No nominations came for Einstein during 1911, when the Wuerzburg physicist Wilhelm Wien won the Nobel for physics, but there were four in 1912, three in 1913, and two in 1914. In these years, the committee routinely categorized nominations by their perceived type:
New discoveries that help further understand or apply existing knowledge;
New explanations of phenomena that help the evolution of theories;
New methods or instruments that have the potential to improve quantitation;
New measurements that helped to determine the accuracy of theories;
New theories
Einstein’s nominations most often fell within the last of these categories, which was terra incognita for the committee members. Like Lenard, the committee members saw relativity as alien to the world of sensory experience and, therefore, more of an intellectual exercise than meaningful science with practical applications. Because Alfred Nobel’s will explicitly stated that the prize should be given for tangible benefits, Einstein had an uphill climb from the outset. In fact, by the end of the committee’s deliberations for 1914, it was clear that it would be some time before Einstein would be seriously considered, if he would be at all. That year, they had dismissed his accomplishments with a single frigid sentence: “For the time being, there is no reason to take into account his candidacy.”
The war years of 1914–1918 did little to improve Einstein’s chances for a Nobel Prize. In addition to the prejudices of the physics committee, he now had to fight the Allies’ perceptions of German scientists. He might be an atypical German, but in many eyes, he still was a German.
Einstein kept busy, putting the finishing touches on his theory of general relativity and extending his considerations to gravitation. In 1915, he conceived a series of lectures on relativity that he presented before the Prussian Academy of Sciences during November. The lectures provided a framework for him to organize his work and publish his new theory of general relativity comprehensively in an extensive article in the March 1916 issue of Annalen der Physik. He quickly followed up that publication with a short book entitled Relativity—the Special and General Theory, designed to explain his ideas to an educated general audience in plain language, with little math. Between 1915 and 1919, Einstein received fifteen nominations. Given the strong anti-German bias of most Europeans, these mostly originated from German scientists and physicists living in neutral countries. Among those nominating Einstein in 1919, surprisingly, was physics committee member Svante Arrhenius, the winner of the 1903 Prize.
Following his completion and publication of the theory of general relativity, Einstein published several articles intimating the cosmological ramifications of his theories that included the predictions that eventually secured his fame. There were three main cosmological events that Einstein addressed. The first was a relativity-based explanation of the shifting of the perihelion, or the closest point of Mercury’s orbit relative to the sun. The Nobel committee acknowledged the workability of Einstein’s solution but, in once again denying Einstein the Nobel Prize, their report noted that, so far, there had been no validation of the correctness of the other two proofs: Einstein’s prediction that the sun’s gravity would bend the light of closely aligned stars, and his assertion that the sun’s gravity would cause a small shift in the red spectrum of the sun relative to the same part of the light spectrum on earth. The committee concluded, “There are also hitherto unobserved phenomena that have been derived from the theory [meaning the two predictions], and it seems obvious that it must be of fundamental significance when ascribing a value to it [the theory of relativity] whether or not the derived consequences agree with reality.”
Thus, a prize for relativity was rejected in 1918, and again in 1919, at least in part on the grounds of insufficient empirical data in support of his theories. Ironically, when nominators proposed a prize for one or another of his accomplishments other than relativity, the committee found a new argument for why an award for anything other than relativity simply wouldn’t do:
[It] would appear peculiar to the learned world if Einstein were to receive the Prize precisely for the work just reviewed [meaning his contributions to science other than relativity], regardless of its obvious great value and utility for the development of science, and not for his other major papers which much more than the ones at hand have attracted the attention of those who have proposed him.
Even as scientific investigation chipped away at the objections to his candidacy, like a celestial body in Einstein’s expanding universe, it seemed that the Nobel Prize was receding ever farther from his grasp.
Soon, however, events in warmer locales would change the Nobel equation. Early in November 1919, preliminary results of the British solar eclipse expedition leaked to Einstein’s friends in Zurich. Another of Einstein’s three key predictions was confirmed as accurate. The gravitational field of the sun did indeed bend starlight as it passed closely by its considerable mass. His friend, Edgar Meyer, sent Einstein a congratulatory poem on the back of a postcard:
All doubt removed
Finally, it is found
That light bends naturally
To Einstein’s greater glory
In the event that the British results were upheld through their final analysis, Einstein would have ticked off yet another necessary criterion of what was proving to be a very demanding Nobel committee.
How things had arrived at this state was as much due to good fortune as detailed planning. Einstein’s Dutch friend Willem de Sitter had passed to Arthur Eddington at Cambridge the cosmological articles published by Einstein during the war. Even before he was aware of Einstein’s celestial predictions, Eddington had been considering an expedition to conduct experiments during the May 29, 1919, total solar eclipse. The Einstein papers increased his enthusiasm for the venture.
To improve his chances of success, Eddington planned on conducting his work at two sites. Along with his assistant, E. T. Cottingham, he traveled to Principe Island in the Bay of Guinea, off the coast of West Africa. The other party was led by Andrew Crommelin and Charles Davidson, who set up shop near Fortaleza, Brazil. Both locations would have a few minutes when the eclipse was complete to photograph the position of nearby stars in the darkened sky.
On November 6, 1919, in a joint meeting of the Royal Society of London and the Royal Astronomical Society, the retired Cambridge professor and Nobel laureate, J. J. Thompson, announced the salient result. The photographic data obtained during the eclipse showed a deflection of 1.7 degrees in the position of relevant stars relative to where they were positioned in the night sky when the sun was not adjacent to them. It was exactly what Einstein had predicted and double the deflection expected on the basis of classical Newtonian physics. The positive outcome was run in the Times of London and then throughout the world. Einstein was the new Newton! The new Copernicus! Surely, the press speculated, the Nobel physics committee would see a way to vote Einstein a Nobel Prize.
Einstein’s new celebrity put him in something of a bind. One outcome of World War I was the isolation of German scientists, who were not welcome at meetings held elsewhere in Europe, a situation that did not begin to officially change until 1926. Einstein, however, was treated differently. Perhaps because he had spurned German nationalism, he became a favored nominee for the physics prize even for scientists from such countries as France, England, and the United States. In Germany, however, he became a lightning rod for right-wing extremists, who regarded his wartime behavior as un-German. This was the period that gave rise to Weyland’s Working Group for the Preservation of Pure Science and its anti-relativity lecture series, the attacks of Ernst Gehrcke, and Lenard’s radicalization. Communist factions, on the other hand, viewed Einstein’s ideas of non-absolute time and relativistic motion as degenerate Western idealism, inappropriate for the reigning Soviet dialectic.
Einstein’s international fame translated into more travel and more lectures, which he undertook not only as a scientist but also as
an emissary of pacifism. During 1921, Einstein made his first trip to the United States in the company of Chaim Weitzmann, who had arranged a lecture tour to raise money for a Jewish university in Palestine. In New York, Einstein was feted with a ticker tape parade. He received the Barnard Medal for Meritorious Service to Science from the National Academy of Sciences and Columbia University. Americans loved the quirky European, and he lectured before huge crowds. At one particularly overcrowded event at Princeton University, Einstein is said to have turned to his host and marveled, “I never realized that so many Americans were interested in tensor analysis.”
Einstein’s participation in the Zionist-sponsored lecture tour conflicted with his ethos of anti-nationalism. However, Einstein was convinced of the rightness of his participation by Europe’s increasingly virulent anti-Semitism and his burgeoning consciousness of his own ethnic heritage. Einstein, who, to this point in time had described himself as “the child of Jewish parents” and shown little affinity for any form of religion—he who had vocally eschewed nationalism—became a Zionist. All of this made him much more a man of the world than a man of Germany. A beleaguered postwar Germany took notice. He became a prominent target for reactionary critics, who referred to Einstein as “un-German” or “internationalist,” a code word meant to brand Einstein with communist leanings.
Einstein received eight Nobel nominations in 1920, fourteen in 1921. Despite continuing hard feelings over the war, many of the nominations came from countries that had been Germany’s enemies. The large number of nominations reflected the general excitement over Eddington’s findings. In his 1921 nomination, Eddington called Einstein’s theory of general relativity “one of the greatest landmarks in the history of scientific thought.” His theory provided the first fresh insights on gravitation since Newton, conjoined into a single theory an explanation for the workings of numerous important natural phenomena, reconciled science and philosophy, and enabled further development by other scientists.
In light of the Eddington results, the Nobel physics committee charged Svante Arrhenius with drafting a special report on Einstein and relativity in 1920 and Allvar Gullstrand with drafting one in 1921. Neither man had the background or worldview to understand the mathematics of Einstein’s theories and the ramifications of his vision. As a result, both reports clearly favored the views of the experimentalists in expressing skepticism about particulars of Einstein’s theories. Arrhenius swallowed whole Gehrcke’s charges of plagiarism regarding Einstein’s explanation of the shift in the perihelion of Mercury. He seized upon uncertainties in Eddington’s measurements.
If possible, Gullstrand was even harder on Einstein than Arrhenius. His evaluation determined that relativity theory “has the character of an article of faith rather than a scientific hypothesis. . . . The effects [predicted by relativity theory] are so small that they lay under the margin of observational error.” He dismissed Einstein’s explanation of the perihelion of Mercury as circular reasoning. He leapt upon irregularities in Eddington’s processes and data, declaring the work completely unreliable.
Chief among the Small Popes, Gullstrand was the individual who most firmly stood between Einstein and a Nobel Prize, though other committee members were also resistant. Hasselberg, who had taken ill during the 1921 proceedings, concurred with Gullstrand in saying, “It is highly improbable that Nobel considered speculations such as these [meaning the theory of relativity] to be the object of his prizes.”
If not for the deaths of two of the Small Popes, it is unlikely that anything would have changed. The demise of Hasselberg and Granqvist paved the way for the appointment of Carl Wilhelm Oseen, first as a temporary consulting committee member and later as a permanent member. Oseen was a mathematician and theoretical physicist whose principle interest was hydrodynamics. A member of the faculty at Uppsala, his worldview was nonetheless contrary to the pre-relativistic experimentalism of the other Uppsala professors on the committee. Gullstrand had frequently sought Oseen’s advice while working on his 1921 evaluation of Einstein, but each time Oseen allayed one of Gullstrand’s concerns, the elder scientist seized upon another. In the end, Gullstrand’s report echoed the chief concern expressed by Philipp Lenard: Einstein’s theories were abstractions, ungrounded in reality. On that basis, the theory of relativity was belief, not science.
Oseen’s election to the Swedish Academy of Sciences and his subsequent appointment to the Nobel physics committee changed everything. He was a new and demanding force. Oseen had nominated Einstein for the prize in 1920 and 1921. Seeing that a prize for relativity was impossible, he struck upon the idea of proposing an award for Einstein’s discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect. Now a member of the physics committee, Oseen managed in the November 1921 committee meeting to fight off a comment in the Arrhenius evaluation that it would seem odd to ignore Einstein’s theory of relativity by awarding him a prize for lesser known work. Oseen forced a stalemate in the discussion; the committee recommended that the 1921 prize be reserved for future determination. Although the full Nobel assembly upheld this result, a number of voices raised the issue of Einstein. When would the committee get around to nominating the most popular scientist of this, or perhaps any, era?
Seventeen nominators supported Einstein in the committee’s November 1922 deliberations. Although most of the nominations were for relativity theory, there was a fair sampling of letters backing Einstein’s work on Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect. Oseen wrote an in-depth report citing why he felt Einstein’s law of the photoelectric effect was a significant enough contribution to warrant a Nobel Prize. In his report, he linked Einstein’s law to Niels Bohr’s atomic model. Oseen was a close friend of the young Dane. He admired Bohr’s model of electrons whizzing at different energy levels around a central nucleus, calling it “the most beautiful of all the beautiful” concepts in contemporary theoretical physics. Oseen showed how Einstein’s law underpinned understanding of Bohr’s model and how drawing both together sustained Planck’s quantum theory, which previously had stood apart in physics. Toward the end of his report, Oseen summarized his argument for Einstein:
Einstein, with his daring law, had hit the nail on the head. . . . Almost all confirmation of Bohr’s theory, and with it, all spectroscopic confirmations, are at the same time confirmations of Einstein’s law. . . . The Einsteinian proposition and Bohr’s contentwise identical frequency conditions are currently one of the most certain laws that obtain in physics. . . . The greatest significance, and equally the most convincing confirmation Einstein’s proposition has received is by virtue of it being one of the prerequisite conditions on which Bohr built his atomic theory. Almost all confirmations of Bohr’s atomic theory are equally confirmations of Einstein’s proposition. . . . The discovery of Einstein’s law is without any doubt one of the most significant events in the history of physics.
Finally, at the very end, so there would be no doubt where he stood, Oseen gilded the lily. “Its discovery to me appears to fully deserve a Nobel Prize in physics.”
Oseen’s mastery of mathematics and theoretical physics silenced Gullstrand, who most vigorously opposed Einstein receiving the prize. Arrhenius was won over by the idea that choosing Einstein might not only address the public mockery of the Academy but also aid the process of renewing international scientific relations. Oseen capitalized on the situation by proposing that the committee support Einstein for the reserved 1921 Prize and Bohr for 1922.
Gullstrand’s consolation was the 1923 Prize for the experimentalist Robert Millikan, whose exhaustive investigations had proven the accuracy of Einstein’s law. Admonishing the Lenard-led reactionaries who persisted in their senseless attacks on theoretical physics, Millikan acknowledged the reciprocal debt that theory and experiment owed, each to the other:
The fact [is] that science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment. . . . Sometimes it is one foot that is put forward first, sometimes the other, but continuous progress is only made
by the use of both—by theorizing and then testing, or by finding new relations in the process of experimenting and then bringing the theoretical foot up and pushing it on beyond, and so on in unending alterations.
The physics committee’s nomination of Einstein to the Nobel assembly was a welcome one, allaying, as it did, broader concerns about what effect the failure to recognize Einstein with a Nobel Prize was having on the reputation of the award. The announcement of Einstein’s award was well received in many quarters. Worldwide, Einstein was a popular figure whose frequent appearances on the international lecture circuit were helping normalize scientific relationships among the countries that had opposed Germany in the Great War.
Lenard seethed, as did other reactionaries who promoted the notion that, despite his birth in Ulm, Einstein was not truly German. Paul Weyland, the demagogue who had conspired with Lenard and others to bring down Einstein at the Berlin Philharmonic lectures two years previously, traveled to Sweden just prior to Einstein’s Nobel Lecture in an unsuccessful effort to mobilize dissent.
The machinations of the Nobel physics committee lay in the past that warm day in Gothenburg in 1923 when, before an engaged audience, Einstein launched into his Nobel Lecture. It was a day that bore witness to the accomplishments of a unique life. There would be many such days during the next ten years. Yet all the while, the potential for trouble was mounting. Back home in Berlin, a backlash was brewing against Einstein’s activities during the war, his opposition to German nationalism, and his support of the Weimar government. Germany was experiencing a rise in reactionary fervor. At the root of it all were the Nazi Party and its “Fuehrer,” Adolf Hitler. The Lenards and Weylands, the Goebbels, the Speers, and the Himmlers would soon have their day. Fingers were being pointed. Einstein would not escape their notice.
The Man Who Stalked Einstein Page 12