Einstein: His Life and Universe

by Walter Isaacson

Byland realized that Einstein’s wisecracking, sarcastic exterior was a shell around a softer inner soul. “He was one of those split personalities who know how to protect, with a prickly exterior, the delicate realm of their intense personal life.”

Amused by the whole situation, he turned to the patrician seated next to him and speculated about the austere Protestant Reformation leader who had founded the university: “Do you know what Calvin would have done had he been here?” The gentleman, befuddled, said no. Einstein replied, “He would have erected an enormous stake and had us all burnt for our sinful extravagance.” As Einstein later recalled, “The man never addressed another word to me.”

“I have to have someone to love, otherwise life is miserable,”

Even before Einstein moved to Berlin, he and Elsa began to correspond as if they were a couple. She worried about his exhaustion and sent him a long letter prescribing more exercise, rest, and a healthier diet. He responded by saying that he planned to “smoke like a chimney, work like a horse, eat without thinking, go for a walk only in really pleasant company.”

Despite such conventional concerns, Einstein still fancied their relationship could avoid sinking into a mundane pattern. “How nice it would be if one of these days we could share in managing a small bohemian household,” he wrote. “You have no idea how charming such a life with very small needs and without grandeur can be!”

It was the most wrenching personal moment for a man who took perverse pride in avoiding personal moments. For all of his reputation of being inured to deep human attachments, he had been madly in love with Mileva Marić and bonded to his children. For one of the few times in his adult life, he found himself crying.

“For me there is no other female creature besides you,” he wrote. “It is not a lack of true affection which scares me away again and again from marriage! Is it a fear of the comfortable life, of nice furniture, of the odium that I burden myself with or even of becoming some sort of contented bourgeois? I myself don’t know; but you will see that my attachment to you will endure.”

“Europe in its madness has now embarked on something incredibly preposterous,” he wrote Ehrenfest that month. “At such times one sees to what deplorable breed of brutes we belong.”

“One of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness,” Einstein said. “Such men make this cosmos and its construction the pivot of their emotional life, in order to find the peace and security which they cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.”

“All true democrats must stand guard lest the old class tyranny of the Right be replaced by a new class tyranny of the Left,”

The skeptical Silberstein came up to Eddington and said that people believed that only three scientists in the world understood general relativity. He had been told that Eddington was one of them. The shy Quaker said nothing. “Don’t be so modest, Eddington!” said Silberstein. Replied Eddington, “On the contrary. I’m just wondering who the third might be.”

The cult of individual personalities is always, in my view, unjustified… It strikes me as unfair, and even in bad taste, to select a few for boundless admiration, attributing superhuman powers of mind and character to them. This has been my fate, and the contrast between the popular estimate of my achievements and the reality is simply grotesque. This extraordinary state of affairs would be unbearable but for one great consoling thought: it is a welcome symptom in an age, which is commonly denounced as materialistic, that it makes heroes of men whose ambitions lie wholly in the intellectual and moral sphere.

“My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and communities,” he reflected. “I am truly a ‘lone traveler’ and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude.”

“Everyone must, from time to time, make a sacrifice on the altar of stupidity, to please the deity and mankind. And I did so thoroughly with my article.”

“The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think,”

“I was bitterly ashamed to share responsibility for the abominable treatment accorded fellow human beings but was unable to do anything about it.”

“To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself.”

On one of the many occasions when Einstein declared that God would not play dice, it was Bohr who countered with the famous rejoinder: Einstein, stop telling God what to do!

When he posed that question, there was one possibility that he simply could not believe: that the good Lord would have created beautiful and subtle rules that determined most of what happened in the universe, while leaving a few things completely to chance. It felt wrong. “If the Lord had wanted to do that, he would have done it thoroughly, and not kept to a pattern… He would have gone the whole hog. In that case, we wouldn’t have to look for laws at all.”

Life for its own sake, Einstein went on, was hollow. “People who live in a society, enjoy looking into each other’s eyes, who share their troubles, who focus their efforts on what is important to them and find this joyful—these people lead a full life.”

He had demonstrated this as an impertinent young thinker, and he proclaimed the principle clearly in 1931. “I believe that the most important mission of the state is to protect the individual and to make it possible for him to develop into a creative personality,” he said.

“Einstein was a humanist, socialist, and a democrat,” he recalled. “He was completely anti-totalitarian, no matter whether it was Russian, German or South American. He approved of a combination of capitalism and socialism. And he hated all dictatorships of the right or left.”

“I must tell you honestly that in the long term I would prefer to be in Holland rather than in America,” Einstein replied. “Apart from the handful of really fine scholars, it is a boring and barren society that would soon make you shiver.”

“As long as I have any choice in the matter, I shall live only in a country where civil liberty, tolerance and equality of all citizens before the law prevail,” he said. “These conditions do not exist in Germany at the present time.”

What happened in Germany in 1933 was not just a brutality perpetrated by thuggish leaders and abetted by ignorant mobs. It was also, as Einstein described, “the utter failure of the so-called intellectual aristocracy.”

The charge of inconsistency would have amused Einstein. For a scientist, altering your doctrines when the facts change is not a sign of weakness.

The essence of his political belief was to oppose any power that “enslaves the individual by terror and force, whether it arises under a Fascist or Communist flag.”

Einstein relished the simplicity of life in Watch Hill. He puttered around its lanes and even shopped for groceries with Mrs. Bucky. Most of all, he loved sailing his seventeen-foot wooden boat Tinef, which is Yiddish for a piece of junk.

Their relationship had not been a model romance. Before their marriage, Einstein’s letters to her were filled with sweet endearments, but those disappeared over the years. He could be prickly and demanding at times, seemingly inured to her emotional needs, and occasionally a flirt or more with other women.

Yet beneath the surface of many romances that evolve into partnerships, there is a depth not visible to outside observers. Elsa and Albert Einstein liked each other, understood each other, and perhaps most important (for she, too, was actually quite clever in her own way) were amused by each other. So even if it was not the stuff of poetry, the bond between them was a solid one. It was forged by satisfying each other’s desires and needs, it was genuine, and it worked in both directions.

(which must be secured against direct interference by the cat):

In it he argued that unrestrained capitalism produced great disparities of wealth, cycles of boom and depression, and festering levels of unemployment. The system encouraged selfishness instead of cooperation, and acquiring wealth rather than serving others. People were educated for careers rather than for a love of work and creativity. And political parties became corrupted by political contributions from owners of great capital.

That imperative—to protect the rights of the individual—was Einstein’s most fundamental political tenet. Individualism and freedom were necessary for creative art and science to flourish. Personally, politically, and professionally, he was repulsed by any restraints.

Admittedly, he was a somewhat contrarian citizen. But in that regard he was in the tradition of some venerable strands in the fabric of American character: fiercely protective of individual liberties, often cranky about government interference, distrustful of great concentrations of wealth, and a believer in the idealistic internationalism that gained favor among American intellectuals after both of the great wars of the twentieth century.

He had been a difficult husband and father because he did not take well to any constricting bonds, but he could also be intense and passionate, both with family and friends, when he found himself engaged rather than confined.

Einstein’s brilliance sprang from being a rebel and nonconformist who recoiled at any attempt to restrain his free expression. Are there any worse traits for someone who is supposed to be a political conciliator?

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.

Einstein’s fundamental creed was that freedom was the lifeblood of creativity. “The development of science and of the creative activities of the spirit,” he said, “requires a freedom that consists in the independence of thought from the restrictions of authoritarian and social prejudice.” Nurturing that should be the fundamental role of government, he felt, and the mission of education.