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Free Creations of the Human Mind - Diana Kormos Buchwald and Michael Gordin *****

It's hard to believe that there could be anything more that could usefully be written about Einstein - and then this impressive little book comes along. ('Little' is not a negative here - I love short books that cram a lot in, and this one delivers impressively.) Rather than present us with the classic scientific biography, Diana Kormos Buchwald and Michael Gordin take six different cuts through Einstein's life and work, examining the process that produced his views and beliefs.

After a prologue that brings together Einstein's interests and the challenges he faced we get six chapters. The first contrasts his life and work in Bern (where he had his wonder year of 1905) and Princeton as the 'sage' of the Institute for Advanced Study. We then get sections on relativity (both special and general), on quantum theory, on his sense of place and belonging (whether it be a lack of nationalism or his support for a Jewish state), on war and peace (given Einstein's profound pacifism) and on philosophy of science, leading to the title of this book, derived from a speech Einstein gave in Oxford in 1933 - where he was making clear that it is human reasoning giving structure to what we can discover from experiment and measurement that provides the scientific system.

What really impressed me was getting an understanding that went far deeper than much popular science without ever being overly technical (the authors are historians rather than science writers: we only get enough of the science to give context). One example that stand outs to me was the debate between Einstein and Bohr over quantum theory. The simplistic popular science view (of which I have been guilty in the past) is Einstein laying a foundation but then trying wholeheartedly to focus on the problems of the theory while Bohr defended it. This certainly became the case later on, but there was a period in the 20s when the implications of Compton scattering were taken by Einstein as clear evidence of light being made up of quantum particles, while Bohr was reluctant to take this step wholeheartedly.

This isn't light reading - it takes a bit of work. And the structure does mean there is a certain amount of overlap and non-linearity between chapters. But the reader is richly rewarded if they want to get more of a feel for Einstein's views and how they shaped the world around him. There is so much more to this book that something like Rovelli's hugely popular Seven Brief Lessons (which will soon be out in a 10th anniversary edition at about the same price) - it deserves a wide readership.

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