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The man beneath the electrified halo of hair

This article is more than 16 years old
PD Smith on Walter Isaacson's sympathetic biography of Einstein

Einstein: His Life and Universe
by Walter Isaacson
675pp, Simon & Schuster, £25

In 1900, the pioneer of electromagnetism and thermodynamics Lord Kelvin claimed "there is nothing new to be discovered in physics now". Within five years an unknown patent office clerk in Bern completely revolutionised the subject. You might think that there was nothing new to be said about Einstein. But like Kelvin, you'd be wrong. Walter Isaacson was given advance access to more than 3,000 pages of family correspondence which were kept under lock and key until 2006. As a result his sympathetic biography of "science's pre-eminent poster boy" can justifiably claim to be more comprehensive than any before. Admittedly, the new documents do not add much to our understanding of the science. Isaacson still manages to explain Einstein's revolutionary thinking with an infectious enthusiasm, but it is the man behind the science who is now brought into sharper focus.

Einstein's popular image is as a "secular saint", complete with an "electrified halo of hair", but he was, of course, only human. The story of how Einstein fell head-over-heels in love with his fellow physics student, the Serbian Mileva Mari (his "little witch"), and of their illegitimate daughter, Lieserl (born in 1902), is well known. But by 1914 their marriage was on the rocks and having just moved to Berlin, Einstein was seeing more of his divorced cousin, Elsa, than he was of his wife. Within months of arriving in the German capital, Mileva had returned to Zurich with their two sons. These years, when Einstein was struggling with the complexities of the general theory of relativity as well as coping with the fallout from his disintegrating private life, can now be described in greater detail than before. The correspondence with his young sons is poignant and when Einstein said goodbye to his family at the Berlin train station he had bawled like a child. But as Isaacson points out, "the stubborn patience that Einstein displayed when dealing with scientific problems was equalled by his impatience when dealing with personal entanglements". Indeed, Einstein said he saw science as a means of escaping from the "narrow whirlpool of personal experience".

Einstein married Elsa in 1919. In 1923 he suggested to his secretary that she come and live with him and Elsa. When she laughed at this, he admitted: "You have more respect for the difficulties of triangular geometry than I, old mathematicus, have." He broke off their relationship with the comment that he would have to "seek in the stars" the love he was forbidden on Earth. But this was far from the truth. As the new material shows, he had a series of affairs, "with Elsa's grudging acquiescence".

Isaacson is rarely critical, however. "Personal relationships involve nature's most mysterious forces. Outside judgments are easy to make and hard to verify." This might be true, but there were times in this otherwise impressive work when a more probing analysis of Einstein's personal failings seems necessary. As ever, however, Einstein's immense charm and good humour is his saving grace, as in this impish comment to Mileva in 1924: "You should enjoy what life has given you - like the wonderful children, the house, and that you are not married to me anymore."

Another aspect of Einstein's life that emerges in greater detail than before is his relationship with his sons, to whom he remained both emotionally and geographically distant. Eduard was always his favourite, and when as a young man he began showing signs of mental illness, Einstein was unable to deal with the situation. In 1930 Mileva had to prevent Eduard throwing himself out of their apartment window and he was confined to a Zurich asylum. Three years later Einstein visited en route to a new position in America. This meeting between the world-famous physicist and his mentally-ill son is beautifully described by Isaacson: "Einstein had brought with him his violin. Often he and Eduard had played together . . . The photograph of them on that visit is particularly poignant. They are sitting awkwardly next to each other, wearing suits, in what seems to be the visiting room of the asylum. Einstein is holding his violin and bow, looking away. Eduard is staring down intensely at a pile of papers, the pain seeming to contort his now fleshy face."

This was the last time that Einstein saw either his younger son or his first wife. Isaacson rejects the recent suggestion that autism made Einstein emotionally cold but there were some people, such as Mileva and Eduard, "whom he simply walled out when the relationship became too painful". Einstein knew his own failings. When his life-long friend Michele Besso died in 1955, he told Besso's son that what he admired most about him was that "he managed for many years to live with his wife not only in peace but in continuing harmony - an undertaking in which rather shamefully I failed twice". A month later, Einstein was himself dead. Until the very end, he remained true to the one love of his life - physics. Beside his bed he left a scrap of paper on which was written a final line of symbols and numbers that he hoped might bring him "just a little step closer to the spirit manifest in the laws of the universe".

· PD Smith's Doomsday Men is published by Penguin

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