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Einstein disliked the ballyhoo, but over the years he learned to make use of it. From his pedestal he occasionally poked a finger into worldly affairs. In the '30s he asked the Polish government to pardon draft dodgers. In the '50s he urged "the little minority of intellectuals" to refuse to testify before congressional committees, on the grounds that "it is shameful for a blameless citizen to submit to such an inquisition."
Bomb & Blast. Einstein was both a pacifist and a Zionist (in 1952 he was asked, but refused, to become the President of Israel). But as the Nazis destroyed the Jewish people, he made a decision that was to produce war's most destructive tool. One day in 1939, Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt. Nazi scientists, he said, might soon be able "to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium." "This requires action," F.D.R. said. Out of it came the Manhattan Project, and at last the atomic bomb.
When Albert Einstein got word of Hiroshima, he seemed unwilling to believe it. "Ach," he said sadly. "The world is not yet ready for it." As A-bomb led to H-bomb, and the atomic arms race began, he lent his prestige to almost any ban-the-bomb society that asked his sponsorship. Einstein's otherworldliness grew more pronounced. "The wish to withdraw into myself," he wrote, "increases with the years." But though his political forays were often Utopian, his scientific imagination still soared. He had unified the concepts of space and time, matter and energy, gravitation and inertia, yet two great cosmic forces, gravitation and electromagnetism, still defied his synthesis.
No Dice in the Cosmos. Einstein was convinced that the cosmos is an orderly, continuous unity: gravity and electro-magnetism must, therefore, have a common source. He was in a minority, for Planck's famed Quantum Theory, which Einstein himself did so much to develop, and which many modern scientists accept, suggests that the physical universe is made up of small particles (quanta) that are governed not by some orderly causality but by chance.
But Einstein persisted: "I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos." He set himself to find a new synthesis, which he called the Unified Field Theory. He wanted to unify the field of gravitation with the field of electromagnetism, and thus resolve every cosmic motion into a single set of laws. On three occasions Einstein felt sure he was on the point of grasping the "final truth." But he had to admit last year that he had "not yet found a practical way to confront the theory with experimental evidence," the crucial test for any theory.
If Einstein ever did find the secret he was looking for, it rests in a legacy of notes and scribblings still to be tested by men and machines. The search for it made the last part of his voyage the loneliest part of all. Albert Einstein, who often said he could not accept the doctrine of immortality of the soul, traveled the rim of mystery and at times, he admitted, it made him feel close to God. "I assert," he once said, "that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force . . . My religion consists of a humble admiration for the illimitable superior spirit who reveals Himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds."