Einstein in time and spa.., p.2
Einstein in Time and Space, page 2
Einstein is a reminder that to be the best of ourselves is not to be pure beyond fault. His goodness wasn’t a state of being, an aspect of genius—rather it was a pursuit. And because of that, all the more remarkable.
1
Illustration of the Avenue de l’Opéra, Paris, 1894, lit with Yablochkov candles.
The lights were coming on. In June 1878, a switch was thrown in Paris. The Avenue de l’Opéra—that grand road with wide sidewalks that draws the eye to the opera house—was suddenly illuminated. An unnatural, intensely bright light shot up the facades of the Haussmann architecture, leaving the upper floors in shadows. The gathered crowd gasped. The Avenue de l’Opéra was the first street in the world to be lit by electric streetlamps.
By the end of the year, these lamps, known as Yablochkov candles, had been installed on London’s Thames Embankment, on posts with curling, monstrous fish at their bases. Soon their fluctuating, otherworldly glow would light every major boulevard in Paris, and thousands more would appear in London and several major cities in the United States.
Marvelous though they were, the Yablochkov candles were far too bright for indoor use, and efforts were underway to perfect an electric light bulb suitable for offices, shops, and homes. In January 1879, the British chemist Joseph Swan successfully demonstrated a working lamp at a lecture in Newcastle. The same year, in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Thomas Edison set out to perfect his version. Edison had his own glassblowing house on-site to supply him with a near constant stream of bulbs. He needed them. That year, he tested more than six thousand materials as possible filaments, which involved carbonizing almost every plant he could think of—bamboo, baywood, boxwood, cedar, hickory, flax. On October 22, 1879, a voltage was applied to a burned piece of cotton thread, coiled inside a bulb. It emitted a soft orange light and kept going for more than half a day. Edison’s project had succeeded.
It was into this new, ever brightening world that Albert Einstein was born, on March 14, 1879, shortly before midday.
He was born in Ulm, an old city in Swabia—in southwest Germany—perched on the Danube. The city’s motto, dating back hundreds of years, is Ulmenses sunt mathematici, “The people of Ulm are mathematicians.” In 1805, it had been the scene of the Austrian army’s defeat by Napoleon. When the Einsteins lived there, construction workers were building a steeple for the minster, where Mozart once played the organ. On completion, the church became the tallest in the world.
Pauline Einstein, eleven years younger than her husband, Hermann, was from a wealthy family. Her father, Julius Koch, ran a grain business and had managed to become “Supplier to the Royal Württembergian Court.” She was educated and refined, though not considered snobbish. Well versed in German literature, she was also musical, playing the piano with both talent and enjoyment. She was said to be practical, efficient, and strong-willed, and was known for a sharp, sarcastic wit that could injure as well as cheer.
Like his wife, Hermann was descended from Jewish tradesmen and merchants. The Einsteins had made their living in rural Swabia for two centuries and with each generation had become assimilated further into German society, to the point where Hermann and Pauline were pleased to consider themselves as Swabian as they were Jewish. In fact, Einstein’s parents had little interest in the Jewish religion.
Hermann was a sympathetic contrast to his wife. Easygoing, even docile, he was earthier in his tastes. He liked to walk amid good scenery; to stop at a tavern, eat sausages and radishes and drink beer. He had a walrus mustache and a square chin, and was dependably solid. At secondary school he had shown an aptitude for mathematics, and although he couldn’t afford to go to university, his education had bought him entry into a higher social class. His son remembered him as wise and friendly. He was also an imperturbable optimist, even though his hopes were often wrecked by his impracticality.
In the summer of 1880, when Albert was one year old, Hermann was persuaded by his youngest brother, Jakob, to move his family to Munich and become a partner in his engineering firm, Jakob Einstein & Cie. In making the journey, the Einsteins moved from a location that was almost pastoral, where cows were still driven through the town square, to one of energetic urbanity. The capital of Bavaria was a city of three hundred thousand people. It had a university, a royal palace, and a thriving art trade.
The brothers initially dealt in water, gas, and boilermaking, but very quickly branched into electrical engineering. In 1882, they took part in the International Electrotechnical Exhibition in Munich, where they demonstrated dynamos, arc lamps, and light bulbs—and a telephone. Three years later they illuminated the Munich Oktoberfest with electric lights for the first time. So for young Albert, the electric light wasn’t something abstract that suggested far-off technological revolution. It was something real, immediate, and knowable. Jakob and Hermann started to teach the boy their business. He learned about the intricacies of motors, the practicalities of electricity and light, and the physical laws that governed them.
After investing a lot of Pauline’s family money, the company prospered, winning streetlamp contracts elsewhere in Germany and in northern Italy. With Jakob holding some important patents, the company employed two hundred people at its height and was able to compete with the likes of Siemens and AEG. But in 1893, when Einstein was a teenager, its fortunes changed when they lost a series of competitions to bring electric light to locations in Munich. Einstein & Cie was the only firm based in the city to compete for the contracts, but it was also the only Jewish firm, and that might have been enough to lose them business. The company went bust and Hermann and Pauline’s house was repossessed. Wrenched from their home, they chose to make a new start in Italy, where business prospects were better.
Electric light surrounded the young Einstein—it was at the forefront of modern technology and at the center of the family business. But while scientists knew how to brighten town streets and make plant-fiber filaments glow gold for hours on end, light itself was still largely a mystery. That would soon change.
2
Albert and Maja Einstein, 1885.
Einstein had one sibling. His sister, two and a half years younger than him, was born in Munich on November 18, 1881. She was named Maria, although throughout her life she always used the diminutive form Maja. When Albert was informed of the imminent arrival of a baby sister he would be able to play with, he imagined something more like a toy—not the strange, small creature he encountered. On first seeing her, he asked his parents, “Yes, but where are its wheels?” He was most disappointed.
The two quickly became firm friends, however, and they remained so for the rest of their lives. Einstein’s relationship with Maja was one of the most solid and loving he would experience. Their childhood was generally a comfortable one: bourgeois, easy, and happy. But Hermann and Pauline were also advocates of self-reliance, in both thinking and action, so when Einstein was three or four years old, he was sent off alone through the busiest, horse-strewn streets in Munich. He’d been shown the way once before and was now expected to manage by himself—albeit secretly shadowed by his nervous parents, who were ready to step in should anything go wrong. As it was, there was no reason to worry. When Albert reached an intersection, he would dutifully look both ways, then cross the road, completely unafraid.
In the evenings, schoolwork was to be completed before he and Maja were allowed to play any games. Young Albert would then spend his time on puzzles and with building blocks, as well as carving wood. His favorite activity was constructing houses of cards, at which he excelled, managing to build some fourteen stories tall.
Einstein’s many cousins would often come to play in the family’s rambling back garden, but he seldom joined in. When he did participate, he was regarded as an authority—“the obvious arbiter in all disputes,” as Maja would remember. But in general, he liked his own company, was careful and thorough, and took his time about things. He developed slowly, and had been so slow in learning to talk that his worried parents consulted a doctor. He had a particular difficulty for much of his childhood: whenever he wanted to say something, he would first whisper the words to himself. This he did for every utterance, no matter how routine, which led the family maid to call him “the dopey one.” Concerned about their son, Einstein’s parents tried hiring a governess, who ended up nicknaming the boy “Father Bore.” He finally grew out of his whispering habit at the age of seven.
Brother and sister bickered and teased each other in the normal fashion, and sometimes worse. Albert, in particular, threw violent temper tantrums when he was young, during which, as Maja recalled, his face would turn yellow and the tip of his nose white, and he would lose all control of himself. On one occasion, after he had started home-schooling, Einstein grew so incensed with the unfortunate teacher that he picked up a chair and hit her with it. She fled, never to be seen again.
“Another time he threw a large bowling ball at his little sister’s head,” Maja wrote some forty years later, evidently not having quite forgiven him. She also recounted an occasion when he hit her on the head with a garden hoe. “This should suffice to show that it takes a sound skull to be the sister of an intellectual.”
3
One day, when he was four or five years old, Albert lay ill in bed. His father came to see him and gave him a pocket compass to examine and play with. When he studied it, Einstein became so excited that he grew cold. The needle fascinated him because he couldn’t make sense of it. He knew movement could be created by contact—that was part of everyday life—but the needle was behind glass, out of reach and enclosed. Nothing was touching it, and yet it moved as if in the grip of someone’s fingers.
By that age he had grown accustomed to such phenomena as the wind and rain, or the fact that the moon hung in the sky and did not fall down. They were accounted for, recognizable: they had been before his eyes since infancy. But the invariance of the compass needle, which pointed north no matter how he manipulated the case, was a wonder.
Watching the needle dance back to its position, Einstein came to understand that this was something beyond his understanding of the world. He knew nothing about Earth’s magnetic fields, but it seemed to him that the needle must be influenced by some mysterious power. As he said when recalling the incident more than sixty years later, he realized that “something deeply hidden had to be behind things.” And he wanted to try to understand it.
“Young as I was, the remembrance of this occurrence never left me.”
4
Hermann Einstein was proud that Jewish rituals were not practiced in his home, viewing them as outdated, the remnants of “ancient superstition.” In his family, just one uncle attended synagogue, and he only did so because, as he used to say, “You never know.”
Therefore, when Albert turned six, his parents were happy to send him to the Petersschule, the local Catholic primary school. In his class of seventy, he was the only Jew. He received the usual Catholic education, learning sections of the catechisms, stories from the Old and New Testaments, and the sacraments. He liked these lessons, and indeed excelled at them, even to the point of helping his classmates with their work.
Einstein received no discrimination from his teachers due to his heritage. But he was, however, bullied by his fellow students, who frequently insulted and physically attacked him as he walked home from school.
To send their son to a Catholic school was one thing, to have him solely under the influence of Catholicism was another, so Albert’s parents hired a distant relative to teach him the values of Judaism to act as a counterweight. Einstein, however, took things much further. In 1888, when he was nine, he suddenly developed a fervent Jewish faith. Of his own accord, he strictly adhered to dogma, obeying the strictures of the Sabbath and kosher dietary laws. He even composed his own hymns, which he sang on his way home from school. Meanwhile, his family carried on with their secular lives.
This change coincided with Albert’s move to his secondary school, the Luitpold-Gymnasium, near the center of Munich. As well as paying attention to mathematics and science alongside the more traditional Latin and Greek, his new school provided a teacher to give religious instruction to its Jewish students.
Einstein later recalled finding a sort of Edenic bliss in the garden that surrounded the family house at this time. He was happy there, able to give himself to contemplation, his faith spurred by air filled with the scent of newly sprung petals, of buds and sap. He had also become conscious of what he called “the nothingness of the hopes and strivings which chase most men restlessly through life.”
He referred to this phase of his life as a “religious paradise,” but it ended as suddenly as it had arrived. When he was twelve, he lost all interest in religion. At that age he should have been preparing for his bar mitzvah, to make a formal commitment to Judaism, and perhaps this in itself played a part in his loss of faith. However, Einstein was later careful to attribute it to the influence of what might be called scientific thinking.
The Einsteins did keep one Jewish custom, albeit in a modified manner. It was common for Jewish families to host a poor religious student for the Sabbath meal. The Einsteins hosted a medical student on a Thursday. Max Talmud was twenty-one when he began to visit the Einsteins and Albert was ten, but the two soon became friends. After seeing his interest in the subjects, Talmud would bring Einstein science and mathematics books, and each week, Einstein would eagerly show him the problems he’d been working on. Although initially Talmud would help him, it didn’t take long for Einstein to outpace him.
The effect on Einstein was profound: “Through the reading of popular scientific books, I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true,” he would recall. “The consequence was a positively fanatic [orgy of ] freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression.”
And it was an impression he never shook off. He would forever be averse to religious orthodoxy and ritual, and hostile toward every kind of authority and dogma. An immediate upshot of this new attitude was that, at the end of three years, at the crucial moment, he refused to go ahead with the bar mitzvah.
5
Religion was not the only thing that Einstein developed an aversion to. German troops would occasionally pass through Munich, banging drums in rhythm and playing songs on fifes, stirring up a merry excitement as they went. The windows would rattle as they marched in lockstep, and children would run into the street to march with them, playing soldiers. When Einstein saw such a display once, his reaction was to burst into tears. “When I grow up,” he explained to his parents, “I don’t want to be one of those poor people.”
This military spirit extended to education as well. At the Luitpold Gymnasium, as in most German schools of the time, the style of teaching focused on memory, discipline, and systematization. Questioning was discouraged—things were to be learned and regurgitated. Teachers were very much the center of authority and knowledge, with the student only a receptacle for that knowledge, a disciple to that authority. Einstein achieved good grades, but he was far from a good student. He was openly contemptuous of the school system, the Gymnasium, and his specific teachers, whom in later life he referred to as “lieutenants.”
On one occasion, one of his teachers went so far as to declare that Einstein was unwelcome in class. He replied that he hadn’t done anything wrong. “Yes, that is true,” the teacher said, “but you sit there in the back row and smile, and your mere presence here undermines the respect of the class for me.” The same teacher went on to say that he wished Einstein would leave the school altogether.
At the age of fifteen, Albert found himself effectively alone in Munich, forced to stay with distant relatives. After the collapse of his father’s firm, the rest of the family had moved to Italy, leaving him behind to complete his education. He became so miserable that he persuaded the family doctor (an older brother of Max Talmud) to draw up a certificate stating that he was suffering from “neurological exhaustion” and claiming that he must suspend his schooling. He then went to his math teacher and asked for it to be confirmed in writing that he had mastered the subject and was an outstanding mathematician. Just before the Christmas holidays in 1894, he packed his things, bought a train ticket, and appeared, without warning, at his parents’ house in Milan. Hermann and Pauline were shocked, but despite their exasperated protests, he was adamant that he would not return to Munich.
He promised that he would study independently to prepare himself for the entrance exam to the Zurich Polytechnic—the institution he had decided he would attend for his higher education. Despite their worries and doubts, in the end his parents did everything they could to help with Einstein’s plan. When it was noticed that the polytechnic required applicants to be at least eighteen, Hermann and Pauline persuaded a family friend to intervene on their son’s behalf and ask for an exception to be made. Their friend evidently took the task seriously, recommending the then sixteen-year-old Albert in the most excessively praiseworthy language he could think of. The director of the polytechnic, Albin Herzog, replied:
According to my experience, it is not advisable to withdraw a student from the institution in which he had begun his studies even if he is a so-called “child prodigy”… If you, or the relatives of the young man in question, do not share my opinion, I shall permit—under exceptional dispensation of the age stipulation—that he undergo an entrance examination in our institution.
The exam began on October 8, 1895, and lasted several days. He did not pass. While he did well in the section specific to his chosen field of study, which covered math and physics, he did poorly in everything else—the general section included the history of literature, politics, and the natural sciences. Einstein was neither confident nor idiotic enough to think that the experience went well. The glaring gaps in his knowledge must have been brought home to him, perhaps as he struggled his way through a question on zoology. “My failure,” Einstein later recalled, “seemed completely justified.”
1
Illustration of the Avenue de l’Opéra, Paris, 1894, lit with Yablochkov candles.
The lights were coming on. In June 1878, a switch was thrown in Paris. The Avenue de l’Opéra—that grand road with wide sidewalks that draws the eye to the opera house—was suddenly illuminated. An unnatural, intensely bright light shot up the facades of the Haussmann architecture, leaving the upper floors in shadows. The gathered crowd gasped. The Avenue de l’Opéra was the first street in the world to be lit by electric streetlamps.
By the end of the year, these lamps, known as Yablochkov candles, had been installed on London’s Thames Embankment, on posts with curling, monstrous fish at their bases. Soon their fluctuating, otherworldly glow would light every major boulevard in Paris, and thousands more would appear in London and several major cities in the United States.
Marvelous though they were, the Yablochkov candles were far too bright for indoor use, and efforts were underway to perfect an electric light bulb suitable for offices, shops, and homes. In January 1879, the British chemist Joseph Swan successfully demonstrated a working lamp at a lecture in Newcastle. The same year, in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Thomas Edison set out to perfect his version. Edison had his own glassblowing house on-site to supply him with a near constant stream of bulbs. He needed them. That year, he tested more than six thousand materials as possible filaments, which involved carbonizing almost every plant he could think of—bamboo, baywood, boxwood, cedar, hickory, flax. On October 22, 1879, a voltage was applied to a burned piece of cotton thread, coiled inside a bulb. It emitted a soft orange light and kept going for more than half a day. Edison’s project had succeeded.
It was into this new, ever brightening world that Albert Einstein was born, on March 14, 1879, shortly before midday.
He was born in Ulm, an old city in Swabia—in southwest Germany—perched on the Danube. The city’s motto, dating back hundreds of years, is Ulmenses sunt mathematici, “The people of Ulm are mathematicians.” In 1805, it had been the scene of the Austrian army’s defeat by Napoleon. When the Einsteins lived there, construction workers were building a steeple for the minster, where Mozart once played the organ. On completion, the church became the tallest in the world.
Pauline Einstein, eleven years younger than her husband, Hermann, was from a wealthy family. Her father, Julius Koch, ran a grain business and had managed to become “Supplier to the Royal Württembergian Court.” She was educated and refined, though not considered snobbish. Well versed in German literature, she was also musical, playing the piano with both talent and enjoyment. She was said to be practical, efficient, and strong-willed, and was known for a sharp, sarcastic wit that could injure as well as cheer.
Like his wife, Hermann was descended from Jewish tradesmen and merchants. The Einsteins had made their living in rural Swabia for two centuries and with each generation had become assimilated further into German society, to the point where Hermann and Pauline were pleased to consider themselves as Swabian as they were Jewish. In fact, Einstein’s parents had little interest in the Jewish religion.
Hermann was a sympathetic contrast to his wife. Easygoing, even docile, he was earthier in his tastes. He liked to walk amid good scenery; to stop at a tavern, eat sausages and radishes and drink beer. He had a walrus mustache and a square chin, and was dependably solid. At secondary school he had shown an aptitude for mathematics, and although he couldn’t afford to go to university, his education had bought him entry into a higher social class. His son remembered him as wise and friendly. He was also an imperturbable optimist, even though his hopes were often wrecked by his impracticality.
In the summer of 1880, when Albert was one year old, Hermann was persuaded by his youngest brother, Jakob, to move his family to Munich and become a partner in his engineering firm, Jakob Einstein & Cie. In making the journey, the Einsteins moved from a location that was almost pastoral, where cows were still driven through the town square, to one of energetic urbanity. The capital of Bavaria was a city of three hundred thousand people. It had a university, a royal palace, and a thriving art trade.
The brothers initially dealt in water, gas, and boilermaking, but very quickly branched into electrical engineering. In 1882, they took part in the International Electrotechnical Exhibition in Munich, where they demonstrated dynamos, arc lamps, and light bulbs—and a telephone. Three years later they illuminated the Munich Oktoberfest with electric lights for the first time. So for young Albert, the electric light wasn’t something abstract that suggested far-off technological revolution. It was something real, immediate, and knowable. Jakob and Hermann started to teach the boy their business. He learned about the intricacies of motors, the practicalities of electricity and light, and the physical laws that governed them.
After investing a lot of Pauline’s family money, the company prospered, winning streetlamp contracts elsewhere in Germany and in northern Italy. With Jakob holding some important patents, the company employed two hundred people at its height and was able to compete with the likes of Siemens and AEG. But in 1893, when Einstein was a teenager, its fortunes changed when they lost a series of competitions to bring electric light to locations in Munich. Einstein & Cie was the only firm based in the city to compete for the contracts, but it was also the only Jewish firm, and that might have been enough to lose them business. The company went bust and Hermann and Pauline’s house was repossessed. Wrenched from their home, they chose to make a new start in Italy, where business prospects were better.
Electric light surrounded the young Einstein—it was at the forefront of modern technology and at the center of the family business. But while scientists knew how to brighten town streets and make plant-fiber filaments glow gold for hours on end, light itself was still largely a mystery. That would soon change.
2
Albert and Maja Einstein, 1885.
Einstein had one sibling. His sister, two and a half years younger than him, was born in Munich on November 18, 1881. She was named Maria, although throughout her life she always used the diminutive form Maja. When Albert was informed of the imminent arrival of a baby sister he would be able to play with, he imagined something more like a toy—not the strange, small creature he encountered. On first seeing her, he asked his parents, “Yes, but where are its wheels?” He was most disappointed.
The two quickly became firm friends, however, and they remained so for the rest of their lives. Einstein’s relationship with Maja was one of the most solid and loving he would experience. Their childhood was generally a comfortable one: bourgeois, easy, and happy. But Hermann and Pauline were also advocates of self-reliance, in both thinking and action, so when Einstein was three or four years old, he was sent off alone through the busiest, horse-strewn streets in Munich. He’d been shown the way once before and was now expected to manage by himself—albeit secretly shadowed by his nervous parents, who were ready to step in should anything go wrong. As it was, there was no reason to worry. When Albert reached an intersection, he would dutifully look both ways, then cross the road, completely unafraid.
In the evenings, schoolwork was to be completed before he and Maja were allowed to play any games. Young Albert would then spend his time on puzzles and with building blocks, as well as carving wood. His favorite activity was constructing houses of cards, at which he excelled, managing to build some fourteen stories tall.
Einstein’s many cousins would often come to play in the family’s rambling back garden, but he seldom joined in. When he did participate, he was regarded as an authority—“the obvious arbiter in all disputes,” as Maja would remember. But in general, he liked his own company, was careful and thorough, and took his time about things. He developed slowly, and had been so slow in learning to talk that his worried parents consulted a doctor. He had a particular difficulty for much of his childhood: whenever he wanted to say something, he would first whisper the words to himself. This he did for every utterance, no matter how routine, which led the family maid to call him “the dopey one.” Concerned about their son, Einstein’s parents tried hiring a governess, who ended up nicknaming the boy “Father Bore.” He finally grew out of his whispering habit at the age of seven.
Brother and sister bickered and teased each other in the normal fashion, and sometimes worse. Albert, in particular, threw violent temper tantrums when he was young, during which, as Maja recalled, his face would turn yellow and the tip of his nose white, and he would lose all control of himself. On one occasion, after he had started home-schooling, Einstein grew so incensed with the unfortunate teacher that he picked up a chair and hit her with it. She fled, never to be seen again.
“Another time he threw a large bowling ball at his little sister’s head,” Maja wrote some forty years later, evidently not having quite forgiven him. She also recounted an occasion when he hit her on the head with a garden hoe. “This should suffice to show that it takes a sound skull to be the sister of an intellectual.”
3
One day, when he was four or five years old, Albert lay ill in bed. His father came to see him and gave him a pocket compass to examine and play with. When he studied it, Einstein became so excited that he grew cold. The needle fascinated him because he couldn’t make sense of it. He knew movement could be created by contact—that was part of everyday life—but the needle was behind glass, out of reach and enclosed. Nothing was touching it, and yet it moved as if in the grip of someone’s fingers.
By that age he had grown accustomed to such phenomena as the wind and rain, or the fact that the moon hung in the sky and did not fall down. They were accounted for, recognizable: they had been before his eyes since infancy. But the invariance of the compass needle, which pointed north no matter how he manipulated the case, was a wonder.
Watching the needle dance back to its position, Einstein came to understand that this was something beyond his understanding of the world. He knew nothing about Earth’s magnetic fields, but it seemed to him that the needle must be influenced by some mysterious power. As he said when recalling the incident more than sixty years later, he realized that “something deeply hidden had to be behind things.” And he wanted to try to understand it.
“Young as I was, the remembrance of this occurrence never left me.”
4
Hermann Einstein was proud that Jewish rituals were not practiced in his home, viewing them as outdated, the remnants of “ancient superstition.” In his family, just one uncle attended synagogue, and he only did so because, as he used to say, “You never know.”
Therefore, when Albert turned six, his parents were happy to send him to the Petersschule, the local Catholic primary school. In his class of seventy, he was the only Jew. He received the usual Catholic education, learning sections of the catechisms, stories from the Old and New Testaments, and the sacraments. He liked these lessons, and indeed excelled at them, even to the point of helping his classmates with their work.
Einstein received no discrimination from his teachers due to his heritage. But he was, however, bullied by his fellow students, who frequently insulted and physically attacked him as he walked home from school.
To send their son to a Catholic school was one thing, to have him solely under the influence of Catholicism was another, so Albert’s parents hired a distant relative to teach him the values of Judaism to act as a counterweight. Einstein, however, took things much further. In 1888, when he was nine, he suddenly developed a fervent Jewish faith. Of his own accord, he strictly adhered to dogma, obeying the strictures of the Sabbath and kosher dietary laws. He even composed his own hymns, which he sang on his way home from school. Meanwhile, his family carried on with their secular lives.
This change coincided with Albert’s move to his secondary school, the Luitpold-Gymnasium, near the center of Munich. As well as paying attention to mathematics and science alongside the more traditional Latin and Greek, his new school provided a teacher to give religious instruction to its Jewish students.
Einstein later recalled finding a sort of Edenic bliss in the garden that surrounded the family house at this time. He was happy there, able to give himself to contemplation, his faith spurred by air filled with the scent of newly sprung petals, of buds and sap. He had also become conscious of what he called “the nothingness of the hopes and strivings which chase most men restlessly through life.”
He referred to this phase of his life as a “religious paradise,” but it ended as suddenly as it had arrived. When he was twelve, he lost all interest in religion. At that age he should have been preparing for his bar mitzvah, to make a formal commitment to Judaism, and perhaps this in itself played a part in his loss of faith. However, Einstein was later careful to attribute it to the influence of what might be called scientific thinking.
The Einsteins did keep one Jewish custom, albeit in a modified manner. It was common for Jewish families to host a poor religious student for the Sabbath meal. The Einsteins hosted a medical student on a Thursday. Max Talmud was twenty-one when he began to visit the Einsteins and Albert was ten, but the two soon became friends. After seeing his interest in the subjects, Talmud would bring Einstein science and mathematics books, and each week, Einstein would eagerly show him the problems he’d been working on. Although initially Talmud would help him, it didn’t take long for Einstein to outpace him.
The effect on Einstein was profound: “Through the reading of popular scientific books, I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true,” he would recall. “The consequence was a positively fanatic [orgy of ] freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression.”
And it was an impression he never shook off. He would forever be averse to religious orthodoxy and ritual, and hostile toward every kind of authority and dogma. An immediate upshot of this new attitude was that, at the end of three years, at the crucial moment, he refused to go ahead with the bar mitzvah.
5
Religion was not the only thing that Einstein developed an aversion to. German troops would occasionally pass through Munich, banging drums in rhythm and playing songs on fifes, stirring up a merry excitement as they went. The windows would rattle as they marched in lockstep, and children would run into the street to march with them, playing soldiers. When Einstein saw such a display once, his reaction was to burst into tears. “When I grow up,” he explained to his parents, “I don’t want to be one of those poor people.”
This military spirit extended to education as well. At the Luitpold Gymnasium, as in most German schools of the time, the style of teaching focused on memory, discipline, and systematization. Questioning was discouraged—things were to be learned and regurgitated. Teachers were very much the center of authority and knowledge, with the student only a receptacle for that knowledge, a disciple to that authority. Einstein achieved good grades, but he was far from a good student. He was openly contemptuous of the school system, the Gymnasium, and his specific teachers, whom in later life he referred to as “lieutenants.”
On one occasion, one of his teachers went so far as to declare that Einstein was unwelcome in class. He replied that he hadn’t done anything wrong. “Yes, that is true,” the teacher said, “but you sit there in the back row and smile, and your mere presence here undermines the respect of the class for me.” The same teacher went on to say that he wished Einstein would leave the school altogether.
At the age of fifteen, Albert found himself effectively alone in Munich, forced to stay with distant relatives. After the collapse of his father’s firm, the rest of the family had moved to Italy, leaving him behind to complete his education. He became so miserable that he persuaded the family doctor (an older brother of Max Talmud) to draw up a certificate stating that he was suffering from “neurological exhaustion” and claiming that he must suspend his schooling. He then went to his math teacher and asked for it to be confirmed in writing that he had mastered the subject and was an outstanding mathematician. Just before the Christmas holidays in 1894, he packed his things, bought a train ticket, and appeared, without warning, at his parents’ house in Milan. Hermann and Pauline were shocked, but despite their exasperated protests, he was adamant that he would not return to Munich.
He promised that he would study independently to prepare himself for the entrance exam to the Zurich Polytechnic—the institution he had decided he would attend for his higher education. Despite their worries and doubts, in the end his parents did everything they could to help with Einstein’s plan. When it was noticed that the polytechnic required applicants to be at least eighteen, Hermann and Pauline persuaded a family friend to intervene on their son’s behalf and ask for an exception to be made. Their friend evidently took the task seriously, recommending the then sixteen-year-old Albert in the most excessively praiseworthy language he could think of. The director of the polytechnic, Albin Herzog, replied:
According to my experience, it is not advisable to withdraw a student from the institution in which he had begun his studies even if he is a so-called “child prodigy”… If you, or the relatives of the young man in question, do not share my opinion, I shall permit—under exceptional dispensation of the age stipulation—that he undergo an entrance examination in our institution.
The exam began on October 8, 1895, and lasted several days. He did not pass. While he did well in the section specific to his chosen field of study, which covered math and physics, he did poorly in everything else—the general section included the history of literature, politics, and the natural sciences. Einstein was neither confident nor idiotic enough to think that the experience went well. The glaring gaps in his knowledge must have been brought home to him, perhaps as he struggled his way through a question on zoology. “My failure,” Einstein later recalled, “seemed completely justified.”
