PROLOGUE Dear Miss. I have read your paper. I suffered the same treatment at the hands of my teachers who disliked me for my independence. Keep this for your sons and daughters that they may derive consolation from it and not give a damn for what their teachers tell them or think of them. There is too much education altogether.    He wrote this in response to a woman who sent her term paper to him. We have edited it down quite a bit.

PROLOGUE The only justifiable purpose of political institutions is to assure the unhindered development of the individual. That is why I consider myself particularly fortunate to be an American.               This is definitely a quote.

SCENE 2 If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.           This is often attributed to him. He never said it, very likely he disliked it, unless it was understood to be completely, totally, without a hint of seriousness, in jest.

SCENE 2 Why do politicians think they're smart enough to solve global problems just because they were smart enough to cause them?          We played with it a lot. The actual quote was more along the lines: One thing is for certain, world leaders cannot solve the world’s problems with the same level of thinking with which they caused them

SCENE 2 ...two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity. I'm not sure about the universe.           This comes down in many different versions, so it is hard to be accurate even if we weren’t paraphrasing, but he definitely said it.

SCENE 2 I can't say with what weapons World War 3 would be fought, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones.           What amazing technology might come into play in the next major war? Hard to say but irrelevant, there can't be a war with such weapons, or else!

SCENE 2 If I had only known, I would have been a locksmith.                  He had many quotes advising against science as a means to make a living. He felt it wasn’t good for the person or for the science. We took the liberty of using it as a comment on the effects of his work. I have actually seen it attributed this way, probably inaccurately.

SCENE 2 God does not play dice with the humor verse!                 Two points here. Yes, the actual quote was about the UNIverse, and this is the line mentioned most often by those who insisted he was religious in the classical sense, no matter how many times he explained what he meant by god and how many things he said to explain that they should not use him in their marketing of god and religion. Perhaps this other quote will add a little light on this: When I am judging a theory, I ask myself whether, if I were God, I would have arranged the world in such a way. Once you understand this hypothetical format of his internal questioning, one can see how he followed that by saying he ran through mental conversations with "the old one" in his head. The old one is the order behind the universe, the symbolic affirmation that it all makes sense.. It meant the non-existent super mind that could comprehend it all and see the order where we might miss it. It also could be himself at times, the self that imagined the order he would set if he were god. Einstein was very good at understanding how the metaphor of god made conveying some concepts easier. He may have understood that using such metaphors quieted some ignorant attacks from fundamentalists who feared science would disprove their beliefs. This may not have been worth the trade of fueling a misconception of his beliefs.

SCENE 2 Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.               It applies to those in the asylum as well as to those in the laboratory insisting that no amount of experimental failures disproves their hypothesis.

SCENE 2 Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.                He said it, but the debate over how real this knock on reality is rages on.

SCENE 2 The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.                Corollary of the statement about the list of infinite things. Apparently, he really had his fill of dealing with stupidity. However, this was probably directed at stupid people in authority. As long as they were not in positions of authority he loved responding to fools and lunatics who wrote to him, he enjoyed getting into their heads, reconstructing and trying to understand their thought processes.

SCENE 2   If you want to see my best suit, it is in my closet. If you want to see me, I am here.              His wife dragged him from his work to dignitaries awaiting him downstairs. When he finally came down she was horrified to see he didn't stop to dress properly. He said that wasn't important, turned to the guests and said the line quoted above.   These are words to live by, but then again his renown did protect him from the truth of the clothes making the man. It is a better quote to remember if you are too often fooled by the packaging of others.

SCENE 2 To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority.               Interesting quip, he likely did not believe in fate, but wouldn’t let that stop a good line. I would like to hear his response if this were turned around and sent back at him in the form, "You work to make your own fate, and you made yourself an authority, for which you have contempt. Why?" My guess is, it would cause a loud and long belly laugh.

SCENE 2 An old hag sits on your lap for a minute, it seems like an hour. A pretty girl sits there for an hour and it seems like a minute. That's relativity. There are several forms of this, some beginning, "your hand hits a hot stove for a moment...." It actually was part of a larger comic in a Yiddish newspaper, where one patron in a barber shop asks another who this Einstein was. Upon hearing Einstein is the inventor of Relativity, he asks what this relativity was. The line cited above was not the actual punchline! That would be the response to it, "and from this he can make a living?" Einstein was so amused by this joke at his expense that he called it the best explanation of relativity he had ever heard, and although he may have repeated it, it has incorrectly been attributed to him since.

SCENE 2 Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics, I assure you, mine are greater.                  To a school child asking for help.

SCENE 2 this Einstein guy is a regular Einstein.               This was not intended to be a quote, but long after writing it I found a corollary quote. Commenting on the difference between the real him (as he saw himself) and the public perception of him, he said "I’m no Einstein."

SCENE 2 I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.                  And modest .

SCENE 2 I rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterward.                  This has been shortened to fit. It may be my personal favorite. It is not a well known quote and despite having read quite a few biographies over the years I had never come across it until researching for this project. It is something I have said for decades, especially when it comes to explaining why I remember every concept and none of the nouns. (Obviously I don’t remember names, but can cover myself on that. I don’t need your name to talk to you, only to talk about you.) In a book whose first draft I penned in 1992, the hero explains much of his abilities as stemming from the mental quickness, sharpness, and associative flexibility that comes from thinking and associating concepts directly in thought and not bogging things down with words. When I finally found one person who understood this, I figured he had to truly be an Einstein.

SCENE 2 The search for truth is more precious than its possession.                         ‘Nuff said.

SCENE 3 Imagination is more important than knowledge.             He was way ahead of his time in observing that all too often academics involves trading the ability to think for some information to be repeated. The information was approved by the powers that be to maintain the status quo, and tests were designed to label the most mindlessly accurate repetition as intelligence. Later some experts categorized education  as "socialization," recognizing that what it taught was "how to fit in," another way of saying "don't rock the boat." The last thing such systems want to reward is thinking. Einstein had commented that education is test oriented and tests search for what the student doesn't know, education should seek and fan the flames of  what the student does know.

SCENE 3 Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.                  This statement obeys its own guideline.

SCENE 3 my happiest thought             When he thought about a painter who fell off a scaffolding, then asked him what it felt like, he began to put together the concept that gravity was equivalent to any other acceleration, and he called this the happiest thought of his life. Extra credit for anyone who figured out that this really belongs in a sequel that would cover General Relativity.

SCENE 3 It is people who make me seasick–not the sea. But I am afraid that science has yet to find a solution for this ailment.      He really is worth knowing even if you never read one word of his science.

SCENE 3 I'm so sure of Lightbeam I'd never lose any sleep worrying if she'll behave the right way.                Okay, he never, as far as I know, personified light as our Lightbeam, and the quote actually came regarding the bending of light in General Relativity. When the expeditions actually measured starlight bending around the sun during an eclipse, all of Einstein’s supporters (and detractors) in physics anxiously awaited the results. Only Einstein saw no reason to wonder what the results would be. He had several other related quotes on this point, for instance, that if the results disproved his theory then he’d feel sorry for "the old one," the order behind it all, because the theory is right. As he was never really talking about God in the religious terms, he wasn’t putting anyone’s god(s) down by this. At the funeral of Max Planck, Einstein’s only real supporter in physics when the rest of the physics world disregarded him, Einstein included in his grand description of Planck that he wasn’t really a scientist, because he was worried while awaiting those results. Fortunately, scientist to the core or not, Max was the single most respected Scientist in the world until he used that position to help Einstein to take the title

SCENE 6 a spirituality first sends one on it. The exploration of the great mysteries is it's own religious experience.            Loose conglomeration of  quotes.

SCENE 6 Pigs see dirt where the pure see only purity           They discuss the meaning in the play, so check local listings for your chance to see it.

ACT 2 SCENE 1 (7) If you want a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or objects.           One might add, on the smaller scale, have a goal with everything you do.

ACT 2 SCENE 1 (7) I am content in my later years. I have kept my good humor and take neither myself not the next person seriously.          Perspective!

ACT 2 SCENE 1 (7) Try not to become a man of success but rather a man of value.           Remember English wasn’t his first (or second) language. This would be stated more appropriately as, "Do not try (for success)" which is very different than actively trying not to succeed.

ACT 2 SCENE 1 (7) Success in life equals work plus play plus keeping your mouth shut.                He actually put it in a formula, X plus Y plus Z form, then defined Z as keeping your mouth shut.

ACT 2 SCENE 3 (9) The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.         He may be onto something...

ACT 2 SCENE 4 (10) Demigods on stilts:            Said in reference to certain common personality traits in people he met living in Princeton, but overall he liked them!

ACT 2 SCENE 5 (11) Curiosity has its own reason for existing.                 And is its own reward?

ACT 2 SCENE 5 (11) I think and think for months and years, ninety_nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.             The ability to accept that his pet ideas were wrong separated him from most one-time successful theorists who can’t move on. Even when it came to Quantum theory, he never said any of the proven data was wrong, he integrated it. He hoped for a deeper explanation that would fit his preferred views, but because he went about the work itself objectively it was his thought experiments performed in attempts to pull the rug out from under quantum theory that kept advancing it!

ACT 2 SCENE 6 (12) I never think of the future _ it comes soon enough.                 He truly was a cool customer; he didn’t dwell on the past nor fear the future. He often did what he felt had to be done knowing he would suffer or be endangered for it.

ACT 2 SCENE 8 (14) Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted            This is generally attributed to him, though some claim he never said it.

ACT 2 SCENE 8 (14) The truth of a theory is in your mind, not in your eye.                 And as The Beatles would sing, Think for yourself.

ACT 2 SCENE 8 (14) has powerful muscles               Hard to call something this short a quote, but having heard him use it in a discussion of intellect without personality (art?), it stands out as portraying his style and manner.

ACT 2 SCENE 8 (14) they'd have a better chance Of shooting birds in the dark, in a country where there aren't very many birds.            As explained in the play, without neutrons splitting an atom was unlikely.

ACT 2 SCENE 8 (14) In 1905 it was amusing, however, a good joke should never be repeated.                     In response to the question of why he fathered Quantum Theory: The scene in the play imitates life.

ACT 2 SCENE 8 (14) When you look at yourself from a universal standpoint, something inside always informs you that there are bigger things to worry about.                    Again with the perspective.

ACT 2 SCENE 8 (14) The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.                 A recurring theme with him.

ACT 2 SCENE 8 (14) The Cosmological Constant, my great mistake.                       He actually said "my greatest mistake" but it didn’t make it that way to the final draft. Theater is like that.

PROLOGUE although the actions never took place in any one interview, all actions such as the toy bird test, making coffee and the hair twirl when lost in thought, are genuine. The attitudes and opinions mentioned are all taken from those mentioned by the professor as his own, at least at some point in his life.

SCENE 2 Lina my dear:               He did call his violin Lina, probably because he never owned a car to name and talk to

SCENE 3 Theory of Invariants.                He felt it actually ended the notion of relativity

SCENE 3 Who cares, that’s in the past:          Invented statement based on common retorts of his at that age. Some find this attitude  to have been a sign of an ego that later submerged, or of a complex that couldn’t take critique. Taking all the facts in it fits if you take it for the opposite. He truly only counted truth, rightness was part of truth, not the discoverer’s greatness. Likewise, being wrong was a passing stage one might have needed to cross to get to the truth. Unlike many nearly great minds, he didn’t fear being wrong. He could take a stand when everyone was against him, and could change his view if the facts proved otherwise. And when he disliked the facts and wanted to disprove them, he could face them head on. As stated earlier, he never tried to discredit the evidence accumulated for quantum theory, he knew to find a truly more pleasing solution rather than just squash what he disliked he needed to accept the facts and work with them to move on. It was his lack of ego attachment that protected him from the denial evident at some point in almost every other great life.

SCENE 3 In a Rolls Royce at a hundred miles per hour, the loudest sound is the clock!               In the 50's when RR first gave in and decided to advertise in normal fashion, Madison Ave gave something like this line to Rolls for approval. They didn’t understand advertising, their reaction, much like that of Tracey in our script,  was literally that they had to do something about that clock. Some people believe that Einstein was subliminally obsessed with time and timing because he worked in a clock making, clock filled, noisy with clockwork, town.

SCENE 4 no hidden tobacco either:                      The pipe and hidden tobacco are definitely true. Drs advised against smoking, the women in his life enforced it, so he puffed the old unlit pipe for fumes. When someone at the research center needed to lure him to a conversation, they'd bait a trap with tobacco .

SCENE 4 (Charlie) Chaplin     tried to meet him and eventually they became close friends. Although he didn't possess a television, he was familiar with such aspects of our culture. He was once at a friend’s home when they put on the TV for Sid Caesar’s "Your Show Of Shows." As luck would have it Sid did his Crazy Foreign Professor routine, a less than reverent send-up of Einstein. The next day a terrified Sid Caesar was brought to a phone to take Einstein’s call. Einstein asked him to do more of the fantastic satirical take on him:  "Everyone else takes me far too seriously." In a similar vein, he once reassured a mother who was mortified because her baby cried when she held it out to Einstein by telling the screaming infant, "You’re the first person in years who has told me what you really think of me."

SCENE 5 Michelson Morley:          Brilliantly clever experimentalists devised ways of accurately measuring the speed of light with the instruments available before even Einstein’s time. The confusion was not due to inaccuracy but because the readings made no sense at all, until the good professor figured it all out.

SCENE 6 Space probes have reached 26,000 miles per hour  Since the early days of the Space Race this has been about right. I have seen listings of 28,000 since the same time, but most (referring to the same vehicles) were closer to this. (It's all relative). One might assume things got much faster, but not really, and even if they did, I still find the same general range of listings.  In truth, since this made the line work (square 26,000 to approximate the speed of light) I wasn't being picky. For instance, I ignored relative velocities after gravity assists. However, on January 29, 2006, NASA launched "New Horizons," the most advanced space probe ever, and it will leave Earth orbit at  36,000 MPH! This was unquestionably done just to make it clear that 26,000 is not the record, but the line beat the probe into the books and the line stays!

SCENE 6 ...but if some stubborn mule is set on changing things, predictability can be delayed.          And I describe Einstein as a mule elsewhere. Extra credit to those who realized this could be the foundation a of a great trilogy

ACT 2 SCENE 1 (7) Everything is actually moving straight ahead through time in their own view:               Food for thought: In any one frame of reference the dimension labeled as 4^th is not quite the same dimension as the next guy in the next frame labels as # 4. If you are next to me at a 4 person square table your right/left dimension is my front/back dimension. Since they are similar they can switch, someone can even be partway between us and say we’re mixing parts of dimensions. We don’t tend to confuse the up down one, but in space you would, and pilots or divers do so but don’t always live to talk about it.. This implies that all 4 are absolutely similar spatial dimensions, since the one we label as time isn’t exactly the same one as a guy moving fast compared to us labels as the time dimension. Perhaps it is better to think of it as timing, as in speeds of processes including clocks, and it isn’t any one dimension, just the difference of our angle in 4-D to the next guy’s. From our view, looking at a near-light-speed starship there's little freedom for internal things like electrons to move, so everything is slower and that's what we call time, no internal motion, no aging. In their view, they have complete freedom, so everything inside the ship is at it’s fullest speed, or greatest slice of timing. Remember, everything moves at the unchanging speed of light, a timing mechanism in the dimension one doesn't see one's self as moving through (or dangling participles in), no matter which of the 4 spatial dimensions that happens to be.

ACT 2 SCENE 2 (8) As long as my cloak stays shadowed                Just want to let the true geeks know that I know, so Extra credit for explaining what holds the cloak on, any cloak we could sense should fall right through him. It would have to be suspended where he was, and if it followed him around some sensor based on following his gravitational field around might be used. Also, to speak he’d need to use gravitation to excite air molecules, so we used some license here.

ACT 2 SCENE 2 (8) With that she was gone. It hit me like a bag of bricks, I was the pigeon. He played me like a violin, he told me the tune and let me sing it to her. He twisted my arm and I didn't even know it, I did his bidding and set the path Lightbeam was bound by her nature to follow.     Space tells matter how to move, matter tells space how to bend, gravity is the summation of these interactions. Energy affects and is affected by gravity just as matter is. Dark energy, that which we can’t sense except through this very interaction, represents over 80% of the effect we once attributed just to matter and energy. Here Otto has described the standard interaction, in his own way.

ACT 2 SCENE 3 (9) Change one word; Laws of physics, not mechanics, are the same in all frames of reference in uniform motion. That's my relativity: That’s the entire difference in relativity. Everything else are findings that made no sense until Einstein figured out what was going on, and ramifications of his discoveries.

ACT 2 SCENE 6 (12) I'm sure I'll miss my mind, but I'll get by on looks.           Inspired by many things he did say. The young Einstein likely said similar things about both his mind and his appearance. He was considered good looking when young, but he never cared to dress the part, inventing the sockless half shaven look 3/4 century before Miami Vice. He loved to joke about his looks. A child once asked the old Professor who was he and what does he do that everybody was taking pictures of him. He replied, "Apparently my job is being a photographer’s model"

ACT 2 SCENE 8 (14) it's all the times I lost my keys that were trouble.              Not a quote, a statement of reality. When young he was always waking his landlady in the middle of the night, she would have evicted him for this had he not been so charming. In later years he could forget he was going on a tour, when told the cab was waiting he’d get up without keys, a coat, a suitcase or sometimes shoes. When reminded he’d be gone for weeks so he should pack, on at least one occasion he went to his room, found a toothbrush and departed with this luggage.

ACT 2 SCENE 8 (14) I am always ready to laugh.                He may never have said this, but it was a common description of him. In fact, more than one person described him as "The most ready person to laugh I have ever met." It went hand in hand with his childlike curiosity and enthusiasm.

ACT 2 SCENE 9 (15) Quite gifted on...:                    his musical ability was called barely amateurish by some and brilliant by others. Once, while playing with an orchestra the conductor commented, "Einstein, can you count?" As with many things, he was off on his own. Putting all the comments together a picture emerges of a musician with limited technical ability and polish by professional standards, but feel for the work and great creativity of performance and interpretation, possibly beyond any professional playing his instrument. Curiously, the exact same totality of comments as was amassed by the drumming of Ringo Starr.

ACT 2 SCENE 9 (15) You're the guy who forgets his own name:              Leaving Germany he was asked his name at a border and could not remember it. He could be truly absent minded, ignoring such mundane details was part of his focus. A Princeton worker once had this exchange on the phone: "How do I get to Albert Einstein's home?" the caller asked. When the man at the dean's office said he couldn't give out those directions, there was a pause on the other end. Then, a sigh, and a response: "This is Albert Einstein. I got lost while taking a walk."

ACT 2 SCENE 9 (15) The song was also made for him:             "As Time Goes By" is a play on words. As a phrase it means as we change, as used in the song it refers to the changing world itself. Knowing it refers to Einstein adds to this that things are changing much faster now, and explains why it is important to mention that a kiss hasn’t become different since last week, the changes aren’t simply fads or aging. The real word play is this, as time goes by means as our very concept of time has been tossed out the window!