'Subtle is the Lord… But malicious He is not,' said a famous physicist born on this day in 1879. What did Albert Einstein, one of the legendary figures of the twentieth century, mean?
Albert’s Annus Mirabilis
Einstein lived by a deep faith—a faith not capable of rational foundation—that there are laws of Nature to be discovered, wrote his biographer and fellow physicist Abraham Pais. ‘‘Nature hides her secret because of her essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse,” Einstein once said
1905
He discovered some of nature’s laws and in 1905, his ‘miracle year’, published six seminal papers on varied topics—two on special relativity, one on the new determination of molecular dimensions (which earned him his doctorate), one on the photoelectric effect (which got him a Nobel prize) and two on Brownian motion
‘What are we going to do if he accepts?’
While Einstein’s political utterances were not usually practicable, he was far from naive, writes Pais and narrates an anecdote. After the death of the first Israeli president Chaim Weizmann, the country’s founding father David Ben Gurion decided to offer the presidency to Einstein. Ben Gurion then asked his personal secretary Yitzhak Navon, “What are we going to do if he accepts?” While Einstein was a pacifist, he was no fan of Soviet communism even in the beginning