[PDF] Einstein In Bohemia eBook

Author : Michael D. Gordin
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 360 pages
File Size : 16,30 MB
Release : 2022-02-22
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0691203822

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"Though Einstein is undoubtedly one of the most important figures in the history of modern science, he was in many respects marginal. Despite being one of the creators of quantum theory, he remained skeptical of it, and his major research program while in Princeton--the quest for a unified field--ultimately failed. In this book, Michael Gordin explores this paradox in Einstein's life by concentrating on a brief and often overlooked interlude: his tenure as professor of physics in Prague, from April of 1911 to the summer of 1912. Though often dismissed by biographers and scholars, it was a crucial year for Einstein both personally and scientifically: his marriage deteriorated, he began thinking seriously about his Jewish identity for the first time, he attempted a new explanation for gravitation-which though it failed had a significant impact on his later work-and he met numerous individuals, including Max Brod, Hugo Bergmann, Philipp Frank, and Arnošt Kolman, who would continue to influence him. In a kind of double-biography of the figure and the city, this book links Prague and Einstein together. Like the man, the city exhibits the same paradox of being both central and marginal to the main contours of European history. It was to become the capital of the Czech Republic but it was always, compared to Vienna and Budapest, less central in the Habsburg Empire. Moreover, it was home to a lively Germanophone intellectual and artistic scene, thought the vast majority of its population spoke only Czech. By emphasizing the marginality and the centrality of both Einstein and Prague, Gordin sheds new light both on Einstein's life and career and on the intellectual and scientific life of the city in the early twentieth century"--

Author : Andrew Robinson
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 370 pages
File Size : 42,56 MB
Release : 2019-09-03
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0300234767

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The first account of the role Britain played in Einstein's life--first by inspiring his teenage passion for physics, then by providing refuge from the Nazis In autumn 1933, Albert Einstein found himself living alone in an isolated holiday hut in rural England. There, he toiled peacefully at mathematics while occasionally stepping out for walks or to play his violin. But how had Einstein come to abandon his Berlin home and go '"on the run"? In this lively account, Andrew Robinson tells the story of the world's greatest scientist and Britain for the first time, showing why Britain was the perfect refuge for Einstein from rumored assassination by Nazi agents. Young Einstein's passion for British physics, epitomized by Newton, had sparked his scientific development around 1900. British astronomers had confirmed his general theory of relativity, making him internationally famous in 1919. Welcomed by the British people, who helped him campaign against Nazi anti-Semitism, he even intended to become a British citizen. So why did Einstein then leave Britain, never to return to Europe?

Author : Dennis Overbye
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 436 pages
File Size : 18,88 MB
Release : 2001-10-01
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780141002217

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In Einstein in Love, Dennis Overbye has written the first profile of the great scientist to focus exclusively on his early adulthood, when his major discoveries were made. It reveals Einstein to be very much a young man of his time-draft dodger, self-styled bohemian, poet, violinist, and cocky, charismatic genius who left personal and professional chaos in his wake. Drawing upon hundreds of unpublished letters and a decade of research, Einstein in Love is a penetrating portrait of the modern era's most influential thinker.

Author : Alan Lightman
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 146 pages
File Size : 46,67 MB
Release : 2011-03-02
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0307789748

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A modern classic explores the connections between science and art, the process of creativity, and ultimately the fragility of human existence. “A magical, metaphysical realm ... Captivating, enchanting, delightful.” —The New York Times Einstein’s Dreams is a fictional collage of stories dreamed by Albert Einstein in 1905, about time, relativity and physics. As the defiant but sensitive young genius is creating his theory of relativity, a new conception of time, he imagines many possible worlds. In one, time is circular, so that people are fated to repeat triumphs and failures over and over. In another, there is a place where time stands still, visited by lovers and parents clinging to their children. In another, time is a nightingale, sometimes trapped by a bell jar. Now translated into thirty languages, Einstein’s Dreams has inspired playwrights, dancers, musicians, and painters all over the world. In poetic vignettes, it explores the connections between science and art, the process of creativity, and ultimately the fragility of human existence.

Author : Stefan Zweig
Publisher : Pushkin Press
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 49,66 MB
Release : 2016-03-22
Category : History
ISBN : 1782271554

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Stefan Zweig was a leading talisman of a united Europe of unfettered movement, of pro-active cultural exchange, humane decency and tolerance, all polar opposites of the Nationalist regimes he loathed, and which came to power in the 1930s. In these poignant essays and addresses, forged in the last years or even months of his life, he shows his profound concern for and dedication to the survival of Europe's spiritual integrity. These essays form the natural accompaniment to Zweig's renowned memoir The World of Yesterday, registering the same themes and evoking the same nostalgia for a world brutally consigned to history. They can be seen as a vital addendum to that major work or as a prefiguration. But perhaps even more so than the prose of the memoir, these essays, few in number but rich in content, reveal the essence of Zweig's thought.

Author : David Reid
Publisher : Pantheon
Page : 541 pages
File Size : 41,41 MB
Release : 2016-03-22
Category : History
ISBN : 1101870664

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A brilliant, sweeping, and unparalleled look at the extraordinarily rich culture and turbulent politics of New York City between the years 1945 and 1950, The Brazen Age opens with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s campaign tour through the city’s boroughs in 1944. He would see little of what made New York the capital of modernity—though the aristocratic FDR was its paradoxical avatar—a city boasting an unprecedented and unique synthesis of genius, ambition, and the avant-garde. While concentrating on those five years, David Reid also reaches back to the turn of the twentieth century to explore the city’s progressive politics, radical artistic experimentation, and burgeoning bohemia. From 1900 to 1929, New York City was a dynamic metropolis on the rise, and it quickly became a cultural nexus of new architecture; the home of a thriving movie business; the glittering center of theater and radio; and a hub of book, magazine, and newspaper publishing. In the 1930s, the rise of Hitler and World War II would send some of Europe’s most talented men and women to America’s shores, vastly enriching the fields of science, architecture, film, and arts and letters—the list includes Albert Einstein, Erwin Panofsky, Walter Gropius, George Grosz, André Kertész, Robert Capa, Thomas Mann, Hannah Arendt, Vladimir Nabokov, and John Lukacs. Reid draws a portrait of the frenzied, creative energy of a bohemian Greenwich Village, from the taverns to the salons. Revolutionaries, socialists, and intelligentsia in the 1910s were drawn to the highly provocative monthly magazine The Masses, which attracted the era’s greatest talent, from John Reed to Sherwood Anderson, Djuna Barnes, John Sloan, and Stuart Davis. And summoned up is a chorus of witnesses to the ever-changing landscape of bohemia, from Malcolm Cowley to Anaïs Nin. Also present are the pioneering photographers who captured the city in black-and-white: Berenice Abbott’s dizzying aerial views, Samuel Gottscho’s photographs of the waterfront and the city’s architectural splendor, and Weegee’s masterful noir lowlife. But the political tone would be set by the next president, and Reid looks closely at Thomas Dewey, Henry Wallace, and Harry Truman. James Forrestal, secretary of the navy under Roosevelt, would be influential in establishing a new position in the cabinet before ascending to it himself as secretary of defense under Truman, but not before helping to usher in the Cold War. With The Brazen Age, David Reid has magnificently captured a complex and powerful moment in the history of New York City in the mid-twentieth century, a period of time that would ensure its place on the world stage for many generations.

Author : Daniel Blue
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 355 pages
File Size : 23,79 MB
Release : 2016-07-14
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1107134862

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Radically reconceives Friedrich Nietzsche's early life, offering an alternative approach and new insights into the early development of Nietzsche's philosophy.

Author : Audra J. Wolfe
Publisher : Johns Hopkins University Press
Page : 313 pages
File Size : 21,41 MB
Release : 2020-08-04
Category : Science
ISBN : 1421439085

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Closing in the present day with a discussion of the 2017 March for Science and the prospects for science and science diplomacy in the Trump era, the book demonstrates the continued hold of Cold War thinking on ideas about science and politics in the United States.

Author : Sean Carroll
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 480 pages
File Size : 12,98 MB
Release : 2016-05-10
Category : Science
ISBN : 0698409760

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The instant New York Times bestseller about humanity's place in the universe—and how we understand it. “Vivid...impressive....Splendidly informative.”—The New York Times “Succeeds spectacularly.”—Science “A tour de force.”—Salon Already internationally acclaimed for his elegant, lucid writing on the most challenging notions in modern physics, Sean Carroll is emerging as one of the greatest humanist thinkers of his generation as he brings his extraordinary intellect to bear not only on Higgs bosons and extra dimensions but now also on our deepest personal questions: Where are we? Who are we? Are our emotions, our beliefs, and our hopes and dreams ultimately meaningless out there in the void? Do human purpose and meaning fit into a scientific worldview? In short chapters filled with intriguing historical anecdotes, personal asides, and rigorous exposition, readers learn the difference between how the world works at the quantum level, the cosmic level, and the human level—and then how each connects to the other. Carroll's presentation of the principles that have guided the scientific revolution from Darwin and Einstein to the origins of life, consciousness, and the universe is dazzlingly unique. Carroll shows how an avalanche of discoveries in the past few hundred years has changed our world and what really matters to us. Our lives are dwarfed like never before by the immensity of space and time, but they are redeemed by our capacity to comprehend it and give it meaning. The Big Picture is an unprecedented scientific worldview, a tour de force that will sit on shelves alongside the works of Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, Daniel Dennett, and E. O. Wilson for years to come.

Author : Emilie Du Châtelet
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 454 pages
File Size : 37,87 MB
Release : 2009-09-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0226168085

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Though most historians remember her as the mistress of Voltaire, Emilie Du Châtelet (1706–49) was an accomplished writer in her own right, who published multiple editions of her scientific writings during her lifetime, as well as a translation of Newton’s Principia Mathematica that is still the standard edition of that work in French. Had she been a man, her reputation as a member of the eighteenth-century French intellectual elite would have been assured. In the 1970s, feminist historians of science began the slow work of recovering Du Châtelet’s writings and her contributions to history and philosophy. For this edition, Judith P. Zinsser has selected key sections from Du Châtelet’s published and unpublished works, as well as related correspondence, part of her little-known critique of the Old and New Testaments, and a treatise on happiness that is a refreshingly uncensored piece of autobiography—making all of them available for the first time in English. The resulting volume will recover Châtelet’s place in the pantheon of French letters and culture.