A Complex Genius

...have seen fit to do on her behalf...

...An astonishing story of intellectual evolution thus comes off sounding at times like a recitation of anecdotes...

...Nevertheless, the marriage lasted until 1919 and embraced his most productive years...

...Perhaps they also fail to recognize that trying to understand how Einstein arrived at his brilliant theories need not be an attempt to denigrate his genius...

...After a 1919 observation proved that gravity could alter the path of light, just as relativity predicted, Einstein became "without question the world's most famous and celebrated scientist," we are told, as well as "the most loved and most hated...

...Pressed to go further by Wise, Einstein replied that a "rigid demand for a 'Jewish State' will have only undesirable results for us...

...Since the early 1980s a dispute concerning Mileva's role in her husband's achievements has been simmering in the pages of publications ranging from Physics Today to the New York Times...

...Along with millions of others, I soon became fascinated by the man behind the theories...

...So I was delighted to read in Denis Brian's Preface that his new biography would focus on the private Einstein, detailing personal struggles "previous biographers left out" or only "covered superficially...

...Revisionist journalist Andrea Gabor added fuel to the flames with her 1995 book, Einstein s Wife, arguing that Mileva was an equal partner in her husband's breakthroughs...

...overlook the fact that the process of making science is often one of "collaborative understanding...

...Einstein charted a similarly idiosyncratic course in the political minefield created in America by the Cold War...

...He argued, Brian reports, that "anti-Semitism was being aroused to account for social conditions, when the true cause of the problem was the devastating economic depression...

...Jews, it said, should be able to immigrate "freely within the limits of the economic absorptive possibilities" of Palestine, which in turn should have a government that made sure there was no "'Majorisation' of one group by the other...

...The evidence, in my own view, is clear at least on one point: At a time before Einstein was comfortably established within the scientific community, he shared his scientific hopes and ideas with Mileva...

...At War's end, Einstein became involved in Zionist efforts to create a Jewish homeland...

...Zionists in the audience were alarmed, though, when he offered that a Jewish state need not be established if an international entity kept the peace between Jews and Arabs...

...The author suggests their relationship never fully recovered from the trauma associated with giving up Lieserl, among other difficulties...

...After receiving a telegram "from an anti-Communist magazine...

...What was seen as his "Socialist bent" attracted the FBI's attention not only to him but also to his secretary, Helen Dukas...

...Born in Ulm, Germany in 1879, Einstein died in Princeton, New Jersey in 1955...

...Some view Einstein's decision to give Mileva the money from his Nobel Prize as acknowledgment of her contribution to his work...

...Here was a "humanist who showed compassion and concern for the children of strangers [but] neglected his own sons and kept the existence of his first, illegitimate child a secret...

...Brian, who accepts the mainstream scholarly position that she "merely helped by looking up data and checking calculations," contends that his largess was mainly part of an effort to get her to agree to a divorce...

...The dispute goes on...

...Einstein deepened Hoover's suspicions with his criticisms of the Red Scare during the McCarthy era, and his 1953 plea that Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who had been linked to Fuchs and convicted of espionage, not be executed...

...It provided the mathematical tools I needed to measure the radius of a neutron star (a member of the class of superdense stellar corpses whose existence still had not been proven when Einstein died, yet whose behavior has been calculated using his equations...

...It is no accident his name has become a synonym for genius...

...He subsequently clarified this view in a statement drafted by his friend Rabbi Stephen Wise...

...Those who dismiss the possibility of her influence, as Denis Brian seems to...

...An ardent pacifist, he not only warned President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939 that the Nazis were probably developing a weapon of hitherto inconceivable power, he stressed that America should follow suit quickly...

...Testifying on January 11, 1946, before a joint Anglo-American Committee on the British Mandate in Palestine, he displayed a sophisticated grasp of the political dynamics of the situation...

...A 1920 edition of the Berliner Tageblatt carried an article by Einstein that condemned the inhumanity of those urging the deportations and provided a penetrating analysis of their hostility...

...Eventually I would personally benefit from the general theory, which tells us that intense gravitational fields bend space and the paths of light...

...In 1921, Einstein agreed to accompany Chaim Weizmann to America on a fundraising tour for the Hebrew University in Jerusalem...

...As a student of physics, I was drawn to Einstein's magnificent special and general theories of relativity...

...What Brian does do admirably is set the Einstein narrative into the surrounding historical context...

...Einstein himself was sometimes the target of anti-Semitic outbursts...

...But he went on to stress that he thought it was futile to try to influence internal affairs in the Soviet Union...

...But after the fact Einstein called the founding of the State of Israel "the fulfillment of our dreams...

...The passions he stirred were intensified by his not hesitating to take strong political and social stands...

...As Germany's economic and political turmoil accelerated and organizations such as Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party (formed in 1920) grew in influence, Einstein's situation became ever more dangerous, especially since he was now decisively asserting his identity as a Jew...

...of passionately debating ideas...

...He had not felt "part of the Jewish race," Brian quotes him as saying, until he "saw and felt the sting of anti-Semitism, particularly in Germany...

...Radical journalist I. F. Stone praised him for rising above "ethnic limitations...

...Brian speculates that the illegitimate child, a girl named Lieserl born in 1902, may have been placed for adoption before she was a year old...

...By 1905 he had arrived at his special theory of relativity, his famous E=mc2 formula, and a conceptualization of light that helped spawn quantum mechanics and would win him a Nobel prize in 1921...

...In 1919 he began "to help Jews who had fled to Germany from Eastern Europe," Brian notes, "even as a powerful lobby in the German government agitated to kick them out...

...Brian sees those 76 years making up a life "full of triumphs and tragic ironies...

...Unfortunately, the biographer rushes through his subject's defining achievements...

...Though he consorted with dignitaries, heads of state and queens, he maintained a serene simplicity that won the hearts of children and appealed to the childlike in-quisitiveness in us all...

...In 1903,followingaperiodof penury, Einstein landed his now legendary job at the patent office in Bern, Switzerland...

...In 1933, with the Nazis consolidating their power and conditions becoming increasingly intolerable for Jews, he finally immigrated to the United States...

...By contrast, physicist Abraham Pais in his 1994 book, Einstein Lived Here, stresses "that at no time in her life did Mileva herself lay claim to shared fame with Einstein, as others...

...FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was alarmed by unsubstantiated charges that the scientist had ties to Klaus Fuchs, a German-born Briton convicted in 1950 of passing atomic secrets to Russia...

...While Brian deftly limns the public controversies Einstein became embroiled in, he does not quite fulfill his promise to plumb the "private life, the earthbound Einstein...

...The New Leader," Brian records, he did speak out against the doctors' death sentences...

...But the reader is left without a full exploration of what may have been the scientist's single most important relationship—his first marriage...

...Some took as evidence of a pro-Soviet bias his initial silence that same year at the news that nine Soviet doctors, six of them Jewish, were to be executed on trumped-up charges...

...Stimulated by notions in the patent applications and spurred in part, according to Brian, by animated discussions with an informal and jokingly named "Olym-pia Academy" of like-minded friends, he began developing epoch-making ideas...

...He harshly criticized British mandate policy as contrary to the interests and harmony of Palestine...

...In 1903 Einstein married the mother, Mileva Marie, whom he had met while both were studying physics at the Federal Polytechnic University in Zurich...

...True, he touches on some profoundly painful personal matters, including the mental illness of Einstein's youngest son, Eduard, and the question of what became of Lieserl...

...Here, too, was a "dedicated democrat" who, after immigrating to the United States, "was constantly accused of being a Communist or a Communist dupe...

...Yet throughout his life the seeming contradictions of this complex man made him a controversial figure...

...Vassar College ALBERT EINSTEIN reshaped our cosmos by supplanting long-treasured concepts of physics with shockingly counterintuitive ideas about the nature of space and time...

...At the University of Berlin, where he was a faculty member, one student interrupted a lecture of his with a death threat...