New Biography of Einstein Draws From Pasadena Archives

Free Creations of the Human Mind: The Worlds of Albert Einstein, a condensed biography of the life and work of Einstein, was released on May 1, 2025, by Oxford University Press.

The book, authored by Diana Kormos-Buchwald, director of the Einstein Papers Project housed at Caltech’s Pasadena campus, and Princeton University’s Michael Gordin, offers local readers a unique connection to the famed physicist whose archival legacy has been preserved and studied in our city for decades.

This 35,000-word biography tackles the dual challenge of distilling Einstein’s complex life as physicist, activist, and global figure while using the extensive Einstein archives in Pasadena to separate mythology from the documented reality of the man who revolutionized our understanding of the universe.

Kormos-Buchwald, who is also Caltech’s Robert M. Abbey Professor of History, says she collaborated with Gordin to whittle down The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, now numbering 17 volumes with more to come, into a compelling introduction to Einstein. “Professor Gordin published an important book on Einstein’s early years in Prague quite a while ago, and, of course, I have been working on Einstein-related projects for 25 years now,” Kormos-Buchwald says. “It’s much harder to write a short book than a long book. We both had extensive materials for a variety of long books, but condensing these, sharpening the narrative, and making it accessible to a broader readership required this collaboration.”

Gordin echoes the sentiment: “Einstein lends himself to very long books. We wanted to tell his life as a story, but we did not want to repeat all the stories that everybody thinks they know. Some of those stories are true, and they can be found elsewhere. But some of the accounts are apocryphal or misleading. We wanted to use the ‘ripped from the archives’ quality of recent findings and recently edited materials in the corpus of the archive and also focus on some topics we wanted to cover.”

Kormos-Buchwald and Gordin worked together closely to craft the book. “Some chapters Diana drafted first; others I drafted first. Then we went back and forth,” Gordin says. “There are individual sentences left in the book where I can tell which of us wrote which, but there are many I cannot.”

Throughout, the two authors were committed to grounding their narrative in primary sources. “We didn’t accept on hearsay any of the things that are floating around. A lot of mythology has built up around Einstein. A lot of historians, philosophers, and scientists have accreted interpretations of his work and life. We might have written a summary of the extant scholarship, but we wanted to do something different,” Gordin says. “We had to make choices about what we thought was important to Einstein himself, what we think is important for people to know now, and what we can really document and establish.”

Kormos-Buchwald concurs: “Past scholarship on Einstein has been criticized for being hagiographic. And there was a phase of ‘great man’ writings about Einstein, which was followed more recently by books and articles intent on demonstrating that Einstein had feet of clay. We wanted to document a middle way, not simply to bring balance, but to be true to what we actually know about his life.”

This approach yielded a biography that brings fresh insights to Einstein’s scientific work, his public positions on pacifism and Zionism, and the ins and outs of his daily life. One corrective Gordin and Kormos-Buchwald focus on has to do with Einstein’s engagement with the field of quantum mechanics which, they say, is often poorly understood or misinterpreted. Einstein is often portrayed as conducting a longstanding debate with Danish physicist Niels Bohr over the nature of quantum mechanics. But, as Gordin and Kormos-Buchwald write, “There was not really a ‘debate’ between Einstein and Bohr until Bohr created it and then declared himself the winner—prematurely. … The work of [later] physicists has not put to rest all the philosophical issues raised by Einstein and others about quantum mechanics; for example, debates about the problematic relations between general relativity and quantum mechanics continue to the present.”

Following a brief chronological introduction, individual chapters of Free Creations of the Human Mind focus on Einstein’s work on the theory of relativity (which Einstein initially called the theory of invariance), quantum mechanics, his Jewish identity and the fate of the Jewish people, his opposition to war, and his philosophy of science. Throughout, Gordin and Kormos-Buchwald bring readers back to Einstein’s daily life, much of which is known through his extensive correspondence. Einstein regularly wrote as many as a dozen letters a day. “For his entire life,” Gordin says, Einstein “maintained a household with a lot of dependents—wife, stepdaughters, sister, secretary—and that meant he had to be careful about his finances. People pretend like this man didn’t have to think about things like that, but he had to pay his taxes like everybody else. He also had several episodes of extremely poor health which disrupted his work and changed how he lived. When you align these with the rest of his biography, his scientific and his personal biography, they are quite revealing. People treat Einstein like a disembodied brain, and they often miss the significance of such things.”

Over the course of his lifetime, Einstein “had periods in which he was very active, very busy, and other periods that were less intense,” Kormos-Buchwald says. “And the clusters of enormous productivity were not concentrated on either science or politics, but on both.” Gordin reflects that “people want to think that somehow when you do science, you don’t do other things, but when Einstein was an active person, the science and the politics and all the other engagements were just part of his life.”

Gordin and Kormos-Buchwald show that Einstein worked to communicate his scientific ideas to a broader audience from the beginning of his career. “Einstein’s first so-called popular book on the special and general theory of relativity was written almost immediately after he completed his papers on general relativity,” Kormos-Buchwald says. “The book was published in 1917, and he completed his theory of general relativity in 1916. This book only found resonance in the German-speaking countries at that point because Germany and the rest of the world were at war with each other. What’s interesting to see is that that book, which he thought was generally understandable, was actually rather technical.”

Later on, Einstein realized how difficult it is for people who are genuinely interested in these new developments in science to comprehend them. He tried very hard after 1917 to write shorter essays and he eventually focused on two topics that he learned how to explain extremely beautifully, namely space and time. His public lectures explained our old conceptions of space and time and how relativity creates a new understanding of these two terms.”

Along with his contemporaries, Einstein thought deeply about what we could know about the world and how we could know it. The book’s title phrase, “free creations of the human mind,” was Einstein’s, intended to communicate his belief that scientific theories are assertions of human creativity which can then be tested against observations and measurements. “For Einstein, the world is not a fiction, and the world is not relative,” Kormos-Buchwald says.

“If a tree falls in the forest when no one is there to hear it, does it make a noise? Einstein’s answer would be yes,” Gordin says. “The tree does make noise if we’re not there to hear it, and the moon is there when you’re not looking at it.”