"The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility," he quoted Kant, and added that the fact that the world is comprehensible "is a miracle." He also understood his responsibility for the weapons he helped create. "We scientists," he wrote, "whose tragic destination has been to help in making the methods of annihilation more gruesome and more effective, must consider it our solemn and transcendent duty to do all in our power in preventing these weapons from being used."

Why, finally, is he so important to the age? Not because he personified brainpower — not because he was "an Einstein" — but rather because he demonstrated that the imagination is capable of coming to terms with experience. Simply by gazing into existence, he concluded that time and space could be warped, that mass and energy were interchangeable. He understood that the world was a puzzle created for deciphering and, more, that a person's place in the order of things was to solve as much of the puzzle as possible. This is what makes a human human; this, and the governing elements of morals and humor.

Einstein's friend and fellow physicist Abraham Pais called him "the freest man I have known," by which he meant that by the pure act of thinking, Einstein controlled his destiny. His mind was utterly fearless, and by its uses he diminished fear in others. "It stands to the everlasting credit of science," Einstein wrote, "that by acting on the human mind, it has overcome man's insecurity before himself and before nature." And so he became a model of what humans might do if they put their mind to it.

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Feb. 18, 1929	July 1, 1946	Feb. 19, 1979
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