Death of a Genius

Almost every morning for the last 22 years, a self-effacing little man, careless-clad in baggy pants and a blue stocking cap, stepped down from the front porch of a modest frame house at 112 Mercer Street, Princeton, N.J., and trudged off to the Institute for Advanced Studies. At a glance, the little man could have been the caretaker or a gardener. He puffed meekly at his pipe; he sidled in quietly; he seldom spoke unless spoken to. But on a second look, a rare quality seemed to glow in that sad and wizened face, with its disordered halo of white hair and its soulful brown eyes. The quality was genius, a compound of soaring intellect and wide-ranging imagination that had carried Albert Einstein past the confines of man’s old scientific certitudes and deeper into the material mysteries of the universe than any man before.

Last week Professor Einstein trudged no more in the grounds of his beloved institute. A lingering gall-bladder infection sent him to the hospital. Blood began to escape from his aorta, the main artery. Shortly after midnight he muttered a few sentences in German. The night nurse could not understand, and the last words of the modern world’s greatest scientist were lost. At 1:15 a.m. Albert Einstein, 76, died in his sleep.

(See pictures of Albert Einstein’s lighter side.)

Great Transformer. “No other man contributed so much to the vast expansion of 20th century knowledge,” said President Eisenhower. Pravda editorialized: “A great transformer of natural science.” Said the Prime Minister of Israel: “The world has lost its foremost genius.”

Thousands of other tributes poured in, but words could not convey the feelings of a world in which the many unquestioningly accepted Einstein’s genius while only the few — and they, of scientific training — adequately understood what he had contributed to knowledge. In person, Albert Einstein was diffident, almost childlike. As a man of scientific thought, he strode boldly with history’s handful: Pythagoras and Archimedes, Copernicus and Newton.

Einstein’s only instruments were a pencil and scratchpad; his laboratory was under his cap. Yet he saw farther than a telescope, deeper than a microscope. Einstein traveled in lonely splendor to the crossroads of the visible and the invisible, expressing each in terms of the other. He came close to proving by mathematicians’ logic what men of religion had long accepted on philosophers’ reasoning or faith: that the laws which move the tiniest unseen electrons must also govern the macrocosms of intergalactic space. Einstein’s scratchpad theorems broke through the thought barriers of knowledge and rewrote the basic scientific law of the universe. The now-mundane miracle of television is a splinter off Einstein’s achievement; the mushroom clouds of atomic fission and hydrogen fusion are his unwanted monuments; mankind’s chance to turn earth-shaking force into good is his legacy.

See 20 things you need to know about Einstein.

Demoniac Possession. The force that drove Einstein to genius he called “a demoniac possession . . . like that of a lover.” Yet for all his scientific wisdom, he was a worldly innocent. He had a lamblike helplessness in the face of everyday problems; he was easily presumed upon. He once agreed to buy an elevator for his two-story home because “the man who came to interest me in it — I liked him so much, I could not say no.” He loved jokes and laughed easily. He loved humanity, but he was comfortable with few of its members. “My passionate interest in social justice,” he wrote in 1949, “has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of desire for direct contact with other human beings … I … have never belonged to my country, my home … or even to my immediate family with my whole heart.”

Family to Support. Einstein’s family lived in Bavaria, where his father sold electrical goods. Albert was born in Ulm, in 1879. As a child he would make up songs, which he chanted in his room. But at school he was shy and backward, and his parents wondered whether his brain was up to par. When he was twelve, he got a copy of Euclid’s Geometry, Thirty years later, Einstein recalled: “It made me realize that man is capable, through the force of thought alone, of achieving . . . stability and purity.” At 13 he read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Still, it took him two attempts to pass the entrance exams to Zurich Polytechnicum.

(See a photographic tour of the life and times of Albert Einstein.)

After graduation, Einstein settled in Switzerland, married Mileva Marie, a Serbian mathematician. With a family to support, he got a job as an examiner in the Swiss Patent Office. But “I soon learned to scent out that which was able to lead to fundamentals. I turned aside from everything else.” During working hours he would scribble his ideas down on scraps of paper. Evenings, he could be seen wheeling a baby carriage through the streets, halting now and then to jot down rows of mathematical symbols.

Out of those obscure symbols came the most explosive ideas of the century. They were the algebraic catalysts that set in motion a reappraisal of every premise and postulate of modern natural science, a physical revolution whose end is far from sight. In 1905 Einstein published his jottings in five papers. In the fifth, and shortest, paper (Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on its Energy Content?) lay the mathematical nuclei of the atomic age.

(Read TIME’s 1979 cover story “The Year of Dr. Einstein.”)

E=mc2. For more than 200 years, science had accepted Newton’s laws of motion as unalterable. In easily parsed schoolboy terms, they seemed to explain everything, from the behavior of gases to the nature of heat. But in the 1880s, more sensitive instruments were uncovering awkward phenomena, particularly in the physics of light. These phenomena operated in open violation of Newton’s laws. To make Newton’s physics work, scientists presumed the existence of a substance called ether, which they thought was necessary to carry light waves through space. But experiments soon proved that ether does not exist. Scientists were plunged into a paralyzing dilemma, caught between their reliance on the old Newtonian concept and the undisputable results of their experiments. For close to 20 years they floated in an etherless void.

See a profile about Einstein, TIME’s Person of the 20th Century.

Einstein’s calculations filled the void, and stretched it far into the cosmos with a brief, daring equation that tripped off the tongue with the doomful simplicity of the first few notes of Beethoven’s Fifth: E=mc².This meant that a mass (m) of one gram of matter contains within itself energy (E) which is the equivalent in ergs to the square of the velocity of light (c²) in centimeters per second. Einstein went on to demonstrate mathematically that there can be no absolute measure of time or space because all spatial bodies are in perpetual motion, relative to one another. He showed that the increased speed of mass, whether a railroad train or a whole whirling galaxy, not only changes the mass, but alters the very yardsticks by which men seek to measure it. Einstein’s conclusion: “Mass is merely another form of energy.”

Sum-Up of 2,000 Years. Almost overnight, the Swiss patent clerk became the world’s most famous scientist. Universities competed for him, and in 1912 he became a professor at the famed Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. In 1915 Einstein expanded his theory into the General Theory of Relativity.

(See TIME’s Einstein covers.)

The first practical proof of Einstein’s new cosmic concepts came in 1919, when measurements of the sun’s eclipse proved that light rays bend around solid objects, as Einstein’s theory postulated. He won the Nobel Prize in 1921. Bertrand Russell wrote: “The theory of relativity is probably the greatest synthetic achievement of the human intellect up to the present time. It sums up the mathematical and physical labors of more than 2,000 years. Pure geometry, from Pythagoras to Riemann, the dynamics and astronomy of Galileo and Newton, the theory of electro-magnetism as it resulted from the researches of Faraday, Maxwell and their successors — all are absorbed, with the necessary modifications, in the theories of Einstein.”

Only a handful of scientists understood what it was all about. The nonscientist simply took the handful’s word on faith. It took him 40 years to see the proof that E = mc2 means that an ounce of matter — sand, oxygen, uranium — holds within itself as much energy as that given off by the explosion of 875,000 tons of TNT. But in the flash of Hiroshima, he saw.

(See rare pictures of the nuclear destruction at Hiroshima.)

Orchids for Dinner. Einstein was happy in Germany under the Weimar Republic. He supported 100 poor families in Berlin, sailed his boat and played the violin. But when Hitler came, Einstein the Jew was badgered by the Brownshirts and finally driven into exile. He was offered a lifetime post in the cloistered School for Advanced Studies, and in 1933 he took up residence in Princeton. Quickly and unwillingly, he became a living legend.

“My life is a simple thing that would interest no one,” he told the first drove of reporters. But to Einstein’s lasting astonishment, Americans were ready to idolize the shy professor with the eccentric look and demeanor that connoted “Genius.” They read with fascination that money bored him (once he used a $1,500 check as a bookmark, then lost the book), that he was absent-minded (he once walked into the salon of a transatlantic liner wearing his pajamas), that his second wife, Elsa, once ate the orchids on her plate at a formal banquet, mistaking them for the salad.

See the story behind Einstein’s intimate life.

Einstein disliked the ballyhoo, but over the years he learned to make use of it. From his pedestal he occasionally poked a finger into worldly affairs. In the ’30s he asked the Polish government to pardon draft dodgers. In the ’50s he urged “the little minority of intellectuals” to refuse to testify before congressional committees, on the grounds that “it is shameful for a blameless citizen to submit to such an inquisition.”

Bomb & Blast. Einstein was both a pacifist and a Zionist (in 1952 he was asked, but refused, to become the President of Israel). But as the Nazis destroyed the Jewish people, he made a decision that was to produce war’s most destructive tool. One day in 1939, Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt. Nazi scientists, he said, might soon be able “to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium.” “This requires action,” F.D.R. said. Out of it came the Manhattan Project, and at last the atomic bomb.

(Read about Einstein and faith.)

When Albert Einstein got word of Hiroshima, he seemed unwilling to believe it. “Ach,” he said sadly. “The world is not yet ready for it.” As A-bomb led to H-bomb, and the atomic arms race began, he lent his prestige to almost any ban-the-bomb society that asked his sponsorship. Einstein’s otherworldliness grew more pronounced. “The wish to withdraw into myself,” he wrote, “increases with the years.” But though his political forays were often Utopian, his scientific imagination still soared. He had unified the concepts of space and time, matter and energy, gravitation and inertia, yet two great cosmic forces, gravitation and electromagnetism, still defied his synthesis.

No Dice in the Cosmos. Einstein was convinced that the cosmos is an orderly, continuous unity: gravity and electro-magnetism must, therefore, have a common source. He was in a minority, for Planck’s famed Quantum Theory, which Einstein himself did so much to develop, and which many modern scientists accept, suggests that the physical universe is made up of small particles (quanta) that are governed not by some orderly causality but by chance.

(See a timeline of scientific milestones from the 20th century.)

But Einstein persisted: “I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos.” He set himself to find a new synthesis, which he called the Unified Field Theory. He wanted to unify the field of gravitation with the field of electromagnetism, and thus resolve every cosmic motion into a single set of laws. On three occasions Einstein felt sure he was on the point of grasping the “final truth.” But he had to admit last year that he had “not yet found a practical way to confront the theory with experimental evidence,” the crucial test for any theory.

If Einstein ever did find the secret he was looking for, it rests in a legacy of notes and scribblings still to be tested by men and machines. The search for it made the last part of his voyage the loneliest part of all. Albert Einstein, who often said he could not accept the doctrine of immortality of the soul, traveled the rim of mystery and at times, he admitted, it made him feel close to God. “I assert,” he once said, “that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force . . . My religion consists of a humble admiration for the illimitable superior spirit who reveals Himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds.”

See the All-TIME 100 Best Nonfiction Books.