Einstein's Genius Club Read online

  After the war, Zionism must have seemed a logical alternative to assimilation: “Judaism owes a great debt of gratitude to Zionism,” he later said. “The Zionist movement has revived among Jews the sense of community.”40 He began to realize the utility of his fame as a scientist and as a Jew. Towards the end of the war, poor Jews fled Eastern Europe and poured into Berlin, crowding into an impoverished shantytown. To the dismay of assimilated, middle-class Jews, Einstein welcomed the refugees, but also urged them to look towards Palestine as the natural homeland of “free sons of the Jewish people.” He further riled assimilated Berlin Jews in 1920, when he castigated the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith for the underlying message of its name, so suggestive of a “servile attitude” and so resistant to ethnic identity. “Not until we have the courage to see ourselves as a nation, not until we respect ourselves, can we acquire the respect of others.”41

  In 1920, Chaim Weizmann, the driving force behind the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and its guarantee of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, became president of the World Zionist Organization. The following year, he set off on a trip to the United States to raise funds for a Hebrew University in Palestine. Einstein agreed to come along. “Naturally, I am needed not for my abilities but solely for my name, from whose publicity value a substantial effect is expected among the rich tribal companions in Dollaria.”42 For all his arch deprecation, he was proud to lend his name to the cause. Howls of outrage were hurled at him for taking such a public stand in favor of Zionism, and especially for setting foot on the soil of Germany's enemies (he stopped in England on the way home from the United States). Before setting out, Einstein heard from his colleague Fritz Haber: “If at this moment you demonstratively fraternize with the British and their friends, people in this country will see this as evidence of the disloyalty of the Jews.”43 Still, Einstein made the trip. He was greeted in the United States with such enthusiasm as would gratify a movie star. This was Einstein's first visit to the country, an exhausting, sometimes preposterous experience. The endless interviewing, hand-shaking, and touring, the crowds gaping to catch sight of him, reporters asking inane or sensationalizing questions, and he answering with “cheap jokes” taken seriously—Einstein said he felt like a “prize ox” being exhibited. In a spare moment, he made his first trip to Princeton as well, receiving an honorary degree from Princeton University and giving four lectures there on relativity (published as The Meaning of Relativity).

  Meanwhile, he dutifully worked for the Weimar Republic. He served on a committee to evaluate German war atrocities; he joined the League of Nations’ Commission on Intellectual Cooperation. He traveled widely, representing (despite his Swiss citizenship) German science and the democratic German government, in sometimes controversial efforts to overcome the animosities of the war. In the spring of 1922, the Collège de France asked him to lecture in Paris. After some hesitation, he accepted. He was the first German scientist to be invited, though many French scholars disapproved, and Einstein's German colleagues were equally unhappy.44 Increasingly certain of his commitment to internationalism, Einstein turned his fame into a pan-national passport.

  Then politics turned dangerous. His friend Walther Rathenau, a Jewish industrialist with philosophic inclinations who became foreign minister in early 1922, was assassinated in June. Political murders in postwar Germany were common. One estimate reported that in 1922, left-wing death squads were responsible for twenty-two such killings; right-wing death squads were responsible for more than three hundred.45 As a Jew, a liberal, and an internationalist, Rathenau was anathema to the conservatives, diehard militarists, anti-Semites, and nascent Nazis making up the political right.

  Einstein knew that he was in danger. His defiant Jewishness, his antiwar activities, his “Red” sympathies during the German revolution in 1918, and especially his world fame—everything pointed to his becoming a target of the right. He canceled his lectures and political work, and even considered resigning from the Prussian Academy for the first time since 1920, when an antirelativity rally left him wondering whether to leave Germany altogether.46

  It was time for him to lower his too-familiar profile. He and Elsa sailed to Japan, where he had been invited to give lectures. Oddly enough, Bertrand Russell had made this trip possible, perhaps unwittingly. During his own trip to Japan in 1921, Russell had been asked by a publisher to name the most “significant” people alive. His answer: Lenin and Einstein. The Japanese publisher decided on Einstein (Lenin having his hands full with the Russian Revolution). Not only did the lecture series allow Einstein to absent himself from the dangers of Berlin; it also contributed handily—a whopping £2,000 in British currency—to his constantly depleted bank account. He spent six weeks in Japan, lecturing to crowded rooms while his words were painstakingly translated into Japanese.

  As he sailed back, en route to a planned stop in Palestine, he learned that he had won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Despite the news, Einstein continued his trip to Jerusalem. He was the honored guest of the British High Commissioner of Palestine, Sir Herbert Samuel, a fellow Jew.47

  The Nobel Prize had long been a certainty, with only one question in the air: Why had it taken so long? The quandary faced by the Nobel committee had much to do with Einstein's eminent qualifications for the award. He had been repeatedly nominated for his major works: the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and relativity. The latter, perhaps the most logical choice for the award, evidently ran up against a seeming technicality: The Nobel Prize is awarded for a discovery, not a theory. More to the point, despite definitive proof by Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, relativity stirred controversy. In Germany, promulgators of the nascent “German Physics” (including the rabidly anti-Semitic Paul Weyland and Ernst Gehrcke) denounced the theory. In Sweden, the committee members had difficulty understanding it. In the end, it was decided to give the award to Einstein not for relativity, but for his discovery of the photoelectric effect. Thus, the paper he called “revolutionary,” the first published paper of his “miracle year,” was the feat for which Einstein won his Nobel.

  By the terms of their divorce agreement, the prize money went to Mileva. (She continued to care for their two sons, and especially for Eduard, whose mental health was increasingly fragile.) Ironically, the awarding of the prize led to a small international quarrel. Germany wanted to claim this latest laureate as its own, insisting that members of the Prussian Academy were automatically German citizens—thus, Einstein was deemed to be German, despite his Swiss citizenship. Einstein objected vehemently. Since protocol required that the winner's national representatives take part in festivities, the quarrel was more than academic. Who would deliver the medal to Einstein? Finessing the problem, Nobel Foundation officials dispatched a Swedish minister to Einstein's apartment, where he handed over the honorific medal and scroll.

  Though adamant about his Swiss citizenship, Einstein had always claimed to be a man without a homeland—a member not of a nation, but of the international community. But during the 1920s, he began to identify strongly with Zionism and Jewish causes. It was the closest he ever came to nationalism. Though passionate in his feelings, Einstein never hesitated to criticize the nascent Jewish state. Hebrew University in Jerusalem enjoyed his early support, but by 1928, despairing of its quality, he resigned from its board.48 He repeatedly encouraged “peaceful cooperation” with Arabs, blaming British policy for the deepening and dangerous animosity. Yet his love for Israel and his identification with Jewish causes never wavered. His feelings were enthusiastically returned: From his sudden fame in 1919 to his death, Einstein was seen by most of the world's Jews as their greatest living figure. When Chaim Weizmann died in 1952, David Ben-Gurion, then prime minister of Israel, decided to offer the presidency to Einstein:

  There is only one man whom we should ask to become President of the State of Israel. He is the greatest Jew on earth. Maybe the greatest human being on earth.49

  Quite sensibly, Einstein refused
. Still, he was deeply moved by the offer from “our state Israel”:

  All my life I have dealt with objective matters, hence I lack both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people and to exercise official functions…. I am the more distressed over these circumstances because my relationship to the Jewish people had become my strongest human bond, ever since I became aware of our precarious situation among the nations of the world.50

  It now requires an effort of historical imagination to recall how much dignity Einstein lent to Jews. Supreme in science, manifestly decent, he was a living refutation of racial and religious slurs. That such a great mind saw himself as a Jew like all the rest; that he said so at a time when millions of poor Jews still lived in Eastern Europe or congregated as immigrants in the slums of New York or Berlin, often resented by their more fortunate brethren; that he spoke out tirelessly to defend them or attack their enemies—these efforts made him not only admired but beloved by his fellow Jews. When Hitler took power in 1933, Einstein's immediate denunciation of the Nazi regime carried powerful weight around the world. His early support of Zionism was of incalculable value, and Weizmann knew it, though he was often annoyed by Einstein's naïveté or obstinacy. In 1918, when Einstein became a Zionist, that cause was largely ignored or unpopular among the mass of Jews; a few thousand emigrated to Palestine, many millions to America and other Western countries. He was the “Jewish saint,” Einstein said ironically, but he never shirked the responsibilities involved. Russell was born into the ruling class of the most powerful empire on earth—Einstein the Zionist was an early patriot of a nation that did not even exist until 1948.

  For Einstein, the years between the wars saw the diminution of his scientific genius. They saw, as well, a new focus on the atom. Relativity had resolved macrophysics—the realm of gravity, time, and space. What remained was the invisible realm of what makes matter.

  In some ways, Einstein remained at the center of physics purely by dint of his reputation. Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, he reestablished his status as an outsider for his stubborn rejection of quantum mechanics. A younger generation, located in the “quantum triangle” of Munich, Göttingen, and Copenhagen, succeeded in changing our worldview, as he had in relativity.51 It was, in many ways, a more startling revolution than Einstein's. Quantum mechanics gave us the structure of the atom, but it robbed us of the certainty of causation. Einstein was never reconciled to a physics in which God appeared to “throw dice.” When, in 1932, he finally accepted the usefulness and (for him, limited) success of quantum mechanics, he turned irrevocably away from mainstream physics. His search for a “theory of everything” based on relativity, a unified theory that would subsume quantum theory, was relentless and, ultimately, unsuccessful.

  Fame assured Einstein of the means to carry on his work. As Germany descended into the hell of Nazism, he found himself afloat in requests for lectures and job offers. He lectured at the new California Institute of Technology in 1930 and again in 1932. He was invited to deliver the Rhodes lecture at Oxford in 1931. In 1932, while at Caltech, he met Abraham Flexner, an academic reformer and inveterate organizer, who was recruiting faculty for his newly endowed Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Flexner, determined to entice the greatest name in science, offered Einstein a six-month contract scheduled around his Berlin duties. But Einstein was as yet unwilling to abandon his home in Berlin.

  Almost immediately after Hitler took power, Einstein was targeted. That the most famous scientist in the world was a Jew—not to mention a pacifist and internationalist—outraged the Nazis. In the years leading up to Hitler's election, Einstein had attended rallies, signed manifestos, and lent his name to appeals in the anti-Fascist cause. Once in power, the Nazis wasted no time in retaliating. Among the photographs in a book listing “traitors to Germany,” Einstein's picture was captioned: “Not Yet Hanged.”52 Soon to come were book burnings, mass dismissals of Jews from academia, and concentration camps.

  Einstein did not hesitate. Only three months after the Nazis took over, he cut all ties with Germany, resigning from the Prussian Academy of Sciences and turning in his passport.53 The Nazi chieftains and German newspapers spat at him, calling him a turncoat. As Einstein wrote to Max Born, “I've been promoted to an ‘evil monster.’”54 The Prussian Academy—with a very few honorable exceptions—rejected Einstein's resignation. They wanted the satisfaction of expelling him, and did so a few months later. Flexner's offer of a half-year stay was extended indefinitely. As it turned out, Einstein remained at the Institute for the rest of his life. He never set foot in Europe again.

  For almost its first decade, the Institute for Advanced Study was an institution on paper only, with no buildings of its own. Offices were rented for its members from Princeton University. Its purpose was to free its scholars from teaching. Lavish salaries also made it attractive: Einstein asked for a salary of $3,000, but was given $15,000 per year—this during the early Depression, when most American professors earned about $2,000. That salary was possible because the Institute was handsomely funded by Louis Bamberger and his sister, Caroline Bamberger Fuld, who had sold their department store in 1929 a few scant weeks before Wall Street crashed.

  Einstein was the second professor named; the first was the American mathematician Oswald Veblen. Until 1935, six mathematicians comprised the entire fulltime Institute—but they were a choice group: Besides Einstein and Veblen, they included the renowned mathematician Hermann Weyl, self-exiled from Göttingen, and the young John von Neumann. As a bonus, one of the visiting scholars in 1933 was the twenty-seven-year old Gödel.

  If not for his fame, Einstein would very probably not have been hired. Mathematicians were the first appointees because there was consensus about the best. Einstein was never a mathematician in the sense of a Gödel or a von Neumann; he was a physicist who used whatever abstruse mathematics he needed, but beyond that his interest and expertise dropped off. Still, general relativity had spurred new mathematical research, and he was in any case too valuable a catch to lose.

  On his way to Princeton in October 1933, Einstein sailed to New York, to be met there by the mayor, a band, speeches, and the usual journalistic hoopla. But Institute officials, worried about conservative protests against Einstein as a Bolshevik, hurried him off to Princeton.55

  So, at age fifty-four, Einstein settled in a most unlikely place: a small American college town nestled amid genteel wealth. Nothing could have been more different from Berlin, where art, decadence, and scientific eminence jostled with Nazis and Communists bloodying the streets, and where Hitler now reigned. The leafy Princeton streets quietly shaded an inbred little community, affluent and above all decorous. Princeton University embodied these qualities in its neo-Gothic architecture reminiscent of Oxford. From about 1920, the university's mathematics department had suddenly blossomed into one of the greatest centers of mathematics in the world, doing new research in every direction. But Fine Hall, which housed it, looked backward, at least architecturally, to old Europe and the Gilded Age of nineteenth-century America: its long corridors punctuated by stained-glass windows, its offices carpeted and lavishly furnished.56 Oswald Veblen, said to have planned the building, was the nephew of Thorstein Veblen, the famous American social thinker who satirized “conspicuous consumption”—spending lavishly to excite the envy of others—which might describe the Fine Hall of Mathematics. The corrosively ironic Thorstein Veblen was one of Einstein's favorite authors, along with Russell.

  EINSTEIN AND RUSSELL: PARALLEL LIVES

  Einstein's last letter, written within days of his death in 1955, was addressed to his friend, Bertrand Russell:

  Thank you for your letter of April 5. I am gladly willing to sign your excellent statement. I also agree with your choice of the prospective signers.

  With kind regards, A. Einstein57

  This short note was a fitting last word to a lifelong friend. It added Einstein's name to what became known as the Einstein-Rus
sell Manifesto. The manifesto was signed by nine other scientists, among them Max Born, Linus Pauling, and Frédéric Joliot-Curie. Conceived by Russell, it called upon the American Congress, and the public, to repudiate war in the face of nuclear weapons. It met with a surprising degree of support, despite the Cold War. Certainly Einstein's signature, offered on his deathbed, lent prestige and credibility. Only days after its publication, an industrialist named Cyrus Eaton offered to fund the conference proposed by the manifesto, providing that it take place in Pugwash, Eaton's birthplace in Nova Scotia. Thus were the Pugwash Conferences and other anti-nuclear movements born.

  Among public intellectuals with international stature, few were more visible in their antipathy for nuclear arms than Einstein and Russell. The two had been comrades in pacifism since World War I, when Russell in England and Einstein in Germany were the most prominent figures on either side to speak out against the slaughter. Though the two men saw little of each other throughout their lives, they lived and thought along similar lines—outspoken defenders of peace, social justice, and intellectual freedom.

  As it had done for so many, World War I changed both their lives. Russell plunged into political action, gathering signatures from Cambridge dons, writing an antiwar letter to The Nation, and joining the Union of Democratic Control and the No-Conscription Fellowship.58 In Germany, Einstein, who had just moved to Berlin, was appalled by the rabid nationalism of leading German intellectuals. He signed the antinationalist “Appeal to Europeans” and, for the first time, joined a political association, the Bund Neues Vater-land (New Fatherland League).