# Walter Isaacson - Einstein_ His Life and Universe-Simon & Schuster  ## Metadata - Author: [[Isaacson, Walter]] - Full Title: Walter Isaacson - Einstein_ His Life and Universe-Simon & Schuster - Category: #books ## Highlights - A century after his great triumphs, we are still living in Einstein’s universe, one defined on the macro scale by his theory of relativity and on the micro scale by a quantum mechanics that has proven durable even as it remains disconcerting. (Location 327) - His fingerprints are all over today’s technologies. Photoelectric cells and lasers, nuclear power and fiber optics, space travel, and even semiconductors all trace back to his theories. (Location 329) - Einstein’s launch into fame, which occurred when measurements made during a 1919 eclipse confirmed his prediction of how much gravity bends light, coincided with, and contributed to, the birth of a new celebrity age. He became a scientific supernova and humanist icon, one of the most famous faces on the planet. (Location 332) - He made imaginative leaps and discerned great principles through thought experiments rather than by methodical inductions based on experimental data. (Location 340) - A society’s competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity. (Location 364) - As he once declared, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” (Location 370) - Many years later, when others thought that his reluctance to embrace quantum mechanics showed that he had lost his edge, he lamented, “To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself.” (Location 372) - “It is important to foster individuality,” he said, “for only the individual can produce the new ideas.”8 (Location 377) - He was slow in learning how to talk. “My parents were so worried,” he later recalled, “that they consulted a doctor.” (Location 387) - But throughout his life, Einstein had a mild form of echolalia, causing him to repeat phrases to himself, two or three times, especially if they amused him. (Location 404) - Initially, Pauline and Hermann had planned to name the boy Abraham, after his paternal grandfather. But they came to feel, he later said, that the name sounded “too Jewish.”10 So they kept the initial A and named him Albert Einstein. (Location 436) - As the science historian Gerald Holton has noted, Einstein regarded “the classical concept of the field the greatest contribution to the scientific spirit.”18 (Location 490) - “I believe that love is a better teacher than a sense of duty,” he said, “at least for me.”19 (Location 494) - he added in a remark that reflected his view of math and physics as well as of Mozart, “like all great beauty, his music was pure simplicity.”20 (Location 498) - In 1935, a rabbi in Princeton showed him a clipping of the Ripley’s column with the headline “Greatest Living Mathematician Failed in Mathematics.” Einstein laughed. “I never failed in mathematics,” he replied, correctly. “Before I was fifteen I had mastered differential and integral calculus.”29 (Location 542) - In fact, he was a wonderful student, at least intellectually. In primary school, he was at the top of his class. “Yesterday Albert got his grades,” his mother reported to an aunt when he was 7. “Once again he was ranked first.” (Location 545) - “As a boy of 12, I was thrilled to see that it was possible to find out truth by reasoning alone, without the help of any outside experience,” he told a reporter from a high school newspaper in Princeton years later. (Location 569) - There was perhaps one other factor in his decision to leave Germany. Had he remained there until he was 17, just over a year away, he would have been required to join the army, a prospect that his sister said “he contemplated with dread.” (Location 679)