Einstein: His Life and Universe

by Walter Isaacson

With his charm and biting wit, he tended to produce either acolytes or enemies, but Einstein fell into neither category. He and Oppenheimer viewed each other with a mixture of amusement and respect, which allowed them to develop a cordial though not close relationship.

Out of the supercharged German-speaking intellectual world, in which physics and mathematics and philosophy intertwined, three jarring theories of the twentieth century emerged: Einstein’s relativity, Heisenberg’s uncertainty, and Gödel’s incompleteness.

During their walks, Gödel explored some of the implications of relativity theory, and he came up with an analysis that called into question whether time, rather than merely being relative, could be said to exist at all.

“The existence of an objective lapse of time,” he wrote, “means that reality consists of an infinity of layers of ‘now’ which come into existence successively. But if simultaneity is something relative, each observer has his own set of ‘nows,’ and none of these various layers can claim the prerogative of representing the objective lapse of time.”

“A theory is more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different things it relates, and the more expanded its area of applicability,” he wrote.

could also be intense and passionate, both with family and friends, when he found himself engaged rather than confined.

wisdom and wear but still a vitality. He was dreamy, as he was when a child, but also now serene.

There were a lot of domestic communists in England, but the people there did not get themselves whipped into a frenzy by internal security investigations, he pointed out. Americans need not either.

the free speech guarantees of the First Amendment, rather than the “subterfuge” of invoking the Fifth Amendment’s protection against possible self-incrimination. Standing up for the First Amendment was particularly a duty of intellectuals, he said, because they had a special role in society as preservers of free thought. He was still horrified that most intellectuals in Germany had not risen in resistance when the Nazis came to power.

Einstein’s opposition to McCarthyism arose partly out of his fear of fascism. America’s most dangerous internal threat, he felt, came not from communist subversives but from those who used the fear of communists to trample civil liberties.

Even slightly frivolous remarks made by Einstein carried a lot of momentum.

So for a while his disdain deepened. But he was saved from serious despair by his wry detachment and his sense of humor. He was not destined to die a bitter man. CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE THE END 1955

“The strange thing about growing old is that the intimate identification with the here and now is slowly lost,” he wrote his friend the queen mother of Belgium. “One feels transposed into infinity, more or less alone.”3

He poked the stick upward until it almost touched the ceiling. Then he let it drop straight down. The ball, while in free fall, behaved as if it was weightless. The spring inside the contraption instantly pulled it into the cup.21

“The attitude we adopt toward the Arab minority will provide the real test of our moral standards as a people,”

The explanation that Einstein himself most often gave for his mental accomplishments was his curiosity. As he put it near the end of his life, “I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious.”11

Curiosity, in Einstein’s case, came not just from a desire to question the mysterious. More important, it came from a childlike sense of marvel that propelled him to question the familiar, those concepts that, as he once said, “the ordinary adult never bothers his head about.”

“He would aim for simplicity and beauty, and beauty for him was, after all, essentially simplicity.”

“I believe what allowed Einstein to achieve so much was primarily a moral quality,”

Perhaps the most important aspect of his personality was his willingness to be a nonconformist.

“The theme that I recognize in Galileo’s work,” he said, “is the passionate fight against any kind of dogma based on authority.”20