Everything Einstein

Walter Isaacson is the President and CEO of the Aspen Institute, and past Chairman and CEO of CNN and  Managing Editor of Time Magazine. He is the author of several biographies, including Benjamin Franklin and Henry Kissinger.  His biography of Albert Einstein -  Einstein: His Life and Universe - was released in April 2007.

Isaacson began his career at the Sunday Times of London and then the New Orleans Times-Picayune/States-Item. In  1978 he joined Time Magazine where he served as a political correspondent, national editor and editor of new media before becoming the magazine's 14th managing editor in 1996. In 2001 he became Chairman and CEO of CNN , and then president and CEO of the Aspen Institute in 2003.

He was appointed after Hurricane Katrina to be the vice-chairman of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. He is on the Board of Directors of United Airlines, Tulane University, the National Constitution Center, and he is chairman of the board of Teach for America.

John D Norton is an internationally recognized expert in the science of Albert Einstein. He has published extensively on Einstein's discoveries of general relativity, special relativity and the light quantum and also on philosophical aspects of Einstein's work. He has been a contributing editor to the publication of Einstein's collected papers and serves on the publication project's advisory board. His most notable achievement was the analysis of the "Zurich Notebook," which contains private calculations made by Einstein in preparation for his greatest discovery, the general theory of relativity.

In 2005, Professor Norton was an invited speaker at many conferences celebrating the centenary of Einstein's annus mirabilis of 1905, including events in Washington, London, Berlin, Tenerife, Jerusalem, Pasadena, Florence and Bern in Switzerland.

Professor Norton has taught in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, since 1983. He was its Chair from 2000-2005 and, since 2005, has been the Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, which is the world's leading research institute in philosophy of science. In an earlier career, Professor Norton was a chemical engineer and worked for Shell Refining making gasoline. That, he remarks, was worthwhile work, but pondering Einstein, his discoveries and a wide range of problems in history and philosophy of science is infinitely more entertaining. His website is http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton

Moderator: Regina Schulte-Ladbeck is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research is in the area of observational astrophysics. Most recently, she has been combining data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to probe galaxies that are in the process of forming new generations of stars. Schulte-Ladbeck came to the United States in 1987 with a fellowship from the German Science Foundation. As a project scientist at the Space Astronomy Laboratory in Madison, WI, she worked on the Wisconsin Ultraviolet Photo Polarimeter Experiment, a small telescope that flew twice on a space shuttle mission. Schulte-Ladbeck has taught astronomy to several thousand students since 1992. She has published over one hundred primary papers on a variety of topics in astronomy and astrophysics, and has served on scientific committees for NASA.


Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was a physicist best known for his discovery of the special and general theories of relativity. These theories provide our best accounts of the nature of space, time and gravity and also the famous E=mc^2. He also worked extensively in statistical physics, which provided compelling evidence for the reality of atoms and led him to postulate the notion of the light quantum. Einstein's discoveries overturned the edifice of classical physics and was distinctive for its simplicity, clarity and its bold and unexpected departures from ordinary thought. These achievements earned Einstein his place as an intellectual hero in popular culture. He is present in spirit whenever we gather to discuss his work.




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