Einstein In Love

Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance

When I first heard saw the title of this book, I was immediately intrigued. How could Romance be scientific? It's one thing to have science involved in romance, or to be a romantic scientist, but as much as I played with the semantics of the title I found myself being curiously sucked into its storyline. The basic premise of this book, as one might expect from the obvious title, is young Albert Einstein's perspective of love and romance. I suppose that is entirely plausible for even a physicist to fall in love, but, rather than detail all of the gritty mathematics of physics it portrays how even the brightest, most ingenious of us all merely seeks to be normal and loved.

The book opens with an Eighteen year old Einstein in Zurich pondering love and many other questions. Now at first glance I thought that it might go one of two ways: It's going to focus on Einstein's life, or it's going to focus on his theories. It turns out that Dennis Overbye incorporates all of Einstein's life, or at least the early part of it, and uses the environment around Einstein as an explanation for why he might have theorized exactly the way that he did.

It is true that when viewing one's surroundings one can usually gain a better understanding of a lot of things, particularly if one understands what is going around them. This is true for Einstein, and it was one of the major points that I took with me when I finished reading this book. Though Overbye does make a slight allusion that his love, Mileva Meric, was responsible for most of his theories, the dialogue between the two is somewhat lost, as the portion that would be her accounts on Special Relativity are all in letter form.

I feel that this novel is relative the seminar on Special Relativity because it portrays the Einstein we know as a young man who seeks out love, and who also desires answers to all of his questions. I feel that it is relevant not just because it is a book about Einstein, rather, because it is a book about a few great ideas: normalcy, love and of course the theory of Special Relativity. Occasionally I did find my mind wondering in the course of reading this book, but that was mainly due to the fact that I had other things running through my mind. I can honestly say that all in all, this book was an accessible easy read,