Einstein: His Life and Universe

by Walter Isaacson

Indeed, whenever personal issues began to weigh on him, he took refuge in his work. It shielded him, allowed him to escape.

“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,”

“This was the opposite of what Einstein believed. He was a man of simple and absolute moral convictions, which were expressed in all he was and did.”

part of the success of Jewish scientists was their “creative skepticism,” which arose from their essential nature as outsiders.

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

More specifically, Einstein’s scientific successes had come in part from his rebelliousness. There was a link between his creativity and his willingness to defy authority.

But how did he come up with the starting blocks for his theoretical thinking—the principles and postulates that would launch his logical deductions? As we’ve seen, he did not usually start with a set of experimental data that needed some explanation. “No collection of empirical facts, however comprehensive, can ever lead to the formulation of such

complicated equations,” he said in describing how he had come up with the general theory of relativity.

Instead, he generally began with postulates that he had abstracted from his understanding of the physical world, such as the equivalence of gravity and acceleration.

Einstein’s great strength as a theorist was that he had a keener ability than other scientists to come up with what he called “the general postulates and principles which serve as the starting point.”

nature is the realization of the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas.”

“Even a genius like Schopenhauer was crushed by unemployment,” he wrote. “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.”30