Einstein Bio

I am almost through Walter Isaacson's detailed biography of Albert Einstein. As I did up until last winter, I am listening to it in spoken book format. 

During Einstein's early years I played tank battle on the WII, earning a Platinum medal for destroying a hundred and thirty enemy tanks. Unlike those klutz tank commanders you see on YouTube videos taking out 130 tanks, I did it without cheats. Until last spring, I had listened to spoken books while getting an aerobic workout practicing table tennis in the garage. Then, as if all by itself, the old Ping-Pong table began filling with junk. The blight spread and soon the whole garage was packed with a black hole of stray possessions. All on its own this chaos happened, the result of a thousand quantum decisions. As a result, my waist expanded and now I am fatter than I was when I took up table tennis.

Having won my platinum medal just around the time Einstein won the Nobel Prize, I took a leap of faith, faced my demons and continued listening to his story as I took on the Sisyphean task of cleaning up the garage. As the life of Einstein enters its final years, the entropic confusion in the garage is finally giving way to order. My next spoken book, I hope, I will audit before the Ping-Pong table rather than an electronic video game.

The biography held several surprises. For one thing, last year when I was debating the atheists I read their repeated claim that Einstein was one of their own. In great detail they showed that he was not only an atheist but an anti-theist like them. Quite the reverse is the case. They had been lying, picking and choosing among sound bites. In reality, Einstein deprecated out-and-out atheism. Militant anti-theists he abhorred, along with fanatics and fundamentalists of all stripes. He was a believer in freedom of the mind above all. Although Einstein did not believe in a personal God or follow the rituals of Judaism as he had done in his childhood, nonetheless, in his reverential attitude to the Deity he was as close to faith as any theist could hope for.

Especially interesting was the evolution of his political thinking. He started out as a strict pacifist, then came Adolph Hitler, and finally the atomic bomb. Hitler made him, along with all reasonable people and lovers of right and freedom, into a committed resister. The atom bomb took him even further from his original pacifism, to which he had been totally committed before the Second World War. For Einstein, the very existence of the bomb changed everything. In short, the bomb made Einstein into a committed world federalist.

Isaacson traces the details of Einstein's apparent flip-flop, showing that in principle, it was not the great scientist who changed; rather it was the entire world that had flip-flopped. He points out that Einstein's original name for relativity theory was "invariance." Like his theory, Einstein was totally invariant in his political position. Freedom of thought, peace and human rights always came first for him. Under normal conditions, he believed, the best thing for the person of conscience to do is to resist war by refusing to participate. But the rise of the Nazis -- one of whose first acts upon attaining power was to vandalize Einstein's Berlin apartment -- meant that human infamy had crossed an invisible line. Then Einstein's own theory was used to create a bomb of unprecedented power. Time Magazine pictured his E=MC2 emblazoned over a mushroom cloud with a large headline saying, "Einstein, Father of the Bomb."

This added bloodguilt to everything else.

Already Einstein had been publicly advocating that the then-secret knowledge of how to make atomic bombs be handed over to a world government, who would have sole authority to wield military power of any sort. "Everything has changed," he said in one of his all too quotable quotes, "Except men's thinking."

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