38 INTRODUCTORYerature. Nor did I ever see him in the company of schoolmates or other boys of
his age,' Talmud recalled later [T2]. In those years, 'his only diversion was music,
he already played Mozart and Beethoven sonatas, accompanied by his mother'
[M4]. Einstein also continued to study mathematics on his own. At the age of
twelve he experienced a second miracle: he was given a small book on Euclidean
geometry [H2], which he later referred to as the holy geometry book. 'The clarity
and certainty of its contents made an indescribable impression on me' [El]. From
age twelve to age sixteen, he studied differential and integral calculus by himself.
Bavarian law required that all children of school age receive religious education.
At the Volksschule, only instruction in Catholicism was provided. Einstein was
taught the elements of Judaism at home by a distant relative [M5]. When he went
to the Luitpold Gymnasium, this instruction continued at school. As a result of
this inculcation, Einstein went through an intense religious phase when he was
about eleven years old. His feelings were of such ardor that he followed religious
precepts in detail. For example, he ate no pork [M6]. Later, in his Berlin days,
he told a close friend that during this period he had composed several songs in
honor of God, which he sang enthusiastically to himself on his way to school [S2].
This interlude came to an abrupt end a year later as a result of his exposure to
science. He did not become bar mitzvah. He never mastered Hebrew. When he
was fifty, Einstein wrote to Oberlehrer Heinrich Friedmann, his religion teacher
at the Gymnasium, 'I often read the Bible, but its original text has remained
inaccessible to me' [E2].
There is another story of the Munich days that Einstein himself would occa-
sionally tell with some glee. At the Gymnasium a teacher once said to him that
he, the teacher, would be much happier if the boy were not in his class. Einstein
replied that he had done nothing wrong. The teacher answered, 'Yes, that is true.
But you sit there in the back row and smile, and that violates the feeling of respect
which a teacher needs from his class' [SI, S2].
The preceding collection of stories about Einstein the young boy demonstrates
the remarkable extent to which his most characteristic personal traits were native
rather than acquired. The infant who at first was slow to speak, then becomes
number one at school (the widespread belief that he was a poor pupil is
unfounded) turned into the man whose every scientific triumph was preceded by
a long period of quiet gestation. The boy who sat in the classroom and smiled
became the old man who—as described in Chapter 1—laughed because he
thought the authorities handling the Oppenheimer case were fools. In his later
years, his pacifist convictions would lead him to speak out forcefully against arbi-
trary authority. However, in his personal and scientific conduct, he was not a
rebel, one who resists authority, nor—except once*—a revolutionary, one who
'Einstein's one truly revolutionary contribution is his light-quantum paper of 1905. It is significant
that he never believed that the physical meaning of the light-quantum hypothesis had been fully
understood. These are matters to which I shall return in later chapters.