Einstein in time and spa.., p.1
Einstein in Time and Space, page 1
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INTRODUCTION
On May 29, 1919, above the skies of the island of Príncipe, the moon passed in front of the sun, and the world fell into shadow. The totality of the eclipse had begun. Waiting for just this moment, an English scientist peered through an astrographic camera to take pictures of the event. And in the Brazilian city of Sobral another scientist did the same, feverishly taking as many photographs as the few minutes of darkness would allow. They worked in the hope that they might record the bending of starlight. They succeeded.
When, a few months later, these results were announced at Bur-lington House in London, home of the Royal Society, the conventional understanding of gravity was swept away. The photographs captured by the expedition teams showed that when the light from stars 153 light-years away, at the center of the Taurus constellation, had reached the vicinity of the sun, it had altered its path, so that those stars no longer appeared in their usual positions in the sky. There was only one explanation that exactly accounted for this: space itself was warped by the presence of the sun. The theory of relativity had just been confirmed. Isaac Newton, the giant of physics, had been cast down, to be replaced by Albert Einstein, a scientist little known beyond Germany.
Einstein, then living in Berlin, forty years old with only the smallest trace of gray at his temples, received the results of the eclipse expedition shortly before he was due to meet with a student named Ilse Schneider. During their conversation, he handed her the telegram he’d received informing him of his theory’s success. Recognizing the deep shift she must now make in her understanding of the universe and its laws, she was understandably excited and offered many congratulations, but Einstein told her calmly, “I knew the theory was correct.”
But, she asked, what if those who observed the eclipse hadn’t seen the bending of light? Or what if they’d seen the light bend, but not by the amount Einstein had predicted in his theory?
“Then I should feel very sorry for the Lord,” he replied. “The theory is correct.”
Two years later, Einstein toured America, to help raise money for the Zionist cause, which was focused on creating a Jewish home in Palestine. He was now as famous as it was possible to be. In every city he visited, thousands upon thousands of people filled the streets to see him. A crowd of admirers lifted him onto their shoulders, he met the president, and the Senate even undertook a discussion about the difficulty of understanding relativity. A year later, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics and undertook a lecture tour of Asia. While in Japan, he met the emperor and empress, and a huge crowd waited all night outside his hotel, hoping to see the great man appear on his balcony. In Tokyo, he lectured for four hours with translation. Feeling a little sorry to have put an audience through such a slog, he managed to cut down his next talk on the tour to under three hours. As he rode the train to the next city, he noticed that his hosts were not quite themselves and asked if anything was wrong. Yes, came the reply: Einstein had insulted those who had organized the second lecture by making it shorter than the first. And so for the rest of the tour he made sure to take his time explaining himself, and the audiences were happy to listen.
Einstein’s fame was so rapid and so complete that, around the same time, two American students, to play out a bet with one another, addressed an envelope to “Professor Albert Einstein, Europe” and posted it, wanting to see if it would reach him. It did, and with no more delay than usual.
“How excellent the postal service is!” was all Einstein said.
* * *
Twenty years before this, in 1902, Albert had just moved to the city of Bern in Switzerland. Twenty-three and a little round in the face, he emanated a restless energy, an easy intensity. A friend who met him for the first time in Bern was immediately struck by the “radiance of his large eyes.” He was waiting to be offered a job at the Swiss Patent Office, in the city—thanks to the help of a friend, the job was effectively sewn up for him. Nevertheless, things were far from rosy. He had very little money and had resorted to advertising his services as a private tutor of physics and mathematics in the local paper. But students were few and his rates were low; he complained it would be easier to make a living busking in the street with his violin. He ate very little. Moreover, his girlfriend, Mileva Marić, had given birth to his daughter less than a month before his move. Were the existence of a child born outside marriage to be discovered, he could say goodbye to his post at the patent office. Albert and Mileva endeavored to keep her a secret from everyone, including Einstein’s family. He knew he must marry—he wished to marry, he believed—but he had not yet gathered the courage to do so. His parents had long made clear their dislike for Mari, and he knew they certainly would not bless the union.
Added to this, although the position at the patent office was most welcome, in accepting it Einstein would be, in a way, accepting failure as well. In the two years since leaving university he had applied for academic positions all over Europe, only to be rejected every time. The patent office was a necessity, but it made definite Einstein’s academic failing, his inability to pursue what he loved and the supremacy of obligations.
Einstein would continue to apply for academic posts for the next five years, before finally making it to the lowest rung on the ladder. At one point in his degrading job hunt, ground down by constant rejection, he modified his ambitions and applied for work as a high school teacher—sending copies of all his scientific papers, including his doctoral thesis and papers on light quanta and special relativity, as supporting documents. There were twenty-one applicants. Einstein didn’t make the final three.
* * *
It is easy to think of Einstein’s life as bifurcating into two halves: before and after the confirmation of general relativity, which is to say before and after fame. In his youth, according to this narrative, he was unappreciated and yet brilliant, while in his old age he was appreciated yet dull. There is some truth to this. Einstein’s finest work was all produced before he was famous, and for much of his early life he was a reasonably obscure figure. It took him nine years to secure an assistant professorship, and even then he wasn’t first choice for the job.
And it is true that after his fame he produced few papers worthy of note. What was perhaps Einstein’s last really great piece of work was written twenty years before his death. And this was not completed in the trailblazing spirit of earlier work—it did not attempt to explain an unknown, say, or reshape any area of inquiry—but instead was reactionary, forged in distrust of the new physics of quantum mechanics. In it, Einstein set out to discredit the quantum by outlining “entanglement,” a phenomenon that could theoretically occur under the rules of quantum mechanics, but that he thought was impossible in reality. One of Einstein’s more remarkable habits was to be right even when he was wrong. In this case, entanglement was eventually proved to be one of the fundamental truths of the universe.
For most of the last thirty years of his life he would dedicate himself to developing a “unified field theory”—a theory of everything, under which all the laws of nature are encompassed, from the movements of celestial bodies to magnetism to what occurs inside the atom—only to be increasingly ignored by his scientific colleagues, who considered him something of a relic and unlikely ever to succeed.
And yet Einstein cannot be so simply defined and is far more interesting than this narrative of accolade harvesting and stagnation implies. It, too, neatly sands off the outlying facts, such as the professional recognition and success he had achieved in Germany even before publishing anything about general relativity. It also ignores his support for the Jewish people and the development of his pacifism. During the buildup to the Second World War these other aspects of the man were far from stagnant. He spent a large portion of his money helping Jews to flee Germany and immigrate to the US, as well as helping to found the organization that became the International Rescue Committee.
Einstein’s fame can get in the way of an objective assessment of his life. It creates an expectation of the extraordinary, and so it’s easy to fail to see what an astounding life Einstein did actually live. It involved a level of genuine success that is almost unthinkable. In one year—in fact, in half a year, from March to September 1905—he submitted his doctoral thesis; he mathematically proved the existence of atoms; he argued for the modern idea of light as a stream of particles (and in so doing laid the groundwork for quantum mechanics); and he proposed the special theory of relativity—in the process doing away with the past few hundred years of scientific orthodoxy and, practically by accident, discovering the equivalence of energy and matter, now immortalized in the equation E = mc2. He did all this in his spare time, while working six days a week as a patent clerk, without access to a library, and with a one-year-old child at home.
On top of this, ten years later, he presented the general theory of relativity, which managed, in one set of equations that exhibited an incredible degree of accuracy, to set out the laws that govern the star-paved heavens. Almost alone, Einstein had figured out a way of con ceiving of space that could describe exactly the movements of the objects in space: it could account for the orbit of Mercury, the motion of two stars orbiting each other, and a thousand more situations. General relativity was so successful in describing the workings of the universe that it anticipated truths even Einstein couldn’t quite believe. Einstein thought the universe was static, but his theory demanded that it be expanding; the theory was right. Relativity insisted on the existence of strange objects in space that are so dense nothing can escape their gravity. Einstein thought these a mathematical bug that could be ignored. They turned out to be black holes, and very real indeed.
Not just early on but later in life, too, Einstein experienced hardship that was nearly as dramatic as his achievements. Einstein and Marić eventually gave up their daughter entirely, something that gravely affected their own relationship. Later, his acrimonious divorce led to a complicated, bitter, and sad relationship with his remaining two children, Hans Albert and Eduard. Things unraveled particularly with Eduard, who, at the age of twenty, threatened suicide and later underwent treatment for schizophrenia, spending much of his remaining life in and out of asylums. Einstein was twice a potential target for assassination, and after the ascension of the Nazi Party, in what was the most extreme expression of antisemitism he experienced during his entire life, he was made an exile from Germany, from his home, possessions, and friends.
* * *
But, for all that, Einstein was in many ways really quite normal—in him, the fabled idea that genius and madness are two aspects of the same state isn’t borne out. He wasn’t reclusive, but made friends effortlessly and navigated those relationships with ease. Far from being monomaniacal, he took an interest in music, art, and psychology and was a vocal and active participant in the politics of the day. At various times, he was a founder of the pacifist organization the New Fatherland League, served on the League of Nations’ International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, and was co-chair of the American Crusade to End Lynching. Nor was he as stoical as is often suggested. When his work was attacked, he would respond heatedly, sometimes publicly, and usually against his better judgment.
Moreover, Einstein’s genius was less mystical than might be imagined. He was a genius—one of the finest scientific minds in history. Faced with his work, it is impossible to claim otherwise. (One of his lesser achievements, for instance, is to have theorized the process of stimulated emission, which would later become the foundation for the invention of lasers.) But he was not the archetypal, inspired, transcendental genius whose intellect is somehow apart from the world. One of the most captivating and consistent traits Einstein possessed was his ability to work—to really, truly work at something.
One day, when he was an assistant professor in Zurich, one of his students, Hans Tanner, came to call on him at his home. Tanner found Einstein in his study, hunched over a sprawl of papers, at work on some equations. He was writing with his right hand and holding Eduard with his left. Hans Albert, meanwhile, was giddily playing with toy bricks on the floor, trying to get his father’s attention. “Wait a minute, I’ve nearly finished,” Einstein said, handing Eduard to Tanner and turning back to his equations. Hans Albert would later recall that the sound of a baby crying never distracted Einstein. Work seems to have given him both purpose and comfort. After his first heartbreak, he wrote that “strenuous intellectual work” and the act of examining nature would between them see him through trouble and bear him through life. At other moments of extreme distress—after the death of his second wife, Elsa, or as he watched Eduard struggle with depression—he would say much the same: work was the only thing that lent significance to life.
Even within his own lifetime, Einstein was overtaken by public interpretations of him, such as the perception that he was an almost saintlike figure, with a moral superiority uncorrupted by fame. This idea was also encouraged after his death by his longtime secretary and the executor of his estate, Helen Dukas, and has firmly persisted. However, there is much to find off-putting about Einstein. As his travel diary from 1922 reveals, he harbored racist opinions of many of those he met during his tour of Asia, likewise when he toured South America in 1925. And he persistently belittled women. In his personal life, he clearly had an unpleasant strain: he was cruel to his first wife, distant as a father, and consistent in his adulteries. He also enjoyed getting his own way. He once canceled a vacation with his teenage son just because he’d dared say something Einstein wasn’t happy about. He was capable of treating anything, or anyone, who constrained his sense of freedom with a petty meanness and anger.
And yet Einstein is a likable character. Some of this is due to the fun, joy, and irreverence that was part of his personality. On vacation, he would speed his boat toward other sailors on the water, only to turn away at the last minute, laughing, narrowly avoiding a collision, and this despite never having learned to swim. He called his Autobiographical Notes—which was the closest he ever came to writing something comprehensive about his life—his “own obituary,” and then barely mentioned himself at all. Having been banned by his doctor from smoking, Einstein decided that as long as he didn’t buy the tobacco himself, he was doing nothing wrong, and so he used to pilfer it from any source he could find, be it colleagues’ tobacco tins or even cigarettes from the street.
Einstein probably succeeds in coming across as agreeably as he does simply because he was so friendly. Not only was he smiling and easy with strangers, but to those he liked he was doggedly loyal, affectionate, and honest. Therefore—outside his family, crucially—it is difficult to find anyone among those who knew him who was not kind about him. In Charlie Chaplin’s autobiography or an interview with an aging Bertrand Russell, in the diaries of a German count or the letters of a Belgian queen, in the reminiscences of his colleagues from all of his places of work, one will consistently encounter the same feeling of happiness at having known Einstein. In the face of such affection, it becomes difficult to resist treating him as one would one’s own friend: with a pleasure at being in their company, and a certain willingness to treat failures and foibles with leniency, if not forgiveness.
* * *
This book is a mosaic biography. It is composed of short chapters of varying styles that deal with a particular moment or aspect of Einstein’s life—one may be an anecdote, the next a discussion of his scientific work, another a quotation from his letters. These individual pieces are intended to make up a picture, in its own way, as representative of its subject as the portrait drawn by a traditional biography. In constructing this mosaic, I don’t set out to redeem Einstein, or to make a case for a defining characteristic of his personality. More fascinating, to me, are the inconsistencies inherent in a life, the inexplicable, incompatible, insane motivations that punctuate days and years.
Today, Einstein is a figurehead as much as a man, symbolic of things larger than himself: of scientific progress, the human mind, the age. He is seen as elevated by his exceptional intellect, as if he represents what we could all be capable of—an image that is added to by his outspoken righteousness, his lack of care for show or dress or awards, his indifference to what people thought of him, his resolute pursuit of truth and peace. He is, in short, a figure for good.
But examining his life shows that his genius did not overshadow his humanity, and that he was not someone formidably, dishearteningly other. When, in 1929, he published yet another attempt at a unified field theory, churches across America gave sermons on the work discussing its theological implications, and the New York Times sent reporters to congregations around the city. Reverend Henry Howard, pastor of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, compared Einstein’s latest theory to St. Paul’s preachings on the unity of nature. But the fact is that the theory wasn’t a sacred text, the product of a semidivine intelligence; it was plain wrong. Albert would abandon it shortly after all the fanfare, just as he would abandon every other attempt at a unified field theory.
