einstein

studying the DNA from Einstein’s brain. Unfortunately, it turned out that the way Harvey had embalmed the brain made it impossible to extract
usable DNA. And so her questions were never answered. 7
In 1998, after forty-three years as the wandering guardian of Einstein’s brain, Thomas Harvey, by then 86, decided it was time to pass on the
responsibility. So he called the person who currently held his old job as pathologist at Princeton Hospital and went by to drop it off. 8
Of the dozens of people to whom Harvey doled out pieces of Einstein’s brain over the years, only three published significant scientific studies.
The first was by a Berkeley team led by Marian Diamond. 9 It reported that one area of Einstein’s brain, part of the parietal cortex, had a higher ratio
of what are known as glial cells to neurons. This could, the authors said, indicate that the neurons used and needed more energy.
One problem with this study was that his 76-year-old brain was compared to eleven others from men who had died at an average age of 64.
There were no other geniuses in the sample to help determine if the findings fit a pattern. There was also a more fundamental problem: with no
ability to trace the development of the brain over a lifetime, it was unclear which physical attributes might be the cause of greater intelligence and
which might instead be the effect of years spent using and exercising certain parts of the brain.
A second paper, published in 1996, suggested that Einstein’s cerebral cortex was thinner than in five other sample brains, and the density of his
neurons was greater. Once again, the sample was small and evidence of any pattern was sketchy.
The most cited paper was done in 1999 by Professor Sandra Witelson and a team at McMaster University in Ontario. Harvey had sent her a fax,
unprompted, offering samples for study. He was in his eighties, but he personally drove up to Canada by himself, transporting a hunk that amounted
to about one-fifth of Einstein’s brain, including the parietal lobe.
When compared to brains of thirty-five other men, Einstein’s had a much shorter groove in one area of his inferior parietal lobe, which is thought
to be key to mathematical and spatial thinking. His brain was also 15 percent wider in this region. The paper speculated that these traits may have
produced richer and more integrated brain circuits in this region. 10
But any true understanding of Einstein’s imagination and intuition will not come from poking around at his patterns of glia and grooves. The
relevant question was how his mind worked, not his brain.
The explanation that Einstein himself most often gave for his mental accomplishments was his curiosity. As he put it near the end of his life, “I
have no special talents, I am only passionately curious.” 11
That trait is perhaps the best place to begin when sifting through the elements of his genius. There he is, as a young boy sick in bed, trying to
figure out why the compass needle points north. Most of us can recall seeing such needles swing into place, but few of us pursue with passion the
question of how a magnetic field might work, how fast it might propagate, how it could possibly interact with matter.
What would it be like to race alongside a light beam? If we are moving through curved space the way a beetle moves across a curved leaf, how
would we notice it? What does it mean to say that two events are simultaneous? Curiosity, in Einstein’s case, came not just from a desire to
question the mysterious. More important, it came from a childlike sense of marvel that propelled him to question the familiar, those concepts that,
as he once said, “the ordinary adult never bothers his head about.” 12
He could look at well-known facts and pluck out insights that had escaped the notice of others. Ever since Newton, for example, scientists had
known that inertial mass was equivalent to gravitational mass. But Einstein saw that this meant that there was an equivalence between gravity and
acceleration that would unlock an explanation of the universe. 13
A tenet of Einstein’s faith was that nature was not cluttered with extraneous attributes. Thus, there must be a purpose to curiosity. For Einstein, it
existed because it created minds that question, which produced an appreciation for the universe that he equated with religious feelings. “Curiosity
has its own reason for existing,” he once explained. “One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the
marvelous structure of reality.” 14
From his earliest days, Einstein’s curiosity and imagination were expressed mainly through visual thinking—mental pictures and thought
experiments—rather than verbally. This included the ability to visualize the physical reality that was painted by the brush strokes of mathematics.
“Behind a formula he immediately saw the physical content, while for us it only remained an abstract formula,” said one of his first students. 15
Planck came up with the concept of the quanta, which he viewed as mainly a mathematical contrivance, but it took Einstein to understand their
physical reality. Lorentz came up with mathematical transformations that described bodies in motion, but it took Einstein to create a new theory of
relativity based on them.
One day during the 1930s, Einstein invited Saint-John Perse to Princeton to find out how the poet worked. “How does the idea of a poem
come?” Einstein asked. The poet spoke of the role played by intuition and imagination. “It’s the same for a man of science,” Einstein responded
with delight. “It is a sudden illumination, almost a rapture. Later, to be sure, intelligence analyzes and experiments confirm or invalidate the intuition.
But initially there is a great forward leap of the imagination.” 16
There was an aesthetic to Einstein’s thinking, a sense of beauty. And one component to beauty, he felt, was simplicity. He had echoed Newton’s
dictum “Nature is pleased with simplicity” in the creed he declared at Oxford the year he left Europe for America: “Nature is the realization of the
simplest conceivable mathematical ideas.” 17
Despite Occam’s razor and other philosophical maxims along these lines, there is no self-evident reason this has to be true. Just as it is possible
that God might actually play dice, so too it is possible that he might delight in Byzantine complexities. But Einstein didn’t think so. “In building a
theory, his approach had something in common with that of an artist,” said Nathan Rosen, his assistant in the 1930s. “He would aim for simplicity
and beauty, and beauty for him was, after all, essentially simplicity.” 18
He became like a gardener weeding a flower bed. “I believe what allowed Einstein to achieve so much was primarily a moral quality,” said
physicist Lee Smolin. “He simply cared far more than most of his colleagues that the laws of physics have to explain everything in nature coherently
and consistently.” 19
Einstein’s instinct for unification was ingrained in his personality and reflected in his politics. Just as he sought a unified theory in science that
could govern the cosmos, so he sought one in politics that could govern the planet, one that would overcome the anarchy of unfettered nationalism
through a world federalism based on universal principles.
Perhaps the most important aspect of his personality was his willingness to be a nonconformist. It was an attitude that he celebrated in a
foreword he wrote near the end of his life to a new edition of Galileo. “The theme that I recognize in Galileo’s work,” he said, “is the passionate fight
against any kind of dogma based on authority.” 20
Planck and Poincaré and Lorentz all came close to some of the breakthroughs Einstein made in 1905. But they were a little too confined by
dogma based on authority. Einstein alone among them was rebellious enough to throw out conventional thinking that had defined science for
centuries.
This joyous nonconformity made him recoil from the sight of Prussian soldiers marching in lockstep. It was a personal outlook that became a