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Free Creations of the Human Mind book cover
Free Creations of the Human Mind
The Worlds of Albert Einstein
2025
First Published
4.25
Average Rating
152
Number of Pages

A nuanced portrait of Albert Einstein, a world citizen pivotally engaged in politics, humanitarianism, and science. Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was the most influential scientist of the twentieth century, and his influence shows little sign of abating. His work comprises of much of today's understanding of the structure of the microphysical and cosmic universes. Einstein was a man of the modern world, faced with intellectual and existential challenges of extraordinary magnitude, a working scientist immersed in epochal theories of special relativity, the quantum theory, but also in organizational activities and teaching at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. More than any other past scientist, Einstein still pervades popular iconography and has come to symbolize genius, creativity, and innovation infused with humanism, wisdom, and humor. His life is interconnected with so many of the important political and intellectual movements of his era - Zionism, pacifism, Nazism, nuclear weapons, philosophy, civil rights, McCarthyism, the League of Nations, and more- that his views shaped the world he lived in while his persona acquired a formidable patina deposited by generations of apocryphal mythmaking, both during and after his lifetime. Free Creations of the Human The Worlds of Albert Einstein presents a concise and nuanced account of Einstein's life and work embedded in his intellectual and social contexts, based on the substantial discoveries made through the study of his tremendous personal archive and several generations of assiduous scholarship. By disentangling the public persona from the private man, the rhetorical statement from the heartfelt conviction, this book shows Einstein as a man of the modern world, faced with intellectual and existential challenges of extraordinary magnitude, whose life was framed by turbulent, violent historical events.

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Authors

Michael D. Gordin
Michael D. Gordin
Author · 9 books
Michael Gordin is Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton University, where he specializes in the history of modern science. In 2013-4 he served as the inaugural director of the Fung Global Fellows Program. He came to Princeton in 2003 after earning his A.B. (1996) and his Ph.D. (2001) from Harvard University, and serving a term at the Harvard Society of Fellows. In 2011 he was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and was named a Guggenheim Fellow. He has published on the history of science, Russian history, and the history of nuclear weapons.
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