xii “I might not be more skilled”: Ernst Straus (Einstein’s assistant at Princeton, late 1940s), in Einstein: A Centenary Volume, ed. A. P. French (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 31.
xii “My boldest dreams”: The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, vol. 8, The Berlin Years: Correspondence, 1914–1918, trans. Ann M. Hentschel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 160 (hereafter cited as CPAE8).
xiii “the greatest blunder”: Did he say it? The first mention was by physicist George Gamow in 1956, the year after Einstein’s death. Since Gamow had an ingenious turn of phrase and Einstein never used the term in other correspondence, some historians have suggested that Gamow made it up. I believe Gamow, however. He was highly respected, and his remarks about other colleagues hold up. Most of all, the phrase matches Einstein’s tone and sentiments: he was not happy about having to add the cosmological constant.
1. Victorian Childhood
7 “The teachers . . . seemed to me”: Philipp Frank, Einstein: His Life and Times, rev. ed. (New York: Knopf, 1953), p. 11.
7 “Einstein, you’ll never”: CPAE1, p. xx.
7 “I got used a long time ago”: CPAE1, p. 11.
8 “Beloved sweetheart”: CPAE1, pp. 11, 12.
9 “It is nothing short of a miracle”: Paul Arthur Schilpp, Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court Press, 1949), pp. 16–17.
10 “director’s reprimand for nondiligence”: CPAE1, p. 27.
10 “Einstein the eagle”: Carl Seelig, Albert Einstein: A Documentary Biography (London: Staples Press, 1956), p. 71.
11 “I would rather not speculate”: Ibid., p. 11.
12 “Without you . . . I lack self confidence”: CPAE1, p. 145.
12 “Michele has already noticed”: CPAE1, p. 152.
14 “Strenuous intellectual work”: CPAE1, p. 32.
2. Coming of Age
16 “What a waste”: CPAE1, p. 152.
17 “with the humble inquiry”: CPAE1, p. 151.
17 “I will soon have graced”: CPAE1, p. 163.
17 “What oppresses me most”: CPAE1, p. 123.
17 “my son Albert”: CPAE1, p. 165.
18 “When I found your letter”: CPAE1, p. 165.
18 “My dear dolly!”: CPAE1, p. 173. I’ve very slightly edited the ending.
19 “a very small [horse-drawn] sledge”: CPAE1, p. 172.
19 “How beautiful it was”: Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), p. 64.
19 “It has really turned out”: CPAE1, p. 191.
20 “Private lessons”: CPAE1, p. 192.
20 “is 5 ft 9”: Seelig, p. 58.
21 “We shall remain”: CPAE1, p. 186.
21 how much she hated Miss Maric: In July 1900, Einstein told his family he was going to marry Marić. He remembered that “Mama [then] threw herself on the bed, buried her head in the pillow, and cried like a child.” Then she said that he was ruining his future, that no decent family would have her, and that “if she gets pregnant you’ll really be in a pretty mess” (CPAE1, pp. 141–42). Aside from that, she took it pretty well.
21 “a married man now”: Albert Einstein–Michele Besso Correspondance, 1903–1955, trans. and ed. Pierre Speziali (Paris: Hermann, 1972), p. 3.
21 “I like him a great deal”: Albrecht Folsing, Albert Einstein: A Biography, trans. and abr. Ewald Osers (New York: Viking, 1997), p. 73.
22 “become so incomprehensible to each other”: CPAE1, p. 129.
22 “When I talked about experiments with clocks”: Frank, p. 131.
3. Annus Mirabilis
24 “a temptation to superficiality”: Folsing, p. 102.
24 “The sight of the twinkling stars”: Maurice Solovine, Albert Einstein: Letters to Solovine (New York: Philosophical Library, 1987), p. 6.
25 The terms used by early scientists: Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield’s old classic The Architecture of Matter (London: Hutchinson, 1962) traces the underlying concepts back long before the time of Lavoisier, as does Max Jammer’s Concepts of Mass in Classical and Modern Physics (New York: Dover, 1997). C. E. Perrin’s essay “The Chemical Revolution: Shifts in Guiding Assumptions” (“The Chemical Revolution: Essays in Reinterpretation,” special issue, Osiris, 2nd ser. [1988]: pp. 53–81) is excellent on what happened in Lavoisier’s time that made the later jump to a focus on mass so difficult. Charis Anastopoulos’sParticle or Wave: The Evolution of the Concept of Matter in Modern Physics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008) shows how that modern view developed.
27 “This should suffice to show”: CPAE1, p. xviii.
29 “[Their] religious feeling takes the form”: Albert Einstein, “The Religious Spirit of Science,” in Ideas and Opinions (London: Folio Society, 2010), p. 38.
32 “Perhaps it will prove possible”: The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, vol. 2, The Swiss Years: Writings, 1900–1909, trans. Anna Beck (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 24.
33 “The idea is amusing”: The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, vol. 5, The Swiss Years: Correspondence, 1902–1914, trans. Anna Beck (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), doc. 28 (hereafter cited as CPAE5).
33 “Both of us, alas, dead drunk”: Dennis Overbye, Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance (New York: Viking, 2000), p. 139.
4. Only the Beginning
34 When von Laue arrived and made his inquiries: Seelig, pp. 92–93.
36 “This unconstruable and unvisualizable dogmatism”: Folsing, p. 203.
37 “Perhaps it would be possible”: CPAE5, p. 20.
5. Glimpsing a Solution
51 “the happiest thought of my life”: The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, vol. 7, The Berlin Years: Writings, 1918–1921, trans. Alfred Engel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 31.
52 “withdraw to the sofa”: CPAE1, p. xxii.
54 “With that kind of fame”: Mileva Einstein-Marić, In Albert’s Shadow: The Life and Letters of Mileva Maric, Einstein’s First Wife, ed. Milan Popovic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), p. 14.
54 “Isn’t it clear”: Overbye, p. 185.
55 “due to my poor memory”: Folsing, p. 259.
55 “If it is possible”: Seelig, p. 95.
6. Time to Think
57 “We are on very good terms”: Peter Galison, Gerald Holton, and Silva S. Schweber, eds.,Einstein for the 21st Century: His Legacy in Science, Art, and Modern Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 186.
57 “the size of a visiting card”: Seelig, p. 171.
57 a reassuring nod: Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (New York: Avon, 1971), p. 322.
61 “the best sounding board”: Seelig, p. 85.
62 “I would have loved”: CPAE5, doc. 300.
63 “Grossmann, you’ve got to help me”: Abraham Pais, Subtle Is the Lord: The Science and Life of Albert Einstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 212.
7. Sharpening the Tools
67 “created a new universe”: Jeremy Gray, Worlds out of Nothing: A Course in the History of Geometry in the 19th Century (London: Springer, 2007), p. 129.
67 “appear to be paradoxical”: Marvin Jay Greenberg, Euclidean and Non-Euclidean Geometries: Development and History (New York: W. H. Freeman, 2007), p. 191.
67 “Grossmann is getting his doctorate”: CPAE1, p. 190.
67 “I have become imbued”: Banesh Hoffmann, Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel (New York: Viking, 1972), p. 116.
69 “exclusively on the gravitation problem”: CPAE5, p. 324.
69 “not the kind of vagabond”: Seelig, p. 10.
69 “split into numerous specialties”: French, p. 15.
69 “when I sat on a chair”: Hoffmann, p. 117.
69 “too complicated”: Jurgen Neffe, Einstein: A Biography, trans. Shelley Frisch (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), p. 219.
70 “Compared
with this problem”: Ibid., p. 116.
70 “Einstein is stuck so deep”: Armin Harmann, The Genesis of Quantum Theory, 1899–1912 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), p. 69.
70 “Never in my life”: Hoffmann, p. 116.
70 “the tail of the lion”: CPAE5, doc. 513.
71 “completely necessary for social reasons”: Alice Calaprice, ed.,The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 37.
72 “When I talk to people”: Folsing, p. 399.
8. The Greatest Idea
76 “Perhaps in another life”: G. Waldo Dunnington,Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955; repr., New York: Mathematical Association of America, 2004), p. 465.
78 “after long years of searching”: John Stachel, Einstein from “B” to “Z” (Boston: Birkhäuser, 2002), p. 232.
78 “the greatest satisfaction”: Folsing, p. 369.
78 “My boldest dreams”: Ibid., p. 374.
9. True or False?
83 “My colleagues concerned themselves”: Pais, p. 235. . “As an older friend”: Ibid., p. 239.
84 “so many major hitches”: Folsing, p. 317.
84 “If the Academy won’t play ball”: Ibid., p. 320.
92 “a ‘multitude of the most sophisticated measurements’”: Ibid., p. 382.
10. Totality
93 a lean, sweaty Englishman: Eddington didn’t mention sweating in his journal, but in May, on the equator off the Congo coast, manipulating heavy equipment outside at midday, anyone is going to sweat.
95 “ This postscript”: Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Eddington: The Most Distinguished Astrophysicist of His Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 25.
96 “one person who heads an expedition”: Quoted in Matthew Stanley, “‘An Expedition to Heal the Wounds of War’: The 1919 Eclipse and Eddington as Quaker Adventurer,” Isis 94 (2003): p. 68.
96 “The lines of latitude”: Ibid., p. 64.
98 “It was impossible to get any work done”: F. W. Dyson, A. S. Eddington, and C. Davidson, “A Determination of the Deflection of Light by the Sun’s Gravitational Field, from Observations Made at the Total Eclipse of May 29, 1919,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 20, nos. 571–81 (January 1, 1920), http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/roypta/220/571-581/291.full.pdf. This article, the Stanley article cited in the previous note, and an article by Peter Coles (“Einstein, Eddington and the 1919 Eclipse,” Astronomical Society of the Pacific Conference Proceedings,252 [2001]: p. 21) are the central sources for the information about Eddington in this chapter.
103 “Have you by any chance”: Einstein to Paul Ehrenfest, September 12, 1919, in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, vol. 9, The Berlin Years: Correspondence, January 1919–April 1920, trans. Ann M. Hentschel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), doc. 104 (hereafter cited as CPAE9).
104 “The whole atmosphere”: Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925; repr., New York: Free Press, 1967), p. 13.
104 “ After a careful study”: “Joint eclipse meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society,” The Observatory (1919), p. 391.
105 “We owe it to that great man”: The objector was the physicist Ludwik Silberstein, quoted in Times (London), November 7, 1919.
105 “This is the most important result”: Quoted ibid.
11. Cracks in the Foundation
113 “gloomy veil”: G. J. Whitrow, Einstein: The Man and His Achievement (London: Dover, 1967), p. 20.
113 “[an] excellent and truly enjoyable relationship”: CPAE8, doc. 56.
113 “no mental brainstorm”: Neffe, p. 102.
113 “my mother often said”: Ibid., p. 103.
113 “acted upon women as a magnet”: Ibid., p. 106. The architect was their close family friend Konrad Wachsmann, who designed the Einsteins’ country home.
114 “The Austrian woman”: Roger Highfield and Paul Carter, The Private Lives of Albert Einstein (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1993), p. 208.
115 “What I admired most”: Einstein to Besso’s adult children, March 2, 1955, in Albert Einstein–Michele Besso Correspondance, p. 537.
115 “larger portions of the physical universe”: Albert Einstein, “Cosmological Considerations on the General Theory of Relativity,” in H. A. Lorentz, A. Einstein, H. Minkowski, and H. Weyl, The Principle of Relativity: A Collection of Original Memoirs on the Special and General Theory of Relativity (1923; repr., New York: Dover, 1952), p. 177.
117 “I have come to the conclusion”: Ibid., p. 180.
118 “ That term”: Ibid., p. 188.
118 “gravely detrimental to the formal beauty”: Ibid., p. 193.
12. Rising Tensions
125 “My life is fairly even”: Eduard A. Tropp, Alexander A. Friedmann: The Man Who Made the Universe Expand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 70.
126 “ with excellent organization”: Ibid., p. 74.
126 “The distance between our airplanes”: Ibid., pp. 75–76.
127 “what Hindu mythology has to say”: Helge Kragh, Cosmology and Controversy: The Historical Development of Two Theories of the Universe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 25.
128 “The results . . . contained in [Friedmann’s] work”: Tropp, p. 169.
128 “Allow me to present”: Ibid., p. 171.
128 “Science, once our greatest pride”: Folsing, p. 524.
129 “Of all the people”: Isaacson, p. 307.
130 “In my previous note”: Tropp, p. 172.
132 “There is a wild currency orgy”: Ibid., p. 187.
133 “My trip is not going well”: Ibid., p. 173.
133 “Everybody was much impressed”: Ibid., p. 174.
13. The Queen of Hearts Is Black
145 “mais votre physique”: A. L. Berger, ed., The Big Bang and Georges Lemaître: Proceedings of a Symposium in Honour of G. Lemaître, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983), p. 370.
146 “He didn’t seem at all”: H. Nussbaumer and L. Bieri, Discovering the Expanding Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 111.
147 felt terribly uncomfortable: The experiment was conducted by Jerome S. Bruner and Leo Postman, and their results were published in “On the Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm,” Journal of Personality 18 (1949): pp. 206–23. “Perhaps the most central finding,” they wrote, “is that the recognition threshold for the incongruous playing cards (those with suit and color reversed) is significantly higher than the threshold for normal cards. While normal cards on the average were recognized correctly—here defined as a correct response followed by a second correct response—at 28 milliseconds, the incongruous cards required 114 milliseconds.” No wonder Einstein held on to his mistake as long as he did.
157 “to see wounded men fall”: Gale E. Christianson,Edwin Hubble: Mariner of the Nebulae (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 108.
153 “[I] have netted nine novae”: Robert W. Smith, The Expanding Universe: Astronomy’s “Great Debate,” 1901–1931 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 114.
155 “It means nothing”: Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 235.
156 “muscled his way in”: Christianson, p. 206.
156 “New observations by Hubble and Humason”: Ibid., p. 210.
157 “It is remarkable”: Daryl Janzen, “Einstein’s Cosmological Considerations” (unpublished paper, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, February 13, 2014), http://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.3212.pdf, pp. 20–21.
157 “When life is full of trouble”: Christianson, p. 211.
14. Finally at Ease
158 “Since I introduced this term”: Kragh, p. 54.
158 “This is the most beautiful”: Timothy Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way (1988; repr., New York: Perennial, 2003), p. 212.
158 “some very in
teresting things”: Berger, p. 376.
159 “Ah, très joli”: Ibid., p. 376.
162 “you have proved”: “Dark Side of Einstein Emerges in His Letters,” New York Times, November 1996.
162 “I must love someone”: CPAE5, doc. 389.
163 Was it really flying snakes: Dorothy Michelson Livingston, The Master of Light (New York: Scribner’s, 1973), p. 291, cited in Denis Brian, Einstein: A Life (New York: Wiley, 1996), p. 12.
163 “exceptionally kindhearted”: Neffe, p. 102.
164 “ten years younger”: Isaacson, p. 361.
164 “As Genesis suggested it”: Berger, p. 395.
165 “The evolution of the universe”: Simon Singh, Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), p. 159.
165 “the most beautiful”: Ferris, p. 212.
165 accurate equations that are “smarter” than the people who devised them: The great example here is Paul Dirac’s equation describing the electron, which he published in 1928. An equation such as x2=25 has two solutions: x=5, or x=-5. Dirac’s equation also had two possible solutions: one for negatively charged electrons—which were all the electrons then known—yet another for positively charged electrons, although such “positive” electrons were utterly unimagined. Four years later, Carl Anderson at Caltech discovered them, and this is what prompted Dirac to observe, “My equation is smarter than I am.” How could this happen? See, for example, Frank Wilczek, “The Dirac Equation,” in It Must Be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science, ed. Graham Farmelo (London: Granta, 2002), pp. 132–61. See also Eugene P. Wigner’s much-anthologized 1960 paper, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.”
15. Crushing the Upstart
172 “quite the most incredible”: Michael Hiltzik, Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention That Launched the Military-Industrial Complex (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), p. 18.
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