It’s over half a century since they sliced up the huge brain of Albert Einstein in a vain bid to discover the source of what his admiring but critical biographer David Bodanis calls “the greatest genius of all time”. But Bodanis believes that Einstein’s piercing early findings, which have moulded modern thinking about photons, lasers, low-temperature physics, and above all his relativity theory, were overshadowed by his stubborn later refusal to accept the revolutionary discoveries of younger rivals like Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in the field of quantum mechanics. Einstein, suggests Bodanis, had, for all his sparkling intuition as he probed the structure of the universe itself, an essentially 19th-century, determinist cast of mind. He “loathed” the disorderly ideas of randomness and the uncertainty principle. The father of relativity, the greatest physicist since Newton, could not himself keep up with changing times.
Einstein’s Greatest Mistake: The Life of a Flawed Genius is published by Little, Brown (£20). Click here to buy it for £16.40
