On Einstein...

Albert Einstein

BY FRANK PELLEGRINI

Everything's relative.

Speed, mass, space and time are all subjective. Light has weight. Space has curves. And coiled within a pound of matter is the explosive power of 14 million tons of TNT.

We know all this, because of Albert Einstein.

The light came on in 1905.

Preternaturally confident and suitably unkempt, the 26-year-old Einstein sent three papers, papers scrawled in his spare time, to the premier journal, "Annalen der Physik," to be published "if there is room." They all made the same issue, and they changed the world. One  was an update of Max Planck's quantum theory of radiation. Another concerned Brownian motion, an until-then unexplained phenomenon involving bouncing molecules. The third, wrote Einstein matter-of factly in a letter to a friend, "modifies the theory of space and time." Its import: Everything's relative. He could have retired right then and still been the savior of science in the 20th century.

In 1939,

Einstein warned Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a letter that the Germans were nearing the nuclear age. America had better get there first. It did. By 1945 Einstein's epiphany and the Manhattan Project would wreak, the most horrible destruction of our age in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Einstein knew what he and his visions had done - Pacifist, deep-thinking Einstein, who loved children, was the father of the bomb. after the war he made a tearful apology to visiting Japanese physicist Hideki Yukawa.

At Princeton,

He was more like a kindly uncle. When he arrived in 1935, and was asked what he would require for his study, he replied: "A desk, some pads and a pencil, and a large waste-basket -- to hold all of my mistakes." His salary had to be raised by Princeton administrators to avoid embarrassment.

He played the violin, helped children with their homework, and did indeed have some trouble remembering his address.

Once, Uncle Einstein sent this reply, along with a page full of diagrams, to a 15-year-old girl who had written for help on a homework assignment: "Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics; I can assure you that mine are much greater." Everything's relative.

Religion

Einstein, though not religious, was a believer. "I want to know how God created this world... I want to know his thoughts; the rest are details." And he had a good idea of what those thoughts were. Subtle but not malicious, non-interventionist but certainly present, Einstein's God didn't "play dice with the universe."

"Stop telling God what to do," Niels Bohr told him.

Einstein got us closer to nature's truths than anyone had before, and he knew how much he had left unsolved. With just a pen and paper, he peeked behind Nature's curtain.

Now, when we think of genius, we see his face.


********************************************************

Today (25 November 2015) marks 100 years of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.  This excellent article was published in the TIME magazine in the year 2000, when it chose Albert Einstein as the Person of Century.

I just love this small piece, the way it has been written.