Predictably, his family was none too happy about their suddenly uncredentialed and unemployed son. Luckily there was an excellent college, the Federal Swiss Polytechnic (abbreviated ETH in German), that did not require a high school diploma for entry. Albert convinced his family he could study on his own for the entrance exam. After an initial failure and another year of study, he succeeded. He found Switzerland, and Zurich in particular, to be a much more liberal place than Munich, and he thrived in the new environment.
Einstein’s general school habits had not noticeably improved, though. If he did not find a course compelling, he often skipped lectures. These were frequently his mathematics classes, despite the ETH having some of the finest mathematicians in central Europe. One of those instructors was Hermann Minkowski, who disparaged Einstein as a “lazy dog.” Fortunately Albert became close friends with Marcel Grossmann, a mathematics student who took diligent notes. Einstein would read the notes by himself and show up for exams, earning both decent grades and an official reprimand for neglect. He looked back on this arrangement with gratitude for Grossmann’s well-organized notebooks. “I would rather not speculate how I might have fared without them.”
Even his physics classes barely held his attention. They largely focused on well-established science and avoided the exciting new work being done in electrodynamics and the study of heat. It was not so different from science education today. The classes were not really about preparing students to do new science; they were about ensuring mastery of the old. Memorization of concepts, endless sample problems to solve, repeating classic experiments. He and his friends had to read up on modern developments on their own initiative.
Physics was loosely divided into experimental and theoretical branches, though most physicists did some of each, and students like Einstein had to demonstrate proficiency in both. Experimentation was typically done in laboratories—specially designed spaces filled (hopefully) with special instruments used to measure electrical currents, or perhaps the thermal properties of a metal, or the viscosity of a gas. You might be searching for a new phenomenon, finding varieties of old ones, or establishing a better number for, say, the speed of sound in glass. This required patience, steady hands, and a good relationship with machines.
Doing theory required little equipment beyond chalkboards, ink, and paper. The work there was largely conceptual—finding the patterns, usually mathematical in form, that shaped the natural world. The equations that emerged would then (hopefully) explain the variety of the physical world through a few elegant concepts like gravity or inertia. A theorist sought something they could never touch—the laws of nature. Here, one required a good relationship with the intangibles such as ideas, numbers, and mathematical beauty. Einstein had a clear preference for theory over experiment. He wanted to know the principles that made the universe function, that explained why things happened. That said, he also deeply enjoyed his work in the laboratory—he liked seeing concepts play out in a tangible way.
Although Einstein could both run an experiment and derive an equation, it seemed that he was hardly on the road to scientific success. Most important, his general disrespect for authority began to hobble him. When he approached his physics professor H. F. Weber about designing a novel experiment, Weber shut him down immediately: “You are a smart boy . . . but you have one great fault: you do not let yourself be told anything.” Albert was a largely unremarkable student, more known for his “roaring, booming, friendly, all-enveloping laughter” than his scientific skills. There were few signs of this changing.
* * *
THE IMPERIAL AMBITION that chased Einstein out of Germany was aimed at a specific rival: Great Britain. The British Empire stretched around the globe, centered in the vast metropolis of London. Its network of colonial possessions brought resources, markets, and, most important of all, vast prestige. Germany, or more specifically, Kaiser Wilhelm II, was deeply envious. Ironically, Wilhelm was actually the grandson of Queen Victoria and spoke fluent English. He would happily recount his childhood memories of playing at her seaside estate. Despite (or perhaps because of) this, Wilhelm marked Britain as his chief rival. His nation shared long land borders with two large, well-armed, and unsympathetic neighbors—France and Russia—but much of his focus remained on the handful of islands in the North Sea.
Technically known as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, the country was a hodgepodge of ethnicities (Scots, Welsh, Irish) under the domination of the English majority. Indeed, foreigners and patriots often referred to “England” when they meant the entire British nation, a practice that survives to this day. Britain thought of itself as a liberal state, primarily in the classical sense of a limited central government with a largely unregulated free-market economy. But it was also testing the waters of liberalism in the modern sense of toleration of different beliefs and practices. The nineteenth century saw the weakening of the centuries-old established Church, under which only professed Anglicans could hold political office, attend universities, and be full members of British society.
Roman Catholics and Protestant “Dissenters” such as Baptists, Unitarians, and Quakers had been literal second-class citizens. The Quakers in particular had largely been content to respond to this by having limited interaction with wider British society and keeping to their own tight-knit communities. Many Quaker families could trace themselves back to the turbulent seventeenth century, when their founder, George Fox, and his followers were routinely imprisoned and assaulted for their belief in direct mystical contact with God and a radical egalitarianism. The name “Quaker” was originally an insult, referring to the shaking brought on by religious devotion; they were formally known as the Religious Society of Friends, casually referring to one another simply as “Friends.”
One of these Quaker families, the Eddingtons, welcomed a new baby in 1882, naming him Arthur Stanley. Only two years later his schoolteacher father, Arthur Henry Eddington, died in a typhoid epidemic. The young Eddington grew up very close to his mother, Sarah Ann, and his sister, Winifred, in the lovely southwest of England. The green hills and valleys there were the setting of the Arthurian legends and provided many adventures for the young boy.
Stanley, as he was known to his family, showed talent for mathematics very early. He learned the 24 x 24 multiplication table before he could read. He tried to count the number of words in the Bible (he made it through Genesis) and the stars in the sky. These eye-straining activities may have led to his need for glasses, which he received at age twelve. The sheer joy of being able to see things clearly meant that he spent much of that year simply staring closely at trees and stone walls. He was fascinated by the natural world, writing articles about Jupiter for a school newspaper or giving lectures about the moon to an audience consisting of the housemaid in the attic. One childhood essay talked about total eclipses, and how “some of the greatest astronomers in the world” would carry out expeditions to observe them.
Sarah Ann belonged to a generation of Quakers known for their conservative views about, well, everything. Alcohol, the theatre, and tobacco were all forbidden. The Quakers were already famously austere—no priests, no rituals, their meeting halls unadorned by so much as a crucifix, their worship conducted in silence punctuated only by moments of divine inspiration. But most had gone even further, focusing their religious practice inward and disdaining participation in politics or the modern world.
Arthur Stanley was part of the first generation to reject this. The so-called Quaker Renaissance presented a new interpretation of their sect’s theology. Quakers had always contended that every human had a direct connection to God known as the Inner Light (sometimes Inward Light). Everyone was able to commune personally with the divine without the need of institutions or priests. The presence of this Inner Light was also the justification for their pacifism—violence against another person was violence against God. To the older Friends this simply meant declining to fight; to the youn
ger Quakers this meant an obligation to wage peace.
So when Eddington went to study science in Manchester and, later, Cambridge, it was an assertion that his religious beliefs had an important role to play in the modern world. It was a conscious choice to represent the Friends. He was taught by mentors who asserted that science and religion were both critical to modernity in the world and had no inherent conflict. There was a long British tradition, particularly at Cambridge, of science and religion mutually supporting each other. The Quakers were distinctive in calling this out as essential for the new socially diverse, technologically sophisticated world that the twentieth century promised.
Despite this commitment to participation in modern British life, Eddington still stood out. He retained many of his mother’s puritan habits and wore a humble cap to class in an era of ubiquitous bowler hats. He was known to be modest, polite, and reserved—stereotypical for a Quaker. His family was fairly poor, which meant that his higher education was contingent on winning a steady stream of competitive awards, grants, and competitions. He first went to study physics at Manchester University, where he worked with Arthur Schuster, a German immigrant doing cutting-edge laboratory experiments. He thrived there, where a lively and modern Quaker community helped him find his place in the world.
Everything changed in December 1901, when Eddington learned that he had been granted £75 to study the next year at Trinity College Cambridge, the home of Newton, Maxwell, and Tennyson. This was a change of enormous significance. From industrial, lower-class Manchester, the pacifist Dissenter would move to the very heart of refined, Anglican, imperial England. He was one of the first Quakers to make this transition, an event inconceivable a generation before.
The young Eddington
(COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)
At Cambridge, Eddington displayed immense powers of concentration and dedication studying physics and mathematics. Nonetheless, he ever so gradually began to loosen up. At first he took up solitary pursuits, such as cycling. He gradually discovered a passion for fine and not-so-fine literature; both The Rubáiyát and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland were equally inspirational (perhaps some combination of the two led to his passion for whimsical rhyming). Later he joined the chess club, read with a Shakespeare society, and took up tennis and golf with more enthusiasm than skill. One hockey teammate recalled a game in which Eddington “indiscriminately bruised the shins of friend and foe alike as he relentlessly but somewhat myopically chased the ball up and down the field.” He was remarkably physically fit, at a lean five foot eight inches tall and 129 pounds (we know because he tracked his weight precisely throughout school). His handsome, chiseled features and neat grooming would have been sound foundations for courting eligible women, but he showed little interest in them except as colleagues.
Even having gathered a small group of friends, he was still known for being quiet and shy. With one exception. Soon after arriving at Cambridge he met C.J.A. Trimble, a mathematics student with whom Eddington felt an immediate connection. In Trimble’s presence he was a transformed man. As his biographer described it: “With this one friend Eddington could throw off all the hesitant diffidence which formed an almost impenetrable barrier to intimacy with others.” With Trimble he could be “light-hearted and full of fun.” The pair took up hiking and spent much of their free time together exploring the countryside.
We do not know precisely the nature of Eddington and Trimble’s connection. Today their relationship would certainly be read as romantic and probably sexual. However, they met in the waning days of the Victorian tradition of romantic friendship in which two men could have an extremely close, intimate, but nonsexual relationship. Cambridge and Oxford were particularly known for giving rise to these sorts of associations. Same-sex relationships of the past, filtered as they are through social and legal conventions of the time, are notoriously difficult to interpret accurately from the present. Eddington’s letters were destroyed at the end of his life, so we lack much of the evidence we use to understand Einstein’s romances.
Regardless of whether their relationship was a physically romantic one, Eddington and Trimble remained close throughout their lives. Their different backgrounds occasionally caused friction. Once, they stopped at an inn and Trimble suggested they have ginger wine mixed with a bit of gin—Eddington, still adhering to his strict upbringing, was “quite indignant” and refused. Right around this time he took up the similarly forbidden practice of smoking tobacco, though. He originally started smoking just to ease toothaches or calm nerves before an exam, but it quickly grew into a lifelong habit.
Something soothing was very helpful as the time of the legendary Mathematics Tripos examination approached. This was the climactic moment for a student at Cambridge, a grueling four-day test intended to find the finest scholars at the university. It was a rite of passage for generations of British physicists and had an enormous influence on a young scientist’s trajectory. Eddington seized the highest score and was rewarded with the title of “senior wrangler” (the lowest-scoring student was the “wooden spoon”). This was the first time a second-year student had taken the top place, and Eddington was celebrated widely—in particular by the Quakers he had left behind in Weston-super-Mare.
* * *
WE ARE USED to thinking of Einstein at the end of his career—wizened, pipe held sagely in hand. The Einstein of 1900 was not that Einstein. He was young, vivacious. One friend described him this way: “His short skull seems unusually broad. His complexion is matte light brown. Above his large sensuous mouth is a thin black moustache. The nose is slightly aquiline. His striking brown eyes radiate deeply and softly. His voice is attractive, like the vibrant note of a cello.” Despite his preference for old clothes (and a lack of socks), women found him irresistible and he returned the sentiment: “He had the kind of male beauty that, especially at the beginning of the century, caused great commotion.” One friend commented that Einstein “acted on women as a magnet acts on iron filings.”
The young Einstein
EMILIO SEGRÈ VISUAL ARCHIVES
He turned his charms on one woman in particular. Mileva Marić was one of the pioneering women studying physics at the ETH. She was from a Serbian family in Hungary and walked with a distinct limp. Einstein was entranced and courted her aggressively. They carried on a torrid premarital affair. Calling her his “beloved witch,” Albert’s letters to her were a heady mix of physics chatter and promised kisses.
Along with Mileva and Grossmann, Einstein’s circle of friends grew to include Michele Besso, an older engineer with whom he loved to perform music. Eventually the group added Maurice Solovine and Conrad Habicht—they grandly called themselves the Olympia Academy. They would gather to talk physics and philosophy over sausage and tea, or play music over fruit and cheese. Albert never much liked alcohol and he declined the beer that was often served. Sometimes they read Henri Poincaré on the nature of time, sometimes Don Quixote. The young Einstein was a bohemian. His pursuit of science was part of the same social movement as the artists and writers lining the turn-of-the-century coffee shops. Beauty, truth, and love were of a piece with the conservation of energy and Newtonian dynamics.
The exciting physics of those days dealt with the forces of Einstein’s childhood—electricity and magnetism. As those forces were put to work in electrical generators over the nineteenth century, they were studied intently by generations of physicists. Alongside developing applications like the telegraph and the lightbulb, scientists tried to create theories to understand and explain what was happening inside the machines. Both electrical and magnetic forces could be seen to push and pull electrical charges apparently without contact—think of the spinning of the young Einstein’s compass needle. This idea that physical effects could be caused without visible physical interaction (a conceptual problem known as “action at a distance”) was unsettling to many scientists. To resolve this, the English apprentice b
ookbinder turned experimental physicist Michael Faraday proposed the notion of “fields.” These were invisible entities filling the space around electrical and magnetic sources that carried those forces from place to place.
Even this was not a particularly satisfying solution, and it was eventually accepted that there must be a physical thing that carried or supported these fields: the ether. The ether was an invisible, nearly intangible substance that filled all of space and permeated matter. What we observed as electricity or a magnetic field were actually states of tension or twisting within that subtle substance. This fixed the problem of action at a distance (a magnet twisted the ether, and then the ether twisted the compass needle) at the cost of accepting that the universe was filled with bizarre unseen material. This was not as radical as it might seem. It was already well accepted that there was an optical ether that carried light waves. In an analogy to sound waves, which can only exist in air, scientists concluded that there must be some medium that supported light waves as well. The ether functioned both as an explanation (it tells us how and why certain phenomena happened) and a hypothesis (an idea whose consequences we can extend, predict, and look for).
It was extremely impressive as both. The Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell used the concept of the ether to construct an elaborate theory of electromagnetism, which connected electricity and magnetism on a deep and profound level. The equations that came out of this theory (now called Maxwell’s equations, though he never actually wrote them down in the modern form) were one of the most successful scientific accomplishments of the century, and today underlie everything from your cell phone to your fiber-optic Internet connection.
Einstein's War Page 2