We rented a very small [horse-drawn] sledge, the kinds they are using there, which has just enough room for 2 people in love with each other, and the coachman stands on a little plank in the rear . . . and calls you “signora”—could you think of anything more beautiful?
. . . There was nothing but snow and more snow as far as the eye could see . . . I held my sweetheart firmly in my arms under the coats.
Einstein must have held her just as firmly. “How beautiful it was,” he wrote her, “[when] you let me press your dear little person against me, in that most natural way.” By the end of their holiday in May 1901, she was pregnant. Given the mores of the time, Marić had no option when she found out but to return to her family until the birth. Nine months later, Einstein wrote her.
Bern Tuesday [February 4, 1902]
It has really turned out to be a little girl, as you wished! Is she healthy and does she cry properly? What kind of little eyes does she have? Is she hungry?
I love her so much & I don’t even know her yet!
Few more references to their daughter survive, for it was nearly impossible for an unmarried couple from their backgrounds to keep an illegitimate child. Although they named their daughter Lieserl (Elizabeth), the indirect evidence suggests that they gave her up for adoption, probably to a family friend in Budapest. Einstein never spoke of her again.
AFTER A SERIES of interviews, Einstein did secure the Patent Office job for which his friend Grossmann’s father had put in a good word. It was in the much smaller city of Bern—not Zurich, but still an acceptable location, even though the salary wasn’t what Einstein had hoped for. He had applied for the position of Technical Expert Second Class, but the head of the Patent Office, Superintendent Haller, disappointed at Einstein’s lack of technical capacity, had only offered him the lower-paid position of Technical Expert Third Class.
Einstein accepted the post, but he needed more money. Like his father, he was entrepreneurial, and in 1902 he put an advertisement in the local paper:
Private lessons in
MATHEMATICS AND PHYSICS
for students and pupils
given most thoroughly by
ALBERT EINSTEIN, holder of the fed.
polyt. teacher’s diploma
GERECHTIGKEITSGASSE 32, 1ST FLOOR
Trial lessons free.
But if Einstein was just as energetic as his father, the two men also shared a certain vagueness about business details. Although he did attract several students, he was so pleasant and talkative that he became friends with most of them—and then felt he couldn’t charge them for lessons. Somehow, however, he did gradually accumulate some savings, including from one student he continued to charge, and who has left a pen portrait of Einstein at this time: His tutor, he wrote, “is 5 ft 9, broad shoulders . . . large sensual mouth . . . The voice is . . . like the tone of a cello.”
Einstein was also trying to continue his own research, but it was difficult. The Patent Office was a six-day-a-week job, and the one good research library in Bern was closed on Sunday, his sole day off. He was too proud to let anyone know how difficult his life was, and certainly too proud to apologize to Professor Weber and grovel his way back into academia.
Einstein may have been struggling professionally, but his romantic life was all he had dreamed of. Marić had some savings from her family, and with their combined money they could afford an apartment big enough for them both. She moved back to Switzerland, and in January 1903 they were married at the Bern City Hall. He was nearly twenty-four, and she was twenty-eight. They wouldn’t have been human if they didn’t miss their daughter. “We shall remain students together for as long as we live,” Einstein wrote exultantly, “and not give a damn about the world.”
His mother was still angry about his choice, letting everyone—and especially her son—know how much she hated Miss Marić. But his loyal younger sister, Maja, urged her to give Einstein’s wife a chance. Marić herself was confident that she would ultimately win the Einstein family over: as she told a girlfriend, she’d simply find someone the mother respected, and make herself helpful to that person, and well, the mother would have to see how well-meaning she was then, wouldn’t she?
The happy couple made new friends in Bern, helped by the fact that skilled violinists were always appreciated. Einstein was often invited to the homes of families that wanted an extra instrument for their own musical evenings. He and Marić also continued seeing the ever loyal, easygoing Michele Besso, who soon moved back to Switzerland from Italy and took a job at the Patent Office as well. Einstein told him, “So I’m a married man now . . . [Mileva] looks after everything splendidly, is a good cook, and is always cheerful.” Besso was already married, too, and Einstein had played a part—introducing him to his ex-girlfriend Marie’s family, which Besso enjoyed so much that he proposed to Marie’s older sister Anna, and soon had a son with her. The couples easily spent time together. “I like him a great deal,” Einstein wrote about Besso, “because of his sharp mind and his simplicity. I also like Anna, and especially their little kid.” By the end of 1903, Einstein and Marić had moved into an apartment with a small balcony overlooking the Alps. They would squeeze onto the balcony—sometimes with their friends, sometimes just the two them—newlyweds admiring their luck.
EVER SINCE HIS teenage years, Einstein had had moments when he felt greatly isolated. Even now, surrounded by those he loved, he was conscious of the barriers that could separate people from one another, even if they’d been close or lived in the same home. He confided to Marić that he and his sister had “become so incomprehensible to each other that we are unable to . . . feel what moves the other,” and that at times “everyone else seems alien to me, as if held back by an invisible wall.” It would have seemed a small miracle that Marić herself had broken through.
When their first legitimate child—a son, Hans Albert—was born in 1904, their income was still low. (“When I talked about experiments with clocks at different parts of a train,” Einstein remembered later about work he was soon to commence, “I still only possessed one clock!”) But the young family had everything it needed. Einstein was good with his hands, and instead of buying his son expensive toys, he improvised with everyday items, once constructing an entire working miniature cable car set out of matchboxes and string, a memory his son cherished even decades later.
It was a happy time. The love between Einstein and Marić had survived the adoption of their daughter, professional frustrations, and the specter of poverty. Surely it could survive anything.
THREE
Annus Mirabilis
IT WAS AT the Patent Office in 1905 that Einstein had his first great breakthroughs.
In many respects, the office was as formal and constrictive as he had feared. It was part of the Swiss federal civil service, and there were strict hierarchies of rank. Einstein was just one of several dozen trained men working at nearly identical high desks through long, constantly supervised days.
Yet it was surprisingly interesting work and had a number of advantages for Einstein in his dream of getting back into the academic world. For one thing, at the Patent Office he was supposed to judge applications for new devices, especially in the field of electrical engineering, and decide if they were original enough to deserve a patent. This was a bit like getting an early look at the latest high-tech creations in Silicon Valley today, and many of the principles he developed for judging those applications would be useful in his later work.
Another upside of the job was the freedom it afforded him to pursue extracurricular work. Although his supervisor, Herr Haller, was pedantic, he tolerated the fact that Einstein obviously was spending free moments on his own research papers, which he would hurriedly push aside or cram into a desk drawer (which he cheekily dubbed his “Department of Theoretical Physics”) whenever Haller strode near.
Since Einstein knew that his only chance of getting a university post would be by coming up with strong research findings, he felt none
of the pressure to publish preliminary, incomplete findings he would have faced had he already obtained a university job and was working his way up (“a temptation to superficiality,” he later wrote, “which only strong characters can resist”). If the task was daunting, he still wasn’t going to let anyone else know just how formidable it was—aside, perhaps, from his wife, who had professional frustrations of her own. Marić had seen her own dreams of research crushed, having failed to obtain an academic post, and was now cooped up at home with their son. It would have been only natural for the two lovers to commiserate, even if the disparate causes of their suffering were slowly opening a gulf between them.
In the evenings, Einstein would go out for long walks with Besso and others, including a new friend named Maurice Solovine, a young Romanian who had applied for the physics lessons Einstein was still offering and had since become one of his crowd—even though he’d given up on physics after a session or two with Einstein and switched to philosophy instead. Sometimes Marić would join them; sometimes it would be just the men. They’d stop at country pubs for cheese, or beer, or the mocha that Einstein favored, and would talk about health foods or the newfangled “aerobics” exercise classes that were constantly being publicized, or about politics and philosophy and all their dreams for the future.
In the summer, if they’d been talking till very late, Einstein and his friends would continue to a mountain just outside Bern where the Einsteins also sometimes went in the daytime with Besso’s family. “The sight of the twinkling stars,” Solovine wrote, “made a strong impression on us.” There they’d wait and, Solovine went on, “marvel at the sun as it came slowly towards the horizon, and finally appeared in all of its splendor to bathe the Alps in a mystic rose.”
Physics, and the foundations of how the world was put together, were natural topics for such moments. Everything in Einstein’s field had been accelerating since his graduation year at the Polytechnic. Marconi had now sent radio waves across not just the English Channel, but across the Atlantic. Marie Curie in Paris had found immense, seemingly limitless sources of energy in radium ores; Max Planck in Germany seemed to have shown that energy didn’t pour out of gradually heated objects in a smooth way, but “jumped” in strange, abrupt intervals—which later became known as quantum jumps. Thermodynamics was a matter of great wonder, for how did the universe know to move heat around in the precise way it did? And there still was the odd way that everything fit into two seemingly perfectly balanced realms—the realm of energy and the realm of matter, or what scientists were increasingly thinking of as the realm of mass.* There had to be some simple unity behind it all, Einstein and Solovine and their closest friends believed: a handful of deep principles that would explain why the universe had been put together to make everything work.
But what?
After the long walks, and reflection at the mountains, there’d be a quick coffee at the nearest café, then a walk together back to town, where the wanderers would start their respective workdays. “We were overflowing with good spirits,” Solovine recalled. There was no need for sleep.
The only problem was that Einstein wasn’t, yet, quite as confident as he appeared. He knew how his father had never achieved what he’d hoped for, with one business venture after another not quite succeeding, leaving Einstein’s parents always dependent on help from richer relatives. And he had seen his closest friends abandon their own lofty dreams for a chance at stability. Marić had put her research to the side, because of the birth and then abandonment of Lieserl, and Besso had slid away from research, too, first by returning to his family’s engineering firm, and then by joining Einstein at the Patent Office.
Although Einstein’s and Besso’s day jobs were interesting, it was not the creative work they had once dreamed of. Einstein knew that the great Englishman Sir Isaac Newton had been only in his mid-twenties when, in the 1660s, he not only came up with the ideas for calculus but also had the first glimmers—at his mother’s Lincolnshire farm, with the famously falling apple—of his great idea that a single law of gravitation stretched from inside the earth, up to apple trees on meadows above, and on to the moon itself, hurtling in its orbit a quarter of a million miles beyond. Einstein was the same age. Where was his great discovery?
Was Einstein going to be one of those who spent their entire lives on the sidelines, admiring what others achieved? To his little sister, Maja, he was a genius—the big brother who could do anything. But Einstein himself could have been forgiven for taking a gloomier view. In his spare time, he tried to put together ideas for publication, but as he turned twenty-four and then twenty-five, none of them were what he had hoped for; none were very deep. He examined the forces that help make liquids curve upward within a straw but didn’t come up with anything profoundly original. If he hadn’t become “Einstein,” these papers would have been forgotten.
Time ticked by, and then as he approached twenty-six, something remarkable happened. In a flurry of activity in the spring of 1905, his deadlock broke, and Einstein began to write a series of five papers that very shortly would transform physics.
EINSTEIN’S MIND was pulling him in many different directions around the time of his twenty-sixth birthday. He was thinking about space and time, light and particles, and began drafting papers about these subjects. But as he did so, he also found himself returning to his earlier speculations about whether there might not be some deeper unity to the universe than he had been taught.
Einstein’s upbringing may not have given him the keenest sense for business, but it had prepared him perfectly for this sort of intellectual freshness. As the Norwegian American economist Thorstein Veblen once observed, when families are undergoing a shift from religious belief to secularism, the children often grow up to be skeptical of any claims of ultimate truth—whether coming from authorities in religion, or science, or any other field. Einstein was shaped by that skepticism, as were other members of his family—especially his sister, Maja, whose unconventional perspective on things manifested itself in a keen sense of irony. (Recalling years later how Albert had once thrown a heavy ball at her head in a fit of temper, she noted, “This should suffice to show that it takes a sound skull to be the sister of an intellectual.”)
Maja’s skeptical attitude came out in teasing wit, but for Einstein this same trait led him to question everything he was taught, whether in his Munich secondary school, his Zurich Polytechnic, or in his own readings. And his inherent skepticism had been building toward this moment, although his fighting spirit would come in handy as well.
As his magnificent work in 1905 went on, Einstein began to investigate in earnest whether the two realms that his Victorian predecessors had believed were entirely separate were not actually linked in some way. The dominant view at the time, as his father and uncle and family friends had explained to him during his childhood, and as he and everyone in his classes in Zurich had drilled into them even further, was that the universe was divided into two parts. There was the domain of energy, which scientists referred to with the letter E. And there was the domain of matter—or, more technically, the domain of mass—which was symbolized by the letter M.
To scientists before Einstein, it was as if the entire world were divided into two vast domed cities. Inside the domed city of E, where energy existed, there were flickering flames, roaring winds, and the like. The other domed city, separate and located far away, was the land of M, of mass, where mountains and locomotives and all the other heavy, substantial stuff of our world existed.
Einstein became convinced that there had to be a way of uniting them. The God he didn’t quite believe in had had no reason arbitrarily to stop creating the universe when He had reached two parts. If there was any sense, He would have gone further and created a deeper unity, of which everything we see is just a different manifestation.
Science is often described as depopulating the heavens—ridding them of mystical forces and beings, giving us a world in which cold reason is enough to accoun
t for all that we see. But Einstein was a student of the history of science, and he knew that he wasn’t alone in feeling that there was something more. Newton, too, had written suggestively that he was simply seeing God’s intentions in the laws he uncovered.
Newton’s life had straddled the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and he saw no distinction between his research in what we now term physics and his research in what we today view as the separate fields of theology and biblical history. He believed the Bible contained hidden truths laid down by God, and that helped him believe the universe also held the Creator’s secrets.
Over time, for most scientists, Newton’s religious assumptions had come to be considered a vestige of the earliest phase of science—a scaffolding that might have been needed at the start but that, with maturity, could be taken away, allowing the “machine” of scientific investigation to operate on its own. The notion of a clockwork universe had begun to take over: of a universe that had intricately linked inner parts and might have been wound up once at the beginning by God, but that since then was able to advance quite automatically, on its own, with any need for a divine hypothesis or presence fading further and further into the past. Researchers in the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth centuries who felt otherwise were thought to have been fed archaic ideas when young, engaging in a touching homage to their community perhaps, but their beliefs otherwise of no significance.
Einstein didn’t go along with that. For scientists at the highest level, he once said, science surpassed and replaced religion: “[Their] religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.” Whoever did not have this sense of wonder “is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.” Newton had shown that our universe is organized by laws as succinct as the divine instructions he found within the Bible. Einstein, now age twenty-six, was ready to do the same.
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