Biographies usually bore me. But Michio manages to avoid the dry academic prose and the romantic idolatry of the subject. He even manages to give a layman reader like myself a beginner’s grasp of Einstein’s theory of relativity!

The book gives me a respect for the physicists and mathematicians of the world. I was already fascinated with Einstein and was overjoyed to get a peek at his life and mind. ( )

Einstein’s Cosmos, How Albert Einstein’s Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space and Time, by Micho Kaku (pp 233). Professor Einstein once wrote “All physical theories, their mathematical expression notwithstanding, ought to lend themselves to so simple a description that even a child could understand.” While I’m no longer a child, I’d like to think I can understand much that children understand, but apparently I can’t. In reading about Einstein’s theories in this and other books, the various word pictures he used to describe his instructions gets did give me insight into some of his theories, but try as I might, any glimpses I gained as a result never got me past the most rudimentary elements of his thinking. This book, despite the author’s valiant attempt to make this subject matter comprehensible, was part wonderful biography and story telling, and part scientific mumbo jumbo (to me). Obviously, my understanding of science is at its most basic level: water is wet if it’s not a solid or a gas, air is what we breathe and is made up of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide (mostly), fire is often hot, and other basics. What I think I know of physics, notwithstanding a class in high school, comes from episodes of The Big Bang Theory television show. In imminently readable prose, the author walks readers through Einstein’s life, and the extraordinary breakthroughs in theoretical physics he made while working as an unheralded patent clerk. His breathtakingly new theories, then and in later years, overturned much of the world’s understanding of physics and spawned new fields of study and direct and indirect collaborators throughout his life and to the present day. Given my extreme ignorance, I will not feign understanding of his breakthroughs by quoting from the book, but even with my pitiable lack of knowledge, even I could grasp at least a tiny bit of the magnitude of his achievements, at least in the abstract. Micho Kaku walks the reader through Einstein’s work, compares it to his predecessors include Newton and Maxwell, and throws in fellow physicists whose names many of your will know: Planck, Schrodinger (of cat fame), Heisenberg (uncertainty principle), Fermi, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Hubble, Higgs, and more. Despite the many passages that defied my brain cells’ ability to comprehend, this was a fascinating book and was well worth my time. ( )

Very interesting review of Einstein's life and his effect on the world of physics and other fields.

Side Note: He had an open solar plexus chakra from an early age, in my estimation, which led to his youthful renunciation of his German citizenship and his cavalier approach to achieving his goals. I think it served him well. ( )

Excellent view. ( )

En El universo de Einstein, Michio Kaku, un físico teórico innovador y autor del “best seller” Hiperespacio, entrelaza la vida y la obra de Einstein con el fin de poder ver el universo tal y como lo veía Einstein, brindando una mirada privilegiada a su manera de pensar. Aunque sus teorías tuvieron enormes repercusiones, Einstein pensaba realmente en términos de simples imágenes físicas &―trenes a gran velocidad, ascensores cayendo, cohetes, relojes en movimiento&―. En realidad, fue a partir de dos de esas ideas simples como surgió el papel crucial de la relatividad en el movimiento del universo. La primera idea ocupó el pensamiento de Einstein desde que tenía dieciséis años, cuando intentaba imaginar cómo se vería un rayo de luz si corriera a su lado. La paradoja de una onda de luz en reposo le habría conducido finalmente a la relatividad y a E = mc2, la famosa ecuación que ha desentrañado los secretos de las estrellas. Einstein dio con su segunda idea mientras estaba reclinado en su silla en la oficina de patentes de Berna: ¿Qué pasaría –se preguntó- si él y su silla se cayeran? Esta imagen casi cómica le llevó a la idea de que la estructura del espacio y el tiempo es curva, desbancando a la misteriosa “fuerza” gravitacional de Newton. Esta idea, a su vez, nos ha permitido llegar a los agujeros negros y el Big Bang. La lucha infructuosa de Einstein por unificar todas las leyes de la naturaleza procede de su fracaso en dar con una tercera idea. Pero Kaku nos muestra de forma persuasiva cuántas ideas de Einstein de los últimos años de su carrera, anteriormente rechazadas por irrelevantes para la física, han llegado a fructificar en nuevos campos de investigación científica, nuevas tecnologías y varios premios Nobel. Sin olvidar que el espíritu de su búsqueda sigue vivo en la teoría de las cuerdas, protagonista de la física teórica más actual. Einstein sigue siendo uno de los más grandes y más estimados científicos de todos los tiempos, pero su trabajo y su legado han sido frecuentemente malinterpretados. Gracias a la perspicacia de Kaku y su habilidad para explicar en lenguaje llano los conceptos científicos más densos, El universo de Einstein proporciona una forma nueva y estimulante de apreciar la vida y las ideas de Einstein. Traducción de Víctor Zabalza de Torres.