That realization would sink in a decade later, when he was wrestling with the geometry of his theory of gravity and found himself forced to rely on the help of a math professor who had once called him a lazy dog. “I have become imbued with great respect for mathematics,” he wrote to a colleague in 1912, “the subtler part of which I had in my simple-mindedness regarded as pure luxury until now.” Near the end of his life, he expressed a similar lament in a conversation with a younger friend. “At a very early age, I made an assumption that a successful physicist only needs to know elementary mathematics,” he said. “At a later time, with great regret, I realized that the assumption of mine was completely wrong.”3
His primary physics professor was Heinrich Weber, the one who a year earlier had been so impressed with Einstein that, even after he had failed his entrance exam to the Polytechnic, he urged him to stay in Zurich and audit his lectures. During Einstein’s first two years at the Polytechnic, their mutual admiration endured. Weber’s lectures were among the few that impressed him. “Weber lectured on heat with great mastery,” he wrote during their second year. “One lecture after another of his pleases me.” He worked in Weber’s laboratory “with fervor and passion,” took fifteen courses (five lab and ten classroom) with him, and scored well in them all.4
Einstein, however, gradually became disenchanted with Weber. He felt that the professor focused too much on the historical foundations of physics, and he did not deal much with contemporary frontiers. “Anything that came after Helmholtz was simply ignored,” one contemporary of Einstein complained. “At the close of our studies, we knew all the past of physics but nothing of the present and future.”
Notably absent from Weber’s lectures was any exploration of the great breakthroughs of James Clerk Maxwell, who, beginning in 1855, developed profound theories and elegant mathematical equations that described how electromagnetic waves such as light propagated. “We waited in vain for a presentation of Maxwell’s theory,” wrote another fellow student. “Einstein above all was disappointed.”5
Given his brash attitude, Einstein didn’t hide his feelings. And given his dignified sense of himself, Weber bristled at Einstein’s ill-concealed disdain. By the end of their four years together they were antagonists.
Weber’s irritation was yet another example of how Einstein’s scientific as well as personal life was affected by the traits deeply bred into his Swabian soul: his casual willingness to question authority, his sassy attitude in the face of regimentation, and his lack of reverence for received wisdom. He tended to address Weber, for example, in a rather informal manner, calling him “Herr Weber” instead of “Herr Professor.”
When his frustration finally overwhelmed his admiration, Professor Weber’s pronouncement on Einstein echoed that of the irritated teacher at the Munich gymnasium a few years earlier. “You’re a very clever boy, Einstein,” Weber told him. “An extremely clever boy. But you have one great fault: you’ll never let yourself be told anything.”
There was some truth to that assessment. But Einstein was to show that, in the jangled world of physics at the turn of the century, this insouciant ability to tune out the conventional wisdom was not the worst fault to have.6
Einstein’s impertinence also got him into trouble with the Polytechnic’s other physics professor, Jean Pernet, who was in charge of experimental and lab exercises. In his course Physical Experiments for Beginners, Pernet gave Einstein a 1, the lowest possible grade, thus earning himself the historic distinction of having flunked Einstein in a physics course. Partly it was because Einstein seldom showed up for the course. At Pernet’s written request, in March 1899 Einstein was given an official “director’s reprimand due to lack of diligence in physics practicum.”7
Why are you specializing in physics, Pernet asked Einstein one day, instead of a field like medicine or even law? “Because,” Einstein replied, “I have even less talent for those subjects. Why shouldn’t I at least try my luck with physics?”8
On those occasions when Einstein did deign to show up in Pernet’s lab, his independent streak sometimes got him in trouble, such as the day he was given an instruction sheet for a particular experiment. “With his usual independence,” his friend and early biographer Carl Seelig reports, “Einstein naturally flung the paper in the waste paper basket.” He proceeded to pursue the experiment in his own way. “What do you make of Einstein?” Pernet asked an assistant. “He always does something different from what I have ordered.”
“He does indeed, Herr Professor,” the assistant replied, “but his solutions are right and the methods he uses are of great interest.”9
Eventually, these methods caught up with him. In July 1899, he caused an explosion in Pernet’s lab that “severely damaged” his right hand and required him to go to the clinic for stitches. The injury made it difficult for him to write for at least two weeks, and it forced him to give up playing the violin for even longer. “My fiddle had to be laid aside,” he wrote to a woman he had performed with in Aarau. “I’m sure it wonders why it is never taken out of the black case. It probably thinks it has gotten a stepfather.”10 He soon resumed playing the violin, but the accident seemed to make him even more wedded to the role of theorist rather than experimentalist.
Despite the fact that he focused more on physics than on math, the professor who would eventually have the most positive impact on him was the math professor Hermann Minkowski, a square-jawed, handsome Russian-born Jew in his early thirties. Einstein appreciated the way Minkowski tied math to physics, but he avoided the more challenging of his courses, which is why Minkowski labeled him a lazy dog: “He never bothered about mathematics at all.”11
Einstein preferred to study, based on his own interests and passions, with one or two friends.12 Even though he was still priding himself on being “a vagabond and a loner,” he began to hang around the coffee-houses and attend musical soirees with a congenial crowd of bohemian soul mates and fellow students. Despite his reputation for detachment, he forged lasting intellectual friendships in Zurich that became important bonds in his life.
Among these was Marcel Grossmann, a middle-class Jewish math wizard whose father owned a factory near Zurich. Grossmann took copious notes that he shared with Einstein, who was less diligent about attending lectures. “His notes could have been printed and published,” Einstein later marveled to Grossmann’s wife. “When it came time to prepare for my exams, he would always lend me those notebooks, and they were my savior. What I would have done without these books I would rather not speculate on.”
Together Einstein and Grossmann smoked pipes and drank iced coffee while discussing philosophy at the Café Metropole on the banks of the Limmat River. “This Einstein will one day be a great man,” Grossmann predicted to his parents. He would later help make that prediction true by getting Einstein his first job, at the Swiss Patent Office, and then aiding him with the math he needed to turn the special theory of relativity into a general theory.13
Because many of the Polytechnic lectures seemed out of date, Einstein and his friends read the most recent theorists on their own. “I played hooky a lot and studied the masters of theoretical physics with a holy zeal at home,” he recalled. Among those were Gustav Kirchhoff on radiation, Hermann von Helmholtz on thermodynamics, Heinrich Hertz on electromagnetism, and Boltzmann on statistical mechanics.
He was also influenced by reading a lesser-known theorist, August Föppl, who in 1894 had written a popular text titled Introduction to Maxwell’s Theory of Electricity. As science historian Gerald Holton has pointed out, Föppl’s book is filled with concepts that would soon echo in Einstein’s work. It has a section on “The Electrodynamics of Moving Conductors” that begins by calling into question the concept of “absolute motion.” The only way to define motion, Föppl notes, is relative to another body. From there he goes on to consider a question concerning the induction of an electric current by a magnetic field: “if it is all the same whether a magnet moves in the vicinity
of a resting electric circuit or whether it is the latter that moves while the magnet is at rest.” Einstein would begin his 1905 special relativity paper by raising this same issue.14
Einstein also read, in his spare time, Henri Poincaré, the great French polymath who would come tantalizingly close to discovering the core concepts of special relativity. Near the end of Einstein’s first year at the Polytechnic, in the spring of 1897, there was a mathematics conference in Zurich where the great Poincaré was due to speak. At the last minute he was unable to appear, but a paper of his was read there that contained what would become a famous proclamation. “Absolute space, absolute time, even Euclidean geometry, are not conditions to be imposed on mechanics,” he wrote.15
The Human Side
One evening when Einstein was at home with his landlady, he heard someone playing a Mozart piano sonata. When he asked who it was, his landlady told him that it was an old woman who lived in the attic next door and taught piano. Grabbing his violin, he dashed out without putting on a collar or a tie. “You can’t go like that, Herr Einstein,” the landlady cried. But he ignored her and rushed into the neighboring house. The piano teacher looked up, shocked. “Go on playing,” Einstein pleaded. A few moments later, the air was filled with the sounds of a violin accompanying the Mozart sonata. Later, the teacher asked who the intruding accompanist was. “Merely a harmless student,” her neighbor reassured her.16
Music continued to beguile Einstein. It was not so much an escape as it was a connection: to the harmony underlying the universe, to the creative genius of the great composers, and to other people who felt comfortable bonding with more than just words. He was awed, both in music and in physics, by the beauty of harmonies.
Suzanne Markwalder was a young girl in Zurich whose mother hosted musical evenings featuring mostly Mozart. She played piano, while Einstein played violin. “He was very patient with my shortcomings,” she recalled. “At the worst he used to say, ‘There you are, stuck like the donkey on the mountain,’ and he would point with his bow to the place where I had to come in.”
What Einstein appreciated in Mozart and Bach was the clear architectural structure that made their music seem “deterministic” and, like his own favorite scientific theories, plucked from the universe rather than composed. “Beethoven created his music,” Einstein once said, but “Mozart’s music is so pure it seems to have been ever-present in the universe.” He contrasted Beethoven with Bach: “I feel uncomfortable listening to Beethoven. I think he is too personal, almost naked. Give me Bach, rather, and then more Bach.”
He also admired Schubert for his “superlative ability to express emotion.” But in a questionnaire he once filled out, he was critical about other composers in ways that reflect some of his scientific sentiments: Handel had “a certain shallowness”; Mendelssohn displayed “considerable talent but an indefinable lack of depth that often leads to banality”; Wagner had a “lack of architectural structure I see as decadence”; and Strauss was “gifted but without inner truth.”17
Einstein also took up sailing, a more solitary pursuit, in the glorious Alpine lakes around Zurich. “I still remember how when the breeze dropped and the sails drooped like withered leaves, he would take out his small notebook and he would start scribbling,” recalled Suzanne Markwalder. “But as soon as there was a breath of wind he was immediately ready to start sailing again.”18
The political sentiments he had felt as a boy—a contempt for arbitrary authority, an aversion to militarism and nationalism, a respect for individuality, a disdain for bourgeois consumption or ostentatious wealth, and a desire for social equality—had been encouraged by his landlord and surrogate father in Aarau, Jost Winteler. Now, in Zurich, he met a friend of Winteler’s who became a similar political mentor: Gustav Maier, a Jewish banker who had helped arrange Einstein’s first visit to the Polytechnic. With support from Winteler, Maier founded the Swiss branch of the Society for Ethical Culture, and Einstein was a frequent guest at their informal gatherings in Maier’s home.
Einstein also came to know and like Friedrich Adler, the son of Austria’s Social Democratic leader, who was studying in Zurich. Einstein later called him the “purest and most fervent idealist” he had ever met. Adler tried to get Einstein to join the Social Democrats. But it was not Einstein’s style to spend time at meetings of organized institutions.19
His distracted demeanor, casual grooming, frayed clothing, and forgetfulness, which were later to make him appear to be the iconic absentminded professor, were already evident in his student days. He was known to leave behind clothes, and sometimes even his suitcase, when he traveled, and his inability to remember his keys became a running joke with his landlady. He once visited the home of family friends and, he recalled, “I left forgetting my suitcase. My host said to my parents, ‘That man will never amount to anything because he can’t remember anything.’ ”20
This carefree life as a student was clouded by the continued financial failings of his father, who, against Einstein’s advice, kept trying to set up his own businesses rather than go to work for a salary at a stable company, as Uncle Jakob had finally done. “If I had my way, papa would have looked for salaried employment two years ago,” he wrote his sister during a particularly gloomy moment in 1898 when his father’s business seemed doomed to fail again.
The letter was unusually despairing, probably more than his parents’ financial situation actually warranted:
What depresses me most is the misfortune of my poor parents who have not had a happy moment for so many years. What further hurts me deeply is that as an adult man, I have to look on without being able to do anything. I am nothing but a burden to my family . . . It would be better off if I were not alive at all. Only the thought that I have always done what lay in my modest powers, and that I do not permit myself a single pleasure or distraction save for what my studies offer me, sustains me and sometimes protects me from despair.21
Perhaps this was all merely an attack of teenage angst. In any event, his father seemed to get through the crisis with his usual optimism. By the following February, he had won contracts for providing street lights to two small villages near Milan. “I am happy at the thought that the worst worries are over for our parents,” Einstein wrote Maja. “If everyone lived such a way, namely like me, the writing of novels would never have been invented.”22
Einstein’s new bohemian life and old self-absorbed nature made it unlikely that he would continue his relationship with Marie Winteler, the sweet and somewhat flighty daughter of the family he had boarded with in Aarau. At first, he still sent her, via the mail, baskets of his laundry, which she would wash and then return. Sometimes there was not even a note attached, but she would cheerfully try to please him. In one letter she wrote of “crossing the woods in the pouring rain” to the post office to send back his clean clothes. “In vain did I strain my eyes for a little note, but the mere sight of your dear handwriting in the address was enough to make me happy.”
When Einstein sent word that he planned to visit her, Marie was giddy. “I really thank you, Albert, for wanting to come to Aarau, and I don’t have to tell you that I will be counting the minutes until that time,” she wrote.“I could never describe, because there are no words for it, how blissful I feel ever since the dear soul of yours has come to live and weave in my soul. I love you for all eternity, sweetheart.”
But he wanted to break off the relationship. In one of his first letters after arriving at the Zurich Polytechnic, he suggested that they refrain from writing each other. “My love, I do not quite understand a passage in your letter,” she replied. “You write that you do not want to correspond with me any longer, but why not, sweetheart? ... You must be quite annoyed with me if you can write so rudely.” Then she tried to laugh off the problem: “But wait, you’ll get some proper scolding when I get home.”23
Einstein’s next letter was even less friendly, and he complained about a teapot she had given him. “The matter of my sending you
the stupid little teapot does not have to please you at all as long as you are going to brew some good tea in it,” she replied. “Stop making that angry face which looked at me from all the sides and corners of the writing paper.” There was a little boy in the school where she taught named Albert, she said, who looked like him. “I love him ever so much,” she said. “Something comes over me when he looks at me and I always believe that you are looking at your little sweetheart.”24
But then the letters from Einstein stopped, despite Marie’s pleas. She even wrote his mother for advice. “The rascal has become frightfully lazy,” Pauline Einstein replied. “I have been waiting in vain for news for these last three days; I will have to give him a thorough talking-to once he’s here.”25
Finally, Einstein declared the relationship over in a letter to Marie’s mother, saying that he would not come to Aarau during his academic break that spring. “It would be more than unworthy of me to buy a few days of bliss at the cost of new pain, of which I have already caused too much to the dear child through my fault,” he wrote.
He went on to give a remarkably introspective—and memorable—assessment of how he had begun to avoid the pain of emotional commitments and the distractions of what he called the “merely personal” by retreating into science:
It fills me with a peculiar kind of satisfaction that now I myself have to taste some of the pain that I brought upon the dear girl through my thoughtlessness and ignorance of her delicate nature. Strenuous intellectual work and looking at God’s nature are the reconciling, fortifying yet relentlessly strict angels that shall lead me through all of life’s troubles. If only I were able to give some of this to the good child. And yet, what a peculiar way this is to weather the storms of life—in many a lucid moment I appear to myself as an ostrich who buries his head in the desert sand so as not to perceive the danger.26
Einstein: His Life and Universe Page 6