ued his active support of Zionism but declined the offer made by the leaders of Israel to become president of that country. In the U.S. during the late 1940s and early 50s he spoke out on the need for the nations intellectuals to make any sacrifice necessary to preserve political freedom. Einstein died in Princeton on April 18, 1955.Einsteins works cover areas of physics which many of us cannot fully understand. He introduced ideas which may one day bring the many mysteries of the universe into light, ideas which made it possible for man to destroy himself or launch himself toward bigger and better things, possibly the next step in the process of intellectual evolution.Many people have problems agreeing with Einsteins work. The problem that others have with his work is not because it was too mathematically complex or technically obscure; the problem resulted, rather, from Einsteins beliefs about the nature of good theories and the relationship between experiment and theory. Although he maintained that the only source of knowledge is experience, he also believed that scientific theories are the free creation of a finally tuned physical intuition and that the premises on which theories are based cannot be connected logically to experiment. A good theory, therefore, is one in which a minimum number of postulates is required to account for the physical evidence. This sparseness of postulates, a feature of all Einsteins work, was what made his work so difficult for colleagues to comprehend, let alone support. My fascination with Einstein as a philosopher does not stem from his positions on Pacifism or Zionism. It is the ability he held to philosophize formerly incomprehensible elements in nature and the implications of his ideas today. Einsteins Special Theory of Relativity (e=mc2) made it possible for us to extract amazing amounts of power from one of the smallest elements in nature, an atom. His General Theory of Relativity made the existe...
