BOOKS: Einstein: Walter Isaacson

Feb. 11—Walter Isaacson's biography, "Einstein: His Life and Universe," is a book that deserves a second read.

Even though it reveals something many readers would never expect having grown up with photos of the kindly, white-haired, older face of Albert Einstein.

As a young man, Einstein was sort of a jerk.

Given that he was brilliant and that his name has come to be synonymous with genius, this revelation shouldn't be a surprise.

Why else would one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, or any century, have come up with his universe-shaking conclusions as a patent clerk rather than a university academic? Why? Because in pursuing work as an intellectual and as a teacher, young Einstein managed to tick off almost everyone who could have hired him.

He would tear apart a professor's theories and work those criticisms into the same letter that he would ask him for a job. Einstein may have known he was a genius but, to most everyone else, he came across as brash and irritating.

That is until 1905, "the miracle year," when Einstein wrote four papers: One on "radiation and the energy properties of light"; a second on the "true size of atoms"; a third proving "that bodies on the order of magnitude 1/1000 mm, suspended in liquids, must already perform an observable random motion that is produced by thermal motion ..."; and four, a paper on a little something often referred to as the theory of relativity.

As he worked to prove his theories and, as academics and the world came to embrace them, Isaacson details how Einstein softened his personal touch on a large basis, though he remained focused on his work and was often difficult to fathom within the context of his personal relationships.

Isaacson has a deft touch in explaining Einstein's theories. Given that Einstein's 1905 revelations are being discussed by the first 100 pages of this 600-plus-paged volume, these transformations are the bulk of the book.

They are important revelations into Einstein's nature given that the young man who once questioned all previous scientific discovery and rebelled against scientific authority became the old man regarded as the preeminent scientific authority within his own lifetime and beyond.