The world as I see it - Albert Einstein (easy books to read .txt) 📗

Albert Einstein. The world as I see it


PREFACE TO ORIGINAL EDITION

Only individuals have a sense of responsibility. --Nietzsche

This book does not represent a complete collection of the articles,
addresses, and pronouncements of Albert Einstein; it is a selection made
with a definite object-- namely, to give a picture of a man. To-day this man
is being drawn, contrary to his own intention, into the whirlpool of
political passions and contemporary history. As a result, Einstein is
experiencing the fate that so many of the great men of history experienced:
his character and opinions are being exhibited to the world in an utterly
distorted form.

To forestall this fate is the real object of this book. It meets a wish
that has constantly been expressed both by Einstein's friends and by the
wider public. It contains work belonging to the most various dates-- the
article on "The International of Science" dates from the year 1922, the
address on "The Principles of Scientific Research" from 1923, the "Letter to
an Arab" from 1930--and the most various spheres, held together by the unity
of the personality which stands behind all these utterances. Albert Einstein
believes in humanity, in a peaceful world of mutual helpfulness, and in the
high mission of science. This book is intended as a plea for this belief at
a time which compels every one of us to overhaul his mental attitude and his
ideas.

J. H.


INTRODUCTION TO ABRIDGED
EDITION

In his biography of Einstein Mr. H. Gordou Garbedian relates that an
American newspaper man asked the great physicist for a definition of his
theory of relativity in one sentence. Einstein replied that it would take
him three days to give a short definition of relativity. He might well have
added that unless his questioner had an intimate acquaintance with
mathematics and physics, the definition would be incomprehensible.

To the majority of people Einstein's theory is a complete mystery.
Their attitude towards Einstein is like that of Mark Twain towards the
writer of a work on mathematics: here was a man who had written an entire
book of which Mark could not understand a single sentence. Einstein,
therefore, is great in the public eye partly because he has made
revolutionary discoveries which cannot be translated into the common tongue.
We stand in proper awe of a man whose thoughts move on heights far beyond
our range, whose achievements can be measured only by the few who are able
to follow his reasoning and challenge his conclusions.

There is, however, another side to his personality. It is revealed in
the addresses, letters, and occasional writings brought together in this
book. These fragments form a mosaic portrait of Einstein the man. Each one
is, in a sense, complete in itself; it presents his views on some aspect of
progress, education, peace, war, liberty, or other problems of universal
interest. Their combined effect is to demonstrate that the Einstein we can
all understand is no less great than the Einstein we take on trust.

Einstein has asked nothing more from life than the freedom to pursue
his researches into the mechanism of the universe. His nature is of rare
simplicity and sincerity; he always has been, and he remains, genuinely
indifferent to wealth and fame and the other prizes so dear to ambition. At
the same time he is no recluse, shutting himself off from the sorrows and
agitations of the world around him. Himself familiar from early years with
the handicap of poverty and with some of the worst forms of man's inhumanity
to man, he has never spared himself in defence of the weak and the
oppressed. Nothing could be more unwelcome to his sensitive and retiring
character than the glare of the platform and the heat of public controversy,
yet he has never hesitated when he felt that his voice or influence would
help to redress a wrong. History, surely, has few parallels with this
introspective mathematical genius who laboured unceasingly as an eager
champion of the rights of man.

Albert Einstein was born in 1879 at Ulm. When he was four years old his
father, who owned an electrochemical works, moved to Munich, and two years
later the boy went to school, experiencing a rigid, almost military, type of
discipline and also the isolation of a shy and contemplative Jewish child
among Roman Catholics-- factors which made a deep and enduring impression.
From the point of view of his teachers he was an unsatisfactory pupil,
apparently incapable of progress in languages, history, geography, and other
primary subjects. His interest in mathematics was roused, not by his
instructors, but by a Jewish medical student, Max Talmey, who gave him a
book on geometry, and so set him upon a course of enthusiastic study which
made him, at the age of fourteen, a better mathematician than his masters.
At this stage also he began the study of philosophy, reading and re-reading
the words of Kant and other metaphysicians.

Business reverses led the elder Einstein to make a fresh start in
Milan, thus introducing Albert to the joys of a freer, sunnier life than had
been possible in Germany. Necessity, however, made this holiday a brief one,
and after a few months of freedom the preparation for a career began. It
opened with an effort, backed by a certificate of mathematical proficiency
given by a teacher in the Gymnasium at Munich, to obtain admission to the
Polytechnic Academy at Zurich. A year passed in the study of necessary
subjects which he had neglected for mathematics, but once admitted, the
young Einstein became absorbed in the pursuit of science and philosophy and
made astonishing progress. After five distinguished years at the Polytechnic
he hoped to step into the post of assistant professor, but found that the
kindly words of the professors who had stimulated the hope did not
materialize.

Then followed a weary search for work, two brief interludes of
teaching, and a stable appointment as examiner at the Confederate Patent
Office at Berrie. Humdrum as the work was, it had the double advantage of
providing a competence and of leaving his mind free for the mathematical
speculations which were then taking shape in the theory of relativity. In
1905 his first monograph on the theory was published in a Swiss scientific
journal, the Annalen der Physik. Zurich awoke to the fact that it possessed
a genius in the form of a patent office clerk, promoted him to be a lecturer
at the University and four years later--in 1909--installed him as Professor.

His next appointment was (in 1911) at the University of Prague, where
he remained for eighteen months. Following a brief return to Zurich, he
went, early in 1914, to Berlin as a professor in the Prussian Academy of
Sciences and director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Theoretical
Physics. The period of the Great War was a trying time for Einstein, who
could not conceal his ardent pacifism, but he found what solace he could in
his studies. Later events brought him into the open and into many parts of
the world, as an exponent not only of pacifism but also of world-disarmament
and the cause of Jewry. To a man of such views, as passionately held as they
were by Einstein, Germany under the Nazis was patently impossible. In 1933
Einstein made his famous declaration: "As long as I have any choice, I will
stay only in a country where political liberty, toleration, and equality of
all citizens before the law are the rule." For a time he was a homeless
exile; after offers had come to him from Spain and France and Britain, he
settled in Princeton as Professor of Mathematical and Theoretical Physics,
happy in his work, rejoicing in a free environment, but haunted always by
the tragedy of war and oppression.

The World As I See It, in its original form, includes essays by
Einstein on relativity and cognate subjects. For reasons indicated above,
these have been omitted in the present edition; the object of this reprint
is simply to reveal to the general reader the human side of one of the most
dominating figures of our day.

I

The World As I See It

The Meaning of Life


What is the meaning of human life, or of organic life altogether? To
answer this question at all implies a religion. Is there any sense then, you
ask, in putting it? I answer, the man who regards his own life and that of
his fellow-creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost
disqualified for life.

The World as I see it


What an extraordinary situation is that of us mortals! Each of us is
here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes
thinks he feels it. But from the point of view of daily life, without going
deeper, we exist for our fellow-men--in the first place for those on whose
smiles and welfare all our happiness depends, and next for all those unknown
to us personally with whose destinies we are bound