From Literary Review, Issue 543, August 2025:
About Time
Historians of science have a guilty secret: we don’t particularly enjoy writing about those deemed singular geniuses. The public – or at least publishers – want stories of revolutionaries who stood entirely apart from their peers and predecessors, or, failing that, to see them ‘exposed’ as plagiarists (ideally stealing the work of the oppressed). But science rarely works in such simplistic ways. A century of historical scholarship has shown that the figure of the lone genius is largely mythical.
Still, it remains tempting to think that Albert Einstein is the exception to the rule. Everything about him savours of the preternatural: his discovery, aged just twenty-six, of special relativity while working as a clerk at the Swiss Patent Office; his appearance in later life as a wild-haired guru uttering sage pronouncements about the universe; the sheer weirdness of the general theory of relativity and quantum physics.
Diana Buchwald and Michael Gordin’s marvellous and concise new biography shows that for all his unquestionable brilliance, Einstein almost always worked as part of a broader community rather than delivering vatic pronouncements from on high. Likewise, it shows that his non-scientific commitments, such as pacifism and Zionism, were responses to specific circumstances rather than abstract idealisms.
Hackneyed stories about Einstein’s youthful scientific incompetence are apocryphal. He excelled in mathematics, and his scientific interests were stimulated by his father’s and uncle’s work in electrical engineering. At seventeen, he enrolled at the ETH, a specialist scientific institute in Zurich founded in 1854. There he met his first wife, Mileva Marić, the only woman on the course. Although their love was fuelled by a shared passion for physics, there is no evidence to support the claim that Einstein stole his early discoveries from her.
Those discoveries were announced during the ‘annus mirabilis’ of 1905, when Einstein was working at the Patent Office, a job he took after avoiding conscription into the Swiss army (partly on the grounds of ‘excessive foot perspiration’) and failing to secure a teaching post. But this was no intellectual exile. Einstein was evaluating cutting-edge electrical technologies and continued to interact with scientific counterparts. His two most famous achievements in 1905 were his explanation of the photoelectric effect (the emission of electrons from an object when struck by light) and his development of the special theory of relativity. It had been known for some time that the former was incompatible with standard electromagnetic theory. Einstein’s solution, built upon recent work by Max Planck, posited the existence of particles or ‘quanta’ of light, placing it at odds with the prevailing wave theory.
As for relativity, the fact that the laws of physics are invariant within one’s reference frame had been rendered famous by Galileo almost three hundred years earlier (inside a moving ship, a falling ball appears to move straight down no less than on shore)....
....MUCH MORE
