8 Chapter 7 Albert's Time Is Up

Chapter 7 Albert's Time Is Up "Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player." —Albert Einstein By 1948, Albert was in very poor health. His heart was getting weaker and weaker. A doctor insisted that Albert take a certain medicine. Albert hesitated. The doctor insisted. So Albert took the medicine and immediately got sick to his stomach.

"There," he snapped at the doctor, "do you feel better now?" Yet there was reason for happiness during those years. In 1948 the Jewish nation of Israel was created. Albert was overjoyed. All his work had helped to bring about something wonderful. After Israel's first president died, Albert was asked to become the next president. Albert said no. "Politics is for the moment," he once wrote, "while an equation is for eternity." Still he was greatly honored by the offer. In 1950, Albert made his will. He wanted all his science papers left to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1951, Maja died. Now Albert had neither his wife nor sister. He was more alone than ever. He surrounded himself with family photographs. He said, "A photograph never grows old. You and I change, people change all through the months and years but a photograph always remains the same. How nice to look at a photograph of a mother or father taken many years ago. You see them as you remember them. That is why I think a photograph can be kind."

Several years later, after a brief illness, Albert was admitted to the Princeton hospital. On April 17, 1955, he asked that his eyeglasses, some paper, and a pen be brought to his hospital bed. He had work—thinking—to do. The next day he died with a sheet of equations next to him. To the very end Albert was thinking. The last letter he wrote was one that urged all nations to give up nuclear weapons. The Einstein house at 112 Mercer Street in Princeton, New Jersey, is treated no differently than any other home in the neighborhood. That's

the way Albert wanted it. He worried that if it was turned into a museum, people would concern themselves too much with his memory and not enough with their own future. After Albert's death, the scientific community mourned the loss of a great and original mind. Jews mourned the loss of a leader who always wished for a better and more peaceful world, even in the darkest moments of Jewish history. And all people mourned the loss of a unique, peace-loving man. Perhaps Albert said it best, "Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile." Albert was not the best husband. He was not the best father. But as a friend said of Albert, he was "the freest man I have known."