His despair grew from the purely scientific to the broadly humanistic. He was increasingly sickened by the growing militarism around him: “heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism—how passionately I hate them.” Few of his colleagues agreed. Instead, he had to look abroad to his friends in neutral countries. Writing to Ehrenfest, he wondered if there was anywhere that would feel like home to him:
The international catastrophe weighs heavily on me as an international person. Living in this “great age” it is hard to understand that we belong to this mad, degenerate species which imputes free will to itself. If only there were somewhere an island for the benevolent and the prudent! Then also I would want to be an ardent patriot.
Without that island of sensibility, the best he could do was isolate himself within the heart of the Reich. He focused on his calculations, and searched for what his equations might still hold.
CHAPTER 4
Increasing Isolation
“Until the truth and German honor have finally been recognized by the entire world.”
EINSTEIN’S HOPES OF seclusion did not last long. The still-warm ashes of a medieval library would ignite a firestorm that would consume the world of science, and Einstein was not able to escape. The humble town of Louvain, one of the many shattered by the fighting, held a special significance. The destruction of the ancient university became a symbol of German Kultur run amok. And a critical pillar of that Kultur was science.
About one-sixth of the town had been wrecked by soldiers chasing down imagined civilian snipers. The university library was utterly ruined. Irreplaceable cultural treasures were destroyed. When word of the devastation spread to Britain, it was seized on to mobilize support for the war. London’s Daily Mail blared, HOLOCAUST OF LOUVAIN—TERRIBLE TALES OF MASSACRE. Burned buildings and bayoneted corpses could be found across Europe by this time, but only in Louvain did there seem to be an assault on the shared European heritage itself. Books and scrolls that should have belonged to scholars of all nations were now gone forever.
Germany had spent decades making itself an intellectual center—remember the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes used to draw Einstein to Berlin—and it now appeared to have sacrificed all of that for naked military advantage. Intellectuals and artists around the world accused Germany of reverting to savagery. Britain’s Prime Minister H. H. Asquith declared that Louvain could only be considered to be a “blind, barbarian” act. The town’s name quickly became shorthand for atrocities against culture and learning.
Scholars in Germany were deeply offended by their country’s portrayal as a brute enemy of knowledge and art. In October, Ludwig Fulda, a well-known Frankfurt playwright, decided to defend German honor on the world stage. He drafted a powerful, indignant statement titled “The Manifesto to the Civilized World.” It circulated among the German intellectual and cultural elite for signatures of support; ninety-three of them attached their names. Once complete it was translated into ten languages, published in all the major German newspapers, and sent abroad in thousands of letters.
The document was a fiery defense of both the actions of the German Army and the German love of culture. Denying all accusations of wrongdoing, it read:
IT IS NOT TRUE THAT OUR TROOPS BEHAVED BRUTALLY IN REGARD TO LOUVAIN. They were forced to exercise reprisals with a heavy heart on the furious population, which treacherously attacked them in their quarters, by firing upon a portion of the town. The greater proportion of Louvain is still standing, and the famous town hall is still uninjured. It was saved from the flames owing to the self-sacrifice of our soldiers. Every German would regret works of art having been destroyed in this war or their being destroyed in the future. But just as we decline to admit that any one loves art more than we do, even so do we refuse no less decidedly to pay the price of a German defeat for the preservation of a work of art.
Many of the critics of the destruction in Louvain had blamed “militarism”—the kaiser’s pursuit of strength of arms and imperial power—rather than Germany as a whole. The manifesto went out of its way to reject this distinction:
IT IS NOT TRUE THAT FIGHTING OUR SO-CALLED MILITARISM IS NOT FIGHTING AGAINST OUR CIVILIZATION, AS OUR ENEMIES HYPOCRITICALLY ALLEGE. Without German militarism German civilization would be wiped off the face of the earth. The former arose out of and for the protection of the latter in a country which for centuries had suffered from invasion as no other has done. The German Army and the German people are one . . .
These intellectuals bound themselves to the deeds of the military. It was impossible, they said, for them to commit a crime against art and science. So, then, was it impossible for the army to have done so. The document denied any distinction between their scholarship and their country’s actions. National solidarity was more fundamental than disciplinary ties.
German science was well represented among the signers of the “Manifesto of 93,” as it came to be known. Six Nobel Prize winners signed: Wilhelm Röntgen, Philipp Lenard, Wilhelm Wien, Adolf von Baeyer, Emil Fischer, and Wilhelm Ostwald. A dozen other scientists attached their names. Einstein’s friends Haber, Klein, and Nernst—and, most painfully, Planck. Planck and Klein later claimed to have not seen the details of the manifesto and to have only signed based on the reputations of those who had signed before them. Not two weeks later, though, Planck affirmed that “as members of our university, we unite as one—with all that we morally feel and represent scientifically—until the truth and German honor have finally been recognized by the entire world, despite all the defamation by its enemies.”
The Manifesto of 93 seemed to represent the entire German intellectual elite. One observer commented that the signatories essentially included every German thinker “of real celebrity.” The document was aimed at neutral countries not yet involved in the fighting. The intent was to persuade them of Germany’s moral superiority in the war, particularly against accusations stemming from Louvain. It backfired in every important way.
It was supposed to use the moral authority of German intellectuals to lend respectability to the army. Instead, it dragged those intellectuals down to the level of atrocities. Scholars in other countries were shocked to see their German colleagues deliberately associating themselves with the terrible acts in Louvain. Many of the signatories followed up the manifesto with personal letters to neutral countries. Wilhelm Wien wrote to Lorentz further denying the accusations against the army’s actions in Belgium. Lorentz was deeply offended by both the public and private claims. He complained that Wien and the other signatories were not acting like scientists—they were claiming full knowledge of events that they had not witnessed themselves. Instead of saying “it is not true” they should say “we do not believe this.” Even worse, they seemed to be celebrating the same events whose existence they denied.
A formal response to the manifesto appeared in the Times of London at the end of October. The names of 117 British scholars were attached, including distinguished scientists such as J. J. Thomson, Oliver Lodge, and William Crookes, president of the Royal Society. They expressed sadness that their former colleagues had been dragged down by the kaiser: “We grieve profoundly that, under the baleful influence of a military system and its lawless dreams of conquest, she whom we once honoured now stands revealed as the common enemy of Europe and of all people which respect the law of nations.” They declared their solidarity with the British government and their determination to carry on the war. A critical mass of British scientists had explicitly broken with their German colleagues and renounced the international basis of their disciplines. Eddington was no doubt distraught to see two names in particular attached to the letter: Arthur Schuster, his former professor at Manchester, and Frank Dyson, the Astronomer Royal and his close friend.
The published response was no spontaneous gathering of scholarly opinion. The reply had been organized by Wellington House, the Briti
sh national propaganda headquarters (both Rudyard Kipling and H. G. Wells wrote for them). The Manifesto of 93 had made Germany’s intellectual leadership into a weakness rather than a strength, and the British government took advantage. This is not to say the document did not represent the scientists’ views—they were genuinely offended by the manifesto and were happy to express their anger at their German counterparts.
* * *
EINSTEIN WAS AS horrified by the manifesto as any scientist in London. His thoughtful friends had suddenly become patriotic sheep. Shocked, he protested to Lorentz that he was surrounded by “collective insanity.” The whole world seemed to be “like a madhouse.” This “mass psychosis,” he said, was particularly powerful in Germany, though it was affecting all the combatant nations. He wondered whether the psychosis was somehow related to the “sexual character of the male.”
He commiserated with his friend Georg Friedrich Nicolai, a Berlin doctor and professor of physiology. Nicolai had been a friend of Elsa’s before Albert even moved to Berlin, and they had bonded over shared politics. He was an odd character: a resolute pacifist who carried scars from dueling and married the daughter of an arms manufacturer. Handsome, he sported a fashionable monocle. He was actually in France when the war broke out and was nearly shot as a spy. His close connections with French professors got him released.
Nicolai was outraged by the Manifesto of 93, particularly the distinguished scientists who had signed it. Science was supposed to be above patriotism. It made him “wonder for the first time whether the edifice of German science, so splendidly solid in its outward appearance, might not be inwardly rotten.”
To battle this, Nicolai drafted a countermanifesto, “An Appeal to Europeans.” It called out the disruption of international scholarly networks caused by the war and summoned intellectuals to fight for peace:
Never has any previous war caused so complete an interruption of that cooperation that exists between civilized nations. . . . Educated men in all countries not only should, but absolutely must, exert all their influence to prevent the conditions of peace being the source of future wars.
He circulated it around Berlin, hoping he would find supporters who, like him, felt alienated by the Manifesto of 93. The silence was deafening. Einstein enthusiastically signed on: “Although I am convinced that the voice of a handful of the informed carries little weight against the lust for power of the mighty and the fanaticism of the many, I still welcome your manifesto with pleasure and am pleased to be permitted to add my name to it.” Only two others signed.
This was a disaster. Worse than being controversial, the countermanifesto was almost completely ignored. It circulated just widely enough to ruin Nicolai’s academic career. He then volunteered to run a cardiac clinic for the army, which, at least in the short term, soothed the authorities enough to allow him to keep working.
Einstein was extremely disappointed. This was his first public statement on politics. The Manifesto of 93 had galvanized him into action, and that action turned out to be completely useless. His colleagues did notice his willingness to buck the nationalistic tide, and he gained a reputation as a political oddball. He was already known to be somewhat eccentric, so no one was particularly concerned.
The Berlin scientific community was in a wartime frenzy. The famed zoologist Ernst Haeckel—Darwin’s greatest apostle in Germany—publicly rejected all of his English honorary degrees. Wilhelm Wien composed an avalanche of furious individual replies to the statement of British scientists. He had them delivered via the American consulate. In those letters he announced that he no longer thought the rift between German and British science could “be healed in the foreseeable future.”
Einstein saw blinding patriotism everywhere he looked. Schoolteachers forbade the use of loan words from English and French such as intéressant(e) (“interesting”). Students studied arithmetic through Kriegsrechnen—war calculations. Even after the failure of Nicolai’s appeal, Einstein started looking for opportunities to push back against the madness around him. Searching for like-minded intellectuals, he heard about the November 1914 founding of the New Fatherland League (abbreviated BNV in German). This was an eclectic group of people all opposed to the war—liberals, conservatives, socialists, internationalists. They were a small gathering of elites, never having more than two hundred members. Meetings were Monday evenings. Their goals were an early peace and an eventual Europe-wide organization to make future wars impossible. Einstein was member number 29.
* * *
IT IS SURPRISING that Einstein did not seem to consider leaving Berlin. He had great confidence in his ability to compartmentalize and stay focused: “Why should not one, like a servant in an asylum, be able to live cheerfully? . . . Up to a point one can choose one’s madhouse.” He continued working on relativity as best he could. He lectured to the Prussian Academy on October 19 and 29, informing them that the final aspects of his theory were near at hand. Also on October 29 the List Regiment joined the battle at Ypres, among them a young soldier named Adolf Hitler.
Einstein’s lectures focused on his Entwurf theory, which he was pretty sure was correct. It still had that enormous flaw, though, which was that it was not generally covariant—the equations did not allow all observers to be equal. He had to decide whether this flaw was fatal. He could say covariance was too important to give up (in a sense, it was the core principle of relativity). But then he would have to start over. Or he could accept the loss of covariance, and perhaps even explain how it wasn’t really a problem. He chose the latter.
Einstein began with a thought experiment proposed by his intellectual godfather, Ernst Mach, which in turn referred back to a thought experiment proposed by everyone’s intellectual godfather, Isaac Newton. Newton thought he could demonstrate the reality of absolute motion in the following way. He admitted that Galileo’s relativity principle sometimes made it difficult to tell who was moving: you or your friend. But now get off your train and fill a bucket with water. When you spin the bucket, you see the outside of the water creep up toward the edge. That sloshing was a result of centripetal forces from the spin acting on the inertia of the water. This, Newton said, was evidence that you were really spinning. No combination of relative motion could create that illusion. Ergo, absolute motion against an absolute space must exist.
Not so fast, said Mach. He warned us that we were thinking too small. The creeping rise of the water was indeed relative to something—it was relative to everything in the entire universe. The whole universe, which we see as the distant stars, was just one more frame of reference. A big one, to be sure, but still just another frame. Mach’s critique was that the inertia that caused the sloshing, then, was actually only determined relative to those distant stars. The bucket of water had no inherent inertia, only this effect that was dependent on the location of the observer. Einstein called this relativity of inertia “Mach’s principle.”
Einstein was determined that general relativity include this Machian perspective. This led to what he called the “hole argument,” which helped him feel better about his problem with covariance. Imagine a universe full of stars, except for one empty area (the hole). We perform our bucket experiment in the center of this area, and get certain measurements of space and time that convince us that inertia works a particular way. Our measurements of space and time are Machian—ticking clocks and rulers laid end to end. They are the results of clear, physical methods of measurement, and they result in a series of numbers.
Then we move to an observer waiting at another place within the hole and take those same measurements of space and time again. Once more, clocks and rulers. Our movement to a new place has put us into a different frame of reference—physicists call this shift a coordinate transformation. This coordinate transformation has changed the measurements we make (for example, walking across the room might change my measurement of the distance to a chair from one foot to ten feet). Now, since the numbe
rs we get from our measurements of space and time are different, we will get a different understanding of inertia.
Einstein then reminds us of the equivalence principle, which tells us that inertia is the key to understanding gravity. So our coordinate transformation—moving around in the hole—has changed the way we see gravity. The change in numbers must have a physical meaning. Fine—this is expected in Mach’s universe. Unfortunately this was not compatible with Einstein’s great hopes for general covariance. In a universe with general covariance, everyone should agree on the nature of gravity. It should be independent of the way we move around. But the hole argument has shown that this is impossible—the change of measurements that comes with a coordinate transformation prevents covariance.
Mach’s principle of the relativity of inertia, then, was incompatible with covariance. General relativity had to give up one or the other. And since Einstein had already failed to find covariance in his Entwurf equations, that was actually a relief. The hole argument, and Mach’s principle, apparently demanded that there be no general covariance. So what seemed to be a major failing of the Entwurf was neatly explained away; he could continue using these equations with a clean conscience.
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