Einstein: His Life and Universe

by Walter Isaacson

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.

A society’s competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity.

“We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.”23

“Through the reading of popular scientific books, I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression.”

“I was originally supposed to become an engineer,” he later wrote a friend, “but the thought of having to expend my creative energy on things that make practical everyday life even more refined, with a bleak capital gain as the goal, was unbearable to me.

Music continued to beguile Einstein. It was not so much an escape as it was a connection: to the harmony underlying the universe, to the creative genius of the great composers, and to other people who felt comfortable bonding with more than just words.

“God created the donkey and gave him a thick skin.”

Einstein and his daughter apparently never laid eyes on each other. She would merit, as we shall see, just one brief mention in their surviving correspondence less than two years later, in September 1903, and then not be referred to again. In the meantime, she was left back in Novi Sad with her mother’s relatives or friends so that Einstein could maintain both his unencumbered lifestyle and the bourgeois respectability he needed to become a Swiss official. There is a cryptic hint that the person who took custody of Lieserl may have been Marić’s close friend, Helene Kaufler Savić, whom she had met in 1899 when they lived in the same rooming house in Zurich. Savić was from a Viennese Jewish family and had married an engineer from Serbia in 1900.

January 6, 1903, to serve as witnesses at the tiny civil ceremony in the Bern registrar’s office where Albert Einstein married Mileva Marić. No family members—not Einstein’s mother or sister, nor Marić’s parents—came to Bern. The tight group of intellectual comrades celebrated together at a restaurant that evening, and then Einstein and Marić went back to his apartment together. Not surprisingly, he had forgotten his key and had to wake his landlady.89

Marić received word that Lieserl, then 19 months old, had come down with scarlet fever.

All evidence about Einstein’s daughter was carefully erased. Almost every one of the letters between Einstein and Marić in the summer and fall of 1902, many of which presumably dealt with Lieserl, were destroyed. Those between Marić and her friend Helene Savić during that period were intentionally burned by Savić’s family. For the rest of their lives, even after they divorced, Einstein and his wife did all they could, with surprising success, to cover up not only the fate of their first child but her very existence.

“All these fifty years of pondering have not brought me any closer to answering the question, What are light quanta?”26

Brownian motion,

Imagine a man in an armchair at home and a woman in an airplane gliding very smoothly above. Each can pour a cup of coffee, bounce a ball, shine a flashlight, or heat a muffin in a microwave and have the same laws of physics apply.

In fact, there is no way to determine which of them is “in motion” and which is “at rest.” The man in the armchair could consider himself at rest and the plane in motion. And the woman in the plane could consider herself at rest and the earth as gliding past. There is no experiment that can prove who is right.

The special theory of relativity that Einstein developed in 1905 applies only to this special case (hence the name): a situation in which the observers are moving at a constant velocity relative to one another—uniformly in a straight line at a steady speed—referred to as an “inertial reference system.”1

Einstein seemed to develop qualms about his affair with his cousin.

“There would only be confusion and misfortune if we were to give into our mutual attraction,” he wrote Elsa.

There was, of course, another factor that made the new job enticing: the chance to be with his cousin and new love, Elsa.

Indeed, by this point all of the women in his life—his mother, sister, wife, and

kissing cousin—were at war with one another.

Through the Habers, Einstein delivered to Marić in mid-July a brutal cease-fire ultimatum. It was in the form of a proposed contract, one in which Einstein’s cold scientific approach combined with his personal hostility and emotional alienation to produce an astonishing document. It read in full: Conditions. A. You will make sure 1. that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order;

2. that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room; 3. that my bedroom and study are kept neat, and especially that my desk is left for my use only. B. You will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons. Specifically, you will forego 1. my sitting at home with you; 2. my going out or traveling with you. C. You will obey the following points in your relations with me: 1. you will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way; 2. you will stop talking to me if I request it; 3. you will leave my bedroom or study immediately without protest if I request it.

D. You will undertake not to belittle me in front of our children, either thro...

The idea that war had a biological basis in male aggression was a topic Einstein also explored in a letter to his friend in Zurich, Heinrich Zangger. “What drives people to kill and maim each other so savagely?” Einstein asked. “I think it is the sexual character of the male that leads to such wild explosions.”

Einstein did not believe, then or later, that these results actually corresponded to anything real. In 1939, for example, he produced a paper that provided, he said, “a clear understanding as to why these ‘Schwarzschild singularities’ do not exist in physical reality.” A few months later, however, J. Robert Oppenheimer and his student Hartland Snyder argued the opposite, predicting that stars could undergo a gravitational collapse.2

It was, by all accounts, a pleasant Atlantic crossing, during which Einstein tried to explain relativity to Weizmann. Asked upon their arrival whether he understood the theory, Weizmann gave a delightful reply: “During the crossing, Einstein explained his theory to me every day, and by the time we arrived I was fully convinced that he really understands it.”

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

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

On one visit, Lebach left a piece of clothing in Einstein’s sailboat, which caused a family row and prompted Elsa’s daughter to urge her to force Einstein to end the relationship. But Elsa was afraid that her husband would refuse. He had let it be known that he believed that men and women were not naturally monogamous.14 In the end, she decided that she was better off preserving what she could of their marriage. In other respects, it suited her aspirations.15

Do you believe in God? “I’m not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.”

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.5

Occasionally, he would take rambling walks on his own, which could be dicey. One day someone called the Institute and asked to speak to a particular dean. When his secretary said that the dean wasn’t available, the caller hesitantly asked for Einstein’s

home address. That was not possible to give out, he was informed. The caller’s voice then dropped to a whisper. “Please don’t tell anybody,” he said, “but I am Dr. Einstein, I’m on my way home, and I’ve forgotten where my house is.”40

Einstein reported to Mileva Marić how much he had enjoyed being with their son. “He has

such a great personality,” he wrote. “It is unfortunate that he has this wife, but what can you do if he’s happy?”55

At the end of the 1940s, when it was becoming clear to him that the effort to control nuclear weaponry would fail, Einstein was asked what the next war would look like. “I do not know how the Third World War will be fought,” he answered, “but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth—rocks.”