Authors: Philipp Frank
Einstein
Copyright 1947, 1953 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages and reproduce not more than three illustrations in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper
.
PUBLISHED IN CANADA BY M
C
CLELLAND & STEWART LIMITED
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 20, 1947
eISBN: 978-0-307-83136-1
v3.1_r1
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible
.
—
ALBERT EINSTEIN
THE PHOTOGRAPHS
reproduced in this book were obtained with the friendly help of Miss Helen Dukas of Princeton, Professor Rudolph W. Ladenburg of Princeton University, Professor Harlow Shapley of Harvard University, and Dr. and Mrs. Gustav Bucky of New York. The diagrams were designed by Mr. Gerald Holton of Harvard University, and the Index compiled with the co-operation of Miss Martha Henderson of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
1.1
Einstein’s paternal grandparents
1.2
Einstein at four
1.3
Einstein and his sister
3.1
Einstein’s graduating class
3.2
Einstein and his first wife
3.3
Einstein in 1905
3.4
Einstein in the years of his greatest productivity (1913)
4.1
Einstein and prominent physicists at Leyden, the Netherlands
5.1
Einstein with Harvard scientists on the occasion when he received his honorary degree
5.2
Einstein and Rabindranath Tagore
6.1
Eclipse of the sun
(
1922
)
6.2
Einstein and Steinmetz
9.1
Five winners of the Nobel Prize in physics
9.2
Recent portrait of Einstein
10.1
Einstein at the Michelson celebration in Berlin
10.2
Michelson, Einstein, and Millikan
12.1
Einstein in his Princeton office
12.2
Einstein in his Princeton home
“To understand Einstein” means to understand the world of the twentieth century
I am writing this biography of Einstein not for physicists and mathematicians, not for philosophers and theologians, not for Zionists and pacifists, but for people who want to understand something of the contradictory and complicated twentieth-century world.
It has often been said that “to understand precisely one hundredth of an inch of a blade of grass, one would have to understand the universe.” But one who could achieve such understanding of a blade of grass would find nothing unclear about anything else in the universe. In a like spirit it can be said that anyone who comprehends even a little of Einstein’s personality, his work, and its influence will have taken a long step toward an understanding of the world of the twentieth century.
Through a combination of fortunate circumstances I had the desire and opportunity to observe Einstein as a man and a scientist. Since my student days I had been captivated again and again by the way in which he was able to derive newly discovered, and often strange, natural phenomena from simple and elegant laws. The connection between physical and philosophic theories had also attracted me repeatedly. As time went on, one question became for me more and more an object of curiosity and often of amazement: why is it that scientific and philosophical theories that apparently have hardly anything to do with human life are so often employed to influence attitudes toward practical questions in politics and religion?