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“He was one of those split personalities who know how to protect, with a prickly exterior, the delicate realm of their intense personal life.”65
“full of whims and mischief, and as moody as ever!”
By April 1901, Einstein was reduced to buying a pile of postcards with postage-paid reply attachments in the forlorn hope that he would, at least, get an answer. In the two cases where these postcard pleas have survived, they have become, rather amusingly, prized collectors’ items. One of them, to a Dutch professor, is now on display in the Leiden Museum for the History of Science. In both cases, the return-reply attachment was not used; Einstein did not even get the courtesy of a rejection. “I leave no stone unturned and do not give up my sense of humor,” he wrote his friend Marcel Grossmann.
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It is no wonder that little by little one becomes a misanthrope.”
“Long live impudence! It is my guardian angel in this world.”
“An academic career in which a person is forced to produce scientific writings in great amounts creates a danger of intellectual superficiality,”
“Hume saw clearly that certain concepts, for example that of causality, cannot be deduced from our perceptions of experience by logical methods,”
His influence was primarily religious: Einstein embraced his concept of an amorphous God reflected in the awe-inspiring beauty, rationality, and unity of nature’s laws.
Einstein regarded the concept of the quanta and all of its unsettling implications as heuristic at best:
In one of our planet’s little ironies, Planck and Einstein would share the fate of laying the groundwork for quantum mechanics, and then both would flinch when it became clear that it undermined the concepts of strict causality and certainty they both worshipped.10
“intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.”8
The simplest picture one can form about the creation of an empirical science is along the lines of an inductive method. Individual facts are selected and grouped together so that the laws that connect them become apparent… However, the big advances in scientific knowledge originated in this way only to a small degree… The truly great advances in our understanding of nature originated in a way almost diametrically opposed to induction. The intuitive grasp of the essentials of a large complex of facts leads the scientist to the postulation of a hypothetical basic law or laws. From these laws, he
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“The Deity endures forever and is everywhere present, and by existing always and everywhere, He constitutes duration and space.”
“The whole paper is a testament to the power of simple language to convey deep and powerfully disturbing ideas,”
Einstein showed that if time is relative, so too are space and distance:
Special relativity has many other curious manifestations. Think again about that light clock on the train. What happens as the train approaches the speed of light relative to an observer on the platform? It would take almost forever for a light beam in the train to bounce from the floor to the moving ceiling and back to the moving floor. Thus time on the train would almost stand still from the perspective of an observer on the platform.
“His conviction that the universe loves simplification and beauty, and his willingness to be guided by this conviction, even if it meant destroying the foundations of Newtonian physics, led him, with a clarity of thought that others could not match, to his new description of space and time.”
“History is full of bad jokes.”
Einstein proceeded to show that, if his notions were correct, clocks would run more slowly in a more intense gravitational field.
“To dwell on the things that depress or anger us does not help in overcoming them. One must knock them down alone.”
Personal relationships involve nature’s most mysterious forces.
Math was nature’s playbook.
“I have gained enormous respect for mathematics, whose more subtle parts I considered until now, in my ignorance, as pure luxury!”10
In non-Euclidean geometry, where space is curved, we need something more generalized—sort of a vector on steroids—in order to incorporate, in a mathematically orderly way, more components. These are called tensors.
“At such times one sees to what deplorable breed of brutes we belong.”40
What made the flurry of political and personal turmoil in the fall of 1915 so remarkable was that it highlighted Einstein’s ability to concentrate on, and compartmentalize, his scientific endeavors despite all distractions. During that period, with great effort and anxiety, he was engaged in a competitive rush to what he later called the greatest accomplishment of his life.
Part of Einstein’s genius was his tenacity. He could cling to a set of ideas, even in the face of “apparent contradiction”
But although he was tenacious, he was not mindlessly stubborn.
“I resemble a farsighted man who is charmed by the vast horizon and whom the foreground bothers only when an opaque object prevents him from taking in the long view.”
“One of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness,”
“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.”25
“Scientists who become icons must not only be geniuses but also performers, playing to the crowd and enjoying public acclaim,”
“With fame I become more and more stupid, which of course is a very common phenomenon,”
“By an application of the theory of relativity, today in Germany I am called a German man of science, and in England I am represented as a Swiss Jew,” he wrote. “If I come to be regarded as a bête noire, the descriptions will be reversed, and I shall become a Swiss Jew for the Germans and a German man of science for the English!”29
He loved being in a group playing music, discussing ideas, drinking strong coffee, and smoking pungent cigars. Yet there was a faintly visible wall that separated him from even family and close friends.
“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.”
“Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being,”
“He had no gift for empathy,”
“Everyone must, from time to time, make a sacrifice on the altar of stupidity, to please the deity and mankind.
“It is a theory of space and time as far as physics is concerned, which leads to a theory of gravitation.”
“Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not.”
“Nature hides her secret because of her essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse.”
But he admitted that he did not “carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books.”
“The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think,”
“Of all the people I have met, I like the Japanese most, as they are modest, intelligent, considerate, and have a feel for art,”
To his critics, the fact that he had suddenly achieved superstar status as the most internationally celebrated scientist since the lightning-tamer Benjamin Franklin was paraded through the streets of Paris was evidence of his self-promotion rather than his worthiness of a Nobel.
“In all the history of human thought, there is no greater dialogue than that which took place over the years between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein about the meaning of the quantum,” says the physicist John Wheeler, who studied under Bohr.
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!
An electron does not have a definite position or path until we observe it.
Now, but only now, we know that the force that moves electrons in their ellipses about the nuclei of atoms is the same force that moves our earth in its annual course around the sun.”
