Walter Isaacson. Einstein: His Life and Universe

It seems impossible to read about Einstein, without collecting the pithy aphorisms that come leaking from his mouth and pen. I'll confess to happily succumbing to this temptation:

-- Imagination is more important than knowledge. (p. 7)
-- Blind respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth. (67)
-- Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not. (297) [This in response to a Michelson-Morley experiment that seemed to show that ether existed and that the speed of light was variable.]
-- The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think. (299) [A U.S. reporter asked Einstein what the speed of sound was. Einstein said he didn't know.]
-- Anything truly novel is invented only during one's youth. Later one becomes more experienced, more famous--and more blockheaded. (316)
-- Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving. (367)
-- Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious. (384-85)

On loneliness:

He did not like to be constricted, and he could be cold to members of his family. Yet he loved the collegiality of intellectual companions, and he had friendships that lasted throughout his life. He was sweet toward people of all ages and classes who floated into his ken, got along well with staffers and colleagues, and tended to be genial toward humanity in general. As long as someone put no strong demands or emotional burdens on him, Einstein could readily forge friendships and even affections.

This mix of coldness and warmth produced in Einstein a wry detachment as he floated throughout the human aspects of his world. "My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and communities," he reflected. "I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude." (274)

On Relativity and Relativism (Or, Einstein's quest for certainty)

For nearly three centuries, the mechanical universe of Isaac Newton, based on absolute certainties and laws, had formed the psychological foundation of the Enlightenment and the social order, with a belief in causes and effects, order, even duty. Now came a view of the universe, known as relativity, in which space and time were dependent on frames of reference. This apparent dismissal of certainties, an abandonment of faith in the absoute, seemed vaguely heretical to some people, perhaps even godless. "It formed a knife," historian Paul Johnson wrote in his sweeping history of the twentieth century, Modern Times, "to help cut society adrift from its traditional moorings." ...

Indirectly, driven by popular misunderstandings rather than a fealty to Einstein's thinking, relativity became associated with a new relativism in morality and art and politics. There was less faith in absolutes, not only of time and space, but also of truth and morality. In a December 1919 editorial about Einstein's relativity theory, titled "Assaulting the Absolute," the New York Times fretted that "the foundations of all human thought have been undermined."

Einstein would have been, and later was, appalled at the conflation of relativity with relativism. As noted, he had considered calling his theory 'invariance," because the physical laws of combined spacetime, according to his theory, were indeed invariant rather than relative.

Moreover, he was not a relativist in his own morality or even in his taste. "The word relativity has been widely misinterpreted as relativism, the denial of, or doubt about, the objectivity of truth or moral values," the philosopher Isaiah Berlin later lamented. "This was the opposite of what Einstein believed. He was a man of simple and absolute moral convictions, which were expressed in all he was and did."

In both his science and his moral philosophy, Einstein was driven by a quest for certainty and deterministic laws. If his theory of relativity produced ripples that unsettled the realms of morality and culture, this was caused not by what Einstein believed but by how he was popularly interpreted. (Walter Isaacson. Einstein: His Life and Universe. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007, pp. 277-78.)

(Nice biography -- readable, with good, accessible accounts of his contributions to science. Although I started skimming the second half of the biography, in which Einstein basically putters around the Institute of Advanced Studies trying to figure out a unified field theory -- and in which the biographer loses his interest as well -- the picture of Einstein drifting with the currents in his little sailboat, doing mathematical equations on a little notebook, is the quintessential picture of the active, contemplative life -- of the true Happiness that Aristotle longs for in Book X of his Ethics.)

Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War.

So savage was the progress of this revolution [at Corcyra], and it seemed all the more so because it was one of the first which had broken out. Later, of course, practically the whole of the Hellenic world was convulsed, with rival parties in every state -- democratic leaders trying to bring in the Athenians, and oligarchs trying to bring in the Spartans.... In the various cities these revolutions were the cause of many calamities -- as happens and always will happen while human nature is what it is, though there may be different degrees of savagery, and, as different circumstances arise, the general rules will admit of some variety. In times of peace and prosperity cities and individuals alike follow higher standards, because they are not forced into a situation where they have to do what they do not want to do. But war is a stern teacher; in depriving them of the power of easily satisfying their daily wants, it brings most people's minds down to the level of their actual circumstances.

So revolutions broke out in city after city, and in places where the revolutions occurred late the knowledge of what had happened previously in other places caused still new extravagances of revolutionary zeal, expressed by an elaboration in the methods of seizing power and by unheard-of atrocities in revenge. To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party membership; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one's unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defence. Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect. To plot successfully was a sign of intelligence, but it was still cleverer to see that a plot was hatching.... If an opponent made a reasonable speech, the party in power, so far from giving it a generous reception, took every precaution to see that it had no practical effect. (3.82) (Tansl. Rex Warner. Penguin Books, 1954)

(Savior of the West against Persian aggression and the paragon of democratic ideals, 5th-century Athens accumulated a war chest and an empire that none in the Mediterranean could rival. And then, as the result of an interminable war, arrogance and atrocity, and a disastrous expedition to the distant island of Sicily, it all went -- as the Brits say -- to smash. No wonder that Thucydides' judicious, cold-blooded account of the rise and fall of the Athenian empire has been the reading of generals for the past four-hundred years. Or that Thomas Hobbes translated it from out of the Greek. For a footnote to the ways in which words lose their shape and meaning on the anvil of terror, see also George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language.")

Homer. The Iliad (transl. Robert Fagles)

At last the armies clashed at one strategic point,
they slammed their shields together, pike scraped pike
with the grappling strength of fighters armed in bronze
and their round shields pounded, boss on welded boss,
and the sound of struggle roared and rocked the earth.
Screams of men and cries of triumph breaking in one breath,
fighters killing, fighters killed, and the ground streamed blood.
Wildly as two winter torrents raging down from the mountains,
swirling into a valley, hurl their great waters together,
flash floods from the wellsprings plunging down in a gorge
and miles away in the hills a shepherd hears the thunder--
so from the grinding armies broke the cries and crash of war. (4.517-28)

"I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son."

Those words stirred within Achilles a deep desire
to grieve for his own father. Taking the old man's hand
he gently moved him back. And overpowered by memory
both men gave way to grief. Priam wept freely
for man-killing Hector, throbbing, crouching
before Achilles' feet as Achilles wept himself,
now for his father, now for Patroclus once again,
and their sobbing rose and fell throughout the house. (24.591-99)

They reached out for the good things that lay at hand
and when they had put aside desire for food and drink,
Priam the son of Dardanus gazed at Achilles, marveling
now at the man's beauty, his magnificent build --
face-to-face he seemed a deathless god . . .
and Achilles gazed and marveled at Dardan Priam,
beholding his noble looks, listening to his words.
But once they'd had their fill of gazing at each other,
the old majestic Priam broke the silence first:
"Put me to bed quickly, Achilles, Prince.
Time to rest, to enjoy the sweet relief of sleep." (24.738-48)

(In Preface to Paradise Lost, C.S. Lewis speaks of Homer's despair, but I disagree. There is no more moving passage in western literature than the reconciliation of Achilles and Priam -- the exhausted killer and the grief-stricken father of Hector, whom Achilles has slain. In a world that pits us against them, the victor against the enemy, the profoundly silent moment in the close of this tumultuous, bloody epic, in which the two take their fill of one another -- this moment speaks more in its silence and peace than most of us, with all of our words and ideologies.)