by Michio Kaku
Fortunately, because of his father’s electrochemical business, there were plenty of electric dynamos, motors, and gadgets lying around the factory to nourish his curiosity and stimulate his interest in science. (Hermann Einstein was working to get the contract for an ambitious project with his brother Jakob, the electrification of the city center of Munich. Hermann dreamed of being at the forefront of this historic undertaking. If he landed the project, it would mean financial stability as well as a large expansion of his electric factory.)
Being surrounded by huge electromagnetic contraptions no doubt awakened in Albert an intuitive understanding of electricity and magnetism. In particular, it probably sharpened his remarkable ability to develop graphic, physical pictures that would describe the laws of nature with uncanny accuracy. While other scientists often buried their heads in obscure mathematics, Einstein saw the laws of physics as clear as simple images. Perhaps this keen ability dates from this happy period of time, when he could simply look at the gadgets surrounding his father’s factory and ponder the laws of electricity and magnetism. This trait, the ability to see everything in terms of physical pictures, would mark one of Einstein’s great characteristics as a physicist.
At age fifteen, Einstein’s education was disrupted by the family’s periodic financial problems. Hermann, generous to a fault, was always helping those in financial trouble; he wasn’t tough-minded like most successful businessmen. (Albert would later inherit this same generosity of spirit.) His company, failing to land the contract to light up Munich, went bankrupt. Pauline’s wealthy family, now living in Genoa, Italy, offered to come to Hermann’s aid by backing a new company. There was a catch, however. They insisted that he move his family to Italy (in part so they could keep a tight rein on his freewheeling, overgenerous impulses). The family moved to Milan, close to a new factory in Pavia. Not wanting to further interrupt his son’s education, Hermann left Albert with some distant relatives in Munich.
All alone, Albert was miserable, trapped in a boarding school he hated and facing military duty in the dreaded Prussian army. His teachers disliked him, and the feeling was mutual. He was apparently about to be expelled from school. On an impulse, Einstein decided to reunite with his family. He arranged for his family doctor to write a medical note excusing him from school, stating that he might suffer a breakdown unless he rejoined his family. He then made the solo journey to Italy, eventually winding up totally unexpected on his parents’ doorstep.
Hermann and Pauline were perplexed about what to do with their son, a draft-dodging, high school dropout with no skills, no profession, and no future. He would get into long arguments with his father, who wanted him to pursue a practical profession like electrical engineering, while Albert preferred to talk about being a philosopher. Eventually, they compromised, and Albert declared he would attend the famed Zurich Polytechnic Institute in Switzerland, even though he was two years younger than most students taking the entrance exam. One advantage was that the Polytechnic did not require a high school diploma, just a passing grade on its tough entrance examination.
Unfortunately, Einstein flunked the entrance exam. He failed the French, chemistry, and biology portions, but he did so exceptionally well in the math and physics sections that he impressed Albin Herzog, the principal, who promised to admit him the following year, without Albert having to take the dreaded exam again. The head of the physics department, Heinrich Weber, even offered to allow Einstein to audit his physics classes when he was in Zurich. Herzog recommended that Einstein spend the interim year attending a high school in Aarau, just thirty minutes west of Zurich. There Albert became a lodger at the house of the high school’s director, Jost Winteler, establishing a lifelong friendship between the Einstein family and the Wintelers. (In fact, Maja would later marry Winteler’s son, Paul, and Einstein’s friend Michele Besso would marry the eldest daughter, Anna.)
Einstein enjoyed the relaxed, liberal atmosphere of the school. Here, he was relatively free of the oppressive, authoritarian rules of the German system. He enjoyed the generosity of the Swiss, who cherished tolerance and independence of spirit. Einstein would fondly recall, “I love the Swiss because, by and large, they are more humane than the other people among whom I have lived.” Remembering all the bad memories of his years in German schools, he also decided to renounce his German citizenship, a surprising step for a mere teenager. He would remain stateless for five years (until he eventually became a Swiss citizen).
Albert, flourishing in this freer atmosphere, began to shed his image as a shy, nervous, withdrawn loner, to become outgoing and gregarious, someone who was easy to talk to and who made loyal friends. Maja, in particular, began to notice a new change in her older brother as he blossomed into a mature, independent thinker. Einstein’s personality would pass through several distinct phases throughout his life, the first being his bookish, withdrawn, introverted phase. In Italy and especially Switzerland, he was entering his second phase: something of an impudent, cocky, sure-of-himself bohemian, always full of clever quips. He could make people howl with his puns. Nothing would please him more than telling a silly joke that would send his friends rolling in helpless laughter.
Some called him the “cheeky Swabian.” One fellow student, Hans Byland, captured Einstein’s emerging personality: “Whoever approached him was captivated by his superior personality. A mocking trait around the fleshy mouth with its protruding lower lip did not encourage the philistine to tangle with him. Unconfined by conventional restrictions, he confronted the world spirit as a laughing philosopher, and his witty sarcasm mercilessly castigated all vanity and artificiality.”
By all accounts, this “laughing philosopher” was also growing up to be popular with the girls. He was a wisecracking flirt, but girls also found him sensitive, easy to confide in, and sympathetic. One friend asked him for advice in love concerning her boyfriend. Another asked him to sign her autograph book, in which he inscribed a piece of silly doggerel. His violin playing also endeared him to many and put him in demand at dinner parties. Letters from that period show that he was quite popular with women’s groups who needed strings to accompany the piano. “Many a young or elderly woman was enchanted not only by his violin playing, but also by his appearance, which suggested a passionate Latin virtuoso rather than a stolid student of the sciences,” wrote biographer Albrecht Folsing.
One girl in particular captured his attention. Only sixteen, Einstein fell passionately in love with one of Jost Winteler’s daughters, Marie, who was two years older. (In fact, all the key women in his life would be older than he, a tendency also shared by both his sons.) Kind, sensitive, talented, Marie wished to become a teacher like her father. Albert and Marie took long walks together, often bird watching, a favorite hobby of the Winteler family. He also accompanied her with his violin while she played the piano.
Albert confessed to her his true love: “Beloved sweetheart…I have now, my angel, had to learn the full meaning of nostalgia and longing. But love gives much more happiness than longing gives pain. I only now realize how indispensable my dear little sunshine has become to my happiness.” Marie returned Albert’s affections and even wrote to Einstein’s mother, who wrote back approvingly. The Wintelers and the Einsteins, in fact, half expected to see a wedding announcement from the two lovebirds. Marie, however, felt a bit inadequate when speaking about science with her sweetheart, and thought this could be a problem in a relationship with such an intense, focused boyfriend. She realized that she would have to compete for Einstein’s affections with his first true love: physics.
What consumed Einstein’s attentions was not only his growing affection for Marie but also a fascination with the mysteries of light and electricity. In the summer of 1895, he wrote an independent essay about light and the aether, entitled “An Investigation of the State of the Aether in a Magnetic Field,” which he sent to his favorite uncle, Caesar Koch, in Belgium. Only five pages long, it was his very first scientific paper, arguing that the mysteriou
s force called magnetism that mesmerized him as a child could be viewed as some kind of disturbance in the aether. Years earlier, Talmud had introduced Einstein to Aaron Bernstein’s Popular Books on Natural Science. Einstein would write that it was “a work which I read with breathless attention.” This book would have a fateful impact on him, because the author included a discussion on the mysteries of electricity. Bernstein asked the reader to take a fanciful ride inside a telegraph wire, racing alongside an electric signal at fantastic speeds.
At the age of sixteen, Einstein had a daydream that led him to an insight which would later change the course of human history. Perhaps remembering the fanciful ride taken in Bernstein’s book, Einstein imagined himself running alongside a light beam and asked himself a fateful question: What would the light beam look like? Like Newton visualizing throwing a rock until it orbited the earth like the moon, Einstein’s attempt to imagine such a light beam would yield deep and surprising results.
In the Newtonian world, you can catch up to anything if you move fast enough. A speeding car, for example, can race alongside a train. If you peer inside the train, you can see the passengers reading their newspapers and drinking their coffee as if they were sitting in their living rooms. Although they might be hurtling at great speed, they look perfectly stationary as we ride alongside at the same speed in the car.
Similarly, imagine a police car catching up to a speeding motorist. As the police car accelerates and pulls up alongside the car, the police officer can look into the car and wave to the passenger, asking him to pull over. To the officer, the motorist in the car appears at rest, although both the police officer and the motorist may be traveling at a hundred miles an hour.
Physicists knew that light consisted of waves, so Einstein reasoned that if you could run alongside a light beam, then the light beam should be perfectly at rest. This means that the light beam, as seen by the runner, would look like a frozen wave, a still photograph of a wave. It would not oscillate in time. To the young Einstein, however, this did not make any sense. Nowhere had anyone ever seen a frozen wave; there was no such description of one in the scientific literature. Light, to Einstein, was special. You could not catch up to a light beam. Frozen light did not exist.
He did not understand it then, but he accidentally stumbled upon one of the greatest scientific observations of the century, leading up to the principle of relativity. He would later write that “such a principle resulted from a paradox upon which I had already hit at the age of sixteen: If I pursue a beam of light with the velocity c (velocity of light in a vacuum), I should observe such a beam of light…at rest. However, there seems to be no such thing, whether on the basis of experience or according to Maxwell’s equations.”
It was precisely his ability to isolate the key principles behind any phenomena and zero in on the essential picture that put Einstein on the brink of mounting a scientific revolution. Unlike lesser scientists who often got lost in the mathematics, Einstein thought in terms of simple physical pictures—speeding trains, falling elevators, rockets, and moving clocks. These pictures would unerringly guide him through the greatest ideas of the twentieth century. He wrote, “All physical theories, their mathematical expression notwithstanding, ought to lend themselves to so simple a description that even a child could understand.”
In the fall of 1895, Einstein finally entered the Polytechnic and began an entirely new phase in his life. For the first time, he thought, he would be exposed to the latest developments in physics that were being debated across the continent. He knew that revolutionary winds were blowing in the world of physics. Scores of new experiments were being performed, seemingly in defiance of the laws of Isaac Newton and classical physics.
At the Polytechnic, Einstein wanted to learn new theories about light, especially Maxwell’s equations, which he would later write were the “most fascinating subject at the time I was a student.” When Einstein finally learned Maxwell’s equations, he could answer the question that was continually on his mind. As he suspected, he found that there were no solutions of Maxwell’s equations in which light was frozen in time. But then he discovered more. To his surprise, he found that in Maxwell’s theory, light beams always traveled at the same velocity, no matter how fast you moved. Here at last was the final answer to the riddle: you could never catch up to a light beam because it always sped away from you at the same speed. This, in turn, violated everything his common sense told him about the world. It would take him several more years to unravel the paradoxes from that key observation, that light always travels at the same velocity.
These revolutionary times demanded revolutionary new theories, and new, daring leaders. Unfortunately, Einstein did not find these leaders at the Polytechnic. His teachers preferred to dwell on classical physics, prompting Einstein to cut his classes and spend most of his time in the laboratory or learning about new theories by himself. His professors viewed these repeated absences from class as chronic laziness; once again Einstein’s teachers underestimated him.
Among the teachers at the Polytechnic was physics professor Heinrich Weber, the same person who had been impressed with Einstein and offered to let him audit his classes after he failed the entrance exam. He had even promised Einstein a job as his assistant after graduation. Over time, however, Weber began to resent Einstein’s impatience and disregard for authority. Eventually, the professor withdrew his support for Einstein, saying, “You are a smart boy, Einstein, a very smart boy. But you have one great fault: you do not let yourself be told anything.” Physics instructor Jean Pernet also was not fond of Einstein. He was insulted when Einstein once threw the lab manual for one of Pernet’s classes into the garbage without even looking at it. But Pernet’s assistant defended Einstein, stating that although unorthodox, Einstein’s solutions were always right. Pernet nevertheless confronted Einstein: “You’re enthusiastic, but hopeless at physics. For your own good, you should switch to something else, medicine maybe, literature, or law.” Once, because Einstein had torn up the lab instructions, he accidentally caused an explosion that severely injured his right hand, requiring stitches to close the wound. His relations with Pernet had degenerated so badly that Pernet gave Einstein a “1,” the lowest possible grade, in his course. Mathematics professor Hermann Minkowski even called Einstein a “lazy dog.”
In contrast to his professors’ disdain, the friends Einstein made in Zurich would stand loyally by him for the rest of his life. There were only five students in his physics class that year, and he got to know them all. One was Marcel Grossman, a student of mathematics who took careful, meticulous notes of all the lectures. His notes were so good, in fact, that Einstein frequently borrowed them rather than go to class, often getting better scores on the exams than Grossman himself. (Even today, Grossman’s notes are preserved at the university.) Grossman confided to Einstein’s mother that “something very great” would someday happen to Einstein.
But one person who caught Einstein’s attention was another student in his class, Mileva Maric, a woman from Serbia. It was rare to find a physics student from the Balkans, even rarer to find a woman. Mileva was a formidable person who decided by herself to go to Switzerland because it was the only German-speaking country admitting women to the university. She was only the fifth woman to be accepted to study physics at the Polytechnic. Einstein had met his match, a woman who could speak the language of his first love. He found her irresistible and quickly broke off his relationship with Marie Winteler. He daydreamed that he and Mileva would become professors of physics and make great discoveries together. Soon, they were helplessly in love. When they were separated during vacations, they would exchange long, torrid love letters, calling each other by a host of fond nicknames, such as “Johnny” and “Dollie.” Einstein would write her poems as well as exhortations of his love: “I can go anywhere I want—but I belong nowhere, and I miss your two little arms and the glowing mouth full of tenderness and kisses.” Einstein and Mileva exchanged over 430 letters, prese
rved by one of their sons. (Ironically, although they lived in near poverty, just one step ahead of the bill collectors, some of these letters recently fetched $400,000 at an auction.)
Einstein’s friends could not understand what he saw in Mileva. While Einstein was outgoing with a quick sense of humor, Mileva, four years older, was much darker. She was moody, intensely private, and distrustful of others. She also walked with a noticeable limp due to a congenital problem (one leg was shorter than the other), which further isolated her from others. Friends whispered behind her back about the peculiar behavior of her sister Zorka, who acted strangely and would later become institutionalized as a schizophrenic. But, most important, her social status was questionable. Whereas the Swiss might sometimes look down on Jews, Jews in turn sometimes looked down on southern Europeans, especially from the Balkans.
Mileva, in turn, had no illusions about Einstein. His brilliance was legendary, as well as his irreverent attitude toward authority. She knew that he had renounced his German citizenship and held unpopular views concerning war and peace. She would write, “My sweetheart has a very wicked tongue and is a Jew into the bargain.”
Einstein’s growing involvement with Mileva, however, was opening up a seismic chasm with his parents. His mother, who had looked approvingly on his relationship with Marie, thoroughly disliked Mileva, regarding her as beneath Albert and someone who would bring ruin to him and their reputation. She was simply too old, too sick, too unfeminine, too gloomy, and too Serbian. “This Miss Maric is causing me the bitterest hours of my life,” she confided to a friend. “If it were in my power, I would make every possible effort to banish her from our horizon. I really dislike her. But I have lost all influence with Albert.” She would warn him, “By the time you’re 30, she’ll be an old witch.”