When I was a 12-year-old living in Chicago, my school class went on a field trip to a museum, and at one point our teacher started talking about how great Albert Einstein was. We were all impressed. Then I remember Melissa Gorman, who was quite attentive, asking our teacher what exactly it was that Einstein invented.
The teacher had no idea.
I was shocked, and not just because I still believed that teachers knew everything. I found it hard to imagine that someone could be so famous without having invented something, or pitched in a World Series, or in some other way actually done something concrete. I knew that Einstein was smart: Several parents in my neighborhood had a picture of him taped up on their refrigerator. A lot of Jewish families in the 1950s and 1960s had photos of Einstein hanging in the house. In those photos it was always clear that Einstein was thinking deeply and perhaps even that he was sad. I wondered, What exactly had he done?
When I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I learned more about Einstein’s great theories and read some of his comments about the impersonality of what he’d achieved—his feeling that although he had been granted the opportunity to see something of how our universe was built, his own role would in time be forgotten. As a teenager, I found Einstein’s acknowledgment of his own mortality hard to accept. But years later when I was teaching at Oxford, I had an epiphany while watching the rowing teams out on the river early one morning. I realized that as one generation of undergraduates took over from the next, they were beginning to blur in my mind. I was startled, and at the same moment pleased, by the thought that my contributions to their education would also blur in their minds, just as on a far higher level we have begun to take for granted Einstein’s role in expanding our understanding of the universe.
