Lately I’ve been fascinated with interviews by Walter Isaacson on Fresh Air and Leonard Lopate about his new book Einstein: His Life and Universe. He has a wonderful talking style, elegantly and eloquently composes Einstein’s work in an approachable fashion while describing a life that still feels alive, though gone for more than a half century. Regardless of your ability to comprehend Einstein, you’ll certainly enjoy his conversation on Einstein.
The
new narrative of Albert Einstein’s life provides hope to every
underachiever out there: He was slow to start speaking, his
teachers predicted early on that he’d never amount to much, and when he
completed his graduate work, he was the only student in his class who
couldn’t land a university position. (Solely due to his life-long intractable difficulty with authority, he had completely put off all of his professors who wrote the recommendations!) And so he wound up working at a
Swiss patent office. The young Einstein was apparently "no
Einstein."
But it was at the patent office that young Albert fleshed out his
theories on relativity, working on the math with his first wife, and conversating with a good friend who was a fellow patent clerk; eventually winning the Nobel Prize. Later,
when he traveled to the United States, he was welcomed as a rock star.
(For more, get the free audio book of Einstein’s Relativity: The Special and General Theory.)
