The Person

How He Thought

Einstein said that words played little part in his thinking. He worked in images and imagined situations, and found the language afterward. His great ideas began as thought experiments simple enough to explain to a child:

• What would you see if you rode alongside a beam of light?
• If lightning strikes both ends of a moving train, does a passenger see the strikes at the same time as someone on the platform?
• What does a person in a falling elevator feel?

He then had the stubbornness to follow each picture to its conclusion, for years if necessary. He was not an outstanding mathematician by the standards of his colleagues, and knew it. For the mathematics of general relativity he relied on his friend Marcel Grossmann, and in later life he always worked with a mathematical assistant.

He described himself as having no special talent, only intense curiosity. That undersells him, but the curiosity was real. He kept asking the questions that most people stop asking at about the age of ten.

Music

After physics, music mattered most. He played the violin from the age of six and carried one on his travels; he called each instrument he owned Lina. Mozart was his great love, with Bach close behind, and he had little time for Wagner. He was a capable amateur who played chamber music with friends, some of them professionals, and was known to miss an entrance.

His second wife, Elsa, said that music helped him think. He would work, get stuck, play for a while, and return to his desk.

Sailing

He loved to sail. He owned a small boat in Germany, a fiftieth-birthday present from friends, which the Nazi government confiscated in 1933. In America he sailed another small boat. He never learned to swim, and refused to wear a life jacket.

Appearance and Habits

The untidy white hair of the famous photographs belongs to his later years. As a young man he was dark-haired and considered handsome.

He cared less and less about clothes as he grew older. He wore baggy sweaters and no socks. He had given them up as a young man, he said, because his big toe always made a hole in them. He smoked a pipe and never learned to drive. He disliked ceremony and formal dinners, and gave away or left unanswered much of the tribute that arrived.

Humor

He was funny, in a dry and sometimes childlike way, and enjoyed deflating solemnity, especially his own. He wrote comic verse to friends. On his seventy-second birthday, tired of smiling for photographers, he stuck out his tongue at one. He liked the resulting picture so much that he ordered nine prints to give to friends.

Friendships

Einstein kept a small number of friendships for decades. Michele Besso, his colleague at the patent office, is the only person thanked in the 1905 relativity paper, and they corresponded for fifty years. Marcel Grossmann's father got him his job, and Grossmann himself later supplied the mathematics. With Niels Bohr he carried on the great argument of twentieth-century physics, with deep affection on both sides.

In his last years in Princeton his closest companion was the logician Kurt Gödel, twenty-seven years younger. The two walked to and from the Institute for Advanced Study together most days, talking in German. Einstein said, according to the economist Oskar Morgenstern, that he went to his office mainly for the privilege of walking home with Gödel.

The Loner

For all his warmth in company, he recognized a detachment in himself. He wrote that he had never belonged wholeheartedly to any country, to his circle of friends, or even to his own family, and that the need for solitude grew with the years. The people closest to him paid for it. See Family and Relationships.