He was the embodiment of pure intellect, the bumbling professor
with the German accent, a comic cliché in a thousand films.
Instantly recognizable, like Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp,
Albert Einstein's shaggy-haired visage was as familiar to
ordinary people as to the matrons who fluttered about him in
salons from Berlin to Hollywood. Yet he was unfathomably
profound--the genius among geniuses who discovered, merely by
thinking about it, that the universe was not as it seemed.
Even now scientists marvel at the daring of general relativity
("I still can't see how he thought of it," said the late Richard
Feynman, no slouch himself). But the great physicist was also
engagingly simple, trading ties and socks for mothy sweaters and
sweatshirts. He tossed off pithy aphorisms ("Science is a
wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it")
and playful doggerel as easily as equations. Viewing the hoopla
over him with humorous detachment, he variously referred to
himself as the Jewish saint or artist's model. He was a
cartoonist's dream come true.
Much to his surprise, his ideas, like Darwin's, reverberated
beyond science, influencing modern culture from painting to
poetry. At first even many scientists didn't really grasp
relativity, prompting Arthur Eddington's celebrated wisecrack
(asked if it was true that only three people understood
relativity, the witty British astrophysicist paused, then said,
"I am trying to think who the third person is"). To the world at
large, relativity seemed to pull the rug out from under perceived
reality. And for many advanced thinkers of the 1920s, from
Dadaists to Cubists to Freudians, that was a fitting credo,
reflecting what science historian David Cassidy calls "the
incomprehensiveness of the contemporary scene--the fall of
monarchies, the upheaval of the social order, indeed, all the
turbulence of the 20th century."
Einstein's galvanizing effect on the popular imagination
continued throughout his life, and after it. Fearful his grave
would become a magnet for curiosity seekers, Einstein's executors
secretly scattered his ashes. But they were defeated at least in
part by a pathologist who carried off his brain in hopes of
learning the secrets of his genius. Only recently Canadian
researchers, probing those pickled remains, found that he had an
unusually large inferior parietal lobe--a center of mathematical
thought and spatial imagery--and shorter connections between the
frontal and temporal lobes. More definitive insights, though, are
emerging from old Einstein letters and papers. These are finally
coming to light after years of resistance by executors eager to
shield the great relativist's image.
Unlike the avuncular caricature of his later years who left his
hair unshorn, helped little girls with their math homework and
was a soft touch for almost any worthy cause, Einstein is
emerging from these documents as a man whose unsettled private
life contrasts sharply with his serene contemplation of the
universe. He could be alternately warmhearted and cold; a doting
father, yet aloof; an understanding, if difficult, mate, but also
an egregious flirt. "Deeply and passionately [concerned] with the
fate of every stranger," wrote his friend and biographer Philipp
Frank, he "immediately withdrew into his shell" when relations
became intimate.
Einstein himself resisted all efforts to explore his psyche,
rejecting, for example, a Freudian analyst's offer to put him on
the couch. But curiosity about him continues, as evidenced by the
unrelenting tide of Einstein books (Amazon.com lists some 100 in
print).