Brenda Maddox
He Promised Her the Nobel Prize
Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance
By Dennis Overbye
Bloomsbury 416pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
The mistitling of this book reveals the problem of scientific biography. Albert Einstein was in love with one thing – physics. Everything else was secondary, which is why his relations with women and his children were so painfully skewed. If a man’s thoughts are absorbed in calculating the gravity of all the mass and energy in the universe with its radius of 10 million light years, matters of the heart take a poor second place.
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