Walter Isaacson Has a Plane (To Catch)**

"Newton, forgive me..."
-Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes

One morning Washington D.C. called my cell phone. I usually let my voice mail field calls before coffee but when D.C. rings, it's always a good idea to answer. A man with a casual and kind southern drawl asks to speak with me. He introduces himself as Walter Isaacson and says that there's a note on his desk that says he must return my phone call.

Confused at first, I then suddenly remember my inquiry to his secretary at the Aspen Institute the night before

"Oh, it was an email," I say.

"Whatever," Walter Isaacson replies. When Walter Isaacson says "whatever" it is not in the same sarcastic sense that the teenagers take, it's in the don't-worry-everything-will-be-all-right type of inflection.

I stumble through what is frequently called the "elevator pitch."

"Sounds good. I will email you my contact information," he says from Washington D.C.

I am a happy journalist.

Albert Einstein was a demagogue. He was also a passionate Zionist. Some described him as anti-authoritarian, insubordinate, and bohemian. He was given to fits of romantic fantasy. He was pacifistic to a point short of the rise of Nazism and he was a violinist. At times he could be very prophetic, deeply spiritual but then he was chronically unkempt and most frequently disheveled. In public he was pithy and witty, but in private he could be womanizing, unsympathetic, socially inept and of course profoundly intellectual and most of all, creative. Though he was conscious of all these failings and exploited them to his own benefit.

His ideas changed the world in a time when the world was already primed for change. The old guard was failing and the clockwork universe of Newton was not conforming to the way things appeared to behave in real life experimentations. Though small at first, the discrepancies were disturbing. It was a phenomenon not simply restricted to the sciences.