Any youngster on the streets of Göttingen understands geometry in four dimensions better than Einstein.* And yet, it was Einstein who completed the task. Why? Because Einstein had a unique capacity to imagine how the world might be constructed, to “see” it in his mind. The equations, for him, came afterward; they were the language with which to make concrete his visions of reality. For Einstein, the theory of general relativity is not a collection of equations: it is a mental image of the world arduously translated into equations.
