An Essay By Einstein

"How strange is the lot of us mortals!

Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it.

But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people -- first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy.

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving...

"I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves -- this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts -- possessions, outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible.

"My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities.

I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude..."
"My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle.

I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality... The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

"This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion.

A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man... I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence -- as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."

source::http://www.aip.org/history/exhibits/einstein/essay.htm

Einstein's Revolution

He was daring, wildly ingenious, passionately curious. He saw a beam of light and imagined riding it; he looked up at the sky and envisioned that space-time was curved.

Albert Einstein reinterpreted the inner workings of nature, the very essence of light, time, energy and gravity. His insights fundamentally changed the way we look at the universe—and made him the most famous scientist of the 20th century.

We know Einstein as a visionary physicist, but he was also a passionate humanitarian and anti-war activist. Born a German Jew, Einstein truly considered himself a citizen of the world. His celebrity status enabled him to speak out—on global issues from pacifism to racism, anti-Semitism to nuclear disarmament. "My life is a simple thing that would interest no one," he once claimed.

But in fact, his letters, notebooks and manuscripts tell a dramatically different story.
Einstein saw the universe as a puzzle, and he delighted in trying to solve its mysteries. All he needed to contemplate the cosmos was his most valuable scientific tool—his imagination.

May 29, 1919
A solar eclipse turns Einstein into an international hero.

Isaac Newton's 17th-century description of gravity became obsolete as the clouds parted on May 29, 1919, and the Sun and Moon aligned in an eclipse. Images of known stars confirmed what Einstein's "General Theory of Relativity" predicted: the Sun's gravity acts like a lens and deflects light from distant stars, making them appear in new locations.

source::http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/einstein/revolution/index.php

Einstein::A World Citizen

Einstein's passionate commitment to the cause of global peace led him to support the creation of a single, unified world government.

Einstein thought that patriotic zeal often became an excuse for violence: "As a citizen of Germany," he wrote in 1947, "I saw how excessive nationalism can spread like a disease, bringing tragedy to millions." To combat this "disease," Einstein wanted to eliminate nationalistic sentiments—first by erasing the political borders between countries and then by instituting an international government with sovereignty over individual states.

During World War I, Einstein supported the formation of the "United States of Europe."

He later endorsed the League of Nations and its successor, the United Nations. But Einstein worried that the United Nations did not have enough authority to ensure world peace.

Einstein himself seemed to have little regard for national boundaries.

His true allegiance was simply to the human race: "I am by heritage a Jew, by citizenship a Swiss , and by makeup a human being, and only a human being, without any special attachment to any state or national entity whatsoever."