Science: Death of a Genius

Almost every morning for the last 22 years, a self-effacing little man, careless-clad in baggy pants and a blue stocking cap, stepped down from the front porch of a modest frame house at 112 Mercer Street, Princeton, N.J., and trudged off to the Institute for Advanced Studies. At a glance, the little man could have been the caretaker or a gardener. He puffed meekly at his pipe; he sidled in quietly; he seldom spoke unless spoken to. But on a second look, a rare quality seemed to glow in that sad and wizened face, with its disordered halo of white hair and its soulful brown eyes. The quality was genius, a compound of soaring intellect and wide-ranging imagination that had carried Albert Einstein past the confines of man's old scientific certitudes and deeper into the material mysteries of the universe than any man before.

Last week Professor Einstein trudged no more in the grounds of his beloved institute. A lingering gall-bladder infection sent him to the hospital. Blood began to escape from his aorta, the main artery. Shortly after midnight he muttered a few sentences in German. The night nurse could not understand, and the last words of the modern world's greatest scientist were lost. At 1:15 a.m. Albert Einstein, 76, died in his sleep.

Great Transformer. "No other man contributed so much to the vast expansion of 20th century knowledge," said President Eisenhower. Pravda editorialized: "A great transformer of natural science." Said the Prime Minister of Israel: "The world has lost its foremost genius."

Thousands of other tributes poured in, but words could not convey the feelings of a world in which the many unquestioningly accepted Einstein's genius while only the few—and they, of scientific training—adequately understood what he had contributed to knowledge. In person, Albert Einstein was diffident, almost childlike. As a man of scientific thought, he strode boldly with history's handful: Pythagoras and Archimedes, Copernicus and Newton.

Einstein's only instruments were a pencil and scratchpad; his laboratory was under his cap. Yet he saw farther than a telescope, deeper than a microscope. Einstein traveled in lonely splendor to the crossroads of the visible and the invisible, expressing each in terms of the other. He came close to proving by mathematicians' logic what men of religion had long accepted on philosophers' reasoning or faith: that the laws which move the tiniest unseen electrons must also govern the macrocosms of intergalactic space. Einstein's scratchpad theorems broke through the thought barriers of knowledge and rewrote the basic scientific law of the universe. The now-mundane miracle of television is a splinter off Einstein's achievement; the mushroom clouds of atomic fission and hydrogen fusion are his unwanted monuments; mankind's chance to turn earth-shaking force into good is his legacy.