Einstein: His Life and Universe

by Walter Isaacson

  The horrors of the great war, the breakdown of social hierarchies, the advent of relativity and its apparent undermining of classical physics all seemed to combine to produce uncertainty. “For some years past, the entire world has been in a state of unrest, mental as well as physical,” a Columbia University astronomer, Charles Poor, told the New York Times the week after the confirmation of Einstein’s theory was announced. “It may well be that the physical aspects of the unrest, the war, the strikes, the Bolshevist uprisings, are in reality the visible objects of some underlying deeper disturbance, worldwide in character. This same spirit of unrest has invaded science.”47

  Indirectly, driven by popular misunderstandings rather than a fealty to Einstein’s thinking, relativity became associated with a new relativism in morality and art and politics. There was less faith in absolutes, not only of time and space, but also of truth and morality. In a December 1919 editorial about Einstein’s relativity theory, titled “Assaulting the Absolute,” the New York Times fretted that “the foundations of all human thought have been undermined.”48

  Einstein would have been, and later was, appalled at the conflation of relativity with relativism. As noted, he had considered calling his theory “invariance,” because the physical laws of combined spacetime, according to his theory, were indeed invariant rather than relative.

  Moreover, he was not a relativist in his own morality or even in his taste. “The word relativity has been widely misinterpreted as relativism, the denial of, or doubt about, the objectivity of truth or moral values,” the philosopher Isaiah Berlin later lamented. “This was the opposite of what Einstein believed. He was a man of simple and absolute moral convictions, which were expressed in all he was and did.”49

  In both his science and his moral philosophy, Einstein was driven by a quest for certainty and deterministic laws. If his theory of relativity produced ripples that unsettled the realms of morality and culture, this was caused not by what Einstein believed but by how he was popularly interpreted.

  One of those popular interpreters, for example, was the British statesman Lord Haldane, who fancied himself a philosopher and scientific scholar. In 1921, he published a book called The Reign of Relativity, which enlisted Einstein’s theory to support his own political views on the need to avoid dogmatism in order to have a dynamic society. “Einstein’s principle of the relativity of our measurements of space and time cannot be taken in isolation,” he wrote. “When its import is considered it may well be found to have its counterpart in other domains of nature and of knowledge generally.”50

  Relativity theory would have profound consequences for theology, Haldane warned the archbishop of Canterbury, who immediately tried to comprehend the theory with only modest success. “The Archbishop,” one minister reported to the dean of English science, J. J. Thomson, “can make neither head nor tail of Einstein, and protests that the more he listens to Haldane, and the more newspaper articles he reads on the subject, the less he understands.”

  Haldane persuaded Einstein to come to England in 1921. He and Elsa stayed at Haldane’s grand London townhouse, where they found themselves completely intimidated by their assigned footman and butler. The dinner that Haldane hosted in Einstein’s honor convened a pride of English intellectuals leonine enough to awe an Oxford senior common room. Among those present were George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Eddington, J. J. Thomson, Harold Laski, and of course the baffled archbishop of Canterbury, who got a personal briefing from Thomson in preparation.

  Haldane seated the archbishop next to Einstein, so he got to pose his burning question directly to the source. What ramifications, His Grace inquired, did the theory of relativity have for religion?

  The answer probably disappointed both the archbishop and their host. “None,” Einstein said. “Relativity is a purely scientific matter and has nothing to do with religion.”51

  That was no doubt true. However, there was a more complex relationship between Einstein’s theories and the whole witch’s brew of ideas and emotions in the early twentieth century that bubbled up from the highly charged cauldron of modernism. In his novel Balthazar, Lawrence Durrell had his character declare, “The Relativity proposition was directly responsible for abstract painting, atonal music, and formless literature.”

  The relativity proposition, of course, was not directly responsible for any of this. Instead, its relationship with modernism was more mysteriously interactive. There are historical moments when an alignment of forces causes a shift in human outlook. It happened to art and philosophy and science at the beginning of the Renaissance, and again at the beginning of the Enlightenment. Now, in the early twentieth century, modernism was born by the breaking of the old strictures and verities. A spontaneous combustion occurred that included the works of Einstein, Picasso, Matisse, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Joyce, Eliot, Proust, Diaghilev, Freud, Wittgenstein, and dozens of other path-breakers who seemed to break the bonds of classical thinking.52

  In his book Einstein, Picasso: Space,Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc, the historian of science and philosophy Arthur I. Miller explored the common wellsprings that produced, for example, the 1905 special theory of relativity and Picasso’s 1907 modernist masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Miller noted that both were men of great charm “yet who preferred emotional detachment.” Each in his own way felt that something was amiss in the strictures that defined his field, and they were both intrigued by discussions of simultaneity, space, time, and specifically the writings of Poincaré.53

  Einstein served as a source of inspiration for many of the modernist artists and thinkers, even when they did not understand him. This was especially true when artists celebrated such concepts as being “free from the order of time,” as Proust put it in the closing of Remembrance of Things Past. “How I would love to speak to you about Einstein,” Proust wrote to a physicist friend in 1921. “I do not understand a single word of his theories, not knowing algebra. [Nevertheless] it seems we have analogous ways of deforming Time.”54

  A pinnacle of the modernist revolution came in 1922, the year Einstein’s Nobel Prize was announced. James Joyce’s Ulysses was published that year, as was T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. There was a midnight dinner party in May at the Majestic Hotel in Paris for the opening of Renard, composed by Stravinsky and performed by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Stravinsky and Diaghilev were both there, as was Picasso. So, too, were both Joyce and Proust, who “were destroying 19th century literary certainties as surely as Einstein was revolutionizing physics.” The mechanical order and Newtonian laws that had defined classical physics, music, and art no longer ruled.55

  Whatever the causes of the new relativism and modernism, the untethering of the world from its classical moorings would soon produce some unnerving reverberations and reactions. And nowhere was that mood more troubling than in Germany in the 1920s.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE WANDERING ZIONIST

  1920–1921

  The motorcade in New York City, April 4, 1921

  Kinship

  In the article he wrote for The Times of London after the confirmation of his relativity theory, Einstein quipped that if things went bad the Germans would no longer consider him a compatriot but instead a Swiss Jew. It was a clever remark, made more so because Einstein knew, even then, that there was an odious smell of truth to it. That very week, in a letter to his friend Paul Ehrenfest, he described the mood in Germany. “Anti-Semitism is very strong here,” he wrote. “Where is this all supposed to lead?”1

  The rise of German anti-Semitism after World War I produced a counterreaction in Einstein: it made him identify more strongly with his Jewish heritage and community. At one extreme were German Jews such as Fritz Haber, who did everything they could, including converting to Christianity, to assimilate, and they urged Einstein to do the same. But Einstein took the opposite approach. Just when he was becoming famous, he embraced the Zionist cause. He did not officially join any Zionist organization, nor for
that matter did he belong to or worship at any synagogue. But he cast his lot in favor of Jewish settlements in Palestine, a national identity among Jews everywhere, and the rejection of assimilationist desires.

  He was recruited by the pioneering Zionist leader Kurt Blumenfeld, who paid a call on Einstein in Berlin in early 1919. “With extreme naïveté he asked questions,” Blumenfeld recalled. Among Einstein’s queries: With their spiritual and intellectual gifts, why should Jews be called on to create an agricultural nation-state? Wasn’t nationalism the problem rather than the solution?

  Eventually, Einstein came around to the cause. “I am, as a human being, an opponent of nationalism,” he declared. “But as a Jew, I am from today a supporter of the Zionist effort.”2 He also became, more specifically, an advocate for the creation of a new Jewish university in Palestine, which eventually became Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

  Once he decided to abandon the postulate that all forms of nationalism were bad, he found it easy to embrace Zionism with greater enthusiasm. “One can be an internationalist without being indifferent to members of one’s tribe,” he wrote a friend in October 1919. “The Zionist cause is very close to my heart ...I am glad that there should be a little patch of earth on which our kindred brethren are not considered aliens.”3

  His support for Zionism put Einstein at odds with assimilationists. In April 1920, he was invited to address a meeting of one such group that emphasized its members’ loyalty to Germany, the German Citizens of the Jewish Faith. He replied by accusing them of trying to separate themselves from the poorer and less polished eastern European Jews. “Can the ‘Aryan’ respect such pussyfooters?” he chided.4

  Privately declining the invitation was not enough. Einstein also felt compelled to write a public attack on those who tried to fit in by talking “about religious faith instead of tribal affiliation.”* In particular, he scorned what he called “the assimilatory” approach that sought “to overcome anti-Semitism by dropping nearly everything Jewish.” This never worked; indeed, it “appears somewhat comical to a non-Jew,” because the Jews are a people set apart from others. “The psychological root of anti-Semitism lies in the fact that the Jews are a group of people unto themselves,” he wrote. “Their Jewishness is visible in their physical appearance, and one notices their Jewish heritage in their intellectual work.”5

  The Jews who practiced and preached assimilation tended to be those who took pride in their German or western European heritage. At the time (and through much of the twentieth century), they tended to look down on Jews from eastern Europe, such as Russia and Poland, who seemed less polished, refined, and assimilated. Although Einstein was German Jewish, he was appalled by those from his background who would “draw a sharp dividing line between eastern European Jews and western European Jews.” The approach was doomed to backfire against all Jews, he argued, and it was not based on any true distinction. “Eastern European Jewry contains a rich potential of human talents and productive forces that can well stand the comparison to the higher civilization of western European Jews.”6

  Einstein was acutely aware, even more than the assimilationists, that anti-Semitism was not the result of rational causes. “In Germany today hatred of the Jews has taken on horrible expressions,” he wrote in early 1920. Part of the problem was that inflation was out of control. The German mark had been worth about 12 cents at the beginning of 1919, which was half of its value from before the war but still manageable. But by the beginning of 1920, the mark was worth a mere 2 cents, and collapsing further each month.

  In addition, the loss of the war had been humiliating. Germany had lost 6 million men and then was forced into surrendering land containing half of its natural resources, plus all of its overseas colonies. Many proud Germans believed it must have been the result of betrayal. The Weimar Republic that had emerged after the war, though supported by liberals and pacifists and Jews such as Einstein, was disdained by much of the old order and even the middle class.

  There was one group that could be easily cast as the alien and dark force most responsible for the humiliation facing a proud culture.“People need a scapegoat and make the Jews responsible,” Einstein noted. “They are a target of instinctive resentment because they are of a different tribe.”7

  Weyland, Lenard, and the Antirelativists

  The explosion of great art and ideas in Germany at the time, as Amos Elon wrote in his book The Pity of It All, was largely due to Jewish patrons and pioneers in a variety of fields. This was particularly true in science. As Sigmund Freud pointed out, part of the success of Jewish scientists was their “creative skepticism,” which arose from their essential nature as outsiders.8 What the Jewish assimilationists underestimated was the virulence with which many Germans, whom they considered to be their fellow countrymen, in fact saw them as essentially outsiders or, as Einstein put it, “a different tribe.”

  Einstein’s first public collision with this anti-Semitism came in the summer of 1920. A shady German nationalist named Paul Weyland, an engineer by training, had turned himself into a polemicist with political aspirations. He was an active member of a right-wing nationalistic political party that pledged, in its 1920 official program, to “diminish the dominant Jewish influence showing up increasingly in government and in public.”9

  Weyland realized that Einstein, as a highly publicized Jew, had engendered resentment and jealousy. Likewise, his relativity theory was easy to turn into a target, because many people, including some scientists, were unnerved by the way it seemed to undermine absolutes and be built on abstract hypotheses rather than grounded in solid experiment. So Weyland published articles denouncing relativity as “a big hoax” and formed a ragtag (but mysteriously well-funded) organization grandly dubbed the Study Group of German Scientists for the Preservation of a Pure Science.

  Joining with Weyland was an experimental physicist of modest reputation named Ernst Gehrcke, who for years had been assailing relativity with more vehemence than comprehension. Their group lobbed a few personal attacks at Einstein and the “Jewish nature” of relativity theory, then called a series of meetings around Germany, including a large rally at Berlin’s Philharmonic Hall on August 24.

  Weyland spoke first and, with the orotund rhetoric of a demagogue, accused Einstein of engaging in a “businesslike booming of his theory and his name.” Einstein’s penchant for publicity, wanted or not, was being used against him, as his assimilationist friends had warned. Relativity was a hoax, Weyland said, and plagiarized to boot. Gehrcke said much the same with a more technical gloss, reading from a written text. The meeting, reported the New York Times, “had a decidedly antiSemitic complexion.”10

  In the middle of Gehrcke’s talk, there arose from the audience a quiet murmur:Einstein, Einstein. He had come to see the circus and, averse neither to publicity nor controversy, laugh at the spectacle. As his friend Philipp Frank noted, “He always liked to regard events in the world around him as if he were a spectator in a theater.” Sitting in the audience with his friend the chemist Walther Nernst, he cackled loudly at times and at the end pronounced the entire event “most amusing.”11

  But he was not truly amused, and he even briefly considered moving away from Berlin.12 His anger aroused, he made the tactical mistake of responding with a highly charged diatribe that was published three days later on the front page of the Berliner Tageblatt, a liberal daily owned by Jewish friends. “I am well aware that the two speakers are unworthy of reply by my pen,” he said, but then proceeded not to be restrained by that awareness. Gehrcke and Weyland had not been explicitly anti-Semitic, nor did they overtly criticize Jews in their speeches. But Einstein alleged that they would not have attacked his theory “if I were a German nationalist, with or without a swastika, instead of a Jew.”13

  Einstein spent most of his piece refuting Weyland and Gehrcke. But he also attacked a more reputable physicist who was not at the meeting but had given support to the antirelativity cause: Philipp Lenard.

&n
bsp; Winner of the 1905 Nobel Prize, Lenard had been a pioneer experimenter who described the photoelectric effect. Einstein had once admired him. “I have just read a wonderful paper by Lenard,” Einstein had gushed to Mari back in 1901. “Under this beautiful piece I am filled with such happiness and joy that I absolutely must share some of it with you.” After Einstein had published his first spate of seminal papers in 1905, citing Lenard by name in the one on light quanta, the two scientists had exchanged flattering letters.14

  But as an ardent German nationalist, Lenard had become increasingly bitter about the British and the Jews, contemptuous of the publicity Einstein’s theory was garnering, and vocal in his attacks on the “absurd” aspects of relativity. He had allowed his name to be used on brochures that were distributed at Weyland’s meeting, and as a Nobel laureate he had worked behind the scenes to make sure that Einstein was not awarded the prize.

  Because Lenard had refrained from showing up at the Philharmonic Hall rally, and because his published critiques of relativity had been academic in tone, Einstein did not need to attack him in his newspaper piece. But he did. “I admire Lenard as a master of experimental physics, but he has not yet produced anything outstanding in theoretical physics, and his objections to the general theory of relativity are of such superficiality that, up until now, I did not think it necessary to answer them,” he wrote. “I intend to make up for this.”15