Einstein (3 page)

C
ONRAD
H
ABICHT
(1876–1958). Mathematician and amateur inventor, member of the “Olympia Academy” discussion trio in Bern, and recipient of two famous 1905 letters from Einstein heralding forthcoming papers.

W
ERNER
H
EISENBERG
(1901–1976). German physicist. A pioneer of quantum mechanics, he formulated the uncertainty principle that Einstein spent years resisting.

D
AVID
H
ILBERT
(1862–1943). German mathematician who in 1915 raced Einstein to discover the mathematical equations for general relativity.

B
ANESH
H
OFFMANN
(1906–1986). Mathematician and physicist who collaborated with Einstein in Princeton and later wrote a book about him.

P
HILIPP
L
ENARD
(1862–1947). Hungarian-German physicist whose experimental observations on the photoelectric effect were explained by Einstein in his 1905 light quanta paper. Became an anti-Semite, Nazi, and Einstein hater.

H
ENDRIK
A
NTOON
L
ORENTZ
(1853–1928). Genial and wise Dutch physicist whose theories paved the way for special relativity. Became a father figure to Einstein.

M
ILEVA
M
ARI
(1875–1948). Serbian physics student at Zurich Polytechnic who became Einstein’s first wife. Mother of Hans Albert, Eduard, and Lieserl. Passionate and driven, but also brooding and increasingly gloomy, she triumphed over many, but not all, of the obstacles that then faced an aspiring female physicist. Separated from Einstein in 1914, divorced in 1919.

R
OBERT
A
NDREWS
M
ILLIKAN
(1868–1953). American experimental physicist who confirmed Einstein’s law of the photoelectric effect and recruited him to be a visiting scholar at Caltech.

H
ERMANN
M
INKOWSKI
(1864–1909). Taught Einstein math at the Zurich Polytechnic, referred to him as a “lazy dog,” and devised a mathematical formulation of special relativity in terms of four-dimensional spacetime.

G
EORG
F
RIEDRICH
N
ICOLAI
,
born Lewinstein (1874–1964). Physician, pacifist, charismatic adventurer, and seducer. A friend and doctor of Elsa Einstein and probable lover of her daughter Ilse, he wrote a pacifist tract with Einstein in 1915.

A
BRAHAM
P
AIS
(1918–2000). Dutch-born theoretical physicist who became a colleague of Einstein in Princeton and wrote a scientific biography of him.

M
AX
P
LANCK
(1858–1947). Prussian theoretical physicist who was an early patron of Einstein and helped recruit him to Berlin. His conservative instincts, both in life and in physics, made him a contrast to Einstein, but they remained warm and loyal colleagues until the Nazis took power.

E
RWIN
S
CHRÖDINGER
(1887–1961). Austrian theoretical physicist who was a pioneer of quantum mechanics but joined Einstein in expressing discomfort with the uncertainties and probabilities at its core.

M
AURICE
S
OLOVINE
(1875–1958). Romanian philosophy student in Bern who founded the “Olympia Academy” with Einstein and Habicht. Became Einstein’s French publisher and lifelong correspondent.

L
EÓ
S
ZILÁRD
(1898–1964). Hungarian-born physicist, charming and eccentric, who met Einstein in Berlin and patented a refrigerator with him. Conceived the nuclear chain reaction and cowrote the 1939 letter Einstein sent to President Franklin Roosevelt urging attention to the possibility of an atomic bomb.

C
HAIM
W
EIZMANN
(1874–1952). Russian-born chemist who emigrated to England and became president of the World Zionist Organization. In 1921, he brought Einstein to America for the first time, using him as the draw for a fund-raising tour. Was first president of Israel, a post offered upon his death to Einstein.

T
HE
W
INTELER FAMILY
.
Einstein boarded with them while he was a student in Aarau, Switzerland. Jost Winteler was his history and Greek teacher; his wife, Rosa, became a surrogate mother. Of their seven children, Marie became Einstein’s first girlfriend; Anna married Einstein’s best friend, Michele Besso; and Paul married Einstein’s sister, Maja.

H
EINRICH
Z
ANGGER
(1874–1957). Professor of physiology at the University of Zurich. Befriended Einstein and Mari
and helped mediate their disputes and divorce.

“I promise you four papers,” the young patent examiner wrote his friend. The letter would turn out to bear some of the most significant tidings in the history of science, but its momentous nature was masked by an impish tone that was typical of its author. He had, after all, just addressed his friend as “you frozen whale”and apologized for writing a letter that was “inconsequential babble.” Only when he got around to describing the papers, which he had produced during his spare time, did he give some indication that he sensed their significance.
¹

“The first deals with radiation and the energy properties of light and is very revolutionary,” he explained. Yes, it was indeed revolutionary. It argued that light could be regarded not just as a wave but also as a stream of tiny particles called quanta. The implications that would eventually arise from this theory—a cosmos without strict causality or certainty—would spook him for the rest of his life.

“The second paper is a determination of the true sizes of atoms.” Even though the very existence of atoms was still in dispute, this was the most straightforward of the papers, which is why he chose it as the safest bet for his latest attempt at a doctoral thesis. He was in the process of revolutionizing physics, but he had been repeatedly thwarted in his efforts to win an academic job or even get a doctoral degree, which he hoped might get him promoted from a third- to a second-class examiner at the patent office.

The third paper explained the jittery motion of microscopic particles in liquid by using a statistical analysis of random collisions. In the process, it established that atoms and molecules actually exist.

“The fourth paper is only a rough draft at this point, and is an electrodynamics of moving bodies which employs a modification of the theory of space and time.” Well, that was certainly more than inconsequential babble. Based purely on thought experiments—performed in his head rather than in a lab—he had decided to discard Newton’s concepts of absolute space and time. It would become known as the Special Theory of Relativity.

What he did not tell his friend, because it had not yet occurred to him, was that he would produce a fifth paper that year, a short addendum to the fourth, which posited a relationship between energy and mass. Out of it would arise the best-known equation in all of physics:
E=mc
²
.

Looking back at a century that will be remembered for its willingness to break classical bonds, and looking ahead to an era that seeks to nurture the creativity needed for scientific innovation, one person stands out as a paramount icon of our age: the kindly refugee from oppression whose wild halo of hair, twinkling eyes, engaging humanity, and extraordinary brilliance made his face a symbol and his name a synonym for genius. Albert Einstein was a locksmith blessed with imagination and guided by a faith in the harmony of nature’s handiwork. His fascinating story, a testament to the connection between creativity and freedom, reflects the triumphs and tumults of the modern era.

Now that his archives have been completely opened, it is possible to explore how the private side of Einstein—his nonconformist personality, his instincts as a rebel, his curiosity, his passions and detachments—intertwined with his political side and his scientific side. Knowing about the man helps us understand the wellsprings of his science, and vice versa. Character and imagination and creative genius were all related, as if part of some unified field.

Despite his reputation for being aloof, he was in fact passionate in both his personal and scientific pursuits. At college he fell madly in love with the only woman in his physics class, a dark and intense Serbian
named Mileva Mari
. They had an illegitimate daughter, then married and had two sons. She served as a sounding board for his scientific ideas and helped to check the math in his papers, but eventually their relationship disintegrated. Einstein offered her a deal. He would win the Nobel Prize someday, he said; if she gave him a divorce, he would give her the prize money. She thought for a week and accepted. Because his theories were so radical, it was seventeen years after his miraculous outpouring from the patent office before he was awarded the prize and she collected.

Einstein’s life and work reflected the disruption of societal certainties and moral absolutes in the modernist atmosphere of the early twentieth century. Imaginative nonconformity was in the air: Picasso, Joyce, Freud, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and others were breaking conventional bonds. Charging this atmosphere was a conception of the universe in which space and time and the properties of particles seemed based on the vagaries of observations.

Einstein, however, was not truly a relativist, even though that is how he was interpreted by many, including some whose disdain was tinged by anti-Semitism. Beneath all of his theories, including relativity, was a quest for invariants, certainties, and absolutes. There was a harmonious reality underlying the laws of the universe, Einstein felt, and the goal of science was to discover it.

His quest began in 1895, when as a 16-year-old he imagined what it would be like to ride alongside a light beam. A decade later came his miracle year, described in the letter above, which laid the foundations for the two great advances of twentieth-century physics: relativity and quantum theory.