Autobiographical notes Einstein, Albert

"Here I sit in order to write, at the age of sixty-seven, something like my own obituary. . . ."

"When I was a fairly precocious young man I became thoroughly impressed with the futility of hopes and strivings that chase most men restlessly through life. Moreover, I soon discovered the cruelty of that chase, which in those years was much more carefully covered up by hypocrisy and glittering words than is the case today. . . . As the first way out there was religion, which is implanted into every child by way of the traditional education-machine. Thus I came—though the child of entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents—to a deep religiousness, which, however, reached an abrupt end at the age of twelve. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression. . . ."

Delivered with warmth, clarity, and humor, this brief work is the closest Einstein ever came to writing an autobiography. Although a very personal account, it is purely concerned with the development of his ideas, saying little about his private life or about the world-shaking events through which he lived.

Starting from little Albert's early disillusionment with religion and his intense fascination with geometry, the narrative presents Einstein's "epistemological credo," then moves through his dissatisfaction with the foundations of Newtonian physics to the development of his own special and general theories of relativity, and his opposition to some of the assumptions of quantum theory.

Translated and Edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp

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