"1945: Princeton - Einstein" Albert Einstein feels as if his own hand had pressed the button. Although he didn't make it, the atomic bomb would not have been possible without his discoveries about the liberation of energy. Now Einstein would like to have been someone else, to have devoted himself to some inoffensive task like fixing drains or building walls instead of investigating the secret of life that others now use to destroy it. When he was a boy, a professor said to him: "You'll never amount to anything." Daydreaming, with the expression of someone on the moon, he wondered how light would look to a person able to ride on a beam. When he became a man, he found the answer in the theory of relativity, won a Nobel Prize, and deserved many more for his answers to other questions born in his mind of the mysterious link between Mozart's sonatas and the theory of Pythagoras, or of the defiant arabesques that the smoke from his extra-long pipe drew in the air. Einstein believed that science was a way of revealing the beauty of the universe. The most famous of sages has the saddest eyes in human history.
Eduardo Galeano >From 'Century of the Wind' (vol 3 of 'Memory of Fire') London: Minerva Books, 1990
