Tuesday, November 20, 2007
By EVELYN SHIH
STAFF WRITER
Remember when Albert Einstein was named "Person of the Century" by Time magazine in December 1999? Turns out the odds were stacked in his favor.Then-managing editor Walter Isaacson had been gathering material on the great scientist throughout the '90s to make the case for crowning him the most important person of the 20th century. Among the other primary candidates were Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Mohandas Gandhi.
Einstein was a personal hero for Isaacson as a boy. Although he studied history and literature in college and became a journalist, Isaacson was profoundly influenced by the man. His father, an engineer, often spoke admiringly of Einstein and made him a household hero.
Isaacson recently published a new biography, "Einstein: His Life and Universe," based on letters unsealed in 2006. He will be talking about the book at the JCC on the Palisades tonight.
FAST FACTS
WHAT: Lecture on Albert Einstein.
WHERE: JCC on the Palisades; 411 E. Clinton Ave., Tenafly. 201-569-7900 or jcconthepalisades.org for more information.
WHEN: 8 tonight.
HOW MUCH: $8 JCC members, $10 general admission.
Q. What do you think you will highlight in your talk about Einstein?
What I'm going to try to show is that what made Einstein special was his imagination, not just his smarts. We all know smart people, and often they don't amount to much. Einstein ... was an outsider. It came from his Jewishness. He was always a rebel, and it made him think imaginatively.
I'm going to talk about why he believed in God, and why his Jewishness was important to him. When he felt the anti-Semitism rise up, he decided to fight back.
Q. Why were some of Einstein's letters only released in 2006?
His stepdaughter [Margot] died in 1986, and the papers dealt with very personal things, such as his relationships with his kids and two wives. So she asked that the papers be sealed for 20 years so that everyone involved would no longer be around.
Q. What do the letters add to our understanding of such a popular figure?
They gave us a sense of Einstein as a person. ... We sometimes think of Einstein as being a cold and aloof scientist. But if you read these papers, you realize how human he was, how passionate he was.
... Most of it deals with the period of 1915, where he is doing his most important work. So it ties in his personal life with his development of the theory of relativity.
Q. Your previous book was "Benjamin Franklin: An American Life," another project where you relied heavily on documents such as letters to re-create a historical figure. Do you think we can get a picture of who these men truly were from their letters and what others say about them?
I think when you read their letters, when you read their diaries, when you read about what other people said about them, you can touch their lives and understand them.
I do worry about the fact that nowadays we don't leave a lot of letters behind, because we're all talking on the phone and writing e-mail. There were 40,000 pages of Benjamin Franklin letters and almost as much for Einstein. But if somebody were to write a biography of someone today, all they'd have is e-mails that have been erased, probably, and telephone message slips, and they wouldn't be able to re-create the lives as well.
People like Benjamin Franklin wrote 20, 30 letters a day, describing what they did, who they met, who they talked to.
Q. What was it like for you to go back to the books and study science for the purposes of writing the book?
It's like reconnecting with a great joy. As kids we all wonder why the sky is blue, or why a compass needle points north. It's great to be able to reconnect with those simple but beautiful questions we had as kids.
Einstein puzzled over both those questions and answered them, by the way.
E-mail: shih@northjersey.com
Copyright © 2007 North Jersey Media Group Inc.
No comments:
Post a Comment