As Albert Einstein lay on his deathbed, he asked only for his glasses, his writing implements and his latest equations. He knew he was dying, yet he continued his work. In those final hours of his life, while fading in and out of consciousness, he was working on what he hoped would be his greatest work of all. It was a project of monumental complexity. It was a project that he hoped would unlock the mind of God.
“I want to know God’s thoughts”
“I am not interested in this phenomenon or that phenomenon,” Einstein had said earlier in his life. “I want to know God’s thoughts – the rest are mere details.” But as he lay there dying in Princeton Hospital he must have understood that these were secrets that God was clearly keen to hang on to. The greatest scientist of his age died knowing that he had become isolated from the scientific community; revered on the one hand, ridiculed for this quest on the other.
It was a journey that started 50 years earlier in Berne, Switzerland. Then – in his early 20s – he was a young man struggling to make his mark. His applications to universities throughout Europe had all been rejected. In the end his father had pulled strings to get him a job as a third class clerk evaluating the latest electrical gizmos.
But in his spare time he was formulating the most extraordinary scientific ideas. In a single year – 1905, a year that would become known as his miracle year – he published papers that would redefine how we see our world and universe…