“I was glad to get out of Hungary,” he writes of his state of mind then. “I felt I had had enough of politicians and government upheavals. . . . Suddenly I was enveloped in the feeling that only science is lasting.”425 That science can be a refuge from the world is a conviction common among men and women who turn to it. Abraham Pais remarks that Einstein “once commented that he had sold himself body and soul to science, being in flight from the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ to the ‘it.’ ”426 But science as a means of escaping from the familiar world of birth and childhood and language when that world
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