Recently a coterie of distinguished scientists, including Murray Gell-Mann, Brian Greene, and Sir Martin Rees, were featured speakers at “Einstein: A Celebration,” a conference hosted by the Aspen Institute and sponsored in part by Discover. After three days of discussion about Albert Einstein’s impact on science, society, and culture, the task of defining the nature of his creative genius fell to a great American novelist: E. L. Doctorow. “Perhaps the organizers of this conference understood all too well that any report on the genius of a mind like Einstein’s would have to be a matter of fiction,” he joked. Yet it was fitting that Doctorow be given the last word on the subject. His novel City of God begins with a meditation on the Big Bang and includes several memorable passages in which a fictional writer peers inside Einstein’s mind and channels his thoughts. This is an adapted version of Doctorow’s remarks at the Aspen Institute on August 11.
When I was a student at the Bronx High School of Science in New York City, our principal, Dr. Morris Meister, had an image for scientific endeavor and the enlightenment it brings: “Think of science as a powerful searchlight continuously widening its beam and bringing more of the universe into the light,” he said. “But as the beam of light expands, so does the circumference of darkness.”
That image would certainly have appealed to Albert Einstein, whose lifelong effort to find the few laws that would explain all physical phenomena ran into immense difficulties as the revolutionary light of his theory of relativity discerned a widening darkness.
Of course, to a public celebrating its own mystification, that hardly mattered. The incomprehensibility of his space-time physics, and the fulfillment of an early prophecy of the theory of relativity when Sir Arthur Eddington’s experiments confirmed the bending of starlight as it passed by the sun, was enough for Einstein to be exalted as the iconic genius of the 20th century.
This was a role he could never seriously accept; he would come to enjoy its perks and use it as he grew older on behalf of his various political and social causes, but his fame was an irrelevancy at best and did not accord with the reality of a life lived most of the time in a state of intellectual perplexity. To be a genius to someone else was not to be a genius to oneself. Acts of mind always come to us without a rating.
