He was the pre-eminent scientist in a century dominated by science. The touchstones of the era, the Atomic Bomb, the Big Bang, quantum physics and electronics, all bear his imprint.
He was the embodiment of pure intellect, the bumbling professor with the German accent, a comic figure in a thousand films. Instantly recognizable, Albert Einstein's shaggy-haired image was as familiar to ordinary people as to the adoring ladies who fluttered about him in salons from Berlin to Hollywood. Yet he was unfathomably profound, the genius among geniuses who discovered, merely by thinking about it, that the universe was not as it seemed.
Even now scientists marvel at the daring of general relativity. But the great physicist was also engagingly simple, trading ties and socks for old sweaters and sweatshirts. Viewing the hoopla over him with humorous detachment, he variously referred to himself as the Jewish saint or artist's model.
Much to his surprise, his ideas, like Darwin's, reverberated beyond science, influencing modern culture from painting to poetry. At first, even many scientists didn't realy grasp relativity. To the world at large , relativity seemed to pull the rug out from under perceived reality. And for many advanced thinkers of the 1920s, that was a fitting credo, reflecting the incomprehensiveness of the contemporary scene, the fall of monarchies ,the upheaval of the social order, indeed, all the turbulences of the 20th century.
Unlike the caricature of his later years who left his hair uncut, helped little girls with their math homework and was a soft touch for almost any worthy cause, Einstein is emerging from these documents as man whose troubled private life contrasts sharply with his serene contemplation of the universe. He could be alternately warmhearted and cold; doting father, yet aloof; an understanding, if difficult, mate, but also a constant flirt. Deeply and passionately concerned with the fate of every stranger, wrote his frined and biographer Philipp Frank, he immediately withdrew into his shell when relations became intimate.
Einstein himself resisted all efforts to expore his psyche, rejecting, for example, a Freudian analyst's offer to put him on the couch. But curiosity about him continues,as evidenced by the continual flow of newly written Einstein books.
