That was when the young patent examiner, still without an academic appointment and stuck in a six-day-a-week clerical job, published a flurry of trail-blazing scientific papers on Brownian motion, light quanta and, above all, special relativity. This can make for tough going, as when Foelsing casually tosses off equations and words like 'kinematic,' 'referential' and 'dynamics' in describing Einstein's 'miracle year' of 1905. Instead, he keeps a tight focus on Einstein's physics, which he describes as 'at the core of his identity.' But unlike them, he touches only lightly on the gossipy aspects of Einstein's life - his somewhat coddled childhood as the gifted scion of a bourgeois German Jewish family, his troubled marriages and siring of an illegitimate child, his indifference to convention and authority. Like other recent biographers, Foelsing makes good use of documents that have only recently become available through the release of Einstein's private papers. 'The depth and variety of Einstein's thinking about nature, the scope and color of his life, and the complexity of his character have,' he admits, 'about them something alarming to a biographer.'Įven so, Foelsing, a physicist- turned-science journalist in his native Germany, manages to bring to life the man who rose from the obscurity of the Swiss patent office not only to shake physics with his revolutionary ideas about space and time but also to become for much of the public the very personification of science. Sometimes saintly, other times fiercely combative, Einstein is, in Foelsing's view, a figure of almost 'unfathomable' subtlety. Yet somehow Albrecht Foelsing, in his massive and richly detailed 'Albert Einstein: A Biography,' has managed to bring a fresh tint to this iconic figure of modern science.Įinstein, as portrayed by Foelsing, is still recognizable as the shaggy-haired genius whose unsettled private life stood in perplexing contrast to his serene contemplation of the universe.

In the four decades since his death, so much has been written about Albert Einstein - as a scientist, humanist and all- purpose sage - it's hard to imagine that anything new could be said about the father of relativity. By Albrecht Foelsing, translated by Ewald Osers

Albrecht fölsing