I wonder what it would have been like for a Princeton undergrad to ride back to school on the Dinky and find himself seated next to Albert Einstein or to see him seated at the corner ice cream store on Nassau Street where he would stop on his walk home. Einstein would walk daily to his office chatting with his friend Kurt Goedel. Interesting that these two monumental minds found such a bond, with Goedel who described the limits of logic and Einstein who explained the great expansive energy of the universe.
Walter Isaacson explains the basics of Einstein’s theories in a way that, mercifully, the average reader can understand. By average reader, I mean, all of us who struggled with math and are baffled by physics. And it is decidedly not true that Einstein was backward as a child and could not learn mathematics. He mastered calculus in his teens was good enough at it to tutor the lesser minds of fellow students. On the other hand, he was slow to take up language, but then again, it is clear that all his life he thought deeply and thoroughly before speaking.
It is interesting and surprising to learn that his discoveries were made mostly of thought experiments, rather than by actual physical testing. That task was left largely to others who proved his theories. It is also a surprise that this man of science insistently denied that he was an atheist. In fact, he surprised several friends who assumed that he had no belief in a grand designer of the incredible design of nature. On the other hand, he said he had no belief in a personal God, but rather believed in Spinoza’s God. Spinoza defined God so broadly and was so opposed to what he termed the superstitious stories of the Bible, that it would be hard to say in what kind of deity Einstein did believe.
On thing is certain, he was proud of his Jewish heritage and hated the German nationalism even before Germany turned to the Nazis. Einstein was also somewhat skeptical of the growing nationalism in Palestine that eventually brought about the state of Israel. Nonetheless, he lobbied for the founding of Israel and was even offered it first presidency which he wisely declined.
Isaacson debunks many of the things we think we know about Einstein but it is true that there actually was some reason in the suspicions that the FBI had about him during the war. Apparently he never knew it, but in his later years the woman he dated was indeed a Soviet agent. His last years were spent quietly and peacefully in Princeton where he was thought to be just as he was, a thoughtful man who had every right to display superior airs, but didn’t. His neighbors had a little daughter who would sneak over to Einstein and get help with her mathematics homework and he obliged. She complained to him that her math problems were so difficult, but Albert Einstein, the patient genius, told her that his math problems were even more difficult.
Two Strikes 