Up and atom

He is a topic as big as the universe.

 Einstein: His Life and Universe

 By Walter Isaacson

 Published by Pocket Books, 2008

 Available at Asia Books, Bt550

 Reviewed by Paul Dorsey

 The Nation

 Albert Einstein once got within 1,400 kilometres of Bangkok, a short distance (in terms of relativity) for someone who travelled little. Having missed out, we can still get to know him quite well in this hefty biography by former journalist Walter Isaacson, though the trip to Southeast Asia gets only a glimpse.

 It's recorded elsewhere that Einstein and his wife Elsa arrived in Singapore via Ceylon on November 2, 1922, and did a little fund-raising among the local Zionists for Hebrew University in Jerusalem before setting sail again for a lecture tour of Japan. Virtually the whole Jewish community of Singapore, numbering around 600, boarded his steamer to greet him.

 One week later, Einstein was awarded the Noble Prize in Physics for his revelations on the photoelectric effect - not for the general or special relativity theories that by then had made him famous. On their inscrutable basis he'd already been given the popstar treatment on his first visit to America in 1921, but the ideas weren't yet ripe enough for the judges in Stockholm.  It was with the cultivation of these greater, unawarded notions that Einstein would wrestle for the rest of his life.

 For most of the 20th century he was the measuring stick by which genius was tallied. By the 1950s his face, framed in a froth of white hair and capped by the diagram of an atom, was in every schoolkid's science textbook. Every micron of his being has been analysed so much that you'd think they'd have cloned him by now.

 But Einstein's ultimately fruitless quest for the unified theory that would meld gravity and electromagnetism led him into the wilderness, where he was watched from afar and with pity by mainstream physicists.

 All of his scientific effort after moving to the US in 1939, Isaacson writes, was devoted to "his own white whale, which he pursued not with the demonic drive of Ahab but with the dutiful serenity of Ishmael".

 He had "no compelling physical insight ... to guide his way, so his endeavours remained a groping through clouds of mathematical equations with no ground lights to orient him."

 It's a Greek tragedy, and Isaacson goes to great lengths to explain why the square pegs would no longer fit in the round holes. But he still sums up Einstein as "the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe".

 Not entirely comfortable with his subject, the author comes across as a CNN cinema correspondent, or one of those old-style reporters at Time. (He's held lofty positions at both.) He can be trite as well as repetitive and vague, as when he says certain childhood books "appear to have been influential", only to report Einstein's own words on the next page: "They were a great influence".

 He sandwiches three pages of careful explanation about Einstein's photoelectric idea with the words "spooky" and "eerie". Neither one applies. But there are great moments as well.

Isaacson recounts the way Einstein worked out his general theory of relativity while he was giving four weekly lectures in Berlin. Presented in exciting "you are there" fashion, it's not quite front-page stuff, yet he gives it the impact of breaking news.

 Those were the glory days. Einstein's quaint and quirky youth and early career had put him permanently outside the box, which was of course where he almost always did his best thinking, and gave him the decidedly anti-social, rebellious thrust to break free of Newton's shackles. He saw things differently.

 Even explained in colourful "thought experiments", like the blind beetle on a curved branch, relativity has never been fully understood by the average layman - the calculations are just too dense - and the misunderstanding has been dangerously edged.

 Beginning with Germany's post-World War I anti-Semitism and continuing to this day, relativity has been often confused with relativism. Einstein never suggested that nothing was absolute, only that time and time and space were. But his proposition happened to coincide with the upheavals of psychoanalysis, art and literature, and it did seem at the time that mankind could no longer cling to anything for sure.

 Still, the struggle to correct the public perception was a mere diversion for Einstein compared to his long battle against quantum mechanics, which was ironically based on his photoelectric theory. This was after the revolutionary had become a reactionary, a  transformation that fuels one of the best parts of the book.

 Much to fury of Neils Bohr and other progressive physicists, Einstein felt the theory of quantum mechanics was incomplete, that it violated common sense. In the place of cause-and-effect stood randomness, and Einstein didn't believe that God would stand for that. "God doesn't play dice," he famously declared.

 Beyond the science, there is the great puzzle of Einstein the man, particularly in politics and in the public eye. You have, for example, the professor raising money for the United Jewish Appeal's refugee work after World War II by counter-signing donors' cheques - so they would get the "autographed" stubs.

 This was who Time magazine named in 1999 the "Person of the Century". He is a topic as big as the universe.