At Princeton, he was more like a kindly uncle. When he arrived in 1935, and was asked what he would require for his study, he replied: "A desk, some pads and a pencil, and a large wastebasket — to hold all of my mistakes." His salary request had to be raised by Princeton administrators to avoid embarrassment. He played the violin, helped children with their homework, and did indeed, as the story goes, have some trouble remembering his address. He spent the balance of his life there, carving out a quiet spot within his legend and grappling with another chilling science that he had fathered but could not love: quantum physics.

Einstein, though not religious, was a believer. "I want to know how God created this world... I want to know his thoughts; the rest are details." And he had a good idea of what those thoughts were. Subtle but not malicious, non-interventionist but certainly present, Einstein's God didn't "play dice with the universe." Quantum physics, guided by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, held that matter lived only as a probability, an approximation, an illusion of order in a chaotic universe. This Einstein could not bear, and he resisted the colder world bitterly until he became, in his own words, "a fossil" among his colleagues. "Stop telling God what to do," Niels Bohr told him, but Einstein couldn't. He spent his last two decades wrestling vainly for a "Unified Field Theory" — the final theory — a cause that Steven Weinberg, among others, has taken up today, so far without success.

Do we see too little beauty in the universe, or did Einstein imagine too much? ("It didn't pan out," he once told a colleague, two weeks after casually mentioning he was on the verge of his "greatest discovery ever.") A half-century after his death, we have his eyes in a jar in New Jersey and his brain (minus a few bits chipped off for analysis) in another jar in Lawrence, Kansas. We have the advances he left us, which have touched nearly every branch of the sciences, and we have the the bomb. But probably above all, in our heads we keep his vision (however vaguely) — the rhyming world is the one we keep on rooting for. Einstein got us closer to nature's truths than anyone had before, and he knew how much he had left unsolved. Once, Uncle Einstein sent this reply, along with a page full of diagrams, to a 15-year-old girl who had written for help on a homework assignment: "Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics; I can assure you that mine are much greater." Everything's relative.

Frank Pellegrini writes for TIME Daily

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