“To punish me for my contempt for authority, Fate made me an authority myself.” —Einstein



Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany, in 1879, just a century ago. He is one of the small group of people in any epoch who remake the world through a special gift, a talent for perceiving old things in new ways, for posing deep challenges to conventional wisdom. For many decades he was a saintly and honored figure, the only scientist the average person could readily name. In part because of his scientific accomplishments, at least dimly grasped by the public; in part because of his courageous positions on social issues; and in part because of his saintly personality, Einstein was admired and revered throughout the world. For scientifically inclined children of immigrant parents, or those growing up in the depression, like me, the reverence accorded Einstein demonstrated that there were such people as scientists, that a scientific career might not be totally beyond hope. One major function which he involuntarily served was as a scientific role model. Without Einstein, many of the young people who became scientists after 1920 might never have heard of the existence of the scientific enterprise. The logic behind Einstein’s special theory of relativity could have been developed a century earlier; but, although there were some premonitory insights by others, relativity had to wait for Einstein. Yet fundamentally the physics of special relativity is very simple; and many of the essential results can be derived from high school algebra and consideration of a boat paddling upstream and downstream. Einstein’s life was rich in genius and irony, passion for the issues of his time, insights into education, the connection between science and politics and a demonstration that in­dividuals can after all change the world.

As a child Einstein showed little indication of what was to come. “My parents,” he recalled later, “were worried because I started to talk comparatively late, and they consulted the doctor because of it. ...I was at that time ... certainly not younger than three.” He was an indifferent student in elementary school. He said the teachers reminded him of drill sergeants. In Einstein’s youth a bombastic nationalism and intellectual rigidity were the hallmarks of European education. He rebelled against the dull, mechanized methods of teaching. “I preferred to endure all sorts of punishment rather than learn to gabble by rote.” Einstein always detested rigid disciplinarians, in education, in science and in politics. At age five he was stirred by the mystery of a compass. And, he later wrote, “at the age of 12 I experienced a second wonder of a totally different nature in a little book dealing with Euclidean plane geometry. …Here were assertions, as for example the intersection of the three altitudes of a triangle in one point, which—though by no means evident—could nevertheless be proved with such certainty that any doubt appeared to be out of the question. This lucidity and certainty made an indescribable impression upon me.” Formal schooling provided only a vexing interrup­tion to such contemplations. Einstein wrote of his self-education, “At the age of 12 to 16 I familiarized myself with the elements of mathematics together with the principles of differential and integral calculus. In doing so I had the good fortune of finding books which were not too particular in their logical rigor, but which made up for this by permitting the main thoughts to stand out clearly and synoptically... I also had the good fortune of getting to know the essential results and methods of the entire field of the natural sciences in an excellent popular exposition, which limited itself almost throughout to qualitative aspects. …a work which I read with breathless attention.” Modern popularizers of science may take some comfort. Not one of his teachers seems to have recognized his talents. At the Munich Gymnasium, the city’s leading secondary school, one of the teachers told him, “You’ll never amount to anything, Einstein.” When Einstein was 15 a teacher strongly suggested that he leave school. The teacher remarked, “Your very presence spoils the respect of the class for me.” Einstein accepted this suggestion with gusto and spent many months wandering through northern Italy.

Einstein in 1947 Orren Jack Turner/Wikimedia Commons

Einstein’s curiosity about physics and his wonder about the natural universe soon mastered his distaste for formal education and he found himself applying, with no high school diploma, to the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. He failed the entrance examination. Accordingly, he enrolled himself in a Swiss high school to satisfy his deficiencies and was admitted to the Federal Institute the following year. But he was still a mediocre student. He resented the prescribed curriculum, and avoided the lecture room in order to pursue his true interests. He later wrote: “The hitch in this was, of course, the fact that you had to cram all this stuff into your mind for the examination, whether you liked it or not.”

He managed to graduate only because his close friend Marcel Grossmann assiduously attended classes and shared his notes with Einstein. On Grossmann’s death many years later Einstein wrote, “I remember our student days. He the irreproachable student, I myself disorderly and a dreamer. He on good terms with the teachers and understanding everything, I a pariah, discontent and little loved. ...Then the end of our studies—I was suddenly abandoned by everyone, standing at a loss on the threshold of life.” By immersing himself in Grossmann’s notes Einstein managed to graduate from college. But, he recalled, studying for the final examinations “had such a deterring effect on me that...I found the considera­tion of any scientific problem distasteful to me for an entire year. …It is little short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not already completely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry, because what this delicate little plant needs most, apart from initial stimulation, is freedom; without that it is surely destroyed. ...I believe that one could even deprive a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if one could force it with a whip to eat continuously whether it were hungry or not.” His remarks should be sobering to those of us engaged in higher education in science. I wonder how many potential Einsteins have been permanently discouraged through the forced feeding of curricula and competitive examinations.