Einstein

by Isaacson, Walter

  After three weeks of lectures and receptions in New York, Einstein paid a visit to Washington. For reasons fathomable only by those who live in that capital, the Senate decided to debate the theory of relativity. Among the leaders asserting that it was incomprehensible were Pennsylvania Republican Boies Penrose, famous for once uttering that “public office is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” and Mississippi Democrat John Sharp Williams, who retired a year later, saying, “I’d rather be a dog and bay at the moon than stay in the Senate another six years.”

  On the House side of the Capitol, Representative J. J. Kindred of New York proposed placing an explanation of Einstein’s theories in the Congressional Record. David Walsh of Massachusetts rose to object. Did Kindred understand the theory? “I have been earnestly busy with this theory for three weeks,” he replied, “and am beginning to see some light.” But what relevance, he was asked, did it have to the business of Congress? “It may bear upon the legislation of the future as to general relations with the cosmos.”

  Such discourse made it inevitable that, when Einstein went with a group to the White House on April 25, President Warren G. Harding would be faced with the question of whether he understood relativity. As the group posed for cameras, President Harding smiled and confessed that he did not comprehend the theory at all. The Washington Post carried a cartoon showing him puzzling over a paper titled “Theory of Relativity” while Einstein puzzled over one on the “Theory of Normalcy,” which was the name Harding gave to his governing philosophy . The New York Times ran a page 1 headline: “Einstein Idea Puzzles Harding, He Admits.”

  At a reception in the National Academy of Sciences on Constitution Avenue (which now boasts the world’s most interesting statue of Einstein, a twelve-foot-high full-length bronze figure of him reclining),43 he listened to long speeches from various honorees, including Prince Albert I of Monaco, who was an avid oceanographer, a North Carolina scholar of hookworms, and a man who had invented a solar stove. As the evening droned on, Einstein turned to a Dutch diplomat seated next to him and said, “I’ve just developed a new theory of eternity.”44

  By the time Einstein reached Chicago, where he gave three lectures and played violin at a dinner party, he had become more adept at answering irksome questions, particularly the most frequent one, which was sparked by the fanciful New York Times headline after the 1919 eclipse that only twelve people could understand his theory.

  “Is it true only twelve great minds can understand your theory?” the reporter from the Chicago Herald and Examiner asked.

  “No, no,” Einstein replied with a smile. “I think the majority of scientists who have studied it can understand it.”

  He then proceeded to try to explain it to the reporter by using his metaphor about how the universe would look to a two-dimensional creature who spent its life moving on a surface of what turned out to be a globe. “It could travel for millions of years and would always return to its starting point,” said Einstein. “It would never be conscious of what was above it or beneath it.”

  The reporter, being a good Chicago newspaperman, was able to spin a glorious tale, written in the third person, about the depths of his own confusion. “When the reporter came to he was vainly trying to light a three-dimensional cigarette with a three-dimensional match,” the story concluded. “It began to trickle into his brain that the two-dimensional organism referred to was himself, and far from being the 13th Great Mind to comprehend the theory he was condemned henceforth to be one of the Vast Majority who live on Main Street and ride in Fords.”45

  When a reporter from the rival Tribune asked him the same question about only twelve people being able to understand his theory, Einstein again denied it. “Everywhere I go, someone asks me that question,” he said. “It’s absurd. Anyone who has had sufficient training in science can readily understand the theory.” But this time Einstein made no attempt to explain it, nor did the reporter. “The Tribune regrets to inform its readers that it will be unable to present to them Einstein’s theory of relativity,” the article began. “After the professor explained that the most incidental discussion of the question would take from three to four hours, it was decided to confine the interview to other things.”46

  Einstein went on to Princeton, where he delivered a weeklong series of scientific lectures and received an honorary degree “for voyaging through strange seas of thought.” Not only did he get a nice fee for the lectures (though apparently not the $15,000 he had originally sought), he also negotiated a deal while there that Princeton could publish his lectures as a book from which he would get a 15 percent royalty.47

  At the behest of Princeton’s president, all of Einstein’s lectures were very technical. They included more than 125 complex equations that he scribbled on the blackboard while speaking in German. As one student admitted to a reporter, “I sat in the balcony, but he talked right over my head anyway.”48

  At a party following one of these lectures, Einstein uttered one of his most memorable and self-revealing quotes. Someone excitedly informed him that word had just arrived of a new set of experiments improving on the Michelson-Morley technique that seemed to show that the ether existed and the speed of light was variable. Einstein simply refused to accept it. He knew that his theory was correct. And so he calmly responded, “Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not.”*

  The mathematics professor Oswald Veblen, who was standing there, heard the remark and, when a new math building was built a decade later, asked Einstein for the right to carve the words on the stone mantel of the fireplace in the common room. Einstein happily sent back his approval and further explained to Veblen what he had meant: “Nature hides her secret because of her essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse.”49

  The building, neatly enough, later became the temporary home of the Institute for Advanced Study, and Einstein would have an office there when he immigrated to Princeton in 1933. Near the end of his life, he was in front of the fireplace at a retirement party for the mathematician Hermann Weyl, a friend who had followed him from Germany to Princeton when the Nazis took power. Alluding to his frustration with the uncertainties of quantum mechanics, Einstein nodded to the quote and lamented to Weyl, “Who knows, perhaps He is a little malicious.”50

  Einstein seemed to like Princeton. “Young and fresh,” he called it. “A pipe as yet unsmoked.”51 For a man who was invariably fondling new briar pipes, this was a compliment. It would not be a surprise, a dozen years hence, that he would decide to move there permanently.

  Harvard, where Einstein went next, did not endear itself quite as well. Perhaps it was because Princeton President John Hibben had introduced him in German, whereas Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell spoke to him in French. In addition, Harvard had invited Einstein to visit, but it did not invite him to give lectures.

  Some charged that this slight was due to the influence of a rival Zionist group in America led by Louis Brandeis, a graduate of Harvard Law School, who had become the first Jewish Supreme Court justice. The allegation was so widespread that Brandeis’s protégé Felix Frankfurter had to issue a public denial. That prompted an amused letter about the perils of assimilationism from Einstein to Frankfurter. It was “a Jewish weakness,” he wrote, “always and eagerly to try to keep the Gentiles in good humor.”52

  The very assimilated Brandeis, who had been born in Kentucky and had turned himself into a proper Bostonian, was an example of the Jews from Germany whose families had arrived in the nineteenth century and tended to look down on the more recent immigrants from eastern Europe and Russia. For both political and personal reasons, Brandeis had clashed with Weizmann, a Russian Jew who had a more assertive and political approach toward Zionism.53 The enthusiastic crowds that greeted Einstein and Weizmann on their trip were mainly made up of the eastern European Jews, while Brandeis and his ilk remained more aloof.

  Most of Einstein’s time during the two days he spent in Boston was devoted to appearances, rallies, and dinners (includ
ing a kosher banquet for five hundred) with Weizmann to drum up contributions for their Zionist cause. The Boston Herald reported on the reaction at one fund-raising event at a synagogue in Roxbury:

  The response was electrifying. Young girl ushers worked their way with difficulty through the crowded aisles, carrying long boxes. Bills of various denominations were rained into these receptacles. A prominent Jewess cried out ecstatically that she had eight sons who had been in the army and wanted to make some donation in proportion to their sacrifices. She held up her watch, a valuable imported timepiece, and slipped the rings from her hands. Others followed her example, and soon baskets and boxes filled with diamonds and other precious ornaments.54

  While in Boston, Einstein was subjected to a pop quiz known as the Edison test. The inventor Thomas Edison was a practical man, getting crankier with age (he was then 74), who disparaged American colleges as too theoretical and felt the same about Einstein. He had devised a test he gave job applicants that, depending on the position being sought, included about 150 factual questions. How is leather tanned? What country consumes the most tea? What was Gutenberg’s type made of?*

  The Times called it “the ever-present Edison questionnaire controversy,” and of course Einstein ran into it. A reporter asked him a question from the test. “What is the speed of sound?” If anyone understood the propagation of sound waves, it was Einstein. But he admitted that he did not “carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books.” Then he made a larger point designed to disparage Edison’s view of education. “The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think,” he said.55

  One remarkable feature of most stops on Einstein’s grand tour was a noisy parade, which was rather unusual for a theoretical physicist. In Hartford, Connecticut, for example, the procession included more than a hundred automobiles headed by a band, a coterie of war veterans, and standard-bearers with the American and Zionist flags. More than fifteen thousand spectators lined the route. “North Main Street was jammed by crowds that struggled to get close to shake hands,” the newspaper reported. “The crowds cheered wildly as Dr. Weizmann and Prof. Einstein stood up in the car to receive flowers.”56

  It was an astonishing scene, but it was exceeded in Cleveland. Several thousands thronged Union train depot to meet the visiting delegation, and the parade included two hundred honking and flag-draped cars. Einstein and Weizmann rode in an open car, preceded by a National Guard marching band and a cadre of Jewish war veterans in uniform. Admirers along the way grabbed on to Einstein’s car and jumped on the running board, while police tried to pull them away.57

  While in Cleveland, Einstein spoke at the Case School of Applied Science (now Case Western Reserve), where the famous Michelson-Morley experiments had been conducted. There he met privately, for more than an hour, with Professor Dayton Miller, whose new version of that experiment had provoked Einstein’s skeptical response at the Princeton cocktail party. Einstein drew sketches of Miller’s ether-drift models and urged him to continue refining his experiments. Miller remained dubious about relativity and partial to the ether, but other experiments eventually affirmed Einstein’s faith that the Lord was indeed more subtle than malicious.58

  The excitement, public outpouring, and dizzying superstar status conferred upon Einstein were unprecedented. But in financial terms, the tour was only a modest success for the Zionist movement. The poorer Jews and recent immigrants had poured out to see him and donated with enthusiasm. But few of the eminent and old-line Jews with great personal fortunes became part of the frenzy. They were, on the whole, more assimilated and less ardently Zionist. Weizmann had hoped to raise at least $4 million. By the end of the year, only $750,000 had actually been collected.59

  Even after his trip to America, Einstein did not become a full-fledged member of the Zionist movement. He supported the general idea of Jewish settlements in Palestine, and especially Hebrew University in Jerusalem, but he never had a desire to relocate there himself nor to press for the creation of a Jewish nation-state. Instead, his connection was more visceral. He came to feel even more associated with the Jewish people, and he resented even more those who would forsake their roots in order to assimilate.

  In this regard, he was part of a momentous trend that was reshaping Jewish identity, by choice and by imposition, in Europe. “Until a generation ago, Jews in Germany did not consider themselves as members of the Jewish people,” he told a reporter on the day he was leaving America. “They merely considered themselves as members of a religious community.” But anti-Semitism changed that, and there was a silver lining to that cloud, he thought. “The undignified mania of trying to adapt and conform and assimilate, which happens among many of my social standing, has always been very repulsive to me,” he said.60

  The Bad German

  Einstein’s trip to America indelibly cast him as he wanted to be: a citizen of the world, an internationalist, not a German. That image was reinforced by his trips to Germany’s other two Great War enemies. On a visit to England, he spoke at the Royal Society and laid flowers on the grave of Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey. In France, he charmed the public by lecturing in French and taking a mournful tour of the graves on the famous battlefields.

  It was also a time of reconciliation with his family. That summer of 1921, he vacationed on the Baltic with his two boys, instilled in young Eduard a love of math, and then took Hans Albert to Florence. They had such a pleasant time that it helped further restore his relations with Mari. “I’m grateful that you’ve raised them to have a friendly regard for me,” he wrote her. “In fact you’ve done an exemplary job all around.” Most astonishingly, on his way home from Italy he visited Zurich and not only called on Mari but even considered staying in “the little upstairs room,” as he called it, at her house there. They all got together with the Hurwitz family and had a musical evening as in the old days.61

  But the mood was soon sullied by the continued collapse of the German mark, which made it harder for Einstein to support a family whose consumption was in Swiss currency. Before the war the mark had been worth 24 cents, but it had fallen to 2 cents by the beginning of 1920. At that time a mark could buy a loaf of bread. But then the bottom fell out of the currency. By the beginning of 1923, the price of a loaf went to 700 marks and by the end of that year cost 1 billion marks. Yes, 1 billion. In November 1923, a new currency, the Rentenmark, was introduced, backed by the government property; 1 trillion old marks equaled 1 new Rentenmark.

  The German people increasingly cast around for scapegoats. They blamed internationalists and pacifists who had forced a surrender in the war. They blamed the French and English for imposing what was in fact an onerous peace. And, no surprise, they blamed the Jews. So Germany in the 1920s was not a good place or time to be an internationalist, pacifist, intellectual Jew.

  The milestone that marked the passage of German anti-Semitism from being a nasty undercurrent to a public danger was the assassination of Walther Rathenau. From a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin (his father founded AEG, an electricity firm that competed with that of Einstein’s father and then became a huge corporation), he served as a senior official in the war ministry, then reconstruction minister and finally foreign minister.

  Einstein had read Rathenau’s politics book in 1917, and over dinner told him, “I saw with astonishment and joy how extensive a meeting of minds there is between our outlooks on life.” Rathenau returned the compliment by reading Einstein’s popular explanation of relativity. “I do not say it comes easily to me, but certainly relatively easily,” he joked. Then he peppered Einstein with some very insightful questions: “How does a gyroscope know that it is rotating? How does it distinguish the direction in space toward which it does not want to be tilted?”62

  Although they became close friends, there was one issue that divided them. Rathenau opposed Zionism and thought, mistakenly, that Jews like himself could reduce anti-Semitism by thoroughly
assimilating as good Germans.

  In the hope that Rathenau could warm to the Zionist cause, Einstein introduced him to Weizmann and Blumenfeld. They met for discussions, both at Einstein’s apartment and at Rathenau’s grand manor in Berlin’s Grunewald, but Rathenau remained unmoved.63 The best course, he thought, was for Jews to take public roles and become part of Germany’s power structure.

  Blumenfeld argued that it was wrong for a Jew to presume to run the foreign affairs of another people, but Rathenau kept insisting that he was a German. It was an attitude that was “all too typical of assimilated German Jews,” said Weizmann, who was contemptuous of German Jews who tried to assimilate, and especially of those courtiers who became what he dismissed as Kaiserjuden. “They seemed to have no idea that they were sitting on a volcano.”64

  As foreign minister in 1922, Rathenau supported German compliance with the Treaty of Versailles and negotiated the Treaty of Rappallo with the Soviet Union, which caused him to be among the first to be labeled by the fledgling Nazi Party as a member of a Jewish-communist conspiracy. On the morning of June 24, 1922, some young nationalists pulled alongside the open car in which Rathenau was riding to work, sprayed him with machine-gun fire, lobbed in a hand grenade, and then sped away.

  Einstein was devastated by the brutal assassination, and most of Germany mourned. Schools, universities, and theaters were closed out of respect on the day of his funeral. A million people, Einstein included, paid tribute in front of the Parliament building.

  But not everyone felt sympathy. Adolf Hitler called the killers German heroes. Likewise, at the University of Heidelberg, Einstein’s antagonist Philipp Lenard decided to defy the day of mourning and give his regular lecture. A number of students showed up to cheer him, but a group of passing workers were so enraged that they dragged the professor from the class and were about to drop him in the Neckar River when police intervened.65