Absorbed in his memories, Lenard fumed over how little credit he had received for his courageous stance. Had he not stood up to Einstein and called him to account, who can say what might have happened? He had exposed the Jew to his colleagues for the sham that he was. He had risked his own career and, given the power the Jew commanded, perhaps even his life. But he had put the Jew on the defensive.
Although it was not until 1933 that the Jew fled Germany with a price on his head, Lenard had been in the vanguard. Einstein had been fortunate to get out when he did. His flight to England, then on to America, had almost certainly saved him from an early death. With Einstein gone, he’d led the purge that, in short order, eliminated the duplicitous Jewish race from German academic life.
That Hitler had remembered Lenard’s contributions and so fulsomely expressed his gratitude gave renewed meaning to the aged professor’s constricted life. The Fuehrer knew more than anyone about sacrifice, yet here he was acknowledging the hardships Lenard had suffered. The struggle had been worthwhile.
While Lenard’s grudges would dog him until his death five years later in Messelhausen, Germany, the good feelings of that day in 1942 never completely left him. Unrepentant of the harm he had caused to so many people and certain that his assessment of Einstein and his theories had been correct, he sat alone in his room, Hitler’s visage watching over him, and reflected with satisfaction on the experiences that had brought him to his place in the world. Waxing philosophical, Lenard lifted his pen and wrote in the stilted style of one born in a distant province who, from childhood, had scorned all learning but science, “To have Adolf Hitler and to know him close to me should be enough to have lived for.”
* * *
“I have done my share.” Einstein said. Lying in his hospital bed, he painfully turned toward his longtime secretary, Helen Dukas. “It is time to go. I will do it elegantly.”
Einstein had been admitted to Princeton Hospital several hours earlier, on April 17, 1955, complaining of chest pain that had worsened over the last several days. Einstein’s premonition of his death was well founded. Seven years earlier, in 1948, doctors discovered that he had developed a “grapefruit-size” aneurysm of the aorta, the body’s largest artery. Nowadays, localized vascular balloonings like Einstein’s are routinely treated by surgery or radiological procedures. At that time, however, surgical methods for treating aneurysms were more rudimentary. Einstein’s physicians felt that there was too much risk for them to operate. Now the aneurysm was leaking, causing pain, signaling it would soon burst.
Having refused emergency surgery, the seventy-six-year-old made himself as comfortable as he could. He reminded Dukas that he wished to be cremated the day he died. She and his older son, Hans Albert, were to spread his ashes on the waters of the Delaware River, just to the west of where he had lived and worked for the past twenty-two years. There should be no memorial service and no marker to commemorate his passing.
Between his admission to the hospital and his death early the next morning, Einstein had several hours to contemplate the cosmic questions that had occupied him during his remarkably fruitful life. Einstein had been born to Jewish parents. He bore no illusions, however, concerning the meaning of being a Jew. Recent history had made it clear to him that “A Jew who sheds his faith along the way, or who even picks up a different one, is still a Jew.” The Nazi’s near extermination of European Jewry and his efforts to establish a Jewish university in Jerusalem had strengthened his identification with Judaism as he’d aged. His beliefs, however, were his own:
I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own—a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body. . . . It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we can dimly perceive, and to try humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature. My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds.
Einstein died early in the morning on April 18, 1955. He was seventy-six years old. There was no deathbed conversion. He remained true to his convictions in death, as he had in life.
Throughout the United States and around the world, people whom Einstein had never met mourned his passing. The loss was particularly heartfelt in Princeton. The locals had grown accustomed to seeing Einstein, dressed in baggy trousers, a rumpled sweater, and sandals, on his daily walks around the town. Despite his once having voiced the opinion that Princeton was a “quaint and ceremonial village of puny demigods, strutting on stiff legs,” he loved the small college town’s deep, green leafiness and the stone spires of its renowned university from the moment he arrived. He quickly renegotiated his position with the Institute for Advanced Studies from being a five-or-six months a year visiting scholar to a year-round member of its faculty. In 1934, he and Elsa bought an ordinary-looking house at 112 Mercer Street and moved in along with Helen Dukas and, later, after Elsa’s untimely death in 1936, Elsa’s daughter Margot.
Local anecdotes are legion and almost always sympathetic. Among them is a story about two undergraduates who saw Einstein walking ahead of them on campus one day and conspired to get his attention. “One plus one equals two!” one of them said in a voice loud enough for Einstein to hear. “You’re an idiot . . . you know that?” said the other. “One plus one equals three!” The argument grew more voluble until, after a minute or so, Einstein stopped abruptly and turned to face them. “Boys, boys,” he admonished them. “There is no need to fight. You are both right!”
Other stories describe him as an eccentric, seemingly so deeply absorbed in the enormity of his thoughts that he was incapable of managing the mundane aspects of normal life. One such story was told by an undergraduate returning to campus in late summer, just before the beginning of the academic year. The young man decided to spend his otherwise unencumbered afternoon canoeing on Lake Carnegie at the foot of the campus. Only one other boat was on the water, a becalmed sailboat that at first glance seemed to be unmanned. As the young man approached the boat, a man and a woman raised themselves above the gunwales and waved him over. The man’s disarrayed shock of white hair left no doubt to his identity. Einstein had forgotten to put a paddle in the boat. They had been dead in the water for over an hour. Would the young man tow them to port?
The woman in the boat almost certainly was Polish-born Johanna Fantiva, Einstein’s last lover, whom he had convinced to immigrate to Princeton in 1939. Twenty-two years younger than Einstein, she left a diary in which much is written about a man quite different than the muddle-headed genius of township lore. Johanna characterized Einstein as an extremely alert and keen-witted critic of his time, angered by Senator McCarthy’s anti-communist campaign, the U.S.-supported rearming of Germany, and the American buildup of atomic weapons. In Johanna’s diary, Einstein comes alive as an amiable maverick who compared himself to an old car, rife with mechanical problems. Despite his ills, Fantiva asserted that he not only retained his own good humor but also cheered up his chronically depressed parrot, Bibo, by telling him jokes.
By the time Einstein reached Princeton, he was fifty-four years old. His best science was behind him, but he remained among the most respected men on the planet. He had lived his life according to a consistent moral code. While many disagreed with his message of pacifistic internationalism, even his critics had to grant that Einstein had stayed true to his credo. He had seen enough of prejudice and ostracism that he would not stand for it in any form. He developed a particular empathy for the plight of black people in America. He was a longtime friend of the actor Paul Robeson, who had grown up in Princeton. When the great African-American opera singer Marian Anderson was denied lodging at Princeton’s Nassau Inn following a 19
37 performance, he invited her into his home. From then on, she stayed with Einstein whenever she was in the area.
Unfortunately, Einstein’s comfort with his pacifist beliefs was challenged by events happening overseas. He fearfully monitored the increasingly bellicose speeches of Adolf Hitler and recognized that Europe once again was heading toward war. During the summer of 1939, while Einstein was vacationing in Peconic, on the northern tip of Long Island, he welcomed to his rental cottage two old friends. Eugene Wigner and Leó Szilárd were Hungarian refugees and physicists, who had managed to escape Europe before Hitler had tightened the noose around that country’s scientists.
Greeting the two men in an undershirt and rolled-up trousers, he led them to the screened-in porch where he listened to their story. Their visit was not a social one. Wigner and Szilárd had received word that German physicists had learned how to split the uranium atom. As Einstein had predicted in his 1905 work on the equivalence of mass and energy—represented by his iconic formula, energy (E) equals mass (m) multiplied by the speed of light (c) squared, or E = mc²—the reaction released an enormous amount of energy. Werner Heisenberg was said to be leading a German effort to build an atomic bomb. Time was short. Einstein must use his influence to prevail on his friend Elisabeth, Belgium’s former Queen—now Queen Mother following the death of her husband—to have her country deny Germany access to the great stores of uranium in the Belgian Congo.
Einstein agreed, but before he could write the letter, Szilárd was convinced by a friend of President Roosevelt that any international effort would be advantaged by their going through government channels. Szilárd returned to Long Island, this time with another Hungarian refugee, the eventual father of the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller, in tow.
Einstein knew Roosevelt personally, having been invited with Elsa to have dinner with the president and Mrs. Roosevelt and spend the night at the White House in 1934. At Szilárd and Teller’s urging, he dictated a letter to Roosevelt dated August 2, 1939. Because of the demands of the presidency, however, Roosevelt didn’t learn of Einstein’s concerns until early October, when his friend and economic advisor Alexander Sachs finally read Einstein’s letter aloud to the president.
In barebones fashion, Einstein’s missive provided Roosevelt with the background he felt the president needed to understand the magnitude of the crisis and how researchers had come to unleash the power of the atom. He went on to express his concern that “[t]his new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs [and] . . . that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed.” He warned, “A single bomb of this type, carried by a boat and exploded in a port might very well destroy the whole port, together with some of the surrounding territory.”
In light of the fact that the United States then had very sparse known stores of uranium, and that German scientists might be well on their way to weaponizing this new threat, Einstein suggested that the president “have some permanent contact maintained between the Administration and the group of physicists working on chain reactions in America.” Einstein envisioned that this unnamed individual would keep government departments informed and facilitate special attention to the availability of uranium, as well as advise the government on increasing funding to universities and institutes so as to accelerate research on nuclear fission.
It took some time, but Roosevelt eventually treated Einstein’s warning seriously. He established a board that included members of his military command, as well as Szilárd, Wigner, Teller, and the physicist Enrico Fermi, who had escaped Mussolini’s fascist Italy. Einstein was invited to join the following year, but declined and later was excluded for reasons of national security.
When, in 1933, Einstein first determined he would immigrate, his entry into the United States was opposed by an organization billing itself as the Women’s Patriot Corporation. This group had charged that Einstein’s associations with a number of European pacifist organizations identified him as a communist. The memoranda of that episode of back and forth with the U.S. government had been retained in what, over the years, had grown to become a fourteen-hundred-page FBI file. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover claimed that Einstein was an “extreme radical.” Hoover’s judgment effectively ruled out Einstein’s participation in the Manhattan Project.
In warning Roosevelt of the German threat and advocating work on nuclear fission weaponry, Einstein had envisioned nuclear weapons as a deterrent or, at worst, weapons that would only be used defensively. He was devastated by the catastrophic loss of life that resulted at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the urging of Szilárd, who was similarly troubled, he assumed the presidency of a new organization, the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, dedicated to nuclear arms control, and rededicated himself to the impossible chimera of a unified world government.
Einstein spent most of his last years in Princeton working on a “unified field theory”—a scientific and mathematical construct that would comprehensively explain the interrelationships among all natural phenomena. In the end, the conquest of this last great challenge eluded him. Nonetheless, Einstein died believing that such an understanding was achievable. “The most incomprehensible thing about the world,” he wrote, “is that it is comprehensible.”
Bibliography
All Web sites were last accessed September 5, 2014.
A Note on the Differences between
Lenard’s and Einstein’s Science
Kostro, L. (2000). Einstein and the ether. Montreal: Apeiron.
Lacayo, R., & Editors of Time. (2014). Albert Einstein: The enduring legacy of a modern genius. New York: Time.
Relativity. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity
Chapter 1: Pyrrhic Victory
Albert Einstein. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
Ash, M. G., & Sollner, A. (1996). Forced migration and scientific change: Émigré German-speaking scientists and scholars after 1933. Berlin: German Historical Institute.
Bentwish, N. (1953). Rescue and achievement of refugee scholars: The story of displaced scholars and scientists, 1933–1952. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Dukas, H., & Hoffmann, B. (1979). Albert Einstein: The human side. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Elisabeth of Bavaria, Queen of Belgium. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_of_Bavaria_(1876%e2%80%931965)
Getting up close and personal with Einstein. (2012, March 31). Jerusalem Post. Retrieved from http://www.jpost.com/Health-and-Science/Getting-up-close-and-personal-with-Einstein
Hentschel, K. (2011). [Foreword to Deutsche Physik; Albert Einstein: Letters to the Prussian Academy of Sciences and the Academy’s response (March 28–April 5, 1933)]. In Physics and National Socialism: An anthology of primary sources. Basel: Birkhäuser.
Isaacson, W. (2007). Einstein: His life and universe. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Philipp Lenard. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipp_Lenard
Schirrmacher, A. (2010). Philipp Lenard: Erinnerungen eines Naturforschers: Kritische annotierte Ausgabe des Originaltyposkriptes von 1931/1943. Berlin-Heidelberg: Springer Verlag: Berlin-Heidelberg, 2010. (Translation provided by Birgit Ertl-Wagner)
Un-German literature to the bonfire: Nightly Rally by the German Student Union. (1933, May 12). People’s Observer, North Germany ed. English translation retrieved from www.cyberussr.com/hcunn/volkisch.html
Weissman, G. (2010). X-ray politics: Lenard vs. Roentgen and Einstein. FASEB Journal, 24, 1631–1634.
Chapter 2: The Heart of the Matter
Art of Living Blog. Albert Einstein real life stories. Retrieved from http://artoflivingsblog.com/albert-einstein-real-life-stories
Einstein vs. Bohr: How their career long debate led to parallel universes. Retrieved from http://www.imposemagazine.com/bytes/einstein-vs-bohr
Lenard, P. [1927 invitation to the National Socialist Working Party convention, missing its RSVP stub]. Philipp Lenard’s bequest, archives
of the Deutsches Museum, Munich, Germany, Box NL Lenard 2012-7a.
Schoenbeck, C. (2012). Albert Einstein und Philipp Lenard: Antipoden im Spannungsfeld von Physik und Zeitgeschichte (Trans. Brian Stamm). Bayreuth, Germany: Springer.
Chapter 3: Familiarity Breeds Contempt
Einstein, A. (1997). The collected papers of Albert Einstein (Vol. 8, Docs. 449 and 562). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Einstein, A. (1918, November 29). Dialogue about objections to the theory of relativity (Dialog über Einwaende gegen die Relativitaetstheorie; Trans. Wikisource). Die Naturwissenschaften. Retrieved from http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dialog_about_Objections_against_the_
Theory_of_Relativity
Einstein’s theory of fidelity. Telegraph. Retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1523626/Einsteins-theory-of-fidelity.html
Esterson, A. (2007, November). An examination of the revised PBS web pages. Retrieved from http://www.esterson.org/einsteinwife3.htm
The Man Who Stalked Einstein Page 21