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make a placid and unpoisonous material, table salt. Why each of these substances has the properties it does is a subject called chemistry, which requires more than 10 bits of information to understand.

CHAPTER 3
     

THAT WORLD
WHICH BECKONS LIKE
A LIBERATION
     

     
    To punish me for my contempt for authority,
Fate made me an authority myself.
EINSTEIN
     
    ALBERT EINSTEIN was born in Ulm, Germany, in 1879, just a century ago. He is one of the small group of people in any epoch who remake the world through a special gift, a talent for perceiving old things in new ways, for posing deep challenges to conventional wisdom. For many decades he was a saintly and honored figure, the only scientist the average person could readily name. In part because of his scientific accomplishments, at least dimly grasped by the public; in part because of his courageous positions on social issues; and in part because of his benign personality, Einstein was admired and revered throughout the world. For scientifically inclined children of immigrant parents, or those growing up in the Depression, like me, the reverence accorded Einstein demonstrated that there were such people as scientists, that a scientific careermight not be totally beyond hope. One major function he involuntarily served was as a scientific role model. Without Einstein, many of the young people who became scientists after 1920 might never have heard of the existence of the scientific enterprise. The logic behind Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity could have been developed a century earlier, but, although there were some premonitory insights by others, relativity had to wait for Einstein. Yet fundamentally the physics of special relativity is very simple, and many of the essential results can be derived from high school algebra and pondering a boat paddling upstream and downstream. Einstein’s life was rich in genius and irony, a passion for the issues of his time, insights into education, the connection between science and politics, and was a demonstration that individuals can, after all, change the world.
    As a child Einstein gave little indication of what was to come. “My parents,” he recalled later, “were worried because I started to talk comparatively late, and they consulted the doctor because of it … I was at that time … certainly not younger than three.” He was an indifferent student in elementary school, where he said the teachers reminded him of drill sergeants. In Einstein’s youth, a bombastic nationalism and intellectual rigidity were the hallmarks of European education. He rebelled against the dull, mechanized methods of teaching. “I preferred to endure all sorts of punishment rather than learn to gabble by rote.” Einstein was always to detest rigid disciplinarians, in education, in science and in politics.
    At five he was stirred by the mystery of a compass. And, he later wrote, “at the age of 12 I experienced a second wonder of a totally different nature in a little book dealing with Euclidean plane geometry.… Here were assertions, as for example the intersection of the three altitudes of a triangle in one point, which—though by no means evident—could nevertheless be proved with such certainty that any doubt appeared to be out of the question. This lucidity and certainty made an indescribable impression upon me.” Formalschooling provided only a tedious interruption to such contemplations. Einstein wrote of his self-education: “At the age of 12 to 16 I familiarized myself with the elements of mathematics together with the principles of differential and integral calculus. In doing so I had the good fortune of finding books which were not too particular in their logical rigor, but which made up for this by permitting the main thoughts to stand out clearly and synoptically … I also had the good fortune of getting to know the essential results and methods of the entire field of the natural sciences in an excellent popular