But a problem was emerging. Einstein was aware of the great advances in physical theory that had taken place in the previous twenty years, and specifically of the world-changing electromagnetic theory of Maxwell and the bold statistical theory of gases due to Boltzmann. In vain he awaited the appearance of these exciting ideas in his classroom. Weber was a conservative scientist and had no intention of teaching these recent and highly mathematical developments in his lectures. A fellow student remarked: “[Weber’s] lectures were outstanding but … [modern developments] were simply ignored. At the conclusion of one’s studies one was acquainted with the history of physics, but not with its present or future.” In particular, “Einstein’s hopes of learning something decisive about Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory were not realized.” When, in his very last semester, Einstein heard a lecture from the mathematician Hermann Minkowski on modern formulations of Newton’s laws he remarked to a classmate, “this is the first lecture on mathematical [theoretical] physics we have heard at the Poly.” This refusal to admit the existence of newer ideas in physics apparently revived in Einstein a long-standing characteristic of his personality, his disrespect for authority in the classroom.
In later life Einstein spoke many times about how regimented his early education had been, and how he had particularly disliked the German system, as exemplified by the Luitpold Gymnasium, which he had fled in 1894. But contemporaries of his, even those with the same Jewish background, did not recall this school as being oppressive. In fact there seems to have been something in Einstein’s own manner that contributed to the conflicts he recalled; he had a knack for driving his teachers to distraction. At the gymnasium his frustrated Latin teacher, Joseph Degenhart, offered one of history’s great erroneous predictions: that “[Einstein] would never get anywhere in life.” When Einstein maintained that he had committed no offense to elicit such an opinion, Degenhart replied, “your mere presence here undermines the class’s respect for me.” After leaving the gymnasium and ending up at Aarau, despite his much greater affinity for this school, his tendency to be less than respectful to his teachers did not change. While on a field trip he was questioned by his geology teacher, Mühlberg, as to whether the strata they were observing ran upward or down; he replied, “It is pretty much the same to me which way they run, Professor.” An Aarau classmate recalled the impression made by the young Einstein. “A cold wind of skepticism was blowing [that suited] the impudent Swabian…. Sure of himself, his grey felt hat pushed back from his thick black hair, he strode energetically up and down in the rapid, I might almost say crazy tempo of a restless spirit which carries a whole world in itself. Nothing escaped the sharp gaze of his large brown eyes. Whoever approached him came immediately under the spell of his superior personality. A sarcastic curl of his lip did not encourage Philistines to fraternize with him…. his witty mockery pitilessly lashed any conceit or pose.”
At Zurich, by his third year of study, the impudent Swabian had reemerged, much to the dissatisfaction of Professor Weber. Einstein began skipping classes and studying the modern works independently, and with “holy zeal,” in his room or in cafés with friends. Weber noticed that, unlike the other students, Einstein always addressed him as “Herr Weber” and not as “Herr Professor,” a brash gesture in the hierarchical Germanic universities of the time. While Einstein continued to do well in Weber’s classes, his arrogance surfaced most clearly in the experimental laboratory class of Weber’s colleague Jean Pernet. At the beginning of each laboratory class the students would be given a sheet of instructions, or “chit,” on how to perform the required work. Einstein would ostentatiously fling the sheet into the wastebasket and proceed by his own methods. This infuriated Pernet, and not necessarily without good reason, as Einstein’s explorations eventually caused an explosion in the lab resulting in an injury to his right hand requiring stitches, which appears to have upset him only because it prevented him from playing the violin for several weeks. Pernet seems to have sincerely misjudged Einstein’s ability, telling him “there is no lack of eagerness or goodwill in your work, but a lack of capability.” When Einstein protested that he felt he did have a talent for physics, Pernet answered curtly, “I only wanted to warn you in your own interests.” Eventually Pernet did more than warn Einstein; he flunked him in the course and had him placed on academic probation.
Professor Weber of course was aware of all this and must also have sensed Einstein’s loss of respect for him because of his backward-looking pedagogy. By Einstein’s third year Weber had developed a particular dislike for the young man, and this boiled over when he confronted Einstein with the following critique: “You’re a very clever boy, Einstein, an extremely clever boy, but you have one great fault: you’ll never let yourself be told anything.” Of course Weber was right on target, except for his choice of the word “fault.”
FIGURE 2.1. Albert Einstein, “the impudent Swabian,” age 17, at his graduation from the cantonal school in Aarau, Switzerland. ETH-Bibliothek Zurich, Image Archive.
By the end of his final year, in the spring of 1900, it was clear that Einstein had made an enemy of his former mentor. Previous to his final exams Einstein had to produce for Weber a diploma thesis. Weber had rejected an earlier proposal by Einstein for a study of the electron theory of electrical current and heat flow, and Einstein had resigned himself to discussing a more mundane topic in heat conduction, in which he had little interest. Three days before his final exams, when Einstein must have been quite pressured to prepare for them, Weber made him recopy the entire diploma thesis because he had not submitted it on the “regulation paper.” To top it off, Weber then gave the thesis the poor grade of 4.5 out of 6.
Einstein’s falling out with Weber might not have had such major consequences for his immediate future if not for another imprudent decision he made. While the physics faculty of the Poly did not contain scholars of historic distinction, the mathematics faculty did: specifically the number and function theorist Adolf Hurwitz and the geometric number theorist Minkowski, whose lecture on mathematical physics Einstein had admired. Minkowski was later to reformulate Einstein’s special theory of relativity as a description of four-dimensional space-time, becoming famous beyond science for his dramatic statement that “henceforth space by itself and time by itself are doomed to fade into mere shadows and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent existence.” Einstein, with his firm commitment to theoretical work and his obvious talent for mathematics, could have impressed these important men with his promise, had he deigned to attend their advanced classes. But he decided that he knew all the math he needed for the physics he intended to do and focused on his independent study of contemporary physics. That the strongest student in his year (at the halfway point of the program) decided to skip the most challenging math courses did not go unnoticed. Years later Minkowski told the physicist (and future close friend of Einstein) Max Born that Einstein’s success had come as a “tremendous surprise, for in his student days Einstein had been a lazy dog. He never bothered about mathematics at all.” Thus by his graduation in June of 1900 Einstein had alienated all the professors whom he might reasonably have asked for the thing he really needed, a position as an academic assistant. This was the standard means for a young graduate to prepare for a career in research and teaching, and since it was very poorly paid, it was rather routine to obtain, particularly for a student of promise such as Einstein.
However it didn’t work out that way for young Albert. First, cramming in all the material he had missed using the notes of his friend and classmate Marcel Grossmann did not compensate for the many lectures he had skipped. He produced a mediocre performance on the final exams, and, handicapped by the poor diploma grade he had already received from Weber, he posted the lowest combined grade point average of the four physics students who passed. (The fifth student taking the exams was Einstein’s future wife and current amour, Mileva Maric; she did even worse and was not granted the degree.) The other three pas
sing students (Grossman, Kollros, and Ehrat) were immediately granted posts as assistants to members of the math faculty. Professor Weber, who needed two assistants for the physics program, as his final insult, engaged two engineering graduates in preference to Einstein.
CHAPTER 3
THE GYPSY LIFE
“This Einstein will one day be a very great man.” Although Einstein had finished college having made a poor impression on his professors, the opposite was true of his peers. Einstein already was a man of great charisma and charm, to go along with his penetrating intellect and deep understanding of science. The prediction of greatness came from Einstein’s classmate Marcel Grossmann, only a few days after their first meeting in 1898. Grossmann, according to Einstein, “was a model student, close to his teachers”; he would graduate at the top of their class and within a few years become a mathematics professor himself at the Poly. He and Einstein formed a genuine friendship: “Once every week,” Einstein recalled, “I would solemnly go with him to the Café Metropol on the Limmat Embankment and talk to him not only about our studies, but also about anything that might interest young people whose eyes were open.” Besides providing Einstein with the invaluable class notes, Grossmann frequently had him as a visitor to his home. Grossmann came from an old and well-connected family near Zurich and would eventually save Einstein from his “vagabond existence” after graduation by arranging for him (through his father’s connections) a job at the patent office in Bern.
But it was not only the important Grossmann family whom Einstein charmed; his sympathies were completely independent of class or status. The woman who ran his boardinghouse, Stephanie Markwalder, forgave him his repeated losing of the house key, as “his impulsive and upright nature … was so irresistible.” To the delight of Frau Markwalder and her daughter Suzanne, he filled their house with joyful and passionate music-making, as well as vigorous discussions, puns, and witticisms. Suzanne, who often accompanied Albert’s violin playing on the piano, found his joie de vivre infectious, as for example when she encountered Albert and Mileva descending the Uetliberg mountain near Zurich and he called out to her, “you must go all the way to the top. It’s marvelous up there … it’s covered with tiny feathers (hoar frost).”
His generosity extended in all directions. Once, when he showed up late to his regular meeting with Grossmann and comrades in the Café Metropol, he explained that the laundry woman at the boardinghouse had told him his violin playing made her work more agreeable, so he had stayed on to please her. On another occasion he came to the rescue of a biology student struggling to please the demanding professor in her physics lab course. After witnessing the student being dressed down by the professor, he offered to take her lab notebook home with him and returned it to her with results that found commendation from the difficult man. However, when she told him he was lucky to work for Weber instead, he couldn’t agree: “What the one teaches is not right, but what the other teaches is not right either!” Another physics classmate, Jakob Ehrat, often sat with Einstein in class, and they became close. Ehrat was an anxious type, not nearly as facile with the material as Einstein; Einstein would help him maintain his composure before the final exams (in which he ended up doing better than Einstein). Einstein often visited him and his mother at their home in Zurich, and on one memorable visit the young Einstein showed up wearing the runner from his chest of drawers as an improvised scarf. Ehrat was amused by his eccentricity but did not fail to see the true character of the man. “I never saw a trace of pettiness, the slightest weakening in his courage for truth and in his refusal to compromise. His almost prophetic gift for justice, his inner strength and spontaneous feeling for beauty impressed me so much that I often dreamed of him long after life had separated us.”
Not surprisingly Einstein’s personal magnetism, artistic temperament, and striking appearance engendered romantic feelings as well as admiration in the opposite sex. A male student whom he taught after graduation wrote down the following somewhat analytical description, which nonetheless makes the point: “Einstein is 5 ft 9, broad shoulders and a slight stoop. Unusually broad short skull. Complexion a matte light brown. A garish moustache sprouts above his large sensual mouth. Nose rather aquiline, and soft deep brown eyes. The voice is compelling, vibrant like the tone of a cello.” A friend of his second wife described his looks more succinctly: “He had the kind of male beauty that, especially at the beginning of the century, caused such havoc.” Before coming to Zurich Einstein had already captured the heart of Marie Winteler, the sweet and naive daughter of his host family in Aarau. He broke off this dalliance soon after arriving at the Poly. It was not long before he had a new object of his interest, his fellow physics student and classmate Mileva Maric.
FIGURE 3.1. Einstein, aged 19, as a student at the Poly, roughly at the time when he was becoming involved with his first wife, Mileva Maric. ETH-Bibliothek Zurich, Image Archive.
Maric was three years older than Einstein and was, not surprisingly, the only woman in the physics track at the Poly. It was only through the great efforts of her father, Milos Maric, a Serbian peasant who had married into the middle class, that she had managed to obtain a math and physics education, from which women were normally excluded. Having excelled at the Zagreb Classical Gymnasium, she had enrolled in Zurich, with every intention of pursuing a career in science. As the class was so small, she met Einstein immediately in the fall of 1896, and there seems to have been some instant chemistry between them, as there is evidence that her decision to leave Zurich for Heidelberg a year later was based on a need to get some distance from him and her emerging feelings for him. However she was far from the meek, simple sweetheart that Einstein had encountered in Marie Winteler; here is how she answered his first letter to Heidelberg:
It’s now been quite a while since I received your letter, and I would have replied immediately … but you said I should write to you someday when I happened to be bored. And I am very obedient and I waited and waited for boredom to set in; but so far my waiting has been in vain and I really don’t know how to manage this; I could wait from here to eternity, but then you would be right to take me for a barbarian, and, again, if I write my conscience is not clear.
These are the words of a spirited, independent woman who could almost match Einstein’s sarcastic wit and also his love of science. Physically she was not considered a great catch; a friend described her thus: “very smart and serious, small, delicate, brunette, ugly.” She walked with a limp from a congenital hip defect and had endured tuberculosis growing up; she suffered from bouts of depression, something to which Einstein seemed immune even during these trying early years (“I am a cheerful fellow … and have no talent whatsoever for melancholic moods,” he wrote in 1901, in the midst of his struggles with family and joblessness). All this meant nothing to Einstein at the time: he had found a soul mate, an outsider and rebel like him, who would join him on his journey of intellectual discovery. Maric returned to the Poly in February of 1898, and their relationship blossomed; a growing intimacy intertwined with a shared sense of discovery as Einstein began to confide in her his ideas that implied that important physical theories were wrong and had to be changed.
As early as March of 1899 Einstein wrote to Maric and told of showing her photograph to his mother and of the tense interchange that ensued (his mother’s deep antipathy to Maric would plague the couple for many years). However, he ends the letter with an intriguing hint: “My broodings about radiation are starting to get on a somewhat firmer ground & I am curious whether something will come out of them.” By the summer of that year he had begun addressing her with the affectionate nickname “Dolly” (Doxerl). In one letter, after explaining to her, complete with equations, why he believes the present electrodynamic theory cannot be correct, he ends with: “If only you would be again with me a little! We both understand each other’s black souls so well & also drinking coffee & eating sausages, etc.” (Among Einstein’s inventions at that time was the suggestive form of
etcetera.) The summer of 1900 brought twin disappointments: Einstein’s lack of success in landing an assistant’s position, and Maric’s failure to pass the final exams and receive her degree. If anything this seemed to bring them closer together, and in July Einstein, during a visit home, announced his intention to marry Mileva, eliciting a “scene” of anger and disapproval from his mother.
Einstein was unmoved by this display, but as often happened, he found solace in reading physics papers, in this case the works of Gustav Kirchoff, the first physicist to understand the importance of the thermal radiation law. Both of Einstein’s parents continued the barrage of disapproval of Maric over the summer, but Einstein held firm: “Mama and Papa are very phlegmatic people and have less stubbornness in their whole body than I have in my little finger.” By the fall of 1900 it was clear that for the immediate future it would be Albert and Mileva against the world, both the world of bourgeois society and the world of the physics establishment. In October Einstein wrote his fiancée from Milan: “You too don’t like the philistine life any longer, do you! He who tasted freedom cannot stand the chains any longer. How lucky I am to have found in you a creature who is my equal, who is as strong and independent as I am myself!”
It was not immediately obvious to Einstein how serious his plight was as he cheerily expected something to turn up any day. He even had the temerity to turn down an insurance job that his friend Ehrat had lined up for him, saying “One must shun such stultifying affairs.” Initially he clung to the naive hope that he could land a job with the mathematician Hurwitz, whose courses he had avoided rather brazenly. When this didn’t work out, he wrote to a friend: “Neither of us have gotten a job and we support ourselves by private lessons, when we can pick up some, which is still very questionable. Is this not a journeyman’s or even a gypsy’s life? But I believe we will be happy in it nonetheless.”
Einstein and the Quantum Page 3