A lesson learned from "Einstein: His Life and Universe," by Walter Isaacson

 Be willing to change your mind when faced with new evidence. 

Is there a more prominent symbol of science than Albert Einstein? He’s one of the most beloved historical and scientific figures worldwide, and yet in his own way, has become a blandly friendly logo without context, similar to the process that has befallen so many other historical titans (see also Washington and Lincoln). I knew only the most basic details of Einstein’s life before reading Einstein: His Life and Universe, the acclaimed biography from Walter Isaacson. Through this reading, I learned the fascinating story of a man who was quite polarizing in his heyday (and who himself bemoaned people turning him into the Santa Claus of science even in his own lifetime), and who had intense moral and scientific struggles over his own discoveries. Through Einstein, we learn the importance of always being open to changing your mind when confronted with new evidence, a lesson that is a central one to his life and that even applied to himself by the end. 

Einstein was born into the rapidly changing world of the late 1800’s, when places like his homeland of Germany were going through the wrenching changes of modernization, and people were responding in a variety of (often unhealthy) ways. His Jewish family attempted to follow the path of “assimilation,” which meant trying to become as German as they could and suppress their ancestral traditions in the name of patriotism. By contrast, Einstein quickly made his name as a curious little boy who had fascinations far beyond everyday life, pondering such universal mysteries as how the light beams in his home worked and what generated the magnetic fields that powered his compasses. Such cosmic views of the world gave him a natural contempt for authority and the German demand that free thinking be subverted to nationalism, a view that caused him more than a bit of trouble before long. 

Einstein’s brilliance was known to everyone around him from an early age (contrary to popular myth that he was a slow child), but he struggled to find steady work at colleges largely due to his habit of publicly calling out professors he disagreed with. It was partly why he was working as a humble patent clerk when he made his breakthrough discovery of relativity, the theory that added the dimension of time and temporal mechanics into an understanding of the universe (I love science but am certainly no scientist myself—one thing Isaacson does a decent job of is breaking down incredibly complicated scientific ideas into something a lay person can make sense of). Einstein was a man who craved an orderly universe, who wanted to find a beautiful grand design behind it all, and he spent the rest of his life searching for a grand theory that could unite all the fields of science. However, as he always proclaimed, science must follow where the evidence leads, and people must be willing to challenge their own deep-rooted assumptions when faced with contradicting evidence. 

Even as a generation of young scientists fervently embraced Einstein and developed new fields of science, he inspired an ugly backlash from old-guard scientists; German scientists such as Philipp Lenard thought Einstein was complicating a once perfectly simple field, and on a deeper level, was corrupting the world’s youth away from the purer ideas of the old world. Many Europeans of this era, rather than accept the reality of a changing world and embrace all the beautiful and messy complications that come along with it, decided to violently cling to a vision that the world could be a simpler, purer place. Einstein became a controversial and often hated scientist who was permanently driven out of his home nation in the 1930’s, and Lenard and his ilk chased their vision of restoring an old world straight up the chimneys of Auschwitz. 

Einstein was a deeply moral and fair-minded man who viewed the duty of scientists to try and make the world a better place, and he abhorred all types of prejudice and bigotry. He became a loyal American citizen who condemned the racial hierarchies of his new adopted country, a devoted lover of the nation of Israel who also condemned its treatment of its Arab neighbors, and a deep admirer of Gandhi’s passive anticolonial movement in India. In keeping with his vision of an orderly universe, Einstein dreamed of a one-world government that could pursue justice for all of mankind. 

Yet with all his acclaim and brilliance, Einstein was a man who could also fail to follow his own lessons. In particular, he was never comfortable that his own relativity discoveries opened the new field of quantum mechanics, which darkly suggested a chaotic universe that was largely unknowable to humanity, and that was capable of sudden, terrifying destructive forces. He urged the American government to research nuclear weapons to ensure the Nazis did not beat us to it, yet he was horrified when Oppenheimer and his group successfully invented an atomic bomb (his famous quote, used to this day--“If World War III happens, World War IV will be fought with rocks”). Einstein to his dying day (literally on his deathbed) desperately tried to poke holes in quantum mechanics, and to find a grand unifying theory that would restore order to the world of science, and thus increasingly became a dinosaur in the very field he pioneered. 

Einstein was, in the end, a man of stunning brilliance and compassion, who had gaping holes in his vision of the universe and in how the world should work. And yet, he also revolutionized the modern world of science by being willing to throw out older models that simply no longer fit the evidence. In our modern world, where people cling to old ideas and violently react to changes that challenge them, we could learn much from this humble patent clerk who simply stared at simple things in life and wondered how they all worked on a deeper level.