Michael’s Reviews > Einstein: His Life and Universe > Status Update

Pg. 533:Einstein's opposition to McCarthyism arose partly out of his fear of fascism. America's most dangerous internal threat he felt, came not from communist subversives but from those who used the fear of communists to trample civil liberties. "America is incomparably less endangered by its own Communists than by the hysterical hunt for the few Communists that are here," told the socialist leadr Norman Thomas.

Pg 458 Einstein's so-called mistakes, such as the cosmological constant he added to his gravitational field equations, often turned out to be more intriguing than other people's successes.

pg. 324 For Einstein, and indeed for most classical physicist, the idea that there could be a fundamental randomness in the universe - that events could just happen without a cause - was not only a cause for discomfort, it undermined the entire program of physics.

pg. 306 One evening at dinner, Murray's wife asked him why he remained so cheerful given the depravity of the world. "We must remember that this is a very small star," he responded, "and provably some of the larger and more important stars may be very virtuous and happy." [ftnt]

pg. 297 1921, Princeton, Einstein went to Princeton, where he delivered a weeklong series of scientific lectures and received an honorary degree "for voyaging through strange seas of thought."

pg. 279: Relativity theory would have profound consequences for theology, Haldane warned the archbishop of Canterbury, who immediately tried to comprehend the theory with only modest success.

p. 84 ..., Einstein steadfastly believed it was right."

p. 84 In addition, Einstein drew from Spinoza a faith in determinism: a sense that the laws of nature, once we could fathom them, decreed immutable causes and effects, and that God did not play dice by allowing any events to be random or undertermined. "All things are determined by the necessity of divine nature," Spinoza declared, and even when when quantum mechanics seemed to show that was wrong,

pg. 67 - "Blind respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth."