The Man Who Read God's Mind

Much has been made of Einstein's having to work as a patent clerk when he could not win an academic post. But Isaacson argues convincingly that, as an academic, Einstein might never have been, well, Einstein. Instead, he would have felt pressure to conform to the prevailing dogma, "compelled to churn out safe publications and be overly cautious in challenging accepted notions."

"Accepted notions" were under siege throughout European science in the late 19th century. Other physicists questioned the idea of absolute motion, absolute space and absolute time. Others, notably the German theoretical physicist Max Planck, fired the first shots in what would be the quantum revolution. Yet it was Einstein who forged the former into special relativity, and took quanta more seriously than Planck, who viewed the quantum as a mathematical construct and not a real physical entity. Why did Einstein take leaps that other greats shied away from? The sassy boy who refused to attend boring classes had become an audacious man, a rebel willing to cast off Newtonian principles of space and time rather than preserve the old, as Planck did. Einstein, Isaacson writes, was not "confined by dogma based on authority ... [He alone] was rebellious enough to throw out conventional thinking that had defined science for centuries."

The apartness and antipathy to dogma carried into his personal and political life. Einstein's relations with his first wife, Mileva, degenerated so badly that in 1914 he demanded she sign a contract promising to deliver three meals to his room daily, renounce "all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons" and "stop talking to me if I request it." In politics, he abhorred nationalism and was a committed pacifist during the first world war, but as the evils of Nazism became clear he embraced the Allied cause.

Ironically, for the last three decades of his life, Einstein played the role of defender of the old order, rejecting the audacious implications of quantum theory. "Relativity may have seemed like a radical idea, but at least it preserved rigid cause-and-effect rules," Isaacson writes. "Quanta, however, mess[ed] with this causality." Einstein never accepted that how one particle affected another was probabilistic, not certain and deterministic. It is poignant to read his prediction, in 1929, that quantum physicists would reach "the limit of their mania for the statistical fad, [and] return full of repentance to the space time picture." It has yet to happen.

During his 22 years in the United States, Einstein tried desperately to devise a theory that would unite gravity and electromagnetism, the only natural forces known in his day. He never succeeded, despite the leaks the newspapers ate up. He also threw himself into social and political causes, from civil rights to a supranational government that would "have a monopoly on military power," especially atomic weapons. Both quests, in physics and in politics, "reflected his instincts for transcendent order," Isaacson writes. "Just as he sought a unified theory in science that could govern the cosmos, so he sought one in politics that could govern the planet."

In 1929 a rabbi sent Einstein a telegram. "Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid. 50 words." Einstein invoked the deity at the drop of a hat, declaring that the Lord might be "subtle but not malicious" and that he "does not play dice" (arguing against the probabilistic laws of quantum mechanics). Raised a Jew, a faith he alternately rejected and embraced and rejected again when he settled on agnosticism, Einstein answered the rabbi by declaring his belief "in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind."