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Einstein: His Life and Universe

Page 79

by Walter Isaacson


  13. Einstein to William Frauenglass, May 16, 1953, AEA 41-112; “Refuse to Testify Einstein Advises,”New York Times , June 12, 1953;Time , June 22, 1953.

  14. All of these editorials ran on June 13, 1953, except the Chicago editorial, which ran on June 15.

  15. Sam Epkin to Einstein, June 15, 1953, AEA 41-409; Victor Lasky to Einstein, June 1953, AEA 41-441; George Stringfellow to Einstein, June 15, 1953, AEA 41-470.

  16. New York Times , June 14, 1953.

  17. Bertrand Russell to New York Times, June 26, 1953; Einstein to Bertrand Russell, June 28, 1953, AEA 33-195.

  18. Abraham Flexner to Einstein, June 12, 1953, AEA 41-174; Shepherd Baum to Einstein, June 17, 1953, AEA 41-202.

  19. Richard Frauenglass to Einstein, June 20, 1953, AEA 41-181.

  20. Sarah Shadowitz, “Albert Shadowitz,”Globe and Mail (Toronto), May 26, 2004. The author is the subject’s daughter.

  21. Sayen, 273–276; Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Committee on Government Operations, “Testimony of Albert Shadowitz,” Dec. 14, 1953, and “Report on the Proceedings against Albert Shadowitz for Contempt of the Senate,” July 16, 1954; Albert Shadowitz to Einstein, Dec. 14, 1953, AEA 41-659; Einstein to Albert Shadowitz, Dec. 15, 1953, AEA 41-660. Shadowitz was cleared in July 1955, two years after his testimony, after the fall of McCarthy.

  22. Jerome and Taylor, 120–121.

  23. Bird and Sherwin, 133, 495.

  24. Ibid., 495.

  25. James Reston, “Dr. Oppenheimer Suspended by A.E.C. in Security Review,” New York Times, Apr. 13, 1954. On Sunday, Apr. 11, Joseph and Stewart Alsop, in their New York Herald Tribune column, had speculated that “leading physicists” were now a target of security investigations, but they did not mention Oppenheimer by name.

  26. Pais 1982, 11; Bird and Sherwin, 502–504.

  27. Johanna Fantova’s journal, June 3, 16, 17, 1954, in Calaprice, 359.

  28. Einstein to Herbert Lehman, May 19, 1954, AEA 6-236.

  29. Johanna Fantova’s journal, June 17, 1954, in Calaprice, 359.

  30. Einstein to Norman Thomas, Mar. 10, 1954, AEA 61-549; Einstein to W. Stern, Jan. 14, 1954, AEA 61-470. See also Einstein to Felix Arnold, Mar. 19,1954,AEA 59-118:“The current investigations are an incomparably greater danger to our society than those few communists in the country could ever be.”

  31. Johanna Fantova journal, Mar. 4, 1954, in Calaprice, 356; Einstein to Queen Mother Elisabeth of Belgium, Mar. 28, 1954, AEA 32-410.

  32. Theodore White, “U.S. Science,”The Reporter , Nov. 11, 1954. White went on to write The Making of the President series of books.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: THE END

  1. Johanna Fantova journal, Mar. 19, 1954, in Calaprice, 356.

  2. Einstein eulogy for Rudolf Ladenberg, Apr. 1, 1952, AEA 5-160.

  3. Einstein to Jakob Ehrat, May 12, 1952, AEA 59-554; Einstein to Ernesta Marangoni, Oct. 1, 1952, AEA 60-406; Einstein to Queen Mother Elisabeth of Belgium, Jan. 12, 1953, AEA 32-405.

  4. Einstein interview with Lili Foldes, The Etude , Jan. 1947; Calaprice, 150. Information about his repeated playing of this record was given to me by someone who knew Einstein in his later years.

  5. Einstein to Hans Muehsam, Mar. 30, 1954, AEA 38-434.

  6. Einstein to Conrad Habicht and Maurice Solovine, Apr. 3, 1953, AEA 21-294; Einstein to Maurice Solovine, Feb. 27, 1955, AEA 21-306.

  7. Sayen, 294.

  8. Einstein to Hans Albert Einstein, May 1, 1954, AEA 75-918.

  9. Einstein to Hans Albert Einstein, unfinished letter, Dec. 28, 1954, courtesy of Bob Cohn, purchased at Christie’s sale, Einstein Family Correspondence.

  10. Gertrude Samuels, “Einstein, at 75, Is Still a Rebel,”New York Times Magazine , Mar. 14, 1954.

  11. Johanna Fantova journal, 1954, in Calaprice, 354–363.

  12. Wolfgang Pauli to Max Born, Mar. 3, 1954, in Born 2005, 213.

  13. Einstein to Michele Besso, Aug. 10, 1954, AEA 7-420.

  14. Einstein to Louis de Broglie, Feb. 8, 1954, AEA 8-311.

  15. Einstein 1916, final appendix to the 1954 ed., 178.

  16. Bertrand Russell to Einstein, Feb. 11, 1955, AEA 33-199; Einstein to Bertrand Russell, Feb. 16, 1955, AEA 33-200.

  17. Einstein to Niels Bohr, Mar. 2, 1955, AEA 33-204.

  18. Bertrand Russell, “Manifesto by Scientists for Abolition of War,” sent to Einstein on Apr. 5, 1955, AEA 33-209, and issued publicly July 9, 1955.

  19. Einstein to Farmingdale Elementary School, Mar. 26, 1955, AEA 59-632; Alice Calaprice, ed., Dear Professor Einstein (New York: Prometheus, 2002), 219.

  20. Einstein to Vero and Bice Besso, Mar. 21, 1955, AEA 7-245.

  21. Eric Rogers, “The Equivalence Principle Demonstrated,” in French, 131; I. Bernard Cohen,“An Interview with Einstein,”Scientific American (July 1955).

  22. Whitrow, 90; Einstein to Bertrand Russell, Apr. 11, 1955, AEA 33-212.

  23. Einstein to Zvi Lurie, Jan. 5, 1955, AEA 60-388; Abba Eban, An Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1977), 191; Nathan and Norden, 640.

  24. Helen Dukas, “Einstein’s Last Days,” AEA 39-71; Calaprice, 369; Pais 1982, 477.

  25. Helen Dukas, “Einstein’s Last Days,” AEA 39-71; Helen Dukas to Abraham Pais, Apr. 30, 1955, in Pais 1982, 477.

  26. Michelmore, 261.

  27. Nathan and Norden, 640.

  28. Einstein, final calculations, AEA 3-12. The final page can be viewed at www.alberteinstein.info/db/ViewImage.do?DocumentID=34430&Page=12.

  EPILOGUE: EINSTEIN’S BRAIN AND EINSTEIN’S MIND

  1. Michelmore, 262. Einstein’s will, which was witnessed by the logician Kurt Gödel, among others, gave Helen Dukas $20,000, most of his personal belongings and books, and the income from his royalties until she died, which she did in 1982. Hans Albert received only $10,000; he died while a visiting lecturer in Woods Hole, Mass., in 1973, survived by a son and daughter. Einstein’s other son, Eduard, received $15,000 to assure his continued care at the Zurich asylum, where he died in 1965. His stepdaughter Margot got $20,000 and the Mercer Street house, which was actually already in her name, and she died there in 1986. Dukas and Otto Nathan were made literary executors, and they guarded his reputation and papers so zealously that biographers and the editors of his collected papers would for years be stymied when they attempted to print anything verging on the merely personal.

  2. “Einstein the Revolutionist,”New York Times , Apr. 19, 1955;Time , May 2, 1955. The lead story in the extra edition of The Daily Princetonian was written by R. W. “Johnny” Apple, a future Times correspondent.

  3. The weird tale has produced two fascinating books: Carolyn Abraham’s Possessing Genius, a comprehensive account of the odyssey of Einstein’s brain, and Michael Paterniti’s Driving Mr. Albert, a delightful narrative of a ride across America with Einstein’s brain in the trunk of a rented Buick. There have also been some memorable articles, including Steven Levy’s “My Search for Einstein’s Brain,”New Jersey Monthly , August 1978; Gina Maranto’s “The Bizarre Fate of Einstein’s Brain,”Discover , May 1985; Scott McCartney, “The Hidden Secrets of Einstein’s Brain Are Still a Mystery,”Wall Street Journal , May 5, 1994. In addition, Einstein’s ophthalmologist Henry Abrams happened to wander into the autopsy room, and he ended up taking with him his former patient’s eyeballs, which he subsequently kept in a New Jersey safe deposit box.

  4. Abraham, 22. Abraham interviewed the grown girl in 2000.

  5. “Son Asked Study of Einstein’s Brain,”New York Times , Apr. 20, 1955; Abraham, 75. Harvey had indicated that he was going to send the brain to Montefiore Medical Center in New York to oversee the studies. But as doctors there waited in anticipation, he changed his mind and decided to keep it to himself. The dispute made headlines. “Doctors Row over Brain of Dr. Einstein,” reported the Chicago Daily Tribune. Abraham, 83, citing Chicago Daily Tribune, Apr. 20, 1955.

  6. Levy 1978. See also www.echonyc.com/~steven/einstein.html.

  7. Se
e Abraham, 214–230, for an account of this issue.

  8. Bill Toland, “Doctor Kept Einstein’s Brain in Jar 43 Years: Seven Years Ago, He Got ‘Tired of the Responsibility,’ ”Pittsburgh Post-Gazette , Apr. 17, 2005.

  9. Marian Diamond, “On the Brain of a Scientist,”Experimental Neurology 88 (1985); www.newhorizons.org/neuro/diamond_einstein.htm.

  10. Sandra Witelson et al., “The Exceptional Brain of Albert Einstein,”Lancet , June 19, 1999; Lawrence K. Altman, “Key to Intellect May Lie in Folds of Einstein’s Brain,”New York Times , June 18, 1999; www.fhs.mcmaster.ca/psychiatryneuroscience/faculty/witelson; Steven Pinker, “His Brain Measured Up,”New York Times , June 24, 1999.

  11. Einstein to Carl Seelig, Mar. 11, 1952, AEA 39-013. See also Bucky, 29: “I am not more gifted than anybody else. I am just more curious than the average person, and I will not give up on a problem until I have found the proper solution.”

  12. Seelig 1956a, 70.

  13. Born 1978, 202.

  14. Einstein to William Miller, quoted in Life magazine, May 2, 1955, in Calaprice, 261.

  15. Hans Tanner, quoted in Seelig 1956a, 103.

  16. André Maurois, Illusions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 35, courtesy of Eric Motley. Perse was the pseudonym of Marie René Auguste Alexis Léger, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1960.

  17. Newton’s Principia, book 3; Einstein, “On the Method of Theoretical Physics,” the Herbert Spencer lecture, Oxford, June 10, 1933, in Einstein 1954, 274.

  18. Clark, 649.

  19. Lee Smolin, “Einstein’s Lonely Path,”Discover (Sept. 2004).

  20. Einstein’s foreword to Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), xv.

  21. Einstein, “Freedom and Science,” in Ruth Anshen, ed., Freedom, Its Meaning (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940), 92, reprinted in part in Einstein 1954, 31.

  22. Einstein to Phyllis Wright, Jan. 24, 1936, AEA 52-337.

  23. Einstein to Herbert S. Goldstein, Apr. 25, 1929, AEA 33-272. For a discussion of Maimonides and divine providence in Jewish thought, see Marvin Fox, Interpreting Maimonides (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 229–250.

  24. Banesh Hoffmann, in Harry Woolf, ed., Some Strangeness in the Proportion (Saddle River, N.J.: Addison-Wesley, 1980), 476.

  INDEX

  Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.

  Abraham, Max, 221, 592n

  Abrams, Henry, 640n

  acceleration, 108, 145–49, 155, 181–82, 188–92, 199, 201–2, 223, 319–20, 511, 548, 607n

  “action at a distance,” 319–20, 330, 346–47, 448–53, 454, 458

  Adler, Friedrich, 38–39, 150–51, 156, 158–59, 163, 240

  AEG, 302

  affine connection, 339, 344

  African-Americans, 445, 505, 531

  Agriculture Department, U.S., 443–44

  Albert I, King of Belgium, 415–16, 432

  Albert I, Prince of Monaco, 296

  Aleckovic, Mira, 87

  algebra, 17

  All Quiet on the Western Front, 372

  American Association for the Advancement of Science, 136

  “American Creed, The,” 530–31

  American Friends Service Committee, 445, 624n

  ammonia, 206

  AM radio signals, 111

  Analysis of the Sensations (Mach), 81

  analytic propositions, 82–83

  Anderson, Marian, 445

  Andromeda galaxy, 254, 353

  Annalen derPhysik, 57, 58, 70, 94, 102, 127, 138, 140, 190–91, 220

  Antigone (Sophocles), 81

  anti-Semitism, 3, 15, 30, 43, 61, 142, 149, 152, 163–64, 177, 183, 207, 269–71, 281–308, 311–12, 315, 359, 403–10, 427, 428–30, 443, 444–45, 469, 475, 505, 517, 524, 567n, 601n

  “Appeal to the Cultured World” (“Manifesto of the 93”) (1914), 206–7, 244

  Arabs, 381, 409, 520, 541

  Aristarchus, 518

  Aristotle, 5

  arms control, 487–95, 498, 500–501

  Army, U.S., 478

  Arrhenius, Svante, 310, 311, 312, 314

  Aspect, Alain, 458

  Associated Press, 355

  Association of Manhattan Project Scientists, 491

  astrology, 384

  astronomy, 5, 191, 202–5, 218, 253, 254–62, 267, 269, 275–76, 311, 316, 317, 353–56

  atheism, 386, 388–90, 462, 587n

  Atlantic, 489, 497

  atomic bomb, 5, 272, 382, 415, 469–76, 480–86, 489–90, 497–98, 500, 509, 525, n–32n

  Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), 531–32

  “Atomic War or Peace” (Einstein), 489–90, 497–98

  atomic weight, 57

  atoms:

  existence of, 2, 43, 56, 57, 70, 93, 94, 95, 101, 103, 104, 140, 164, 169, 255

  gas, 164, 323, 480–81

  momentum and position in, 323, 346, 348–49

  nucleus of, 322, 456

  splitting of (nuclear fission), 469–72

  structure of, 314, 321–22, 325, 345, 456

  subatomic particles of, 316, 322–33, 334, 345, 352, 353, 454, 459–60, 463–64, 512, 538, 625n, 627n

  Attempt at a Theory of Electrical and Optical Phenomena in Moving Bodies (Lorentz), 116–17

  Austro-Hungarian Empire, 163–64

  autism, 566n

  Avogadro, Amedeo, 101–2

  Avogadro’s number, 101–3, 106

  Aydelotte, Frank, 480–81

  Bach, Johann Sebastian, 29, 38, 420, 472

  Bad Nauheim conference (1920), 287–89

  Baldwin, Roger, 380

  Balfour, Arthur, 290

  Ballets Russes, 280

  Balthazar (Durrell), 279

  Bamberger, Louis, 395, 397

  Baron-Cohen, Simon, 566n

  Barrow, John, 351–52

  Baruch, Bernard, 474

  Beethoven, Ludwig van, 29, 38, 207, 536

  Begin, Menachem, 520

  Beginning or the End, The, 491–93

  Belgian War Resisters’ Committee, 417

  Belgium, 168, 471–73

  Bell, John Stewart, 458

  Ben-Gurion, David, 508, 521, 523

  Berkeley, George, 81, 350

  Berks, Robert, 604n

  Berlin, Isaiah, 278

  Berlin, University of, 14, 168, 178–81, 184–89, 201, 202, 203–11, 212, 213, 215–16, 217, 218–21, 224, 227n, 228–32, 234, 236, 237, 241–42, 246–48, 249, 259, 261–62, 271, 277, 280, 281–89, 301–6, 307, 315, 318, 356–59, 362, 363, 364, 381–83, 384, 387–89, 392, 394–95, 399–401, 403, 408, 411, 471, 523, 601n

  Berliner Tageblatt, 285–88, 359

  Berlin Physical Society, 96

  Bern, University of, 142, 144–53

  Bern Clock Tower, 107, 113, 124, 125–26

  Bern Scientific Society, 438

  Bernstein, Aaron, 18–19, 567n

  Bernstein, Jeremy, 468, 576n

  Besso, Anna Winteler, 27, 62, 231, 237, 418, 517, 540, 636n

  Besso, Michele Angelo, 27, 61–62, 66, 83, 85, 101, 106, 113, 122, 126, 128, 136, 150, 151, 169, 170, 174, 184, 186, 190, 199, 200–201, 210, 211, 213, 215, 218, 221, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230–31, 234, 237, 239, 277, 322, 323, 334, 341, 355, 417, 418, 517, 538, 540, 576n, 591n, 636n

  Bethe, Hans, 407

  Bible, 20, 386, 391, 434

  Bibo (Einstein’s parrot), 438, 535–36

  Big Bang theory, 355

  Biology of War, The (Nicolai), 244

  birth control, 65–66

  bivector fields, 512

  Bizet, Georges, 370

  blackbody radiation, 68, 94–95, 96, 98, 99–100, 118, 322

  black holes, 250–52

  Blackwood, Caroline, 433–34

  Blumenfeld, Kurt, 282, 290, 303

  Bohm, David, 458, 534

  Bohr, Niels:

  atomic model of, 314, 321–22, 325, 345

  Einstei
n’s disputes with, 269, 324–26, 344–49, 496, 514–15, 539, 609n

  at Institute for Advanced Study, 514–15

  in Manhattan Project, 482–84

  Nobel Prize awarded to, 325

  photograph of, 336

  quantum mechanics supported by, 324–26, 332–33, 344–49, 448, 451–52, 458, 468–69, 514–15, 626n

  reputation of, 5, 269, 311, 330–31, 325, 338, 407

  Boltzmann, Ludwig, 33, 49, 56–57, 67, 68, 69–72, 98

  Bond, Horace, 505

  Bond, Julian, 505

  “border conditions,” 252–54, 265–66

  Born, Hedwig, 270, 286–87, 330, 331, 372, 392, 393, 408, 429

  Born, Max, 95, 100, 106, 132, 223–24, 241–42, 253, 267, 268, 269–70, 274, 286, 287, 288, 324, 329, 330, 331, 334, 335, 392, 393, 408, 413, 429, 432, 442, 448, 450, 461, 463, 464, 519–20, 538, 539

  Bose, Satyendra Nath, 327–29, 609n

  Bose-Einstein condensation, 328–29, 609n

  Bose-Einstein statistics, 327–28

  Boston Globe, 136

  Boston Herald, 299

  Brahe, Tycho, 166

 

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