Finished, at last, Walter Isaacson’s EINSTEIN: HIS LIFE AND UNIVERSE, 551 pages, 25 chapters of lucid prose by and about the greatest mind of the 20th century. I hope to write a long commentary on my website but for now urge you to read these final five paragraphs from the Epilogue.

” There was a simple set of formulas thaat defined Einstein’s outlook. Creativity required being willing not to conform. That required nurturing free minds and free spirits, which in turn required, ‘a spirit of tolerance.” And the underpinning of tolerance was humility – the belief that no one had the right to impose ideas and beliefs on others.
The world has seen a lot of impudent geniuses. What made Einstein special was that his mind and soul were tempered by this humility. He could be serenely self-confident in his lonely course yet also humbly awed by the beauty of nature’s handiwork. ‘A spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe – a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble,’ he wrote. ‘In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort.’
For some people, miracles serve as evidence of God’s existence. For Einstein it was the absence of miracles that reflected divine providence. That fact that the cosmos is comprehensible, that it follows laws, is worthy of awe. This is the defining quality of a ‘God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists.’
Einstein considered this feeling of reverence, this cosmic religion, to be the wellspring of all true art and science. It was what guided him. ‘When I am judging a theory,’ he said, ‘I ask myself whether , if I were God, I would have arranged the world in such a way.’ It is also what graced him with his beautiful mix of confidence and awe.
He was a loner with an intimate bond to humanity, a rebel who was suffused with reverence. And thus it was that an an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe.”

SET ASIDE A MONTH, AND READ A CHAPTER A DAY! IT’S AN INTELLECTUAL BANQUET.