What exactly did he discover?

John Ziman

• ‘Subtle is the Lord’: The Science and Life of Albert Einstein by Abraham Pais
  Oxford, 552 pp, £15.00, October 1982, ISBN 0 01 985390 4
• The Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics as the Language of Nature by Heinz Pagels
  Joseph, 370 pp, £10.95, March 1983, ISBN 0 7181 2217 8
• Philosophy and the New Physics by Jonathan Powers
  Methuen, 203 pp, £3.95, December 1982, ISBN 0 416 73480 4
• Albert Einstein: The Centennial Symposium in Jerusalem edited by Gerald Holton and Yehuda Elkana
  Princeton, 439 pp, £24.70, August 1982, ISBN 0 06 908299 5

It is less than three decades since Albert Einstein died, yet many different personae have been supposed behind the familiar mild exterior. Nobody would impute any lack of psychic integrity in the man himself. True enough, he was a peculiarly self-contained person whose inner life was always opaque, even to his most intimate companions. But there was no harsh discontinuity or irreconcilable inconsistency in his temperament, and we have no reason to suppose that he was nervously guarding some guilty secret like Newton’s heretical Unitarianism. His private and public activities are amply documented, and are seldom inexplicable to an intelligent and imaginative observer. Yet even in his scientific work, Einstein can be represented as playing several different roles, in several quite different dramas.