Einstein: His Life and Universe

by Walter Isaacson

Einstein was never an inspired teacher, and his lectures tended to be regarded as disorganized until his celebrity ensured that every stumble he made was transformed into a charming anecdote.

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

Golden felt he was speaking “with almost childlike hope for salvation and without appearing to have thought through the details of his solution.” He reported back to Marshall, “It was surprising, though perhaps it should not have been, that, out of his métier of mathematics, he seemed naïve in the field of international politics. The man who popularized the concept of a fourth dimension could think in only two of them in considerations of World Government.”

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.”

he wrote Queen Mother Elisabeth. “Besides, I believe that older people who have scarcely anything to lose ought to be willing to speak out in behalf of those who are young and are subject to much greater restraint.”

The explanation that Einstein himself most often gave for his mental accomplishments was his curiosity. As he put it near the end of his life, “I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious.”

A tenet of Einstein’s faith was that nature was not cluttered with extraneous attributes. Thus, there must be a purpose to curiosity. For Einstein, it existed because it created minds that question, which produced an appreciation for the universe that he equated with religious feelings. “Curiosity has its own reason for existing,” he once explained. “One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality.”

For some people, miracles serve as evidence of God’s existence. For Einstein it was the absence of miracles that reflected divine providence. The fact that the cosmos is comprehensible, that it follows laws, is worthy of awe. This is the defining quality of a “God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists.”