Freedom and individualism are necessary for creativity and imagination to flourish.

“think that everything the inventor says is wrong.”73

“You have to remain critically vigilant.” Question every premise, challenge conventional wisdom, and never accept the truth of something merely because everyone else views it as obvious. Resist being credulous. “When you pick up an application,”

Out of the supercharged German-speaking intellectual world, in which physics and mathematics and philosophy intertwined, three jarring theories of the twentieth century emerged: Einstein’s relativity, Heisenberg’s uncertainty, and Gödel’s incompleteness. The surface similarity of the three words, all of which conjure up a cosmos that is tentative

He was also, at least as a young child, prone to temper tantrums. “At such moments his face would turn completely yellow, the tip of his nose snow-white, and he was no longer in control of himself,” Maja remembers. Once, at age 5, he grabbed a chair and threw it at a tutor, who fled and never returned. Maja’s head became the target of various hard

“It is a glorious feeling to discover the unity of a set of phenomena that seem at first to be completely separate,” he wrote to his friend Grossmann as he embarked that spring on an attempt to tie his work on capillarity to Boltzmann’s theory of gases. That sentence, more than any other, sums up the faith that underlay Einstein’s scientific

These sentiments led Einstein to be critical of what he saw as the excessive consumption and disparities of wealth in America.

Although many scientists were using atomism to explore their own specialties, for Einstein it was a way to make connections, and develop unifying theories, between a variety of disciplines.

“The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility… The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.”