5 things I learned from reading "Einstein. His Life and Universe" book

5 things I learned from reading "Einstein. His Life and Universe" book

"Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving". Walter Isaacson starts this biography with this Einstein's quote. With his General Relativity Theory, Einstein revolutionized the science known until the 20th century. I really enjoyed this book. It helped me to realize that even this worldwild genius was into daily human troubles and concerns like all of us.

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"Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving." Albert Einstein, in a letter to his son Eduard, February 5, 1930

Here my list of things I learned, hope this makes sense to you dear reader:

1. Your enviroment matters

Everybody is a mirror of their relationships. From personal interest to daily habits, we share a lot of things. Think about your closest friends. You'll find out that you have a lot of things in common, I mean, that is one of the main reasons you became friends.

Before university, Einstein had interest in different areas: Math, Physics and Philosophy, to metion some of them. In 1902, Einstein made friends with two young students, Maurice Solovine, a philosophy student at the University of Bern, and Conrad Habicht, a former student of mathematics at the Zurich Politechnic. They started a small reading group where they read great thinkers together and then discuss their ideas. Together they create "The Olympia Academy" (I know, it sounds like a new Netflix series). They were really into books that explored the intersection of science and philosophy. Years after, some of the knowledge and ideas he get during this pasionate talks, were reflected on his Theory of Relativity.

When Einstein start publicing some of his work, it was innebitable to work with some of the greatest physicits and mathematicians of the 20th century: Max Born, Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck and Erwin Schrödinger, to mention some.

If your are learning to code, you want to become a better engineer or developer, join a community that supports you. It is not even necesary to be on the same place, online communities are there, Hashnode or Meetup for example, are a great places to start.

2. To achive great goals takes time

Lately, I had been restudying some common algorithms and data structures. I have been doing this for some months and still getting frustating because I need to practice and study more before I feel more confortable with them. Yes, I just wrote months, meaning less than a year. Reding this book, I found out that it took Einstein more than 15 years to prove and improve his Theory of General Relativity. He spents hours and days working on it. Sometimes, he even forgot to eat or keep in touch with his sons. Can you imagine how good can you become if you practice DSA every day for more than 8 hours during 15 years? Remember that to achive our goals, for example, finding a new job, creating a company, developing an app or writing a book, requires constant effor and time to master.

3. Things you learnt, already changed

As I mentioned before, Einstein created a small group to disscuss about different books and topics. "The Olympia Academic" was a saved place for them to disccus and argue about their viewpoints. Einstein and this group were fulled of curiosity. As a young man, around 15 years old, Einstein had a really good understanding of maths. This helped him to develop a deep analize of different mathematical theorems and start questioning about some perspectives in Math and Physics. The Relativity Theory was an intended to resolve the incompatibility between Newtonian Mechanics and Electromagnetism. If Einstein and his colleagues had taken as self-evident truth what they had learned about Physics, probably they would not had developed this theory.

Special Relativity (1905) was a revolutionary theory for the time. After it, concepts such as Newton's absolute time were relegated to the background of new concepts that this theory introduced, and later, with the General Relativity (1915), Newtonian gravity theory was replaced.

Think about your daily work, or things you learnt in school. In software development, I'm always relearning concepts and how things work. This industry is fast and it is well appreciated when someone says "hey, I know we were doing this like that but, what do you think about this new thing". After you have a great understanding of the fundamentals, go outside and relearnt.

4. Everyone goes through difficult times

One of the stories in this book that most impressed me was one from the World War I era. One way to demonstrate Einstein's Theory of General Relativity was during an eclipse. An eclipse was comming near the area, and visualizing it would help to prove his theory. He was living in Berlin. The political environment around Europe was not the best, and, as if that were not enough, there was a perfect place to see the eclipse at a location in the Soviet Union. Einstein and his collegues had to figure out a lot of things to realize this experiment: funding, recluting, traveling, get special equiment, like cameras, the list goes on. And of course, they had to manage it in time. An eclipse won't wait for you (like my unfinished sprint tasks that are waiting in my Trello board as I write this.)

When they came to the Soviet Union, some member of the team were captured by the military because number one: they were coming from what we now call Germany, and two: they had suspicious weapons, this special cameras to see the eclipse. They didn't arrived to the place, and even if they had arrived, the experiment would have been a complete failure because that particular day it was very cloudy . Fortunately, the eclipse was not only visible from the Soviet Union and other scientists around the world were able to confirm this theory. The demonstration of this theory launched Einstein to fame.

I know, last years have been really hard for some people, but just remember that everyone pass throw hard times. Einstein lived in the middle of World War I, had to leave Europe for the World War II, he emigrated to the States and never saw his beloved Europe again, but still, he continued with his studies in Physics.

*For more explanation google "How an eclipse proved Einstein's theory of relativity?", well, I just did it for you.

5. Last but not less: Hobbies matter

Einstein played the violin, and considering the repertory that Isaacson mention, he was really good at it. His favorite composers were Mozart and Bach. I really loved this fact. Between working, he sometimes played his violin to clarify his mind. He made many friends through music and even gave some concerts for people close to him.

I used to admire people who studied and worked all the time, you know, that guy who is a super high level programmer and works the whole day and his life is his job. I though that to succeed in this industry, I had to do that too. We, humans, are able to do a lot of things, we should not lock ourselves into one thing only. Do you want to learn to dance, learn it, do you feel like take some italian lesson, take them, do you want to write that song, write it. We think better when our brain is stress-free. Hobbies worth our time.

This book unveils a lot of details around Einstein work and the time he was living on. And for me, as a women, it was inebitable to note the traits of the male-dominated society and the gender gaps that have always existed in science. It is a good book to learn a lot of things in Einsteins world.

Hope you enjoyed this post. Happy coding!