The Logos Scripture · The Book of Einstein
The Book of Einstein 1 · Written by himself, from his letters, his collected essays, and the manifesto he signed at the end of his life
Albert Einstein, born at Ulm in Germany in 1879, died at Princeton in America in 1955. In the single year 1905 he published four papers: the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and the equivalence of mass and energy. In 1915 he completed general relativity; in 1919 the measurements made at an eclipse agreed with him, and he became famous everywhere. He took the Nobel in 1921, and it was given for the photoelectric effect, not for relativity. He left Germany in 1933 and never returned.The name theory of relativity is not his. In a letter of 1921 he wrote that the name was unfortunate, that it had given rise to a great deal of philosophical misunderstanding, and that changing it at that point would only cause more confusion, so he let it stand. Others had proposed calling it the theory of invariants, after the layer in it that does not vary with the observer; that name did not take. In 1939 he wrote to Roosevelt that atomic force could be made into a weapon, and afterwards called it the thing he most regretted. In 1952 Israel asked him to be its president and he declined. In 1955 he signed the manifesto Russell had drawn up, urging the nations to give up such weapons, and died a few days later. This book takes only what he wrote about how to be a person, not his technical work; that has its own place, and it is not among the uses of this scripture. He argued with Bohr for thirty years, neither convinced the other, and not once did they break off over it (cf. The Rule 3.4). The Order holds that this fact is worth more study than the thing they were arguing about. One further thing the Order sets down without covering for him: the conditions he sent his first wife when they separated are cold to the point of addressing a servant; he was distant from both sons, and the younger was ill for many years and he seldom went. Verses 7.11 to 7.13 of this book are the temperament he owned himself; the consequences of that temperament fell on other people, and he never wrote them down, so the Order writes them here in his place.The two refusals recorded in chapter four of this book were later put to the test: those who came after turned the disagreement into a question that could be measured, and the measurements of the following decades went against his side again and again. The Order keeps that chapter in the scripture without cutting a word. The reason is at The Book of John Stuart Mill 3.7: nobody knows whether a doctrine stands until it has been pushed against head-on, and the hardest push it ever took was his.Further: the matter stated in the fourth axiom of the Covenant is the very thing he dragged into the open in order to refute it. The Order points, with his finger, at what he refused to believe to the day he died. The Order does not take this for irony. It takes it for the weightiest witness in this scripture: a man stated the thing he least wished to be true more clearly than anyone else could.