yes, the curvature of the rubber sheet is a way of expressing—not literally, it’s a symbol—the curvature of space-time. The experimental proof of general relativity came only later. Probably the most famous aspect of the experimental proof is the bending of a light-ray by the gravitational field of the sun. The light emitted by distant stars was observed to be bent by the gravitational field of the sun in 1919 during an astronomical expedition led by Sir Arthur Eddington, a British astronomer. After that expedition, physicists started to take general relativity much more seriously. There were other experimental proofs as well, but that was the beginning of the idea that general relativity was correct. Before that, it was unproven and Einstein asked astronomers to go looking for it. That’s what happened in 1919. Astronomers were able to back up his theory with observations.

So, after we had the proof of general relativity, how was science different? How did the universe look different? What are the implications of that for the way we see the world now?

The whole idea of the Big Bang has been explained, to a great extent, in terms of general relativity. This came much later than Einstein of course — he was dead by then. General relativity also explains the existence of black holes. Einstein didn’t think they existed, but, since the 1960s, experimental proofs have been found that they do. The whole structure of space and time which Newton imagined, an absolute coordinate system, has been abandoned in favour of a curved space-time formulation. That’s really the result of Einstein’s work.

Going back to the miraculous year of 1905, which is the focus of Rigden’s book. His achievements in so many papers in such a short period of time seems almost superhuman. But he was just human, right? Do we risk exaggerating his genius sometimes?

He was certainly very human and had many failings as well as an extraordinary scientific imagination. Scholars have looked closely at what Einstein was doing in the years up to 1905, there’s not enough evidence to be sure. There were a few letters to his wife, and he published a little bit. There is this feeling that it came out of the blue. It obviously didn’t. No genius works from a sudden eureka moment and it’s not like that, even with Einstein. The problem is that we don’t really know exactly what he was reading and how his thought process worked. What we do know is what he published in 1905 and that he was fascinated by contradictions in physics. He imagined chasing a light-ray in his mind and asked what a light-ray would look like if you caught up with it and came to the conclusion that it’s an impossible physical situation. That, according to Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetism, there was no such thing as catching a light-ray. From that, he concluded that light always moves at a constant speed — independent of the coordinate system you were using to measure it with. It didn’t matter how fast an observer moved, light would always move at a constant speed faster than the observer.

“Einstein’s great idea about general relativity was that gravitation and acceleration were equivalent and that we must build our idea of the universe on that thought.”

Another contradiction that fascinated him was to do with magnetism and electric charge. He imagined that if you had a stationary charge observed by a stationary observer, there would be no magnetic field which could be observed with a compass. But, if you kept the stationary charge and then the observer started to move, by Maxwell’s definition of electromagnetism, he/she would observe a magnetic field with a compass. So which was true? Was there a magnetic field or wasn’t there? He said that’s a contradiction, we have to resolve it. And he did resolve it, with his theory of relativity.

There’s often a temptation to move away from contradiction but it sounds like he just confronted it head-on.

Let’s talk about your next choice of Albert Einstein books which is the Born-Einstein Letters, 1916-1955 , which was republished in 2005. This is a collection of correspondence between Einstein and his friend, the German physicist, Max Born. What do they talk about in the letters?

It was a long friendship. It began with physics but developed into a relationship with many other overtones to do with politics, ethics, and the state of Germany during those years. Both of them won Nobel Prizes, so when we read them we’re exposed to a couple of very intelligent people writing about science. Throughout the letters, you get these human asides: It’s a very unique mixture of science and humanities. They disagreed frequently and they disagreed most famously about quantum theory. In one letter from Einstein to Born he says, ‘The old one does not play dice. I can’t accept the possibility of chance ruling the universe.’ And Born never agreed with that. Right to the end of the correspondence, they’re arguing about the role of probability in physics.

They’re also talking about the First World War and how they react to that and about Jewishness. They’re both Jewish but they have different attitudes to Jewishness. And they’re talking about the Nazi period, of course. During that time, Born escaped from Germany and went to Edinburgh and became a professor. Einstein had gone to the United States — so they didn’t meet. After 1933, they corresponded but they didn’t have any personal contact — which is good, as it means that their ideas are on paper rather than just spoken to each other. We learn a lot. Born edits the letters and has a lot of commentary where he responds after Einstein’s death. Einstein’s step-daughter wrote to him about his last few days in hospital and she said, ‘He left this world without sentimentality or regret.’ Born says, ‘we lost our dearest friend when he died.’ But ‘without sentimentality or regret’ is the keynote of the letters. Einstein can be quite inhuman. He doesn’t have normal human reactions to some things including, for instance, the death of his second wife. His family life was not particularly happy. He divorced his first wife and had a rather difficult relationship with his children. This comes into the book quite a lot because Born is a warmer personality than Einstein. The contrast is interesting.

You say he didn’t have normal human reactions to things. What kind of personality does come across then?

Let’s move on to your next choice of Albert Einstein book: The Einstein File by Fred Jerome, published in 2002. This is a book on an investigation of how the FBI, led by J. Edgar Hoover, spied on Einstein for 23 years. What happened exactly?

It started in the 1930s when Einstein moved to the United States. He had extremely mixed feelings about Russia and about communism . He had some sympathies for socialism but he wasn’t a communist. But the FBI and many right-wing Americans thought that he was. So, even after he became an American citizen in 1940, he was regarded with suspicion by them. He wrote a letter to President Roosevelt in 1939 advocating the building of an atomic bomb, along with some other physicists, which was taken seriously by the American government and Roosevelt. Eventually, the Manhattan Project got going, partly out of Einstein’s interest in the subject. Obviously other factors were involved as well, Einstein was not the only influence, but he was quite important. But even though he was involved in supporting this project, he was not allowed to have access to any secret documents. The army, who ran the Manhattan Project, did not give him security clearance. But it seems the FBI didn’t know that and when they started compiling their file in the 1940s, they assumed that Einstein could be a spy with access to secret information about the atomic bomb project and they acted accordingly.

“Long before many people had realised what a risk to world peace Nazi Germany posed, Einstein recognised it.”

J. Edgar Hoover was convinced he was a security risk and might be leaking information to the Russians. When the Klaus Fuchs spy case happened—around 1950—Hoover became even more convinced that Einstein was a risk. But what finally tipped the balance for Hoover was that Einstein gave a broadcast on television in 1950 where he openly told the whole of the United States that the hydrogen bomb, which President Truman had just announced as a project, could cause a poisoning of the atmosphere and would be a total disaster, that it shouldn’t be followed up. Hoover then became passionately convinced that Einstein’s every move should be tracked and that all political associations that he had should be put into this file. He was hoping to prove that Einstein was a communist and that he might be deported from the United States. That was a serious project of the FBI and the immigration service for five years between 1950 and his death in 1955.

And this didn’t come out until reasonably recently then, with freedom of information requests?

It didn’t come out until the 1990s. It’s quite disturbing, really, to think the FBI could have kept the secret for so long. In fact, some FBI agents—even though they were in the employment of the agency—were not aware about this secret file. Hoover knew that if it got out it would cause tremendous embarrassment to the United States government — this world famous scientist being pursued as a potential spy. He managed to keep the secret but how it was kept in the decades after the 1950s and 1960s is extraordinary and quite alarming, I think.

Was this campaign a complete failure? Or is there evidence that it was able to damage Einstein’s reputation or legacy in any way?

Ironically, I think it probably persuaded Einstein—because he was aware he was under surveillance, he didn’t know the details but he knew he was being watched—to come out and make a very public statement in the press in 1953 in support of intellectuals who were standing up against Joseph McCarthy’s campaign. McCarthy reacted very strongly to this and said Einstein was an ‘enemy of America.’ He later changed that to ‘a disloyal American,’ but he never went back on that statement. Einstein thought he might have to go to jail because he was recommending to people that they should not testify to congressional committees about their political views. He said that courage was needed by American intellectuals otherwise they would become slaves. That is what he felt the American government was trying to do during the Red Scare of the 1950s.

It was a very courageous thing to come out and say in that climate.

It was. It is quite moving to read his own private views and worries but he was quite old by then. He was prepared to stand up because he felt the situation had become so like Nazi Germany in the 1930s. He really felt that having lived through the rise of Nazi Germany, he had a duty to warn Americans that the same thing might happen with McCarthyism. I think you can say he was a real factor in the fall of McCarthy. Only one factor, but he was important. After the fall of McCarthy, Hoover realized there was no point in pursuing Einstein anymore. The whole file was wound down by the FBI just before Einstein’s death — but it does run to 1800 pages. One irony is that much of the file consists of associations to which Einstein had lent his name but very little of it consists of his views.

Let’s move on to Einstein’s political writings, that Hoover failed to read, in Einstein on Politics edited by David Rowe and Robert Schulmann from 2007. What picture do we get from this Albert Einstein book, then, of his political views?

This is the first book which really collects everything together which is why it’s valuable. There were a couple of books before that but this is the first collection in which everything is there that matters: letters, public statements, all of course in English (many of them were originally in German.) The general attitude has always been that Einstein was politically naïve. I don’t think that’s true. When you see what he did and what he stood for, you can’t call him naïve. He was a committed pacifist until 1933 and made a number of provocative speeches about pacifism. After he recognised what the Nazis stood for, he immediately changed his mind and said that there was no possibility of resisting Nazism without military force. He was prescient. Long before many people had realised what a risk to world peace Nazi Germany posed, Einstein recognised it and argued that the countries of the West would have to arm themselves and fight, eventually.

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He was not naïve about Israel . He supported the founding of Israel but persistently said to Israelis that they would have to find an ethical solution to their relationship with the Arabs. Otherwise, the whole state would fail and they had a duty to do so. He never changed his mind and when he was invited to be President of Israel in 1952—not long before his death—he refused saying ‘I have no talent for politics and I would have to say things to my fellow Jews in Israel that they would probably not want to hear about their relationship with the Arabs.’ Again, he was probably right. Whether he could have influenced events more than he did by becoming president, we’ll never know. But he was certainly regarded seriously by the Israelis as a thinker and as an activist. Then, on the matter on world-government, in 1945, it made sense. The United Nations had just started but they were already quarrelling in the Security Council. Einstein said the only way of controlling nationalism was by having a central, military authority. He tried to get both America and the Soviet Union and the British and some other nations involved in that, on the model of the Austro-Hungarian Empire which he had grown up under. He gave a speech at a Nobel Prize winning anniversary dinner in New York, saying, ‘The war is won but the peace is not.’ There was about two or three years of campaigning for world government with other physicists and thinkers. Of course it failed — but that was, I suppose, inevitable in the Cold War.

Is this book just of historical interest, to know what he thought, or do Einstein’s thoughts resonate for us today?

When you read his collected writings, you can’t help but see that there was a connection between his personal integrity and his political views which we all struggle with: how we behave as individuals and how we behave as a collective. His honesty and his courage do make me think. And he wrote well. He had a pungent style, his writing is not woolly, and he had a sense of history too. He also had a wonderful sense of humour. That comes through in virtually everything he writes about politics and human behaviour. Sometimes he was pretty caustic but he was often just gently ironic. I’m sure you’ve seen a photograph at the end of his life of him sticking his tongue out at the photographers. I think impudence and defiance of authority are the defining features of his political statements. I find that, on the whole, admirable.

That is something that seems to run through his scientific thinking and his political views.

He was a rebel, against orthodoxy of all kinds. We haven’t touched on his last 30 years as a physicist which are a bit notorious. He was trying to unify electromagnetism and gravitation — in other words, to extend general relativity to an even more universal understanding of the universe. He didn’t succeed, but in my book I’ve got a piece contributed by Steven Weinberg, the particle physicist, who says that even though Einstein failed we have to admire his determination to carry on and not accept quantum theory as the final theory. He said, ‘I can’t accept that as the final theory of physics, there must be something beyond it.’ He again showed his defiance of orthodoxy because almost every physicist thought he had lost his way. And some of them said so — Bohr, in particular. Niels Bohr came to Princeton in 1939 and Einstein had plenty of opportunity to meet him and talk to his old friend. But he didn’t want to because they disagreed so radically about physics. They spent quite a lot of time ignoring each other. Bohr was very upset about it but Einstein was determined not to reopen this old debate so kept his distance.

How should we remember Einstein?

As a unique genius. I’ve written two books on genius and I can’t think of anybody else who managed to combine science and decent human behaviour in the way that he did. And also as a humorous man. I really admire his jokes…

November 20, 2015

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Andrew Robinson

Andrew Robinson is a London-based writer and author of some twenty-five books on science; history of science; archaeology and scripts; and Indian history and culture. His recent books include a biography of Jean-François Champollion, Cracking the Egyptian Code and India: A Short History . He is author of Einstein: A Hundred Years of Relativity , republished in 2015 to celebrate the centenary of Einstein’s general theory of relativity and described by astronomer Patrick Moore as “by far the best book about Einstein that I have ever come across”.

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Albert Einstein

By: History.com Editors

Updated: May 16, 2019 | Original: October 27, 2009

The German-born physicist Albert Einstein developed the first of his groundbreaking theories while working as a clerk in the Swiss patent office in Bern. After making his name with four scientific articles published in 1905, he went on to win worldwide fame for his general theory of relativity and a Nobel Prize in 1921 for his explanation of the phenomenon known as the photoelectric effect. An outspoken pacifist who was publicly identified with the Zionist movement, Einstein emigrated from Germany to the United States when the Nazis took power before World War II. He lived and worked in Princeton, New Jersey, for the remainder of his life.

Einstein’s Early Life (1879-1904)

Born on March 14, 1879, in the southern German city of Ulm, Albert Einstein grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in Munich. As a child, Einstein became fascinated by music (he played the violin), mathematics and science. He dropped out of school in 1894 and moved to Switzerland, where he resumed his schooling and later gained admission to the Swiss Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich. In 1896, he renounced his German citizenship, and remained officially stateless before becoming a Swiss citizen in 1901.

Did you know? Almost immediately after Albert Einstein learned of the atomic bomb's use in Japan, he became an advocate for nuclear disarmament. He formed the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists and backed Manhattan Project scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer in his opposition to the hydrogen bomb.

While at Zurich Polytechnic, Einstein fell in love with his fellow student Mileva Maric, but his parents opposed the match and he lacked the money to marry. The couple had an illegitimate daughter, Lieserl, born in early 1902, of whom little is known. After finding a position as a clerk at the Swiss patent office in Bern, Einstein married Maric in 1903; they would have two more children, Hans Albert (born 1904) and Eduard (born 1910).

Einstein’s Miracle Year (1905)

While working at the patent office, Einstein did some of the most creative work of his life, producing no fewer than four groundbreaking articles in 1905 alone. In the first paper, he applied the quantum theory (developed by German physicist Max Planck) to light in order to explain the phenomenon known as the photoelectric effect, by which a material will emit electrically charged particles when hit by light. The second article contained Einstein’s experimental proof of the existence of atoms, which he got by analyzing the phenomenon of Brownian motion, in which tiny particles were suspended in water.

In the third and most famous article, titled “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” Einstein confronted the apparent contradiction between two principal theories of physics: Isaac Newton’s concepts of absolute space and time and James Clerk Maxwell’s idea that the speed of light was a constant. To do this, Einstein introduced his special theory of relativity, which held that the laws of physics are the same even for objects moving in different inertial frames (i.e. at constant speeds relative to each other), and that the speed of light is a constant in all inertial frames. A fourth paper concerned the fundamental relationship between mass and energy, concepts viewed previously as completely separate. Einstein’s famous equation E = mc2 (where “c” was the constant speed of light) expressed this relationship.

From Zurich to Berlin (1906-1932)

Einstein continued working at the patent office until 1909, when he finally found a full-time academic post at the University of Zurich. In 1913, he arrived at the University of Berlin, where he was made director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. The move coincided with the beginning of Einstein’s romantic relationship with a cousin of his, Elsa Lowenthal, whom he would eventually marry after divorcing Mileva. In 1915, Einstein published the general theory of relativity, which he considered his masterwork. This theory found that gravity, as well as motion, can affect time and space. According to Einstein’s equivalence principle–which held that gravity’s pull in one direction is equivalent to an acceleration of speed in the opposite direction–if light is bent by acceleration, it must also be bent by gravity. In 1919, two expeditions sent to perform experiments during a solar eclipse found that light rays from distant stars were deflected or bent by the gravity of the sun in just the way Einstein had predicted.

The general theory of relativity was the first major theory of gravity since Newton’s, more than 250 years before, and the results made a tremendous splash worldwide, with the London Times proclaiming a “Revolution in Science” and a “New Theory of the Universe.” Einstein began touring the world, speaking in front of crowds of thousands in the United States, Britain, France and Japan. In 1921, he won the Nobel Prize for his work on the photoelectric effect, as his work on relativity remained controversial at the time. Einstein soon began building on his theories to form a new science of cosmology, which held that the universe was dynamic instead of static, and was capable of expanding and contracting.

Einstein Moves to the United States (1933-39)

A longtime pacifist and a Jew, Einstein became the target of hostility in Weimar Germany, where many citizens were suffering plummeting economic fortunes in the aftermath of defeat in the Great War. In December 1932, a month before Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Einstein made the decision to emigrate to the United States, where he took a position at the newly founded Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey . He would never again enter the country of his birth.

By the time Einstein’s wife Elsa died in 1936, he had been involved for more than a decade with his efforts to find a unified field theory, which would incorporate all the laws of the universe, and those of physics, into a single framework. In the process, Einstein became increasingly isolated from many of his colleagues, who were focused mainly on the quantum theory and its implications, rather than on relativity.

Einstein’s Later Life (1939-1955)

In the late 1930s, Einstein’s theories, including his equation E=mc2, helped form the basis of the development of the atomic bomb. In 1939, at the urging of the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, Einstein wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt advising him to approve funding for the development of uranium before Germany could gain the upper hand. Einstein, who became a U.S. citizen in 1940 but retained his Swiss citizenship, was never asked to participate in the resulting Manhattan Project , as the U.S. government suspected his socialist and pacifist views. In 1952, Einstein declined an offer extended by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s premier, to become president of Israel .

Throughout the last years of his life, Einstein continued his quest for a unified field theory. Though he published an article on the theory in Scientific American in 1950, it remained unfinished when he died, of an aortic aneurysm, five years later. In the decades following his death, Einstein’s reputation and stature in the world of physics only grew, as physicists began to unravel the mystery of the so-called “strong force” (the missing piece of his unified field theory) and space satellites further verified the principles of his cosmology.

HISTORY Vault: Secrets of Einstein's Brain

Originally stolen by the doctor trusted to perform his autopsy, scientists over the decades have examined the brain of Albert Einstein to try and determine what made this seemingly normal man tick.

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His Life and Universe

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Table of Contents

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About The Book

About the author.

Walter Isaacson is the bestselling author of biographies of Jennifer Doudna, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein. He is a professor of history at Tulane and was CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair of CNN, and editor of  Time . He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2023. Visit him at Isaacson.Tulane.edu.

Product Details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (May 13, 2008)
• Length: 704 pages
• ISBN13: 9780743264747

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• History > Modern > 20th Century
• Science > Relativity
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Raves and Reviews

"Walter Isaacson has captured the complete Einstein. With an effortless style that belies a sharp attention to detail and scientific accuracy, Isaacson takes us on a soaring journey through the life, mind, and science of the man who changed our view of the universe." -- Brian Greene, Professor of Physics at Columbia and author of The Fabric of the Cosmos

"This book does an amazing job getting the science right and the man revealed." -- Sylvester James Gates, Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland

"This book will be widely and deservedly admired. It is excellently readable and combines the personal and the scientific aspects of Einstein's life in a graceful way." -- Gerald Holton, Professor of Physics at Harvard and author of Einstein, History, and Other Passions

"Once again Walter Isaacson has produced a most valuable biography of a great man about whom much has already been written. It helps that he has had access to important new material. He met the challenge of dealing with his subject as a human being and describing profound ideas in physics. His biography is a pleasure to read and makes the great physicist come alive." -- Murray Gell-Mann, winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics and author of The Quark and the Jaguar

"With unmatched narrative skill, Isaacson has managed the extraordinary feat of preserving Einstein's monumental stature while at the same time bringing him to such vivid life that we come to feel as if he could be walking in our midst. This is a terrific work." -- Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

"Isaacson's treatment of Einstein's scientific work is excellent: accurate, complete, and just the right level of detail for the general reader. Taking advantage of the wealth of recently uncovered historical material, he has produced the most readable biography of Einstein yet." -- A. Douglas Stone, Professor of Physics at Yale

"This is a brilliant intellectual tapestry -- and a great read. Skillfully weaving Einstein's revolutionary scientific achievements, his prolific political initiatives, his complex personal life, and his fascinating personality, Isaacson has transformed the transformer of the twentieth century into a beacon for the twenty-first century." -- Martin J. Sherwin, coauthor of American Prometheus:The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer , winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for biography

"I found so much to admire; there are many places where I just had to cheer what Isaacson had written." -- Dudley Herschbach, Professor of Science at Harvard

"Isaacson has written a crisp, engaging, and refreshing biography, one that beautifully masters the historical literature and offers many new insights into Einstein's work and life." -- Diana Kormos Buchwald, General Editor of the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein

"Isaacson has admirably succeeded in weaving together the complex threads of Einstein's personal and scientific life to paint a superb portrait." -- Arthur I. Miller, author of Einstein, Picasso

“This is a biography that happens to be treatise on creativity. I was about to say scientific creativity, but I think I mean creativity itself. It shows us the creative exuberance of a man with an extraordinary visual imagination, able to recast certain problems in surprising ways.”

– Ian McEwan

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Albert Einstein : a biography

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Albert Einstein's first child, a girl named Leiserl, was born out of wedlock in 1902 and put up for adoption by her parents. To this day, historians do not know what became of her.

Albert Einstein Biography

Albert Einstein was born at Ulm, in Württemberg, Germany , on March 14, 1879. Six weeks later the family moved to Munich and he began his schooling there at the Luitpold Gymnasium. Later, they moved to Italy and Albert continued his education at Aarau, Switzerland and in 1896 he entered the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich to be trained as a teacher in physics and mathematics. In 1901, the year he gained his diploma, he acquired Swiss citizenship and, as he was unable to find a teaching post, he accepted a position as technical assistant in the Swiss Patent Office. In 1905 he obtained his doctor's degree. During his stay at the Patent Office, and in his spare time, Einstein produced much of his remarkable work and in 1908 he was appointed Privatdozent in Berne. In 1909 he became Professor Extraordinary at Zurich, in 1911 Professor of Theoretical Physics at Prague, returning to Zurich in the following year to fill a similar post. In 1914 he was appointed Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute and Professor in the University of Berlin. Einstein became a German citizen in 1914 and remained in Berlin until 1933 when he renounced his citizenship for political reasons and emigrated to America to take the position of Professor of Theoretical Physics at Princeton*. He became a United States citizen in 1940 and retired from his post in 1945. After World War II, Einstein was a leading figure in the World Government Movement , he was offered the Presidency of the State of Israel, which he declined, and he collaborated with Dr. Chaim Weizmann in establishing the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Einstein always appeared to have a clear view of the problems of physics and the determination to solve them. He had a strategy of his own and was able to visualize the main stages on the way to his goal. He regarded his major achievements as mere stepping-stones for the next advance. At the start of his scientific work, Einstein realized the inadequacies of Newtonian mechanics and his special theory of relativity stemmed from an attempt to reconcile the laws of mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. He dealt with classical problems of statistical mechanics and problems in which they were merged with quantum theory: this led to an explanation of the Brownian movement of molecules. He investigated the thermal properties of light with a low radiation density and his observations laid the foundation of the photon theory of light. In his early days in Berlin, Einstein postulated that the correct interpretation of the special theory of relativity must also furnish a theory of gravitation and in 1916 he published his paper on the general theory of relativity. During this time he also contributed to the problems of the theory of radiation and statistical mechanics. In the 1920's, Einstein embarked on the construction of unified field theories , although he continued to work on the probabilistic interpretation of quantum theory, and he persevered with this work in America. He contributed to statistical mechanics by his development of the quantum theory of a monatomic gas and he has also accomplished valuable work in connection with atomic transition probabilities and relativistic cosmology. After his retirement he continued to work towards the unification of the basic concepts of physics, taking the opposite approach, geometrisation, to the majority of physicists. Einstein's researches are, of course, well chronicled and his more important works include Special Theory of Relativity (1905), Relativity (English translations, 1920 and 1950), General Theory of Relativity (1916), Investigations on Theory of Brownian Movement (1926), and The Evolution of Physics (1938). Among his non-scientific works, About Zionism (1930), Why War? (1933), My Philosophy (1934), and Out of My Later Years (1950) are perhaps the most important. Albert Einstein received honorary doctorate degrees in science, medicine and philosophy from many European and American universities. During the 1920's he lectured in Europe, America and the Far East and he was awarded Fellowships or Memberships of all the leading scientific academies throughout the world. He gained numerous awards in recognition of his work, including the Copley Medal of the Royal Society of London in 1925, and the Franklin Medal of the Franklin Institute in 1935. Einstein's gifts inevitably resulted in his dwelling much in intellectual solitude and, for relaxation, music played an important part in his life. He married Mileva Maric in 1903 and they had a daughter and two sons; their marriage was dissolved in 1919 and in the same year he married his cousin, Elsa Löwenthal, who died in 1936. He died on April 18, 1955 at Princeton, New Jersey. From Nobel Lectures, Physics 1901-1921, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1967 This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. For more information about the Biography of Albert Einstein, visit the source as shown above. * Albert Einstein was formally associated with the Institute for Advanced Study located in Princeton, New Jersey.

Einstein Biography - Wikipedia

Einstein biography .

• Fölsing, Albrecht (1997): Albert Einstein: A Biography. New York: Penguin Viking. (Translated and abridged from the German by Ewald Osers.)
• Hoffmann, Banesh, with the collaboration of Helen Dukas (1972): Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel. London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon Ltd.
• Isaacson, Walter (2007): Einstein: His Life and Universe. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, New York. ISBN 9780743264730
• Pais, Abraham (1982): Subtle is the Lord: The science and the life of Albert Einstein. Oxford University Press. The definitive biography to date.
• Pais, Abraham (1994): Einstein Lived Here. Oxford University Press.
• Parker, Barry (2000): Einstein's Brainchild. Prometheus Books. A review of Einstein's career and accomplishments, written for the lay public.
• Schweber, Sylvan S. (2008): Einstein and Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0674028289.
• Oppenheimer, J.R. (1971): "On Albert Einstein," p. 8–12 in Science and synthesis: an international colloquium organized by Unesco on the tenth anniversary of the death of Albert Einstein and Teilhard de Chardin, Springer-Verlag, 1971, 208 pp. (Lecture delivered at the UNESCO House in Paris on 13 December 1965.) Also published in The New York Review of Books, 17 March 1966, On Albert Einstein by Robert Oppenheimer
• Moring, Gary (2004): The complete idiot's guide to understanding Einstein ( 1st ed. 2000). Indianapolis IN: Alpha books (Macmillan USA). ISBN 0028631803

Einstein Biographies and Links

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A. Einstein

"With fame, I become more and more stupid, which of course is a very common phenomenon."

- A. Einstein

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Author : Albert Einstein

German-American theoretical physicist

• 1.1 Correspondence
• 2.1 Articles

Works [ edit ]

• Annus mirabilis papers , in Annalen der Physik , vol. 17 and 18, 1905
• On a Heuristic Point of View about the Creation and Conversion of Light (1905, Wikisource translation)
• On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies (1905, translation in 1920 by Meghnad Saha )
• A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions , PhD thesis, 1905
• The Development of Our Views on the Composition and Essence of Radiation (1909, Wikisource translation)
• The Field Equations of Gravitation (1915, Wikisource translation)
• The Foundation of the Generalised Theory of Relativity (1916, translation 1920 by Satyendra Nath Bose )
• Relativity: The Special and General Theory (1920)
• On the quantum theory of radiation, 1917, pp 63 [1]
• Dialog about Objections against the Theory of Relativity (1918, Wikisource translation)
• Time, Space, and Gravitation (1919)
• A Brief Outline of the Development of the Theory of Relativity (1921, translation by Robert William Lawson )
• Ether and the Theory of Relativity (1920, translation in 1922 by George Barker Jeffery and Wilfrid Perrett )
• The Bad Nauheim Debate (1920–1922, translated by Wikisource)
• Geometry and Experience (1921, translation in 1922 by George Barker Jeffery and Wilfrid Perrett )
• The Meaning of Relativity (1922)
• Albert Einstein to Franklin D. Roosevelt - August 2, 1939
• Russell-Einstein Manifesto

Correspondence [ edit ]

Works about einstein [ edit ].

• " Einstein, Albert ," in Encyclopædia Britannica (12th ed., 1922)
• " Einstein, Albert ," in Collier's New Encyclopedia , New York: P. F. Collier & Son Co. (1921)

Articles [ edit ]

• " Lights All Askew in the Heavens " in The New York Times , November 10, 1919
• " Einstein Expounds His New Theory " in The New York Times , December 3, 1919

Films [ edit ]

• The Einstein Theory of Relativity (1923), an animated documentary silent film directed by Dave Fleischer

Some or all works by this author are in the public domain in the United States because they were published before January 1, 1929.

This author died in 1955, so works by this author are in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 68 years or less . These works may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works .

Public domain Public domain false false

Some or all works by this author are in the public domain in the United States because they were legally published within the United States (or the United Nations Headquarters in New York subject to Section 7 of the United States Headquarters Agreement ) between 1929 and 1977 (inclusive) without a copyright notice.

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Bibliographic information

Two Books on Einstein and the World He Made

A lbert Einstein is one of the most written-about figures of the 20th century, and for good reason. His theories upended the system that physicists had used to describe the world since Newton. Along the way, he became a figure of public fascination—a true celebrity. Now two books further scrutinize different aspects of the man.

Samuel Graydon’s “Einstein in Time and Space” is not an exhaustive biography. Instead it presents 99 vignettes, most of them one to three pages long, that highlight key qualities of this complex person: the curious child, the rebellious student, the serial adulterer, the wily prankster, the loyal friend, the civil-rights defender, the intellect unsurpassed in his time. Mr. Graydon, the science editor at the Times Literary Supplement, has chosen his number of chapters in a playful homage to the atomic number of the element einsteinium.

Even if readers are familiar with these stories, Mr. Graydon’s approach often delivers a fresh take on episodes not strongly emphasized in other biographies. Here is Einstein the engineer patenting a unique refrigerator design and a hearing aid. There he is building a miniature cable car out of matchboxes for his young son Hans. “That was one of the nicest toys I had,” Hans later recalled.

As a correspondent, Einstein could be quite impish: “So, what are you up to, you frozen whale, you smoked, dried, canned piece of soul, or whatever else I would like to hurl at your head?” he once wrote to a friend. While starting his career in Bern, Switzerland, the young physicist formed a little club called the Olympia Academy with two friends to discuss science and philosophy. “Einstein, despite being the youngest,” writes Mr. Graydon, “was elected president, earning him the title ‘Albert Ritter von Steissbein’ (roughly, ‘Sir Albert, Knight of Backside’). A certificate was made up, featuring a drawing of a bust of Einstein beneath a string of sausages.”

Mr. Graydon’s stated goal is to point out “the inconsistencies inherent in a life, the inexplicable, incompatible, insane motivations that punctuate days and years.” The author notes how Einstein, a devoted pacifist, maintained a close friendship with the German chemist Fritz Haber, who pioneered the use of both chlorine and mustard gas during World War I. He observes that the deep thinker didn’t pass up the chance to party with the movie stars Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks when out in California.

The book also includes moments of quiet dignity, such as the story of the black contralto Marian Anderson, who had been invited in 1937 to give a concert at Princeton University but was denied a room at the local hotel due to her race. Einstein simply prepared a room for her at his home, an invitation that was extended from that day forward whenever she visited the town.

Mr. Graydon has woven from these separate strands a compelling and beautifully written narrative, though I have one caveat. In his acknowledgments, the author admits that he “lightly fictionalized” a few chapters about representative days at Einstein’s office. Given the wealth of material on hand, a summary of Einstein’s life hardly needs any false embellishments.

While “Einstein in Time and Space” primarily concentrates on Einstein’s personal experiences, Hanoch Gutfreund and Jürgen Renn’s “The Einsteinian Revolution” delves deeply into his science. Mr. Gutfreund, the academic director of the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Mr. Renn, the director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, have written extensively on Einstein and with this book take on a particular challenge: “to dispel the popular myth that Albert Einstein, the unconventional scientific genius, instigated an overwhelming scientific revolution through pure thought alone.” They succeed in that goal, along the way providing an excellent overview of Einstein’s major discoveries, from his early work on quantum theory to general relativity, the new law of gravity that overturned Newton. It is a welcome addition to any collection of books on modern physics.

A true understanding of Einstein’s accomplishments, they write, demands a revision of the legendary concept of the “paradigm shift.” The notion was introduced in 1962 by the historian of science Thomas Kuhn, who argued that a scientific revolution suddenly replaces a previous system of knowledge with a new one unconnected to the past. But Messrs. Gutfreund and Renn prefer to view Einstein’s work as an evolutionary process, where the new system is built upon the scientific scaffolding already in place.

In the late 19th century, that scaffolding was constructed around three dominant areas of physics: mechanics, thermodynamics and electromagnetism. Troubling puzzles were beginning to arise at the intersections between these fields, and many scientists attempted to find solutions within their own isolated specialties. But Einstein—with his deep reading of the scientific literature and the philosophy of science, his constant dialogues with scientific friends, and his careful attention to new experimental discoveries—stood above those boundaries, enabling him to perceive an entirely new vista.

The authors provide a detailed examination of Einstein’s annus mirabilis in 1905, when he recognized that light can act like a particle as well as a wave; proved that atoms exist; linked matter with energy in that celebrated equation E=mc2; and, with the special theory of relativity, swept away the idea that we live in a fixed space governed by a universal clock.

Before these discoveries, the authors note, the Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz had developed a mathematical scheme to explain the behavior of charged particles moving through the ether—the medium that supposedly permeates physical space to allow light to travel. Lorentz’s equations foresaw many of the phenomena later explained by special relativity. But his physical interpretation, complicated and full of assumptions, was still rooted in classical physics. Einstein jettisoned this kludge by doing away with the ether, recognizing that space and time are not absolute and declaring that the speed of light is a constant whether a body is stationary or in motion.

Einstein didn’t arrive at this solution in a single eureka moment. It was the result of deep reflection over the years, influenced by such philosophers as David Hume, who questioned the causal relations between events; Ernst Mach, who objected to Newton’s idea of absolute space; and Henri Poincaré, who early on noted the possible relativity of time. Einstein stood upon the shoulders of giants to gain his new perspective.

While “The Einsteinian Revolution” is written for a general audience, a background in physics helps make certain sections more accessible. Yet the authors’ overall thesis is clear and convincing. “The substance of Einstein’s work was not new,” they stress, “but rather was the result of an accumulation of knowledge over centuries; it was his conceptual organization that was new.” Their book, along with Mr. Graydon’s “Einstein in Time and Space,” enhances our understanding of both a great scientist and an exemplary humanist.

Ms. Bartusiak is a professor emeritus at MIT and the author of “Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony.”

Albert Einstein’s Role in the Atomic Bomb Was the “One Great Mistake in My Life”

Einstein and his colleague Leo Szilard played a crucial role in encouraging the United States to create an atomic bomb.

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Although acquainted with physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer , Einstein never worked on the Manhattan Project that led to the development of nuclear weapons, nor was he aware of plans to drop the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But Einstein and his colleague Leo Szilard played a crucial role in encouraging President Franklin D. Roosevelt to pursue the bomb in the first place.

A Startling Visit from a Friend

It all started with a visit by Szilard, a Hungarian-German physicist who previously studied with Einstein in the 1920s. Their research led to the creation of a refrigerator pump that required no moving parts, resulting in what is most commonly called the Einstein refrigerator, according to Genius in the Shadows , a Szilard biography by William Lanouette.

After their collaboration, Szilard conceived the idea of a nuclear “chain reaction” while working in London in 1933. The next year, he convinced the British government to make his chain reaction patent a military secret, according to Lanouette, successfully forestalling a nuclear arms race with Adolf Hitler , who by then was the Chancellor of Germany.

However, after scientists in Germany experimentally split the uranium atom in 1938, Szilard became deeply concerned about idea of Hitler obtaining an atomic bomb first and began raising alarm bells among his personal connections. In Lanouette’s words, he “worked frantically to start the very arms race he had feared.”

In 1939, Szilard visited his old friend Einstein, stunning the fellow physicist by describing the nuclear chain reaction concept. “I haven’t thought of that at all,” Einstein admitted, according to Lanouette. Einstein immediately agreed to warn his friends in the Belgian Royal Family that Nazi Germany might have eyes on the Belgian Congo, which contained the world’s largest uranium supply.

But after that initial meeting, Szilard became convinced that U.S. officials should be warned about Germany’s intentions as well. Szilard and Einstein met for a second time three weeks later, discussing how to get word to President Roosevelt and starting work on one of the most impactful and historic letters in the 20 th century.

The Einstein-Szilard Letter

Through friends, Szilard met with Alexander Sachs, a Wall Street banker with access to the White House. Sachs said he had already spoken with Roosevelt about uranium but that the government decided not to pursue uranium research because Columbia University physicists had told them the prospects of an atomic bomb were minimal, according to The New World 1939/1946: A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission .

Sachs felt Roosevelt might be persuaded by someone of Einstein’s reputation, according to the book. Einstein—who was also encouraged by Hungarian physicists, including refugees Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller— sent a letter dated August 2, 1939, urging Roosevelt about the possibility that Nazi Germany could develop an atomic bomb.

“In the course of the last four months it has been made probable… that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated,” the letter read . “Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.”

Warning that this phenomenon could also lead to the construction of particularly devastating bombs, Einstein encouraged Roosevelt to consider a similar program in the United States and urged him to make contact with physicists working on chain reactions in the United States, according to the letter.

Preoccupied with events in Europe, Roosevelt didn’t respond for nearly two months, making the physicists fear he wasn’t taking the threat of nuclear warfare seriously, according to the U.S. Department of Energy . On the contrary, however, Roosevelt felt Hitler achieving unilateral possession of such powerful bombs would pose a grave risk to the nation.

The Letter Spurs Action

Roosevelt wrote back to Einstein on October 19, 1939, informing him about the establishment of a committee of civilian and military representatives to study uranium, according to the Energy Department. Although this was only the first of many such steps and decisions along the way, this committee was ultimately the catalyst for the Manhattan Project.

In 1940, Einstein sent Roosevelt two more letters on March 7 and April 25, recommending additional work on nuclear research, according to An Einstein Encyclopedia by Alice Calaprice and others. He wrote again on March 25, 1945, expressing his growing fears about the possible misuse of uranium, but it wasn’t delivered before Roosevelt’s death a little more than two weeks later.

The more famous 1939 letter, however, came to be known as the Einstein-Szilard letter and is widely considered to be the key stimulus for the United States developing the atomic bomb, according to Lanouette.

Einstein never worked on the Manhattan Project and had no prior knowledge of plans to use the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. A pacifist who despised war, Einstein came to deeply regret his role in the development of the bomb, later saying : “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in developing an atomic bomb, I would have done nothing.”

Einstein harbored these regrets for this rest of his life. In 1954, one year before his death, Einstein discussed the matter in a letter to his friend, chemist Linus Pauling. Although he cited the fear of Germany developing a bomb as a partial justification, he nevertheless described his letter to Roosevelt as the “one great mistake in my life.”

Einstein Appears in the 2023 Oppenheimer Movie

Oppenheimer , now available for rent or purchase on Prime Video and Apple TV+ , is directed and written by Christopher Nolan . Cillian Murphy stars as J. Robert Oppenheimer , and Tom Conti portrays Albert Einstein . Other cast members include Emily Blunt , Matt Damon , Robert Downey Jr. , Florence Pugh , Rami Malek , Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, and Kenneth Branagh.

Colin McEvoy joined the Biography.com staff in 2023, and before that had spent 16 years as a journalist, writer, and communications professional. He is the author of two true crime books: Love Me or Else and Fatal Jealousy . He is also an avid film buff, reader, and lover of great stories.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson

Daniel Hale Williams

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George Washington Carver

Jean Tatlock: The Woman Oppenheimer Loved

Who Plays Albert Einstein in Christopher Nolan's 'Oppenheimer'?

In a star-studded cast that includes Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., and Florence Pugh, be sure to not overlook this Scottish actor.

The Big Picture

• Tom Conti, a Scottish actor who is a veteran of both stage and screen, portrays Albert Einstein in Oppenheimer .
• Conti starred in one of the greatest movies of all time: Paddington 2 .
• Conti previously worked with Christopher Nolan on The Dark Knight Rises .

Christopher Nolan 's Oppenheimer might just be the director's most impressive and captivating film to date. As is the norm with Nolan, the film boasts a star-studded ensemble cast. Cillian Murphy plays J. Robert Oppenheimer , the American theoretical physicist dubbed "the father of the atomic bomb," alongside Robert Downey Jr. , Emily Blunt , Florence Pugh , and Matt Damon . The film tells the story of Oppenheimer , director of the Los Alamos Laboratory during the World War II-era Manhattan Project, and his involvement in developing the atomic bomb.

Deemed by the internet as the unofficial rival to Greta Gerwig 's Barbie , Oppenheimer finished its theatrical run as Nolan's biggest overseas box office success . After receiving 13 Academy Award nominations, it was the leading victor of the night. With 7 wins , including Best Picture, Best Director, and acting Oscars for Downey Jr. and Murphy, Oppenheimer is officially Nolan's top accolade earner . The film deals with more than merely the historical events leading to the weapon's creation, including the immense gravity of the ethical debate that surrounded the Manhattan Project. One of the most prolific participators in this discourse was Albert Einstein , the German-born theoretical physicist best known for his theory of relativity. In Oppenheimer , Albert Einstein is played by Tom Conti , who comes to the latest Nolan event following a long and lauded career.

Oppenheimer

The story of American scientist, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and his role in the development of the atomic bomb.

Albert Einstein Has a Nobel Peace Prize for Physics

Albert Einstein , born in 1879 in the German Empire, is known across the globe as one of the most influential thinkers of all time. He was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in theoretical physics, with special regard to his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect . His theory of relativity, published in parts between 1905 and 1915, laid the groundwork for our understanding of gravity and its role within nature. Broken into two categories, his theory of special relativity described the laws and behavior of physical phenomena in the absence of gravity, while general relativity dealt with the forces of natural law, providing an explanation of the law of gravitation .

Prior to publishing his theory of relativity, Einstein studied and worked in Switzerland , where he gained Swiss citizenship and received his Ph.D. Back in Germany, he spent nearly two decades as the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, before receiving his aforementioned Nobel Prize. In 1933, Einstein renounced his German citizenship and left for America, opposing the rise of Adolf Hitler's regime .

Albert Einstein Is One of Many Key Figures in 'Oppenheimer'

In 1939, Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt , in which he aimed to warn the U.S. government of Germany's potential research into nuclear weapons. Einstein wagered, due to recent developments in the research surrounding fission, previously unseen amounts of power could be achieved through fission chain reactions, and harnessing such power into a bomb was both conceivable and catastrophically concerning . He believed that German powers were actively pursuing this form of research and urged the United States government to do the same. This warning is widely regarded as one of the key events to spark the doomsday clock and the race to atomic power.

Christopher Nolan Demanded a Ridiculous Amount of Corn for ‘Interstellar'

In 1940, due to his outward expression of pacifist tendencies, Albert Einstein was denied the required security clearance to participate in or give input to the Manhattan Project. So other than, in part, encouraging the project's development by professing his concern to the United States government, Einstein played no role in the Manhattan Project's development of the atomic bomb. The same year he was denied the security clearance, Einstein officially became a citizen of the United States , where he would continue working for the remainder of his life before passing away in 1955 in Princeton, New Jersey. Before his death, Einstein often spoke to encourage the nuclear proliferation of the world's powers, and he even expressed deep regret for having written the letter to Roosevelt that encouraged the United States' research into atomic energy. In an interview following the end of World War II, Einstein admitted, "Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in developing an atomic bomb, I would have done nothing for the bomb."

Who Is 'Oppenheimer's Tom Conti?

A Scottish actor who is a veteran of both stage and screen, Tom Conti takes on the role of the prolific scientist with countless credits under his belt. From starring alongside David Bowie in 1983's Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence to earning a 1984 Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for his performance in Reuben, Reuben , Conti has graced film and television across multiple decades and continents. However, first and foremost, Conti is a thespian of the stage. Appearing in acclaimed productions on the West End and on Broadway in New York, Conti's performance in Whose Life is it Anyway? earned him a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play. Perhaps most importantly, the truest fans of peak cinema will remember Conti for his role as Judge Gerald Biggleswade in Paddington 2 — one of the greatest films of all time.

Tom Conti and Christopher Nolan Have Worked Together Before

Although Tom Conti sports a fair amount of hair and makeup design in the Oppenheimer trailer, keen eyes will recognize Conti from a previous Christopher Nolan venture. In the culmination of Nolan's Batman trilogy , Conti appeared in 2012's The Dark Knight Rises , credited simply as "Prisoner." His role was anything but simple, though. As a fellow captive of the cavernous prison in which Christian Bale 's Bruce Wayne found himself, Conti's character was the catalyst that encouraged Bruce at his lowest point, leading him toward his escape and eventual redemption before triumphantly facing-off against Tom Hardy 's Bane .

Oppenheimer is available to watch on Peacock in the U.S.

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The Story of Albert Einstein: An Inspiring Biography for Young Readers (The Story of Biographies) Paperback – June 30, 2020

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Independent reading —This Albert Einstein biography is broken down into short chapters and simple language so kids 6 to 9 can read and learn on their own.
• Critical thinking —Kids will learn the Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How of Albert's life, find definitions of new words, discussion questions, and more.
• A lasting legacy —See Albert progress from curious kid to famous scientist with a visual timeline!
• Reading age 6 - 8 years
• Part of series The Story Of: A Biography Series for New Readers
• Print length 70 pages
• Language English
• Grade level 1 - 2
• Lexile measure 860L
• Dimensions 5.83 x 0.2 x 8.27 inches
• Publisher Rockridge Press
• Publication date June 30, 2020
• ISBN-10 1646119711
• ISBN-13 978-1646119714
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Rockridge Press (June 30, 2020)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 70 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1646119711
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1646119714
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 6 - 8 years
• Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 860L
• Grade level ‏ : ‎ 1 - 2
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 4.5 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.83 x 0.2 x 8.27 inches
• #31 in Children's Science Biographies (Books)
• #110 in Children's Intermediate Readers

About the author

Susan b. katz.

Susan B. Katz is an award-winning of over 60 children's books. She is a Spanish bilingual author, National Board Certified Teacher, educational consultant, and social media strategist. As a former bilingual educator of over 25 years, Susan incorporates props, puppets and multimedia into her presentations making them interactive and engaging. Susan has published books with Scholastic, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, Capstone, Lerner, Bala Kids, and Little Bee. MEDITATION STATION won the International Book Award for Best Children's Mind/Body/Spirit title. THE STORY OF RUTH BADER GINSBURG hit #18 on Amazon overall and #9 among all kids books. ALL YEAR ROUND was named "Best New Book" by The Children's Book Review. She translated it into Spanish as Un Año Redondo. MY MAMA EARTH (Barefoot Books), won the Moonbeam Gold Award for Best Picture Book as well as being named "Top Green Toy" by Education.com. Her most recent book, GAUDI: ARCHITECT OF IMAGINATION got a Starred Review from School Library Journal. Susan is also the Founder and Executive Director of www.ConnectingAuthors.org, a national non-profit bringing children's book authors and illustrators into schools and libraries as role models of literacy and the arts. Ms. Katz served as the Strategic Partner Manager for Authors at Facebook. When she's not writing, Susan enjoys salsa dancing and spending time at the beach. She is also an avid wildlife photographer: www.behance.net/susanbkatz Her website is: www.susankatzbooks.com

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Books We Love

20 new books hitting shelves this summer that our critics can't wait to read.

Meghan Collins Sullivan

June is around the corner, meaning summer is almost here! As we look forward to travel and staycations, plane rides and trips to the beach, we've asked our book critics for some advice: What upcoming fiction and nonfiction are they most looking forward to reading?

Their picks range from memoirs to sci-fi and fantasy to translations, love stories and everything in between. Here's a look:

Daughter of the Merciful Deep by Leslye Penelope

I was hooked when I first saw the gorgeous cover for Daughter of the Merciful Deep by Leslye Penelope. But the novel's premise put it at the top of my summer reading list. Penelope is known for unforgettable characters, world-building, beautiful writing and robust storytelling. Her latest work, inspired by actual events — the drowned Black towns of the American South — promises a magical, mythical and powerful tale of a young woman's quest to save her town. A historical fantasy must-read. (June 4) — Denny Bryce

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The Future Was Color by Patrick Nathan

The Future Was Color by Patrick Nathan has everything I look for in a book: a unique and startling voice, a queer protagonist and a deep understanding of a particular time and place. George — once György — is a gay Hungarian immigrant working as a screenwriter in McCarthy-era Hollywood, occasionally fantasizing about his officemate, Jack. When a once-famous actress named Madeline invites George to stay and write at her spacious Malibu house, she won't take no for an answer — and so George finds himself in a hedonistic milieu where pleasure, politics and strong personalities intermingle. (June 4) — Ilana Masad

Mirrored Heavens: Between Earth & Sky, Book 3 by Rebecca Roanhorse

Rebecca Roanhorse is one of my auto-read authors — and one major reason is because of her fire Between Earth and Sky series. That trilogy comes to a stunning, fevered conclusion with Mirrored Heavens . All of the characters you love, hate and love to hate will converge on the city of Tova. Get ready for an epic battle between ancient gods, their human avatars and the mortals caught in between. (June 4) — Alex Brown

Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water by Amorina Kingdon

You may know about 52 Blue , whose vocalizations likely go unheard by some other whales; it captured worldwide sympathy and became a pop-culture metaphor. But did you know all whale song is critically disrupted by ships? If that gets you wondering, keep an eye out for Sing Like Fish , which promises to illuminate the fragile symphony of the deep. (June 4) — Genevieve Valentine

Consent: A Memoir by Jill Ciment

I look forward to reading Jill Ciment's Consent and to the discussions it's sure to provoke. In this follow-up memoir to Half a Life, Ciment reconsiders what she wrote 25 years ago about her teenage affair and marriage to her art teacher, 30 years her senior. Half a Life was written before the #MeToo movement, and before her husband died at the age of 93 after 45 years of marriage. Consent promises a fuller picture. (June 11) — Heller McAlpin

Do What Godmother Says by L.S. Stratton

As we continue to experience the frenzy of Harlem Renaissance celebrations, commemorations and historical resonance, Do What Godmother Says by L.S. Stratton is the perfect addition to the litany of works set in this artistic period this year. It examines the intense and frequently degenerating relationship between patrons and artists during this intellectual and cultural movement. In this dual-timeline gothic thriller, a modern writer discovers a family heirloom painting by a Harlem Renaissance artist, which connects her family to a mysterious past. This historical novel is one I'm eager to read because it deftly exposes the layers of creative ownership, especially when race and wealth are involved. (June 11) — Keishel Williams

Horror Movie: A Novel by Paul Tremblay

Paul Tremblay is one of the most entertaining and innovative voices in contemporary fiction regardless of genre. Horror Movie , a story about a cursed movie that never came out and is about to get a remake, is a love letter to horror novels and horror movies, as well as a tense narrative that will redefine the cursed film subgenre. Tremblay is one of the modern masters of horror, and this new novel promises to be packed with the author's distinctive voice, knack for ambiguity and intrigue, and superb atmosphere. (June 11) — Gabino Iglesias

Cue The Sun! The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum

Every so often there's a nonfiction title I covet like it's the next installment in my favorite mystery series. This summer it's Cue the Sun! Based on in-depth interviews with more than 300 sources from every aspect of the production process, this book is a cultural history of the genre that ate American entertainment, from New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum. It combines the appeal of a page-turning thriller and the heft of serious scholarship. Juicy and thoughtful, it's a must-read for anyone interested in television or popular culture. (June 25) — Carole V. Bell

The Undermining of Twyla and Frank by Megan Bannen

In this return to the delightfully wacky world established in one of my personal top-five romance novels of all time, The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy , Megan Bannen takes on the friends to lovers trope with a combination of madcap joie de vivre and the exhausted practicality of a mom who's had enough. Also, there are dragons! (July 2) — Caitlyn Paxson

The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş

I am eagerly awaiting Ayşegül Savaş' The Anthropologists . Born in Istanbul, Savaş has lived in England, Denmark and the U.S. also and now resides in France; in this novel she takes up themes of cultural migration through focus on a young couple seeking an apartment in a foreign city. I'm intrigued to discover how Savaş gifts her characters with an anthropological lens of exploration. (July 9) — Barbara J. King

Elevator in Saigon by Thuân, translated by Nguyen An Lý

Elevator in Saigon is a literal and structural exquisite corpse , capturing Vietnam's eventful period from 1954 to 2004. Mimicking an elevator's movement, the novel heightens our yearning for romance and mystery, while unflinchingly exposing such narrative shaft. Channeling Marguerite Duras and Patrick Modiano, the book also offers a dead-on tour of a society cunningly leaping from one ideological mode to the next. As if challenging Rick's parting words to Ilsa in Casablanca , Thuận's sophomore novel in English implies that geopolitical debacles might have been mitigated if personal relations were held in more elevated regard than "a hill of beans." (July 9) — Thúy Đinh

Goodnight Tokyo by Atsuhiro Yoshida, translated by Haydn Trowell

Atsuhiro Yoshida's Goodnight Tokyo begins with a film company procurer who's tasked with finding fresh kumquats for a production. From there, interlinked tales of Tokyo residents unspool in unpredictable directions. Characters range from a cabdriver to a star of a detective TV series who might be an actual detective. Readers will be reminded of Jim Jarmusch's 1991 movie Night on Earth , which also takes place in the wee hours of the morning and threads together the stories of strangers. (July 9) — Leland Cheuk

Navola: A novel by Paolo Bacigalupi

I love when a beloved author — especially one known mostly for a certain type of book — throws us a daring curveball. Navola is exactly such a pitch. Paolo Bacigalupi, who has won pretty much every major award in the science-fiction field with his climate-conscious dystopianism, is veering hard left with his new novel. It doesn't take place in the future, and it isn't a cautionary tale. Instead, it's a hefty tome of high fantasy set in a dreamed-up world akin to Renaissance Florence. Only with, you guessed it, dragons. But also high finance, political intrigue, and de' Medici-esque opulence. Bacigalupi is one of today's most gripping spinners of speculative fiction, and I can't wait to dive into this surprising magical foray. (July 9) — Jason Heller

The Lucky Ones: A Memoir by Zara Chowdhary

In 2002, two train carriages were set on fire in Gujarat, India. Within three weeks, more than 2,000 Muslims were murdered in response by Hindu mobs. By the end of the year, more than 50,000 Muslims became refugees in their own country. The Lucky Ones is a unique memoir in English of this largest-ever massacre in independent India . It is also about a communal crisis bringing a fractured family together. A must-read in our warring world today. (July 16) — Jenny Bhatt

Sharks Don't Sink: Adventures of a Rogue Shark Scientist by Jasmin Graham

Author Jasmin Graham is a marine biologist specializing in smalltooth sawfish and hammerhead sharks. Who are the real sharks in this story? Graham had to face the sharp-teethed truths of academia, while creating a world of curiosity and discovery around the complex lives of sharks. To combat the racism she encountered in academia, Graham created an "ocean of her own" to become an independent scientist and a champion of social justice, a journey she unspools in this new memoir. (July 16) — Martha Ann Toll

Liars by Sarah Manguso

I have long been a fan of Sarah Manguso's crystalline prose, from her fragmented illness memoir The Two Kinds of Decay to her tightly constrained 2022 novel Very Cold People . Her second novel , Liars , marries restraint with rage — in it, Manguso traces the full arc of a 15-year relationship between Jane, a successful writer, and John, a dilettante artist-cum-techie, in aphoristic vignettes. The result is a furious, propulsive meditation on wifehood, motherhood and artistic ambition. (July 23) — Kristen Martin

The Horse: A Novel by Willy Vlautin

Musician and Lean on Pete author Willy Vlautin captures the American West like few other writers. His prose is always excellent, his characters always beautifully drawn, and that promises to be the case with his next novel, about an isolated Nevada man in his 60s who is visited by a blind horse that refuses to leave. (July 30) — Michael Schaub

Einstein in Kafkaland: How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came Up With the Universe by Ken Krimstein

Art and science collide in Ken Krimstein's new graphic biography . In this book, the author of the brilliant and whimsical The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt similarly translates careful research into scenic, emotive comics — in this case tracking the potential effects of an adventitious meeting in Prague between two geniuses on the cusp of world-changing discoveries. (Aug. 20) — Tahneer Oksman

Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

I'd probably be interested in a new biography of Audre Lorde if it focused on the eating habits of the brilliant thinker, poet, feminist and activist. But biographer Alexis Pauline Gumbs promises to more than exceed that bar. An award-winning poet, writer, feminist and activist in her own right, Gumbs is among the first researchers to delve into Lorde's manuscript archives. The resulting book highlights the late author's commitment to interrogating what it means to survive on this planet — and how Lorde's radical understanding of ecology can guide us today. (Aug. 20) — Ericka Taylor

Et Cetera: An Illustrated Guide to Latin Phrases by Maia Lee-Chin, illustrated by Marta Bertello

To those claiming Latin is dead, I say res ipsa loquitur — the thing speaks for itself — in children's cartoons , Hollywood cartoons and enduring epics . As a fan of both Mr. Peabody and the Muses, the idea of combining Maia Lee-Chin's thoughtful scholarship and Marta Bertello's dynamic artistry is captivating. Their new book reimagines the world of Latin's invention and tops my summer reading list. (Aug. 27) — Marcela Davison Avilés

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