"The crimes of the Germans are really the most abominable ever to be recorded in the history of the so-called civilized nations," he wrote the physicist Otto Hahn. "The conduct of the German...

Among the many surprising things about the life of Albert Einstein was the trouble he had getting an academic job.

He retained the ability to hold two thoughts in his mind simultaneously, to be puzzled when they conflicted, and to marvel when he could smell an underlying unity. People like you and me never grow...

people should consider themselves citizens of the world.

We should not make the mistake of blaming capitalism for all existing social and political evils, nor of assuming that the very establishment of socialism would be sufficient to cure the social and...

I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, he answered, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth-rocks.20

In the meantime, he rejected a friend's offer to help him get a job at an insurance company, dismissing it as an eight hour day of mindless drudgery. As he told Marić, One must avoid stultifying...

Each period is dominated by a mood, with the result that most men fail to see the tyrant who rules over them.

To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself.

What Einstein appreciated in Mozart and Bach was the clear architectural structure that made their music seem deterministic and, like his own favorite scientific theories, plucked from the universe...

Nature hides its secret because of its glory, not for the purpose of deception

To keep the ability to be surprised like children, and the wonder of ordinary things such as the fall of apples and elevators, is the characteristic of Einstein and others.

His fingerprints are all over today's technologies. Photoelectric cells and lasers, nuclear power and fiber optics, space travel, and even semiconductors all trace back to his theories.

My curiosity interferes with my work

When a blind beetle crawls over the branch of a curved tree, it does not notice that the path that was actually made it is, I was lucky to notice what the beetle did not notice it.

society's competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity. Therein

On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies Now let's look at how Einstein articulated all of this in the famous paper that the Annalen der Physik received on June 30, 1905. For all its momentous import,...

Einstein's discovery of special relativity involved an intuition based on a decade of intellectual as well as personal experiences.9 The most important and obvious, I think, was his deep understanding...

Einstein's 1905 burst of creativity was astonishing. He had devised a revolutionary quantum theory of light, helped prove the existence of atoms, explained Brownian motion, upended the concept of...

conformed to the principle of least action, a foundation of physics that holds that light or any object moving between two points should follow the easiest path.3 Planck's paper not only contributed...

The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.23

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving. -ALBERT EINSTEIN, IN A LETTER TO HIS SON EDUARD, FEBRUARY 5, 1930

All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it. But he immediately proceeded to emphasize the role that pure reason and logical deductions play. He conceded, without apology, that his...

Back in 1917, when Einstein had analyzed the "cosmological considerations" arising from his general theory of relativity, most astronomers thought that the universe consisted only of our Milky Way,...

I've always been, he wrote, full of whims and mischief, and as moody as ever!36

Einstein was asked what the next war would look like. I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, he answered, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth-rocks.20

In fact, it was specifically for discovering the law of the photoelectric effect that Einstein would win his only Nobel Prize.

It is important to foster individuality, he said, for only the individual can produce the new ideas.8 This

Einstein's brilliance and the lessons of his life. As a young student he never did well with rote learning. And later, as a theorist, his success came not from the brute strength of his mental...