Dmitri Levitin at Literary Review:
Historians of science have a guilty secret: we don’t particularly enjoy writing about those deemed singular geniuses. The public – or at least publishers – want stories of revolutionaries who stood entirely apart from their peers and predecessors, or, failing that, to see them ‘exposed’ as plagiarists (ideally stealing the work of the oppressed). But science rarely works in such simplistic ways. A century of historical scholarship has shown that the figure of the lone genius is largely mythical.
Still, it remains tempting to think that Albert Einstein is the exception to the rule. Everything about him savours of the preternatural: his discovery, aged just twenty-six, of special relativity while working as a clerk at the Swiss Patent Office; his appearance in later life as a wild-haired guru uttering sage pronouncements about the universe; the sheer weirdness of the general theory of relativity and quantum physics. Diana Buchwald and Michael Gordin’s marvellous and concise new biography shows that for all his unquestionable brilliance, Einstein almost always worked as part of a broader community rather than delivering vatic pronouncements from on high.
more here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.