Einstein: His Life and Universe

by Walter Isaacson

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.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

It was a perfect school for Einstein. The teaching was based on the philosophy of a Swiss educational reformer of the early nineteenth century, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who believed in encouraging students to visualize images. He also thought it important to nurture the “inner dignity” and individuality of each child. Students should be allowed to reach their own conclusions, Pestalozzi preached, by using a series of steps that began with hands-on observations and then proceeded to intuitions, conceptual thinking, and visual imagery.56 It was even possible to learn—and truly understand—the laws of math and physics that way. Rote drills, memorization, and force-fed facts were avoided.

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. He was awed, both in music and in physics, by the beauty of harmonies.

“Blind respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”

“You have to remain critically vigilant.” Question every premise, challenge conventional wisdom, and never accept the truth of something merely because everyone else views it as obvious. Resist being credulous. “When you pick up an application,” Haller instructed, “think that everything the inventor says is wrong.”73

Then came what may be the most revolutionary sentence that Einstein ever wrote. It suggests that light is made up of discrete particles or packets of energy: “According to the assumption to be considered here, when a light ray is propagated from a point, the energy is not continuously distributed over an increasing space but consists of a finite number of energy quanta which are localized at points in space and which can be produced and absorbed only as complete units.” Einstein explored this hypothesis by determining whether a volume of blackbody radiation, which he was now assuming consisted of discrete quanta, might in fact behave like a volume of gas, which he knew consisted of discrete particles. First, he looked at the formulas that showed how the entropy of a gas changes when its volume changes. Then he compared this to how the entropy of blackbody radiation changes as its volume changes. He found that the entropy of the radiation “varies with volume according to the same law as the entropy of an ideal gas.” He did a calculation using Boltzmann’s statistical formulas for entropy. The statistical mechanics that described a dilute gas of particles was mathematically the same as that for blackbody radiation. This led Einstein to declare that the radiation “behaves thermodynamically as if it consisted of mutually independent energy quanta.” It also provided a way to calculate the energy of a “particle” of light at a particular frequency, which turned out to be in accord...

They even considered the unlikely possibility that the earth was the only thing at rest with respect to the ether, and that everything else in the cosmos was spinning around, including the other planets, the sun, the stars, and presumably poor Copernicus in his grave.

For the time being, very few physicists embraced Einstein’s new theory, and many came forth to denounce it.

“The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think,” he said.55

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

“When I was discussing cosmological problems with Einstein,” George Gamow later recalled, “he remarked that the introduction of the cosmological term was the biggest blunder he ever made in his life.”

Elsa and her daughters came out that afternoon for a small, private celebration. She was dismayed to find him in his oldest suit, which she had hidden. “How did you manage to find it?” she asked. “Ah,” he replied, “I know all about those hiding places.”1

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

This wariness of authority reflected the most fundamental of all of Einstein’s moral principles: Freedom and individualism are necessary for creativity and imagination to flourish.

“Violence breeds violence,” he wrote Levine in a letter of praise. “Liberty is the necessary foundation for the development of all true values.”

“The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”