Einstein

by Philipp Frank

  “This subject brings me to the vilest offspring of the herd mind — the odious militia. The man who enjoys marching in line and file to the strains of music falls below my contempt: he received his great brain by mistake, the spinal cord would have been amply sufficient. This heroism at command, this senseless violence, this accurate bombast of patriotism — how intensely I despise them!”

  Einstein was not opposed to a dictatorship because it recognized the existence of an élite, but because it tried to develop a herd mind among the majority of the people.

  This goal — the avoidance of war and military service — seemed so desirable that in this case he believed the most primitive and most radical means to be the most effective — that is, the refusal of the individual to perform military service, as practiced by certain religious groups such as the Quakers or Jehovah’s Witnesses. In 1929, when he was asked what he would do in case of a new war, he replied in a magazine: “I would unconditionally refuse to do war service, direct or indirect, and would try to persuade my friends to take the same stand, regardless of how the cause of the war should be judged.” In 1931 he placed his reputation and his personal co-operation at the disposal of the War Resisters International and issued an appeal in which he said:

  “I appeal to all men and women, whether they be eminent or humble, to declare that they will refuse to give any further’ assistance to war or the preparation of war. I ask them to tell their governments this in writing and to register this decision by informing me that they have done so.… I have authorized the establishment of the ‘Einstein War Resisters International Fund.’ ”

  When I visited the House of Friends in London, the headquarters of the Quakers, I saw the pictures of three men in the secretary’s office: Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer, and Einstein. I was rather surprised at this combination and asked the secretary what it was that these three persons had in common. Amazed at my ignorance, he informed me: “All three are pacifists.”

  5. Campaigns against Einstein

  The German intellectuals who had blindly followed the ruling military class into the first World War were bewildered when their trust was broken by the loss of the war. The professors in the years immediately following the armistice felt like sheep without a shepherd. When Einstein ventured forth into this confused atmosphere by entering into public affairs in support of Zionism and pacifism, strong opposition began to be organized against him.

  For the ardent nationalists, the Jews and the pacifists were the scapegoats to be blamed for the defeat in the war by a “stab in the back,” and any supporter of their movements was the object of their violent anger. Even those who agreed with Einstein’s ideas were shocked by his blunt way of speaking in face of the opposing sentiment, and he began to be looked upon as a kind of enfant terrible. Einstein was not familiar with political machinations and had no interest in them, and so his statements were considered either childish or cynical. With the success of his theory acclaimed by the English solar expedition and the rise of his fame, his enemies set out to depreciate this success as far as possible.

  There suddenly appeared an organization whose only purpose was to fight Einstein and his theories. The leader was a certain Paul Weyland, whose past, education, and occupation were unknown. The organization had at its disposal large sums of money of unknown origin. It offered relatively large fees to people who would write against Einstein or oppose him at meetings. It organized meetings by means of large posters, such as were used to announce the greatest virtuosi.

  The people who spoke for and represented this movement may be divided into three groups. The first group comprised the political agents of the “revolution from the Right.” They knew absolutely nothing about Einstein and his theories except that he was a Jew, a “pacifist,” that he was highly regarded in England, and that he also seemed to be trying to gain a hold on the German public. These people spoke loudest and with the greatest assurance. As professional propagandists usually do, they accused Einstein and his supporters of making too much propaganda. They did not enter into any objective discussions, and they intimated in a more or less veiled fashion that the spread of Einstein’s theory was due to the same conspirators who were to blame for the German defeat. Since it is characteristic of the mode of thought of this group, I wish to quote from an article that appeared in the magazine Der Türmer, a literary monthly that was highly regarded in German nationalistic circles. Under the title “Bolshevistic Physics” Einstein’s theory is directly related to the political situation. In the opinion of many, the German defeat was due to the circumstance that President Woodrow Wilson had promised the Germans a just peace, and had thus led them to conclude an armistice, as they were not compelled to do by the military situation. The article continues:

  “Hardly had it become clear to the horrified German people that they had been frightfully duped by the lofty politics of Professor Wilson and swindled with the aid of the professorial nimbus, when a new professorial achievement was again being commended to the simple Germans with the greatest enthusiasm and ecstasy as the pinnacle of scientific research. And unfortunately even highly educated people fell for this — all the more so since Professor Einstein, the alleged new Copernicus, numbers university teachers among his admirers. Yet, without mincing words, we are dealing here with an infamous scientific scandal that fits very appropriately into the picture presented by this most tragic of all political periods. In the last analysis one cannot blame workers for being taken in by Marx, when German professors allow themselves to be misled by Einstein.”

  A second group in this movement directed against Einstein was composed of several physicists who had acquired a reputation in professional circles as a result of precise experiments, and who now wondered that someone could become world-famous because of the constructions of his creative imagination. They lacked the comprehensive vision to realize the necessity for such far-reaching generalizations as those of Einstein; on the whole they were inclined to see only that honest hard-working physicists were being slighted in favor of a frivolous inventor of fantastic hypotheses. Here there was already something of the idea that the ability to observe nature faithfully was a characteristic of the “Nordic” race, which Einstein consequently lacked.

  The third group was composed of philosophers who advocated certain philosophical systems that were inconsistent with the theory of relativity. Or, to put it more precisely, they did not understand the exact physical meaning of the relativity theory, and so they attributed to it a metaphysical interpretation that it actually did not contain. Then they denounced this philosophy that they themselves had invented. Here, too, there is already something of the conception that the Nordic-Aryan philosopher probes the true profundity of nature itself while other races are satisfied with a discussion of how nature may be described from different points of view.

  But since physicists as well as philosophers are often very naïve or, to put it more plainly, are very thoughtless in matters of individual and political psychology, the latter two groups were frequently not even aware that they were acting in the service of a specific political propaganda.

  When Paul Weyland organized his first meeting in the Berlin Philharmonie, he even made great efforts to secure speakers who were of Jewish origin so as to create a kind of smoke screen. At this first meeting Weyland, whose speech was more political than scientific, was followed by E. Gehrcke, a competent experimental physicist of Berlin, who criticized the theory from the point of view of a man who, while making no mistakes in his experiments, simply lacks the acute understanding and flight of imagination to pass from individual facts to a synthesis. Such people are usually ready to accept old hypotheses because through habit they have forgotten that they are not facts, but they like to stamp new theories as “absurd” and “opposed to the spirit of empirical science.” An invitation had also been extended to a representative of philosophy who was to prove that Einstein’s theory was not “truth,” but only a “fiction.” He was of Jewish descent and wa
s intended to be the climax of the meeting. Despite his political innocence and urgent telegrams, he declined at the last moment because some friends had explained the purpose of the meeting to him. As a result the first attack took place without the blessing of philosophy.

  Einstein attended this meeting as a spectator and even applauded the attacks in a friendly spirit. He always liked to regard events in the world around him as if he were a spectator in a theater. The meetings of this group were just as amusing as the sessions of the university faculty in Prague, or of the Prussian Academy of Science.

  Other meetings of this group took place, and in this year the “Einstein case” became a constant subject of discussion in the press. Einstein was besieged with requests to express publicly his opinion of these attacks. But it was repugnant to him to act as if he thought that he was dealing with scientific discussions. He had no desire to discuss publicly questions that for most people were incomprehensible and that played no part whatsoever in these meetings. Finally, in order to terminate the entire affair, he wrote in a Berlin newspaper that it would be senseless to answer in a scientific manner arguments that were not meant scientifically. The public would not be able to judge who was right. Therefore he said simply: “If I were a German nationalist with or without a swastika, instead of being a Jew with liberal, international opinions, then …” This was more understandable to everyone than scientific arguments would have been. Now Einstein’s opponents were more furious than ever and asserted that Einstein was turning a scientific discussion into a political one. Actually, he had once again been the enfant terrible and had simply called the thing by its right name. Even many of his friends would have preferred it had he acted as if he did not understand the motives of his opponents.

  At this time he began to feel uneasy in Berlin and there was a great deal of talk that he would leave Germany. He was also offered a professorship at the Dutch University of Leiden. When he was asked whether he actually wanted to leave Berlin, he said: “Would such a decision be so amazing? My situation is like that of a man who is lying in a beautiful bed, where he is being tortured by bedbugs. Nevertheless, let us wait and see things develop.”

  The movement against Einstein acquired a certain respectability as soon as a physicist who was generally regarded as an outstanding member of his profession put himself at its head. I have already spoken of Philipp Lenard on several occasions. In 1905 Einstein had based his new conception of light on the observations of Lenard. For these and other experiments carried out with the greatest ingenuity, Lenard had received the Nobel prize. He was less skilled, however, in deriving general laws from his observations. When he tried to do so, he involved himself in such complicated hypotheses that they could not contribute to any clarification. He therefore achieved no recognition as a theoretician.

  He was one of the physicists who during the World War had become extreme nationalists and particularly embittered enemies of England. He regarded the defeat, which came quite unexpectedly for him as well as for the others who held the same political views, as the work of international powers: namely, the Socialists and pacifists. He was one of those who began to accuse the Jews of being the actual wire-pullers in the background. Lenard soon joined the Hitler groups and was a very old member of the National Socialist Party.

  He was astonished that Einstein had such great success after the war. In the first place, this man was not an experimenter; secondly, he was the inventor of an “absurd” theory that contradicted sound common sense as embodied in mechanistic physics; and thirdly, in addition to all this he was a Jew and a pacifist. For Lenard this was more than he could stand, and he put his reputation and prestige as a physicist at the service of Einstein’s opponents. In him were united the motives of all three groups that opposed Einstein: the agents of the revolution from the Right, the pure “empiricists,” and the advocates of a certain philosophy.

  Lenard’s nationalistic fanaticism was revealed by many incidents. On one occasion the well-known Russian physicist A. F. Joffe was traveling through Germany after the war in order to resume contact with German colleagues. He went to Heidelberg and wanted to visit Lenard to discuss scientific subjects with him. He requested the porter at the institute to announce him to Lenard. The porter returned and said to Joffe: “Herr Geheimrat Lenard wishes me to say that he has something more important to do than to converse with the enemies of his fatherland.”

  As is well known throughout the entire world the unit of intensity of an electrical current is called an ampere, after the French physicist and mathematician André M. Ampère. Lenard, however, ordered that in his laboratory the electrical unit must change its French name and assume the name of a German physicist, Weber. This change was made on all the instruments in the Heidelberg laboratory.

  Every year in September there was a meeting of German-speaking scientists and teachers of sciences. Usually several thousand persons came together. In 1920 this meeting was to take place at the well-known spa Bad Nauheim. Several papers dealing with the relativity theory were also on the program. Lenard decided to take this opportunity to attack Einstein’s theories before the assembled scientists and to demonstrate their absurdity.

  This became generally known and the session was awaited as if it were a sensational and decisive meeting of a parliament. Max Planck presided. This great scientist and distinguished man detested any kind of sensation. He endeavored to arrange the session in such a way so as to keep the debate on the level on which scientists usually discuss matters and to prevent nonscientific points of view from being brought into it. He arranged it so that the greatest part of the available time was filled with papers that were purely mathematical and technical. Not much time remained for Lenard’s attack and the debate that would ensue. The entire arrangement was made to prevent any dramatic effects.

  Questions of principle were not touched upon in the long reports, which were full of mathematical formulæ. Then Lenard took the floor for a short talk in which he attacked Einstein’s theory, but without introducing any emotional coloring. His argument was neither that the theory was inconsistent with experimental results, nor that it contained logical contradictions, but actually only that it was incompatible with the manner in which ordinary “common sense” conceived things. Fundamentally it was only a criticism of a language that was not that of mechanistic physics.

  Einstein replied very briefly and then two others spoke still more briefly for and against Einstein. With this the session came to an end. Planck was able to heave a sigh of relief that the meeting had passed without any major conflict. The armed policemen who had watched the building were withdrawn. Planck was in such good humor that he ended the session with one of the trivial jokes that have been current among non-physicists: “Since the relativity theory unfortunately has not yet made it possible to extend the absolute time interval that is available for the meeting, our session must be adjourned.”

  To a certain degree the lack of understanding of the philosophical significance of Einstein’s theory among most professional physicists stood in the way of a real debate in which it would have been possible to explain the true content of the theory to its well-meaning opponents. As a result, however, the impression was created that while the Einstein theory might have a meaning for mathematicians, yet for a more philosophically thinking mind it contained various absurdities.

  Thus Lenard himself received the impression that not enough attention was paid to his arguments, and the mass of physicists and mathematicians had no opportunity to take part in a truly fundamental discussion on a grand scale. For the moment the physicists probably felt relieved that nothing worse had happened; nevertheless, the opportunity had been permitted to pass without organizing a real explanation for the great mass of scientists and educated persons.

  The opposition of Lenard and his supporters to Einstein’s theory was checked by one fact. Even though the foundations of the theory could be characterized as “absurd” and “muddled,” yet it was undeniable that i
nferences could be drawn from this “absurd” theory that every scientist had to admit were usable and important. Even the most vigorous opponent, if he was a physicist or chemist, had to reckon with the formula that represented the relation between mass and energy. If the energy E is given off, this is equivalent to a loss of mass E/c2, where c is the velocity of light (see Chapter III). Even the most zealous adherent of the “revolution from the Right” had to use this formula E = mc2 if he wanted to penetrate the nucleus of the atom. Consequently Lenard and his group endeavored to separate this law from its connection with Einstein’s theory and to prove that it had already been known before Einstein, having been advanced by a physicist of whose racial origin and sentiments they approved.

  In the writings of those who want to avoid the name of Einstein at any price, the law of the transformation of mass into energy is often to be found as the “principle of Hasenöhrl.” It is interesting, perhaps, for an understanding of the entire milieu in which Einstein worked to describe how this deliberate removal of Einstein’s name occurred.

  It had long been known that light falling on a surface exerts a pressure on it as if particles were being hurled against the surface. In 1904 the Austrian physicist Hasenöhrl had concluded from this knowledge: if light radiation is enclosed in a vessel, it will exert a pressure on the walls. Even if the vessel itself does not have any material mass, yet because of the pressure of the enclosed radiation it would under the impact of a force behave like a body with material mass. And this “apparent” mass is proportional to the enclosed energy. When the vessel radiates energy E the “apparent” mass m will decrease, according to E = mc2.