This is the second part of a two-part article. Read the first part here.
Albert Einstein has talked on many subjects since he became a world hero. For two reasons an attempt is being made to bottle him up during his present stay at Princeton. One is that Jews in Germany complain that they suffer for it whenever Einstein talks; the other is that admirers of Einstein feel that science has suffered because he has diverted so much of his energy to political causes.
The two causes to which Einstein has partly sacrificed his scientific career had their beginnings in his childhood. When he was eight or nine years old he was terrified by the sight of soldiers drilling in Munich, and he won a promise from his father that some way would be found to save him from military service. His adoption of Swiss citizenship effected that purpose. Einstein’s other cause was that of the Jews. He was introduced to anti-Semitism at school before he was ten years old. A priest exhibited to the class one of the thousands of well-authenticated nails which the Jews had driven into the feet of Christ. The sight of the relic so stimulated the sense of justice of the young scholars that they made an example of the Einstein boy. For a time after Einstein became absorbed in science, he lost the sense of being a Jew. It was revived after he became famous. He felt it a duty to use his prestige in aid of Jewish relief work, and he gradually became deeply interested in Zionism. His first trip to the United States, in 1 921, was undertaken to help in founding a Jewish university in Palestine. Hitlerite persecution made him an exile and a militant Jew.
Einstein’s two causes eventually turned against each other. His anti-Hitlerism partially swallowed up his pacifism. He has recently suggested that a special dispensation might be granted, absolving conscientious objectors of their vows and authorizing them to fight in case of a war against Hitler. Einstein argues that Hitlerism menaces the peace of the world. In substance he echoes the familiar slogan that we must have peace even if we have to fight for it. For this he has been read out of the pacifist party by Henri Barbusse and other orthodox leaders.
When a world-famous man takes up one cause, he is in demand for all causes. Einstein’s signature appeared on a manifesto accusing the Yugoslav government of murdering a radical professor, on an appeal to Poland to pardon evaders of military service, and on petitions for Mooney, the Scottsboro Negroes, and many others. He accepted a variety of honorary posts, ranging from that of special advisor to the Himalayan Research Institute of the Roerich Museum to that of executive committeeman of the Ingersoll centenary celebration promoted by Joseph Lewis, king of the freethinkers. Einstein’s position as first citizen of the world brings him a vast fan mail; his opinion is in request on art, literature, politics, the immortal soul, financial and family troubles, etc. His replies reveal a mind active on many subjects outside of science. Bernard Shaw said that the finest criticism of any of his plays was contained in a letter from Einstein on “Saint Joan.” The Balzacians of the world were cheered when Einstein, in a letter to Santiago Gastaldi, the leading Balzacian of Uruguay, said, “This master, perhaps as no other, casts light on the human creature; he teaches us to love his weaknesses.” Einstein’s manner of handling his correspondence illustrates his Olympian quality; all mortals are of the same size to Einstein, as he looks down from his great height; his courtesy is not proportioned to the distinction of the individual. He throws away letters that do not interest him, whether they come from big men or little. When he received a can of tobacco from an unemployed laborer, he wrote his thank-you letter in verse. He has penned pretty rhymes for children named in his honor. He loves to write doggerel. He is tender to crackpots and even to infant prodigies. Receiving a savant of twelve years who had formulated a perpetual-motion theory, Einstein sat down with his precocious colleague for half an hour and finally convinced him that there was a flaw in his calculations. There is cunning and suppressed laughter mingled with Einstein’s artlessness and seriousness; he and Shaw hit it off perfectly together, both being skeptics and ironists to the marrow. The complexities of Einstein’s nature parallel those of his theory. His definitive biography should be written in mathematical symbols. With his customary objectivity, Einstein discusses himself in a foreword to his biography by Anton Reiser. After certifying that Reiser’s statements of fact are correct, the scientist adds: “What has perhaps been overlooked is the irrational, the inconsistent, the droll, even the insane, which nature, inexhaustibly operative, implants in an individual, seemingly for her own amusement.”
Einstein is a man of rarest equanimity. His achievements were possible only to a mind that nothing could irritate. His work has been that of solving infinitely complicated puzzles, and every correct solution came after many failures. He has always been able, with a shrug of the shoulders, to abandon the results of long toil and start all over again. His complete absence of prejudice in his own favor has made it impossible for him to become embroiled with his critics. He says it is impossible for him to understand how a difference of opinion can ever lead to a personal quarrel. Still, Einstein is human and has been able on rare occasions to show a trace of temper. He was insulted last year at Geneva by a Balkan delegate, who asked “Whom does this Jew represent?” Einstein accepted it calmly at the time; later in the day he expressed his indignation in his hotel room, according to Konrad Bercovici, by sawing out frightful discords on his violin. Mrs. Einstein says that the Professor, while outwardly calm, will occasionally betray inward wrath by improvising ugly rhapsodies. He is reported to have had something like a tantrum once because a portrait of himself reappeared in his living-room after he had removed it. There is one thing that will strike sparks from the philosopher, and that is any reflection on his yachtsmanship. His chief sport was formerly that of sailing on the Wannsee, a lake near Berlin. As a scientist, he is meek and humble; as a skipper, vain and arrogant. A slur on his navigation, it is reported, changes his whole character.
The greatness of Einstein, according to some of his enlightened admirers, is a peculiar detachment which frees him from bias in favor of traditional ideas. His unique intellectual aloofness enabled him to distrust some of the most sacred assumptions of science. At the age of twenty-six, he boldly declared that a fundamental belief concerning the universe, religiously held since the time of Newton, was a mere prejudice—a failure of the human being to recognize obvious human limitations. In some way, Einstein was practically able to resign from the human race and to see things as gods or devils see them. Unfortunately, he could describe his Apocalypse neither in prose nor in poetry, but only in mathematical terms. He presented his vision in three letter-size pages of equations which constitute, in the opinion of some judges, the most important document of the century; some regard it as the greatest intellectual effort of man.
There is no doubt of Einstein’s giant mentality. Probably the circumstances of his early life contributed something to the detachment which enabled him to see the universe from the viewpoint of an observer in distant space. The freedom of Einstein in his speculations may be related to his footlooseness in political, social, and religious concerns. He was born in Germany. Both parents were Jews by race, but his father was a freethinker. Albert received his first training at a Roman Catholic school. As a youth, he lived for some time in Italy. He got his higher education in Switzerland at a school frequented by students of many nationalities. He became a naturalized Swiss and regarded himself as a citizen of the world. His most intimate friend during his school days was Friedrich Adler, an internationalist, who shot Prime Minister Stürgkh in 1916 as a protest against the war. His first wife was a Serbian and a Catholic. In early life, he came into contact with scientists of many nations. Socially, politically, religiously, he lived in a sort of vacuum; at any rate, in a kind of environment that dissolves ordinary prejudices, loyalties, and traditional mental habits. It is possible that, if Einstein had been a passionate patriot, a gregarious being, and an orthodox religionist, he might have developed the Einstein theory. It seems more likely, however, that his detachment as a man had something to do with his detachment as a scientist; it is conceivable that, if Einstein had been a good German, a good Jew, and a good mixer, the relativity theory might not yet have been discovered.
Einstein was born at Ulm on March 14, 1879. In 1880, his parents moved to Munich. His scientific life began, according to his biographers, at the age of four years when, toying with a compass, he began to speculate on the marvels of the universe. As a small boy, however, Albert was considered stupid. He was slow in speech, and there was some doubt whether his brain was of standard capacity. When he was ten, an older student—Max Talmey, now a New York physician—gave him some of Aaron Bernstein’s popular books on natural science. The Bernstein books, termed “pseudoscience” by one of Einstein’s biographers, seemed to excite the boy’s passion for science. In prose and verse, Einstein has acknowledged his indebtedness to Dr. Talmey for these volumes, and if popular science did well by Einstein, he has reciprocated handsomely. At the age of fifteen, Albert moved to Milan with his father, an electrical engineer. At seventeen, he entered the Technical Academy at Zurich. A fellow-student here was Mileva Maric, who in 1903 became the first Mrs. Einstein. Two boys were born to them. Several years later they were divorced. In 1911, the scientist married Elsa Einstein, a double first cousin, her father being a brother of Einstein’s father and her mother a sister of Einstein’s mother.
His steady march toward greatness began at Zurich when he devoted himself to the study of light—a subject about which we still know practically nothing, he has recently said. At Zurich, he planned an experiment on the theory that light travels through a motionless ether; he wanted to measure the path of a flash of light from one point on earth to another. The fast-moving earth would travel a perceptible distance while the light was journeying from the one point to the other. If the light traveled through ether, and if the ether remained motionless while the earth moved, the path of the ray of light should appear to be slightly curved; just as a rock thrown from the window of a moving train appears to curve toward the rear of the train. Einstein thought his proposed experiment might explain a good deal about the nature of ether and about the motion of the earth; the experiment, however, remained unexecuted, because of the expense involved and because Einstein learned that it had been performed in 1887 by the late Dr. A. A. Michelson at Cleveland, 0hio. The result of the Michelson experiment had been surprising. It failed to show the existence of ether. No curve was found in the path of light. The earth acted as if it were standing still. No experiment has ever puzzled scientists as much as this one. It had caused a vast amount of speculation about the universe before Einstein entered the field. It was generally agreed that something must be wrong with the ether theory and something wrong with the Newtonian theory. Einstein now devoted himself to the effort to discover what was wrong. He gave up all thought of experimental work. His only apparatus has always been a pad and a fountain pen, and his laboratory is under his hat. One of his most revolutionary ideas came to him while he was sailing a boat.
In the meantime, Einstein had to earn a living. Ill-fitted for practical life, he made three efforts to teach school, quickly losing each position. Through a former fellow-student, he obtained a place as an examiner of patents in the International Patent Office at Berne; this was in 1902, when he was twenty-three years old. Einstein did his routine work thoroughly, but spent his spare minutes on his own studies. He and other employees were prohibited from busying themselves with outside matters during working hours. Einstein has admitted that he violated this rule systematically. He made surreptitious calculations on bits of paper, smuggling them into a drawer of his desk if a superior entered his room. Einstein lacked the clerkly conscience. He is a man who would never wrong another human being, but he had no compunction about violating an arbitrary office rule. One of the great harvest years of Einstein’s career was 1905, when, at the age of twenty-six, he published five important scientific papers, the most important of which was the Special Relativity Theory, which contained the foundation of what is now called the Einstein theory. In this paper he attacked certain classic laws of the universe. An abstruse document, for mathematicians only, it was immediately hailed by Professor Max Planck of Berlin as a revolution in human thought. Einstein had been performing his daily grind at the Patent Office while pioneering a new world of thought. In later life, he has advised young scientific workers to find some “shoemaker’s job” as a balance against a one-sided life of complete devotion to science. After his recognition by Planck, however, Einstein was promptly rescued from the Patent Office. He served successively at the Universities of Zurich, Prague, and Berlin, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, and at the Prussian Academy of Sciences. His General Relativity Theory, or the Einstein theory proper, was published in 1915, when he was thirty-six years old. It caused immediate interest among scientists, but remained unknown to laymen until after its verification by photographs of the eclipse of 1919.
The reception of his work by qualified judges was almost universally favorable. Along with the praise, however, came some abuse. He was accused of stealing from Edgar Allan Poe, Mother Eddy, and St. Thomas Aquinas, among others. According to Mrs. Einstein, her husband was disconcerted by the tributes and rather pleased at being denounced as a charlatan and a plagiarist. According to his scientific colleagues, Einstein, always detached, talks of his theory as if somebody else had formulated it and never shows the least paternal pride or anxiety concerning it.
Two of Einstein’s four American trips were made to Southern California, which is now the chief centre of research and speculation on the Einstein universe. The primary proof of Einstein’s theory, the bending of starlight in passing the sun, has been corroborated by other evidence obtained at the Mt. Wilson Observatory near Pasadena. One of the predictions of Einstein was that a ray of light coming from a massive body like the sun would have slightly different characteristics from a ray of light originating on earth. This difference was found to exist. Further tests were made with light from the so-called “faint companion” which revolves around Sirius, the brightest of the stars. The “faint companion” is an astonisher, because of the weight of the stuff of which it is composed; one spoonful would weigh approximately a ton. The light from such an object should have the Einstein trademark all over it; this was found to be the case. Another discovery at Mt. Wilson was not so fortunate for the theory; it did not damage the main structure, but it peeled off some of the decorative detail. This was the discovery that the most distant star groups appeared to be rushing outward at the rate of 7,000 miles a second and that the universe was expanding or “exploding.” This caused Einstein to discard some of the early trimmings of his theory; the beliefs that parallel lines meet and that space curls back on itself are now outmoded.
It is a question today whether Einstein’s chief work has been done. His latest theory, an attempt to blend gravitation and electromagnetism, has met with an unenthusiastic reception. When a great intellect opens a new domain of knowledge, thousands of scientific squatters occupy it and the discoverer is sometimes elbowed out of his own jurisdiction. In applied science this occurred, for instance, to Alexander Graham Bell, who in his old age said that he could not even grasp the modern developments of the telephone, and to Edison, who lived to be a green apprentice in departments of research that he had founded. Einstein is still the undisputed cosmic master and will probably always be one of the greatest of scientific immortals, but it is already taxing him to keep abreast of the work of his followers. He says that the bold speculations of some of the younger men already make him feel like a reactionary. ♦
