20 Things You Need to Know About Einstein

Einstein was slow in learning how to speak. His parents even consulted a doctor. He also had a cheeky rebelliousness toward authority, which led one headmaster to expel him and another to amuse history by saying that he would never amount to much. But these traits helped make him a genius. His cocky contempt for authority led him to question conventional wisdom. His slow verbal development made him curious about ordinary things – such as space and time – that most adults take for granted. His father gave him a compass at age five, and he puzzled over the nature of a magnetic field for the rest of his life. And he tended to think in pictures rather than words.

Some researchers claim to detect in Einstein’s childhood a mild manifestation of autism or Asperger’s syndrome. Simon Baron-Cohen, the director of the autism research center at Cambridge University, is among those. He writes that autism is associated with a “particularly intense drive to systemize and an unusually low drive to empathize.” He also notes that this pattern “explains the ‘islets of ability’ that people with autism display in subjects like math or music or drawing -- all skills that benefit from systemizing.”* I do not find such a long-distance diagnosis to be convincing. Even as a teenager, Einstein made close friends, had passionate relationships, enjoyed collegial discussions, communicated well verbally and could empathize with friends and humanity in general.

Yes, his great breakthroughs came from visual experiments performed in his head rather than the lab. They were calledGedankenexperiment -- thought experiments. At age 16, he tried to picture in his mind what it would be like to ride alongside a light beam. If you reached the speed of light, wouldn’t the light waves seem stationery to you? But Maxwell’s famous equations describing electromagnetic waves didn’t allow that. He knew that math was the language nature uses to describe her wonders, so he could visualize how equations were reflected in realities. So for the next ten years he wrestled with this thought experiment until he came up with the special theory of relativity.

In 1905, Einstein had graduated from college but had not been able to get a doctoral dissertation accepted or get an academic job. So he was toiling six days a week as a third-class examiner in the Swiss patent office. During his spare time, he produced four papers that upended physics. The first showed that light could be conceived as particles as well as waves. The second proved the existence of atoms and molecules. The third, the special theory of relativity, said that there was no such thing as absolute time or space. And the fourth noted an equivalence between energy and mass described by the most famous equation in all of physics, E=mc2.

Einstein was interpreted as a relativist by many (including some whose disdain fueled their anti-Semitism.) This was not the case. Beneath all of Einstein’s theories, including relativity, was a quest for certainties and absolutes. In fact, he considered calling his masterwork “Invariance Theory” rather than “Relativity Theory,” because it was based on underlying invariances and certainties. His objection to quantum mechanics was that it assumed that the realities of the universe depended on our observation of it, which conflicted with his own faith that there was a reality that existed independent of our ability to observe it.

Did Einstein believe in God? Yes. He defined God in an impersonal, deistic fashion, but he deeply believed that God’s handiwork was reflected in the harmony of nature’s laws and the beauty of all that exists. He often invoked God, such as by saying He wouldn’t play dice, when rejecting quantum mechanics. Einstein’s belief in something larger than himself produced in him a wondrous mixture of confidence and humility. As he famously declared: “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. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort.” When asked directly if he believed in God, he always insisted he did, and explained it once this way: “We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.”

Didn’t Einstein reject quantum mechanics?

He believed that quantum mechanics, which has probabilities and uncertainties at its foundation, did not give a complete description of the universe. He spent the second half of his career trying to poke holes in the theory and to subsume it in a unified theory that would restore certainty and determinism to physics. He was not successful, but his lonely and stubborn quest tells us a lot about his personality and mind.