reality that was painted by the brush strokes of mathematics. “Behind a formula he immediately saw the physical content, while for us it only remained an abstract formula,” said one of his first students.15 Planck came up with the concept of the quanta, which he viewed as mainly a mathematical contrivance, but it took Einstein to understand their physical reality. Lorentz came up with mathematical transformations that described bodies in motion, but it took Einstein to create a new theory of relativity based on them.
One day during the 1930s, Einstein invited Saint-John Perse to Princeton to find out how the poet worked. “How does the idea of a poem come?” Einstein asked. The poet spoke of the role played by intuition and imagination. “It’s the same for a man of science,” Einstein responded with delight. “It is a sudden illumination, almost a rapture. Later, to be sure, intelligence analyzes and experiments confirm or invalidate the intuition. But initially there is a great forward leap of the imagination.”16
There was an aesthetic to Einstein’s thinking, a sense of beauty. And one component to beauty, he felt, was simplicity. He had echoed Newton’s dictum “Nature is pleased with simplicity” in the creed he declared at Oxford the year he left Europe for America: “Nature is the realization of the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas.”17
Despite Occam’s razor and other philosophical maxims along these lines, there is no self-evident reason this has to be true. Just as it is possible that God might actually play dice, so too it is possible that he might delight in Byzantine complexities. But Einstein didn’t think so. “In building a theory, his approach had something in common with that of an artist,” said Nathan Rosen, his assistant in the 1930s. “He would aim for simplicity and beauty, and beauty for him was, after all, essentially simplicity.”18
He became like a gardener weeding a flower bed. “I believe what allowed Einstein to achieve so much was primarily a moral quality,” said physicist Lee Smolin. “He simply cared far more than most of his colleagues that the laws of physics have to explain everything in nature coherently and consistently.”19
Einstein’s instinct for unification was ingrained in his personality and reflected in his politics. Just as he sought a unified theory in science that could govern the cosmos, so he sought one in politics that could govern the planet, one that would overcome the anarchy of unfettered nationalism through a world federalism based on universal principles.
Perhaps the most important aspect of his personality was his willingness to be a nonconformist. It was an attitude that he celebrated in a foreword he wrote near the end of his life to a new edition of Galileo. “The theme that I recognize in Galileo’s work,” he said, “is the passionate fight against any kind of dogma based on authority.”20
Planck and Poincare and Lorentz all came close to some of the breakthroughs Einstein made in 1905. But they were a little too confined by dogma based on authority. Einstein alone among them was rebellious enough to throw out conventional thinking that had defined science for centuries.
This joyous nonconformity made him recoil from the sight of Prussian soldiers marching in lockstep. It was a personal outlook that became a political one as well. He bristled at all forms of tyranny over free minds, from Nazism to Stalinism to McCarthyism.
Einstein’s fundamental creed was that freedom was the lifeblood of creativity. “The development of science and of the creative activities of the spirit,” he said, “requires a freedom that consists in the independence of thought from the restrictions of authoritarian and social prejudice.” Nurturing that should be the fundamental role of government, he felt, and the mission of education.21
There was a simple set of formulas that defined Einstein’s outlook. Creativity required being willing not to conform. That required nurturing free minds and free spirits, which in turn required “a spirit of tolerance.” And the underpinning of tolerance was humility—the belief that no one had the right to impose ideas and beliefs on others.
The world has seen a lot of impudent geniuses. What made Einstein special was that his mind and soul were tempered by this humility. He could be serenely self-confident in his lonely course yet also humbly awed by the beauty of nature’s handiwork. “A spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe—a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble,” he wrote. “In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort.”22
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.”23
Einstein considered this feeling of reverence, this cosmic religion, to be the wellspring of all true art and science. It was what guided him. “When I am judging a theory,” he said, “I ask myself whether, if I were God, I would have arranged the world in such a way.”24 It is also what graced him with his beautiful mix of confidence and awe.
He was a loner with an intimate bond to humanity, a rebel who was suffused with reverence. And thus it was that an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe.
SOURCES
EINSTEIN’S CORRESPONDENCE AND WRITINGS
vols. 1–10. 1987–2006. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
(Abbreviated CPAE)
The founding editor was John Stachel. The current general editor is Diana Kormos Buchwald. Other editors over the years include David Cassidy, Robert Schulmann, Jurgen Renn, Martin Klein, A. J. Knox, Michel Janssen, Josef Illy, Christoph Lehner, Daniel Kennefick, Tilman Sauer, Ze’ev Rosenkranz, and Virginia Iris Holmes.
These volumes cover the years 1879–1920. Each volume comes in a German version and an English translation. The page numbers in each differ, but the document numbers are the same. In cases where I cite some information that is in one version but not the other (such as an editor’s essay or footnote), I designate the volume and language version and cite the page number.
Albert Einstein Archives. (Abbreviated AEA)
These archives are now at Hebrew University in Jerusalem with copies at the Einstein Papers Project at Caltech and in the Princeton University library. Documents from the archives are cited both by date and by the AEA folder (reel) and document number. In the case of most of the untranslated German documents, I have relied on translations made for me by James Hoppes and Natasha Hoffmeyer.
FREQUENTLY CITED WORKS
