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.)