Credit: Copyright © 2016 by David Bodanis. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
Widely considered the greatest genius of all time, Albert Einstein revolutionized our understanding of the cosmos with his general theory of relativity and helped lead us into the atomic age. Yet in the final decades of his life, he was ignored by most working scientists, and his ideas were opposed by even his closest friends. How did this happen? Einstein's imagination and self-confidence served him well when he was young. But when it came to the new field of quantum mechanics, the same traits undermined him. An intimate biography touching on the romances and rivalries of the celebrated physicist, as much as on his scientific goals, "Einstein's Greatest Mistake" reveals what we owe Einstein today — and how much more he might have achieved if not for his all-too-human flaws. Below is an excerpt from "Einstein's Greatest Mistake: A Biography" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016).
Einstein should have been happy. Revered worldwide since Eddington's confirmation of his theory in 1919, he was awarded the Nobel Prize of 1921 for his work in theoretical physics. Movie stars and royalty wanted to be near him; the mobbed appearances continued. But amidst that acclaim, amidst that fame, Einstein began to worry about one consequence of his celebrated theory—and his professional angst was also compounded by growing stress in his personal life.
His divorce from Mileva Maríc (which had finally come through in 1919) had given him freedom, but it had distanced him from his two beloved sons. He tried writing them long chatty letters, but they were in no mood to accept their father's overtures. When he got them to visit him in Berlin, he purchased a telescope and put it on his balcony for them to use, but this didn’t help either. When Einstein did travel to Switzerland to take them on the sort of walking holidays they had liked before, everything was mannered, stilted. Once, in exasperation, he wrote to the elder boy, Hans Albert, from Berlin, taking him to task for being so cold. But Hans Albert was just as angry: his father was abandoning them, so how could he expect any kindness in return? Hans Albert later remembered that he felt as if a "gloomy veil" had come over what was left of their family life. https://www.livescience.com/56689-book-excerpt-einsteins-greatest-mistake.html
