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"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
Although he would eventually be recognized as one of history’s greatest imaginative thinkers, Einstein initially found his imagination a stumbling block to his education as a boy in Germany. Although he received generally good grades, his professors became frustrated with his acting out in response to the oppressive, discipline-centered learning environment. His most active learning occurred outside of class, where he voraciously read books on science and mathematics.
When Einstein was 15, his family relocated to Italy, leaving him behind to finish secondary school. After only a semester, he abandoned school to follow his parents to Italy. Later that year, he attempted to bypass the remainder of his secondary education by taking a test that would have allowed him to study electrical engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Switzerland’s version of M.I.T.). But Einstein failed the arts portion, and his family sent him to Aarau to finish secondary school.
Depressed over his recent failure, he wrote an essay on the subject of his future in which he said, "If I were to have the good fortune to pass my examinations, I would go to Zurich. I would stay there for four years in order to study mathematics and physics. I imagine myself becoming a teacher in those branches of the natural sciences, choosing the theoretical part of them. Here are the reasons which lead me to this plan. Above all, it is my disposition for abstract and mathematical thought, and my lack of imagination and practical ability."
"Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."
After bumpy rides through high school and college, Einstein may have felt the urge to leave the academic world behind him without looking back; in fact, he had the opposite problem. Despite his apparent ineptitude in the environment, Einstein was committed to a course in academia. Although he was fully qualified to teach math and physics, no university would hire him. He was barely able to support himself and his wife by teaching high school math and tutoring. Finally, a friend's father recommended Einstein for a position in the patent office in Bern. He became a technical expert, third class, spending his days evaluating the patent proposals of would-be inventors, correcting flaws in the submitted designs and deciding whether or not ideas would actually work. However, in his free time, he was doing a very different kind of work.
1905 is often called Einstein's "Year of Miracles" because he made outstanding progress with his work in theoretical physics even as he continued to work full time at the patent office. His access to the work of contemporary physicists and mathematicians was limited because he did not work at a university. Nonetheless, he wrote three astonishing academic papers, one of which began his work on the Theory of Relativity, a theory which would rock the world of physics, suggesting that space and time are not absolute and calling into question the first tenets of physics established by Sir Isaac Newton.
"The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible."
The years after 1905 were a mix of professional triumphs and personal defeats for Einstein. As he refined his Theory of Relativity, he continued to publish papers on a number of topics. Not all of them were as ground-breaking as Relativity, but they share the imprint of Einstein’s imagination; for example, in 1910 Einstein published a paper on "critical opalescence," which essentially answered the question, "Why is the sky blue?" (He found that the bending of light as it was scattered by each individual molecule of the atmosphere caused the phenomenon.)
As he gained notoriety, Einstein saw the academic world open its arms to him, offering positions lecturing and researching at academic institutions throughout Switzerland. But the intense academic work took its toll on Einstein’s family; in 1914 he and his wife divorced after 11 years of marriage.
Einstein charged ahead with his research, and in 1915 he completed and published his General Theory of Relativity. But the strain of his relentless academic work caught up with him in 1917 when he became seriously ill. His cousin Elsa nursed him back to health and within two years they were married. Elsa was more patient with Einstein’s eccentricities than his first wife and proved to be a great source of strength for him especially when British scientists took advantage of a solar eclipse in 1919 to perform experiments which supported the General Theory of Relativity and Einstein was thrust upon the world stage. The November 17 London Times headlines read, "REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE. New Theory of the Universe. Newtonian Ideas Overthrown." This recognition only fueled Einstein’s fervor; by 1928 he had once again collapsed from illness due to overwork.
"If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German, and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German, and Germany will declare that I am a Jew."
In 1930 Einstein was at the height of his fame. He had begun to travel to the United States while making the rounds of the world’s great academic institutions. In 1932 Princeton University offered Einstein a position at the New Institute for Advanced Study, a school essentially created for him. When they asked him how much he expected to be paid, the financially naïve Einstein requested only $3,000 a year. Elsa interceded and negotiated his salary up to $16,000. He accepted with the understanding that he would spend seven months a year working in Berlin and five months working in the U.S., but when the Nazis came to power during Einstein’s stay in America, the couple could not return to Germany because they were Jewish. Einstein became the first of many of Europe’s most brilliant academic minds who were forced to immigrate to the United States to escape the Nazi persecution of the Jews. By a quirk of fate, Einstein avoided the traumatic escape most were forced to undertake. He had happened to be in the right country at the right time.
Although Einstein had been a staunch pacifist for much of his life, Einstein became one of the most vocal and high-profile advocates of American intervention. In 1939 he began a correspondence with the White House. In his letters, Einstein warned President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the possibility that Germany was actively investigating the possibility of nuclear warfare. Although Einstein had little to do with the actual development of the atomic bomb, his concerns that Germany would develop one first and use it moved Roosevelt to fund the Manhattan Project, the U.S. brain trust where the first hydrogen bomb was designed. Einstein’s war effort capitalized more on his notoriety than his scientific abilities. For example, in 1944 he wrote out his 1905 paper on special relativity by hand and put it up for auction. The auction raised six million dollars, which Einstein donated to the war effort.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former."
Einstein achieved an unprecendented level of visibility for a member of the scientific community. Although it was his Nobel-prize-winning advances in physics which first thrust him into the spotlight, it was his political activism that kept him there. As part of his efforts to fight Hitler and support the Jewish effort to establish a homeland in the middle-east, Einstein made public appearances throughout Europe, America, England, Palestine and Japan.
During these appearances, he would often explain some of his most complicated theories in layman's terms and share his political beliefs. His trademark dry wit and absent-minded appearance were immediately endearing. An apparently ideal combination of modesty and talent, Einstein was a hero in a world in need of one.
After the war, Einstein began to work less, but one of the most major events in his life was yet to come. After the death of the first president of Israel in 1952, the Israeli government decided to offer the post to Einstein. Einstein declined. He had neither the desire nor the energy to run a country. But rather than see the offer as an honor, Einstein was personally mortified. He later chastised the Israeli government for making an offer, which he felt they knew he could not accept but which he felt embarrassed to reject. Three years later on April 18, 1955 Einstein died in Princeton, New Jersey of massive heart failure. He was 76 years old.
A great deal of fuss was made about Einstein’s remains. He had made provisions that they be cremated and scattered at an undisclosed location, but his brain was preserved for scientific observation. It was not until recently that Canadian researchers discovered that he had an unusually large inferior parietal lobe, a portion of the brain which is a center of mathematical thought and spatial imagery, and shorter connections between the frontal and temporal lobes. But Einstein’s genius cannot be chalked up solely to superior brain design. Only two men in the history of the world (Einstein and Newton, whose theories were, ironically enough, overturned by Einstein’s own) have made such significant contributions to the study of physics. Though many of Einstein’s theories have been challenged as incorrect or incomplete in terms of today’s physics, the discipline owes so much to Einstein’s work and imagination that today’s physics could hardly exist without them. J. Robert Oppenheimer (another great physicist and father of the H-bomb) explains it best: "Any man whose errors take ten years to correct, is quite a man."
Whether or not you believe you have the potential to revolutionize the world as Albert Einstein did, you should take a page out of his book and follow your dream. As Einstein said, "Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish."
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