E-mail a friendWalter Isaacson
original airdate May 16, 2007
Walter Isaacson is president of one of the world's preeminent think tanks, the Aspen Institute. He's the former CEO of CNN and managing editor of Time magazine. He's also a critically acclaimed biographer, whose latest work is the first biography of Albert Einstein since his papers were made available to the public. A Rhodes Scholar, Isaacson began his career as a reporter for The Sunday Times of London. The New Orleans native is also vice chair of the Louisiana Recovery Authority.
Walter Isaacson
Tavis: Walter Isaacson is the president and CEO of the Aspen Institute. He previously served as chairman and CEO of CNN and managing editor for "Time" magazine. He's also a bestselling author of a number of books, including the 2003 bestseller on Benjamin Franklin.
His latest is once again sitting atop "The New York Times" bestseller list. The book is called "Einstein;" the first biography of Albert Einstein since the release of his vast collection of papers back in 2006. He joins us tonight from New York. Walter Isaacson, nice to have you on the program, sir.
Walter Isaacson: It's great to be back with you, Tavis.
Tavis: Before I talk about Einstein, let me talk about your hometown of New Orleans. I am literally on my way to New Orleans in a couple of days. We actually just made an announcement about a week ago that we'll be talking more about on this show in the coming days, but Jonathan Demme, the Academy Award-winning director, has been shooting some exclusive footage of a number of families returning to New Orleans.
And so later in this month, as a matter of fact, we're going to kick off, Walter, on this show a five-night series featuring some of the families that Jonathan Demme has been following for the last year or so. We're going to preview that - premiere that, I should say, here on our program.
Later in the year, I think, Jonathan's putting it out as a feature film, but we're going to go down there in a couple of days to finish up shooting this documentary. So it's been a while since I've been there; what's your sense, having said all that, of how the recovery is coming, or not coming, as it were?
Isaacson: Well, it's sort of a tale of two cities. Part of New Orleans is doing just fine. I just came back from there. Jazzfest was better than ever, I heard Sweet Irma Thomas do her wonderful tribute at Jazzfest and lots of people were down there. The city was alive.
We also were there for an education reformer's conference, and that's the unwritten story about New Orleans now is the number of people from places like Teach for America or New Leaders, New Schools, or New Schools New Orleans that have come down and opened innovative schools. It's a great magnet for the education reform movement, and I think we're going to end up with a better school system than we had before the storm.
But as you know, Tavis, and you've talked to our mutual friend, Dr. Norman Francis, there's some things that are very, very slow. We're having trouble getting people back into some of the homes, some of the neighborhoods. And we also have a huge problem with the federal bureaucracy.
We have that 10 percent match from our FEMA grants, and that's now generated 2.4 million documents. So I think the president is considering waiving from now on that FEMA match, and then you'd see the city start picking up real fast.
Tavis: I've been reading of late about some problems that this program called Road Home is having. What do you know about the Road Home program and the problems that they've been having of late, speaking of people trying to get home?
Isaacson: Right. Well, the Road Home program gives people money to compensate for the break of the federal levees and the flooding, and we've had to be very careful, and Dr. Francis and I are part of the group that oversees that, to make sure all the money is spent properly and accounted for because we don't want anybody to think we're wasting the money.
But the flip side of that is it's taken a bit too long, it's gone too slowly. There's a lot of frustrations, and I understand those frustrations, but the money's flowing now and people are coming home. In fact, the city has bumped up in population in the last few weeks, and you can feel people coming home and Jazzfest happening again.
Tavis: One final question on that. What's your sense of hope or lack thereof for this city returning to some semblance, even, of what we knew of it before the storm came?
Isaacson: Oh, I'm absolutely, totally optimistic. We're going to talk about Einstein; he understood force fields and attractions. New Orleans has a magnetic force field that attracts people back. You already see Tulane University getting more enrollment than they expected, coming back strong. Dr. Francis' university, Xavier University, is doing well.
People are coming back to the city. You're going to have great schools in that city. We have a really long way to go, but it's a type of city - and you know that well, Tavis - that really pulls people back. So I'm very optimistic.
Tavis: You don't think you're overly optimistic?
Isaacson: No, I go home and I just see the fact and how heroic - the people you're going to see on your show, how heroic they are 'cause they care about coming home.
Tavis: Let me talk, then - thank you for indulging me on that. I wanted to start by talking about -
Isaacson: Oh, Tavis, thank you for keeping the focus on New Orleans.
Tavis: No, my pleasure. Let me go to "Einstein." Before I get into "Einstein" specifically, what is it about - I think I get it. If I were you, I think I'd understand why you want to do this. But what is it that attracts you to these larger-than-life figures, whether it's Franklin, whether it's Einstein? You love this stuff, I take it.
Isaacson: You want to be inspired by people, and I like to get inspired by peoples' minds. Now, you've done this show long enough that you know smart people are a dime a dozen, so I'll look for what besides being smart does it take in order to be significant? For Ben Franklin, it was an ability to pull people together and understand our values.
For Albert Einstein, it's a creativity and an imagination - an ability to think differently and out of the box. We all can aspire to that creativity and I'm hoping people read about Einstein, they get inspired. They say, "I can think more creatively."
Tavis: Speaking of being inspired, I want to talk about a few of the things that you share with us about Einstein, given your exclusive and unprecedented access to these papers. I want to have you share in a moment some things you learned about Einstein that you introduce us to in the text, one of which, though, blew me away. Who knew that Einstein was such a slow learner and that he was even slow to speak?
Took him a long time as a kid to start talking for all the parents who are watching whose kids are slow to speak. Took him a long time to start talking, but when he started talking, he started talking in complete sentences, yes?
Isaacson: Well, that's a great inspiration to those of us who are parents, to know that Einstein was no Einstein as a kid. (Laughter) He was slow in learning to talk. They called him the dopey one in the family. He was also very rebellious. He sort of challenges authority, gets kicked out of one of the schools. But I think it's that slow verbal learning ability that causes him to think in pictures.
To do thought experiments in his head, what you and I, Tavis, called daydreaming. But if you're Einstein, you get to call them thought experiments. And secondly, to question the things you and I would find a bit mundane, like how do we know that time passes the same way for everybody? So it was that quirkiness in the way he thinks. And here's a lesson to that, which is we're all creative in different ways, and we should nurture creativity, no matter how we find it.
Tavis: To your point now, Walter, how much of creativity do you think for any of us starts with asking interesting, strange, provocative, stupid questions?
Isaacson: Well, it's not just provocative questions. Sometimes you have to ask questions about very ordinary things. Einstein's dad gives him a compass when he's age five, and he spends his time in bed with chills, looking at how that needle keeps pointing northward and asking, "What makes that needle move?" Well, you and I can probably remember getting a compass, and we looked at it for a little while and said, "Hey, cool," and then moved on to something else.
But he keeps asking questions about things that you and I would find ordinary. Why is the sky blue? Why is it when you're accelerating upward in an elevator it feels like gravity? Those are simple questions. They're not even weird or provocative questions, but they cause the greatest breakthroughs in the history of science.
Tavis: I wonder whether or not to even ask those simple questions is part and parcel of what it means to be a genius; to even think to ask those kinds of questions as opposed to taking these things for granted?
Isaacson: That's a good question, too, and maybe it does mean you're a genius, but it also means that any of us can ask questions. Just like Isaac Newton watches an apple fall, and to him, that's fascinating.
I think one of the things I've learned from this book is to be fascinated just by the ordinary wonders of nature.
Tavis: Tell me about Einstein's miracle year of 1905.
Isaacson: Yeah, I told you he was kind of rebellious. He was able to tick off all of his professors at the Zurich Polytech. So when he graduates, he's the only kid graduating in his class who can't get a job. He can't get a job as a teaching fellow or an assistant professor - any type of job, even a high school teacher. So finally, after two years wandering around, he gets a job as a third class clerk, or examiner, in the patent office looking at patent applications in Berne, Switzerland.
But I think that that's also a lucky thing for him, 'cause he's trying to imagine and picture the underlying reality to concepts people come up with. Like, how do you synchronize clocks? How do you use a signal, like a radio or a light signal, to synchronize distant clocks? So he's thinking about the passage of time and the speed of light.
And in that miracle year he writes a letter to a friend. He's mad at the friend for not having written; and he calls him, "You canned piece of sole, you frozen whale; I'm going to send you a letter of inconsequential babble until you send me a letter. But once you do, I'll send you four papers I've been working on in my spare time."
And when you read about these papers you realize, my goodness, this patent clerk up-ended physics. He says the first paper deals with the energy property of light, and it's very revolutionary. And that's the paper that tells us that light is not just a wave, it's also a particle - foundation for quantum theory. He goes on to describe the other papers and finally he says, "And the last one modifies the theory of time."
And that's spatial relativity, saying if you're moving, time is different than somebody who's moving in a different way. That time is different for people in different states of motion. And finally, he adds an addendum to that and says, "And if this is right, there's a relationship between energy and mass that involves the speed of light, and it can be expressed by E=MC2." So this is a total miracle year done by a guy who's just a clerk in the patent office.
Tavis: (Laughs) Tell me Einstein's thoughts about the atomic bomb, and I preface that by saying to the viewer, as you argue in the text, that his involvement in the creation of the atomic bomb was marginal but certainly his research, his equations, helped it eventually to get created. His thoughts about the atomic bomb.
Isaacson: Yes. Well, as I said he comes up with E=MC2, it means a tiny bit of mass, if you unleash the power of its atoms, has a huge amount of energy. Then as - he's been a pacifist his whole life. He was in Germany, even opposed German militarism during World War I. But he does something our politicians don't do often enough, which is when the factual evidence changes, he changes his general theories and beliefs.
So when Hitler comes to power, he decides he's no longer a pacifist and it's necessary to fight Hitler. So Einstein writes a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt explaining that on the basis of E=MC2, some friends of his who were scientists, like Leo Szilard, had come up with the notion of a nuclear chain reaction, and from that there could be the construction of bombs.
So that letter helps Franklin Roosevelt be convinced that we have to start a project in the United States to build atomic bombs. After the bomb goes off, Einstein, of course, has mixed emotions, so he becomes one of the leaders in the arms control movement in trying to get world peace because they ask him, "How do you think World War III will be fought?" He says, “I don't know, but I know how World War IV will be fought - with sticks and rocks, if we don't do something in this atomic age."
Tavis: To your point now, did he ever regret - again, I don't want to say regret his involvement, but regret that his research, that his work, was used - indeed, writing the president to say this could happen - to create something so destructive.
Isaacson: I don't know if he truly - I think he had mixed emotions. I think he worried that the Germans were going to build a bomb. He also knew that you can't keep secret how a nuclear chain reaction works. Somebody was going to come up with that idea. But he felt that our scientific advances had outstripped our moral advances and our political advances, and we needed to catch up on the side of controlling nuclear weapons so we never had a world war again using nuclear weapons.
Tavis: Two other quick questions and I'll let you go. First, I don't know why I felt this or why I thought this, but I was fascinated to read in your text about Einstein's belief in God. For some reason, probably just my strange way of thinking, I thought Einstein to be agnostic, perhaps, and that's not what I learned from the text.
Isaacson: Well, he believed it was a great mystery. He said it was a mystery that was far too vast for our limited imaginations. But you're not alone. He was - I start the chapter on Einstein's god in the book with a dinner party in Berlin where other people were taking notes. And the people at dinner are surprised when Einstein says he's religious, that he has a faith in a creator.
And he's not sort of a personal god that will intervene in our lives and sort of make it so that the New Orleans Saints win the Super Bowl or something, but it's a type of god who you sense. He said, "There's a spirit manifest in the laws of the universe in the face of which we must be humbled and awed, and that is my sense of cosmic religion." And he said that science and religion need not conflict. He said, "Science without religion is lame, and religion without science is blind."
Tavis: Finally - and you intimated at this in the first answer to my first question, but I want to bring this back full circle again - what, for you, then, for everyday people, those of us who might not be geniuses - what is the legacy of the life of Albert Einstein?
Isaacson: Well, one of the things I hope we'd learn from Einstein's life is that science can be beautiful, wondrous, and creative and imaginative. Some people, including myself, when we don't - we aren't scientists, we get intimidated by science. But just as I think we can appreciate the beauties of history or of great literature, of good books or Shakespeare plays or Mozart's music, I think we should all want to regain that sense of wonder we probably had as kids.
About why the sky is blue and why apples fall to the ground, and what it's like to be in an elevator accelerating upward. And I hope that people who aren't scientists can get turned on to the beauty and creativity of a scientific mind by just looking at the amazing life of Albert Einstein.
Tavis: After all these years, he put Ben Franklin on the bestseller list, and now he's done it for Albert Einstein. The new book is called -
Isaacson: And I'm going to do it for Tavis Smiley someday.
Tavis: I look forward to it. (Laughter) Hopefully I will have done something to have deserved the honor of you doing a book about me.
Isaacson: Maybe you can get a unified field theory that explains gravity and magnetism.
Tavis: I'll start working on it the minute I get off the show here.
Isaacson: Okay.
Tavis: The new book again by Walter Isaacson is called "Einstein: His Life and Universe." Walter Isaacson, nice to have you on the program.
Isaacson: It was great to be with you again, Tavis.
Back to May 16, 2007