Einstein, hating fame but living life purposefully
New biography adds to what we know of his middle years.
Published 5:40 pm, Thursday, October 27, 2011
If Albert Einstein had died recently, like Steve Jobs did, instead of in 1955, the passing of the physics genius would have been given days of nonstop media coverage by the cable news stations, had they existed then.
Einstein would have been embarrassed to, well, death. As it was, with newspaper and radio news, he spent a great deal of his life in the fishbowl, and he hated all of it. But he used the attention nevertheless to see the world in a way he wouldn't have otherwise.
Einstein, as author Josef Eisinger writes in “Einstein on the Road,” achieved his fame early in life, first with his energy-matter equation, E=mc
The scientist really didn't have to do anything else the rest of his life. But he was a German Jew as the country's Weimar Republic crumbled and the Nazi party rose in power. Einstein would have preferred to keep his thoughts on the makeup of the atom, but external events dictated his life.
The purpose of Eisinger's book is to flesh out the diaries Einstein wrote during the middle part of his life, which often was composed of travel. As life for Jews became riskier in Berlin, Einstein, usually with wife Elsa, escaped by cruising to Japan, India, Israel, Spain, South America and the United States in the 1920s and 1930s.
He became an unwilling political football as the world divided into the sides that would fight World War II. Einstein was an ardent pacifist, which also did not endear himself to the re-arming German government. As he traveled, Einstein was compelled to attend never-ending dinners and banquets held in his honor to raise money for numerous causes, mainly Jewish organizations.
Einstein eventually settled into an academic position at Princeton University. Einstein's loner personality emerges from the diaries written before he moved to New Jersey. He seemed happiest when he could find two or three other string players so he could pick up a violin and perform Mozart chamber pieces.
The picture that may stick with many readers is that no matter where Einstein traveled, from high-elevation viewpoints overlooking Rio de Janeiro to touring misty Japanese villages, he always had in the back of his mind the problem of a unified field theory. Such a theory would have tied relativity to electromagnetism, providing a broader explanation of the mechanism of the universe.
Einstein never achieved a unified field theory. No one else has, either. But he lived a life that advanced science by gigantic leaps and that advocated peace instead of war. And he continues to inspire people who change the world, including Steve Jobs.