Free Creations of the Human Mind

A nuanced portrait of Albert Einstein, a world citizen pivotally engaged in politics, humanitarianism, and science. Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was the most influential scientist of the twentieth century, and his influence shows little sign of abating. His work comprises of much of today's understanding of the structure of the microphysical and cosmic universes. Einstein was a man of the modern world, faced with intellectual and existential challenges of extraordinary magnitude, a working scientist immersed in epochal theories of special relativity, the quantum theory, but also in organizational activities and teaching at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. More than any other past scientist, Einstein still pervades popular iconography and has come to symbolize genius, creativity, and innovation infused with humanism, wisdom, and humor. His life is interconnected with so many of the important political and intellectual movements of his era - Zionism, pacifism, Nazism, nuclear weapons, philosophy, civil rights, McCarthyism, the League of Nations, and more- that his views shaped the world he lived in while his persona acquired a formidable patina deposited by generations of apocryphal mythmaking, both during and after his lifetime. Free Creations of the Human Mind: The Worlds of Albert Einstein presents a concise and nuanced account of Einstein's life and work embedded in his intellectual and social contexts, based on the substantial discoveries made through the study of his tremendous personal archive and several generations of assiduous scholarship. By disentangling the public persona from the private man, the rhetorical statement from the heartfelt conviction, this book shows Einstein as a man of the modern world, faced with intellectual and existential challenges of extraordinary magnitude, whose life was framed by turbulent, violent historical events.

Diana Kormos Buchwald is Robert M. Abbey Professor of History and General Editor and Director of The Einstein Papers Project at Caltech, where she shepherded ten volumes of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein and their English translations into print. She is a fellow of the AAAS and the American Physical Society, and member of the Académie Internationale d'Histoire des Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Michael D. Gordin is Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History and Dean of the College at Princeton University. A specialist in the history of modern science, he has published books on nuclear weapons, Albert Einstein, and debates over pseudoscience. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation, and is a member of the Leopoldina, the National Academy of Sciences of Germany.