Science Secrets
Page 22
Yet such happiness was diminishing. At the end of the documentary Einstein's Wife, Milan Popović, the grandson of Helene Savić, against a gentle backdrop of moving music, paraphrased the sad contents of a letter from Marić to Savić:
“She said she is like a shell,
and Einstein is a pearl in the shell,
and when the pearl is finished,
then the pearl don't need more the shell.”
When I first heard Popović say these lines, I was transfixed and moved. Then later I looked up the original letter. Marić wrote the actual letter in the winter of 1909–1910. Literally translated, it reads: “with such fame there is not much time left over for the wife at all. I read a certain impishness between the lines, when you wrote that I must be jealous of the science. But what can one do? the one gets the pearl, the other the box.”39 Compare her words to Popović's interpretation. It is too awkward, at least for me, to twist the actual quotation into Popović's account, where Einstein is the pearl and Marić is the creative shell. Instead, it simply seems that Marić complained that Einstein, being both the pearl and the shell, unfairly gave his best part to science while Marić received only his shell.
Einstein and Marić eventually divorced. It's not quite true that he then gave her the money award from his Nobel Prize of 1921. He proposed to invest it so that Marić and their sons could benefit from the earnings.40 Through all their difficult and sometimes friendly interactions over financial support, the many letters on the matter give no evidence that there was any intellectual debt involved.41
Any document can include errors, omissions, inaccuracies, or even lies. Likewise, information of all kinds might include truthful claims. The important point is that each step away that a document is separated from the period it purportedly describes, introduces additional layers of potential inaccuracies that can arise in the translations, rewording, additions, and so forth. A letter written by a participant in the events in question, even decades later, can be very informative. But we should still be careful with its contents. A still later account by one who was not present at such events involves greater uncertainties. If we cannot dissipate such uncertainties, we should at least acknowledge them. We should cultivate a fair skepticism, especially against outstanding stories that resonate with what we would personally like to believe. Too often, writers enamored with a sensational conjecture tend to misread evidence. They seek not to test a conjecture but to confirm it. But what makes a good story does not necessarily make good history.
Nevertheless, enough evidence discloses important roles for Marić. In the words of historian Gerald Holton, “Ironically, the exaggeration of Mileva's scientific role, far beyond what she herself ever claimed or could be proved, only detracts both from her real and significant place in history, and from the tragic unfulfillment of her early hopes and promise. For she was one of the pioneers in the movement to bring women into science, even if she did not reap its benefits. At great personal sacrifice, as it later turned out, she seems to have been essential to Albert during the onerous years of his most creative early period, not only as anchor of his emotional life, but also as a sympathetic companion with whom he could sound out his highly unconventional ideas.”42
For those of us who prefer the voice of firsthand witnesses rather than historians, consider the agreeable recollections of Solovine. He remarked that Einstein's productivity benefited from his good life at home in the company of Mileva: “I am convinced that her influence was beneficial, in the environment and affection and in allowing him to work peacefully. I cannot forget that the memoir On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, which established his reputation, was published in 1905, where a perfect harmony reigned between them.”43
12
Einstein and the Clock Towers of Bern
NEAR the center of the old city of Bern, there stands a massive medieval tower that, in the 1300s, served as a prison for women who had illicit relations with clergymen. In 1405, a great fire burned it severely. The structure was rebuilt and converted into a bell tower bearing a great astronomical clock. On two faces, golden clock-hands tipped by suns point to hours, while another dial shows the phases of the moon. Five ancient gods—Mercury, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and Venus—illustrate five days of the week as well as the five planets of Ptolemy's heavens. And near a corner, beneath a grinning jester, sits a bearded Chronos, the god of time, holding an hourglass.
This medieval clock tower straddles the very street where Einstein lived in early May of 1905, when he first thought of the relativity of time. Every day as he walked to work, Einstein walked by that tower or even under its arches. This fact gave rise to a myth comparable to that of Galileo and the Leaning Tower of Pisa—a myth about Einstein and the clock towers of Bern. Whereas the growth of the tale about Galileo is somewhat difficult to ascertain, because it began centuries ago, the story about Einstein and the towers is a recent development, so we can track its growth quite thoroughly.
In 1905, in his first paper on relativity, Einstein briefly illustrated a definition of the notion of time by alluding to the arrival of a train and the pointers of a clock. Since he was then an employee at the Swiss patent office, one might imagine that his job led him to think about clocks and trains in relation to physics and that he thus came to solve problems that other physicists failed to solve. But actually, Einstein's allusion to the generic, commonplace technologies of clocks and a train were not unique to him. Other physicists who did not work at patent offices also analyzed notions of motion and time using examples involving trains and clocks.1 But this is not widely known, so it might seem that Einstein's abstract relativity stemmed from his practical job.
In 1993, Alan Lightman, in a bestselling book, imagined discussions between Einstein and his friend Michele Besso against a backdrop of clock towers that loom in Einstein's dreams.2 Lightman's short narrative was intended to be a thoughtful yet fictitious account. Still, historical claims also arose.
By 1995, a story had emerged: “Einstein is said to have been prompted to the Theory of Relativity as he watched the receding clock tower while travelling by tram to his job at the Swiss patent office in Berne.”3 In 1999, Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard University, published an article in the New York Times in which he briefly stated how Einstein formulated relativity: “from imagining himself riding on a beam of light and looking back at a seemingly frozen clock tower, he developed the theory of special relativity.”4 Here the valid historical account given by Einstein, about imagining catching up to a light beam, appears arbitrarily mixed with the image of a clock tower. (Interestingly, notions of “frozen” time show up in Lightman's short fictional story).
At the same time, also at Harvard University, historian Peter Galison carried out research to argue that Einstein's relativity stemmed from the intersection of technology, physics, and philosophy, focusing on an apparently neglected chronometric dimension. In 2000, Galison wrote: “This summer I was standing in a northern European train station, absentmindedly staring at the turn-of-the-century clocks that lined the platform. They all read the same to the minute. Curious. Good clocks. But then I noticed that, as far as I could see, even the staccato motion of their second hands was in synchrony. These clocks were not simply running well, I thought, these clocks are coordinated. Einstein must have seen such coordinated clocks…. Every day he must have seen the great clock towers that presided over Bern with their coordinated clocks.” Galison further claimed: “Pointing up at a Bern clock tower—one of the famous synchronized clocks in Bern—and then to a clock tower in nearby Muri (not yet linked to the Bern mother clock), Einstein laid out his synchronization of clocks.”5 For this claim, he cited only one piece of evidence, by Josef Sauter, which I'll discuss below.
At roughly the same time, a writer of a biography of Einstein, Dennis Overbye, commented: “It would be pretty to think” that maybe Einstein's breakthrough happened one day as he walked with his friend Michele Besso under that great clock tower.6
In a book of 2001, historian Arthur I. Miller argued that Einstein had been influenced by discussions about clocks: “We must not forget that at the Patent Office Einstein…spoke often with friends from the Federal Postal and Telegraph Administration about issues in wireless telegraphy and synchronization of clocks.” Miller characterized this as an important fact to remember, but it was just a plausible speculation; there is no evidence that Einstein often discussed clocks at the patent office. Regardless, Miller further claimed that the “practical problems of wireless telegraphy” provided a “key input into Einstein's thinking into relativity in 1905.”7 Again, there is no evidence for such a claim.
Two years later, in a book published in 2003, Peter Galison repeatedly claimed that, in 1905, while Besso and Einstein stood on a hill northeast of downtown Bern, Einstein excitedly gestured toward the clock towers in Bern and Muri as he explained his realization that time should be defined by exchanging signals.8 This anecdote stemmed from two sources: a biography by Albrecht Fölsing and a recollection by Josef Sauter. Writing in 1993, Fölsing had never met Einstein or Besso, yet he wrote that Einstein explained to Besso, and later to Sauter, his procedure for synchronizing clocks—by pointing to a bell tower in Bern and another in Muri.9 Since those towers are not visible from downtown Bern, Galison claimed that “Besso and Einstein must have been standing on the hill shown to the northeast of downtown Bern.”10 That, however, would be impossible; the map in Galison's book is upside down; the hill is really south of downtown Bern. Galison's and Fölsing's only source was the account by Sauter, a coworker at the patent office. Sauter voiced his recollection in 1955, when he was eighty-four years old. He explained how Einstein once explained to him his new definition of synchrony: “to pin down the ideas, he told me, let's suppose that one of the clocks is atop a tower at Bern and the other on a tower at Muri.”11 Sauter did not claim that Einstein pointed to any actual clocks on towers, nor that he had his sudden creative insight by thinking about clock towers, nor even that he told Besso anything about clock towers. Thus the story about Einstein and Besso discussing the coordination of clock towers while standing on a hill dissolves in the air—or it should, but instead it becomes a myth.
In 2003, hundreds of thousands of readers had the opportunity to read a book review in the New York Times that claimed: “In May 1905, on a hill from which he and his friend Michele Besso could see both the electrically synchronized clocks of Bern and the as yet uncoordinated clock tower of suburban Muri, Einstein realized in a flash that…”12 The reviewer was trying to summarize Galison's book, but actually, Galison did not claim that Einstein had his great idea while he and Besso looked at clock towers, only that Einstein explained it to him in that way soon afterward (which is fiction as well). Aspects of the story spread into other books, acquiring new details.
Years ago, one day in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Church Street, I was at a store that repairs Swiss clocks and watches. On the wall, nicely framed, was a review article on Galison's book. Right then a man said to his companion: “Hey honey, did you read this one? How they got it all from Swiss clocks.” She smiled: “Oh yeah…. That was a good one.” Maybe we could draw a line between experts and laypersons, but what I want to highlight is the continuity between the biographers, historians, fiction writers, reviewers, physicists, and laypersons at a store. We're all connected by the common reflex to slightly misread, to decorate impressions with speculations. It is a common and pervasive habit. This is the same pattern that we have seen in the evolution of other historical myths: a plausible conjecture (“he may have…” or “he must have…”), voiced by an authoritative source (a prominent professor of history, a famous physicist), becomes misconstrued as an actual happening.
Aside from readers' urge to conjecture, the tale shines because of its plausibility. The overall circumstance is striking: Einstein formulated the relativity of time while living in the clockmaking capital of the world, Switzerland. He worked at the Swiss patent office, a clearinghouse for chronometric technologies, as Galison argued. Maybe patents on timing devices actually influenced Einstein? Unfortunately, there is no evidence that Einstein in fact was influenced by any such technologies or that he evaluated any patent applications for chronometric devices.13
Still, was Einstein influenced by the patent office? Researching this question, the best sign of an apparent connection that I found was a single sentence in an early book on Einstein, written by a man who followed him around in the mid-1910s. In that book, published in 1921, Alexander Moszkowski briefly remarked about Einstein: “He recognizes a definite connection between the knowledge acquired at the patent office and the theoretical results which, at that same time, emerged as examples of the acuteness of his thinking.”14 Moreover, there's another bit of evidence: decades later, Einstein himself commented, “the work on the final formulation of technical patents was a true blessing, and also provided important inspiration for physical conceptions.”15 Yet both of those statements are vague. What was the connection? Did it allude to Einstein's relativity or to his other papers over seven years? Does it have to do with timing technologies? Did it help his decisive creative step to relativity? We have no evidence of that.
Perhaps we should ask: What evidence is there of any way in which Einstein's job helped him as a physicist? We find that Einstein learned to write more clearly, thanks to the stern critical teachings of the director at the patent office, Friedrich Haller. As reported by one of Einstein's friends, Haller warned Einstein: “If you do not write clearly, I will throw you out.”16 And Josef Sauter quoted Einstein on this matter: “This man [Haller] taught me how to express myself correctly; he was stricter than my father.” Also, Einstein's stepson-in-law Rudolf Kayser reported that: “He [Haller] taught them [the examiners] to think sharply and logically, and to select every word in its most exact sense.”17 This is a less dramatic connection between Einstein's patent work and his physics, but it is warranted by the evidence.
Regardless, consider now the ways in which the myth about the clock tower has spread. In his number-one-bestselling 2007 biography of Einstein, Walter Isaacson duly mentions the “synchronized clocks of Bern and the unsynchronized steeple clock visible in the neighboring village of Muni.”18 But that too was a mistake; the clock towers actually marked a common time. By now, some writers, even historians, have misconstrued Galison's conjectures as historical facts, as they now claim that Einstein actually often evaluated patent applications for synchronizing the clocks of Bern.19
Galison's account has engendered similar stories with additional imaginary details. In a book in French, for example, theoretical physicist Thibault Damour writes:
Soon the two friends were climbing the hill of Gurten at a happy pace, from where one has magnificent view of Bern. Let's try to imagine their lively dialogue….
A. E.: “Wait…Yes, that's it! I think I've got it…Look at the tower of the Clock, down there in the center of Bern. If one had binoculars, one could read there the time. But that would not be our time. It would be necessary to subtract the time taken by the light to come from the clock to us. I sense that this will modify the notion of time for an observer in motion. Thank you Michele! I am sure that now it will work! Tonight, I will figure out what follows in detail.”20
Galison's account has also entered books on literature.21 Moreover, some physicists believe the story. For example, Hans Ohanian claimed that Einstein reviewed patent applications for the operation of synchronized city clocks (fiction), and that he explained this creative breakthrough to Besso by pointing at the clock towers (fiction again).22 Another physicist, Max Jammer, echoes a version of the story, casting it as conjecture, but as a likely one: “In fact, Einstein may have already encountered the problem of time synchronization on his daily walk to the patent office when passing near the famous clock tower on the Kramgasse, where he lived, and seeing the distant clock on the church in Muri, a nearby suburb of Bern.”23 This apparently plausible scenario is actually imposs
ible, because the church bell tower of Muri simply cannot be seen at all when walking from Einstein's apartment in Kramgasse to the old patent office building. Regardless, Jammer carries out a kind of inversion to add plausibility to the story. Instead of beginning with the scant evidence, Sauter's account, Jammer first posits that Einstein “may have” been influenced by the clock towers of Bern and Muri, and afterward he quotes Sauter's words. Thus we encounter a common device in some myths: a story arises from misreading a genuine source, and later, that source is used as evidence for the myth, by presenting the story first.
I've focused on the development of this tale mainly in the English language, but note that Galison's book has already been translated into German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, and perhaps others of which I am unaware.
Other writers have presented different versions of the myth by which Einstein's relativity work was inspired by the clocks. In 2000, Walter Mih presented one such version as a “legend”: “Streetcars routinely pass through the archway below the astronomical clock. Legend says that Einstein developed the Special Theory of Relativity when he was riding in a streetcar and watching a clock.”24 And the brief claim echoed by psychologist Steven Pinker in 1999 has engendered its own strain of myths. That tale simply mixed Einstein's light wave thought-experiment with a clock tower. Again, Pinker was not the first to state it, but I associate it with him because some writers cite him as their source. Pinker's claim has spread quickly, passing into books on law, the environment, and education. One such book claims that Einstein's “first insights into the theory of relativity, for example, occurred when he imagined himself riding on a beam of light looking back at a frozen clock tower.”25