Events of 1905

Einstein's reasoning is very much with us, from the laboratory production of Bose-Einstein condensates, through the observatory's glimpses of gravitational lensing, to the abstractions of string theory and the outer reaches of cosmology. For historians and philosophers of science, Einstein remains a figure of endless fascination-what he thought about the real and the objective in science, how he sorted out the shifting politics of his very long day: pacifism, militancy against Nazism, the atomic bomb, McCarthyism. Jeremy Bernstein shines at this strategy of embedment, particularly in his biographical sketches-the striking series of portraits of physicists he has given us over the years in The New Yorker, in which he humanizes figures like Hans Bethe while keeping their ideas lucid and central.