Celebrity annoyed Einstein — he would once list his occupation as "artist's model" — but while his theory made the rounds at cocktail parties, the physicist himself discovered that Americans wanted desperately to hear what else he had to say. So he spoke up. His gave speeches and met with heads of state, made enemies of Hitler (and later McCarthy) with his ardent blend of pacifism, Zionism and Communism. (Eventually the sound of his voice got too loud for him; with so much made of every trip, Einstein never left the U.S. after 1935.) His every bon mot was duly recorded for posterity, and his personal quirks (such as very rarely wearing socks) were eagerly added to the fast-growing legend. Not Einstein the physicist anymore; Einstein, the Einstein.

Did the man have flaws? Eager excavators have found that he was unkind to his first wife, Serbian physicist Mileva Maric, and distant at best with his second wife, Elsa, and their son. The famous absentmindedness, so jolly in his later years, was not so benign when it came to human contact. Should we be surprised at this from a man who did not speak until age 3, slouched his way through school, and grew up to find a universe that no others had? Surprised that he was more than a little aloof?

In 1929, TIME noted in a cover story on the physicist that "Albert Einstein's theories have altered human existence not at all." That would not last — the fields of electronics, quantum physics and space travel all bear his fingerprint now (though we're still waiting to see those twins in spaceships wearing watches). But that the atom could be split and its power unleashed — that one was the first to leap off the theoretician's blackboard. In 1939, America's most celebrated pacifist warned Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a letter that the Germans were nearing the nuclear age. America — this the physicist knew from experience from his days in Germany — had better get there first. It did. By 1946 Einstein's epiphany and the Manhattan Project would wreak, in the name of good, the most horrible destruction of our age in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Einstein knew what he and his visions had done; after the war he made a tearful apology to visiting Japanese physicist Hideki Yukawa. Pacifist, deep-thinking Einstein, who loved children, was the father of the bomb.

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