based on his published and unpublished papers unsealed in 2006. albert einstein published his general theory of relativity on march 20th 1916. >> after the inaugural book last night in new york city i'm proud to say the women's national democratic club is walter isaacson's first of 40 stocks on his 30 city book tour for einstein, his life and universal and purchased it is for sale after the luncheon and walter will be staying around after the q&a to find copies. when he became editor of "time" magazine was going to have to pick a person of the century. the more i thought about the more fascinated i became a feinstein. he encompasses the modern science from the infinitesimal to the infinite. a century after its great triumphs we are still living in the universe. walter was born in new orleans in 1952. his father to whom he dedicates this book still recites their. one of walters early positions as a reporter for the new orleans times picayune and as mentioned he continues to have strong ties to the city and after katrina was appointed vice chairman of the recovery authority. they are a graduate of harvard and oxford where he was a scholar. he began his career at london before returning to new orleans. in 1978 he joined time magazine and became its editor in 1996. in 2001 after the aol merger he became the exceed federal and then chairman and ceo of the news group. four years ago walter left cnn to become president and ceo of the aspen institute. the institute is an international nonprofit educational and publicly policy forum. he's offered several books and is on the board of several corporations and is the current chairman of the board of teach for america. walter lives in washington, d.c. with his wife and daughter. in november of 2003 when walter spoke this put him about his best-selling book on benjamin franklin i had the honor of introducing him and i compared him to mr. franklin. ausley remarked among other similarities how both men changed course in mid life from careers in the media to become involved in education, public policy and world affairs. while doing research for this introduction i came upon a similarity between isaacson and his current subject albert einstein walter said that one of the major attractions in writing this book on einstein was neinstein's creativity and refusal to conform as you can see from the risks, choices and changes isaacson has made in his own life by being a journalist, businessman, biographer and educator and he also is a creative thinker and nonconformist. it is my pleasure to introduce walter isaacson. [applause] >> that was very nice. thank you so much. that is far too high. nobody's ever compared me to neinstein. [laughter] also i will say and this is reassuring i hope as parents there is one comparison which is that albert einstein was no einstein when he was a kid. in fact he was very slow in learning how to talk, so slow that his parents consulted a doctor and the family, describing it in germany, dubbed him the bill be one. he was also somewhat of a rebel. one of his headmaster's actually kicked him out of school. another of music history by saying einstein will never amount to much. i do think that all of the qualities made feinstein the patron saint of the stratford school kids everywhere and to see his posters of course among every school kid who thinks of himself as a rebel or slow in learning how to talk. but i also think that these qualities are along the qualities that help make elbert einstein's genius. first of all he was slow and learning how to talk so he fought in pictures. he used to do what he called thought experiments, what you and i called daydreaming, but for him it was called a thought experiment. and it made him imagine things like what would it be like to ride alongside a light be more to be in an elevator where there was no gravity or being in the train with lightning striking on both ends and what he lacks tel dan, fought pictures rather than complex mathematical formulas when he was a kid. secondly, it taught him to marvel at the monday in. you and i tend to marvel at mysterious things and he marveled at mundane things. his father gave him a compass at age five and einstein said his hands trembled as he watched one of the needle tip pointing north. it had to be an unseen thing in the universe making this happen. yuri and i probably remember getting a compass as a kid but we didn't sit there and marvel at something that seemed relatively mundane. but he said he learned so slowly even things like space and time and feel this, electromagnetic fields fascinated him. being a rebel also made him question authority. it made him define and, somewhat contemptuous and impotent, and pertinent and especially nonconventional and the five conventional wisdom and that too was part of the genius because there were people -- being in this city you know that smart people are a dime a dozen. people can really think differently, think out of the box, that is what made somebody a genius and what makes somebody creative. one of the things that's not true, however, one of the great myths about einstein is he flunked math as a child. the would be wonderful for the history, but no, he was actually very good at math and i give him a report card from school. even as a kid he was teaching himself eldora coming up with his own proof of the theorem by picturing a triangle in a larger trial and realizing that it had to be right. every now and then my daughter betsy, when she was 16 she was doing algebra and she got one of the questions wrong on her home work and was trying to figure it out. i said just look at it. if the linus ex plus two y squared it's got to slope of a word. so what do you mean? will algebra, math is just sort of the brush strokes of the good lord uses to pay the wonders of the universe. and the reality. she said they don't teach us that math refers to reality. yeah, that's what equations are, so with einstein he was a little bit smarter at age 16 than my daughter even though i love my daughter. so he was puzzling over the maxwell's equations and what they represented. maxwell's equations that would come along at the end of the 19th century to describe light waves, electromagnetic waves, and as a 16-year-old he did what his thought experiments. he looked at the equations and said what would happen if you caught up with a light beam would you ever catch up with the waves if you were going fast in the ocean you catch up with the waves they would be stationary next to you because that happens to a light beam if you catch up with the waves of a light beam. and i promise you i won't go into maxwell's equations the speed of light is constant. and so, he said this worried him at 16. he got anxiety. his hands started to sweat. i can tell you things causing my hands to get sweaty at 16 and it wasn't maxwell's's equations. that is why he's feinstein with all due respect and i am not. but anyway, he is brilliant in math but is a rebel and likely old friend dr. benjamin, he runs away as a teenager, drops of high school, runs away from germany is resistant of all of the literalists so he runs away to switzerland and italy and then switzerland where he applies to the second best college at the time and he flunks the examination. not in math i may say or physics but he's not very good in languages it takes him a year and he finally gets into the new missouri polytechnic. they're being the rubble and the nonconformist, the one who defied authority he is able to take off all three of the major professor who teach him. the great heinrich webber, the physics professor doesn't teach maxwell's equations and einstein quits going and then doesn't call him professor, he calls him weber, which is considered degrading so weber feels alienated from him. the lab instructor, the physics laboratory instructor, einstein was never a great experimentalist, that's why he was the dearest. he goes into the lab and of course he tears up the instructions one day says he can do it better and blows something up so he had to get stitches in his hand. he put him on probation from the lab, and then minkowski, the great math professor, once again, we have a guy who puts into writing albert einstein is the lazy dog and not a good mathematician. and so when he finally does graduate from the paul retek he does good on his grades what is the only correct what is his section of the polly took who can't get a job, can't get an assistant professorships or fellowship, can't get a teaching assistantship, can't even get the job teaching high school which he tries to get. in fact we of germany, switzerland, italy with letters, job applications, finally by some postcards and they are the ones with a little detachable things with the return postcard so people could at least give an answer and most of them don't even bother to reply. so one of them in austin and holland is some feeling the history of science museums. they would be slightly embarrassed since they didn't even reply, but he couldn't get a job. finally, with the help of a friend he gets the job as a third class examiner in the patent office in switzerland working on the school six days a week examining patents. but lest we feel sorry for him i actually think working in the patent office was one of the reasons he was able to come up with this theory. had he been an acolyte in the academy, had he been a junior professor at the university he would have to turn out say papers and appeal to the professor. instead, he was looking at patent applications and once again, not the training he got to call them thought experiments of what it was like these things people were applauding the patents for, how did the work, what was the physical reality underneath it? he was taught to be skeptical of his boss, taught never to trust in any promise to always look at the underlying premises, and the types of devices he looked at were devices that were synchronized clocks because switzerland had gone into the standard time zones, and the swiss being swiss were obsessive and have to work together and be very good. so, there he is trying to synchronize looking at these devices at synchronized blocks and they make the signals. he sends a signal, radio signal, electrical signal, and the struggle with the speed of light. so he's trying to figure out how does that work and outside of the patent office to can see the famous clock tower 11th century clock tower with the trains coming in and out of the station under the clock tower and the trains and the station they were synchronized. so he began thinking about motion and time and the speed of light and that experiment in his head he did as a 16-year-old about catching up with light beams. he writes a letter to a friend that his close friend and fortunately one of them, conrad, there he is on the far left is a close friend in the olympia academy where they talk about philosophy would conrad moves away which is good for the history of science because of wainstein gets to write him a letter. typically a feinstein it's an important letter. calls him you frozen wheel, dried peace of soul why haven't you send me your dissertation? if you will send me your dissertation i promise you for papers and return. this is a guy six days a week working at the patent office when people aren't looking on the side, in the evening he's writing papers and its leader in the letter you realize because he calls it inconsequential better and says on a petraeus for writing the inconsequential well but then he talks of the paper and says the first deals with radiation and yes that's the one that says life is in only a way that is a particle, the foundation of the quantum theory. the second talks about the true size of atoms. this is before the scientists were convinced atoms existed but this is the paper he decides to use as his third try to get a doctoral dissertation because they could projecting the dissertation because it is the simplest and easiest to understand of his papers so he submits it for the dissertation. another is with the motion which is white particles and water or liquid seemed to flick of around then he says the fourth is a rough draft at this point moving bodies of space and time. so a lot more of an inconsequential battle. that's for sure. but he didn't tell his friend in the letter because he hadn't yet full of it was after he finishes that fourth peeper another fault occurs to him as he's going on vacation and that is if you modify space and time energy and mass or related and he comes up with the equation of course, the relation of energy and mass equals mc squared and there it is the most famous equation in all of physics. relativity is the most famous of all of his theories and relativity is a very simple concept. all what the city says is all motion is relevant. this you are moving and i'm moving nobody can say i'm totally at rest, and absolutely not rest and you're the one moving. you may think you're sitting there and are not rest, you are moving 36,000 miles per hour around the song so there's no way to say one person is at rest and the other persian motion, the only way to define the motion is relative to something else. and it says all laws of physics apply equally to people from let to one another. that sound simple but it gets you that feinstein has a 16-year-old. maxwell's equations. could you catch up with a light beam? that would mean somebody traveling fast the law of physics would look different and somebody not traveling as fast and that sort of violates the principal of relativity. and he finds the two that he believes in are incompatible. one, the principal carless devotee and never to come up the speed of light is constant. both of those things he believes in but he thinks they're incompatible. he can't figure out. he gives up on trying to to get out how the two different principles could be made to work together. then one day he's taking a walk with his other friend and the more engineer einstein helped get a job in the patent office and the two guys are trying to synchronize clocks and that sort of thing with a patent of application. the take a walk in 1995 right when the letter was written. they take a walk and einstein suddenly has an inspiration. and his inspiration he does it in pictures. this isn't complicated math, and even in the paper he writes about it he does it by visualizing, telling you to visualize it and it's called the step, the leap that got him there and it's simply this, imagine there is a fast-moving train and lightning strikes at both ends of the train. he says how do you define with simultaneous? remember he said the patent office supposed to be trying to figure out how to get the clocks to be simultaneous. one way to define being simultaneous is if you are standing halfway in between the two events you see the light from both of them at the exact same time but that depends on the speed of light. suppose the lightning strikes both ends of the treen, somebody on the platform says the of simultaneous but somebody on the train if it's speeding fast the first lightning bolt, the one in front at first because it will get to him first if he's on the speeding train. don't worry, it's in the book. it's really not that hard. but what it means is to one person something will look simultaneous but to somebody in motion relative to that person it may not look simultaneous and that means being simultaneous is relative. and from that in the simple phrase it's what do we mean by time, when the train gets to the station my watch hand hits 7:00. so, it means time is relative. time is not absolute. if you are moving, time goes differently and somebody else is moving in a different way. and indeed as you catch up with a light beam and try to move as fast as the speed of light it goes just as fast from your perspective that time slows down. i know it's not exactly easy and that's why it even took einstein ten years from his thought experiment and why all the other great physicists of the time others who had been dealing with moving bodies and couldn't figure out how to reconcile it, but the wheat is still something we can picture, we can imagine, and it shows the rebellion because what he does is he throws away 300 years of conventional wisdom. sir isaac newton saying time is absolute and tick-tocks along and moves along your respective of any of server. he says no, time is relative. the only thing constant is the speed of light. now in these wonderful 1905 papers there was somebody helping him check the math. a very interesting woman. she was the only woman student at the zurich politics studying six, and they fell madly in love in the love of marriage even though she's older, some what of an oppressive, it is an immediate romanced. they go off to the lake como on vacation and have an illegitimate daughter lost to history put up for adoption probably in serbia, probably died of scarlet fever. then a few years later finally when he gets the job at the patent office he's able to marry her and they have two children together and she's putting up with him, putting up with helping him to his mouth and helping with his papers, but eventually they dress the part. it's a very human story feinstein. he had been led to believe. so finally, he says to her because he can't afford it of course he says one of these days one of those papers will win the nobel prize. nobody had hardly done much with the paper. he couldn't even get an academic job even after he published the beavers. he says one of these days it will win the nobel prize if you give me a divorce you will get the money. that is a lot of money of the nobel prize. she's smart, she calculates the odds she thinks a physicist and a lawyer and a chemist and she takes the deal. now it's not until 1922 that the amounts he has won the nobel prize from the love of marriage he gets the money and buy three apartment buildings. in the meantime, feinstein has fallen in love with his first cousin, this is a great soap opera. [laughter] they have two sons, the divorce is messy because they haven't won the nobel prize yet. he's alienated from his son's and letters that had just become released that i base my book on, the letters to his two sons back-and-forth to his cousin all of these letters about the language of the kids 8-years-old, even-years-old looking for that father he's finally gotten a job in berlin but world war i is broken out. the children have moved back to switzerland, he can't cross the border that often, and even as he's having this personal time with his children, his first wife calling for his cousin not quite married to her yet he's trying to generalize his great theory of relativity. as i said before the special theory of relativity, the 1905 becomes the special theory because it only applies in the special case which is constant velocity of motion. weinstein wanted to apply to accelerated motion as well so all motioned general brought into the collective. second, it conflicted. there was the part of the nativity that conflicted with sir isaac newton's theory of gravity. because he said the two great objects act upon each other instantly right away with a guaranteed veto gravitational force the big relativity says nothing. not even information can travel faster than the speed of light. so he is trying to generalize this theory of relativity and once again, he does it with a thought experiment. but a picture any of you can picture which is if you're on earth in an enclosed chamber imagine an elevated chamber enclosed the standing still coming to drop something out of your pocket and it falls to the fore with an exhilarated speed and your feet are pressed to the floor because gravity's pull you down like me standing here. now imagine you're in outer space where there is no gravity. but you are in a closed chamber and it's accelerating up words, once again, and your feet would be pressed to the floor. you take something out of your pocket, it would fall. in fact it is equivalent that the total equivalence between being an accelerated and being in the gravity. so einstein -- people sort of notice even newton noticed the gravitational mass were equivalent it takes einstein to do this thought experiment and say okay there's an equivalence principle here, gravity and its celebration are just different facets of the same thing. this took him a very long time to figure out how to work with this he says gravity is not really a force operating between two objects. but gravity is is the quantity of space. imaginable in ball rolled into fabric as he says. imagine like a trampoline fabric. put the bowling ball and as it rolls it curves to the dimension of the trembling. now imagine a rolling some balls right behind it. they curve towards the bowling ball and go towards the bowling ball not because the bowling ball has a strange material is believed to mysterious attraction but because it's curved the fabric of the trampoline and the balls roll towards it. you can see it in two dimensions how that works. now weinstein can see it in three dimensions which is that a massive object curves the three dimensions of space and so things are attracted around it. in fact so much weinstein he can see it in four dimensions because the special theory of relativity says that space and time are connected in four dimensions. so with a massive object does is curves the dimensions of space, time and objects curve towards it. and you can picture it like that and that is the way. he comes up with the equations in this race to do it and it really is the grandest pherae in all of science. it is our notion of gravity which is the movement of object perfins base and the curvature of space tells objects how to move just like the curve on the trampoline fabric would tell a billiard ball how to curb. one of the -- at this point people think this is a grand fiji but what is this guy talking about? it's kind of hard to know is he right especially since it is the second time he's told us that newton is wrong about the universe. einstein says you can test it. if i'm right and e equals mc squared, gravity tends the fabric of space, then gravity will bend light. the light from a distant star will be spent as it passes through the sun. that's interesting but it's hard to tell because if you look at the stars behind the sun and you can't see them because you're blinded by the sun so they have to wait for the total eclipse of the sun and 1990 and photograph the stars as the eclipse heavens' they know where they are supposed to be that as they get behind the sun they are off of it. because gravity bend the starlight from the sun. it comes from the equivalent principle. once again he says if you were in an accelerating elevator and accelerating fast towards a light beam comes in by the time it gets to the other wall it will be lower down. this comes from the equivalent as well. right at the end of world war i and one of the most dramatic experiments in the history of science and an english quaker, and author even as the u-boats is there and the war is ending to see if he can prove right of the fury of a german jew and it's supposed to be science over the politics. the photographic from an island off of brazil where he said another team compared the place that would take him during the eclipse and bring it back to the royal academy in london and their j.j. thompson who discovered the royal academy and then they announced feinstein is right, newton is wrong, the starlight has been bent by the sun. now, this was totally astonishing to people and by the way it was in the days of "the new york times" knew how to write great headlines. and then in "the new york times" light in the heavens met us finance board the lesser god go for the results of the eclipse observations einstein's ury triumphs. starr is not where they seem or were calculated to be, but nobody need worry. [laughter] anyway, suddenly einstein has been proven right it still takes them two years to get a nobel prize they believe it, he gets a prize in 1921 but they don't announce it until 1922 because they are a little bit baffled. and they don't even give it to relativity, to give it to the quantum so the electric effect because this is baffling to people and also it ties in with the strangling the nerves with a lot of the absolute tests including those in germany who refer to it as jewish physics. and it seems to be a relativism because it seems to tie in with the moral relativism with the breaking of classical bonds like picasso and others sort of painting. and you're no different ways of looking at space and time and breaking the bond calling himself of the literary interpreter of feinstein. james joyce, all of these seven in 1920, 21, 22. the feelings throughout europe and stuff but people are walking around puzzled. the great new yorker cartoon as a puzzle over the theory of as a quote from neinstein -- wainstein -- einstein. as i said, einstein is it a conformist. other people are trying to, but for einstein the rise of anti-semitism made him identify more with his jewish heritage. he hadn't been -- he believed in god, he believed in god's spirit in the universe he hadn't been for a practicing in terms of his judaism and when the anti-semitism rises he aligns himself politically with the zionist movement and judaism because he doesn't like people being oppressed using a free mind and thought. in fact, he comes to america, the first time 1921. they ask when they arrive this 10,000 people meeting and they asked did he understand the fury of probity and he says on the way over professor neinstein explained many times about the time we got here i was convinced that he understood. anyway, there are pretty it's all over the place. this is a theoretical physicist but they are permitting him. he comes here in this club and a few other places would you be able to fathom this that he comes to washington and the senate decides to debate whether or not relativity is right or not. [laughter] then they bring him to the white house to meet harding in the day as the president harding do you understand the theory of relativity, and harding being one of the last honest politicians in this town says no he doesn't understand the fury of normalcy which was hurting's political platform. thousands of people lined up to him talking about sex and stuff. one of them interviewed in the paper says i said we had in the balcony but he talked over my head anyway. he goes in the national academy and has a wonderful statute of him out front and he goes on a very long dinner and which other people are talking about their studies of ground and stuff like that. einstein turns to a danish physicist next to him that says i've developed a new fury of eternity. [laughter] but anyway, it becomes the new age celebrity. charlie chaplin, albert einstein. finally the show up here at the debut and they say they cheer you because they don't understand you, they cheer for me because they understand me but it's the new age of celebrity and it's sort feinstein with his wild hair exuding humanity but also the science that makes everybody go huh but then they say well because you could kind of picture. the bending of light, equals mc squared pity he did say the bill prize for the total effect that something strange happens to him after the famous. by 1925 or so he is attributing to the quantum pherae but he gets more uncomfortable with it and suddenly he is the december of the old order defending classical physics. he's the one who doesn't believe in the quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principal at the notion of probability. he believes there are certain laws and that god made certain laws that govern the universe and all the talk of uncertainties makes him uncomfortable. famously over and over again he says i cannot believe god would play dice with the universe. finally he says weinstein, quit telling god what to do. [laughter] speaking of which, people sometimes ask was god adjusted figure of speech for neinstein? and people assume because he was a great scientist perhaps that maybe he didn't really believe in god and he kept objecting, he kept saying no. i believe that this is a spirit manifest in the lobby of the universe it in the face of which we have to be humble. and that to me is my sense of the creator and in which i discover. many say that we are in the position of a child entering a huge library and they know somebody must have written the books that know how there's doesn't understand. the child suspect some mysterious order in the arrangement of the book. that it seems to me is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being towards god so always he was researcher for the spirit manifest in the lobbies of the universe but somebody was such a big ego he could have a real humility that came from that aw with looking at the universe. he also became a pacifist, got very involved in politics. but here's something that will baffle you in the city. as a scientist when the facts can along he revised his theory. he believed there should be the connection between factual evidence and for general feeling is or ideology. so when hitler comes to power einstein is visiting america and of course he never goes back to germany. finally settles in princeton and abandons his pacifism to join the fight against hitler and he gets visited by scientific friends. 1939 and they go over the possibility of a chain reaction. in other words, putting into effect equals mc squared turning a little bit of mass into huge energy. so he writes a letter to franklin roosevelt warning that a bomb could be built and he says the germans may be doing this and you ought to start a project. a somewhat odd because he had been a pacifist involved with a lot world federalist type of causes, jay edgar hoover who back then was the head of the fbi has been compiling a dossier as being disloyal. thousands of pages available from the freedom of information act, and they decide he's too much of a security risk to let him know about the atom bomb projects even if you read this letter telling franklin roosevelt to do it so he wasn't destined to work on it and in fact there red scare comes along, but he believes a simple equation, three - three expression and free thought were necessary for the creativity. so he doesn't work of the atom bomb project but he does help support the war effort. when the bomb is built, he's pretty much associated in the public mind with it when you see that mushroom cloud we imagine equals mc squared next to it and everybody ties him together with the bomb. he feels somewhat mixed emotions of course having pushed the project was chagrined to find out they were not actually building the bomb and so he dedicates himself not to pacifism, but arms control, trying to find a way to control nuclear weapons. people call him by yves, somebody asked him how world war iii would be solved. i don't know how it would be but i do know how world war iv will be fought with sticks and rocks. and he continued to work on his unified field theory as well because he wanted to find a way to tie together all of the forces of nature so that there wouldn't be any uncertainty or probabilities. we could get back to the strict causality and determinism. people sometimes ask did he waste his time to fight the unified field theory? asked me in 100 years whether the brian green of the world would turn the superstring theory into what einstein was working for for the unified theory but einstein when asked said i am not wasting my time, i can afford to. i've already made my reputation. and the other question about einstein is why was he so recalcitrant and in his way about defending st. determinism when he had been a rebel and of violating the classical physics with the theory of relativity. and it's as a shame if you get older the mind calcifies. he also says a great quote that the good lord punished me for my attempt for authority and state named me authority by myself. so he still had his impotence but he realized having become the world's greatest authority he couldn't quite think as rebellious lee as he did before. at the end of his life he wasn't destined to die a bitter man. he worked with russell on the neinstein russell manifesto trying to get arms control and world peace. he was offered famously the presidency of israel. david offers him that. thank goodness einstein doesn't accept. einstein didn't exactly have the diplomacy skills or whatever to be a figurehead of state, but he does on his deathbed agree to give a speech independence day. he's told a billion people listen you will finally make me famous. so he writes that speech and on his deathbed he is working on it and he decides to make a speech on behalf of world peace. he never gave the speech as he's sitting there in the princeton hospital an aneurysm is first and he starts with the very first i speak to you today not as an american citizen and not as a jew but has a human being and he has an outline for speech calling for world peace. but then he puts aside and pulls of his calculations again and the very last night and on that day he just keeps scrolling into the evening one of last line of equations to get himself still a little closer to the spirit manifest in the lobby of the universe with little crossroads and mathematical mistakes and finally trailing off in the end. thus it was a very important rebellious but incredibly imaginative food class patent clark became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos and the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom in the universe. thank you very much. [applause] >> walter isaacson, thank you very, very much. we knew this was went be interesting. don't forget please write your questions down on the cards we will be picking up the cards. before i begin with the first question though i would like to think walter for his contribution to our new orleans project. >> i would like to thank all of you for helping in new orleans. >> yes. thank you. first question, what experience is education have you had that enables you to not only understand einstein's theory, but also to be able to make them understandable to the long scientific reader? >> first was my father. my father is an engineer. he loves science and math and taught us to love science and math. we have a problem in this society we think we intimidate, people are trying to feel the scientists are intimidating. none of us in the room would admit or brag they don't know the names of the shakespeare plays but people would just say i don't understand the relativity theory and uncertainty principle and even though we want our children to learn science we think we can just have teachers that will force deep science and math and the schools and we will take our kids to art museums and concerts' and tuzee sporting the events and talk about history and everything else, and yet, we probably don't talk or so the great science enough and if we want our kids we can't just say they should learn science and math but we aren't going to think about it, we should feel the magic and the wonder that comes from being a scientist and should make it our hero as well as sports heroes and military heroes. so to me, trying to make science magical and wonderful again like my dad did for me is what i just hope people will do when they read the book and say here is a cool dude and it makes it magical. >> who do you see as having einstein's in florence in this century? >> science, the great challenge will be the last line einstein route, can somebody find a fury that a unified theory that ties together the forces we know in nature and the particles we know? it may be difficult. you know, einstein invoked the deity, and at one point when they told him that somebody had disproved his theory by sex threat he said no, no, civil is the lord put meaning the experiment was wrong. they carved that on a fireplace in princeton and late in his life he's with one of his friends and mathematician standing in front of the fireplace and he looks of the mantel and says maybe he is a little malicious and the question is whether the good lord created the universe that does have trouble with the and uncertainty at its core or whether there will be a theory of everything and allows for the broad sense, i just hope benjamin franklin, one of my old friends so to speak, people like thomas jefferson and the previous centuries people felt they could understand and grapple with signs as well as with politics and diplomacy. i hope we see more people in this century who can love music, love the arts and also loves science and the humanities and politics and everything else. >> what do you think einstein would think about man landed on the loan to the commode and the program and outer space today? >> he would love it because one of the outgrowths of his theory is a study of what is called cosmology. cosmology is a study of the shape of the universe. it's a size, expansion, its history from the beginning of time to the end of time, pretty big subject and cosmology, einstein was the one who came up with a notion we have of the universe that is finite but still has no borders, and that enables everything from space travel to us understanding dark energy, expansion of the cosmos, that sort of thing. he loved the notion of looking at the university was a master of the smallest of all things which is how photon's get emitted from the breakdown of atoms, but he also was the master of the largest fall of things which is the expansion of the cosmos. >> senses the woman's national democratic club you could expect us a semi political question. what president bush welcomed einstein today? [laughter] >> do you think there is more antiscience attitude in the present administration than president harding's de? >> obviously that is a controversial subject. i do feel a better appreciation for the fact will science is not something that just this administration or this town needs, but in all of our lives where we have the knee-jerk ideology we decide to fight over certain things instead of just looking at the evidence i wouldn't want to particularly criticized one party or one set of politicians, but i do hope that bringing the wonders of science that part of the magic of science is we can balance the factual evidence and general theory and that is why we need to do to be a little bit more pragmatic and thoughtful whether it is the way we fight the war mica iraq or deal with school prayer or school choice and vouchers. look at the evidence now let's see what the evidence shows and let's not be quite as ideological as we need to be. >> i have two questions on the theory of relativity so i'm going to piggyback them. what is the value of the theory of relativity and is it saying the theory of relativity a little like saying the theory of evolution? >> no. to take the second question first, the theory of relativity has testable consequence as does evolution. but relative to the says this is how much gravity will then the light beam and you can test it and its 1.7 seconds as of the theory tells you so it's very fragile. what is the fury of relativity need in our daily lives? for technology it's, you know, important. you couldn't have space travel, you know, we couldn't have gps systems through in the south of dupont if you didn't have validity into the calculation. but it's one of the two pillars of modern science it doesn't affect us day-to-day if you got on an airplane and spent the next 30 years on the airplane speeding up the speed of an airplane and then return you would return maybe two or three seconds younger than somebody come in your twin, who stayed on earth. of course it would probably age use of it doesn't have that much of an impact. [laughter] >> to time for just one more question and i want to thank everybody for your excellent questions and also, please, remember he will be signing copies of his book today and its heavy. >> it's not as heavy as it looks. >> how long did it take to write the book? >> time as relevant. >> good answer. final question. >> what have you thought about for your next project? >> i don't know. i really don't. i was so fascinated by einstein and science. i've never pulled myself into a project more than this and sometimes i just pick up the book and read his own words, certain parts he wrote and i will say that's great. i think i just going to spend the summer saving it and maybe by the end of the summer i will figure out what i'm going to do next. thank you so much. [applause] >> as a very small token of our appreciation, i would like to present -- >> i still have my one from four years ago which was blue. [laughter] i guess you have now changed. >> we change colors from time to time. >> this program first aired in 2007. to watch other archives booktv programs, visit booktv.org. what i tried to do is we've to get their letters that triste footprints large and small of the people from bondage to self-determination, from the civil war to the war in iraq and as i said from the plantations to the glistening white house. the correspondence of this leaves the soldiers, lovers come faubus, mothers, artists, activists, they are woven together with those of historical giants from phyllis wheatley, paul dunbar, langston hughes, james baldwin, alice walker and toni morrison to benjamin banneker, sojourner truth, frederick douglass, w.e.b. boyce, i'd be wells barnett and colin powell. the likely of the extraordinary are matched by the equally poignant letters of the ordinary who with him in hand share their joy and pain, ecstasy and heartache. >> this letter is from hannah grover to her son, cato. my dear son, cato, i longed to see you in my old age. i live in cold well with mr. grover, the minister of that place. now, my dear son, i pray that to come to see your mother or send me $20 i will come and see you in philadelphia. and if you can't come to see your old mother, send me a letter and tell me where you live, what family you have and when you do for a living. i am a poor old servant. i longed for freedom, and my master will free me if anybody will engage to maintain me so i don't come upon him. i love you, cato. you love your mother, you are my only son. this from your affectionate mother, hannah buskirk now hannah grover. p.s., i haven't seen you since i saw you at staten island about 20 years ago. if you have any money send it to dr. bonner and he will give it to me. if you have any love for your poor old mother, pray,, or sing to me. i love you with all my heart. hannah von birshkirk. >> this is a letter from byman september 19th, 1858. i take the pleasure of writing you these few words with much regret to inform you i am being sold to the name of pearson, a trader in new orleans. i am here yet, but expect to go along, and when i do go, i want to send you some things but i don't know who to send them by but i will try to send them to you and my children. give my love to my father and my mother and tell them goodbye for me, and if we shall not meet in this world i hope to meet them in heaven, my wife, for you and my children, this pen cannot express their grief that i feel to be parted from you all. >> we are taken behind the public facade and activists dr. martin luther king jr.'s letter from the birmingham jail is here along with the private mrs. to his wife who in 1960 he writes from the state prison. >> this is a letter from martin luther king jr. to his wife in october 26th 1960. hello, darling. today i find myself a long way from you and the children, i am at the state prison in reads bill which is about 230 miles away from atlanta. they picked me up from the dekalb jail at around 4:00 a.m. this morning. i know this if experience is difficult for you, especially in the conditions of your pregnancy. but as i said to you yesterday, this is the cross that we must bear for the freedom of our people. so i urge you to be strong in faith and this will strengthen me. i can assure you it is extremely difficult to think of being away from you, my little yokie and mardy for four months by ask go