Abstract

Einstein's Influence. A Fellow-Scientist's Tribute

The life of scientist Albert Einstein, who was born on March 14, 1879, marked a heroic age in two senses. In his lifetime, in great part by his works, were formed the new concepts of large- and small-scale physics which have profoundly affected man's thinking. And also in his lifetime the unwritten tradition of free and open speculation on which for him all science rested was often challenged and with his aid defended. The great revolutionary minds in science have been thinkers rather than inventors, rather than experimenters. And it was not the complexity but the simplicity of their thought which made it a challenge to everything that the rest of the world had taken for granted, which enabled it three times to conquer the thinking world.