A half century after he died, Albert Einstein still knows how to make an entrance. He drops in unexpectedly when I take out the trash: a momentary glance up at the night sky becomes a vertiginous vision of fusion-powered stars, their bulks held together by the curvature of space-time, their light emitted at a steady 186,282 miles per second. He leaps out from among the sun-bleached rocks when I visit Mount Wilson in California, where Edwin Hubble first saw that the universe is expanding and so transformed the general theory of relativity into a road map of the origin and fate of the cosmos. And he greets me from the faint, Xeroxed papers of the Einstein Archives at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, his words still fresh and vibrant in letters to Franklin Roosevelt, Sigmund Freud, Bertrand Russell, adulatory children, even to cranks wishing to debunk his theories.
Over the years, these visitations have consolidated into a portrait of my Einstein—or, more precisely, my three Einsteins, related but distinct aspects of the man, which I envision nested inside one another like Aristotle's heavenly spheres. The symbolic Einstein touches me through his seismic influence on popular culture; the scientific Einstein reaches me through his serpentine formulas and theories; the philosophical Einstein reaches deepest into my heart, challenging my notions of beauty and spirituality. What ties these together is Einstein's miraculous gift for reckless invention. In his public proclamations, his theorizing, and his religious ruminations, he cast a piercing gaze on existing formulations, rejected existing ideas, and freely redefined terms—space and time, pacifism, God—in search of deeper meanings.
The symbolic Einstein offered me his most pointed lessons while I was growing up, just as he has for millions of other academic-minded kids over the past eight decades. Who doesn't know the stories? Einstein famously (if not actually) started out a "slow" child but grew up to become a gentle genius. Einstein was so far ahead of his time, so out of step with his colleagues, that he had to take a menial job at the Swiss patent office while he hammered away at the mysteries of E = mc^2. Einstein encouraged the development of the atomic bomb, then spent the late years of his life arguing for peace and international cooperation. He was an otherworldly presence, visually signified by his mane of untamable hair, who nevertheless uttered deliberately accessible epigrams: "God is subtle, but He is not malicious," or "To punish me for my contempt for authority, Fate has made me an authority myself."
