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Nonfiction Books » 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 about the 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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What did Albert Einstein do?

What is albert einstein known for, what influence did albert einstein have on science, what was albert einstein’s family like, what did albert einstein mean when he wrote that god “does not play dice”.

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Albert Einstein was a famous physicist. His research spanned from quantum mechanics to theories about gravity and motion. After publishing some groundbreaking papers, Einstein toured the world and gave speeches about his discoveries. In 1921 he won the Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery of the photoelectric effect .

Albert Einstein is best known for his equation E = mc 2 , which states that energy and mass (matter) are the same thing, just in different forms. He is also known for his discovery of the photoelectric effect , for which he won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921. Einstein developed a theory of special and general relativity, which helped to complicate and expand upon theories that had been put forth by Isaac Newton over 200 years prior. 

Albert Einstein had a massive influence on contemporary physics. His theory of relativity shifted contemporary understanding of space completely. Along with his equation E = mc 2 , it also foreshadowed the creation of the atomic bomb . Einstein’s understanding of light as something which can function both as a wave and as a stream of particles became the basis for what is known today as quantum mechanics .

Albert Einstein was raised in a secular Jewish family and had one sister, Maja, who was two years younger than him. In 1903 Einstein married Milena Maric, a Serbian physics student whom he had met at school in Zürich. They had three children: a daughter, named Lieserl, and two sons, named Hans and Eduard. After a period of unrest, Einstein and Maric divorced in 1919. Einstein, during his marriage, had begun an affair with his cousin Elsa Löwenthal. They were married in 1919, the same year he divorced Maric.

How did Albert Einstein die?

After suffering an abdominal aortic aneurysm rupture several days before, Albert Einstein died on April 18, 1955, at age 76.

In December 1926 Albert Einstein wrote to Max Born that “[t]he theory produces a good deal but hardly brings us closer to the secret of the Old One. I am at all events convinced that He does not play dice.” Einstein was reacting to Born’s probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics and expressing a deterministic view of the world. Learn more.

Albert Einstein (born March 14, 1879, Ulm , Württemberg, Germany—died April 18, 1955, Princeton , New Jersey , U.S.) was a German-born physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 for his explanation of the photoelectric effect . Einstein is generally considered the most influential physicist of the 20th century.

(Read Einstein’s 1926 Britannica essay on space-time.)

Einstein’s parents were secular , middle-class Jews. His father, Hermann Einstein, was originally a featherbed salesman and later ran an electrochemical factory with moderate success. His mother, the former Pauline Koch, ran the family household. He had one sister, Maria (who went by the name Maja), born two years after Albert.

Einstein would write that two “wonders” deeply affected his early years. The first was his encounter with a compass at age five. He was mystified that invisible forces could deflect the needle. This would lead to a lifelong fascination with invisible forces. The second wonder came at age 12 when he discovered a book of geometry , which he devoured , calling it his “sacred little geometry book.”

Einstein became deeply religious at age 12, even composing several songs in praise of God and chanting religious songs on the way to school. This began to change, however, after he read science books that contradicted his religious beliefs. This challenge to established authority left a deep and lasting impression. At the Luitpold Gymnasium , Einstein often felt out of place and victimized by a Prussian-style educational system that seemed to stifle originality and creativity. One teacher even told him that he would never amount to anything.

Yet another important influence on Einstein was a young medical student, Max Talmud (later Max Talmey), who often had dinner at the Einstein home. Talmud became an informal tutor, introducing Einstein to higher mathematics and philosophy . A pivotal turning point occurred when Einstein was 16 years old. Talmud had earlier introduced him to a children’s science series by Aaron Bernstein, Naturwissenschaftliche Volksbucher (1867–68; Popular Books on Physical Science ), in which the author imagined riding alongside electricity that was traveling inside a telegraph wire. Einstein then asked himself the question that would dominate his thinking for the next 10 years: What would a light beam look like if you could run alongside it? If light were a wave , then the light beam should appear stationary, like a frozen wave. Even as a child, though, he knew that stationary light waves had never been seen, so there was a paradox . Einstein also wrote his first “scientific paper” at that time (“The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields”).

Einstein’s education was disrupted by his father’s repeated failures at business. In 1894, after his company failed to get an important contract to electrify the city of Munich , Hermann Einstein moved to Milan to work with a relative. Einstein was left at a boardinghouse in Munich and expected to finish his education. Alone, miserable, and repelled by the looming prospect of military duty when he turned 16, Einstein ran away six months later and landed on the doorstep of his surprised parents. His parents realized the enormous problems that he faced as a school dropout and draft dodger with no employable skills. His prospects did not look promising.

Fortunately, Einstein could apply directly to the Eidgenössische Polytechnische Schule (“Swiss Federal Polytechnic School”; in 1911, following expansion in 1909 to full university status, it was renamed the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, or “Swiss Federal Institute of Technology”) in Zürich without the equivalent of a high school diploma if he passed its stiff entrance examinations. His marks showed that he excelled in mathematics and physics , but he failed at French , chemistry , and biology . Because of his exceptional math scores, he was allowed into the polytechnic on the condition that he first finish his formal schooling. He went to a special high school run by Jost Winteler in Aarau , Switzerland , and graduated in 1896. He also renounced his German citizenship at that time. (He was stateless until 1901, when he was granted Swiss citizenship.) He became lifelong friends with the Winteler family, with whom he had been boarding. (Winteler’s daughter, Marie, was Einstein’s first love; Einstein’s sister, Maja, would eventually marry Winteler’s son Paul; and his close friend Michele Besso would marry their eldest daughter, Anna.)

Einstein would recall that his years in Zürich were some of the happiest years of his life. He met many students who would become loyal friends, such as Marcel Grossmann, a mathematician, and Besso, with whom he enjoyed lengthy conversations about space and time. He also met his future wife, Mileva Maric, a fellow physics student from Serbia.

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Table of Contents

• Rave and Reviews

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

Browse Related Books

• History > Modern > 20th Century
• Science > Relativity
• Biography & Autobiography > Science & Technology

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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The Scale of Einstein, From Faith to Formulas

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By Janet Maslin

• April 9, 2007

The story of Albert Einstein’s life calls for a protean biographer, not to mention a fearless one. Conveying the magnitude of Einstein’s scientific achievements is tough enough, but that’s just the start. His geopolitics, faith, cultural impact, philosophy of science, amorous affairs, powers of abstraction and superstar reputation are all part of this subject. So are the two world wars through which Einstein lived and the internecine physics-world struggles in which he became embroiled.

Then there are the odd quirks and the pricelessly prophetic anecdotes, as when one Zurich classmate of the budding genius went home to tell his parents that “this Einstein will one day be a great man.” Many of these need to be included, and matters of scale make this job dauntingly difficult too. Einstein’s earth-shaking concept of general relativity is directly juxtaposed, in Walter Isaacson’s confidently authoritative “Einstein: His Life and Universe,” with a set of household rules that the great man wrote to keep his first wife at bay. “You will stop talking to me if I request it,” this document asserted. “You will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way.”

Mr. Isaacson deals clearly and comfortably with the scope of Einstein’s life. If his highly readable and informative book has an Achilles’ heel, it’s in the area of science. Mr. Isaacson had the best available help (most notably the physicist Brian Greene’s) in explicating the series of revelations Einstein brought forth in his wonder year, 1905, and the subsequent problems with quantum theory and uncertainty that would bedevil him.

But these sections of the book are succinctly abbreviated. Paradoxically that makes them less accessible than they would have been through longer, more patient explication. Still, the cosmic physics would be heavy sledding in any book chiefly devoted to Einstein’s life and times, and Mr. Isaacson acknowledges that. “O.K., it’s not easy,” he writes, “but that’s why we’re no Einstein and he was.”

In his introduction to “Einstein,” Mr. Isaacson sounds dangerously as if he is again trumpeting the virtues of a founding father (his last book was a biography of Benjamin Franklin). “Tyranny repulsed him, and he saw tolerance not simply as a sweet virtue but as a necessary condition for a creative society,” he proclaims. Whiffs of a textbook tone are similarly alarming. (“Einstein would become a supporter of world federalism, internationalism, pacificism, and democratic socialism, with a strong devotion to individual liberty and freedom of expression.”) But over all this is a warm, insightful, affectionate portrait with a human and immensely charming Einstein at its core.

“Oh my! That Johnnie boy!/So crazy with desire/While thinking of his Dollie/His pillow catches fire.” That was a poem written by the love-struck future patent clerk of Bern, Switzerland (he would spend seven years in that job while writing his greatest scientific papers) to Mileva Maric, the first of two women he would marry. (To dissolve this union, the ever-confident Einstein offered Maric the money from a Nobel Prize he had not yet won.) It reveals a different side of Einstein than his famous “On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light” did.

But in Mr. Isaacson’s artfully seamless account, the genius and the flirt are remarkably well reconciled. And that first marriage was based on both. “I can already imagine the fun we will have,” he wrote to Maric about a prospective vacation. “And then we’ll start in on Helmholtz’s electromagnetic theory of light.”

Mr. Isaacson does a similarly graceful job of integrating Einstein’s science with his broader philosophical concerns, especially the global worries that plagued him with the approach of the Second World War. Even as a committed pacifist he remained primarily a scientist and revised his opinions as fate required. “For a scientist, altering your doctrines when the facts change is not a sign of weakness,” Mr. Isaacson underscores.

And the man who had once listed his religion as “Mosaic” when applying for a professorship in Prague became much more thoughtful about Judaism in later years. Whatever Einstein’s precise faith, Mr. Isaacson says, “his beliefs seemed to arise from the sense of awe and transcendent order that he discovered through his scientific work.”

With the help of many witty, candid letters, Mr. Isaacson offers a wonderfully rounded portrait of the ever-surprising Einstein personality. Equally important is the Einstein myth, and the material on this subject is even more entertaining. Einstein horrified his colleagues by enjoying his vast celebrity. (“Einstein’s personality, for no clear reasons, triggers outbursts of a kind of mass hysteria,” the German consul reported to Berlin as the great man made one of his rock-star visits to New York.) He also stymied the press in its efforts to keep up with his accomplishments. Mr. Isaacson has great fun with the reportorial frenzy that surrounded each new pearl of Einsteinian wisdom. Among the headlines that appeared in The New York Times: “Unintelligible to Laymen” and “Stars Not Where They Seemed or Were Calculated to Be, but Nobody Need Worry.”

Mr. Isaacson is also keenly attuned to the intellectual crises hidden by the hoopla. As Einstein aged, he changed from a fierce young iconoclast to a pillar of science, resistant to advances in the very quantum ideas that he himself had brought forth. “The intellect gets crippled,” he said of growing older, “but glittering renown is still draped around the calcified shell.” Here as throughout the book Mr. Isaacson asks the right questions. (“So what made Einstein cede the revolutionary road to younger radicals and spin into a defensive crouch?”) And he answers them with the clear, broad grasp of complex issues that make this book an illuminating delight.

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20 Best Books on Albert Einstein (2022 Review)

September 16, 2020 by James Wilson

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Albert Einstein was an intelligent man who discovered groundbreaking theories. He was a german who changed the world of physics. He created the theory of relativity. He’s done so much for physicists and the world. His death was nearly a centennial, yet he’s still one of the most notable, if not the most notable, physicist to this day. He has done amazing work, but people just see him as the crazy smart physicist with wacky hair. Where did he grow up? What was his life like? What did he do to achieve his success?

What are the Best Albert Einstein Books to read?

These are some questions that the following 20 books can answer. This book discusses Einstein’s incredible achievements, but they also discuss the rest of his history. He was more than just a physicist. He did a lot of great work. These books will delve into just what he did, and the impact he has made.

Best Books on Albert Einstein: Our Top 20 Picks

Here are some of the best Albert Einstein books that you can consider to expand your knowledge on the subject:

1. Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer is not really about Einstein at all. This book is actually about memory techniques, and applying them to everyday life. The book draws inspiration from Foer who used this research to help his own memory. He does plenty of research in this book that helps back his claims.

The book is mostly about memory athletics. This is a very engaging book. It keeps readers drawn in and entertained. The book mixes the tips on memory techniques with stories about them. This book has a lot of incredible information, but it only includes a few techniques. It is more about the experience than it is about the advice.

• Authors : Joshua Foer (Author)
• Publisher : Penguin Books; Reprint Edition (February 28, 2012)
• Pages : 307 pages

2. Einstein: His Life and Universe

Albert Einstein was a noble man who did a lot of work. He was underappreciated during this time. After his death, the importance of his work was realized. He is one of the world’s greatest physicists. Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson discusses the life of Einstein and all of his achievements.

This book was based on personal letters that Albert Einstein wrote himself. Albert Einstein was not a “go with the flow” kind of guy. He questioned everything. He also sought the truth. This book is all about the way Einstein thought. It also discusses his personal life. He was a struggling father, the creator of the cosmos, and a true genius. This book is a great history of Albert Einstein that includes his own point of view.

• Authors : Walter Isaacson (Author)
• Publisher : Simon & Schuster; 1st Edition (April 10, 2007)
• Pages : 675 pages

3. Relativity: The Special and General Theory

The theory of relativity is arguably Albert Einstein’s greatest achievement. He did a lot of research, and spent countless hours discovering new information on physics. Relativity: The Special and General Theory by Albert Einstein is about Einstein’s process in discovering the theory of relativity. The good gives the basis for the many theories of relativity that Einstein worked with.

This book wasn’t really about Einstein’s life. It’s more about the science he pursued and the work he did. He explains it very well, but non-physicists may have a hard time grasping what Einstein is saying. This is a complicated read, but it’s very informative and has a lot of great knowledge. This is a wonderful read for those who appreciate Einstein and want to know more about his research.

• Authors : Albert Einstein (Author)
• Publisher : Dover Publications; Illustrated Edition (October 18, 2010)
• Pages : 192 pages

4. Einstein’s Dreams

Albert Einstein was an incredible man with deep, thoughtful ideas. Einstein’s Dream by Alan Lightman is a fictional collage of stories that Einstein dreamed up. This work puts a different light on Einstein and the work he did. It takes his importance to a new level. LIghtman was clever to think up this book. It’s interesting, intriguing, and fun. It’s a fairly quick read. It feels like no time goes by when reading this book.

This book is fiction, but it is based on Einstein and research that has been done on him. Historical fiction is great because it’s interesting, yet still educational and informed. This book will help readers have exciting, stimulating, and beautiful dreams. This book is thought-provoking, yet informative. Anyone who loves Albert Einstein will love this book.

• Authors : Alan Lightman (Author)
• Publisher : Vintage; Illustrated Edition (November 9, 2004)
• Pages : 144 pages

5. Who Was Albert Einstein?

Albert Einstein was a great man who did great work. Who Was Albert Einstein? By Jess Bralier is the perfect book for kids wanting to learn about Einstein and his work. The book is an easy read for kids, and does a great job of explaining who Einstein was. The book is funny and engaging. Kids will laugh and smile as they read about Einstein’s life.

This book is particularly perfect for essay assignments on Einstein. Kids will get to know every aspect of his life in an easy to read way. This is good read for young kids, too. Kids as young as seven can read this book and understand what it is saying. This is a wonderful chapter book that is fun, enlightening, and wonderful for kids of all ages. Einstein would be happy to know kids take an interest in him with this book.

• Authors : Jess Brallier (Author), Who HQ (Author), Robert Andrew Parker (Illustrator)
• Publisher : Penguin Workshop; Illustrated Edition (February 18, 2002)
• Pages : 112 pages

6. The World As I See It

Albert Einstein was known best as a physicist, but he was also a writer. The World As I See It by Albert Einstein is a book full of Einstein’s writings. He was a thoughtful man who was both charming and witty. He was perceptive and cared about the world.

This book is great, but it is edited down from Einstein’s original work. It picks and chooses what is shared, so it doesn’t include the full story. Where there are problems, there are also benefits. Because this book is editing down, it is a quick and simple read. It is interesting and contains easy language. The content of the book is great, but there are many grammatical errors that clutter the story and make it incomprehensible at times.

• Publisher : CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (January 2, 2014)
• Pages : 108 pages

7. I Am Albert Einstein

I Am Albert Einstein by Brad Meltzer is a great kids book about Einstein. The book has lots of great illustrations that accompany the biography. The book discusses Einstein’s childhood, a part of his life that kids can relate to. This book is a quick and easy read. Kids of all ages can enjoy this book, but it’s particularly great for kids aged five- eight. This book is non-fiction, but it reads like fiction. This is a great bedtime story for children that is also highly educational.

This book is part of a series on many other historical figures who did great things. The series does a great job of introducing kids to the people who shaped history, and explaining just what they did. This is a very fun read. It has great pictures and great information.

• Authors : Brad Meltzer (Author), Christopher Eliopoulos (Illustrator)
• Publisher : Dial Books (September 16, 2014)
• Pages : 40 pages

8. Ideas and Opinions

Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein is a book full of Einstein’s essays. This book includes essays for all parts of his life. The essays are full of all kinds of topics with all kinds of opinions.  Einstein discusses relativity, war and peace, human rights, government, religion, science, and economics. These are some of Einstein’s most popular essays gathered in one place. Einstein has a lot of great perspectives.

This book goes to show how brilliant of a mind Einstein was. Einstein even goes on to explain the meaning of life, or what he considers the meaning of life. Einsteins was a brilliant physicist, but he was also a humanist with a large heart, and many thoughtful opinions. Anyone interested in learning about Einstein should read his essays first. They truly grasp his personality and who he was as a person.

• Publisher : Broadway Books; 3rd ed. Edition (June 6, 1995)
• Pages : 384 pages

9. Learn Like Einstein

Albert Einstein had one of the greatest minds in the world. Many others wish for that same mind. Learn Like Einstein by Peter Hollins is a book that does, in fact, helps readers learn like Einstein. This book focuses on tips for learning, studying, and memorizing information. Of course, it doesn’t actually give readers Einstein’s brain, but it bases studying habits on how he learned. This book can help readers increase their reading speed, improve focus and concentration, practice memory techniques created by experts, and cram information in the right way.

This book explores different learning methods and how people learn the way they do. The book looks into learning with music, learning through listening and movement, and how note taking can actually be a disadvantage when studying. This is the perfect book for those who have faulty memory and have a hard time studying for tests. The book is full of plenty of great tips that will help students who failed their past test, ace the next one.

• Authors : Peter Hollins (Author)
• Publisher : PH Learning Inc. (March 18, 2017)
• Pages : 162 pages

10. When Einstein Walked with Godel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought

When Einstein Walked with Godel: Excursion to the Edge of Thought by Jim Holt is more about the scientific aspect of Einstein’s life, and questions it poses today. The book addresses questions like “does time exist?” and “what is infinity?” This book helps readers explore the human mind, the cosmos, and more. Holt explains physics through humor and logic.

This book is informative and interesting. He uses sketches, experiments, and examples to help explain physics and Einstein’s work. The book has many essays on math, physics, and science. It is a lot of great information, but non-scientists should hold off on reading it, because the language is a bit complicated.

• Authors : Jim Holt (Author)
• Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition, First Printing (May 15, 2018)

11. Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum

Albert Einstein’s research on the theories of relativity and in quantum physics in general has changed the world of science. Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum is a book about another man’s research, Lee Smolin. Smolin has researched quantum physics and believes that some of the problems they face are unsolvable. This book has all kinds of information on physics.

The book is full of puzzles, stories, experiments, and so much more. This book delves into the fun part of physics: the labs. This book aims to complete the work Einstein created, and argues that completing his work should be a top priority.  There are many quantum problems that the world faces. By working with Einstein’s previous work and creating new work, those problems could be solved.

• Authors : Lee Smolin (Author)
• Publisher : Penguin Press; Illustrated Edition (April 9, 2019)
• Pages : 352 pages

12. Einstein and the Quantum: The Quest of the Valiant Swabian

Einstein and the Quantum: The Quest of the Valiant Swabian by A. Douglas Stone is about the significance of Albert Einstein and his research. The book discusses Einstein’s relationships with quantum mechanics, religion, and more. The book is a combination of physics, biography, and science.

The book gives a glimpse into his life and how his personal relationships affected his science. Stone has so done so much research on Einstein and truly shares the person he was to the best of his ability. This book doesn’t diminish him to his work, but also discusses the person behind it. Albert Einstein was essential to the evolution of science, and Stone proves it with this book. This book is not too complicated of a read, and is actually very interesting. It’s a little long, but definitely worth the read.

• Authors : A. Douglas Stone (Author, Preface)
• Publisher : Princeton University Press; Revised Edition (October 6, 2015)
• Pages : 344 pages

13. Simply Einstein: Relativity Demystified

Simply Einstein: Relativity Demystified by Richard Wolfson is a book about relativity that is easy to read. This book was not created for physicists. In fact, it was made for everyone but. Wolfson is a physicist himself. With this book, he aims to explain different elements of physics and the ideas that are associated with them. Wolfson explains time travel, black holes, curved space, and more in this book. He was everyone to have an idea of how physics works. He answers many commonly asked questions.

This book isn’t easy to read, but it is much simpler than many other physics books. The language isn’t too complicated. It is a great book for beginners, and anyone else who wants to know about Einstein, physics, and the theory of relativity.

• Authors : Richard Wolfson (Author)
• Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company; Illustrated Edition (November 17, 2003)
• Pages : 288 pages

14. Relativity: The Special and the General Theory

Relativity: The Special and the General Theory by Albert Einstein is on its 100th anniversary edition. The book was written by Einstein, but this edition has commentary from Hanoch Gutfreund and Jürgen Renn. Einstein wrote this book for popular audiences. His intent was to explain relativity to modern audiences who wouldn’t ordinarily understand it. He wanted everyone to understand his work, not just physicists.

This book has an introduction, and an analysis of Einstein’s work that is contributed by Gutfreund and Renn. This book is the perfect read for curious minds who love Einstein. This book is very helpful for understanding Einstein and the work he did. He was a brilliant man who wanted everyone to understand him.

• Authors : Albert Einstein (Author), Hanoch Gutfreund (Commentary), Jürgen Renn (Commentary)
• Publisher : Princeton University Press; 100th Anniversary ed. Edition (June 16, 2015)
• Pages : 320 pages

15. Gravity: An Introduction to Einstein’s General Relativity

Gravity: An Introduction to Einstein’s General Relativity by James B. Hartie is an introduction to general relativity and the work of Einstein. This book is informative and thought-provoking. It is the perfect book for physics professors to use as their class textbook. The book has information on Einstein, but also on physics in general. The book is the perfect combination of math and science.

This book includes discussions on many topics: The Global Positioning System, black holes, X-ray sources, pulsars, quasars, the Big Bang, gravitational waves, and more. This book is super informative. It has lots of knowledge on physics that goes into depth on all of the topics. This book can be boring at times, but it is certainly not under-researched.

• Authors : James Hartle (Author)
• Publisher : Pearson (December 26, 2002)
• Pages : 608 pages

16. The Ultimate Quotable Einstein

Albert Einstein was a notable man who said a lot of great things. The Ultimate Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice includes some of the best quotes Einstein said. The book is full of 1,600 quotes that came from the brilliant mind of Einstein. The books fall understand different topics, like “On Race and Prejudice,” and “On and to Children.”

In addition to the many Einstein quotes this book has, it also has a chronology of Einstein’s life and achievements. This book is perfect for people who want to use an Einstein quote, but have no source to back it up. This book works perfectly for a “works cited” page in an essay. Instead of scouring through countless quotes, this book helps readers find and choose the best one for them.

• Authors : Albert Einstein (Author), Alice Calaprice (Editor), Freeman Dyson (Foreword)
• Publisher : Princeton University Press; Illustrated Edition (September 23, 2013)

17. Einstein’s War: How Relativity Triumphed Amid the Victorious Nationalism of World War I

Albert Einstein’s work spans wars, two of the most notable being World War I and World War II. Einstein’s War: How Relativity Triumphed Amid the Victorious Nationalism of World War I by Matthew Stanley discusses how Einstein’s work impacted World War I.

Even though Einstein is more associated with World War II, the first world war had a great deal in contributing to his success. It shaped him to be the person he was. During this war, Einstein was working on general relativity that helped blockading in Berlin. Even though he never fought, he did a lot of behind the scenes science work for the war. This book delves into the work Einstein did for the war. He did many notable things that would not have been possible without his position in the first world war.

• Authors : Matthew Stanley (Author)
• Publisher : Dutton; Illustrated Edition (May 21, 2019)
• Pages : 400 pages

18. Einstein’s Relativity and the Quantum Revolution: Modern Physics for Non-Scientists

Einstein’s Relativity and the Quantum Revolution: Modern Physics for Non- Scientists by Richard Wolfson and The Great Courses is an introduction to modern physics. The book is on its second edition, so it is up to date on all kinds of new information. The book is meant for non-scientists. It aims to help everyday people who don’t know about physics. This book makes complex concepts simple and easy to understand.

The book can be read, but it is also audible, so readers can enjoy listening to the actual lecture. This book is great for beginner scientists, and anyone who wants to understand physics and the work that Einstein spent his life committing to.

• Authors : Professor Richard Wolfson (Author)

19. Einstein: The Man, The Genius, and the Theory of Relativity

Albert Einstein was a great man of history. He spent his early years making science experiments in Germany before and the work he did when he moved to the United States. Einstein: The Man, The Genius, and the Theory of Relativity by Walter Issacson is all about Einstein’s life. This book discusses every aspect of Einstein’s life, from E= MC2 to his marriages and children.

The book isn’t too long, so it focuses on the highlights of Einstein’s life. Because of this, the book does not get too into depth into Einstein’s life. The book has lots of great information, but only scratches the surface on Einstein. The book has wonderful accompanying photos that help readers understand the content of the book in an interesting way.

• Publisher : Andre Deutsch; Illustrated Edition (August 7, 2018)
• Pages : 160 pages

20. Einstein on the Run: How Britain Saved The World’s Greatest Scientist

It is a known fact that Einstein is a German who lived in the United States. What is lesser known is the fact that he lived in Britain, too. Einstein on the Run: How Britain Saved the World’s Greatest Scientist by Andrew Robinson is about Einstein’s short residence in England. The place was a perfect refuge for Einstein against Nazi assasins.

The book recounts the work Einstein did in England, how the country saved his life, and why he eventually left. Einstein spent plenty of time in England, and almost became a citizen. But what changed? And what effect did it have on his science? These are the questions addressed in this book. Living in England wasn’t a huge part of Einstein’s life, but it was important.

• Authors : Andrew Robinson (Author)
• Publisher : Yale University Press; Illustrated Edition (October 8, 2019)
• Pages : 376 pages

Choosing the Best Albert Einstein Books

Albert Einstein was an incredible physicist, and an even more incredible man. He did amazing work with physics and science. When people hear E=MC2, they think of Einstein. He discovered the theory of relativity and changed the way people viewed and used physics. Einstein passed away in 1955, but he is still relevant in the world of science. He was a kind, empathetic soul who did amazing work. These books explain just the kind of man and he was, and helps readers understand him on a whole new level. They explain his history, his science, and best of all, they explain his character.

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During his stay at the Patent Office, and in his spare time, he 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. He 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 1920s, 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.

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel . It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures . To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.

* Albert Einstein was formally associated with the Institute for Advanced Study located in Princeton, New Jersey.

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Albert Einstein

One of the most influential scientists of the 20 th century, Albert Einstein was a physicist who developed the theory of relativity.

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Who Was Albert Einstein?

Quick facts, early life, family, and education, einstein’s iq, patent clerk, inventions and discoveries, nobel prize in physics, wives and children, travel diaries, becoming a u.s. citizen, einstein and the atomic bomb, time travel and quantum theory, personal life, death and final words, einstein’s brain, einstein in books and movies: "oppenheimer" and more.

Albert Einstein was a German mathematician and physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity. In 1921, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. In the following decade, he immigrated to the United States after being targeted by the German Nazi Party. His work also had a major impact on the development of atomic energy. In his later years, Einstein focused on unified field theory. He died in April 1955 at age 76. With his passion for inquiry, Einstein is generally considered the most influential physicist of the 20 th century.

FULL NAME: Albert Einstein BORN: March 14, 1879 DIED: April 18, 1955 BIRTHPLACE: Ulm, Württemberg, Germany SPOUSES: Mileva Einstein-Maric (1903-1919) and Elsa Einstein (1919-1936) CHILDREN: Lieserl, Hans, and Eduard ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Pisces

Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm, Württemberg, Germany. He grew up in a secular Jewish family. His father, Hermann Einstein, was a salesman and engineer who, with his brother, founded Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Cie, a Munich-based company that mass-produced electrical equipment. Einstein’s mother, the former Pauline Koch, ran the family household. Einstein had one sister, Maja, born two years after him.

Einstein attended elementary school at the Luitpold Gymnasium in Munich. However, he felt alienated there and struggled with the institution’s rigid pedagogical style. He also had what were considered speech challenges. However, he developed a passion for classical music and playing the violin, which would stay with him into his later years. Most significantly, Einstein’s youth was marked by deep inquisitiveness and inquiry.

Toward the end of the 1880s, Max Talmud, a Polish medical student who sometimes dined with the Einstein family, became an informal tutor to young Einstein. Talmud had introduced his pupil to a children’s science text that inspired Einstein to dream about the nature of light. Thus, during his teens, Einstein penned what would be seen as his first major paper, “The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields.”

Hermann relocated the family to Milan, Italy, in the mid-1890s after his business lost out on a major contract. Einstein was left at a relative’s boarding house in Munich to complete his schooling at the Luitpold.

Faced with military duty when he turned of age, Einstein allegedly withdrew from classes, using a doctor’s note to excuse himself and claim nervous exhaustion. With their son rejoining them in Italy, his parents understood Einstein’s perspective but were concerned about his future prospects as a school dropout and draft dodger.

Einstein was eventually able to gain admission into the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, specifically due to his superb mathematics and physics scores on the entrance exam. He was still required to complete his pre-university education first and thus attended a high school in Aarau, Switzerland, helmed by Jost Winteler. Einstein lived with the schoolmaster’s family and fell in love with Winteler’s daughter Marie. Einstein later renounced his German citizenship and became a Swiss citizen at the dawn of the new century.

Einstein’s intelligence quotient was estimated to be around 160, but there are no indications he was ever actually tested.

Psychologist David Wechsler didn’t release the first edition of the WAIS cognitive test, which evolved into the WAIS-IV test commonly used today, until 1955—shortly before Einstein’s death. The maximum score of the current version is 160, with an IQ of 135 or higher ranking in the 99 th percentile.

Magazine columnist Marilyn vos Savant has the highest-ever recorded IQ at 228 and was featured in the Guinness Book of World Records in the late 1980s. However, Guinness discontinued the category because of debates about testing accuracy. According to Parade , individuals believed to have higher IQs than Einstein include Leonardo Da Vinci , Marie Curie , Nikola Tesla , and Nicolaus Copernicus .

After graduating from university, Einstein faced major challenges in terms of finding academic positions, having alienated some professors over not attending class more regularly in lieu of studying independently.

Einstein eventually found steady work in 1902 after receiving a referral for a clerk position in a Swiss patent office. While working at the patent office, Einstein had the time to further explore ideas that had taken hold during his university studies and thus cemented his theorems on what would be known as the principle of relativity.

In 1905—seen by many as a “miracle year” for the theorist—Einstein had four papers published in the Annalen der Physik , one of the best-known physics journals of the era. Two focused on the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion. The two others, which outlined E=MC 2 and the special theory of relativity, were defining for Einstein’s career and the course of the study of physics.

As a physicist, Einstein had many discoveries, but he is perhaps best known for his theory of relativity and the equation E=MC 2 , which foreshadowed the development of atomic power and the atomic bomb.

Theory of Relativity

Einstein first proposed a special theory of relativity in 1905 in his paper “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” which took physics in an electrifying new direction. The theory explains that space and time are actually connected, and Einstein called this joint structure space-time.

By November 1915, Einstein completed the general theory of relativity, which accounted for gravity’s relationship to space-time. Einstein considered this theory the culmination of his life research. He was convinced of the merits of general relativity because it allowed for a more accurate prediction of planetary orbits around the sun, which fell short in Isaac Newton ’s theory. It also offered a more expansive, nuanced explanation of how gravitational forces worked.

Einstein’s assertions were affirmed via observations and measurements by British astronomers Sir Frank Dyson and Sir Arthur Eddington during the 1919 solar eclipse, and thus a global science icon was born. Today, the theories of relativity underpin the accuracy of GPS technology, among other phenomena.

Even so, Einstein did make one mistake when developing his general theory, which naturally predicted the universe is either expanding or contracting. Einstein didn’t believe this prediction initially, instead holding onto the belief that the universe was a fixed, static entity. To account for, this he factored in a “cosmological constant” to his equation. His later theories directly contracted this idea and asserted that the universe could be in a state of flux. Then, astronomer Edwin Hubble deduced that we indeed inhabit an expanding universe. Hubble and Einstein met at the Mount Wilson Observatory near Los Angeles in 1931.

Decades after Einstein’s death, in 2018, a team of scientists confirmed one aspect of Einstein’s general theory of relativity: that the light from a star passing close to a black hole would be stretched to longer wavelengths by the overwhelming gravitational field. Tracking star S2, their measurements indicated that the star’s orbital velocity increased to over 25 million kph as it neared the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy, its appearance shifting from blue to red as its wavelengths stretched to escape the pull of gravity.

Einstein’s E=MC²

Einstein’s 1905 paper on the matter-energy relationship proposed the equation E=MC²: the energy of a body (E) is equal to the mass (M) of that body times the speed of light squared (C²). This equation suggested that tiny particles of matter could be converted into huge amounts of energy, a discovery that heralded atomic power.

Famed quantum theorist Max Planck backed up the assertions of Einstein, who thus became a star of the lecture circuit and academia, taking on various positions before becoming director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics (today is known as the Max Planck Institute for Physics) from 1917 to 1933.

In 1921, Einstein won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect, since his ideas on relativity were still considered questionable. He wasn’t actually given the award until the following year due to a bureaucratic ruling, and during his acceptance speech, he still opted to speak about relativity.

Einstein married Mileva Maric on January 6, 1903. While attending school in Zurich, Einstein met Maric, a Serbian physics student. Einstein continued to grow closer to Maric, but his parents were strongly against the relationship due to her ethnic background.

Nonetheless, Einstein continued to see her, with the two developing a correspondence via letters in which he expressed many of his scientific ideas. Einstein’s father passed away in 1902, and the couple married shortly thereafter.

Einstein and Mavic had three children. Their daughter, Lieserl, was born in 1902 before their wedding and might have been later raised by Maric’s relatives or given up for adoption. Her ultimate fate and whereabouts remain a mystery. The couple also had two sons: Hans Albert Einstein, who became a well-known hydraulic engineer, and Eduard “Tete” Einstein, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a young man.

The Einsteins’ marriage would not be a happy one, with the two divorcing in 1919 and Maric having an emotional breakdown in connection to the split. Einstein, as part of a settlement, agreed to give Maric any funds he might receive from possibly winning the Nobel Prize in the future.

During his marriage to Maric, Einstein had also begun an affair some time earlier with a cousin, Elsa Löwenthal . The couple wed in 1919, the same year of Einstein’s divorce. He would continue to see other women throughout his second marriage, which ended with Löwenthal’s death in 1936.

In his 40s, Einstein traveled extensively and journaled about his experiences. Some of his unfiltered private thoughts are shared two volumes of The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein .

The first volume , published in 2018, focuses on his five-and-a-half month trip to the Far East, Palestine, and Spain. The scientist started a sea journey to Japan in Marseille, France, in autumn of 1922, accompanied by his second wife, Elsa. They journeyed through the Suez Canal, then to Sri Lanka, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Japan. The couple returned to Germany via Palestine and Spain in March 1923.

The second volume , released in 2023, covers three months that he spent lecturing and traveling in Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil in 1925.

The Travel Diaries contain unflattering analyses of the people he came across, including the Chinese, Sri Lankans, and Argentinians, a surprise coming from a man known for vehemently denouncing racism in his later years. In an entry for November 1922, Einstein refers to residents of Hong Kong as “industrious, filthy, lethargic people.”

In 1933, Einstein took on a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he would spend the rest of his life.

At the time the Nazis, led by Adolf Hitler , were gaining prominence with violent propaganda and vitriol in an impoverished post-World War I Germany. The Nazi Party influenced other scientists to label Einstein’s work “Jewish physics.” Jewish citizens were barred from university work and other official jobs, and Einstein himself was targeted to be killed. Meanwhile, other European scientists also left regions threatened by Germany and immigrated to the United States, with concern over Nazi strategies to create an atomic weapon.

Not long after moving and beginning his career at IAS, Einstein expressed an appreciation for American meritocracy and the opportunities people had for free thought, a stark contrast to his own experiences coming of age. In 1935, Einstein was granted permanent residency in his adopted country and became an American citizen five years later.

In America, Einstein mostly devoted himself to working on a unified field theory, an all-embracing paradigm meant to unify the varied laws of physics. However, during World War II, he worked on Navy-based weapons systems and made big monetary donations to the military by auctioning off manuscripts worth millions.

In 1939, Einstein and fellow physicist Leo Szilard wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt to alert him of the possibility of a Nazi bomb and to galvanize the United States to create its own nuclear weapons.

The United States would eventually initiate the Manhattan Project , though Einstein wouldn’t take a direct part in its implementation due to his pacifist and socialist affiliations. Einstein was also the recipient of much scrutiny and major distrust from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover . In July 1940, the U.S. Army Intelligence office denied Einstein a security clearance to participate in the project, meaning J. Robert Oppenheimer and the scientists working in Los Alamos were forbidden from consulting with him.

Einstein had no knowledge of the U.S. plan to use atomic bombs in Japan in 1945. When he heard of the first bombing at Hiroshima, he reportedly said, “Ach! The world is not ready for it.”

Einstein became a major player in efforts to curtail usage of the A-bomb. The following year, he and Szilard founded the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, and in 1947, via an essay for The Atlantic Monthly , Einstein espoused working with the United Nations to maintain nuclear weapons as a deterrent to conflict.

After World War II, Einstein continued to work on his unified field theory and key aspects of his general theory of relativity, including time travel, wormholes, black holes, and the origins of the universe.

However, he felt isolated in his endeavors since the majority of his colleagues had begun focusing their attention on quantum theory. In the last decade of his life, Einstein, who had always seen himself as a loner, withdrew even further from any sort of spotlight, preferring to stay close to Princeton and immerse himself in processing ideas with colleagues.

In the late 1940s, Einstein became a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), seeing the parallels between the treatment of Jews in Germany and Black people in the United States. He corresponded with scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois as well as performer Paul Robeson and campaigned for civil rights, calling racism a “disease” in a 1946 Lincoln University speech.

Einstein was very particular about his sleep schedule, claiming he needed 10 hours of sleep per day to function well. His theory of relativity allegedly came to him in a dream about cows being electrocuted. He was also known to take regular naps. He is said to have held objects like a spoon or pencil in his hand while falling asleep. That way, he could wake up before hitting the second stage of sleep—a hypnagogic process believed to boost creativity and capture sleep-inspired ideas.

Although sleep was important to Einstein, socks were not. He was famous for refusing to wear them. According to a letter he wrote to future wife Elsa, he stopped wearing them because he was annoyed by his big toe pushing through the material and creating a hole.

One of the most recognizable photos of the 20 th century shows Einstein sticking out his tongue while leaving his 72 nd birthday party on March 14, 1951.

According to Discovery.com , Einstein was leaving his party at Princeton when a swarm of reporters and photographers approached and asked him to smile. Tired from doing so all night, he refused and rebelliously stuck his tongue out at the crowd for a moment before turning away. UPI photographer Arthur Sasse captured the shot.

Einstein was amused by the picture and ordered several prints to give to his friends. He also signed a copy of the photo that sold for $125,000 at a 2017 auction.

Einstein died on April 18, 1955, at age 76 at the University Medical Center at Princeton. The previous day, while working on a speech to honor Israel’s seventh anniversary, Einstein suffered an abdominal aortic aneurysm.

He was taken to the hospital for treatment but refused surgery, believing that he had lived his life and was content to accept his fate. “I want to go when I want,” he stated at the time. “It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.”

According to the BBC, Einstein muttered a few words in German at the moment of his death. However, the nurse on duty didn’t speak German so their translation was lost forever.

In a 2014 interview , Life magazine photographer Ralph Morse said the hospital was swarmed by journalists, photographers, and onlookers once word of Einstein’s death spread. Morse decided to travel to Einstein’s office at the Institute for Advanced Studies, offering the superintendent alcohol to gain access. He was able to photograph the office just as Einstein left it.

After an autopsy, Einstein’s corpse was moved to a Princeton funeral home later that afternoon and then taken to Trenton, New Jersey, for a cremation ceremony. Morse said he was the only photographer present for the cremation, but Life managing editor Ed Thompson decided not to publish an exclusive story at the request of Einstein’s son Hans.

During Einstein’s autopsy, pathologist Thomas Stoltz Harvey had removed his brain, reportedly without his family’s consent, for preservation and future study by doctors of neuroscience.

However, during his life, Einstein participated in brain studies, and at least one biography claimed he hoped researchers would study his brain after he died. Einstein’s brain is now located at the Princeton University Medical Center. In keeping with his wishes, the rest of his body was cremated and the ashes scattered in a secret location.

In 1999, Canadian scientists who were studying Einstein’s brain found that his inferior parietal lobe, the area that processes spatial relationships, 3D-visualization, and mathematical thought, was 15 percent wider than in people who possess normal intelligence. According to The New York Times , the researchers believe it might help explain why Einstein was so intelligent.

In 2011, the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia received thin slices of Einstein’s brain from Dr. Lucy Rorke-Adams, a neuropathologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and put them on display. Rorke-Adams said she received the brain slides from Harvey.

Since Einstein’s death, a veritable mountain of books have been written on the iconic thinker’s life, including Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson and Einstein: A Biography by Jürgen Neffe, both from 2007. Einstein’s own words are presented in the collection The World As I See It .

Einstein has also been portrayed on screen. Michael Emil played a character called “The Professor,” clearly based on Einstein, in the 1985 film Insignificance —in which alternate versions of Einstein, Marilyn Monroe , Joe DiMaggio , and Joseph McCarthy cross paths in a New York City hotel.

Walter Matthau portrayed Einstein in the fictional 1994 comedy I.Q. , in which he plays matchmaker for his niece played by Meg Ryan . Einstein was also a character in the obscure comedy films I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen (1970) and Young Einstein (1988).

A much more historically accurate depiction of Einstein came in 2017, when he was the subject of the first season of Genius , a 10-part scripted miniseries by National Geographic. Johnny Flynn played a younger version of the scientist, while Geoffrey Rush portrayed Einstein in his later years after he had fled Germany. Ron Howard was the director.

Tom Conti plays Einstein in the 2023 biopic Oppenheimer , directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Cillian Murphy as scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer during his involvement with the Manhattan Project.

• The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.
• A question that sometimes drives me hazy: Am I or are the others crazy?
• A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.
• Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.
• I want to go when I want. It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.
• If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.
• Nature shows us only the tail of the lion. But there is no doubt in my mind that the lion belongs with it even if he cannot reveal himself to the eye all at once because of his huge dimension. We see him only the way a louse sitting upon him would.
• [T]he distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.
• Living in this “great age,” it is hard to understand that we belong to this mad, degenerate species, which imputes free will to itself. If only there were somewhere an island for the benevolent and the prudent! Then also I would want to be an ardent patriot.
• I, at any rate, am convinced that He [God] is not playing at dice.
• How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it.
• I regard class differences as contrary to justice and, in the last resort, based on force.
• I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves—this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth.
• My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault and no merit of my own.
• The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.
• An autocratic system of coercion, in my opinion, soon degenerates. For force always attracts men of low morality, and I believe it to be an invariable rule that tyrants of genius are succeeded by scoundrels.
• My passionate interest in social justice and social responsibility has always stood in curious contrast to a marked lack of desire for direct association with men and women. I am a horse for single harness, not cut out for tandem or team work. I have never belonged wholeheartedly to country or state, to my circle of friends, or even to my own family.
• Everybody is a genius.

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Top 5 Books on Albert Einstein and 10 Books He Recommended

The best books on albert einstein and books he recommended reading.

There are countless books on Albert Einstein, and it comes with good reason, after all, he is widely acknowledged as being one of the greatest geniuses of all time. Perhaps best known for developing the theory of relativity and making important contributions to the development of quantum mechanics, we’ve curated a list of amazing reads that seek to rationalize the complex inner workings of this historic physicist.

Long before his brilliance unfolded upon a global stage, and shortly after graduating from college, a 23-year-old Einstein was working for minimum wage in a Swiss patent office. That’s about the time when he and some newfound friends, Maurice Solovine and Conrad Habicht, formed an informal weekly discussion group to which they gave the grandiloquent name “Olympia Academy.”

Over drinks and cigars, these young lads discussed intellectually thrilling ideas ranging from philosophy to physics to whatever topics could be pondered in between. Even after the club broke up a few years later, Einstein said it influenced many of his theories . Thus, we’ve included in this guide to his book recommendations many of the texts that played a foundational role in shaping the way we now view our place amongst the grand scheme of the universe.

Keep in mind, as your own genius continues blossoming in the pursuit of life’s truths, Einstein did once famously caution that “reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.”

Nonetheless, reading clearly played a profound role in molding Albert Einstein as a person, and furthermore, this favorite educational activity of his must have had something to do with the spirited – and scientifically groundbreaking for that matter – approach he took to life.

Therefore, in order to get to the bottom of what inspired who is arguably humanity’s smartest man to the pinnacle of scientific success, we’ve compiled a list that starts with 5 books on Albert Einstein and ends with 10 books that he read himself and would certainly recommend to others as well.

Einstein by Walter Isaacson

How did Albert Einstein’s mind work? What made him a genius? Isaacson’s biography shows how his scientific imagination sprang from the rebellious nature of his personality. His fascinating story is a testament to the connection between creativity and freedom.

Based on newly released personal letters of Einstein, this book explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk – a struggling father in a difficult marriage who couldn’t get a teaching job or a doctorate – became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom, and the universe. His success came from questioning conventional wisdom and marveling at mysteries that struck others as mundane. This led him to embrace a morality and politics based on respect for free minds, free spirits, and free individuals.

These traits are just as vital for this new century of globalization, in which our success will depend on our creativity, as they were for the beginning of the last century, when Einstein helped usher in the modern age.

Einstein 1905 by John S. Rigden

For Albert Einstein, 1905 was a remarkable year. It was also a miraculous year for the history and future of science. In six short months, from March through September of that year, Einstein published five papers that would transform our understanding of nature. This unparalleled period is the subject of John Rigden’s book, which deftly explains what distinguishes 1905 from all other years in the annals of science, and elevates Einstein above all other scientists of the twentieth century.

Rigden chronicles the momentous theories that Einstein put forth beginning in March 1905: his particle theory of light, rejected for decades but now a staple of physics; his overlooked dissertation on molecular dimensions; his theory of Brownian motion; his theory of special relativity; and the work in which his famous equation, E = mc 2 , first appeared. Through his lucid exposition of these ideas, the context in which they were presented, and the impact they had – and still have – on society, Rigden makes the circumstances of Einstein’s greatness thoroughly and captivatingly clear.

One hundred years after Einstein’s prodigious accomplishment, this book invites us to learn about ideas that have influenced our lives in almost inconceivable ways, and to appreciate their author’s status as the standard of greatness in twentieth-century science.

Einstein on Politics by David Rowe and Robert Schulmann

The most famous scientist of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein was also one of the century’s most outspoken political activists. Deeply engaged with the events of his tumultuous times, from the two world wars and the Holocaust, to the atomic bomb and the Cold War, to the effort to establish a Jewish homeland, Einstein was a remarkably prolific political writer, someone who took courageous and often unpopular stands against nationalism, militarism, anti-Semitism, racism, and McCarthyism.

In  Einstein on Politics , leading Einstein scholars David Rowe and Robert Schulmann gather Einstein’s most important public and private political writings and put them into historical context. The book reveals a little-known Einstein – not the ineffectual and naive idealist of popular imagination, but a principled, shrewd pragmatist whose stands on political issues reflected the depth of his humanity.

Nothing encapsulates Einstein’s profound involvement in twentieth-century politics like the atomic bomb. Here we read the former militant pacifist’s 1939 letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning that Germany might try to develop an atomic bomb. But the book also documents how Einstein tried to explain this action to Japanese pacifists after the United States used atomic weapons to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki, events that spurred Einstein to call for international control of nuclear technology.

The Born-Einstein Letters by Albert Einstein and Max Born

A classic collection of correspondence between two Nobel Prize winners, The Born-Einstein Letters is also highly topical: scientists continue to struggle with quantum physics, their role in wartime, and the public’s misunderstanding.

The World As I See It by Albert Einstein

Among the best books on Albert Einstein is none other than one written by the man himself. To the majority of people, Einstein’s theory is a complete mystery. Their attitude towards Einstein is like that of Mark Twain towards the writer of a work on mathematics: here was a man who had written an entire book of which Mark could not understand a single sentence. Einstein, therefore, is great in the public eye partly because he has made revolutionary discoveries which cannot be translated into the common tongue.

We stand in proper awe of a man whose thoughts move on heights far beyond our range, whose achievements can be measured only by the few who are able to follow his reasoning and challenge his conclusions. There is, however, another side to his personality. It is revealed in the addresses, letters, and occasional writings brought together in this book.

These fragments form a mosaic portrait of Einstein the man. Each one is, in a sense, complete in itself; it presents his views on some aspect of progress, education, peace, war, liberty, or other problems of universal interest. Their combined effect is to demonstrate that the Einstein we can all understand is no less great than the Einstein we take on trust.

Albert Einstein Book Recommendations

Don quixote by miguel de cervantes.

Don Quixote has become so entranced reading tales of chivalry that he decides to turn knight errant himself. In the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, these exploits blossom in all sorts of wonderful ways. While Quixote’s fancy often leads him astray – he tilts at windmills, imagining them to be giants – Sancho acquires cunning and a certain sagacity. Sane madman and wise fool, they roam the world together-and together they have haunted readers’ imaginations for nearly four hundred years.

With its experimental form and literary playfulness,  Don Quixote  has been generally recognized as the first modern novel. This Penguin Classics edition, with its beautiful new cover design, includes John Rutherford’s masterly translation, which does full justice to the energy and wit of Cervantes’s prose, as well as a brilliant critical introduction by Roberto Gonzalez Echevarriá.

Source: Leopold Infeld, who worked with Einstein, wrote in his autobiography The Quest  about how much Einstein loved Cervantes’s classic tale of the chivalrous knight Don Quixote, “Einstein lay in bed without shirt or pajamas, with Don Quixote on his night table. It is the book which he enjoys most and likes to read for relaxation…”

A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume

Published in the mid-18th century and received with indifference (it “fell dead-born from the press,” noted the author), David Hume’s comprehensive three-volume  A Treatise of Human Nature has withstood the test of time and has had enormous impact on subsequent philosophical thought. Hume – whom Kant famously credited with having “interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy a quite new direction” – intended this work as an observationally grounded study of human nature. He employed John Locke’s empiric principles, constructing a theory of knowledge to serve as a foundation for the evaluation of metaphysical ideas.

Reprinted here in one volume, the  Treatise begins with an examination of the nature of ideas: their origins and connections, modes and substance, and abstract qualities. The work’s considerations of existence, knowledge, and identity explore the ways in which people use these concepts as a basis for firm but unproven beliefs. The second part surveys the passions, from pride and humility to contempt and respect, analyzing their roles in human choices and actions. The book concludes with a meditation on morals and an in-depth explanation of the perceived distinctions between virtue and vice.

One of philosophy’s most important works and a key to modern studies of 18th-century Western thought,  A Treatise of Human Nature  is essential reading for all students of philosophy and history.

Source: By his own admission, this book by an 18th-century Scottish philosopher, that looked to understand the link between science and human nature, had a big influence on Einstein.

Hume’s accomplishment of articulating a scientifically moral philosophy appealed to the physicist as did the book’s call to move from metaphysical speculation towards facts you can observe, reports Big Think . There was also an important caveat to this, according to Hume, that observation alone cannot grasp the laws of nature. This implication had a profound impact on the development of Einstein’s counter-intuitive ideas.

Isis Unveiled by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

ISIS Unveiled was H.P. Blavatsky’s first major literary effort, a critical response to the growing materialism in both scientific and religious institutions, and a vindication of the ageless quest. In the author’s words, Isis “is the fruit of a somewhat intimate acquaintance with Eastern adepts and study of their science…they showed us that by combining science with religion, the existence of God and immortality of man’s spirit may be demonstrated.”

Supported by extensive evidence from religious and mystical traditions, classical scholarship, and the testimony of nature, these volumes aid the student in detecting the vital principles which underlie the philosophical systems of old. Volume I focuses on the prevailing scientific theories of the time, balanced against the “anciently universal Wisdom Religion,” while Volume II examines the creeds of religions past and present, alongside the myths and symbols of various cultures.

Throughout, the author strikes at the root of dogma and affirms the “paramount importance of re-establishing the Hermetic philosophy in a world which blindly believes it has outgrown it.

Source: Listed among his favorite books, Albert Einstein appreciated Blavatsky’s perspective.

The Brothers Karamasov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Brothers Karamasov is a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, and an exploration of erotic rivalry in a series of triangular love affairs involving the “wicked and sentimental” Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and his three sons – the impulsive and sensual Dmitri; the coldly rational Ivan; and the healthy, red-cheeked young novice Alyosha. Through the gripping events of their story, Dostoevsky portrays the whole of Russian life, it’s social and spiritual striving, in what was both the golden age and a tragic turning point in Russian culture.

Set in 19th-century Russia, the book a passionate philosophical novel that enters deeply into questions of God, free will, and morality. It is a theological drama dealing with problems of faith, doubt and reason in the context of a modernizing Russia, with a plot that revolves around the subject of patricide. Dostoevsky composed much of the novel in Staraya Russa, which inspired the main setting. It has been acclaimed as one of the supreme achievements in world literature.

Source: Out of all the world’s books, Albert Einstein considered  The Brothers Karamazov  to be “the supreme summit of all literature” and said that he had learned more from Dostoevsky than any other thinker.

The Analysis of Sensations by Ernst Mach

Insisting that sensation constitutes the data for all science, physical and psychological, Mach articulated an early form of scientific positivism that provided Kulpe and Titchener with an epistemological framework for their emerging views. Conceiving of space and time not as Kantian categories but as the immediate data of experience, Mach also helped lay the groundwork for the Gestaltists’ later recognition of the phenomenal status of extension and duration.

“The biological task of science is to provide the fully developed human individual with as perfect a means of orientating himself as possible,” Mach writes. “No other scientific ideal can be realized, and any other must be meaningless.”

Source: Mach’s principle , in cosmology, hypothesis that the inertial forces experienced by a body in nonuniform motion are determined by the quantity and distribution of matter in the universe. It was so called by Albert Einstein after the 19th-century Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach.

Ethics by Baruch Spinoza

A profoundly beautiful and uniquely insightful description of the universe, Benedict de Spinoza’s Ethics is one of the masterpieces of Enlightenment-era philosophy. This Penguin Classics edition is edited and translated from the Latin by Edwin Curley, with an introduction by Stuart Hampshire.

Published shortly after his death, the Ethics is undoubtedly Spinoza’s greatest work – an elegant, fully cohesive cosmology derived from first principles, providing a coherent picture of reality, and a guide to the meaning of an ethical life. Following a logical step-by-step format, it defines in turn the nature of God, the mind, the emotions, human bondage to the emotions, and the power of understanding – moving from a consideration of the eternal, to speculate upon humanity’s place in the natural order, the nature of freedom and the path to attainable happiness.

A powerful work of elegant simplicity, the Ethics is a brilliantly insightful consideration of the possibility of redemption through intense thought and philosophical reflection.

Source: Einstein agreed with Spinoza’s idea of God, replying to a telegram from a Rabbi Goldstein, “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.”

The Collected Works of Johann Von Goethe

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic. His works include plays, poetry, literature, and aesthetic criticism, and treatises on botany, anatomy, and colour. He is considered to be the greatest German literary figure of the modern era.

Source: Einstein kept a bust of Goethe and was known to quote the writer to his German-speaking assistants. In a 1932 letter to Leopold Casper, Einstein wrote that he admire Goethe as “a poet without peer, and as one of the smartest and wisest men of all time.” He added that, “even his scholarly ideas deserve to be held in high esteem, and his faults are those of any great man.”

A System of Logic by John Stuart Mill

A System of Logic , in two volumes, was published in 1843. Book VI is Mill’s attempt to formulate a logic of the human sciences – including history, psychology, and sociology – based on casual explanation conceived in Humean terms.

Source: At about the time he started his job in the patent office in Bern in 1902, Einstein and some newfound friends, Maurice Solovine and Conrad Habicht, formed an informal weekly discussion group to which they gave the grandiloquent name “Olympia Academy.” Thanks to Solovine, we know that they read A System of Logic .

Science and Hypothesis by Henry Poincare

Science and Hypothesis is a study written in 1902, by the French mathematician, Henri Poincaré. It was designed with non-specialist readers in mind, and contains information on mathematics, space, physics and biology. The main theme of this work is that the absolute truth of science is non-existent. It postulates that many scientific beliefs are closer to convenient conventions than valid explanations.

Source: Derived from the list of Olympia Academy books, Albert Einstein particularly enjoyed this read.

None by B. Kovner

Jacob Adler, a Yiddish humorist whose contributions under the name of B. Kovner were a regular feature of The Jewish Daily Forward wrote a dozen books, 18,000 poems, numerous plays, and more than” 30,000 humorous articles.

Source: Einstein loved reading Adler’s funny stories during the last months of his life.

The Grammar of Science by Karl Pearson

Published in 1892, The Grammar of Science argues that the scientific method is essentially descriptive rather than explanatory.

Source: Derived from the list of Olympia Academy books, Albert Einstein recommended this read to the group.

If you enjoyed this guide to the best books on Albert Einstein and the 10 he recommended, be sure to check out our list of 20 Inspirational Books Elon Musk Recommends Reading !

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Book Reviews

This is genius: a new graphic novel imagines conversations between einstein and kafka.

Tahneer Oksman

Turns out Albert Einstein and Franz Kafka lived in Prague at the same time and had the same circle of friends. In the new graphic novel, Einstein in Kafkaland, Ken Krimstein puts us in the room with two 20th century geniuses. Ken Krimstein / Bloomsbury Publishing hide caption

It’s April 1, 1911, and 32-year-old Albert Einstein — former bureaucrat at the Swiss Patent Office, with a half-decade old doctorate in physics from the University of Zurich — sits in a train car with his two sons and his wife, fellow physicist and mathematician Mileva Marić. They are travelling from Zurich to Prague, where Einstein has landed a job as a full professor in theoretical physics, teaching in the German section of what is now Charles University. He has a few things on his mind, including money troubles, but most critical is his unfinished theory of relativity. When they leave the city 15 months later, Einstein will have cracked the code.

What happens over the course of this long, mysterious year in Prague is the question driving Ken Krimstein’s new graphic novel Einstein in Kafkaland . Part biography, part historical fiction, Krimstein playfully explores the possibilities, building, with footnotes, on a thorough archive of letters, diaries, and other research. The result, a thought-provoking work made up of comics suffused in a gentle mix of aquamarine watercolors, is equal parts joyful and ruminative. (Think: Alice in Wonderland meets The Lives of the Poets meets Krazy Kat. ) The full subtitle to the book — How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came Up with the Universe — signals the lavish whimsy that goes a long way towards making this such a delightful, inspiring read.

Throughout, cartoon-Einstein sports his characteristic pipe alongside a signature frizzy head of hair. But it’s his obsessive ruminations that perhaps most effectively signal what has become Einstein-the-character, a culmination of all the gossip, public appearances, private words, and first-hand accounts of one of the best-known scientists to have ever lived. Krimstein pairs Einstein’s story with that of Franz Kafka, who was 28, virtually unpublished, and living with his parents in a house in Prague when Einstein arrived for his short but impactful stay. What binds the two together, in addition to an alleged one-time meeting at a weekly salon, is a complementary preoccupation with getting at the truth — “the true truth” — against all odds, and against many other people’s better judgements. For both, a journey to find this truth, whether in science or literature, is one that will sometimes alienate as painfully as it may ultimately bind them to others.

During Einstein’s time in Prague, a time in which he works out his theory of relativity, Kafka will have his own breakthrough. In one long feverish night he will pen the short story, most often known in English as “The Judgment,” which will launch an unparalleled writing career forever transforming art and literature. Like Einstein’s completed theory of relativity, Kafka, too, will offer the world a new way of thinking. It’s a way of thinking that, our narrator assures us, “we’re all still struggling to catch up to.”

Einstein in Kafkaland: How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came Up With the Universe by Ken Krimstein Ken Krimstein/Bloomsbury Publishing hide caption

Despite his title, Krimstein centers his book unevenly, focusing mainly on Einstein, and taking us step by step through the meditations that lead to his discovery. Nonetheless, along the way he also provides readers with glimpses into the life of the perpetually melancholic insomniac insurance clerk, Kafka. We witness, for example, an early morning swimming routine with his best bud — and future literary executor — Max Brod. But what Kafka’s presence in the narrative most crucially enables are imagined conversations between him and Einstein. In these, the two puzzle, and sometimes commiserate, over what it means to see the world differently from everyone else. What happens when you believe so confidently in your own hard-won perceptions that you risk killing the heroes that brought you there?

Author Interviews

A new graphic novel depicts the time einstein and kafka met in prague.

Krimstein, a well-published cartoonist whose previous work includes another delightful graphic biography, The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt , luxuriates in intellectual history shoulder to shoulder with juicy biographical details. He depicts Einstein debating with his foe, Max Abraham; taking fantastical trips into a four-dimensional world with Euclid; and walking and talking with Austrian physicist, and dear friend, Paul Ehrenfest. And he exposes, too, scenes of the future Nobel Prize winner in the bath, trying to kill off bedbugs; or engaging with his young children, and wife, in Gedankenexperiments (thought experiments), to help him think through the problems that continually occupy him.

At its heart, Einstein in Kafkaland is the story of ordinary genius. It unwraps the ways in which genius so often arises out of ordinary circumstances. Perhaps even more compellingly, the book tracks how unimaginable discoveries develop following exchanges with others — friends and family, colleagues and nemeses, neighbors and role models. Aberrations aside, works of genius most wholly emerge in dialogue.

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Tahneer Oksman is a writer, teacher, and scholar specializing in memoir as well as graphic novels and comics. She lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

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Albert Einstein Book: Get Smart about Einstein: Biographies for Kids (Get Smart Biographies of Famous People | Kids Books Series (Ages 8 to 12 and Early Teens)) [Print Replica] Kindle Edition

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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0CFGH1YRM
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Rocket Books (August 10, 2023)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 10, 2023
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