Albert Einstein

German-born theoretical physicist (1879–1955), best known for the special and general theories of relativity and the subject of Walter Isaacson’s 2007 biography Einstein: His Life and Universe. Rejected by the Zurich Polytechnic on his first application, and working as a third-class examiner at the Swiss patent office — having been refused an academic post after his doctoral dissertation was rejected — Einstein published, in 1905 alone, three papers that reshaped physics plus a short addendum containing E = mc².

Isaacson, drawn on at length in Walter Isaacson on Genius, Creativity, and the Craft of Biography, attributes Einstein’s central leap to visual thinking sharpened by his day job: examining patents for synchronising distant clocks by light signal primed him to picture what ‘simultaneous’ means for two observers in relative motion, from which he derived that time itself, not merely its measurement, is relative to the observer. Isaacson notes that it took the physics community roughly four years after publication to accept the theory. Isaacson also discusses Einstein’s marriage to Mileva Marić — a scientific sounding board he treated poorly, and to whom he promised his eventual Nobel Prize money as a divorce settlement, a bet Marić accepted years before he won it in 1921 — and his more practical second marriage to his cousin Elsa.

In the wiki

• Walter Isaacson on Genius, Creativity, and the Craft of Biography — visual thinking and the 1905 papers; the Mileva Marić divorce settlement; used as Isaacson’s test case for the individual-versus-historical-forces question

See also

• Walter Isaacson — biographer