Einstein's Genius Club

by Feldman, Burton, Williams, Katherine

  Privacy was not easily attained. In Princeton, his wife, Elsa, and secretary, Helen Dukas, guarded the front door of 112 Mercer Street. Princeton was as self-contained and self-assured as Einstein himself, so his daily walk to his office attracted little attention. On one occasion, however, his morning walk was interrupted by a high school student sufficiently guileless to have inveigled a rare interview for his school newspaper. “My life is a simple thing that would interest no one. It is a known fact that I was born, and that is all that is necessary.” Thus did Einstein steer the young journalist away from personal questions.1

  No one who met Einstein seems to have harbored suspicions that his reticence was a pose. Indeed, he led a very active social life. Yet he seems to have avoided revelation—even self-revelation, having remained, as he remarked in an appreciation of Freud, among those “not-having-been-analyzed.” One activity that tends to reveal is teaching. But Einstein preferred not to teach. His appointments at the Prussian Academy in Berlin and at the Institute for Advanced Study relieved him of all teaching duties. “I couldn't resist the temptation of a post in which I would be free from all obligations and be able to indulge wholly in my musings,”2 he wrote of his appointment in Berlin. No one took a Ph.D. under his direction. He did not cultivate protégés or disciples among students. As he said, he was always a loner.

  In his later years, Einstein alluded to the price he paid for his single-minded devotion to science. When his close friend Michele Besso died in 1955, shortly before Einstein himself, he wrote admiringly to Besso's widow of Michele's ability to lead a “harmonious life”:

  [W]hat I most admired in Michele as a man was his ability to live many years with his wife, not only in peace but in constant accord, an endeavor in which I have lamentably failed twice.3

  Einstein had chosen the perfection of work, Besso the perfection of life. Besso's sister, visiting Princeton in 1947, told Einstein that she said she had long wondered why her brother had not made some great discovery in mathematics. Einstein laughed and said, “Michele is a humanist, a universal spirit, too interested in many things to become a monomaniac. Only a monomaniac gets what we commonly refer to as results.” Then, according to Besso's sister, “Einstein giggled to himself.”4

  THE CONFIDENCE OF YOUTH

  It is thought that scientific genius is best nurtured in households rich in learning and culture. If so, Einstein's family was ideal. His father, Hermann Einstein, was an easygoing and good-natured man, not particularly suited to the business world. After several false starts, he opened an electrochemical works in Munich with his brother Jakob. Einstein's mother, Pauline, was the more cultured and widely read parent. She also played the piano.

  Einstein was born in Ulm, a vibrant, highly industrialized city in southern Germany. The Einstein family history is typical of German Jewry. In the sixteenth century, a small Jewish community grew in the small town of Buchau, about forty miles from Ulm, where an abbey afforded protection. To that small town, in 1665, came Baruch Moises Ainstein. Like other Jews, Ainstein became a tradesman (in cloth and horses) and enjoyed relative freedom to practice his faith. For two centuries, the Jews of Buchau lived nestled against the Alps in peace. During the mid-nineteenth century, however, Einstein's family began a slow migration to Ulm, where prosperity born of industry beckoned. Hermann was born in Ulm and to Ulm he returned with Pauline, whom he met in Stuttgart, where he had been sent to school.

  In 1880, a year after Albert's birth, the family moved to Munich, convinced by Hermann's brother Jakob that riches were to be made from the generation of electricity. Jakob, a graduate of Stuttgart Polytechnic, persuaded the more cautious Hermann to join him in partnership. Jakob would serve as inventor and technician; Hermann would tend to the business side.

  Despite Jakob's talent, or perhaps because of it, the ensuing years were lean. Munich and the surrounding Bavaria, conservative and steeped in tradition, had resisted industrialization. Not so the rest of Germany. Although the Einstein brothers seemed to have gotten in on the ground floor, they faced fierce competition from well-established companies outside Bavaria. Time and again, Jakob's innovations proved too ambitious and Hermann's caution too inhibiting. Later, Maja, Albert's sister, described their father's method: He “had a particularly pronounced way of trying to get to the bottom of something, by examining it from every side, before he could reach a decision.”5 It was a mode better suited to a physicist than to a businessman. Albert's formative years were spent watching his father and uncle struggle through several incorporations and dissolutions. Capital borrowed from family and friends was lost time and again, and, in the end, the brothers went their own ways.

  In many ways, it was an ordinary childhood. Yet the young Einstein was anything but ordinary. Even the moment of his birth provided a shock. Pauline, glimpsing her firstborn, saw only his “large and angular” head, flattened at the back. In a few weeks, time, his skull rounded out; still, he was overly plump, to his grandmother's horror: “Much too fat! Much too fat!” Slow to speak, he nevertheless appeared quite self-possessed as an infant, able to amuse himself. His sister's arrival on the scene may have upended his universe. She was clearly useless as a toy. “Where are its wheels?” he asked.6

  For all that the Einstein family struggled, it remained solidly middle class. The loving parents, culturally Jewish but not observant, seem to have indulged Einstein and his sister, Maja, nurturing their inquisitiveness and encouraging their musical talents. Despite protests (including hurling a chair at a prospective music teacher), Albert took violin lessons and became so proficient that he and his mother played piano duets. He was free to wander about his neighborhood at the tender age of four. He was also free to let loose his temper on Maja. She narrowly missed being hit by a bowling ball and was not so lucky when Albert came after her with a hoe. More than anything, he was free to explore intellectually, especially in the realm of mechanics. With an extended family steeped in technical and business know-how, Einstein found ready answers to his precocious questions. He was always eager to observe: At age five, during an illness, he was given a magnetic compass by his father. The device, meant only as a distraction, fascinated and excited the budding physicist.

  He acquitted himself honorably enough in his schoolwork. But he was the odd boy out in elementary school and, later, the Gymnasium, where rote learning and sports-worship ruled. Happily, he could turn to his uncle Jakob about algebra. Later, a young medical student, Max Talmey, became a boarder in the Einstein house. With Talmey, Einstein found an equal with whom to converse about physical science and higher mathematics. Geometry opened up the “sacred… book” of Euclidian geometry for Einstein: Its “clarity and certainty made an indescribable impression on me.”7

  Very early on, he demonstrated the stubborn independence so evident throughout his life. He scorned organized sports and such youthful pastimes as playing soldier: “Poor people,” he once said as a uniformed parade passed.8 He resented the “mindless and mechanical method of teaching” favored by German elementary and secondary schools. Compulsory examinations seemed to him appropriate for “a penal institution.”9 Again and again, he turned to his mathematical pursuits, a world apart from school and the society of children.

  At age twelve, Einstein, whose upbringing was secular, got religion. His overwhelmingly Catholic public school was required by law to ensure that he received training in his own religion. A distant relative was unearthed to do the honors, his nonobservant parents being unequal to the task. At first fiercely reluctant, he succumbed to the lure of Judaism with all the fervor of a convert. He was swept up by religious zeal, forgoing pork and composing religious songs. But as the time neared for his bar mitzvah, his high-spirited belief vanished. “[W]ith breathless attention,” he began reading “popular scientific books” that thoroughly contradicted, in his view, much of the Bible. Later, he remembered his subsequent “orgy of free thinking, coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state throu
gh lies.”10 He never had a bar mitzvah.

  Had his father's business not turned sour, Einstein would probably have endured the hated Gymnasium and graduated with his peers. Military service would then have swallowed him up, all the more agonizing for his antipathy toward authority. But at age fifteen, he was able to escape. His parents were now living in Milan, where Hermann and Jakob, with the backing of Pauline's family, had reconstituted their failed electrical lighting company. Albert stayed in Munich to finish Gymnasium. It was not a happy year. He was lonely and missed his family. He spent Christmas alone for the first time. As ill luck would have it, his “home room” teacher, or primary Gymnasium instructor, was the Greek professor. Although Einstein excelled at mathematics and the sciences, Greek eluded him. Some of the blame must surely rest with adolescent arrogance: Of what use to him that florid language with its dual voice and impenetrable verb system? At any rate, in the spring, the Greek professor exploded: “Your mere presence here undermines the class's respect for me,” he shouted.11 On the verge of dismissal from school, already far beyond the Gymnasium mathematics curriculum, and miserable without his family, Albert begged a family friend and doctor for an official letter allowing him to leave school and join his parents.

  The conundrum of what to do now that Albert was in Milan occupied the Einsteins for months. Back in the family fold, Albert regained his spirits. But family finances were at low ebb. In Munich, Albert had been eligible for state-funded schooling. Now, he would have to earn his keep at a practical job (a solution he instantly rejected) or find a way to continue his schooling. Albert resisted both, perhaps because he relished the freedom of days without lessons. He fell in with a congenial group of youths with whom he explored Milan. He also helped with the family business. Finally, it was decided that he would apply to the renowned Zurich Polytechnic School (later renamed Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule—the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology—or ETH) to pursue a degree in electrical engineering. Lacking a high school diploma, he boned up for the college entrance exam. Unfortunately, for all his efforts, he failed three parts of the exam: French, chemistry, and biology. As always, he did poorly in subjects other than his passions—math and physics.

  Calamity was averted when physics professor Heinrich Weber saw those scores. He invited Einstein to sit in on his lectures. From there, entrance by special fiat was almost inevitable. All that was required was a high school diploma. A year in Aarau, a small town outside Zurich, gave Einstein much more than his high school diploma. Boarding with a high school professor and his family, Einstein fell in love for the first time, played his violin incessantly, and haunted the beautiful countryside. Marie Winteler, the object of his affection, was destined to be supplanted, the victim of Einstein's great charms and also his tendency to withdraw his emotions without warning.

  The following year, Einstein entered Zurich Polytechnic School (ETH). There, he met Mileva Marić, the sole female student in the physics class. Marić, an ethnic Serb, was, like Einstein, an outsider. Highly intelligent and resolute—attributes necessary for her to have penetrated such a male domain as ETH—she knew that in Zagreb her chances of pursuing a technical degree were nonexistent. Switzerland, with its tradition of liberal thinking, gave her the chance. Although well matched in their intelligence, temperamentally Marić and Einstein seemed poles apart. Increasingly at ease with himself and the world, Einstein was as outgoing as Mileva was somber. On the surface, at least, he exuded charm and nonchalance in social settings. Still, in later years Einstein described himself as a “loner.” Solitude afforded him the space to think. Nor did solitude necessarily mean physical isolation. As a boy he could shut out the noise surrounding him in a crowded room and lose himself in a problem. Scientists would do well to live in lighthouses, he once said (perhaps thinking of Spinoza, who took up lens grinding), alone and apart for the sake of thought.12

  At ETH, Einstein studied with several physicists who would become lifelong friends: Marcel Grossmann, whose lecture notes helped Einstein pass math exams; Friedrich Adler, a socialist and, like Einstein, devoted admirer of the philosopher Ernst Mach; and Michele Besso, who would later work with Einstein at the Patent Office. Besso was a particularly cherished friend. At ETH, they devoured material not generally taught in classes, including James Maxwell's theories on electromagnetism and Ernst Mach's critique of Newton. It was Besso to whom Einstein turned in May 1905 with his “difficult problem.” Out of that conversation came the final step toward the special theory of relativity.

  Not alone among ETH students, Einstein rebelled against the ordinary demands of the professors—attending lectures and taking exams were bothersome distractions. He devoted most of his time and energies to extracurricular studies: Mach, Maxwell, Hermann von Helmholtz, Heinrich Hertz, Hendrik Lorentz, Henri Poincaré. His love affair with Mileva blossomed. In their fourth year at ETH, they both took a required final exam. Einstein passed, coming in third among five. Mileva failed one crucial part. Distraught, she nevertheless allowed herself to be encouraged by Einstein and hoped to retake the exam the following year. Their marriage was planned. It would remain so for three long years, all the while actively opposed by Einstein's mother.

  Having graduated, Einstein struggled to make a living. He and Mileva tried their hand at tutoring, but existence was meager. Einstein failed to gain a teaching post, alone among his ETH friends to be shut out. Just as he had antagonized his Gymnasium professors, Einstein had managed to alienate almost everyone in authority at ETH. Broke and discouraged, he and Mileva returned to their respective homes. In the meantime, he gained Swiss citizenship and landed two successive temporary teaching jobs. Mileva, at her home in Novi Sad, was pregnant. She would later give birth to a daughter, to be named Lieserl. The infant was probably given up for adoption some months after her birth.

  In 1902, Einstein moved to Bern, where at last he landed a solid job at the Patent Office. He and Mileva had been apart for a year. At the end of 1902, Hermann Einstein died of heart failure, having finally given his approval for the marriage. Einstein and Mileva married in January 1903. Too impoverished for a honeymoon, they returned to their apartment in Bern. Little Lieserl remained in Novi Sad, kept secret from their life in Bern. Einstein never set eyes on her.

  THE MIRACLE YEAR

  Like a general marshaling troops, Einstein pursued his goals single-mindedly and relentlessly. His behavior with his family was an example. Newlywed though he was, he wrote paper after paper, all the while toiling six days a week at the Patent Office. Mileva, meanwhile, having failed her exams again, settled into the job of housewife, scribe, adviser, colleague, and, in 1904, mother to Hans Albert, the first of their two sons.

  It had been a dream of his early youth, to fly along a ray of life as if surfing. That image became a thought experiment and led to the fourth of his five “annus mirabilis” papers of 1905. That paper, famously titled “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” demolishes Newton's absolute time and space. They become relative to the speed of light. What became known as the special theory of relativity remains today one of Einstein's two most celebrated contributions to physics. The second appeared in a paper written soon after: “Is the Inertia of a Body Dependent on Its Energy Content?” The answer to this question emerged in a simple and elegant formula: e=mc2.

  Yet of his five “miraculous” papers, Einstein reserved the word “revolutionary” for the first: “On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Generation and Transformation of Light.” It was revolutionary—the more so for its contribution to quantum mechanics, a worldview he never ceased to oppose. It was also Einstein's most profound contribution to atomic structure—apart from the equation that culminated in Hiroshima.

  Einstein's “light” article postulates that the wave theory of light, while useful and commonsensical, since it accords with our view of light as continuous, nevertheless does not accord with experimental data. Rather, light is particle, “distributed discontinuously in space.” The paper at
tempts to resolve a contradiction between the two phenomena: gas and electromagnetism. Gas, it had been shown, was made up of discontinuous particulate matter—atoms. Light or electromagnetic processes were supposed to be waves that traveled through a medium called the ether. Eventually, thanks to Einstein, the problem of “ether,” and, indeed, the need to conceive of it, disappear. But in the “light” paper, Einstein is more concerned with solving the disconnect between experimental data and the idea of light as a wave. What he demonstrates, though for years physicists resist his conclusions, is that light is particulate. It is “quantum” in nature, discontinuous and finite, just as are the atoms of helium in a balloon.

  The second “miracle year” paper, “A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions,” was not published until 1906. However, as soon as Einstein completed it, he sent it to the University of Zurich as his doctoral dissertation. That paper and the third, “On the Motion of Small Particles Suspended in Liquids at Rest Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat,” take up the molecular realm. The aptly titled dissertation reveals Einstein's early interest in fixing the size, and indeed the reality, of atoms. The third paper dealt with Brownian motion—the movement of particles suspended in liquid—and thermodynamics. These three papers alone would have assured Einstein's fame as a physicist. Indeed, so radical were the concepts of light quanta and relativity that only very slowly did the world of physics begin to take note.