Autobiographical Notes

By Albert Einstein

Book Overview

Delivered with warmth, clarity, and humor, this brief is the closest Einstein ever came to writing an autobiography. Although a very personal account, it is purely concerned with the development of his ideas, saying little about his private life or about the world-shaking events through which he lived. Starting from little Albert's early disillusionment with religion and his intense fascination with geometry, the narrative presents Einstein's "epistemological credo" then moves through his dissatisfaction with the foundations of Newtonian physics to the development of his own special and general theories of relativity, and his opposition to some of the assumptions of quantum theory.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812691792
• ISBN13: 9780812691795
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Open Court
• Length: 95 Pages
• Weight: 0.71 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

The life devoted to objective understanding of nature

This is the autobiographical sketch which Paul Arthur Schillp requested from Einstein for the volume devoted to him in' The Living Philosophers Series'. In other words this particular book is one - chapter of a much larger volume , reprinted at the centennial neither of Einstein's birth or death, but of his annus mirabilis 1905 when he wrote the five papers that revolutionized Mankind's understand of the physical world. Einstein was sixty- seven when he wrote this , and he in his usual lightly humorous vein said that it might constitute an ' obituary '. In fact Einstein lived for nine more years. But of course the great scientific work was done over twenty- five years before he wrote this sketch. In the sketch Einstein traces his own scientific development, and describes briefly his major discoveries. He also explains at the outset his early understanding that the world of human wishes, desires and subjectivities was not to be his prime realm of concern. He wished to be among those who lived in what he regarded as the refined realm of understanding the physical nature and world as a whole. The quest for the impersonal and objective truth through the hard work of thought is the central theme of Einstein's life. And if it yielded him long years of frustration it also provided him with miraculous revelation of a kind the world as a whole would come to wonder at, and be transformed by.