Einstein's Muscles and Morals

By George DeWan | Staff Writer

Einstein's Muscles and Morals

The English author and physicist C. P. Snow recalled driving to Nassau Point in 1937 to visit the 58-year-old Albert Einstein. ``What did surprise me was his physique,'' Snow wrote in Commentary magazine in 1967. ``He had come in from sailing and was wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. It was a massive body, very heavily muscled: he was running to fat around the midriff and in the upper arms, rather like a footballer in middle age, but he was still an unusually strong man. ...''

``Mostly we talked of politics,'' Snow continued. ``The moral and practical choices in front of us, and what could be saved from the storm to come, not only for Europe but for the human race. All the time he was speaking with a weight of moral experience which was different, not only in quantity but in kind, from anything I had ever met. By this time he had lost any intrusion from his own ego, as though it had never existed. It was something like talking to the second Isaiah.''