The following is his flippant description of Erwin Schrödinger's great work: “But the world apparently already had enough Austrian philosophers, and he couldn't find work in that field. The result is that his representations are vague. Isaacson tries to describe Einstein's ideas selectively without sketching in a background of the contemporaneous physics. In that area the book has to compete with Abraham Pais's magisterial Einstein biography “Subtle Is the Lord…”: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein, originally published in 1982 by Oxford University Press. Although it perhaps presents the most readable account of Einstein's life, it fails to do as well in presenting Einstein's physics. It is well written and carefully researched with extensive notes. Isaacson's book is a sympathetic biography of Einstein as a mensch firmly embedded in the fabric of spacetime. Bohr's own attempts to enlighten Winston Churchill and Roosevelt about the complementarity of the bomb-that it could be used for both war and peace-had been a disaster and led the two leaders to issue a joint order to their intelligence agencies to watch Bohr as a security risk. A chance for Einstein to change history may have been lost. But in late December 1944, Bohr had rushed to Princeton, New Jersey, and assured Einstein that responsible statesmen were aware of the bomb, as well as “the unique opportunity for furthering a harmonious relationship between nations” (page 483), and he had persuaded Einstein to do nothing. Rud Nielson, in Physics Today, October 1963, page 22). Later, in 1957, Bohr stated, “It was terrible that no one over there,” in the UK and the US, “had worked on the solution of the problems that would arise when it became possible to release nuclear energy they were completely unprepared.” (See “Memories of Niels Bohr,” by J. Hoping that Niels Bohr would support his appeal, Einstein wrote to him: “The politicians do not appreciate the possibilities and consequently do not know the extent of the menace” (page 483). They felt that the policymakers had to be made aware of the immense consequences of that development. In December 1944 Einstein learned from his friend Otto Stern that a US atomic bomb would probably become a reality in the war.
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