Einstein in Bohemia

by Michael D. Gordin

  Jaumann was a student of Ernst Mach in more than just physics. Philosophically, he took one of Mach’s most controversial positions—a skepticism toward atoms—much further than his teacher. When Jaumann had been a student, this had been a minority view, but still defensible. By 1917, Philipp Frank—himself a strong admirer of Mach’s philosophy of science and Einstein’s successor to the chair in mathematical physics at Prague (and later still his most influential biographer)—considered Jaumann’s slavish following of Mach’s misguided views pernicious: “One cannot deny that Gustav Jaumann has undertaken this task with strong constructive force in numerous works. I however do not believe that success in the real spirit of Mach’s doctrines has been achieved.”63 When Jaumann died in 1924, he was in the midst of composing a 2,000-page textbook filled with continuous differential equations to demonstrate a physics with unified forces and without any atomic particles—the position of a borderline heretic. When the committee was deliberating in 1910 Jaumann seemed even then behind the times. And as much as Jaumann clearly admired Mach, by the time he left for Brno in 1903, the feeling was not mutual.

  Perhaps the emergent conflict started in 1893 with their jointly authored textbook for gymnasium students, which came out in two nearly identical versions, one for teachers and one for students. Mach cut the two chapters Jaumann wrote from the student edition, deeming them too hard for the task at hand.64 Relations deteriorated after that. In Mach’s so-called “Prague Testament,” composed over an extended period and detailing his wishes for the physics institute after he left for Vienna in 1895, the old master singled out Jaumann for particular abuse, demanding that he not be appointed his successor:

  Jaumann worked here for ten years, so to speak, on his own behalf, and received a salary for it. I demanded only very few tasks as an assistant from him in the first years and later none at all. I was on the contrary in a constant state of self-defense against his penchant for extravagance and disorder. His work as an assistant, preparation for lectures, restoration of apparatus, free manufacture of new devices, management of materials, correspondence, were seen to in the last four years exclusively by my son Ludwig alone, with the aim of supporting me. He established with great effort exemplary order in Jaumann’s administration.65

  Needless to say, Jaumann, who was then at the German University, did not get the call to Prague at that time. But it seems he never learned of his fall from favor. In 1906, after Mach himself had retired, Jaumann wrote him asking for support in his application for a position that had been vacated by the suicide of Mach’s Viennese colleague Ludwig Boltzmann.66 He did not get that post either, and his next opportunity to leave Brno came with von Stürgkh’s intervention.

  Von Stürgkh performed such inversions all the time, and he considered it good policy. When the case of Lippich’s successor came before him, he pondered the particulars and then chose the Austrian ranked number two. In a memorandum to the emperor on 16 December 1910, he explained:

  Although the professoriate nominated Professor Dr. Einstein to the first position because it placed especial value on his brilliant achievements in the area of modern theoretical physics, I nonetheless believed I should first begin negotiations with Professor Jaumann from Brünn, named to the second position, since he also has published entirely outstanding works and might open a broad and fruitful field of his original research activity through assumption of a theoretical-physical chair. In addition this could mean at least that one of the numerous young physicists of the Vienna School could take Jaumann’s vacated chair at the German higher technical school in Brünn.67

  Einstein was not privy to this reasoning, and he did not interpret the machinations as a response to either his citizenship or even the fact that his wife was a Serbian, and thus a member of an ethnic group that conservative Austrian officials viewed with great suspicion. For Einstein, there was only one reason for the inversion: “I was not called to Prague. I was only put forward by the faculty; the Ministry however has not accepted the proposal because of my Semitic descent.”68 This was, as the documents show, not the real reason, but Einstein believed it until his death, as did many locals in both Prague and Vienna, an urban legend that would prove important in Einstein’s complex self-identification as a Jew.

  Maybe it would not turn out so bad for Einstein in the end. After all, sometimes the person in second position got the job. When Ernst Mach, to date the most successful physicist in the university’s history, had been hired in Prague in 1867, he had also been in second position behind Adalbert von Wahltenhofen yet got the post when the latter declined the offer.69 The same had actually already happened to Einstein in his current position at the University of Zurich. When the extraordinary professorship had opened up in 1909, Einstein had been secondo loco, behind his former classmate Friedrich Adler. When Adler had learned that Einstein, whom he considered more talented, had been ranked behind him, he had ceded the position and devoted himself to revolutionary politics instead. A few years later, in 1916, in opposition to the brutal atrocities of the Great War, the former physicist would walk up to von Stürgkh, now prime minister, as the latter was dining at a Viennese hotel and shoot him dead. Einstein would successfully lobby to have the death penalty waived for Adler.70 By then, Einstein had become world famous. But at this point in our narrative, he was still stuck in Zurich and in second position on Prague’s list.

  Einstein eventually got the position, a gift from none other than Jaumann, who opted to stay at Brno and declined the post. There is a popular story about why he made that decision, one that fits what we know about Jaumann’s abrasive personality. In his biography of Einstein, Philipp Frank reports Jaumann’s answer to the call, upon learning that originally he had been in the second position, as a direct quotation: “If Einstein has been proposed as first choice because of the belief that he has greater achievements to his credit, then I will have nothing to do with a university that chases after modernity and does not appreciate true merit.”71 Here, as throughout his 1947 biography, Frank provides no references to sources, even for direct quotations such as this one. It’s a great story, one that is especially ironic considering the titanic stature Einstein later acquired; but it is probably not true, and certainly not in the verbatim form in which we have received it. Archival evidence indicates that Jaumann considered the offer but rejected it because of breakdowns in salary negotiations, and also because he was quite familiar with the conditions in Prague.72 If he were to move, it would be to a place like Vienna; otherwise, he was happy where he was. Nonetheless, this has not stopped most Einstein biographers from quoting Frank’s apocryphal account—certainly derived from rumors circulating around Prague—as direct testimony. This would not be the only time that Frank’s cavalier attitude to citation pushed the mythology of Einstein down false tracks.

  With the candidate for first position withdrawn, the road was cleared for Einstein, and he was accordingly called to Prague. The salary offer was very good, especially compared to what he was receiving in Zurich: 6,400 crowns a year, with a raise of 800 crowns after both the fifth and tenth years, and 1,000 after the fifteenth and twentieth years, followed by a pension vested in 10 years.73 (The ministry expected Einstein to last in Prague that long, which he did not; it also expected the Habsburg Empire to last, and in eight years it was gone as well.) Von Stürgkh pointed to an important condition attached to Einstein’s assumption of the post: “Finally I note that the adoption of Austrian citizenship is tied with your appointment; Your Honor wants thus to immediately take steps to effect the release from your current citizenship.”74 Despite extensive searching, I have been able to find no evidence that Einstein ever became a subject of the Habsburg emperor; it is absolutely certain that he never relinquished his Swiss citizenship. Given the absence of any traces in this most bureaucratic of domains, it seems likely that Einstein just ignored this comment. As we have seen, he would ignore a similar demand from Berlin three years later.75

  In Switzerland, there was litt
le understanding of this drama of first and second positions, but rumors got out that Einstein was being courted by Prague, and it made his local supporters anxious. Students at Zurich petitioned the university to do everything it could to retain the young physicist: “The undersigned students of the lectures of Prof. Einstein wish to hereby ask you to do the utmost possible to retain this outstanding researcher & teacher at our university.”76 The counteroffers were insufficient—an extraordinary professor salary, even a generous one, could not compete with the promotion that Prague offered, and on 20 January 1911, Einstein formally resigned from Zurich.77 The family was moving to Prague.

  * * *

  “It is mildly puzzling to me why Einstein made this move,” wrote Abraham Pais, a physicist and one of Einstein’s many biographers. “He liked Zürich. Mileva liked Zürich. He had colleagues to talk to and friends to play music with. He had been given a raise.”78 Perhaps no one was more distraught about it than Mileva Einstein, née Marić. She wrote to her close childhood friend, Helene Savić, in January 1911, two months before the move, that she was filled with apprehension:

  My husband, after mature reflection and because of material advantages, has accepted the invitation to go to Prague, and in March we shall leave Zurich to move over there. I cannot put it otherwise than to say that I am not going there gladly and that I expect very little pleasure from life there. I am a little afraid for the children, who have to grow up in those unpleasant circumstances. My only comfort is that I might be imagining it all in dark colors, or that this invitation might be followed by another that might take us away from there. Do you know Prague at all?79

  That, indeed, was the question: What did any of them know about this place? This is a difficult question to answer, as the decision was made so quickly that no friends seem to have been consulted about it by post, thus leaving us no surviving trails in the correspondence. Had he turned to the Germanophone periodicals emanating from Prague for guidance, Einstein might have paused. In March 1911, the conservative periodical Deutsche Arbeit published a nostalgic piece about how wonderful Prague had been in 1811, when it had been (ostensibly) a fully German city.80 That, like Stumpf’s reminiscence at the start of this chapter, would have colored the situation more darkly. More likely, Einstein did what any German-speaking traveler around Central Europe of the time would have done: consulted the Baedeker guide to the city. The most recent version was the 1910 edition for Austria—Prague was, indeed, one of the major metropolises of that country—and it presented a series of impressive sights to be visited, as was fitting for a travel guide. It mentioned Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler as scientific luminaries and noted that the city was home to four institutions of learning, two polytechnics and two universities divided by language. It also dubbed the German University “the oldest institution of higher learning in the German Empire.”81 There was a sense in which that was true, but it papered over a good deal of history that would matter to the young family of four—the Einsteins’ sons, Hans Albert and Eduard, were six years and eight months old, respectively—when they slowly began to get to know the city.

  They took their time on the trip. They left Zurich on 30 March, stopping in Munich, where Einstein visited the Dutch physicist Peter Debye and the field’s leading light, Arnold Sommerfeld. Then they headed on to Bohemia, arriving at the Hotel Viktoria at 18 Jungmannstraße (Jungamannova třída) on 3 April 1911. Einstein’s appointment began the following day. They stayed at the hotel for a few days before settling into their apartment on the third floor of a new building on Třebízkého ulice 1215, in the rapidly expanding neighborhood of Smíchov on the western bank of the Moldau. (The building still stands, but the street name and house number have changed to Lesnická ulice 7.)82 Einstein had moved from first position on the list to second and back again, oscillating between centrality and marginality. And so it was to be in Prague, a city that was both a metropole and a province, depending on how you looked at it. It was that dual status that would enable Einstein to carry out his most intensive physics research in the city, while at the same time casting him in a bit part in a play that had been unfolding since the Middle Ages.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Speed of Light

  Thus the Einsteinian relativity theory of 1905 sinks into the dust. Will a new, more general relativity principle arise like the phoenix from the ashes? Or will one return to absolute space? And summon back the much-maligned ether so that it can carry, besides the electromagnetic field, also the gravitational one?

  —Max Abraham1

  On 9 June 1911, Einstein received a letter in Prague from an unexpected source: the Belgian soap magnate Ernst Solvay.2 Einstein had met Solvay once before, on the occasion of accepting his first honorary doctorate in July 1909 at the University of Geneva, a few short years after receiving his original doctorate. The Geneva ceremonies marked another of the dramatic changes in fortune that had greeted the former patent clerk who had just that same year been appointed extraordinary professor at Zurich. He was being honored on the same dais as such luminaries as physicist Marie Curie from Paris and chemist Wilhelm Ostwald from Leipzig, the latter long a hero of Einstein’s (his father had tried to get his wayward son a job with Ostwald immediately after graduation) and on the eve of being awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Joining the three scientists were Ernst Zahn, a restaurant keeper from Göschnen in the canton of Uri who was widely acclaimed for his authentic, earthy folk prose, and Solvay, who stood at the apex of an empire based on his innovations in the manufacture of soda ash. To be sure, Einstein remembered Solvay, but this was not who Einstein expected to contact him at his post at the German University in Prague.3

  Solvay had written to invite Einstein to a conference to be held in Brussels at the end of that October on the topic of “Radiation and the Quanta.” Solvay was a passionate follower of physics, and the chemist Walther Nernst, a pioneer in thermodynamics and professor at the university in Berlin, had persuaded him to bankroll a gathering of the leading minds working on topics related to the new quantum theory. Nernst had drawn up the list of invitees for the meeting, Einstein’s name prominently among them. It had been an obvious choice, given Einstein’s 1905 paper explaining the puzzling photoelectric effect—whereby electromagnetic radiation of high frequency (e.g., blue or ultraviolet light) ejects electrons from metallic surfaces, now the basis of solar panels—through the postulation of light particles (“quanta”), a hypothesis that contravened the orthodox interpretation of light as a wave. This insight, which solidified the hypothesis of discrete energy packets in thermal radiation that had been proposed by Nernst’s colleague Max Planck in 1900, would be cited by the Swedish Academy when it awarded Einstein the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1921. On the other hand, Einstein was rather young and had only just received his first full-time position at a university. He was an indispensable invitee, but also noticeably junior to the rest of the attendees (see figure 1).

  The Solvay Conference of 1911 was a milestone in the history of physics, and it has been credited with solidifying the very notion that “modern physics” had displaced what came to be understood as “classical physics.”4 The agenda of the meeting was clearly focused on the decade-old quantum theory, which had already generated an overwhelming number of puzzles related to thermodynamics, electromagnetic radiation, atomic spectra, and more. It was the hot topic of contemporary physics, and Einstein had been at the center of it from the outset. He delivered the final of the four keynotes, on the quantum theory of specific heats, and it was a tremendous success.5 He cut a fine figure, impressing the pantheon of theoretical physicists, many of whom he was meeting for the first time, including Hendrik A. Lorentz, the Dutch physicist whose work on the electrodynamics of moving bodies had been crucial to Einstein’s special theory of relativity.

  FIGURE 1. The participants in the Solvay Conference of 1911. Albert Einstein is the figure standing second from the right. Marie Curie (the only woman invitee) is sitting at the table in discussion with Fr
ench physicist Henri Poincaré. Sitting at the head of the table are Ernst Solvay and, to his left, Hendrik Lorentz, who chaired the meeting. Seated at the far left is Walther Nernst, whose brainchild this meeting was. Finally, standing second from the left at the blackboard is Max Planck, next to his famous equation, the intellectual impetus for the gathering. Source: Benjamin Couprie, 1911, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1911_Solvay_conference.jpg.

  Given that it represented such a salient mark of his own lofty status in the discipline and the opportunity to debate vigorously with his most respected colleagues, one might think Einstein would have been enthusiastic about what his Swiss friend Michele Besso had prospectively called “the Brussels witches’ sabbath.”6 Despite its social charms, however, Einstein seemed rather lukewarm about the conference’s intellectual content. “Nothing came out of Brussels,” he wrote to his former assistant Ludwig Hopf, “but it was overall a delightful spectacle.”7 To his close friend Heinrich Zangger back in Zurich, he joked that “the entire affair would have been a delicium for diabolical Jesuit fathers.”8 Despite the later mythology that Einstein spurned all social conventions, he clearly had enough social graces to write to Solvay that the “Congress will always form one of the most beautiful memories of my life.”9 (But not enough to spell the industrialist’s name correctly: he had it as “Solvey.”)