Einstein

by Philipp Frank

  Every institution that wanted to appoint one of the refugee scholars was in a dilemma. On the one hand, the American universities were quite ready to help the victims of political persecutions and were glad to have the opportunity of acquiring men of great ability, but, on the other hand, they had a responsibility to their own graduates who were looking for academic positions. It would have been a severe disappointment for them to have positions unexpectedly filled by scholars from Europe who were naturally older and had greater reputation.

  This situation also placed those refugee scholars who had already obtained a position in a difficulty. They felt morally obligated to help their countrymen and fellow sufferers who had been less fortunate, but they also felt obliged to look after the interests of their students primarily. Some of them even went so far as to say that it was the duty of every refugee scholar who had a position to see to it that no other refugee obtained one at the same institution.

  For Einstein the situation was even more difficult. Here again he came to be regarded as the symbol and leader of the entire group of refugee scholars. The friends of the refugees upheld Einstein as an example of the outstanding men who were coming to the United States, while their opponents felt themselves compelled to disparage him in order to oppose the refugee group. The refugees themselves looked upon Einstein as their natural leader. They felt that with his fame he would somehow be able to help them, and they turned to him for help.

  Einstein received hundreds of letters from scholars in Europe who wanted to emigrate and who asked his aid in getting them a position or an “affidavit of support,” required under the American immigration regulations. Einstein tried hard to help them, and he even made out such affidavits himself for many. Others immediately turned to Einstein on their arrival in America. He did the best he could, but naturally the number of persons whom he was actually able to help was very small in comparison with the enormous number who appealed to him.

  In recommending foreign scholars for positions, Einstein as always had only two considerations in mind: the immediate feeling of sympathy for every suffering person, and the conviction that the pursuit of science should be assisted wherever possible. He was always ready to write recommendations for these people. He thought that if a foreign scientist was needed, his recommendation would be of some help, and if this were not the case, it would not hurt either the person recommended or the institution.

  Einstein might have done more for the refugees if he had undertaken to study the situation at various universities and to take advantage of the personal, economic, and political factors involved, but such an action was not possible for him. The people who are the most outstanding intellectually and also the kindest are not always very practical. This explains the contradictory opinions about Einstein. Some people felt that he was kind and devoted, others that he cared little for the fate of individuals.

  While co-operating sincerely in charitable social and political organization Einstein will suddenly tell you: “Sincerely speaking I have never been much interested in people but only in things.” And if you ask him what he meant by “things” he would say: “physical phenomena and methods to handle them.”

  The psychological situation of these new refugees also had its difficulties. Many came from Germany, which they had always considered their native land and with whose intellectual and cultural life they felt themselves united. They had been driven out, but that did not mean that they had therefore lost all connection with it. They came to a foreign country that gave them a friendly reception and made it possible for them to start a new life, which was sometimes even better than the life in their former country. If they laid too great an emphasis on their connection with German culture, they could easily arouse a feeling of antagonism to themselves in the new country.

  On the other hand, owing to the circumstances leading to their emigration, they were strongly opposed, both politically and culturally, to the ruling circles in Germany. As a result, they were accused on the one hand of propaganda in favor of German culture, and on the other hand of carrying on hate propaganda that might create enmity between the United States and Germany or even involve them in war. Remarkably enough, these contradictory accusations were often made at the same time.

  Einstein himself was often surprised that the new immigrants from Germany still remained so much attached to their old country. It was a special puzzle to him why the Jewish refugees, who had suffered so much in Germany, still had such a strong yearning for that country. As Erika and Klaus Mann reported, Einstein on one occasion told this story:

  “I met a young German lawyer who is living in New York, a so-called Aryan, and asked him whether he was homesick. ‘Homesick?’ he said. ‘I? What for? I am not a Jew.’

  “Isn’t that a good one?” Einstein added. “Isn’t that typical? Isn’t the nationalism of the Jews sentimental and lachrymose, a sullen and morose love for a country such as is to be found only among people who do not feel sure which country is theirs?”

  “I am also a Jew,” continued Einstein, “but yet everything seems to me so fine in America that I am not homesick for any country, to say nothing of Herr Hitler’s Germany.”

  We know Einstein’s aversion against the inhuman mechanical attitude of the German ruling caste under the Kaiser, let alone under Hitler. Equally strong, however, is his love for the German music of Bach and Mozart. In certain respects, perhaps, he even shares the tastes of the German nationalists in art. He dislikes “modern” music and finds it rather repugnant. Generally, he likes everything German that derives from the spirit of the pre-Bismarckian and pre-Wilhelminian period. He has been happy with visitors imbued with the spirit of classical German music and literature. He is even quite sympathetic to the Kantian philosophy, partly perhaps because of its emotional relationship with that period of the German spirit. He has this sympathetic feeling for it although on purely scientific grounds he has rejected it in all essential points.

  I have been struck by the fact that despite his emphasized hostility to the spirit of a Germany ruled by Prussian militarists, he has always been fond of conversing with men — for instance, German-American ministers, in whom the older German spirit had somehow been preserved.

  In America Einstein had often been regarded officially as a leader of the Jewish people. When the World’s Fair was opened in New York in 1939–40, Palestine was represented by a pavilion. Since it was customary, at the opening of a pavilion, for the ambassador of the particular country to deliver an address, the question arose who should deliver such an address at the opening of the Palestinian pavilion. The choice did not fall upon a political leader of the Zionists, nor on a rabbi, but instead on Einstein, who was thus officially recognized as a kind of spiritual leader of the Jews.

  5. Einstein’s Attitude toward Religion

  To understand Einstein in its attitude to the Jewish people, one must understand his attitude to traditional Biblical religion and to religion in general. Would not a man like Einstein, whose unsparing criticism had removed the last remnants of medieval semi-theological conceptions from physics, assume a purely critical attitude to the religion of the Bible? Ever since his arrival in America this aspect of his personality has been much in the limelight. In this country people are more interested than in Europe in the problem of the relation between science and religion, and they feel more strongly the need for a mutual understanding between them.

  Einstein’s attitude toward traditional religion is related in turn to his divided attitude to social relations in general. When I first became acquainted with Einstein, around 1910, I had the impression that he was not sympathetic to any kind of traditional religion. At the time of his appointment to Prague he had again joined the Jewish religious community, but he looked at this act rather as at a formality. At this time, too, his children were about to enter elementary school, where they would receive religious instruction. This was a rather difficult problem as he belonged to the Jewish religion and his wife to Greek Orthodox.
“Anyway,” said Einstein, “I dislike very much that my children should be taught something that is contrary to all scientific thinking.” And he recalled jokingly the manner in which school children are told about God. “Eventually the children believe that God is some kind of gaseous vertebrate.” This was an allusion to a saying of the German scientist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel that was then current.

  At that time a superficial observer would easily have settled the question of Einstein’s attitude to religion with the word “sceptical.” Perhaps characteristic of this attitude is a remark that Einstein made to an orthodox Jew whom he once met at a police station in Prague, where I had gone with him to obtain a visa for a passport. The man asked Einstein if he knew a restaurant in Prague where the food was strictly kosher — that is, prepared according to the ritualistic precepts. Einstein mentioned the name of a hotel that was known to be kosher. The man asked Einstein: “Is this hotel really strictly kosher?” This annoyed Einstein somewhat and he said seriously: “Actually only an ox eats strictly kosher.” The pious man was hurt and looked indignantly at Einstein. The latter, however, explained that his statement was not offensive at all but quite objective and innocent: “An ox eats grass, and that is the only strictly kosher food because nothing has been done to it.”

  Einstein’s attitude reflects often the immediate response of a genius which is similar to that of an intelligent child. The world is not judged in the traditional way, but as reason suggests. If this judgment is expressed without any of the traditional euphemisms, it is often called “cynical”; but it should be called rather “sincere with a sense of humor.”

  Einstein was once told that a physicist, whose intellectual capacities were rather mediocre, had been run over by a bus and killed. He remarked sympathetically: “Too bad about his body.”

  On another occasion Einstein was invited by a committee organized to honor a well-known scholar to take part in the celebration of his seventieth birthday and to address the gathering. Einstein replied to this committee: “I hold the man whom you are honoring in high esteem and I like him very much. For this reason I will arrange a dinner in his honor all alone at my home on his birthday. Since no audience will be present, I will simply keep the speech to myself. Wouldn’t it be more convenient for you and the scholar whom you are honoring if you did the same?”

  His manner of speech is often an expression of the urge to make the serious things in the world tolerable by means of a playful disguise, a form of behavior that is ultimately the basis of all artistic activity. The use of such caustic words was for Einstein an artistic way of coming to terms with the world, like the playing of a Mozart sonata, which also represents the evil of the world in a playful manner. In a certain sense all of Mozart’s music might be called “cynical.” It does not take our tragic world very seriously and reflects it in gay, youthful rhythms.

  To understand Einstein’s views on religion seriously it is good to start from his conception of physical science and of science in general. As I have already repeatedly emphasized, the general laws of science, according to Einstein, are not products of induction or generalization but rather products of free imagination which have to be tested by physical observations. In his Oxford address Einstein asks:

  “If it is the case that the axiomatic basis of theoretical physics cannot be an inference from experience, but must be free invention, have we any right to hope that we shall find the correct way? Still more — does this correct approach exist at all save in our imagination?”

  To Einstein the physical theory is a product of human inventiveness, the correctness of which can be judged only on the basis of its logical simplicity and the agreement of its observable consequences with experience. This is exactly the description of a theory and the criterion of its validity which has been advocated by the Logical Positivists. To them the belief in the “existence of a correct theory” means the “hope to make a certain invention.” The expression “the correct form of a theory” has no more meaning than “the correct form of an airplane” what is obviously a meaningless expression.

  But here Einstein deviates definitely from the conception of Logical Positivism. In his Oxford lecture he replied to the question whether there is a “correct way” as follows :

  “To this I answer with complete assurance that in my opinion there is the correct path and, moreover, that it is in our power to find it. Our experience up to date justifies us in feeling sure that in nature is actualized the idea of mathematical simplicity.

  “It is my conviction that pure mathematical construction enables us to discover the concepts and the laws connecting them, which give us the key to the understanding of the phenomena of nature. Experience can, of course, guide us in our choice of serviceable mathematical concepts; it cannot possibly be the source from which they are derived.

  “In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it to be true that pure thought is competent to comprehend the real as the ancients dreamed.”

  Here Einstein even goes so far as to use the language of idealistic philosophy, of the advocates of an aprioristic knowledge — that is, knowledge independent of experience — although he has been a decided opponent of this philosophy. Nevertheless, in order to emphasize as strongly as possible his opposition to some oversimplifications current under the name of “positivism” he employs a mode of expression that can easily be misunderstood by those who have only a superficial knowledge of Einstein’s views.

  The difference between Einstein’s views and those “dreams of the ancients” to whom he felt related is the following: According to the views of the ancient philosophers the power of intuition suffices to advance propositions that do not need to be tested by experience. But this is not what Einstein actually means. He means that the inventive faculty presents us with various possibilities for the construction of mathematical theories, among which only experience can decide.

  The conviction of which Einstein spoke, and for which, naturally, no cogent reasons can be given, is the following: among the theories there will some day be one which in its logical simplicity as well as in its simple representation of observation will be so greatly superior to all rival theories that everyone will recognize it as the best in every respect. This conviction is nothing but an expression of scientific optimism. It is an expression of belief in a certain constitution of observable nature, which has been often called a “belief in the rationality of nature.”

  The existence of such logical pictures of nature is a characteristic that is not self-evident, but which we recognize by experience and which we may call the “rationality of nature,” if we prefer to employ the terminology of traditional philosophy. This terminology is usually employed when one wishes to express one’s sympathy with certain feelings that are customarily expressed with great beauty in the language of that philosophy. Amazement at this rational aspect of nature turns into admiration; and this admiration is, in Einstein’s opinion, one of the strongest roots of religious feeling.

  When we speak of the existence of a logical system that corresponds to natural processes, the term “existence” means in everyday language only that there are thinking beings similar to men which can imagine such a system. If we speak of the “existence” of such a system without relating it to a thinking being, it is an obscure mode of expression. If we do connect it with a thinking being, we imagine more or less vaguely a being similar to man with superior intellectual capacities. Consequently, to speak of the “rationality” of the world always means to think vaguely of a spirit superior to man and yet similar to him. In this way Einstein’s conception of nature is related to what is usually called a “religious” conception of the world.

  Einstein knows very well that this is not a statement about nature that is in any way scientific, but that it expresses a feeling aroused by the contemplation of nature. In this connection he once said:

  “The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the sower of all true art and science. He to whom
this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms — this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the ranks of devoutly religious men.”

  According to Einstein’s conception, it is particularly the scientist in the field of natural science, and especially in the field of mathematical physics, who has this mystical experience. Here is the root of what Einstein calls “cosmic religion.” He once said:

  “The cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest, deriving from behind scientific research. No one who does not appreciate the terrific exertions, the devotion, without which pioneer creation in scientific thought cannot come into being can judge the strength of the feeling out of which alone such work, turned away as it is from immediate practical life, can grow.

  “What deep faith in the rationality of the structure of the world, what a longing to understand even a small glimpse of the reason revealed in the world, there must have been in Kepler and Newton!”

  In recent years the view has frequently been put forth that the physical theories of the twentieth century, especially Einstein’s theory of relativity and the quantum structure of energy, have a great significance for the mitigation of the conflict between religion and science. Since Einstein has spoken of a “cosmic religion” based on science he has been often quoted as an advocate of that view. This, however, is a great misunderstanding. With his clear insight into the logical structure of a scientific theory, he has never encouraged the religious interpretation of recent physics which became current by the popular books of such scientists, as Jeans and Eddington.