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Copyright © 2019 by Matthew Stanley
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Stanley, Matthew, 1975– author.
Title: Einstein’s war : the birth of relativity amid the vicious nationalism of World War I / Matthew Stanley.
Description: New York, New York : Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019001286 | ISBN 9781524745417 (hardcover ; alk. paper) | ISBN 1524745413 (hardcover ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781524745431 (ebook) | ISBN 152474543X (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Relativity (Physics)—History. | Science—Social aspects. | Einstein, Albert, 1879–1955. | Eddington, Arthur Stanley, Sir, 1882–1944. | World War, 1914–1918—Science.
Classification: LCC QC173.52 .S73 2019 | DDC 530.1109/041—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001286
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
The World of Science Before the War
CHAPTER 2
Science Across Nations
CHAPTER 3
The Wars Begin
CHAPTER 4
Increasing Isolation
CHAPTER 5
The Collapse of International Science
CHAPTER 6
A Vital Victory
CHAPTER 7
To Cross the Trenches
CHAPTER 8
The Borders of the Universe
CHAPTER 9
The Resistance to Relativity
CHAPTER 10
Angels of the Revolution
CHAPTER 11
The Test
CHAPTER 12
The Relativity Circus
EPILOGUE
The Legacy of Einstein and Eddington
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
PROLOGUE
“The Devil howling, ‘Ho! . . .’”
THEY HAD BEEN allies for five years but were meeting for the first time. On a Friday afternoon in June 1921 a shabby scientist, wearing shoes without socks, shuffled down a hallway in London. He described himself as having a “pale face and long hair, and a tiny start of a paunch.” Someone watching would notice “an awkward gait, and a cigar in the mouth . . . and a pen in pocket or hand. But crooked legs and warts he does not have, and so is quite handsome.” No one on the planet would have needed an introduction to him: his lively mane and bushy mustache marked him unmistakably as Albert Einstein, the most famous thinker in the world.
Waiting for him was a neatly dressed, square-jawed Englishman. He had a lean, athletic build and a thoughtful, penetrating gaze. Arthur Stanley Eddington had just been elected president of the Royal Astronomical Society (colloquially known as the RAS), but it was not his expertise about the hearts of stars and movements of galaxies that bonded him to Einstein. He had literally journeyed across the world, suffered condemnation and the threat of prison, and battled against centuries of scientific tradition to help make this unruly visitor from Berlin into an icon of science. He was the one who had showed Einstein’s relativity to be true, and who had spread that gospel around the world.
They shook hands in Burlington House, a grand Palladian structure that sat at the inner ring of British science. Not long before, it would have been unthinkable for someone who answered to “Herr Professor” to set foot there. The building had seen ferocious arguments about whether German research even counted as real science, and whether Germans could ever be allowed back into the scientific community after the horrors of the Great War. But now the main room filled to bursting with British scientists eagerly waiting to hear Einstein’s every word.
THIS IS THE story of a theory, general relativity, hailed at its birth as “one of the greatest—perhaps the greatest—of achievements in the history of human thought.” It remains, a century later, one of the essential pillars upholding our understanding of the universe. Relativity not only explained the movements of galaxies through space, predicted black holes, and defined the grand scales of the cosmos, it forced us to question the most basic ways we experience the world around us. Einstein warned that time and space were not what they seemed, that the most fundamental tools we use to make sense of reality were warped. Gravity bent light, twins aged at different rates, stars were askew in the heavens, matter and energy were strange shadows of each other. We saw only a distorted, partial view of the true four-dimensional universe. The truth of things was accessible only to those who could grapple with complicated mathematics and philosophical paradoxes.
Einstein’s extraordinary claims, and Einstein himself, burst into public view in 1919. His theory had been complete for four years and he had been hard at work on it for almost a decade before that. But his work was still little known outside a small group of theoretical physicists. Why? This is also a story of science’s journey from peace to war and back again.
The First World War, the industrialized murder that racked Europe from 1914 to 1918, coincided with Einstein’s most productive years (fifty-nine publications). His struggle with his own theory was inextricably tied to the course of the World War, as it was known at the time. Scientists seeking to confirm his ideas were arrested as spies. Technical journals were banned as enemy propaganda. Colleagues died in the trenches. And most frustratingly, Einstein was separated from his most crucial ally by barbed wire and U-boats. This ally was Eddington, who would go on to convince the world of the truth of relativity.
Eddington took up the cause of that German physicist—whom he had never met—to show how science could triumph over nationalism and hatred. The international institutions of science had been shattered by the war and had left Einstein isolated, but Eddington realized that relativity could be the key to restoring exactly those networks. In 1919, when Europe was still in chaos from the war, Eddington led a globe-spanning expedition to catch a fleeting solar eclipse. It was a rare opportunity to confirm Einstein’s bold prediction that light has weight. It was the results of this expedition—the proof of relativity, as many saw it—that put Einstein on front pages around the world. The pandemonium of the Great War was the background against which this new sage appeared. His scientific revolution depended on battles both intellectual and political, fought from Berlin to London to the very edge of the universe.
The story of Einstein’s relativity was a deeply human one. Far from being an abstract develop
ment of ideas through pure rationality or a spark of inspiration from one person’s mind, this was a messy adventure that combined friendship, hatred, and politics. While Einstein never held a rifle or fired a shot, the war shaped his life and work for years. Falling ill from wartime starvation, unable to send simple letters to his most important colleagues, Einstein was constantly reminded he was living in a state under siege. The war hobbled him but also created the conditions under which his theory came to fruition. The pressures of that shattering conflict pushed together specific people and ideas at just the right moments of serendipity to create the relativity revolution. Einstein’s emergence as a history-making figure could have been quite different: the practice of science, and what it even meant to be a scientist, became deeply enmeshed in questions of politics and empire. All of this molded not only the creation of relativity but the way the world came to first meet Einstein.
One of the most extraordinary features about Einstein’s ascent was the way ordinary nonscientists engaged with the mysteries of relativity. The mathematics and concepts of the theory were hardly accessible; nonetheless apostles like Eddington convinced huge swaths of the public that they should care deeply about its implications. One newspaper of the time tried to describe how the proverbial “man in the street” reacted to this scientific revolution: It “disturbs fundamentally his basic conceptions of the universe and even of his own mind. It challenges somehow the absolute nature of his thought.” What did it mean to live in a universe where things were “relative”? What did science say about our everyday experience? What could we truly know about the world? The implications were mind-bending and the explanations often opaque. The Archbishop of Canterbury complained that the more he read about relativity, the less he understood. The theory can be tough to swallow whole. But in this story we walk alongside Einstein as he develops relativity from the first—we can watch it built brick by brick, from thought experiments to radical concepts to experimental confirmation, instead of needing to grasp it all at once.
Beyond the philosophical puzzles raised by the content of the theory, there were further obstacles. Science already had a theory that explained the nature of the universe: the one presented more than two centuries before by Sir Isaac Newton. Newton’s ideas had answered almost every question asked of them, and they underlay everything that was known at the beginning of the twentieth century. Following his system was what it meant to do science. Alexander Pope’s classic couplet captured this reverence:
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in Night:
God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light.
Einstein and Arthur Eddington around the time they met.
EMILIO SEGRÈ VISUAL ARCHIVES
And now this disheveled German sought to replace Newton? The British poet J. C. Squire offered an addendum to Pope:
It did not last: the Devil howling “Ho!
Let Einstein be!” restored the status quo.
So Einstein and Eddington not only had to convince the world that relativity was true, they had to make the case that it was more true than Newton—so extraordinary that it deserved to knock Newton from his pedestal.
This was Einstein’s personal war. Not only the creation of his universal theory but the struggle to make it known, to persuade friends and enemies of its importance. And his passage from scientific outsider to the new author of our reality not only took place against the backdrop of Armageddon but was intertwined with it. Without the Great War, relativity would not be as we know it, and Einstein’s name would not be synonymous with genius. Two wars, entangled, that changed the world.
CHAPTER 1
The World of Science Before the War
“Thank you. I’ve completely solved the problem.”
THE EINSTEINS WERE early adopters. The brothers Jakob and Hermann ran a small company at the cutting edge of technological innovation: electrification. They brought electrical lights to the public streets of southern Germany, becoming part of that country’s extraordinary growth at the end of the nineteenth century. Only unified in 1871 in the wake of its overwhelming victory in the Franco-Prussian War, Germany was still a young nation. The formerly feuding twenty-five principalities and kingdoms had become a world empire with an enormous army and a streamlined economy whose intellectual and cultural institutions dominated the Continent. There seemed to be no better model for modernity. When Mark Twain visited in 1878, he wrote, “What a paradise this land is! What clean clothes, what good faces, what tranquil contentment, what prosperity, what genuine freedom, what superb government! And I am so happy, for I am responsible for none of it. I am only here to enjoy.”
A year after Twain’s visit, Hermann Einstein’s wife, Pauline, delivered their first child, Albert. They were living in Ulm at the time, a modest city on the banks of the Danube. Ulm (whose urban motto declares “the people of Ulm are mathematicians”) did not hold the Einsteins’ attention for long, and they quickly moved to Munich, the great metropolis of southern Germany. The young Albert was late to talk. He had the habit of saying sentences to himself over and over to get them right before actually speaking. He was also known for his terrible tantrums in which “his face would turn completely yellow, the tip of his nose snow-white.” During one of these episodes, his sister reported, he struck her in the head with a garden hoe.
The Einsteins were Jewish but almost completely secular. In Imperial Germany there were few legal restrictions on Jews but plenty of anti-Semitic boundaries. Like many assimilationist families they dove deeply into German secular culture. Hermann read Schiller and Heine aloud to the children in the evenings. Pauline, a skilled pianist, hoped Albert would be a music partner and started him on violin lessons at age six. In a sign of things to come, the boy deeply disliked the mechanical, repetitive drills he was taught and studied music only reluctantly. It was not until years later that he discovered a passion for Mozart sonatas and threw himself into studying the violin. As he recalled years later, “I believe altogether that love is a better teacher than a sense of duty—at least for me.”
Unfortunately for him, the German education of the day was much more focused on duty than love. The schools—he attended the nearest one to his home, which happened to be a Catholic institution—were highly disciplined and militaristic. He was always unhappy being told what to do and became an antagonist of nearly all his teachers. He threw a chair at one tutor and had the annoying habit of addressing his instructors with the casual “Du” instead of the formal “Sie.” Family legend reports that one teacher dressed him down by saying, “Your mere presence here undermines the class’s respect for me.” Albert was just fine with that situation.
He had few friends and was self-reliant from an early age (he walked the busiest streets of Munich alone at age four). A favorite entertainment was building houses of cards. Contrary to common legend, Albert’s grades were fine. The instruction at school focused largely on classical languages, which was not to his taste, so much of his lasting education happened at home. As an older man, Albert recalled the definitive moment that set him toward a love of science. At age four or five his gadget-loving father brought him the gift of a compass. The simple consistency with which the needle always pointed north struck him deeply. He was entranced by these invisible forces, absolutely consistent and reliable. What were they? Were there more? Could they be understood? If so, how?
A brief phase of religious observance at age eleven (neither stimulated nor supported by his family) was swiftly eclipsed the next year by the discovery of what he came to call his “sacred little geometry book.” The Einsteins regularly invited a poor medical student, Max Talmud, over for dinner. Talmud and Uncle Jakob brought Albert popular science and mathematics books, which Einstein credited with spurring him toward freethinking. The pivotal geometry text was Euclid’s classic Elements, the foundation for two thousand years of European mathematical education. It is structured around a series of i
ndisputable premises (for example, two points define a line) that are then developed steadily and rigorously into sophisticated deductions (for example, the Pythagorean theorem). Albert was stunned by the way the complex could be built from the simple, and how conclusions “could be proved with such certainty that any doubt was ruled out. This clarity and certainty made an indescribable impression on me.” This became his model for how to think about the natural world: start with one clear, powerful idea and then deduce the consequences, hopefully producing something useful along the way.
Particularly important for Einstein was that this knowledge seemed to be beyond the individual. It was true in a profound, transcendental way. Mathematics and science, then, became a way for him to escape “the fetters of the merely personal.” As a teenager he declared he wanted to become a theoretical physicist precisely because of the independence it would give him—from society, from convention, from tradition, from authority. He also admitted that his lack of “practical sense” meant theory would be better than application.
Einstein was perfectly willing to muddle through the expectations of a rigid school system, except for one frightening consequence awaiting him after graduation. Like all German men, he would have to serve in the army. School was bad enough, and he did not think he could survive actual military life. So in an amazing bit of lateral thinking, in 1894 he convinced a family friend to diagnose him with “neurasthenic exhaustion.” This malady was the classic nineteenth-century ailment of an overworked brain and an exhausted nervous system. Einstein levered his diagnosis into dismissal from his school before graduation. He went even further and formally gave up his German citizenship. The imperial state would hold no power over him anymore.
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