In response to the many accusations I have faced over the years that I worship Albert Einstein like a deity, I would like to present five mortal mistakes the brilliant but ultimately human physicist made.
His first mistake was to divorce his wife and then marry his cousin. I don't feel that I really need to go into much depth about the problems this presented him in his life, so I'll just leave that fact right here and then move on.
His second mistake was his inability to understand or overcome the monetary problems which plagued him. From the beginning of his career, he repeatedly failed to negotiate for even a basic salary, accepting paltry and demeaning compensation for his brilliant contributions to science.
His third mistake was to denigrate the young but growing scientific discipline of Quantum Mechanics. His famous quip that the Almighty "does not play with dice", in conjunction with his disparaging thought experiment known as "Schrödinger's Cat" in which he tried to point out the perceived ridiculousness of life-sized machines designed around nanoscopic quantum states, were both premature, despite having been received favorably at the time.
His fourth mistake was to take such a prominent role in the early stages of the Manhattan Project, which ultimately culminated in the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The letters he penned to the Allies during World War II, as well as their consequences for humanity, most likely haunted him to his grave and beyond.
And his fifth mistake, which was by far the most costly, was to spend over half his life searching for the ever-elusive Universal Theorem. When the mathematician Gödel published his famous Incompleteness Theorem in the early 1930s, it served as definitive proof that there was no such thing as a "Theory of Everything", and that for every conclusion a person reaches, there are one or more unprovable assumptions that their logic depends upon. Unfortunately, for all his brilliance, Einstein was among those many overly exuberant optimists who never truly received that memo.
So there you have it: five costly mistakes that one of history's greatest minds made, and which clearly delineate his mortality.
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