The Ultimate Einstein/Ultimate Einstein, The (1998)(Marshall).iso/ein/book.txt

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FOREWORD

The story of Albert Einstein, scientist, philosopher, and
contemporary conscience, with all its impact and
influence, would fit better within the walls of a library than
between the covers of a single book. For Einstein was far
more than the scientist who confidently claimed that space
and time were not what everybody thought, including the
most sophisticated heirs of Newton, and who shrugged it
off when he was found to be right. In his technical
language, the universe was four-dimensional, while fallible
human beings thought they had a right to no more than
three. He passionately indulged in pacifism, and as
passionately indulged out when Hitler began to show that
he really meant what he said about the Jews and the
masterrace. Throughout it all he stuck to the job in hand,
determined to squeeze the next secret from Nature.
  The different facets of Einsteins life and work will long
continue to be explored. Deeper and deeper theses on ever
smaller aspects of his science will continue to be written.
The impact of his support for pacifism between the two
world wars will one day get the detailed and possibly
disillusioning analysis it warrants; so will the result of that
honest enthusiasm for Zionism which for long led him to
believe that the promised land could be reached without
force of arms. In theology he is likely to remain something
of an enigma, even among those who do not take his
cosmic religion too seriously. As a peg on which to hang
an argument on science and government, he is less useful
than might be expected; even so, the real relevance of his
famous letter to Roosevelt in 1939, and of his lesserknown
actions in the winter of 1944, provide the substance of
more than one might-have-been which could be explored
in detail. Einstein the philosopher is certain to get even
more critical study as the deeper implications of his work
continue to be investigated. And few can read his
correspondenceùwhose publication is long overdueù
without feeling that Einstein's wit is worth a slim volume
on its own. All this will come one day.
  But something more than these specialist portraits, each
with Einstein at the center of a technical argument,
emerges from digging hard into the documents, and from a
critical appraisal of the myth and reminiscence which have
grown around his memory in the last two or three decades.
It is the picture of a man who can, without exaggeration,
be called one of the great tragic figures of our time. It is
the picture of a man who while still young abandoned,
with all the passion of the convinced monastic, much of
what life had to offerùand who was shot back into the
struggle by the unobliging stumble of history. Thus the
youth who relinquished his nationality at the age of 16
returned to the fold later; opted out of German nationality
a second time in middle life; and even in old age, when
reconciliation had become respectable, refused to return to
"the land of the mass murderers." The dedicated pacifist,
who after his change of stance was reviled for his apostasy,
believed himself to be among those who pressed the
buttons which destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The
Zionist who put peace with the Arabs as a first essential
was forced finally to agree that it was necessary to fight. In
science the greatest physicist in three centuries, or possibly
of all time, found himself after middle age pushed by the
advance of quantum theory into a backwater, "a genuine
old museum-piece" as he described himself.
  These ironies not only gave Einstein's life a great
personal poignancy; they also combined to keep him in the
glare of the public limelight, first switched on with such
spectacular results in 1919 when, in Whitehead's words,
 "a great adventure in thought had at length come safe to
shore." In this glare, the human figure has tended to be
enlarged into the Delphic oracle. The aureole of white hair
helped. So did the great luminous eyes. So did the brave
stand which Einstein made for civic and academic
freedoms. After his death, all this encouraged a
biographical molly-coddling which was less than his
genius deserved. It also tended to encourage the belief that,
as he once put it, all men dance to the tune of an invisible
piper. This is not so. "Wherever a system is really
complicated, as in the brain or in an organized
community," Sir George Thomson has said,
 "indeterminacy comes in, not necessarily because of h
 [Planck's constant] but because to make a prediction so
many things must be known that the stray consequences of
studying them will disturb the status quo, which can never
therefore be discovered. History is not and cannot be
determinate. The supposed causes only may produce the
consequences we expect."[From a letter to the author from
Sir George Thomson, February 16, 1970.]
  This has rarely been more true than of Albert Einstein,
whose thought and action in science and life became
interrelated in a way no dramatist would dare to conceive.
His extraordinary story has itself some quality of the
indeterminacy which in physics he was so reluctant to
accept. He would not have liked it. But he would have
appreciated the situation. He might even have laughed
about it.

  RONALD W. CLARK
  New York
  March 1971

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank Dr. Otto Nathan, Einstein's literary
executor, for permission to quote hitherto unpublished
letters and other copyrighted material. I am also especially
grateful to Miss Helen Dukas, Einstein's secretary for
more than twenty-five years, for her generous and
unstinting help in studying the material in the Einstein
Archive at Princeton. Neither will agree with all that I
have written; indeed, if two devoted colleagues and an
impartial biographer were to take the same view all the
time, there would be something wrong somewhere. I alone
am responsible for the facts put down and the opinions
expressed.
  I also wish to thank: Dr. Jagdish Mehra of the University
of Texas at Austin, Texas, for reading the manuscript; and
Professor Norman Bentwich, Josef Fraenkel, Professor N.
Kemmer, Professor Sir Bernard Lovell, Dr. R. E. W.
Maddison, Professor C. W. McCombie, Dr. David
Mitrany, Heinz Norden, Dr. Peter Plesch, Sir George
Thomson, and Lancelot Law Whyte for reading portions of
the manuscript. A very large number of people in the
United States, Europe, and the Middle East have been
generous in providing documents and reminiscences. It is
unfortunately impossible to name them all, but I would
particularly like to thank the following, while reiterating
that, throughout the book, any opinions expressed, and the
responsibility for the facts given, are entirely my own:
  Walter Adams, Director, The London School of
Economics and Political Science; Professor Aage Bohr;
Dr. Vannevar Bush; Dr. C. H. Collie; Professor A. Vibert
Douglas; Eidg. Amt fⁿr geistiges Eigentum, Berne; Dr. H.
A. Einstein; Churchill Eisenhart; Dr. Elizabeth Eppler,
Institute of Jewish Affairs; Professor I. Estermann; Mme.
M. Fawtier, UNESCO; Frau Kate Freundlich; Professor
Dennis Gabor; Mrs. Barbara Gamow; Dr. Judith R.
Goodstein, California Institute of Technology; Dr. Max
Gottschalk; Kurt R. Grossmann; Sir Roy Harrod; Drs. J.
van Herwaarden, Rijksuniversiteit te Utrecht, Univer
siteitsmuseum, Utrecht; Dr. Max J. Herzberger; Richard
G. Hewlett, Chief Historian, U. S. Atomic Energy
Commission; Professor Banesh Hoffmann; Alvin E.
Jaeggli, Eidg. Technische Hochschule Bibliothek, Zurich;
Bernard Jaffe; Miss Suzanne Christine Kennedy, Nuffield
College, Oxford; Oscar Kocherthaler; Professor C.
Lanczos, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies; Dr. W.
Lanzer, Verein fⁿr Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung,
Vienna; Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh; Dr. Jacob R.
Marcus, American Jewish Archives; Julian L. Meltzer, the
Weizmann Archives; Professor Ashley Montagu; Mrs. B.
Mulholland; Dr. John N. Nagy; Professor Linus Pauling;
Professor J. Pelseneer, UniversitΘ Libre de Bruxelles; Y.
Perotin, League of Nations Archives, Geneva; Dr. Peter
Plesch; Professor William Ready, McMaster University,
Hamilton, Ontario; Professor Nathan Rosen; Professor
Leonora Cohen Rosenfield; Professor J. Rotblat; Dr.
Alexander Sachs; Mrs. Esther Salaman; Mrs. Alice
Kimball Smith; Drs. P. van der Star, Rijksmuseum voor de
Geschiedenis der Natuurwetenschnappen, Leiden; Dr.
Gertrud Weiss Szilard; U. S. Department of the Navy; U.
S. National Archives and Records Service; E.
Vandewoude, Cabinet du Roi, Bruxelles; Dr. Charles
Weiner and Mrs. Joan Warnow of the American Institute
of Physics, for their help and guidance in the use of
materials in the Niels Bohr Library for History and
Philosophy of Physics; Jeremy Weston, The Royal
Institution; Dr. G. J. Whitrow; Professor Eugene P.
Wigner; E. T. Williams, The Rhodes Trust.
  Finally, I wish to thank the large number of Jewish
organizations in the United States, Britain, Israel, and
elsewhere who have helped to resolve specific problems;
the numerous German bodies who have supplied
information on the question of Einstein's nationality; the
librarians and archivists of the university and other sources
listed in the section on references who have helped to
make my work less arduous; and the following for
permission to quote copyrighted material:
  Algemeen Rijksarchief, The Hague (H. A. Lorentz
correspondence); American Journal of Physics (R. S.
Shankland's "Conversations with Albert Einstein"); His
Majesty King Baudouin of the Belgians (letter to Einstein
from His Majesty King Albert of the Belgians); Professor
Aage Bohr (letters of Professor Niels Bohr); Burndy
Library (Ehrenhaft manuscript); The California Institute of
Technology Archives, Pasadena (quotations from the Hale
and Millikan Papers); Cambridge University Press (Lord
Rayleigh's The Life of Sir J. J. Thomson; Einstein and
Infeld's The Evolution of Physics; Hermann Bondi's
Assumption and Myth in Physical Theory; Sir James Jeans'
The New Background of Science); Jonathan Cape Ltd. and
Alfred Knopf (Philipp Frank's Einstein); Columbia
University (1912 correspondence with Einstein); Thomas
Y. Crowell Co. (The Questioners, by Barbara Lovett
Cline); Deutsche Verlags-amstalt Stuttgart, and Dr. H.
Tramer (Blumenfeld's Erlebte Judenfrage); Miss Margot
Einstein (letters of Mrs. Albert Einstein); Eyre &
Spottiswoode (Publishers) Ltd. (Anton Reiser's Albert
Einstein: A Biographical Portrait); Professor Peter Fowler
(letter of Ernest Rutherford); Sigmund Freud Copyrights,
Basic Books and Hogarth Press Ltd. (Letters of Sigmund
Freud: 1873-1939); Frau Kate Freundlich (Freundlich
correspondence); Victor Gollancz Ltd. (Leopold Infeld's
Quest: The Evolution of a Scientist); Institute for
Advanced Study (letters of Dr. Frank Aydelotte and Dr.
Abraham Flexner); Lady Jeans (Sir James Jeans' letter);
Martin J. Klein (Paul Ehrenfest); Mrs. Henry R. Labouisse
(correspondence of Madame Curie); Dr. Wanda Lanzer
(Adler correspondence); the executors of the late Lord
Cherwell (Lord Cherwell's correspondence); Mc-Graw
Hill Book Company (Max Talmey's The Relativity Theory
Simplified); Mrs. B. Mulholland (Commander Locker
Lampson's letters); North Holland Publishing Company
and Dr. Abraham Pais (Niels Bohr, ed. L. Rosenfeld);
North Holland Publishing Company (Niels Bohr: An
Essay, by L. Rosenfeld); Oxford University Press (Robert
Oppenheimer's The Flying Trapeze: Three Crises for
Physicists, the Whidden Lectures, 1962); Dr. Peter Plesch
(Janos, by John Plesch); Punch (for poem, "Einstein and
Epstein Are Wonderful Men ..."); Dr. Nesca Robb (Dr. A.
A. Robb's poem); Mme Romain Rolland and Editions
Albin Michel (Romain Rolland's Journal des AnnΘes de
Guerre 1914-1918); Professor Peggie Sampson (R. A.
Sampson's letter); The Hon. Godfrey Samuel and The
House of Lords (Samuel material); Charles Scribner's
Sons (Harlow Shapley's Through Rugged Ways to the
Stars); The Scientific American ("An Interview with
Albert Einstein," by I. Bernard Cohen); Raglan Squire (Sir
John Squire's answer to Pope's epitaph on Sir Isaac
Newton); Staples Press and Miss Joyce Weiner (Carl
Seelig's Albert Einstein); Dr. Gertrud Weiss Szilard (Dr.
Leo Szilard's letters and Reminiscences); The Master and
Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge (the writings of Sir
Arthur Eddington); United Nations (League of Nations
archival material); University Museum, Utrecht (Professor
Julius correspondence); Mrs. G. W. Watters (writings of
Dr. Leon L. Watters); George Weidenfeld & Nicholson
Ltd. (Antonina Vallentin's Einstein); the Trustees of the
Weizmann Archives (letters written by Chaim Weizmann).
  R.W.C.

PART ONE

THE MAKING OF
A MISSION

CHAPTER 1

GERMAN BOY

The life of Albert Einstein has a dramatic quality that does
not rest exclusively on his theory of relativity. For the
extravagant timing of history linked him with three
shattering developments of the twentieth century: the rise
of modern Germany, the birth of nuclear weapons, and the
growth of Zionism. Their impact on his simple genius
combined to drive him into a contact with the affairs of the
world for which he had little taste. The result would have
made him a unique historical figure even had he not
radically altered man's ideas of the physical world. Yet
Einstein was also something more, something very
different from the Delphic, hair-haloed oracle of his later
years. To the end he retained a touch of clowning humor
as well as a resigned and understanding amusement at the
follies of the human race. Behind the great man there
lurked a perpetual glint in the eye, a fundamental
irreverence for authority, and an unexpected sense of the
ridiculous that could unlatch a deep belly laugh that shook
the windows; together with decent moral purpose, it
combined to make him a character rich in his own
nonscientific right.
  German by nationality, Jewish by origin, dissenting in
spirit, Einstein reacted ambivalently against these three
birthday gifts. He threw his German nationality overboard
at the age of fifteen but twenty years later, after becoming
Swiss, settled in Berlin where he remained throughout the
First World War; after Germany's defeat in 1918 he took
up German civic rights again, "one of the follies of my
life," as he later wrote of it, only to renounce his country a
second time when Hitler came to power. His position as a
Jew was buttressed by his support of Zionism, yet he
offended more than once by insistence that Jews were,
more importantly, members of the human species.
Moreover his Zionism conflicted at times with his
pacifism, and to his old friend, Lord Samuel, he
commented that he was, despite anti-Semitic attacks, "pas
trΦs Juif." The free thinking ideals of his youth continued
into old age; yet these included a belief in the ordered and
orderly nature of the universe which was by no means in
conflict with the idea of a Godùeven though what
Einstein meant by the word was peculiar to himself and a
small number of others. In these and other ways, in his
private and his professional life, Einstein became the great
contradiction: the German who detested the Germans; the
pacifist who encouraged men to arms and played a
significant part in the birth of nuclear weapons; the Zionist
who wished to placate the Arabs; the physicist who with
his "heuristic viewpoint" of 1905 suggested that light
could be both wave and particle, and who was ultimately to
agree that even matter presented the same enigma. Yet
Einstein himself supplied part of the answer to his own
riddle. In ordinary life, as well as in the splendid mysteries
of physics, absolutes were to be distrusted; events were
often relative to circumstance.
  He was born in Ulm, an old city on the Danube with
narrow winding streets and the great cathedral on which
workmen were then building the tallest spire in Europe.
Lying in the foothills of the Swabian Alps, where the Blau
and the Iller join the Danube, the city had in 1805 been the
scene of the Austrian's defeat by Napoleon. Four years
later it was ceded to Wⁿrttemberg under the Treaty of
Vienna. In 1842 the old fortifications were restored by
German engineers, and with the creation of the new
German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors in 1870, Prussian
discipline began to reach down from the north German
plains towards the free-and-easy Swabians of whom the
Einsteins were commonplace examples.
  They came from Buchau, a small town between Lake
Constance and Ulm, comfortable and complacent on the
Federnsee, a minor marsh of prehistoric interest whose
story is admirably told in the fine new Federnsee Museum
and whose shores are today thronged with weekend
tourists. Since 1577 the Jews had formed a distinguished
and respectable community in the area. They prospered
down the centuries; they hung on, despite the burning of
the synagogue in 1938 and all that followed it, until 1968.
Only then could the local papers report: "Death of the Last
Jew in Buchau." His name was Siegbert Einstein, a
relative, many times removed, of the most famous Jew in
modern history.
  Industrious and mildy prosperous, the Einsteins had lived
in Buchau at least since the 1750s according to the six
family registers kept by the Jewish authorities. By the
middle of the nineteenth century they were numerous, and
eleven of that name are shown on the roll of those who
subscribed to the new synagogue in 1839. Albert
Einstein's great-grandfather had been born in the town in
1759, and the Jewish registers record his marriage to
Rebekka Obernauer, the birth of their son Abraham in
1808, and Abraham's marriage to Helene Moos. Their son
Hermann, the father of Einstein, was born in Buchau on
August 30, 1847. Nineteen years later Abraham and his
family moved to Ulm, thirty miles to the north, and in
1876 Hermann married Pauline Koch, born in Cannstadt,
only a few miles away, and eleven years his junior.
  Like the Einsteins, the Kochs had been part of the
Wⁿrttemberg Jewish community for more than a century, a
family with roots rather more to the northùin Goppingen,
Jebenhausen, and Cannstadt. Like her husband, Pauline
Koch spoke the soft Swabian dialect, hallmark of an
ancient duchy that had once spread from Franconia to
Switzerland, from Burgundy to Bavaria, and whose
inhabitants lacked both the discipline of Prussia and the
coarseness of Bavaria.
  Although Einstein was not of peasant stock, he came
from people almost as close to the earth, and his reactions
were often those of the man tied to the hard facts of life by
the seasons. His second wife's scathing "My husband
mystical!" may not be literally justified, but it illustrates
the difference which has grown through the years between
the unreservedly philosophical Einstein whom many of his
admirers would like him to have been and the more
practical man he very often was. Absent-minded scientist,
of course; that was real and not sham. Einstein never
played to the gallery, although more aware of its existence
than is sometimes imagined; but, more than most men, he
was absent-minded only about things that didn't matter; or
when he knew there was someone to remember for him.
  The differences between his parents, a devoted, cheerful
couple who faced the results of the husband's happy
golucky character with resignation, were largely those of
emphasis. The picture of the father that comes through,
secondhand, from a grandson he never knew, is of a jovial,
hopeful man. This fits the description which Einstein
himself presented to his friend Philipp Frank, who wrote
of Hermann: "His mode of life and his Weltanschauung
differed in no respect from those of the average citizen in
that locality. When his work was done, he liked to go on
outings with his family into the beautiful country round
Munich, to the romantic lakes and mountains, and he was
fond of stopping at the pleasant, comfortable Bavarian
taverns, with their good beer, radishes, and sausages."
More than half a century later Albert Einstein remembered
those Sunday excursions with enjoyment, the discussions
between his father and his mother as to which way they
should go, and the husband's careful selection of a route
which would end up where his wife wanted. "Exceedingly
friendly, mild, and wise," was how he spoke of his father
as he approached the age of seventy. Easygoing and
unruffleable, a large optimistic man with a thick
moustache who looks out from his portraits through a
rimmed pince-nez with all the quiet certitude of the
nineteenth century, Hermann Einstein would have thought
it slightly presumptuous to have fathered a genius.
  Pauline Koch, with even features and a mass of dark hair
piled high above a broad forehead, brought to the union
more than the comparative affluence of a woman whose
father was a Stuttgart grain merchant and court purveyor.
She brought also a breath of genuine culture, a love of
music which was to be inextricably entwined with her
son's work and, in the pursuit of her ambition for him, a
touch of the ruthlessness with which he followed his star.
She appears to have had a wider grasp than her husband of
German literature, and while for him Schiller and Heine
were an end in themselves, for her they were only a
beginning. To Pauline Koch, it might well be thought,
Einstein would attribute the imaginative genius which was
to make him so much more than a mere scientist. He took
a different view. "I have no particular talent, I am merely
extremely inquisitive," he replied in later life when asked
from whom he had inherited his talents. "So I think we
can dispense with this question of heritage."
  For a year the young Einsteins lived in Buchau. Then in
1877 they moved back to Ulm where Hermann set up, in a
building on the south side of the Cathedral Square which
later became the "Englander" wine tavern, a small
electrical and engineering workshop financed by his more
prosperous in-laws. He and his wife lived a few hundred
yards away in an apartment at No. 135, city division B, an
undistinguished four-story building renumbered 20
Bahnhofstrasse in 1880 and destroyed in an Allied air raid
64 years later. Below it, one of the tributaries of the river
Blau flowed in a cutting beside the street, past the
overjutting windows of houses that had not changed much
since the fifteenth century, turning before it reached the
cathedral and entered the Danube. Here, in the town whose
inhabitants proudly claimed that "Ulmense sunt
mathematici" (the people of Ulm are mathematicians),
Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879.
  Within a year of the birth, Hermann's small business had
collapsed, a victim of his own perpetual good nature and
high hopes. He now moved to Munich and with his brother
Jakob opened a small electrochemical works. Thus for
Einstein Ulm was merely a vestigial memory, a town from
whose winding medieval streets the open country could
still be seen, a town where the Jews retained their own
identity yet lived at ease with the rest of the community; a
smallish place through whose squares the cows with their
great clanging bells were driven, and into which there
drifted, on summer evenings, the scent of the forests and
the surrounding hills.
  The move to Munich brought the Einstein family from an
almost rural environment into the capital of Bavaria,
already more than a quarter of a million strong, still fresh
from the architectural adornment's added to it by the mad
King Ludwig I at a cost of 7,000,000 thalers.
Overwhelmingly Catholic, its air was heavy with the sound
of bells from numerous churches: the cathedral of the
archbishopric of Munich-Freising, with its unfinished
towers; the Jesuit St. Michael's; the Louis, with Cornelius'
fresco of the Last Judgment; and St. Mariahilf with its
gorgeous glass and fine woodwork. The city was rich in art
galleries, proud of its seven bridges across the Isar, and of
the K÷nigsbau built in the style of the Pitti Palace in
Florence; a city still epitomizing the baroquerie of
southern Germany before it bowed knee to the Prussians
from the north. From its narrow alleyways and its fine
arcades there was carried on one of the great art trades of
Europe; from its breweries there came, each year, no less
than 49,000,000 gallons of which 37,000,000 were drunk
in the city itself.
  In the University of Munich there had begun to work in
1880 a man whose influence on Einstein was to be
continuous, critical, and, in the final assessment,
enigmatic. This was Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, then
aged twenty-two, the latest in a long line of "excellent,
reliable, incorruptible, idealistic, and generous men,
devoted to the service of Church and State." Born in Kiel
while the port was still part of Danish Schleswig-Holstein,
aged eight at the time of Prussia's conquest of the
province, Max Planck was born into a professional
German family which moved south to Munich the
following year. Later he studied at the university before
going north to Berlin. Then, dedicated to the task of
discovering how nature worked, Planck returned to
Munich where he served as a privatdozent for five years;
as he walked daily to the university the young private tutor
may have brushed shoulders with a boy whose life was to
be intimately linked with his own. For two decades later
Einstein was to provide a revolutionary development to
Planck's own quantum theory. Another decade on, and
Planck was to attract Einstein from the Switzerland he
loved to the Germany which he detested. Planck was to
encourage him into becoming a German citizen for the
second time and, more than once during the 1920s, to
dissuade him from leaving the Fatherland. In these, and in
other ways, the two men's lives were to be ironically
linked in a way which reads like nature aping art.
  The first Einstein home in Munich was a small rented
house. After five years the family business had prospered
sufficiently for a move to be made to a larger home in the
suburb of Sendling. This was surrounded by big trees and a
rambling garden, usually unkempt, which separated it
from the main road. Only a short distance away were
buildings soon converted into a small factory for
manufacture of electrical equipment. Here Hermann
attended to the business while brother Jakob, with more
technical knowledge, ran the works.
  A year after the family's arrival in Munich, Albert's
sister Maja was born. Only two years younger, she was to
become constant companion and unfailing confidant.
Himself unconcerned with death, he faced the loss of two
wives with equanimity; but the death of his sister, at the
age of seventy, dented the hard defensive shell he had built
round his personal feelings.
  In one way the Einsteins failed to fit any of the
convenient slots of their history and environment. In a
predominantly Catholic communityùeighty-four percent
in Munichùthey were not merely Jews, but Jews who had
fallen away. Many deep-grained Jewish characteristics
remained, it is true. The tradition of the close-knit
intermarrying community is well brought out in the family
trees, and Einstein himself was to add to it when, after
divorce, he married a double cousin. The deep respect for
learning which the Jew shares with the Celt ran in the very
marrow of the family. And Einstein was to become but one
more witness to the prominent part that Jews have played
in the revolutionary developments of scienceùfrom
Jacques Loeb in physiology to Levi-Civita and Minkowski
in mathematics, Paul Ehrenfest in the quantum theory,
Haber in chemistry, and Lise Meitner, Leo Szilard, and
many others in nuclear physics. Thus he belonged to a
group whose loyalties crossed frontiers and oceans, known
by its members to be steadfastly self-succoring and claimed
by its enemies to operate an international conspiracy.
  Despite this, the essential Jewish root of the matter was
lacking: the family did not attend the local synagogue. It
did not deny itself bacon or ham, nor certain seafoods. It
did not demand that animals must be slaughtered
according to ritual and did not forbid the eating of meat
and dairy products together. All this was to Hermann
Einstein but "an ancient superstition" and equally so were
the other customs and traditions of the Jewish faith. There
was also in the family one particularly hard-bitten agnostic
uncle, and Einstein used him as peg for the old Jewish
joke. He would always describe with relish how he had
surprised him one day in full formal dress preparing to go
to the synagogue. The uncle had responded to the
nephew's astonishment with the warning: "Ah, but you
never know."
  Thus Einstein was nourished on a family tradition which
had broken with authority; which disagreed, sought
independence, had deliberately trodden out of line. This
also, as surely as the humanitarian tradition of Jewish self
help, was to pull him the way he went, so that at times he
closely resembled J. B. S. Haldane, who came to believe
that authority and government itself must be badùany
government and any authority. Sent first to a Catholic
elementary school apparently on the grounds that it was
convenient, he was there a Jew among Christians; among
Jews he was, like the members of his family, an outsider.
The pattern was to repeat itself through much of his life.
  The bare facts of his early years are well enough known,
but an aura of mythology surrounds most of the detail.
Neither his sister nor either of his wives contributed
significantly to the raw material of biography and with the
exception of one chapter in a little-known book written by
the man who introduced Einstein to science at the age of
thirteen, virtually all of it comes from Einstein himself in
middle or old age when he could remember not only "with
advantages" but with the hindsight of history to guide him.
As he himself has written, "Every reminiscence is colored
by today's being what it is, and therefore by a deceptive
point of view." This alone would suggest caution; but there
is also Einstein's own admission that his evidence could be
faulty.
  The admission, which is substantiated by Einstein's son,
was made in old age after Dr. Janos Plesch, who had
known Einstein at least since 1919 when he attended
Pauline Einstein on her deathbed, sent him for comment
the material he was incorporating in his own
autobiography. "It has always struck me as singular," he
wrote, "that the marvelous memory of Einstein for
scientific matters does not extend to other fields. I don't
believe that Einstein could forget anything that interested
him scientifically, but matters relating to his childhood,
his scientific beginnings, and his development are in a
different category, and he rarely talks about themùnot
because they don't interest him but simply because he
doesn't remember them well enough." Einstein agreed,
commenting: "You're quite right about my bad memory
for personal things. It's really quite astounding. Something
for psychoanalystsùif there really are such people." Many
of the reported details of Einstein's early years must
therefore be believed in more as an act of faith than as the
result of reliable evidenceùa situation true to a lesser
extent of his later life when there grew up round his
activities a thick jungle of distortions, misconceptions,
inventions, and simple lies. A biography with frontispiece
drawing showing "Einstein at the first test of the atomic
bomb"ùa test of which he knew nothing at the timeùis
illustration rather than exception.
  Nothing in Einstein's early history suggests dormant
genius. Quite the contrary. The one feature of his
childhood about which there appears no doubt is the
lateness with which he learned to speak. Even at the age of
nine he was not fluent, while reminiscences of his youth
stress hesitancies and the fact that he would reply to
questions only after consideration and reflection. His
parents feared that he might be subnormal, and it has even
been suggested that in his infancy he may have suffered
from a form of dyslexia. "Leonardo da Vinci, Hans
Christian Andersen, Einstein, and Niels Bohr," it is
claimed by the Dyslexic Societyùwith understandable
special pleadingù"are supermen who have survived the
handicap of dyslexia." Far more plausible is the simpler
situation suggested by Einstein's son Hans Albert, who
says that his father was withdrawn from the world even as
a boyùa pupil for whom teachers held out only poor
prospects. This is in line with the family legend that when
Hermann Einstein asked his son's headmaster what
profession his son should adopt, the answer was simply: "It
doesn't matter; he'll never make a success of anything."
  As remembered by Einstein in later years, this
backwardness had its compensations, since it indirectly
helped guide him towards the field he was to make his
own. "I sometimes ask myself," he once said, "how did it
come that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity.
The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to
think about problems of space and time. These are things
which he has thought of as a child. But my intellectual
development was retarded, as a result of which I began to
wonder about space and time only when I had already
grown up. Naturally, I could go deeper into the problem
than a child with normal abilities."
  His boyhood was straightforward enough. From the age
of five until the age of ten he attended a Catholic school
near his home, and at ten was transferred to the Luitpold
Gymnasium, where the children of the middle classes had
drummed into them the rudiments of Latin and Greek, of
history and geography, as well as of simple mathematics.
The choice of a Catholic school was not as curious as it
seems. Elementary education in Bavaria was run on a
denominational basis. The nearest Jewish school was some
distance from the Einstein home and its fees were high. To
a family of little religious feeling the dangers of Catholic
orientation were outweighed by the sound general
instruction which the school gave.
  According to some sources he was here confronted for the
first time with his Jewishness. For as an object lesson a
teacher one day produced a large nail with the words: "The
nails with which Christ was nailed to the cross looked like
this." Almost sixty years later Einstein gave his seal to the
tale: "A true story." But Frank, to whom he appears to
have told it, comments that the teacher "did not add, as
sometimes happens, that the Crucifixion was the work of
the Jews. Nor did the idea enter the minds of the students
that because of this they must change their relations with
their classmate Albert." It seems likely, despite the
highlight sometimes given to the incident, that none of the
boys took much notice of the nail from the Crucifixion.
And in later life Einstein was to repeat more than once
that the fact of his Jewishness was only brought home
when he arrived in Berlin a few months before the start of
the First World War.
  Before he left his Catholic elementary school for the very
different Luitpold Gymnasium he received what appears to
have been the first genuine shock to his intellectual
system. The "appears" is necessary. For this was the
famous incident of the pocket compass and while he
confirmed that it actually happened he was also to put a
gloss on its significance.
  The story is simply that when the boy was five, ill in bed,
his father showed him a pocket compass. What impressed
the child was that since the iron needle always pointed in
the same direction, whichever way the case was turned, it
must be acted upon by something that existed in space
the space that had always been considered empty. The
incident, so redolent of "famous childhoods," is reported
persistently in the accounts of Einstein's youth that began
to be printed after he achieved popular fame at the end of
the First World War. Whether it always had its later
significance is another matter. Einstein himself, answering
questions in 1953 at the time of his seventy-fourth
birthday, gave it perspective by his assessment of how it
hadùor might haveùaffected him. Did the compass, and
the book on Euclidean geometry which he read a few years
later, really influence him, he was asked. "I myself think
so, and I believe that these outside influences had a
considerable influence on my development," he replied
with some caution. "But a man has little insight into what
goes on within him. When a young puppy sees a compass
for the first time it may have no similar influence, nor on
many a child. What does, in fact, determine the particular
reaction of an individual? One can postulate more or less
plausible theories on this subject, but one never really finds
the answer."
  Soon afterwards another influence entered Einstein's life.
From the age of six he began to learn the violin. The
enthusiasm this evoked did not come quickly. He was
taught by rote rather than inspiration, and seven years
passed before he was aroused by Mozart into an awareness
of the mathematical structure of music. Yet his delight in
the instrument grew steadily and became a psychological
safety valve; it was never quite matched by performance.
In later years the violin became the hallmark of the
world's most famous scientist; but Einstein's supreme and
obvious enjoyment in performance was the thing.
Amateur, gifted or not, remained amateur.
  Hermann Einstein with his compass and Pauline Einstein
with her insistence on music lessons brought two
influences to bear on their son. A third was provided by his
uncle Jakob, the sound engineer without whom Hermann
would have foundered even faster in the sea of good
intentions. Jakob Einstein is a relatively shadowy figure,
and his memorial is a single anecdote, remembered over
more than thirty years and recalled by Einstein to his early
biographers. "Algebra is a merry science," Uncle Jakob
would say. "We go hunting for a little animal whose name
we don't know, so we call it x. When we bag our game we
pounce on it and give it its right name." Uncle Jakob may
or may not have played a significant part in making
mathematics appear attractive, but his influence seems to
have been long-lasting. In many of Einstein's later
attempts to present the theory of relativity to
nonmathematicians, there is recourse to something not so
very different; to analogies with elevators, trains, and ships
that suggest a memory of the stone house at Sendling and
Uncle Jakob's "little animal whose name we don't know."
  However, the Einstein family included an in-law more
important than Father, Mother, or Uncle Jakob. This was
CΣsar Koch, Pauline Koch's brother, who lived in
Stuttgart and whose visits to the Einstein family were long
remembered. "You have always been my best-loved
uncle," Einstein wrote to him as a man of forty-five. "You
have always been one of the few who have warmed my
heart whenever I thought of you, and when I was young
your visit was always a great occasion." In January, 1885,
CΣsar Koch returned to Germany from Russia, where part
of his family was living. With him he brought as a present
for Albert a model steam engine, handed over during a
visit to Munich that year, and drawn from memory by his
nephew thirty years later. Soon afterwards CΣsar married
and moved to Antwerpùwhere the young Albert was
subsequently taken on a conducted tour of the Bourse. A
well-to-do grain merchant, CΣsar Koch appears to have
had few intellectual pretensions. But some confidence was
sparked up between uncle and nephew and it was to CΣsar
that Einstein was to send, as a boy of sixteen, an outline of
the imaginative ideas later developed into the Special
Theory of Relativity.
  However, nothing so precocious appeared likely when
Einstein in 1889 made his first appearance at the Luitpold
Gymnasium. Still slightly backward, introspective,
keeping to himself the vague stirrings of interest which he
felt for the world about him, he had so far given no
indication that he was in any way different from the
common run of children. The next six years at the
Gymnasium were to alter that, although hardly in the way
his parents can have hoped.
  Within the climate of the time, the Luitpold Gymnasium
seems to have been no better and no worse than most
establishments of its kind. It is true that it put as great a
premium on a thick skin as any British public school but
there is no reason to suppose that it was particularly
ogreish. Behind what might be regarded as no more than
normal discipline it held, in reserve, the ultimate weapon
of appeal to the unquestionable Prussian god of authority.
Yet boys, and even sensitive boys, have survived as much;
some have even survived Eton.
  The Gymnasium was to have a critical effect on Einstein
in separate ways. The first was that its discipline created in
him a deep suspicion of authority in general and of
educational authority in particular. This feeling lasted all
his life, without qualification. "The teachers in the
elementary school appeared to me like sergeants and in the
Gymnasium the teachers were like lieutenants," he
remembered. More than forty years later, speaking to the
seventy-second Convocation of the State University of New
York, he noted that to him, "the worst thing seems to be
for a school principally to work with methods of fear,
force, and artificial authority. Such treatment destroys the
healthy feelings, the integrity, and selfconfidence of the
pupils. All that it produces is a servile helot." And years
later, replying to a young girl who had sent him a
manuscript, he wrote. "Keep your manuscript for your sons
and daughters, in order that they may derive consolation
from it andùnot give a damn for what their teachers tell
them or think of them."
  Not giving a damn about accepted beliefs was an attitude
which certainly developed at the Gymnasium. The
teaching may or may not have justified the principle, but
the outcome was singularly fortunate as far as Einstein was
concerned. It taught him the virtues of scepticism. It
encouraged him to question and to doubt, always valuable
qualities in a scientist and particularly so at this period in
the history of physics. Here the advance of technology was
bringing to light curious new phenomena which, however
hard men might try, could not be fitted into the existing
order of things. Yet innate conservatism presented a
formidable barrier to discussion, let alone acceptance, of
new ideas. If Einstein had not been pushed by the Luitpold
Gymnasium into the stance of opposition he was to retain
all his life, then he might not have questioned so quickly
so many assumptions that most men took for granted, nor
have arrived at such an early age at the Special Theory of
Relativity.
  A third effect was of a very different kind. There is no
doubt that he despised educational discipline and that this
in turn nourished the radical inquiring attitude that is
essential to the scientist. Yet it was only years later, as he
looked back from middle life to childhood, that he
expressed his dislike of the Gymnasium so vehemently.
Until then, according to one percipient biographer who
came to know him well, "he could not even say that he
hated it. According to family legend, this taciturn child,
who was not given to complaining, did not even seem very
miserable. Only long afterwards did he identify the tone
and atmosphere of his schooldays with that of barracks, the
negation, in his opinion, of the human being."
  Yet by the end of the First World War this school
environment had become a symbol in an equation whose
validity Einstein never doubted. The Luitpold Gymnasium
as he looked back on it equaled ruthless discipline, and the
Luitpold Gymnasium was German. Thus the boyhood
hardships became transformed into the symbol of all that
was worst in the German characterùa transformation that
was to produce dire and ironic consequences. With the
stench of Auschwitz and Belsen still in the nostrils it is
easy enough to understand the near paranoia that affected
Einstein when in later life he regarded his own
countrymen. It is easy enough to understand his reply
when, at the age of sixty-nine, he was asked: "Is there any
German person towards whom you feel an estimation, and
who was your very personal friend among the
Germanborn?" "Respect for Planck," Einstein had replied.
"No friendship for any real German. Max von Laue was
the closest to me." All this is understandable. Yet Germans
were among the first to die in the concentration camps,
and it is remarkable to find in Einstein, normally the most
compassionate of men, an echo of the cry that the only
good German is a dead one. Thus the Luitpold
Gymnasium, transmogrified by memory, has a lot to
answer for; it convinced Einstein that the Prussians had
been handed out a double dose of original sin. Later
experiences tended to confirm the belief.
  At the Gymnasium there appears to have been, as there
frequently is in such schools, one master who stood apart,
the odd man out going his nonconformist way. His name
was Reuss. He tried to make his pupils think for
themselves while most of his colleagues did little moreùin
Einstein's later opinionùthan encourage an academic
Kadavergehorsamkeit ("the obedience of the corpse") that
was required among troops of the Imperial Prussian army.
In later life Einstein would recall how Reuss had tried to
spark alive a real interest in ancient civilizations and their
influences which still could be seen in the contemporary
life of southern Germany. There was to be an unexpected
footnote to Einstein's memory. For after his first work had
begun to pass a disturbing electric shock through the
framework of science, he himself visited Munich and
called on his old teacher, then living in retirement. But the
worn suit and baggy trousers which had already become
the Einstein hallmark among his colleagues merely
suggested poverty. Reuss had no recollection of Einstein's
name and it became clear that he thought his caller was on
a begging errand. Einstein left hurriedly.
  The influence that initially led Einstein on to his chosen
path did not come from the Luitpold Gymnasium but from
Max Talmey, a young Jewish medical student who in 1889
matriculated at Munich University. Talmey's elder
brother, a practicing doctor, already knew the Einstein
family, and quickly introduced him to what Max called
"the happy, comfortable, and cheerful Einstein home,
where I received the same generous consideration as he
did." In later life Talmey was seized with the idea for a
universal language, an Esperanto which he felt would be
particularly valuable for science. He tried to enlist
Einstein's support, became interested in relativity, and
then, like so many others, attempted to explain the theory.
More important was the inclusion in his little-known book
on the subject of his own impressions of Einstein at the age
of twelve, the only reliable first-hand account that exists.
  "He was a pretty, dark-haired boy ... a good illustration ...
against the theory of Houston Stewart Chamberlain and
others who try to prove that only the blond races produce
geniuses," Talmey wrote.

  He showed a particular inclination toward physics and took
pleasure in conversing on physical phenomena. I gave him
therefore as reading matter A. Bernstein's Popular Books on
Physical Science and L. Buchner's Force and Matter, two works
that were then quite popular in Germany. The boy was
profoundly impressed by them. Bernstein's work especially,
which describes physical phenomena lucidly and engagingly, had
a great influence on Albert, and enhanced considerably his
interest in physical science.

  Soon afterwards he began to show keenness for
mathematics, and Talmey gave him a copy of Spieker's
Lehrbuch der ebenen Geometrie, a popular textbook.
Thereafter, whenever the young medical student arrived
for the midday meal on Thursdays, he would be shown the
problems solved by Einstein during the previous week.

  After a short time, a few months, he had worked through the
whole book of Spieker. He thereupon devoted himself to higher
mathematics, studying all by himself Lubsen's excellent works
on the subject. These, too, I had recommended to him if memory
serves me right. Soon the flight of his mathematical genius was
so high that I could no longer follow. Thereafter philosophy was
often a subject of our conversations. I recommended to him the
reading of Kant. At that time he was still a child, only thirteen
years old, yet Kant's works, incomprehensible to ordinary
mortals, seemed to be clear to him. Kant became Albert's
favorite philosopher after he had read through his Critique of
Pure Reason and the works of other philosophers.

  He also read Darwinùat least according to the more
reliable of his stepsons-in-law. There is no evidence that
he was particularly moved. One reason was that the battle
for evolution had by this time been fought and won. Yet
even in his youth Einstein may have believed, as he was to
write years later, that "living matter and clarity are
oppositesùthey run away from one another." The same
feeling, that "biological procedures cannot be expressed in
mathematical formulas," gave him a lifelong scepticism of
medicine according to his friend Gustav Bucky, and it
certainly tended to concentrate all his interests on
nonbiological subjects. Another side of the same coin was
presented to Leo Szilard, a colleague for more than a third
of a century who forsook physics for biology: "One can
best feel in dealing with living things how primitive
physics still is ..." This attitude, a sense almost of
annoyance with the Creator at having produced things
which could not be quantified, explains at least something
of the invisible barrier which so often rises to separate
Einstein the intuitively understanding and kind human
being from Einstein ordering his daily life. The bugle calls
of science were always sounding and he could rarely
devote much time to individual men and women. His
reaction to the living world was illustrated one day as he
stood with a friend watching flocks of emigrating birds
flying overhead: "I think it is easily possible that they
follow beams which are so far unknown to us."
  Einstein well knew the limitations that this attitude
imposed, and to Lord Samuel he once commented of the
relation between physics and biology that "it is certainly
true that restricting ourselves to concepts and laws of
physics, we are unable to get a reasonable view of the total
events of life. Perhaps it will be impossible for us ever, as
men. But I do not believe that it thence follows that
physics principally does not comprehend the processes of
life." This was adequate reason; discovering the nature of
the physical world was task enough for one man.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to speculate on what might
have happened to biology in the twentieth century had
Einstein decided to turn his genius towards the animate
rather than the inanimate world.
  The decision appears to have been made soon after the
age of twelve. It is not too definite a word although details
and date must be inferred rather than demonstrated,
deduced from circumstantial evidence rather than
illustrated by the hard fact and undeniable statement that
form part and parcel of more extrovert and better
documented childhoods. By the time he was twelve
Einstein had attained, in his own words, "a deep
religiosity." His approval of this translation of the German
in his autobiographical notes is significant; for religiosity,
the "affected or excessive religiousness" of the dictionary,
appears to describe accurately the results of what he called
"the traditional education-machine." Always sensitive to
beauty, abnormally sensitive to music, Einstein had no
doubt been deeply impressed by the splendid trappings in
which Bavarian Catholicism of those days was decked out.
But if his emotions were won over, his mind remained
freeùwith considerable results. "Through the reading of
popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that
much of the stories in the Bible could not be true," he
wrote.

  The consequence was a positively fanatic [orgy of] free-thinking
coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being
deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression.
Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this
experience, a sceptical attitude towards the convictions which
were alive in any specific social environmentùan attitude which
has never again left me, even though later on, because of a better
insight into the causal connections, it lost some of its original
poignancy.

  This is important not because the change of heart itself
was unusual but because of Einstein's future history. For
centuries young people have abandoned revealed religion
at the impressionable age and turned to the laws of nature
as a substitute. The process is hardly one for wide-eyed
wonder. What was different with Einstein was that the
common act should have such uncommon results.
  His need of something to fill the void, the desperate need
to find order in a chaotic world may possibly have been a
particularly Jewish need. Certainly Abba Eban, in 1955
Israeli ambassador to the United States, noted after
Einstein's death how "the Hebrew mind has been obsessed
for centuries by a concept of order and harmony in the
universal design. The search for laws hitherto unknown
which govern cosmic forces; the doctrine of a relative
harmony in nature; the idea of a calculable relationship
between matter and energyùthese are all more likely to
emerge from a basic Hebrew philosophy and turn of mind
than from many others." This may sound like hindsight
plus special pleading; yet the long line of Jewish physicists
from the nineteenth century, and the even longer list of
those who later sought the underlying unifications of the
subatomic world, give it a plausibility which cannot easily
be contested.
  If there were no order or logic in the man-made
conceptions of the world based on revealed religion, surely
order and logic could be discovered in the huge world
which, Einstein wrote, "exists independently of us human
beings and which stands before us like a great eternal
riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and
thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned like a
liberation, and I soon noticed that many a man who I had
learned to esteem and to admire had found inner freedom
and security in devoted occupation with it." The young
Einstein, like many a Victorian ecclesiastic who wished
"to penetrate into the arcana of nature, so as to discern
'the law within the law,'" picked up science where religion
appeared to leave off. Later he was to see both as different
sides of the same coin, as complementary as the wave and
corpuscle conceptions of light, and both just as necessary if
one were to see reality in the round. All this, however,
developed in the decades after conversion.
  Conversion did not come in a day. Common sense,
together with what little evidence exists, suggests that
Einstein's determination to probe the secrets of the
physical world did not appear like a Pauline vision on the
Damascus road but crystallized over a period.
Nevertheless, it was a conversion which began in early
youth, quickly hardened, and set fast for the rest of his life.
  Brooding on the "lies" he had been told in the Luitpold
Gymnasium, Einstein decided on the work to which he
would be willing to devote everything and sacrifice
anything with a steely determination which separated him
from other men. On two occasions he put down in simple
words what that work was. The first came during an
hour's meetingùapparently about 1911ùwith the Jewish
philosopher Martin Buber, who pressed him hard "with a
concealed question about his faith." Finally, in Buber's
words, Einstein "burst forth," revealingly. "'What we (and
by this 'we' he meant we physicists) strive for,' he cried,
'is just to draw His lines after Him.' To draw afterùas one
retraces a geometrical figure." And a decade later, walking
with a young woman physicist to his Berlin University
office, Einstein spelled out the same task in more detail.
He had no interest in learning a new language, nor in food
nor in new clothes. "I'm not much with people," he
continued, "and I'm not a family man. I want my peace. I
want to know how God created this world. I am not
interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of
this or that element. I want to know His thoughts, the rest
are details."
  This aim was matched by a belief: "God is subtle, but he
is not malicious." With these words he was to crystallize
his view that complex though the laws of nature might be,
difficult though they were to understand, they were yet
understandable by human reason. If a man worried away at
the law behind the lawùif, in Rutherford's words, he
knew what questions to ask natureùthen the answers
could be discovered. God might pose difficult problems but
He never broke the rules by posing unanswerable ones.
What is more, He never left the answers to blind chance
"God does not play dice with the world."
  However, Einstein's God was not the God of most other
men. When he wrote of religion, as he often did in middle
and later life, he tended to adopt the belief of Alice's Red
Queen that "words mean what you want them to mean,"
and to clothe with different names what to more ordinary
mortalsùand to most Jewsùlooked like a variant of
simple agnosticism. Replying in 1929 to a cabled inquiry
from Rabbi Goldstein of New York, he said that he
believed "in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the
harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns
himself with the fate and actions of men." And it is
claimed that years later, asked by Ben-Gurion whether he
believed in God, "even he, with his great formula about
energy and mass, agreed that there must be something
behind the energy." No doubt. But much of Einstein's
writing gives the impression of belief in a God even more
intangible and impersonal than a celestial machine
minder, running the universe with undisputable authority
and expert touch. Instead, Einstein's God appears as the
physical world itself, with its infinitely marvelous structure
operating at atomic level with the beauty of a craftsman's
wristwatch, and at stellar level with the majesty of a
massive cyclotron. This was belief enough. It grew early
and rooted deep. Only later was it dignified by the title of
cosmic religion, a phrase which gave plausible
respectability to the views of a man who did not believe in
a life after death and who felt that if virtue paid off in the
earthly one, then this was the result of cause and effect
rather than celestial reward. Einstein's God thus stood for
an orderly system obeying rules which could be discovered
by those who had the courage, the imagination, and the
persistence to go on searching for them. And it was to this
task which he began to turn his mind soon after the age of
twelve. For the rest of his life everything else was to seem
almost trivial by comparison.
  Einstein had three more years at the Gymnasium,
uninterested in the classics, increasingly able at
mathematics, precocious in philosophical matters which
one can assume he discussed only rarely with his masters
and not at all with his fellow pupils. This time in Munich
would have been longer still had not the family business
failed again. For now the Einsteins decided to cross the
Alps to Milan. The reason why is obscure, but it seems
that the Kochs came to the rescue once more. A wealthy
branch of the family lived in Genoa, and it may well have
been their stipulation that the new business enterprise
should start where they could keep a watchful eye on the
happy-golucky optimism of Hermann Einstein.
  The family moved from Munich in 1894, taking their
daughter Maja with them and leaving Albert in a
boardinghouse under the care of a distant relative. It was
anticipated that he would in due time finish his course,
acquire the diploma which would ensure entry to a
university, and would then enter the profession of
electrical engineering which his father had vaguely chosen
for him. The son had other views and within six months
had followed his family across the Alps.
  The details of Einstein's departure from the Gymnasium
come in various forms, at second remove, from his own
comments in middle and old age. What is certain is that he
left before acquiring the necessary diploma. It has been
stated that he first obtained a doctor's certificate saying
that because of a nervous breakdown he should join his
parents in Italy, plus a statement from his mathematics
master testifying to his ability; before the medical
certificate could be presented Einstein was summarily
expelled on the grounds that "your presence in the class is
disruptive and affects the other students." This should be
taken with caution but these general lines of the incident
have the ring of truth. For the kindly, gentle Einstein who
is remembered today, the friend of all mankind (except the
Prussians), a saint insulated from the rest of the world, is
largely a figure of his later years; it is a figure very
different from the precocious, half-cocksure, almost
insolent Swabian of youth and early manhood. Einstein
was the boy who knew not merely which monkey wrench
to throw in the works, but also how best to throw it. This
may well explain why the Gymnasium was glad to send
him packing. And the ignominy of being sacked before
going could explain much of his later dislike of the place.
  He was by now heartily glad to see the last of the
Luitpold Gymnasium. The feeling was reciprocated. Yet
the years there had left their mark in a way which neither
his masters nor even he can fully have appreciated. They
had made him detest discipline; but, under his guard, they
had taught him the virtues of self-discipline, of
concentration, of dedication to an ideal, of an attitude
which can be described as firm or as relentless according
to taste. Years later, when colleagues were discussing the
single-minded determination with which he had followed
his star without regard for others, one listener noted: "You
must not forget. He was a German."
  Little is known about the two years which the young
Einstein spent in Italy, but he looked back on them as
extremely happy. "I was so surprised, when I crossed the
Alps to Italy, to see how the ordinary Italian, the ordinary
man and woman, uses words and expressions of a high
level of thought and cultural content, so different from the
ordinary Germans," he remembered nearly forty years
later. "This is due to their long cultural history. The people
of northern Italy are the most civilized people I have ever
met."
  It may not have been literally true that "he went into
galleries, and wherever he found a Michelangelo he
remained the longest," as claimed by one of his stepsons
in-law in a book which Einstein smartly repudiated. But
there is little doubt that he enjoyed the people and the air
of freedom, both very different from what he had known in
the Munich Gymnasium. When his father's business failed
yet again, almost as expected, and was restarted in Pavia,
his own travels began to take him farther afield to Padua,
Pisa, Siena, and Perugia.
  His education appears to have been halted in midstream
and the Swiss School in Milan, at which he is sometimes
reported to have studiedùin those days the International
School of the Protestant Families in Milanùhas no record
of him. His sister Maja and his cousin Robert were on the
rolls but Einstein was aged fifteen when he arrived in the
city and the Swiss School took children only to the age of
thirteen.
  However, this freedom could not last, since the
continuing precariousness of the family finances made it
necessary to prepare for a career. The only record of how
he was prodded into this comes secondhand from his son:
"At the age of sixteen," he has said, "his father urged him
to forget his 'philosophical nonsense,' and apply himself
to the 'sensible trade' of electrical engineering." The lack
of a necessary Gymnasium certificate at once made itself
felt, since entry to a university was barred without it.
  There was one possible way out. Conveniently over the
Alps from Milan, there existed in Zurich the Swiss Federal
Polytechnic School,[The organization is known variously
by its German, French, Italian, and English titles: Eidg.
Technische Hochschule (ETH); Ecole Polytechnique
FΘdΘrale (EPF); Svizzera Polytecnica Federale (SPF); and
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (FIT).]outside
Germany the best technical school in Central Europe. The
Polytechnic demanded no Gymnasium diploma and all a
candidate had to do was pass the necessary examination.
There was one difficulty however. In the spring of 1895
Einstein was only sixteen, at least two years younger than
most scholars when they joined the ETH. However, it was
decided that the risk should be taken, and in the autumn he
was despatched over the Alps.
  Before he wentùprobably a few weeks or months earlier,
although the date is uncertainùhe sent to his Uncle CΣsar
in Stuttgart a "paper" which was an augury of things to
come: "an essay which looks more like a program than a
paper" as he described it, and one in which the boy of
about sixteen proposed tackling one of the most hotly
disputed scientific subjects, the relationship between
electricity, magnetism, and the ether, that hypothetical
nonmaterial entity which was presumed to fill all space
and to transmit electromagnetic waves.
  Neither letter nor paper is dated, but in 1950 Einstein
recalled that they were written in 1894 or 1895, while the
internal reference to the ETH in Zurich suggests that the
latter was the more likely date. "My dear Uncle," he
began,

  I am really very happy that you are still interested in the little
things I am doing and working on, even though we could not see
each other for a long time, and I am such a terribly lazy
correspondent. And yet I always hesitated to send you this
[attached] note because it deals with a very special topic; and
besides, it is still rather na∩ve and imperfect, as is to be expected
from a young fellow like myself. I shall not mind it at all if you
don't read the stuff; but you must recognize it at least as a
modest attempt to overcome the laziness in writing which I have
inherited from both of my dear parents.
  As you probably already know, I am now expected to go to
the Polytechnic in Zurich. However, it presents serious
difficulties because I ought to be at least two years older for
that. We shall let you know in the next letter what happens in
this matter. Warmest greetings to dear Aunt and our lovely
children.

  The accompanying essay, written in sloping and spidery
Gothic script on five pages of lined paper, was headed:
"Concerning the Investigation State of Aether in Magnetic
Fields," and began by outlining the nature of
electromagnetic phenomena and stressing the little that
was known concerning their relationship with the ether.
This could be remedied, it was suggested, by studying the
potential states of the aether in magnetic fields of all kinds
by comprehensive experimental studiesùor, in other
words, by measuring "the elastic deformations and the
acting deforming forces." This emphasis on experiment
was repeated towards the end of the paper where the
author said: "I believe that the quantitative researches on
the absolute magnitude of the density and the elastic force
of the ether can only begin if qualitative results exists that
are connected with established ideas."
  It was altogether a remarkable paper for a boy of sixteen
and if it is straining too far to see in it the seeds of the
Special Theory, it gives a firm enough pointer to the
subject which was to remain constantly at the back of his
mind for a decade. As he wrote in old age, at the age of
sixteen Einstein had discovered a paradox by considering
what would happen if one could follow a beam of light at
the speed of lightùthe result being "a spatially oscillatory
electromagnetic field at rest." He did not put it quite like
that to Uncle CΣsar. But it was no doubt still in his mind
as he arrived in Zurich, carrying the high hopes of the
family and, judging from the odd hint, a firm
determination that he would not become an electrical
engineer.

CHAPTER 2

STATELESS PERSON

Einstein arrived in Zurich, the bustling mercantile capital
of Switzerland, in the autumn of 1895. Set on its long
finger of lake among the foothills of the Alps, the city was
half cultural remnant from the Middle Ages, half
commercial metropolis, a center whose nonconformist
devotees were within the next few years to include Lenin,
Rosa Luxemburg, and James Joyce. Einstein, for whom the
attractions of Zurich never palled, was to be another.
  During this first visit as a youth of sixteen and a half he
stayed with the family of Gustav Meier, an old friend of
his father and a former inhabitant of Ulm. He may have
been accompanied by his mother, and it is certain that
Mrs. Einstein approached a Zurich councillor on her son's
behalf, asking "whether he could use his influence to let
Albert jump a class in view of his unusual talent and the
fact that, owing to the movement of his family, his
schooling had been a little erratic." Einstein did, in fact,
take the normal entrance examination for the ETH shortly
afterwards. He did not pass. The accepted reason for his
failure is that although his knowledge of mathematics was
exceptional he did not reach the necessary standard in
modern languages or in zoology and botany.
  This is less than the whole truth. So is the statement that
while the exam was taken at the age of eighteen, Einstein
was two years younger. More significantly, his father's
decision that he should follow a technical occupation was
one which the young Einstein would have found it difficult
to evade directly. Subsequently, he admitted that failure in
Zurich "was entirely his own fault because he had made no
attempt whatever to prepare himself"; and, asked in later
life whether he might have been forced into choosing a
"profitable profession" rather than becoming a scientist, he
bluntly replied, "I was supposed to choose a practical
profession, but this was simply unbearable to me." Thus
although the horse had now been brought to the water in
Zurich nothing could make it drink. But the principal of
the ETH, Albin Herzog, had been impressed by Einstein's
mathematical ability. Reading between the lines, he had
also been impressed by his character. With the support of
Meier, it was arranged that the boy should attend the
cantonal school at Aarau, twenty miles to the west, where
a year's study should enable him to pass the ETH entrance
exam.
  A small picturesque town on the Aare, from whose banks
the vineyards climb the slopes of the Jura, Aarau could
justifiably boast of its cantonal school run by Professor
Winteler. But wherever Einstein had been sent in
Switzerland, he would have been impressed by the contrast
with the Munich Gymnasium. For in spite of the Swiss
tradition under which every man appears eager to spring to
arms, and has his rifle on the wall, the spirit of militarism
is singularly absent. Contrariwise, the practice of
democracy, about which Einstein early showed what was
to be a lifelong enthusiasm, had for centuries been an
ingrained feature of the country. Even so, he was lucky
with Aarau and with Winteler, with whose family he lived
during his stay at the school.
  A somewhat casual teacher, as ready to discuss work or
politics with his pupils as with his fellow teachers,
Winteler was friendly and liberal-minded, an ornithologist
never happier than when taking his students and his own
children for walks in the nearby mountains. Teaching
resembled university lectures rather than high school
instruction. There was a room for each subject rather than
for each class, and in one of them Einstein was introduced
to the outer mysteries of physics by a first-class teacher,
August Tuchschmid. More than half a century later he
remembered the school as "remaining for me the most
pleasing example of such an institution," where teacher
and taught were joined in "responsible and happy work
such as cannot be achieved by regimentation, however
subtle." Instruction was good, authority was exercised with
a light hand, and it is clear that in this friendly climate
Einstein began to open out, even though the details that
have survived are scanty and tantalizing. On a three-day
school outing during which pupils climbed the 8,000-foot
Santis above Feldkirch, he slipped on a steep slope and
was saved from destruction only by the prompt move of a
colleague who stretched out his alpenstock for the boy to
grasp, a quick action that helped change the course of
history. When on another school outing, a master asked
him:
  "Now Einstein, how do the strata run here? From below
upwards or vice versa?" the reply was unexpected: "It is
pretty much the same to me whichever way they run,
Professor."
  The story may well have been embroidered by
recollection. But it reflects an attitude that juts out during
Einstein's youth from beneath the layers of adulation
which increased with the years. The description of
"impudent Swabian," given by his fellow pupil Hans
Byland, belongs to this period. "Sure of himself, his gray
felt hat pushed back on his thick, black hair, he strode
energetically up and down in a rapid, I might almost say
crazy, tempo of a restless spirit which carries a whole
world in itself," Byland has said. "Nothing escaped the
sharp gaze of his bright brown eyes. Whoever approached
him immediately came under the spell of his superior
personality. A sarcastic curl of his rather full mouth with
the protruding lower lip did not encourage Philistines to
fraternize with him." These rougher corners eventually
became smoothed off so that he would bite back the
comment he might consider natural and others might
consider bitter; but the essential attitude remained, an
intellectual disinclination to give a damn for anybody. As a
rock never very far below the surface it was as likely to
capsize Einstein as anyone else.
  This prickly arrogance appears increasingly throughout
his student years. The gentle philosopher, benignly asking
questions of the universe, was always to be one part of the
complete Einstein. But there was another part during
youth. He knew not only the clanging existence of
metropolitan Munich but the delights of northern Italy. He
was, judged by the experience of his contemporaries, a
young man of the world, well filled with his own opinions,
careless of expressing them without reserve, regarding the
passing scene with a sometimes slightly contemptuous
smile. Had it not been for his deep underlying sense of the
mystery of things, a humility that at this age he was apt to
conceal, he would have been the model iconoclast.
  Einstein enjoyed Aarau. He enjoyed not only the business
of learning, an unexpected revelation after the Munich
experience, but also the Swiss with their mixture of serious
responsibility and easy-going democracy, their refusal to
be drawn into the power game already dividing Europe,
their devotion to a neutrality which was personal as well as
political. The effect remained. Even in his last decades,
dazzled by the American future, Einstein still showed a
homesickness for Europe that was epitomized by Zurich or
Leiden; in the late 1940s, as the liberal image faded in the
United States, the feeling was reinforced, and he tended to
look back to a golden age that centered on prewar
Switzerland.
  Life in Aarau was to have one specific and far-reaching
result. For the antagonism to all things German which had
been burning away in Einstein for years now came to the
surface in what was, for a boy, a remarkable explosion. He
refused to continue being German. The usual story is that
on arriving in Milan from Munich the youthful Einstein
told his father that he no longer wished to be German and
at the same time announced that he was severing all
formal connection with the Jewish faith. In general it is the
second half of the story, which would have caused his
religiously happy-go-lucky family little worry, which is
given most credence; the first has been considered a later
magnification of youthful disenchantment and wishful
thinking. In fact, the reverse is true.
  As far as the Jewish faith is concerned, the boy had as
little to renounce as the grown man. While Einstein the
Zionist speaker of adult life had an intense feeling for
Jewish culture, a dedication to preservation of the Jewish
people, and a deep respect for the Jewish intellectual
tradition, his feelings for the faith itself rarely went beyond
kindly tolerance and the belief that it did no more harm
than other revealed religions. "I am naturally not
responsible for what other people have written about me,"
he has stated when commenting on this alleged youthful
renunciation. "At that time I should certainly not have
understood how one could have got out of Jewishness."
  The question of German nationality was different. At
first, the idea of a sixteen-year-old renouncing his country
appears slightly bizarre, while in the modern world the
mechanics of the operation would be complicated. So
much so that the story has been taken rather lightly and
AndrΘ Mercier, head of the department of theoretical
physics in the University of Berne, and Secretary General
of the International Committee on General Relativity, has
gone on record as saying that when Einstein arrived in
Switzerland "he was by nationality a German and
remained so until he became of age." It has also been
pointed out that if the young Einstein did "give up his
passport at the age of fifteen," as has been claimed by Dr.
Walter Jens of the University of Tⁿbingen, then this act
would have been of no legal consequence.
  In fact, no passport was involved. On birth, Einstein had
become a citizen of the state of Wⁿrttemberg and, as a
result, a German national. According to a letter in the
Princeton archives, he had pleaded with his father, even
before the latter had crossed the Alps to Milan, to
renounce this nationality on his behalf. Nothing appears to
have been done. But the boy returned home from
Switzerland to Milan to spend the Christmas of 1895 with
his parents. And soon after his return to Aarau early in
1896 Hermann Einstein, presumably yielding at last to his
son's renewed badgerings, wrote to the Wⁿrttemberg
authorities. They acknowledged the application, and on
January 28, 1896, formally ended Einstein's German
nationality. Two memoranda sent by them to Ulm on
January 30 and February 5 confirmed this with various
departments in the city. "Between the ages of fifteen and
twenty-one," Einstein wrote, "I was entirely without state
papers, which at that time was not a risky thing."[Einstein
usually described himself during this period as "stateless"
or "staatenlos," rather than "schrifteblos" ("without
papers"). On this occasion he used the phrase "ganz ohne
Staatspapiere" ("totally without state papers").] He was in
fact nearly seventeen by the time his father's application
was acknowledged, but it is true that he completed his
education in Switzerland and obtained his degree in
Zurich as a stateless person, merely "the son of German
parents" as he put it on official forms.
  The hatred of Germany revealed by this precocious move
may genuinely have sprung from stern discipline and it is
quite possible that Einstein was seriously contemplating
his move before his arrival in Milan. His feelings may well
have been increased by the contemptuous way in which he
was expelled from the school before he could resign.
Northern Italy in the mid-1890s provided one contrast
with a Germany already flexing its muscles, and the sober
Swiss provided another. Whatever the relative importance
of these different motivations, the net result was an
attitude that later developed into an anti-Germanism that
had a trace of paranoia, an emotional fissure which split
Einstein's character from end to end like a geological
fault.
  During those first weeks of 1896 in Aarau none of these
dark overtones could be discerned. He was now free of
Germany. He would, in due course and with good luck,
acquire the Swiss nationality on which he had set his
heart. What is more, he had by now succeeded in
switching academic horses in midstream: despite the
family decision that he should become an electrical
engineer, it was now agreed that he should study for a
teacher's degree. The details can only be inferred. But it is
significant that it was his mother's comparatively well-to
do family which was to underwrite his student days; and it
is not difficult to envisage the fond mother being won over
by her son's arguments and then persuading her relatives
that they would be investing in the future. There is little
doubt that in his younger days he had a way with women.
  Einstein took his examination at the ETH in the summer
of 1896. He passed, returned to his parents in Italy, and in
October left them for Switzerland, now dedicated to a four
year course which would, if he were successful, qualify
him for a post on the lowest rung of the professional
teacher's ladder.
  On October 29, 1896, he settled down in Zurich, first in
the lodgings of Frau Kagi at 4 Unionstrasse. There he was
to remain for two years before moving to Frau Markwalder
in 87 Klosbach and then, after twelve months, returning to
Frau Kagi at a new address. At the end of each term he
visited his family in Milan or, later, Pavia, while in Zurich
he was under the watchful but discreet eye of the Karr
family, moderately well-to-do people distantly related to
Einstein's mother, whose relatives now provided the 100
francs a month on which he lived.
  His fellow students came mainly from the families of
minor professional people or small businessmen, typified
by Marcel Grossman whose father owned a factory making
agricultural machinery at Hongg, a few miles from Zurich.
There was Louis Kollros from the watchmaking center of
La Chaux-de-Fonds in the Jura, Jakob Ehrat from
Schaffhausen with its Rhine falls, and a group of young
girls from Hungary of whom one joined the class of '96
with Einstein. This was Mileva Maric, born in 1875 and
like the rest of the class a few years older than Einstein,
daughter of a Serbian peasant from Titel in southern
Hungary who had labored her way to Zurich by dogged
determination, handicapped by a limp, anxious to succeed.
  Superficially, the picture of Einstein's student days was
conventional enough. There was the fairly frequent change
of rooms; the frugal diet of restaurants and cafΘs,
supplemented by snacks from the nearby bakery or from
kind Swiss landladies. There was the weekend outing to
one or more of the minor summits surrounding the
Zurichsee, the Swiss version of the reading parties in the
Lakes or North Wales which were a feature of the
Victorian scene in Britain. And there were frequent visits
back to Aarau where his sister Maja was now spending the
first of three years in the Aargau teachers seminary.
  Einstein was casual of dress, unconventional of habit,
with the happy-go-lucky absentmindedness of a man
concentrating on other things which he was to retain all
his life. "When I was a very young man," he once confided
to an old friend, "I visited overnight at the home of
friends. In the morning I left, forgetting my valise. My
host said to my parents: 'That young man will never
amount to anything because he can't remember
anything.'" And he would often forget his key and have to
wake up his landlady late at night, calling: "It's Einstein
I've forgotten my key again."
  He followed the normal student pursuits, picking up on
the Zurichsee a passion for sailing that never deserted him,
taking occasional walks in the mountains even though, in
the later words of his eldest son, "he did not care for large,
impressive mountains, but . . . liked surroundings that
were gentle and colorful and gave one lightness of spirit."
On the water he would invariably have a small notebook.
FrΣulein Markwalder, who sometimes accompanied him,
remembered years later how when the breeze died and the
sails dropped, out would come the notebook and he would
be scribbling away. "But as soon as there was a breath of
wind he was immediately ready to start sailing again."
  The picture is almost prosaic. Yet a hint of something to
come is suggested by the barely concealed arrogant
impatience that showed itself even during the musical
evenings to which he was often invited by the parents of
his Swiss friends. If attention to his performance was not
adequate he would stop, sometimes with a remark that
verged on boorishness. To a group of elderly ladies who
continued knitting while he played, and who then asked
why he was closing his score and putting his violin back in
its case, he explained: "We would not dream of disturbing
your work." And when, politely asked on one occasion,
"Do you count the beat?" he quickly replied, "Heavens, no.
It's in my blood." Perhaps there was always something a
little risky in questioning Einstein. The "not much with
people," as he later put it, was true despite his personality,
not because of it. Even as a youth, moodily aloof at times
from his companions, he had a quality that attracted as
certainly as it could rebuff. As a man, he was the kind who
made heads turn when he entered the room, and not
merely because the founder of relativity had come in. If the
word "charisma" has a modern meaning outside the public
relations trade, Einstein had it.
  It is noticeable that he appears to have been particularly
happy in the company of women. The feelings were often
mutual. The well-set-up young man with his shock of jet
black wavy hair, his huge luminous eyes, and his casual air
was distinctly attractive. More than one young Zurich girl,
more than one Swiss matron, was delighted that the young
Herr Einstein was such an excellent performer on the
violin and was agreeable to accompany them at evening
parties. And he was a frequent visitor to the house of Frau
Bachtold where several of the women students lodged,
sitting in the living room and attentively listening as
Mileva Maric played the piano. At Aarau he had been the
confidant of one young woman who played Schubert with
him and asked his advice when proposed to by a much
older man. At Zurich he appears to have exercised a
similar influence. Years later Antonina Vallentin, a great
friend of Einstein's second wife, said significantly that "as
a young man and even in middle age, Einstein had regular
features, plump cheeks, a round chinù masculine good
looks of the type that played havoc at the turn of the
century."
  Einstein's pleasure in the company of women lasted all
his life. But there was little more to it than that. Like most
famous men he attracted the hangers-on, the adorers, and
the semi-charlatans. On at least two occasions women
claimed him as the father of their children, but in one
instance the claimant was insane while the case of the
other appears to have been equally groundless. His doctor
friend, Janos Plesch, suggested in a letter after Einstein's
death that he may have formed a liaison during the First
World War when he had been left by one wife and had not
yet acquired another. Other comparably vague suggestions
have been handed down from the early Berlin days. While
they cannot be ignored, it would be wrong to give them
more weight than unsubstantiated observations deserve
suggestions which tended to be kept afloat by Einstein's
own personal attitude. According to Vera Weizmann, wife
of the Jewish leader Chaim Weizmann, Einstein's second
wife did not mind him flirting with her since "intellectual
women did not attract him; out of pity he was attracted to
women who did physical work." The same comment has
been made in strikingly similar terms by more than one of
his friends, who have drawn attention to the fact that he
preferred to have women rather than men around him. All
this is true. Yet the implications are not the obvious ones.
As a young man he tended to keep his women friends at
arms length since he wished to devote the maximum
energy and resource to the one great game; later on, as
youth merged first into middle and later into old age, he
still tended to like having women around, but in an almost
old-maidish way. He had, after all, resigned himself to the
necessary priorities; first research, second Einstein. This
was an order of duties which at first makes it easy to be
sorry for himùthe man who had apparently cut himself
off from so many of the things that make life worth living.
The feeling is misplaced. Einstein himself was, as he
acknowledged to his friend Michelangelo Besso, somewhat
cold and something of a tough nut. Monks and nuns,
spinsters and dedicated military men, manage to live
happily and quite a few live usefully; Einstein, answering a
call quite as compelling, enjoyed a satisfaction from his
work quite as great as most men enjoy from anything else.
  This life-long dedication set him apart in a number of
ways. As Bertrand Russell once wrote, "Personal matters
never occupied more than odd nooks and crannies in his
thoughts." Other men allowed themselves to become
implicated in the human predicament, on one level
willingly dealing with the trivia of life and on another
being swept off course by the normal passions. Einstein
avoided such energy-wasting complications at all levels.
To this extent his self-imposed task, the determination to
keep first things first, forced him into abdicating his
human position. He felt an intuitive sympathy with human
beings in the mass; but when it came to individualsùand
he included himselfù he found little time or sympathy or
understanding to spare.
  Einstein's obsession with exploring and understanding
the physical world caught him early. He followed it, as
AndrΘ Mercier has noted, as the result of a double
experience, "the experience of the exterior world,
revealing material facts, numberless and numerical; and
the revelation of an interior or spiritual world which
showed him the path he should follow." But there was
another dichotomy about the early years. A good deal of
his genius lay in the imagination which gave him courage
to challenge accepted beliefs. This quality has been rightly
stressed, and his old friend Morris Cohen went so far as to
claim that "like so many of the very young men who have
revolutionized physics in our day [Einstein] has not been
embarrassed by too much learning about the past or by
what the Germans call the literature of the subject." Yet
the "too much" is relative. Einstein's ability to soar up
from the nineteenth century basis of physics, and his own
dislike of the routine involved in understanding that basis,
has tended to undervalue the four-year slog of routine
which he went through at the ETH. Yet this routine was
demanding enough.
  Working to become a teacher in mathematical physics, he
had to devote himself to both mathematics and the natural
sciences. Under six professorsùnotably Hermann
Minkowski, who was to play such an important part in
giving mathematical formality to Special Relativityùhe
studied mathematical subjects that included the differential
and integral calculus, descriptive and analytical geometry,
the geometry of numbers, and the theory of the definite
integral. Two professors, Weber and Pernet, dealt with
physics, while Professor Wolfer lectured on astrophysics
and astronomy. The theory of scientific thought and
Kantian philosophy was studied under Professor Stadler.
To these compulsory subjects Einstein added an odd
ragbag of optionals which included not only gnomic
projection and exterior ballistics, both of which might have
been expected, but also anthropology and the geology of
mountains under the famous Albert Heim; banking and
stock exchange business; Swiss politics; and, under a
privatdozent, Goethe's works and philosophy.
  Despite the emphasis on mathematics, Einstein himself
was more drawn towards the natural sciences. The reason,
given in his autobiographical notes, was that he "saw that
mathematics was split up into numerous specialties, each
of which could easily absorb the short lifetime granted to
us. Consequently, I saw myself in the position of Buridan's
ass which was unable to decide upon any specific bundle of
hay." One result of his choice was the difficulty that faced
him when, between 1905 and 1915, he struggled to extend
the theory of Special Relativity. As he himself wrote, it
dawned on him "only gradually after years of independent
scientific work" that "the approach to a more profound
knowledge of the basic principles of physics is tied up with
the most intricate mathematical methods."
  Thus it was physics to which he turned, working "most of
the time in the physical laboratory, fascinated by the direct
contact with experience." This "contact with experience"
was in strange contrast with the period when he would
answer a question about his laboratory by pointing to his
head and a question about his tools by pointing to his
fountain pen. Yet despite this he never ceased to
emphasize that the bulk of his work sprang directly and
naturally from observed facts; the coordinating theory
explaining them might arise from an inspired gleam of
intuition, but the need for it arose only after observation.
  In June, 1899, Einstein seriously injured a hand in the
Zurich laboratoriesùtypically enough after tearing up a
chit of paper telling him how to do an experiment one way
and then attempting to do it another. And it is significant
that a biography by one of his stepsons-in-law, whose facts
were described by Einstein himself as "duly accurate,"
should contain the following sentences:

  He wanted to construct an apparatus which would accurately
measure the earth's movement against the ether. ... He wanted to
proceed quite empirically, to suit his scientific feeling of the
time, and believed that an apparatus such as he sought would
lead him to the solution of a problem of far-reaching perspectives
of which he already sensed. But there was no chance to build this
apparatus. The scepticism of his teachers was too great, the spirit
of enterprise too small.

  Without Einstein's imprimatur this would sound
unlikely. With it, the story provides an interesting gloss.
  From the first, however, it was theoretical physics which
attracted him, and here he was unlucky. Subsequently he
was to write of the "excellent teachers (for example,
Hurwitz, Minkowski)" of these Zurich days. But it is
significant that he omitted all reference to Heinrich Weber,
who gave the physics course. According to Einstein's
fellow student Louis Kollros, this course was designed
primarily for engineers. "His lectures were outstanding,"
according to Adolf Fischùthe same youth who had saved
Einstein's life on the Santis a few years beforeù "and a
magnificent introduction to theoretical physics, but Weber
himself was a typical representative of classical physics.
Anything that came after Helmholtz was simply ignored.
At the close of our studies we knew all the past of physics
but nothing of their present and future." In particular, they
knew nothing of Maxwell, whose theory of
electromagnetism was already changing not only men's
ideas of the physical world, but the practical applications
of physics to that world. Of the two sets of notes made by
Einstein at Weber's own lectures, one dealt with heat and
thermodynamics, the other with technical problems and
with electricity from Coulomb's law to induction; yet
Maxwell's work was not touched upon. This was not as
startling as it sounds. For Maxwell's theoryù"the most
fascinating subject at the time that I was a student," as
Einstein wroteùwas symptomatic of the radically new
ideas which were about to transform the face of physics.
  Only a few years earlier, as the nineteenth century moved
towards its close, the empire of the physical sciences had
appeared to be on the edge of the millennium. Just as there
seemed no possible limit to the industrial development of
the United States, to the political advances in Europe over
much of which the liberal spirit still reigned, or to the
technological progress which could be achieved in the
workshops of the world, so did physical science seem to be
moving towards a solution of its final problems. Almost a
century earlier Laplace had made his great boast: "An
intelligence knowing, at a given instance of time, all forces
acting in nature, as well as the momentary position of all
things of which the universe consists, would be able to
comprehend the motions of the largest bodies of the world
and those of the lightest atoms in one single formula,
provided his intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject
all data to analysis; to him nothing would be uncertain,
both past and future would be present in his eyes."
  This prophecy from the Newton of France had been in
some ways an extrapolation from the spectacular success of
Newton's own celestial mechanics with whose help the
motions of moon, comets, asteroids, and satellites could be
computed with splendid accuracy. The confidence
appeared to be justified, not only by the advances made
throughout the nineteenth century but by the ease with
which these could be seen as intelligible parts of one vast
but finite corpus of knowledge whose final understanding
must be only a few years away. Mechanics, acoustics, and
optics were all set on firm foundations during this heroic
age of classical physics. Faraday's work on
electromagnetism from 1831 onwards produced the
dynamo and the first shoots of what was to become the
great electrical industry. The first scientific knowledge of
electricity led to the electric telegraph. And to crown the
fine structure there came Maxwell in the 1860s with the
synthesis of his electromagnetic equations, giving the
answer to so many natural phenomena and forecasting the
radio waves to be discovered by Heinrich Hertz twenty-five
years later. "In their various branches the explanations of
new discoveries fitted together giving confidence in the
whole," says Sir William Dampier, "and it came to be
believed that the main lines of scientific theory had been
laid down once for all, and that it only remained to carry
measurements to the higher degree of accuracy represented
by another decimal place, and to frame some reasonably
credible theory of the structure of the luminiferous ether."
  It was the problem of this luminiferous ether, through
which Maxwell's electromagnetic waves appeared to be
transmitted like shakings in an invisible jelly, which had
during the last decades of the century begun to sap the
foundations of classical science, and to reveal the
electromagnetic theory as the revolutionary theory it was.
Yet this was not the only worm in the apple. The imposing
structure which had been built on Newtonian mechanics,
the solid edifice of knowledge utilized by so many of the
sciences to which it had seemed that man was now putting
the finishing touches, had in fact been undermined by a
score of experimental physicists tunneling along their own
separate routes from a dozen different directions. Their
work was continuing and the repercussions from it were
beginning to be felt.
  In the world of Newtonian physics, an obstinate planet
had failed to conform to the calculations, for it had been
confirmed that the motion of the perihelion of Mercury's
orbit was advancing by a small but regular amount for
which the Newtonian hypothesis could provide no
explanation. From Vienna there came the heresy of Ernst
Mach who was sceptical of the very foundations of
Newton's universe, absolute space and absolute time. In
the United States Albert Michelson and Edward Morley
had performed an experiment which confronted scientists
with an appalling choice. Designed to show the existence
of the ether, at that time considered essential, it had
yielded a null result, leaving science with the alternatives
of tossing aside the key which had helped to explain the
phenomena of electricity, magnetism, and light or of
deciding that the earth was not in fact moving at all. Wien,
in Berlin, was investigating discrepancies in the
phenomena of heat and radiation which stubbornly refused
to be explained by the concepts of classical physics. In
Leiden the great Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz had
formed a new theory of matter in which atomsùstill
regarded as John Dalton's solid billiard balls of matter
when their existence was credited at allùcontained
electrically charged particles. In the Cavendish Laboratory,
Cambridge, J. J. Thomsonù about to be joined by a young
New Zealand graduate, Ernest Rutherfordùwas showing
that these extraordinary bits of electricity, or electrons, not
only had an existence of their own but a mass and an
electric charge which could be measured. If this were not
enough to strike at the very vitals of accepted ideas,
Becquerel in Paris had found that at least one element, the
metal uranium, was giving off streams of radiation and
matter, an awkward fact which appeared to make nonsense
of contemporary ideas. These were only the more
important of a disturbing new group of discoveries made
possible as much by technological advance as by
exceptionally nimble minds, which were about to destroy
the comfortable complacency into which physics had
worked itself. It is hardly surprising that in this climate,
"Maxwell's theory of the electromagnetic field was ... not a
part of the ordinary syllabus of a provincial German
university," as Max Born has pointed out. The reluctance
of the more conservative men of science to acknowledge
this revolutionary conceptù marking a change from
Newton's ideas of forces operating at a distance to that of
fields of force as fundamental variablesùwas no more
surprising than any other human weakness for things as
they are. For the embrace of Newtonian mechanics had
continued for so long, and was still so firm, that those who
either saw or suspected the fundamental incompatibility of
Maxwell's theory with these long-accepted ideas tended to
look the other way and, above all, to avoid discussion of
such a potentially disturbing subject. "In the beginning (if
there was such a thing) God created Newton's laws of
motion together with necessary masses and forces. This is
all; everything beyond this follows the development of
appropriate mathematical methods by means of
deduction"ùthis was the field of physics as presented to
Einstein and his fellow students, and accepted by all
except the few contemporaries fortunate enough to fall
under the influence of a few questioning minds in Berlin,
in Leiden, in Paris, or in Cambridge.
  Einstein thus comes on to the scene as a student at a
moment when physics was about to be revolutionized but
when few students were encouraged to be revolutionaries.
Without his own basically dissenting spirit he would have
got nowhere. With it, the almost inevitable consequence
was that he pushed along with his formal work just as
much as he had to and found his real education elsewhere,
in his own time. Military parallels are naturally obnoxious
to civilian minds, but just as insistence on cavalry between
the two world wars forced creative military minds such as
Liddell Hart, de Gaulle, and Guderian to think for
themselves, so the plodding insistence of Weber and his
colleagues drove Einstein into reading and studying for
himself. The human comparison is distressing, the
professional one unavoidable. Einstein would have
developed his original mind whatever happened; but the
conformity of Weber, the pervasive air of a science learned
for examination rather than for probing into the natural
world, speeded up the process.
  In his autobiographical notes, Einstein remembered how
he used his spare time, "in the main in order to study at
home the works of Kirchhoff, Helmholtz, Hertz, etc."
Maxwell was another of the scientific revolutionaries
whose work he studied at home in his lodgings, or on the
banks of the Zurichsee while his friend Marcel Grossmann
attended lectures on his behalf, took notes, and later passed
these on so that when examination questions had to be
faced Einstein was adequately briefed.
  There was also Henri PoincarΘ, "the last man to take
practically all mathematics, both pure and applied, as his
province." PoincarΘ's influence on Einstein has sometimes
been greatly exaggerated. However, it has rarely been
noted that the first International Congress of
Mathematicians was held in Zurich at the end of
Einstein's first year as a student there; that PoincarΘ was
due to attend; and that while he was prevented from doing
so, there was read at the conference his famous paper
containing the prophecy: "Absolute space, absolute time,
even Euclidean geometry, are not conditions to be imposed
on mechanics; one can express the facts connecting them
in terms of non-Euclidean space." There is no evidence
that Einstein attended the conference; but it seems unlikely
that news of such an expression, so in tune with the
freedom of his own way of thinking, should entirely have
passed him by.
  Whatever the exact weight of PoincarΘ's influence on
Einstein, at Zurich or after, there is no doubt about the
significance of Ernst Mach, that disappointed man who
ran a close second to Maxwell himself in Einstein's
estimation. The philosopher-scientist whose fortunes
slowly sank before his death in 1916, and who is now
mainly remembered for the eponymous Mach number of
supersonic flight, had been born in 1838 in Turas,
Moravia. He was in succession professor of mathematics at
Graz and Prague, and professor of physics at Vienna
where he expounded his ideas in books, papers, and
lectures. He had been strongly influenced by Gustav
Fechner, the physicist turned philosopher who had
unsuccessfully tried to found the "science of
psychophysics," and the basis of Mach's outlook was
simple: that all knowledge is a matter of sensations and
that what men delude themselves into calling "laws of
nature" are merely summaries of experiences provided by
their ownùfallibleùsenses. "Colors, space, tones, etc.
These are the only realities. Others do not exist," he had
written in his daybook.
  Einstein's views on the importance of such purely
observational factors in discovering the way in which the
world is built changed considerably throughout the years.
His formulation of the Special Theory of Relativity, he was
never tired of emphasizing, "was not speculative in origin;
it owes its invention entirely to the desire to make physical
theory fit observed facts as well as possible." Yet as the
years passed, the value of pure thought, objective and
dissociated from exterior circumstance, appeared to
increase. In 1930 he wrote to a correspondent who had
sent him one of Mach's letters that "his writings had great
influence on my development. But how much he
influenced my life's work it is impossible for me to
fathom."
  However, the renunciation of almost all that Mach stood
for began only in Einstein's mid-life, the final stage in a
long philosophical pilgrimage. During the first or second
year of his studies in Zurich there was nothing but awed
enthusiasm when his attention was drawn to Mach's
Science of Mechanics by Michelangelo Besso, an Italian
engineering student six years older than Einstein who had
come to the ETH from Rome. The book, which shook his
dogmatic faith in mechanics as the final basis of all
physical thinking, "exercised a profound influence upon
me in this regard while I was a student," he said, "I see
Mach's greatness in his incorruptible scepticism and
independence. ..."
  One expression of this independence was Mach's analysis
of Newtonian mechanics and his conclusion that it
contained no principle that is self-evident to the human
mind. The nub of this criticism was that Newton had used
expressions which were impossible of definition in terms
of observable quantities or processesùexpressions such as
"absolute space" and "absolute time," which to Mach were
thus quite meaningless. One result was that in Mach's
view the Newtonian laws would have to be rewritten in
more comprehensible terms, substituting in the law of
inertia, for instance, "relative to the fixed stars" for
"relative to absolute space." This critical attitude to the
whole Newtonian framework as it had been utilized for
more than two centuries helped to prepare Einstein's mind
for things to come; for if Mach could claim, with at least a
measure of plausibility, that men had been misled about
the definition of the material world, then a similarly
audacious venture was not beyond Einstein. Realization
that accepted views could be so readily challenged came as
a revelation to the student who intuitively felt that the
world of degree courses was at the best incomplete and at
the worst wrong. If he were really to discover how God
had made the world he could take nothing for granted; not
even Newton.
  This scepticism was a useful scientific qualification, but
one side effect was inevitable: Einstein became, as far as
the professorial staff of the ETH was concerned, one of the
awkward scholars who might or might not graduate but
who in either case was a great deal of trouble. In such a
situation it was natural that he should be asked by
Professor Pernet, responsible for practical physics, why he
did not study medicine, law, or philology rather than
physics. It was natural that Pernet, faced with the young
man's assertion that he felt he had a natural talent for
physics, should reply: "You can do what you like: I only
wish to warn you in your own interest." And it was natural
that Weber, who disliked the young man addressing him
as "Herr Weber" instead of "Herr Professor," should add,
after admitting Einstein's cleverness: "But you have one
fault: one can't tell you anything." Einstein was not quite
as cocky as that. "At nineteen I had not published anything
and would have laughed if anyone had suggested such a
thing," he wrote in old age.
  The situation throughout his four academic years at the
ETH from 1896 until 1900 was not improved by his own
attitude towards examinations. "The coercion," as he
called it in his autobiographical notes, "had such a
deterring effect [upon me] that, after I had passed the final
examination, I found the consideration of any scientific
problems distasteful to me for an entire year." For graduate
he did, in August, 1900, receiving an overall mark of 4.91
out of 6.00; celebrating with his particular friends, of
whom all except Mileva Maric had been successful; and
expecting that he would now be offered, as was the custom
of the time, a place on the lowest rung of the academic
ladder, an appointment in the physics department of the
ETH. However, the laws of human nature worked as
rigorously for Albert Einstein as for others. Kollros was
given a post under Hurwitz. Marcel Grossmann went to
Fiedler, Ehrat to Rudio. Weber the physicist took on two
mechanical engineers but overlooked the physicist
Einstein. For the difficult fellow, no opening could be
found.
  The refusal of the ETH to employ him was a blow not
only to his prospects but to his pride, and the contrast with
his colleagues bit deep. "He, on good terms with the
teachers and understanding everything; I, a pariah,
discounted and little loved," he wrote to Grossmann's
widow years afterwards. "... Then the end of our studies. ...
I was suddenly abandoned by everyone, standing at a loss
on the threshold of life."
  Yet it cannot have been entirely unexpected and it was
certainly not unnatural. For the trappings of the grand old
man of science have tended to obscure the reality of the
self-willed youth from which he developed; the floating
aureole of white hair evolved not from the dedicated
student but from the rebel. In the autumn of 1900 Albert
Einstein was the graduate who denied rather than defied
authority, the perverse young man for whom "you must"
was the father of "I won't," the keen seeker out of heresies
to support; a young man who was written off as virtually
unemployable by many self-respecting citizens.
  These awkward facts became apparent throughout the
next few months. One of the first results of Einstein's
failure to gain a post in the ETH was the summary ending
of his allowance from the Koch relations in Genoa. Having
come of age he would have to stand on his own feet. He
crossed the Alps once more to join his parents in Milan,
and from here, in September, 1900, wrote the first of
numerous letters asking for work. It went to Adolf
Hurwitz, the Zurich professor under whom he had read
differential and integral calculus, and asked whether there
was "any chance" of becoming his assistant. Shortly
afterwards, a further letter followed, revealing the honesty
which was to bedevil so many of his efforts. "Since,
through lack of time, I was unable to attend the
mathematical school there was no chance of practice in
practical and theoretical physics, and I have nothing in my
favor except the fact that I attended most of the courses
which offered me opportunity," this letter admitted. "I
think I must mention that in my student years I was mainly
occupied with analytical mechanics and theoretical
physics." The "mention" was no doubt enough, and the
post went elsewhere.
  Later that autumn, Einstein was back in Zurich working
with Professor Alfred Wolfer under whom he had studied
astrophysics and astronomy and who was now a director of
the Swiss Federal Observatory. The work, though
temporary, served its purpose, as shown in Einstein's first
letter to Hurwitz. "I would not have taken the liberty of
disturbing you with such a question during the recess had
not the granting of my Zurich citizenship, which I have
requested, been dependent upon furnishing proof of a fixed
job," he said.
  Citizenshipùin effect, Swiss nationalityùhad been one
of Einstein's objectives since the first weeks of 1896.
Almost half a century later he remembered how he had
been "happy in Switzerland because there men are left to
themselves and privacy is respected," and throughout his
student days he had regularly set aside 20 francs a month
towards the cost of obtaining Swiss naturalization. Now at
last he had the necessary cash, the necessary residential
qualifications, and the necessary job. He had made his
formal application to the Zurich authorities the previous
autumn, on October 19, 1899, enclosing a testimonial of
good character and proof of unbroken residence in the city
since October 29, 1896. "Meanwhile," he concluded, "I
commend my application to your most benevolent
consideration, and remain with hope, Albert Einstein,
Unionstrasse 4, Zurich-Hottingen." But the wheels of the
Zurich authorities ground as slowly as God's, and it was
the following summer before the necessary declaration was
demanded of his father. It was given on July 4, with
Hermann Einstein formally stating that he was "perfectly
in agreement with the request of his son, Albert Einstein,
regarding immigration to Switzerland and [the granting
of] civic rights of the city of Zurich."
  Einstein made only passing references to the formalities
in later years. But the "duly accurate" biography by his
stepson-in-law, written under the pseudonym of Anton
Reiser, contained details which can only have come from
himself. Even though they came thirty years later they
have an interest in that they show Einstein as seen by
Einstein. "The process had not been simple," Reiser wrote.

  The Zurich city fathers definitely mistrusted the unworldly
dreamy young scholar of German descent who was so bound [sic]
to become a citizen of Switzerland. They could not be too sure
that he was not engaged in dangerous practices. They decided to
examine the young man in person and to question him rigorously.
Was he inclined to drink, had his grandfather been syphilitic, did
he himself lead a proper life? Young Einstein had to give
information on all these questions. He had hardly expected that
the acquisition of Swiss naturalization papers was so morally
involved a matter. Finally, the authorities observed how harmless
and how innocent of the world the young man was. They laughed
at him, teased him about his ignorance of the world, and finally
honored him by recognizing his right to Swiss citizenship.

  The tests do not seem exacting, even for 1900, but they
lodged in his memory firmly enough.
  On February 21, 1901, Einstein was granted the threefold
citizen-rights of the Swissùof the city, of the canton, and
of the Swiss confederation. As such he became due for his
three-month military service, like all other young Swiss
men. Thirty years later he was to be among those who
signed a protest against this system which made "soldiers
of every able-bodied citizen from his eighteenth year to the
end of his life and provides every household with a gun,"
claiming that "no more subtle way of preventing
disarmament could be found by an enemy of peace." In
1901 he felt differently, dutifully presenting himself to the
authorities, who rejected him for military service because
of flat feet and varicose veins. According to
contemporaries he was shocked and distressed. He
certainly kept his Dienstbⁿchlein, or military service book,
for many years, at least until the 1930s.
  The formality over, Einstein was now a fully fledged
Swiss, a status he was to retain all his life and of which he
was always proud. There is little doubt that his chances of
permanent employment were now greater than they had
been as a German Jew. Yet his move had been far from
merely utilitarian. He felt a basic attachment to
Switzerland and the Swiss which continued throughout the
years and grew with self-imposed exile in the United
States into reminiscent affection. The reasons for it are
revealing.
  "I love the Swiss because, by and large, they are more
humane than the other people among whom I have lived,"
he wrote late in life. There was also their pacific political
record. For as Einstein's old friend Morris Raphael Cohen
has stressed, "Like other opponents of military
imperialism, Einstein [was] inclined to look upon the
smaller European nations as on the right path"ûwhile
tending to ignore the fact that "their present attitude is in
part at least due to the fact that the path of military
aggrandizement is no longer open to them." Quite apart
from this record, which on the political plane gave
Switzerland an honorable place among nations, the
country had physical and psychological characteristics
which helped to make it a national example of all that
Einstein felt the world might be if only men behaved
sanely. Thus within its frontiers were French- and Italian
speaking peoples as well as German-speaking, and within
these boundaries the rough corners of national attitudes
tended to be smoothed off by mutual contact. The Swiss
therefore tended to be tolerant of national idiosyncrasies
and of personal ones as well. In the early years of the
century, moreover, before the country had become the
home of international agencies, before the reputation of
Swiss bank accounts and of Swiss bankers gave it an aura
of power, Switzerland existed in a European backwater
that was particularly satisfying to Einstein, a man anxious
only to be left to his work. Here, safe in the Swiss cocoon,
he could carry on with minimum interruption. This was
the prospect although it was not to be enjoyed
immediately. His expectations of quickly getting a
permanent job were still not justified and in March he was
back with his parents in Milan.
  However, his hopes were rising. In 1901, as much as
today, publication produced the rungs of the ladder up
which scientists climbed to fame, and in December of the
previous year Einstein set up the first rung. This was
"Folgerungen aus der KapillaritΣtserscheinungen"
("Deductions from the Phenomena of Capillarity"), which
appeared on December 13, 1900, in the Annalen der
Physik. Shortly after the issue appeared he sent a copy to
Wilhelm Ostwald, the German physical chemist who was
carrying out his pioneer work on the principles of
catalysis. The paper had been inspired by Ostwald's own
work, and Einstein inquired whether there was a job in
Ostwald's laboratory where he would have "the
opportunity for further education." He appears to have
received no reply, either to this first letter, or to a second
which was, unknown to Einstein himself, supported by an
appeal from his father. Certainly he got no job.
  Before sending the second letter he had also written to
Kamerlingh Onnes, the Dutch physicist, who in Leiden
was already probing down towards the depths of ultimate
cold. "I hear through a student friend," he wrote on a
simple reply-paid card, "that there is a post vacant at your
university for an assistant, and I take the liberty of
applying for this." He outlined his qualifications and
added that he was putting in the same post a copy of his
treatise published in the Annalen der Physik. This card,
now in the Leiden Museum for the History of Science, was
the first link between Einstein and the Dutch university
city, dreaming away among its canals and its great past,
most of its honest burghers unaware that Kamerlingh
Onnes was founding under their patronage the science of
cryogenics and that Lorentz was dramatically introducing
atomic ideas into Maxwell's electromagnetic theory. Two
decades later Einstein was to become an honored visiting
professor to the university. In its great hall he was to give
some of his first lectures on the General Theory of
Relativity. But his first contact with Leiden was of a
different kind. Kamerlingh Onnes did not even answer,
and the reply-paid second half of the card, self-addressed
to "A. Einstein, via Bigli 21, Milano," remains blank in
the museum's archives.
  But rescue was at hand. "I have been offered a position in
a technical school at Winterthur, to last from May 15 to
July 15, to teach mathematics while the regular professor
serves a term in the army," he wrote from Milan on May 3
to Professor Alfred Stern of Zurich. Stern taught history in
the ETH, and when, years later, he was celebrating his
eightieth birthday, Einstein wrote to him saying: "As a
student I spent my most harmonious hours in your family
circle and I often look back upon those days with
pleasure." In 1901 he went on to unburden himself about
the pleasure of getting his first job.

  I am beside myself with joy as I have just received confirmation
that all is settled. I have no idea who recommended me, because
as far as I know not one of my teachers has a good word to say
for me, and I did not apply for the post but was invited. There is
also a possibility that later on I may be able to find a job with the
Swiss Patent Office.
  What am I to say now about your kind and fatherly
friendship that you have constantly bestowed upon me
whenever I had the chance to see you? I know that you are
fully aware of my feelings, and do not wish to have them said.
But it is true that no one else has ever treated me thus, and
often when I came to you in a sad and bitter mood I found
peace of mind and happiness in such pleasant company. But
before you start laughing at me too much, I am fully aware
that I am a curious bird and apart from an upset tummy or
something like that, am not really given to melancholia. ...
Within the next few days I will cross the Spluegen on foot,
combining duty and pleasure. When I arrive in Zurich, I will
certainly visit you.

  A few days later he was off, crossing the Alps and
walking on down through the valleys of the Grisons to
Coire and eastern Switzerland.
  Einstein's period as stand-in for Professor Gasser at the
Winterthur Technical School was uneventful. But no cause
was found for keeping his services after Gasser's return.
Once again he found himself back in Zurich, looking for
work.
  He was now saved by a combination of persistence and
personal wire-pulling. In a Zurich newspaper he read that
a teacher was required in a boarding school run by a Dr.
Jakob Nuesch of Schaffhausen, the little town on the Swiss
frontier, famous alike for its Rhine Falls and its position
astride the narrow neck of land joining the main body of
Switzerland to its "island" on the right bank of the Rhine.
In Schaffhausen there lived Conrad Habicht, a former
fellow student from the ETH and a young man able to drop
the right word in the right ear. With Habicht's help,
Einstein was given the post which turned out to be, for the
most part, coaching a young English boy, Louis Cohen. He
held it for only a few months.
  Just what happened is difficult to discover but easy to
imagine. Einstein's detestation of the rigid discipline and
the methods of the Gymnasium had in a way been
compounded by his experiences in Zurich where he
considered the routine teachings of the professors an
unmitigated evil and the helpful notes of Marcel
Grossmann a satisfactory method of evading them.
Schaffhausen was not Munich and the methods of
Switzerland were not those of the Fatherland. But
Einstein's ideas of minimum routine and minimum
discipline were very different from those of his employer,
Jakob Nuesch. By the end of the year he was back once
more in his old Zurich rooms, out of work again.
  By this time, however, there were two gleams of light on
the horizon. Before he left Schaffhausen he had completed
a thesis on the kinetic theory of gases for his Ph.D. and
sent it to the University of Zurich. He had also made
formal application for the post in the Swiss Patent Office
which was to be his first regular job.
  "I, the undersigned, herewith offer myself for the post of
engineer Class II at the Federal Patent Office which is
announced in the Bundesblatt of 11 December, 1901," this
went. He outlined his training at the ETH, mentioned his
jobs at Winterthur and Schaffhausen, and then concluded
by saying: "The papers which confirm these statements
can be found at the present time in the University of
Zurich and I hope to be able to forward them within the
next few days. I am the son of German parents but I have
lived since I was sixteen years of age without a break in
Switzerland. I am a citizen of the town of Zurich. With
great respect, I sign myself, Albert Einstein, Bahnhofstra.,
Schaffhausen."
  The Swiss Patent Office had been founded only in 1888
and still went its official if individual way under the
control of its original director, Herr Friedrich Haller. A
large, friendly rough diamond, Haller was an engineer
who had won his professional spurs during the 70s and 80s
when the Swiss were establishing their reputation for
driving railways through mountains, across mountains,
and, if really necessary, up the near vertical sides of
mountains. Success was the yardstick and if success were
attained by a leavening of by-guess-and-by-God to formal
scientific work, Haller saw little harm in that. He ran the
Patent Office on his own unconventional lines, "with a
whip in one hand and a bun in the other" according to a
much later Patent Office official, and it was largely his
own idiosyncratic rule which appears eventually to have
brought Einstein to the Swiss capital as a minor civil
servant.
  Among Haller's personal friends was Herr Grossmann,
father of the Marcel Grossmann of the ETH. Although the
Grossmann's intervention on Einstein's behalf is certain,
the details are not clear; yet it seems likely that a casual
talk between the two older men brought a generous
promise that when a vacancy arose Marcel's friend would
be favorably considered. Einstein learned of such an
opening in December, 1901, and a few months after
applying was among those selected for interview. His
friend had earlier sent him an encouraging letter to which
he replied:

  Dear Marcel,
  When I found your letter yesterday I was deeply moved by
your devotion and compassion which do not let you forget an
old, unlucky friend. I could hardly find better friends than you
and Ehrat. Needless to say, I would be delighted to get the
job. I would spare no effort to live up to your
recommendation. I have spent three weeks at my parents'
home looking for a position of assistant lecturer at some
university. I am sure I would have found one long ago were it
not for Weber's intrigues against me. In spite of all this, I
don't let a single opportunity pass unheeded, nor have I lost
my sense of humor. ... When God created the ass he gave him
a thick skin.

  Shortly afterwards, he traveled to Berne for the all
important personal interview with Haller. The director has
left no account of what must have been, for Einstein, a
troublesome event. The only evidence that remains
consists of a brief paragraph in Reiser. "Albert was
examined for two full hours. The director placed before
him literature on new patents about which he was required
to form an immediate opinion. The examination
unfortunately disclosed his obvious lack of technical
training." However, this minor detail was no
embarrassment to a man such as Haller, intent on helping
an old friend. On June 16 Einstein was formally appointed,
together with a J. Heinrich Schenk, as Technical Expert, at
a salary of 3,500 francs a year. But Haller's goodwill could
stretch only so far. The post for which Einstein had
applied was Technical Expert (Second Class). He was
made Technical Expert (Third Class).
  Two legends have grown up about the appointment. One
is that Einstein was employed because a knowledge of
Maxwell's equations was considered essential and he was
the only applicant who had it. The second is that the
authorities in Zurich had already marked Einstein as a
genius and passed on the good news to Haller, who had
seized the chance of bringing on to his staff a young man
whose fame and fortune would all come in good time.
  The first of these legends is easily disposed of. The
vacancy officially advertised in the Swiss Gazette listed the
qualifications for the Patent Office post merely as follows:
"Grundliche Hochschulbildung in mechanisch-technischer
oder speziell physikalischer Richtung, Beherrschung der
deutschen und Kenntnis der franz÷sischen Sprache oder
Beherrschung der franz÷sischen und Kenntnis der
deutschen Sprache, eventuell auch Kenntnis der
italienischen Sprache." ("Thorough academic education in
technical mechanics, or special leaning towards physics, a
mastery of German and knowledge of French, or mastery
of French and knowledge of German, and possibly
knowledge of Italian.") The "speziell physikalischer
Richtung" is the nearest that the requirement comes to a
knowledge of Maxwell's laws and it is unlikely that Haller
wouldùas is sometimes suggestedùhave pulled them into
his interviews of candidates to eliminate everyone but
Einstein.
  It is easy to see the way in which the second legend, of
long standing in the Patent Office, quietly grew throughout
the years. For in retrospect it must have been maddening
for the authorities to reflect that they had taken an
ordinary, if not an ugly, duckling under their wing without
realizing that he would develop into the most amazing
swan of the scientific world. What more natural than that a
legend of prescience, of inner awareness of the young
man's potential genius, should steadily grow? The picture
of Haller, nodding sagely in his retirement whenever the
name of Einstein arose, is a picture which one hardly likes
to shatter. Yet there appears not the slightest evidence for
it. Neither Zurich nor any other Swiss university would
have passed Einstein over, and on to others, had they seen
in him anything more than an awkward, slightly lazy, and
certainly intractable young man who thought he knew
more than his elders and betters. He had in fact been set on
his path to the future by an act of no more intellectual
judgment than a good turn for an old friend.
  But it was to be a future very different from what must
have been anticipated. The Grossmanns, father and son, no
doubt felt that they had shoveled a good companion into a
safe job for life. Einstein saw it mainly as a useful base
from which he could begin his self-imposed task of
exploring the nature of the physical world.
  A week after being formally appointed, he took up his
post in the Patent Office.

CHAPTER 3

SWISS CIVIL SERVANT

The city to which Einstein moved in the summer of 1902
was very different in character from Zurich. Standing on
its high sandstone ridge, three parts encircled by the swift
waters of the Aare, looking towards the fine prospect of the
Oberland, Berne was less tied to technology and industry,
more tuned to the arts, than the city to the east. Embassies
and legations occupied many of the fine houses to the
south of the river across the Kirchenfeld Bridge. Summer
tourists came to gaze at the famous clock tower with its
midday procession of model bears which was the pride not
only of the city but of all Switzerland. The British had
already begun to make the huge main hotel, standing
cheek by jowl with the Swiss Parliament house, a base
from which they moved into the mountains for the
fashionable sport of skiing they had introduced. In Berne
the wrappings of the Swiss cocoon, which tended to shelter
the country from the buffets of a Europe already being
polarized towards either Paris or Berlin, were slightly less
protective. Here Einstein was to spend the first creative
years of his life, transforming the face of physics from the
small back room of an apartment behind the arcades of
Kramgasse into which there vibrated the chimes of the city
clock tower.
  His work as a technical officer in the Swiss Patent Office,
then housed in the upper stories of the Federal Telegraph
offices in Speichergasse, began on June 23, 1902. The
details of his seven-year career there are simple enough.
The initial appointment was provisional and it was agreed
that when this was confirmed his salary should be
"regularized to suit that of his work at the time."
Confirmation did not come until September 5, 1904, when
Haller wrote to the Federal Council, noting that Einstein
had "proved himself very useful" and proposing that his
salary should be raised from 3,500 to 3,900 francs. He
should, however, remain Class III rather than be promoted
to Class II since "he is not yet fully accustomed to matters
of mechanical engineering (he is actually a physicist)."
  Upgrading to a higher class followed in 1906 when his
salary was increased by another 600 francs. Since the
autumn of 1904, Haller then wrote, Einstein had
"continued to familiarize himself with the work, so that he
now handles very difficult patent applications with the
greatest success and is one of the most valued experts in
the office." The director went on to note that his young
technical officer had "acquired the title of Dr. Phil. from
the University of Zurich this winter, and the loss of this
man, who is still young, would be much regretted by the
administration of the office."
  Three points are of interest. The first is that Einstein had
won his academic spurs in 1905. They had come after his
presentation to the University of Zurich of a twenty- one
page paper on "A New Definition of Molecular
Dimensions," dedicated to his friend Marcel Grossmann.
Judging by the records, it was touch and go whether he got
his doctorate. Professor Alfred Kleiner, director of the
Zurich Physics Institute, recommended acceptance of the
dissertation. But "as the principal achievement of
Einstein's work consists of the treatment of differential
equations, it is thus of a mathematical nature and belongs
to analytical mechanics ..." and Kleiner recommended two
more opinions. That of Professor Burckhardt appears to
have been decisive; despite "crudeness in style and slips of
the pen in the formulas which can and must be
overlooked," he noted that Einstein's paper showed
"thorough mastery of mathematical methods."
  Director Haller's remark about his young technical
officer not only notes his academic advance but also
implies that Einstein was by this time already searching
around for another post and had not concealed the fact
from his employers. Circumstantial evidenceùcasual
references to teaching posts in Einstein's correspondence
of this periodùconfirms that this was so. Thirdly it is
significant that the director of the Patent Office, writing
about his employee's progress in the spring of 1906, did
not even comment on the three papers that the young man
had by this time contributed to a single issue of the
Annalen der Physikùone important enough to take him
into the history books, one which helped to bring him the
Nobel Prize sixteen years later, and the third containing
the outline of the Special Theory of Relativity.
  Einstein's first home in Berne was one small room in
Gerechtigkeitsgasse and from this he walked every
morning the few hundred yards to the building in whose
third-floor office he learned his routine duties. One of his
early visitors was the Max Talmey who had introduced
him to science a decade earlier and who had recently
called on his parents in Milan. They were "rather reticent"
about their son, Talmey noted, and in Berne the reason
appeared obvious. "I found my friend there and spent a day
with him," he wrote. "His environment betrayed a good
deal of poverty. He lived in a small, poorly furnished
room. I learned that he had a hard life struggle with the
scant salary of an official at the Patent Office. His
hardships were aggravated through obstacles laid in his
way by people who were jealous of him." The "obstacles"
should not be taken too seriously. Einstein the potential
school-master, with one paper already to his credit in the
pages of the Annalen der Physik, increasingly sure of
himself, was an intellectual cut above his colleagues. He
still had the confident brashness that seeps out from some
of his early letters, and it is inconceivable that he should
not have been put in his place from time to time by more
pedestrian companions.
  The work of the Patent Office at the turn of the century
was strikingly different from what it later became. The
difference is illustrated by one fact: until 1908 patents
were granted only for inventions which could be
represented by a model. The model, it is difficult not to
feel, may have been as important as the specification
which described, in words which ideally should allow of
no dispute, the duties which the device was intended to
perform. These inventions, ideas, and proposals which
were directed to the office consisted largely of suggestions
for practical, utilitarian, basically simple, and often
homely applications of technology to the mundane affairs
of everyday life. At first glance, all this appears to be
singularly unrelated to Einstein's special genius. Yet
despite the apparently esoteric quality of the theories on
which his fame was founded, these theories sprang, as he
was never tired of stressing, from observation of facts and
from deductions which would account for these facts. This
demanded an intuitive discernment of essentials, and it
was just this which was sharpened during his days at the
Patent Office. For the work frequently involved rewriting
inventors' vague applications to give them legal
protection; this in turn required an ability to see, among
sometimes tortuous descriptions, the basic idea or ideas on
which an application rested. The demand was not so much
for the routine application of a routine mind to routine
documents, as for perceptive intuition. "It is no
exaggeration," says a member of the Patent Office staff,
"to say that his activity was, at least in the first few
months, literally an apprenticeship in the critical reading
of technical specifications and in understanding the
drawings that went with them."
  Observation and analysis were therefore brought to a
sharper edge as from the summer of 1902 onwards
Einstein sat in the long narrow room of the government
office with his fellow technical officers sorting, reading,
and putting into intelligible German the specifications for
typewriters and cameras, engineering devices, and the
hundred and one curious appliances for which inventors
wished to claim legal protection. He himself was in no
doubt of what he learned at the Patent Office. "More
severe than my father," was how he described the director
to his colleague Joseph Sauter. "He taught me to express
myself correctly."
  But there was more to it than that. Einstein himself
subsequently made two comments on his work in Berne.
When he took up the post he wrote to his friend Habicht
that it would give him "besides eight hours of work ...
eight hours of idleness plus a whole Sunday." And half a
century later, on his seventieth birthday, he wrote that the
formulation of patent statements had been a blessing. "It
gave me," he said, "the opportunity to think about physics.
Moreover, a practical profession is a salvation for a man of
my type; an academic career compels a young man to
scientific production, and only strong characters can resist
the temptation of superficial analysis."
  It was "the opportunity to think about physics" that
mattered. For while the Patent Office work helped to tickle
into first-class condition Einstein's ability to discern the
essentials of a scientific statement, it acted also as an
undemanding occupation which released his mind for
creative work at a different level. The process is not
uncommon, and there had been an example in the very city
in which he workedùthat of Albrecht von Haller the
scientist, who as secretary of the Berne City Council had in
the 1750s kept the Council minutes. Reprimanded one day
by the Council chairman for writing a scientific treatise as
a meeting proceeded, Haller was able to read out the
detailed minutes that he had, simultaneously, been
correctly keeping. Many men of genius need an occupation
which keeps the wolf from the door while their intellectual
work thus continues undisturbed. Trollope working in the
Post Office while concentrating on the Barchester novels;
Maurice Baring helping Trenchard plan the bombing
offensive of 1918 while continuing his work as man of
letters; Churchill politicking away through the interwar
years while producing Marlboroughùthese are examples
of great men immersing part of themselves in a routine
that helped to release their creative genius. In Berne,
Einstein was another, unobtrusively trotting from
Gerechtigkeitsgasse to the Patent Office each morning,
usually lunching at his desk, returning to his lodgings each
evening with the orthodoxy of the city clerk, then setting
himself down in a quiet corner to discover the laws of
nature.
  His first original papers had no connection with the
theory of relativity which was to make him world famous.
They concerned, instead, the nature of the forces which
hold together molecules of a liquid. "My major aim ...," he
has written, "was to find facts which would guarantee as
much as possible the existence of atoms of definite finite
size." His statement well illustrates the attitude which still
permeated scientific thought at the turn of the century. A
number of eminent scientistsùnotably Mach and
Ostwaldùdid not believe in the physical existence of
atoms as such. For them, Dalton had lived in vain. They
regarded atomic theory "more as a visualizing symbol than
as knowledge concerning the factual construction of
matter." It was typical that Einstein, still in his early
twenties, should set about educating them.
  The first five papers in which he started to do this were
published between 1901 and 1904.[The part played by
thermodynamics in Einstein's search for a unified basis for
physics is analyzed by Martin J. Klein in
"Thermodynamics in Einstein's Thought," Science, Vol.
157 (August 4, 1967), pp. 509-516.] They were followed
by a sixth which came in his annus mirabilis of 1905 and
which applied several of his earlier results in a
dramatically conclusive way. The first two papers, "my
two worthless beginner's works" as Einstein himself
described them when in December, 1907, he sent offprints
of all his other papers to Johannes Stark, dealt with
capillarity and potential differences. Neither was
particularly successful, but the attraction of their subject
for Einstein, dealing as it did with the links between
intermolecular and other forces, was made clear in a letter
he wrote to Marcel Grossmann in April, 1901. "As regards
science," this said,

  I have got a few wonderful ideas in my head which have to be
worked out in due course. I am now almost sure that my theory of
the power of attraction of atoms can be extended to gases and
that the characteristic constants for nearly all elements could be
specified without undue difficulty. Then the question of the inner
relationship of molecular forces will also take a decisive step
forward. Perhaps the researches of others directed to different
goals will ultimately prove the theory. In that case I shall then
use all I have so far achieved in the field of molecular attraction
in my doctor's thesis. It is a magnificent feeling to recognize the
unity of a complex of phenomena which appear to be things quite
apart from the direct visible truth.

  Thus even at this early stage, when dealing with a subject
far removed from the new concept of space and time to be
embodied in relativity, Einstein revealed two aspects of his
approach to science which became the keys to his work:
the search for a unity behind disparate phenomena, and the
acceptance of a reality "apart from the direct visible truth."
  The subject matter of this early work was the immense
numbers of particles which made up the liquids or the
gases being considered. It is not possible to deal with the
movements of individual particles, and therefore statistical
methods, which could handle the averaged-out movements
of vast numbers, had to be used. If man had time enough,
and equipment sensitive enough, it would be possible to
calculate the movement of each molecule and each atom,
since these movements were the result of cause and effect.
But statistics, as in life insurance, provided a handy
shortcut. As yet they provided no more.
  His methods in the first two papers were those of
thermodynamics. When he had completed them, he turned
to the statistical foundations of the subject, attempting in
three more papers to derive the laws describing
equilibrium and irreversibility from the general equations
of mechanics and the theory of probability. He believed his
methods to be new, although they had, unknown to him,
already been used by the American Josiah Willard
Gibbs.[Gibbs' main papers were written between 1876 and
1878 and published in the Transactions of the Connecticut
Academy of Sciences. Only in 1892 were they translated
into German.]
  Between the first of these early papers, written in Zurich,
and the last of them, written in Berne, Einstein's
circumstances changed. He became the center of a small
coterie of young students who were to remain his friends
for life; and, soon after this was formed, he married the
friend of his Zurich days, Mileva Maric.
  The group came into being shortly after Einstein moved
to Berne. He had arrived a few weeks before taking up his
Patent Office appointment and he was doubtful whether
his funds would last until the first payday. What he really
loved and really understood was physics. Berne was a
university city and it was thus the most natural thing in the
world that he should set up shop as a private tutor, offering
to teach physics at so much an hour.
  His first pupil was Maurice Solovine, a young Rumanian
studying a ragbag of subjects at Berne University that
included literature, philosophy, Greek, mathematics, and
geology. "Walking in the streets of Berne one day during
the Easter holidays of 1902, and having bought a
newspaper, I noticed an advertisement saying that Albert
Einstein, former pupil of the ╔cole Polytechnique of
Zurich, gave lessons in physics at three francs an hour," he
has written. Solovine sought out the house, climbed the
stairs to the first story, and rang the bell.
  "I heard a thunderous 'herein,' and then Einstein
appeared. As the door of his apartment gave on to a dark
corridor I was struck by the extraordinary brilliance of his
huge eyes," Solovine continues.

  Having entered and taken a chair, I told him that I studied
philosophy but that I wanted to study physics a little more
thoroughly to gain a real knowledge of nature. He confided in me
that he also, when he was younger, had a strong taste for
philosophy, but the vagueness and arbitrariness which reigned
there had turned him against it, and that he was now concerned
solely with physics. We talked for about two hours on all sorts of
questions and we found we had similar ideas and were drawn
towards one another. As I left he accompanied me downstairs
and we talked for about another half hour in the street before an
appointment was made for the following day.

  The second visit was followed by a third, and on
Solovine's suggestion it was agreed that they should read
some of the standard works and discuss the problems they
presented. Einstein proposed starting with Karl Pearson's
The Grammar of Science, and this was soon followed by
Mill, Hume, Spinoza, Mach, Henri PoincarΘ, and
Riemann, whose non-Euclidean geometry was utilized in
Einstein's development of the General Theory of Relativity
a decade later.
  The two men were soon joined by Conrad Habicht,
Einstein's old friend from Zurich who now arrived in
Berne to continue his mathematical studies. The faint line
between teacher and taught, between the twenty-three-
year-old Einstein and his companions of twenty, soon
disappeared and the lessons dissolved into discussions that
were continued week by week and month by month.
  At times they would top off their argument with a long
walk. Sometimes a Sunday would be enlivened by an
eighteen-mile tramp to the Lake of Thun, by whose side
they would camp for the day, before returning to Berne on
the evening train. "Very often," Solovine has written,

  I met Einstein at the exist from the Patent Office; sometimes we
would take up the discussion we had left off the night before and
sometimes we confided to others our hopes and fears. Our
material situation was far from being brilliant; but, in spite of
that, what enthusiasm we had, what fire, what a passion for the
things that really mattered! We also made a number of
excursions together ùwalking, sometimes climbing to the top of
the Gurten Kulm on Saturday to see the sunrise. The scent of the
pines, warmed by the sun during the day, used literally to
intoxicate me.

  Einstein himself was the natural leader, and not only by
virtue of the elder-statesman advantage which a year or
two's seniority gave him. Even in his early twenties the
force of character which was so to impress observers later
on made itself felt. Something of this shows through even
in the factual description given by Lucien Chavan, a young
electrical engineer in the Federal Post and Telegraph
Administration who was an occasional member of what
became the self-styled "Olympia Academy." "Einstein is
1.76 meters tall," he wrote beneath a picture of Einstein
which was given to the Swiss Postal Library after
Chavan's death,

  broad shouldered, with a slight stoop. His short skull seems
remarkably broad. His complexion is swarthy. He has a narrow
moustache above a large sensitive mouth, an aquiline nose. His
brown eyes have a deep benign luster. He has a fine voice, like
the vibrant tones of a cello. Einstein speaks a good French with a
slight foreign accent.

  Discussion was the magnet which held the group together
and when it was in full swing little else mattered. Solovine
has recorded how shortly before Einstein's birthday he saw
caviar displayed in a shop window in the city. Knowing it
from his earlier days in Rumania, he decided with Habicht
to buy some as an expensive birthday treat. When it was
put on the table Einstein was talking about the problems of
Galilean inertia. He went on talking, eating the caviar
without comment. "It's all the same to me," he said, when
told what it was. "You can offer bumpkins the most
exquisite things in the world and they don't know how to
appreciate them." What mattered was the talk. It went on
intermittently until 1905 when Solovine left the country
for the University of Lyon and Habicht moved to another
part of Switzerland.
  The impact of mind on mind, the cut and thrust of
argument, did much to sharpen the intellectual rapier with
which Einstein was preparing to attack the body of
classical physics. Even so, the Olympia Academy should
be viewed in perspective. It was not a group of young men
living in the academic stratosphere. The faces which look
out from the contemporary photograph above wing collars
and bow ties have a smile in the eyes, and if the attitude of
Einstein implies a deep earnestness it suggests also an air
of half-amused human tolerance which not even seventy
years was to remove. During the Academy's nightlong
discussions of physics and philosophy, their walks through
the solitary Berne streets or on the hills, Einstein certainly
clarified his own thoughts and began to see more plainly
the special problems to which he must devote himself. But
if this was a debating society of a particularly high order it
was also something more normal: a group of high-spirited
young men, active and contentious, lively legged as well as
lively minded and as eager as most others to pursue their
discussions in the CafΘ Bollwerk, a few steps from the
Patent Office, as they were to pursue them in the quiet of
their own rooms. It is history which has isolated the group;
to most of the inhabitants of Berne, as well as to its
members, the Olympia Academy might have been
duplicated in a hundred towns and cities across Europe.
  This carefree, almost undergraduate existence, was
drastically changed when in January, 1903, Einstein
married Mileva Maric. The daughter of a Slav peasant,
four years his senior, Mileva was to remain his wife until,
early in 1919, a divorce between the couple was agreed on
when the prospects of a Nobel Prize, whose 30,000 kroner
he promised to pass on to her if he won it, seemed likely to
secure her own future and that of their two sons. She had
left him in the summer of 1914; but she was wife and
companion during the decade which brought him from the
anonymity of the Patent Office to a secure position in
international science and to the threshhold of world-wide
fame. Thus the part that Mileva played in helping him up
the ladder of success, or in holding him back, is important
in Einstein's own story; it has remained untold partly
because of his reluctance to reveal details of his personal
affairsù"after 300 years a man's private life should still
remain private," he once said of Newtonùpartly because
Mileva lived on, despite crippling illness, until 1948;
partly because legal problems have prevented publication
of a long series of letters between the couple. Yet the story,
also told in many letters which Einstein wrote to his
colleague and confidant Michelangelo Besso, is of
incompatibility rather than conflict; of a couple who
respected one another as long as they did not have to live
together. And it is a story which makes all more
remarkable the intellectual accomplishment of a man who,
as he wrote on one occasion, would have become mentally
and physically exhausted if he had not been able to keep
his wife at a distance, out of sight and out of hearing.
  This confidence to Besso was made in 1916, when
relations between Einstein and Mileva were at their worst,
but it illustrates the role of friend and father-confessor
which the Italian engineer was to play in Einstein's life.
Besso, six years older, had come from Rome to study in the
ETH engineering department, but his real link with
Einstein was stronger. While Maja Einstein, who had
studied at Aarau, was to marry Paul Winteler, the son of
the town's schoolmaster, Besso married Paul's sister
Anna. In 1904, a year after he married Mileva, Einstein
helped Besso into a position as examiner at the Berne
Patent Office. The two men walked the same way home.
Their confidences were professionalùwith the result that
Besso was to become the only man thanked for help in the
famous relativity paperùbut they were also personal, and
after Einstein moved to Zurich in 1909 his letters to Besso
reveal the deteriorating stages of his marriage.
  According to some accounts the couple had become
engaged while still students, but this was frowned upon by
Hermann Einstein who had apparently never met Mileva
when he died in Italy in 1902. Certainly Einstein crossed
the Alps to be present at his father's deathbed and
certainly he married Mileva a few months after his return
to Berne. The photographs which survive show her as a
not unattractive woman of pleasant features, broadish nose
above good sensual mouth, and with an aura of thick dark
hair. She had a limp, but this was not serious and judging
by the generally unkind descriptions, her deficiencies, such
as they were, lay elsewhere. "A modest, unassuming
creature" was the best that FrΣulein Markwalder, daughter
of Einstein's landlady, could muster. Carl Seelig, who like
Mileva lived in Zurich for the greater part of his life,
comments that

  her dreamy, ponderous nature often curdled her life and her
studies. Her contemporaries found Mileva a gloomy, laconic, and
distrustful character. Whoever got to know her better began to
appreciate her Slav open-mindedness and the simple modesty
with which she often followed the liveliest debates from the
background.

  He notes in addition that she was "hardly the typical
Swiss-German house-sprite, the height of whose ambition
is a constant war against dust, moths, and dirt." There is
more than a touch of race bias in some of this, and it is fair
to assume that to many Teutons Mileva had the
unpardonable Slav tendency of letting things slip. There
was one compensation. Einstein, hearing a friend
comment, "I should never have the courage to marry a
woman unless she were absolutely sound," replied, "But
she has such a lovely voice."
  Einstein himself has given various accounts of why he
did in fact marry her. One old friend to whom he confided
his own account, says, "How it came about he doesn't
know himself," and to another he said that he married
despite his parents' determined opposition, out of a feeling
of duty. In old age he also tried to rationalize his actions,
claiming that what he called this tragedy in his life
probably explained his immersion in serious work.
However, whether the emotional crises of an unhappy
marriage are likely to affect the work of the theoretical
physicist in the same beneficent way that they can affect
the artist is a moot point; certainly Einstein, writing not
years later but as the rift with Mileva developed, gave little
sign of it.
  In many ways, Einstein would in 1903 have been happier
with a dedicated housekeeper; instead, he tumbled into
marriage, almost by accident, possibly while thinking of
more important things. But even in those days, before
pacifism, before Zionism, before the antibomb movement,
he was a decent man beneath the determination of his
scientific exterior. Just as, even then, he felt a
responsibility towards the human race, so did he feel a
responsibility towards those with whom circumstance had
joined him. He hardly had time or inclination to be a
family man, but he did his best.
  Relations worsened as the years passed, particularly after
1905 when the Theory of Special Relativity began to make
him famous. His acquaintances, the men and women
against whom he was brushed by the chances of everyday
life, were only too ready to admit that relativity was
beyond them; his second wife was to say so with an air of
relief. With Mileva the situation was different, for was she
not a physicist like her husband? Had she not, in fact, got
just enough "little learning" to enter the new world he had
created, if only he would spare time to explain things? The
answer was "No," but she would never believe it.
  Another factor was quite as important. When Einstein
married, he expected to win more time for work; he
expected to shuffle off the domestic detail which hangs
round bachelor necks. The physicist who in later life was
to discard socks as unnecessary complications and who
insisted that washing and shaving with the same soap
made life that much simpler, had one basic desire, even in
the early 1900s: to transfer to other shoulders the tiresome
tasks which diverted time from more important things.
Many men have married for worse reasons; and many have
found that, failing the grand passion, such mundane
considerations have enabled a couple to rub along happily
enough.
  It is true that Einstein could always isolate himself from
surrounding trivia with an enviable ease. In a mob, at a
concert, listening to speeches, he could follow the exterior
pattern of events while an essential part of his mind
worked away at the problem of the moment. But it would,
even so, be useful if marriage removed the clutter of
workaday duties and diversions. That it failed to do so,
that it merely exchanged the preoccupations of
bachelordom for those of a family man, is clear from the
pictures of his early family life that have survived.
  "He was sitting in his study in front of a heap of papers
covered with mathematical formulas," says one student
who visited him a few years after his marriage. "Writing
with his right hand and holding his younger son in his left,
he kept replying to questions from his elder son Albert
who was playing with his bricks. With the words, 'Wait a
minute, I've nearly finished,' he gave me the children to
look after for a few moments and went on working." A
similar picture is painted by David Reichinstein, one of the
Zurich professors. "The door of the apartment was open to
allow the floor which had just been scrubbed, as well as
the washing hung up in the hall, to dry," he says. "I
entered Einstein's room. He was calmly philosophic, with
one hand rocking the bassinet in which there was a child.
In his mouth Einstein had a bad, a very bad, cigar, and in
the other hand an open book. The stove was smoking
horribly. How in the world could he bear it?"
  The home life of a poorly paid academic in Switzerland
in the first decade of the century must be kept in
perspective. All the same, a colleague felt it necessary to
ask: "How could he bear it?" The answer is that he had to.
  Einstein married Mileva Maric in Berne on Tuesday,
January 6, 1903. The two witnesses at the quiet wedding
were the original members of the Olympia Academy,
Maurice Solovine and Conrad Habicht. There was no
honeymoon, and after a celebratory meal in a local
restaurant the couple returned to their new home, a small
apartment in 49 Kramgasse only a hundred yards from
Berne's famous clock tower. Here there was a minor
incident. Many stories were to arise, or to be invented, of
the absent-minded professor; but here, on his wedding day,
Einstein did find on arriving back home that he had
forgotten the key.
  Superficially, he now slipped down into one of the
innumerable ruts occupied by minor members of the Swiss
civil service. His raise in salary eighteen months after
marriage did little more than compensate for the additional
expenses of a son, Hans Albert, who was born towards the
end of 1903. The distant goal of First-Grade Technical
Assistant must have seemed at first glance to be the
ultimate end of all human hope and ambition for the aloof
young man who walked to work every day from his
apartment, its entrance protected by stone arcades
supported on stout stone pillars. On one of them, there
rests today a plaque: "IN DIESEM HAUS," it records,
"SCHUF ALBERT EINSTEIN IN DEN JAHREN
1903-5 SEINE GRUND-LEGENDEABHANDLUNG
UBER DIE RELATIVIT─TSTHEORIE" ("In this
house between 1903 and 1905 Albert Einstein completed
work on the theory of relativity").
  In March, 1905, Einstein was twenty-six. Only his papers
on intermolecular forces distinguished him from hundreds
of other young men serving their time in government
offices, and they did not distinguish him all that much.
When, early in 1905, he rounded off the series in an
inaugural dissertation for the University of Zurich, he had
a total of six papers to show for the five years that had
passed since his graduation. This work looked more like
the result of postgraduate enthusiasm than the start of the
most distinguished career in physics that Europe had
known for centuries. It was a good record for a failed
teacher who had ended up in the Patent Office; it was
surprisingly little for a man who was about to shake the
scientific world.
  Up to now, Einstein had no academic status. He had the
run of the Patent Office library, strong on engineering but
weak on physics, and he read the leading physics journals
published in German. But he had access to little else.
Neither did he work, nor could he talk and debate even on
social occasions, inside a university environment with its
incessant point counterpoint of argument, its constant
cross-fertilization of ideas, and its stimulating climate of
inquiry. The Olympia Academy, lively as it was, was no
substitute for this. He corresponded with his former
student friends in Zurich and he occasionally visited them.
But that was all. Thus from 1902 until 1905 Einstein
worked on his own, an outsider of outsiders, scientifically
provincial and having few links with the main body of
contemporary physics. This isolation accounts for his
broad view of specific scientific problemsùhe ignored the
detailed arguments of others because he was unaware of
them. It also shows a courage beyond the call of scientific
duty, submission to the inner compulsion which was to
drive him on throughout life and for which he was willing
to sacrifice everything.
  Any one of the four main papers which he published in
1905 would have assured him a place in the textbooks.
Three were published in the single famous Volume 17 of
Annalen der Physikùtoday a bibliographical rarity which
changes hands at many hundreds of dollarsùand the
fourth in Volume 18. All were comparatively short, and all
contained the foundations for new theories even though
they did not elaborate on themù"blazing rockets which in
the dark of the night suddenly cast a brief but powerful
illumination over an immense unknown region," as they
have been described by Louis de Broglie.
  In one way it was the wide variety of the ground
illuminated which made this achievement of 1905 so
remarkable. It was as if a young explorer had in one
dazzling year of travel shown himself to be master
navigator, a good man in tropical jungle, and at the same
time a first-rate mountaineer. Yet in science there had
been one burst of genius strikingly similar to Einstein's.
Almost two and a half centuries earlier Newton had been
driven by the plague at Cambridge to the quiet of
Woolsthorpe and had there produced the calculus, an
explanation of the spectral nature of white light, and the
law of gravitation.
  In the spring of 1905 Einstein gave a rΘsumΘ of things to
come in a letter to his friend Conrad Habicht. "I promise
you in return four works, the first one very soon as I am
expecting my author's copies," he wrote

  It is on the radiation and energy of light, and it is very
revolutionary as you will see for yourself, provided you send me
your work first. The second discusses the methods of determining
the real dimensions of atoms by investigating the diffusion and
internal friction of liquid solutions. The third proves that,
according to the molecular theory of heat, bodies of dimensions
of the order of 1/1000 mm. suspended in liquid experience
apparent random movement due to the thermal motion of
molecules. Such movement of suspended bodies has actually
been observed by biologists who call it Brownian molecular
movement. The fourth work is based on the concepts of
electrodynamics of moving bodies and modifies the theory of
space and time; the purely kinematic part of this work should
interest you. ...

  The promised papers were a peculiar mixtureùas though
a competently executed watercolor from the local art
society had been thrown in with three Rembrandts. For the
"second work" was merely Einstein's inaugural
dissertation for the University of Zurich which he was
having printed in Berne, interesting enough in its own
way, but a minnow among the whales of the other three
papers. Of these, that dealing with Brownian motion
sprang most obviously from earlier work. For his doctoral
dissertation had discussed various methods of statistical
thermodynamics and it was these tools that he used to
predict not only that in certain circumstances the results of
molecular movement could actually be seen under the
microscope, but also the mass and the numbers of
molecules in any particular volume.
  This motion had been reported some seventy years earlier
by Robert Brown, the Scottish naturalist, and there is some
doubt as to how much Einstein knew about it in 1905.
Writing forty-five years later, he stated that he had
"discovered that, according to atomistic theory, there
would have to be a movement of suspended microscopic
particles open to observations, without knowing that
observations concerning the Brownian motion were
already long familiar." However, his letter to Habicht
shows that by 1905 he was in fact well aware of Brown's
observations even though he may not have known of the
further investigations which had followed them.
  The Scotsman had discovered that when pollen dust was
suspended in water and studied under the microscope the
individual particles exhibited a continuous, zigzag, and
apparently random motion. "These motions," he wrote,
"were such as to satisfy me, after frequently repeated
observation, that they arose neither from current in the
fluid nor from its gradual evaporation, but belonged to the
particle itself." Brown repeated his experiments with
pollen from a number of plants. He observed a similar
"swarming" motion in all of them and at first believed he
had discovered the "primitive molecule." Then he found
the same effect when the dusty particles of inorganic
matter were treated in the same way. Many men
discovered more about the Brownian motion in the years
that followed: M. Gouy saw that as the viscosity of the
liquid increased, so did the sluggishness of the
movements; Franz Exner noted that speed of movement
increased with a rise in temperature but decreased if bigger
particles were used.
  When Einstein later observed this motion through the
microscope for himself he was fascinated. "It is an
impressive sight," he wrote.

  It seems contradictory to all previous experience. Examination
of the position of one suspended particle, say every thirty
seconds, reveals the fantastic form of its path. The amazing thing
is the apparently eternal character of the motion. A swinging
pendulum placed in water soon comes to rest if not impelled by
some external force. The existence of a never diminishing motion
seems contrary to all experience. This difficulty was splendidly
clarified by the kinetic theory of matter.

  It was the explanation of this "contrary" experience that
Einstein now gave in his paper, "On the Motion of Small
Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid According to
the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat." The random
motion of the individual particles was due to the kinetic
energy of the invisible molecules with which they were
constantly colliding. From this point he went on to use his
new statistical machinery to predict the mass and number
of molecules involved. It was the essence of his theory that
the mean kinetic energy of agitation of the particles would
be exactly the same as the roughly known energy of
agitation in a gas molecule, and this was in fact shown
experimentally only a few years laterùby Jean Perrin in
Paris in 1908 and by Fletcher and Millikan four years later
in Chicago.
  "To appreciate the importance of this step," Max Born
has written of Einstein's successful attempt to quantify the
Brownian motion, "one has to remember that at that time
[about 1900] atoms and molecules were still far from being
as real as they are todayùthere were still physicists who
did not believe in them." The latter included both Mach
and "the old fighter against atomistics, Wilhelm Ostwald"
who, Arnold Sommerfeld has stated, "told me once that he
had been converted to atomistics by the complete
explanation of the Brownian motion." Thus Einstein's
figures for the invisible molecules had something in
common with the Hertzian sparks which showed the
existence of the radio waves postulated by Maxwell two
decades earlier.
  But Einstein's paper was also to have an important
consequence for scientific methodology in general. "The
accuracy of measurement depends," Max Born has pointed
out,

  on the sensitivity of the instruments, and this again on the size
and weight of the mobile parts, and the restoring forces acting on
them. Before Einstein's work it was tacitly assumed that
progress in this direction was limited only by experimental
technique. Now it became obvious that this was not so. If an
indicator, like the needle of a galvanometer, became too small or
the suspending fiber too thin, it would never be at rest but
perform a kind of Brownian movement. This has in fact been
observed. Similar phenomena play a large part in modern
electronic technique, where the limit of observation is given by
irregular observations which can be heard as a "noise" in a
loudspeaker. There is a limit of observability given by the laws
of nature themselves.

  Einstein's virtual proof of the existence of molecules,
invisible to the human eye, postulated by theory rather
than produced by experimental evidence, was symptomatic
of the line which he was to take throughout the career on
which he was now embarking. It was illustrated by his
later comments on the difficulties which Mach and
Ostwald had felt in accepting the atomic theory as a
statement of fact rather than as a convenient hypothesis.
"The antipathy of these scholars towards atomistic theory
can indubitably be traced back to their positivistic
philosophical attitude," he wrote. "This is an interesting
example of the fact that even scholars of audacious spirit
and fine instinct can be obstructed in the interpretation of
facts by philosophical prejudices. The prejudiceùwhich
has by no means died out in the meantimeùconsists in the
faith that facts by themselves can and should yield
scientific knowledge without free conceptual
construction."
  Einstein thus believed that theories into which facts were
later seen to fit were more likely to stand the test of time
than theories constructed entirely from experimental
evidence. This was certainly the case with the first paper
which he had described in his letter to Habicht, a paper
which "fell like a bolt from the blue, so much so that the
crisis which it ushered in some fifty years ago is not yet
passed today," as Louis de Broglie described it in 1955. It
was to help bring Einstein the Nobel Prize for physics
sixteen years later, and was to play a key part in the
development of modern technology, since the photoelectric
effect whose law it propounded was to become a
cornerstone of television. It contained Einstein's first
implied admission of the duality of nature which was to
haunt his life and an early hint of the indeterminacy
problem which drove him, as de Broglie has put it, "to end
his scientific life in sad isolation andùparadoxically
enoughùapparently far behind the ideas of his time."
Moreover, with the sense of theater which chance was to
utilize so often in Einstein's life, it linked his scientific
work at the age of twenty-six with two men whose non
scientific beliefs and attitudes were to influence him, and
on some occasions to dominate him, for more than forty
yearsùMax Planck, that devoted upholder of the German
state who was also the founder of the quantum theory, and
Philipp Lenard, composed in almost equal parts of Nobel
Prize winner and Jew-baiter.

  This famous paper, "On a Heuristic Viewpoint
Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light,"
explained one particular phenomenon, the photoelectric
effect, which had been puzzling scientists for years, and it
suggested answers to a number of other less important
scientific riddles. But it did a great deal more and while it
is usually known as Einstein's "photoelectric paper" it did
not spring from consideration of this specific problem but
from something far more fundamental. For Einstein,
mulling over his previous work on thermodynamics and
statistical mechanics, noted a discrepancy in current
scientific beliefs and wondered how it could be removed:
the photoelectric riddle was merely a particularly
convenient one which could apparently be resolved by
applying a revolutionary explanation of the discrepancy.
To understand its importance it is necessary to consider
briefly how the nature of light was regarded at the start of
the twentieth century.
  To the Greeks, the idea that light consisted of minute
grains in rapid movement appeared to be borne out by the
fact that it traveled in straight lines and bounced off
mirrors in the same way that balls bounce off walls. Only
in the early 1600s was there made the first of a series of
discoveries which culminated, in the last third of the
century, in the theory put forward by Huygens: that light
was composed of waves propagated through a medium
which he called the ether and which permeated all space.
Newton, in his Opticks, apparently favored the corpuscular
theory, although he also outlined a scheme in which
corpuscules of light were associated with waves which
influenced themùan idea revived some two and a half
centuries later in the form of wave mechanics to explain
the nature of matter. Not until the nineteenth century did
the work first of Fresnel and then of Maxwell provide a
wave explanation of light which appearedùat least for a
few yearsùto deal satisfactorily with all the experimental
evidence.
  It was Hertz who raised one of the first questions which
were to bring this comfortable state of affairs to an end.
What he found was that when a sheet of glass was put
between his wave transmitter and his receiver, the sparks
produced in the transmitter failed to produce as large a
group of sparks in the receiver. He decided, naturally
enough, that the receiving loop must be affected by the
sparks' ultraviolet light, which does not penetrate glass,
and that in some inexplicable way this light was thus
increasing the electrical discharge from his metal receiver.
Other scientists discovered that his photoelectric effect, as
it came to be known, could be produced by visible as well
as by ultraviolet light; that it was produced with some
metals more easily than with others; and that the receiving
metal acquired a small positive electrical charge.
  Now elucidation of the nature of light by Maxwell's
electromagnetic equations had been paralleled by another,
and apparently contradictory, development. For while it
had been found that light was radiated as electromagnetic
waves, other physicistsùHendrik Lorentz in Leiden and J.
J. Thomson in Cambridge among themùhad been
discovering that what could only be considered particles,
the negatively charged electrons, played an important part
in the constitution of electrified matter. It is at this stage
that Lenard comes on the scene. A scientist of great skill,
Lenard was a German whose desperation at his country's
defeat in 1918 quickly led him into the welcoming arms of
the Nazi party; in addition, his paranoiac hatred of the
Jews brought him, after 1919, into the movement which
attempted to discredit both Einstein's honesty and his
work. At the turn of the century Lenard put forward a
simple explanation of the photoelectric effect; it was that
photoelectrons, or negative charges, were knocked out of
the metal by the light which hit it. Soon, however, he
reported another less easily explicable phenomenon. Since
electrons were ejected from the sensitive metal solely as a
result of light falling upon it, then it might surely be
assumed that an increase in light would produce an
increase in the speed at which the electrons were thrown
from the metal. However, this was not the case. If the
intensity of the light was increased, then a great number of
electrons would be ejected from the metal, but they would
continue to be ejected at the same speed. Butùand this
appeared even more inexplicableùif there was a change in
the color of the light, or in other words in its frequency,
then there would be a change in the speeds at which the
electrons were thrown out; and the higher the frequency
the higher the speed of ejection.
  While Lenard was thus occupied in the familiar scientific
operation of answering one riddle and creating another,
Max Planck, by this time professor of theoretical physics at
the University of Berlin, was grappling with a problem
which at first glance seemed to be only indirectly
concerned with the photoelectric effect. Planck had taken
the chair after the death of Kirchhoff in 1887, and it was
from a continuation of Kirchhoff's work that he produced
the theory which was to alter man's idea of energy as
drastically as Einstein's theory of relativity was to alter
ideas of time and space.
  Kirchhoff had been interested, like many of his
contemporaries, in discovering more about the mechanism
by which radiant energy was emitted by electromagnetic
waves, already known to include not only the spectrum of
visible light but the infrared and ultraviolet rays on either
side of them, as well as the newly discovered radio waves.
It was known that as a body was heated its maximum
energy was produced at shorter and shorter wavelengths,
and its color passed from red to yellow and then to bluish
white. But all experiments appeared to be affected by the
nature of the emitting body, only overcome by Kirchhoff's
ingenious method of using "black-body radiation" which
utilized a closed container with blackened inner walls and
one tiny pinhole. When the container was heated to
incandescence, genuinely pure light of all the visible
wavelengths could, in theory at least, be observed coming
from the pinhole. This primitive equipment was
supplemented in 1881 by the bolometer, invented by
Samuel Langley, the Harvard professor whose
aerodynamic work led on to the Wright brothers and Kitty
Hawk. With Langley's bolometer, which depended on the
electrical measurement of minute quantities of heat set up
in a blackened platinum wire, it was possible to record
temperature changes as little as one-millionth of a degree
under the impact of specific wavelengths; thus there was
now, it appeared, a route to an adequate description of the
way that energy was radiated.
  During the 1890s, Planck found that this was far from
being the case. Despite the efforts of physicists throughout
Europe it became clear that while one set of distribution
formulas produced by Wilhelm Wien served well enough
to explain radiation at low wavelengths, those at high
wavelengths demanded the different mathematical
explanation produced by Lord Rayleighùas though nature
had changed the rules of the game at half time. No one
could explain it. "The discrepancy," Sir Basil Schonland
has stated, "suggested that something fundamental had
been missed by both. The affair, which was extremely
closely examined by the best minds of the time, presented
something like a scientific scandal."
  It was to this discrepancy that Planck turned during the
latter half of the 1890s. In the autumn of 1900 he thought
he had solved the problem and on October 14 read a paper
to the Berlin Physical Society which proposed a single neat
expression to explain how radiation worked. These
satisfied the Wien distribution formula at low wavelengths
and Rayleigh's distribution formula at high ones; in fact
they fitted experimental observations between infrared
measurements towards one end of the spectrum and
ultraviolet measurements towards the other so well that
some men working on ultraviolet found it necessary to
repeat their experiments and amend their figures.
  For Planck, this was not enough. Intuitively, he felt that
something more and something different was required.
"After some weeks of the most intense work of my life,
clearness began to dawn upon me, and an unexpected view
revealed itself in the distance," he later said. To Professor
R. W. Wood, he explained in more detail. "Speaking
briefly, I can call the whole action a process of despair," he
wrote.

  Actually, my nature is peace-loving and I am disinclined
towards serious adventure. But for six years (from 1874 on) I had
been doing battle with the problem of the equilibrium between
radiation and matter without success. I knew that the problem is
of fundamental importance for physics, I knew the formula that
reproduced the energy distribution in the normal spectrum; a
theoretical interpretation would have to be found at any cost, no
matter how high. Classical physics was not adequate, that was
clear to me. ...

  Some weeks after his October address, Planck found the
explanation. Walking in the Grunewald woods in Berlin,
he turned to his son. "Today," he said, "I have made a
discovery as important as that of Newton."
  On December 14, 1900, he appeared again before the
Physical Society. This time he announced that his earlier
expression could best be derived from an entirely new
hypothesis. It was not only new but startling. For Planck
now stated that his whole theory was based on one
assumption: that energy was emitted not in the continuous
flow that everyday commonsense suggested but as discrete
bursts for which he used the Latin "How much," or quanta.
The size of quanta was, moreover, directly related to the
frequency of the electromagnetic wave with which they are
associated, violet light, which has twice the frequency of
red light, having associated quanta twice as large as those
associated with red light. Linking the frequency of the
radiation and the size of the quantum there was, in the
units current in Planck's time which are still widely but
not exclusively used, the magic quantity of h = 6.6 x 10
=27, erg. sec., quickly known as Planck's constant and soon
recognized as one of the fundamental constants of nature.
  At first sight this revolutionary idea appeared to stick a
dagger between the ribs of the accepted view that light
consisted of waves rather than particles. But not even
Planck could go as far as that. His theory, he stressed, was
concerned with the relationship between radiation and
matter, not with the nature of radiation on its journey
between emission and reception; thus he allowed the
discontinuous bursts of energy to join up in some
inexplicable way and produce waves which dissolved into
particulate entities as they were absorbed. The "scientific
scandal," as Schonland was later to describe it, had been
removed only by creating a fresh one.
  In 1903 J. J. Thomson, giving the Silliman Lectures at
Yale University, appears to have been on the verge of
dissipating it when he suggested that some form of
localized radiant energy might account for a number of
unexplained experimental facts, including the manner in
which ultraviolet light ejected electrons from a metal
surface. But the idea was taken no further. This preserved
the wave nature of light; it also left the way open for
Einstein. For just as Niels Bohr was later to use the
quantum theory to explain the structure of the atom, so did
Einstein now use it to justify the idea that light could have
characteristics of both wave and particle.
  Until 1905 his published papers had dealt almost
exclusively with thermodynamics and statistical
mechanics; they were essentially studies in which the laws
of nature were considered by reference to the random
movements of vast numbers of individual particles which
obeyed Newton's laws as obediently as the planets. But
there were also Einstein's unpublished thoughts; and these
were obsessed with the reality of light and its associated
electromagnetic waves, a reality conceived not in terms of
Newtonian particles but of the field which had been
proposed by Faraday and developed by Maxwell. No one
had up till now thought of asking the awkward questions
which the contradiction begged; or if they had thought of it
they had not dared. Einstein both thought and dared.
  "There is a profound formal difference between the
theoretical ideas that physicists have formed concerning
gases and other ponderable bodies, and Maxwell's theory
of electromagnetic processes in so-called empty space,"
began the photoelectric paper. The difference could be
resolved, he suggested, if for some purposes light itself
could be considered as a collection of independent particles
which behaved like the particles of a gasùthe heuristic
viewpoint of his title. When Einstein began to consider
this new concept in the light of his earlier work, he found
that it provided some startlingly useful results. The
photoelectric explanation was one of them.
  For the size of Planck's quanta depended on the
frequency of the light concerned, and the small quanta of a
low-frequency light would, if they were considered as
discrete packages of particulate energy, therefore eject the
electrons they hit with a comparatively low speed; the
bigger "packets of energy," as the quanta making up the
higher-frequency colors could be considered, would of
course eject at higher speeds the electrons they hit. This
explanation would also account for what happened when
the intensity of the light of any specific color was
decreased. Each individual quantum which went to make it
up would have the same power to eject an electron which it
hit. But there would be fewer quanta, fewer "hits," and
fewer electrons ejected. As Sir James Jeans said in
describing the photochemical law that Einstein produced,
his explanation of the photoelectric effect "not only
prohibits the killing of two birds by one stone, but also the
killing of one bird with two stones."
  In his paper Einstein did more than put forward a theory
which was, as he said, "in perfect agreement with
observation"ùand which was later to be confirmed
experimentally, by Millikan for visible light, by de Broglie
for X rays, and by Jean Thibaud and Ellis for gamma rays.
In addition, he calculated the maximum kinetic energy of
the electron which was emitted, giving this by the use of
the formula hv ù e°, where h is Planck's constant, v is the
frequency of the light, and e° is the energy lost by the
electron in its escape from the metal surface, called the
work function. Thus Einstein's conception of light as
being formed of light quantaùor photons, as they were
later christenedùin itself involved a paradoxical
contradiction from which a man of lesser mental stature
might have edged away. For while light consisting of
discrete packets of energy, as indivisible as the atom was
still thought to be, conformedùif it conformed to
anythingùto the corpuscular theory of Newton's day, the
idea also utilized frequency, a vital feature of the wave
theory. Thus, as Bohr was later to write, physics was
"confronted with a novel kind of complementary
relationship between the applications of different
fundamental concepts of classical physics." Physicists
began to study more closely these contradictory ideas
which alone seemed to explain verifiable facts, and
eventually, in the 1920s, they began to see the limitations
of deterministic description. At the level of simple atomic
processes, nature could only be described in terms of
statistical chanceùthe case of "God playing dice with the
world" that Einstein could never accept. Yet he had
pushed the stone that started the avalanche.
  This was not clear in 1905. Even so, Einstein had to face
the embarrassing contradiction that Planck had tried to
avoid: for some purposes, light must be regarded as a
stream of particles, as Newton had regarded it; for others,
it must be considered in terms of wave motion. But he
believed that eventually, if men were only persistent
enough, a satisfactory explanation for the contradiction
would emerge. This was in fact to be the case some two
decades later when de Broglie and Schr÷dinger, Born and
Heisenberg, were to produce a conception of the physical
world that could be regarded in terms either of waves or of
particlesùor as one humorist called it, of "wavicles."
  Planck himself was reluctant to accept Einstein's
development of his theory, and as late as 1912 was
rejecting, in Berlin lectures, the idea that light traveled
through space as bunches of localized energy. "I think it is
correct to say," writes Robert Millikan, who was to win the
Nobel Prize for demonstrating the corpuscular nature of
electricity with his work on the electron, "that the Einstein
view of light quanta, shooting through space in the form of
localized light pulses, or, as we now call them, photons,
had practically no convinced adherents prior to about
1915, by which time convincing experimental proof had
been found."
  Einstein's record was thus an unusual one. He had
applied Planck's revolutionary theory with apparent
success to a physical phenomenon that classical physics
could not explain. He had been more revolutionary than
his elders and they would not credit him with what he had
done. It needed courage; but this was to be expected from
the man who could, in the same volume of the Annalen der
Physik, explode the bomb which was his new theory of
relativity.

PART TWO

THE VOYAGE
OF DISCOVERY

CHAPTER 4

EINSTEIN'S RELATIVITY

The Special Theory of Relativity that was to give Einstein
his unique position in history was outlined in the third
paper which he wrote for the Annalen der Physik in the
summer of 1905. Entitled simply "On the Electrodynamics
of Moving Bodies," it was in many ways one of the most
remarkable scientific papers that had ever been written.
Even in form and style it was unusual, lacking the notes
and references which give weight to most serious
expositions and merely noting, in its closing paragraph,
that the author was indebted for a number of valuable
suggestions to his friend and colleague, M. Besso. Yet this
dissertation of some nine thousand words overturned
man's accepted ideas of time and space in a way which
was, as The Times of London once put it, "an affront to
common sense," and drastically altered the classical
concepts of physics still held by the overwhelming
majority of scientists. In addition, it provided such an
accurate blueprint for the way in which the physical world
was built that within a generation men could no more
ignore relativity in the teaching of physics than they could
ignore grammar in the teaching of language.
  During the seventy-odd years that have passed since
Einstein tossed this rock into the pool, an immense
literature and exegesis has spread out round the paper, the
theory, and its history. This literature does more than
describe, explain, and criticize what Einstein wrote, and
attempt with varying degrees of success to outline his
theory to the layman. It also gives differing assessments of
Einstein's debt to his predecessors, and shows scientific
historians to be as practiced as their less specialized
colleagues in the gentle art of blacking an opponent's eye.
This is natural enough. Most revolutionary theories
scientific as well as politicalùhave roots deep in the past;
about the exact direction of such roots, historians argue
and scholars write theses. As time blurs details, as old men
"remember with advantages," as rumor is transformed first
into myth and then into fact, the genesis of scientific
theory becomes increasingly difficult to describe with more
than scholarly plausibility. Darwin's theory of evolution,
so long worked over yet springing to the surface almost
simultaneously with that of Wallace, is an example from
one other field; the conscription of Hertz' radio waves into
the utilitarian straitjacket of radar, long possible in many
countries and then, within a few months, suddenly
crystallizing in Britain, the United States, and Germany, is
an example from another.
  Relativity is no exception to the rule. Today, two-thirds of
a century after Einstein posted the manuscript of his paper
to Annalen der Physik, the dust is still stirred by discussion
of what inspired him. The controversy about how much he
owed to his predecessors complicates still further the
problem of explaining a complicated subject to the lay
public. However, it is not insuperable and is best tackled
by outlining briefly the background against which his
paper was written; by describing first the daring
propositions he put forward and then their implications;
and by surveying the sometimes contradictory evidence of
the paper's genesis.
  In the background of the scientific world as it existed in
the first years of the twentieth century there still towered,
as central ornament, the bold figure of Sir Isaac Newton.
Driven in 1666 from Cambridge to his Lincolnshire home
by the plague when only twenty-four, he had been almost
of an age with Einstein; and, like Einstein, he had in a
single summer delivered three hammer blows at the
foundations of contemporary science. The formulation of
the law of gravity was the greatest of the three, showing
that the fall of the apple and the passage of the moon in its
orbit were governed by the same natural laws. For starting
with an explanation of the forces which kept the planets on
their tracks, Newton constructed the first modern synthesis
of the physical world, a logical explanation of the universe.
Judged by contemporary standards, his universe was a
simple and comforting place through which planets and
stars, men and animals, the smallest particles of matter,
and even the particles of which light was deemed to
consist, moved in accordance with the same mathematical
laws. "From the time of Newton up to the end of the last
century," J. Robert Oppenheimer has noted

  physicists built, on the basis of these laws, a magnificently
precise and beautiful science involving the celestial mechanics of
the solar system, involving incredible problems in the Cambridge
Tripos, involving the theory of gases, involving the behavior of
fluids, of elastic vibrations, of soundùindeed, a comprehensive
system so robust and varied and apparently all-powerful that
what was in store for it could hardly be imagined.

  In the first pages of his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia
Mathematica, which enshrined these laws, Newton used
two words whose definitions formed the basis not only of
his whole system but of everything which had been
constructed as a by-product of itùtwo words which
between them formed the bottom layer of the house which
science had been building for two and a half centuries.
One of them was "time," the other was "space." "Absolute,
true, and mathematical time," as Newton put it, "of itself
and from its own nature, flows equably, without relation to
anything external, and by another name is called
duration." Space could be "absolute space, in its own
nature, without relation to anything external," which
"remains always similar and immovable"; or relative
space, which was "some movable dimension or measure of
the absolute spaces."
  From these definitions Newton went on to illustrate the
principle of the addition of velocities, a principle so
obvious that at first there seems little point in repeating it.
Yet it was to be radically amended by Einstein's Special
Theory, and it is salutary to consider how Newton
expressed it. "Absolute motion," he wrote,

  is the translation of a body from one relative place into another.
Thus in a ship under sail the relative place of a body is that part
of the ship which the body possesses; or that part of the cavity
which the body fills, and which therefore moves together with
the ship; and relative rest is the continuance of the body in the
same part of that immovable space, in which the ship itself, its
cavity, and all that it contains, is moved. Wherefore, if the earth
is really at rest, the body which relatively rests in the ship, will
really and absolutely move with the same velocity which the ship
has on the earth. But if the earth also moves, the true and
absolute motion of the body will arise, partly from the true
motion of the earth, in immovable space, partly from the relative
motion of the ship on the earth; and if the body moves also
relatively in the ship, its true motion will arise, partly from the
true motion of the earth, in immovable space, and partly from the
relative motions as well of the ship on the earth, as of the body in
the ship; and from these relative motions will arise the relative
motion of the body on the earth. As if that part of the earth,
where the ship is, was truly moved towards the east, with a
velocity of 10,010 parts; while the ship itself, with a fresh gale,
and full sails, is carried towards the west, with a velocity
expressed by 10 of those parts; but a sailor walks in the ship
towards the east, with 1 part of the said velocity; then the sailor
will be moved truly in immovable space towards the east, with a
velocity of 10,001 parts, and relatively on the earth towards the
west, with a velocity of 9 of those parts. ...

  Newton's sailorùpacing 3 miles an hour east on the deck
of his ship while the ship sails past the coast at 12 miles an
hour in the same direction and therefore moving past the
land at 15 miles an hourùhas his modern counterpart: the
train passenger traveling at 40 miles an hour whose
carriage is passed by a second train traveling at 50 miles
an hour, to whom a passenger in the faster train is moving
at only 10 miles an hour. In both cases it is possible to
describe the movement of a personùor a particleùin one
frame of reference (the sailor relative to the ship) and then
to describe it in a second frame of reference (the sailor
relative to the land) by the simple addition of velocities.
  Newton's sailor and the train movements of the twentieth
century have one other important thing in common.
Newton himself gives a clue to it when he writes: "The
motions of bodies included in a given space are the same
among themselves, whether that space is at rest or moves
uniformly forward in a straight line." In other words, the
mechanical laws which are applicable in a shipùor a
trainùwhen at rest are also applicable when it is moving
uniformly. Nature does not give special preference to one
situation or the other, and any measurements or
experiments made on a vehicle in uniform motion will
produce the same results as when it is at rest.
  During the second half of the nineteenth century, attacks
began to be made on this mechanical view of the universe.
From one side came those prepared to strike at its
epistemological roots, denying that the apparently sound
mechanical structure was anything more than a convenient
illusion. Gustav Kirchhoff, whose work prepared the way
for the quantum revolution, looked on Newtonian concepts
merely as convenient explanations for various unrelated
phenomena which had been noted, and which did not
demand the creation of a single comprehensive
explanation of the physical world. Ernst Mach, the
physicist turned philosopher whose influence on Einstein
was so great, and who had for the hard currency of
observable sensations much the same respect that Soames
Forsyte had for property, went further in the same
direction. In The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and
Historical Account of Its Development, Mach boldly
challenged Newton's assumptions of absolute space and
absolute time, claiming that he had "acted contrary to his
expressed intention only to investigate actual facts. No one
is competent to predicate things about absolute space and
absolute motion; they are pure things of thought, pure
mental constructs, that cannot be produced in experience."
And Henri PoincarΘ, "the last man to take practically all
mathematics, both pure and applied, as his province,"
went even further, not only throwing overboard in lordly
manner absolute time and absolute space but insisting that
even the laws of nature, the simple ways of tabulating and
ordering the sensations of life which Mach allowed, were
merely the free creations of the human mind.
  But if such men were able to cast doubt on Newton's
absolute space and time, an equally dangerous attack was
to come from a different quarter as confusing, and
sometimes conflicting, evidence on the nature and
behavior of light accumulated during the nineteenth
century. To Newton, light was a stream of particles
moving according to mechanical laws, although his
contemporary, Christiaan Huygens, thought it might be
instead a vibration in an unspecified medium, much as
sound was a vibration in the air. The problem looked as if
it had been solved in midcentury when the French
physicist Dominique Arago, followed by Jean Foucault,
produced evidence supporting the wave theory. If any
doubt remained it appeared to be dispelled during the next
few decades. Maxwell's theoretical calculations showed
that the vibrations associated with light were due to very
rapid oscillations of electric and magnetic fields; twenty
years later Hertz, with his demonstration of
electromagnetic radio waves, seemed to put this beyond
question.
  But there was one particular way in which Maxwell's
electromagnetism operated in a manner totally different
from Newtonian mechanics. Newton had built his law of
gravitation on the idea of action at a distance, believing
that the pull of gravity between the apple and the ground,
the moon and the earth, the earth and the sun, in fact
between all the components of the universe, operated as a
mysterious and instantaneous force across empty space.
Maxwell utilized instead Faraday's idea of "the field," a
region of space in which certain physical conditions were
created and through which forces were transmittedù
somewhat like ripples through an invisible jelly, the
electromagnetic waves of light being propagated through
the field in straight lines at a finite speed, and the pull of
the magnet for iron filings being a property of the field
which the magnet had itself created.
  Largely due to the concept of the field, it was believed
during the last decades of the nineteenth century that
electromagnetic waves required a medium through which
they could travel, just as sound needs the molecules of air
before it can be heard and seismic waves require the
medium of the earth before they can be recorded. Scientists
decided that this medium was the ether, vaguely postulated
since the time of the Greeks. But the presence of the ether
had never been confirmed and there was a doubt about its
existence, like the pea under the princess' mattress
minute, yet sufficient to prevent peace of mind. It was to
resolve this doubt that the famousùindeed, almost
legendaryùMichelson-Morley experiment was designed in
1887. How much Einstein knew of this before 1905 is
questionable, and even more so is the importance to his
thinking of what he did know. The awkward results of the
experiment permeated the scientific climate of the 1890s
and its implications must even have been noted in the
Berne Patent Office. Later, moreover, it would be seen as a
linchpin of the whole theory of relativity. As Einstein said
years later, talking to Sir Herbert Samuel in the grounds of
Government House, Jerusalem: "If Michelson- Morley is
wrong, then relativity is wrong."
  By the time that Einstein came on the scene other
experiments had been carried out in an effort to show the
existence of the ether by recording the effects of the earth's
passage through it. Trouton and Noble had tried to
discover experimentally the torque which should, in
theory, have been shown by the charging of a condenser
hung from a fine filament with its plates inclined to the
ether drift. Both Lord Rayleigh and Brace had looked for
double refraction in a transparent body produced by the
passage of the ether through it. All these experiments had
failed to produce any evidence for the existence of the
ether. It was, however, the Michelson-Morley experiment
which lodged in the scientific gullet, partly because its
implications seemed impossible to escape, partly because
of its basic simplicity.
  What Michelson and Morley set out to discover was the
effect of the earth's passage through the postulated ether
on the speed of light. Long known to be roughly 186,000
miles per second, this was so great as to present technical
problems which would have ruled out the experiment
before the last decades of the nineteenth century. On the
other hand, the experiment's basic mathematics are quite
simple.
  To understand them one has merely to consider the case
of two oarsmen rowing respectively across a river 400
yards wide, and 400 yards up and down the same stream of
water, an analogy which is one of many littering the pages
explaining Einstein's work. Both oarsmen have the same
speedùwhich can be arbitrarily given as 500 yards a
minute, with the stream running at an equally arbitrary
rate of 300 yards a minute. The first oarsman starts from
one bank, aiming to arrive at a point on the far bank
directly oppositeùin other words, 400 yards away. If there
were no current he would reach it in four-fifths of a
minute. But since there is a current he must point his boat
upstream. Now an observer starting at the same point as
the oarsman but allowing himself merely to float
downstream will see the "aiming point" on the far bank
moving "back" at a rate of 300 yards a minute (the rate of
the stream's movement), while the oarsman is moving
away from him at a rate of 500 yards a minute (the speed
at which he is rowing). The construction of a simple right
angled triangle using this information, plus an equally
simple use of Pythagoras, will show that the oarsman will
have traveled 500 yards before he reaches the far bank and
that the time he takes will be one minute for the single
journey or two minutes there and back.
  Now what of the oarsman given the comparable task of
rowing 400 yards upstream and returning to the same
point? During the first minute he will have covered 500
minus 300 yards, or 200 yards. So he will take two
minutes for the journey against the stream. On his return,
his speed of 500 yards a minute will be aided by the 300
yard-a-minute stream so that the 400 yards will take him
only half a minute. In other words the time for the double
journey measured up and down the stream is more than the
double journey measured across the stream and it always
will be more except in a currentless river. And by
measuring the times both oarsmen take, it is possible to
calculate both the speed at which they row and also the
speed of the river. Similarly, Michelson and Morley
proposed, it should be possible to confirm the existence of
the ether.
  In their experiment the ether, presumably streaming past
the earth at 20 miles a second as the earth moved in its
orbit round the sun, would represent the current. A ray of
light, split into two, would represent the two oarsmen.
These two rays would be directed along two paths identical
in length but at right angles to one another; then they
would be reflected back to the "test-bed" of the experiment
ùafter having made journeys which would be respectively
"across," and "up," and then "down" the presumed flow of
the ether. If the "ether flow" had an effect on light
comparable to normal mechanical effects, the two
returning rays would be out of phase. The result would be
interference fringes, or bands of alternately light and dark
color, and from these it would be possible to calculate the
speed of the ether wind relative to the movement of the
earth. Nearly forty years later Edward Appleton used a
comparable technique with radio waves to pinpoint the
height of the ionosphere from which such waves are
reflected back to the earth.
  The huge difference between the speed of light and the
mere 20 miles per second of the earth's orbit round the sun
presented considerable problems, and an earlier
experiment carried out in 1881 by Michelson alone had
failed. Now these inherent problems had been solved and
"pure" science was able to move forward once again on the
vehicle provided by technology. This has happened
frequently. From the days of William Herschel, whose
discovery of infrared rays in 1800 was aided by sensitive
thermometers, through the work of Oersted, von
Fraunhofer, Wheatstone, and Joule, knowledge of the
physical world has marched steadily forward on the
achievements of the craftsmen. Maxwell, on arriving at
Aberdeen, had stated significantly: "I am happy in the
knowledge of a good instrument maker, in addition to a
smith, an optician, and a carpenter." In another field,
accurate gravimetric analysis was made possible by
improvements in the chemical balance. Hermann Bondi
has emphasized that "the enormous stream of discoveries
at the end of the nineteenth century that gave us such
insight as the discovery of X rays, working with
radioactivity, and all that, is entirely due to the fact that
the technologists developed decent vacuum pumps."
Others, commenting on the difference between the science
of the twentieth and earlier centuries, have pointed out that
we are on a higher level today not because we have more
imagination, but because we have better instruments.
  The process of pure science moving forward with the
packhorses of technology was now illustrated by
Michelson and Morley, who set up their apparatus at the
Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, Ohio. The
massive stone test-bed, nearly five feet square, was floated
in a bowl of mercury to obviate vibrations. The light rays
used were ingeniously increased by a system of mirrors.
The experiments were carried out at various times of day
to lessen the chances of experimental error. Yet the results,
however they were considered, told one incontrovertible
story: light which traveled back and forth across the ether
stream did the journey in exactly the same time as light
traveling the same distance up and down the ether stream.
  The problem which now faced science was considerable.
For there seemed to be only three alternatives. The first
was that the earth was standing still, which meant
scuttling the whole Copernican theory and was
unthinkable. The second was that the ether was carried
along by the earth in its passage through space, a
possibility which had already been ruled out to the
satisfaction of the scientific community by a number of
experiments, notably those of the English astronomer
James Bradley. The third solution was that the ether
simply did not exist, which to many nineteenth century
scientists was equivalent to scrapping current views of
light, electricity, and magnetism, and starting again.
  The only other explanation must surely lie in some
perverse feature of the physical world which scientists had
not yet suspected, and during the next few years this was
sought by three men in particularùGeorge Fitzgerald,
professor of natural and experimental philosophy at
Trinity College, Dublin; Hendrik Lorentz of Leiden, the
kindly humanitarian physicist whose lifetime spanned the
closing days of Newtonian cosmology and the splitting of
the atomùthe man who, wrote Einstein within a few
weeks of his own death, "for me personally ... meant more
than all the others I have met on my life's journey"ùand
the French mathematician Henri PoincarΘ.
  The Fitzgerald explanation came first. To many it must
have seemed that he had strained at a gnat and swallowed
an elephant. For while Fitzgerald was unwilling to believe
that the velocity of light could remain unaffected by the
velocity of its source, he suggested instead that all moving
objects were shortened along the axis of their movement.
A foot rule moving end forwards would be slightly shorter
than a stationary foot rule, and the faster it moved the
shorter it would be. The speed of the earth's movement
was all that was involved, so the contraction would be
extremely small, and it would only rise to appreciable
amounts as the speed involved rose to a sizable proportion
of the speed of light itself. But it was not this alone that
made the proposal apparently incapable of proof or
disproof. Any test instruments would adjust themselves in
the same way, shortening themselves as they were turned
into the direction of the earth's movement through the
ether. For some years this explanation appeared to be little
more than a plausible trickù"I have been rather laughed
at for my view over here," Fitzgerald wrote to Lorentz
from Dublin in 1894ùand it was only transformed into
something more when Lorentz turned his mind to the
question.[The history of the Fitzgerald-Lorentz contraction
has striking resemblances with the story of Wallace and
Darwin's concurrent work on evolution. Fitzgerald was the
first to publish the contraction hypothesis, doing so in a
letter to Science; but not even Fitzgerald himself, let alone
Lorentz, knew that the letter had appeared. For details see
"The 'Fitzgerald' Contraction" by Alfred M. Bork, Isis,
No. 57 (1966), pp. 199-207, and "Note on the History of
the Fitzgerald-Lorentz Contraction" by Stephen G. Brush,
Isis, No. 58 (1967), pp. 231-232.]
  Lorentz had been among the first to postulate the
electron, the negatively charged particle whose existence
had finally been proved by J. J. Thomson at Cambridge. It
now seemed to him that such a contraction could well be a
direct result of electromagnetic forces produced when a
body with its electrical charges was moved through the
ether. These would disturb the equilibrium of the body,
and its particles would assume new relative distances from
one another. The result would be a change in the shape of
the body, which would become flattened in the direction of
its movement. The contraction could thus be explained, as
Philipp Frank has put it, as "a logical consequence of
several simultaneous hypotheses, namely the validity of the
electromagnetic field equations and laws of force and the
hypothesis that all bodies are built up of electric charges."
  Lorentz' invocation of electromagnetism thus brought a
whiff of sanity into the game. Here at least was a credible
explanation of how a foot rule in motion could be of a
different length from the foot rule at rest. However, if this
solved one problem it created others; and it played havoc
with the simple transformation which had hitherto been
used to describe events taking place in one frame of
reference in terms of a different one. This had served well
enough throughout the centuries for sailors on ships, for
men on horseback, and for the early railways. It serves
well enough for flight and even for contemporary space
travel. Yet if Lorentz' hypothesis was correct the simple
addition of velocities could no longer hold water. For if
distances contract with relative speed then the yards paced
out on the deck by Newton's sailor will be slightly shorter
than the relatively stationary yards on the shore which his
ship has sailed past. The smallness of the difference, so
minute that it can be disregarded for practical purposes,
can be gauged by even a nonmathematician's comparison
of the simple equations, or "transformations," of the
Newtonian world with those which Fitzgerald had
provided and which were given a fresh significance by
Lorentz. In the old Galilean transformation, the new place
of the sailor on his deck is given by his old position plus or
minus the speed (v) of his walking multiplied by the time
(t) he has been on the moveùin other words, his old
position x, plus or minus vt. But using the new set of
equations which Lorentz now developed from Fitzgerald's
ideasùand which soon became known as the Lorentz
Fitzgerald transformationsùthe sailor's new position is
represented by this x ▒ vt divided by ??1 - (v2/c2). In the
case of the sailor walking at 3 miles an hour, v2 will be 9,
and in most examples from everyday life it will be a
similarly humble figure; but c is the speed of light in miles
per second, and c2 is many millions of millions miles per
hour. Once this is realized, two things become
immediately clear: that the sailor need not be worried by
the Lorentz transformations and that these will, as
Fitzgerald had forecast, begin to have significant
applications only when the speeds concerned are a
significant percentage of the speed of light.
  While Fitzgerald and Lorentz were struggling to produce
these explanations for physical experiments, Henri
PoincarΘ was making a different approach. He was
concerned not so much with the awkward specific problem
of the speed of light as with the conglomeration of
problems being presented to physicists at the turn of the
century. He was, moreover, tackling them from an angle
more philosophical than that of Fitzgerald and Lorentz.
"Suppose," he argued, "that in one night all the
dimensions of the universe became a thousand times
larger. The world will remain similar to itself, if we give
the word similitude the meaning it has in the third book of
Euclid. ... Have we any right, therefore, to say that we
know the distance between two points?" PoincarΘ's answer
was "No"ùthe concept of space being relative to the frame
of reference within which its distances were measured.
  PoincarΘ reached the height of his reputation in the
1900s, and in 1904 he was among those invited to a
Congress of Arts and Sciences at the Universal Exposition,
St. Louis, 1904, held to commemorate the Louisiana
Purchase a century earlier. Here he dealt, in a speech
which was part of a symposium surveying human thought
in the nineteenth century, with the contemporary crisis in
physics. "Perhaps," he said, "we should construct a whole
new mechanics, of which we only succeed in catching a
glimpse, where, inertia increasing with the velocity, the
velocity of light would become an impassable limit." The
Lorentz transformation would no doubt be included in the
new structure and it might well form part of a new
principle of relativity which would replace, or supplement,
the restricted principle which was epitomized by the
Galilean transformation. But PoincarΘ was, as he stressed,
doing his best to fit such new ideas as were required into
the existing classical principlesù"and as yet," he
concluded at St. Louis, "nothing proves that the principles
will not come forth from the combat victorious and intact."
  His speech was an indication of the scientific unrest and
philosophical distrust created not only by the Michelson-
Morley experiment but by others made during the
preceding two decades in Cambridge and Berlin, Leiden
and Paris. But there was no hint of the Special Theory,
created by Einstein for different reasons after an approach
across different territory.

  While Fitzgerald, Lorentz, and PoincarΘ were trying to
rescue physics from the cul-de-sac into which it appeared
to have been led by the Michelson-Morley experiment,
Einstein was wondering about the world in general,
gaining a basic grounding in physics at the ETH, and
giving special attention to what he realized, early on, were
the revolutionary implications of Maxwell's
electromagnetic theory, based on continuous fields. This
was a basically new idea of the way in which the world
had been made, and it continued to exercise Einstein for a
decade, working away like a fermenting yeast in contrast
to the boring material with which the Zurich masters tried
to fill the stockpot of his mind.
  As early as the age of sixteen, he had considered what he
would see were he able to follow a beam of light at its own
velocity through space. Here is a problem picture as
graphic as any of the number with which he was to explain
his ideas. What, in fact, would be seen by anyone who
could travel as fast as the oscillating electromagnetic
waves which by the turn of the century were known to
cause the phenomenon of light? The answer, in Einstein's
words, was "a spatially oscillatory electromagnetic field at
rest." But this was a contradiction in terms of which
Maxwell's equations gave no hint. Quite as important, if
such a conception were feasible, it would mean that the
laws of electromagnetism would be different for observers
at rest and for those on the moveùat least for those
moving at the speed of light. But it seemed soundly
established that the mechanical laws of the Newtonian
universe were the same for all observers and Einstein saw
no reason for thinking that the laws of electromagnetism
would be any different. Thus it looked as certain as the Q.
E. D. at the end of a theorem that the laws of nature would
prevent anyone or anything moving at the speed of light.
But this idea, in turn, raised its own problems. For in the
mechanical Newtonian world it was always possible to add
a little more force and thus make the billiard ball, or the
cannonball, go a little faster. What was there to prevent
addition plus addition from pushing up speeds above that
of light?
  This was one of the problems which worried Einstein
persistently during his studies at the ETH and during his
early years at the Patent Office, a constant background to
his other work and a hobbyhorse he could pull down from
the shelf of his mind when more pressing work gave him a
moment to spare.
  Einstein himself has given more than a hint of how he
worked away at it. "I must confess," he told Alexander
Moszkowski in Berlin in 1915, "that at the very beginning,
when the Special Theory of Relativity began to germinate
in me, I was visited by all sorts of nervous conflicts. When
young, I used to go away for weeks in a state of confusion,
as one who at that time had yet to overcome the stage of
stupefaction in his first encounter with such questions." To
R. S. Shankland, professor at the Case Institute of
Technology, Cleveland, Ohio, he said in old age that he
had "worked for ten years; first as a student when, of
course, he could only spend part time on it, but the
problem was always with him. He abandoned many
fruitless attempts 'until at last it came to me that time was
suspect.'" And to Carl Seelig he wrote on March 11, 1952:

  Between the conception of the idea of this Special Theory of
Relativity and the completion of the corresponding publication,
there elapsed five or six weeks. But it would hardly be correct to
consider this as a birthday, because earlier the arguments and
building blocks were being prepared over a period of years,
although without bringing about the fundamental decision.

  He worked alone, or almost alone. His earlier papers had
brought him into the physicists' worldùor, more
accurately, into contact with it by correspondence. But he
had none of the stimulus of university life, he played no
part in any scientific group or society. For all practical
purposes he was a scientific loner, trying out his ideas not
on the sharp minds of professional equals but on the blunt
edges of the Swiss civil service. His only two confidants
were two colleagues, Josef Sauter and the Michelangelo
Besso whom he had eased into the Patent Office the
previous year.
  Sauter, eight years older than Einstein, was given the
young man's notes to criticize after they had walked home
from the office one evening and Einstein had outlined his
ideas. "I pestered him for a whole month with every
possible objection without managing to make him in the
least impatient, until I was finally convinced that my
objections were no more than the usual judgments of
contemporary physics," Sauter has written. "I cannot
forget the patience and good temper with which he
listened, agreeing or disagreeing with my objections. He
went over it again and again until he saw that I had
understood his ideas. 'You are the second to whom I have
told my discovery,' he said."
  Sauter believes that Einstein's confidant was Maurice
Solovine. More probably it was Besso, with whom Einstein
certainly discussed his ideas and of whom he said: "I could
not have found a better sounding board in the whole of
Europe." Besso's version of events was: "Einstein the
eagle took Besso the sparrow under his wing. Then the
sparrow fluttered a little higher." Certainly Besso was the
only person given a niche in history in the famous paper
outlining the Special Theory.
  This was possibly the most important scientific paper that
has yet been written in the twentieth century, in some ways
the very type of those described by Hermann Bondi. Their
aim, he said, "is to leave as disembodied, as
impersonalized a piece of writing as anybody might be
willing to read, knowing that others have to read it if they
wish to know what has been achieved. The paper is very
likely to tell the reader almost nothing about how the result
was found." Yet if in outlining the Special Theory it thus
conformed in one respect, it was an exception in other
ways. Supporting evidence was not called upon at all; in
fact, the paper which was to set the scientific world on its
ears contained not a single footnote or reference, those
stigmata of scholarly respectability, and as
acknowledgment only a casual reference to Michelangelo
Besso, thrown in almost as an afterthought.
  Einstein began by doing exactly what he had done when
dealing with the photoelectric effect: he noted a
contradiction in contemporary scientific beliefs apparent
for years but conveniently ignored. In the first case it was
the contradiction between the Newtonian world of
corpuscles and the Maxwellian world of fields. Here it was
something perhaps even more fundamental: the
contradiction implicit in Faraday's law of induction. This
had for years been one of the accepted facts of life and to
raise awkward questions about it was to spit in a sacred
place. Yet, Einstein pointed out, the current induced
between a magnet and a conductor depends according to
observation only on the relative motion of the conducting
wire and the magnet "whereas the customary view," in
other words, the accepted theory of currents, "draws a
sharp distinction between the two cases in which either the
one or the other of these bodies is in motion." Faraday had
discovered the induction law in 1834 but, as Born has put
it, "everybody had known all along that the effect
depended only on relative motion, but nobody had taken
offense at the theory not accounting for this circumstance."
Even had they done so, few would have had the temerity to
pass on, in Einstein's grand style, to what he saw as the
inevitable consequences.
  "Examples of this sort," he continued, "together with the
unsuccessful attempts to discover any motion of the earth
relatively to the 'light medium,' suggest that the
phenomena of electrodynamics as well as of mechanics
possess no properties corresponding to the idea of absolute
rest." What they did suggest, he went on, was that "the
same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for
all frames of reference for which the equations of
mechanics hold good."
  This linking of electrodynamics and mechanics was the
crux of the matter. In the world of electromagnetism,
governed by the field laws of Faraday and Maxwell, light
was propagated at a constant speed which could not be
surpassed; but there seemed to be little connection here
with Newtonian mechanics, in which the speed of an
object might be indefinitely increased by adding more
energy to it. What Einstein now proposed was that the
velocity of light was a constant and a maximum in the
electromagnetic and the mechanical worlds and that light
would thus travel with a constant velocity that was
independent of the bodies emitting or receiving it. This
would explain the failure to discover the movement of the
earth through the ether and it would also answer Einstein's
boyhood riddle of how a beam of light would look if you
traveled at its own speed. The answer to the riddle was that
this would be impossible since only light could reach the
speed of light.
  Yet the inclusion of Newton's mechanical world within
that of Maxwell's electromagnetism is difficult to
conceive. For what it says is this: That while a ball thrown
forward at x miles an hour from a train traveling at y miles
an hour will apparently be traveling at x plus y miles an
hour, something very different happens with light;
whatever the speed of the train from which it is being
emitted, light will travel at the same constant speed of
some 186,000 miles per second. Furthermore, it will be
received at this same constant speed, whatever the speed of
the vehicle that receives itùas though the ball thrown
from the speeding train would arrive at the fielder on the
ground with the same speed whether he was standing still,
running in the direction of the train, or running towards it.
  This of course appeared to be ridiculous. As Bertrand
Russell has said, "Everybody knows that if you are on an
escalator you reach the top sooner if you walk up than if
you stand still. But if the escalator moved with the velocity
of light you would reach the top at exactly the same
moment whether you walked up or stood still." But
Einstein went on to link this assumption with his initial
ideaùthat all the laws of nature are identical to all
observers moving uniformly relative to one another. It
required more than vision and audacityùqualities
demanded of Blondin crossing the Falls, of Whymper
nonchalantly tackling the unclimbed Matterhorn, of
Whittle, confident that the jet would work. It demanded
also the quality of intuition, a feel for nature as indefinable
as a poet's sense of words or the artist's knowledge of what
his last dab of materialistic paint can unlock in the human
mind.
  Einstein once wrote with his collaborator of "the eternal
struggle of the inventive human mind for a fuller
understanding of the law governing physical phenomena,"
and Sir Basil Schonland, writing of Maxwellùwhose
relaxation was writing verseùhas no hesitation in
describing him as "fey," a word not commonly used to
describe scientific genius. Einstein himself was always
ready to agree that inventiveness, imagination, the
intuitive approach ùthe very stuff of which artists rather
than scientists are usually thought to be madeùplayed a
serious part in his work. And when his friend Janos Plesch
commented years later that there seemed to be some
connection between mathematics and fiction, a field in
which the writer made a world out of invented characters
and situations and then compared it with the existing
world, Einstein replied: "There may be something in what
you say. When I examine myself and my methods of
thought I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy
has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing
positive knowledge."
  The problems created by linking Einstein's two
assumptions ùthe similarity of all natural laws for all
observers and the constancy of the speed of light in both
the electromagnetic and the mechanical worldsùbecome
evident when one reconsiders Newton's handy sailor.
Consider him standing on the deck as his ship sails
parallel to a long jetty. At each end of the jetty there stands
a signal lamp and midway between the two lamps there
stands an observer. As the sailor passes the observer,
flashes of light are sent out by the two lamps. They are
sent out, so far as the stationary observer on the jetty is
concerned, at exactly the same time. The light rays coming
from each end of the jetty have to travel the same distance
to reach him, and they will reach him simultaneously. So
far, so good. But what about the sailor on the shipùwho
will have been at an equal distance from both lamps as
each sent out its light signal? He knows that both flashes
travel with the same speed. Although this speed is very
great it is finite, and since he is moving away from one
lamp and towards the other he will receive the light
signals at different times. As far as he is concerned, they
will not have been switched on simultaneously.
  Here is the first extraordinary result of linking Einstein's
two assumptions. If they are correctùand there is now no
doubt about thisùthe old idea of simultaneity is
dethroned; for events which are simultaneous to the
observer on the jetty are not simultaneous to the sailor on
deck. "So we see," as Einstein put it, "that we cannot
attach any absolute signification to the concept of
simultaneity, but that two events which, viewed from a
system of coordinates, are simultaneous, can no longer be
looked upon as simultaneous events when envisaged from
a system which is in motion relatively to that system."
  If the nub of Einstein's Special Relativity can be
considered as resting within any one sentence it rests here
in the realization that one man's "now" is another man's
"then"; that "now" itself is a subjective conception, valid
only for an observer within one specific frame of reference.
  Yet despite the apparent chaos that this appears to cause,
there is one stable factor which it is possible to grasp as
thankfully as a rock climber grasps a jug handle hold in a
dangerous place. That factor is the constancy of the speed
of light, and with its aid all natural phenomena can be
described in terms which are correct for all frames of
reference in constant relative motion with each other. All
that was needed, Einstein went on to demonstrate, were
the Lorentz transformation equations. Using these instead
of the earlier and simpler Newtonian transformations, it
was still possible to connect events in any two frames of
reference, whether the difference in their relative speeds
was that between a sailor and the deck, between a ship and
the coast, or between a physicist in the laboratory and the
electrons of atomic experiments which were already
known to move at a sizable proportion of the speed of
light.
  But a price had to be paid for resolving this difference
between two conceptions of simultaneity; or, put more
accurately, it had to be admitted that if the constancy of the
speed of light was allowed to restore order from chaos,
then not one but two factors in the equations were different
from the simple stable things that man had always
imagined. For velocity is provided by distance divided by
time, and if velocity was invariant in the Lorentz
transformations not only distance but time itself must be
variable. If the Newtonian world of mechanics as well as
the Maxwellian world of electromagnetism were subject to
the invariant velocity of light, both distanceùor spaceù
and time were no longer absolute.
  It is at this point that the difference between the ideas of
Fitzgerald, Lorentz, and even PoincarΘ, and the ideas of
Einstein, begins to appear. For his predecessors, the
Lorentz transformation was merely a useful tool for
linking objects in relative motion; for Einstein it was not a
mathematical tool so much as a revelation about nature
itself. As he wrote years later, he had seen "that the
bearing of the Lorentz transformation transcends its
connection with Maxwell's equations and was concerned
with the nature of space and time in general."
  The difference between the earlier view and that of
Einstein was exemplified by what Max Born, one of the
first expositors of relativity, called "the notorious
controversy as to whether the contraction is 'real' or only
'apparent.'" Lorentz had one view. "Asked if I consider
this contraction as a real one, I should answer 'Yes,'" he
said. "It is as real as anything we can observe." Sir Arthur
Eddington, the later great exponent of Einstein, held a
rather different view. "When a rod is started from rest into
uniform motion, nothing whatever happens to the rod," he
has written. "We say that it contracts; but length is not a
property of the rod; it is a relation between the rod and the
observer. Until the observer is specified the length of the
rod is quite indeterminate."
  But it was not only distance but also time which was now
seen to be relative. The idea was not entirely new. Voigt
had suggested in 1887 that it might be mathematically
convenient to use a local time in moving reference
systems. But just as Einstein transformed earlier ideas of
the curious "contraction" by showing that it was space
itself which was altered by relative speed, so was his
concept of relative time far more than a mathematical
convenience. It was, in fact, more than a concept in the
proper meaning of the word. For with his Special Theory
Einstein was not so much propounding an idea as
revealing a truth of nature that had previously been
overlooked. And as far as time was concerned the truth
was that a clock attached to a system in relative movement
ran more slowly than a clock that was stationary. This was
not in any sense a mechanical phenomenon; it was not in
any way connected with the physical properties of the
clock andùas was to be shown less than half a century
laterùit was as true of clocks operated by atomic
vibrations as of those operated by other methods; it was a
property of the way in which God had made the world.
  Once it is accepted, as it was during the years that
followed 1905, that space and time are relatively different
in moving and in stationary systems, and that both can be
linked by the Lorentz transformations, the position of the
velocity of light as the limiting velocity of the universe
becomes clear. For the stationary measuring rod which
shrinks at an ever faster rate as its speed increases, and
reaches half its original length at nine-tenths the speed of
light, would shrink to nothing as it reached ten-tenths.
Similarly, the recordings on a clock would slow to a
standstill as it reached the same speed.
  Three questions arise. One is the question of which is the
"real" dimension and which the "real" time. Another is the
riddle of why the extraordinary characteristic of the
universe revealed by the Special Theory had escaped
man's notice for so long. The third is the question of what
difference the Special Theory could make to the world.
The answer to the first is simple. The "real" dimension
and the "real" time is that of the observer, and the
stationary and the moving observers are each concerned
with their own reality. Just as beauty lies in the eye of the
beholder, so does each man carry with him his own space
and his own time. But there is one rider to this, a
restriction put even on relativity. For while the time at
which something happens is indeed a relative matter there
is a limitation: if two events happen at different places in
such a way that a light signal starting at the first event
could reach the second before it took place, then no use of
the Lorentz transformations will make the first event take
place after the second one. In other words, relativity does
not claim that if a man is hit by a bullet, then it is possible
for an observer somewhere else in the universe to have
seen the gun being fired after the bullet landed. This,
however, does not invalidate the famous thought
experiment ùan experiment possible in theory but ruled
out by experimental difficultiesùconcerning the alleged
twin paradox. Here, two twins, one of whom "stays at
home" while the other travels through the universe at great
speed, age differentlyùan outcome still disputed by a few
who refuse to accept the restrictions on "common sense"
that Einstein showed to be necessary.[Although novelists
have often played tricks with time, one of the most
extravagant examples was provided, some years before
Einstein, by Camille Flammarion, the French astronomer.
This was Lumen, published in 1873, the story of an
adventurer who traveled back through time at 250,000
miles a second to witness, among other things, the end of
the Battle of Waterloo before the beginning. "You only
comprehend things which you perceive," Lumen told the
reader. "And as you persist in regarding your ideas of time
and space as absolute, although they are only relative, and
thence form a judgment on truths which are quite beyond
your sphere, and which are imperceptible to your
terrestrial organism and faculties, I should not do a true
service, my friend, in giving you fuller details of my
ultraterrestrial observations. ..."
  The weakness was, of course, shown years later by
Einstein's revelation that c was the limiting speed in the
universe since at the speed of light a body's mass would
become infinitely great. Flammarion ùin whose honor the
141st of the minor planets was named Lumenùbelieved in
vegetation on the moon and in advanced and intelligent
life on Mars, wrote many books of popular astronomy,
including The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds which went
through thirty editions, and late in life turned to psychic
research.]
  The answers to the second questionùwhy have such
characteristics of the universe escaped notice for so
long?ù is that the human physiological apparatus is too
insensitive to record the extremely minute changes in
space and time which are produced by anything less than
exceptionally high speeds. In other and better known ways,
the five senses have their limitations. The unreliability of
touch is exemplified by the "burn" which cold metal can
give.
  Taste is not only notoriously subjectiveù"One man's
meat, another man's poison"ùbut is also governed, to an
extent not yet fully known, by genetic inheritance. So, too,
smell is an indicator whose gross incapacity in humans is
thrown into relief by insects that can identify members of
their species at ranges of up to a mile. Sound is hardly
better. The pattern of "reality" heard by the human is
different from that heard by the dogùwitness the
"soundless" dog whistles of trainers; while the "real"
world of the near sightless bat is one in which "real"
objects are "seen"ùand avoidedùby ultrasonic waves
which play no part in the construction of the external
human world.
  And sight, a stimulation of the human retina by certain
electromagnetic waves, is perhaps the most illusory of all
senses. "Seeing is believing," and so it is difficult to
appreciate that the light of common dayùall that unaided
human physiology allows in the visual search for the world
aroundùcomes through only a narrow slit in a broad
curtain. At one end of this curtain there exist the cosmic
rays, a trillionth of a centimeter in wavelength; at the
other, the infrared, heat radiations, and the even longer
wavelengths used for radar, radio, and television. In
between lies the narrow band of the visible spectrum, for
long the only source of man's incomplete visual picture,
supplemented but slowly as he used instruments to
increase his own limited powers. The landscape seen with
human eyes is dramatically different, yet no more "real,"
than the scene captured on the infrared plate and showing
a mass of detail beyond human vision; the "real" world of
the partially color-blind is the same "real" world seen
more colorfully by most human beings and both worlds are
composed of the same objects which make up the "real"
but again different world of totally color-blind animals.
  Thus the human species is unconsciously and inevitably
selective in describing the nature of the physical world in
which it lives and moves. Once this is appreciated, the
implications of Einstein's Special Theory begin to take on
a more respectable air. For his achievement showed
beyond all reasonable doubt that there existed a further
limitation, so far unnoticed, produced by man's lack of
experience of speeds comparable to that of light. Until
such speeds were reached the variability of space and time
which was a product of relative motion was so small as to
be unobservable. So it was, as Professor Lindemann was
later to point out in an article which foreshadowed his
power to explain complicated scientific matters to Winston
Churchill, "precisely because the old conceptions are so
nearly right, because we have no personal experience of
their being inaccurate in everyday life, that our so-called
common sense revolts when we are asked to give them up,
and that we tend to attribute to them a significance
infinitely beyond their deserts." In fact, the human
concepts of absolute space and time, which Einstein
appeared to have violated so brusquely, had been produced
simply by the rough-and-ready observation of countless
generations of men using a physiological apparatus too
coarse-grained to supply any better approximation of
reality. As Bertrand Russell once wrote in describing the
speeds at which relativity is significant, "Since everyday
life does not confront us with such swiftly moving bodies,
Nature, always economical, had educated common sense
only up to the level of everyday life."
  Thus Special Relativity did not so much "overthrow
Newton" as show that Newtonian ideas were valid only in
circumstances which were restricted even though they did
appear to permeate everyday life. As Oppenheimer has
written, the apparent paradoxes of relativity.

  do not involve any contradictions on the part of nature; what
they do involve is a gross change, a rather sharp change, from
what learned people and ordinary people thought throughout the
past centuries, thought as long as they had thought about things
at all. The simple facts, namely that light travels with a velocity
that cannot be added to or subtracted from by moving a source of
light, the simple fact that objects do contract when they are in
motion, the simple fact that processes are slowed down when
they take place in motion, and very much so if they move with
velocities comparable to the speed of lightù these are new
elements of the natural world and what the theory of relativity
has done is to give coherence and meaning to the connection
between them.

  But Einstein's revelation was one which only a very few
could ever hope to prove by experiment in the laboratory
and which would remain forever outside the experience of
most people. Thus to the nonscientistùas well as to some
physicistsùEinstein had really offended against common
sense, the limited yardstick with which men measure the
exterior world. In addition, the mental effort required
before the theory could be fully grasped turned it for the
general public, when they were eventually forced to notice
it, into a fantasy which further separated the world of
science from the world of ordinary men and women. Only
Einstein's na∩ve honesty, and the burning intensity which
gave him the quality of the guru down the ages,
transformed amused scepticism of the theory into a
veneration for its author which no one deplored more than
Einstein himself.
  Yet even when it is accepted that the theory of Special
Relativity is not a metaphysical concept but, as Einstein
was never tired of pointing out, an explanation of certain
observable features of the universe, even when it is
appreciated how this explanation had hitherto slipped
through the net of human understanding, the third
question remains. For at first glance the Special Theory
appears to deal with matters that are outside the range of
human experience. Nevertheless there are two answers,
one general and the other specific, to the question of what
difference the Special Theory was to make to the world.
  The general answer has been concisely given by
Eddington, the British astronomer who was to play an
important role in Einstein's later life. "Distance and
duration are the most fundamental terms in physics;
velocity, acceleration, force, energy, and so on, all depend
on them; and we can scarcely make any statement in
physics without direct or indirect reference to them," he
has written.

  Surely then we can best indicate the revolutionary consequences
of [relativity] by the statement that distance and duration, and all
the physical quantities derived from them, do not as hitherto
supposed refer to anything absolute in the external world, but are
relative quantities which alter when we pass from one observer
to another with different motion. The consequence in physics of
the discovery that a yard is not an absolute chunk of space, and
that what is a yard for one observer may be eighteen inches for
another observer, may be compared with the consequence in
economics of the discovery that a pound sterling is not an
absolute quantity of wealth, and in certain circumstances may
"really" be seven and sixpence.

  However, the differences in these varying values of time
and space were so small as to become significant only
when the speeds involved were far beyond the range of
human experience. How, then, could they really affect the
world? It is here that one comes to the more specialized
answer, and to what, in the light of history, can be
considered as either an extraordinary coincidence or as
part of the natural evolution of science.
  For Einstein's Special Theory was evolved just as the
investigations of physicists were reaching into the
subatomic world of the nucleus, and as astronomers were
for the first time peering out beyond the confines of the
galaxy in which the earth is a minute speck towards the
immensities of outer space. In the atomic world there were
already known to be particles such as the electron which
moved at speeds which were a sizable percentage of the
speed of light; and in outer space, beyond our own galaxy,
it was soon to be discovered that there were others which
were moving at similar speeds. Thus in both of the fresh
fields which were opening up during the first decades of
the twentieth century, the microscopically small and the
macroscopically large, the revelations of relativity were to
have a significant place.
  But there was another, and in some ways more important,
result which flowed directly from the acceptance of
Einstein's theory which during the next decade was seen
as inevitable. For the absolute quality of space and time
had not only been generally accepted up to now but have
been confirmed by the overwhelming bulk of observational
evidence. Now it was realized that the conventional belief,
so soundly induced from observation, was gravely lacking,
a circumstance with important philosophical implications.
For it underlined, more strongly than had previously been
the case, that science might really be a search not for
absolute truth but for a succession of theories that would
progressively approach the truth. It suggested,
furthermore, that the best path to be followed might not be
that of observation followed by the induction of general
laws, but the totally different process of postulating a
theory and then discovering whether or not the facts fitted
it. Thus a theory should start with more scientific and
philosophical assumptions than the facts alone warranted.
A decade later the method was to provide the startling
results of the General Theory.

  How much, it is now necessary to ask, did these
revelations owe to Einstein's predecessors? It should be
clear by this time that the problem he tackled was different
from that faced by Fitzgerald and Lorentz, who were
mainly concerned with explaining the awkward result of
an important experiment, and different in many ways from
that faced by PoincarΘ, whose problem was largely a
philosophical one. Einstein, not overconcerned with
specific experiments, or with philosophy, had a grander
aim: to penetrate the fog and discern more clearly the
principles on which the material world had been built.
"The theory of relativity," he once said, "was nothing more
than a further consequential development of the field
theory." Asked by Hans Reichenbach, later a Berlin
colleague and later still a professor of philosophy at the
University of California, how the theory of relativity had
been arrived at, he "replied that he had discovered it
because he was so firmly convinced of the harmony of the
universe."
  Yet in science as elsewhere, "no man is an Island, entire
of itself." Einstein himself spoke repeatedly in later life of
his debt to Lorentzù"the four men who laid the
foundations of physics on which I have been able to
construct my theory are Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, and
Lorentz" he said during his visit to the United States in
1921. In more general terms he emphasized that "in
science ... the work of the individual is so bound up with
that of his scientific predecessors and contemporaries that
it appears almost as an impersonal product of his
generation." Thus the problem resolves itself into that of
deciding the extent of Einstein's knowledge of specific
papers and of the Michelson- Morley experiment.[The
most detailed analysis of the situation has been given by
Gerald Holton in a number of papers. See, in particular,
"On the Origins of the Special Theory of Relativity,"
American Journal of Physics, Vol. 28 (1960), pp. 627-636,
and "Einstein, Michelson, and the 'Crucial' Experiment,"
Isis, Vol. 60, Part 2, No. 202 (Summer, 1969), pp. 133
197.]
  Einstein himself made a number of statements on the
subject. At first, when he spoke of relativity in Berlin, in
the United States, and in London, he was apt to stress, as
in London in 1921, merely "that this theory is not
speculative in origin; it owes its invention entirely to the
desire to make physical theory fit observed fact as well as
possible." At Columbia University, the same year, he noted
that "to start with, it disturbed me that electrodynamics
should pick out one state of motion in preference to others,
without any experimental justification for this preferential
treatment. Thus arose the Special Theory of Relativity. ..."
Both statements tended by implication to sustain the idea
that the Michelson-Morley experiment had played a part in
his thinking. The point was elaborated in a letter which he
wrote from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton
on March 17, 1942, to one of Michelson's biographers. "It
is no doubt that Michelson's experiment was of
considerable influence upon my work insofar as it
strengthened my conviction concerning the validity of the
principle of the Special Theory of Relativity," he said. "On
the other side I was pretty much convinced of the validity
of the principle before I did know this experiment and its
result. In any case, Michelson's experiment removed
practically any doubt about the validity of the principle in
optics and showed that a profound change of the basic
concepts of physics was inevitable."
  Later evidence provided by Einstein is contradictory and
is probably influenced by the fact that, as Maitland put it,
"events now long in the past were once in the future."
"When I asked him how he had learned of the Michelson
Morley experiment," says R. S. Shankland, who visited
Einstein on February 4, 1950, from the Case Institute of
Technology, while preparing a historical account of the
experiment, "he told me he had become aware of it
through the writings of H. A. Lorentz, but only after 1905
had it come to his attention. 'Otherwise,' he said, 'I would
have mentioned it in my paper.' He continued to say that
the experimental results which had influenced him most
were the observations of stellar aberration and Fizeau's
measurements on the speed of light in moving water.
'They were enough,' he said." Yet when Shankland again
visited Princeton on October 24, 1952, Einstein was not so
certain. "This is not so easy," Shankland quotes him as
saying.

  "I am not sure when I first heard of the Michelson experiment. I
was not conscious that it had influenced me directly during the
seven years that relativity had been my life. I guess I just took it
for granted that it was true." However, Einstein said that in the
years 1905-1909, he thought a great deal about Michelson's
result, in his discussions with Lorentz and others in his thinking
about general relativity. He then realized (so he told me) that he
had also been conscious of Michelson's result before 1905 partly
through his reading of the papers of Lorentz and more because he
had assumed this result of Michelson to be true.

  In 1954, for Michael Polanyi's The Art of Knowing,
Einstein personally approved the statement that "the
Michelson-Morley experiment had a negligible effect on
the discovery of relativity." Furthermore, a supplementary
note from Dr. N. Balazs, who was working with Einstein
in Princeton in the summer of 1953, and who questioned
him on the subject for Polanyi, runs as follows:

  The Michelson-Morley experiment had no role in the
foundation of the theory. He got acquainted with it while reading
Lorentz' paper about the theory of this experiment (he of course
does not remember exactly when, though prior to his paper), but
it had no further influence on Einstein's consideration and the
theory of relativity was not founded to explain its outcome at all.

  To David Ben-Gurion, who asked whether the theory of
relativity was the result of thought only, Einstein
confirmed that this was so but added: "I naturally had
before me the experimental works of those preceding me.
These served as material for my thoughts and studies."
And finally there is the letter from Einstein to Carl Seelig,
published after Einstein's death. "There is no doubt, that
the Special Theory of Relativity, if we regard its
development in retrospect, was ripe for discovery in 1905,"
he wrote.

  Lorentz had already observed that for the analysis of Maxwell's
equations the transformations which later were known by his
name are essential, and PoincarΘ had even penetrated deeper into
these connections. Concerning myself, I knew only Lorentz'
important work of 1895, but not Lorentz' later work, nor the
consecutive investigations by PoincarΘ. In this sense my work of
1905 was independent. The new feature of it was the realization
of the fact that the bearing of the Lorentz transformation
transcended its connections with Maxwell's equations and was
concerned with the nature of space and time in general.

  From this not entirely satisfactory evidence two general
conclusions have been drawn. One is the view of the
popular eulogy, in which Einstein is seen as the inspired
genius, working in an intellectual vacuum and drawing the
Special Theory from his brain like the conjuror producing
the rabbit from the hat. The other is typified by the view of
Sir Edmund Whittaker, the notable British physicist who
in Einstein's biographical memoir for the Royal Society
wrote that he had "adopted PoincarΘ's Principle of
Relativity (using PoincarΘ's name for it) as a new basis for
physics."[Whittaker took the same point of view in his
History of the Theories of the Aether and Electricity.
Einstein, hearing of this from his friend Born when the
second edition was published in 1953, commented as
follows: "Everybody does what he considers right, or, in
deterministic terms, what he has to do. If he manages to
convince others, that is their own affair. I myself have
certainly found satisfaction in my efforts, but I would not
consider it sensible to defend the results of my own work
as being my own 'property,' as some old miser might
defend the few coppers he had laboriously scraped
together. I do not hold anything against him, nor of course,
against you. After all, I do not need to read the thing."]
  The truth appears to be different from both tidy black-
and-white versions. It is rather that Einstein, traveling
from his own starting point to his own lonely destination,
noted Lorentz' work as bearing on his own, different,
problems. When light dawned, during that creative
fortnight in 1905, what Einstein had already heard of the
Michelson-Morley experiment fell into place. But it was no
more than an interesting piece of evidence which gave
comforting confirmation of the theory which he had
already decided could provide a more accurate picture of
the material world than that provided by Newtonian
mechanics alone. What he had produced was, as he wrote
in The Times in 1919, "simply a systematic extension of
the electrodynamics of Clerk Maxwell and Lorentz."
Certainly Lorentz himself had no doubt about whose
theory it was. "To discuss Einstein's principle of relativity
here in G÷ttingen ...," he said when he spoke there in
1910, "appears to be a particularly welcome task."
  If there are any missing acknowledgments in Einstein's
work, they belong not to Michelson-Morley, to Lorentz,
Fitzgerald, or PoincarΘ but to August F÷ppl, a German
administrator and teacher whose Introduction to
Maxwell's Theory of Electricity was almost certainly
studied by Einstein. The famous relativity paper has
similarities in style and argument with F÷ppl's treatment
of "relative and absolute motion in space"; and F÷ppl
himself writes of "a deep-going revision of that conception
of space which has been impressed upon human thinking
in its previous period of development" as presenting
"perhaps the most important problem of science of our
time."
  Thus F÷ppl, like the Lorentz equations, can justifiably be
considered as another of the useful instruments lying to
hand which Einstein was able to utilize. As The Times was
later to say of Einstein's General Theory, there is no need
to defend his originality. "The genius of Einstein consists
in taking up the uninterpreted experiments and scattered
suggestions of his predecessors, and welding them into a
comprehensive scheme that wins universal admiration by
its simplicity and beauty."
  The "comprehensive scheme" of 1905 had shown that
space and time, previously thought to be absolute, in fact
depended on relative motion. Yet these are but two of the
three yardsticks used to measure the nature of the physical
world. The third is mass. Was this, also, linked in some
hitherto unexpected way with the speed of light? Einstein
considered the question. In view of the apocalyptic
consequences, his thoughts, thrown off in a letter to
Habicht, apparently in the summer of 1905, have all the
casualness of a bomb tossed into the marketplace. After
suggesting that Habicht might like to join him in the
Patent Office, he adds:

  You don't need to bother about valuable time, there is not
always a subtle theme to meditate upon. At least, not an exciting
one. There is, of course, the theme of spectral lines, but I do not
think that a simple connection of these phenomena with those
already explored exists; so that for the moment the thing does not
seem to show very much promise. However, a result of the
electrodynamic work has come to my mind. The relativity
principle in connection with the Maxwell equations demands that
the mass is a direct measure for the energy contained in the
bodies; light transfers mass. A remarkable decrease of the mass
must result in radium. This thought is amusing and infectious but
I cannot possibly know whether the good Lord does not laugh at
it and has led me up the garden path.

  During the next few weeks Einstein obviously thought
more about the amusing and infectious idea. The result
was a brief paper which appeared in the Annalen der
Physik in the autumn of 1905 almost as a footnote to his
earlier paper. "The results of the previous investigation
lead to a very interesting conclusion, which is here to be
deduced," he began. The deduction, carried through little
more than a page and a half, went on with the following
historic words:

  If a body gives off the energy L in the form of radiation, its
mass diminishes by L/c2. The fact that the energy withdrawn
from the body becomes energy of radiation evidently makes no
difference, so that we are led to the more general conclusion that
  The mass of a body is a measure of its energy content; if the
energy changes by L, the mass changes in the same sense by
L/9 X 1020, the energy being measured in ergs, and the mass
in grams.

  Einstein concluded with the comment that the theory
might be put to the test by the use of such materials as
radium salts whose energy content was very variable, and
that radiation appeared to convey inertia between emitting
and absorbing bodies. Yet the immediately important
conclusion was that mass did in fact increase with relative
speed. There had already been laboratory examples of this
awkward process. During the last decade of the century,
both J. J. Thomson in Cambridge and subsequently W.
Kaufmann in G÷ttingen had investigated the ways in
which fast cathode rays, the streams of electrons whose
existence had been postulated by Lorentz and confirmed by
Thomson, could be electromagnetically deflected; both had
found that mass of the particle appeared to depend on
velocity. Some years later F. Hasen÷hrl had shown that
light radiation enclosed in a vessel increased that vessel's
resistance to accelerationù and that its mass was altered
in the process. Finally, in 1900, PoincarΘ had suggested
that this inertia or resistance to acceleration was a property
of all energy and not merely of electromagnetic energy.
  Now Einstein had leapfrogged ahead, ignoring the
separate experimental results which had been puzzling
individual workers and coming up with a simple overall
explanation which, almost staring them in the face, had
appeared too simple to be true. All mass was merely
congealed energy; all energy merely liberated matter. Thus
the photons, or light quanta, of the photoelectric effect
were just particles which had shed their mass and were
traveling with the speed of light in the form of energy;
while energy below the speed of light had been
transformed by its slowing down, a transformation which
had had the effect of congealing it into matter. There had
been a whiff of this very idea from Newton, who in his
Opticks had asked: "Are not gross Bodies and Light
convertible into one another, and may not Bodies receive
much of their Activity from the Particles of Light which
enter their Composition?" The apparent rightness of this
was underlined by his comment, a few lines lower, that
"the changing of Bodies into Light, and Light into Bodies,
is very conformable to the Course of Nature, which seems
delighted with Transmutations."
  The nub of this revelationùwhich involved two separate
things, the difference between the mass of a body at rest
and its mass in motion, and the transformation of a
material body into energyùlinked the previously separate
concepts of conservation of energy and conservation of
matter, and was embodied in two equations. One showed
that the mass of a body moving at any particular velocity
was its mass at rest divided by ??1 - v2/c2. This quickly
provides a clue to man's long ignorance of the difference
between the mass of a body at rest and in movement; for
the difference will be very small indeed until the velocity
concerned leaves the speeds of ordinary life and begins to
approach the velocity of light. As with space and time, the
changes are too small to be noted by man's inadequate
senses. The second equation follows on from the fact that
the motion whose increase raises the mass of a body is a
form of energy. This is the famous E = mc2, which states,
in the shorthand of science, that the energy contained in
matter is equal in ergs to its mass in grams multiplied by
the square of the velocity of light in centimeters per
second. Here again, one needed no mathematical expertise
to see the essence of the argument: the velocity of light
being what it is, a very small amount of mass is equivalent
to a vast amount of energy.
  Einstein's "follow-through" from his Special Theory of
Relativity thus explained how electrons weighed more
when moving than when at rest, since this was the natural
result of their speed. It helped to explain how materials
such as radium, whose radioactivity still puzzled the men
experimenting with them, were able to eject particles at
great speeds and to go on doing so for long periods, since
creation of the comparatively large amounts of energy
involved could be attained by the loss of a minute amount
of mass. It helped to explain, furthermore, the ability of the
sunùand of the starsùto continue radiating a large
amount of light and heat by losing only a small amount of
mass.
  Forty years later, the facts of nature as revealed by
Einstein's equation were to be demonstrated in another
way. For by then it had been discovered that if the nucleus
of a heavy atom could be split into two parts, the mass of
its two fragments would be less than that of the original
nucleus. The difference in mass would have been
transformed into energy; its amount would be minute, but
the energy released would be this minute mass multiplied
by the square of the speed of lightùthe energy which,
released from vast numbers of nuclei by the fission
process, destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
  The chances of splitting the atom appeared insoluble in
1905. But the equation was there. And for writers and
cranks, for visionaries and men who lived on the
borderland of the mind, a new pipedream became possible.
A few scientists thought along similar lines, and in 1921
Hans Thirring commented: "... it takes one's breath away
to think of what might happen in a town, if the dormant
energy of a single brick were to be set free, say in the form
of an explosion. It would suffice to raze a city with a
million inhabitants to the ground." Most of his
professional colleagues did not speculate thus far.
Rutherford maintained almost to the end of his life in 1937
that the use of the energy locked within the atom was
"moonshine." And when a young man approached
Einstein in Prague in 1921, wanting to produce a weapon
from nuclear energy based on E = mc2, he was told to calm
himself. "You haven't lost anything if I don't discuss your
work with you in detail," Einstein said. "It's foolishness is
evident at first glance. You cannot learn anything more
from a longer discussion."
  The demonstration of Einstein's mass-energy equation in
the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has naturally
given this by-product of his Special Theory a popular
predominance over all others. But it should be emphasized
that nuclear fission, whose utilization made nuclear
weapons possible, was "discovered" by other men moving
along very different paths of research. Fission illustratedù
dramatically in the case of the atomic bombsùEinstein's
mass-energy equation rather than being based on it.
  But the atomic bomb came forty years after Einstein had
cut at the foundation of classical physics, and the effects of
relativity during these four decades were to be all
pervasive. So much so that while the immense effects of
evolution and communism, those two other revolutionary
ideas of the last hundred years, are as toughly debated as
they are freely admitted, a different attitude exists about
relativity. So much has it been assimilated into human
knowledge that it is sometimes overlooked altogether.
  Yet there are three ways in which man's relationship
with his physical world has been changed by relativity.
The first, and possibly the least important, is that it has
helped him to understand some phenomena which would
otherwise have been incomprehensible. The behavior of
nuclear particles discovered during the last half-century is
only the most obvious example. "We use it," Oppenheimer
has said of Special Relativity, "literally in almost every
branch of nuclear physics and many branches of atomic
physics, and in all branches of physics dealing with the
fundamental particles. It has been checked and cross-
checked and counter-checked in the most numerous ways
and it is a very rich part of our heritage."
  In addition to supplying this very practical tool, relativity
has enabled man to give more accurate, more descriptive
accounts of the world of which he is a part. As Philipp
Frank has pointed out, the plain statement that a table is
three feet long is not only incomplete but meaningless
when compared with the statement that it is three feet long
relative to the room in which it stands. "Relativism," he
says, "means the introduction of a richer language which
allows us to meet adequately the requirements of the
enriched experience. We are now able to cover these new
facts by plain and direct words and to come one step nearer
to what one may call the 'plain truth about the universe.'"
  It is this "plain truth about the universe" which suggests
the third and most important change that relativity has
produced. Its epistemological implications are still hotly
debated. Nevertheless, it is indisputable that while the
theory has enabled man to describe his position in the
universe with greater accuracy it has also thrown into
higher relief the limitations of his own personal
experiences. "Physical science," Sir James Jeans has
emphasized,

  does not of course suggest that we must abandon the intuitive
concepts of space and time which we derive from individual
experience. These may mean nothing to nature, but they still
mean a good deal to us. Whatever conclusions the
mathematicians may reach, it is certain that our newspapers, our
historians and story-tellers will still place their truths and
fictions in a framework of space and time; they will continue to
sayùthis event happened at such an instant in the course of the
ever- flowing stream of time, this other event at another instant
lower down the stream, and so on.
  Such a scheme is perfectly satisfactory for any single
individual, or for any group of individuals whose experiences
keep them fairly close together in space and timeù and,
compared with the vast ranges of nature, all the inhabitants of
the earth form such a group. The theory of relativity merely
suggests that such a scheme is private to single individuals or
to small colonies of individuals; it is a parochial method of
measuring, and so is not suited for nature as a whole. It can
represent all the facts and phenomena of nature, but only by
attaching a subjective taint to them all; it does not represent
nature so much as what the inhabitants of one rocket, or of
one planet, or better still an individual pair of human eyes,
see of nature. Nothing in our experiences or experiments
justifies us in extending either this or any other parochial
scheme to the whole of nature, on the supposition that it
represents any sort of objective reality.

  Relativity has thus helped human beings to appreciate
their place in the physical world just as T. H. Huxley's
Man's Place in Nature gave them a context in the
biological world. It is significant that one of the most
hardheaded remarks on relativity made after Einstein's
death should come from a religious journal. His theory has
shown, remarked The Tablet, that "space and time for the
physicist are defined by the operations used to measure
them, and that any theory in which they appear must
implicitly take these operations into account. Thus modern
science looks at nature from the viewpoint of a man, not
from that of an angel."

CHAPTER 5

FRUITS OF SUCCESS

Einstein's papers of 1905 revealed to the small handful of
leading European physicists that they had a potential
leader in their midst; only the next decade would show
whether that potential was to be realized. Other men, in
the arts as well as in science, in politics, and in war, had
sent up sparks of genius during their early years yet failed
to set the world ablaze. And even if Einstein did have the
qualities needed to carry through and exploit his early
promise, there were still a dozen ways in which chance
might circumscribe or cut short his futureùthe Great War,
taking Hasen÷hrl on the German side and Moseley on
Britain's, was only one pitfall lying ahead.
  However, Einstein's statistical work which led to his
paper on the Brownian motion, his conception of photons,
and his adventurous theory of relativity were all soon seen
as more than isolated efforts. Instead, it became clear that
they were logically consequential operations, each of
which could be further developed to throw fresh light on
the current problems of physics. In this development he
was to be helped by the climate of the times. From 1905
until 1914 he was able to think and read and move in a
truly international scientific society that was shattered with
the outbreak of the Great War and was not fully restored
for almost half a century. Traveling from Berne or Zurich
to Leiden or Salzburg, to Brussels or Vienna, he crossed
frontiers that were political but not cultural. Talking with
Lorentz in Holland, with Mach in Austria, and in Belgium
with Rutherford from England, Madame Curie and
Langevin from France, Planck and Nernst from Berlin, he
was embraced as a full member of that small truly
professional group whose work was concentrated on the
single task of discovering the nature of the physical world.
For a short while, it was a scientific world without politics,
an unusual state of affairs to which Einstein always looked
back as though it were the norm rather than an exception
which occurred as science prepared to tackle the riddles of
the atom. Among these colleagues he moved with a calm
assurance and a quizzical smile; both came, for all his
innate humbleness, from an inner certainty of being right.
Thus he looked ahead from 1905, untroubled by the Jewish
problem which was later to engage his energies, unworried
by thoughts of war in Europe which had surely given up
such a recklessly wasteful occupation, totally unaware that
his work with brain, pen, and paper would have any
impact beyond the circumscribed scientific field in which
he moved.
  The story of his life for the next decade is therefore first
of scientific consolidation and then of scientific
exploration, of increasing contact with the men and
women who produced the twentieth century's scientific
revolution. In it there appear rarely, and as if by accident,
the figures of his family and the everyday emotions which
move most ordinary men. He was kind, but in a slightly
casual way; amiable as long as people allowed him to get
on with his work, and totally uninterested in what he
regarded as the superficialities of life. "My wife returned
yesterday from Serbia, where she had been on holiday with
both the children," he wrote to Professor Hurwitz in a
typical note. "Do you know what the result is? They've
turned Catholic. Well, it's all the same to me."
  In the summer of 1905 Einstein himself visited Belgrade
with Mileva. They stayed with her relatives and friends,
spending a week in the lakeside holiday resort of Kijevo,
and then traveling on to Novi Sad where he met his wife's
parents for the first time. It was one of numerous holiday
journeys to what is now Yugoslavia but was then part of
the Austro-Hungarian Empire, holidays were long
remembered by his elder son Hans as pleasant rambling
interludes during which the odd character of a father
amiably visits his in-laws from another world,
accompanied first by his small son and, later, by a baby
second son as well. Einstein never forgot his Serbian hosts
and kept up an intermittent correspondence with them for
nearly half a centuryùmentioning only casually, they
recounted after his death, that he had been awarded a
Nobel Prize.
  Other holidays were spent in the nearby Oberland,
sometimes in Murren, not yet become overfashionable,
quiet holidays of a minor civil servant who superficially
seemed likely to spend the rest of his life on much the
same local round. He would occasionally visit CΣsar Koch
in Antwerp. He kept in touch with his former colleagues of
Aarau or Zurich, and to friends and relations he jotted off
the postcards with their spidery writing that were later to
become collectors' items. It was all rather low key. Yet it
was this that still seemed to be the genuine Einstein.
Surely the real person was the slightly shabby, poor man's
bohemian of the rather broken-down apartment in
Marktgasse. Surely the potential genius of which whispers
began to come from Planck and the great names in Berlin
was merely a dream figure which had stepped down from
one of Paul Klee's early landscapes.
  The only hint that the potential genius might be the real
Einstein came from his ferocious concentration on the task
to be done and his determination that nothing should be
allowed to divert him from it. A few years earlier it might
have been only a hangover from graduate enthusiasm; now
it began to look as though it was part and parcel of the
mature man. Here there is a similarityùfirst pointed out
by C. P. Snowùbetween Einstein and Churchill, the
"eminently wise man" as Einstein later described him. The
comparison is not surprising once the picture-book image
of both scientist and statesman is scraped away to reveal
the machinery beneath. Of Churchill it has been written
that almost obsessional concentration "was one of the keys
to his character. It was not always obvious, but he never
really thought of anything but the job in hand. He was not
a fast worker, especially when dealing with papers, but he
was essentially a nonstop worker." Einstein, with the black
notebook in his pocket, handy for the moment when the
sails began to hang limp, reading while he rocked the
cradle in his Berne apartment, was much the same.
  He had his music. But this, as he would explain on
occasions, was in some ways an extension of his thinking
processes, a method of allowing the subconscious to solve
particularly tricky problems. "Whenever he felt that he had
come to the end of the road or into a difficult situation in
his work," his elder son has said, "he would take refuge in
music, and that would usually resolve all his difficulties."
Einstein himself once remarked that: "Music has no effect
on research work, but both are born of the same source and
complement each other through the satisfaction they
bestow."
  There was also his sailing, and here a remark by his
second wife is pertinent: "He is so much on the water that
people cannot easily reach him." On the Zurichsee, on the
Lake of Thun, or on any of Switzerland's myriad of small
lakes, where the hand responded instinctively to the
demands of the breeze and an able man could let a boat
sail itself, the mind could get on with the job without fear
of interruption. What is more, the surroundings helped.
"He needed this kind of relaxation from his intense work,"
says his elder son. And with relaxation there would often
come the solution. For his work needed neither laboratory
nor equipment.
  During the years that immediately followed 1905
Einstein is thus outwardly the minor Jewish civil servant
of slightly radical ideas, the professional odd man out,
with a Slav wife and illusions of grandeur that had actually
gained him a doctorate of philosophy. But slowly, and as
surely as the tide comes in, the other image began to
harden, the picture of the man who for some inexplicable
reason really was being sought out by those who had made
their way in the world. This metamorphosis was nothing to
do with the popular acclaim which brought Einstein
international renown after the First World War. As far as
the outside world was concerned he remained totally
unknown until 1912, when some aspects of relativity
became headline news in Austria, and almost totally
known until 1919. But in the academic world the
significance of the relativity papers soon began to be
appreciated.
  First off the mark seems to have been Wilhelm Wien,
who as editor of the Annalen der Physik had accepted the
papers. Immediately after the appearances of the number
containing Einstein's first paper, he came into Laub's
workroom, which was near his own, at about nine o'clock,
as was usual, says Jakob Johann Laub, a former pupil at
the ETH who was taking his degree at Leipzig under
Wien. He had the copy of the Annalen in his hand, and he
said that it contained an article by Herr Einstein. He told
Laub to refer to it in the next colloquium. This started a
lively discussion, from which it appeared that one would
not easily become accustomed to the new ideas of time and
space.
  In Berlin, Planck was equally quick. This is confirmed by
Max von Laue, the young son of an army officer whose
path was to cross and recross Einstein's for half a century.
Von Laue had been born in Koblenz within a few months
of Einstein and had gained his doctorate at Strasbourg
before starting the work on X rays for which he later won a
Nobel Prize. When he came to Berlin in the autumn of
1905 as assistant to Planck, he has written, the first lecture
which he heard in the physics colloquium of the university
was one by Planck on Einstein's work, "On the
Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," which had appeared
in September. It described the beginnings of the theory of
relativity which immediately made the greatest impression
on him, although he needed years to understand it. But he
used the next summer holidays to make a tour through the
Swiss mountains in order to visit Albert Einstein in Berne.
  Another man who realized the significance of his work
was the Pole, Professor Witkowski, who after reading the
famous Volume 17 of Annalen der Physik exclaimed to his
friend Professor Loria in Cracow, "A new Copernicus is
born! Read Einstein's paper." But there was a sequel
apparently in 1907ùaccording to Einstein's future
collaborator, Leopold Infeld. "Later, when Professor Loria
met Professor Max Born at a physics meeting, he told him
about Einstein and asked Born if he had read the paper,"
writes Infeld. "It turned out that neither Born nor anyone
else there had heard about Einstein." They went to the
library, took from the bookshelves the seventeenth volume
of Annalen der Physik, and started to read the articles.
"Although I was quite familiar with the relativistic idea
and the Lorentz transformations," Born has said of the
incident, "Einstein's reasoning was a revelation to me."
Elsewhere he has said that the paper "had a stronger
influence on [his] thinking than any other scientific
experience."
  It is clear that during the year immediately following
1905 the concept of relativity percolated slowly through
accepted ideas like rain through limestone rather than
breaking them down like the weight of water cracking a
dam. But as water slowly penetrates the myriad channels,
so did the Special Theory begin to affect the whole body of
physics. There were some setbacks, and one early reaction
to the theory was of unqualified rejection. It came as a
paper by W. Kaufmann on the constitution of the electron,
and it included the following blunt statement: "I anticipate
right away the general result of the measurements to be
described in the following: the results are not compatible
with the Lorentz-Einsteinian fundamental assumptions."
The results had been obtained experimentally in
Kaufmann's laboratory and were in line with other
theories which had given plausible accounts of the
electron's characteristics without invoking relativity. But
neither Einstein nor anyone else fully realized that the
technology of the times was incapable of delivering results
accurate enough to support or refute the theory of
relativity.
  The scientific world awaited Einstein's reply with some
interestùmuch as Central Europe held its breath after
Tetzel had committed Luther's theses to the flames. It
came the following year in the first of two articles in the
Jahrbuch der RadioaktivitΣt und Elektronik. Taking the
theory of relativity a number of important steps forward,
the articles were to be of great importance for other
reasons. Here it is only necessary to note the startling way,
suggesting assurance or arrogance according to point of
view, with which Einstein handled Kaufmann. He agreed
that the results could not be faulted; but he added, "it will
be possible to decide whether or not the foundations of
relativity theory correspond with the facts only if a great
variety of observations is at hand." He did not leave it at
that. With a statement of revealing certainty he brushed
aside the possibility of two other theories cited by
Kaufmann being more acceptable. "In my opinion," he
went on, "both . . . have rather small probability, because
their fundamental assumptions concerning the mass of
moving electrons are not explainable in terms of
theoretical systems which embrace a greater complex of
phenomena." Here was a specific illustration of Einstein's
scientific outlook. "A theory," Einstein continued, "is the
more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises
is, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the
more extended is its area of applicability." A theory which
explained a small number of experimental results might or
might not be valid, but the mere fact that it did explain
them was not, of itself, any particular recommendation.
With a theory that mattered, the process was the reverse. It
was formulated to explain one of the major blueprints of
nature as revealed in general terms; only then was a search
made to see whether minor details supported it. Einstein's
attitude was not that of "tant pis pour les faits"; but to
some sceptics it must have looked dangerously like it.
  His attitude was all the more surprising in that it was
taken by a young man who lacked academic status.
Einstein was still a humble Patent Office employee, even
though he was beginning to be sought out, personally or
through correspondence, by young scientists who wished to
discuss the vital affairs of theoretical physics.
  One of the correspondents was von Laue, who in the
summer of 1906 called at the Patent Office. The young
man who came to meet him made such an unexpected
impression that Laue did not believe he could be the father
of relativity. He let him go past and only when Einstein
returned from the waiting room did they make one
another's acquaintance. Their long discussion, continued
as the two men walked back to Einstein's home from the
office, increased von Laue's understanding of relativity.
Recalling the occasion, he remembered that the cigar
which he had been offered was so unpleasant that he
"accidentally" let it fall from the bridge into the Aare. And
he remembered that as they looked at the lovely view of
the Bernese Oberland Einstein commented: "I just don't
understand how people can run about all over that lot."
  The theory of relativity remained the central scientific
problem with which he concerned himself. He saw it,
rightly most scientists feel today, as one of the vital factors
in man's understanding of the natural world, a factor
whose omission had distorted ideas across the whole
spectrum of physical knowledge. But there was another of
equal importance; this was the conception of quanta which
Planck had seen as accounting for certain characteristics of
radiation and which Einstein with his light quanta, or
photons, had adventurously developed. The subject, which
seemed to present numerous and almost insuperable
problems, continued to exercise him. For while the theory
of the photon helped to clarify heat, radiation, and the
photoelectric effect, it totally failed to explain interference,
the diffraction of light, or other phenomena. There was
something, if not wrong, then at least incomplete about the
explanations that had so far been put forward, and during
these years in Berne Einstein worked hard to lessen this.
  One of his confidants was young Laub, who during his
degree examination had mentioned relativity. Wien
disagreed with certain of his statements and advised him to
talk with Einstein. Early in 1907 Laub therefore traveled
to Berne and was drawn, like everyone else who met
Einstein on a professional basis, into an obsessional
discussion that soon rose and swamped everything else.
Their interchange of letters gives a good deal of insight
into Einstein's preoccupations and into the conditions
under which he worked during these years. "He found
Einstein kneeling in front of the oven, poking the fire,
quite alone in his flat... ," says Seelig. "They found so
much to discuss that for several weeks at midday, and
during the evening, Laub fetched his new sparring partner
from the Patent Office, and he visited him again the
following year." Their intellectual collaboration produced
three joint works dealing with the basic equations of
electromagnetism and the pondero-motive force of the
electromagnetic field. As the well-trained mathematician,
Laub naturally took over the complicated mathematical
tasks, while Einstein concentrated on their physical
implications.
  Einstein did not only outline his work to Laub. He also
revealed what the young Patent Office employee of less
than thirty thought of the masters of the craft. "I am
ceaselessly occupied with the question of the constitution
of radiation," he wrote in 1908,

  and am in correspondence on this question with H. A. Lorentz
and Planck. The former is an astonishingly profound and at the
same time amiable man. Planck is also very pleasant in
correspondence. He has, however, one fault: that is that he is
clumsy in finding his way about in foreign trains of thought. It is
therefore understandable when he makes quite faulty objections
to my latest work on radiation. He has not, however, said
anything against my criticisms. I hope that he has read them and
recognized them. This quantum question is so incredibly
important and difficult that everyone should busy themselves
with it. I have already succeeded in working out something which
may be related to it, but I have serious reasons for still thinking
that it is rubbish.

  Two years later he was still pressing on, writing to Laub
in November, 1910: "I now have the greatest hopes of
solving the radiation problem, actually without light
quanta. I am incredibly curious as to how the thing will
turn out. We must renounce the energy principle in its
present form." A few days later his curiosity had been
satisfied. "Another failure in the solution of the radiation
problem," he reported. "The devil played a wicked trick on
me."
  While much of the gossip in the letters is only of
parochial importance, Einstein has some interesting
observations on Lenard. After Laub had in 1908 gained an
assistantship with Lenard at Heidelberg, Einstein was
quick to congratulate him both on the appointment and on
the money that went with it. "But I think that the
opportunity of working with Lenard is still more important
than the assistantship and the income together," he added.
"Bear with Lenard's whims. He is a great master and an
original mind. Perhaps he can be quite good socially with
a man whom he has learned to respect." Two years later,
after Laub had apparently been sacked, his opinion had
changed. "Lenard really is crazy," he wrote. "Put together
entirely with gall and intrigue. However, you can play that
game better than he! And you can get away from him
whereas he must live with himself until the end. I will do
what I can to get you an assistant's place."
  The need for "solving the radiation problem actually
without light quanta" about which Einstein had written to
Laub in 1907 seemed pressing enough, for both Lorentz
and Planck continued to stress that the purely corpuscular
theory of light which they appeared to postulate failed to
account for many observable phenomena. However,
Einstein struggled on, as intrigued as his contemporaries
at the dual qualities of light which neither he nor any of
them could as yet resolve. What he did succeed in doing
during this period was to apply Planck's quantum formula
to the vibrations of atoms, molecules, and solids, thereby
explaining the deviations of the specific heat of solids from
the classical laws. The fact that different amounts of heat
were needed to raise different solids the same number of
degrees had so far been difficult to explain satisfactorily.
But in "Plancksche Theorie der Strahlung und die Theorie
der spezifischen Warme" ("Planck's Theory of Radiation
and the Theory of Specific Heat") Einstein opened the door
to a solution. This decisive step led to a good deal of fresh
experimental research, to the investigations by Nernst and
his followers on specific heat at very low temperatures, and
to the solution of subsequent problems by such men as
Lindemann, Debye, and Born.
  On the face of it, the work had none of the spectacular
implications of relativityùor, for that matter, of the
"heuristic viewpoint" that light could consist of both waves
and particles. But not even Einstein could organize a
revolution every year. And if his work on relativity and the
photoelectric effect was the addition of a volume to man's
knowledge, then his work on specific heat is typical of the
way he continued, year after year, adding the odd page or
two whenever opportunity offered.
  Meanwhile his thoughts were increasingly preoccupied
with another subject, linked as closely to philosophy as to
physics, more nebulous yet even more fundamental. This
was the new questioning of causality, taken for granted in
one shape or form for centuries by the majority of
scientists who believed that the explanation of every event
could be found in its antecedent conditions. The billiard
balls on the green baize tables moved along paths that
could be predicted once the vectors imposed on them were
known; and if the equations involved had for strict
accuracy to be those of the Special Theory rather than of
Newtonian mechanics, effect yet followed cause in exactly
the same way. Surely the motions of the atoms and of their
components, infinitely small though they were, could be
comparably predicted once it became possible to quantify
the forces imposed upon them?
  This was not to be so. Doubts had been raised with the
discovery of radioactivity and of the way in which the
atoms comprising an element disintegratedùapparently
without reason and in a pattern which enabled the
statistician to forecast the future of a collection of atoms
but not of an individual atom. At first it had appeared that
this statistical forecast might be similar to the prediction of
how a tossed coin would fallùused only because sufficient
factors were not known with enough accuracy to allow the
use of anything better. Once enough was known, it would
surely be possible not merely to predict statistically the
outcome of a series of coin tossings but to predict in terms
of cause and effect the result of each particular toss.
Surely, it was argued, the grand designs of nature operated
along similar causal lines, with all that was required being
merely sufficient information on the causes.
  On this question, which grew steadily in importance as
the century advanced, Einstein became increasingly
separated from the bulk of his colleagues. While they
moved on, he remained faithful to the attitude he had
adopted as early as 1907 and which he revealed in a letter
of that year to Philipp Frank, a young Austrian who had
just taken his doctorate at the University of Vienna. In a
paper entitled "Kausalgesetz und Erfahrung" ("Causal
Law and Experience"), Frank had set out to show that the
law of causality "can be neither confirmed nor disproved
by experience; not, however, because it is a truth known a
priori but because it is a purely conventional definition."
Einstein, who developed rich correspondence with any
scientist who had similar interests, wrote to Frank. "He
approved the logic of my argument," Frank has said,

  but he objected that it demonstrates only that there is a
conventional element in the law of causality and not that there is
merely a convention or definition. He agreed with me that,
whatever may happen in nature, one can never prove that a
violation of the law of causality has taken place. One can always
introduce by convention a terminology by which this law is
saved. But it could happen that in this way our language and
terminology might become highly complicated and cumbersome.

  What Einstein was saying was this: If all the details of a
coin's velocity, mass, moment of inertia, and other
relevant factors were known as soon as it was in the air,
and if it was still impossible to tell only by statistics which
way it would fall, this was due not to a failure of causality.
There was simply another causative factor which had not
been considered. So with the laws of nature. Current
ability to understand events in the atomic world only in
statistical terms sprang from the limitations imposed by
ignorance. In due course scientists might learn all the
necessary facts, and the mysteries would then be removed.
In 1907 it was difficult to dispute that this would
eventually be so. The arguments were not developed until
more than a decade later when the progress of physics
slowly revealed that at the atomic level the laws of cause
and effect give way to the laws of chance. Einstein
remained unmoved, acknowledging that the work of his
earlier years had led to the new situation, confident that
"God did not play dice with the world."
  All this lay two decades away as Einstein the scientist
built up his connections with Europe's leading physicists
and Einstein the Patent Office employee played the role of
minor civil servant. The situation was growing more
incongruous. But the reflection was not on Einstein so
much as on a system which could apparently find no place
for him in the academic world. The first steps to remedy
this were taken in 1907ùmainly at the instigation of the
Professor Kleiner who in 1905 had helped to push through
Einstein's Ph.D. in Zurich. Kleiner wanted Einstein on his
staff. But during the early years of the century it was
impossible for a man to be appointed professor in
Switzerland ùor in most other continental countries
before serving a spell as privatdozent. The holders of such
posts, which have no equivalent in Britain or the United
States, lecture as much or as little as they like and
normally receive only nominal sums from the students
whom they serve. In 1907 Kleiner proposed that Einstein
should apply for a post as privatdozent in the University of
Berne, a post in which the looseness of obligation would
enable him to combine it easily with his Patent Office job.
Einstein applied for entry to the faculty of theoretical
physics, submitting as proof of his ability the printed
version of the paper which had won him his Zurich
doctorate. With his usual mixture of impatience and
optimism he did not wait for the outcome before writing to
the dean. "Since I am keen that the time I spend on
teaching, if my application is accepted, should be
profitable," he wrote to Professor Gruner, head of the
faculty, "I should like to give a course capable of
developing and arousing the interest of certain students. It
would perhaps also be profitable if my lectures could be a
kind of supplement to your two classes."
  However, he was to receive a shock. His application was
rejected; partly because it was too short, "an amusing
example of academic red tape which is found everywhere,"
as he later noted; partly because Professor AimΘ Forster
did not want a privatdozent on his staff. There were
probably other reasons. The aura of the great man that has
surrounded Einstein's name since 1919, when his work on
the General Theory suddenly became well known, has
overshadowed his position and his nature during the years
before the First World War. The Einstein of the early
1900s was not only a scientist of minor academic
qualifications who had launched an obscure theory on the
world. He was also the man who failed to fit in or to
conform, the disrespector of professors, the dropper of
conversational bricks, the awkward Jewish customer, the
man who although approaching the age of thirty still
seemed to prefer the company of students. However, help
was at hand. The decision "was revised shortly afterwards,
and certainly at the wish of the Zurich University physicist
Kleiner, who wanted to appoint me."
  Thus Einstein started on his academic career at the age of
twenty-nine. His first lectures as a privatdozent in Berne
were delivered in the winter term of 1908-09. The subject
was "The Theory of Radiation." He had only four students
and during the following term the number shrank to a
single man. Formality was abandoned and the session
continued in Einstein's own rooms. The contradictions of
his life still obstinately continued. The genius who had at
first been rejected by the ETH had been succeeded by the
minor Patent Office official who in a single issue of the
Annalen der Physik had delivered three major blows at the
accepted body of physics. Now this picture was succeeded
by that of the apparently unsuccessful university part
timer. But once again the situation was on the point of
being transformed.

  The events which combined to give Einstein a new status
were his formulation of the principle of equivalence, the
cornerstone of the theory of General Relativity, and the
arrival of two papers from Hermann Minkowski, who had
left Zurich in 1902 for G÷ttingen, which gave
mathematical form to Special Relativity.
  The principle of equivalence, which first saw the light of
day in "The Principle of Relativity and the Inferences to
Be Drawn from It," published in two issues of the
Jahrbuch der RadioaktivitΣt und Elektronik in 1907 and
1908, emerged from a problem that had been worrying
Einstein since his formulation of the Special Theory in
1905. This theory had been complete in itself. But it was a
characteristic of Einstein's whole scientific life that most
of his main achievements sprang directly from their
predecessors. Each advance was first consolidated and
then used as base for a fresh move into unexplored
territory.
  In the Special Theory he had shown that there was no
place for the word "absolute" when motion was
considered. Movement was relative, whether it was the
movement of the stars in their courses or of the electrons
in the physicist's laboratory. Yet the motion concerned
was of a very limited varietyùhence the "special" in the
description of the theory. For he had dealt only with
motion in a straight line at a constant velocity. In the
world of everyday life to which he clung with such
determination, this was exemplified by the train moving at
constant speed, from which it was impossible to discover
the existence of motion except by looking out of the
window and relating the train to another frame of
reference. But this situation altered radically if there was a
change in the speed of the train. Then acceleration thrust
back a passenger sitting in a forward-facing seat, or
deceleration slumped him forward, while the movement of
inanimate objects in the trainùa glass of water, for
instanceùwould clearly show that a change of movement
was taking place. Similarly, if constant motion were
maintained in a circular motionùas in a car on a merry
go-roundùthen the outward pull on the body (or on the
glass of water) would once again provide a yardstick for
the movement involved. "Because of this," said Einstein in
describing how his argument had progressed from Special
to General Relativity, "we feel compelled at the present
juncture to grant a kind of absolute physical reality to
nonuniform motion. ..."
  This discrepancy between the relativity of uniform
motion and the apparent nonrelativity of nonuniform
motion, between the fact that the first has no meaning
unless it is compared to something else, while the second
is self- evident within its own frame of reference, greatly
worried him. As it has been put by Dr. Sciama, "This was
displeasing to Einstein, who felt that the harmony of his
theory of relativity required that all motion should be
equally relative." He had come to it by considering the
empirical equivalence of all inertial systems in regard to
light. But he now raised the purely epistemological
question: "Why should relativity concern only uniform
motion?"
  As he sat at his desk on the third floor of the Post and
Telegraph Building; walked down towards the Kirchenfeld
Bridge in the evening, only half-seeing the splendid vision
of the Oberland spread out before him; and as he casually
rocked Hans Albert in his cradle, Einstein refused to let
the discrepancy remain unexplained. What was it, he
wondered, that lay at the heart of inertia, that tendency of
a body to resist acceleration?
  At first he thought back to Ernst Mach, now in his mid
sixties, still deeply sceptical of the atomic theory, already
becoming out of touch, bypassed, and half- forgotten. "I
was, of course, familiar with Mach's idea that inertia
might not represent a resistance to acceleration as such, so
much as a resistance to acceleration relative to the mass of
all the other bodies in the world," he has said. "This idea
fascinated me; but it did not provide a basis for a new
theory." Mach, who attributed the movement of earthly
bodies to the influence of the starsùit "savors of astrology
and is scientifically incredible," was Bertrand Russell's
opinionùwas reviving Bishop Berkeley's notion that
centrifugal forces were governed by the same thing.
Einstein arrived at a somewhat similar conclusion by a
very different route. But first he had begun to reflect on
one force which had always been taken for granted, the
force of gravity. "I made the first step towards the solution
of this problem"ùthat of acceleration ù"when I
endeavored to include the law of gravity in the framework
of the Special Theory of Relativity," he has said.
  He began by returning to Newton's conception of inertia
which triggers the senses into knowing when the train has
jerked forward or a body is being pulled out of a straight
line in a swing or on a merry-go-round. First, "every body
continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a
straight line, unless it is compelled to change that state by
forces impressed thereon"; and, secondly, the greater the
mass of the body, the greater the force needed to accelerate
it or to change its course. These formal statements were
the quintessence of everyday experience, the scientists'
explanation of the fact that it is easier to throw a tennis
ball than a cannonball and less difficult to get a small
wheelbarrow on the move than a large one. But there was
one exception to this otherwise unfailing rule that different
forces were necessary to move objects of different masses.
That exception was gravity, the mysterious force which
appeared to pervade space and which tended to draw all
objects to the ground. More than three centuries earlier
Simon Stevenus, quartermaster of the Dutch army, had
shown that different weightsù reputedly cannonballs of
different sizesùfell to the ground at the same speed. Some
years later, Galileo repeated and refined the experiment to
produce his revolutionary conclusion: that the force of
gravity had the same effect on all objects regardless of
their size or mass. Air resistance prevented cannonballs
and feathers from falling at similar speeds, but if this
resistance were eliminated, by the use of a perfect vacuum
for instance, then cannonballs and feathers would reach
the ground at the same time if dropped from equal
heightsùa proposition subsequently found to be correct.
  The explanation proposed by Newton for this curious
exception to his laws of inertia was ingenious; to Einstein
it was too ingenious. The explanation was that gravity,
reaching up into the heavens to attract material objects
down to earth, exercised its power precisely in proportion
to the mass concerned. On objects of small mass, the
"pull" was relatively small; on those of greater mass, the
"pull" was increasedùto just the extent needed to bring
them all down towards the ground at the accelerating
speed of 32 feet per second. Thus the force of gravity
operated so that it always counterbalanced inertiaùa
proposition which Einstein found very hard to take for
granted.
  There was yet another aspect of Newton's explanation
which he found it difficult to accept. For the effect of
gravity was in Newtonian terms transmitted through space
instantaneously, a proposition which conflicted harshly
with Einstein's assumption in the Special Theory that the
speed of light is a limiting speed in the universe. The more
he contemplated this instantaneous and apparently
fortuitous balancing of the effect of gravity and the effect
of inertia, the less he liked it. It was an accident of nature
that he considered too odd to be truly accidental, a lucky
chance which he felt must be the result of something more
than luck.
  This was a repetition of the situation which had led to the
photoelectric paper and to the theory of Special Relativity.
In the first, Einstein had started by drawing attention to
the contradictions between the corpuscular and the field
theories which science had been content to leave rubbing
up against one another with little more than an occasional
comment. And the famous relativity paper had begun by
drawing attention to the discrepancy between the
observational and the theoretical aspects of Faraday's law
of induction. Now here, once more, was a curious state of
affairs which science had either not noticed or had thought
it better to leave alone.
  Einstein's reaction was typical. He visualized the
situation in concrete terms, in the "man in a box" problem
which appears in different guises in most discussions of
General Relativity. Einstein's illustration was basically
simpleùalthough it appears more so now, when men have
been shot out of the earth's gravitational field, than it did
some half-century ago when space travel was only a
theoretical fancy.
  In the first place Einstein envisaged a box falling freely
down a suitably long shaft. Inside it, an occupant who took
his money and keys from his pocket would find that they
did not fall to the floor. Man, box, and objects were all
falling freely in a gravitational field; but, and this was the
important point, their temporary physical situation was
identical to what it would have been in space, far beyond
any gravitational field. With this in mind, Einstein then
mentally transported both box and occupant to such a point
in space beyond the pull of gravity. Here, all would have
been as before. But he then envisaged the box being
accelerated. The means were immaterial, since it was the
result that mattered. Money and keys now fell to the
bottom of the box. But the same thing would have
happened had the box been at rest in a gravitational field.
So the effect of gravity on the box at rest was identical
with the effect of acceleration beyond the pull of gravity.
What is more, it was clearly apparent that if a centrifugal
force replaced acceleration the results would be the same.
As it was later described by Professor Lindemann, a friend
of Einstein for more than forty years, it would be as
impossible for the man in the box "to tell whether he was
in a gravitational field or subject to uniform acceleration,
as it is for an airplane pilot in a cloud to tell whether he is
flying straight or executing a properly banked turn."
  Thus logical reasoning showed that the effects of
gravitation were the equivalent of those of inertia, and that
there was no way of distinguishing acceleration of
centrifugal force from gravity. At least, this appeared to be
so with money and keys and other material objects. But
what would happen if one thought, instead, in terms of
light? Here it was necessary to change the "thought
experiment." Once again there was the closed box. But this
time, instead of dropped keys and money it was necessary
to envisage a ray of light crossing the box from one side to
the other while the box was being accelerated. The far side
of the box would have moved upwards before the ray of
light reached it; the wall would be hit by the light ray
nearer the floor than the point at which it set out. In other
words, to the man in the box there would have apparently
been a bend in a horizontal ray of light.
  But it was the very substance of Einstein's conception
that the two situationsùone produced by nonuniform
motion and the other produced by gravityùwere indistin-
guishable whether one used merely mechanical tricks or
those of electrodynamics. Thus the ray of light, seen as
bent by the man in the box when the box was subject to
acceleration, would surely be seen in the same way if
gravity were involved when the box was at rest. From one
point of view this was not as outrageous as it sounded. In
1905 Einstein had given fresh support to the idea that light
consisted not of waves but of a stream of minute machine
gun bullets, the light quanta which were later christened
photons. Why, after all, should not these light quanta be
affected by gravity in the same way as everything else?
  But even as the idea was contemplated its implications
began to grow like the genie from the lamp. For a straight
line is the path of a ray of light, while the basis of time
measurement is the interval taken by light to pass from one
point to another. Thus if light were affected by gravity,
time and space would have two different configurations
one when viewed from within the gravitational field and
one when viewed from without. In the absence of
gravitation the shortest distance between A and Bùthe
path along which a light ray would travel from A to Bùis
a straight line. But when gravitation is present the line
traveled by light is not the straight line of ordinary
geometry. Nevertheless, there is no way of getting from A
to B faster than light gets along this path. The "light line"
then is the straight line. This might not matter very much
in the mundane affairs of the terrestrial world, where the
earth's gravity was for all practical purposes a constant
that was a part of life. But for those looking out from the
earth to the solar system and the worlds beyond, the
principle of equivalence suggested that they might have
been looking out through distorting spectacles. Einstein's
new idea appeared to have slipped a disk in the backbone
of the universe.
  Yet he still did not know what gravity was. He still did
not know the characteristics of the gravitational field in
the way that one could know the characteristics of the
electromagnetic field by referring to Maxwell's equations.
Only two things seemed clear. One was that gravity did
not operate as Newton had said it operated. The second
was that it had become "perfectly plain that a reasonable
theory of gravitation could only be obtained by an
extension of the principle of relativity." Just as "Special"
Relativity could produce an accurate account of events in a
frame of reference which was moving uniformly in relation
to the observer, so could a more general version of the
theory do the same thing when the frame of reference was
moving at accelerating speedsùand then the theory should
automatically be able to describe motion in a gravitational
field as well.
  Therefore Einstein now began to look out towards the
problems beyond the earth just as he had earlier looked in
towards the problems of molecules and atoms. The work
took time, and another eight years passed before he
produced the General Theory, described in 1919 by J. J.
Thomson, the president of the Royal Society, as "one of the
most momentous pronouncements of human thought" that
the world had known. The delay was due not to Einstein's
commitment to other research but to the complexity of the
problems involved. Their solution came with the aid of
other men, among them Hermann Minkowski who in 1909
transformed Einstein's earlier Special Theory into a
convenient mathematical tool.

  While Einstein had been at work in his Berne apartment,
as unaware of his coming influence as Marx in the
Reading Room of the British Museum, important events
had been taking place in G÷ttingen. Standing on the
outliers of the Harz Mountains, its ancient ramparts
planted with lindens, proud of its university and its
splendid botanic garden laid out by Albrecht von Haller,
the little town still retained a whiff of the Middle Ages.
The later memories of Gauss and Riemann were still fresh
as there began the "great and brilliant period which
mathematics experienced during the first decade of the
century ..., unforgettable to those who lived through it."
Among its heroes was Hermann Minkowski, the man who
at the ETH had taught Einstein, the "lazy dog" who "never
bothered about mathematics at all," as Minkowski
described him to Max Born.
  Minkowski, Russian by birth, had been in his early
thirties when lecturing in Zurich. He had been only a
middling teacher but earlier, as a boy of eighteen, had won
the Paris Prize for mathematics. It was a natural that he
should have been drawn to G÷ttingen in 1902, much as
physicists were drawn to the Cavendish at Cambridge
during its heyday under Thomson and Rutherford.
Minkowski was the most recent of the Jews who since the
early 1800s had been helping to develop mathematics.
Karl Jacobi had discovered elliptic functions and been
followed by Johann Rosenheim who proved the existence
of Jacobi's Abel functions. He in turn had been followed by
Georg Cantor, who developed the theory of transfinite
numbers.
  Minkowski's contribution to the development of Special
Relativity was in effect a single paper, "Basic Equations
for the Electromagnetic Phenomena in Moving Bodies,"
published in the G÷ttinger Nachrichten in 1907; and, more
far-reaching in its effects, "Space and Time," a popular
lecture on the subject which he read to the Gesellschaft
Deutscher Naturforscher und ─rzte in Cologne on
September 2, 1908. The combined effect of the two was to
be immense. For Minkowski not only gave a new
mathematical formalism to the Special Theory but also, in
the opinion of some, enabled Einstein to solve the
problems of gravitation by means of the General Theoryù
"whether he would ever have done it without the genius of
Minkowski we cannot tell," says E. Cunningham. Yet,
contrariwise, Minkowski introduced fresh specialized
meanings to old familiar words which brought a new
confusingly esoteric element to an already difficult subject.
  Einstein himself described Minkowski's contribution as
the provision of equations in which "the natural laws
satisfying the demands of the [special] theory of relativity
assume mathematical forms, in which the time coordinate
plays exactly the same role as the three space coordinates."
To understand the importance of this it is necessary to
reconsider exactly what it was that Einstein had already
achieved. He had shown that an accurate description of
mechanical and optical phenomena is linked with the
movement of the observer relative to the phenomena
observed. And he had, with his use of the Lorentz
equations, been able to demonstrate the mathematical
relationship between such observations made by observers
moving at different relative speeds. What Minkowski now
demonstrated was that a limitless number of different
descriptions of the same phenomenon could be provided by
a single equation through the introduction, in a certain
way, of time as a fourth variable. In this, the three space
coordinates were used as in the Lorentz transformation;
the time variable, however, was no longer represented by t
but by ?? ù 1 ct. The result was an equation which dealt
with the "real" world, of which the differing descriptions
as seen from differently moving bodies were but partial
and incomplete expressions; moreover, the curve produced
from plotting a series of such equations representing
phenomena contiguous in time would represent nothing
less than a continuum of the real worldùmuch as to the
wolf and the dog of George Lewes, "the external world
seems a continuum of scents."
  Minkowski thus gave a mathematical formalism to what
had been the purely physical conception of Special
Relativity. But more important in some ways was the
language in which he clothed his workùessential in the
mathematical context where it was used, but misleading
outside it unless sufficient explanation were given. Thus
an event which takes place in three-dimensional space at a
specific time is described as a "world-point," while a series
of consecutive eventsùthe movement of a rocket, of a
man, or of an electronùis described as a "world-line."
More significantly, and confusingly, time is described as
"the fourth dimension."
  Einstein was well aware of the bewilderment which such
language created. "The nonmathematician," he wrote, "is
seized by a mysterious shuddering when he hears of 'four
dimensional' things, by a feeling not unlike that awakened
by thoughts of the occult. And yet there is no more
commonplace statement than that the world in which we
live is a four-dimensional space-time continumm." Here
even Einstein, whose scientific explanations have at times
a breathtaking simplicity, does not go quite far enough.
For he does not explain that while for the layman the word
"dimension" signifies one of the three measurements of a
body represented by length, breadth, or thickness, for the
mathematician it means a fourth variable which must,
naturally enough, be inserted into any equation concerning
events, since these occur not only in space but at a certain
instant in time.
  The change produced by Minkowski was clear enoughù
"from a 'happening' in three-dimensional, space, physics
becomes, as it were, an 'existence' in the four-dimensional
'world,'" as Einstein said. Or, as Jeans had written of
Einstein's original paper, "The study of the inner workings
of nature passed from the engineer-scientist to the
mathematician." Einstein was in no doubt about the
difficulties that might ensue in the nonmathematical
world. "Since the mathematicians have attacked the
relativity theory, I myself no longer understand it any
more," he claimed, tongue in cheek. "The people in
G÷ttingen sometimes strike me," he said on another
occasion, "not as if they wanted to help one formulate
something clearly, but as if they wanted only to show us
physicists how much brighter they are than we."
  However, all this was merely the ripple of his exterior
amusement. He knew, and he was subsequently to stress
the fact, that it was Minkowski who not only transformed
the Special Theory but who brought it to the attention of
men outside the comparatively small world of theoretical
physics.
  The paper in the G÷ttinger Nachrichten had been
important but was of limited influence. Something more
significant was involved when in September, 1908, the
Deutsche Naturforscher und Artzte, a body used by
scientists to help spread the knowledge of their individual
disciplines among a wider audience, met in Cologne. Here
Minkowski delivered his lecture on "Space and Time," and
after half a century his opening words still have a fine
ring:

  Gentlemen! The ideas on space and time which I wish to
develop before you grew from the soil of experimental physics.
Therein lies their strength. Their tendency is radical. From now
on, space by itself and time by itself must sink into the shadows,
while only a union of the two preserves independence.

  For Minkowski, relativity had become a central fact of
life. After he and David Hilbert had visited an art
exhibition at Kassel, Hilbert's wife asked what they
thought of the pictures. "I do not know," was the reply.
"We were so busy discussing relativity that we never really
saw the art." Minkowski was among the most austere and
dedicated of mathematicians. He was the last man to
popularize, to play to the gallery. Yet he had sounded the
trumpet for relativity in no uncertain fashion. He was still
only forty-four and in the early winter of 1908 it would not
have been too outrageous to speculate on the prospects of
future long-term collaboration between Minkowski in
G÷ttingen and Einstein in Berne. Then, towards the end of
the year he fell ill. He was taken to the hospital and died of
peritonitis on January 12, 1909ùregretting on his
deathbed, according to a legend which has more than a
touch of plausibility: "What a pity that I have to die in the
age of relativity's development."
  The increased fame which Minkowski brought Einstein
among a larger circle of German scientists looks less
surprising today than it did in 1908. In retrospect it is
possible to see Einstein's papers of 1905, the almost
equally dramatic paper of 1907, and Minkowski's
dΘnouement of 1908, as parts of a steady increase of
reputation which in the end would inevitably be too great
to be contained by the four walls of the Patent Office.
  The break came the following year. So did Einstein's first
honorary doctorate, his first professional appointment, and
his first major invited paper, read to the annual meeting of
the Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher und ─rzte whose
members had twelve months earlier listened to Minkowski.
In fact 1909 was the year when the chrysalis opened and
the professor of theoretical physics emerged, fully formed,
equipped at all points, an independent animal whose
eccentricities, once regarded as the irresponsibilities of a
too casual youth, were now seen as the stigmata of genius.
  The first important event in this year which marked a
watershed in Einstein's life was an invitation to Geneva,
where the university was celebrating the 350th anniversary
of its foundation by Calvin. Einstein, it had been decided,
should be awarded an honorary doctorate. Almost forty
years afterwards, he recalled that he thought the letter
from Geneva was merely a circular and had tossed it into a
wastepaper basket; only when Geneva inquired why there
had been no reply was the crumpled invitation retrieved
and accepted.
  Einstein traveled to Geneva early in July and was duly
honored, together with Marie Curie, steely and
determined, the woman who "felt herself at every moment
to be a servant of society"; Ernest Solvay, the Belgian
whose chemical profits endowed his eponymous
congresses; and Wilhelm Ostwald, who a few months later
won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on catalysis.
  No firsthand record of Einstein's visit to Geneva appears
to have survived, but the secondhand stories are in
character if not entirely free from an air of mythology.
Certainly he seems to have arrived at the various
ceremonies in informal dress, possibly in the straw hat
with which legend credits him. And it was in the true
Einstein tradition that he should turn to a neighbor at the
sumptuous university banquet with the remark: "Do you
know what Calvin would have done had he been here? He
would have erected an enormous stake and had all of us
burnt for sinful extravagance."
  Two months after the Geneva visit came something more
important. The previous summer Einstein had been visited
in Berne by Rudolf Ladenburg, a physicist from Berlin
who was also an official of the Naturforscher. The result
was an invitation to lecture at the organization's 1909
conference, and in September Einstein left Berne for
Salzburg, where this was to be held. The next few days
were significant; before he was thirty, he told a colleague
of this occasion, he had "never met a real physicist."
  At Salzburg Einstein gave his first major "invited paper,"
thus exhibiting himself before an informed critical
audience. He thus came under the close-range scrutiny of
the pillars of the scientific establishment. But he in turn
was able to scrutinize them. Those he met included
Planck, Wien, Rubens, and Sommerfeld. "I am much
struck by the last-named," he wrote to Laub on December
31. "He is a splendid chap." And at Salzburg he also met
for the first time young Ludwig Hopf, who was to become
his assistant in Zurich and Prague, and Max Born from
Breslau, the physicist who had listened entranced to
Minkowski on "Space and Time" in Cologne and had then
joined him in G÷ttingen.
  Judging by what was to follow, it was Planck rather than
Sommerfeld whom Einstein might have singled out for
special mention; for it was he for whom Einstein was to
have a near reverence which Planck noted and turned to
Germany's benefit when he could. The two men had been
in correspondence, at first desultory, since 1900, but
Planck was increasingly impressed by the young man who
had boldly taken his quantum theory into fresh fields. In
1908 Planck, an ardent mountaineerùclimbing the
12,000-foot Ortler when well into his sixtiesùhad been
staying at Axalp in the Bernese Oberland and he and
Einstein were to have met there; but the plan fell through.
Only now, at Salzburg, did the two men come face to face.
Einstein's lasting attitude was illustrated twenty years
later. Asked to contribute a preface to Planck's Where Is
Science Going?, "he said that it would be presumptuous on
his part to introduce Max Planck to the public, for the
discoverer of the quantum theory did not need the reflected
light of any lesser luminary to show him off. That was
Einstein's attitude towards Planck, expressed with genuine
and na∩ve emphasis."
  At Salzburg, relativity as such was dealt with by Max
Born, three years younger than Einstein and still with his
name to make. "This seems to be rather amusing," Born
wrote subsequently.

  Einstein had already proceeded beyond Special Relativity which
he left to minor prophets, while he himself pondered about the
new riddles arising from the quantum structure of light, and of
course about gravitation and General Relativity which at that
time was not ripe for general discussion.

  Einstein was still only thirty. He had already shaken the
scientific world with an esoteric theory about which some
of his elders still retained doubts. It would not have been
surprising if he had chosen a comparatively "safe" subject
on which to discourse before such a high-powered
audience. But that was not the Einstein way. His paper was
entitled "The development of Our Views on the Nature and
Constitution of Radiation," and it was subsequently
described by Wolfgang Pauli as "one of the landmarks in
the development of theoretical physics." Its challenge
came quickly:

  It is undeniable that there is an extensive group of data
concerning radiation which show that light has certain
fundamental properties that can be understood much more
readily from the standpoint of the Newtonian emission theory
than from the standpoint of the wave theory. It is my opinion,
therefore, that the next phase of the development of theoretical
physics will bring us a theory of light that can be interpreted as a
kind of fusion of the wave and mission theories. The purpose of
the following arguments is to give a foundation for this opinion,
and to show that a profound change in our views of the nature
and constitution of light is indispensable.

  So the young manùstill a mere "doctor" with not a
professorship to his nameùwas to make the members of
his audience profoundly change their views about light and
to suggest that it was both particle and wave as well!
Planck, rising first when the discussion was opened,
probably spoke for the majority: "That seems to me," he
said, "to be a step that, in my opinion, is not yet called
for."
  Einstein's paper lived up to its promise. For he invoked
the E = mc2 of his second relativity paper of 1905 which
showed that the emission of energy in the form of light
caused a change of mass and therefore supported the
corpuscular theory. And he went on to argue that the
elementary process of emission took place not as a
spherical wave which classical theory demanded but as
directed, or needle, radiation. This was grasping Planck's
nettle with a vengeance. With the benefit of hindsight, it is
clear that only Einstein would have dared to do it.
  In the audience was Lise Meitner, a young woman of
thirty-one studying under Planck in Berlin. "At that time I
certainly did not yet realize the full implications of his
theory of relativity," she wrote more than half a century
later,

  and the way in which it would contribute to a revolutionary
transformation of our concepts of time and space. In the course of
this lecture he did, however, take the theory of relativity and
from it derive the equation: energy = mass times the square of
the velocity of light, and showed that to every radiation must be
attributed an inert mass. These two facts were so
overwhelmingly new and surprising that, to this day, I remember
the lecture very well.

  Almost exactly three decades later, walking at Christmas
with her nephew Otto Frisch in the Stockholm woods, Lise
Meitner hit upon the explanation of what Otto Hahn, one
of Planck's successors in Berlin, had just discovered in
Berlin: nuclear fission, which with Einstein's mass-energy
equation was the key to nuclear weapons.
  Einstein left Salzburg after the conference of 1909 for a
short holiday in the surrounding country and then returned
to Berne. But this time it was a return with a difference.
For now, at the age of thirty, he was at last to part
company with the Patent Office and to take up his first
full-time academic post.
  In 1908 it had been decided to establish a chair of
theoretical physics in the University of Zurich and
Professor Kleiner, who had helped Einstein to become a
privatdozent in Berne, chose him for the post. However,
Kleiner's early enthusiasm had waned, due partly it
appears to Einstein's facility for being his own worst
enemy. According to Philipp Frank, the professor had
attended one of Einstein's lectures in Berne and concluded
that it did not seem to be at the right level for students. "I
don't demand to be appointed a professor at Zurich,"
Einstein retorted. Here it may not have been only his
brusque honesty coming to the surface. He may have had
his sights on something higher than the university. For
while this was merely a cantonal institution, the ETH,
where Einstein had graduated, and for which he always
kept a soft spot in his heart, was a federal organization,
standing on the higher educational ground and with the
reputation that went with the situation.
  Whatever Kleiner's personal feelings, something else was
involved. His assistant was Friedrich Adler, the son of
Viktor Adler who had founded the Austrian Social
Democratic party, and a fellow student with Einstein at the
ETH. The father had sent his son to study physics in
Switzerland in the hope that he would be kept from
politics. Yet it was politics which now stretched out to
touch him in the academic world. For the members of the
Zurich Board of Education had the final say in the
appointment of the newly created chair, and a majority of
the board were Social Democrats. In an ideal world this
would have been irrelevant; nevertheless, the chair was
offered to Adler.
  This fact does not appear to have worried Einstein. The
affair of the professorship had "ended in smoke, which I
am glad of," he wrote to his friend Laub. "There are
enough schoolmasters without me." However, it had not
yet ended. The young Adler was a man of paranoiac
honesty, and of a nature which was to bring him to the
door of the execution yard a few years later. Once he
learned that Einstein would have accepted the post had it
been offered, he reported to the Board of Education in no
uncertain words: "If it is possible to obtain a man like
Einstein for our university, it would be absurd to appoint
me. I must quite frankly say that my ability as a research
physicist does not bear even the slightest comparison to
Einstein's. Such an opportunity to obtain a man who can
benefit us so much by raising the general level of the
university should not be lost because of political
sympathies."
  To his father in Vienna, Adler wrote in much the same
style. On November 28 he reported that he had again
spoken with Kleiner, urging him to end the protracted
argument by making a firm recommendation about
Einstein, and adding: "I hope to have achieved this by
Christmas."
  During this period Einstein himself appears to have been
searching around for another nonuniversity appointment.
He wrote to Marcel Grossmann, asking whether he should
apply for a post in the Technical College at Winterthur;
applied to the Gymnasium of the Zurich Kantonsschule for
details of a vacancy for a mathematical master; and
discusses in more than one letter to Laub the prospects for
what appear to be nonuniversity posts. He might have been
happy in any of themùaccording to the hindsight of forty
years on. "Teaching is always satisfying if one has an
interest in the young," he wrote after the Second World
War to one of his wife's young Balkan friends who was
starting life as a schoolmistress. "I might have gone in for
it myself in earlier years but I could not find a place."
  However, while he was still searching around, Adler's
honest argument had its effect. Early in the new year
Einstein was called to Zurich to see Kleiner who, as he
wrote to his friends the Ehrats on February 15, "expressed
himself very graciously on the success of the 'exam,' and
hinted that something would very soon mature." Only one
doubt apparently remained. "If I am not compelled to stay
here"ùat the Patent Officeù"on account of the accursed
money," Einstein went on, "my prospects apparently look
very rosy for the next autumn." However, the following
April he was still waiting. "Would you believe it," Adler
wrote to his father on April 16, apparently after a fresh
series of appointments had been announced, "Einstein was
not mentioned, and I'm glad that I did not wait any longer
but began my holiday." But the money problem was finally
settled and his appointment was formally announced by
the early summer.
  On July 6, 1909, he handed in his resignation to the
Federal Department of Justice and Police by whom he was
formally employed. According to Patent Office legend,
Haller at first refused to take the resignation seriously.
When forced to realize that Einstein really was intent on
leaving, he wrote to the Federal Council, officially making
a request for his employee's release. "The departure means
a loss for the office," he wrote. "However, Herr Einstein
feels that teaching and scientific research are his proper
calling, and thus the director of the office has refrained
from tempting him to remain by offers of financial
betterment."
  Einstein, returning to Switzerland from the Salzburg
meeting, first supervised the change of home from Berne
to Zurich and then, in October, took up his post in the
university. Two days later he realized he had forgotten to
report his move to the authorities and wrote to Lucien
Chaven, still in Berne: "I send you my Dienstbⁿchlein and
the establishment license with the request that you report
my departure to the police and the District Command."

CHAPTER 6

MOVES UP THE LADDER

Einstein's appointment in Zurich was that of associate
professor, not full professor, and his salary was only the
4,500 francs a year he had been receiving at the Patent
Office. It was augmented by lecture fees, and was raised by
1,000 francs in 1910, but these additions did not
compensate for the increased expenses of a university
professor and the higher cost of living in Zurich. By
contrast with his position little more than a decade later,
when he could have commanded whatever salary he
wished, Einstein still lived and worked among the poorly
paid, overworked lower professional classes and, to make
ends meet, Mileva took in student lodgers. "In my
relativity theory," he once said to Frank, "I set up a clock
at every point in space, but in reality I find it difficult to
provide even one clock in my room."
  Even so, Einstein had at last officially broken through
into the academic world and the future seemed plain
sailing. The prospect was of a placid life at one or possibly
two Swiss universities, of responsibility increasing steadily
through the years, life in an ivory tower safe within the
citadel. In fact, the future was to be dramatically different.
Within five years Einstein was to have served three
universities in three countries as well as the Zurich ETH, a
more than usually peripatetic record for a scientist of those
times. Within a few more years he was to become involved
in the battles of pacifism, the struggle of Zionism, and the
expanding role of scientists in world affairs. And in 1939
he was to help unleash nuclear weapons on the world. But
there was no hint of this in 1909 when he expected, as he
was to say after another twenty years, "to spend all his
time in more solitary pursuits."
  If there was any suggestion of a coming change in his
life, it concerned his private affairs. The mutual patience
with each other of Einstein and his wife was already
wearing thin, and to Besso he wrote, a few weeks after
settling into Zurich, that he had not recovered the balance
of mind which "M" had made him lose. This situation had
a bearing on his movement during the next few yearsù
from Zurich to Prague, back to Zurich, and then on to
Berlin. But the restlessness of his wife, who acquiesced in
his move to Prague yet whose dislike of the ferment in the
Bohemian capital was partly responsible for his return to
Switzerland, was only one factor.
  There was also his own personal ambition. It is
fashionable to think of Einstein as a man insulated from
the problems of real life, never worrying about money,
scornful of honors and careless of the position which the
world accorded him. Later on, as the most famous scientist
in the world, he could afford to be casual. But earlier,
when he was, as T. H. Huxley once said of his own career,
only "at the edge of the crush at the pit-door of this great
fools' theater," he had perfectly valid reasons for wishing
to press on for recognition. With his ill-organized life, a
certain minimum of money was required to cope with the
day-to-day routines of life and provide peace and leisure
for his work. Apart from this financial need, which
justified a circumspect move from one appointment to the
next, there was one other, dominating, reason for his
shuttlings back and forth across Europe during these years
before the First World War. He was, as he often said, the
kind of man who did not work well in a team.
Furthermore, his mental stature was such that he needed
little stimulation from other workers in his own field. At
the same time he preferred to work in a congenial
intellectual climate. He liked being near the places where,
as he once put it in a letter to Janos Plesch, "the future was
being brewed."[Compare with Snow's reference to
scientists who "feel the future in their bones."] It is no
coincidence that in Prague he was directed by Georg Pick
towards the mathematical apparatus which he needed for
his General Theory of Relativity, and that he completed
this work in a wartime Germany amid a galaxy of talent
which included such men as Sommerfeld, von Laue,
Planck, and Weyl.
  Little of this could have been forecast as he turned to the
business of academic life for the first time in the autumn of
1909. With his wife and his son Hans Albert he moved
into an apartment in Moussonstrasse at the bottom of the
Zurichberg, and here his second son, Eduard, was born in
July, 1910.
  The Adlers also lived in the same building. "We are on
extremely good terms with the Einsteins, who live above
us," Friedrich Adler wrote to his parents on October 28,

  and as things turned out I have become closer to him than to any
of the other academics. The Einsteins live the same Bohemian
life as ourselves. They have a son the same age as Annika who
spends a lot of time with us. ... The more I speak with Einstein,
and this happens often, the more convinced do I become that I
was right in my opinion of him. Among contemporary physicists
he is not only the clearest but the one who has the most
independent of brains, and it is true that the majority of
physicists don't even understand his approach. Apart from that,
he is a pure physicist, which means that he is interested in
theoretical problems which unfortunately is not the case with
me."

  In addition, Einstein was popular as a lecturer. This was
due partly to his lack of convention, partly to his humor,
partly to memories of the Munich Gymnasium which made
it impossible for him to fit into the usual professorial mold.
He went to a great deal of trouble over his first lecture, in
order to help students, recalled his old friend from Aarau,
Dr. Adolf Fisch. "He repeatedly asked the class whether
they understood him. In the breaks he was often
surrounded by male and female students who wanted to
ask questions. In a patient and friendly manner he tried to
answer them."
  He lectured in Zurich regularly throughout termtime; on
an "Introduction to Mechanics," on thermodynamics, the
kinetic theory of heat, on electricity and magnetism, and
on selected topics from theoretical physics. The number of
students was usually in single figuresùmore the result of
the tepid interest in physics than of any lack of ability in
the master. Adler neatly sums up the situation after
Einstein had taken up his appointment. "My mathematics
lecture had an audience of only four, which is as good as
can be expected in a small university such as this. But
people must go and listen to Einstein, as they have to take
their examinations with him, and after seven hours they
have had more than enough."
  He was precise and clear, he rarely used notes, yet he
never floundered as even the best extemporaneous lecturer
can. His humor was of the quiet, throwaway kind which
illustrated points in his thesis, a sometimes quixotic,
frequently irreverent humor which delighted his students.
He was, moreover, one of the few lecturers who openly
invited his listeners to interrupt him if they failed to
understand a point, and it was obviously with the memory
of the Luitpold Gymnasium still in his mind that he wrote
to Chavan on January 17 saying: "Teaching also gives me
great pleasure, chiefly because I see that my boys really
enjoy their work."
  The flavor of Einstein the teacher is given by Dr. Hans
Tanner of Frauenfeld, who attended Einstein's lectures for
many months. "During the whole time, as far as I can
remember, Einstein only got stuck once," he has said.

  He suddenly stopped in the middle of a lecture and said: "There
must be some silly mathematical transformation which I can't
find for the moment. Can one of you gentlemen see it?" Naturally
none of us could. "Then leave a quarter of a page. We won't lose
any time. The answer is as follows."
  Some ten minutes later Einstein interrupted himself in the
middle of an elucidation. "I've got it." At first we did not
know what he meant. During the complicated development of
his theme he had still found time to reflect upon the nature of
that particular transformation. That was typical of Einstein.

  It was also typical that he should cultivate a casual
friendship with his students, unusual at that time. Taking
them to the Terrasse CafΘ after the weekly physics
colloquium, bringing them home to discuss the riddle of
the universe over coffee in the manner of the Olympia
Academy little more than a decade before, Einstein
appeared a happy man, outwardly satisfied with his
financial status and content with the fame he had already
achieved.
  The niche in which circumstance had placed him seemed
a satisfactory one. He was sixteen and a half when he
arrived in Switzerland. Now he was thirty-one, a whole
impressionable lifetime away, a Swiss citizen bound to the
country by the strong bonds of all converts, blind to its
defects and soberly convinced that in their system of
government the Swiss had found the democratic key to the
political millennium. He occasionally traveled outside the
frontiers and brushed shoulders with other members of the
international physicists communityùPlanck from Berlin,
Rutherford from England, PoincarΘ from Parisùthe
scientific revolutionaries who were already overturning
man's idea of the place he lived in. Yet their more
rambustious worldùthe world of the Berlin laboratories,
of the CollΦge de France, and of the Cavendish, all places
against which Zurich had a faintly provincial airùhad
little attraction for Einstein. He needed no more than
pencil, paper, and pipe, peace for relaxation with his
violin, a nearby lake to sail on, the opportunity for an
occasional not-too-strenuous stroll in pleasant scenery.
Switzerland, that happy, happy land, offered it all.
  This was outwardly the situation at the end of 1910,
when he had been teaching in Zurich for little more than a
year. Yet during the first months of 1911 his colleagues
heard astounding news: Einstein was about to leave
Switzerland for Prague. This was, as his Swiss biographer
has noted, "a grievous blow for Swiss science." It would
have seemed even more grievous had it been known that
Einstein had been considering the move within a few
months of coming to the city in October, 1909.
  So much, and a good deal more, is clear from the
correspondence between Friedrich Adler and Adler's
father in Vienna, to whom the son described in blow-by-
blow detail the moves which preceded Einstein's next step
up the ladder. Although Adler had refused the chair in
Zurich eventually taken by Einstein, he had continued to
hold a post in the university. "I am still after all a physicist
and this has its drawbacks because when Einstein leaves
people will look upon it as a tragedy if I am not his
successor, which I do not want," he wrote on January 23,
1910. This was no boasting letter from son to father. Adler
had in fact been offered the chief editorship of the Social
Democrat Volksrecht and was at first unable to understand
why Einstein was, as he put it on February 15, "so upset
that I am not remaining a scientist."
  The reason became clear the following month. "Einstein
remonstrated most strongly with me about joining the
Volksrecht," he wrote to his father,

  asking me at least to cancel my holiday for this term. And at
last something has come out which no one knows; he has
received the offer of a post at another university. He has told me
this in confidence, so please do not repeat it. His argument is
that he can then propose me for his post with added confidence,
which he wants to do not from feelings of personal friendship but
from impartial conviction. This is nice of him but does not alter
the situation.

  Exactly a month later Einstein revealed to his colleague
that the mysterious offer was from the German University
in Prague, where the faculty had unanimously put forward
his name. "No one knows of this other than myself, and I
ask you not to mention it," Adler wrote to his father.
  For Einstein there was more than one attraction in an
appointment to the capital of Bohemia, third city of
Austria-Hungary, a splendid assembly of noble palaces,
royal parks, and lavishly decorated churches. The first
rector of the university had been Ernst Mach. And at
Benetek, a few miles outside Prague, Tycho Brahe, the
Dane who had ushered in a great age of astronomy, had
employed the young Kepler. These were associations
which could not be ignored by a man of Einstein's
background. He would not have ignored them even had he
been aware of the complex emotional, racial, and political
situation which was already beginning to develop in
Prague. But in 1910, Einstein was not very aware; he was
then even less of a political animal than he became in later
life; most of what went on outside his own world he
considered irrelevant and much of it he considered
unpleasant. Thus he was barely awake to the fact that in
Prague the struggle between the indigenous population and
their German masters was already bitter if concealed, or
that the existence of two universities in the city, German
and Czech, created as a compromise solution in 1888, was
only one indication of this. In addition, but apparently
unknown to him, a large Jewish community had for years
added an important religious and racial element to what
was essentially a political situation.
  As in Zurich two years previously, two main names were
put forward for the Prague appointment. But whereas in
Zurich the initial solution had been simple, hacked out by
the chopper of political loyalties, the complications in
Prague were numerous enough to add an air of farce. On
the one hand there was Einstein. On the other there was
Gustav Jaumann, professor at the Technical Institute in
Brno. The choice between them rested on the
recommendation of Anton Lampa, head of the physics
faculty, and was exercised formally by the Emperor
through the Ministry of Education. Lampa favored
Einstein, influenced as he was by the belief that the latter
was still an unequivocal Machistùand no doubt by
Planck's words of advice: "If Einstein's theory should
prove correct, as I suspect it will, he will be considered the
Copernicus of the twentieth century." The Ministry
preferred Jaumann not only because he was a Machist; in
addition, he had the virtue of Austrian birth.
  The situation was further complicated by university
regulations, which laid down that the importance of
candidates' publications should govern their positions on
the entry list. Einstein's papers from 1902 onwards
brought him to the top. But this was too much for
Jaumann, a self-styled unrecognized genius who now
withdrew from the race protesting: "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 merit." The move appeared to leave
the field open for Einstein.
  But now another impediment arose. While the Emperor
Franz Joseph had no direct role in the appointment, he
could exercise a veto; and it was known that the Emperor
would confirm university appointments only by confessing
members of a recognized church, a state of grace from
which Einstein was self-excluded. This local difficulty
became clear soon, and on June 23 Adler wrote to his
father telling him that his friend's Prague appointment
might not be definite. For although Einstein had never
officially renounced his faith, and was therefore
technically a Jew, it was well known in Zurich that for all
practical purposes he was an "unbeliever."
  The position was made clearer in a letterùundated but
apparently also written on June 23ùwhich Adler's wife,
Katya, sent to her father-in-law. "On Sunday Einstein
came and told us that the offer from Prague was not going
to materialize," this went.

  There was a second problem: they did not want "a foreigner."
However, [Adler] maintains that the trouble is not that Einstein
is a "foreigner" but that he is an unbeliever. The university found
this out and this is the inevitable result. ... Now Einstein is as
unpractical as a child in cases like this, and [Adler] finally got
out of him the fact that on the application form he put down that
he was an unbeliever but did not say that he had not left the
Church. As Einstein very much wants the Prague post, and as the
first hurdle would be the question of his religion, [Adler]
suggested to him at the time that he should pass the whole thing
over to Lampa in Prague so that should the question arise in
discussion, Lampa would be briefed. Einstein did not do this;
and now, following the letter from Lampa, he can hardly do so.
Einstein is naturally disappointed that the appointment is
rejected since this means that the same thing will happen with
any other position for which he applies.

  That Einstein's attitude was the result more of muddle
than agnostic scruple seems clear from a letter which he
wrote less than two years later when Paul Ehrenfest ruled
himself out from becoming Einstein's successor by roundly
declaring himself an atheist. "I am frankly annoyed that
you have this caprice of being without religious
affiliations," wrote Einstein, already a friend and admirer
who would have been overjoyed if Ehrenfest could have
taken his chair; "give it up for your children's sake.
Besides, once you are professor here you can go back to
this curious whim againùand it is only necessary for a
little while."
  However, in the summer of 1911, when Einstein was an
innocent year younger, it seemed too late for him to
retrieve his own position by such sleight of mind. But all
was not yet lost. "The affair is under way again," Adler
wrote to his father on September 23; Einstein had received
a request to call on the Minister of Education in Vienna,
and was leaving Zurich for the city that morning.
"Perhaps," Adler added, "it would be useful for him to see
you and discuss things while he is there. ... In all practical
things he is absolutely impractical."
  This time there was no hitch. Imperial doubts were
circumvented and Einstein's appointment to the chair was
at last confirmed. Only, however, after he had reluctantly
agreed to take Austro-Hungarian nationality, a necessity
since the appointment would make him a civil servant. As
a consolation he was allowed to remain a Swiss so that
now, for the first but not the last time, he was able to claim
the privileges of dual nationality.
  According to Katya, Einstein wanted this Prague
appointment "very much," and for several reasons. In
Prague he would be a full rather than an associate
professor; his salary, moreover, would be higher, and
friends who later met him in Prague commented on his
improved standard of living. In Berne the Einstein home
had been lit by oil lamps. In Zurich there had been gas. In
Prague it was electricity. This was more than an index of
technological advance; in Prague, the Einsteins for the
first time had a maid living in.
  But the clue to the real attraction of this capital, where
the swords of German-Czech animosity were already being
sharpened, is to be found in the final words of a letter from
Einstein to Lucien Chavan written a few months after his
arrival. "I am having a good time here, even though life is
not so pleasant as in Switzerland," he wrote.

  Apart from the fact that I am an alien, there is no water here
that one can drink without its being boiled. The population for
the most part speaks no German and is strongly anti-German.
The students, too, are not so intelligent and industrious as in
Switzerland, but I have a fine institute with a magnificent library.

  In one way Einstein was like many another manùhe kept
an eye on the main chance. Only in his case the objective
was not making a fortune but keeping close to the
resources which would stimulate him most. He liked
Zurich and the Swiss: but what was that against "a fine
institute with a magnificent library?"
  The move to Prague took place in March, 1911, and
Einstein quickly settled down in his new post, considerably
helped by Ludwig Hopf, his young assistant in Zurich who
had moved east with him. He was to stay in the city less
than eighteen months, yet the experience was to be
important. Here he was forced to note, however much he
tried to push out of his mind all except his work, the
ambiguous position of the Jews in a community already
divided against itself. He was forced to notice the emotions
aroused in many Jewish friends by the very mention of the
Zionist cause, as well as the pan-German feelings which
were already moving the Central Powers towards the
precipice of the First World War. In Prague he had as
pupil Otto Stern, the Silesian physicist who was to follow
him to Zurich in 1912, hold a succession of posts in
Germany, cross the Atlantic in the great refugee wave of
the 1930s, and dramatically reenter Einstein's life during
the final months of the Second World War. And in Prague
Einstein was introduced to the mathematical machinery
which helped him solve the problems of general relativity.
  This extension of his powers came through George Pick,
once an assistant of Ernst Mach and twenty years older
than Einstein. Pick and Einstein had a mutual interest in
music. They struck up a strong friendship, and when
Einstein spoke of the difficulties he was having, Pick
proposed that he consider using the absolute differential
calculus of Ricci and Levi-Civita. The two men remained
in touch long after Einstein had left Prague, and in June,
1939, with the Germans already in occupation of the city,
Pick, then aged eighty, sent a long letter to Einstein in
Princeton reminiscently discussing the past. He died, a few
years later, in Theresienstadt concentration camp.
  Comparatively little is known of Einstein's life in the
Bohemian capital, and the fullest account is given by
Philipp Frank, the Austrian physicist with whom he had
been in correspondence about causality in 1907. Frank had
become a leading member of the Vienna Circle, a group
including Carnap, Neurath, and Moritz Schlick, which
formed the hard core of the logical positivists who stressed
"Mach's requirement" that worthwhile statements had to
be capable of test by physical experiment. Einstein's
Machist beliefs were still strong. Frank was a young
physicist of great promise. And when Einstein left Prague
in the summer of 1912 Frank, only just twenty-eight, was
appointed in his place.
  One thing is quite clear both from Frank's account and
from the stray reminiscences which Einstein himself
passed on to his friends over the years. This is that he
responded to "the political air in which the town was
steeped" and to the situation in which the Jews of Prague
found themselves. For here Czechs and Germans lived in
their own closed worlds. The professors of the two
universities rarely met and the Germans isolated
themselves from the Czech majority within their own
cultural ring of concerts and lectures and theaters. "Yet
half the Germans were Jews, a fact which tended to drive
them towards a mutually supporting alliance. "On the
other hand," Frank points out,

  the relation of the Jews to the other Germans had already begun
to assume a problematical character. Formerly the German
minority in Prague had befriended the Jews as allies against the
upward-striving Czechs, but these good relations were breaking
down at the time when Einstein was in Prague. When the racial
theories and tendencies that later came to be known there as Nazi
creed were still almost unknown in Germany itself, they had
already an important influence on the Sudeten Germans. Hence a
somewhat paradoxical situation existed for the Germans in
Prague. They tried to live on good terms with the Jews so as to
have an ally against the Czechs. But they also wanted to be
regarded as thoroughly German by the Sudeten Germans, and
therefore manifested hostility against the Jews. This peculiar
situation was characterized outwardly by the fact that the Jews
and their worst enemies met in the same cafΘs and had a common
social circle.

  All this presented a particularly piquant state of affairs
for Einsteinùa reneged German, Swiss by choice, who by
accepting a post at the German University had been forced
to take Austro-Hungarian nationality against his own
wishes. It was the first of many nonscientific problems that
the pursuit of physics was to pose. He resolved it by openly
becoming a member of the Jewish community although
tending to ignore his German origin.
  The Prague community included Franz Kafka, Hugo
Bergmann, and the writer Max Brod. Much of its activity
centered on the home of Bertha Fanta, an ardent Zionist,
and while its sphere of influence was intellectual and
artistic rather than political, the ultimate triumph of
Zionism was accepted almost as a fact of nature. Einstein
could not be troubled with such an idea, and for him these
Jews formed "a small circle ... of philosophical and Zionist
enthusiasts which was loosely grouped round the
university." It was one thing to be concerned with the
affairs of fellow Jews in a foreign capital; it was quite
another to consider Jewry and its problems on a world
basis. For, in the words of Philipp Frank, "the problems of
nationality and of the relations of the Jews with the rest of
the world appeared to him only as a matter of petty
significance."
  His aloofness from what many fellow Jews regarded as
the great cause no doubt affected the interpretation of
Einstein which Brod introduced into his novel The
Redemption of Tycho Brahe. Here the portrait of the young
Kepler has many of the characteristics of Einstein. Frank
claims that Walther Nernst, professor of physical
chemistry in Berlin with whom Einstein was later to be
closely associated, told Einstein on reading the book: "You
are this man Kepler." This is significant as suggesting how
not only Brod in Prague, but Nernst at a later period,
considered the Einstein whom they saw at close quarters.
For the figure of Kepler-Einstein is that of the scientist at
the height of his intellectual powers; fully stretchedùin
this case on the generalization of relativity; not concerned
with the rest of the human race; only distantly aware of the
surrounding turmoil; and regarding the responsibility of
science as a responsibility confined to the scientific arena.
  Some phrases in Brod's book epitomize Albert Einstein
at this central period of his life; others give a clue to his
failure as from the 1920s onwards he became the supporter
of every good cause that could gain his ear. Thus the
young Kepler-Einstein begins to inspire the old Tycho
Brahe with a feeling of awe.

  The tranquility with which he applied himself to his labors and
entirely ignored the warblings of flatterers was to Tycho almost
superhuman. There was something incomprehensible in its
absence of emotion, like a breath from a distant region of ice. ...
He had no heart and therefore had nothing to fear from the world.
He was not capable of emotion or love. And for that reason he
was naturally also secure against the aberrations of feelings.

  It would have been easy to consider such a man as an
intriguer whose continuing success was due to cunning,
but it was clear to Brahe "that Kepler was the very
opposite of an intriguer; he never pursued a definite aim
and in fact transacted all affairs lying outside the bounds
of his science in a sort of dream." The picture of a Kepler
working with the instinct of genius within his own
scientific shell, but all at sea when he left it, is a not too
inaccurate picture of Einstein in his later years, of the man
with two Achilles heels: a too trusting belief in the
goodness of people and a desperately held and innocent
belief that the grand investigations of science not only
should but could be insulated from the worlds of politics
and power. Strangely, the belief survived even Fritz Haber
and the First World War. It did not survive his desire to
beat the Germans twenty-five years later.
  But all this was to come. In Prague there was merely the
faintest glimmer of awakening in his Jewish
consciousness, an awareness which he himself did not
recognize until he arrived in Berlin. This is clear not only
from Frank but from the testimony of Dmitri Marianoff,
one of Einstein's two stepsons-in-law. Einstein himself
protested strongly against Marianoff's biographyùas he
was to protest against almost any public mention of his
private life and tastesùbut there is little reason to dispute
the non-scientific details of the book, which have obviously
come from Einstein in reminiscent family mood, barriers
down.
  Marianoff makes a point of the way in which Einstein
was thrown up against his inner Jewishness by the daily
circumstances of Prague life. "Once in his strolls through
the city he stumbled on a short alley that led to an old
high-walled Jewish cemetery, preserved there since the
fifth century," he wrote.

  The story of his race for a thousand years was told before him
on the tombstones. On them were inscriptions in Hebrew with
symbolic records of a tribe or a name. A fish for Fisher, a stag for
Hirsch, two hands for the tribe of Aaron. Here he found the
battered, chipped, and crumbling slab of the tomb of Rabbi
Loeue, the friend of Tycho Brahe, the sixteenth century
astronomer whose statue with the globe and compass in his
hands Einstein had just passed in front of the Svato-Tynsky
Chram.

  What Einstein also tended to remember from Prague,
according to Marianoff, was "the solemn sounds of the
organ in Catholic cathedrals, the chorales in Protestant
churches, the mournful Jewish melodies, the resonant Hus-
site hymns, folk music, and the works of Czech, Russian,
and German composers." This was the world in which he
sought relaxation, moving in "a sort of dream" while his
mind concentrated on the work that mattered.
  Most important within this work was the continuing
riddle of gravity. Throughout the whole of his stay in
Prague he worked steadily towards a solution of the
problems it presented, returning to the principle of
equivalence and the "thought-experiment" with light that
he had devised to test its validity. The result was another
paper for the Annalen der Physik.
  "In a memoir published four years ago," it began,

  I tried to answer the question whether the propagation of light
is influenced by gravitation. I return to this theme, because my
previous presentation of the subject does not satisfy me, and for a
stronger reason, because I now see that one of the most important
consequences of my former treatment is capable of being tested
experimentally. For it follows from the theory here to be brought
forward, that rays of light, passing close to the sun, are deflected
by its gravitational field, so that the angular distance between the
sun and a fixed star appearing near to it is apparently increased
by nearly a second of arc.

  Here was the essential Einstein, dissatisfied with earlier
work and worrying round it until he unearthed the chance
of providing experimental evidence.
  The "theory here to be brought forward" incorporated his
idea of how gravity affected the matter of the physical
world. Yet matter, as he had already shown, was really
congealed energy, while light quanta, or photons,
consisted of particles which had changed their mass in the
process of reaching the speed of light. Viewed thus it
seemed plausible, even without Einstein's logical structure
of argument, that light should be affected by the tug of
gravity as certainly as the cannonball. In fact Newton had
asked in his Opticks: "Do not bodies act upon Light at a
distance and by their action bend its Rays; and is not this
action (coe£teris paribus) strongest at the least distance?"
And the German astronomer Soldner had used Newton's
cor- puscular theory of light for predicting a similar
deviation although his figure was only half that demanded
by Einstein's theory.
  But there was another consequence which Einstein now
brought forward for the first time. If light is produced in a
star or in the sun, an area of strong gravity, and then
streams down on the earth, an area of weak gravity, its
energy will not be dissipated by a reduction of speed, since
this is impossible, light always having the same constant
speed. What would happen, Einstein postulated, was
something very different: the wavelength of the light
would be changed. This "Einstein shift," the assumption
that the spectral lines of sunlight, as compared with the
corresponding spectral lines of terrestrial sources of light,
must be somewhat displaced toward the red," was spelled
out in some detail. However, he was careful to add the
qualification that "as other influences (pressure,
temperature) affect the position of the centers of the
spectral lines, it is difficult to discover whether the
inferred influence of the gravitational potential really
exists." In fact the Doppler shift, produced by the motion
of the stars relative to the solar system, was to provide an
additional and even more important complication.
  What Einstein concentrated on instead was the deflection
of light by the sun, and his paper ended with a prophetic
paragraph:

  A ray of light going past the sun would accordingly undergo
deflection to the amount of 4.10-6=.83 seconds of arc. The
angular distance of the star from the center of the sun appears to
be increased by this amount. As the fixed stars in the parts of the
sky near the sun are visible during total eclipses of the sun, this
consequence of the theory may be compared with experience.
With the planet Jupiter the displacement to be expected reaches
to about 1/100 of the amount given. It would be a most desirable
thing if astronomers would take up the question here raised. For
apart from any theory there is the question whether it is possible
with the equipment at present available to detect an influence of
gravitational fields on the propagation of light.

  The paper of 1911 had one major limitation. For what it
considered was one, and only one, special case of the
effects of gravity: that in which gravity had the same force
and direction throughout the entire space that was being
considered. This was a simplification that helped Einstein
to move the theory forward, but it worried him, partly
because of its artificiality and partly because he realized
that its removalùand the consequent creation of a theory
more in accord with realityùwould demand a
mathematical expertise that was still beyond him.
  Despite this limitation, which was eventually to lead him
deeper into the mathematicians' world, and which was in
some ways to blunt the intuitive feel for physics which was
his real genius, the paper of 1911 was important for one
special reason. In it, Einstein threw down the gauntlet to
the experimentalists. Was light bent by gravity as it passed
near the sun? Surely this was a question to which it should
be possible to provide a clear-cut yes-or-no answer? It was
not to be quite as simple as that; but from 1911 onwards he
pointed out with increasing persistence that here was one
way of proving or disproving experimentally a theory
which had been built up logically but which had as its
foundation little more than an intuitive hunch.
  Meanwhile he worked on in Prague. And meanwhile the
new status he was acquiring began to bring lecture
invitations in increasing numbers. In January, 1911, he
was invited to Leiden by Lorentz, and he and Mileva
stayed with the Lorentz family the following month.
Shortly afterwards he was formally invited to a major
scientific conference, the First Solvay Congress,[The
Conseil de Physique Solvay is usually translated into
English as the Solvay Congress. However, Jean Pelseneer,
Professeur Extraordinaire, UniversitΘ Libre, Brussels, and
the author of an unpublished "Historique des Instituts
Internationaux de Physique et de Chimie Solvay depuis
leur fondation," points out that while a "Congress"
involves a large number of scientists or others, Solvay's
scheme was almost the reverseùthe invitation of a small
number of men representing the cream of European
physicists. "Council" or "Conference" is suggestedùbut
"Congress" is by this time probably too well used to be
changed.] held in Brussels between October 30 and
November 3, 1911. Einstein, the ex-German Swiss,
attended it as an Austro- Hungarian.
  The Solvay Congress, the first of many, was organized by
the Belgian chemist and industrialist, Ernest Solvay, at the
instigation of Walther Nernst, a leading figure in the
German scientific hierarchy. Solvay was an able man,
already in his seventies, who had patented his own soda
process and whose companies were reported to be making
nine-tenths of the world's supply. He had for long been in
close contact with Nernst, to whom he proposed the idea of
using part of his great wealth for the good of science.
Solvay's own hobby was the development of a new
physical theory and Nernst pointed out that if he called a
conference of Europe's leading physicists he would then be
able to outline the theory to them. Subsequently they could
discuss among themselves, in a series of invited papers,
the crisis in physics which had been introduced during the
past decade by the quantum theory, the discovery of
radioactivity, and the investigation of the atom. Solvay
responded, and in the autumn of 1911 a score of Europe's
leading physicists arrived in Brussels. Their fares had been
paid, accommodation was provided in the Hotel
Metropole, where two rooms had been set aside for the
congress, and each was given an honorarium of 1,000
francs for attendance. "The whole undertaking pleases me
very much and I scarcely doubt that you are its instigator,"
said Einstein in accepting Nernst's invitation and agreeing
to read a paper.
  It was not these lavish trappings but the standing of those
who came to Brussels which made the congress more
important for Einstein than any other he had attended.
Planck, Nernst, and Rubens were among those from
Germany; PoincarΘ, Madame Curie, and Langevin among
those from France. James Jeans and Rutherford came from
England, while from Austria-Hungary came Einstein and
Franz Hasen÷hrl, later to be spuriously credited with
Einstein's mass-energy equation. Lorentz himself presided
over the congress, which was also attended by Kamerlingh
Onnes from Leiden. Maurice de Broglie from Paris, Gold
schmidt from Brussels, and Frederick Lindemann, then
studying under Nernst in Berlin, acted as secretaries. It
was very different from the Salzburg meeting. Here
Einstein was brought in to an "experts only" conference
whose quality can be gauged from the studied photograph
which survived in the Metropole through two German
occupations. It shows a striking group of menùand one
woman ùthe real revolutionaries of the twentieth century.
  In Brussels Einstein met Planck, Nernst, and Lorentz on
equal terms for the first time. Here also he met Madame
Curie, then at the height of her fame, and Ernest
Rutherford, the epitome of the huge New Zealand farmer
looking round for new land to bring into cultivationùbut
this time the unexplored territory of physics. "Einstein all
calculation, Rutherford all experiment," was the verdict of
Chaim Weizmann,[Einstein, writing some forty years later
to Carl Seelig, commented: "I concentrated on speculative
theories, whereas Rutherford managed to reach profound
conclusions on the basis of almost primitive reflection
combined with relatively simple experimental methods."]
the man as close to Rutherford scientifically in the coming
war as he was close to Einstein in the postwar Zionist
movement. There were other contrasts between the two
men, highlighted by the fact that Rutherford never entirely
lost a trace of scepticism when dealing with foreigners.
Thus when Wien claimed that no Anglo- Saxon could
understand relativity, Rutherford had a ready answer: "No.
They have too much sense."
  In Brussels there also met for the first time the two men
who occupied such ironically contrasted positions during
the Second World War: Einstein, popularly credited with
the most important influence on the creation of nuclear
weapons, and Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell), more
correctly credited, as Churchill's eminence grise, with a
comparable influence on Britain's wartime science. Linde
mann, only twenty-five at the time of the Solvay Congress,
facing a distinguished and disgruntled future, as different
from Einstein as man of the world from provincial recluse,
was to become firm friend and devoted admirer. "I well
remember my co-secretary, M. de Broglie, saying that of
all those present Einstein and PoincarΘ moved in a class by
themselves," he wrote almost half a century later. His first
reaction was given in a letter to his father.

  I got on very well with Einstein, who made the most impression
on me except perhaps Lorentz. He looks rather like Fritz
Fleischer "en mal," but has not got a Jewish nose. He asked me
to come and stay with him if I came to Prague and I nearly asked
him to come and see us at Sidholme.[The Lindemann home in
south Devon.] ... He says he knows very little mathematics, but
he seems to have had a great success with them. ...

  Lindemann's biographer notes that

  observing this shy genius at close quarters, [he] formed an
opinion of Einstein's character which he never revised. He saw
there the towering intellect which made him for Lindemann the
greatest genius of the century, but he saw also a pathetic na∩vetΘ
in the ordinary affairs of life. Einstein appeared to him to be
living in a universe of his own creation, and almost to need
protection when he touched the mundane sphere. In all matters of
politics he was a guileless child, and would lend his great name
to worthless causes which he did not understand, signing many
ridiculous political or other manifestos put before him by
designing people.

  Yet the two men were united by one thing: the view that
human beings counted for little when weighed against the
splendid problems of physics. Lindemann, according to
one colleague, "had time for a few dukes and a few
physicists, but regarded most of the rest of mankind as
furry little animals." Substituting "pacifists" for "dukes,"
much the same was true of Einstein.
  The theme of the congress was radiation and quanta, and
Einstein contributed a paper, "The Actual State of the
Problems of Specific Heats," which dealt with the
fundamental arguments he had used to explain the
anomalies of specific heat at low temperatures. Madame
Curie's reaction was typical. She "appreciated the
clearness of his mind, the shrewdness with which he
marshaled his facts, and the depth of his knowledge."
Most of those attending felt much the same.
  While the congress was in progress, Einstein was
involved in a typically Einsteinian imbroglio. It arose from
his readiness to leave the chair in Prague to which he had
been appointed only some eight months previously.
Mileva's attitude played a part. Although she had enjoyed
life in Switzerland, it is clear from her letters to the Adlers
that she approved the move to Prague; thus the readiness
to uproot herself again, and so quickly, at first seems
surprising. Frank, who was to succeed Einstein in the
German University, has given one explanation. To some
degree, he has said, it was certainly the wish of his first
wife who was accustomed to Zurich. She had found it
difficult to adapt herself to the life in Prague. This was
strange since she was by birth a Yugoslav woman. But she
had come to Switzerland as a student and was not able to
perform a second assimilation. Mileva herself, writing
from Pragueù apparently to Michelangelo Besso's wife
when she knew that she would be leaving, said that she
thought she would hardly be homesick for Prague. But, she
went on, some nice things had happened. However,
Einstein was not a man to be unduly swayed by his wife's
feelings; whatever Mileva may have thought about
Switzerland, it was to yet another country that his eyes
now turned. The reason, as so often with Einstein, can be
found in the answer to one question: What would be the
effect of the move on his scientific work?
  In Prague there was the "fine library"; there was contact
with such minds as George Pick. But the enthusiasm of the
first few weeks soon evaporated. One reason is supplied by
his eldest son, only six at the time but vividly remembering
how his father later explained the situation. "He had," he
says, "to lecture on experimental physics. And he was
always happy when something went right." This was not at
all what Einstein had bargained for. He liked contact with
young students. He was always happy explaining the
excitements of physics. But he liked to do this when he
wished, not when he had to, and he liked to keep clear of
routine experimental work. In fact he was not really cut
out for a normal university chair, and if he had to occupy
one he wanted the terms to be more flexible than they were
at Prague. "I want my peace," he was to explain a decade
later. He wanted it even in 1911; peace in which to think
and reach out to touch the stars. At Prague it was difficult
to get. Within a few months of arrival, he was preparing to
move.
  The circumstances are described in a long series of letters
between Einstein, Lorentz, and Professor Julius of Utrecht
University, the solar physicist who Einstein respected as a
"clear-sighted, artistically fine-spirited man." It is not easy
to acquit Einstein of some deviousness in the situation
which they reveal. However, the evidence is circumstantial
and much can be explained by the muddled simplicity with
which he handled most affairs outside physics; in this case
it was, for him, a singularly fortunate muddle.
  On August 20, 1911, some two months before the First
Solvay Congress, Professor Julius informed Einstein that
Professor Windt, the university's professor of physics, had
died earlier in the month. "Our university and the interests
of physics would best be served if it were possible for you
to take over the professorship," he wrote. But several
members of the faculty would be against the appointment
of a foreigner, and his letter should therefore be regarded
only as an unofficial feeler. Einstein replied by return,
pointing out that he had been in Prague for only four
months, had acclimatized himself there, and must ask
Julius "to consider another colleague for the vacancy."
  However, he was by this time an important enough
scientific fish to be worth angling for carefully. The
following month Julius tried again after the members of
the faculty had met. "It was simply unthinkable at our
meeting not to mention your name," he wrote. "Everyone
was in full agreement that your reasons for refusing were
not decisive and that I should make a further attempt at
convincing you." Einstein's reply suggested that perhaps
the attractions of Prague were not really so great after all.
He recalled his lectures at Leiden the previous spring and
noted how everyone there had charmed him, quite apart
from the incomparable Lorentz. And he was, he added,
"seriously thinking" of accepting the Utrecht offer. But
there was one point that Julius might well have taken as a
warning. "I must tell you one more thing," Einstein went
on. "Before I left my home in Zurich to go to Prague, I
promised privately to let the Polytechnic know of any other
post that I might take up so that they in turn could tell me
if they had knowledge of any vacancy." The implications
of this might have been clear to Julius, who had just
received a letter from Lorentz saying: "Einstein only
prefers Prague because there is little hope of going to the
Polytechnic." But he still pressed on, writing on September
27 that he hoped Einstein would be "more impressed with
the prospects at Utrecht than at Zurich," and following it
up with a further letter on October 11, saying that he was
still waiting for Einstein's answer.
  Einstein finally replied on October 18. He apologized for
the long delay and explained that he had been away for
three weeks, first to the Gesellschaft Deutscher Natur
forsches und ─rzte in Karlsruhe. Then he had gone to
Zurich "to take part in a vacation course." And at Zurich
he had learned that the Polytechnic might wish to offer
him a post, although he added that they were, in fact, "not
likely" to press on with the offer. But he asked "for the
sake of my fellow citizens"ùhe was, after all, a burgher of
Zurichùfor a little more time to make up his mind about
Utrecht.
  This was the position when he went to Brussels at the end
of October for the Solvay Congress. Just what was said
there about the Utrecht appointment is not certain. But it is
clear that Lorentz, having been asked by his Dutch
colleagues to use his influence with Einstein, bungled the
mission; also that Einstein backed the choice of Peter
Debye, the Dutch physicist who had taken his chair at the
University of Zurich the previous year. He also pushed
Debye's claims when he went on from Brussels to meet
Julius in Utrecht before returning to Prague; and from
Prague, on November 15, he wrote to Julius finally turning
down the Utrecht post.
  In this reply Einstein thanked Julius for his friendly
welcome in Utrecht. "These pleasant personal
experiences," he went on,

  have made my final decision to stay here more difficult, but I
am now finally decided. Look at the situation from my position.
Here I have a roomy institute, a beautiful library, and no
difficulty with the language which, with my difficulty at learning
them, has weighed heavily in the scales. Consider also the
personal scruples which we talked about and which I cannot
forget. Then you will understand my decision and not hold it
against me. However, rest assured that it was extremely difficult
to turn down the chance of entering your circle, so pleasant both
culturally and physically. The moment I returned I wrote to
Debye and have received his reply saying that the opportunity of
returning to his fatherland under such pleasant conditions gives
him great pleasure. My high opinion of him you already know, so
it is unnecessary to repeat it and I need only say that I am very
pleased about his acceptance by the university.

  Indeed there is no doubt that he was very pleased. For the
offer from Zurich, which he had casually mentioned to
Julius some weeks earlier, had been hardening. The
authorities had already written to Madame Curie and
Henri PoincarΘ about Einstein's suitability for the post,
and a letter now arrived in Prague from Marcel
Grossmann telling him what was going on. "Naturally, by
and large, I am in favor of accepting a chair of theoretical
physics in your Polytechnic," he replied. "The prospect of
returning to Zurich affords me great delight. This prospect
has in the last few days caused me to refuse an offer from
Utrecht University." This was not quite the story which he
had given to Julius.
  Einstein's correspondence with Lorentz hints at a twinge
of misgiving. "You have gathered by now, despite my long
silence to your last letter, that not the slightest shadow is
cast on our relationship through the Utrecht affair,"
Lorentz wrote to him on December 6.

  I would like to stress once more that there is no question of your
having hurt my feelings, and am convinced that you have taken
the course that you think right. This does not deny that I am very
depressed about the result of your discussion with the Utrecht
faculty, but that is not your fault; only that of fate which did not
wish to treat us favorably this time. If only I had written to you at
the start. But it was not possible as one is very reserved in
Utrecht, and rightly so. In the meantime I guessed, but did not
know, that you had been contacted. Because I suspected as much,
I mentioned to Julius the day before I left for Brussels that you
and I would meet (I saw him at the Academy Conference). I had
hoped in this way to be able to speak to you about the offer from
Utrecht, and immediately received permission to do so, as well
as being asked to try to persuade you to accept. If only I had
succeeded in expressing myself better or, before it was too late,
known about your scruples; I could perhaps have removed any
obstacles. But I will not continue with this "if only ..."; it does
not help us. I will console myself with the fact that after all you
will be achieving great things in Zurich too.

  Lorentz concluded with the best of wishes, hoped that
they would meet again soon, noted that if Einstein was
able "to open up fresh vistas in physics, that will be one of
my greatest joys," and ended with a postscript: "I have
caught you out in a mathematical error: Namely, 25 francs
= 12 Fl. Dutch, and you sent me Fl. 15.09. I therefore
return Fl. 3."
  The convoluted negotiations for the Utrecht chair,
reminiscent of C. P. Snow at his best, were now followed
by a further misunderstanding equally surprising to find
among grown men. For two days later Lorentz wrote
again, asking whether Einstein's decision to go to Zurich
was final. Einstein, not knowing that Lorentz had decided
to retire from his chair at Leiden, thought that he still had
the Utrecht chair in mind. His ignorance saved him from
making an awkward choice. He would have found it
difficult to refuse Lorentz, yet he preferred Zurich to
Leidenùand was by this time justifiably confident that it
would formally be offered to him. He had accepted before
Lorentz brought the real situation to his notice.
  Einstein had been given outstanding references for what
it had now been decided should be a new chair of
mathematical physics at the ETH. One was from Madame
Curie. "I much admire the work which M. Einstein has
published on matters concerning modern theoretical
physics," she wrote from Paris on November 17.

  I think, moreover, that mathematical physicists are at one in
considering his work as being in the first rank. At Brussels,
where I took part in a scientific conference attended by M.
Einstein, I was able to appreciate the clearness of his mind, the
shrewdness with which he marshaled his facts, and the depth of
his knowledge. If one takes into consideration the fact that M.
Einstein is still very young, one is justified in basing great hopes
on him and in seeing in him one of the leading theoreticians of
the future. I think that a scientific institution which gave M.
Einstein the means of work which he wants, by appointing him to
a chair in the conditions he merits, could only be greatly honored
by such a decision and would certainly render a great service to
science.

  Henri PoincarΘ wrote in similar vein, stressing Einstein's
youth and the vistas which his ideas had opened out. "The
role of mathematical physics," he concluded, "is to ask
questions; it is only experience that can answer them. The
future will show, more and more, the worth of Einstein,
and the university which is able to capture this young
master is certain of gaining much honor from the
operation."
  Some news of the situation seems to have seeped through
from Zurich to Prague, probably via Marcel Grossmann,
and by the end of 1911 Einstein knew that his star was
rising rapidly. In addition to the aborted offer from
Lorentz, there had come others from Vienna and from the
Reichsanstalt in Berlin. Both had been turned down and he
now looked hopefully forward to a return to Zurich. By
now, moreover, his fame had spread to the United States,
and during the first days of 1912 he received an invitation
from New York's Columbia University. Would he consider
coming for four to six weeks as a special lecturer in
physics during the autumn or the spring of 1913? "While I
am not authorized to make you any definite proposition, I
wish if possible to open the way for one," wrote George
Pegram.

  We have in times past been honored by the presence here of
such men as Professors Larmor, Planck, Lorentz, and others on
the basis of such a lectureship. ... I can assure you that your
coming would be welcomed, not only by the men at Columbia,
but by many from neighboring institutions who have been
interested in watching, even if not contributing to, the
development of the relativity theory. ...
  Personally I have been very much interested in the relativity
theory since my attention was first directed to it by Professor
Lorentz, and I should be glad to see greater appreciation of it
in America, where I confess our physicists have been rather
slow to take it up.

  Einstein replied on January 29. "Unfortunately," he said,
"I am so loaded with different kinds of work that I cannot
even think about a trip like that." And with his typical
modesty he concluded: "I am convinced that it will be easy
for you to find a man who will be more experienced for a
task of this nature than I."
  His spare time was now filled with thoughts of a return to
Zurich, and in February he was able to write happily to
Otto Stern: "Two days ago (Halleluja!) I was called to the
Zurich Polytechnic and have already handed in my
resignation here. Great joy felt by the old people and the
two little bears." His feelings were further shown a few
weeks later when he ended a letter to Professor Kleiner of
the University of Zurich, whom he had been advising on
the choice of staff: "With the friendliest of greetings, I
remain, Yours A. Einstein, who is tremendously happy
that he will soon be setting up his tent once again in
Zurich."
  Before he left Prague, he had one visitor whose impact
was to be considerable. This was Paul Ehrenfest, a man ill
starred for a tragic life whose work in physics was
perpetually to hover round the borders of genius. Ehrenfest
had been born in Vienna and had studied and graduated
there before obtaining a special professorship at the St.
Petersburg Polytechnic. But his position as an Austrian
barred the way ahead; so did the fact that he was a Jew,
even though he declared himself as without religion. In
addition, Ehrenfest's gay unconventionality, which so
mirrored Einstein's, hardly helped him in the clamber up
the academic ladder. He was, it has been written, bored by
lectures at which the audience was not expected to
interrupt, and especially so if he was the lecturer.

  In contrast to the usual education principles, he infected his
students with his own enthusiasm and rushed with them to the
outposts of the empire of physics, where the fighting against the
great unknownsùrelativity and quantum theoryùwas going on.
But at the same time, he did not forget to take them to an
occasional tower from which he could show and explain to them
in his masterly way the domains already conquered.

  In the autumn of 1912 Ehrenfest decided to tour German
speaking Europe in search of a better post, and almost
automatically found his way to Einstein in Prague. The
two men had been in professional touch a few years
earlier, and by 1912 each admired the other's work.
"Whatever I can do for you I will certainly do," Einstein
wrote in reply to news of Ehrenfest's impending visit: "...
stay at my house so that we can make good use of the
time."
  Ehrenfest arrived on February 23 and stayed for a week.
The two men talked only a little about the search for a new
appointment. As Einstein wrote later, "It was the state of
science at the time that took up almost all of our interest.
... Within a few hours we were true friends, as though our
dreams and aspirations were meant for each other."
  Martin Klein, whose first volume of Ehrenfest's
biography, The Making of a Theoretical Physicist, gives
such a splendid portrait of the man, has described that first
week's encounter in some detail. Its flavor is given by one
paragraph:

  Two days of continual scientific dispute (by no means onesided,
as Ehrenfest found an error in Einstein's reasoning and supplied
a simple intuitive way of seeing the correct result) must have
broken down any barriers there might have been between them.
By Sunday they were playing Brahms violin and piano sonatas
together. "Yes, we will be friends," Ehrenfest wrote in his diary.
"Was awfully happy."

  He stuck to his nonreligious guns and was not offered the
Prague chair. But before the end of the year he had been
appointed to Leiden as successor to Lorentz. Soon
afterwards Einstein made the first of many journeys to stay
with the Ehrenfests, as happy with their children as when
he accompanied their parents in playing Bach. "Nature
created us for each other," he wrote in 1922. "I find it
difficult to find a human contact beneficial to me. I need
your friendship perhaps more urgently than you need
mine." What he had found was another man to whom
physics was the whole of life and who put everything else
firmly in its place.
  Einstein and his family left Prague for Switzerland in
August, 1912. His appointment at the ETH was for ten
years, and as he moved into his fifth home in Zurich he
may well have looked forward to settling down at last.
  In the autumn of 1912 he began holding weekly
afternoon colloquia at which new work was discussed. By
now his reception was very different from what it had been
in the university only three years earlier, and it was not
only members of the ETH who attended. Students at the
university, and their professors, found ways and means of
joining in, and the meetings were usually crowded,
Einstein affably discussing the latest developments with
anyone who could contrive to be present. He remained
unchanged. The meetings over, he would do as he had
done years previously, carrying on the discussion outside
the building with those who accompanied him to his
favorite cafΘ. He found it difficult to relinquish his grasp
on the problem in hand. Years afterwards his students
recalled him standing in a snowstorm under a lamp at the
foot of the Zurichberg, handing his umbrella to a
companion and jotting down formulas for ten minutes as
the snowflakes fell on his notebook.
  Von Laueù"the most important of the younger German
theorists. His book on the theory of relativity is a little
masterpiece," Einstein wrote to Kleinerùnow crossed his
path again, coming to speak on interference of X rays, an
occasion which was followed by Einstein opening the
discussion and extemporizing "on the most intricate
problems of physics with as much ease as if he were
talking about the weather." Many scientists came to Zurich
specifically to see him and von Laue recalls one particular
visit when he saw Einstein and Ehrenfest striding along in
front of a great swarm of physicists as they climbed the
Zurichberg, and Ehrenfest bursting out in a jubilant cry: "I
have understood it." Von Laue's words echo the same air
of nuclear innocence that then permeated the Cavendish
Laboratory where Andrade could offer a toast to "the
useless electron, and long may it remain so."
  Another visitor was Madame Curie, with whom Einstein
and his wife stayed in Paris late in March, 1913, when he
addressed the SociΘtΘ Francaise de Physique. It is clear
from Madame Curie's correspondence, and from Einstein
and Mileva's "thank you" letters, that she had shepherded
an unsophisticated pair through the rigors of a hurried and
demanding visit. In return, Einstein hoped that she would
allow him to help her "about the small journey into the
mountains when term comes to an end." Typically, he
ended the invitation with a brief postscript which began
"And now a note about physics!"
  The Curiesùmother and two daughtersùarrived in
Zurich in July for a fortnight in the Bregaglia Alps and the
Engadine with Einstein, his wife, and his elder son. The
holiday was a great success. Years later Hans Einstein
remembered how they had crossed the Maloja Pass on foot;
how his father and Madame Curie had inspected the
glacier mills, Einstein cogitating on the forces which had
carved these deep vertical wells; and how Madame Curie,
recalling the fact that Einstein was technically a Swiss,
demanded that he name every peak on the horizon.
  There was ample reason for her to seek out Einstein and
to mull over with him, during the informal talks of a
walking holiday, the implications of the new ferment in
physics in her own specialized field of radioactivity. Fresh
radioactive substances were being discovered, and the key
to their characteristics and behavior obviously had to be
sought within Rutherford's new concept of the atom, now
known to consist of a positively charged central nucleus
surrounded, at a comparatively great distance, by one, by a
few, or by a cloud of orbiting electrons. Einstein, with his
instinctive feel for the nature of things, would obviously
have worthwhile viewsùwhile it was already clear that
subnuclear particles moved at speeds fast enough to make
relativistic effects important.
  However, so far it was only physicists who were brought
into intimate day-to-day contact with the implications of
relativity. Many other technical men found it difficult to
see that "the new physics" formed part of their world, as
was evident when Einstein spoke on the subject during a
visit to G÷ttingen.
  "I remember watching the engineering professors who
were present and who were, of course, horrified by his
approach, because to them reality was the wheels in
machineryùreally solid entities," says Professor Hyman
Levy, then a research student at the university.

  And here was this man talking in abstract terms about space
time and the geometry of space-time, not the geometry of a
surface which you can think of as a physical surface, but the
geometry of space-time, and the curvature of space-time; and
showing how you could explain gravitation by the way in which a
body moves in space-time along a geodesicùnamely the shortest
curve in space-time. This was all so abstract that it became
unreal to them. I remember seeing one of the professors getting
up and walking out in a rage, and as he went out I heard him say,
"Das ist absolut Bl÷dsinn" ("That is absolute nonsense").

  Whatever arguments there might be among engineers,
physicists realized that a new star had risen in the
scientific firmament and was still rising fast. Einstein was
now among the "European professors distinguished in
philosophy and science," and as such he supported in the
summer of 1912 the foundation of a scientific association
"quite indifferent to metaphysical speculation and so
called critical, transcendental doctrines" and "opposed to
all metaphysical undertakings." The idea started in Berlin
and foundered with the outbreak of war two years later.
But its manifesto was the first such collective statement to
be signed by Einstein; and it underlines his frequent
statements that Special Relativity was the outcome not of
metaphysical speculation but of considering scientifically
the results of experimental evidence.
  "There has long been felt the need of a philosophy which
should grow in a natural manner out of the facts and
problems of natural science," begins the manifesto, which
was signed by some three dozen professors, including
Mach, Einstein, Sigmund Freud, andùperhaps
significantlyùF÷ppl. After agreeing that there had
evolved "a strictly empirical and positivistic point of view
quite indifferent to metaphysical speculation and to so
called critical, transcendental doctrines and systematic
relations throughout considerable scientific circles," the
manifesto continued:

  On the other hand the particular sciences find themselves forced
to consider problems of even greater generality so that they take
on of themselves a philosophical character. ... In the theory of
relativity [physics] touches the most searching question thus far
of epistemology: Is absolute or is only relative knowledge
attainable? Indeed: Is absolute knowledge conceivable? It comes
here directly upon the question of man's place in the world, the
question of the connection of thought with the brain. What is
thought? What are concepts? What are laws? In psychological
problems, physics and biology come together. And finally, the
anthropological sciences, especially history and sociology, find
themselves brought into closer and closer connection with
biological concepts.
  Those who take an interest in these progressive inquiries
will find it to their advantage to have a scientific association
which shall declare itself opposed to all metaphysical
undertakings, and have for its first principle the strictest and
most comprehensive ascertainment of facts in all fields of
research and in the development or organization and
technique. All theories and requirements are to rest
exclusively on this ground of facts and find here their ultimate
criterion. ...

  Einstein signed this document while still trying to
generalize his theory of relativity so that it would apply not
only to the special case where gravity operated as a force of
constant intensity and direction but also in all the
multiplicity of special cases which existed throughout the
universe. In this he was aided by his old friend Marcel
Grossmann, the former colleague of a dozen years before,
whose notes during student days had enabled him to skip
mathematics and concentrate on physics. This particular
chicken was coming home to roost and it was on Gross-
mann that Einstein now leaned heavily for the
mathematical support which he needed. Even so, it was
hard going and Einstein, apologizing to Ehrenfest for the
delay in writing to him, explained in May, 1913: "My
excuse is the actually superhuman exertions with which I
have devoted myself to the problem of gravitation. I am
now inwardly convinced that I have found the right way,
but at the same time I am also sure that a murmur of
indignation will travel down the rows of our colleagues
when the work appears, which will happen in a few
weeks."
  There was an ironic outcome of the work. In 1913
Einstein and Grossmann published jointly a paper which
came much nearer to the theory of gravity for which
Einstein was still groping. This was "Entwurf einer
Verallgemeinerten Relativitatstheorie und eine Theorie der
Gravitation" ("Outline of a General Theory of Relativity
and a Theory of Gravitation"), to which Einstein
contributed the physical sections and Grossmann the
mathematical. Einstein was dissatisfied with the paper, for
its equations appeared to show that instead of a single
solution to any particular set of gravitational circumstances
there was an infinitude of solutions. He believed "that they
were not compatible with experience." This, together with
the conclusion that the results would not agree with the
principle of causality, led him to believe that the theory
was untenable. "These were errors in thinking which
caused me two years of hard work before at last, in 1915, I
recognized them as such and returned penitently to
Riemann curvature, which enabled me to find the relation
to the empirical facts of astronomy," he said. Yet the 1913
paper contained the clue to its own apparent discrepancy:
what appeared to be an infinitely large number of solutions
to one problem was really a single solution applicable to
each of an infinitely large number of different frames of
reference. Thus the cards of the General Theory of
Relativity had been laid face upwards on the table in 1913.
They were picked up again by Einstein himself in 1915.
But they had lain there unnoticed for two years.
  By 1913 Einstein had thus reached a temporary impasse.
But his views on the need for generalizing the Special
Theory aroused great interest, and in September he put
them before the eighty-fifth meeting of the Gesellschaft
Deutscher Naturforscher und ─rzte, held in Vienna. The
auditorium was packed with scientists anxious to hear
about a theory even more outlandish than Special
Relativity. In some ways they were disappointed. Instead of
the esoteric explanations they had expected, there came
one of Einstein's minor masterpieces of simple statement,
an account in which he compared the development of the
various theories of gravitation with the development of
successive concepts of electricity. As one of his Zionist
friends was later to comment, when Einstein wished, he
could "speak of basic metaphysical concepts such as time
or space as matter-of-factly as others speak of sandwiches
or potatoes."
  The lecture was remarkable, however, not only for the
clear exposition which foreshadowed some of Einstein's
later scientific writings, so much more understandable
than many of his interpreters, but for an incident which
well illustrates his character. In his recent work he had
used a generally covariant form of the electromagnetic
equation first given the previous year by a young Viennese
physicist, Friedrich Kottler. In their paper Einstein and
Grossmann had acknowledged their indebtedness, but
Einstein had never met Kottler personally. On the spur of
the moment he asked whether Kottler was in the audience.
A young man rose. Einstein asked him to remain
standingùso that all could see the man whose help had
been so useful.
  Although Special Relativity had by this time become
incorporated into the new framework of physics with little
more than a disapproving grunt from its more conservative
critics, the situation was very different with Einstein's still
tentative generalized theory. "It was clear in the discussion
that followed that many German-speaking men of science
were not yet converted to his ideas," says Robert Lawson, a
young English physicist then working in the city's Radium
Institute, and the man who later translated into English
Einstein's first book on relativity. "Doubts were expressed
on the validity of his views on the equality of inertial and
gravitational mass, on the velocity of propagation of
gravitational processes, on the possibility of ever being
able to detect the deflection of light rays in a gravitational
field or the predicted red shift of spectral lines in such a
field." At one point the debate grew quite heated, with
Felix Ehrenhaft, for long a colleague and later an
opponent of Einstein, arguing at length with two of the
critics. To relieve the tension, someone pressed the button
that automatically shifted the blackboard from one part of
the platform to anotherùcalling out as he did so: "Look.
The blackboard moves against the lecture hall and not the
lecture hall against the blackboard." Einstein remained
unperturbed, smiling, and noting only that he was
prepared to stand or fall by experimental results.
  This lecture propelled him into the news, when a
Viennese daily paper produced the headline: "The Minute
in Danger, A Sensation of Mathematical Science." Even
by 1913, eight years after the publication of the first
relativity paper in the Annalen der Physik, the subject was
still sufficiently unknown to the general public to be
presented as a "sensation"ùa premonitory hint of what
was to happen in 1920 when the implications of General
Relativity burst upon an exhausted world.
  During this visit to Vienna Einstein heard dramatic news
of the theory put forward by the Danish physicist Niels
Bohr, which united Rutherford's concept of the nuclear
atom with the Planck-Einstein quantum theory. Bohr was
still only twenty-eight, but already as deeply concerned as
Einstein not only with the upheaval in physics through
which they were living, but with its underlying
philosophical implications. The two were to be friends for
nearly forty years, but the matters on which they agreed
were more than balanced by those in which each
unsuccessfully struggled to convert the other. Both at first
failed to appreciate the practical results which would flow
from their work; both, when nuclear weapons arrived,
appreciated more quickly than many of their fellow
scientists the political and moral implications; both, in
many ways epitomizing the stock character of absentmind-
ed scientists, were anxious to direct nations into decent
ways. These motives united them as much as the argument
for and against determinacy divided them, an argument
which was to lead Einstein into scientific isolation for the
later years of his life.
  Bohr had been educated as a physicist in Copenhagen
and had come under the special influence of Max Planck.
But he had also studied and worked in England, first under
J. J. Thomson at the Cavendish and then under Rutherford
at Manchester. Long afterwards, reminiscing on his past,
he reflected on his good luck that Denmark had been
politically free until the German invasion of 1940, thus
allowing him to maintain contacts with both German and
British schools of thought. One result of these contrasted
contacts was the theory, whose confirmation Einstein now
heard in 1913, which successfully accounted for some
puzzling features of Rutherford's nuclear atom by
invoking the idea of Planck's quanta.
  According to classical physics, the electrons orbiting the
nucleus of Rutherford's atom would lose energy by
radiation and inevitably spiral into the nucleus itself,
giving out as they did so a continuous spectrum of
radiation. But this did not happen; instead, free atoms
radiated certain specific and discrete frequencies that were
characteristic of the atom concerned. Bohr explained this
behavior with two suppositions. The first was that atoms
exist only at well-defined stationary states or levels, and
that at each of these states the electrons circle the nucleus
in specific "allowed" orbits. While this continues the atom
emits no radiation. Bohr's second supposition was that
when an electron jumpedùfor whatever reasonùfrom one
of its "allowed" orbits to another "allowed" orbit nearer
the nucleus, then radiation was emitted; by contrast, when
an atom absorbed radiation, one or more of its orbiting
electrons jumped from its "allowed" orbit to another
farther from the nucleus. Both emission of radiation and
its absorption took place in discrete unitsùthe light quanta
of the Planck-Einstein quantum theory of 1905. Thus Bohr
had vindicated by one stroke of supreme genius both
Planck's conception of radiation by discontinuous surges
of energy and Rutherford's picture of the atom as a
miniature solar system with electrons orbiting a central
nucleus.
  He had, moreover, gone further than disembodied theory.
He had applied this to the hydrogen atom and, "leaning
directly on Einstein's treatment of the photoelectric
effect," as he himself wrote, had proposed to Rutherford
that the theory was now susceptible to spectroscopic proof.
Such proof was provided in Cambridge in the autumn of
1913 by Rutherford's son-in-law, Ralph Fowler, then
working in the Cavendish. Fowler passed the news to
Rutherford and Rutherford passed it on to George de
Hevesy, the Hungarian-Danish chemist from the
Cavendish who was attending the conference in Vienna.
Hevesy in turn told Einstein, and on October 14 wrote to
Rutherford describing the occasion.
  "Speaking with Einstein on different topics we came to
speak on Bohr's theorie [sic]," he wrote from Budapest.
"He told me that he had once similar ideas but he did not
dare to publish them. 'Should Bohr's theories be right, so
it is from [sic] the greatest importance.' When I told him
about the Fowler Spectrum the big eyes of Einstein looked
still bigger and he told: 'Then it is one of the greatest
discoveries.' I felt very happy hearing Einstein saying so."
Hevesy's statement that Einstein "had once similar ideas"
about this crucial problem was supported years later by
Bohr himself, speaking in Moscow at the Institute of
Physical Problems. Einstein's reaction, as apparently
explained to Bohr himself was: "I could probably have
arrived at something like this myself but if all this is true
then it means the end of physics."
  Einstein recognized the greatness of Bohr's achievement
however much he might fear for the future of physics, and
in his autobiographical notes of 1949 emphasized how he
felt at the time. The work of the previous decade, he said,
had undermined the foundation of physics. "That this
insecure and contradictory foundation was sufficient to
enable a man of Bohr's unique instinct and tact to discover
the major laws of the spectral lines and of the electron
shells of the atoms together with their significance of
chemistry, appeared to me like a miracleùand appears to
me as a miracle even today. This is the highest form of
musicality in the sphere of thought."
  The result of Bohr's work was, as Planck put it in 1920
when he received the Nobel Prize, that "a stream of
knowledge poured in a sudden flood, not only over this
entire field but into the adjacent territories of physics and
chemistry." But there was one other result which
increasingly affected Einstein over the years. When the
new picture of the atom was outlinedùthe Rutherford
Bohr model, as it was calledùit was appreciated that the
causes lying behind the movements of individual
subnuclear particles were not known. But causes were
nevertheless believed to exist. Only during the next few
years did it become more and more apparent that this was
not always so: that whatever happened at other levels,
individual events at the level of the subatomic world were
unpredictable and could only be described statistically. But
Einstein would never agree.
  This great schism which the apparent indeterminacy of
the subnuclear world was to create still lay in the future as
Einstein listened to Hevesy in Vienna and lectured to the
slightly dubious audience on his latest theory of General
Relativity. In the city, he had also met for the first time
Ernst Mach, whose writings a decade and a half earlier
had buttressed his doubts about Newton's absolute time
and absolute space. The meeting took place in 1911,
possibly while Einstein was traveling to or from the Solvay
Congress, an encounter between the younger man on the
crest of the wave and the elderly Mach, crippled in
physical health and bypassed intellectually by the swift
stream of science. Mach was now in his seventies. Half-
paralyzed, he had retired from the University of Vienna a
number of years previously and lived in semiseclusion in
the suburbs of the city, half-forgotten and seeing few
visitors. "On entering his room," says Frank, "one saw a
man with a gray, unkempt beard and a half-good-natured,
half-cunning expression on his face, who looked like a
Slav peasant and said: 'Please speak loudly to me; in
addition to my other unpleasant characteristics I am also
almost stone-deaf.'"
  Einstein had not yet noticeably fallen away from Mach's
basic beliefs, even though it seems likely that his
acceptance of them was weakening. Similarly Mach, while
strongly opposed to what he considered merely the
assumptions of relativity, had so far kept the fact to
himself. Thus the two men were still openly united on
many scientific matters. One of the comparatively few
differences was their attitude to atomic theory, Einstein
accepting it freely while Mach did so only grudgingly and
with considerable philosophical reservation.
  Few details of the encounter have survived but Bernard
Cohen, interviewing Einstein shortly before his death, says
he recalled one thing:

  Einstein asked Mach what his position would be if it proved
possible to predict a property of a gas by assuming the existence
of atomsùsome property that could not be predicted without the
assumption of atoms and yet one that could be observed. Einstein
said he had always believed that the invention of scientific
concepts and the building of theories upon them was one of the
great creative properties of the human mind. His own view was
thus opposed to Mach's, because Mach assumed that the laws of
science were only an economical way of describing a large
collection of facts. Could Mach accept the hypothesis of atoms
under the circumstances Einstein had stated, even if it meant
very complicated computations? Einstein told me how delighted
he was when Mach replied affirmatively. If an atomic hypothesis
would make it possible to connect by logic some observable
properties which would remain unconnected without this
hypothesis, then, Mach said, he would have to accept it. Under
these circumstances it would be "economical" to assume that
atoms may exist because then one could derive relations between
observations. Einstein had been satisfied: indeed more than a
little pleased. With a serious expression on his face, he told me
the story all over again to be sure that I understood it fully.
Wholly apart from the philosophical victory over what Einstein
had conceived Mach's philosophy to have been, he had been very
gratified because he had admitted that there might, after all, be
some use to the atomistic philosophy to which Einstein had been
so strongly committed.

  The two men parted on the best of terms and when Mach
died in 1916 Einstein's tributes were eulogistic and
unqualified. "Mach recognized clearly the weak aspects of
classical physics," he wrote, "and to that extent was not far
from postulating a theory of relativity, and this nearly half
a century ago! It is not improbable that Mach would have
come to the theory if when he was an alert young spirit the
meaning of the constancy of the velocity of light had by
that time been raised by the physicists."
  Yet before his death Mach had reneged, although
Einstein knew nothing of this when he wrote the laudatory
obituary notice. In the summer of 1913 Mach signed the
Preface to his The Principles of Physical Optics, which did
not appear until 1921. In thisù"what may be my last
opportunity," as he put itùhe reversed his views on
relativity. "I gather from the publications which have
reached me, and especially from my correspondence," he
wrote,

  that I am gradually becoming regarded as the forerunner of
relativity. I am able even now to picture approximately what new
expositions and interpretations many of the ideas expressed in
my book on mechanics will receive in the future from the point of
view of relativity.
  It was to be expected that philosophers and physicists should
carry on a crusade against me, for, as I have repeatedly
observed, I was merely an unprejudiced rambler, endowed
with original ideas, in varied fields of knowledge. I must,
however, as assuredly disclaim to be a forerunner of the
relativists as I withhold from the atomistic doctrine of the
present day.
  The reason why, and the extent to which, I discredit the
present-day relativity theory, which I find to be growing more
and more dogmatical, together with the particular reasons
which have led me to such a viewùthe considerations based
on the physiology of the senses, the theoretical ideas, and
above all the conceptions resulting from my experiments
must remain to be treated in the sequel.

  There was no sequel. But the voice from the grave
shocked Einstein and deepened the differences which were
soon separating his epistemology from that of Mach.
Speaking in Paris in 1922, he went on record as describing
Mach in terms which would have sounded strange only a
short while earlierù"un bon mΘcanicien" ... but
"deplorable philosophe." And his views on the recantation
were specifically given in a letter to a friend who had sent
him one of Mach's letters. "There can be no doubt," he
said, "that this was a result of his advanced years, and thus
a diminished capability for absorbing facts, since the
theory's whole line of thought conforms to Mach's who is
rightly regarded as the forerunner of the invention of the
theory of relativity."
  The date at which Mach changed his views is not known.
But his Preface was dated, and therefore probably
concluded, within a few weeks of his receiving a
significant letter which Einstein wrote to him on June 25,
1913. "At the solar eclipse next year," he said, "it will be
seen whether the light rays are bent by the sun; in other
words whether the basic and fundamental assumption of
the equivalence of the acceleration of the reference frame
and of the gravitational field really stands up. If so, then
your inspired investigations into the foundations of
mechanics ùdespite Planck's unjust criticismùwill
receive a splendid confirmation."
  It would be produced, Einstein hoped, by an expedition to
observe the solar eclipse in southern Russia during the late
summer of 1914, an expedition under the leadership of
Erwin Finlay-Freundlich, an astronomer of mixed German
and Scottish descent and then the youngest assistant at the
Berlin University Observatory. Einstein's friendship with
Freundlich had begun in the summer of 1911 when
Professor L. W. Pollak, then a student at Prague
University, had visited the Berlin Observatory. He recalled
that Einstein had concluded his recent paper by suggesting
that the new theory might be tested astronomically, and he
mentioned Einstein's passing regret that no one seemed
interested.
  It is not clear whether Freundlich had actually read
Einstein's latest paper. But something in its ideas as he
heard them from Pollak sparked his imagination. From
then onward he showed a constant, if sometimes critical,
interest in the development of relativity, carrying out
measurements for Einstein during the next few years,
working with him during the war, producing the first book
on what became the General Theory of Relativity, and
acting as interpreter and shock absorber during Einstein's
first visit to Britain in 1921.
  Shortly after Pollak's visit, Freundlich wrote to Einstein
in Prague, offering to search for any deflection of light
near Jupiter, an ambitious idea that must have been
doomed from the start. Einstein replied on September 1:

  It would give me great pleasure if you would consider these
interesting questions. From past experience I fully realize that
the answers will not be easy to obtain. But one thing can be said
with certainty: if no such deflection exists, then the idea of the
theory is not pertinent. One must remember, you see, that the
ideas are very bold. If only we had an orderly planet larger than
Jupiter! But mother nature did not see fit to provide us with one
that would make things easier for us!

  Nothing came of these first efforts, nor of Freundlich's
later inspections of old photographic plates which he
described in the Astronomische Nachrichten. When that
failed, he went on to the study of double stars. Einstein
still had doubts. "I am very curious about the results of
your research...." he wrote to Freundlich in 1913. "If the
speed of light is in the least bit affected by the speed of the
light source, then my whole theory of relativity and theory
of gravity is false."
  When the eclipse of 1914 offered a definite chance of
providing experimental proof or disproof, the next step
was obvious. The Berlin Observatory was unenthusiastic,
but willing to let Freundlich visit the Crimeaùat his own
expense and on his own time. This was the situation in the
summer of 1913. Freundlich, who had not yet met
Einstein, was preparing to marry and to spend his
honeymoon in the Alps and on August 26 he was delighted
to receive a letter from Switzerland. "This morning," he
wrote to his fiancΘe, "I had a nice letter from Einstein in
Zurich in which he asked me to meet him in Switzerland
between September 9 and 15. This is wonderful because it
fits in with our plans."
  A fortnight later, as the train pulled into Zurich, Freund-
lich and his bride saw waiting for them the short figure of
Fritz Haber, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for
Chemistry which had been opened in Berlin two years
earlier. Beside him stood an untidy figure in almost
sporting clothes, wearing what Frau Freundlich remembers
after half a century as a very conspicuous straw hat:
Einstein, the maker of new worlds.
  Einstein was delighted to meet his friends, and insisted
that they accompany him to Frauenfeld, a few miles from
Zurich, where he was to speak to the Swiss Society of
Natural Sciences. Then he invited them to lunch with
himself and Otto Stern, now working in Zurich as his
assistant. Only at the end of the meal did he discover that
he had no money. The situation was saved by Stern, who
passed him a 100-franc note under the table.
  At Frauenfeld, where both he and Grossmann spoke on
the new theory, Einstein announced, to the embarrassment
of Freundlich, that the company had among them "the
man who will be testing the theory next year." From
Frauenfeld they all traveled for the Society's outing to
Ermatingen on the shores of Lake Constance, Einstein
later insisting that he and the Freundlichs return alone to
Zurich. Throughout the entire journey the two men
discussed the problems of gravitation while the young
bride studied the scenery of a Switzerland she had never
before seen.
  The Zurich meeting settled details of what Freundlich
would do in the Crimea the following summer. Soon
afterwards, Einstein invoked the aid of Professor George
Ellery Hale of the Mount Wilson Observatory, Pasadena,
California, a man whose similarity of outlook with
Einstein's is shown by an early passage in his
autobiography ù"Naturally I do not share the common
fallacy of an antagonism between science, literature, and
art, which appeals to me in much the same way. Creative
imagination is the vital factor in all of them, and I was
fortunate to learn this at an early age." Hale passed on
Einstein's letter to Professor Campbell of the Lick
Observatory. "He writes to me," Hale replied to Einstein
on November 8,

  that he has undertaken to secure eclipse photographs of stars
near the sun for Dr. Freundlich of the Berlin Observatory, who
will measure them in the hope of detecting differential
deflections. Doubtless he will send you further particulars, as I
requested him to communicate directly with you.
  I fear there is no possibility of detecting the effect in full
sunlight. ... The eclipse method, on the contrary, appears to be
very promising, as it eliminates all ... difficulties, and the use
of photography would allow a large number of stars to be
measured. I therefore strongly recommend that plan.

  Einstein also recommended it. So did Freundlich. But the
problem of money still remained, as Freundlich pointed
out in December. "After receipt of your last letter,"
Einstein wrote to him on December 7, "I immediately
wrote to Planck, who really applied himself seriously to the
matter. ... Should all efforts fail, I shall pay for the thing
myself out of my hard-earned savings, at least the first
2,000 marks. So go ahead and, after due consideration,
order the plates and don't waste any more time thinking
about the money problem." However, Einstein was not to
dig into his own pocket. During the first months of 1914
help came from unexpected sources. The money was
provided by Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach and by the
chemist Emil Fischer.
  Thus Einstein, firmly settled in Zurich, would await the
results of a German expedition which in the late summer
of 1914 would provide proof or disproof of a theory on
whose development he was still hard at work. He had at
last achieved full professional status in the establishment
which had grudgingly accepted him as a student of sixteen,
in a country whose atmosphere and environment he
enjoyed. His sister Maja had now settled in Lucerne with
her husband, Paul Winteler. To the same city, only thirty
miles away from Zurich across the intervening hills, there
had also come his mother. For Mileva, Switzerland seemed
the only country in which it was possible to live and thus
family feelings appeared to chime in with professional
success. It must have seemed that now, at last, he might
finally settle down.
  Yet Einstein was not the kind of man for whom family
feelings weighed very heavily. And although he felt a
compelling need for the intellectual climate of Europe, he
did not quickly throw down deep roots. Links provided by
sentiment or the emotions were gossamer thick. Thus it is
less surprising than it seems that by the autumn of 1913 he
was preparing to move to Berlin, capital of a German
Empire whose policies he detested and whose inner spirit
he deeply distrusted.

CHAPTER 7

A JEW IN BERLIN

Einstein's attendance at the Solvay Congress of 1911 had
repercussions which decisively affected the rest of his life.
For among those in Brussels most deeply impressed by his
ability were Max Planck and Walther Nernst, twin pillars
of the Prussian scientific establishment. Following their
return to Berlin both men became engaged in a difficult
and delicate task which exercised their scientific
enthusiasm and their patriotic instincts.
  The task was recruitment of staff for the new and
ambitious series of research institutes which the Emperor
had graciously allowed to be called the Kaiser Wilhelm
Gesellschaft zur F÷rderung der Wissenschaften (the Kaiser
Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of the Sciences).
These institutes were not only to investigate pure science;
they would also, it was intended, help increase Germany's
lead in the application of scientific discoveries made
during the previous half century. In this field the country
was now technologically supreme in Europe, providing
much of the continent with dyestuffs, with the tungsten
needed for steelmaking, with magnetos for the engines
which were revolutionizing land transport and were soon
to bring a new dimension to warfare, and providing also
the best scientific instruments. Significantly, when war
broke out in 1914, the British found much of their artillery
using gunsights made exclusively by Goerz of Berlin.
  Yet the Germans recognized that applied technology
demands a constant diet of pure research. They were aware
that in the United States the General Electric Company
had invited Charles Steinmetz, the electrophysicist, to
head their laboratories and to do what work he pleased.
They knew that in Britain Lord Haldane, secretary of state
for war until 1912, had seen the country to be "at a
profound disadvantage with the Germans, who were
building up their Air Service on a foundation of science"
and had, as a result, laid the foundations at Farnborough of
what was to become the Royal Aircraft Establishment. All
this constituted a warning that was heeded by Friedrich
Althoff, the permanent secretary in the Prussian Ministry
of Education. Althoff "knew the weakness of human
beings for decorations and titles, and he exploited it as
another man would exploit a gold mine. The 'voluntary
subscriptions' he obtained in this way went to further his
great plans. Among other things he reorganized the whole
system of higher education and brought the main body of
scientific research into special research institutes." Then
came his crowning achievement, the Kaiser Wilhelm
Gesellschaft, the ambitious plans for which were approved
by the Emperor himself. They were in the true Althoff
tradition. The institutes were to be financed by bankers
and industrialists who were to be rewarded not merely by a
flush of patriotism but by the title of "Senator," the right to
wear handsome gowns, and the honor of an occasional
breakfast with the Emperor.
  The scheme was announced in the autumn of 1911 and
during the following summer work began at Dahlem, on a
site near the end of the new underground from Berlin, on
buildings for the Institute for Physical Chemistry and
Electrochemistry which was to be run by Haber. The
Physics Institute was to follow, and as little difficulty was
expected in staffing it as there had been in attracting men
to work under Haber. Indeed, as far as physics was
concerned, the scientific atmosphere of the German capital
was almost magnet enough. Only the Cavendish
Laboratory at Cambridge, forging ahead into the nuclear
world under the command of J.J. Thomson, could compare
with the physics faculty of the University of Berlin.
  Therefore, it was felt in the Prussian capital, there would
be little difficulty in attracting Einstein. It was perhaps
strange that a theoretical physicist should be considered
the best man to run such an institute; and Einstein himself
was the most unlikely of men to grapple successfully with
the practical problems of any major organization.
However, that was not really the point, since the actual
creation of the institute was known to be some way off in
the future. What mattered was getting this unconventional
Swiss to Berlin for the ideas he might produce.
  One possible impediment lay concealed in the word
"Swiss," for Einstein had reneged on his German
nationality more than a decade and a half previously. And
even if the authorities could be induced to accept him, for
the sake of German progress if not for the sake of science
alone, there was always the chance that Einstein might not
accept Berlin. There is little evidence that up to this date
he had openly voiced the criticism of the Prussian regime
and of the German mentality which later so obsessed him;
but such views as he had were almost certainly known,
implicitly if not explicitly, to Planck and Nernst. But both
were determined men, and in the summer of 1913 they
decided to visit Einstein in Zurich.
  Some of the preliminaries appear to have been dealt with
by this time. While still in Pargue in the spring of 1912,
Einstein had written that he would be "going to Berlin to
be able to talk shop with different people," and added that
he had "appointments with Nernst, Planck, Rubens,
Warburg, Haber...." Later, when his German nationality
became an issue on his winning the Nobel Prize, he
officially wrote that this question of nationality had been
discussed with Haber "when my appointment to our
Academy was being considered." It seems likely, therefore,
that Planck and Nernst, the subject having already been
raised, were visiting Zurich to make sure that if a formal
offer were made, then it would be accepted.
  The high drama of these two major figures in German
science traveling south from Berlin to tempt the young
Einstein back into the Prussian orbit was equaled by the
differences between the men themselvesùPlanck aloof and
superbly professional, always master of the situation, the
tall trimmed figure from whom his country could never
demand too much; Nernst the businesslike genius, a jolly,
plump little man against whom Planck appeared as the
epitome of discipline. Both were excellent as fishers for
Einstein who had a respect for Planck only just this side
idolatry. For Nernst there was even some warmth, shown
in the words that Einstein wrote of him years later:
"Although sometimes good-naturedly smiling at his
childlike vanity and self-complacency, we all had for him
not only sincere admiration but also a personal affection.
He was neither a nationalist nor a militarist . . . [with] a
sense of humor as is very seldom found with men who
carry so heavy a load of work."
  This appreciation, made after Nernst's death during the
Second World War, was as revealing of the writer as of its
subject. More than one of Einstein's friends pointed out
that whatever "childlike vanity and self-complacency"
Nernst might show on the surface, there lay beneath it a
keen financial mind that enabled him, almost alone among
German scientists, to make a small fortune from his
relations with industry.
  Planck and Nernst met Einstein in his rooms at the ETH
and pleaded their case with him at some length. He was
unwilling to give a decision then and there, and the two
professors decided to ascend the Rigi, the most famous of
nineteenth century Swiss viewpoints, while he was making
up his mind. After their excursion by train and funicular
railway they would return to Zurich for his answer.
Einstein, exhibiting the quirkish humor with which he
often tweaked authority's tail, announced that they would
know the verdict as soon as they saw him. If he was
carrying a white rose the answer would be No; if the rose
was red, then he would accept the offer from Berlin if it
were formally made.
  When the two men later stepped down from their carriage
they were relieved to see Einstein trotting up the platform
carrying a red rose.
  The proposal had been that Einstein should become
director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics when
it was set up, and would meanwhile give advice on
research in the subject carried out in other parts of the
organization. However, had this been the sum total of the
offer it seems probable that he would have been carrying a
white rose rather than red. But the Kaiser Wilhelm
appointment was only one part of an attractive package
deal.
  Almost exactly three years earlier, Jacobus Hendrikus
van't Hoff, the originator of the theory of the spatial
structure of molecules, had died at the age of fifty-nine. He
had been a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences,
the oldest scientific institution in Germany, planned by
Liebnitz and established by Frederick the First as the
"Society of Sciences," and his chair had remained empty.
Planck and Nernst were confident that with the help of
their colleagues they could persuade the Prussian Ministry
of Education to approve Einstein's appointment to the
chairùa necessary move since the Academy existed under
the umbrella of the Prussian civil service. Most members
occupied only honorary and unpaid positions. A few,
however, were endowed from one of various funds, and it
was part of the plan that, with such help, Einstein should
be offered a salary much in excess of what he was
receiving in Zurich. If this were not attraction enough,
there was a third item in the offer which Einstein agreed to
accept if it were officially made. This was a nominal
professorship in the University of Berlin, nominal since
under the proposed special arrangements Einstein would
be able to lecture as much or as little as he wished and
would have none of the normal duties concerned with
university administration. To sum up, he would be left free
to devote himself, exactly as he wished, to the business of
pure research. He would, moreover, be able to do so in the
best possible placeùto the remark that only a dozen men
in the world really understood relativity, Nernst once
replied: "Eight of them live in Berlin."
  On their return to Berlin, Planck and Nernst, supported
by Rubens and Emil Warburg, the founder of modern
photochemistry, prepared their draft notice for
presentation to the Ministry of Education. The original
proposed Einstein "for full membership of the Academy
with special personal salary of 6,000 marks," but the figure
was subsequently doubled to "12,000," an indication that
the Germans were anxious that this particular catch should
not slip through their net. The draftùin which the
German birth and education of this apparently Swiss
professor was inserted almost as an afterthought
described Einstein's early years, and the publication of his
first relativity paper.
  "This new interpretation of the time concept has had
sweeping repercussions on the whole of physics, especially
mechanics and even epistemology," it went on. "The
mathematician Minkowski subsequently formulated it in
terms which unify the whole system of physics inasmuch
as time enters the stage as a dimension on completely
equal terms with the three conventional dimensions." It
then, somewhat surprisingly in the light of later events,
turned to what were considered more relevant matters.
  "Although this idea of Einstein's has proved itself so
fundamental for the development of physical principles, its
application still lies for the moment on the frontier of the
measurable," it continued.

  Far more important for practical physics is his penetration of
other questions on which, for the moment, interest is focused.
Thus he was the first man to show the importance of the quantum
theory for the energy of atomic and molecular movements, and
from this he produced a formula for the specific heat of solids
which, although not yet entirely proved in detail, has become a
basis for further development of the newer atomic kinetics. He
has also linked the quantum hypothesis with photoelectric and
photochemical effects by the discovery of interesting new
relationships capable of being checked by measurement, and he
was one of the first to point out the close relationship between
the constant of elasticity and those in the optical vibrations of
crystals.
  All in all, one can say that among the great problems, so
abundant in modern physics, there is hardly one to which
Einstein has not brought some outstanding contribution. That
he may sometimes have missed the target in his speculations,
as, for example in his theory of light quanta, cannot really be
held against him. For in the most exact of natural sciences
every innovation entails risk. At the moment he is working
intensively on a new theory of gravitation, with what success
only the future will tell. Apart from his own productivity,
Einstein has a special talent for probing peculiar original
views and premises, and estimating their interrelationship
with uncanny certainty from his own experience.
  In this treatment and investigation of classical theory, even
in the earliest of his publications, as well as in his
demonstration and criticism of new hypotheses, Einstein must
rank as a master.

  The interest in this account, which was to open the gates
to Berlin, lies in the way in which it glosses over
Einstein's work on relativity and quickly dismisses the
"heuristic viewpoint" of the photoelectric paper for which
he was to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics nine
years later. Nernst and Planck, who presumably drew up
the document, took into account not only the conservative
views of their colleagues but also the character of the
minister. And Planck, reluctant to admit that his quanta
did not somehow take on wave characteristics during the
journey from here to there, still felt it necessary to insist
that when it came to photons Einstein had "missed the
target."
  Having been approved by the Academy, the proposal was
submitted to the government on July 28, 1913. It was
nearly four months later before the reply came. On
November 20 the minister stated that the Kaiser had
approved the appointment, that the Minister of Finance
had agreed to grant Dr. Einstein traveling expenses, and
that he now wished to be informed if "Professor Einstein
actually accepts his new post." Long before this Nernst
took the matter as settled. "At Easter, Einstein will move
to Berlin," he wrote to Lindemann on August 18, 1913;
"Planck and I were in Zurich to see him the other day, and
the Academy has already elected him. We have great
expectations of him."
  Einstein formally accepted on December 7, having by this
time asked his release from the post he had taken up only
eighteen months earlier. In his letter to Berlin he stressed
his gratitude for the chance of being able to carry on his
scientific work free from professional duties. "When I
consider that each working day weakens my thinking
powers I can accept this high honor only with a certain
degree of awe," he went on. "Accepting the post, however,
has encouraged me to think that one man cannot ask of
another more than that he should devote his whole
strength to a good cause, and in this respect I feel myself
truly competent."
  Einstein's acceptance was significant in a number of
ways. The most obvious was later stressed by Sommerfeld
who wrote that "we owe the completion of his General
Theory of Relativity to his leisure while in Berlin." But
there is more to it than that. Had Einstein remained in
Zurich until the outbreak of war in August, 1914, it is
almost inconceivable that he would have returned to
Germany. The anti-Semites in that country would have
been deprived, both in the postwar chaos of the early 1920s
and in the preparations for the Nazi takeover, of a ready
made target on which to concentrate their fire. It is almost
equally unlikely that Einstein would have moved to the
United States in 1933ùand thus been available on Long
Island in the summer of 1939 to prod the Americans into
research which gave them nuclear weapons before the end
of the war in the Pacific.
  For these reasons, if for no other, it is worth considering
the pros and cons of what must for Einstein have been a
difficult decision. On the credit side there was the
enormous attraction of the intellectual climate into which
he would be moving. There was also the attraction of the
salary. Einstein was never a man to care about money but
he was the father of two growing sons and he felt
responsible for them if not extravagantly affectionate.
There was also the reason which he gave to Ehrenfest for
what he called his "Berlinization": "I accepted this
peculiar sinecure because giving lectures grates so oddly
on my nerves, and I don't have to lecture there at all."
  "In addition," says one of his generally more reliable
biographers, Philipp Frank, "there were also personal
factors that entered into the decision. Einstein had an
uncle in Berlin, a fairly successful businessman, whose
daughter, Elsa, was now a widow. Einstein remembered
that his cousin Elsa as a young girl had often been in
Munich and had impressed him as a friendly, happy
person. The prospects of being able to enjoy the pleasant
company of this cousin in Berlin made him think of the
Prussian capital more favorably." This statement must be
taken with some caution. Frank, who wrote his book in
1947, more than thirty years later, was an intimate of
Einstein, and it is difficult not to believe that the source of
the comment was Einstein himself. It is true that he
eventually married Elsa Einstein; but when he moved to
Berlin in April, 1914, he moved with Mileva and their two
sons. The marriage had not yet broken up; and while there
are indications that it was almost on the rocks, it seems
overharsh to suggest that he accepted the Berlin
appointment in the hope that it would eventually bring his
marriage to an end. However, that is what happened.
  Mileva Einstein's reaction to Berlin, very largely Slav
dislike for all things Teuton, which for her contrasted so
strongly with the casual happy atmosphere of Switzerland,
had a counterpart in Einstein's own feelings. Seventeen
years previously he had renounced not only German
nationality but what he considered the essential
Germanism: reverence for obedience, regimentation of the
body, and a rigidity of the spirit which forced minds
narrowly upwards like the pine trunks of the dark German
forests. Now, as a man, he would be walking back into the
environment from which he had escaped as a boy. Yet
throwing down an intellectual gauntlet, taking a calculated
risk, were actions which not only had led to Einstein's
fame but were typical of his mental makeup; accepting a
post in the Kaiser Wilhelm would enable him to do both
things. There was also one other factor which mattered
more than anything else. Einstein's friend Reichinstein put
it clearly after he had talked with him in Berlin about the
work that led to the General Theory. "To be able to work
when a great idea is at stake," he wrote, "[an idea] which
has to be nursed to maturity during a longer period of
time, a scientist must be unencumbered by cares, must
avoid all disturbing conflicts of life, must bear with all
humiliations from his opponents in order to safeguard that
precious something which he bears in his soul." In Berlin,
under the conditions provided by Planck and Nernst,
Einstein would be unencumbered by money worries, would
avoid the disturbing conflicts of a teaching routine. More
than one friend, more than one colleague, has stressed how
he was in some ways more of an artist than a scientistùor
at least "an artist in science." And "the true artist will let
his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge
for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but
his art." Einstein would even put himself in pawn to the
Prussians.
  The problem of nationality, raised when the question of
going to Berlin had first been discussed, at last appeared
settled. Haber had pointed out that membership of the
Prussian Academy of Sciences would automatically make
Einstein a Prussian citizenùand two decades later
Professor Ernst Heymann, perpetual secretary of the
Academy, wrote of Einstein's "Prussian nationality which
he acquired in 1913 simply by becoming a full member of
the Academy." Einstein's version was that, "as I attached
importance to the fact that there would be no change in my
nationality, I made acceptance of a possible appointment
dependent on this stipulation, which was agreed to."
Exactly what was finally done is not clear even today. But
there had been a Professor Haguenin, a Frenchman in the
Academy's Faculty of Letters, who had insisted on
remaining French. The position was no doubt different in
the case of a German who had renounced his German
nationality, but Einstein was left with the impression that
in Berlin he would not only retain his Swiss nationality but
would avoid becoming a German once again. The
government, but not the Academy, later denied that this
was so. If the government was right, this did not
necessarily mean that Planck and Nernst had failed to keep
their promise. The "agreement" may have first been
discussed early in the summer. And it was only on July 13,
1913, that a new Nationality Law provided in its Section
14 that state employment in the service of the Reich, or in
one of the federal states, automatically gave German
citizenship to the respective foreign employee, official, or
civil servant.
  Certainly for a good deal of his life Einstein believed that
he, as a Swiss, had gained professorial status in Berlin
only by diplomatic sleight of hand. But it is typical of what
his elder son has called his delight in making up good
stories for good listeners that he should later give another
version. To Dr. Max Gottschalk, a prominent Belgian
Jewish scholar and good friend, who asked how a Swiss
had become a full German professor, Einstein explained
that the Kaiser had visited the university one day. "He
asked to be introduced to Professor Einstein and I was
brought forward," he said. "After that, as the Kaiser had
called me a professor I had to be a full professor."[His
close friend Leon Watters later quotes him as saying:
"Though I lived in Germany for many years, I never
became a German citizen. I made that a condition of my
going there. I never met the Kaiser, probably on that
account."]
  Details were settled before the end of 1913, and it was
arranged that he should take up his duties in Berlin on
April 1, 1914. It had been a remarkable triumph for a man
not yet thirty-five, so much so that even Einstein himself,
confident as he usually was of Einstein, mentally kept his
fingers crossed. In the circumstances this was natural
enough. He was still stuck on the General Theory, even
with Marcel Grossmann's aid. He was still in the middle
of those "errors of thinking which caused me two years of
hard work," as he described it, and to Besso he wrote
deploring the fact that German theorists were not receptive
to general discussion based on fundamental principles. "I
am somewhat uneasy as I see the Berlin adventure
approaching," he said. "... A free unprejudiced look is
generally not characteristic of 'adult' Germans. It's as if
they wore blinders."
  In Zurich, Louis Kollros, his old colleague of ETH days,
organized a farewell supper for him in the Kronen-halle.
"We all regretted his departure," Kollros has said. "He
himself was delighted at the prospect of being able to
devote all his time to research ... delighted and a little
anxious nevertheless; he did not know what the future held
in store for him. When I accompanied him home that
evening he turned to me and said: 'The gentlemen in
Berlin are gambling on me as if I were a prize hen. As for
myself I don't even know whether I'm going to lay another
egg.'"[Einstein was apparently fond of the simile. Talking
after dinner in Gottingen one evening with Paul Hertz,
who taught theoretical physics there, he compared the
whole concept of new ideas to that of a chicken laying an
egg: "Kieksùauf einmal ist es da" ("Cheep ùsuddenly
there it is").]
  Einstein moved with his family from Zurich to Berlin on
April 6, 1914. Haber helped him find and lease a flat in
Berlin-Dahlem and here he spent the early part of the
summer settling in.
  On July 2 he gave his inaugural address to the Academy.
"First of all I have to thank you most heartily for
conferring on me the greatest boon that could be conferred
on a man like myself," he began. "By electing me to your
Academy you have freed me from the distractions and
cares of a professional life and so made it possible for me
to devote myself entirely to scientific studies. I hope that
you will continue to believe in my gratitude and industry
even when my efforts appear to yield only poor results."
He also made it clear what direction these efforts would
take, commenting on special relativity, explaining the need
to generalize it, and noting that such a generalization
could not yet be tested. "We have seen that inductive
physics asks questions of deductive and vice versa, and
that an answer calls upon the deployment of all our
energies. May we soon succeed in making permanent
progress by our united efforts!"
  While events moved on towards the first item in this
permanent progressùFreundlich's expedition to the
Crimea ùEinstein traveled each morning to his office in
the Academy, housed in the Prussian State Library on the
Unter den Linden. Here he arranged with his new
colleagues from the university how, when, and about what
he would lecture during the coming autumn term. And
here he was visited by officials of the Kaiser Wilhelm
Gesellschaft with whom he arranged details of the new
institute. He has denied that when asked to outline his
needs he said that these consisted only of pencils and paper
which he would supply himself. However, "it is true that I
always knew how to arrange things so that I remained
unburdened," he has written. "I wanted to have time free
for thinking and I had no wish to dictate other people's
actions (nothing of the 'Fuehrer')."
  In Berlin Einstein was to see for the first time how the
ramifications of science spread out not only into
philosophy and metaphysics, but into politics and power,
and how they penetrated, like the metal rods in a
ferroconcrete building, the organizations on which the
equilibrium of European peace still rested. At first, he was
barely distressed by the new climate. "Life is better here
than I anticipated," he wrote to Professor Hurwitz on May
4. "However, a certain discipline as regards clothes, etc.,
which I have to observe on the commands of a few old
gentlemen, in order not to arouse reproaches from the
people here, rather disturbs my peace of mind. The
Academy in its general ambience is reminiscent of any
other faculty. Apparently most of its members confine
themselves to a certain peacocklike grandezza in their
writings. ..." And there were compensations. His status
had been raised not merely in scientific esteem and
financial reward, but in the eyes of his relatives,
particularly those of his mother. In his youth they had
tended to write him off. Now, "they felt honored to receive
him in their homes and to be mentioned as his relatives."
  There was, above all, the new freedom to devote himself
almost entirely to his work. The most urgent thing now
was the expedition to southern Russia to observe the
eclipse in August, and from April onwards Einstein and
his family were in regular and close contact with the
Freundlichs. As the date of the expedition's departure
approached, Einstein withdrew more and more into his
own scientific carapace; more frequently, he became the
Einstein of the later newspaper caricatures, insulated from
the normal contacts of life by his own interior problems.
Thus there was the occasion when he pushed back the
plates at the end of a meal with the Freundlichs. Before a
word could be said he began to cover a much prized
"party" tablecloth with equations as he talked with his
host. "Had I kept it unwashed as my husband told me,"
says Frau Freundlich half a century afterwards, "it would
be worth a fortune." But this was typical "I have seen him
in his keenness," Lord Samuel once wrote, "when no table
was handy, kneel down on the floor and scribble diagrams
and equations on a scrap of paper on a chair."
  There was also the complementary occasion when the
Freundlichs arrived to dine with the Einsteins. After a long
wait without their host, Mileva answered the telephone to
discover her husband was ringing from Dahlem. He had,
he said, been waiting more than an hour at the
underground station for Freundlich. As agreed, Freundlich
had kept the rendezvous at the Einstein apartment.
  By this time Einstein was not only engrossed. He was
also confident. Earlier doubts had been swept away and
even before coming to Berlin in the spring he had written
in high spirits to Besso. "Now I am fully satisfied, and I no
longer doubt the correctness of the whole system, whether
the observation of the eclipse succeeds or not," went his
letter. "The sense of the thing is too evident." This is a
revealing phrase. For Einstein was saying that if a man
stood fast by his intuition, if he hung on in the face of
difficulties, if he really felt from an inner sense of
conviction that he were right, then an explanation for
discrepancies would arrive; inconsistencies in the evidence
would become explicable. It was, although he does not
seem to have realized it himself, a final farewell to Mach
and his deification of the sensations. It was also
indulgence in an act of faith. Only Einstein the
philosopher could have convinced Einstein the scientist
that if the evidence did not agree with the theory then the
evidence must be faulty.
  All these hopes were wrecked by Germany's declaration
of war on Russia on August 1, 1914, her declaration of war
on France two days later, and her invasion of Belgium
which brought Britain into the war on August 4; "My dear
astronomer Freundlich will become a prisoner of war in
Russia instead of being able to observe the eclipse,"
Einstein wrote to Ehrenfest in Leiden on August 19. "I am
worried about him." But Freundlich and the members of
his team were luckier than they might have been, although
their equipment was impounded and they themselves were
arrested and taken to Odessa. By the end of the month
their exchange for a number of high-ranking Russian
officers had been arranged and by September 2 Freundlich
was back in Berlin. Here he spent the rest of the war,
mainly at the observatory but giving part-time assistance to
Einstein.
  Thus the war delayed the testing of the General Theory
for five years. But it was to affect Einstein decisively in
one other way. For it was the instrument which finally
brought his first marriage to an end.
  His relations with Mileva had become increasingly
fragile. Years later he complained that in Switzerland she
had been jealous of all his friends, with the solitary
exception of Solovine, and inferred that her disposition
had made life together impossible. But he looked back
more in sorrow than in pain, accepting with resignation
the fact that nothing could have made the marriage work
properly and acquitting both his wife and himself of
anything worse than bad luck. In 1914 he was far less
equable about the matter.
  It was at least reasonable that Mileva should return to
Zurich with the two sons in the summer of 1914; it was
even more reasonable that she should stay with them there
when war broke out in Augustùat least until the
immediate prospects had become clearer. But by Christmas
it was plain that something more was involved. Mileva
remained in Switzerland with the children. Einstein, still a
Swiss citizen, remained in Berlin, spending the holiday
with Professor and Frau Nernst, a lonely but perhaps not
entirely unhappy figure playing his violin to them on
Christmas Eve.
  Mileva did not return. Einstein did not care. In fact there
is a good deal of circumstantial evidence to suggest that he
was heartily glad to remain on his own while he got down
to the hard work of completing the General Theory. Not all
his friends felt this was a satisfactory situation, and Haber
in particular began a long series of kindly but unsuccessful
attempts to bring the two together again. The slender hope
of this is shown by a letter that Einstein wrote to Besso,
some months after the famous General Theory paper had
been published and after he had experienced a stormy
meeting with his wife in Switzerland. If he had not had the
strength of mind to keep her at a distance, out of sight and
out of mind, he would, he said, have been worn out
physically and morally.
  Even by Christmas, 1914, one problem was evidentù
how to provide for Mileva and the two sons, one aged ten,
the other four. Einstein had a qualified affection for the
boys, as long as it did not take up too much of his time,
and he was anxious that they should not suffer from the
breakup of their parents' marriage. For the next few years,
therefore, moneyùand the difficulty of getting it without
loss from wartime Germany to neutral Switzerland
became one of Einstein's preoccupations.
  If the First World War quickly put a temporary spoke in
one of Einstein's scientific wheels and brought his private
life to a climax, it also did something far more important:
it brought him face to face, for the first time, with the
interrelationships between science and world affairs. Until
now he had looked on science as a vocation to be followed
only by men of intelligence and moral integrity, occupying
positions that were usually cut off from most other people.
They were not necessarily better, but they were certainly
different. Surely the appalling business of international
politics, of war and all that went with it, was something in
which they, last of all people, should be involved?
  This belief was ingenuous. Newton himself had been an
adviser to the British Admiralty. Michael Faraday and Sir
Frederick Abel were advisers to the British War Office.
Dewar and Abel produced cordite, Nobel invented
dynamite, and the studies on the Stassfurt deposits carried
out by van't Hoff whose chair Einstein now filled were of
great use to Germany's wartime industry. Science had in
fact been one of war's handmaidens since bronze replaced
stone in prehistoric times. Yet the nature of Einstein's
work on the fundamental problems of physics had tended
to quarantine him away from this fact and his self-imposed
dedication to the task had aided the process. He was
therefore shocked at what he witnessed in Berlin. For now
his colleagues leaped to arms unbidden, as certain as
Rupert Brooke where duty lay. His former assistant,
Ludwig Hopf, joined the German Air Ministry and helped
to develop military aircraft. Otto Stern was soon serving
with the forces on the eastern front, from which he
maintained contact with Einstein by a series of brief letters
and field postcards. The young Max Born, brought to the
University of Berlin from G÷ttingen when Planck
persuaded the Prussian Ministry of Education that he
needed help, worked first for the German air force and
then for a military board investigating the physics of sound
ranging. Schwarzschild the astronomer, whose
calculations were to support the first confirmation of
Einstein's General Theory, served as a mathematical
expert with the German armies on the eastern front.
Nernst first became a War Ministry consultant, advising
on chemical agents for shells, and subsequently accepted a
commission.
  Above all there was Fritz Haber, who had at once
volunteered for service but had been rejected on medical
grounds. "His resulting depression," says his biographer,
"disappeared when he received a problem from the
Ordnance Department. Request was made for gasoline
with a low freezing point, since the army expected to fight
through a Russian winter." Furthermore it was not long
before Haber was in uniform, and telling his wife that a
scientist belonged to the world during times of peace but to
his country during times of war. It had quickly become
clear that his revolutionary method for producing
ammonia ùfor which he was later awarded the Nobel
Prize for Chemistryùwas essential to the stockpiling of
explosives and fertilizer without which the German war
effort could hardly have continued. First he was consulted
on how this process could best be utilized. Next he was
brought in to advise on the practicability of gas warfare,
first as a sergeant. "One of [his] great disappointments was
lack of a higher military title," says his biographer. "As a
full professor at a university, he had the feeling he was
equivalent to a general; Academy members had a
comparable uniform for court occasions." Later he was
commissioned as a captainùbut not before he compelled
his hesitating colleague Richard Willstatter to join in gas
mask research: "I am a sergeant," he said. "I command
you to the task." Haber soon joined forces with Nernst, and
within a few months was supervising production of enough
chlorine for the first German gas attack in the spring of
1915. By the following year he had become the head of
Germany's chemical warfare service and, after
experimenting with hundreds of substances, achieved a
major technological success by introducing mustard gas in
1917. Einstein had no illusions. Reading a report of the
Allied use of gas bombs, he remarked to his colleagues:
"This is supposed to say that they stunk first, but we know
better how to do it."
  Even Einstein, critical of his own country since youth,
had expected something different from what he now
witnessed. "One imagines that at least a few educated
Germans had private moments of horror at the slaughter
which was about to commence," says Fritz Ringer. "In
public, however, German academics of all political
persuasions spoke almost exclusively of their optimism
and enthusiasm. Indeed, they greeted the war with a sense
of relief. Party differences and class antagonisms seemed
to evaporate at the call of national duty. Social Democrats
marched singing to the front in the company of their
betters, and the mandarin intellectuals rejoiced at the
apparent rebirth of 'idealism' in Germany."
  Reaction from the universities reinforced all Einstein's
distaste for what he saw as the exclusively German
characteristic of marching to the band. He looked askance
at his own colleagues and he later tended to overlook the
fact that Lindemann risked his life testing service aircraft,
that Madame Curie drove Red Cross ambulances, and that
both Rutherford and Langevin worked as scientists on the
inter-Allied antisubmarine committee which produced the
first Asdic detectors. It might be wrong for Allied
scientists to prostitute science; but, by Einstein's
implication, it was worse for German scientists to do the
same thing since Germany had been the aggressor. It was a
plausible argument; but it should have destroyed any
vestigial illusion that scientists could remain outside the
battle.
  The sight of the Berlin scientific establishment devoting
itself to war with hardly a murmur of dissent drove
Einstein towards a treble commitment to internationalism,
pacifism, and socialism. These were all fine ideals and all
appealed to the best in him. Yet although there is little
evidence that his support of them had any effect on the
course of history, that support, the direct result of his
wartime experiences in Berlin, led him after the war into
waters where he was dangerously out of his depth. By that
time, he was a world figure. All his public actions were
followedùeither with reverence or amusement. The
upshot was a worldwide belief that Einstein was fired by
an almost saintly honesty of purpose and a less justifiable
feeling that scientists almost inevitably lost their way in
the corridors of power.
  The war thus revolutionized Einstein's attitude to the
world about him. He could no longer remain isolated. He
had to play his part on the side of the angels. But physics
still came first. It held him to Berlin, despite the fact that
while he hoped for an Allied victory he was forced to turn
a Nelsonian blind eye not only to the work of his
colleagues but even to the sources of some of his own
money. For this came, at least in part, from Leopold
Koppel who in 1916 created the Kaiser Wilhelm
Foundation for Military Technical Sciences. The full
details of Einstein's links with Koppel are not known, but
in a letter to Freundlich in December, 1913, Einstein
speaks of Koppel as the man who had "given the money
for my salary as a member of the Academy." According to
the Max Planck Gesellschaft, into which the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute was transformed in 1946, Einstein's
Institute for Physics received regular sumsù25,000 marks
from October 1, 1917, to March 31, 1918ùfrom the
Koppel donation which set up the military foundation.
Einstein himself wrote to Hedwig Born in 1919 referring
to another rich man and saying "my academic
remuneration does not depend on his purse but on that of
Herr Koppel," while Professor Jens of Tⁿbingen University
has stated that Einstein "was first given the opportunity for
undisturbed research by a Prussian banker who undertook
to pay Einstein a supplementary salary of 4,000
Reichsmarks from April 1, 1914, onwards for a period of
twelve years," and names the banker as Koppel.
"Einstein," he sums up, "knew that the sumptuous bed in
which he lay swarmed with bugs."
  Whatever the exact figures, it is clear that Einstein at the
height of his powers was being supported by the very
people he was soon condemning, and exhibiting a
surprising ability to prevent his left hand from knowing
what his right hand was doing. Yet even had he troubled
to think about the matter, there would have been no
contradiction in declaiming against the war while using
for science the money of those who supported it. Like
Major Barbara, Einstein would have reflected that the
money was better in his hands than theirs.
  Einstein's ingrained distrust of all things military and of
all things Prussian was first revealed clearly by his
reaction to the "Manifesto to the Civilized World." This
was a fulsome and pained expression of surprise that the
world should have objected to the German invasion of
Belgium. Issued early in October, 1914, it disclaimed
Germany's war guilt, justified the violation of Belgium on
the grounds that it would have been suicide to have done
anything else, spoke of "Russian hordes . . . unleashed
against the white race" in the tones of Dr. Goebbels twenty
years later, and claimed that "were it not for German
militarism, German culture would have been wiped off the
face of the earth." The manifesto gained ninety-three
supporters from the upper echelons of the intellectual
world, where it was circulated. Wilhelm R÷ntgen, the
discoverer of X rays, signed it. So did Ernst Haeckel, the
evolutionist. So did Paul Ehrlich, the biologist. And so did
Max Planck, although he may have been one of those who
had, in Einstein's kind words to Lorentz, signed
"carelessly, sometimes without having read the text." But,
Einstein added, he did not "think that these people can be
persuaded to retract."
  A reaction to "The Manifesto of the 93," as it became
known, came within days from George Nicolai, professor
of physiology in the University of Berlin, soon to be the
author of The Biology of War, and the conscript-turned
pacifist who during the closing months of the war made a
sensational escape from Germany by plane. The exact part
that Einstein played in the "Manifesto to Europeans"
which Nicolai produced is not clear, but Nicolai himself,
writing to Einstein on May 18, 1918, gives him credit for
being coauthor, and continues: "Indeed, without your
participation, it might never have seen the light of day. At
least I am inclined to believe, difficult as it is to determine
such contingencies, that I should never have done anything
alone." Even though the countermanifesto was a joint
effort, its wording is extraordinarily reminiscent of the
statements, announcements, messages, and exhortations
which were to come in a stream from Einstein throughout
the next forty years. It was the first of its sort which he
wrote or signed, and it is therefore significant enough to be
quoted in full:

  Never before has any war so completely disrupted cultural
cooperation. It has done so at the very time when progress in
technology and communications clearly suggest that we recognize
the need for international relations which will necessarily move
in the direction of a universal, worldwide civilization. Perhaps
we are all the more keenly and painfully aware of the rupture
precisely because so many international bonds existed before.
  We can scarcely be surprised. Anyone who cares in the least
for a common world culture is now doubly committed to fight
for the maintenance of the principles on which it must stand.
Yet, those from whom such sentiments might have been
expectedùprimarily scientists and artistsùhave so far
responded, almost to a man, as though they had relinquished
any further desire for the continuance of international
relations. They have spoken in a hostile spirit, and they have
failed to speak out for peace.
  Nationalist passions cannot excuse this attitude, which is
unworthy of what the world has heretofore called culture. It
would be a grave misfortune were the spirit to gain general
currency among the intellectuals. It would, we are convinced,
not only threaten culture as such: it would endanger the very
existence of the nations for the protection of which this
barbarous war was unleashed.
  Technology has shrunk the world. Indeed, today the nations
of the great European peninsula seem to jostle one another
much as once did the city-states that were crowded into those
smaller peninsulas jutting out into the Mediterranean. Travel
is so widespread, international supply and demand are so
interwoven, that Europeùone could almost say the whole
worldùis even now a single unit.
  Surely, it is the duty of Europeans of education and goodwill
at least to try to prevent Europe from succumbing, because of
lack of international organization, to the fate that once
engulfed ancient Greece! Or will Europe also suffer slow
exhaustion and death by fratricidal war?
  The struggle raging today can scarcely yield a "victor"; all
nations that participate in it will, in all likelihood, pay an
exceedingly high price. Hence it appears not only wise but
imperative for men of education in all countries to exert their
influence for the kind of peace treaty that will not carry the
seeds of future wars, whatever the outcome of the present
conflict may be. The unstable and fluid situation in Europe,
created by the war, must be utilized to weld the continent into
an organic whole. Technically and intellectually, conditions
are ripe for such a development.
  This is not the place to discuss how this new order in Europe
may be brought about. Our sole purpose is to affirm our
profound conviction that the time has come when Europe must
unite to guard its soil, its people, and its culture. We are
stating publicly our faith in European unity, a faith which we
believe is shared by many; we hope that this public
affirmation of our faith may contribute to the growth of a
powerful movement toward such unity.
  The first step in this direction would be for all those who
truly cherish the culture of Europe to join forcesùall those
whom Goethe once prophetically called "good Europeans."
We must not abandon hope that their voices, speaking in
unison, may even today rise above the clash of arms,
particularly if they are joined by those who already enjoy
renown and authority.
  The first step, we repeat, is for Europeans to join forces. If,
as we devoutly hope, enough Europeans are to be found in
Europeùpeople to whom Europe is a vital cause rather than a
geographical termùwe shall endeavor to organize a League of
Europeans. This league may then raise its voice and take
action.
  We ourselves seek to make the first move, to issue the
challenge. If you are of one mind with us, if you too are
determined to create a widespread movement for European
unity, we bid you pledge yourself by signing your name.

  The manifesto, drawn up in the University of Berlin, was
circulated among its professors. It was signed by Nicolai
and by Einstein. It was signed by Wilhelm Forster, the
eighty-year-old head of the Berlin Observatory who had
already signed the Manifesto of the 93, and by Otto Buek.
That was all.
  Einstein no doubt felt its ineffectiveness a month later
and was drawn for the first time into membership of a
political party. This was the Bund Neues Vaterland,
established on November 16, 1914, and including among
its founder members the banker Hugo Simon who in 1919
became Prussian Minister of Finance, and Ernst Reuter
who became a famous burgomaster of Berlin after the
Second World War. The main object of the group was to
bring about an early peace. The second was the creation of
an international body that would make future wars
impossible. Both were aims with which Einstein whole
heartedly sympathized and he is reported to have been
"very active, attending meetings and delivering speeches."
The Bund, struggling for existence in a nation not only at
war but enthusiastically supporting the war, was obviously
doomed to an early death. However, Einstein's support was
open, something very different from the support which he
was to give, through connections in Holland and
Switzerland, to the forces striving for an early end to the
war even if this involved Germany's defeat.
  It has been said with some justice that "to work in any
open way for peace under the Kaiser's regime in 1914 was
equivalent to treason," and if Einstein is taken to have
been a German some of his actions have more than a touch
of it. Had all of them been publicly known in the
immediate aftermath of the Armistice, his trials and
tribulations during the early 1920s would have been that
much greater. For he hoped not only for an end to the war
but, more specifically, for German defeat; and he made
this hope quite clear to those whom he could trust. The
attitude linked him loosely with at least part of the
"German resistance" of thirty years later, although with
one difference. In Europe of 1914-18 he was not only able
to continue his life's work from his privileged position in
Berlin; he was also able to carry on his "resistance" work
of pleading peace in both Holland and Switzerland with
the minimum of personal risk since in any trouble he could
always claim the protection of his Swiss passport. There is
nothing shameful in the fact that circumstance thus
enabled him to have the best of both worlds; yet it tended
to widen the gap that already separated him from most
other men.
  Einstein's first wartime contacts outside Germanyùwith
the exception of personal letters to his wifeùwere with
Ehrenfest and Lorentz in Holland. To the first he revealed
his feelings as early as August 19, 1914: "Europe, in her
insanity, has started something unbelievable. In such times
one realizes to what a sad species of animal one belongs. I
quietly pursue my peaceful studies and contemplations and
feel only pity and disgust." Writing a few months later,
early in December, he elaborated: "The international
catastrophe has imposed a heavy burden upon me as an
internationlist. In living through this 'great epoch' it is
difficult to reconcile oneself to the fact that one belongs to
that idiotic, rotten species which boasts of its freedom of
will. How I wish that somewhere there existed an island
for those who are wise and of goodwill! In such a place
even I should be an ardent patriot." Einstein, just
emerging from his own closed world, did not yet
appreciate how readily good men, and wise ones, can
support bad causes; or that his ideal island would have to
be defended.
  In much the same vein he wrote to Lorentz in the
summer of 1915, deploring the national bias which he
found "even among men of great stature," noting that
frontiers made little difference, and setting down his belief
"that men always need some idiotic fiction in the name of
which they can face one another. Once it was religion.
Now it is the state." In this same letter he also refers to a
proposal which Lorentz had rejected. Its details are
suggested in a letter from Einstein to Ehrenfest later the
same month. In this he admits that the proposal was na∩ve,
and goes on: "Impulse was stronger than judgment. I
would so much like to do something to hold together our
colleagues in the various 'Fatherlands.' Is not that small
group of scholars and intellectuals the only 'Fatherland'
which is worthy of serious concern to people like
ourselves? Should their convictions be determined solely
by the accident of frontiers?"
  Shortly afterwards, in September, 1915, he left Berlin for
Switzerland, intent on the "something" of his letter to
Lorentz. With his Swiss passport, his wife still living in
Zurich, and his numerous friends in both Zurich and
Berne, this was on the face of it an acceptable journey to
make. Its main object, however, was to visit Romain
Rolland, the famous author and pacifist then living in
Vevey on the shores of Lake Geneva.
  Einstein had written to Rolland in March. "Through the
press and through my association with the stalwart Bund
Neues Vaterland," he said,

  I have learned how valiantly you have committed yourself, heart
and soul, to the cause of bridging the fateful misunderstandings
between the French and German people. I am eager to express to
you my deep admiration and respect. May your splendid example
inspire other highminded men to abandon the incomprehensible
delusions that, like a malignant plague, have gripped even
otherwise intelligent, able, and sensible people.
  When posterity recounts the achievements of Europe, shall
we let men say that three centuries of painstaking cultural
effort carried us no farther than from religious fanaticism to
the insanity of nationalism? In both camps today even scholars
behave as though eight months ago they suddenly lost their
heads.
  If you think I could be of any service to youùbecause of my
present domicile or by virtue of my connections with scientists
in Germany and abroadùI am at your disposal to the limits of
my ability.

  It is not quite clear how he thought he could help, but
Rolland in neutral Switzerland subsequently received a
letter from Berlin saying that there was much good news
about their work which could be given by a man close to
themùthe scholar Einstein who would be visiting Rolland
shortly.
  Now, in mid-September, Einstein arrived at Vevey from
Zurich, accompanied by Dr. Zangger from the ETH who
had helped get him back to the Polytechnic in 1912.
Rolland's long diary entry of September 16, 1915, is
extraordinarily revealing.
  "Professor Einstein, the brilliant physicist and
mathematician of the University of Berlin, who wrote to
me last winter, came to see me from Zurich, where he is
staying, with his friend, Professor Dr. Zangger," this
reads.

  We spent the whole of the afternoon on the terrace of the Hotel
Mooser, at the bottom of the garden, amid swarms of bees who
were plundering the ivy, which was in flower. Einstein is still
young, not very tall, with an ample figure, great mane of hair a
little frizzled and dry, very black but sprinkled with gray, which
rises from a high forehead, with nose fleshy and prominent,
small mouth, full lips, a small moustache cut short, full cheeks
and rounded chin. He speaks French with difficulty and mixes it
with German. He is very lively and gay; and he finds no difficulty
in giving an amusing twist to the most serious of subjects. He is
Swiss by origin, born in Germany, a naturalized German and
then, as far as I can understand, renaturalized Swiss two or three
years before the war. I admire the Swiss Germans' brilliant
vitality. Two or three small cantons have given Germany her
greatest modern painter, Boecklin; her greatest novelist, Keller;
her greatest poet, Spitteler; her greatest physicist, Einstein. And
what others are there that I fail to mention? And, in all, this
common quality as much in Einstein as in Spitteler; absolute
independence of the spirit, solitary and happy. Einstein is
unbelievably free in his judgments on Germany where he lives.
No German has such a liberty. Anyone other than he would
suffer by being so isolated in his thoughts during this terrible
year. Not he, however. He laughs. And he has even been able,
during the war, to write his most important scientific work. I
asked him if he expressed his views to his German friends and
talked about them. He said no. He contents himself with asking a
series of Socratic questions, in order to disturb their
complacency. And he says that "people don't like that much."
What he says is hardly encouraging; for it shows the
impossibility of concluding a peace with Germany before one has
crushed her. Einstein says that the situation seems to him far less
favorable than it was a few months ago. The victories on the
Russian front have revived the pride and the appetite of the
Germans. "Hungry" seems to Einstein to be the word which best
characterizes the Germans. Above all one sees the will for
power, the admiration for force, and their exclusive decision for
conquests and annexations. The government is more moderate
than the nation. It wishes to evacuate Belgium but is unable to do
so. The officers threatened revolt. The big bankers, the
industrialists, big business, is all powerful; they expect to be
paid for the sacrifices they have made, the Emperor is only a tool
in their hands and in those of the officers; he is good, feeble,
hopeless about the war that he has never wanted, but into which
he was forced because he is so easy to manipulate. All his
unpredictable actions of the last few years, and his disconcerting
brusquenesses, were carefully prepared by pan-German groups
who used him without his knowing it. Tirpitz and Falkenhayn are
the protagonists of the most bloody action. Falkenhayn seems the
most dangerous; Tirpitz is above all a powerful impersonal
machine. As to the intellectuals in the universities, Einstein
divides them into two very clear classes; the mathematicians,
doctors, and the exact sciences who are tolerant; and the
historians and the arts faculties which stir up the nationalist
passions. The mass of the nation is immensely submissive,
"domesticated" (Einstein approves of this description by
Spitteler). Einstein blames above all else the education which is
aimed at national pride and blind submission to the state. He
does not think that race is responsible since French Huguenots,
refugees for two centuries, have the same characteristics. The
socialists are the only independent element (to some extent);
however, they form only a minority of the party grouped round
Bernstein. The Bund Neues Vaterland goes ahead only slowly
and does not grow much. Einstein does not expect any salvation
of Germany by herself; she has neither the energy nor the
audacity to make such an initiative. He hopes for a victory by the
Allies which will ruin the power of Prussia and of the dynasty.
When I asked whether this would not rally the nation around its
unfortunate masters, Einstein the sceptic said that faithfulness
was not a part of its nature; for her masters she has the
admiration of fear and the respect for force, but no affection; if
this force is smashed Germany will become like a country of
savages who having adored their idol, throw it into the flames
when they realize that they have been defeated. Einstein and
Zangger dream of a partitioned Germany; on one hand southern
Germany and Austria, on the other Prussia. But such a breakup
of the Empire is more than doubtful. In Germany, everyone is
convinced of victory; and one hears officially that the war will
continue only for another six months or even less. However,
Einstein says that those who know realize that the situation is
grave and that it will become worse if the war goes on. It is not
food which they will feel the most need of but certain chemical
products necessary for the war. It is true that the truly admirable
ingenuity of the German professors supplies the necessary
products in the form of substitutes. All the professors at the
universities have been put at the head of military services or
commissions. Alone, Einstein has refused to take part. Whatever
the outcome of the war the main victim will be France. All
Germans know this; and for this reason Germany has a pitying
sympathy. When I said that this sympathy from the Germans
always has, for us, a disdainful character, Einstein and Zangger
strongly protested. The political interest of England grows all the
time in their eyes. Zangger, like all the German Swiss, speaks of
it with antipathy. He is well informed and gives little-known
proofs of British speculation. England has decided that France
should hold at Marseilles (as well as at Genoa) goods destined
for Switzerland. After that she sells them at double or treble the
price to the Swiss. The war is really a battle between two worlds.
France and Europe are crushed between them. Einstein, in spite
of his lack of sympathy for England, prefers her victory to that of
Germany because she will be more able to bring the world back
to life.
  We speak of the voluntary blindness and the lack of
psychology on the part of the Germans. Einstein describes,
laughing as he does so, how at each meeting of the Council of
the University of Berlin, all the professors meet after the
session in a cafΘ and there, each time, the conversation opens
with the same question: "Why does the world hate us?" Then
everyone talks, everyone gives his own reply, and everyone
takes care not to say the truth. He spoke of one general
meeting of the universities which was held in secret last July;
there it was discussed whether the German universities
should break all their links with the rest of the world's
universities and academies. The motion was turned down by
the universities of southern Germany, which formed the
majority. But the University of Berlin supported it. She is the
most official and the most imperialist of them all; her
professors are specially chosen with this in mind.

  It is clear that Einstein, in the hatred of his fellow
countrymen that Rolland's entry indicates, forgot that they,
as well as the English, heard "bugles calling for them from
sad shires"; for once his humanity escaped him. Another
significant point in Rolland's account is the exculpation of
the Kaiser. It seems unlikely that Einstein was swayed by
personal sympathies, and all accounts of a meeting
between the two men appear to be apocryphal. But he
clung to the Emperor's good intentions. "The Kaiser
meant well," he said in an interview a decade after the end
of the war. "He often had the right instinct. His intuitions
were frequently more inspired than the labored reasons of
his Foreign Office. Unfortunately, the Kaiser was always
surrounded by poor advisers." And, asked whether the
Kaiser or the Jews were responsible for the debacle of
1918, he replied: "Both are largely guiltless. The German
dΘbacle was due to the fact that the German people,
especially the upper classes, failed to produce men of
character, strong enough to take hold of the reins of
government and to tell the truth to the Kaiser."
  With Rolland, Einstein laid the blame unequivocally on
what he saw as the essential German spirit, but the
intensity of his feeling shocked the Frenchman. The two
men exchanged a few more words, standing on the station
platform at Vevey as the train prepared to leave for Berne.
"In looking at Einstein," wrote Rolland, "I noted how he,
one of the very few men whose spirit had remained free
among the general servility, had been led, as a reaction, to
see the worst side of his own nation and to judge her
almost with the severity of her enemies. I know certain
men in the French camp who, for the same reason, would
shake hands with him. (Incidentally, Einstein is a Jew,
which explains his international outlook and the mocking
character of his criticism.)" The strength of Einstein's
feeling was remarkable; and he must have questioned even
the scientific benefits of life in Berlin when he considered
that his patrons included the creator and financial
supporter of the Kaiser Wilhelm Foundation for Military
Technical Sciences.
  In neutral Switzerland his views could be declared
without fear of serious contradiction. In Germany, he put a
slightly different emphasis on reasons for the war. Asked
by the Berlin Goethe Association a few months after his
return for a short article outlining his feelings, he made no
mention of the German guilt he had stressed so strongly to
Rolland. "The psychological root of war lies, in my
opinion," he wrote "in the biologically based aggressive
character of man. We 'lords of creation' are not the only
ones who can pride themselves on this; we are
considerably surpassed by the bull and the cock. This
tendency towards aggression shows itself wherever men
are in close proximity, but it shows much more strongly
when they are grouped together in narrow closed societies.
These almost inevitably anger each other, and this then
degenerates into quarrels and mutual homicide unless
special precautions are taken." He went on to plead for the
outlawing of war and for the European organization he
had outlined in the manifesto. "I am also convinced," he
concluded, "that in spite of the unspeakably sad conditions
of the present time, there should be a political organization
in Europe which should outlaw war in the same way that
not so long ago the German Reich outlawed war between
Bavaria and Wⁿrttemberg."
  Naturally enough, this was all a good deal more cautious
than the opinions he had voiced to Rolland. By the end of
1915, prospects of a quick victory had faded and with them
went the comparative freedom of the first year of war. Not
even Einstein would have survived expression of open
hope "for a victory by the Allies which will ruin the power
of Prussia and of the dynasty." Indeed, he seems to have
compartmentalized his feelings with surprising ease. He
remained on the friendliest of terms with Haber, the poison
gas expert, and with his help was able to squeeze from the
German General Staff a travel permit for a colleague. He
was also, according to Max Born, one of the Berlin
intellectuals who in midwar met high officials in the
German Foreign Office to dissuade them from starting
unrestricted U-boat warfare "as it would be bound to bring
the United States into the war and thus lead to final
defeat."
  However, Einstein may well have been supporting such
humanitarian pleas on moral grounds under the cover of
expediency. For as hopes of an early peace faded, any
suggestion of limiting operations had a defeatist ring that
could no longer be tolerated. The Bund Neues Vaterland
was outlawed, and while hints of a negotiated peace might
be made privately, they produced in public the same
vilification that comparable ideas produced in Britain,
France, or, later, the United States. There is little evidence
that this tightening of the official attitude had much effect
on Einstein's privately expressed views, and his
correspondence with Lorentz, largely concerned with
scientific work, continued to be sprinkled with the
strongest pacifist sentiments which could have been noted
by the censor. Luckily he was not involved in work where
indiscretion would have been more dangerous to friends
than to foes.
  There can certainly be no doubt about Einstein's pacifist
feelings nor about his more concealed wish for a German
defeat. But at the same time he retained the privileged
position of a critic whose presence would be tolerated
although his views were disliked. This position was the
result partly of the renown which the General Theory had
brought him in 1915, partly of his legal status as a Swiss.
It nevertheless rankled with more than one Allied scientist
when the war was over and Einstein's scientific eminence
was buttressed by the claim that he had always been an
open opponent of the militarists. Certainly as a Swiss he
retained advantages, not the least being a freedom to visit
neutral countries with less bureaucratic interference than
most Germans, and he made use of this at Easter, 1916, to
visit his wife in Zurich.
  The meeting was disastrous. Einstein, according to his
correspondence with Besso, made an "irrevocable"
decision not to see Mileva again. Hans stopped writing to
his father when Einstein returned to Berlin. And when,
Mileva being ill, the question of another visit to Zurich
was raised in the summer, Einstein poured out his troubles
in a long letter to Besso, who henceforth acted as honest
broker between the couple. If he came to Zurich, he said,
Mileva would demand to see him and he would have to
refuse, partly because of his earlier decision, partly to
avoid emotional scenes. The boys would think he was
being callous, and he really thought no good would come
of it.
  He went on to say that Besso had no idea of the tricks
which were natural to such a woman as his wife, and
explained that he would have been worn out if they had
not been apart. It was now two years since she had left him
in Berlin and Einstein asked his friend whether, when they
had met recently, he had not seen a better man, one who
had regained the innocent joy of a real life. If his wife had
to go to hospital that would be different. Then he would
visit herùand see the children on "neutral ground."
Otherwise, "No."
  From now onwards Bessoùor "Uncle Toby" as Einstein,
remembering Tristram Shandy, sometimes called him
acted as a regular go-between, helping to arrange schools
for the boys, working out expenses, and advising him of
the current Mileva situation in Zurich in a long series of
letters that were divided between scientific gossip and
domestic detail.
  With the worsening war situation travel abroad became
more complicated. In the autumn of 1916 Einstein visited
Holland, but was able to do so only after Lorentz had sent
him an official invitation and he had obtained his original
Swiss naturalization papers from Zurich.
  On the day after arriving at the Ehrenfests' in Leiden, he
visited Lorentz in Haarlem, going there with his host.
  After dinner, they went up to Lorentz' study where
Einstein was ushered into the best and most comfortable
chair, which was pulled up to Lorentz' working desk.
Einstein was provided with a cigar. Only then did Lorentz
begin to question him about the bending of light in a
gravitational field. Einstein listened, nodding, puffing
happily away at his cigar as he saw how well Lorentz
appreciated the tremendous difficulties with which he had
had to struggle. Then, as Lorentz continued, Einstein
began to puff less frequently. When the older man had
finished, Einstein bent over the slip of paper on which
Lorentz had been writing mathematical formulas as he
spoke. At first he said nothing, merely twisting his finger
in the lock of hair over his right ear, an action familiar to
those who knew him well.
  "Lorentz," wrote Ehrenfest in a note of the visit, "sat
smiling at an Einstein completely lost in meditation,
exactly the way a father looks at a particularly beloved
sonùfull of secure confidence that the youngster will
crack the nut he has given him, but eager to see how. It
took quite a while, but suddenly Einstein's head shot up
joyfully; he 'had' it. Still a bit of give and take,
interrupting one another, a partial disagreement, very
quick clarification and a complete mutual understanding,
and then both men with beaming eyes skimming over the
shining riches of the new theory."
  Soon after his return from Leiden to Berlin, Einstein
discovered that his old friend Friedrich Adler not only
thought along antiwar lines similar to his own but had
taken up arms to reinforce them. In 1912 Adler had left
Switzerland for Austria and here, desperate at the
government's refusal to convene Parliament and thus put
its action to the test of public debate, he took what seemed
to be the most reasonable logical action. In October, 1916,
he walked into the fashionable Hotel Meissel and Schadn
and at point-blank range shot dead the Prime Minister,
Count Stⁿrgkh.
  When Adler was put on trial, Einstein wrote offering to
give evidence as a character witness, an offer which Adler,
in keeping with his subsequent actions, appears to have
loftily declined as being unnecessary. Awaiting trial, he
settled down into a succession of prisons and military
fortresses to write a long thesis on relativity, Local Time,
System Time, Zone Time.
  On July 14, 1917, Adler wrote to Einstein asking for
advice on his work. Einstein replied cordially, and a
typewritten draft of the manuscript soon arrived in Berlin.
Meanwhile, other copies were being sent to psychiatrists
and physicists who were asked whether Adler was
mentally deranged. "The experts, especially the physicists,
were placed in a very difficult situation," says Philipp
Frank, who himself received a copy. "Adler's father and
family desired that this work should be made the basis for
the opinion that Adler was mentally deranged. But this
would necessarily be highly insulting to the author, since
he believed that he had produced an excellent scientific
achievement. Moreover, speaking objectively, there was
nothing in any way abnormal about it except that his
arguments were wrong." Einstein held much the same
view, noting that it was based on "very shaky
foundations."
  Whether or not Adler's critical study of relativity
influenced his fate is unclear. But although he was
condemned to death, this sentence was commuted to
eighteen months, probably the most lenient punishment in
history for a Prime Ministerial assassination. The eighteen
months do not seem to have been notably rigorous; and a
letter to Einstein, written from the military fortress of
Stein-an-Donau in July, 1918, reveals a prisoner happily
immersed in the problems of science who could end his
letter with the comment that in these difficult times
conditions were much better inside prison walls than
outside them.
  Einstein's correspondence with Adler was carried on as
he struggled to counteract a serious breakdown that was
partly nervous collapse, partly longstanding stomach upset,
the latter no doubt exacerbated by the trials of wartime
Berlin and a bachelor existence. At first he thought he had
cancer and confided the fact to Freundlich, adding that it
was unimportant whether or not he died, since his theory
of General Relativity had been published and that was
what really mattered.[Discussed elsewhere] Freundlich induced
him to visit a relative of his wife, a Dr. Rosenheim, who
quickly diagnosed the stomach trouble which was to worry
him for the rest of his life.
  The illness was hardly surprising. For years he had been
deeply immersed in scientific work which has been
described as the greatest intellectual effort of any single
human brain. His views on the war were diametrically
opposed to those of the men and women around him. In
addition, he was living a makeshift existence which gave
full rein to the inclination summed up by his doctor friend
Janos Plesch. "As his mind knows no limits, so his body
follows no set rules," he wrote; "he sleeps until he is
wakened; he stays awake until he is told to go to bed; he
will go hungry until he is given something to eat; and then
he eats until he is stopped." That Einstein, mentally
hardpressed and physically underorganized, should
experience a breakdown in wartime Berlin is not to be
wondered at; the surprise is that he avoided one so long.
  During the first two months of his illness he lost fifty-six
pounds in weight. Although he wrote to Lorentz in April
that he was getting better, it was summer before he was out
and about, and August before he was able to recuperate in
Switzerland.
  While he was ill Hedwig Born, the young wife of Max
Born, became a frequent visitor. "His utter independence
and objectivity, and his serene outlook, enabled me to ride
up over the awful darkness of those days and to look far
beyond the desperate day-to-day conditions," she has said
of the war years in the German capital. His "utter
independence" was typified by a letter to Ehrenfest in
June. "You are complaining about yourself again, and are
dissatisfied with yourself," he said. "Just think how little
difference it will make in twenty years how one has
loitered about on this earth, just so long as one has done
nothing base. Whether you write this or that article
yourself, or whether someone else writes it, makes very
little difference. Stupid you certainly are not, except
insofar as you keep thinking about whether or not you are
stupid. So away with the hypochondria! Rejoice with your
family in the beautiful land of life!"
  Isolation from the hopes and fears of ordinary men
included isolation from the fear of death itself. "No,"
Einstein told Frau Born when on one visit during his
illness she asked whether he was afraid of dying. "I feel
myself so much a part of all life that I am not in the least
concerned with the beginning or the end of the concrete
existence of any particular person in this unending
stream." This, she says, was typical of the unity which he
looked for in all nature.

  It is probably not surprising that it was he who helped me to be
an objective scientist, and to avoid feeling that the whole thing
was impersonal. Modern physics left me standing. Here was only
objective truth, which unhappily meant nothing to me, and
perhaps the possibility that in the future everything would be
expressed scientifically. So I asked Einstein one day, "Do you
believe that absolutely everything can be expressed
scientifically?" "Yes," he replied, "it would be possible, but it
would make no sense. It would be description without
meaningùas if you described a Beethoven symphony as a
variation of wave pressure." This was a great solace to me.

  There was certainly a flaw in Einstein's attempt to regard
all human lifeùeven one's ownùas merely a bubble on
the cosmic stream. To Freundlich, he once confided that
there was no one in the world whose death would worry
him. "I thought how terrible it was for a man with a wife
and two children to believe and say such a thing," says
Frau Freundlich. "Then, a year or so afterwards, Einstein's
mother died in Berlin, where she had come to spend the
last few months of her life with him. In a way I was glad.
For Einstein wept, like other men, and I knew that he
could really care for someone." And many years later his
friend Gustav Bucky wrote: "He believed that nothing
really touched him inwardly. But this man who never
wanted to show emotion wrote just one sentence to me
after my bad illness: 'From now on, I will be thankful
every hour of my life that we are left together.'" So often,
despite himself, humanity kept breaking in.
  Einstein's illness of 1917 had a more important result
than stomach trouble. For it at last brought him under the
wing, first mothering and eventually matrimonial, of his
cousin Elsa. At what point they renewed their youthful
acquaintance is vague but it was almost inevitable that he
should meet, if only on a family basis, the cousin he
remembered from his childhood days in Munich.
  Elsa's mother was Pauline Koch's sister, which meant
that both Elsa and Albert could claim CΣsar Koch as an
uncle, while both were also related rather back along the
Einstein family tree. By 1917 Elsa had become Elsa
Lowenthal, a pleasant widow with two daughters, Ilse aged
twenty and Margot aged eighteen. In appearance she was
comfortable rather than beautiful, and she lacked the
curiosity which had at times made Mileva so mentally
importunate. "I'm glad my wife doesn't know any
science," Einstein later said to a colleague. "My first wife
did."
  Near-sighted and slightly provincial, Elsa was an easy
butt during her husband's triumphal progress through the
world for the enemies which her protectiveness made. But
she was careful, conscientious, undemanding, and suitably
awed by fameùin many ways the ideal wife for the
absentminded genius of which Einstein became the
epitome. Her character was unconsciously described by
Einstein himself when he made a remark to his friend
Philipp Frank "based," as Frank says, "on many years of
experience." Said Einstein: "When women are in their
homes, they are attached to their furniture. They run round
it all day long and are always fussing over it. But when I
am with a woman on a journey, I am the only piece of
furniture that she has available, and she cannot refrain
from moving round me all day long and improving
something about me."
  It is not true that from 1917 onwards Einstein allowed
Elsa to make up his mind for him on everything except
science, pacifism, and politics. Even outside the three
interests of his life, only Einstein made up Einstein's
mind. But when he had done so he allowed Elsa to
organize details, to implement decisions, to handle the
minutiae, and thus allow him to get on with his work.
Field Marshal Montgomery once wrote in a privately
produced booklet for his troops that "the wise commander
... will be well advised to withdraw to his tent or caravan
after dinner at night and have time for quiet thoughts and
reflection." Montgomery had no wish to be worried by
unnecessary detail. Neither had Einstein.
  During his illness Elsa, not surprisingly, looked after
him. In the later stages of his convalescence he joined her
Haberlandstrasse mΘnage. Given the context it was a not
unexpected outcome that in 1919, after finally obtaining a
divorce from Mileva, he should marry cousin Elsa.
  As he slowly recovered in 1917 he decided to finish his
recuperation in Switzerland; the Swiss citizen thus
exchanged the growing austerity of wartime Berlin for the
comparative luxury of a neutral country. He had intended
to take the cure at Tarasp in the Lower Engadine but, as he
explained to Besso, lack of funds forced him to content
himself with a rest at his mother's in Lucerne.
  In Switzerland he had hoped to meet Rolland again.
When this proved impossible, he wrote instead.

  I am touched by the warm interest you display in a man you
have met but once. But for my uncertain health I would not,
you may be sure, deny myself the privilege of visiting you.
Unfortunately the smallest strain often exacts its toll. The
dismal record of mankind has not made me more pessimistic
than I actually was two years ago. Indeed, I find that the wave
of imperialist sentiment that swept over leading circles in
Germany has somewhat subsided. Yet, it would still be
exceedingly dangerous, I believe, to come to an agreement
with the Germany of today.
  The victory of 1870 and the subsequent commercial and
industrial success in that country have established a religion
of power that found in [Heinrich von] Treitschke [German
historian] an expression which is not in the least exaggerated.
Virtually all men of education have become captivated by this
powerful credo which has, in fact, supplanted the ideals of the
era of Goethe and Schiller. I know people in Germany whose
private lives are guided by utter altruism, yet who awaited the
declaration on unrestricted submarine warfare with the utmost
impatience. I am firmly convinced that only harsh realities can
stem this confusion of minds. These people must be shown
that they must respect non-Germans as equals and that, if they
are to survive, they must earn the confidence of other
countries. Neither by force nor breach of faith will they attain
the goals they have set themselves.
  I think it is hopeless to struggle against these goals with the
weapons of the mind. Those who consider men like Nicolai to
be utopians do so with honest conviction. Only facts can cure
the misled masses of the delusion that we live for the state,
and that the state should, at any price, concentrate all power
in its own hands.
  To my way of thinking, the best method of resolving this
dreary dilemma would be to form an enduring military
arbitration pact among America, Britain, France and Russia,
with agreements on mutual aid and minimum and maximum
limits of military preparedness. Such a treaty should include
provisions for most-favored-nation treatment with respect to
tariffs. Any nation should be allowed to join the treaty
provided it has a democratically elected parliament in which
the chief executive must command a majority. I shall not go
beyond this brief outline.
  If Germany, which is dependent on foreign markets for the
sale of industrial products, were faced with such a stable
situation, the view would soon prevail that the path it
followed must be abandoned. However, so long as German
statesmen are able to hope sooner or later for a shift in the
balance of power, there can be no serious expectation that
their policy will be changed. As evidence that everything
remains as it has always been, I cite the manner in which the
recent change in the German chancellorship was staged.
  May you find solace in these gloomy times in your inspired
creative work.

  The vigor of Einstein's anti-German sentiments struck
Rolland forcefully. In his diary he pointed out that the
policy of crushing Germany had no greater supporters than
some prominent Germans. "I note once again," he added,
"the extreme injustice, through an excess of justice, to
which the most liberal spirits come, vis-α-vis their own
country. ..."
  Bearing all this in mind it is at first strange that Einstein
should have returned to Berlin as quickly as he did.
Zangger wrote to Rolland urging him to induce the visitor
to remain in Switzerland. Other friends did the same. But
after spending a week with his two sons in Arosa, he
returned from the country which he loved to the country he
detested.
  The unfortunate meeting with Mileva at Easter, 1916,
had not been repeated. He had no intention that it should
be, and any hint that he was making more than a brief visit
to Switzerland might well have brought his wife to his
door. He had continued to support her; but now more than
ever he had no wish to be brought personally into the
negotiations, so far mainly conducted through Besso, the
ever-faithful go-between. In a letter written to him on May
15, Einstein confided that he was increasingly hard-
pressed financially. Of his total income of about 13,000
marks a year, roughly 7,000 was being sent regularly for
the upkeep of his wife and children. Another 600 marks a
year went to his mother in Lucerne, and some of his
customary additional fees were now disappearing. He had
perilously little left to maintain the status of a professor, let
alone anything for luxuries or reserves. He had, after all,
been obliged to abandon Tarasp for Lucerne.
  Soon, however, there was hope of a change. Shortly after
his return to Berlin, he told Besso that his address would
in future be Haberlandstrasse 5, adding that his move
seemed to have taken place alreadyùa turn of phrase
which suggests that Elsa was the initiator of the marriage
in eighteen months' time.
  This marriage was to have little effect on the course of
Einstein's purely scientific career, which had reached its
climax before 1919. It did, however, affect crucially his
impact on the world, as father figure, as oracle, as the man
whose support was for years a useful weapon in the hands
of any group ingenious enough to win it. For without the
care and protecting intervention of this kindly figure
placid and housewifely, of no intellectual pretensions but
with a practiced mothering ability which made her the
ideal organizer of geniusùtwo things would almost
certainly have happened. He would have cracked under the
strain of unrelenting publicity and public demands, and
withdrawn from pacifism, Zionism, and socialism, into the
shell where he carried on his scientific work. He would
also have made a fool of himself more often than he did,
have issued more statements that he had to retract, signed
more documents without reading them properly, and been
used more frequently by men of ill will.
  From the first, Elsa knew the part that had been cut out
for her. "All I can do is to look after his outside affairs,
take business matters off his shoulders, and take care that
he is not interrupted in his work," she said during his visit
to England in 1921. "It is enough to be a means of
communication between him and all sorts of human
beings." And a decade later, describing her role to Dr.
Chaim Tschernowitz, the Jewish scholar who was visiting
their house outside Berlin, she said: "When the Americans
come to my house they carry away details about Einstein
and his life, and about me they say incidentally: he has a
good wife, who is very hospitable, and offers a fine table."
The point of her remark was not to be missed, says Dr.
Tschernowitz. "Einstein might be the lion among thinkers,
but this good woman felt, and rightly so, that to a large
extent the world owed him to her, who watched over him
as one might over a child." Einstein was aware of these
possibilities. Thus in the summer of 1917 he willingly
became the bohemian setpiece of a bourgeois household.
  It was part of his genius that he could isolate himself
from his surroundings, and this was never more necessary
than in the apartment of No. 5, Haberlandstrasse. On the
dark green wallpaper of the main sitting room there hung
the expected portrait of Frederick the Great, looking down
without a smile on the heavy immobility of the
Biedermeier furniture, on the corner cabinets stocked with
porcelain, on the huge round central table with the
starched white tablecloth edged with crochet, on Schiller
and Goethe, the white eyes of their white busts firmly fixed
on each other from opposite sides of the room. Beyond lay
the library, its walls soon to be ornamented by a large
framed picture of Michael Faraday. Into this epitome of all
things that were proper came Albert Einstein,
unchangeable by the pleas of Elsa, happy to be shepherded
by her through the mundane necessities of everyday life,
grateful for the protecting shield which she was to
interpose between himself and the overcurious world, yet
determined to go his own way in the things that mattered.
  Before the situation could be regularized, however,
Mileva had to agree to a divorce. This she did within less
than a year. Negotiations were under way by the early
summer of 1918 when Einstein sent through Besso details
of how he would be prepared to support her and the
children. During these negotiations the question of the
Nobel Prize was raised. It is not quite certain who first
suggested that the interest from the Prize, then some
30,000 Swedish kroner, would be sufficient to keep
Einstein's family in at least modest circumstances, but it
appears to have been Mileva. If so, it is a striking tribute to
her faith in him.
  Early in July, Einstein received the first divorce papers.
Then he had to give evidence before a tribunal in Berlin.
And after that an ever-growing dossier had to be returned
to Zurich. All this he took lightly enough, acknowledging
receipt of the first papers with the exclamation "Till
Eulenspiegel!" and later noting to Besso that the divorce
was entertaining all those in Berlin who were in the know.
  As the legal moves continued and as Einstein heard from
friends in Holland that the British were planning to carry
out a test of his theory during the eclipse of 1919, the war
situation began to change dramatically. After the failure of
the great German offensive in the spring, the influence of
the United States began decisively to affect the balance of
forces. On the Western front, preparations continued for
the Allied offensive which in August, 1918, ruptured the
German front for the first time in four years. In September,
the Allied Expeditionary Force at Salonika broke through
the Bulgarian lines, and the following month British forces
gained a decisive victory over the Turks, those redoubtable
German allies in the Middle East. On November 9, the
Kaiser abdicated. Karl Ebert, the staunch, imperturbable
saddler's son, was handed the chancellorship and at 2 P.M.
the Republic was proclaimed from the steps of the
Reichstag.
  Two days later, as the maroons boomed out the
Armistice, Einstein wrote to his mother in Switzerland:
"The great event has happened."
  For him, as for other Germans of like mind, the Republic
and the Armistice were twin trumpets heralding the
millennium. Now, they fondly imagined, they would have
help in the task of leading their misguided countrymen
back into the peaceful ways from which they had been
diverted half a century earlier. Perhaps so. But even
Einstein, optimistic as ever, might have thought twice as
he considered his old friend Planck. A few weeks before
the fall of the Kaiser, the Bund Neues Vaterland, which
had continued an underground existence since being
banned by the authorities in February, 1916, came above
ground once more. Einstein sent Planck a copy of the
opening declaration and asked for his support. But this
would mean a demand for the Kaiser's abdication; Planck
replied that his oath to the Emperor made support
impossible. No such problems worried Albert Einstein,
who threw himself wholeheartedly on the side of the
Republic. He was, he wrote to his mother on a second
postcard on the day of the Armistice, "very happy at the
way things are developing." Shortly afterwards, he himself
was to take his part.
  With the formation of workers' and soldiers' councils
which followed the disintegration of law and order on
November 11, there had come a similar move in the
University of Berlin. Here one of the first actions of the
student council was to depose and lock up the rector and
other members of the staff. The remaining members of the
administration knew Einstein's left-wing views and turned
to him for help. Would he intervene on their behalf with
the students?
  Einstein telephoned Max Born and another colleague, the
psychologist Max Wertheimer, and the three men made
their way to the Reichstag where the student council was
meeting.
  As soon as Einstein was recognized, all doors were
opened, and the trio was escorted to a room where the
student council was in session. The chairman, before
dealing with their business, asked Einstein what he
thought of the new regulations for students. He did not
think very much of them, a reaction which caused the
council to decide that the problem presented by the three
professors was not one for them but, instead, for the new
government.
  In the Reich Chancellor's Palace, amid a contradiction of
Imperial footmen and delegations from the new workers'
and soldiers' councils, the three men were received by
President Ebert. The fate of the Reich itself still hung in
the balance and he could spare them little time. But he
wrote for them a few words to the appropriate minister.
  A quarter of a century later Einstein recalled: "How na∩ve
we were, even as men forty years old!! I can only laugh
when I think about it. Neither of us realized how much
more powerful is instinct compared to intelligence."
  At the time, November, 1918, Einstein's na∩vetΘ mattered
little. He was, within the comparatively small world of
physicists, a creature of extraordinary power and
imagination. Outside it, he was still unknown. This
situation was to be dramatically altered within the year.

CHAPTER 8

THE SENSORIUM OF GOD

The autumn of 1918 which brought Germany bitter and
apparently irretrievable defeat also brought the Republic.
To Einstein this was a gleam of hope in the darkness, the
only one which held out a promise for the future as the
Empire dissolved between the hammer of the Allied
armies on the west and the anvil of emergent communism
to the east. Just as he now believed there was political hope
for a country he had so long considered beyond hope, so
was there at last the prospect of proof or disproof for the
General Theory of Relativity over whose difficulties he had
triumphed while the war went on.
  In Berlin, four years earlier, he had settled down to work
in earnest. First he had expectantly looked forward to the
results which Freundlich and his party would bring back
from the Crimea. Yet even had their efforts not been
snuffed out by the war, they would have provided
experimental confirmation only for a theory which was
incomplete. For while Einstein was now convinced of the
revolutionary idea that gravity was not force but a property
of space itself, he had not yet been able to construct the
mathematical framework within which it could be
described. He continued to wrestle with this task as his
colleagues went to war, Haber struggled with his poison
gas production, and his English friend Lindemann
reported at the Royal Aircraft Factory, Farnborough, as a
temporary technical assistant at ú3 (then $15) a week.
  After the failure of the Russian expedition to the Crimea
and Freundlich's return to Berlin, he pressed on with the
theoretical work for every available minute, letting slide
everything that would slide. During this period Freundlich,
entering Einstein's study, saw hanging from the ceiling a
large meat hook bearing a thick sheaf of letters. These,
Einstein explained, he had no time to answer. Freundlich,
asking what he did when the hook was filled up, was
answered by two words: "Burn them."
  The agony continued into the summer of 1915 and into
the autumn. "This month," he wrote to Sommerfeld on
November 28, 1915, "I have lived through the most
exacting period of my life; and it would be true to say that
it has also been the most fruitful. Writing letters has been
out of the question. I realized that up till now my field
equations of gravitation had been entirely devoid of
foundation." Then, he went on, he had started again,
chosen a fresh line of attack, and had finally triumphed.
Sommerfeld was not immediately impressed, a fact which
induced Einstein to send him a postcard: "You will
become convinced of the General Theory of Relativity as
soon as you have studied it. Therefore I will not utter a
words in its defense."
  Sommerfeld did not have long to wait. There soon
appeared Volume 49 of the Annalen der Physik. It
contained, on pages 769 to 822, "The Foundation of the
General Theory of Relativity." "The theory appeared to me
then, and it still does," said Born, "the greatest feat of
human thinking about nature, the most amazing
combination of philosophical penetration, physical
intuition, and mathematical skill. But its connections with
experience were slender. It appealed to me like a great
work of art, to be enjoyed and admired from a distance."
  The General Theory, which brought the first realization
"that space is not merely a background for events, but
possesses an autonomous structure," was to be the starting
point for an even larger collection of papers and
developments than the Special Theory. Einstein wrote
some of them, and for another forty years he was,
necessarily, deeply involved in the arguments about the
universe that the General Theory unleashed. Yet in some
ways he saw this as the cornerstone of the arch he had
started to build more than a decade previously and he
himself as now free for other things. From this time
onwards, according to Wolfgang Pauliùaged only sixteen
in 1916 but within five years to be writing one of the
classic expositions of the General TheoryùEinstein was
often to comment: "For the rest of my life I want to reflect
on what light is."
  Whereas Special Relativity had brought under one set of
laws the electromagnetic world of Maxwell and Newtonian
mechanics as far as they applied to bodies in uniform
relative motion, the General Theory did the same thing for
bodies with the accelerated relative motion epitomized in
the acceleration of gravity. But first it had been necessary
for Einstein to develop the true nature of gravity from his
principle of equivalence. Newton had seen it as a force
operating instantaneously over limitless distances;
Einstein's conception was very different, even though in
practice most of his results approximated very closely to
those of Newton. Basically, he proposed that gravity was a
function of matter itself and that its effects were
transmitted between contiguous portions of spacetime,
rather as the effects of a shunting engine are transmitted
down a line of stationary railway cars. Where matter
exists, so does energy; the greater the mass of matter
involved, the greater the effect of the energy which can be
transmitted.
  In addition, gravity, as he had postulated as far back as
1911, affected lightùthe arbiter of straight lines and the
wave emanation whose passage over a unit of distance
gives a unit of timeùexactly as it affected material
particles. Thus the universe which Newton had seen, and
for which he had constructed his apparently impeccable
mechanical laws, was not the real universe but only what
he had seen through the misleading spectacles produced by
gravity. The law which appeared to have worked out so
well had been drawn up for a universe that did not exist, as
though a tailor had made a suit for a man he had seen only
in a distorting mirror. This was the logical followup from
the principle of equivalence and from Einstein's
assumption that gravity was basically a field characteristic
of matter. That Newton's suit fitted the real man tolerably
well was hardly the point.
  Einstein's paper gave not only a corrected picture of the
universe but also a fresh set of mathematical laws by
which its details could be described. These were of two
kinds. There were the structural laws, which dealt with the
relationships between the mass of a gravitating body and
the gravitational field which the very existence of the mass
automatically created; and there were the laws of motion,
which could be used to describe the paths taken by moving
bodies in gravitational fields. These laws utilized
Riemannian geometry, the need for which had been the
direct result of the assumption that light would be
deflected by a gravitational field and that the shortest
distance between two points in such a field would not,
when viewed from outside it, be coincident with a straight
line. For there were certain consequences by assuming that
what appeared as a straight line-of-sight to anywhere in
the universe, as ramrod true as any sergeant-major could
wish, was in fact as curved as the route followed by a ship
steaming round the world on the shortest path from A to B
and that the exact curvature would depend on the
gravitational field, and therefore the mass of matter, which
was involved.
  One consequence is evident from the simple
consideration of a globe. It is that Euclidean geometry, in
which the angles in a triangle always add up to two right
angles, is not relevant for a triangle formed by the equator
and two lines of longitude. Those running from the
equator to the North Pole through Greenwich and New
Orleans, for instance, enclose with the equator not two but
three right anglesùeven though equator and lines of
longitude follow the shortest routes from point to point. As
Einstein allegedly explained to his younger son, Eduard:
"When the blind beetle crawls over the surface of a globe,
he doesn't notice that the track he has covered is curved. I
was lucky enough to have spotted it."
  Einstein had seen that his assumption of a curvature of
light in a gravitational field meant that Euclidean
geometry, satisfactory enough when coping with the small
distances of everyday life, had to be replaced by something
more sophisticated when dealing with the universe. The
geographer and the surveyor have a comparable problem,
selecting one projection which is satisfactory for the small
areas of topographical maps and another projection for the
vastly larger areas of regional or national maps. Einstein
searched about for some time before he found something to
help. In Prague, on George Pick's advice, he had studied
the work of Ricci and Levi-Civita. Back in Zurich he had
worked with Marcel Grossmann to make the preliminary
sketch of the General Theory which appeared in 1913. But
it was only when he turned back to Riemann, the young
German who had died almost half a century earlier, that he
found what he wanted.
  Riemann was the mathematician whose masterpiece, On
the Hypotheses Which Determine the Foundations of
Geometry (▄ber die Hypotheseen, welche der Geometrie
zu Grunde liegen), Einstein had studied a decade earlier
with his companions of the Olympia Academy in Berne.
Handicapped by a shy character, dogged by bad luck and
the bad health which killed him at forty, Riemann had
been a brilliant product of nineteenth century G÷ttingen.
At the age of twenty-four he had speculated that "a
complete, well-rounded mathematical theory can be
established which progresses from the elementary laws for
individual points to the processes given to us in the
plenum ('continuously filled space') of reality, without
distinction between gravitation, electricity, magnetism, or
thermostatics." This apparent rejection of "action at a
distance" in favor of the field theory was dramatically in
advance of its time. Yet it was merely a prelude to the
construction of a non- Euclidean geometry which, in the
words of the late E. T. Bell, "taught mathematicians to
disbelieve in any geometry, or in any space, as a necessary
mode of human perception. It was the last nail in the
coffin of absolute space, and the first in that of the
'absolutes' of nineteenth century physics."
  In Riemann's geometry, parallel lines do not exist, the
angles of a triangle do not add up to 180║, and
perpendiculars to the same line converge, a conception
which is easier to understand in an age of worldwide air
travel than when the University of G÷ttingen was the
intellectual pride of the Kingdom of Hanover. In
Riemann's world the shortest lines joining any two points
are not straight lines but geodesics and, a corollary self
evident even to nonmathematicians, the length of the
shortest distance between any two points on such a curved
surface is determined by a formula different from that
determining the length of a line on a plane surface.
  Einstein used Riemannian geometry to create equations
by which the movements of the stars in their courses and
the structure of the universe itself could be described. But
this was followed by the introduction of a phrase well
enough understood by mathematicians but almost as
confusing to the layman as the definition of time as the
fourth "dimension." This was "curvature of space," part of
that terminology which Sir Edmund Whittaker later
described as "so well established that we can never hope to
change it, regrettable though it is, and which has been
responsible for a great deal of popular misconception."
Mathematicians apply the word "curved" to any space
whose geometry was not Euclidean. "It is an unfortunate
custom," Whittaker went on,

  because curvature, in the sense of bending, is a meaningless
term except when the space is immersed in another space,
whereas the property of being non-Euclidean is an intrinsic
property which has nothing to do with immersion. However,
nothing can be done but to utter a warning that what
mathematicians understand by the term "curvature" is not what
the word connotes in ordinary speech; what the mathematician
means is simply that the relations between the mutual distances
of the points are different from the relations which obtain in
Euclidean geometry. Curvature (in the mathematical sense) has
nothing to do with the shape of the spaceù whether it is bent or
notùbut is defined solely by the metric, that is to say, the way in
which "distance" is defined. It is not the space that is curved, but
the geometry of the space.

  All this, as pointed out by Max Talmey, the Jewish
student who had first introduced the young Einstein to the
physical sciences in Munich, could be attributed not only
to lack of communication between mathematicians and
nonmathematicians, but also to imperfections in
translation from the language in which all Einstein's
original papers, as well as a great number of others on
general relativity, have been written. In German, as
Talmey says, one cannot form from the adjective
"uneuklidisch" a noun corresponding to the English
substantive "non- Euclideanism" formable from the
adjective "non- Euclidean." "Nichteuklidisch" is used, but
many German authors, in Talmey's words, used the
expression "Raum- Krummung," space-curvature, to
denote that quality which, in the end, is due to a straight
line being interminable in a gravitational field. English
writers followed their example although they did not need
to do this.
  "Space-curvature," the renewed claim that light did not
go straight, the idea that the universe could only be viewed
from the earth through the distorting spectacles of gravity,
would all have combined to create an immediate sensation
had Europe been at peace. As it was, only a narrow path
led through the minefields of the war from Einstein in the
Berlin of 1916 to the shattering first proof of the theory in
1919.
  Einstein himself was well aware that proof would not be
easy. Two and a half centuries earlier Newton, pressed on
the question of whether gravity was or was not exercised
instantaneously, admitted that he could see no way of
solving the problem experimentally. To do so would
require, he commented, "the sensorium of God." Einstein,
if challenged, would no doubt have been torn between
modesty and a full awareness of what he was
accomplishing. For despite the fundamentally different
concepts of gravity put forward by Newton and himself,
the differences in experimental results would in most cases
be slight and thus difficult to detect. As Einstein himself
wrote: "The old theory is a special limiting case of the new
one. If the gravitational forces are comparatively weak, the
old Newtonian law turns out to be a good approximation to
the new laws of gravitation. Thus all observations which
support the classical theory also support the General
Relativity theory. We regain the old theory from the higher
level of the new one." Proof, then, would most likely be
found in a field where the gravitational force was strong
and where some deviation from the Newtonian law had
already been noted.
  Just such a prospect seemed to be offered by the planet
Mercury. In the two hundred years which had followed
Newton, the discoveries of science had revealed a
succession of facts which had each fallen into place in his
grand design. Not only the passage of the moon round the
earth and the curving flight of the cricket ball, but the flow
of the tides and the fiery trails of the comets were shown to
follow the orderly paths which his universal scheme
demanded. One feature of this had been the repetition of
the planetary circuits round the sun. Venus and Mercury,
Mars, Jupiter, and Uranus, together with their orbiting
colleagues, followed their same elliptical paths with only
insignificant change, tracing out through the heavens
circuits that appeared to remain the same throughout the
centuries.
  The first man to suspect that this might not be so was
Dominique Arago, the fiery French republican from whom
not even Louis Napoleon could extract an oath of
allegiance. In the early 1840s Arago proposed to Urbain
Jean Joseph Leverrier, a young French astronomer, that he
should carefully analyze the motions of Mercury. The
result was surprising. For Leverrier's figures showed
clearly that the perihelion of Mercuryùthe point on its
elliptical path which is nearest to the sunùadvanced by a
specific amount each year. The rate was extremely small,
but even after the effects of the other planets had been
taken into account the advance still remained some 43
seconds of arc each century. Thus the path of Mercury
round the sun was not a static closed ellipse, but a nearly
closed circuit, slowly gyrating and coming back to its
original position once every 3,000,000 years.
  This lack of coincidence with the path planned out for it
by Newton in his grand scheme profoundly distressed
astronomers, and some desperate expedients were put
forward in an effort to correlate fact and theory. Leverrier
himself decided that the anomaly would be accounted for if
there existed an as yet unseen planet, only 1,000 miles
across and circling the sun at a distance of 19,000,000
miles. In the hope of discovery, this was named Vulcan;
but despite careful searching of the skies at each
subsequent eclipse no such planet could be located. From
Asaph Hall, the discoverer of the satellites of Mars, there
came an even more ingenious proposal: that in the
Newtonian formula concerned, the exponent 2 might be
altered to 2.0000001612. The suggested trick had
something in common with that of the "scientist," armed
with chisel and tape measure, who was found by Flinders
Petrie to be "adjusting" a side of the Great Pyramid "which
did not quite conform to the length required by his theory."
As Einstein was to comment, the discrepancy in Mercury's
orbit "could be explained by means of classical mechanics
only on the assumption of hypotheses which have little
probability, and which were devised solely for this
purpose." So much was true even after fullest
consideration had been given to the various influences
which the planets as a group exercised on each individual
in the group, the astronomical problem of "perturbations,"
as it was called.
  The discrepancy had worried Einstein for years. As far
back as 1907 he had written to his colleague Conrad
Habicht that he was "busy on a relativistic theory of the
gravitation law with which I hope to account for the still
unexplained secular changes of the perihelion movement
of Mercury." Now with Riemannian geometry the
perihelion of a planet moving round a central attracting
body in a nearly circular orbit would advance. The amount
would not be great, but Mercury's enormous speed,
comparatively small size, and closeness to the intense
gravitational field of the sun might yield a significant
figure. Einstein applied the equations from the General
Theory to the motion of Mercury. The results showed that
the perihelion should advance about 0.1" for each
complete orbital revolution of the planet. Roughly 420
such revolutions were made in a century. Thus the secular
advance of Mercury's perihelion each century as deduced
from the General Theory was in fact almost exactly the
figure provided by Leverrier's observations. The theory
thus, in Einstein's words to the daughter of Simon
Newcomb, who spent much of his life in producing more
accurate orbital tables for the moon and the planets,
"completed the work of the calculus of perturbations and
brought about a full agreement between theory and
experience."
  Einstein announced this result before he had completed
his General Theory, reading his paper on it to the Prussian
Academy of Sciences in the autumn of 1915. A few weeks
later he revealed his feelings to Ehrenfest. "Can you
imagine my joy at the feasibility of the general covariance,
with the result that the equations of the perihelion
movement of Mercury prove correct? I was speechless for
several days with excitement." But it was not the
excitement of surprise. Asked whether he had been
worried about the outcome of the calculations, he replied:
"Such questions did not lie in my path. The result could
not be otherwise than correct. I was only concerned with
putting the answer into a lucid form. I did not for one
second doubt that it would agree with observation. There
was no sense in getting excited about what was self
evident." However confident he may have been, he was
delighted when shortly after the publication of his own
Mercury paper the astronomer K. Schwarzschild published
a description of how to obtain the same results in a far
more elegant manner.
  The use of the field equations of the General Theory to
supply figures which were unlikely to be coincidental, and
which solved one of the most stubborn riddles of
astronomy, was cited by Einstein in his paper of 1916. The
figures certainly supported his theory but they did not
exactly give proof; the Mercury anomaly had been known
for years, the General Theory had merely provided one
satisfactory explanation and there might be others. The
two remaining possibilities for a test put forward by
Einstein in 1911 both concerned the behavior of light in a
gravitational field and both had one thing in common.
They concerned phenomena which had never been either
known or suspected; and if they could be shown to exist,
they would therefore be in a totally different class. They
would in fact be comparable to the prediction of a new
planet in the sky just where Neptune was later discovered,
or to Mendeleyev's forecast of the undiscovered elements
in the Periodic Table. They would by implication give
substantial proof that in the General Theory there was to
be found a more accurate description of the universe.
  The more esoteric of the two tests concerned the effect of
gravity on the frequency of light. The mathematical route
followed by Einstein led him to assume that an atom
radiating in a strong gravitational field would vibrate more
slowly than in a weak gravitational field. For if time as
well as space was inevitably altered by the deflection of
gravity then the vibration of atoms, those impeccable
timepieces of the universe, would also be affected. But the
frequency of vibration governs the color of light radiated,
and an atom radiating in a strong gravitational field would
emit light a little closer to the red end of the spectrum than
when it was radiating a weaker gravitational field. Such
displacements had already been noted by L. F. Jewell in
1897 and by other workers early in the twentieth century,
but they had been explained as entirely due to "pressure
effects." These did indeed exist, and their presence
increased the difficulty of isolating as a separate
characteristic "the Einstein shift," as it was soon called.
This was extremely smallùso small according to
Einstein's calculations that it was unlikely to be observed
even if the gravitational field of the sun were used as a test
bench. However, there are bodies in the universe
producing immensely stronger fields than the sun, and a
decade after Einstein's prediction the huge gravitational
field of the "white dwarf" star near Siriusùso dense that a
cubic inch of it would weigh more than half a ton on
earthùwas utilized. And almost half a century after
Einstein's paper, Robert Oppenheimer was able to write of
the Einstein shift: "The most precise and, I think, by far
the most beautiful example of this is a recent experiment
conducted at Harvard in which light was simply allowed to
fall down from the third floor to the basement of the
Physics Building. One could see how much bluer it had
become; one part in 1014; not very much."
  No such possibilities existed in 1916, and readers of
Einstein's paper turned naturally to the other proposed
method of testing the theory. This was the method which
Freundlich had been going to adopt in the Crimea in
August, 1914: the observation of light from the stars
during an eclipse to discover whether it was deflected
when passing through the gravitational field of the sun.
  The summer of 1916 was hardly a propitious period for
devoting men, money, materials, and thought to any
scientific subject unless it seemed likely to help the war
effort. Britain and Germany were locked in a struggle
whose outcome no one could yet foresee, and American
entry into the war was still nearly a year away. All effort
was harnessed to the task of winning; in Germany the
Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes and the University of Berlin
were on national service; and elsewhere the situation was
similar. Rutherford from Britain and Langevin from
France were deeply engaged on antisubmarine work. Pure
science, it seemed, must await the coming of peace.
  In these circumstances, one of Einstein's acts was to be of
crucial importance. On receiving copies of Annalen der
Physik containing his paper on the General Theory, he
sent one to Willem de Sitter, professor of astronomy in the
University of Leiden and a foreign correspondent of the
Royal Astronomical Society in London. De Sitter passed
on his copy to the Society's secretary, Arthur Eddington,
who was now drawn into a developing drama. The long
train of events set in motion by de Sitter and continued by
Eddington was to have repercussions quite as formidable
in their own way as the bloody battles being waged on the
Western front.
  Arthur Eddington was in 1916 Plumian Professor of
Astronomy at Cambridge, and director of the university
observatory. A Quaker, with the Friends' typical mixture
of bold humanity and mystic faith, he had been a Senior
Wrangler, and his Stellar Movements and the Structure of
the Universe, published in 1914, had created the new
subject of stellar dynamics. He was still only thirty-four
and it was confidently predicted of him that great promise
would be followed by even greater performance. As
secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society, Eddington
had the task of producing the Society's Monthly Notices
and this involved close scrutiny of Einstein's paper which
arrived from Holland, a scrutiny which soon convinced
him of its importance to his own cosmological
investigations.
  The important factor in 1916 was Eddington's superb
mathematical ability, which "enabled him not only to
grasp the argument, but very soon to master the absolute
differential calculus of Ricci and Levi-Civita, and to use
tensors as a tool in developing contributions of his own."
One result was that he asked de Sitter to write for the
Royal Astronomical Society's Monthly Notices three long
articles explaining the General Theory. These articles, the
second produced after Einstein had held several
conversations with de Sitter in Leiden, introduced
Einstein's new theory to the non-German-speaking world.
Their importance in what was to follow cannot be
overestimated. "Even if Einstein has not explained the
origin of inertia," concluded the second article,

  his theory represents an enormous progress over the physics of
yesterday. Perceiving the irrelevance of the representation by
coordinates in which our science is clothed, he has penetrated to
the deeper realities which lay hidden behind it and not only has
he entirely explained the exception and universal nature of
gravitation by the principle of the identity of gravitation and
inertia, but he has laid bare intimate connections between
branches of science which up to now were considered as entirely
independent from each other, and has thus made an important
step towards the unity of nature. Finally his theory not only
explains all that the old theory of relativity could explain
(experiment of Michelson, etc.), but without any new hypothesis
or empirical constant, it explains the anomalous motion of the
perihelion of Mercury, and it predicts a number of phenomena
which have not yet been observed. It has thus at once proved to
be a very powerful instrument of discovery.

  Even in the gloomy concentration of the war, scientists
were soon speculating on how to investigate the "number
of phenomena which have not yet been observed." Sir
Frank Dyson, the Astronomer Royal, ordered a study to be
made of photographs taken during the eclipse of 1905 in
the hope that something might be discovered from them,
but the search was unsuccessful. Lindemann and his father
contributed a paper to the Monthly Notices on the daylight
photography of stars and concluded: "It is suggested that
experiments ... be undertaken by some observatory
possessing a suitable instrument, and enjoying a fine
climate, with a view to testing Einstein's theory." The
possibility had been rejected as impracticable by Hale
before the 1914 eclipse, and even if a suitable observatory
could have been found and persuaded to do the work it
seems unlikely that current technology could have
produced useful results. There were other suggestions, but
none which seemed likely to be successful.
  However, help was at hand. Another solar eclipse would
take place on a day when the stellar background would be
ideal. If the problem of testing the General Theory "had
been put forward at some other period of history," as
Eddington later pointed out, "it might have been necessary
to wait some thousands of years for a total eclipse of the
sun to happen on the lucky date." The wait was only three
years.
  That this opportunity was seized by the British was due
not only to Eddington's personal enthusiasm for relativity
but to his influence on Dyson. Sir Frank was to become a
firm friend of Einstein, and the latter's portrait by
Rothenstein for long hung in a place of honor in Flam
steed House, the Astronomer Royal's official home at
Greenwich. Throughout his career he had shown a special
interest in solar eclipses, and despite the uncertainties of
war he was anxious to make full use of the opportunities
provided by 1919. But it was nevertheless largely due to
Eddington's influence that Dyson so quickly emphasized
the opportunities for testing the General Theory that the
eclipse would offer. De Sitter's articles, which had whetted
the scientific appetite, had been published largely as a
result of Eddington's initiative, and soon afterwards
Eddington was commissioned by the Physical Society to
prepare his own account of what the General Theory was
and signified. The Report on the Relativity Theory of
Gravitation that followed was published in 1918 and later
expanded as The Mathematical Theory of Relativity. Long
before this, however, Dyson had moved into action.
  On May 29, 1919, the sun would be seen in a field of
stars of quite exceptional brightness, part of the Hyades
group which lies at the head of the constellation Taurus. In
a note from Greenwich dated March 2, 1917, and printed
in the Monthly Notices, Dyson drew attention to "the
unique opportunities" which this would offer. "There are
an unusual number of bright stars, and with weather
conditions as good as those at Sfax in 1905ùwhich were
by no means perfectùno less than thirteen stars might be
obtained," he wrote, adding that these "should serve for an
ample verification, or the contrary," of Einstein's theory.
The track of the eclipse would unfortunately cross the
Atlantic, but he had been in touch with the secretary of the
Royal Geographical Society, who would tell him how
many observing stations might be used, and he had
"brought the matter forward so that arrangements for
observing at as many stations as possible may be made at
the earliest possible moment."
  These plans were made as the U-boat blockade was
tightening on Britain and the Russian front collapsing, as
American entry into the war was still problematical, and
peace remained below any visible horizon. Yet they
typified not so much British isolation from reality as the
same sort of lofty confidence seen a quarter of a century
later when, with the Germans hammering at the gates of
Stalingrad and the Eighth Army with its backs to the Nile,
the Allied Ministers of Education in exile met in London
to plan what eventually became UNESCO.
  During 1917, as British plans for the eclipse expeditions
went ahead, Einstein published two more important
papers. In one of them he returned to the radiation
problem which had occupied him intermittently since
1905; in the other he used the General Theory to give a
picture of the universe which was not only important in its
own scientific right, but added a spectacular significance
to the theory itself.
  In the radiation paper, in which he derived Planck's
original quantum law from a different starting point, he
suggested that as well as spontaneous emission and
absorption there could also take place the process of
stimulated emission. In 1917 this seemed mainly of
theoretical interest; forty years later it was utilized to
provide the maser and laser of modern technology. In
addition to postulating this fresh process, Einstein also
stressed that the momentum transfer which took place with
emission was directional. The importance of this, as far as
Einstein was concerned, lay in the admission that had to
be made at the same timeùthat the direction was "in the
present state of the theory ... determined only by 'chance.'"
It is significant that Einstein put quotation marks round
"chance." He still believed that what had to be attributed to
chance in the current state of knowledge would one day be
explicable on causal grounds. How strongly he continued
to feel about this was shown when he wrote to Born seven
years later. "I find the idea quite intolerable that an
electron exposed to radiation should choose of its own free
will not only its moment to jump off, but also its direction.
In that case, I would rather be a cobbler, or even an
employee in a gaming house, than a physicist. ..." Yet it
was his paper of 1917 which provided chapter and verse
for just such an idea.
  Meanwhile, his development of the General Theory
continued. Just how great were the demands made on him
is indicated in a letter to Ehrenfest in February. "I have
once more broken a little ground in the gravitation theory
and by so doing have run the risk of being placed in a
madhouse," this went. "I hope you have none in Leiden so
that I can pay you a visit without running any risk. What a
pity we don't live on Mars so that we could observe the
futile activities of human beings only through a telescope.
Our Jehovah no longer needs to send down a rain of pitch
and sulfur: he has turned modern and automatically
devised this activity."
  The paper which occasioned this outburst was shorter
than the final outline of the General Theory but was in
some ways almost as important. For while the details of
the General Theory were to remain in dispute over the
years, and the first rapture created by the results of the
British expeditions was to be qualified by later
observations, the importance of Einstein's potentially
explosive paper of 1917 was to remain undisputedùeven
though its suppositions were to be questioned with a
brusqueness which has not affected the General Theory
itself. The paper was called, quite simply, "Cosmological
Considerations on the General Theory of Relativity." What
it did was to utilize the equations of the General Theory to
speculate on the physical extent of the universe; and in so
doing, it is generally accepted, to found the modern study
of cosmology. Even for Einstein, this was playing for high
stakes.
  His reason for starting on this controversial game was a
very practical one. The idea that the system of fixed stars
should ultimately determine the existence of centrifugal
force was an important part of the conceptual background
to the General Theory of Relativity. This was not a new
idea and had been put forward in general terms by both
Berkeley and Mach. However, with his field equations
Einstein had given a numerical quantity to account for this
action of the surrounding stars. He had linked the distant
twinkle of the night sky with the homely gravity of
everyday life and one question quickly followed: Were
there enough stars in the universe to produce the
centrifugal force which could be observed and recorded?
The need to answer this question inexorably drew Einstein
into thinking about a specific extension of the question to
which he was devoting his life. He now needed to know
not merely how God had made the world but also about its
actual extent. Thus the relativistic cosmology which
Einstein now initiated was, as Hubble later described it, a
natural offshoot of the General Theory, a "superstructure
including other principles." If it was subsequently found to
be wanting, it did not necessarily invalidate the General
Theory itself.
  The comfortable idea of a finite universe with the earth at
its center had been suspect from the beginning of the
scientific renaissance and had finally been abandoned with
the coming of Newton. For with Newton it had seemed
clear that a finite material universe would tend to collapse
in upon itself much as it had been suspected, before Bohr's
prescribed electron orbits, that particles circling an atomic
nucleus would inevitably be drawn down towards it. The
new universe of Newton's day was something nobler if
more impersonal, an infinitude of stars scattered through
infinite Euclidean space, an idea that survived against only
sporadic objections, usually overcome by special pleading.
With the nineteenth century, and the growing interest in
astronomy, an alternative was put forward: a finite
universe which existed, islandlike, in the immensities of
infinite and "empty" space. But all such blueprints had one
thing in common: each represented a static universe whose
size and contents remained unchanging in quantity
throughout the endless passage of time.
  As Einstein wrestled with the cosmological implications
of the General Theory, the first of these alternatives, the
earth-centered universe of the Middle Ages, was effectively
ruled out; but both the others were considered. Both were
rejected. The reasons for rejecting the Newtonian universe
can be simply understood, although in the light of current
knowledge about the recession of the galaxies they appear
rather dated. For it seemed mathematically clear that the
effect of an infinite number of stars would, even at infinite
distances, produce an infinitely strong force whose effect
would be to give the stars a high velocity through the
universe. But observation indicated that compared with the
speed of light the velocities of stars were small. Thus it
was essential that the stars should be finite in number.
  The possibility of a finite "island-universe" in an
infinitude of empty space was ruled out for slightly more
complex reasons. One was based on a theory of the way in
which particlesùor starsùwould distribute themselves in
random movement, and which appeared to make an
"island-universe" impossible. Another reason sprang from
the fact that since the curvature of space was dependent on
the distribution of matter, space would be curved in the
vicinity of the island-universe but Euclidean in the empty
space of infinity beyond. This in turn meant that bodies
beyond the island-universe would move in straight lines,
according to Newton's law of inertia, since inertia was
itself equivalent to gravitational force, which would not be
present.
  Einstein was therefore forced to consider whether it was
possible to conceive of a universe that would contain a
finite number of stars distributed equally through
unbounded space. His answer to the apparent contradiction
lay in the idea that matter itself produced the curvature of
space. For in the "Einstein world," as it soon became
known, the curvature produced by matter turned space
back on itself so that a ray of light, moving in a straight
line in terrestrial terms, would return to its starting point
after circling the universe: a universe whose three
dimensions contained as finite a number of stars as the
number of names on the two-dimensional surface of a
globe, but whose surface was itself as unbounded as that of
the same globe. These stars were, moreover, distributed
equally, as though the names were spread out equally
across the surface of a globe. This was an essential if the
"Einstein world" was to conform to Einstein's own inner
intuition that just as the laws of nature must be the same
for all observers, so must the view of the universe. "There
must be no favored location in the universe, no center, no
boundary; all must see the universe alike," as Hubble put
it. "And, in order to ensure this situation, the cosmologist
postulates spatial isotropy and spatial homogeneity, which
is his way of saying that the universe must be pretty much
alike everywhere and in all directions." This universe
included local irregularities of curvature, comparable to
the hills and valleys on a world globe built in relief; yet it
also had an overall curvature, like the overall curvature of
the earth itself which produces a terrestrial world with a
radius of some four thousand miles.
  With the help of the General Theory, two equations could
be obtained which included only two unknownsù the
curvature of space and the total mass of the particles
making up the universe. It was a comparatively simple
matter to provide estimates for the mass; thus the universe
of the "Cosmological Considerations" of 1917 was a
universe to which a size might be given, however rough an
estimate this was.
  "The whole universe," Einstein said to his friend
Alexander Moszkowski in Berlin,

  has a diameter of about 100 million light years, in round
numbers. That amounts to about 700 trillion miles [this is the
British trillion of 1018]. It follows from the mathematical
calculations which I have presented in "Cosmological
Considerations Arising from the General Theory of Relativity,"
in which the figure I have just quoted is not given. The exact
figure is a minor question. What is important is to recognize that
the universe may be regarded as a closed continuum as far as
distance measurements are concerned.

  Einstein had achieved a plausible result. But he had done
so only by a piece of mathematical juggling which was to
have an interesting history. This was the introduction of a
fresh term into the field equations of the General Theory,
the "cosmological constant" which represents a repulsive
force which, contrary to ordinary gravitational attraction,
increases with the distance between objects. The value
given to this term determines the character of the universe
which is produced, and from the first it was a matter of
controversy. Einstein justified its use when he gave "the
theoretical view of the actual universe" at the end of his
1917 paper. "The curvature of space is variable in time
and place according to the distribution of matter, but we
may roughly approximate to it by means of a spherical
space," he wrote.

  At any rate, this view is logically consistent, and from the
standpoint of the General Theory of Relativity lies nearest at
hand; whether, from the standpoint of present astronomical
knowledge, it is tenable, will not here be discussed. In order to
arrive at this consistent view, we admittedly had to introduce an
extension of the field equations of gravitation which is not
justified by our actual knowledge of gravitation. It is to be
emphasized, however, that a positive curvature of space is given
by our results, even if the supplementary term is not introduced.
That term is necessary only for the purpose of making possible a
quasi-static distribution of matter, as required by the fact of the
small velocities of the stars.

  The Einstein world with its "quasi-static distribution of
matter," was quickly challenged by de Sitter, who
maintained that while the General Theory indicated a
curved space, this curvature was continually decreasing.
Thus the de Sitter world built on the General Theory was
steadily increasing in size; space was constantly
straightening itself out, becoming less curved and more
Euclidean. This idea of an expanding universe had as yet
no observational support, and for some time the ideas of
both Einstein and de Sitter on the structure of the universe
were considered as equally comparable possibilities
between which it was difficult to make a choice. Only in
the 1920s, as the work of Hubble and others at Mount
Wilson verified the recession of the galaxies and the
continual expansion of the universe, was the position
drastically altered.[Discussed elsewhere] And only in 1930 did
Einstein withdraw the "cosmological constant."
  Long before this, however, the term had come under
attack for totally different reasons from Professor
Friedmann, a Russian astronomer who had begun to study
Einstein's publications from a purely mathematical
standpoint. George Gamow, who was working under
Friedmann at the time, has described what happened.
"Friedmann noticed that Einstein had made a mistake in
his alleged proof that the universe must necessarily be
stable and unchangeable in time," he says.

  It is well known to students of high-school algebra that it is
permissible to divide both sides of an equation by any quantity,
provided that this quantity is not zero. However, in the course of
his proof, Einstein had divided both sides of one of his
intermediate equations by a complicated expression which, in
certain circumstances, could become zero.
  In the case, however, when this expression becomes equal to
zero, Einstein's proof does not hold, and Friedmann realized
that this opened an entire new world of time-dependent
universes; expanding, collapsing, and pulsating ones. Thus
Einstein's original gravity equation was correct, and changing
it was a mistake. Much later, when I was discussing
cosmological problems with Einstein, he remarked that the
introduction of the cosmological term was the biggest blunder
he ever made in his life. But the "blunder," rejected by
Einstein, and the cosmological constant, denoted by the Greek
letter ??, rears its ugly head again and again and again.

  Despite Gamow's well-justified comments, Einstein's
entry into the cosmological arena was important both for
science and for Einstein. "This suggestion of a finite, but
unbounded space is one of the greatest ideas about the
nature of the world which ever has been conceived," as
Max Born put it. "It solved the mysterious fact why the
system of stars did not disperse and thin out which it
would do if space were infinite; it gave a physical meaning
to Mach's principle which postulated that the law of
inertia should not be regarded as a property of empty space
but as an effect of the total system of stars, and it opened
the way to the modern concept of the expanding universe."
Furthermore, the idea was put forward at a significant
moment, just as observational astronomy was preparing to
give practical muscle to the theoretical flesh.
  At a different level, Einstein's direct use of the General
Theory to present a picture of the universe gave him an
almost mystical significance for the layman. A scientist
who could give a fresh, and apparently more reliable,
explanation for the movements of the stars in their courses
was an important enough figure. A physicist who could
apparently show that light did not always run straight had
at his command an almost conjuring-trick attraction. But a
man who could talk in familiar terms of curved space, and
with a friendly gesture from the blackboard explain how
the universe was both finite and boundless, had stretched
out to touch untouchable things in a way that made him
part magician and part messiah.
  That is, if the General Theory were right. As Einstein,
Born, and Wertheimer intervened with the students in
Berlin in November, 1918, as the Empire went down in
defeat, and de Sitter in Holland constructed his own
blueprint of the universe, final plans were being made in
Britain to discover whether this was so.

CHAPTER 9

THE FABRIC OF THE UNIVERSE

The first turning point in Einstein's life had come with
publication of his paper on the electrodynamics of moving
bodies, an event whose significance, like the thunder of the
guns at Valmy, was recognized at first by only a few. The
second was of a totally different orderùand not only
because the implications of the General Theory were more
important. This of itself would have ended his normal life
as a Berlin professor, well enough known in his own field
but still comparatively obscure outside it. But the
circumstances in which the General Theory was tested
brought Einstein a worldwide scientific fame which
arrived almost literally overnight and swept him away
from his scientific moorings into the stream of public
events. Between the Armistice of November, 1918, and the
end of the following year he became the most famous
scientist in the world.
  This was not all. Scientific renown came just as events in
Germany and elsewhere pushed him into a political
activity for which he had little aptitude. He instinctively
supported the left-wing movements set free by defeat and
became a devoted if muddled supporter both of pacifism
and of a world government which could only be
maintained by force. He revealed his zealous and perhaps
ingenuous belief that Germany's good name would be
restored if her war crimes were publicly investigated and,
if necessary, admitted. And he became emotionally
committed to the cause of Zionism. These actions were
enough to make his name disliked by German nationalists
while he remained obscure, and detested once he became
famous. As a result, his scientific fame became
inextricably entangled with political controversies. All this
was further complicated at a personal level by his long
sought divorce from Mileva, his marriage to Elsa, and the
death of his mother who spent her final days with him in a
Berlin threatened equally by starvation, inflation, and
revolution.
  Within a few months of Germany's defeat Einstein's
opinion of his own countrymen had begun to change. Until
now he had tended to forgetùor to try to forgetù that he
himself was a German and to submerge what remained of
the thought in the reality of his Swiss passport. He had
looked upon the majority of his compatriots with almost
unqualified distaste, regarding them as the people who
supported an aggressive war with only minor protest and
condoned barbarous activities which he did not shrink
from calling "war crimes." But as the defeat of November,
1918, merged into the starvation of 1919, so the
differences between the Germans he had detested and the
Allies whom he had so hoped would win tended to
disappear. "As for politics, I have become deeply
disillusioned," he wrote to Ehrenfest on March 22, 1919.
"Those countries whose victory I had considered during
the war by far the lesser evil I now consider only slightly
less of an evil." And to Lorentz he warned: "We must
remember that, on the average, men's moral qualities do
not greatly vary from country to country." He held the
opinion for little more than a decade between the anti-
Prussian hatred of his youth and the more understandable
anti-German paranoia of his later years. But during this
decade Einstein's native Germanism rose to the surface
once again and he was no longer so worried about being
what he was.
  As early as December 6, 1918, he was writing to
Ehrenfest commenting that the Germans, "once having
gained some slight understanding of the causes of the war,
[had] borne the collapse with calm and dignity." Judgment
on German scholars during the war, made from abroad,
had been "overly harsh," he noted to Lorentz. It was, he
went on, difficult for those who had been outside Germany
to appreciate the power of mass suggestion which had been
exercised within it. Furthermore, it was "a priori
incredible that the inhabitants of a whole great country
should be branded as morally inferior! The declaration of
the 93, foolish as it was, was neither conceived nor signed
with any awareness of wrong." And the man who drafted it
he described as "a decent and unusually well-meaning
man, as long as the red rag of 'politics' is not waved in
front of him."
  Einstein's attempt to exculpate the German academics,
much as the "stab-in-the-back" theory attempted to
exculpate the German armed forces, was partly the result
of his being knocked off balance during the immediate
postwar months. For Einstein and others trustingly
expected that they would have Allied cooperation in
rebuilding a new and democratic Germany; that they
would now be helped in the task of putting their own house
in order. The fact that the Reichswehr could boast of a
formidable army still in being, that there remained a
considerable danger that the Armistice would not easily be
enforced, did not damp their hopes. But instead of the
hand stretched out in cooperation if not in friendship, they
met the rigor of the Allied blockade whose only effect,
other than the starvation of civilians, was to make the task
of the republican government even more difficult.
  All this quickly prodded Einstein into the political
activity for which he had little liking and less competence.
"I cannot understand how any man can join a political
party," he was later to write. But when the Bund Neues
Vaterland, illegally revived in September, was formally
refounded on November 10, 1918, after an open-air
meeting at the foot of Bismarck's statue in front of the
Reichstag, Professor Albert Einstein appeared not only as a
member but among those who sat on the Working
Committee. He was among the one hundred intellectuals
from Europe and the United States who in December
signed the PΘtition du ComitΘ de la FΘdΘration des
Peuples, addressed to the heads of state about to meet in
Versailles for the Peace Conference and prophetically
asking them to "make a peace that does not conceal a
future war." And in his letter to Ehrenfest of December 6,
1918, he hoped that he would shortly be visiting Paris "to
plead with the Allies to save the famished German
population from starvation."
  Einstein's changed attitude cannot be accounted for
entirely by bitterness at the Allied blockade. With the
exception of pacifismùfor which he had an honorable
blind spot and on whose behalf he would usually sign the
most specious of propaganda manifestosùhe was not
abnormally gullible. His enthusiasms were rarely of the
ephemeral sort such as justified the claim that Lloyd
George was a pillow, always bearing the imprint of the last
head which had rested on it. His changing and sometimes
contradictory views on the Germans, and on the need for
political action, often sprang from his belief that different
situations demanded different attitudes. Circumstances, he
felt, really did alter cases, and in fields other than science.
Just as there were no absolutes in time and space, so was
there nothing immutable about the attitudes that men
should take up when dealing with the kaleidoscopic,
irrational, and infinitely complicated actions of their
fellowmen. The point of view was logical enough. But it
gave his enemies useful weapons.
  Einstein did not go to Paris at the turn of the year.
Instead he went to Zurich, where he had some months
earlier been offered a chair to be held jointly at the
university and the ETH. He had turned down the offer but
had agreed, instead, to visit the city for a month or six
weeks, twice a year, and give on each occasion a series of a
dozen lectures. Explaining to Besso his reactions to the
offer, he said that he lacked the gift to be ubiquitous and
that in Berlin he was able to satisfy all his wishes. He
would demand from Zurich nothing more than his
expenses and would by this sacrifice on the altar of the
country, as he called it, free himself of painful feelings
while at the same time acting in a correct manner in the
eyes of his friends and his Berlin patrons.
  The arrangement was convenient for another reason. His
divorce was at last in its final stages. The thing would be
settled within the first few weeks of 1919 and it would be
useful, if not essential, for him to be in Switzerland.
  He left Berlin during the last week of January, 1919,
arrived in Zurich on January 27, and stayed at the
Sternwarte boardinghouse in Hochstrasse. The General
Theory of Relativity had in academic circles become as
great a subject of discussion as the Special Theory, but it
was still a subject for specialists alone and its author was
known in Zurich as a former professor rather than as a
man about to shake the world. This is illustrated by an
incident recalled by Hermann Weyl. Due to the coal
shortage which was an aftermath of the European war, the
authorities had to "ration" entry to the lectures, which
could only be attended by those who bought an invitation
card for a few francs. On this occasion Einstein appeared
with Professor Weyl and the latter's wife. But Frau Weyl
had forgotten her invitation card, and a steward stopped
her. Einstein became as angry as Einstein ever could
become and said that if Frau Weyl was not allowed in,
then there would be no lecture. The steward gave way,
under protest. But shortly afterwards Einstein received a
letter from the rector in which he was politely but firmly
asked not to interfere with the authorities' regulations.
  In Zurich Einstein was also asked by the students to
lecture on quantum theory. "... It is not for me to lecture
about quantum theory," he replied. "However hard I tried,
I never fully understood it. Besides, I have never gone into
the details and tricks on which the quantum theory is at
the moment based, so that I cannot give a comprehensive
theory. What I have personally accomplished in this
subject is easy for you to find out."
  His divorce was settled on February 14, 1919.
Simultaneously, he awarded to Mileva any money that
should come from a Nobel Prizeùseveral years before he
was awarded it. When the prize came, three years later, the
cash was passed on from Sweden, via Berlin, to Zurich.
Some was lost in movement through the foreign exchanges
and more by bad management. With what was left Mileva
bought a pleasant house on the Zurichberg. The following
year she formally obtained permission to retain the name
of Einstein; and, as Mileva Einstein, she lived for another
quarter of a century, overshadowed by illness and the
worry of a schizophrenic younger son.
  Einstein did not lose touch with her. Once the final break
had been agreed upon, mutual animosities lessened and
dislike dissolved, if not into affection at least into mutual
understanding. Even before the divorce had gone through
Mileva was advising him on his projected marriage to
Elsa; what it was can be inferred from his replyùthat if he
ever wished to leave his second wife, no power on earth
would stop him.
  As soon as his lecture series in Zurich was completed in
the spring of 1919, Einstein returned to Berlin. And here,
on June 2, he married Elsa in the registry office at Berlin
Wilmersdorf, traveling back to Zurich shortly afterwards,
apparently to discuss the future of his sons with Mileva. He
remained in Zurich until June 25 when he appeared again
in Berlin, leaving for Zurich once more on the twenty
eighth and remaining in Switzerland for another three
months until, on September 21, he returned to Berlin
again.
  While thus settling his personal affairs, Einstein was also
being swept up by the rising tide of Zionism. Here it is
only necessary to note that during his Berlin visits of the
spring and summer of 1919 he was approached by the
Zionists and won over to their cause. They were gratified.
But as they saw it, their "catch" was merely that of a
prominent Jewish scientist. Before the year was out their
minnow was to grow into a whale.
  Espousal of the Zionist cause greatly affected Einstein's
position in Germany during the next decade and increased
his nonscientific notoriety. This was augmented by the
fevor with which he now began to discuss German war
crimes. He had first raised the subject with Lorentz in
1915 and he returned to it now in the hope that "...
information about the crimes which were committed by the
German High Command in Belgium and France ... would
help to create a better understanding among our own
people of how the others feel."
  It is doubtful whether the crimes that most countries
commit in the heat of war can satisfactorily be examined
afterwards either by their own nationals or by the victors
ùlet alone on the instigation of someone who had hated
his own country from his youth "and ... always felt the
dangers that threatened the world from her side." Even
among those who believe that the Nuremberg trials were
not only necessary but just, many would have preferred to
see the work carried out with the visible impartiality of
neutrals. In this light, Einstein's revival of the subject was
well intentioned but unfortunate. It was doubly so since he
was still apparently a renegade German who preferred to
travel on a Swiss passport, and whose ignorance of
international machinery was equaled by his lack of any
personal contact with the machinery of war.
  This much was clear to Lorentz, to whom Einstein wrote
on April 26, 1919, saying that with five other private
citizens he had formed a commission "with the purpose of
thoroughly examining those charges concerning
Germany's conduct in the war which have become known
abroad and are considered as proved." Would Lorentz,
Einstein asked, join the commission as one of the neutrals
who would help to get documentary evidence?
  Lorentz' reply was a cautious masterpiece of tact. He was
an internationalist. He was visibly a man of goodwill.
More than most, he understood Einstein, and a few months
earlier he had written to Ernest Solvay when future
congresses were being discussed, noting that "a man such
as Einstein, that great physicist, is in no way 'German' in
the way that one often uses the word nowadays; his
opinion of events in recent years is no different from yours
and mine." But Lorentz had also a far clearer idea of the
possible, and of the likely, reactions of fallible men. While
willing to help Einstein through second parties, he himself
deftly sidestepped the invitation to serve on the proposed
commission. "You must not deceive yourself that your task
will be an easy one," he replied. "The main difficulty, of
course, is that this first step has only just been taken; it
would have been more successful if it had been taken when
Germany was still winning." Moreover, he pointed out, it
was extremely urgent that the Germans officially
supported the move. "You must be absolutely certain," he
went on, "that the government will allow you full
discussion and publication and not put obstacles in your
way. It seems to me that you must obtain this assurance
before you make any contact with the Belgians or the
French because if they discover, after they have heard of
your intentions, that you are not completely free to speak
out, then you will have lost more than you have won."
However, Lorentz was about to visit Paris and Brussels. He
would make what inquiries he could. And he arranged
with a colleague in Holland to pass on news from Einstein
while he, Lorentz, was traveling. The results were hardly
satisfactory. Lorentz, willing to help, was obliged to
inform Einstein of the detestation felt for Germans "good"
and "bad" alike, inside the countries which had been
occupied.
  This was underlined shortly afterwards when he
discussed prospects for the next Solvay Congress. "It is
clear that at the moment Germans will not be invited
(there is difficulty in their coming to Brussels)," he said,
"even though there is no mention of their formal
exclusion; the door will be held open to you, so that in
future it will be possible for everybody to work together
again. Unfortunately, however, this will have to wait for
many years." There was, in fact, some doubt about whether
the door would be held open even for Einstein. M. Tassel,
the congress secretary, had to deal in particular with
Professor Brillouin, who attended the 1911 Congress and
who on June 1, 1919, wrote from the CollΦge de France
about "the pro-German neutrals, whatever their scientific
value," as well as about the problems of Germans. "I am
thinking, for example," he went on, "of Debye, the
Dutchmen of great merit, who spent all the war as a
professor in G÷ttingen. Naturally, also of Einstein who,
whatever his genius, however great his antimilitarist
sentiments, nevertheless spent the whole war in Berlin and
is in the same position. It is only afterwards that they have
made the necessary political effort to throw light on their
German colleagues and dispute the abominable and lying
Manifesto of the 93."
  Einstein's relations with the congress were to
complement his weathercock attitude to his own
countrymen. He had attended the Second Congress in
1913, although he read no paper there and, as forecast by
Lorentz, he was invited in the summer of 1920 to the
Third Congress, to be held the following April. Germans
as such were still not to be invited. But as the secretary
wrote, "an exception [had] been made for Einstein, of ill
defined nationality, Swiss I believe, who was roundly
abused in Berlin during the war because of his pacifist
sentiments which have never varied for a moment."
Rutherford put it slightly differently. "The only German
invited is Einstein who is considered for this purpose to be
international," he wrote. Einstein accepted "with great
pleasure" and later in the year Lorentz informed
Rutherford that he would be speaking at the April, 1921,
Congress on "L'╔lectron et le MagnΘtisme; effets
gyroscopiques." Only in February, two months before the
congress was to be held, was he told that Einstein would
not be present. The reason was the request for him to
speak for the Zionists in the United States in March and
April, so that "through [his] personal cooperation the rich
American Jews will be persuaded to pay up." Nevertheless,
Einstein wished the congress every success.
  Two years later, when the Fourth Congress was being
planned for 1924, the situation was different. Once again
Einstein was to be invited. But on August 16 he wrote to
Lorentz from Lautrach in southern Germany. "This letter
is hard for me to write but I have to write it," he began.

  I am here together with Sommerfeld. He is of the opinion that it
is not right for me to take part in the Solvay Congress because
my German colleagues are excluded. In my opinion it is not right
to bring politics into scientific matters, nor should individuals be
held responsible for the government of the country to which they
happen to belong. If I took part in the congress I would by
implication become an accomplice to an action which I consider
most strongly to be distressingly unjust. This feeling is all the
more strong when I think of the French and Belgians who have
recently committed too many crimes to continue to pose as
injured innocents.

  He was seething over the French invasion of the
Ruhr,[Discussed elsewhere] and his views of Germany and
Germans had been mellowed by the advent of Weimar. But
he still looked to a future of international cooperation, and
continued: "I should be grateful if you would see to it that I
do not even receive an invitation to the congress. I want to
be spared the necessity of decliningùan act which might
hinder the gradual reestablishment of friendly
collaboration between physicists of various countries."
  To Madame Curie he later admitted that "the
disinclination of Belgians and French to meet Germans
was not psychologically incomprehensible to me. But when
I saw that German scholars were to be excluded on
principle merely because of their nationality, I realized
that by going to Brussels I should indirectly be supporting
such a ruling. That did not tally with my ideas at all. It is
unworthy of cultured men to treat one another in that type
of superficial way, as though they were members of the
common herd being led by mass suggestion."
  Only in 1926, after Germany had joined the League of
Nations, and the international relations of science were
returning to normal, did the position alter. "Now," Lorentz
noted on the telegram which told him of the new situation,
"I am able to write to Einstein." But in 1926 there was still
one more formality to be observedùand in view of
Einstein's subsequent links with the royal palace in
Brussels it has some significance. It was thought proper
that the approval of King Albert of the Belgians should be
sought, and on April 2, 1926, Lorentz was given an
audience at which His Majesty specifically approved the
nomination of Einstein to the scientific committee of the
coming congress, and the proposal to invite Planck and
other former enemy scientists. "His Majesty," Lorentz
subsequently reported, "expressed the opinion that, seven
years after the war, the feelings which they aroused should
be gradually damped down, that a better understanding
between peoples was absolutely necessary for the future,
and that science could help to bring this about. He also felt
it necessary to stress that in view of all that the Germans
had done for physics, it would be very difficult to pass
them over." This sweet reasonableness was just as well. By
1926 physics was in the ferment of the new quantum
mechanics, and the 1927 Congress would have been
meaningless without the presence of Heisenberg, Born,
Planck, and Einstein from the former enemy countries.
  Eight years earlier, as in the summer of 1919 Einstein
tried to conscript Lorentz into an investigation of German
war crimes, things were not like that. Just what degree of
help Lorentz finally gave is not clear, either from the
correspondence in the Algemeen Rijksarchief in The
Hague or from the complementary letters in the Museum
of Science in Leiden. But at the end of the summer the
commission on whose behalf Einstein was working
produced its first publication. This was a small booklet
dealing with alleged atrocities in Lille. It had gone to press
while Einstein was in Switzerland, and when he received a
copy on his return to Berlin in the second half of
September he "was quite startled," as he wrote to Lorentz
on the twenty-first. The preface was "tactless" andùpartly
at Einstein's instigation, one suspectsùthe whole edition
was eventually withdrawn for correction, amendment, and
reissue early in 1920.
  It is at this point in 1919 that Einstein, facing what
seemed to be the Allied condemnation of a whole nation,
further qualified his previous rabid anti-Germanism and
rejected an extraordinarily tempting offer from Leiden.
The reason may have been partly a wish to give "the new
Germany" a chance to pull herself up by her moral
bootstraps, partly the fear that a "thirst for power" might
be growing up in an "elsewhere" that Einsteinùlike many
other Germansùidentified with France.
  The offer came from Ehrenfest. He had not yet got the
approval of the authorities, but there seemed little doubt
that he would get itùeven for the terms which he outlined
on September 2, 1919. One word which Einstein used to
describe them was "fabulous." This was no overstatement.
What Ehrenfest suggestedù"trial discussions have given
me the greatest imaginable hope that it will be possible to
arrange everything exactly according to your wishes"
was that Einstein should come to Leiden University. The
normal maximum salary of 7,500 guilders, he said, would
be Einstein's minimum. There would be no lecturing
duties, and the only obligation would be for him to make
his base in or near the city. "You can spend as much time
as you want in Switzerland, or elsewhere, working, giving
lectures, traveling, etc., provided only that one can say
'Einstein is in Leidenùin Leiden is Einstein,'" Ehrenfest
added.
  To Einstein it was a most tempting offerùone whose
acceptance would bring him close to the orbit of Lorentz in
Haarlem and of de Sitter, and which would strengthen his
ties with Ehrenfest. The terms of his rejection are
revealing.
  "Your offer is so fabulous and your words are so friendly
and so full of affection that you can hardly imagine how
confused I have been as a result of your letter," he replied
on September 12.

  You know, of course, how happy I am in Leiden. And you know
how much I like all of you. But my position is not so simple that I
can do the right thing just by following my own inclinations. I am
sending you a letter that Planck wrote to me while I was in
Zurich. After receiving it I promised him not to turn my back on
Berlin unless conditions were such that he would regard such a
step as natural and proper. You have hardly any idea of the
sacrifices that have been made here, with the general financial
situation so difficult so that it is possible for me to stay and also
to support my family in Zurich. It would be doubly wrong of me
if, just when my political hopes are being realized, I were to walk
out unnecessarily, and perhaps in part for my material advantage,
on the very people who have surrounded me with love and
friendship, and to whom my departure would be doubly painful
at this time of supposed humiliation. You have no idea with what
affection I am surrounded here; not all of them try only to catch
the drops which my brain sweats out.
  So you see how things stand with me. I can leave here only if
there is a turn of events that makes it impossible for me to
remain. Such a turn of events could occur. But unless it does
so, my departure would be tantamount to a despicable breach
of my word to Planck. I would be breaking faith and would
certainly reproach myself later on. (I feel like some relic in an
old cathedralùone doesn't quite know what to do with the
old bones, but. ...)

  In conclusion he added that he would like to visit
Leidenù"if my tyrannical belly permits." He wondered
whether he would be able to get a travel permit. He was
certainly eager to see his old friends again. He loved
Leiden. But as far as any permanent post was concerned,
he was staying in Berlin.
  Planck, the man of honor who had yet signed the
Manifesto of the 93, had in fact for the first but not the last
time done as much to keep Einstein in Berlin as he had
done to bring him there in 1914. His letter, which, in
Einstein's words, had induced him "not to turn his back on
Berlin," was written on July 20, 1919, and began by
explaining how he, Planck, had contrived to get equipment
funds for Freundlich by an ingenious sleight-of-finance.
  Then Planck went on to explain his much deeper and
more important reason for writing. This was that rumors
were circulating that the Zurich authorities were trying to
induce Einstein to remain in Switzerland. Planck felt sure,
he went on, that Einstein would not make up his mind
before he had consulted his friends in Berlinùbut the very
mention of this was a measure of his worry. He wanted to
stress one thing: that a matter as important as Einstein's
future both for the Academy and for German science as a
whole should not be settled entirely in terms of money. In
other words, either the Academy itself, or the State, should
put at Einstein's disposal whatever was required to keep
him in Berlinùif he wished to remain, that was. Planck
concluded with one fervent wish: that Einstein should let
him know if money really was the problem.
  Planck was not merely a good Germanùin both senses of
the phraseùbut also an imaginative scientist with a keen
sense of things to come. And it cannot have been wholly
coincidence that his plea for Einstein to remain within the
German fold was stressed now. As he must have guessed, a
transformation was coming.
  A fortnight after Einstein replied to Ehrenfest, turning
down the Leiden offer, he received a historic telegram sent
by Lorentz from Leiden five days earlier. It was dated
September 27, 1919, and ran: "Eddington found star
displacement at rim of sun, preliminary measurement
between nine-tenths of a second and twice that value." The
words were to mark a turning point in the life of Einstein
and in the history of science.

  In Britain the Royal Astronomical Society had noted of
the Special Theory in 1917 that "experimental
confirmation has been ample, and no serious doubt of its
truth is entertained, criticism being confined to questions
of its exact scope and philosophical implications." But
confirmation was the result of physicists laboring in their
laboratories, almost in the normal course of their work;
something on a different scale was required to test the
General Theory, and it says much for Sir Frank Dyson that
in March, 1917, he had drawn "attention to the unique
opportunities afforded by the eclipse of 1919" to test
Einstein's theory. "It was not without international
significance, for it opportunely put an end to wild talk of
boycotting German science," Eddington later wrote of the
decision. "By standing foremost in testing, and ultimately
verifying, the 'enemy' theory, our national observatory
kept alive the finest traditions of science; and the lesson is
perhaps still needed in the world today."
  In March, 1917, Britain's darkest weeks of the war still
lay ahead, and the prospect of sending expeditions to
South America and to Africa, where the eclipse could best
be seen, could not be viewed without misgiving. Despite
this, Dyson was given ú 1,000 ($5,000) from the
government, and a Joint Permanent Eclipse Committee of
the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society was
set up under his chairmanship. In the spring of 1918, as
the Germans broke through to the Marne and once again
brought the issue of the war into doubt, plans went steadily
ahead for British expeditions to Sobral in northern Brazil
and to Principe Island in the Gulf of Guinea.
  Early the following year, in January, 1919, a series of test
photographs, showing the Hyades against a reference
frame of other stars, was taken at Greenwich Observatory.
Two months later Eddington and E. T. Cottingham, who
were to make the eclipse observations on Principe Island,
and A. C. D. Crommelin and C. R. Davidson, who were to
do the same at Sobral, met for a final briefing in Flamsteed
House, Greenwich. Eddington's enthusiasm for the
General Theory was illustrated when Cottingham asked, in
Dyson's study: "What will it mean if we get double the
Einstein deflection?" "Then," said Dyson, "Eddington will
go mad and you will have to come home alone."
  Next morning both parties left for Funchal, Crommelin
and Davidson traveling on to Brazil while Eddington and
Cottingham sailed to Principe, where they arrived on April
23. One month of hard work followed, setting up
instruments, taking test photographs, and making final
preparations for the great day.
  May 29 began with heavy rain, which stopped only about
noon. Not until 1:30 P.M., when the eclipse had already
begun, did the party get its first glimpse of the sun. "We
had to carry out our programme of photographs on faith,"
wrote Eddington in his diary. "I did not see the eclipse,
being too busy changing plates, except for one glance to
make sure it had begun and another halfway through to see
how much cloud there was. We took sixteen photographs.
They are all good of the sun, showing a very remarkable
prominence; but the cloud has interfered with the star
images. The last six photographs show a few images which
I hope will give us what we need. ..."
  It looked as though the effort, so far as the Principe
expedition was concerned, might have been abortive. Only
on June 3 was the issue settled. "We developed the
photographs, two each night for six nights after the
eclipse," Eddington wrote, "and I spent the whole day
measuring. The cloudy weather upset my plans and I had
to treat the measures in a different way from what I
intended, consequently I have not been able to make any
preliminary announcement of the result. But one plate that
I measured gave a result agreeing with Einstein."
  This, says Eddington's biographer, "was a moment which
Eddington never forgot. On one occasion in later years he
referred to it as the greatest moment of his life." Turning
to his companion he said, remembering the evening in
Dyson's study nearly three months previously:
"Cottingham, you won't have to go home alone."
  At a dinner of the Royal Astronomical Society following
Eddington's return to Britain, he described the trials and
tribulations of Principe in a parody of the Rubaiyat whose
final verses went thus:

  The Clock no question makes of Fasts or Slows,
  But steadily and with a constant Rate it goes.
  And Lo! the clouds are parting and the Sun
  A crescent glimmering on the screenùIt shows!ù
  It shows! !

  Five minutes, not a moment left to waste,
  Five minutes, for the picture to be tracedù
  The Stars are shining, and coronal light
  Streams from the Orb of DarknessùOh make haste!

  For in and out, above, about, below
  'Tis nothing but a magic Shadow show
  Played in a Box, whose Candle is the Sun
  Round which we phantom figures come and go.

  Oh leave the Wise our measures to collate.
  One thing at least is certain, LIGHT has WEIGHT
  One thing is certain, and the rest debateù
  Light-rays, when near the Sun, DO NOT GO
  STRAIGHT.

  Despite Eddington's moment of drama on Principe, full
confirmation did not come all at once. While the Principe
photographs had been developed and measured in West
Africa, those of the Sobral expedition were brought to
Britain before being processed. The first were
disappointing. Then came the main set of seven. "They
gave a final verdict," wrote Eddington, "definitely
confirming Einstein's value of the deflection, in agreement
with the results obtained at Principe."
  But the news had not yet percolated beyond the small
circle of those connected with the expeditions. Einstein
knew through his friends in Holland that the expeditions
had been in progress, but he had known little more. On
September 2 he wrote to Dr. E. Hartmann of Fulda, noting
that "so far nothing precise has been published about the
expedition's measurements so that even I know nothing
about them," and in rejecting Ehrenfest's proposals for a
Leiden post ten days later, he asked whether there was
news about the British eclipse expedition.
  Ehrenfest passed on Einstein's message to Lorentz, who
with his more numerous contacts abroad was able to
discover what was happening. And on September 27,
1919, there came Lorentz' telegram: "Eddington found
star displacement at rim of sun. ..."
  Einstein's first reaction was to write to his mother in
Lucerne. "Good news today," he said on a card, "H. A.
Lorentz has wired me that the British expeditions have
actually proved the light shift near the sun." He would
have to stay in Berlin for a few more days, he added; then
he would go to Holland on the invitation of Ehrenfest. And
in Holland he would be able to get the details he really
wanted.
  Looking back, both Einstein and his colleagues were apt
to harp on his inner certainty. Thus Ilse Rosenthal-
Schneider, one of his students, remembers how, as the two
of them were discussing a book which raised objections to
his theory, Einstein reached for a telegram lying on the
windowsill and handed it to her with the words: "Here,
this will perhaps interest you." "It was," she has written,
"Eddington's cable with the results of measurement of the
eclipse expedition. When I was giving expression to my
joy that the results coincided with his calculations, he said,
quite unmoved, 'But I knew that the theory is correct,' and
when I asked, what if there had been no confirmation of
his prediction, he countered: 'Then I would have been
sorry for the dear Lordùthe theory is correct.'"
  This was not the certainty of hindsight; all along he had
believed that the theory would be confirmed. Nevertheless,
he was glad enough to begin preparations for a trip to
Holland. First he had to obtain the necessary travel
documents. On October 5 he wrote to Ehrenfest,
explaining that he had been to the Dutch Embassy in
Berlin and asking his friends in Holland to help.
Kamerlingh Onnes now used his influence as the head of
Leiden's worldfamous Cryogenic Laboratory to intercede
on Einstein's behalf. Within a few days he had a Dutch
entry permit.
  Before he left Berlin he received further news from
Lorentz. "I have not yet written to you about the
observation of the rays glancing off the edge of the sun, as
I thought that one of the English journals, Nature, for
instance, would have written fully about it," he explained
on October 7.

  This has not yet happened so I do not wish to wait any longer. I
have heard of Eddington's results through Mr. Van der Pohl, the
conservator of this laboratory. He visited the British Association
meeting at Bournemouth and told me on his return what
Eddington spoke about. As the plates are still being measured he
cannot give exact values, but according to Eddington's opinion
the thing is certain and one can say with certainty that the
deflection (at the edge of the sun) lies between 0.87" and 1'74".
Van der Pohl also told me that there was a discussion about it (I
wish I had been there) and that Sir Oliver Lodge wished you and
Eddington the best of luck with the figures when they came.

  He went on to describe some of his own work and then
returned to the Eddington results. "They are certainly," he
noted, "some of the most beautiful results that science has
produced and we should indeed rejoice."
  So far, the warnings that a major change in man's ideas
of the physical world was at hand had seeped out only
gradually. No results had been publicly available when the
British expeditions had returned to London. The accounts
given at the British Association meeting had stressed that
vital measurements and comparisons still had to be
completed. Even Lorentz' telegram to Einstein had given a
general rather than a specific indication of success. Thus
the reports had hardened up slowly, over the weeks,
lacking the suddenness which alone could give headline
quality in a Europe grappling with the problems of postwar
chaos. There was, moreover, to be a last twist before the
news finally broke on the world.
  This was given in Leiden where Einstein arrived in the
latter half of October. The vital results of the British
expeditions were known here privately at least by October
23, when he wrote to Planck in Berlin. "This evening," he
said, "Hertzsprung showed me a letter from Arthur
Eddington according to which the accurate measurements
of the plates gave exactly the theoretical value of the light
diffraction. It is a gift from Fate that I have been allowed
to experience this. ..."
  But even now only a small handful of professors were in
the know. Two days later, on the evening of Saturday,
October 25, the situation changed dramatically. The Dutch
Royal Academy met in Amsterdam. Einstein was there. So
was Lorentz and so was Ehrenfest. First the routine
business was disposed of. Next, Einstein was formally
welcomed. Then, in the words of the Academy's official
report, "Mr. H. A. Lorentz communicated the most recent
confirmation of Professor Einstein's General Theory of
Relativity." But, as the agenda put it, the communication
would "not be printed in the report." No press
representatives appear to have been present. For another
ten days the rest of the world remained in ignorance of the
fact that Newton's view of the universe had received an
amendment from which it would never totally recover.
  It was not until the afternoon of Thursday, November 6,
1919, that the Fellows of the Royal and the Royal
Astronomical Societies met in Burlington House to hear
the official results of the two eclipse expeditions. Dyson
read the reports on behalf of himself, Eddington, and
Davidson. He had devoted a good deal of his professional
life to the study of solar eclipses and had personally
observed no less than three. This time it was different. The
aim of the operation had been to test Einstein's theory, and
unofficial news of the results had been rumbling round the
scientific world for weeks. Here, if nowhere else, men were
aware that an age was ending, and the main hall of the
Society was crowded. J. J. Thomson, now President of the
Royal Society, James Jeans, and Lindemann were present.
So were Sir Oliver Lodge and the mathematician and
philosopher Alfred Whitehead. All were agitated by the
same question. Were the ideas upon which they had relied
for so long at last to be found wanting?
  "The whole atmosphere of tense interest was exactly that
of the Greek drama," wrote Whitehead later.

  We were the chorus commenting on the decree of destiny as
disclosed in the development of a supreme incident. There was
dramatic quality in the very stagingùthe traditional ceremonial,
and in the background the picture of Newton to remind us that
the greatest of scientific generalizations was now, after more
than two centuries, to receive its first modification. Nor was the
personal interest wanting: a great adventure in thought had at
length come safe to shore.

  Thomson rose to address the meeting, speaking of
Einstein's theory as "one of the greatest achievements in
the history of human thought," and then pushing home the
full measure of what relativity meant. "It is not the
discovery of an outlying island but of a whole continent of
new scientific ideas," he said. "It is the greatest discovery
in connection with gravitation since Newton enunciated
his principles." As The Times of London put it, Einstein's
theory dealt with the fabric of the universe.
  Then Dyson read the body of his report, giving the
figures provided by the photographs and describing their
significance. "Thus the results of the expeditions to Sobral
and Principe," he concluded, "leave little doubt that a
deflection of light takes place in the neighborhood of the
sun and that it is of the amount demanded by Einstein's
generalized theory of relativity as attributable to the sun's
gravitational field."
  The discussion that followed brought out one thing: that
while the results of the eclipse expedition had yielded a
convincing key piece of evidence, the new theory was also
acceptable on entirely different grounds. Eddington was to
emphasize the point nearly twenty years later when there
had been further astronomical support. The theory, he
said, was primarily concerned with phenomena which,
without it, might have seemed mildly puzzling.

  But we do not need to observe an eclipse of the sun to ascertain
whether a man is talking coherently or incoherently. The
Newtonian framework, as was natural after 250 years, had been
found too crude to accommodate the new observational
knowledge which was being acquired. In default of a better
framework, it was still used, but definitions were strained to
purposes for which they were never intended. We were in the
position of a librarian whose books were still being arranged
according to a subject scheme drawn up a hundred years ago,
trying to find the right place for books on Hollywood, the Air
Force, and detective novels.

  Einstein had altered all that.

PART THREE

THE HINGE OF FATE

CHAPTER 10

THE NEW MESSIAH

Einstein awoke in Berlin on the morning of November 7,
1919, to find himself famous. It was an awkward morning
for fame, with the Wilhelmstrasse barricaded, all traffic
stopped on the orders of Gustav Noske, the republican
Minister of Defense, and warning leaflets from the
Citizens Defense Force being handed out to passersby. On
the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution it
seemed that Berlin was to be torn apart by a struggle
between the workers, who believed that the German
government had not moved far enough to the left, and the
army, who believed that it had moved too far.
  He was of course already known to the equivalent of
today's science writers. In addition, the esoteric quality of
his work had combined with his own individuality to
produce a local notoriety. Now, on the morning of
November 7, the situation was dramatically changed. Even
a month later he could write to Born that the publicity was
"so bad that I can hardly breathe, let alone get down to
sensible work." Any journalist who felt that the
newsworthiness of the British expeditions had ended with
their safe return to England learned better as accounts of
the previous afternoon's meeting in Burlington House, and
the subsequent leading article in The Times, arrived in the
German capital. Under "The Fabric of the Universe," The
Times stated that "the scientific conception of the fabric of
the Universe must be changed." And after an account of
the British expeditions and their purpose, it concluded
thus: "But it is confidently believed by the greatest experts
that enough has been done to overthrow the certainty of
ages, and to require a new philosophy of the universe, a
philosophy that will sweep away nearly all that has
hitherto been accepted as the axiomatic basis of physical
thought."
  This was strong meat. Its effect was not lessened by
accounts in other papers, which with few exceptions
agreed that the world would never be the same again.
Attention turned to the man responsible. Little was known
about him except that in 1914 he had not signed the
notorious Manifesto of the 93. Whether he was Swiss or
German was uncertain, but The Times described him as an
ardent Zionist and added that when the Armistice had
been announced the previous year, he "signed an appeal in
favor of the German revolution"ùprobably a reference to
his support of the re-formed Bund Neues Vaterland.
  Throughout the day Einstein was visited by an almost
continuous stream of reporters. He genuinely did not like
it. But he soon realized that there is a time for compromise
as well as a time for standing firm. There was, moreover,
one way in which the distasteful interest could be turned to
good use. So there were no free photographs of Einstein;
as one reporter later noted, "These, his wife told me, are
sold for the benefit of the starving children of Vienna." It
was not only photographs which could coax money into
the channels through which he thought it should flow.
There was also a demand for simple explanations of
relativity, for which the newspapers of the world would
pay large sums. Einstein never succumbed to the
temptation of writing articles galore. But before the end of
the month he was in touch with a young correspondent for
Nature and had agreed to contribute an article to The
Times.
  The Nature correspondent was Robert Lawson, the young
physicist who had attended his lecture in Vienna six years
previously. Interned at the outbreak of war, but
nevertheless allowed to continue his scientific work at the
Radium Institute, Lawson returned to the University of
Sheffield at the end of 1918, and now, as well as writing to
Einstein himself, gave Arnold Berliner, the editor of
Naturwissenschaften, an account of the situation in
Britain. "The talk here is of almost nothing but Einstein,"
he said, "and if he were to come here now I think he would
be welcomed like a victorious general. The fact that a
theory formulated by a German has been confirmed by
observations on the part of Englishmen has brought the
possibility of cooperation between these two scientifically
minded nations much closer. Quite apart from the great
scientific value of his brilliant theory, Einstein has done
mankind an incalculable service."
  Berliner passed on the letter to Einstein who, in
acknowledging Lawson's direct request for material for
Nature, mentioned the article he was writing for The
Times. "It cannot do any harm for, thank God, the solar
eclipse and the theory of relativity have nothing in
common with politics," he said. "In this work, English
men of science have behaved splendidly throughout, and to
my delight your letter shows me that the feelings of
English colleagues have not been influenced as much by
the war as one might have feared. Within the last few days
I have had also from Eddington a very charming letter,
about which I have been extremely pleased. I should like to
utilize the favorable circumstances to contribute as much
as possible towards the reconciliation of German and
English colleagues."
  His article appeared on the twenty-eighth, but before this
the paper had renewed its efforts to explain to readers how
important the confirmation of the General Theory really
was. For it was becoming clear that the announcement at
the Burlington House meeting was not just a nine-days'
wonder. Although some scientists were reluctant to accept
all that Einstein had claimed, and although others, like Sir
Oliver Lodge, were still gruffly sceptical, the ablest minds
in science realized, and publicly acknowledged, that this
was not an end but a beginning. On November 15, The
Times added its weight in a leading article headed "The
Revolution in Science." "The ideals of Aristotle and Euclid
and Newton which are the basis of all our present
conceptions prove in fact not to correspond with what can
be observed in the fabric of the universe," it concluded.
"Space is merely a relation between two sets of data, and
an infinite number of times may coexist. Here and there,
past and present, are relative, not absolute, and change
according to the ordinates and coordinates selected.
Observational science has in fact led back to the purest
subjective idealism, if without Berkeley's major premise,
itself an abstraction of Aristotelian notions of infinity, to
take it out of chaos."
  A fortnight later came Einstein's own article. Using the
opportunity to deplore the war, he began with a typical
flourish by saying: "After the lamentable breach in the
former international relations existing among men of
science, it is with joy and gratefulness that I accept this
opportunity of communication with English astronomers
and physicists." He went on to outline the basic principles
of relativity, special and general, displaying in what was
his first popular exposition all those abilities which still
make Einstein on relativity a good deal clearer than most
other writers.
  At the end of the same article he lightly commented on
the status that the English had given him, tossing a joke
into the future that was to be thrust back in his face within
a decade. "The description of me and my circumstances in
The Times shows an amusing feat of imagination on the
part of the writer," he said. "By an application of the
theory of relativity to the taste of readers, today in
Germany I am called a German man of science and in
England I am represented as a Swiss Jew. If I come to be
regarded as a bΩte noire the description will be reversed,
and I shall become a Swiss Jew for the Germans and a
German man of science for the English." Unwilling to
censor the comment, The Times was equally unwilling to
let it pass unremarked. "We conceded him his little jest,"
an editorial admitted. "But we note that, in accordance
with the general tenor of his theory, Dr. Einstein does not
supply an absolute description of himself."
  The comment was indicative of an undertow of feeling in
some conservative circles, both scientific and lay.
Thomson, Eddington, Jeans, and many other bright
Fellows of the Royal Society appeared to have accepted the
extraordinary ideas of this Jew of whose nationality no one
appeared to be certain. But could the thing really be true?
Was there not somewhere, in some fashion, a more
reasonable explanation to which sane men would wake up
one morning? Some distinguished men certainly thought
so. Among them was Sir Oliver Lodge, who had left before
the end of the famous meeting of November 6, even
though expected to speak in the discussionùand who later
explained this on the grounds of a previous engagement
and the need to catch the six o'clock train. On the twenty
fourth, Lodge, whose The Ether of Space well qualified
him for leading the sceptics, addressed an impressive if
polyglot company which included the Bishop of London,
Lord Lytton, Lord Haldane, Sir Francis Younghusband, H.
A. L. Fisher, and Sir Martin Conway. Newton, Lodge
affirmed, had not understood what gravitation was. "We
do not understand it now," he went on. "Einstein's theory
would not help us to understand it. If Einstein's third
prediction were verified, Einstein's theory would dominate
all physics and the next generation of mathematical
physicists would have a terrible time." Indeed, they did.
  This third prediction, the Einstein shift, still exercised
Einstein himself, as he revealed in a letter to Eddington
which shows vestigial doubt as well as gratitude, courtesy,
and humility. "Above all, I should like to congratulate you
on the success of your difficult expedition," he wrote.
"Considering the great interest you have taken in the
theory of relativity even in earlier days I think I can
assume that we are indebted primarily to your initiative for
the fact that these expeditions could take place. I am
amazed at the interest which my English colleagues have
taken in the theory in spite of its difficulty." Then,
speaking of the third test, he added: "If it were proved that
this effect does not exist in nature, then the whole theory
would have to be abandoned."
  Einstein was not alone. In addition to the doubters
headed by Lodgeùand Sir Joseph Larmor, who had been
among the first to describe matter as consisting of
electrified particlesùthere were others who feared that
relativity might be beyond them, or who had doubts as to
whether the results of the eclipse expeditions were,
scientifically speaking, a good thing.
  The archives reveal some surprising names in both
groups. In the first there is Dyson, who wrote to Hale at
the Mount Wilson Observatory on December 29. "I was
myself a sceptic, and expected a different result," he said.
"Now I am trying to understand the principle of relativity
and am gradually getting to think I do." Hale was less
optimistic. "I congratulate you again on the splendid
results you have obtained," he wrote to Dyson on February
9, 1920, "though I confess that the complications of the
theory of relativity are altogether too much for my
comprehension. If I were a good mathematician I might
have some hope of forming a feeble conception of the
principle, but as it is I fear it will always remain beyond
my grasp. However, this does not decrease my interest in
the problem, to which we will try to contribute to the best
of our ability." His doubts were repeated to Rutherford to
whom he wrote that relativity seemed "to complicate
matters a good deal."
  Rutherford's own qualifications and doubts were unlike
those of Dyson and Hale. He noted that the interest of the
general public was very remarkable and almost without
precedent, the reason being, he felt, that no one was able to
give an intelligent explanation of relativity to the average
man. He himself did not have much doubt about the
accuracy of Einstein's conclusions and considered it a
great bit of work. However, he feared that it might tend to
draw scientific men away from experiments toward broad
metaphysical conceptions. There were already many like
that in Britain, he went on, and no more were needed if
science was to continue advancing. This was a typical
Rutherfordian attitude, illustrating his built-in belief that
the only worthwhile experiments were those whose results
he could personally repeat and check. So far as the work of
Einstein was relative to Newton, he said in 1923, it was
simply "a generalization and broadening of its basis, in
fact a typical case of mathematical and physical
development." But nine years later the balance had altered.
"The theory of relativity by Einstein, quite apart from any
question of its validity," he agreed, "cannot but be
regarded as a magnificent work of art." His qualifications,
however deeply rooted in scientific intuition, may have
reflected the slight allergy to Einstein himself which
comes out at times in Rutherford's comments. Certainly he
showed no wish to have him in Cambridge when the idea
was mooted in 1920, or even when Einstein was a refugee
from Germany in 1933.
  Much the same lukewarm view appears beneath the
surface in J. J. Thomson. "[He] accepted these results
(1919) and the interpretation put upon them, but he never
seemed particularly enthusiastic on the subject nor did he
attempt to develop it, either theoretically or by
experiment," said his biographer some years later. "I
believe, from a conversation which I can recall, that he
thought attention was being too much concentrated on it
by ordinary scientific workers, with the neglect of other
subjects to which they were more likely to be able to make
a useful contribution. His attitude to relativity was that of a
looker-on. Probably the same was true of nearly all his
contemporaries. It was the creation of a younger
generation." And when it came to cosmology, Thomson's
patience ran out. "We have Einstein's space, de Sitter's
space, expanding universes, contracting universes,
vibrating universes, mysterious universes," he noted in his
memoirs. "In fact the pure mathematician may create
universes just by writing down an equation, and indeed if
he is an individualist he can have a universe of his own."
  The semiquizzical note can be heard in many of the
repercussions which followed the November meeting at
Burlington House. Eddington, speaking in support of
relativity in Trinity College, Cambridge, early in
December, said that although 6 feet tall he would, if
moving vertically at 161,000 miles a second, shrink to a
height of only 3 feet. J. J. Thomson, adopting the same
line, remarked that "the tutor who preferred rooms on the
ground floor to the attic would hardly be consoled to know
that the higher he was up, the more Euclidean his space
became because it was further from the effects of
gravitation." A good deal of the lightheadedness which
took hold of so many serious men when they began to
discuss relativity no doubt sprang from Eddington's
example. As his biographer has said in writing of Space,
Time and Gravitation, the relativist could, like the Mad
Hatter, experience time standing still. In later books Alice
herself moved mystifyingly across his stage, the living
embodiment of the Fitzgerald contraction; and the Red
Queen, "that ardent relativist," proclaimed the relativity
even of nonsense.
  The trend was spurred on by the simultaneous fame of
Jacob Epstein, and even the sober Observatory republished
the following verse from Punch:

  Einstein and Epstein are wonderful men,
  Bringing new miracles into our ken.
  Einstein upset the Newtonian rule;
  Epstein demolished the Pheidian School.
  Einstein gave fits to the Royal Society
  Epstein delighted in loud notoriety.
  Einstein made parallels meet in infinity
  Epstein remodelled the form of divinity.

  Anti-Germanism, understandably enough after the long
haul that victory had demanded, also showed itself in
divers reactions, and from Rutherford's Cavendish
Laboratory there came a typical poem from A. A. Robb.
One of the few English physicists who had given more
than passing attention to the Special Theory, Robb had
written as early as 1914 that "although generally
associated with the names of Einstein and Minkowski, the
really essential physical considerations underlying the
theories are due to Larmor and Lorentz." His aversion to
Einstein was increased by General Relativity and in the
introduction to The Absolute Relations of Time and Space,
he caustically wrote of Einstein's theory of simultaneity
that "this seemed to destroy all sense of the reality of the
external world and to leave the physical universe no better
than a dream, or rather a nightmare."
  The acclaim which surged up at the end of 1919 naturally
presented too good an opportunity to miss; the result was
Robb's "Hymn to Einstein," to be sung to the tune of
"Deutschland ▄ber Alles":

  Scientists so unbelieving
  Have completely changed their ways;
  Now they humbly sing to Einstein
  Everlasting hymns of praise.
  Journalists in search of copy
  First request an interview;
  Then they boost him, boost him, boost him;
  Boost him until all is blue.

  He the universe created;
  Spoke the word and it was there.
  Now he reigns in radiant glory
  On his professorial chair.
  Editions of daily papers,
  Yellow red and every hue
  Boost him, boost him, boost him, boost him;
  Boost him until all is blue.

  Philosophic speculators
  Stand in awe around his throne.
  University professors
  Blow upon his loud trombone.
  Praise him on the Riemann symbols
  On Christoffel symbols too
  They boost him, boost him, boost him;
  Boost him until all is blue.

  Other scientists neglected
  May be feeling somewhat sick;
  And imagine that the butter
  Is laid on a trifle thick.
  Heed not such considerations
  Be they false, or be they true;
  Boost him, boost him, boost him, boost him;
  Boost him until all is blue.

  Einstein himself also seems to have been affected. Thus
he started, early in December, one hare that was to run
through decades of books about relativity, naturally enough
ignored by science but enjoyed by many simple souls.
Interviewed by the New York Times, he was asked how he
had come to start work on the General Theory. He had
been triggered off, he replied, by seeing a man falling from
a Berlin roof. The man had survived with little injury.
Einstein had run from his house. The man said that he had
not felt the effects of gravityùa pronouncement that had
led to a new view of the universe. Here is perhaps a link
with Planck's illustration of energyù his story of a
workman, carrying bricks to the top of a house and piling
up energy which remained there until the bricks slipped
and fell on his head weeks later. Here, too, is another
illustration of Hans Einstein's statement that his father
was always willing to exaggerate in order to explain, and
would at times, delight in making up a story to please an
audience.
  All this, however, was froth on the top of the argument.
Beneath the humor, the Alice in Wonderland analogies,
and the limericks concerning the young lady called Bright,
whose speed was much faster than light,[The most
respectable is Arthur Butler's: "There was a young lady
called Bright/Whose speed was much faster than light/She
went out one day/In a relative way/And came back the
previous night."] there lay an almost universal agreement
that Einstein's view of gravitation was more consistent
with the available facts than Newton's. There might be
debate over details, the third proof had not yet been
obtained, and there were to be several attemptsùall either
unsuccessful or inconclu-siveùto show that the outcome
of the Michelson-Morley experiment itself could be
faulted. But the band of responsible critics was
comparatively small, and it was clear that Einstein had in
fact cast fresh light not only on the subject of gravitation
but on the whole question of how scientific knowledge
might be acquired. For Newton's theory had been founded
on the most detailed observational evidence; each
twinkling pinpoint in the heavens appeared to support the
belief that the accumulation of evidence, and the induction
from it of general laws, could lead to the ultimate truth.
Now it had been shown that by starting with a purely
speculative idea, it was possible to construct a theory
which would not only be supported by the mass of
observational evidence with which Newton had worked,
but which would also explain evidence which Newton
could not explain. By the opening weeks of 1920 it was
clear that Einstein held the field.
  But to some people he had yet to live down his presence
in Berlin throughout the war, however pacifist his
sentiments might be. M. Brillouin had his counterparts in
England, as Eddington was forced to make clear early in
the New Year. As keen as Einstein himself for the
restoration of scientific cooperation between the belligerent
countries, Eddington had stressed this point in his first
letter when on December 1, 1919, he had written to
Einstein from Cambridge saying that since November 6
"all England has been talking about your theory.... It is the
best possible thing that could have happened for scientific
relations between England and Germany," he went on.

  I do not anticipate rapid progress towards official reunion, but
there is a big advance towards a more reasonable frame of mind
among scientific men, and that is even more important than the
renewal of formal associations. ... Although it seems unfair that
Dr. Freundlich, who was first in the field, should not have had
the satisfaction of accomplishing the experimental test of your
theory, one feels that things have turned out very fortunately in
giving this object lesson of the solidarity of German and British
science even in time of war.

  So far so good. Eddington's liberal sentiments were held
by many men of science, possibly a majority. When, later
in December, three names were proposed for the Royal
Astronomical Society's Gold Medal, Einstein was
approved for the award by an overwhelming majority. He
was duly informed and, writing to Born on January 27
about the Peace Treaty, added: "By the way, I am going to
England in the spring, to have a medal pressed into my
hand and to have a closer look at the other side of this
tomfoolery."
  A few days later he received an apologetic letter from
Eddington, who said that the officials of the Royal
Astronomical Society had met to vote on the Gold Medal
award, but a purely chauvinistic lobby had mustered at the
last minute and had successfully stopped its being made to
Einstein. For the first time in thirty years, no Gold Medal
would be awarded. "I am sure," wrote Eddington, "that
your disappointment will not be in any way personal and
that you will share with me the regret that this promising
opening of a better international spirit has had a rebuff
from reaction. Nevertheless, I am sure the better spirit is
making progress."
  As with Solvay, Einstein had to wait for a change in the
political climate. Then, at last allowed to join in the game,
he scooped the pool. In 1925 he was awarded the Royal
Society's Copley Medal; and, the following year, the Royal
Astronomical Society's Gold Medal.
  Whatever the difficulties in making formal British
awards to a German, Einstein had by the first months of
1920 gained not only success but notoriety, and his
reaction to it was shown in a letter written to Hopf on
February 2, 1920. "Saying 'no' has never been a strong
point with me, but in my present distress I am at last
gradually learning the art," he said. "Since the flood of
newspaper articles, I have been so swamped with
questions, invitations, challenges, that I dream that I am
burning in Hell and that the postman is the Devil eternally
roaring at me, throwing new bundles of letters at my head
because I have not yet answered the old ones."
  The speed with which his fame spread across the world,
down through the intellectual layers to the man in the
street, the mixture of semireligious awe and near hysteria
which his figure aroused, created a startling phenomenon
which has never been fully explained, but is well described
by Alexander Moszkowski, a Berlin litterateur and critic
who moved on the fringe of the Einstein circle.
Moszkowski's book, Einstein the Searcher, caused
Einstein's friends a great deal of misgiving, and the Borns
felt so strongly about it that they persuaded him to try to
stop publication. The outcome of a long series of
conversations during which Einstein had spoken about his
work quite freely and in simple terms, the book was a
vulgarization of science more unusual then than it would
be today. It also had considerable, and somewhat dramatic,
prepublication publicity, and it was this, more than the
substance of the book itself, which angered Einstein's
would-be protectors. He himself cared very little.
  "Everything sank away in the face of this universal theme
which had taken possession of humanity," Moszkowski
wrote of the huge public interest in relativity.

  The converse of educated people circled about this pole, and
could not escape from it, continually reverted to the same theme
when pressed aside by necessity or accident. Newspapers entered
on a chase for contributors who could furnish them with short or
long, technical or nontechnical, notices about Einstein's theory.
In all nooks and corners, social evenings of instruction sprang up,
and wondering universities appeared with errant professors that
led people out of the three-dimensional misery of daily life into
the more hospitable Elysian fields of four-dimensionality.
Women lost sight of domestic worries and discussed coordinate
systems, the principle of simultaneity, and negatively charged
electrons. All contemporary questions had gained a fixed center
from which threads could be spun to each. Relativity had become
the sovereign password.

  Exaggerated as it sounds, this account is no more than
the truth, even if the truth in fancy dress. The attitude was,
moreover, not confined to the uninitiated. "To those who
have the vision the world of physics will take on a new and
wonderful life," wrote the reviewer in Nature of Einstein's
own book on relativity. "The commonest phenomena
become organic parts of the great plan. The rationality of
the universe becomes an exciting romance, not a cold
dogma. The thrill of a comprehensive understanding runs
through us, and yet we find ourselves on the shores of the
unknown. For this new doctrine, after all, is but a
touchstone of truth. We must submit all our theories to the
test of it; we must allow our deepest thoughts to be gauged
by it. The metaphysician and he who speculates over the
meaning of life cannot be indifferent."
  It was therefore predictable that learned societies should
hold many meetings at which the special and the general
theories were discussed, that the Times Educational
Supplement should devote three full-page articles to
interpretations of relativity by Professor Lindemann, Dr.
Herbert Carr, and Alfred Whitehead, and that an Einstein
Sociey should be started in the House of Commons in
1920. "Its formation was due more to the curiosity of those
of us who had unexpectedly survived the First World War
than to any profound scientific search," says one of its
members, Colin Coote.
  It was understandable that within a year there should be
more than one hundred books on the subject, and that
intellectual interest should be shown not only in the
world's capitals but in the provinces. "At this time," writes
Infeld, later to become one of Einstein's collaborators, "I
was a schoolteacher in a small Polish town, and I did what
hundreds of others did all over the world. I gave a public
lecture on the relativity theory, and the crowd that queued
up on a cold winter's night was so great that it could not
be accommodated in the largest hall in the town." When
Eddington had lectured in Cambridge on a similar night in
December, "hundreds were turned away unable to get near
the room," in his own words. In Paris the American
Eugene Higgins presented $5,000 through the Scientific
American for the best 3,000-word exposition of relativity.
"I am the only one in my entire circle of friends who is not
entering," observed Einstein. "I don't believe I could do
it." The prize, fittingly enough in view of Einstein's Berne
background, was won by Lyndon Bolton, a senior
examiner of the British Patent Office.
  If all this was explicable in terms of an important new
scientific theory which had become the common coin of
intelligent conversation, Einstein was also raised to the far
less comprehensible position of a popular celebrity. From
London the Palladium music hall asked whether he would
appear, virtually at his own figure, for a three-week
"performance." The "Einstein cigar" appeared on the
market. Children were blessed, or otherwise, with his
name. The cartoonists took him to their hearts. In
Germany, he was shown in company with the French
President Millerand, who was advocating the heaviest
possible reparations from that country: "Can't you
persuade the simple-minded B⌠che that even with an
absolute deficit of 67,000,000,000 marks he is still
relatively well off?" In Britain, a detective shown catching
a bank thief with the help of a flashlight whose light rays
turned corners, laconically remarked: "Elementary, my
dear Einstein." He had in fact been hoisted into position by
the same mob which hoists film stars. Reason had little to
do with the matter. But in one way the treatment of
Einstein was different in its results. Film stars
pontificating on the future of the world, boxers
dogmatizing on politics, can be good entertainment and
few people take them more seriously than this. Einstein
was in another category. His theory might not be
understandable to most men but it was clear that he had an
intellect of unique proportions. Surely his brain could be
turned to illuminate, with good effect, some of the
problems that worried ordinary mortals? It was easy to
answer "Yes."
  All this was only a prelude to a long series of invitations
to lecture in foreign countries; to the bags of letters and
pleas for money which come to famous men and, in
Einstein's case, were brought up the stairs by the sackload.
It was a prelude to determined appeals from more
substantial causes, above all from the Zionists and the
pacifists, both quick to realize that in Einstein they might
be able to secure a unique totem figure.
  The photogenic white-haired messiah to which the world
later became accustomed cannot be invoked to explain the
extraordinary and worldwide phenomenon. The picture of
Einstein as he toured the world in the early 1920s, well
booted and accoutered, broad-brimmed hat giving a touch
of mystery, is quite the reverse: a picture of the
distinguished man of the times, possibly aloof, but
certainly established. The sheer audacity of his theory
helped. "Light caught bending" was an affront to common
sense that few could in their heart of hearts take seriously;
there was, if nothing else, a curiosity value about the man
who had apparently shown that it did.
  Yet to attribute Einstein's popularity to this alone is to
rate too low the inner awareness of the common people.
Some weight must be given to Leopold Infeld's view. "It
was just after the end of the war," he says.

  People were weary of hatred, of killing and international
intrigues. The trenches, bombs, and murder had left a bitter
taste. Books about war did not sell. Everyone looked for a new
era of peace, and wanted to forget the war. Here was something
which captured the imagination; human eyes looking from an
earth covered with graves and blood to the heavens covered with
the stars. Abstract thought carrying the human mind far away
from the sad and disappointing reality. The mystery of the sun's
eclipse and of the penetrating power of the human mind.
Romantic scenery, a strange glimpse of the eclipsed sun, an
imaginary picture of bending light rays, all removed from the
oppressive reality of life. One further reason, perhaps even more
important; a new event was predicted by a German scientist
Einstein, and confirmed by English astronomers. Scientists
belonging to two warring nations had collaborated again! It
seemed the beginning of a new era.

  Even this was only part of the story. Quite as important
was the intuitive realization that the new light cast on the
physical world struck at the very vitals of what they had
always believed. Few could understand the implications,
let alone the complex intellectual structure from which
these implications sprang; even so, deep within there lay a
sensitive sounding board, developed since the days when
man had first stood up on two feet out of four. Erwin
Schr÷dinger, who six years later was to become a standard
bearer in the new cause of wave mechanics, hinted at the
underlying reason for the Einstein phenomenon in his
Tarner Lectures of 1956. "I have sometimes wondered why
they made such a great stir both among the general public
and among philosophers," he said of the transformations
of time and space produced by relativity.

  I suppose it is this, that it meant the dethronement of time as a
rigid tyrant imposed on us from outside, a liberation from the
unbreakable rule of "before and after." For indeed time is our
most severe master by ostensibly restricting the existence of each
of us to narrow limitsùseventy or eighty years, as the Pentateuch
has it. To be allowed to play about with such a master's
programme believed unassailable until then, to play about with it
albeit in a small way, seems to be a great relief, it seems to
encourage the thought that the whole "timetable" is probably not
quite as serious as it appears at first sight. And this thought is a
religious thought, nay I should call it the religious thought.

  With the "great stir" there started the Einstein
mythology, the complex structure of story and half-story,
half-truth, quarter-truth, adorned exaggeration, and plain
lie, which from now onwards increasingly surrounded his
activities. All men caught in the white-hot glare of public
interest discover, sometimes with amusement, sometimes
with resignation, often with resentment, that their smallest
doings are memorialized, embroidered, and explained
away in a continuous flow of anecdote whose connection
with the truth is frequently marginal. Einstein was to
suffer more than most from such attentions and soon
learned to regard them with amusementùas must any
biographer who meets the same quasi-documented story
appearing in different decades, from different continents,
and being retailed, in all good faith, to illustrate one or
more of Einstein's extraordinary, endearing, or
unconventional attitudes.
  There were many reasons for the mythology which
developed from 1920 onwards. One was that inventions
had good ground to grow in. Immersed in his work in
Berlin, Einstein did on one occasion use a check as a
bookmark; it was therefore pardonable that the story
should surface as the account of how he had placed a
$1,500 check into a book and then lost the book. His
character was kindly and gentle, and he was at least once
asked by a neighbor's small girl to help with her sums;
after that, small girls all over the world had Einstein doing
their homeworkùdespite the fact that he had refused the
request on the grounds that it would not be fair. The
legends themselves, melting in the harsh light of
investigation, show not so much what sort of man he really
was as what kind of man the world thought him. Behind
his confidence, Einstein was genuinely humbleùand
legend made him forbear comment when a girl graduate,
failing to recognize him, voiced surprise that he should
still be studying physics with the words: "I finished
physics when I was twenty-five." Only Einstein, out of
time with his fellow musicians at an amateur recital,
would receive the criticism: "Einstein, can't you count?"
Only Einstein, unable to find his glasses and asking the
dining-car attendant to read the menu, would be met with
the comment: "Sorry, sir, I ain't had education either."
And only Einstein, looking like an untidy middle-class
nonentity, could go unrecognized by officialdom in a score
of stories, pottering his way through the crowd, a
Chaplinesque figure somehow embodying all the human
virtues of "us" against "them." Thus he became, as the
forces of left and right jockeyed for position in the postwar
Germany of the Weimar Republic, a new sort of
international image, the scientist wth the touch of a saint,
a man from whom an awed public expected not only
research but revelation.
  From outside Germany there came adulationùand in
1921 the much-prized Foreign Fellowship of the Royal
Society. Inside, opinion was mixed. Planck and
Sommerfeld, von Laue and Rubens, Nernst and Haber
were among those who knew what Einstein had
accomplished, while some Weimar politicians mentally
seized upon him as typifying the new Germany which they
hoped could now be presented to the world. Yet there were
many others to whom his success was deeply offensive,
uniting in one man all that they detestedùthe success of
an intellectual left-wing pacifist Jew.
  This feeling counterbalanced the adulation in many ways.
In Ulm, for instance, the authorities at first intended to
make him a freeman of the city. "But before I approach our
collegium," wrote Herr Dr. Schemberger to the Faculty of
Philosophy in Tⁿbingen University on behalf of the City
Council, "I would like to find out whether it is true that
Einstein's work is really of such outstanding merit." The
answer was an unqualified "Yes" which concluded: "What
Newton did for mechanics, Einstein has done for physics."
But when Dr. Schemberger wrote to Einstein on March 22,
it was not the freedom of the city which was offered, but
merely congratulations and the assurance that the town
was glad to have him as one of its sons. Einstein's thanks
were read out at the next council meeting. There was to be
no freedom. Two years later, when the award of the Nobel
Prize for Physics put the seal on his work, the authorities
settled for a street to be named after him. Perhaps it was
only coincidence that it lay on the outskirts of the city and
in a poorish area. More than a quarter of a century later, in
1949, he was asked to become an honorary citizen.
Einstein refused.
  The honors from outside Germany increased throughout
1920. The first came from Leiden. Lorentz had
telegraphed him as soon as he had heard of the Royal
Society's meeting in November, 1919, and Einstein's
reply, saying how much it had pleased him, although he
knew the telegram's contents, is revealing. "It is a proof of
your affection which means more to me than all the
experimental confirmation in the world," he wrote on
November 15. "The day I was allowed to spend with you in
Haarlem was one of the most wonderful of my life. You
yourself must feel how deep is my love and respect for
you." There soon followed the proposal of Kamerlingh
Onnes that he be appointed "byzondere Hoogleerarden," or
professor extraordinary, for three years at an annual salary
of 2,000 guilders. The duties would involve only one or
two visits a year, each of a few weeks, and there would be
no need to interrupt his Berlin work. Einstein accepted,
after receiving a plea to do so from Ehrenfest, and having
been told by Lorentz that Kamerlingh Onnes, who just
twenty years earlier had ignored Einstein's appeal for
work, "would regard it as a high honor if you would
discuss with him the researches being carried out in his
cryogenic laboratory."
  There were numerous delays, and while Einstein visited
his friends in Leiden in May, 1920, it was not until five
months later that he made his first formal visit as a
professor extraordinary. Between these two visits, he met
Niels Bohr for the first time. Bohr, who had just started the
Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, made
possible by an endowment from the Carlsberg
organization, had been invited by Planck to lecture to the
Physikalische Gesellschaft and on his arrival both Planck
and Einstein came forward to meet him. So similar in
work and outlook, few men were more dissimilar in
appearance; Planck formal and precise behind his rimless
glasses, immaculately dressed, the German professor down
the ages; Einstein still dark-haired, still rather splendid in
a leonine way, but already beginning to foreshadow the
familiar figure of untidy genius which became the
hallmark of his later years.
  Something was sparked off between Bohr and Einstein at
this meeting, the first of a long series of mental collisions
whose succession through the years was to have a quality
quite separate from the impact of genius on genius. For it
was Einstein who, fifteen years earlier, had first brought
an air of unexpected respectability to the idea that light
might conceivably consist both of wave and of particle and
to the notion that Planck's quantum theory might be
applied not only to radiation but to matter itself. It was
Bohr who was to bring scientific plausibility to the first of
these ideas with his principle of complementarity and
substance for the second with his explanation of
Rutherford's nuclear atom. Yet these very ideas were to
create not a unity between the two men but a chasm. From
the early 1920s, as Bohr and those of like mind followed
them on to what they saw as inevitable conclusions,
Einstein drew back in steadily growing disagreement,
withdrawing himself from the mainstream of physics and
giving to his later years a tragic air which not even the
staunchest of his friends could argue away.
  "I am just as keen on him as you are," he wrote of Bohr
to Ehrenfest after this first meeting in 1920. "He is an
extremely sensitive lad, and goes about the world as if
hypnotized." Bohr was quite as impressed with Einstein.
"The discussions, to which I have often reverted in my
thoughts," he later wrote, "added to all my admiration for
Einstein a deep impression of his detached attitude.
Certainly his favored use of such picturesque phrases as
'ghost waves [Gespensterfelder] guiding the photons'
implied no tendency to mysticism, but illuminated a rather
profound humor behind his piercing remarks." And on
July 27 he wrote to Rutherford, saying that his visit had
been "a very interesting experience, it being the first time I
had the opportunity of meeting Planck and Einstein
personally, and I spend [sic] the days discussing
theoretical problems from morning till night."
  Later, he gave some details of these discussions. "What
do you hope to achieve?" he had asked, when Einstein had
doubted whether it was necessary to give up causality and
continuity. "You, the man who introduced the idea of light
as particles! If you are so concerned with the situation in
physics in which the nature of light allows for a dual
interpretation, then ask the German government to ban the
use of photoelectric cells if you think that light is waves, or
the use of diffraction gratings if light is corpuscular."
  Einstein remarked: "There you are: a man like you comes
and one would expect that two like-minded persons had
met, yet we are unable to find a common language. Maybe
we physicists ought to agree on certain general
fundamentals, on certain general propositions which we
would regard as positive before embarking on
discussions."
  But Bohr objected: "No. never! I would regard it as the
greatest treachery on my part if, in embarking on a new
domain of knowledge, I accepted any foregone
conclusions." This "certain difference in attitude and
outlook" between the two men, as Bohr described it, was
clear from the first day. It was sharpened and increased
during long discussions over more than three decades. But
it was the difference between the sides in a great game in
which both men strove "to set the cause beyond renown/
To love the game beyond the prize,/ To honour, while you
strike him down,/ The foe that comes with fearless eyes."
  Something of their mutual admiration shines out from
their first letters. Einstein, thanking Bohr for a gift of food
which had arrived from Copenhagen after Bohr's return
there, wrote on May 2: "Not often in life has a man given
me such happiness by his mere presence as you have done.
I now understand why Ehrenfest enjoyed you so much. I
am studying your great works andùwhen I get stuck
anywhereùnow have the pleasure of seeing your friendly
young face before me, smiling and explaining. I have
learned much from you, mainly from your sensitive
approach to scientific problems." Bohr's reply, written as
he learned that Einstein would be visiting Copenhagen,
was equally revealing.

  For me, it is one of the greatest experiences of life that I can be
near you and talk to you, and I cannot say how grateful I am for
all the friendliness which you showed to me on my visit to
Berlin, and for your letter which I am ashamed not to have
answered before. You do not know how great a stimulus it was
for me to have the long-awaited opportunity of hearing from you
personally your views on the very question with which I myself
have been busy. I will never forget our conversation on the way
from Dahlem to your house, and I very much hope that during
your visit here an opportunity will arise of continuing it.

  Einstein was by the midsummer of 1920 making
numerous lecture visits of the sort that Bohr referred to.
After each he returned to Berlin, and after each he found
opposition to himself, and to all that he stood for,
ominously growing. And now he decided to straighten out
the anomalous question of his nationality. He had
renounced his German citizenship and as far as he knew
was merely a German-born Swiss, an awkward situation
which made him a sitting target for his enemies. There
was one simple way of coming into the body of the Kirk:
he could take up German civic rights again, an action that
might underline his support for the Republic and would at
least suggest that he was no longer ashamed of his country.
  On July 1, 1920, Einstein was sworn into the Weimar
constitution and eight and a half months later, on March
15, 1921, into the Prussian constitution. Often unreliable
on dates, he gave this account of his resumption of
German citizenship to Janos Plesch towards the end of the
Second World War: "I accepted it in 1918 after the general
disaster, at the urgent representations of my colleagues. It
was one of the follies of my life. Politically I hated
Germany from my youth and I always felt the dangers that
threatened the world from her side."
  If Einstein hated Germany, a portion of Germany
certainly hated him. The reasons for this, given the
situation in the country in July and August, 1920, are
simple to explain if difficult to excuse. In countries which
had won the war only at desperate cost, Einstein polarized
a longing for cooperation and reconstruction, for an end to
the anarchy and for the rational use of scientific
knowledge for the common good. In Germany it was
otherwise. Here patriotic passion, born of defeat, distrusted
pacifist leanings and international connections; and if anti
Semitism was a convenient though dishonorable weapon,
desperate times demanded desperate measures. Such
feelings were epitomized by the new symbol of General
von Luttwitz' Erhardt Brigade, which had marched into
Berlin from the Baltic to support the abortive Kapp Putsch
a few months earlier. On their helmets they wore a reverse
of the swastika, a religious symbol usually associated with
the worship of the Aryan sun gods Apollo and Odin.
  In the ferment of postwar Germany, where internal
divisions were lessened by what appeared to be the
vindictive brutality of the Allied blockade, there was more
than one group willing to direct rising passions against
Einstein, a ready-made target for hatred. There were those
scientists who genuinely did not believe in the theories
which had brought him a fame unique in their scientific
experience. There were others who, whatever they
believed, could not bear the thought of such acclaim being
lavished on a man who had spent the hard-fought war
burrowing away in the University of Berlin. It was bad
enough that an unknown professor should have declaimed
against the war, held out a welcoming hand to the enemy
across the French frontier, and failed even to bend his
energies to the commonweal like other scientists such as
Haber and Nernst; it was intolerable that the same line
should be followed by the man now that he had been
jerked to fame overnight. Thus the renown which was to
take Einstein round the world in the first half of the 1920s
acted as an irritant to the anti-Semitism which burgeoned
with the coming of Hitler a decade later. Its roots went
deep, it flourished in the postwar period, and as the years
passed it became more firmly established, so that it later
proved a weapon which the Nazis could wield. They would
have utilized something, of course. But the steady growth
of anti-Semitism during the interwar years was at least
partly due to the ease with which its supporters could
concentrate their attacks on Einstein and the "new
physics."
  The attacks started before the end of 1919. In December,
while Einstein was still half-submerged by the first tidal
wave of publicity which followed the Royal Society
meeting in London, he had written to Ehrenfest noting that
"anti-Semitism is strong here [Berlin] and political
reaction is violent, at least among the 'intelligentsia.'" A
few days later he noted that following an article by Born in
the Frankfurter Zeitung, both of them would be persecuted
by the press and other rabble. It was so bad for him, he
went on, that he could scarcely come up for air, let alone
work.
  Then, in March, Wolfgang Kapp seized Berlin but failed
to hold it in the face of a general strike called by the
Weimar government. Internal evidence suggests that the
same right-wing forces which subsidized the Kapp
Putschùclaimed by Kurt Grossman to include "secret
groups round Krupp"ùplayed at least some part in the
growing anti-Einstein movement. Finally they created the
"Study Group of German Natural Philosophers" (Arbe
itsgemeinschaft Deutscher Naturforscher), which had at its
disposal large sums of money, offered fees to those who
would write or speak against Einstein, and advertised its
meetings by large posters as though they were announcing
public concerts. Leader of this so-called "Study Group"
was Paul Weyland, a man entirely unknown in scientific
circles and of whom, over the years, nothing was
discovered. Much of his support came from assorted
riffraff; some of it came from more scientifically
respectable sources. The physicist Ernst Gehrcke joined
the association and so did a number of other men who
could genuinely claim to be classed as bona fide even if
undistinguished scientists.
  Above all there was Philip Lenard, whose work on the
photoelectric effect had been the forerunner of Einstein's
and whose achievements had been stressed by Einstein in
his letters to Laub. Lenard had been considered something
of an oddity by many of his colleagues at Heidelberg, but
before the war he had not been an anti-Semite. He read the
ultrarespectable Frankfurter Zeitung and, according to
Laub, held a high opinion of Einstein's photoelectric
paper. One thing that did rankle was Einstein's implied
dismissal of the ether as an unnecessary complication in
the universe; this in turn, although rather irrelevantly, led
him to denigrate the theory of relativity. His views no
doubt hardened during the war. They certainly became
fixed by the torrent of praise which poured over Einstein
from November, 1919, onwards. And in 1920 Lenard
reappears as the Nobel Prize winner enthusiastically
providing scientific respectability for the Weyland
organization, which described relativity as part of a vast
Semitic plot to corrupt the world in general and Germany
in particular. Its attacks avoided scientific argument;
instead, they concentrated on the "Jewish nature" of
relativity, and on the personal character of Einstein. This
made them an embarrassment to the scientific community.
But to the uninformed public the news that the "Study
Group" was supported by a Nobel Prize winner gave the
organization a stiffening of pseudo-respectability it would
otherwise have lacked.
  In August the "Antirelativity Company," as Einstein
called it, announced twenty meetings to be held in
Germany's biggest towns. Berlin was its headquarters and
it hired the Berlin Philharmonic Hall for a setpiece
demonstration against both relativity and Einstein, to be
held on August 27.
  In some ways the packed meeting had an air of farce as
much as of high drama. On to the stage came Weyland,
apparently the "handsome dark-haired man of about thirty
who wore a frockcoat and spoke with enthusiasm about
interesting things" later described by Einstein's colleague
Leopold Infeld. "He said that uproar about the theory of
relativity was hostile to the German spirit. Then there
came a university lecturer who had a little beard, was
small, who also wore a frockcoat, and who read out his
speech from a brochure which had been sold before the
lecture. He raised objections about understanding the
theory of relativity."
  This second spokesman seems to have been Gehrcke, and
as he dived into some rudimentary technicalities there was
a murmur of "Einstein, Einstein" in the audience. For
Einstein had arrived to see what it was all about. There he
was, sitting in a box, obviously enjoying himself. As the
speakers went on, attacking relativity, omitting, distorting,
unbalancing, appealing to the good Aryan common sense
of their audience and invoking its members not to take
such stuff seriously, the clown that lies not far below
genius began to show itself. At the more absurd statements
about relativity Einstein could be seen bursting into
laughter and clapping his hands in mock applause. When
the meeting had ended he greeted his friends: "That was
most amusing."
  However, the so-called "Study Group" was a symptom of
something more sinister than scientific absurdity, and
Einstein replied in the columns of the Berliner
Tageblattù the first time that he had come down into the
marketplace to face his accusers. His statement was
headed: "My Answer to the Antirelativity Theory
Company Ltd." In many ways it is vintage Einstein.
"Under the pretentious name of Study Group of German
Natural Philosophers, there has come into existence a
variegated society whose provisional aim it is to disparage
both the theory of relativity and myself as its author in the
eyes of nonphysicists," he began.

  Messrs. Weyland and Gehrcke have recently held their first
lecture on this in the Philharmonic. I myself was present. I am
very well aware that neither of these speakers are worthy of an
answer from my pen, and I have good reasons to believe that
motives other than a desire to search for truth are at the bottom
of their enterprise. (Were I a German national, with or without
swastika, instead of a Jew of liberal, international disposition,
then....) I therefore reply only because it has been urged by well
wishers that my views should be made known.
  First of all I must point out that there is, to my knowledge,
scarcely a scientist who has carried out anything worthwhile
in theoretical physics who does not concede that the whole
theory of relativity is logically constructed and is in accord
with facts which have so far been shown to be incontestable.
The most outstanding theoretical physicistsùI cite H. A.
Lorentz, M. Planck, Sommerfeld, Laue, Born, Larmor,
Eddington, Debije, Langevin, Levi-Civitaùsolidly support
the theory and have themselves made worthy contributions to
it. As an outspoken opponent of the theory of relativity I can
only name Lenard among the physicists of international
repute. I admire Lenard as a master of experimental physics;
but he has not yet done anything in theoretical physics, and
his objections against the General Theory of Relativity are so
superficial that until now I have not considered it necessary to
answer them in detail. I now propose to rectify that omission.
  It is held up against me that it is bad taste for me to speak up
for the theory of relativity. I can truly say that all my life I
have been a friend of reasonable argument and of the truth.
High-falutin' words and phrases bring me out in goose
pimples whether they deal with relativity or anything else. I
myself have often made fun of such things and this has then
been thrown back at me. However, I gladly make a present of
this opportunity to the gentlemen of the antirelativity
company.

  Einstein then turned to the lectures, dealing first with
Weylandù"who seems to be no sort of expert (doctor?
engineer? politician? I cannot find out)"ùand then with
Gehrcke. His opponents had relied on such devices as
quoting results from one British eclipse station already
known to be incorrect due to a technical defect and
omitting all reference to the British announcement that the
theory had been proved. Thus Einstein's demolition task
was easy.
  "Finally," he said, referring to the annual meeting of the
German Association of Scientists and Doctors which was
to be held in Bad Nauheim the coming month, "I notice
that at the scientists' gathering at Nauheim there has, at
my suggestion, been arranged a discussion on the theory of
relativity. Anyone who wants to protest can do so there
and put up his ideas to a proper gathering of scientists."
  Fifty years ago it was almost unknown for a scientist to
use the columns of the daily press in this way. Even
Einstein's friends were shocked. Hedwig Born wrote that
he must have suffered very muchù"for otherwise you
would not have allowed yourself to be goaded into that
rather unfortunate reply in the newspaper." Ehrenfest was
even more condemnatory. "My wife and I absolutely
cannot believe that you yourself wrote down at least some
of the phrases in this article, 'My Answer,'" he said on
August 28. "We don't forget for a minute that you have
certainly been provoked in an especially vulgar way, and
neither do we forget in what an abnormal moral climate
you live there; nevertheless this answer contains certain
reactions that are completely non-Einsteinian. We could
underline them one by one in pencil. If you really did write
them down with your own hand, it proves that these
damned pigs have finally succeeded in touching your soul
which means so terribly much to us...."
  This in fact was what had happened. Einstein felt he had
no alternative but to reply to the charges of charlatanism,
self-advertisement, and plagiarism. "I had to do it if I
wanted to remain in Berlin, where every child recognizes
me from the photographs," he replied to Ehrenfest. "If one
is a democrat, one has also to acknowledge the claims of
publicity."
  Second only to the sense of shock that a scientist should
defend himself in this way was astonishment that a
member of the scientific fraternity should need to do so.
"The incredible thing," von Laue wrote to Sommerfeld, "is
that men such as Lenard and Wolf of Heidelberg, who
have a reputation as scholars, actually lecture to such an
association. Yesterday Gehrcke spoke after Weyland, and
although he stoked up the old fires, his quiet manner of
speaking was a relief after Weyland, who can compete
with the most unscrupulous demagogue. It is a disgrace
that such a thing can happen."
  Von Laue went on to say that he, Rubens, and Nernst had
sent their own short letter of protest against the activities
of the association to the leading Berlin newspapers. This,
published in the Berliner Tageblatt, read as follows:

  We cannot presume in this place to utter our opinion on the
profound, exemplary intellectual work which Einstein has
brought to his relativity theory. Surprising successes have already
been achieved, and further proof must naturally lie in future
research. On the other hand, we must stress that apart from
Einstein's researches into relativity, his work has assured him a
permanent place in the history of science. In this respect his
influence on the scientific life not only of Berlin but of the whole
of Germany can hardly be overestimated. Whoever is fortunate
enough to be close to Einstein knows that he will never be
surpassed in his respect for the cultural values of others, in
personal modesty and dislike of all publicity.

  Sommerfeld himself had been deeply aroused,
particularly in view of fresh rumors that Einstein was
planning to leave Germany. As president of the German
Physics Society he felt it necessary to come to the rescue.
"Dear Einstein," he wrote on September 3,

  With real fury I have, as man and as president, followed the
Berlin hunt against you. A word of warning to Wolf of
Heidelberg was unnecessary. His name, as he has meanwhile
written to you, has simply been misused. I feel sure it will be the
same with Lenard. A fine type, this Weyland-Gehrcke!
  Today I have conferred with Planck about what has to be
done about the Association of Scientists [Naturforscher
Gesellschaft]. We would like to put to the president, my
colleague von Mⁿller, a sharp protest against "scientific"
demagogy, and a vote of confidence in you. This would not be
formally voted upon but would only be raised as an expression
of the scientific conscience.
  You must not leave Germany! Your whole work is rooted in
German (and Dutch) science; nowhere will you find so much
understanding as in Germany. It is not in your character to
leave Germany now, when she is being so dreadfully
misinterpreted by everyone. Just one more point: had you,
with your views, lived during the war in France, England, or
America, you would certainly have been locked up had you
turned your back on the Entente and its false system, as I do
not doubt you would have done (as were JaurΦs, Russell,
Caillaus, etc.).

  Sommerfeld went on to explain that a south German
magazine group had suggested that Einstein might write
an article for them. He was fairly obviously in favor of the
idea, particularly as there had been some criticism of the
Berliner Tageblatt letter. Sommerfeld himself had not read
it, but those who had, he said, considered it "not very
happy" and rather unlike Einstein. It was, he felt, hardly
the right place in which to answer the anti-Semitic attack.
And he put in another plea for the south German group.
  "I hope that in the meantime you have regained your
philosophical laughter and sympathy with the Germany
whose trials are everywhere apparent," he concluded. "But
no more of desertion."
  In emphasizing that Einstein should stand his ground,
Sommerfeld was appealing, ironically enough, to
Einstein's feelings for Germany, the nation cast off in
1896, whose actions he had bitterly criticized throughout
the war. To retire to Holland, or even Switzerland, would
be desertion; desertion not only of his scientific colleagues
but of that Germany "whose trials are everywhere
obvious."
  At the end of August, 1920, Einstein was therefore once
again being pulled in two directionsùaway from Berlin by
the threat of anti-Semitism and the friendships of Lorentz
and Ehrenfest; towards Berlin by his loyalty to university
colleagues and his new-found hope for a republican
Germany. He knew that a permanent post at Leiden
University could be his for the asking and the same was no
doubt still true of Zurich. His thoughts were already
turning to England, and to a young British visitor who
called on him to discuss German requests for periodicals
from British universities, he "referred to his lecturing at
Oxford and expressed the pleasure that it would be for him
to do so some time." Lindemann, recently made head of
the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford, had also called on him
in Berlin. They had recalled their last meeting at the
Solvay Congress and agreed to exchange future papers,
and it is more than likelyùespecially in the light of future
eventsùthat Lindemann put the idea of an Oxford visit
into Einstein's head. Something more substantial had
already been suggested to Rutherford, who had taken J. J.
Thomson's place at the Cavendish the previous year. For
on September 1, Jeans had written to him from Zermatt,
sending what was probably a report of Einstein's statement
in the Berliner Tageblatt. "My dear Rutherford," he said,

  You spoke of the need of a first-class applied mathematician or
math[ematical] physicist for Cambridge. I have been wondering
what you would think of Albert Einstein. From the enclosed it
seems quite likely that he will be leaving Berlin very soon
there has been a good deal of disturbance over him there, as you
have probably seen, and he would probably consider an English
offer I should think.
  In my opinion he is just the man needed, in conjunction with
yourself, to reestablish a school of mathematical physics in
Cambridge. The only serious drawback I think of is that he
does not, or did not, speak English, but I imagine he would
soon learn. His age is forty-two, nearly forty-three, and I
imagine he has still plenty of creative power left.

  There is no record of Rutherford's reply, but it seems
likely that he was still slightly allergic to Einstein.
Nevertheless, for a man of such unique reputation almost
all options were open and it would not have been
surprising had Einstein now left Germany for a permanent
post outside the Reich. But by the time he replied to
Sommerfeld on September 6, he had decided otherwise.
  "Actually," he wrote,

  I attached too much importance to that attack on me, in that I
believed that a great part of our physicists took part in it. So I
really thought for two days that I would "desert" as you call it.
But soon there came reflection, and the knowledge that it would
be wrong to leave the circle of my faithful friends. Perhaps I
should not have written the article. But I wanted to prevent the
feeling that my continuing silence about the protests and the
accusations, which were systematically repeated, was due to
agreement. It is a bad thing that every utterance of mine is made
use of by journalists as a matter of business. I must lock myself
up.
  I cannot possibly write the article in the South German
Monthly. In fact, I should be very happy if I could bring
myself up to date with my correspondence. Such a declaration
at Nauheim would perhaps on the grounds of tidiness be just
the thing as far as people abroad are concerned. But I do not
on any account want to speak myself, for I am again happy
and content and read nothing that depresses me except
absolute essentials....

  Three days later he wrote to the Borns. "Like the man in
the fairy tale who turned everything he touched into gold,
so with me everything turns into a fuss in the newspapers,"
he noted: "suum cuique." But he added that "insight and
phlegm" had returned and that now he was thinking "only
of buying a sailing boat and a country cottage close to
water. Somewhere near Berlin."
  Yet if he had agreed not to leave Germany, the decision
could easily be changed. The agents of the German
Republic now acted to prevent such a catastrophe. One was
Planck, the other was Haenisch, the German Minister of
Education; both were determined that for the sake of
German science Einstein should be discouraged from
having second thoughts.
  Planck wrote to Einstein on September 5, from Gmund
am Tegernsee in the South Tyrol. He could scarcely
believe reports of the meeting in the Berlin Philharmonic
and found it impossible to understand what was going on.
But very much more important to him, he continued, was
what impression the intrigues were likely to have on
Einstein, whom he feared might eventually lose patience
and take a step which would punish both German science
and his friends for the wrong that had been done by those
of a pitiable state of mind. The proper representatives of
science should not, indeed dare not, he ended, fail to
ensure that Einstein was adequately compensated.
  Planck, who could speak not only from his own
Olympian height but also from a position of friendship,
was supported by the Minister of Education. "Most
respected professor," the Minister now wrote to Einstein.

  With sorrow and shame I see by the press that the theory
represented by you has become a public object of spiteful attacks
which go far beyond the limits of pertinent criticism, and that
even your own scientific personality has not been spared from
defamation and slanders. It is of special satisfaction to me to
know in connection with this affair that scholars of recognized
repute, among whom are prominent representatives of the
University of Berlin, are supporting you, are denouncing the
contemptible attacks upon your person, and are drawing attention
to the fact that your scientific work has assured you a unique
place in the history of science. Where the best people are
defending you, it will be the easier for you to pay no further
attention to such ugly actions. Therefore, I may well allow myself
to express the definite hope that there is no truth in the rumors
that, because of these vicious attacks, you wished to leave Berlin
which always was, and always will be, proud to count you, most
respected professor, among the first ornaments of the scientific
world.

  Einstein appears to have delayed his reply, although he
no doubt acknowledged the Minister's appeal. He had
good reason to be cautious, for it seemed possible that the
"Antirelativity Company" might muster considerable
support, from rabblerousers if not from scientists. "The
first anti-Einstein lecture," the New York Times had
reported, "had a decided anti-Semitic complexion, which
applied equally to the lecture and to a large part of the
audience." And in the volatile atmosphere of early Weimar
Germany there was a genuine danger of violence at Bad
Nauheim, where the meeting of the Gesellschaft Deutscher
Natur-forscher und ─rzte was to start on September 25. It
seemed likely that there would at the least be a dramatic
confrontation comparable to that between Bishop
Wilberforce and T. H. Huxley at the British Association in
Oxford sixty years earlier.
  Bad Nauheim is only some twenty miles from Frankfurt,
where Born had recently been appointed professor, and
Einstein stayed with the Borns for the duration of the
meeting, traveling into the small town each day with his
friends. The spa is a leisurely place in the foothills of the
Taunus, lying among the pines, accustomed to conferences
and old people, and on the morning of September 25 its
inhabitants were surprised to find the Badehaus guarded
by armed police with fixed bayonets: an indication both of
the extent to which anti-Semitism had already been
aroused and of Weimar's wish to avoid trouble. The
opposition to Einstein had been fully organized. "I had
previously received a letter, signed by Weyland, in which I
was guaranteed a very large sum (I forget the details) if I
would side with them," Ehrenhaft has written. Instead, he
passed on the letter to Einstein.
  The Badehalle was packed for the discussion on
relativity. "When Lenard began," says Dr. Friedrich
Dessauer, who was sitting on Einstein's left, "Einstein
wanted to make notes but, as one would expect, he had no
pencil. He asked to borrow mine in order to reply clearly
and convincingly to Lenard's objections.... As a minor
joke, Einstein has my pencil to this day. At least, he never
returned it to me, so that what has come from it is probably
more intelligent than it would have been if I had got it
back."
  Lenard's style can be judged from his opening words: "I
have much pleasure in today taking part in a discussion on
the gravitation theory of the ether. But I must say that as
soon as one passes from the theory of gravitation to those
of the powers of mass proportion, the simple
understanding of the scientist must take exception to the
theory." One could, he went on, express the result of
observations through equations; or one could explain
equations in terms of observations. "I would very much
favor the second idea whereas Einstein favors the first."
  Einstein now rose to reply. No verbatim account appears
to have survived. Dr. Dessauer says that the argument was
not quite as grim as was feared, and the report in the
Physikalische Zeitschrift gives the impression of a
decorous exchange. However, Born later commented that
Einstein "was provoked into making a caustic reply,"
while Einstein himself later wrote to Born saying: "I ...
will not allow myself to get excited again, as in Nauheim.
It is quite inconceivable to me how I could have lost my
sense of humor to such an extent through being in bad
company." According to Felix Ehrenhaft, he was
"interrupted repeatedly by exclamations and uproar. It was
obviously an organized interruption. Planck understood
this and was pale as death as he raised his voice and told
those making the row to be quiet."
  When Einstein had finished, Lenard rose to say that he
had not heard anything new. "I believe," he added, "that
the fields of gravitation which have been spoken of must
correspond to examples, and such examples have not yet
appeared in practice." Instead of the obvious retort that the
British expeditions had provided them, Einstein replied
more soothingly: "I would like to say that what seems
obvious to people and what does not seem obvious, has
changed. Opinions about obviousness are to a certain
extent a function of time. I believe that physics is abstract
and not obvious, and as an example of the changing views
of what is clear, and what is not, I recommend you to
consider the clarity with which Galilean mechanics has
been interpreted at different times."
  The argument was continued at this level. A Professor
Rudolph claimed that proof of the General Theory was no
argument against the ether. A Professor Palagyi looked on
the difference of opinion as merely an example of "the old
historical opposition between the experimentalist and the
mathematical physicist, such as existed, for example,
between Faraday and Maxwell." Max Born weighed in
with a brief comment in favor of Einstein, and before
much more could be said it was discovered, no doubt to
Planck's relief, that time was up. "Since the relativity
theory unfortunately has not yet made it possible to extend
the absolute time interval that is available for the
meeting," he announced, "our session must be adjourned."
  The dangerous corner had been turned. Einstein went
home to Berlin, comforted. Early in October it was
formally announced that he would be remaining there.
  If this decision had been made solely on the same
grounds as his original decision to join the Kaiser Wilhelm
Instituteùthe wish to remain in closest possible contact
with the men who were investigating the nature of the
physical worldùthis would have been understandable
enough. But by 1920 it was no longer necessary for
Einstein to move towards the center of interest; by now,
the mountain would come to Mohammed. Einstein thus
stayed on in Berlin for a tangle of motives almost as
complex as those which had brought him there six years
earlier. According to Frank, his reassuring letter to
Haenisch, saying that he would not be leaving, had stated:
"Berlin is the place to which I am bound by the closest
human and scientific ties." But there was more to it than
that. He believed that the Weimar Republic held out a new
hope for Europe in general as well as for Germany in
particular; and also, according to Frank, he felt that "it
was now important for all progressively minded elements
to do everything possible to increase the prestige of the
German Republic."
  His multiple commitments left little time for active work
in the revived Bund Neues Vaterland that in 1920 became
the German League for Human Rights, but he was a
cooperating well-wisher and, says one of its supporters,
was "such a celebrity that we took him to one of the large
'no more war' mass demonstrations in the Berlir
Lustgarten and presented him to the fifty or sixty thousand
people there gathered." It was also significant that early in
1921 he should become a founder member of the
Republican League, one of whose principal tasks it was "to
enlighten German youth on the causes of the Empire's
collapse and to propagate the conviction that Germany's
resuscitation is possible solely on the basis of a republican
form of government." The Republican League was, for
better or for worse, of no particular importance. But
Einstein was not lapsing from his wartime socialism into
his former contempt for all political action. His founder
membership of the League was a straw which showed
which way the gale of events was blowing him.
  Quite apart from "human and scientific ties" there was
another reason for his staying in Berlin. Lenard and his
supporters, aiming to discredit all for which Einstein was
the symbol, were to have greater effects than they can ever
have imagined. For he responded to a challenge with what
was at times an almost stubborn pigheadedness. They had
provided one.
  Basically, he still wanted a quiet life. He still half-
believed, as he had hopefully said to Elsa towards the end
of December, 1919, that "it will soon all die down." But
Lenard and the "Antirelativity Company" had kicked him
into full awareness of what anti-Semitism could really be
like. Thus there was a compensation for the objectionable
limelight that now burned down on him. If he had to live
within its glare, he would at least make use of it; he would
use the ridiculous acclaim that he was now being given to
good, nonridiculous purpose. He would ensure that his
fellow Jews were given all possible support in their efforts
to preserve their culture, in a homeland of their own if
necessary. He would fight the good fight against
militarism and nationalism with all the logic and reason
which he still expected other men to appreciate. And
Berlin was a better place for that task than Leiden or
Cambridge or Zurich.
  In almost any other circumstances the Berlin professor of
1918 who had become a world figure by 1920 would have
passed by with contempt the door onto the political world
which the transformation had swung open for him. Now
he passed through, eager to do what he could with his
influence in the German capital, sensing that his esoteric
work had given him "that power/Which erring men call
Chance," but still totally ignorant of the ways in which the
machinery of power could be used to produce results.

CHAPTER 11

AMBASSADOR-AT-LARGE

By the time the Berlin church bells were ringing in 1921,
it was clear that Einstein had weathered the first of the
nationalist, anti-Jewish storms for which he was to act as
lightning conductor. It was also clear that his fame was to
be neither nine-days' nor nine-months' wonder; the blaze
of public interest that had flared up throughout the world
showed every sign of continuing into the foreseeable
future.
  He was therefore faced with a series of foreign
engagements and tours which he could hardly avoid. There
is no doubt that he hated it all. He always hated excessive
recognition, well aware that in spite of what he had done,
he was in some ways like the men on Everest who
metaphorically stood upon the shoulders of their
predecessors. He was never in any doubt about his own
worth; he had no reason to be. But he hated the hubbub
created around him by those ignorant of the very language
of science which he spoke. Nevertheless, there were
compensations; for he could dispense his favors much as
he had signed photographs during the first flush of fame at
the end of 1919. Then the odious publicity had been made
bearable by contributions which he exacted for the poor.
Now the rigmarole of tours and public lectures was
counterbalanced, in the United States by aid to the Zionist
cause, in Britain and France by the help he could bring to
the forces which wanted to rebuild a new Europe,
including Germany, on a basis of mutual trust. In science
he had achieved almost transcendental success by paring
problems down to their simplest terms. Surely the same
process would work in national politics and international
affairs? Einstein walked into the lion's den devoutly
believing this was so.
  The first of his major toursùthe "thorns in the side of my
colleagues at the Academy," as he called themùwas to the
United States, in support of the Zionist cause, even though
he also lectured at Columbia and Princeton Universities
during the same visit. Before this, however, early in 1921,
he had gone to both Prague and Vienna, returning to the
former city's university as the man who had unexpectedly
become its most famous professor.
  In Prague he stayed with his old friend Philipp Frank,
who has left a vivid account of how Einstein spoke to a
crowded audience, explaining relativity in far more
homely terms than had been expected. When the clapping
and cheering had died down, he said simply: "It will
perhaps be pleasanter and more understandable if instead
of making a speech I play a piece for you on the violin."
  In two curious ways, shadows from the future temporarily
darkened this visit to the city where he had first sensed
both the undercurrent of European anti-Semitism and the
growl that he always believed to be the voice of pan
Germanism. For despite his personal feelings he was now,
for those Germans who found it convenient, a German
hero; and thus a Sudeten paper could claim, on his arrival
in the Czech capital, that "the whole world will now see
that a race that has produced a man like Einstein, the
Sudeten German race, will never be suppressed." Here in
Prague all his fears for the future, all the suspicions that
the war had nurtured and that the Weimar government had
only partially subdued, rose to the surface once again. To
Frank he confided one thing: his fear that he would be
forced to leave Germany within ten years. From a man
who had so recently sworn allegiance to Weimar and to
Prussia, the forecast at first seems puzzling. It was wrong
by only two years.
  In Prague, also, a young man insisted on speaking to
Einstein after his lecture. He had considered Einstein's
mass-energy equation, and on its basis concluded it would
be possible to use the energy locked within the atom for
production of a new and immensely powerful explosive;
furthermore, he had invented a machine which he claimed
could help make such an explosive. It would be interesting
to know more of the youth, and it is tantalizing to
speculate on what might have happened had Einstein been
other than what he was. All we have is Frank's version of
his reaction. "Calm yourself. You haven't lost anything if I
don't discuss your work with you in detail. Its foolishness
is evident at first glance. You cannot learn more from a
longer discussion."
  Einstein no doubt meant what he said. But one wonders
whether the "foolishness" which he saw was purely
technological or whether his mind might not have harked
back to the example of John Napier, the discoverer of
logarithms, for whose work he had profound respect.
During Elizabethan times Napier invented a "tank" and
the "burning mirrors" with which he hoped to destroy the
Armada; but before his death he burned all records of his
allegedly most deadly weaponùa device reputed to have
wiped out a flock of Pentland sheep. One wonders also
whether, eighteen years later, writing his plea to Roosevelt
that the Americans should investigate nuclear weapons,
Einstein remembered Prague.
  In Vienna, soon afterwards, he spoke in the university
Physics Institute and also gave his first big public lecture,
being sketched while he was speaking by a young English
artist, Edmond Kapp, and refusing to sign one of the
sketches "because it makes me look too Chinese." The
lecture was given to an audience of 3,000 in one of the
city's largest concert halls, and on realizing its size
Einstein experienced a minor fit of agoraphobia, insisting
that his host Felix Ehrenhaft walk with him to the hall and
then sit near him. In 1921 Ehrenhaft held the chair of
experimental physics in the University of Vienna, and he
and Einstein were still good friends. Later he developed an
obsessional idea that Einstein, who was afterwards to
describe his old friend as a man "without any self-criticism
who has gradually developed into a kind of phony," had
plagiarized his work.

  "Einstein stayed in my house," Ehrenhaft recalled.

  He came to Vienna with two coats, two pairs of trousers, two
white shirts, but only one white collar. When my wife asked him
if there was not something that he had left at home he answered
"No." However, she found neither slippers nor toilet articles. She
supplied everything including the necessary collars. However,
when she met him in the hall in the morning he was barefooted,
and she asked him if he didn't need slippers. He answered "No.
They are unnecessary ballast." Since his trousers were terribly
crumpled, my wife pressed the second pair and put them in order
so that he would be neat for the second lecture. When he stepped
onto the stage she saw to her horror that he was wearing the
unpressed pair.

  This was the familiar Einstein en voyage, traveling with
the minimum of baggage, forgetful of the mechanics of
everyday life, and a constant worry to Elsa, who on
occasion would pack a suitcase for his journeys only to
find on his return that it had not been opened. "How lucky
that my husband's head is firmly stuck on: otherwise he
would no doubt have left it in Leipzig," she once wrote.
"Every time that he travels complications arise. ... This
time he left a new toothbrush and a tube of 'Daramad'
[toothpaste]. He could not have left anything else behind as
he did not unpack anything else." The trait worried his
hosts. It never worried Einstein, with his mind tied to the
essentials. If the rest of the world wanted to fuss about
such trivia as trousers and ties and toothbrushes, so much
for the world.
  From Vienna he returned to Germany. And here, during
the next few months, he agreed to make a propaganda tour
of the United States during which he would speak
specifically to raise money for the Hebrew University,
already being built in Jerusalem.
  Shortly after the trip had been settled, he received a letter
from which great consequences were to flow. Dated
February 14, 1921, it came from Sir Henry Miers, Vice-
Chancellor of Manchester University, and invited Einstein
to give the Adamson Lecture there at some date convenient
to himself. Professor Sherrington, the President of the
Royal Society, and his predecessor J.J. ùby this time Sir
JosephùThomson, had both been Adamson Lecturers, but
it was an imaginative stroke of Sir Henry's to invite
Einstein so soon after the end of the war, while many
Englishmen were still allergic to the idea of meeting
Germans either socially or professionally.
  Einstein replied on February 23, accepting the invitation,
but implying that he would have to speak in German
"my English is practically nonexistent while my French is
imperfect"ùand noting that he could not settle a date, as
he was already irrevocably committed to an American tour
in March. There was no doubt about his reason for
acceptance. He looked upon the invitation as evidence of
"a genuine wish to reestablish international links among
scholars." A month later Sir Henry confirmed acceptance,
adding that the lecture should be the first that Einstein
delivered in England even though there was little doubt
that he would receive other invitations. This was to be the
case. Soon after, Lindemann wrote to Sir Henry from
Oxford to ask how much Einstein was being paid for the
lecture and added: "I should like to arrange one here but
there seems to be a difficulty about funds." London
University's King's College went further, inviting Einstein
to speak after he left Manchesterù"what Manchester
thinks today London thinks tomorrow."
  Einstein left Germany for the United States at the end of
March, 1921.[Discussed elsewhere] Meanwhile Lindemann was
involved in arrangements for the visit to England. He had
received a letter from Freundlich and as a result wrote to
Sir Henry: "Einstein would like [Freundlich] to be with
him in England, if possible, to help him avoid any
incidents when traveling. Freundlich's mother was
English, in fact he proposes to stay with an aunt in
Manchester, so that he should be able to look after the
courier part of the visit." A special request to Lord Curzon,
then Foreign Secretary, expedited the necessary visa and
Freundlich was waiting when the White Star liner Celtic
docked at Liverpool on June 8. On board was Einstein,
with his wife, somewhat exhausted after a marathon three
month tour but quite confident that he had helped Zionism
towards a promising future.
  In the United States he had learned to be cautious of
interviews, and he now refused to comment on relativity,
noting that "quite apart from the sensational aspect, there
was a deeper scientific aspect, and he had to distinguish
between those who really understood the subject and those
who did not." In addition he may have wondered what his
reception would be in a country where the Gold Medal of a
learned society could be given with one hand and snatched
back with the other.
  The following day he began by addressing the members
of the University Jewish Students Society on the needs of
the Hebrew University, explaining what had made him "an
international man," underlining the current anti- Semitism
in German universities, and speaking of the Jerusalem
plans as "not a question of taste but of necessity."
  Later, in the main hall of the university, he came to the
subject of relativity. He spoke in German throughout this
first public appearance in Britain but, reported the
Manchester Guardianùin the words of David Mitrany, a
young Rumanian political scientist later to become
Einstein's colleague and close personal friend at
Princetonù "the excellence of his diction, together with
the kindly twinkle which never ceased to shine in his eye
even through the sternest run of the argument, did not fail
to make their impression upon the audience."
Subsequently he was created a doctor of science, the first
such honor to be bestowed upon a German in England
since the outbreak of war seven years previously.
  After half a centuryùand after a war with Germany that
was waged almost as much on ideological as on national
linesùit is difficult to appreciate the psychological barrier
which Einstein, and men like him, had to overcome. But
the idiocy which had brought death in Britain to
dachshunds on account of their ancestry was still
plastering London with warnings that "Every Performance
of a German Play Is a Vote for German 'Culture.'" It was
not only the Germans who could demonstrate nationalism
run mad, and even when the objectivity of Einstein's work
and nature is allowed for, his success in Britain is
something of an achievement. The Manchester Guardian
helped in its leading article on June 10 to explain how this
came about, and to indicate what it was that raised
Einstein to his unique position. "The man in the street, a
traveler between life and death, is compact of all elements,
and is neither devoid of science nor of poetry," it said.

  He may have few ideas in either, but he probably cherishes
what he has, and whatever touches them nearly is of moment
to him. Professor Einstein's theory of relativity, however
vaguely he may comprehend it, disturbs fundamentally his
basic conceptions of the universe and even of his own mind. It
challenges somehow the absolute nature of his thought. The
very idea that he can use his mind in a disinterested way is
assailed by a conception which gives partiality to every
perception. And with his keen thrust at personal things, the
idea of relativity stretches out to the very conceptions of the
universe, as can be seen from the mere titles of the closing
chapters of Professor Einstein's little book on the subject.

  From Manchester, Einstein moved south to London,
where Sir John Squire had added to Pope's epitaph on
Newton, so that it now ran:

  Nature and Nature's law lay hid in night.
  God said "Let Newton be" and all was light.
  It did not last: the Devil howling "Ho!
  Let Einstein be!" restored the status quo.

  There had been more than one change of plan in his
departure from the United States and in the date of his
arrival in London. "I recall . . . I had invitations to meet
him in London and Manchester on the same night,"
Eddington wrote to Lindemann when he was due to see
Einstein again a decade later. "This is doubtless explicable
by the principle of indeterminacy; still I hope on this
occasion you will have a more condensed distribution"ù
an Eddington remark comparable to his comment that
Einstein had "taken Newton's plant, which had outgrown
its pot, and transplanted it to a more open field."
  In London, the Einsteins' host was Viscount Haldane of
Cloan, former Secretary of State for War and former Lord
Chancellor. Haldane had a special link both with Germany
and with Einstein's philosophical outlook. He had studied
at G÷ttingen before Einstein was born, and had often
returned to renew his friendships in the town; he had been
sent by the British government on an abortive mission to
Germany in 1912 and had subsequently, almost on the
outbreak of war, been unwise enough to speak of Germany
as his "spiritual home." Not unexpectedly, he had been
hounded from office in 1915 after a propaganda campaign
which alleged, among other things, that he was an
illegitimate brother of the Kaiser, had a German wifeùhe
was in fact a lifelong bachelorùand had delayed the
mobilization of the British Expeditionary Force in 1914. In
a postwar Britain drained of most things except bitterness,
Haldane was therefore in a delicate position vis-α-vis the
Germans. It was certainly courageous of Einstein to have
come so willingly to London; it was equally courageous of
Haldane to be his host.
  The former Minister "had much admiration for the power
of systematic reflection which distinguished the German
people," and his interest in Einstein lay in a genuine and
dogged preoccupation with epistemology, a preoccupation
which had just produced The Reign of Relativity. This
dealt only in passing with Einstein's theories, and was
more concerned with "Knowledge itself and the relativity
of reality to the character of Knowledge"ù "Haldane is
doing for Einstein what Herbert Spencer did for Darwin,"
said Sir Oliver Lodge. "To say that he understood
[relativity] better than any other British pure philosopher
at that time would, I am afraid, be a poor compliment,"
was Eddington's reaction. "For what it is worth, it is
undoubtedly true. ..." And Asquith's account of Haldane
explaining relativity at a dinner party is significant:
"Gradually a cloud descended until, at last, even the
candles lost their lighting power in the complexities of
Haldane's explanations." The First Viscount felt a respect
for Einstein verging on veneration, and for years only two
pictures hung in the study at Cloan, his Scottish home: one
of his mother, the other of Albert Einstein.
  In 1921 Haldane also had a less scientific interest in the
visit. "Einstein arrives here in the early days of June," he
wrote on May 12 to John Murray, his publisher, "and his
advent will make a market for us which we must not lose."
His foresight was well justified. In mid-June he was able to
inform his mother that The Reign of Relativity, which was
to go into three editions in six weeks, was "being sold with
Einstein's books in the bookshops." He had in fact written
to Einstein from his home in Queen Anne's Gate as soon
as news of the proposed visit to England leaked out. "Will
you do me the honor of being my guest at the above
address during your London stay," he asked. "I do not
know whether you are coming alone or whether your wife
will be with you. But it does not matter because the house
is large enough." He followed the letter with a telegram,
and the small Absagen written on it suggests that Einstein
had at first declined. If so, he changed his mindùa wise
course since there were few men better qualified than
Haldane to convoy him through a Britain which was still
uncertain whether it much wished to honor any German
scientist, relativity or not.
  In spite of this, there was, Haldane wrote to his mother in
Scotland on May 26, "much interest in the Einstein visit.
Lord Stamfordham [private secretary to King George V]
talked to me of it last night." Four days later he told her:
"The social world is beginning to worry for invitations to
meet Einstein, and I am sternly refusing two smart
ladiesùwhich I have no doubt they think rather brutal."
Two days later he wrote to his sister: "I have repelled Lady
Cunard, who wanted to get up a party for Einstein."
  It was not only fashionable London that was eager to
meet this mystery man who had emerged from the
shambles of a defeated Germany. From St. Pancras, where
Haldane met the Einsteins at two o'clock on Friday the
tenth, the visitors were taken direct to a meeting of the
Royal Astronomical Society in Burlington House.
  Here Eddington, recently elected president, recalled how
the first printed references to the General Theory had been
published in England in the Society's Monthly Notices. He
described the preliminaries to the two eclipse expeditions,
and he indicated how one man's imaginative concept had
changed the traditional view of the universe. Einstein,
modestly smiling, accepted it all with the self- assured
charm of a very bright boy.
  Then the visitors were taken to Queen Anne's Gate where
a dinner party of quite exceptional nature was to be held
for them that evening. Earlier, Haldane had planned a
reception at which the Prime Minister was to be present.
But Lloyd George had failed to follow in President
Harding's footsteps and meet Einstein.[Discussed elsewhere]
  The private dinner party which did duty for the reception
was a glittering enough occasion. Heading the list of
guests was the Archbishop of Canterbury. His
apprehensions about the evening can be judged by a letter
written to J. J. Thomson a few weeks earlier by Lord
Sanderson, for many years a high Foreign Office official.
"The Archbishop ... can make neither head nor tail of
Einstein, and protests that the more he listens to Haldane,
and the more newspaper articles he reads on the subject,
the less he understands," Sanderson confided.

  I am, or believe myself to be, in an intermediate stage, roaming
the lawns and meadow leazes halfway down. I therefore offered
to write for the Archbishop a short sketch of what I imagined to
be the pith of the theory in its more elementary form. I enclose it
with his comment. It is of course very inadequate, but I fancy that
as far as it goes it is not entirely at variance with Einstein's
argumentùsome of his followers and critics seem to me to go
further. But I should have been sorry to have misled the
Archbishop. Do you think you could glance through it, or ask
some expert to do so, and write a short note of any gross errors?

  Thomson obliged, thus helping to brief Archbishop
Davidson for what seemed likely to be an intellectual
tournament on the heroic scale. For also present in Queen
Anne's Gate on the evening of the tenth were Eddington
and Alfred Whitehead who had been among the "chorus"
at the Burlington House meeting two years earlier. Dr.
Inge, the "gloomy Dean" of St. Paul's, was present with
his wife. So were Bernard Shaw, Professor Harold Laski of
the London School of Economics, and General Sir Ian
Hamilton, the ill-starred leader from Gallipoli who had
been a close friend of Haldane since the latter's days as
Secretary of State for War. Over this formidable brains
trust, a regiment which could have laid down an
intellectual barrage sufficient to overcome most men, there
presided Haldane and his sister Elizabeth, a distinguished
woman in her own right and the translator of Descartes
and Hegel.
  The main outcome of the evening, disappointing to
Haldane in some respects, must have been reassuring to
the Archbishop. "I have never seen a more typical
scientific lion in appearanceùhe might have been
prepared for the role on the stageù" she later wrote
percipiently, "a mass of long black hair tossed back, and a
general appearance of scientific untidiness, but he was
modest and quiet to talk to, and disclaimed a great deal of
what is attributed to him." Choosing his moment carefully,
Davidson turned to Einstein and queried: "Lord Haldane
tells us that your theory ought to make a great difference to
our morale." But Einstein merely replied: "Do not believe
a word of it. It makes no difference. It is purely abstract
science." This was only a briefer version of Einstein's
reply to an interviewer a few years later. "The meaning of
relativity has been widely misunderstood," he said.
"Philosophers play with the word, like a child with a doll.
Relativity, as I see it, merely denotes that certain physical
and mechanical facts, which have been regarded as
positive and permanent, are relative with regard to certain
other facts in the sphere of physics and mechanics."
However, he took the Archbishop's interest as natural, and
noted later that more clergymen than physicists were
interested in relativity. "Because," he explained when
asked the reason, "clergymen are interested in the general
laws of nature and physicists, very often, are not."
  The Archbishop's wife fared little better than her
husband. When, after dinner, she explained to Elsa how a
friend had been talking about Professor Einstein's theory
"especially in its mystical aspect," Frau Einstein broke into
laughter with the words: "Mystical! Mystical! My husband
mystical!" echoing his own reply to a Dutch lady who in
the German embassy in The Hague said that she liked his
mysticism. "Mysticism is in fact the only reproach that
people cannot level at my theory," he had replied.
  Frau Einstein's reply was not what was expected. But it
was part of the defense which the Einsteins erected around
themselves, Elsa unconsciously no doubt, but her husband
after due thought. "I can well understand [him] hastily
shearing off the subject," Eddington later noted of the
remark to Davidson; "in those days one had to become an
expert in dodging persons who mixed up the fourth
dimension with spiritualism. But surely the answer need
not be preserved as though it were one of Einstein's more
perspicacious utterances. The non sequitur is obvious."
What might also have been obvious by this time was a
certain flagging in the guest of honor who had been spared
Lady Cunard but after a long morning's journey from
Manchester had been whisked to the Royal Astronomical
Society, taken from Burlington House through a quick
change into formal clothes, and then presented on a plate
as the main dish of a testing evening.
  Saturday was a day of comparative rest during which
Einstein, sitting on a simple kitchen chair at the back of
Haldane's house, was informally photographed. And,
apparently at the same time, "Einstein ... had one done of
myself to hang in his study in Berlin," Haldane proudly
informed his mother. The following day the guests were
taken to lunch with the Rothschilds, where they met Lord
Crewe and Lord Rayleigh who had first seen Einstein at
the Solvay Congress a decade earlier. According to Sir
Almeric Fitzroy, the clerk of the Privy Council, Rayleigh
listened to Einstein's explanation of relativity, then
commented: "If your theories are sound, I understand it is
open to us to affirm that the events, say, of the Norman
Conquest have not yet occurred." Afterwards, Haldane
related to his mother in one of the long accounts which he
wrote to her almost daily, Lord Rothschild drove the party
to a Jewish meeting, through the city to the Tower, and
back along the Embankment. "In the evening we dined at
the Harmers where Einstein played the violin. ..."
  Then they returned to the row of fashionable but modest
town houses where Einstein was introduced to London life.
Some of the later second- and third-hand accounts of the
visit appear not only to have been overimpressed with
Haldane's "Lordship," but also to have confused Queen
Anne's Gate with Haldane's Scottish estate which Einstein
never visited. Thus in some stories they moved in an
atmosphere of deferential butlers, vast Tudor beds, and the
exaggerations of a Hollywood spectacular.
  Boris Kunetzov is typical. "Their room in his palatial
residence was bigger than the whole of their Berlin
apartment," he says. "Einstein's embarrassment turned
into dismay when he found that a footman had been
assigned to him. When he saw the liveried monument he
whispered to his wife: 'Elsa, do you think they will let us
out if we try to run away?' They slept in a spacious
bedroom with heavily curtained windows. Next morning
Einstein rose early, as was his custom, and tried in vain to
open the curtains. Behind him his wife asked laughingly:
'Albertle, why didn't you call the footman to do it?' 'Oh,
no,' he replied, 'he frightens me.'" No doubt they were
impressed, after Berlin, with the wealth that still remained
in Britain at the end of a long war; but, equally without
doubt, they took it in their stride.
  On Monday morning Einstein was taken by Haldane to
Westminster Abbey, where he placed a wreath on
Newton's grave before being handed over to the Dean.
After lunch he prepared for his first public appearance in
London. It was to be made at King's College in the Strand,
and the Principal, Ernest (later Sir Ernest) Barker, had
some misgivings about his guest's reception. "Feeling
against Germany was very much stronger after that war of
1914-18 than it has been since the war of 1939-45" he
later wrote, "and there were fears that the lecture might be
disturbed or even prevented." All the tickets, sold in aid of
charity for distressed European students, were taken up
well in advance, and when Haldane led Einstein onto the
platform even the gangways were filled with students.
Among those in the audience were Whitehead, James
Jeans, Professor Lindemannùand William Rothenstein,
making notes for his remarkable portrait of Einstein who
is presented as a Struwwelpeter character, smiling from an
aureole of almost electrified hair.
  He had insisted on speaking in Germanùpartly because
of his almost nonexistent English; partly, it was reported,
because "he had complete confidence in English
broadmindedness." Thus the hall was filled by those who,
as Barker said, "would probably understand nothing, being
ignorant alike of German and of relativity, but would
nonetheless be eager to listen." There was no applause
when the two men had walked onto the platform. The
meeting could easily swing either way.
  "Einstein had no notes, no hesitations, and no
repetitions," wrote the anonymous commentator of the
Nation, "and the logical order in which he expounded his
ideas was masterly beyond praise. One sat wondering how
much of this exquisite performance was being wasted upon
the audience; to how many was this carefully precise
German an unintelligible noise?" As on other occasions,
the objectivity of Einstein's demeanor, the
otherworldliness of his dreamy eyes, and his shock of
flowing hair, disarmed potential critics. He talked for an
hour, without interruption, somehow evoking an interest
even among those who could understand little more than
the occasional phrase. Then he paused and, still speaking
in German, announced: "My lecture is already a little
long." There was an unexpected storm of encouraging
applause. "I shall take that as an invitation," he said. "But
my further remarks will not be so easy to follow." Finally,
he sat down. Then someone started clapping. The applause
grew and whole rows of men stood up, a spontaneous
acclamation of courage as much as of relativity.
  One interesting point in the lecture was Einstein's
statement on the ancestry of relativity. "I am anxious to
draw attention to the fact that this theory is not speculative
in origin," he said. "It owes its invention entirely to the
desire to make physical theory fit observed facts as well as
possible. We have here no revolutionary act, but the
natural combination of a line that can be traced through
centuries. The abandonment of certain notions connected
with space, time, and motion, hitherto treated as
fundamentals, must not be regarded as arbitrary, but only
as conditioned by observed facts." Emphasis on
observational experience compared with the flash of
intuition was really more true of the General than of the
Special Theory. But it was more revealingly true of the
earlier, "pro- Machian" philosophy that had so far
supported Einstein than of the newer outlook which was
already taking its place as his faith in sensation as the real
yardstick of the physical world began to falter. When, later
in life, he was asked by Hans Reichenbach, professor of
philosophy in the University of California, how he had
arrived at the theory of relativity, Einstein no longer
mentioned observed facts. On that occasion his
explanation was of a totally different kind: he had come to
it, he said, because he had been "so firmly convinced of the
harmony of the universe."
  In Britain, men of goodwill were well aware of Einstein's
potential influence in bringing a new attitude of
reconciliation into the relationship between wartime
enemies, and many said as much during his visit. Thus
Haldane had introduced the King's College lecture with
the statement that Britain was grateful to Germany for
giving the world the genius of Einstein just as Germany
has been grateful to Britain for giving the world the genius
of Newton. That evening, when Einstein was entertained
in King's College, Ernest Barker opened his after-dinner
speech by comparing two "observers" of the theory of
relativity, and then suggested that his listeners should
substitute two nations for them. "Each of these two nations
had its own way of life, its own space, its own ethics and
character. If it were possible to find some means by which
these two nations could have the same view of life, then
there would be new possibilities, whether by leagues of
nations, or other ways, to arrive at better understanding
with each other." Then Barker turned to Einstein. "If at
your command, the straight lines have been banished from
the universe, there is yet one straight line that will always
remainùthe straight line of right and justice. May both
our nations follow this straight line side by side in a
parallel movement which, in spite of Euclid, will yet bring
them together in friendship with one another and with the
other nations of the world."
  The words were significant, not only of the attitude of
men like Barker in Britain but of others in France, in the
United States, and elsewhere. A few months later, when
Australian universities invited Einstein to visit their
country, The Times noted that "it is considered that as
Australia is resuming trade with Germany, no better start
can be made than by extending an invitation to one of the
world's greatest scientists." On this occasion pressure of
engagements forced Einstein to refuse. But from the time
of this first visit to Britain he was even more eager to play
the role of reconciliator.
  On the morning following the King's College lecture,
Lindemann collected Einstein from Queen Anne's Gate
and drove him to Oxford, where the two men spent the
day. Two months earlier, when he had first heard of
Einstein's coming visit, Lindemann had invited him to
stay at his father's home in Sidmouth, Devon. Einstein had
declined and Lindemann had to be content with showing
him the Clarendon Laboratory where he had recently taken
up the chair of experimental philosophy. Before leaving
for home the next day, Einstein wrote to Haldane's
mother. "One of the most memorable weeks of my life lies
behind me," he said. "Visiting this country for the first
time I have learned to marvel at its splendid traditions and
treasures of knowledge. One of the most beautiful
experiences was the intimacy with your two children, the
harmonious hospitality of their home, and the wonderful
relations which unite them with yourself. For the first time
in my life I have heard of a prominent public man who
converses by letter every day with his mother. The
scientific talk with Lord Haldane has been for me a source
of pure stimulation, and so has the personal intimacy with
him and his remarkable knowledge." For a man of
Einstein's knobbly honesty, this was an outstanding
tribute, and a further suggestion that beneath Haldane's
formal exterior a great man may have been trying to get
out.
  There was no doubt about the success of the visit. As the
Nation noted in an editorial headed "The Entente of the
Intellectuals," the reception of the King's College lecture
had marked "a definite turning point in the postwar
feeling" of Britain; the general welcome given to Einstein
had gone "some way to restore the prewar unity of culture
for Europe and the civilized world." And, Haldane later
wrote to Lindemann: "I think the German ambassador was
right when he told me on Monday evening that the
reception of Einstein in England would do something
towards making the way smoother for the approach to
better international relations." Thus a main aim of the
visit, a loosening of the pack ice which kept Britain and
Germany apart, had been achieved.
  As Einstein returned across the North Sea, Haldane wrote
in his diary: "Professor Whitehead, the mathematician,
dined with me alone, to compare notes." There was much
to compare. British scientists had been immensely
impressed by Einstein, but some of them still thought that
the extraneous metaphysical overtones were part of the
man himself and of his theory. This was well illustrated by
R. A. Sampson, the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, who
was present at the London lecture and who wrote to
Lindemann three days later. "I would say at once," he
wrote,

  that there is no room for question that Einstein "explained"
gravitation, and as it seems to me, said absolutely the last word
upon it. Beyond this I prefer to keep reserve on certain points, as
thinking them unproved and the attempt to prove them
misdirected.
  One of them is the retranslation into spatial terms of the
formula to which gravitation has been reduced. That formula
is so general that it transcends any "meaning," and to give it
one is gratuitous.
  Next I reject the philosophical implication that all that we
know is equally relative and intangible or else unreal.
  As regards reality if we admit that our existence is real,
though presumably relative to some more comprehensive
existence, and we can explain neither our own nor the other,
then it is evidently not a condition of reality that we should be
able to explain what we mean. Hence I have no difficulty in
admitting absolute rotation even though I do not know what I
mean.
  Nor for that matter absolute translation (but Einstein has
proved this an uncalled-for idea in gravitation).
  It appears to me that Einstein's argument regarding rotation
proves that we do not know that the earth rotates. Yet I assert
that we do know that it rotates, though the argument is
mathematically correct. You ask, with respect to what does it
rotate? I have no final answer, but I don't think you will say it
is open to a rational man to hold that it does not rotate. ...

  Einstein returned to Berlin as the first postwar German to
be lionized in the United States and Britain. The word
"German" is important. For whatever his previous
feelings, the German defeat of 1918 had induced him to
slough off the hard skin of bitter distaste for his
compatriots which had first formed in Munich. In this he
was illogical. Whatever inner spirit may drive a nation on
towards its destiny, for better or worse, it is unlikely to be
altered within a few years by the tribulations of defeat or
the triumphs of victory. If the Germany of 1921 held high
hopes, then these lay within its marrow in 1890; and if the
Germany of the Luitpold Gymnasium was more than a
local nightmare, then there was little hope for her in 1921.
Einstein did not see it that way. Weimar had changed
everything, and if he still held reservations about the
treatment that the Jews could expect, he yet hoped that
Germany was now freely walking back into the European
body politic.
  Certainly he now had confident hopes for her future. It is
not clear whether he believed that his earlier feelings had
been unbalanced, or whether the whole German nation had
undergone a Pauline conversion on the road to Versailles.
But although he was still using a Swiss passport, he now
had no inhibitions about traveling as an unofficial German
ambassador.
  He wanted to prevent any revival of the wartime hatred
between Germany and Britain, and he was as discouraging
as he could be when, shortly after his return to Berlin,
Sommerfeld asked him to help get published in Britain an
article he had written on the Lusitania Medal. The original
had been struck in Germany the day after the torpedoing of
the British liner without warning and the loss of 1,198
men and women, including 100 Americans. This was an
opportunity too good to miss, and a medal was struck in
Englandùgenerally being attributed to Lord Northcliffe,
later in charge of propaganda in enemy countries. The
British medal claimed to be an exact replica of the
German, but was dated the day before the sinking and
showed a skeleton handing out tickets to passengers.
  Sommerfeld's article on the Lusitania episode was
published in the Mⁿnchner Neuesten Nachrichten on June
24, and ten days later he sent a copy to Einstein, noting
that the London Athenaeum had sympathetically reported
the King's College lecture and urging that they could
hardly ignore a piece of gentle lobbying. "Quite frankly, I
regret that you have written it, possibly due to isolation
during the war," Einstein replied. "No intelligent
Englishman believes stories about the war. When I was in
England I got the impression that the scientists there are
less prejudiced and more objective than our German
scientists. But I must point out that quite a number of well
known English scientists were pacifists and refused war
duties; i.e., Eddington and Russell. If you had been there
you also would have had the feeling that it was not right to
tell people such things. What the public thinks, I do not
know, but in our country, too, many lies are printed
without any denials." He questioned the point of washing
old dirty linen in public and implored Sommerfeld, "in the
interests of international understanding," to leave things
alone.
  Einstein's genuine attempts to create a climate of
reconciliation so strikingly in contrast to his attitude after
the Second World Warùand the power which his position
gave him to push forward this cause, were not lost on his
compatriots. In Berlin, on July 1, 1921, he was the guest of
honor at a party given by Herr von Winterfeldt, President
of the German Red Cross, and attended by President Ebert,
many members of the German Cabinet, and the chief
burgomaster of Berlin. Here, his remarks were to be the
subject of criticism. "In America," he told those present,

  there undeniably predominated a markedly unfriendly feeling
towards everything German. American public opinion was so
excited that even the use of the German language was
suppressed. At present a noticeable change is taking place. I was
received heartily by America's learned men and learned
corporations. They gladly spoke German, and everywhere were
mindful with genuine sympathy of the German scientists and
institutes with which they maintained so close a friendship
before the war. In England the impression forced itself upon me
that the English statesmen and scholars had it in mind again to
bring about friendly relations with Germany. The heartiness of
the speeches in England could hardly be surpassed. Better times
appear to be coming.

  That Einstein should not only make such a judgment
between the attitudes of his two hostsùstrongly in contrast
with the general opinion of most other peopleùbut that he
should openly announce it, indicates a double lack of
judgment. The New York Times was quick to jump on his
words, noting that "perhaps ... in spite of his wonderful
mind [he] is as much mistaken, and in about the same
way, when he says that 'England' is warmly pro-German
as he is when he said that 'America' is warmly anti-
German."
  This was not quite the case. The trouble was that Einstein
learned only tardily that the casual statements of famous
men, perhaps tossed off rather lightheartedly, can look
very different when presented under black headlines. And
it was typical that he should conclude a letter to
Sommerfeld, protesting against a Figaro article by a
correspondent with whom he had talked, by saying: "The
man had no right to reproduce utterances of mine.
Furthermore, whether by intent or not I do not know, he
had many things wrongly emphasized, although he has not
lied."
  Einstein's weakness for making unguarded statements
that could easily be used against him was shown in one
incident, trivial in itself, which had important
repercussions on the way he later allowed himself to be
presented to the world. This started with a report from
Cyril Brown, a New York Times correspondent in Berlin.
The report quoted an account of Einstein's views on the
United States, given to a "sympathetic-looking Hollander."
The statements were distinctly unflattering. After
admitting that American men worked hard, Einstein was
quoted as saying: "For the rest, they are the toy dogs of the
women, who spend the money in a most unmeasurable,
illimitable way and wrap themselves in a fog of
extravagance." Later, the genesis of the New York Times
story became known. Einstein had spoken in German to
the reporter of the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, which
had printed its story in Dutch; the Berliner Tageblatt had
taken parts of the Dutch story and printed it in German;
the Times correspondent had then taken parts of the
Berliner Tageblatt story and cabled this in English to New
York. With the best will in the world, excluding any
assumption that the Berlin paper would wish to make
Einstein look ridiculous, or that the Times man
overemphasized any anti- Americanism, these choppings,
subbings, and translations inevitably did more than alter
the balance of the original. Few readers, even in the more
sophisticated present, would be expected to allow for all
this; half a century ago the "toy dogs" remarkùapparently
quoted elsewhere as "lapdogs"ùhad the effect of a match
to gunpowder.
  It was followed by a leading article in the New York
Times. After claiming that the report appeared to be
correct even though the writer wished it were not, it put
forward as possible causes of Einstein's irritation "the
failure of himself and his companion to make more than a
partial success of the special mission on which they came
to the U.S., and the antagonism they aroused where they
had expected to win full approval and cooperation."
Further criticism followed; so did letters to the editor; and,
on the eleventh, a second editorial, presumably written
after the paper had been in touch with its Berlin
correspondent. "Dr. Einstein," it said, "will not be forgiven
and should not be, for his boorish ridicule of hospitable
hosts who honored him because they believed the
guarantors of his greatness in his own domain. That he is
small out of that domain is a matter of no great
consequence, however, for it is a peculiarity shared by
many other specialists of like eminence, and in no degree
reduces their value to the world."
  By this time Einstein had been bearded by the
correspondent of the New York World to whom he said that
"the Amsterdam interview in no way expressed my
sentiment. I never made the unfavorable comments on the
American people and their mode of life." This attempt by a
rival to undercut the Times' own story failed to impress
that paper, which rather loftily replied that it was easy to
get the impression that Einstein had now "explained rather
than denied the essential part of the Courant's article."
However, the Times had second thoughts; and after
another two and a half weeks it admitted in a long report
from Berlin that Einstein's remarks did not, after all, "turn
out to be as harsh as they appear in the cabled reports."
  The effect of this tempest in a teacup was considerable.
Years later Einstein was still refusing interviews on the
grounds that he had been misquoted as calling American
men lapdogs of their women; and it says much for the tact
and tenacity of the New York Times' chief correspondent in
Berlin that his paper became one of the few to which
Einstein was eventually willing to speak freely.
Nevertheless, the memory of the incident remained. It had
come just as he was on the crest of popularity's wave and it
reinforced his natural dislike of sharing his nonscientific
thoughts and emotions with a public for whom he had
become a compound of guru, film star, oracle, and saint.
Thus the dichotomy which marked so much of his life
began to appear here as well. For his views on Zionism
and pacifism, for his explanations of what the grand
structure of science could mean, he needed the large public
which only the popular press could provide; he was usually
unwilling to pay the price, to subject himself to what even
in the best-run world must be a fair percentage of
distortions and inventions. When he was willing to take
the risk, his innate honesty, his insistence on telling the
truth at all cost, combined with a flair for making
headlineable statements to gain him the sympathy of all
but the most bloody-minded opponents. When he was not
being his own enemy, he could get a "good press" that was
the despairing envy of experienced publicists. Too often,
he mentally muttered "lapdogs" and was content to let his
case go by default.
  One result of his journey to the United States and Britain
was that Einstein now felt there was a genuine hope of
reopening scientific relations between these countries and
Germany. It could be argued that the German aggression
of 1914, and the excesses to which it led, had cleared the
disease from a body politic which could now, more mature,
more internationally oriented, play its part in creating a
new and better Europe. Einstein, the new citizen of the
Weimar Republic, sincerely hoped so.
  France was a different proposition, as he realized when,
early in 1922, he was invited to lecture in Paris. The
invitation had first been made in 1913 when those
administering the Michonis Fund in the CollΦge de France
asked him to succeed Lorentz as visiting lecturer the
following year. Einstein accepted, but the visit had been
canceled with the outbreak of war. Now his old friend
Langevin revived the idea. One impediment immediately
arose. Many French scientists felt that such an invitation
would imply that their hatred of the Germans was
diminishing. They protested, and their protests might have
succeeded had it not been for the support which Langevin
obtained from Paul PainlevΘ. Powerful Minister of War a
few years earlier, and now Premier and President of the
Chamber of Deputies, PainlevΘ was a mathematician by
profession, an amateur enthusiast of relativity, and he
gladly gave unofficial blessing to Langevin's proposal.
  In Berlin, Einstein was at first dubious. The idea chimed
in with his wish to reforge the links between German
scientists and those in other countries, but he had no
illusion about the deep and bitter feelings that outside the
limited scientific, artistic, and professional circlesùand
sometimes inside themùstill divided the peoples of France
and Germany. At first, he tentatively refused the
invitation. Then he mentioned it in passing to Walther
Rathenau, the German Minister of Reconstruction.
  Rathenau was in many ways the antithesis of all that
Einstein stood for. A German-Jewish industrialist, he had
inherited control of the great Allgemeine ElektrizitΣt-
Gesellschaft (A.E.G.) and twice during the war had striven
hard to save the Empire: first in 1916 when he had
reorganized German economy to counter the effects of the
British blockade; secondly in 1918 when, almost alone
among responsible officials, he had proposed a levΘe en
masse to meet the advancing Allies. With the coming of
the Weimar Republic, Rathenau founded the new
Democratic party and rose swiftly to ministerial status. He
first met Einstein in the house of a mutual friend, and
Einstein invited him to the Haberlandstrasse home. The
friendship ripened. Einstein was concerned by the effect
which Rathenau's acceptance of a ministry might have on
the position of the Jews in Germany; Rathenau, in his turn,
was interested in Einstein as a unique unofficial
ambassador. There was no doubt about the advice he now
gave. "Rathenau has told me that it is my duty to accept,
and so I accept," Einstein wrote to Langevin.
  In Paris there were fears that the visit would bring
protests from French nationalists, and as arrangements for
the occasion were completed, Langevin was careful to
secure an apartment to which his guest could be taken in
secret. "Langevin has got a roof for me and will tell you
where it is," Einstein wrote to his old friend Maurice
Solovine, who was reading proofs of the French edition of
Einstein's book on relativity, "but keep it strictly secret;
otherwise the days during my stay in Paris are going to be
very irksome."
  Langevin himself remained uncertain of the reception to
be expected and on the afternoon of March 28, 1922,
traveled out from Paris to Jeumont on the Belgian frontier.
With him went Charles Nordmann, the astronomer of the
Paris Observatory whose Einstein and the Universe,
published in France the previous year, was a minor classic
of popular description and interpretation.
  Nordmann has left, in the Revue des Deux Mondes and
L'Illustration, two graphic accounts of the visit. At the
frontier station they found their guest unassumingly sitting
in the corner of a second-class compartment. Nordmann
had never met him and it is clear from his account that he
was vastly impressedùnot so much by the "creator of
worlds," which would have been natural enough, as by the
physical presence of the man. Einstein's sense of
command was later to become so overlaid with the image
of the seemingly frail, white-haired saintù"Charlie
Chaplin with the brow of Shakespeare," as the New
Statesman once put itùthat it is well to be reminded of
what he was like in his prime.
  "The first impression that one gets is of astonishing
youth," Nordmann wrote.

  Einstein is big (he is about 1 m 76), with large shoulders and
the back only very slightly bent. His head, the head where the
world of science has been re-created, immediately attracts and
fixes the attention. His skull is clearly, and to an extraordinary
degree, brachycephalic, great in breadth and receding towards
the nape of the neck without exceeding the vertical. Here is an
illustration which brings to nought the old assurances of the
phrenologists and of certain biologists, according to which genius
is the prerogative of the dolichocephales. The skull of Einstein
reminds me, above all else, of that of Renan, who was also a
brachycephale. As with Renan the forehead is huge; its breadth
exceptional, its spherical form striking one more than its height.
A few horizontal folds cross this moving face which is sometimes
cut, at moments of concentration or thought, by two deep vertical
furrows which raise his eyebrows.
  His complexion is smooth, unpolished, of a certain
duskiness, bright. A small moustache, dark and very short,
decorates a sensual mouth, very red, fairly large, whose
corners gradually rise in a smooth and permanent smile. The
nose, of simple shape, is slightly acquiline.
  Under his eyebrows, whose lines seem to converge towards
the middle of his forehead, appear two very deep eyes whose
grave and melancholy expression contrast with the smile of
this pagan mouth. The expression is usually distant, as though
fixed on infinity, at times slightly clouded over. This gives his
general expression a touch of inspiration and of sadness which
accentuates once again the creases produced by reflection and
which, almost linking with his eyelids, lengthen his eyes, as
though with a touch of kohl. Very black hair, flecked with
silver, unkempt, falls in curls towards the nape of his neck
and his ears, after having been brought straight up, like a
frozen wave, above his forehead.
  Above all, the impression is one of disconcerting youth,
strongly romantic, and at certain moments evoking in me the
irrepressible idea of a young Beethoven, on which meditation
had already left its mark, and who had once been beautiful.
And then, suddenly, laughter breaks out and one sees a
student. Thus appeared to us the man who has plumbed with
his mind, deeper than any before him, the astonishing depths
of the mysterious universe.

  The three men faced a four-hour journey, from which
Nordmann remembered some revealing remarks. When
they began to talk of quantum problems, Einstein noted,
significantly: "That is a wall before which one is stopped.
The difficulties are terrible; for me, the theory of relativity
was only a sort of respite which I gave myself during their
examination." And, remarking that there was something
crazy about it, he went on: "But there, physicists are all a
bit crazy, aren't they? But it's just the same with
racehorses: what one buys, one has to sell!"
  When they discussed the worldwide interest that his ideas
had aroused, Einstein noted, as he repeatedly did with
undisguised amazement: "It's unbelievable." Of the
opposition to him and his ideas in Germany he
commented, putting his hands on his chest: "So long as
they don't get violent, I want to let everyone say what they
wish, for I myself have always said exactly what pleased
me." And, asked about the left-wing parties, he said, with
a broad smile: "I don't know what to say about that since I
believe that the left is 'une chose polydimensionelle.'"
  It was midnight by the time they arrived at the Gare du
Nord. Here there was a reception party of journalists and
photographers. Einstein had no wish to meet them;
Langevin was still worried about nationalist protests. Thus
one plan suited both men. Together with Nordmann, they
left the train by dropping from the coach on the side away
from the platform, crossed the railway lines, and
disappeared into a side door on the farther platform. Then,
unnoticed, they vanished into the MΘtro. Einstein enjoyed
the operationùparticularly as the MΘtro train moved off
below the spot where the crowds were still waiting.
  On the afternoon of Friday, March 31, he was driven to
the CollΦge de France. Here, in the main hall, where
Ernest Renan, Henri Bergson, and other giants of the
French establishment had lectured, he explained the
conflict between classical relativity and electrodynamics in
a slow French to which his slight accent added a touch of
mystery. Langevin sat immediately behind, ready to
prompt him with the occasional word if he hesitated.
Madame Curie was among the audience. So was Bergson.
But the room was not packed as some had expected.
Tickets had been sent only to a restricted number of
scientists and students with a special interest in the
subject. Paul PainlevΘ himself stood by the door, checking
the formal invitations.
  Einstein spoke to other selected audiences during the next
few days, to the CollΦge's philosophical and mathematical
sections and, on April 6, to a session of the French
Philosophical Society at the Sorbonne. Langevin was again
present, as well as Bergson and PainlevΘ. His reception
was kind if questioning, an attitude less critical than that
of ╔mile Picard, permanent secretary of the French
Academy of Sciences, who was quoted as saying: "On the
subject of relativity I see red." Einstein was closely
questioned about the philosophical implications of his
theory. And here, answering a question from ╔mile
Mayerson, he appeared finally to cut the strings which had
held him to Mach. "Mach's system studied the
relationships which exist between the data of experience,"
he said. "For Mach, science is the sum total of these
relationships. It is a bad point of view; in short, what
Mach created was a catalogue and not a system. To the
extent that Mach was a good mechanic he was a deplorable
philosopher."
  Some gaps in the French welcome were the result of
politics as much as science, and the Society of French
Physicists, strongly nationalist in outlook, virtually refused
to accept his presence in the capital. Opinion was more
evenly divided in the Academy, where a number of friends
argued strongly that he should address "the immortals."
But the fact that Germany was not yet a member of the
League of Nations was raised as a barrier. The argument
was finally settled when thirty members announced they
would leave in a body as soon as Einstein entered the
room.
  As well as the French people, the French press was in
two minds about the problem of how to regard members of
the nation they had fought for more than four long years.
"If a German were to discover a remedy for cancer or
tuberculosis," asked one paper, "would these thirty
academicians have to wait for the application of the
remedy until Germany joined the League?" Among others
which tried to edge their readers towards conciliation was
the paper with the large headline: "Einstein in Paris! It Is
the Victory of the Archangel over the Demon of the
Abyss." Yet the verdict of the Academy, essentially a
verdict on Germany, would probably have been endorsed
by the majority of Frenchmen. Einstein would have
sympathized, even had he not agreed. For there were
occasions when his perceptions about the human race
equaled his intuitive genius in science. He knew that in
France he was suspect three times over. He was the man
who had upset the scientific applecartùor at least
appeared to have done soùand thus he naturally aroused
the resentment of those who believed in things-as-they-are.
He was not only a scientific iconoclast but German as well.
To compound the crime he was not only German but a
German Jew. It is not surprising that he received only a
qualified welcome in a country which had recently lost
more than 1,350,000 men dead and missing at German
hands and which still argued over the rights and wrongs of
the Dreyfus case.
  However, it was not only in France that Einstein's new
popularity was less than wholehearted. England had
welcomed him the previous year, but now The Times, a fair
enough reflection of informed opinion, produced an
enigmatic editorial. It began by quoting a remark of
PainlevΘ in Paris: "A sustained effort of the brain is
necessary to penetrate the thought of the great German
savant and to follow his logic. Thus the craze of society to
discuss Einstein between two rubbers of bridge appears to
be one of the funniest things in the world." In a mild
attempt to cut both Einstein and relativity down to size, the
paper then continued: "Relativity is an interesting word in
itself and it expresses just what a number of people are
always doing, namely thinking of everything in terms of
something else." Mathematical theories, it continued,
"never make much practical difference, and perhaps it is
as well that they should not; for if, owing to the theory of
relativity, the apple no longer fell to the ground, a number
of other things might happen, some of them dangerous,
and Einstein might become as unpopular as he is now
popular." This may have been no more than The Times on
an off morning, but it is easy to see it as a mild reproof to
the scientist who was already revealing, now that people
were taking notice of him, an interest in public affairs that
was unexpected, unwelcome, and slightly irregular.
  Before he left France Einstein was to demonstrate this
interest in a highly delicate way. During the journey into
Paris he had confided to Nordmann that he would like to
see the battlefields and on the last day of his visit he was
collected from his apartment at 6:30 in the morning by
Nordmann, Solovine, and Langevin.
  Einstein brought the single small traveling bag that was
his entire luggage, and the party drove off northeastwards
along the line of the German advance in 1914. They were
quickly among the ruins of war, a landscape of flattened
villages, moldering trench systems, and entire forests
leveled by artillery barrage. Frequently they stopped and
dismounted, Einstein visibly shaken, bewildered, and
almost uncomprehending that war could really have been
like this, even worse than the propagandists claimed. At
one point, among devastated farms and beside trees
withered by gas, he turned to his friends. "All the students
of Germany must be brought here," he said, "all the
students of the world, so that they can see how ugly war
really is. People often have a wrong idea because it comes
from books. Thus most Germans have an image of
Frenchmen that is purely literary; and many men have an
equally literary idea of war and the ruins that it creates.
How necessary it is that they should come and see."
  They went on through St. Quentin, where the Americans
had first gone into action in strength, and then into the
ruins of Rheims, Einstein stopping from time to time with
the single word "Terrible." In Rheims they had lunch, and
here an extraordinary incident occurred.
  At a nearby table sat two senior French officers,
immaculate in full dress, and a fashionably accoutered
woman. Nordmann noticed that they first appeared to
recognize Einstein and then confirmed his identity by
sending a waiter to Nordmann's chauffeur. As the Einstein
party later rose to leave the restaurant, the French officers
and their companion stood up, turned to Einstein and,
without saying a word, politely bowed.
  From Rheims they drove north across fifty miles of
devastation and Einstein was put on the train to Cologne.
As it prepared to move off, he waved his broad-brimmed
hat towards the German frontier: "I will describe all I have
seen to the people over there."
  He arrived back in Berlin to find that during his absence
a showing of the first "relativity film" had taken place.
Made by a Professor Nicolai and a Herr Kornbaum, it
consisted of four parts. The first showed the familiar
experiment of an object falling first from a car in motion
and then from a car at rest; the second, the contradictions
met with in the accepted theory of light. The third part
tried to show how relativity solved these problems in terms
of space and time, while the last dealt with the deflection
of starlight revealed by the British expedition of 1919. The
film was ingenious, but it took for granted that the
audience had a working knowledge of physics, and thus
failed to achieve complete success in a complicated
problem. Strangely enough, it was only after a lapse of
almost two months that Einstein wrote to the German
papers saying that he had had no hand in the film's
production and had in fact asked its makers to use a
different title. But it crossed the Atlantic and was reviewed
in Vanity Fair for a fee of $100 by Morris Raphael Cohen,
who had translated Einstein's lectures at the City College
of New York.[Discussed elsewhere] "It was the only movie I had
ever gone to," he later wrote. "I have often expressed a
willingness to go to another movie on the same terms but
have found no takers."
  Einstein's visit to Paris sparked off further invitations,
one of which came from the Zurich Student Union. "Tell
them," he wrote to Weyl on June 6,

  that I, as an old Zurich boy, had much pleasure from their
invitation. But I so desperately need peace and quiet, and what I
could say on the subject of physics can, with respect, be whistled
from the birds on the rooftops, so that I still find it difficult to
open my mouth. Don't hold it against me that I declined your
invitation, and don't say: "He could go to Paris but not come to
us." To have refused the Paris invitation would have been
treachery to international ideals, devotion to which is now more
necessary than ever. But there is no need for "reparations" in the
case of my own fellow countrymen. They always retain their
sobriety, equanimity, and toleration.

  International ideals continued to occupy him. Some
Frenchmen, it had been clear from his experiences in
Paris, were ready to stretch out their hands in a gesture of
reconciliation. And it was with this fact very much in
mind that on June 11 he addressed a meeting of the
German Peace Federation on the floor of the Reichstag. He
made a plea for European unity, deplored the differences
created by language, and said that in future men of
goodwill should ask, not "What can be done for my
country?" but rather "What must my country do to make it
possible for the greater entity to exist?" And he went on to
express the beliefs he was to hold for another decadeù
until the rise of Hitler made him abandon them in despair:
I hold it to be of extreme consequence that whenever the
possibility arises, men of different languages, of different
political and cultural ideas, should get in touch with one
another across their frontiersùnot with the feeling that
something might be squeezed out of the other for their and
their country's benefit, but with a spirit of goodwill to
bridge the gap between the spiritual groups in
comparatively independent spheres."
  Perhaps there was at last a chance to build a new world
from the postwar chaos. Perhaps there was more than a
glimmer of hope for Europe. Einstein thought so, and
when he was invited by Sir Eric Drummond, Secretary
General of the League of Nations, to join the newly formed
International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, he
quickly agreed. The Weimar Republic was still threatened
from within, a prickly bitterness still hampered Franco
German relations, and a sense of imminent chaos suffused
Berlin itself. Even so, it did appear that the forces which
stood for international reconstruction, for the slow painful
business of recasting Germany in a less military mold so
that she could live with her continental neighbors, were at
last gaining strength.
  Then, on June 24, 1922, Walter Rathenau was
assassinated by right-wing extremists as he left his home
in the Berlin Grⁿnewald. The murder was part of a
pattern. Earlier in the month two nationalists had only just
failed to kill Herr Scheidemann, the former Prime
Minister, and a few days after Rathenau's death attackers
seriously wounded another prominent Jew, the publicist
Maximilian Harden.
  Einstein saw Rathenau's murder as symbolic of a rising
tide of anti-Semitism which would soon be lapping round
his own feet. It pushed him into temporary resignation
from the League committee and it drove him to the edge of
leaving Germanyùfor the second time in less than two
years. This time, moreover, he took the decision, planned
his withdrawal, and was dissuaded only by pleas from the
League officials in Geneva to change his mind and remain
in Berlin.
  Rathenau had become Foreign Minister in February, and
had taken the post despite warnings from Einstein. "I
regretted the fact that he became a Minister," he wrote. "In
view of the attitude which large numbers of the educated
classes in Germany assume towards the Jews, I have
always thought that their natural conduct in public should
be one of proud reserve." In this case anti- Semitism had
quickly been reinforced by something more. By April,
Rathenau had successfully concluded the Treaty of Rapallo
under which Germany and Russia reestablished diplomatic
relations, renounced financial claims on each other, and
pledged themselves to economic cooperation. Engineered
without the knowledge of America, Britain, or France, it
had been an omen of things to come; to many in Germany
it had seemed yet another sign that the Weimar Republic
in general and Jews in particular were tarred with the
same red brush of communism.
  Thus Rathenau's murder tended to polarize the two
forces already jockeying for influence within the Republic.
The day of his burial was proclaimed an official day of
mourning, and all schools, universities, and theaters were
ordered to close. But in Heidelberg Philipp Lenard
ostentatiously gave his lectures as usual. And in Berlin it
was rumored that Einstein, the Jewish scientific equivalent
of the Jewish Foreign Minister, was next on the assassins'
list.
  The rumors had some foundation. While Einstein had
been in the United States the previous year a young
German, Rudolph Leibus, had been charged in Berlin with
offering a reward for the murder of Einstein, Professor
Foerster, and Harden, on the grounds that "it was a
patriotic duty to shoot these leaders of pacifist sentiment."
Found guilty, Herr Leibus was fined the equivalent of $16.
It seems unlikely that the rate for provocation to murder
had risen since then.
  Einstein himself was under no illusions. On July 4 he
wrote to Geneva resigning from the newly formed
commission. [Discussed elsewhere] At the same time he
explained to Madame Curie, whom he had only recently
recommended to accept, that he was doing so "not only
because of the tragic death of Rathenau but because on
other occasions I have observed a strong feeling of anti
Semitism among the people whom I am supposed to
represent; as they seem on the whole to lean that way, I
feel that I am no longer the right person for the job."
  However, this was only a beginning, and two days later
he wrote to Max Planck from Kiel, canceling a lecture
which he had planned to give to the Natural Science
Society in Berlin. He had been informed independently by
serious persons that it would be dangerous for him in the
near future to stay in Berlin or, for that matter, to appear
anywhere in public in Germany, for he was supposed to
belong to that group of persons whom the people were
planning to assassinate, he said.

  Of course, I have no positive proof of this, but in the prevailing
situation it seems quite plausible. ... The trouble is that the
newspapers have mentioned my name too often, thus mobilizing
the rabble against me. I have no alternative but to be patient
and to leave the city.

  Madame Curie now wrote pleading with him to stay on
the League commission, saying that this would have been
Rathenau's response. Einstein replied on July 11 that she
did not understand the situation in Germany and added
that it was quite impossible for a Jew to serve both the
German and an international intelligentsia. Then he went
further.
  "I accept the full consequences of this situation sine ira et
studio," he said,

  and have decided to relinquish as quietly as possible both my
position at the Academy and as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute for Physics, and then to settle down somewhere as a
private individual. In any case I cannot stay in Berlin as threats
have already been made on my life by the ultranationalists. It is
of course difficult to prove whether these threats are real. In any
case I shall take this as an excuse to move away from turbulent
Berlin to somewhere quiet where I am able to work. Material
conditions have made that impossible here.

  Five days later he wrote to Solovine: "Here, since the
fearful assassination of Rathenau, one lives through
exciting days. I, also, am always ready. I have stopped my
lectures and I am officially absent, although in fact I am
always here. Anti-Semitism is very strong."
  By mid-July, 1922, Einstein was therefore yet again
resigned to being driven from Germany. He had lived there
eight years, longer than he had lived anywhere since his
youth. Now, once more, he would be moving on. Just how
little this worried him at the time is indicated by a letter
written two years earlier to Max Born, who had sought his
advice on going to G÷ttingen. "After all, it is not so
important where you live," he had said.

  The best thing is to follow your heart, without thinking much
about it. Also, as a man who has no roots anywhere, I don't feel
qualified to give advice. My father's ashes lie in Milan. I buried
my mother here a few days ago. I myself have been gadding
about incessantlyùa foreigner everywhere. My children are in
Switzerland under conditions that entail a complicated venture
for me if I want to see them. Such a man as myself considers it
an ideal to be at home somewhere with his dear ones; he has no
right to advise you in this matter.

  Now, as in 1919 and 1920, he was only dissuaded at the
last moment from moving: possibly to Holland, possibly to
Switzerland. However, dissuaded he was, by Pierre Comert
of the League of Nations, who appealed to him on much
the same grounds as Madame Curie: to leave Germany
now would be to abandon ship.[Discussed elsewhere]
  Some grounds for confidence were indeed provided the
following month at the centennial meeting of the
Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher und ─rzte in
Leipzig. Einstein, still anxious not to provide too easy a
target for the anti-Semites, had refused to attend as a key
speaker. But the authorities had insisted on making
relativity an important feature, and lectures on it were
planned by von Laue and others. As soon as this became
known, the former members of the "Antirelativity
Company" went into action, preparing a broadsheet which
was sent to the papers and distributed in Leipzig as the
conference opened. "The undersigned," it said, "consider it
irreconcilable with the seriousness and dignity of German
science that a theory, much open to attack, is prematurely
and vulgarly broadcast to the lay world and that the
Society of German Scientists and Physicists is used to
support such attempts." But "the undersigned" was an
even less impressive group than had been mustered at Bad
Nauheim the previous year. It looked as though the
antirelativity plank in the anti-Semites' platform was
cracking.
  However, Einstein was by this time alert enough to
realize that the situation might change once again, just as
significantly and just as quickly. Doubts remained beneath
the brave front which he put on affairsùeven though in
the autumn of 1922 he was given one recognition which
many felt he should have received earlier, the Nobel Prize
for Physics.
  However, it is possibly truer in the case of physics than in
the other categories for which the prize is awarded
chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace
that considerable time must pass before achievements can
be properly evaluated. Thus only in 1947 did Appleton
receive the prize for his investigations of the ionosphere
carried out in 1924 and 1925, and it was not until 1951
that Cockcroft and Walton were awarded the prize for
their artificial disintegration of the nucleus in 1932. In the
case of Einstein, other factors were at work. Whether the
argument still raging over General Relativity was one of
them is a question whose answer will forever be locked
within the bosom of the Swedish Academy of Science.
However, there was no need to invoke the General Theory,
since Einstein's earlier work was available. But here the
members of the Academy were balked by a wording of
their mandate which might have worried them even more
had they decided to consider the Special Theory as the
basis of the award. For when Alfred Nobel laid down the
lines on which the physics prize was to be given, he
stipulated that it should be for a "discovery"; furthermore,
it should be one from which mankind had derived great
use. Now it was questionable whether the Special Theory
was, strictly speaking, a "discovery" at all; even if it were,
it was still difficult to claim that by the early 1920s
mankind had derived any great use from it. Relativity was
already a commonplace tool in laboratories where
subatomic particles were being investigated, but this was
not what Nobel had meant. However, during the autumn of
1922 the Academy decided that it could make the award
and yet dodge the difficult relativity issues. The prize was
awarded "independently of such value as may be ultimately
attached to his theories of relativity and gravity, if these
are confirmed, for his services to the theory of physics, and
especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric
effect." Here they were on safe ground; for the
photoelectric law was not only a discovery revealing the
quantitative relationship between light and the emission of
electrons, but was even by the early 1920s being utilized in
practical ways.
  The announcement produced one reaction that was hardly
unexpected: Lenard wrote bitterly to the Swedish Academy
accusing it of trying to restore Einstein's prestige without
committing itself to the support of relativity. But the award
also produced something of greater significance. This was
an anguished inquiry from the Swiss and German
ambassadors in Stockholm, both of whom wanted to claim
Einstein as their own. The result was a mixture of pathos
and farce which was not without international interest; for
on the answer to the question depended the country whose
ambassador could appear with Einstein at the elaborate
Nobel Prize ceremony and at the state banquet given by the
King of Sweden every year in honor of the prize winners.
  Einstein was traveling on a Swiss passport, a fact which
the German Foreign Office immediately passed on to the
German ambassador, Herr Nadolny, but which Nadolny, in
the professional nature of things, was reluctant to take at
its face value. He appears to have been justified. For when
he telegraphed an inquiry to the Berlin Academy of
Sciences at the beginning of December, he immediately
received the reply: "Einstein ist Reichsdeutscher." "The
Swiss ambassador was surprised when I told him this,"
Nadolny later wrote. "However, when I described the
telegram to him he calmed down and accepted the
situation with the comment that Einstein was generally
looked upon as a German and probably now wished to be
considered as a German." Nadolny, on his part, was
equally gracious, suggesting to Berlin that Switzerland's
part in Einstein's life and work should be stressed in any
announcement to the papers and later proposing that the
Swiss ambassador might, "as a worthwhile courtesy," be
invited to the Nobel Lecture which Einstein was to give in
Stockholm. The outcome was in fact a compromise.
Einstein himself was unable to accept the award
personally, being out of Europe on December 11, the
anniversary of Nobel's death on which the prizes are
awarded. This lucky chance enabled both the Germans and
the Swiss to play parts in the act. For in Stockholm the
award was received by the German ambassador on
Einstein's behalf, but in Berlin it was handed over to him,
at his own request, not by the Swedish ambassador to
Germany but by the Swiss. But in the Nobel records
Einstein was recorded as "German."
  One result of the imbroglio was that the Berlin Academy
was instructed by the German Minister of Science, Art,
and Popular Education to elucidate once and for all the
riddle of Einstein's nationality. Its report, made on January
13, 1923, merely stated that since all civil servants must be
Germans and Einstein had in 1914 become a civil servant,
"it must be inferred" that he was German, "even if he did
not possess it [German nationality] from birth." The
earlier Swiss nationality was not involved, it concluded,
and the Academy therefore considered their man "chiefly
Reichsdeutscher," the "chiefly" being a qualification
which may have crept into the argument due either to
caution or an inability to find the vital documents.
  This, however, was not the end of the matter. When
Einstein returned to Germany early in 1923 he was asked
by the Academy to put forward his own views. "Referring
to your letter of February 15," he replied on March 24,
1923,

  allow me to inform you as follows. When my appointment to
the Academy was being considered, my colleague Haber
informed me that my appointment would result in my becoming a
Prussian citizen. As I attached importance to retaining my
[Swiss] nationality, I made acceptance of a possible appointment
dependent on this, a stipulation which was agreed to. I do not
doubt that this can be confirmed by ministry documents.
Furthermore, I know that these facts are well known to my
colleagues Haber and Nernst.

  However, the German civil service would not easily let
goùand it was supported by the German consul general in
Barcelona who reported to Berlin after Einstein's visit
there early in 1923[Discussed elsewhere]: "On the whole the
local visit of Einstein, who, however, always appears as
German not as Swiss, is reckoned a complete success, as
much for himself and for German science as for German
Spanish cultural relations."
  On May 14, 1923, the Minister wrote to Einstein stating
that there was nothing in the records concerning his
nationality and advising that if he wished the matter to be
finally settled he should get in touch with a senior civil
servant, Dr. von Rothenburg. The interview took place six
months later. Its result was a statement by Einstein dated
February 7, 1924. In it he says that the senior civil servant
had represented firmly the view that he, Einstein, acquired
the rights of a Prussian citizen with his appointment to the
Academy, since no other view could be established from
the documents. There the affair rested until, nine years
later, Einstein gave up his passport in the German embassy
in Brussels and walked off German soil for the last time.
  Documents may have been destroyed. The officials of
1923 may have been unduly anxious to claim that Einstein
had been a German since 1914. But it seems curious that
the swearing in to Weimar in 1920 and to Prussia in 1921,
his stelf-styled "folly," should not have been mentioned
during this dispute. Yet no one can doubt either Einstein's
passionate dislike of becoming a German again in 1914, or
his equally passionate change of heart which followed the
birth of the Republic.
  There is one explanation which fits the known facts. It is
conceivable that Planck and Nernst, despite their friendly
intentions in 1913, were unable to prevent Einstein's
automatic reenrollment as a fully fledged German. He was
also a Swiss; he had his Swiss passport. Why should they
trouble him by telling him the technical truth that he was
also, inevitably under the new law of June, 1913, a son of
the Fatherland once again? When, in the euphoria of
Weimar, he wished to become a German, Planck and
Nernst could hardly dissuade him on the grounds that he
already was a German, and in the circumstances it would
have been natural for them to encourage the purely formal
act which did not alter his status but which he remembered
as "one of the follies" of his life. Planck and Nernst could
then let their consciences rest happy: if it was not exactly
true that two wrongs had in this case produced a right, at
least two misunderstandings had combined to bring about
the desired result and Einstein could move about the world
as an unofficial German ambassador, which appeared to
satisfy all parties.
  The Nobel Prize money went to Mileva. Even Einstein's
closest friends did not know this, and Lorentz wrote
happily that, quite apart from the honor, there was "a
material side to the Nobel Prize and I trust that this will
ease the cares of your daily life." By this time his financial
position was more reassuring. Requests to lecture came
thick and fast, and it was the acceptance of one of these,
arranged by "a cunning publisher of a very well-
established periodical" in Japan, which had taken him
from the country during the Nobel ceremonies. Acceptance
of the Japanese invitation was very much a leap in the dark
and both his brief diary notes and the oblique references in
several newspaper interviews suggest that in practice it
turned out to be a disillusioning experience, even though
he liked what he considered to be the simple, gentle
Japanese. Little more might have been expected. He had
been invited to lecture from one end of the country to the
other, all expenses paid; he should not have been surprised
if he was to be milked hard in the process.
  As might have been forecast, he was shocked by
conditions east of Suez. Thus after arrival in Colombo, at
the end of October, 1922, he noted: "... We rode in small
one-man carriages drawn at a trot by men of herculean
strength yet delicate build. I was bitterly ashamed to share
responsibility for the abominable treatment accorded
fellow human beings but was unable to do anything about
it." From Ceylon he and Elsa traveled on to Shanghai.
Here they were met by the sound of "Deutschland,
Deutschland ⁿber Alles," sung by the members of the
city's German colony and arousing mixed emotions in
Einstein's German-Swiss heart.
  They arrived in Japan in mid-November. He held a press
conference at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo and then
prepared for his first lecture. This was to be given in the
main hall of Tokyo University, and by the time that he was
due, the Japan Weekly Chronicle recorded, "the hall was
filled with scholars, teachers, and students. Some women
were present, too." There was also Yamamoto Sanehiko,
the proprietor of the paper Kaizosha. Einstein began
speaking at 1:30 P.M. and continued for three hours, a
formidable effort even allowing time for translation. After
this there was an hour's break, presumably for what might
be called light refreshments. At 5:30 he was back at the
rostrum once more. He started where he had left off,
apparently delighted at having such attentive listeners and
continued for another three hours. "The audience," it was
reported, "were astonished at his staying power."
  It was an auspicious start to what was on the whole an
unsatisfactory tour. The Einsteins were introduced to the
Emperor and the Empress, a singular honor, and Einstein
later recorded how he had spoken with the Empress in
French. They attended the Feast of Chrysanthemums in the
Imperial Gardens and there were a number of other formal
receptions before the start of the month-long tour. The
audiences to which he now spoke were less serious than
those in Tokyo, being attracted by his name as much as by
the almost mystic significance which relativity had
assumed for the Japanese. Not everyone welcomed its new
status. "The excessive reliance on science and the
contempt for faith have made a failure of the last century
or so," noted the Japan Weekly Chronicle. "It is sad to
reflect that the Japanese should nevertheless be so elated
over a new scientific theory."
  To Einstein, "elated" would have seemed an
understatement as he was paraded through Japan, a
scientific curiosity to be gazed at as well as listened to. In
view of the time taken for translation he cut his original
lecture, only to restore its former length after being told he
had gravely offended his hosts by giving them less than
Tokyo. His reactions can be gauged by a report in the
Japan Weekly Chronicle, whose correspondent noted that
the tour was "weighing on him rather heavily." Einstein
had also shown, it went on, "a strong distaste for the
popular style of lecture, boosted and crowded with people
who are simply curious to pay the fee to see the latest lion.
He had expected that his audience would consist only of
curious students of physics."
  His impact can be estimated not only by the reception but
by the levels at which relativity appears to have been
discussed. One account, published in the Mainichi and
reprinted in English in the Japan Weekly Chronicle, need
not be credited with literal accuracy; but it does indicate
the national importance which was accorded in Japan to a
theory which only a minute proportion of the population
could understand.
  The report described a discussion "of quite unusual
nature" by the Cabinet Council: "One of the Ministers
asked whether ordinary people would understand Professor
Einstein's lectures on the theory of relativity," it began.

  Mr. Kamada, Minister of Education, rather rashly said of course
they would. Dr. Okano, Minister of Justice, contradicted Mr.
Kamada, saying that they would never understand. Mr. Arai,
Minister of Agriculture and Commerce, was rather sorry for Mr.
Kamada, so he said that they would perhaps understand vaguely.
The headstrong Minister of Justice insisted that there could be no
midway between understanding and not understanding. If they
understood, they understood clearly. If they did not understand,
they did not understand at all. A chill fell on the company. Mr.
Baba, the tactful director of the Legislation Bureau, said that
they could understand if they made efforts. Their efforts would
be useless, persisted the Minister of Justice. He had himself
ordered a book on the theory of relativity when the theory was
first introduced into Japan last year and tried to study it. On the
first page he found higher mathematics, and he had to shut the
book for the present. When the members of the Imperial
Academy were invited to dinner at the Hama detached palace, he
had mentioned the problem to Dr. Tanakadate Aikitsu, who was
seated next to him. Dr. Fujisawa Rikitaio (an authority on
mathematics), overhearing their discussion, said that in America
they were collecting popular explanations of the theory, offering
an enormous prize. Such being the case, Dr. Fujisawa said, it
was wiser not to begin the study at once. He supported Dr.
Okano's opinion. Hearing this elaborate explanation, Mr. Baba,
director of the Legislation Bureau, decided to eschew Einstein
for the time being.

  The rest of the population behaved otherwise and by the
end of December Einstein was thankful to board ship for
Europe. Even so, he had a high opinion of the people
themselves; "Japan is wonderful," he wrote to his friend
Solovine on his return to Berlin. "Beautiful manners, an
interest in everything, an artistic touch and intellectual
na∩vetΘ coupled with common sense. A refined people in a
picturesque country." On the way home he visited
Palestine, formally opening there the Hebrew University
whose foundation stone had been laid on Mount Scopus
some five years earlier.[Discussed elsewhere] Then he and his
wife sailed on to Marseilles, traveling from the port of
Madrid where, during his absence from Europe,
arrangements had been completed for what was to be
another triumphal tour.
  The lecture which Einstein gave to the Academy of
Sciences in Madrid, before being elected a member, was
attended by King Alphonso XIII. The rector of Madrid
University proposed that not only Professor, but also Frau
Einstein should be granted the diploma of Doctor honoris
causa. And the Spanish Minister of Education offered him
a home, in the name of the Spanish nation, should
conditions in Germany "impede the tranquil continuation
of his intellectual studies." There, opinion continued
divided; the anti-Semite lobby continued to make itself
heard, but in Ulm the city councillors decided on March 20
that a new street should be named Einsteinstrasse.
  In Spain, there was only one hint of trouble. Before
reaching Madrid, Einstein lectured in Barcelona and here
he attended a meeting of the local Syndicalists, workers
dedicated to obtaining control of industry by direct action.
Exactly what he said to them is not clear, but The Times,
not notably inaccurate in such matters, quoted him
addressing them with the words: "I also am a
revolutionary, though only a scientific one. The
persecutions you tell me of seem to have been more stupid
than wicked. You see only the bad side of things. There is
also a good side." This seems harmless enough, but the
left-wing Spanish newspapers may have embroidered their
stories, and Einstein was obliged to state that reports of
this meeting did "not correctly convey what he said"ùan
elegant phrase which, as The Times reported from Madrid,
"thus dissipated a rather painful impression which was
made in some circles here by the words attributed to him."
  Einstein arrived back in Berlin only a few weeks before
an announcement in Washington gave further support to
the General Theory. The previous September there had
been another total eclipse of the sun, visible throughout a
narrow belt stretching from Somaliland across the Indian
Ocean to Australia, and a number of expeditions had been
sent out to gather further evidence for or against the
theory. A party from the Greenwich Observatory and a
Dutch-German expeditionùthe German contingent led by
Freundlich with special equipment prepared in the
Potsdam Observatoryùhad gone to Christmas Island in
the Pacific. From Sydney a phototelescope had been taken
to Cunnamulla in Queensland, and the government of New
South Wales had sent a party to Cordillo Downs, deep in
the Australian interior, to which a dismantled telescope
had been carried more than one hundred miles from the
railhead on the backs of camels. In addition, Australian,
Canadian, and American astronomers had set up their
instruments near Broome on the northwest coast of
Australia, the American expedition being led by Professor
W. W. Campbell of the Lick Observatory.
  As in 1919, the observers were at the mercy of the
weather. This time, however, one minor source of possible
error had been eliminated. In 1919, the light from the sun
and its nearby stars had been collected by mirrors whose
small distortions complicated the resulting calculations; in
most of the instruments now being used, the light was
directly collected by the telescopes' object glasses. Other
refinements had been incorporated in the equipment and it
was generally accepted, as The Times wrote on September
21, 1922, that "if the expected verification has been made
this morning it will have to be admitted that human
observations of the universe can be reconciled with a
theory from which absolute space and absolute time have
been excluded, although at present they are not
reconcilable with a theory based on these Newtonian
conceptions."
  Seven months later it was revealed that the verification
had been made. Some teams had been frustrated by bad
weather, but Professor Campbell's party had met with
almost perfect conditions. Hundreds of star images were
recorded on their four special phototelescopes and some
scores of these, shown on ten plates, had been selected for
calculation and checking. Now, on April 12, 1923,
Campbell reported that the prints taken on September 21
and compared with those taken at Tahiti three months
before the eclipse, showed agreement with Einstein's
prediction "as close as the most ardent proponent of the
relativity theory could hope for." The following evening,
Eddington reported the results of the Lick expedition to his
fellow astronomers in Burlington House, recalling the two
expeditions of 1919 and adding: "I think it was the
Bellman in 'The Hunting of the Snark' who laid down the
rule: 'When I say it three times, it is right.' [sic] The stars
have now said it three times to three separate expeditions,
and I am convinced that their answer is right."
  Not everyone was pleased. "It is an interesting
commentary on the reluctance of many leading men of
science to accept the relativity theory," says Eddington's
biographer, "that when Campbell was asked what he
anticipated from the eclipse plates, he replied: 'I hoped it
would not be true.' Undoubtedly some Fellows of the Royal
Society and even a few in the Royal Astronomical Society
felt the same way."
  Even though the Lick expedition provided the third proof
"that light does not go straight" when affected by gravity,
conservative doubts were to some extent justified by later
events. For as technological advance made more accurate
results possible, speculation continued about the amount of
deflection involved; and thirty years later it could be
claimed that this was "still controversial, at least in regard
to magnitude."
  Back in Germany, Einstein must have felt that his travels
were over for the time being. His fears of the previous
summer were evaporating and he now looked forward to
an untroubled continuation of work in Berlin. He might
well have been warned by the extraordinary story of his
alleged "trip to Russia." In the Deutsche Allgemeine
Zeitung of September 15, 1923, there appeared the report
that Einstein was expected in Moscow at the end of the
month. On October 6 the Berliner Tageblatt took up the
story with an announcement that he had left for the
Russian capital, while on October 27, the nationalist
Berliner Borsenzeitung quoted Russian reports that
Einstein would be "arriving in Petersburg on October 28
and will speak on the relativity theory to a group of trained
scientific workers." Not to be outdone, the Kieler Zeitung
reported on November 2 that: "Einstein is staying in
Petersburg for three days." With such a wealth of
circumstantial report, his fellow countrymen could be
justified in thinking that he had visited Russia, even
though dates and details might not be correct. In fact he
was never in the country. The story was merely another
item in the anti-Jewish, antirelativity campaign, which was
always anxious to tar its enemies with the Communist
brush.
  Yet the canard, damaging to Einstein at a time when
many still considered Weimar's resumption of relations
with Russia to be a betrayal, was given a plausibility by his
own actions. For he was not only on comparatively
friendly terms with Georg  Tschisherrin, the Russian
Peoples' Commissar for Foreign Affairs in Berlin, but was
on at least one occasion used as an intermediary by the
Zionist leader, Kurt Blumenfeld, in an effort to ease the
conditions of the Jews in Russia.
  Blumenfeld has himself told the story, revealing how he
one day met an East European Jew who had been closely
following Zionist activities. "You have won Einstein for
the Zionist cause," said this man. "Tschisherrin has the
greatest respect for Einstein, with whom he has often
spoken. Get him to introduce you to Tschisherrin; if you
meet him alone with Einstein then something can come of
it." Blumenfeld recalls how he mentioned the matter to
Einstein, who immediately went to the telephone, saying:
"This conversation can be really interesting." A few days
later, the two men visited the Soviet embassy, the
ambassador saying a few minutes after their meeting: "I
know what is in your mind." The interview was long and
inconclusive. Tschisherrin was prepared to admit that the
movement of small groups of Russian Jews to Palestine
might be allowed but that "mass emigration is out of the
question: it conflicts with the Soviet system." Einstein was
certainly willing to intervene with the Russians if this were
likely to help the cause of Zionism. He would just as
willingly have intervened with the devil had he seen any
hope of success. But he was not used to supping with long
spoons.
  Early in November he was suddenly jerked awake again
to his position in Germany, and to the dangerous situation
of anyone who fraternized with Communists. During the
first days of the month he was visited by a prominent
Jewish leader who appears to have advised him that his
life was in danger. Just how serious the warning was is not
known. But on November 7, Einstein wrote to Planck a
letterùno copy of which has survivedùsaying that he was
leaving the country for a few days and canceling a dinner
date with Planck at Haberlandstrasse for the evening of the
ninth.
  Planck failed to receive the letter and arrived at the
Einstein home on the ninth, only to be received by Elsa
with news of her husband's sudden departure for Leiden.
Both had good cause for alarm. For between the writing of
Einstein's letter on the seventh and Planck's arrival in
Haberlandstrasse, the National Socialists, led by Hitler and
supported by General Ludendorff, had begun their attempt
to take over the Bavarian government in Munich as
prelude to a march on Berlin. There had been fighting
during the day and what was to happen next was still
uncertain.
  Einstein's flight was not in fact linked with the Munich
putsch. It was, rather, an indication of the anti- Semitic
climate of the times, but on the night of the ninth it can
hardly have looked fortuitous. The rising was put down
and on November 10 Planck wrote to Einstein in Leiden,
pleading with him yet again not to accept any of the offers
which would no doubt be made to him.
  There is no evidence whatever that Einstein suffered from
personal fear; rather the reverse. But he wanted to get on
with his work, he knew that there would be little chance of
that under a National Socialist government, and it was in
character that until he learned that the putsch had been
crushed he should seek the security of Leiden. It was
equally in character that Planck should write to him in the
name of German science and implore him to come back.
He came.
  He did not return entirely in reply to Planck's appeal;
much as he respected the older man's scientific genius,
Einstein always went his own way. He did not return
because of Elsa and the comfort of the Haberlandstrasse
home. In 1923, as in 1914, Berlin still providedùas long
as Weimar remainedùthe intellectual climate in which he
could best get on with his work.

PART FOUR

THE EINSTEIN AGE

CHAPTER 12

UNTER DEN LINDEN

Einstein returned from Holland to Berlin towards the end
of November, 1923. For the next decade the city was his
base for a central, consolidating period of his life. But
what consolidated was not only the physicist with the
international reputation, the man who had shown the
universe to be built differently from accepted ideas. This
absentminded scientist turning his huge luminous and
inquiring eyes on visitors, behaving at times with an
almost studied childlike simplicity, more an actor playing
Einstein than the man himself, was only one facet. It was
matched by another, by the man whom the President of the
United States and the Emperor of Japan had been honored
to meet, the Nobel Prize winner coaxed into helping the
League of Nations, the physicist whose advice was
constantly sought by the more formidable of the Jewish
leaders. Moreover this Swabian, whose triumphs in the
realm of abstract thought had brought him the fame of an
oracle and the veneration that goes with it, had during the
transformation decided to use the reputation that chance
had unexpectedly tossed him. He would campaign with the
Zionists for a Jewish homeland in Palestine and he would
help build a new Europeùalthough whether it should be
built on unarmed pacifist goodwill or beneath the umbrella
of international arms was something which he found it
difficult to decide.
  With these political ambitions, it would have been natural
enough if Einstein had exercised considerable influence
outside his specialist field during the decade which began
in 1924. Many physicists did so. The British government
was apt to consult Rutherford as a matter of course on any
question affecting science. There were Madame Curie and
Professor Langevin in France, Lorentz in Holland. Edward
Appleton, pioneer of the ionosphere, had a finger in
innumerable government pies. Lindemann later became, as
Lord Cherwell, one of the most influential, and
controversial, politicoscientific figures of his time. Yet
Einstein operated throughout this period at a very different
level and with very different results. His name was
invaluable for transferring cash from wealthy Jews into
Zionist funds. His name on pacifist manifestos was always
a sign of honest intent, and of considerable publicity value
until the law of diminishing returns came into action. But
during the years between the two world wars the effect of
his efforts in these fields was in many ways as counterpro
ductive as his enthusiasm was unlimited. The reasons do
not lie entirely in the fact that, operating as a Jew in
Germany, he was something of a fish out of water; other
Jews in other spheres drove opinion the way they wanted it
until the Nazis came to power.
  He was handicapped in all his efforts to implement his
good intentions by the very qualities that made him the
genius he was. First, and of overwhelming importance,
was his determination to devote as much time as possible
to discovering how the physical world was built. He
wanted to aid the Jews and he wanted to help keep the
peace of the world. But whenever he was in danger of
becoming too deeply involved, there was some new riddle
of the universe that demanded attention. Kurt Blumenfeld,
who recruited Einstein into the Zionist cause, shrewdly
noted of him to Weizmann that "Zionism and Palestine
were only peripheral concerns"; and in 1923 Einstein
himself revealed his own view of the priorities when he
told Weizmann that he would give his name and would
talk to people in Berlin but would not "travel around or
visit congresses, since in order to preserve my rights as a
thinker I have to stay quiet in order to work." His
dedication to the pacifist cause was equally unquestioned
between 1919 and 1933. But his enthusiasm had
perpetually to contend with the fact that there were
scientific papers to be written or read, and men like Planck
or Sommerfeld or von Laue to discuss them with. Thus he
was forced to overlook his homework, to skimp his
practice in a game that constantly demanded it.
  With this tendency to give less attention to nonscientific
matters than enthusiasm required, there went a dislike for
the formalities demanded of those who try to influence
others, and a contempt for the sleight-of-mind that is often
called for. Einstein despised the careful cultivation of men
or women for particular ends, the balancing of interest
against interest, the bland statement that conceals truth
rather than illuminates it, and the ability to judge the right
moment for dropping the right hint into the right ear.
  Finally there was his sense of the ridiculous. He did not
mind what he looked like and he often did not mind what
he said. He was, quite simply, too unconcerned to worry
about trifles, even when circumstances began to push him
more frequently than his scientific colleagues onto the
public stage where trifles matter. But they managed to look
like figures from the great drama of public affairs; he too
often evoked the music-hall. Thus it was inevitable that he
should occupy a large place in human hearts and a small
one in the corridors of power.
  The Berlin into which Einstein settled down in 1924 has
a special niche in history. This was the Berlin whose
fortunes changed as Germany struggled up from the
postwar economic morass and was then pushed back into it
by the world depression of 1929, a city which had done
with the soldiers' councils of the revolution, and the troops
of the Kapp Putsch, but was soon to be beguiled by the
presidency of Hindenburg; and, eventually, by
Hindenburg's candidate for the chancellorship, Adolf
Hitler.
  In the capital, Einstein not only occupied a unique
position but lived under conditions more favorable than
those he had previously been used to. For the first time in
his life he had one home for more than a few years. To
counteract the undertow of anti-Semitic nationalism,
quiescent for a while but never very far below the surface,
there was the respect of the university and the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute which he knew was his due. In Leiden,
where he delighted to stay with the Ehrenfests on his visits
as professor extraordinary, he was enormously popular.
Royalties from his book on relativity and his salary from
Leiden helped to raise him from the rut of most professors;
he had always been careless of money but now he could
almost afford to be. He had his music and he had his
sailingùon a fine choice of lakes which ringed Berlin
with the circlet of watery fingers that were to be marker
points for the bombers in the Second World War, whatever
the camouflage experts could do. He had, moreover, an
entrΘ into the polyglot world of educated industrialists and
civilized financiers, of artists and actors and designers who
during the first years of Weimar appeared to have taken
over the privileged position in the state so long occupied
by the military. Thus he was a close friend of Willy
Meinhardt, the head of the Osram company, at whose
house in the Engadine he began to stay. He was a friend of
Slevogt, the painter, of Emil Orlik, the designer. A typical
party organized by his doctor friend, Janos Plesch,
consisted of Einstein and Haber, Slevogt and Orlik, Fritz
Kreisler, Arthur Schnabel, and the German Foreign
Minister, Count Rantzau. Just as in his student days
Einstein had at times been more than the retiring
contemplative physicist, so now, on the crest of the wave,
he became for a while almost as human as other men,
expanding in the Weimar renaissance.
  It was during this period that he walked one evening, as
described by Plesch, to a favorite restaurant with the
Russian physicist Joffe, with Plesch, and with a third
companion. Einstein and Joffe, walking behind the other
couple, were talking loudly and Einstein burst out in a roar
of enjoyment. When they caught up with their friends,
Einstein explained: "Poor old Joffe can't make up his mind
through which hole an electron will go if he fires it
through a lead obstacle with a number of holes. An
electron is indivisible, and therefore it must go through
one hole only. But which hole? And the solution"ùwith a
gust of Einstein laughterù"is really very simple; it goes
through the fifth dimension." Physics was still, as yet, too
important to be taken too seriously.
  Einstein's base for operations was of course No. 5,
Haberlandstrasse, where his wife quietly helped to
organize his life and where his stepdaughter Ilse often
acted as secretary. The most important room in the
apartment was Einstein's study in a corner turret of the
block, reached by a small staircase and with a view only of
rooftops and the sky. Here were the expected books, a
round table in the small window alcove stacked with
papers, notes, references, and an assortment of pamphlets.
Here also, almost hidden on top of a bookcase, was the
cigar box surreptitiously filled from time to time by
Einstein's friends, who knew how Elsa tried to ration him
to one a day for the sake of his health. The study was
Einstein's absolute preserve. No cleaner was allowed in.
Neither was Elsa. "It was here that his work was done and
his friends received to discuss problems without
interference," Plesch has written. "It was always a matter
of regret to his wife (he always referred to her as 'my old
lady') that she was unable to look after him and his things
in that room as everywhere else, but Einstein was
adamant; never mind the dust and disorder; it was the
independence that mattered."
  Here he spent most of his mornings and many of the
afternoons when not engaged on university business or
lectures, filling sheet after sheet of paper with calculations;
immersed in the implications and development of the
General Theory; and, from 1920 onwards, struggling to
find the mathematical framework which would include
both the phenomena of electromagnetism and those of
gravity, the unified field theory which would encompass,
as the New York Times put it, "the wheeling of the planets,
the speeding of light on its course, the attraction of earth
for a falling stone, the luster of the diamond, the instability
of radium, the lightness of hydrogen and the heaviness of
lead, the flow of electricity through a wire, millions of
manifestations of matter, energy, time, space."
  The academic situation in Germany can be judged from
an appeal for money which he made early in April, 1924.
Before the war, the income of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute
for Physics had been 75,000 marks, worth $17,750; now it
was 22,000 marks, worth $1,125. In real terms the salaries
of scholars and teachers, Einstein had estimated in a
British journal the previous year, were only a fifth of what
they had been before the war; in many cases they were
much less. Fewer scientific meetings were taking place,
and one reason was that many who would have attended
lacked the streetcar fares to take them across Berlin.
Einstein himself was in a different category. He wanted to
pay for his own assistants, as was then customary. But his
rich industrial friends would have none of this in the
straitened circumstances of postwar Berlin, and put a lump
sum into a special bank account on which he could draw as
and when he wished. However much he drew, the account
was always made up to the original sum.
  That his appeal was not special pleading is borne out by a
young Oxford man, Edward Skillings, who some time
earlier had visited Berlin and eight other university centers
to assess German requests for English books and
periodicals. "It is plain to see that large sections of the
professors are suffering from grievous privations both
physical and mental," he reported. In Halle the wife of one
of them explained that her husband would not be able to
work without the "fearfully humiliating" help from
England. In G÷ttingen the professor Skillings hoped to see
had recently died of undernourishment. These were of
course only details in the larger picture of gloom and
depression which was already beginning to lower the
confidence of the Germans in the ability of their new
republican government ùa foreseeable result which could
be attributed either to a casual lack of Allied interest or to
a Machiavellian method of sapping the authority of a left
wing government. Einstein had no doubt about which was
the more likely alternative. "Everyone here knows that the
financial obligations laid upon the country cannot be
fulfilled at their present figure, even with the utmost
exertion," he wrote. "All this has bred in us the conviction
that there is no hope of working our way by legitimate
means out of our present serfdom. This paralyzes
economic activities and drives people to evade taxation,
and to try to remove their capital from the country."
  Against this dull and depressing background, the
phenomenon of relativity, embodied in the photogenic
figure of Einstein himself, was a colorful exception, an
example which the nationalists could have used, had they
only wished, to illustrate the genius of German science.
Part of the phenomenon was the "relativity industry"
which by the early 1920s was flooding the continent, as
well as Britain and the United States, with explanations
that ranged from the erudite to the simpleminded. "The
stream continues," wrote E. Cunningham in Nature in
June, 1922. "Here are seven more books on relativity." The
previous year a bibliography, prepared by the director of
the International Catalogue of Scientific Literature,
included nearly 650 papers, articles, and books dealing
with the subject, and many score more had been added by
the time that Dr. Cunningham settled down to his
reviewing.
  Von Laue in Germany had been the first to write a full
scale book explaining Special RelativityùDas
RelativitΣtsprinzipùwhich appeared in Brunswick in
1911. Five years later Freundlich did much the same for
the General Theory with The Foundations of Einstein's
Theory of Gravitation. "There really is a need for
improvement if misunderstandings are to be avoided,"
Einstein had written to Freundlich on seeing his draft. "I
will gladly . . . explain everything conscientiously to you.
Should we disagree over certain points, that doesn't
matter, but in that case my preface which you ask for will
have to be omitted." Apparently there were no
disagreements and the book appeared with Einstein's
preface. Eddington's Report on the Relativity Theory of
Gravitation for the Physical Society of London had quickly
gone into a second edition, and his Space, Time, and
Gravitation, which appeared in 1920, had, like the Report,
"awakened English-speaking physicists and astronomers to
the importance of the new theory. They began to bestir
themselves for there was 'the sound of a gong in the tops
of the mulberry trees'; old ideas were in the melting pot;
an exciting spirit of adventure was vaguely felt even by
those not mathematically equipped to read the book
critically."
  Einstein's major paper on the General Theory had been
reprinted in book form in Leipzig in 1916, and his
Relativity: The Special and the General Theory appeared
the following year. By 1920 it had run through fourteen
German editions totaling 65,000 copies. The English
edition, translated by Robert Lawson and published in
1920, ran through seven editions in nineteen months. In
addition, the lectures which Einstein gave in Princeton in
the spring of 1921 were quickly reprinted and a number of
his original papers on relativity, together with others by
Lorentz and Minkowski, were reprinted as a book two
years later in Germany and Britain.
  Lorentz, Planck, Born, and Weyl were among Einstein's
colleagues who wrote books on the subject, and even
Lenard was represented with his strongly critical ▄ber
RelativitΣtsprinzip, Aether, Gravitation. In Paris, Charles
Nordmann had written Einstein and the Universe: A
Popular Exposition of the Famous Theory, in which razor
sharp French logic cut through to reveal the simplicity of
Einstein's ideas with an effectiveness that not even
Einstein could better. More remarkable than any of these
was the massive encyclopedia article which Sommerfeld
had commissioned from Wolfgang Pauli for the
EncyklopΣdie der mathematischen Wissenschaften. Aged
only twenty, Pauli was one of Sommerfeld's students who
had attended the famous Bad Nauheim meeting; his
account of relativity for the encyclopedia was quickly
reprinted in book form, "in view of the apparently
insatiable demand . . . for accounts of the theory of
relativity," as Sommerfeld said in the preface. Reprinted
forty years later, it was then described by Niels Bohr as
"still one of the most valuable expositions of the basis and
scope of Einstein's original conceptions."
  Just over the horizon, and to appear in 1925, was
Bertrand Russell's The ABC of Relativity, a book almost as
important for the friendship which it was to encourage
between Einstein and Russell as for its extraordinarily
clear presentation of the subject. Russell, who in the
columns of the Athenaeum had been among the first to
describe the implications of the 1919 eclipse expeditions,
was in the next third of a century to show remarkable
similarities with Einstein. Like Einstein he was basically
pacifist. Like Einstein he supported the Second World War
as certainly as he opposed the First. Both men were
frequently, and unjustifiably, tarred with the Communist
brush, and both were concerned with the fundamental
problem of the human predicament. But two main
differences kept them apart. Einstein was proud of his
similarities with his fellowmen. Russell proud of those
things which made him different. And while Einstein left
his study only against his better judgment, Russell was
always up front in the political battle. While Einstein had
worked on at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute between 1914
18 under what he called his patrons, Russell had gone to
prison for his pacifist views.
  The study did not only see Einstein at work on those
problems of the natural world that obsessed all physicists.
Here he also dealt as best he could with the torrent of
appeals, begging letters, and requests for advice that
poured down on him during these years of fame and
notoriety. If Einstein could prove that light did not go
straight then he could do anything, however impossible it
sounded. Such was a common belief.
  Rudolf Kayser, who married Einstein's elder
stepdaughter, Ilse, has a picture which may not be literally
true but at least gives a good impression of what had to be
dealt with. "Poor people beg for money, for clothing, and
jobs," he has written.

  A young man has taken the notion to become an explorer; won't
Einstein help him to go to India or Africa? A woman
telegraphsùwould the professor please obtain a visa? Actors ask
for engagements; young people in small towns who have hardly
attended high school would like to come to Berlin and become
his disciples. Einstein reads all these requests with kindliness
and understanding, and also with a sense of humor. These are
obligations of fame which one must bear with a smile, but this
fame has consequences, frequently responsible for bitterness.
There are letters and magazine articles filled with hatred, malice,
envy, and vulgarity. And since Einstein is a Jew and an opponent
of all nationalistic pride, all the garbage of political strife is also
cast at him. In addition, there come the fools and the prophets,
who sprout, like mushrooms, especially in the years of insecurity
and anarchy. This one writes that he has finally discovered the
essence of sleep. That one writes that he has found the only
correct way to lower the price of coal. Another one has invented
new senses, since the old five senses are no longer sufficient for
man's use. Technicians report on their new inventions. They
send blueprints of new contraptions and flying machines. Still
another is engaged in overthrowing the traditional astronomy and
building up a new one. Still another believes that he has found
new mathematical formulas. ...

  He was much tried in other ways. The flat-earthers, the
spiritualists, the inveterate believers, all latched on to the
apparent enigma of relativity to bolster their own ideas.
Sometimes they rolled many of them into one packet like
the author of Spiritism: The Hidden Secret in Einstein's
Theory of Relativity, for whom Hebrew words, the
"uranium cubic diatonal," and mystic numbers all
contributed to the secret. So, almost inevitably, did another
old standby. "This wonderful portrayal of the earth and the
heavens as interlocked bodies of darkness and light is
involved," readers were informed, "in the dimensions of
the Great Pyramid of Egypt whose missing top expresses
the space area of the 'time' of the day and of the night, of
the universal 'unit space of division.'" Einstein might well
have murmured, with some of the internationalists who
looked askance at his statements on their affairs, "God
save me from my friends."
  To those in his own line of country he was always
generous of time, money, and effort, a fact which quickly
permeated the academic world. Thus the young foreign
student who wished to study chemistry in Bonn, had been
rejected by the Prussian Ministry of Education, and who
knew it was against the law to make a second application,
wrote as a matter of course to Einstein. He sent his entire
biography, with every detail. "When you are twenty," he
wrote years later, "you feel as important as I did. You are
certain that the whole world appreciates this importance.
Einstein did." For he not only recommended a second,
albeit unlawful, application but produced for enclosure a
letter from himself supporting the application and
denouncing the injustice.
  A clear picture of this Einstein, always eager to help lame
scientific dogs over bureaucratic stiles, is given by Leopold
Infeld, a young Pole studying at the University of Cracow
who was later to collaborate with him in the United States.
Infeld wished to complete his studies in Berlin but found
that Poles were unwelcome there and Polish Jews more so.
Finally, in desperation, he telephoned Einstein and was
given a time to call.
  "Shy, deeply touched, in a holiday spirit of expectation at
meeting the greatest living physicist, I pressed the bell of
Einstein's flat," he wrote of the occasion.

  I was shown into a waiting room full of heavy furniture and
explained to Mrs. Einstein why I had come. She apologized and
explained that I would have to wait because a Chinese Minister
of Education was just then talking to her husband. I waited, my
cheeks burning with excitement. ... [He] opened the door of his
study to let the Chinese gentleman out and me in. Einstein was
dressed in a morning coat and striped trousers with one
important button missing. It was the familiar face which one saw
at that time so often in pictures and magazines. But no picture
could reproduce the shining glow of his eyes.

  Einstein listened to what Infeld had to say, claimed that
his signature did not carry very much weightù"because I
have given very many recommendations and they are anti
Semites"ùand then wrote a few helpful words to Planck.
"Instead of thinking about his genius, about his
achievements in physics," Infeld wrote, "I thought then,
and later, about his great kindness, about his loud laugh,
about the gentle way he talked, about the brilliance of his
eyes, about the clumsiness with which he looked about for
a piece of paper on a desk full of paper, about the queer
mixture of great warmth and great aloofness."
  The incident was significant both of Einstein's perpetual
kindness and of his Achilles heel; for he wrote, says Infeld,
"without knowing whether I had the slightest idea of
physics." The practice continuedùso much so that refugee
scientists, arriving in Oxford in 1933 and proudly showing
a testimonial from Einstein, were often advised to keep
quiet about it.
  The combination of prodigious intellect and human
vulnerability which made him such a contradictory human
being became more obvious during these early 1920s as
the image of the tousle-headed eccentric began to form and
harden round the central character of the man. At one
level, the physicist who technically headed the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute for Physics, still being developed, was
the remote genius who had changed the human picture of
the universe, a being so divorced from other men that his
obiter dicta had the authority of the Delphic oracle. At
another level he was the Einstein who delighted in taking
control of the elevator in his Haberlandstrasse block and
manipulating the buttons so that guests were whisked up,
back, then up and down again past the floor at which they
wished to alight. This was the Einstein who when nagged
about well-worn dress clothes would say: "I will simply
fasten a notice to it saying: 'This suit has just been
cleaned.'" He retained the mixture of clown and small boy
delighted with simple jokes, engrossed by absurdities. He
was always ready to respond to the ridiculous challenge,
and when a group of eminent friends called for him one
evening, he accepted a bet to take off his waistcoat without
first removing his coat. He was wearing his only dress suit,
but immediately began a series of elaborate contortions.
These continued for some while. It seemed he would have
to pay up. Then, with a final tortuous twist he did the trick,
triumphantly waving his crumpled waistcoat and
exploding into his long deep belly laugh. This was not at
all the thing for the quieter waters of Berlin academic
society. It was not even the thing for some of Einstein's
friends, such as Haber with his perfectly run home.
Ehrenhaft recalls how on one occasion he and his wife
arrived at the Habers together with Einstein and Elsa, both
men properly dinner-jacketed. As they sat down in the
drawing room Elsa exclaimed: "But Albert, you haven't
put your socks on." "Yes, yes," he replied unblinkingly. "I
have already disclosed the secret to Frau Ehrenhaft."
  But Einstein's idiosyncrasies were accepted. And his
friend Willy Meinhardt, president of the Osram concern,
helping his guest find his overcoat, could without offense
produce it with the words: "This must be Einstein's; it's
made by Peek & Kloppenburg"ùat that time the cut-price
tailors of Berlin.
  The stories of Einstein's reluctance to attend formal
functions, to play the social lion in the expected way, are
still numerous and must have been more so in the Berlin of
half a century ago. Many are certainly apocryphal but
some ring true, as when he replied to a Berlin hostess who
had described her list of guests: "So you would like me to
serve as a centerpiece?" His frequent description of the
more formal social functions was "feeding time at the
zoo," while of academic dinners he confessed to one of his
stepsons-in-law: "On occasions like this I retire to the back
of my mind and there I am happy."
  He genuinely hated it allùannouncing to a companion as
he joined one dinner party: "Now I go on the trapeze."
Antonina Vallentin, who knew him well during the Berlin
days, says that it was in vain that

  one would explain to him the customary formalities, and those
who had not known him long would explain patiently, as to a
backward child. They would repeat: This is done. ... Why is it
done? he would ask. Until you noticed his smile, he seemed like
a malicious child. Tails? Why tails? I never had any and never
missed them. Once his wife employed all her powers of
persuasion, her charm and humor, to make him order an evening
suit for a solemn occasion, and after violent resistance from him
a compromise was eventually reached: a dinner jacket instead of
tails. Afterwards he merely said, yes, he did have a dinner jacket
in his cupboard which he was even ready to exhibit, until the day
came when "the fine thing," as he called it, had grown too small
and was no longer presentable.

  If a streak of bloody-mindedness, a reluctance to be
pushed down paths which he did not wish to pursue,
tended to buttress such protests, the deep feeling behind
them was genuine enough: the feeling that pretentiousness
and hypocrisy were among the ingredients of the "dressing
-up" on which so much of the world insisted. Behind this
gentle charade there was also an urgency which for
Einstein had a particular poignancy. All those buttons; all
those tails; all that putting on and taking off, wasting
valuable minutes and hours while in the distance he could
hear, with Marvell, "time's wingΘd chariot hurrying near."
What a waste it all was. And so with shoes, which could be
replaced by sandals, and socks that could be dispensed
with altogether. How he would have sympathized with his
near-contemporary J.B.S. Haldane, who rejoiced on his
emigration to India that he would now be able to go foot
free, and added: "Sixty years in socks is enough." Einstein,
for his part, was delighted that he could turn to a
companion at a formal dinner where his own merits were
being lauded and whisper: "But the man doesn't wear
socks!"
  These newsworthy stigmata of the enfant terrible, like his
frequent avowals of humility, sprang from deeply rooted
convictions. At times he might deliberately strike a
posture, but what often appeared to be awkwardness for
awkwardness' sake was the natural action of a natural
man. "I am happy because I want nothing from anyone,"
he once told an American correspondent. "I do not care for
money. Decorations, titles, or distinctions mean nothing to
me. I do not crave praise. The only thing that gives me
pleasure, apart from my work, my violin, and my sailboat,
is the appreciation of my fellow workers." Here is a hint of
the bridge between the skylarking clown, the eccentric who
at times gives the impression of acting with one eye on
posterity, and the dedicated scientist. As his elder son says,
he was always "a great ham." He enjoyed sending people
away with the answers they expected to get. But for most
of the time his air of wondering aberration from the
normal standards of life was genuine enough. He was just
too occupied with more important matters to worry.
  It was this fierce dedication, as much as the revelations of
the eclipse expeditions, which helped to set him apart from
other scientists. At the lower levels, men said that only
three physicists understood the riddles of the worldù
Einstein, Planck, and Lorentz. More to the point was
Planck's reply to Freundlich, who one day presented him
with a problem and hoped for an answer off the cuff.
Freundlich's widow long recalled how her husband
repeated to her what Planck had said: "I shall have to
think about it and then I will write down the answer. I
cannot provide it at once, just like that. Einstein could do
so. I cannot." It is unlikely that the exact words are
remembered correctly over half a century; but their
significance was unforgettable.
  The same attitude is shown in an incident recalled by
Ehrenfest's widow. This involved Einstein, Nernst, and
Lorentz at a meeting of the Berlin Physical Society. After
Nernst had made a statement, Einstein said: "You know, I
don't think that reference is admissible." Whereupon
Nernst replied: "But Herr colleague, it is the very reference
which you yourself used in your last publication." To
Einstein, this presented no difficulty. "How can I help it if
the dear God will not take account of what I said in my last
publication?" he asked. This was no more than permitted
byplay. Something more was contributed by Lorentz, who
did not laugh with the rest of the assembly. Instead, he
remained silent for a moment. Then he spoke: "Ah, yes.
Anything is allowed to Einstein."[Like most Einstein
stories, this circulates in a variety of versions. Infeld,
recalling it in 1955, has Einstein exclaiming: "Do you
really propose that I should start an argument with the
Lord because He has not made the world in accord with
the opinions I have expressed?"]
  Einstein was lucky in having at least some support from
industry. The prediction that light reaching the earth from
the stars would be altered in frequency by the gravitational
field through which it passed had interested Freundlich
since his first contacts with Einstein. He had close
connections with German business, and soon after the war
persuaded a number of industrialists, notably Dr. Bosch, a
director of I. G. Farben, to finance an institute which could
investigate the phenomenon. This was the Einstein
Institute in Potsdam, later to be amalgamated with the
observatory there as the Institute for Solar Research.
Throughout the 1920s a long series of observations was
made from it. The results were inconclusive, a fact which
may have played its part in the gradual estrangement
between Einstein and Freundlich. Certainly Einstein
visited the institute less and less frequently. Certainly
Planck took it that there had been a definite rupture in
their relationsùso much so that he wrote to Freundlich
offering to intervene. Memories must be taken with
caution; but Freundlich, with his Scottish ancestry, was
remarkably British in looks, sympathies, and demeanor.
Einstein, in the early 1920s, had great hopes for Germany.
"It was almost," said Frau Freundlich, thinking back with
a pinsharp perception that cannot be discounted, "as
though my husband was too British, not Jewish enough."
  The heart of the institute was a long-focus telescope
accommodated in a sixty-foot tower, surrounded by a
second tower built of stone, and the sunlight reflected
down this was turned through 90 degrees and taken along
a forty-foot room, partly sunk in the ground. The demands
made on the architect, Erich Mendelsohn, were
considerable, and he satisfied them by designing a building
in marked contrast to those standing nearby in the grounds
of the observatory. They, built at the end of the previous
century, were in the sober, traditional Prussian style and
utilized the red bricks of the Mark Brandenburg.
Mendelsohn's "Einstein Tower," as it was soon known,
was a concrete construction, whose flowing white outlines
were in some ways symbolic of the artistic renaissance
already sweeping the Weimar Republic. It was even
suggested that while the older buildings with their separate
bricks epitomized the Euclidean concept of mathematics
and atomic structure as understood at the turn of the
century, Mendelsohn's long, elegant curves epitomized
post-Einsteinian physics. Certainly the building became
one of the things to be seen in Potsdam, and more than one
tourist agency added the Einstein Tower to its tour of the
Potsdam palaces.
  Not everyone liked the new building. Photographs were
taken to illustrate its slightly bizarre outline, and among
the German papers that described it, there was one which
called it "a cross between a New York skyscraper and an
Egyptian pyramid." The architecture of the institute was in
fact to play its own small part in the anti-Einstein
campaign which grew with the rise of the National
Socialist party in the 1930s. For, it was asked, was it not in
keeping that investigation of the absurd relativity theory
should be carried out in a grotesque building which had no
roots in German traditions? Was it not typical that the
theory of the Jew Einstein should be investigated by the
half-Jew Freundlich from a building which offended so
deeply the decent nationalist traditions? A small point, but
one not to be ignored by any competent rabblerouser.
  Einstein's observations with Freundlich were fitted into
gaps between many other duties. He had an office in the
Academy of Sciences and his work for the Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute took a good deal of time. Under his agreement
with the university he did not have to lecture, but he
nevertheless did so fairly frequently. On these occasions,
as at most other continental universities, attendance was
not restricted to students taking specific courses. Some
came more out of curiosity than scientific interest and it
was easy even for nonstudents to slip in as long as they did
not cause trouble. On more than one occasion a ripple of
anticipation passed through the listeners as a prostitute in
full war paint came in, sat in one of the back rows to see
for herself what the great man was like, and then left as
silently as she had come. Einstein would continue
unchecked; but it was clear from his quizzical half-smile
that he noticed.
  Every Thursday afternoon he attended the special
students physics seminar, watching for talent, listening to
ideas, quite happy if even the youngest member of the
group could suggest a line of thought worth following.
"When my turn came to give a talk, I was terribly
nervous," says Esther Salaman, then a young student in
Berlin.

  Einstein was in the front row, with his pipe; beside him was
von Laue. Turning round after I had pointed to my slides, I saw
in the semi-darkness Einstein looking at me as if to say "Don't
worry." I was talking about some work on radioactivity done at
the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, which raised a difficult
problem. A young lecturer got up and suggested a solution in a
long statement, but I could not follow. Einstein came to my
rescue. "Clever, but not true," he said ("Schlau, aber nicht
wahr"), and he restated the problem, and said what we knew and
did not know about it so clearly and simply that everyone was
satisfied.

  There were also the seminars organized by von Laue at
which the latest scientific papers would be discussed by
Planck, Nernst, Haber, Lise Meitner, or Einstein. These
members of the university staff would occupy the front row
of the old university building in which the meetings were
held. Behind them there often sat physicists from the
larger German industrial companies, invited men whose
presence in the rarefied upper atmosphere of the academic
world was a sign of the cooperation which had
strengthened the country's industrial sinews since the start
of the century.
  Then the talking started. "Sometimes he would step up to
the blackboard," says Professor Cornelius Lanczos, who
was his assistant for a while. "Then, all at once, what had
seemed complicated seemed simple." The transformation
was stimulating. In these early 1920s Einstein was at the
height of his powers as a creative physicist, confident of
his own abilities, still believing that just one more heave
on the intellectual rope would bring victory and an
explanation of the mysteries which clouded the quantum
theory. This position was very comparable to that of the
assured company of physicists who half a century earlier
believed that the natural world by that time contained few
secrets. Before them, only just over the horizon, had lain
Rutherford's nuclear atom; before Einstein lay the
indeterminacy in physics which would end the world he
knew.
  Before him there also lay a fresh and daunting
experience: investigation of the unified field problem, a
problem with which he knew that he was making little or
no progress despite the recurrent but illusory signs of
success. The reason was not merely that the 1920s were
Einstein's forties, and that as they ran out he drew further
away from the magic age at which the creative scientist
in contrast to the artist, who utilizes experience as well as
logicùis usually admitted to have shot his bolt. Einstein
was genius enough to have broken this "finished at forty"
convention as he broke many others. But after 1920
something more was involved. As he turned to the unified
field, his work became increasingly that of the
mathematician rather than the physicist. It was no longer
so much the investigation of the natural world which
presented difficulties as the presentation of known facts
within an adequate mathematical structure. This change of
emphasis came at an unfortunate moment. For the
mathematical stockpile of the preceding century was now
almost exhausted and few mathematicians had been
building a new one. Einstein, moving ever more deeply
into the subject, was for the first time in his life
handicapped by a lack of instruments, of the mathematical
tools which he knew to be essential if the job were to be
tackled properly. Thus in the specialty to which he
increasingly devoted his energies Einstein found himself
blocked in a way he had not previously experienced. Yet
even this was only half the story. For as he turned to
mathematics his old intuitive sense of physics began to fall
away. Like an artist turning to sculpture after a lifetime of
painting, he began to lose the "feel" of the medium he
knew so well. He was still Einstein. He was still head and
shoulders above the rest. But it was to be a shorter head
and shoulders, and in the battle royal over quantum
mechanics that lay only a decade ahead his view was to be
that much more restricted.
  Something of this shows in the photographs. He had
always been the introvert Einstein compared with the
extrovert Rutherford. Nevertheless, until he began to tackle
the unified field seriouslyùand until he found himself
foxed by the developments of quantum mechanicsù he
had much the same confidence as Rutherford, accused of
being on the crest of the wave and answering: "Well, I
made the wave, didn't Iùat least to some extent." The
transformation was noticeable from the mid-1920s
onwards and it was not entirely age or the deepening tones
of the international situation that created it. For the first
time in his life Einstein was getting out of his depth in
scientific waters.
  All this was as yet no more than the smallest cloud on the
horizon. He was still the supreme master rather than the
old master. This comes through clearly in memories of a
seminar on statistical mechanics held for graduate students
in the winter of 1921-22. "I was finishing my doctor's
thesis in mathematics and was probably the only
mathematician in the group," says Max Herzburger, later
one of the world's greatest instrumental opticians.

  Each student who had to give one of the talks was attached to a
professor who helped him prepare his remarks, and I had the
great fortune to be attached to Dr. Einstein. I frequently visited
him and went with him for walks in the nearby park to discuss
the problems of my lecture. The discussions were unforgettable.
He took nothing as certain truth merely because it was written in
books, and he was always asking questions which led to a deeper
understanding of the problem.

  The impression on Denis Gabor, then another young
student, is as vivid now as half a century ago. "I can still
hear his voice," he writes,

  and I could repeat some of his sayings verbatim. On some
occasions he took the floor, and one was particularly
unforgettable. One doctor, who later became very famous as the
theoretician of electrical circuits, but who at that time was a very
shy young man, made rather a bad job of Einstein's famous
elucidation of Planck's law of radiation. Einstein went to the
blackboard and started by saying that the job was to reconcile
Wien's law with Rayleigh's so that they would contradict one
another as little as possible. By the way, he went on, Wien found
his law by noticing how similar the radiation curves are to
Maxwell's law. "You see," he continued, "that the saying of
Oxenstiernù'with how little wisdom the world is governed'ùis
true also in science. What the individual contributes to it is very
little. The whole is of course admirable." He then went on to
give with enormous gusto his dissertation which is found in all
books on physics. I have never known anybody who enjoyed
science so sensuously as Einstein. Physics melted in his mouth!

  Also present on this occasion was the young Hungarian
who became the deus ex machina of Einstein's later years,
an extraordinary character well meriting his sobriquet of
"the gray eminence of physics." This was Leo Szilard, the
man who on March 12, 1934ùmore than four years before
Otto Hahn split the uranium atom, more than five years
before Einstein's famous letter to Rooseveltùapplied for a
patent covering the laws of nuclear chain reaction and
later filed it as a secret Admiralty patent because of his
"conviction that if a nuclear chain reaction can be made to
work it can be used to set up violent explosions." In 1922
Szilard was only twenty-four. But he was a student in
whom Einstein quickly saw "one of those men, rich in
ideas, who create intellectual and spiritual life wherever
they are." He soon became a regular visitor to the
Haberlandstrasse home.
  Both Szilard and Einstein were theoreticians; but both
had a complementary side to their interests, as though a
miniature painter were to take up carpentry as a hobby.
Thus Szilard had a practical inventive flair that tied in
with Einstein's long experience in the Berne Patent Office.
One result was a series of joint patents, lodged in Britain
and the United States as well as in Germany, for what was
then a revolutionary form of heat-exchange refrigerator.
Some recollections claim that Elsa expected Einstein to
make a fortune from the patents; others, more plausibly,
claim that the hopes were Szilard's. Little came of the
scheme although the Einstein-Szilard heat pump, which
provides its essential mechanism, has become a feature of
many postwar nuclear power stations.
  Einstein's self-imposed duties at the university, his
collaboration with Freundlich at the Potsdam observatory,
and his work at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, would have
been enough to occupy the mental energies of a normal
man; to him, they were the background to more important
things. What still concerned him most was any indication
that he, or physicists elsewhere in the world, were
touching things nearer the heart of nature. Thus he was a
familiar figure at conferences, picking out the men he
wanted to meet but dodging the social round. He conferred
with Bohr in Denmark, and was a frequent visitor to
Holland, where he never missed a chance of seeing
Lorentz.
  In Leiden he usually stayed with the Ehrenfests, writing
his name on the huge white wall of the study that did duty
for a visitors' book and relaxing as he did in few other
places.
  In Berlin he would take time off with Max Planck,
carrying his violin round on informal social visitsùas far
as anything could be informal with Planckùand after
dinner enjoying duets with his host as pianist. His small
circle of artists, industrialists, and literary people could
almost be considered cronies. In his own mild way, he
enjoyed good food and drink with a peasant heartiness and
years later looked in astonishment at a colleague who
turned down a glass of wine. "One should not neglect the
pleasures that nature provides," was his comment. Yet
Berlin, with its undercurrent of anti-Semitism, with its
sense of still being the center of a struggle for power
between two diametrically opposed forces, had a near-the
brink atmosphere that was lacking in Holland. In Leiden
Einstein could not only talk physics as easily as draw
breath; here he could still find something of the
nonpolitical atmosphere he had known before his Berlin
days. Here he could be quite uninhibited, quite relaxed
and when he allowed himself to be, Einstein was a good
and total relaxer.
  A former colleague, Margarete Uexkⁿll, had married
Anton Nieuwenhuis, a Dutch government doctor, and was
now a neighbor of the Ehrenfests. She recalls how Einstein
ùperhaps with a cast back to his days in Berneù enjoyed
living in a house where happy-go-lucky Slav hospitality
reigned. "He could sleep when he was tired, and eat when
he was hungry rather than at set mealtimes," she has said.

  There was always a table in the dining room set with milk,
bread, cheese, and fruit. As the Ehrenfest's villa was next to ours
and the two gardens were adjoining, we could not avoid watching
Einstein's daily habits. More than once a day he would pass our
house with his pipe well alight, out along the Rhine and Schie
canal, sometimes in lively conversation with a colleague,
sometimes with the children. When the sun shone he sunbathed
on the terrace, smoking, reading, or just thinking; he could then
take off most of his clothes, since no one could see him from the
street. He was indifferent to material comforts and I once heard
him say: "What more does a human being want? Manuscript,
violin, bed, table, and chair, that is enough."

  He also wanted the company of children, although it was
not in his nature to admit it. Therefore he was a happy
man when he took Ehrenfest's small children and their
companions down to the seacoast dunes a few miles away
and let them bury him up to the neck in the sands without
a trace of concern. He was happy when he stood at the
open windows of Ehrenfest's study on a summer evening,
playing the violin in his shirtsleeves while Ehrenfest
accompanied him on the grand piano in the book-lined
room. How often he must have thought back a decade to
the rejected chance of spending a life in the comparable
quiet of Utrecht, only a few miles away. And yet how often
did he not congratulate himself on keeping his priorities
right, on following his star to Berlin where a combination
of free time and intellectual stimulus had enabled him to
crack the nut of the General Theory.
  Even in Leiden, he could be plucked out of his freedom.
Thus Margarete records one uproarious occasion on which
Einstein and Ehrenfest were awakened by the telephone
from an after-lunch siesta. Queen Wilhelmina, the Prince
Regent, and Emma the Queen-Mother were visiting the
Marine School in Leiden. They had heard that Einstein
was "in residence," and they requested that he and his host
should attend the reception being held later that same day.

  No question or answer was needed to pose the first
problem. Einstein knew that his nearest black suit was five
hundred miles away in Berlin. Ehrenfest knew that his
solitary specimen was lying in a mothproofed trunk in the
attic. Frau Ehrenfest rose to the occasion by telephoning
several professors of Einstein's build and begging them to
have their suits delivered as soon as possible. A few hours
later the two men presented themselves to their Majesties,
Einstein in a suit that fitted where it touched, Ehrenfest
smelling strongly of mothballs.
  This was only the beginning of a difficult evening. After
a formal shaking of hands by the Queen, the two men tried
to disappear in the crowd, duty done, honor satisfied ùand
now to get out of those clothes. They had not gone far
when they were cut off by the Queen-Mother's adjutant
and asked to return. "I noticed that you tried to escape me,
but I managed to catch you," she said, according to the
story that Einstein and his friend told their neighbor.
"Surely you could offer your hand to an old lady too?"
  Einstein's regular visits to Leiden, the amiable round of
work in Berlin, interest in the affairs of Zionism in general
and of the Hebrew University in particular, as well as a
steadily increasing involvement in the problem of world
peace, were all interrupted in 1925 by a lecture tour to
South America. In itself, this was of little importance in
his life. Indirectly, it was of great significance since it
caused him to turn down an invitation to the California
Institute of Technology later in the same year. Had he
accepted, it is unlikely that he would have spent the last
two decades of his life in Princeton.
  There were many reasons why Einstein would have
enjoyed a visit to the United States in 1925, not the least
being that two quite separate but equally important
confirmations of his "heuristic viewpoint" of 1905 had
come from American scientists. The first was given by
Robert Millikan, who as a professor at the University of
Chicago had in 1915 determined the size of the charge on
a single electron. But he had also done something more. "I
spent ten years of my life testing that 1905 equation of
Einstein's," he wrote, "and, contrary to all my
expectations, I was compelled in 1915 to assert its
unambiguous experimental verification in spite of its
unreasonableness, since it seemed to violate everything
that we knew about the interference of light."
  Eight years later Arthur Compton found that when X rays
were scattered by matter the wavelength of some was
lengthened; in other words, their energy was decreased.
The unequivocal way in which this confirmed Einstein's
ideas of two decades previously is made clear in a key
paragraph of the paper describing what soon came to be
known as the Compton effect. "We find," Compton wrote,

  that the wavelength and the intensity of the scattered rays are
what they should be if a quantum of radiation bounced from an
electron, just as one billiard ball bounces from another. Not only
this, but we actually observe the recoiling billiard ball, or
electron, from which the quantum has bounced, and we find that
it moves with just the speed it should if a quantum had bumped
into it. The obvious conclusion would be that X rays, and so also
light, consist of discrete units, proceeding in definite directions,
each unit possessing the energy hv and the corresponding
momentum h??. So in a recent letter to me Sommerfeld has
expressed the opinion that this discovery of the change of
wavelength of radiation, due to scattering, sounds the death knell
of the wave theory of radiation.

  It was not to be quite that. But it was to lead on, easily
enough, to the idea that was to develop during the next few
years: that not only radiation but matter itself might be
both corpuscle and wave.
  Millikan had met Einstein briefly during 1921 in
Chicago.[Discussed elsewhere] Later in the year he moved to
California as head of the Troop College of Technology at
Pasadena, renamed the California Institute of Technology,
and by 1925 he was attracting to it not only a galaxy of
brilliant staff but also as many distinguished visitors as
could be encouraged into his orbit. There was one
particular reason for thinking that Einstein might soon be
among them, quite apart from any general desire to discuss
physics at firsthand with his American counterparts.
  For it was at Mount Wilson Observatory, high in the
Sierra above Pasadena, that Dayton Miller had for years
been carrying out a complex repetition of the Michelson
Morley experiment whose verdict he still hoped to alter. In
the spring of 1921 he announced results which at first
glance appeared to do this. They broke down on
investigation, but four years later he issued further figures.
Einstein's reaction to the second announcement was
shown by a letter to Millikan in June in which he reported
on his unified field theory. "I believe that I have really
found the relationship between gravitation and electricity,
assuming that the Miller experiments are based on a
fundamental error," he said. "Otherwise the whole
relativity theory collapses like a house of cards." Other
scientists, to whom Miller announced his results at a
special meeting, lacked Einstein's qualifications. "Not one
of them thought for a moment of abandoning relativity,"
Michael Polanyi has commented. "Insteadùas Sir Charles
Darwin once described itùthey sent Miller home to get his
results right." Einstein later came round to much the same
view, noting to Millikan in September: "Privately I do not
believe in the accuracy of Miller's results, although I have
no right to say this openly." He would have been further
persuaded by his friend Max Born, who visited Mount
Wilson in the winter of 1925-26, operated Miller's
interferometer and found it very shaky and unreliable. A
tiny movement of the hand, or a slight cough, made the
interference fringes so unstable that no readings were
possible.
  At Mount Wilson there was also Walter S. Adams, who
had some years earlier estimated the phenomenal density
of the companion to Sirius, the star later known as Sirius
B. At the beginning of the century this would have been
considered impossible. But Rutherford, showing that the
atom consisted largely of empty space, had thereby opened
up the possibility of superdense stars in which subatomic
particles were squeezed together in a concentration
unknown on earth. Eddington pointed out soon after the
success of the 1919 eclipse expeditions that such stars
must have extremely intense gravitational fields. If Adams
were correct, the "Einstein shift" exercised by Sirius B
should be thirty times that exercised by the sun, and this
would bring it well within the range of experimental test.
Adams took up the challenge, and by the beginning of
1925 was planning experiments which did eventually show
a shift towards the red. Results were not precisely those
predicted by the General Theory but they were near
enough to be considered as additional confirmation. If the
presence of Millikan as head of Caltech and of Adams at
Mount Wilson was not in itself enough to attract Einstein
to Pasadena, there was also Edwin Hubble, now using the
observatory's 100-inch telescope to open up the study of
the universe beyond the galaxy and raise fresh questions
about the "Einstein world" of general relativity.
  The new institute thus had a general leaning towards the
cosmology that Einstein had forced science to consider.
Eddington had been a visitor in 1924, and it was at a
dinner held in his honor that Professor W. H. Williams,
himself a specialist in relativity, had produced "The
Einstein and the Eddington," a parody of "The Walrus and
the Carpenter," following a round of golf with Eddington.
Recited at a faculty club dinner, it ran as follows:

  The Einstein and the Eddington
  Were counting up their score;
  The Einstein's card showed ninety-eight
  And Eddington's was more,
  And both lay bunkered in the trap
  And both stood up and swore.

  I hate to see, the Einstein said,
  Such quantities of sand;
  Just why they placed a bunker here
  I cannot understand;
  If one could smooth this landscape out,
  I think it would be grand.

  If seven maids with seven mops
  Would sweep the fairway clean
  I'm sure that I could make this hole
  In less than seventeen.
  I doubt it, said the Eddington,
  Your slice is pretty mean.

  . . .

  The time has come, said Eddington,
  To talk of many things;
  Of cubes and clocks and meter-sticks,
  And why a pendulum swings,
  And how far space is out of plumb,
  And whether time has wings.

  I learned at school the apple's fall
  To gravity was due,
  But now you tell me that the cause
  Is merely G mu nu.
  I cannot bring myself to think
  That this is really true.

  . . .

  And space, it has dimensions four,
  Instead of only three.
  The square on the hypotenuse
  Ain't what it used to be.
  It grieves me sore, the things you've done
  To plane geometry.

  You hold that time is badly warped,
  That even light is bent;
  I think I get the idea there,
  If this is what you meant;
  The mail the postman brings today,
  Tomorrow will be sent.

  . . .

  The shortest line, Einstein replied,
  Is not the one that's straight;
  It curves around upon itself,
  Much like a figure eight,
  And if you go too rapidly
  You will arrive too late.

  But Easter day is Christmas time
  And far away is near,
  And two and two is more than four
  And over there is here.
  You may be right, said Eddington,
  It seems a trifle queer.

  Pasadena's concern with relativity was certainly strong
enough to augment Einstein's general interest in the work
of the American physicists, and early in 1925 he
tentatively agreed to visit the institute later in the year.
However, he had previously arranged to visit South
Americaùpartly to lecture at the Argentine State
University, partly in the hope of coaxing money into
Zionist funds from wealthy Jews. He loved the place
"Nature's Paradise," as he described it on a card to Lord
Haldaneùbut was slightly embarrassed by the fulsome
welcome of the German colony which metaphorically
clasped him to its Teutonic bosom. "Strange people, these
Germans," he wrote in his diary after being greeted by the
German ambassador. "I am a foul-smelling flower to them,
yet they keep tucking me in their buttonholes."
  As usual, he did not spare himself. "The journey made
my nerves so bad that the doctor very urgently advises me
not to let myself in for so great an undertaking for several
years," he wrote to Millikan on reluctantly canceling his
visit. Millikan renewed the invitation in 1927. Again
Einstein was forced to decline. He wrote: "I can hardly
consider taking such a journey any more. (From an animal
I have become a vegetable.)
  "I must say that my formal studies during recent years,
though interesting in themselves, have resulted in my
failing to follow very closely the swift march of theoretical
physics. On the other hand, they have not progressed to the
point where I can be certain of their physical fruitfulness.
As for the future, that is only a gamble. So you will
probably not lose much by my failure to come."
  There were other reasons as well and, as was often the
case, they were explained by Elsa, who poured them out in
a typical letter to Millikan. "For days my husband
hesitated," she wrote on September 18.

  Your offer was too generous! Now, after long reflection, he has
to decline after all. With a heavy heart, on account of other
invitations he had received! For instance, Russia and England
have both invited him for years in the heartiest manner. Then, if
he were in California, there would certainly come urgent
invitations from various cities like New York, Chicago, and
others. It would be painful to decline them all. On the other
hand, it could be unpleasant if he went via the Panama Canal
both ways, and avoided New York. Confidentially, my dear
professor, it is too much for him to visit these cities. This
dilemma is so great that he will have to forgo California. And he
would gladly have come! His state of health is very good. But he
must take good care of himself at all times, as he was very ill last
year.

  Thus the link with Pasadenaùand with the work of
Hubble and Hale at Mount Wilson which was dramatically
to affect Einstein's cosmological outlookùdid not begin
until 1930, and was to last a mere three years. Then he
was swept into the arms of Abraham Flexner and the
Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, a development
which would probably not have taken place had his links
with Pasadena been more permanent by that time. The
result was that throughout the later 1920s Einstein
remained in Europe, and for most of the time in Germany,
ever more deeply involved in two major dramas. The first
concerned postwar Germany's struggle first to pull herself
back into European political respectability and then to hold
her positionùa struggle closely linked with her attitude to
rearmament. It was a drama which for Einstein rose to its
climax in 1933 with his decision to remain outside
Germany forever and his breathtaking apostasy of pacifism
that for many disciples had all the horror of a good man
suddenly cutting his own throat.
  Yet this story of Germany between the wars was in some
ways less important for Einstein than the scientific drama
which from now onwards increasingly overshadowed his
life. This concerned the riddle of the dual nature of things,
by this time being extended from radiation to matter itself,
and its solution by a method which led on to the
dethronement of causality, up to now a cornerstone of
physics. For as the physicists of the postwar world began to
explain the duality of nature inherent in Einstein's
conception of the photon, it eventually became difficult to
fault one uncomfortable conclusion: that in the subatomic
world probabilities, rather than events, were all that could
be forecast from any particular set of circumstances. This
was a conclusion against which Einstein battled with
conservative determination, fighting a stubborn rearguard
action and then, when all appeared lost, taking up a stance
which his friend Max Born described as aloof and sceptical
ù"a tragedy, for him, as he gropes his way in loneliness,
and for us who miss our leader and standard bearer."
  The story began during the early 1920s as it became
evident that the great advances in physics started in the
first decade of the century were losing their head of steam.
They had solved individual problems, but they had done
nothing to replace the all-embracing pattern of classical
physics which they had first questioned, then shattered.
Planck's qauntum theory, Einstein's photons, Rutherford's
first ground plan of the nuclear atom and Bohr's
disturbing explanation of itù had each provided isolated
answers to isolated problems. Yet in the process they
seemed to have produced more riddles than they had
solved. "By the spring of 1925," writes Martin Klein, "the
theoretical picture had been elaborated by the work of
many physicists into a tantalizingly incomplete and
confused tangle of successes and failures, so that Wolfgang
Pauli, one of the most acute, and most outspoken, of the
young theorists could write to a friend: 'Physics is very
muddled again at the moment; it is much too hard for me
anyway, and I wish I were a movie comedian or something
like that and had never heard anything about physics.'"
  Yet within a few years the confusions of this situation
had been drastically altered by a fresh picture of the
subatomic world. This new conception which came into
being during the 1920s has been considerably modified
during the last forty years. Yet its fundamentals have stood
the test and have tended to show it as a natural evolution
from the ideas which started with the electron of Lorentz
and J. J. Thomson and were altered and expanded by
Planck, Einstein, Rutherford, and Bohr.
  A fundamental premise of classical physics was that
events followed each other in succession on a basis which
could be predicted if only one understood the laws of
nature and had sufficient facts. Laplace's belief that the
positions and the velocities of all the objects of the
universe would provide sufficient data for a prediction of
the future might be an extravagant illustration. Yet this
was little more than a grand if fantastic extrapolation of
the idea that events could be determined, not only in the
laboratory but throughout the whole range of human
experience. Certain factors in the quantum theory had first
cast a ray of doubt upon this comfortable assumption: the
electron in the Bohr atom, jumping from one orbit to
another without obvious cause, tended to increase this
doubt. Was there, perhaps, no real "cause" for such
movements? Though they could be "predicted" in one
sense of the word, must this forever be merely a statistical
prediction, possible only because of the vast numbers
involved? And if there were no identifiable "cause," if
events at the subatomic level were governed solely by
chance, might this not also be true at other levels? Might
not the whole conception of causality in the universe be
merely an illusion?
  This possibility had already gravely disturbed Einstein. It
had disturbed not only the remnants of his belief in
classical physics, but his sense of rightness in an ordered
and orderly world, and as early as January, 1920, he had
voiced his doubts to Mac Born.[Einstein's preoccupation
with this theme from 1920 until the end of his life is
referred to regularly throughout the long series of letters
published in Briefwechsel 1916-1955 Albert Einstein/Max
Born (Munich, Nymphenburger, 1969; London,
Macmillan, 1970). Some of Einstein's letters to Born have
appeared elsewhere in slightly different translations; for
clarity references are to the collected letters.] "The
question of causality worries me also a lot," he had written
on January 27. "Will the quantum absorption and emission
of light ever be grasped in the sense of complete causality,
or will there remain a statistical residue? I have to confess
that I lack the courage of conviction. However, I should be
very, very loath to abandon complete causality. . . ."
  Thus the new concept of the subatomic world was even
by 1920 beginning to produce a gulf. Bohr, Born, and a
number of Einstein's other contemporaries, as well as
many of the younger men who were in great part
responsible for the new idea readily jumped the gap.
Einstein stayed where he was. Therefore, the scene in
many ways paralleled that into which he had launched his
theory of relativity two decades earlier. But then he had
been in the iconoclastic vanguard; now he took up station
with the small conservative rearguard.
  A chronological account of the story shows revealingly
how two different groups of thinkers, starting to clear the
confusion of the early 1920s from different points of
attack, produced two different concepts of nature which
were quickly synthesized into one, a process which
transformed the newly conceived wave mechanics into the
more embracing quantum mechanics.[Twenty-one of the
key letters by Einstein, Schr÷edinger, Planck, and Lorentz
which deal with this period, together with an illuminating
introduction by Martin J. Klein, are published in Letters
on Wave Mechanics, K. Przibram, ed. (New York,
Philosophical Library, 1967; London, Vision Press,
1967).]
  The first move came in 1923, and it was more directly
linked with Einstein himself than is commonly realized. It
was made by Louis de Broglieùyounger brother of
Maurice de Broglie who had been co-secretary of the First
Solvay Congressùa French physicist who had begun by
studying medieval history, changed to physics in
midstream, and worked on radio during the war. During
his early studies before 1914 de Broglie had been
captivated by relativity. "When, after a long absence, I
returned to my studies with greater maturity at the end of
World War I," he has written, "it was again the ideas of
Einstein" which guided him. "I had a sudden inspiration,"
he says. "Einstein's wave particle dualism was an
absolutely general phenomenon extending to all physical
nature, and, that being the case, the motion of all particles,
photons, electrons, protons, or any others, must be
associated with the propagation of a wave."
  De Broglie outlined this unconventional proposal, "the
suggestion made . . . purely on grounds of intellectual
beauty, to ascribe wave nature to ponderable particles," as
it has been described, in three papers published in the
AcadΘmie des Sciences' Comptes Rendus in 1923. "In the
months that followed," he says, "I did my utmost to
develop and extend my ideas still further in preparation of
my doctoral thesis. Before doing so, I asked Paul
Langevin, who was so well versed in the theory of
relativity and in quantum theory, to examine my
conclusions, and he saw fit to ask me for a second copy
which he proposed to send to Einstein. Einstein quickly
realized that my generalization of his theory of light
quanta was bound to open entirely new horizons to atomic
physics, and wrote back to Langevin saying that I had
'lifted a corner of the great veil.'"
  What was revealed behind the veil was more startling
than the earlier idea that light might be considered as a
collection of particles at one moment and as a series of
waves at another. De Broglie's idea was not of the
either/or variety; instead, he postulated that particles such
as electrons were guided by what were soon to be called
"de Broglie waves" or "matter waves." These waves
produced the interference effects that were familiar to
scientists in their studies of light. Where the interference
effects added up, they produced the "preferred orbits"
which Bohr had already postulated, and within these the
movements of the particles were governed by the laws of
wave propagation.
  While de Broglie was developing this revolutionary idea
for his doctoral thesis, Einstein again came into the
picture. In the summer of 1924 he received from S. N.
Bose, an Indian physicist of Dacca University, a short
paper on "Planck's Law and the Hypothesis of Light
Quanta," which considered radiation as a form of gas
consisting of photons. Einstein was so impressed by the
paper that he himself translated it into German and sent it
to the editor of the Zeitschrift fⁿr Physik, who published it
in July. The reason for his interest was simple. He had
seen immediately that it was possible to extend Bose's
statistical methods to ordinary atomsù "Bose-Einstein
statistics," as they became knownùif it were assumed, as
de Broglie was assuming, that material particles had the
simultaneous wave and particulate properties he himself
had assumed for radiation two decades earlier. "His quick
and immediate response . . . proved ultimately to be the
turning point in my career as a scientist," says Bose today.
  Einstein developed this theme in a two-part paper for the
Prussian Academy. Before he read the second he had
received from his friend Langevin a draft of de Broglie's
doctoral thesis, and he stressed in his paper how useful he
had found de Broglie's ideas. "The scientific world of the
time hung on every one of Einstein's words," de Broglie
has written, "for he was then at the peak of his fame. By
stressing the importance of wave mechanics, the illustrious
scientist had done a great deal to hasten its development.
Without his paper my thesis might not have been
appreciated until very much later."
  This was indeed so. But Einstein's comment on de
Broglie's dissertation had also been noted by Erwin
Schr÷dinger, a thirty-seven-year-old Viennese who was
later to show a remarkable facility for riding across the
frontiers between science and the humanities without
noticing their existence, a man of two cultures who could
claim ironically of later cosmic ray studies that they
promised "the stepped-up realization of the plan to
exterminate mankind which is close to all our hearts."
Schr÷dinger was in no doubt about the debt he owed to
Einstein. "The whole thing," he later wrote to Einstein,
"would certainly not have originated yet, and perhaps
never would have (I mean, not from me), if I had not had
the importance of de Broglie's ideas really brought home
to me by your second paper on gas degeneracy."
  Schr÷dinger now exhibited one of those brief spurts of
concentrated genius which have more than once changed
the face of physics. Within four months he erected the
basic structure of what became known as wave mechanics.
In this, the emphasis of the de Broglie waves on the
electron particle was taken a step further. The particle
itself now gave way to what was, in effect, a standing
electron wave; instead of being a wave-controlled
corpuscle it became a corpuscular wave.
  What had thus occurred within a very few years was a
steady merging of the particle and wave concepts. The
electronùand possibly the other particles about which
physicists were still comparatively ignorantùhad changed
from being either a particle or a wave to being one under
certain circumstances and the other under different
circumstances. Now it appeared that it was both at the
same time. Here it seemed that science had run up not only
against "common sense," which was already suspect when
it began to deal with events in the subatomic world, but
against rational logic. For could anything really be one
thing and its opposite at one and the same time?
  Waiting to provide the answer was Niels Bohr. His
answer was an unqualified "Yes." He said so in the
"principle of complementarity," which proposed that
whether light or electrons were waves or moving particles
depended entirely on the specific properties which were
being investigated; the subject under study had dual
characteristics, and whether it conformed to those we knew
as wavelike properties or to those we knew as particulate
depended solely on how we studied it. Bohr had his own
characteristic way of explaining what he called the poetry
of complementarity, and his disciple L. Rosenfeld
describes how Bohr used a scene in Japan to illustrate it.

  At sunset the top of Fujiyama disappeared behind a curtain of
gold-fringed clouds: the black mass of the mountain, surmounted
by this fulgent crown, conveyed an impression of awe and
majesty. On the next morning, it offered an entirely different
spectacle: the pointed summit alone, covered with shining snow,
emerged from the dense mist filling the valley; the landscape was
radiating gladness and joy. So, Bohr mused, the two half
mountains together are not simply equal to a mountain: to each
belongs a peculiar, individual impression, and the two are
complementary.

  Schr÷dinger's wave mechanics, which was quickly seen
to provide a plausible explanation for much that had not
previously been explicable, was thus credible on the
grounds that reality is what you make it. This was
disturbing enough to those who believed that all ignorance
in science could be removed by an addition of knowledge.
But more was to follow.
  Even before de Broglie and Schr÷dinger had begun to
explain the inner workings of the atom by what was
essentially a physicist's combination of wave and particle
ideas, a totally different approach was being made by
Werner Heisenberg, a German in his early twenties.
Heisenberg started from Mach's assumption that theories
should be based on physically verifiable phenomena, and
in trying to discover the structure of the atom he seized
upon the spectral lines that were the individual
fingerprints of each element's atoms. The wavelengths for
these could be determined by the use of a mathematical
system called matrix mechanics or quantum mechanics.
Thus by 1927 the de Broglie-Schr÷dinger picture of the
electron was being matched by a purely mathematical
explanation of the atom which used the spectral lines as a
starting point but soon abandoned discrete pictorial
representation for a discrete set of numbers.
  These two advances had in fact been along parallel paths.
And they were now brought together by arguments which
effectively showed that both explanations were saying the
same thing in different languages. Schr÷dinger made the
first move in uniting the two ideas and Born carried it
further by providing a statistical interpretation of
Schr÷dinger's wave conception; but he did so only by
admitting that he was dealing with large numbers of
random events and that his results dealt solely with their
probability. The suggestion that a satisfactory picture of
the physical world could consist not of a description of
events but of their probabilities had already been made in
Heisenberg's famous "uncertainty principle." This showed
convincingly that at the subatomic level the mere act of
observation affected what one was observing, and that the
nearer one reached an accurate figure for either the
position or the momentum of a particle, the less accurate
became the figure for the other. Moreover, the uncertainty
in the two factors was found to be linked, as though by a
master craftsman, with a figure which had by this time
become familiar: Planck's constant of the quantum theory,
discovered a quarter of a century earlier.
  At this point, a stage in one of the great dramas of
physics was brought to a satisfactory conclusion. De
Broglie had played his part with Heisenberg. Schr÷dinger
and Born had contributed in equal measure to the new
conception and both, forced to leave Germany a few years
later, were to disagree on its implications. Planck with the
magician's wand of his universal constant, and Einstein
with his power to influence men's minds by example, had
played significant parts. Together they had produced "the
new physics"; now they had to lie on the bed they had
made.
  The significant outcome of these events was, as de
Broglie put it many years later, that quantum physics now
appeared to be

  governed by statistical laws and not by any casual mechanisms,
hidden or otherwise. The "wave" of wave mechanics ceased to be
a physical reality and became a solution of partial differential
equations of the classical type, and thus the means of
representing the probability of certain phenomena taking place.
The corpuscle, too, was turned into a mere phantomùwe can no
longer say "at such an instant a corpuscle will be found in such a
place with such an energy or momentum," but only "at such an
instant there will be such a probability that a corpuscle will be
found at such and such a place." In other words, while a given
experiment can either localize a corpuscle or ascertain its
momentum, it cannot do both.

  There were subtle differences in the manner in which the
physicists involved regarded this central feature of
indeterminacy which occupied a key position in the new
picture of the subatomic world. While Born, Heisenberg,
and Bohr accepted it without qualification, Einstein and
Planck accepted it only with the strongest qualifications.
Yet these two were the very men who a quarter of a
century earlier had pulled into physics the very ideas
which they now thought of as its Trojan horse.
  The break with the old world which this new concept
epitomizes can be illustrated by two statements. One is by
Sir Basil Schonland, who describes the new world in The
Atomists. "It appeared experimentally proven," he says,

  that at the bottom of all phenomena there were to be discerned
laws of chance which made it impossible to think of an ordered
deterministic world; the basic laws of nature appeared to be
fundamentally statistical and indeterminate, governed by the
purest chance. On a large scale they could appear exactly the
reverse but this was only because they involved such a vast
number of events. They had the monumental stability of an
enormous life insurance company though, like it, they rested on
individual uncertainty.

  This was the world now presented, as Max Born put it, to
the generation to which Einstein, Bohr, and he belonged.
It was a generation which had been

  taught that there exists an objective physical world, which
unfolds itself according to immutable laws independent of us; we
are watching this process like the audience watch a play in a
theater. Einstein still believes that this should be the relation
between the scientific observer and his subject. Quantum
mechanics, however, interprets the experience gained in atomic
physics in a different way. We may compare the observer of a
physical phenomenon not with the audience of a theatrical
performance, but with that of a football game where the act of
watching, accompanied by applauding or hissing, has a marked
influence on the speed and concentration of the players, and thus
on what is watched. In fact, a better simile is life itself, where
audience and actors are the same persons. It is the action of the
experimentalist who designs the apparatus which determines
essential features of the observations. Hence there is no
objectively existing situation, as was supposed to exist in
classical physics.

  The distressing position in which Einstein now found
himself was not unique. J. Robert Oppenheimer has
pointed out how "many of the men who have contributed
to the great changes in science have really been very
unhappy over what they have been forced to do," and cites
not only Planck and Einstein but Kepler and de Broglie.
The process is not restricted to physics. Lord Conway,
bemoaning the vulgarisation des Alpes which his own
guidebooks had done so much to bring about, has pointed
out that "each generation makes of the world more or less
the kind of place they dream it should be, and each when
its day is done is often in a mood to regret the work of its
own hands and to praise the conditions that obtained when
it was young."
  So with Einstein. At times he was wryly humorous about
his inability to accept the new world which his colleagues
had created. Philipp Frank visited him in Berlin,
apparently in 1932, and they began to talk of the new
physics. Then, says Frank,

  Einstein said, partly as a joke, something like this: "A new
fashion has now arisen in physics. By means of ingeniously
formulated theoretical experiments it is proved that certain
physical magnitudes cannot be measured, or, to put it more
precisely, that according to accepted natural laws the investigated
bodies behave in such a way as to baffle all attempts at
measurement. From this the conclusion is drawn that it is
completely meaningless to retain these magnitudes in the
language of physics. To speak about them is pure metaphysics."

  And when Frank pointed out to Einstein that he had
invented the fashion in 1905, Einstein answered: "A good
joke should not be repeated too often." More cogently, he
explained to Infeldùthe Pole who had visited him in
Berlin and who was later to join him in the United
Statesù"Yes, I may have started it, but I regarded these
ideas as temporary, I never thought that others would take
them so much more seriously than I did."
  His feelings went deep, and were epitomized in the
famous phraseùlinked with his name as firmly as the
equation E = mc2ùwhich he used in a letter to Max Born
on December 12, 1926. "Quantum mechanics is certainly
imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the
real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring
us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate,
am convinced that He does not throw dice."
  That final remark was altered, repeated, paraphrased, and
was to go round the world. But the central meaning was
clear and unqualifiedùthat, in its usually repeated form,
"God does not play dice with the world." As Einstein put it
years later to James Franck: "I can, if the worst comes to
the worst, still realize that the Good Lord may have
created a world in which there are no natural laws. In
short, a chaos. But that there should be statistical laws
with definite solutions, i.e. laws which compel the Good
Lord to throw the dice in each individual case, I find
highly disagreeable."
  Thus he regarded the statistical laws necessary to explain
the subatomic world as merely second-best; he could not
accept them as the fundamental laws of physical reality
these, he believed, should determine events themselves
rather than their probabilities. In time, when much more
had been learned, it would be possible to throw overboard
the current, purely statistical, explanations and replace
them with something better. More satisfactory laws would
be discoveredùeventually men would find out how a non
dice-throwing God had made the world.
  This was the stance which he took up in the late 1920s.
He retained it, almost unchanged, to the end of his life. He
has rarely described it more clearly than in a letter he
wrote to Herbert Samuel in October, 1937, after the
publication of Samuel's Belief and Action. "You have
rightly underlined that these [statistical] physicists do not
distinguish between observed and objectively existing
facts," he said.

  There is no causality regarding the first; to have shown this is
one of their greatest merits. Whether the objective facts are
subject to causality is a question, the answer to which necessarily
depends on the theory from which we start. Therefore, it will
never be possible to decide whether the world is causal or not.
Up to now we possess for the description of atomic events only a
statistical theory. But if we should succeed in constructing a
theory of deterministic character, based on less independent
suppositions than the present statistical physics, nobody will
insist in sustaining the latter as the base of physics. I must
confess that I am convinced that this possibility will be realized.
It ought also to be noted that the statistical quanta mechanics do
cover or explain neither all the recognized partial results of our
present theoretical physics nor all recognized empirical facts. It is
therefore an uncritical attitude to declare the statistical character
of nature to be a fact. It may only be excused by the fact that up
to now we do not have any other theory.

  The formulation of this new idea of the subatomic world
took place between the publication of de Broglie's papers
in 1924, and the summer and autumn of 1927 which saw
the publication of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and
the exposition of Bohr's complementarity principle. But
most physicists still retained qualifications. Most realized
that in matters of this sort there is no finality and that the
solution of one set of problems usually produces another;
most realized that it would be unwise to take up too
dogmatic a stance. Then, in October, they were forced out
of their corners, compelled to stand up and be counted, to
state their loyalties. The occasion was the Fifth Solvay
Congress in 1927. Together with the Sixth, which was
held three years later in 1930, it marked a notable change
in Einstein's position in the scientific world.
  The general subject of discussion at the Fifth Congress
was "Electrons and Photons," and the list of speakers and
papers made it clear that differing views of the wavelike or
corpuscular nature of matter would be hammered out
energetically; so, it was equally clear, would the
underlying riddle of causality versus indeterminacy, that
ghost which European physicists had raised and which
now looked over their shoulders wherever they went.
Lorentz came from Holland, Sir William Bragg with his
son Lawrence from England, Arthur Compton from the
United States, Born and Heisenberg from G÷ttingen,
Einstein from Berlin, Schr÷dinger from Stuttgart, and de
Broglie from Paris. And from Copenhagen there came
Bohr, anxious to explain his complementarity principle,
strongly supported by Heisenberg. "At the Solvay
meetings," Bohr later wrote, "Einstein had from their
beginning been a most prominent figure, and several of us
came to the conference with great anticipations to learn his
reaction to the latest stage of the development which, to
our view, went far in clarifying the problems which he had
himself from the outset elicited so ingeniously."
  At the start of the conference, Bohr threw down the
gauntlet with an account of the epistemological problems
presented by the latest developments in physics. He agreed
that certainty had been removed from the subatomic world,
that there was now, as he put it elsewhere, the
impossibility of any sharp separation between the behavior
of atomic objects and the interaction with the measuring
instruments which serve to define the conditions under
which the phenomena appear." This meant that the wave
or particle concept was determined by the type of
experiment. Yet even when it had been decided to study
the wave or the particle characteristics, Heisenberg's
uncertainty principle still masked an exact picture of what
nature was like. The trapdoor of indeterminacy had been
opened and those involved would have to make the best
they could of it.
  Einstein made very little. Strangely perhaps, he read no
paper at the Fifth Congressùin fact, it is usually
overlooked that his account of specific heats in 1911 is the
only Solvay paper he ever did read. But when those
attending the congress met after the sessions in the
Fondation Universitaireùthe university club founded after
the First World War with the residue of the Hoover
Fundù Einstein came out into the open. He still disliked
uncertainty and Bohr's complementarity, and he bluntly
said so.
  Then the discussion opened out. Lorentz did his best to
give the floor to only one speaker at a time. But everyone
felt strongly. Everyone wanted to put his own view. There
was the nearest thing to an uproar that could occur in such
distinguished company, and in the near confusion
Ehrenfest moved up to the blackboard which successive
speakers had used and wrote on it: "The Lord did there
confound the language of all the earth."
  On that and following evenings, Bohr made abortive
attempts to convince Einstein of his views. Ingenious
experiments were postulated by Einstein, in which it was
sought to show that with the right equipment all the
characteristics of an electron could theoretically be
discovered. Each time Bohr proved that this was not so.
Both sides stuck to their guns. Einstein maintained that the
statistical nature of the quantum theory and the apparent
impossibility of discovering all the characteristics of
physical reality that sprang from it was merely the result of
ignorance. In due course physicists would be able not
merely to estimate the probability of an event happening
but to discover whether it would happen. Bohr, and the
many who supported him, claimed that indeterminacy was
here a part of nature itself.
  Strong passions and strong loyalties were aroused even
though "a most humorous spirit animated the discussions,"
according to Bohr.

  On his side, Einstein mockingly asked us whether we could
really believe that the providential authorities took recourse to
dice playing [. . . ob der liebe Gott wⁿrfelt], to which I replied by
pointing at the great caution, already called for by ancient
thinkers, in ascribing attributes to Providence in everyday
language. I remember, also, how at the peak of the discussion
Ehrenfest, in his affectionate manner of teasing his friends,
jokingly hinted at the apparent similarity between Einstein's
attitude and that of the opponents of relativity theory; but
instantly Ehrenfest added that he would not be able to find relief
in his own mind before concord with Einstein was reached.

  Schr÷dinger attempted to provide a causal interpretation
for wave mechanics and de Broglie proposed what he
described as a "double solution," which some felt tried to
make the best of both worlds. But at the end of the day the
field was occupied by Born, Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, and
Dirac whose statistical interpretations fitted in with the
new uncertainty principle and all that went with it.
  Throughout all this Einstein remained Einstein. "During
a fairly long walk, he made a profound impression on me
and fully confirmed my faith in him," writes de Broglie,
whose papers had started the avalanche.

  I was particularly won over by his sweet disposition, by his
general kindness, by his simplicity, and by his friendliness.
Occasionally, gaiety would gain the upper hand and he would
strike a more personal note and even disclose some detail of his
day-to-day life. Then again, reverting to his characteristic mood
of reflection and meditation, he would launch into a profound
and original discussion of a variety of scientific and other
problems. I shall always remember the enchantment of all those
meetings, from which I carried away an indelible impression of
Einstein's great human qualities.

  To de Broglie, Einstein revealed an instinctive reason for
his inability to accept the purely statistical interpretation of
wave mechanics. It was a reason which linked him with
Rutherford, who used to state that "it should be possible to
explain the laws of physics to a barmaid." Einstein, having
a final discussion with de Broglie on the platform of the
Gare du Nord in Paris, whence they had traveled from
Brussels to attend the Fresnel centenary celebrations, said
"that all physical theories, their mathematical expressions
apart, ought to lend themselves to so simple a description
'that even a child could understand them.'" And what
could be less simple than the statistical interpretations of
wave mechanics?
  None of the protagonists was willing to let go this
particular argument and it was taken up with renewed
vigor when the next Solvay Congress was held in 1930.
The central problem still revolved round the one question:
Was it, or was it not, theoretically possible to ascertain the
position of a particle and also its momentum at one
specific moment?
  In 1930 Einstein proposed a "thought-experiment"ù one
that was theoretically possible even if ruled out by
experimental limitations. The proposal was to enclose light
within a mirror-lined box which was weighed. One photon
would be automatically released by a time-control
mechanism within the box, which would then be weighed
again. From the change in mass it would be possible, using
Einstein's equation, to calculate the energy or momentum
of the photon which was released at one specific moment.
At first, and even at second glance, Einstein appeared to
have an unbreakable case. Only the following day did Bohr
realize that Einstein had overlooked one thing: the effect
of the weighing on the clock.
  There have been many explanations of the results of this
exchange but none clearer than that given by Barbara
Cline, and it is worth quoting in full. "Bohr's reasoning
applied to any method of weighing," she says.

  but to illustrate that reasoning most clearly he chose to imagine
that Einstein's box of light was hung on a spring from a rigid
scale. Thus when a photon was released the box would move in
recoil. Its vertical position in relation to the earth's surface would
change and therefore its position within the earth's gravitational
field. According to the General Theory of Relativity, this change
in spatial position would mean a change in the rate of the clock,
preset and attached to the box. The change would be extremely
small but in this case crucial. For due to a chain of inevitable
uncertainties: the uncertainty of the escaping photon's direction,
therefore of the box's recoil, therefore of its position within the
earth's gravitational field, the precise time when the photon was
released from the box could not be determined. It was indeed
indeterminable to the extent given by Heisenberg's lawùthe
cornerstone of the Copenhagen interpretation. This was the way
Bohr answered the serious challenge of Einstein, who had
forgotten to apply his own General Theory of Relativity.

  The argument, which had really started seven years
earlier and had changed the face of physics, involved two
separate but linked questions: Was matter as well as
radiation wavelike and yet corpuscular as well, depending
only on how it was considered; and were the laws of the
subatomic world the indeterminate laws of statistics? The
first of these problems had the greater practical effect on
the scientific world, and Sir William Bragg, the director of
the Royal Institution who had been present at the 1927
Congress, had once commented: "On Mondays,
Wednesdays, and Fridays we teach the wave theory and on
Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays the corpuscular
theory." Forty years on, the synthesis had been made.
"Everything that has already happened is particles,
everything in the future is waves," states Sir Lawrence
Bragg, Sir William's son and in turn the director of the
same institution. "The advancing sieve of time coagulates
waves into particles at the moment 'now.'" On this
Einstein had moved in step, seeing the contradiction as
one with which he could cope, a contradiction of common
sense no less amenable to reason than the apparent
contradictions of relativity.
  Indeterminacy was a riddle at a different level, more
fundamental and, as far as Einstein was concerned, more
important. Here his discomfitureùand it cannot be called
less, however much his colleagues tried to soften the
blowùended the first series of battles in the long
campaign he was to wage. They had altered his status in a
small but certain way. His touch was as sure as ever, but it
belonged to a previous age.
  The gap remained throughout the years. At the height of
the initial debate, early in 1927, Einstein showed his
feelings at the end of a message to the Newton celebrations
in England, concluding with the hope: "May the spirit of
Newton's method give us the power to restore unison
between physical reality and the profoundest characteristic
of Newton's teachingùstrict causality." Years afterwards
he was just as hopeful. And in 1944, in a letter to Born, he
put down what Born has described as "probably the best
and most lucid formulation of Einstein's point of view." In
this he said:

  You believe in the God who plays dice, and I in complete law
and order in a world which objectively exists, and which I, in a
wildly speculative way, am trying to capture. I firmly believe, but
I hope that someone will discover a more realistic way, or rather
a more tangible basis than it has been my lot to do. Even the
great initial success of the quantum theory does not make me
believe in the fundamental dice game, although I am well aware
that our younger colleagues interpret this as a consequence of
senility.

  He hoped on to the end. Just how little his hopes were
justified is shown by Max Born, speaking three months
after Einstein's death, at the conference held in Berne to
celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Special Theory.

  A man of Einstein's greatness, who has achieved so much by
thinking, has the right to go to the limit of the a priori method.
Current physics has not followed him; it has continued to
accumulate empirical facts, and to interpret them in a way which
Einstein thoroughly disliked. For him a potential or a field
component was a real natural object which changed according to
definite deterministic laws. Modern physics operates with wave
functions which, in their mathematical behavior, are very similar
to classical potentials, but do not represent real objects. They
serve for determining the probability of finding real objects,
whether these are particles, or electromagnetic potentials, or
other physical quantities.

  A number of reasons can be adduced for the way which
Einstein thus began to slip from the mainstream of physics
during the later 1920s. It can be claimed that the gemlike
flame burned a little less gemlike as he diverted his
energies into pacifism, the needs of the Hebrew University
in Jerusalem, or the requirements of the Jewish Agency.
Just as tenably, it can be argued that he spent more time in
such pursuits because he felt his powers diminishing. More
plausibly, it can be attributed to concentration on
mathematics, so essential to his work on the unified field
theory.
  Yet the opposition which he maintained so stubbornly
towards the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics was not
based entirely on his inability to "see" it as he had "seen"
many other innovations in physics. It was based on
something more fundamental, upon an interior assumption
about the world that had much more resemblance to
religious faith than to the ever-questioning scepticism of
science. Einstein believed that the universe had been
designed so that its workings could be comprehensible;
therefore these workings must conform to discoverable
laws; thus there was no room for chance and
indeterminacy ùGod, after all, did not play the game that
way. At a different level he stressed these beliefs in an
interview in October, 1929, when the argument about
quantum mechanics was at its height. "I claim credit for
nothing," he said, at a mention of his modesty.
"Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the
end, by forces over which we have no control. It is
determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human
beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a
mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible
piper."
  Although he felt so strongly about the problem which was
to cut him off from his colleagues, Einstein still laid the
cards fairly on the table, sometimes with an objectivity that
tended to mask his feelings. This was shown when, early
in 1928, he lectured at Davos in Switzerland. He was very
vulnerable to any call from that country and responded to
an appeal that was to have important repercussions. The
first was a serious breakdown in health. Then, as a result
of this, there came employment of Helen Dukas, a young
German woman who for the next quarter of a century was
to be his secretary, general factotum, and, after the death
of Elsa, dedicated watchdog.
  The appeal came from the Davoser Hochschule, which
was starting university courses for young men and women
in the surrounding sanatoria. Treatment in these meant a
break from regular studies, usually for months and often
for years; but special courses could alter all that, and the
Davos authorities appealed for specialist teachers to give
their services for a few weeks late in March. Einstein
responded readily enough. The opening ceremonies on
March 28 were followed by a series of study groups held in
the Kurhaus; by discussions; and by a concert of chamber
music given for the benefit of the school. He
enthusiastically took part in everything, willingly agreeing
to play the violin in an ad hoc trio with cellist and pianist,
and on the night of the concert was one of the star turns.
Not least enjoyed by the audience was the sight of Einstein
himself, refusing to bow but taking the music score, then
bending it forward so that it was Schubert who
acknowledged the applause.
  His lecture was on "Fundamental Concepts of Physics
and Their Most Recent Changes," and there was no doubt
as to what he considered these were: "Today faith in
unbroken causality is threatened precisely by those whose
path it had illumined as their chief and unrestricted leader
at the front, namely, by the representatives of physics," he
noted. "To understand this drift, which deserves the
greatest interest of all thinking men, we must take a bird's
eye view of the development of the fundamental concepts
of physics up to the present time." He went on to outline
Newtonian mechanics and to describe how relativity had
welded together both Newton's ideas and the more recent
ideas of the field theory and had shaken the fundamental
concepts of time and space. But now doubt had been
thrown on the theory of strict causality, which had
previously remained untouched. "We reach here," he went
on, "a complication of questions with which the modern
generation of physicists is struggling in a gigantic display
of intellectual power."
  Then he tackled the difficult task of putting across to his
nonspecialist audience, in simple terms, how the latest
theories which explained the structure of the atom
succeeded in doing so only at the sacrifice of strict
causality. "All natural laws," he admitted, "are therefore
claimed to be, 'in principle,' of the statistical variety and
our imperfect observation practices alone have cheated us
into a belief in strict causality." Finally he noted that the
new theory explained not only radiation but matter by a
combination of corpuscular and wave ideas. "We stand
here before a new property of matter for which the strictly
causal theories hitherto in vogue are unable to account," he
concluded. But his scientific instinct was against accepting
this; as he was to maintain to the end of his life, the
theories which invoked indeterminacy were forced to do so
only because of man's ignorance.
  With the Hochschule course behind him, Einstein
accepted an invitation to stay at Zuoz, in the neighboring
Lower Engadine, with Willy Meinhardt. During the visit
he was called to Leipzig to give evidence as an expert
witness in a patent dispute between the Siemens Company
and the A.E.G., whose former president had been his
friend Walther Rathenau.
  He returned from Leipzig to Zuoz unexpectedly.
Typically, he refused to let a porter carry his heavy
suitcase. The result of the walk over slippery snow was an
unexpected collapse which revealed a delicate heart. "The
P.T. adepts have declared that it wouldn't have happened
if Einstein had kept himself in constant trim by regular
exercises," Dr. Plesch has written.

  Up to a point no doubt there is something in what they say.
Einstein never took any exercise beyond a short walk when he
felt like it (which wasn't often, because he has no sense of
direction, and therefore would seldom venture very far afield),
and whatever he got sailing his boat, though that was sometimes
quite arduousùnot the sailing exactly, but the rowing home of a
heavy yacht in the evening calm when there wasn't a breath of
air to stretch the sails. The Zuoz incident was therefore, as
Einstein freely admits, perhaps the last of quite a series of
overexertions.

  Einstein himself, writing to Plesch, noted that the main
cause of the trouble had really been "the oar of a difficult
sailing boat in an evening calm."
  The results were serious enough. He was moved back to
Berlin in easy stages. The details of the heart trouble
remained unclear. Numerous remedies were sought. All
were unsuccessful. Finally Janos Plesch tried his hand.
  Dr. Plesch was four years older than Einstein, a wealthy
Hungarian who had built up in Berlin a successful and
fashionable medical practice. With a fine town house in
Berlin and an equally fine country estate at Gatow, with an
intimate circle of acquaintances in the diplomatic and
theatrical world, Plesch was in character the complete
opposite of Einstein. What united the two men was not
only Plesch's diagnostic success, which dented Einstein's
built-in scepticism of doctors; there was also his interest in
the world of art and letters and his love for splendid living,
which had already touched Einstein's innate if usually
suppressed love of good food and drink.
  Plesch quickly diagnosed inflammation of the walls of the
heart, put his patient on a salt-free diet, and eventually
packed him off with Elsa and her two daughters, Ilse and
Margot, to a small seaside resort on the Baltic coast north
of Hamburg. Here he recuperated. But it was a slow
business, not helped by the fact that he continued sailing
until Plesch put a stop to it.
  As a result of the illness he was deprived of his normal
secretarial help at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and the
university, and before he left Berlin to recuperate was
obliged to engage a secretary for work at home. Newspaper
advertisements were ruled out since they would produce a
glut of useless replies. Elsa mentioned the problem to Rosa
Dukas, executive secretary of the Jewish Orphan
Organization of which she was the honorary president;
Miss Dukas proposed her sister Helen, who had recently
left a publisher.
  Helen Dukas, who presented herself at No. 5,
Haberlandstrasse, on Friday, April 13, was competent and
diffident in almost equal parts. She had at first rejected her
sister's suggestion. She knew nothing of physics; she felt it
would all be beyond her; but she was persuaded to give the
work a chance. "The professor lay reading in bed," she has
said of their first meeting. "When he looked up and saw
me he stretched out his hand and said smilingly: 'Here lies
an old corpse.' At that moment all my fear fell away from
me, although even then I was not sure whether I would be
able to work for him." She continued to do so, with
increasing duties that eventually turned her into both
secretary and housekeeper, until Einstein's death twenty-
seven years later.
  Her first task was to find a substitute for him at the
coming meeting in Geneva of the International
Commission on Intellectual Cooperation. For his work on
this, like his work for the pacifist causes which he
supported, and for the Zionists, was now to suffer a
temporary interruption. He had already achieved mixed
results in these fields when he began his fiftieth yearùand
as Germany moved on toward the time, little more than a
year away, when rising unemployment, the support of
industrialists who feared communism, and the creation of
a scapegoat in the shape of the Jews, would together
transform Hitler's National Socialists into the second
largest party in the country.

CHAPTER 13

THE CALL OF PEACE

Einstein's breakdown of 1928 put a rein on his activities
for a time. But he was not a man to spare himself longer
than necessary and as soon as possible was working once
more in the pacifist cause which he had vigorously
supported since 1914. He had long been a staunch
upholder of the German League for Human Rights which
the Bund Neues Vaterland had become, and from his
sickbed was soon sending regular notes to its secretary
general, Kurt Grossmann, asking for information or giving
advice. And shortly after his recovery he was persuaded to
make a gramophone record of "My Credo" in which his
soft kindly voice outlined his pacifist beliefs as though they
were something that any sensible man must agree with.
  Before the war Einstein had taken no part in the pacifist
movements centered on Switzerland. His interests were
strictly circumscribed by physics in those days and he
concerned himself as little with the problems of politics
and power as with Zionism until he saw, from Berlin, the
convulsions that war produced, the eagerness with which
his colleagues leaped to service, and the disruption that
war caused to the grand international machinery of
science. Then, like thousands of others, he was swept up
emotionally, without giving much thought to the practical
results of what he was doing. "My pacifism is an
instinctive feeling, a feeling that possesses me because the
murder of men is disgusting," he once explained to Paul
Hutchinson, editor of the Christian Century. "My attitude
is not derived from any intellectual theory but is based on
my deepest antipathy to every kind of cruelty and hatred. .
. . I am an absolute pacifist." In an introduction to a
handbook on pacifism, Die Friedensbewegung, he declared
that "a human being who considers spiritual values as
supreme must be a pacifist." More poignantly in the light
of future events, he later told Die Wahrheit of Prague that
if another war broke out he would "unconditionally refuse
to do war service, direct or indirect, and would try to
persuade my friends to take the same stand, regardless of
how the cause of the war should be judged." Not long
afterwards he was persuading his friends to do the reverse.
  During the first postwar years pacifists had strong
popular support, not only in Germany, but throughout a
continent exhausted by four years of bloodletting. Thus
Einstein for once marched with the crowd rather than
against it. But national ambitions and strengths returned.
As the price of war became blurred by time and by the
jollifications of regimental reunions, so did support for the
martyrdom of pacifism ebb away. By contrast, Einstein's
beliefs, explained whenever he found the opportunity in a
plethora of interviews, statements, and articles, remained
rock hard throughout the 1920s.
  Mingled with these pacifist appeals were calls first for
European government and later for world government.
Implicit in most of them was the presumption of force or
the threat of force if such governments were to survive, but
Einstein came only reluctantly and slowly to the point
where he would admit that this was the case. In the early
1920s it was a natural enough evolution for those so
removed from affairs that they genuinely believed in
appeal to international goodwill would work. But the
reluctance to admit that to "fight for peace" was in pacifist
terms more than a contradiction of words helped to keep
the League of Nations impotent, handed the best cards to
the potential aggressor, and paved the way for Hitler.
Einstein himself eventually saw as much and in 1936
could admit that "it is no exaggeration to say that the
British and, to some extent, French pacifists are largely
responsible for the desperate situation today because they
prevented energetic measures from being taken at a time
when it would have been relatively easy to adopt them."
Before 1933 no one was more energetic in the process than
Einstein himself.
  However, in the immediate postwar years, it was the
League on which the hopes of peace rested. Einstein
therefore supported the League. Or, more accurately, he
supported it until experience rubbed him up against it at
close quarters. Then disillusion quickly set in. He was
surprised that miracles were not worked overnight and
shocked that when human beings began to manage great
affairs of state they still behaved like human beings. After
that, his support of the League had increasingly to be
propped up by his friends.
  He had returned to Berlin from France only a few weeks
when, on May 17, 1922, he was invited by Sir Eric
Drummond, secretary general of the League, to become a
member of the International Committee on Intellectual
Cooperation[The English title was International
Committee on Intellectual Cooperation; the French was
Commission internationale de cooperation intellectuelle.
Both sides often swapped "Committee" and "Commission"
as the spirit moved themùand in even official letters
dropped the "intellectual."] then being formed. The
committee was the brainchild of Henri Bergson and was to
represent, said Gilbert Murray, a subsequent chairman,
"the deeper spirit of the League." In many ways it was an
ancestor of UNESCO, which sprang from the United
Nations after the Second World War, and its members
were appointed, in the words of the undersecretary general,
"not as representatives of their respective countries but on
account of their personal achievements. At the same time,
the council endeavored as far as possible to give
representation on the committee to the big cultural groups
of the world. In this sense, therefore, each member may be
said to represent a certain culture, though he does not sit in
the committee as the official representative of any country
in particular." This ingenious explanation, given in 1924
in reply to an inquirer who asked whether Einstein
represented Germany on the committee, covered a delicate
point, since Germany had not then joined the League.
Einstein was, in fact, brought onto the committee "as a
representative of German science," although it is not clear
whether he himself really appreciated the fact.
  The invitation to serve was the final move in a long series
of negotiations. Some French officials objected to having a
German on the committee; the Germans who clung to the
periphery of the League claimed brusquely that Einstein
was not a German but merely a Swiss Jew. A subsequent
difficulty, Gilbert Murray has stated, was provided by
Einstein's own mistrust of the committee as a body formed
by the victors. But "a conversation with leading members
very soon satisfied him as to our real international and
peaceful spirit."
  Einstein therefore replied by return to Drummond's
invitation of May, 1922. "Although I am not clear at all as
to the character of the work to be done by the committee, I
consider it my duty to accept your invitation. In my
opinion, no one, in times such as these, should refuse to
take part in any effort made to bring about international
cooperation." Shortly afterwards he wrote to Madame
Curie, who had also been asked to serve. "Although it is
not clear to me what the commission will be able to
achieve, I nevertheless accepted after brief consideration,"
he said. "Somewhere in the background there must surely
be the idea of building up international understanding;
whether we can gain any influence depends of course on
how we handle things. It would really give me pleasure if
you also would accept, as I know there is complete
understanding between us." Einstein's acceptance gave the
officials of the League much satisfaction. For while
Madame Curie, Lorentz, Paul PainlevΘ, and Gilbert
Murray were to be members, Einstein was the keystone of
the arch.
  However, the League was to pay a price for its
acquisition. Einstein's "purity of heart," as Murray
described it, the fact that he was so "very reluctant to
believe evil," his inability or unwillingness to admit that
whatever the fine intentions of the League, it had to
operate in the world of fallible men, combined to limit his
usefulness. This much is clear from the files. It should not
create surprise. One of Einstein's sincerest admirers, the
late Morris Raphael Cohen, made the point when he
reviewed Einstein's The World As I See It in the Menorah
Journal. "The example of the incomparable Newton, as
well as of contemporaries like Millikan and Eddington,
should warn us against assuming that those who achieve
great things in physical science will necessarily display
unusual wisdom in politics and religion," he said. "It is not
merely that devotion to science leaves little time to acquire
comparable knowledge on these more complicated
subjects. When Harvey suggested that Newton pay less
attention to his theosophic and theologic speculations, the
latter proudly rebuked him: 'Sir, I have given these
subjects prolonged study.' But the result of this study, as
seen in Newton's commentary on the Book of Daniel and
on the Apocalypse, is a striking indication of how highly
specialized is human genius." Perhaps, more accurately,
how specialized it can be. At least two of the geniuses on
the Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, Lorentz and
Madame Curie, showed no trace of the vacillations and
contradictions with which Einstein was to spread alarm
and despondency among his colleagues.
  The first of these came less than two months after his
acceptance. On July 1, Einstein wrote a brief letter to
Pierre Comert, head of the Information Secretariat at the
League, brusquely stating that he felt it necessary to resign
from the committee, whose first meeting was to be held
late in the summer. No reason was given, although in an
accompanying note Einstein expressed concern that the
situation in Berlin was such that a Jew was well advised to
exercise restraint about taking part in politics. In addition,
he added, somewhat irrelevantly since his appointment
was still on an international rather than a national basis: "I
have no desire to represent people who certainly would not
choose me as their representative, and with whom I find
myself in disagreement on the questions to be dealt with.
..."
  To Madame Curie Einstein wrote in more detail,
explaining that he was resigning not only because of the
murder of Rathenau[Discussed elsewhere] but because of anti
Semitism in Berlin and his feeling that he was "no longer
the right person for the job." The reply was both to the
point and rather tart. "Dear Mr. Einstein," she said,

  I have received your letter, which has caused me a great
disappointment. It seems to me that the reason you give for your
abstention is not convincing. It is precisely because dangerous
and prejudicial currents of opinion do exist that it is necessary to
fight them and you are able to exercise, to this extent, an
excellent influence, if only by your personal reputation which
enables you to fight for toleration. I think that your friend
Rathenau, whom I judge to have been an honest man, would have
encouraged you to make at least an effort at peaceful, intellectual
international collaboration. Surely you can change your mind.
Your friends here have kind memories of you.

  While Madame Curie was writing to Einstein on a
personal basis, the officials of the League had been thrown
into despair, and desperate efforts to retrieve the situation
were being made by the secretary of the committee. This
was Nitobe, a Japanese Samurai, born with the right to
wear two swords, whose philosophic journey was to lead
him into the ranks of the Quakers. On receiving Einstein's
resignation Nitobe had cabled to Murray: "Einstein resigns
giving no reasons stop important to have him stop fear his
resignation will have bad effect stop grateful if you can use
your influence." He also appealed to Bergson, who said
that he had no personal contacts with Einstein but made an
ingenious suggestion: "It is my belief that since the
Committee of Intellectual Cooperation is now properly
constituted, the resignation of one of its members cannot
become definitive until the committee has accepted it.
Therefore, before we meet you can ask Einstein to
reconsider his decision." The League officials clutched
gratefully at this straw and Comert was dispatched to
Berlin, where he met Einstein on July 27 and 28. His
account of the interviews is revealing.
  "I explained to you," he subsequently wrote to Einstein,

  that your sudden and motiveless retreat would gravely prejudice
the Committee of Intellectual Cooperation since the public would
be able to put a bad interpretation on your sudden decision to
withdraw your collaboration.
  With great sincerity, and in all confidence, you then told me
of the particular distressing reasons which induced you to
consider your resignation.
  I was very impressed by them. We will ignore entirely these
circumstances. I told you that the difficulties of your personal
position in Germany appeared to me so considerable that the
members of the Council of the League of Nations would
never, in my opinion, have dared to appeal to you if they had
suspected that this appointment would make your position in
Berlin even more critical.
  Then we examined together, in complete confidence, if it
would be advisable in these conditionsùnew to meùto
confirm your resignation. Although very anxious to assure
your collaboration with the Committee of Intellectual
Cooperation, I do not think that I put any excessive insistence
on your rejoining us. I understand very well that the
committee could not lightly assume the responsibility of
hindering the work of a man such as yourself by attracting to
him personally serious sources of irritation.
  However, before my departure from Berlin, and with a spirit
which I sincerely admire, you told me that you were giving up
all thought of resignation. The work of the League of Nations,
you told me, was so dear to your heart that for it you were
ready to accept certain risks rather than compromise, by an
inexplicable resignation, the task of the committee. At one
point during our interview I recall that concerning this you
alluded to the eventuality, on your return from Japan, of a
change in your domicile in order to ensure the peace and
security of your work.
  At the end of our conversations you wrote anew, on July 29,
to the secretary general. Your preparations for leaving for
Japan prevented you from attending the first meeting of the
Committee of Intellectual Cooperation but you declared that
upon your return your collaboration would be even more
zealous, thus making up, in some fashion, for the loss of time
occasioned by your absence. It was with this friendly letter
that you left us for the Far East.

  The committee held its first session in Geneva in August,
and the official report explained that "Professor A.
Einstein was prevented from assisting in the work of the
committee owing to his absence on a scientific mission to
Japan."
  In fact Einstein did not leave for Japan until some
months later and at the end of August he was writing to
Lord Haldane from Berlin in support of a solution to the
reparations problem put forward in the Berliner Tageblatt.
He noted that "from French friends I understand that
PoincarΘ would not be completely opposed to such a plan
but that on the English side there would be inherent
opposition," and concluded: "Meanwhile I ask you please
to ensure that my name is not made public in this affair."
  He sailed for Japan with his wife in October, 1922,
having failed to obtain a substitute to serve on the
committee until his return. To Geneva he explained that
one professor had waited until it was too late before
accepting and that another had been on holiday. Most
professors who could honestly be said to represent German
science were obviously reluctant to aid a League from
which Germany was still excluded.
  Einstein's absence, extended by a visit to Palestine, and a
return to Germany by way of Madrid, continued until
February, 1923, and it was only late in March that he
returned to Berlin. He had not been in touch with the
League. But, hearing indirectly that he was on his way
home, its officials now expected that he would make
preparations as promised for attending the session of the
committee due to start in July. They were to be startlingly
disappointed.
  On his way to Berlin, Einstein broke his journey in
Zurich. And here, on March 21, he wrote to the League
resigning from the committee yet again. A copy of his
letter was, moreover, immediately made available to the
Nouvelle Gazette de Zurich, in whose columns the League
officials were able to read it the following morningùwhile
the letter itself was presumably still passing through their
administrative machinery.
  "I have recently become convinced that the League of
Nations has neither the force nor the goodwill [la bonne
volontΘ] necessary for the accomplishment of its task," it
said. "As a convinced pacifist it does not seem to me to be
a good thing to have any relations whatsoever with it. I ask
you to strike my name from the list of committee
members."
  This was his second resignation from a committee whose
meetings he had not yet attended. The reaction in Geneva
can be gauged from the letter sent by Comert to Einstein
the following month.

  Abruptly, on March 21, without any preliminary notice, you
sent us your resignation from Zurich, where we did not even
know that you had arrived.
  Your letter announces only your resignation from the
Committee of Intellectual Cooperation. It is a condemnation,
without appeal, of the League of Nations which, you say,
possesses neither the force nor the goodwill to carry out its
task and with which you refuse, in your capacity as convinced
pacifist, to have any connection.
  This judgment, my dear Professor Einstein, without having
followed the work of your commission, without having
attended a single one of its meetings, on your return from a
voyage during which it was perhaps not easy to follow
European affairs.
  Before this letter was able to reach Geneva, it was given to
the Zurich papers, published, and thus communicated to the
whole world.
  This sudden volte-face, with all its repercussions, strikes an
unhappy blow at those who, like us, looking towards a
realizable and human ideal, follow humbly and obstinately, in
a devastated Europe, the work of international peace which
symbolizes for us the League of Nations. They had hoped that
your collaboration would help to guide the work of the
Committee of Intellectual Cooperation in the most useful way.
Knowing that the task of the League of Nations cannot be
carried out without the support of all men of goodwill, they
were particularly happy at the help of an authority as eminent
as yourself. Today their hope is disappointed. But their faith
in this great work has been sufficiently hardened by the daily
battle to resist the shock without being shattered. They will go
on, dear Professor Einstein, with the work they have begun
and with the sincere hope, I dare to say the conviction, that
the road which separates you from us today will one day lead
you back to us.

  Einstein's formal resignation was handed in at the second
session of the committee which began in July. By this time
he had explained his action in more detail to Die
Friedenswarte, a German pacifist paper. He had resigned,
he said,

  because the activities of the League of Nations had convinced
me that there appeared to be no action, no matter how brutal,
committed by the present power group, against which the League
could take a stand. I withdrew because the League, as it
functions at present, not only does not embody the ideal of an
international organization but actually discredits such an ideal.
  I did it, however, with inner reluctance, because the hope
had not quite died in me that a better body might yet grow
from this shell of a League of Nations. I am comforted by the
thought that one of the cleanest and finest of men was elected
in my place, Professor Lorentz of Haarlem, and with this
nobody could be happier than I. May the League in the future
prove my harsh words to have been mistaken.

  Einstein's actionùproduced, he later admitted, "more by
a passing mood of despondency than by mature reflection"
ùhad been caused by the French occupation of the Ruhr.
Inflation in Germany had become unbearable and at the
end of 1922 the Weimar government suspended payment
of the German reparations agreed upon in April, 1921.
The French, tried beyond endurance, in January, 1923,
occupied the small oval heartland of industrial Germany in
an effort to squeeze blood from a stone. The result was to
bring Einstein in line with the protesting German
nationalists, although for reasons very different from
theirs. They felt that the League, and all it stood for, was
too strong; Einstein's objections were the complete
opposite, as he made clear in a letter to Madame Curie,
written to her nine months later when the twenty-fifth
anniversary of the discovery of radium was being
celebrated in Paris.

  I know that, quite rightly, I annoyed you when I left the League
of Nations Committee with bitter comments, after I had
recommended you only six months earlier to participate in the
commission's work. But this was not done from bad motives or
from a weakness for Germany, but really because I was
convinced that the League of Nations (not the committee to
which I was to belong) was a pliant tool of power politics under
the cover of objectivity. Thus I wanted nothing to do with the
League of Nations. I was also of the opinion that a completely
open exchange of opinions could not damage the organization.
Perhaps I was wrong, but this was my firm conviction.

  Both the British and the Americans condemned the
occupation of the Ruhr. So did many Frenchmen. While
there was therefore widespread regret within the League at
the way in which Einstein had demonstrated his attitude, it
was submerged in the belief that he must be encouraged
back into the fold once more. There appeared to be a
chance of this in the spring of 1924 when, on April 17, the
acting secretary of the committee received a confidential
note reporting that Einstein had told a friend in Berlin
"how he profoundly regretted the precipitate gesture of his
resignation." Would it not be possible to tempt him back?
  Gilbert Murray was conscripted for the task and on May
16 wrote to Einstein telling him that if he was ready to
reconsider his position, then the committee "would
unanimously welcome your presence." Einstein's reply
was in his usual honest and outspoken fashion. He would
like to rejoin the committee because he felt that its work
might aid the improvement of Franco-German relations.
And he concluded on a typically humble note. "If I should
not be electedùwhich in view of what has passed would
be entirely justifiedùI should be glad to do any work for
the committee with which it might care to entrust me."
  His return was discussed at the twenty-ninth session of
the Council of the League on June 16, and Henri Bergson
"could see nothing but advantage in Professor Einstein
again taking a seat on the committee." The council agreed.
But whereas all members had so far been elected "not as
representatives of their respective countries but on account
of their personal achievements," it was decided "that
Professor Einstein should sit on the committee as
representative of German science." The formal offer was
now made, and Einstein wrote his acceptance to Sir Eric
Drummond on the twenty-fifth. "I accept with the sincerest
gratitude my reelection to the Committee on Intellectual
Cooperation," he said. "In view of my past attitude this
election gives proof of a singular broadmindedness and
magnanimity, which I fully appreciate. I will spare no
effort to promote the good cause for which the committee
is working."
  There is one interesting point about his letter of
acceptance. Attached to it in the League files there is a
note: "Not to be roneographed. The S.G. [secretary
general] says that council members should each have a
copy sent privately." There is also a note which says: "As
the Einstein letter is private, I do not think it should be
printed in the Official Journal." The League was anxious
that no undue attention should be paid to Einstein's "past
attitude" and that no one should be led on to disinter the
reasons for which he had resigned little more than a year
previously.
  When Einstein was formally introduced to the committee
together with a second new member at the start of the
fourth session on Friday, July 25, 1924, the statement by
Henri Bergson was equally circumspect, not to say smooth.
"The chairman also welcomed M. Einstein, both as an old
and a new colleague," says the official report. "He had
been appointed a member of the committee, just as the
other members had been, without requesting the
appointment. He had returned to the committee at his own
request, having wished to become a member of it. He
therefore doubly belonged to it." Bergson went on to
recapitulate Einstein's achievements and concluded with
the assurance that "if by his presence on a committee of
the League of Nations he succeeds in attracting to this
ideal all those who have been interested in his lofty
speculation, he will have rendered a new and very great
service to humanity."
  Einstein did not succeed in doing as much as this. The
results of his somewhat intermittent attendance at the
committee's sessions until his final resignation in the
spring of 1932 were a good deal less important than he can
have expected or many of his colleagues can have hoped.
This was not entirely, or perhaps even mainly, the fault of
Einstein. The disparate forces brought together in the
committee were almost equally suspicious of the France
that had become the most powerful force on the continent
and had every intention of remaining so, and of the
German Republic that was working its passage back into
respectability.
  These stresses showed in the academic world as clearly as
elsewhereù"it must be admitted," Einstein said on
January 16, 1926, "that scientists and artists, at least in the
countries with which I am familiar, are guided by narrow
nationalism to a much greater extent than are public men."
This was not true of him. He was handicapped certainly,
but rather by his temperamental inability to make the
compromises and accommodations demanded by
committee work. Furthermore, his earlier resignation in
protest against the French occupation of the Ruhr now
made it necessary for him to stress that he was no
chauvinist; and his international status, German-born,
Swiss by adoption, then full German again, made him
particularly vulnerable to attack. All this tended to
counterbalance the prestige of his name, which the League
had been so eager to utilize but which was a somewhat
doubtful asset in the work of the next few years.
  One of the first developments after Einstein had at last
joined the committee was the establishment of the
International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, in effect
its executive organ. It was to be financed by the French
government and set up in Paris, and there was an
unwritten agreement that its head should always be a
Frenchman. After initially welcoming the idea, Einstein
grew suspicious of possible French domination. He himself
was unable to oppose the details due to absence in South
America, but he tried to persuade Lorentz to protest in his
name. Lorentz declined.
  The meetings of the committee continued to be held in
Geneva, and here Einstein played his part in discussing the
various proposals put forward for cooperation. "We had no
funds but we could often help a man whose books or
scientific instruments had been destroyed by getting him
admitted to a laboratory or a library, and sometimes got
men restored to lost positions," Gilbert Murray has
written. "I remember one case where we failed, but the
man in question wrote me a letter explaining what a
comfort it had been to him in his loneliness, to know that
scientists like Einstein and Lorentz and Madame Curie
had at least been thinking about him."
  At a different level, Einstein sat on subcommittees
dealing with bibliography and with a proposed
international meteorological bureau. He gave personal
advice on the allocation among Russian ΘmigrΘ
intellectuals of money donated by the Red Cross and he
spent much time discussing how the prospects of peace in
the future might be increased by means of school education
in the present. All were low-key affairs. They had their
place on the outer periphery of international relations but
even here their prospects depended very much on the
extent to which cooperation could be forced through on the
more crucial issues of armaments and trade. Thus the
straight fact that the committee achieved comparatively
little during its existence is largely a measure of the status,
or lack of it, which it was accorded. At the level where real
decisions were made, no one took culture very seriously.
  Gilbert Murray was the committee member brought most
intimately into contact with Einstein. "One had the feeling
that all of us were capable of understanding what each one
said and meant, a feeling by no means always present to
international committees," he had written.

  One felt also in the mass of one's colleagues a sense of what I
would venture to call by the rather bold name of purity of heart.
Einstein was one clear caseùimmense intellectual power,
perfect goodwill, and simplicity. ... What struck me most about
[him], apart from his mathematics and his music, which were
both beyond my range, was his gaiety and instinctive kindliness.
... Bergson once said of him that he had made discoveries at a
greater distance from the ordinary organs of human knowledge
than any other man in history. ...

  And to Bertrand Russell, Murray wrote, after Einstein's
death: "Of course he was perfectly simple and unassuming.
But once I saw him sitting by the lake and went up to
speak to him and saw that he was lost in thought and
didn't see anything. He was very reluctant to believe evil
... one felt a sort of confidence that he would quite simply
take the right view about everything."
  Einstein's main interest was the effect of education in
removing the misunderstandings and hatreds which help
to make war not only possible but popular, an interest
closely linked with the pacifist activities which were taking
up an increasing amount of his time. "To my mind the
main task," he said when addressing the committee
informally on one occasion, "is how generally to improve
the education of the young. The League can do no greater
work than help make better the elementary school system
throughout the world." And it is a tribute to the
extraordinary weight of his name that this informal and
slightly obvious statement, thrown off in a Geneva
conference room, should have been worth a leading article
in the New York Times, which noted this was an Einstein
statement which "even the least learned in mathematics
and physics can understand."
  His attitude was plainly stated in a letter which he wrote
to Millikan in Pasadena in 1925. "In July I again attended
a meeting for the League of Nations committee," he said.
"There one comes back to your idea of fighting the
chauvinistic influence in the schools as much as one can."
He went on to give his impressions of the committee as it
existed at that date. "Honestly, and taking everything into
consideration, the efficiency of the committee is not very
great," he said.

  Real activity can, it seems to me, come from an individual Jew
but not from a corporate body, especially if what is involved is
not only a question of exercise of power but the exercise of
spiritual and moral force. I am glad to be able to say that the
French ho are active in the Committee are of a good and
honorable disposition. On the other hand, it cannot be denied
that French influence is incomparably greater than it should be if
rated by their intellect. England and America are very good but
are not strong enough in defending their interests. One must try
to strengthen and cultivate the germ of international
understanding and cooperation. H. A. Lorentz has unfortunately
not been successful in Brussels in carrying through the admission
of the Germans to the international organizations, which
naturally strengthens the chauvinism of present-day scientists.
Strange to say, politicians and businessmen in Europe are more
liberal in their thought than the scientists; one cannot help
regarding this as a sign of decadence. In America this seems
quite the reverse, and to be more important.

  His general attitude, and a hint of the reason why he
failed to influence the committee very much, is given in a
letter from Dr. A. Trowbridge, an American observer,
reporting to Millikan on the meeting held in Paris on
January 14, 1926. "Einstein came in a little late and sat
very silent throughout the proceedings," he said. "There
was some suggestion of putting him on some standing
committee, but he declined on the plea of overwork. His
sole communication to the proceedings was a statement
that 'in some countries,' where there was a distinctly
antagonistic feeling towards the League of Nations, it
might be necessary to add some other method than that
suitable in countries where there already existed a
predisposition in favor of the League of Nations. I am not
sure whether Einstein meant under 'some countries'
Germany or the United StatesùI think, however, the
former."
  Einstein's interest in education led to one of the few
concrete results of his cooperation with the League. Soon
after its formation, the committee was asked "to encourage
an exchange of letters between leaders of thought, on the
lines of those which have always taken place at the great
epochs of European history; to select subjects best
calculated to serve the common interest of the League of
Nations and of the intellectual life of mankind; and to
publish this correspondence from time to time." The first
volume, entitled A League of Minds, contained letters from
M. Henri Focillon, Se±or Salvador de Madariaga, Gilbert
Murray, Paul ValΘry, and others. And in the autumn of
1931, M. Steinig, a League official, traveled to Berlin with
the aim of securing Einstein's cooperation on a second
volume. Just what it would deal with was relatively
immaterial, although certain possibilities had been
discussed in Geneva; what was required was a long
original letter from Einstein which could be published
under the League's auspices.
  The idea strongly attracted Einstein who had, Steinig
later reported to M. Bonnet, director of the institute in
Paris, "a horror of platonic declarations which did not look
forward to an immediately realizable end. After M.
Einstein had underlined his interest in education as a
means of ensuring peace, we decided," M. Steinig went on,

  that he would accept in principle the idea of writing two letters
to two different people on this question: one of these letters
would probably be addressed to M. Langevin, and M. Einstein
proposed here to deal with an exchange of views between
representatives of French and German organizations on the
means of influencing the content of history books in the two
countries, for instance. One could, M. Einstein considered,
progressively correct the historical accuracy of such books by
removing "tendentious errors" on the one hand and, on the other,
the errors which provoked and nourished the feelings of national
hostility.
  Another letter, which would be produced in the form of a
questionnaire, would be addressed to M. Freud of Vienna. M.
Einstein will probably ask him to explain how an education
inspired by the new principles of psychoanalysis would be
able to contribute in guiding the ideas of children towards
peace and in diminishing the aggressive impulses which are
the foundation of all war.

  The choice of Langevin, an old personal friend across the
German frontier, was reasonable enough but at first it
seems strange that Freud should have been mentioned.
While Einstein had a firm respect for Freud's personal
stature and integrity he had at this time little use for his
theories and had met him only once. But it seems likely
that this idea had been planted earlier, after a meeting of
the committee when Einstein and a number of colleagues
had dined with Dr. Ernst Jackh, a former director of the
Hochschule fⁿr Politik in Berlin, at the house of the
German undersecretary general of the League in Geneva.
"As we were going into dinner," Jackh has written,

  I asked Professor Einstein: "Would you agree that it is no mere
chance that your theory of relativity, and Professor Freud's
psychoanalysis, the League of Nations and its World Court, and
other phenomena of our time, have developed together: that they
are all an expression of the same revolutionary phase through
which the contemporary world is passing?"
  Professor Einstein looked at me, said nothing for a moment,
and then: "This synthetic vision is new to me. Let me think it
over."
  During dinner I watched him, and I noticed that he was
eating and drinking nothing, but was staring in front of him
and meditating. After dinner, he came up to me and said,
"You are quite right: I endorse your Holism."

  Einstein proposed to Steinig that he himself should write
to Langevin while Steinig made first contact with Freud in
Vienna. A subsequent note from Bonnet to Einstein
tactfully suggested that as Langevin was already in China
on a mission for the committee, and as Bonnet himself
would soon be leaving for China, it might be best for
Einstein to omit the first personal contact. Here it is not
oversuspicious to recall Einstein's original feelings about
the French and the siting of the institute in Paris, run by a
French director. The Langevin project never matured; the
reasons are not clear; but the problem of reconciling the
French and the German views of history given in the
textbooks never had to be argued out in public.
  Meanwhile, Einstein's proposals were discussed in Paris,
and in due course Steinig wrote to Freud. "I hasten to
answer your letter because you tell me you intend to use
my comments when you meet Professor Einstein at the end
of this month," Freud replied on June 6, 1932.

  While reading your letter I have indulged in as much
enthusiasm as I am able to muster at my age (seventy-six) and in
my state of disillusionment. The words in which you express
your hopes and those of Einstein for a future role of
psychoanalysis in the life of individuals and nations ring true and
of course give me very great pleasure. It has been no little
disappointment to me that at a time when we can continue our
work only under the greatest social and material difficulties, I
haven't seen the slightest sign of interest for our efforts on the
part of the League of Nations. Thus practical and idealistic
considerations combine to induce me to put myself with all that
remains of my energies at the disposal of the Institute for
Intellectual Cooperation.
  I cannot quite imagine as yet what form my participation is
going to take. It will devolve upon Einstein to make
suggestions. I would prefer not to hold forth on my own and
hope that the character of a discussion can be maintained in
such a way, perhaps, that instead of answering one question
put to me by Einstein, I respond from the point of view of
psychoanalysis to statements in which he expresses his
opinions. I would also prefer not to pick out a single topic
from among those enumerated in your letter. It is rather a
question of a number of problems of which the most important
for practical purposes is the influence of psychoanalysis on
education. But as I say, in all these practical details I am
ready to follow Einstein's suggestions. When you see him you
won't be able to tell him anything more about my personal
relationship to him than he knows already, although I only
once had the long-desired opportunity of talking to him.
  As for yourself, please accept my cordial thanks for your
interest in psychoanalysis.

  Yours very sincerely,
  Freud

  Subsequently, Steinig met Freud to explain the project in
more detail. Freud was not optimistic. "All my life I have
had to tell people truths that were difficult to swallow," he
said, according to Steinig. "Now that I am old I certainly
do not want to fool them." But he would answer Einstein's
open letter as best he could.
  This letter, dated July 30, 1932, posed one simple
question: "Is there any way of delivering mankind from the
menace of war?" Having asked the question, Einstein then
continued to give his own answerùthe creation of an
international authority, whose nonexistence he put down
simply to the fault of the "governing class," to those
"whose aspirations are on purely mercenary, economic
lines," and to the additional fact that "the ruling class at
present has the schools and press, usually the Church as
well, under its thumb." Yet war only appeared to be
possible, he admitted, because "man has within him a lust
for hatred and destruction." And here, of course, the
psychoanalyst might be able to help.
  Freud's long discursive answer was in some ways self-
contradictory. He wrote of "pacifists like us"; yet while he
agreed with Einstein that an international court of
authority was essential to peace, he noted the need for "its
investment with adequate executive force." He agreed with
Einstein on man's instinct for hatred and destruction, and
then continued:

  The upshot of these observations, as bearing on the subject in
hand, is that there is no likelihood of our being able to suppress
humanity's aggressive tendencies. In some happy corners of the
earth, they say, where nature brings forth abundantly whatever
man desires, there flourish races whose lives go gently by,
unknowing of aggression or constraint. This I can hardly credit; I
would like further details about these happy folk. The
Bolshevists, too, aspire to do away with human aggressiveness by
ensuring the satisfaction of material needs and enforcing equality
between man and man. To me this hope seems vain. Meanwhile
they busily perfect their armaments, and their hatred of outsiders
is not the least of the factors of cohesion among themselves.

  Freud concluded this depressing prognostication with one
faint hope: that it was not too chimerical to believe that
war might one day be ended through a combination of two
factors. One of these was man's cultural disposition and
the other was "a well-founded dread of the form that future
wars will take." The idea of peace by the threat of terror
was not one which Einstein welcomed. Yet a mere seven
years later he was, by signing a letter to Roosevelt, to prod
research along the road to the ultimate weapon.
  The Einstein-Freud correspondence was published the
following year in Paris, after lengthy discussion about
what the little booklet should be called. Law and Violence,
much favored for a while, was finally rejected for Why
War?. Editions appeared in French and in Germanù
although Warum Krieg? was banned in Germany, where
not even advertisements for it were allowed.
  Why War?ùthe one permanent memorial to Einstein's
membership of the committeeùappeared only after he had
finally severed all connection with the League and had
made a public and ill-judged protest against the
disarmament conference being held under the League's
auspices in Geneva.
  The reasons for this change of stance were twofold and
complementary. First in importance was his increasing
involvement in the plethora of pacifist movements which
grew up during the 1920s. His own personal attitude to
pacifism remained unaltered; nevertheless, the framework
within which it could be expressed changed substantially
between 1920 and 1930. For the first few years after the
Armistice another world war was so unthinkable that no
argument against one was necessary. But slowly the
situation began to deteriorate. As it did so, there arose the
prospect of the League, certainly a potential keeper of the
peace but a policeman without even a baton in his hand.
  Einstein, like most other men, was at times self-
contradictory. But a great deal of the confusion which
surrounds his pacifist attitude disappears once it is
considered dispassionately and historically and once his
somewhat tortuous self-justifications are ignored. The
truth is that in 1920 he was an unqualified pacifist; that
the logic of events added first one qualification and then
another; and that with the coming to power of Hitler even
Einstein was forced to realize that pacifism would not
work. The evolution took place gradually but unevenly; at
times it slipped back, and at times he himself does not
seem to be clear what he really wanted to say.
Furthermore, he continued to call himself a pacifist even
while agreeing that the dictators could only be stopped by
force of arms, an attitude which spread alarm and
despondency through the pacifist camp.
  But as late as 1928 his attitude was still uncomplicated.
"It seems to me," he wrote, in refusing an invitation from
the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom
to a conference in Geneva on the subject of gas warfare,
"an utterly futile task to prescribe rules and limitations for
the conduct of war. ... The masses of people can most
effectively fight the institution of war by establishing in
time of peace an organization for absolute refusal of
military service." He further outlined his state of belief in a
letter to the British No More War movement later in the
year. "I am convinced," he wrote, "that the international
movement to refuse participation in any kind of war
service is one of the most encouraging developments of our
time. Every thoughtful, well-meaning and conscientious
human being should assume, in time of peace, the solemn
and unconditional obligation not to participate in any war,
for any reason, or to lend support of any kind, whether
direct or indirect."
  The phrase "support of any kind, whether direct or
indirect" is plain enough. Yet within little more than a
year Einstein was writing to the Finnish Minister of
Defense, applauding the fact that his country allowed
conscientious objectors to be employed, without penalty,
for nonmilitary work under civilian control. "It is evident,"
says Harold Bing, the British pacifist leader, "that Einstein
considered that governments were justified in requiring of
conscientious objectors to military service, some kind of
civilian alternative. He had not grasped the logical position
of the absolutist who refused all service under a system of
military conscription." More surprisingly, even after his
experiences in wartime Berlin, he had failed to grasp the
fact that service in a nation at war is indivisible, that the
peaceful plowman plows to feed the civilians who make
the guns which serve the forces.
  Yet Einstein's apparent ambiguity deeply disturbed
pacifists who believed that they had his unequivocal
support. "On August 30, 1930," writes Bing,

  I was taken by Martha Steinitz [sometime secretary of the Bund
der Kriegsdienstgegener and later joint secretary of the WRI] to
meet Einstein at his lakeside summer house near Potsdam [See
pages 501-502.] ... and, in reply to his questions, explained why I
and others had refused alternative service because to accept such
service was to recognize the state's right of conscription and to
acquiesce in the conscription of others and because any work
imposed upon us by the state in wartime would be intended to
assist the war effort. At the end of our conversation he declared
that he now understood the absolutist position.

  Understood maybe. But only three months later he gave
little evidence of this in one of his most famous pacifist
speeches. This was made in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New
York on December 14, after he had broken his journey en
route to Pasadena. There was the usual injunction on
pacifists to replace words with deeds, and a demand for
refusal to be conscripted. "Even if only two percent of
those assigned to perform military service should
announce their refusal to fight," he said, "... governments
would be powerless, they would not dare send such a large
number of people to jail." However, this phrase, which was
to produce a rash of button badges with the words "two
percent" on them, was followed by a plea to countries
which operate conscription to bring in laws "permitting
pacifists in place of military service to do some strenuous
or dangerous work, in the interest of their country or of
mankind as a whole. ..." It is possible to claim that
Einstein had, in fact, not "understood the absolutist
position." It is possible to claim that he did understand it,
but rejected it and felt happy about objectors carrying out
work which would in fact assist a war effort. A third
possibility is that in the press of preparations for his
American visit,[Discussed elsewhere] amid the work which had
to be finished before he left Berlin, he had not thought out
to a conclusion the implications of what seemed to him a
satisfactory solution to a tough moral problem.
  But there is another explanation of his evolving pacifist
attitudes. Perhaps in pacifism, as in space, there should be
no absolutes, a standpoint which makes more
comprehensible his attitude of 1931, evolving from that of
the "two percent" of a few months previously. "As he sees
the problem, there are two ways of resisting war," said the
chairman of War Resisters International, Fenner (now
Lord) Brockway, after he had visited Einstein at the head
of a WRI delegation, "the legal way and the revolutionary
way. The legal way involves the offer of alternative
service, not as a privilege for a few, but as a right for all.
The revolutionary way involves uncompromising
resistance, with a view to breaking the power of militarism
in time of peace or the resources of the state in time of
war. The general conclusion of Professor Einstein was that
both tendencies are valuable, and that certain
circumstances justify the one and certain circumstances the
other." All was as relative here as it was in physics.
  His dedication to the pacifist movement tended
increasingly to tug Einstein away from the overcozy
international atmosphere of the League. Always an
instinctive outsider, he felt unhappy in the role of insider
automatically conferred by membership of the committee.
In addition, there were problems within the organization
itself. "National Committees" had been created which by
1930 were acting as liaison groups between the central
body in Geneva and the intellectual communities of
individual countries. Einstein was a member of the
German committee, created after Germany had joined the
League in 1926, but his opinions were given only qualified
support by fellow members, and their recommendations
led him to claim that the whole system of national
committees was a "blessing to the policy of cultural
oppression of cultural minorities." He felt that his fellow
members on the main committee were dragging their feet
on education and had failed to support those who had
"thrown themselves without reserve into the business of
working for an international order and against the military
system."
  These criticisms were made in a letter to M. Albert
Dufour-Feronce, a League undersecretary, in July, 1930. In
a typically casual way Einstein thought that a reference
here to his "resolve to go no more to Geneva" would be
taken as a formal resignation. He put in no appearance in
1931 and in April, 1932, arrived back from the United
States to find awaiting him an invitation to a meeting in
July. He replied immediately, saying he thought his
mandate had expired in 1931. "I was fully convinced,
during the early years, that I was not suitable for doing
useful work on this committee," he continued. "It would
therefore be acceptable, and more just, if another takes my
place. This would in any case suit me better, as I will find
it difficult to find the time, next summer, to attend the
Geneva conference.
  "At the same time I would like to mention that I accepted
membership at the time, only because owing to the
political stance of German academics you would have had
great difficulty in finding someone whose political and
international views would have been suitable."
  The letter, written to M. Montenach, the Swiss secretary
of the committee, was quickly followed in the League by
an internal note outlining various steps which it was hoped
would stave off Einstein's resignation. Gilbert Murray was
again asked to intercede. M. Dufour-Feronce, who had
once worked in the German Foreign Office and who knew
Einstein personally, was to do the same. "You might,"
Dufour-Feronce was instructed by Montenach, "insist on
his making a special effort to come to Geneva for six days
to attend the session of the committee beginning on July
18. You could say that the other members of the committee
who have been for nearly ten years his colleagues and have
much affection and admiration for him would greatly
appreciate such a gesture of sympathy and interest which
would be made by his attending the session before the
expiration of his term of office."
  All these blandishments failed. And Einstein, who found
it "difficult to find the time" to attend Geneva for the July
meeting, arrived there instead in May, and in
circumstances which would certainly have made
impossible any further connection with the League.
  So far, despite his support for the militant pacifists, he
had clung to the hope that the League, however greatly its
operations might fall below his own standards, offered a
genuine promise for the future. Nowùand for the next
eighteen monthsùhe put more faith in the belief that "if
the workers of this world, men and women, decide not to
manufacture and transport ammunition, it would stop war
for all time." And he also, increasingly, voiced an open
distrust of what the League was doing, unconsciously
echoing Wells' gibe about "this little corner of Balfourian
jobs and gentility."
  Einstein's distrust exploded in reaction to the
Disarmament Conference which opened in Geneva in
February, 1932. It was a reaction which illustrated his
bigness of heart but revealed the immense gap which
divided the real world of nation-states and politicians from
the world which Einstein felt must exist because it should
exist. It was a reaction which undermined those who
believed he might be a useful ally in a practical struggle to
avert war, and it was one which offered a useful weapon to
those only waiting to claim that outside his own field
Einstein was something between crank and buffoon. In
almost every way it was one of his most disastrous
interventions in public affairs.
  The Disarmament Conference which sat in Geneva
between 1932 and 1934 was attended by representatives of
sixty nationsùincluding nonmembers of the League such
as Russia and the United Statesùand was an effort to
reduce armaments within the framework of the League
Covenant. At first Einstein had welcomed the idea of such
a conference, even if only as a last hope. "I believe [it]
should take place in any event, at the very least, it will
help to clarify the situation and focus attention on this
important problem," he told the editor of the French
journal Paix Mondiale. However, it must have been
obvious to any knowledgeable observer that if the
conference was to have the slightest chance of success, it
would involve months of wrangling, a balancing of
weapon against weapon, a long delicate series of
negotiations in which a choice between comparable evils
was taken only after much discussion. The reaction of
Einstein, with his simple belief that all countries must
abolish arms and subjugate their future to an international
organization, was easy enough to forecast. It came in May,
1932, when the conference had been meeting for only
three months and its committees were deep in intricate
argument.
  Earlier in the year he had been asked by the Rev. J. B.
Th. Hugenholz, a Dutch delegate to the Joint Peace
Council of the International Union of Antimilitarist
Ministers and Clergymen, to attend a meeting of the
council in Geneva in May. He declined. But towards the
end of that month, following a visit to Oxford, he decided
to visit Geneva after allù"because," he said, "some
friends convinced me that it was my duty to do so." On
Sunday, May 22, he left London for Geneva with Lord
Ponsonby, not only a leading pacifist but an old friend.
Ponsonby was also an intimate of Arthur Henderson, the
former British Foreign Mininster now presiding over the
Disarmament Conference. Under Henderson, Ponsonby
had carried out much of the detailed negotiation which had
preceded the trade agreement between Britain and Russia.
They were men of somewhat similar outlook and it has
even been suggested that Henderson "engineered"
Einstein's appearance at Geneva. There is no evidence of
this, and if Henderson played any part at all, which seems
unlikely, even he must have been surprised at the genie
which he had encouraged out of the bottle.
  On the morning of Monday, May 23, Einstein visited the
League headquarters. As he entered the public gallery, the
Japanese and Russian delegates of the Air Commission
were arguing that the mobility of aircraft carriers increased
the offensiveness of the planes they carried; for the United
States Allen Dulles and for Britain Captain J. T.
Babingtonùwho had won a hard-earned D.S.O. for the
wartime bombing of the Friedrichshafen Airship Factory
ùwere arguing the reverse. The speaker stopped for a
moment, then continued, according to Konrad Bercovici, a
young Rumanian-American journalist. "That brief second,
however, was an acknowledgment, a more marked
acknowledgment, of the greatness the man radiated than if
all had stopped everything they were doing and applauded
him," he wrote. "All eyes were turned towards Einstein.
Where he was, the world was."
  But Einstein had not come just to watch. That afternoon
he held a press conference at the BrΦgues Hotel attended
by about sixty correspondents. What he said, both here and
elsewhere in Geneva, has been variously reported. The
editors of Einstein on Peace print one account, which
appears to be a cut version, while noting that the War
Resisters International had another transcript which
Einstein "rather freely revised ... insofar as it deals with
me." But there is no doubt about the tenor of his statement,
whose main points are given in a few key sentences in the
"official" version: "One does not make wars less likely to
occur by formulating rules of warfare." "War cannot be
humanized. It can only be abolished." "People must be
persuaded to refuse all military service." These seem
reasonable propositions, even if they can be challenged,
and at first Romain Rolland's comment quoted in Einstein
on Peaceùthat Einstein "tended to become impractical
once outside the scientific field"ùseems a little harsh.
  However, it was not what he said but the context of his
opinions which tended to destroy his credibility for all
except those who had already been converted to the
conspiracy theory of war. This is made clear by Bercovici's
account of the Geneva visit and of an interview with
Einstein which he succeeded in obtaining before the press
conference started. According to the editors of Einstein on
Peaceùnaturally anxious to present their subject in the
best lightùthis account, "while possibly exaggerated,
suggests, nonetheless, the universal and instinctive
appreciation of Einstein's personality." It consists
essentially of a long quoted statement, triggered off when
Bercovici said that he had come to the city to watch the
comedy of peace.
  "This is not a comedy," Einstein replied.

  It is a tragedy. The greatest tragedy of modern times, despite
the cap and bells and buffoonery. No one has any right to treat
this tragedy lightly or to laugh when one should cry. We should
be standing on rooftops, all of us, and denouncing this conference
as a travesty! ...
  If you want peace in America then you must join us in
Europe, and together we shall ask the workers to refuse to
manufacture and transport any military weapons, and also to
refuse to serve any military organization. Then we will have
no more conscriptions; we will have no more war!
Governments could go on talking from now to doomsday. The
militarists could lay any plans they wish.
  If the workers of this world, men and women, decide not to
manufacture and transport ammunition, it would end war for
all time. We must do that. Dedicate our lives to drying up the
source of war: ammunition factories.
  I have absolute information that if a war should break out
today anywhere in Europe so many conscientious objectors
would throw away or refuse to shoulder arms that one-half of
every army would be busy putting down the revolt of the other
half before going to fight the enemy. The trouble with the
delegates here and with most people ruling over nations today
is that they don't know what their peoples think and how their
peoples feel about war.
  The trouble with most of these delegates is that they are
unintelligent and insincere and are but puppets moved by
strings in the hands of politicians at homeùpoliticians and
ammunition manufacturers. Any declaration of war would be
followed by world-wide revolutions. We must prevent that,
prevent the destruction of Western civilization by the
uncivilized governments of the world.

  No one would claim that this is necessarily an accurate
sentence by sentence verbatim account of what Einstein
said. But from all available evidence it would seem to
reflect his excitedùand, as Bercovici puts it at one point,
"almost hysterical"ùattitude. Yet Germany had not yet
walked out of the conference, and was not to do so for
another eighteen months. The French, who were to insist
that some system of general security should precede
disarmament, were still trying. Hope still existed.
  Against this background, Einstein's attitude marks the
high tide of his pacifism, which had been rising since the
First World War. And with the reflection that within
fourteen months he was to be encouraging men to take up
arms, the only other nonscientific preoccupation of his life
must now be considered: the support of Zionism, for which
he showed the same white-hot idealism, a quality often
producing results which, here also, counterbalanced the
value of his name.

CHAPTER 14

THE CALL OF ZION

It is demonstrably unfair, yet still perfectly true, to claim
that the Zionists seized upon Einstein's fame from 1919
onwards and exploited it to their advantage. No movement
dedicated to so difficult a mission can let its tactics be too
closely controlled by the principles of a gentlefolks' aid
society; and with a genius of Weizmann's caliber in
control it was inevitable that the magnetism of Einstein,
the incorruptible man of science, should be conscripted to
the general task of implementing the Balfour Declaration,
and to the special one of coaxing money from the pockets
of American Jewry. The Zionists should not be criticized
for this. If criticism is warranted it springs, rather, from
their failure to bring Einstein unconditionally within their
fold; to capture him so completely that his statements of
support would never contain the irritating qualifications
which he saw as essential to honesty but which could be a
niggling hindrance to men fighting for their ideals. One
should have sympathy for both sides. How difficult it must
have been for Einstein to move from the world of physics
into the passionate turmoil of creating the new Jerusalem!
How tantalizing it must have been for the Zionists to have
captured the most famous living Jew for the causeùand
then find that he was a bad speaker who often said things
out of na∩vetΘ which caused trouble!
  Einstein himself has stated that he did not become aware
of his own Jewishness until after he went to Berlin in the
spring of 1914. This is not as surprising as it sounds. The
modern Zionist movement did not come into existence
until 1897. The current for assimilation still continued to
run swiftly through the Jewish community and Einstein
himself noted in 1921 that "up till about a generation ago
the Jews in Germany did not regard themselves as
belonging to the Jewish people. They felt themselves only
members of a religious community. ..." Thus, despite the
"nail from the Crucifix" brought into the Munich
schoolroom, Einstein appears to have remembered no anti
Semitism from his student days, from his work in the
Berne Patent Office, or from his years as a young professor
in Zurich. "Different but equal" was the attitude of the
liberal Swiss; so much so that the correspondence of
Einstein's student days, of his early married life, and of his
gradual integration into the scientific world contains
barely a hint of his origin or of the religion into which he
had been born.
  In Prague, the Jewish community provided a power bloc
in the struggle between the Czechs and the Germans into
whose Austro-Hungarian Empire they had been brought.
And here, for the first time it appears, Einstein became a
member although certainly not a committed one, of a
Jewish group. It met every Tuesday evening in the home of
Bertha Fanta; but while almost every other member was an
ardent Zionist, Einstein was completely uninterested.
  The reason is not difficult to see once the viability of
Zionism as a practical proposition in 1910 is soberly
considered. Theodore Herzl had launched the movement
little more than a decade previously, convening the first
first to Cologne and then in 1911 to Berlin. The idea that
Zionist Congress at Basel, where in 1897 it resolved "to
secure for the Jewish people a home in Palestine
guaranteed by public law." Led from Vienna until Herzl's
death in 1904, the movement had been transferred to
Germany, first to Cologne and then in 1911 to Berlin. The
idea that the national home might be founded elsewhere
than in Palestine, mooted more than once, was finally
rejected in Basel at the Seventh Congress in 1905. Here
the tentative offer made two years earlier by the British
government, under which the Zionist organization was
provisionally to be granted 6,000 square miles of East
Africa, was firmly turned down. Zionists were concerned
only with Palestine. But Palestine had for centuries been
part of the Turkish Empire and when, even after the
revolution of 1908, it became clear that the Turks had no
intention of granting the Zionists a charter, "the
movement, as Herzl had conceived it, came to a
standstill."
  To some Jews this was not altogether unwelcome. For
while many saw their people as a potential nation, others
saw them only as a group held together by theological
beliefs and a personal code of behavior. "Thus," says
Leonard Stein in his history of Zionism,

  while there was one school of thought which stoutly denied that
the Jews were a nation at all, there was another which held that
the Jews were a nation and nothing elseùa nation precisely like
any other, except that it happened to have been temporarily
deprived of its national territory. Both sets of extremists
oversimplified the Jewish problem, because both of them could
only conceive of nationhood in terms of the nation-state. In
calling upon the Jews to be fearlessly themselves, in reminding
them that, for all their differences, they had precious possessions
in common, in warning them that those possessions would be
jeopardized if they failed to maintain and to enrich their
corporate life, the nationalists performed a valuable and indeed
an indispensable function. In suggesting, on the other hand, that
the Jewish problem would be solved if the Jews would only
imagine themselves to be something they were not, they were
playing with fanciful analogies and using language which was
sometimes least carefully thought out by those who used it most
freely.

  Einstein had no wish to be ground between these two
millstones. In 1911 his common sense estimated Zionist
prospects more as a chimera than a practical possibility.
He was, moreover, already intellectually at odds with any
movement which buttressed nationalism, however
honorable its motives, and this intuitive feeling was to be
strengthened by the experiences of the war years. Yet in
1920 Einstein emerges as the dedicated though sometimes
qualified Zionist, adding the luster of his name to a cause
still in need of luster despite its greatly improved
prospects: speaking on platforms; warily putting a foot into
the deep waters of Zionist politics; and making an
exhausting tour of the United States for the cause.
Something more than the magic of Weizmann's
personality had been needed to bring this about.
  One factor which influenced him was the transformation
of Zionism from a pious hope to a practical possibility by
the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the statement by the
British Foreign Minister that "His Majesty's Government
view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national
home for the Jewish people, and will use their best
endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object. ..." It
was true that the Declaration was issued at a fortunate
moment and that, as H. A. L. Fisher has sagely noted, it
"rallied to the Allied cause, at a time when money was
urgently needed, the powerful and cosmopolitan
community which, not from New York only, controls the
loan market of the world." But it was also true that the
ancient plain of Philistia, after almost 1,300 years of
Persian and Turkish rule, was now being conquered by
Allenby's armies. The hopes of the Jews looked high.
  Moreover, as the significance of these hopes began to
sink into the postwar German-Jewish consciousness, the
attitude of Jewish intellectuals such as Einstein was
inevitably affected by the influx of their fellow Jews from
Eastern Europe, and by the reactions of many
wellestablished German Jews who were happy to ignore
their plight. With Einstein, the process had begun five
years earlier, when he first moved to Berlin. In
Switzerland, he wrote, there was "nothing that called forth
any Jewish sentiments in me. When I moved to Berlin all
that changed. There I realized the difficulties with which
many young Jews were confronted. I saw how, amid anti-
Semitic surroundings, systematic study, and with it the
road to a safe existence, was made impossible for them."
These difficulties were further intensified when the new
Republican government contemplated expelling the new
refugees from the east. "I stood up for them," Einstein
later wrote, "and pointed out in the Berliner Tageblatt the
inhumanity and folly of such a measure. Together with
some colleagues, Jews and non-Jews, I started university
courses for these eastern-born Jews, and I must add that in
this matter we enjoyed official recognition and
considerable assistance from the Ministry of Education."
Here were some of the reasons for Einstein's enthusiasm
for Zionism, quoted by him after conversion. They suggest
that his interest was captured as much by the prospect of a
Hebrew University, run by Jews, for Jews, as by the wider
prospects of Zionism. They also make it easier to
understand his reactions as the good cause hardened into
the nationalism of which he was always suspicious rather
than into the internationalism which he always supported.
  Einstein's recruitment into the Zionist cause has been
described by the man who carried it out, Kurt Blumenfeld.
Two things are clear. First, that "until 1919 Einstein had
no association with Zionism and Zionist ways of thought."
Second, that the method of Einstein's recruitment was
important not only in itself but by its example. "The
method," says Blumenfeld, "found effective with him
brought [other] friends and followers to Zionism: that is to
say, the drawing out from a man of what is within him
rather than the forcing from him of what is not truly
within his nature."
  Blumenfeld's account of his meetings with Einstein in
February, 1919, is revealing both of Einstein and of the
Zionist cause as it struggled into practical existence:

  Felix Rosenblueth [today Minister of Justice Pinhas Rosen] had
prepared a list of Jewish scholars whom we wished to interest in
Zionism. Einstein was among them. Scientists had known his
importance for years but when we called upon him we did not
know that his name would soon be resounding across the world.
The abundance of interviews and photographs which later
surrounded him had not yet started.
  I began to talk about the Jewish question. "What has that to
do with Zionism?" Einstein asked. "The Zionism idea will
give the Jew inner security. It will remove discord. Openness
and inner freedom will be the result."
  These were the thoughts which interested Einstein. With
extreme na∩vetΘ he asked questions, and his comments on the
answers were simple and unconventional. "Is it a good idea to
eliminate the Jews from the spiritual calling to which they
were born? Is it not a retrograde step to put manual
capabilities, and above all agriculture, at the center of
everything Zionism does?"
  So far Einstein had avoided giving any specific opinions.
Now opposition showed itself. "Are not the Jews, through a
religious tradition which has evolved outside Palestine, too
much estranged from the country and country life? Are not the
talents which they have exploited with such scientific
accomplishment perhaps the result of an innate spirituality; is
it necessary to create a Jewish national movement which is
circumscribed by the Jewish question?"
  We felt during our talk that we were dealing with a man of
unusual gifts. There was nothing very surprising in his words,
but I could see the thoughts of the man in the flash of his eyes
and the look told me more than the words.

  A few days later Einstein and Blumenfeld met again. "On
this occasion," writes Blumenfeld, "he told me that
Hermann Struck, the etcher, had tried to interest him in
the Bible and the Jewish religion, but that he had refused
to be drawn. 'I really don't know enough about my
religious feelings,' he said. ... 'I have always known
exactly what I should do, and I feel satisfied with that.'"
  Shortly afterwards, Blumenfeld noticed a change in
Einstein's attitude. "'I am against nationalism but in favor
of Zionism,' he said. 'The reason has become clear to me
today. When a man has both arms and he is always saying
I have a right arm, then he is a chauvinist. However, when
the right arm is missing, then he must do something to
make up for the missing limb. Therefore I am, as a human
being, an opponent of nationalism. But as a Jew I am from
today a supporter of the Jewish Zionist efforts.'"
  Einstein's support was to be complicated by the general
situation in Germany. Support for assimilation was
possibly even stronger among Jews there than it had
previously been, partly as a result of the forces unleashed
by the war, which tended to draw together all those living
within the German Empire, partly as a reaction to what
was considered the Jewish influence behind the Russian
Revolution. Few wished to carry the policy as far as
Einstein's colleague Haber, who had taken himself and his
family into the Christian church. Yet there were many for
whom the possibilities of Zionism had a double danger. It
made more difficult their own attempts to become
assimilated into the non-Jewish German community and it
provided a weapon for those endemic anti-Semites whose
attitude had helped to produce Zionism. Thus for every
man who welcomed Einstein's espousal of the Zionist
cause there was another among his friends who would
warn that this was not really the way to further the cause
of Jews in Germany; that pressure on them would be
increased; and that if there were too much talk of a
National Home outside Europe there would be increasing
demands for Jews to be sent there.
  The forces supporting assimilation were certainly strong,
but so too were Einstein's feelings once he had become
seized of the Zionist cause. Just how strong is shown by his
letter of April 3, 1920, refusing to attend a meeting
organized by the Central Association of German Citizens
of Jewish Faith to help combat anti-Semitism in academic
circles.
  "I should gladly come if I believed it possible for such an
undertaking to succeed," he wrote.

  First, however, the anti-Semitism and the servile disposition
among us Jews in our own ranks would have to be combated by
more knowledge. More dignity and more independence in our
ranks! Not until we dare to regard ourselves as a nation, not until
we respect ourselves, can we gain the esteem of others, or rather
only then will it come of its own accord. There will be anti
Semitism in the sense of a psychological phenomenon as long as
Jews come into contact with non-Jewsùwhat does it matter?
Perhaps we owe it to anti-Semitism that we can maintain
ourselves as a race. I at least believe so.
  If I catch sight of an expression like "German citizens of
Jewish faith" I cannot help smiling a little sadly. What is
there to be found in this pretty label? What is Jewish faith?
Does there exist a kind of unbelief by virtue of which one
ceases being a Jew? There is not. But it suggests that the right
people believe two things, i.e., (1) I don't wish to have
anything to do with my poor (East European) Jewish brethren,
and (2) I do not want to be taken for a child of my own
people, but only as a member of a Jewish community.
  Is this sincere? Can the "Aryan" feel any respect for such
underhand fellows? I am neither a German citizen, nor is
there anything in me which can be designated as "Jewish
faith." But I am a Jew and am glad to belong to the Jewish
people, even if I do not consider them in any way God's elect.
Let us calmly leave anti-Semitism to the non-Jew and retain
our love for people of our kind.
  I hope that you will not frown on account of this confession.
No harm or unkindness is meant.

  Einstein was later to put his point of view even more
pungently. "The German Jew who works for the Jewish
people and for the Jewish home in Palestine no more
ceases to be a German than the Jew who becomes baptized
and changes his name ceased to be a Jew," he wrote in
1926. "The two attachments are grounded in realities of
different kinds. The antithesis is not between Jew and
German, but between honesty and lack of character. He
who remains true to his origin, race, and tradition will also
remain loyal to the state of which he is a subject. He who
is faithless to the one will also be faithless to the other."
  A further gloss on his position is given by a letter written
on an unknown date in 1921 to the Prague pharmacologist
Professor Starkenstein. Einstein stressed that
denomination was itself unimportant, although for a Jew to
embrace another faith was a symbolic action, indicating
that he wished to cut himself off from his own people.
Possibly he had Haber in mind. Freedom from any
denomination at all was, however, a different matter. "I
myself belong to no denomination and consider myself a
faithful Jew," he went on. "In how far we Jews should
consider ourselves as a race or a nation respectively, in
how far we form a social community by tradition only, on
this subject I have not arrived at a decisive judgment. It
suffices that we form a social body of people which stands
out more or less distinctly from the rest of humanity, and
the reality of which is not doubted by anyone."
  The lack of decision was shrewdly noted by Blumenfeld,
whose frank account shows clearly the skill with which he
brought Einstein into the Zionist camp. He realized that
for Einstein, "Zionism and Palestine were only peripheral
concerns," that these interests had not yet "become part of
his specific pattern of life." Utilizing him for publicity
purposes was thus a delicate matter and "was only
successful if I was able to get under his skin in such a way
that eventually he believed that words had not been put
into his mouth but had come forth from him
spontaneously."
  If Einstein the Zionist thus found himself at odds with
much of the Jewish community on matters of practical
politics, he also had reservations about the character and
methods of the key man in the Zionist movement. This
was Chaim Weizmann, subsequently a good friend of
Einstein but diametrically opposed to him in many ways.
Weizmann was a Russian Jew who had emigrated to
England before the war, became naturalized, and quickly
achieved a position in the scientific world that owed
nothing to his work as a propagandist for Zionism. In an
ironic way Weizmann was the Allied counterpart of Fritz
Haber. For while Haber found a method of supplying a
blockaded Germany with unlimited explosives, Weizmann
was a biochemist who discovered how one particular strain
of bacterium could synthesize acetone, essential for the
manufacture of the explosive cordite. On the outbreak of
war he moved from Manchester University to government
service. Subsequently he became director of Admiralty
Laboratories under A. J. Balfour, First Lord of the
Admiralty.
  Thus Weizmann soon found himself well placed for
staking the Zionist claim to Palestine. His connections
with Whitehall increased still further as the naval war
moved towards its crisis and as Balfour left the Admiralty
for the Foreign Office in 1916. By September, 1917, his
influence was such that the Prime Minister, "on
Weizmann's representation of urgency, told Sutherland
[one of Lloyd George's private secretaries] to put down
'Palestine' for the next War Cabinet." The Balfour
Declaration followed on November 2. Thus it was in the
accepted order of things that Weizmann represented the
Zionist organization when this was given a hearing by the
Council of Ten at the Peace Conference on February 27,
1919.
  Positions of power are rarely gained or held by those who
believe that all men are not only brothers but innocent
ones. A good deal of ruthless wire pulling is required, a
good deal of balancing and counter-balancing, and not
occasionally the bland reassurance on facts which are not
facts at all. All these, the common coin of getting things
done, are required even of a statesman with the moral
integrity of Weizmann. But to a man of Einstein's
temperament this element of wheeling and dealing was
repugnant. Thus, as Isaiah Berlin has noted,

  Weizmann's relationship with Einstein, despite their deep
mutual admiration for each other, remained ambivalent;
Weizmann was inclined to regard Einstein as an impractical
idealist inclined to utopian attitudes in politics. Einstein, in his
turn, looked on Weizmann as too much of a Realpolitiker, and
was irritated by his failure to press for reforms in the [Hebrew]
university away from what he regarded as an undesirable
American collegiate pattern. Nevertheless, they remained allies
and friends to the end of their lives.

  Along with these feelings which tended to qualify
Einstein's enthusiasm for Zionism there was the
essentially pacifist nature of his approach to the problems
of the world. Even when it came to Zionism, a subject as
emotionally close to his heart as anything ever was, he
could never look on his opponents, in this case the Arabs,
as the deep-dyed villains which the sentiments of the case
demanded. He was all for the policy of live and let live.
While many Zionistsùpossibly the majority of themùsaw
a Jewish National Home essentially as a political state
created for political purposes, Einstein saw it rather as a
cultural center. "For me," he wrote as late as 1938, "the
value of the Zionist undertaking lies mainly in the
educational and unifying effect on the Jews of different
countries. I am not for the striving for a Jewish state,
mainly because I am against the secularization (or
becoming worldly) of Jewry." Many Zionists called for
mass emigration to the Promised Land, but Einstein
foresaw the way in which Arab opposition would be
intensified. Thus the dichotomy which runs through so
much of his life showed itself here also. To the demands of
Realpolitik he would oppose the need for idealism; when
force was demanded he would respond that pacifism was
essential.
  Despite these qualifications, however, he was drawn into
the Zionist maelstrom by the climate of post-Armistice
Germany, by the humiliations which the Jews from the
east were suffering at the hands of Berliners, and by the
impassioned advocacy of such German Zionists as Kurt
Blumenfeld. His support had hardly been secured when a
good chance of utilizing it arose.
  Late in 1920 Weizmann decided to visit the United States
to raise funds for the Keren Hayesod, to be formed in
March, 1921, to take over from the Palestine Restoration
Fund the main financial burden of constructive work. He
quickly picked a strong party to accompany him. "I also
approached Professor Albert Einstein, with special
reference to the Hebrew University," he later wrote, "and
to my great delight found him ready to help." It is clear
from Blumenfeld's account and from Einstein's private
correspondence that this was a description of his reaction
more enthusiastic than accurate.
  Blumenfeld had received a detailed telegraphed directive
from Weizmann. "I was to stir up Einstein," he says,

  go with him to America, and there join in the propaganda for
the Keren Hayesod. Einstein must be interested, above
everything else, in the idea of the Hebrew University in
Jerusalem.
  When I appeared before Einstein with this telegram he at
first said No: "Do you think so much of the idea of a Hebrew
University in Jerusalem?" It was unfortunate that I, for
different reasons, was a bad advocate of the idea, and Einstein
therefore said: "How is it that you are asking me to publicize
an idea that you yourself do not wholeheartedly support?
Besides, I consider that the role which is expected of me is an
unworthy one. I am not an orator. I can contribute nothing
convincing, and they only need my name which is now in the
public eye."
  I did not reply, but read Weizmann's telegram aloud again.
"It is irrelevant that we know what is necessary for Zionism
today," I said. "We both know too little of all the factors
involved. Wiezmann represents Zionism. He alone can make
decisions. He is the president of our organization, and if you
take your conversion to Zionism seriously, then I have the
right to ask you, in Dr. Weizmann's name, to go with him to
the United States and to do what he at the moment thinks is
necessary."

  Einstein had already begun to interest himself in politics
and had joined the Republican League only a few days
previously. But his concern with the peripheral left wing
was parochial compared with the prospects that were now
dangled before him. Did he really want to enter the
dubious world of power politics which even he must have
realized was the only world in which the great
expectations of Zionism could be translated into reality?
Surely his interrogation of the physical world would
suffer? Surely it was all rather demeaning?
  No doubt he pondered over these questions. If they had
been asked two years previously he would almost certainly
have given different answers. But he had emerged in the
autumn of 1920 a different man from the almost
lighthearted professor who only twenty-four months earlier
had tried to talk the Berlin students into common sense
while Born and Wertheimer had looked on. Now he was
not only a scientist but one who might genuinely be able to
influence world affairs. And by now he had watched the
tide of anti-Semitism begin to rise again and had felt it
lapping round his own feet in Berlin and Bad Nauheim. It
seems more than likely that Lenard and the "Anti
relativity Company" were in his mind as he listened to
Weizmann's telegram.
  But there was also another factor. "I learned later,"
Weizmann has written, "that Haber had done all he could
to prevent Einstein from joining me: he said, among other
things, that Einstein would be doing untold harm to his
career, and to the name of the institute of which he was a
distinguished member, if he threw in his lot with the
Zionists, and particularly with such a pronounced Zionist
as myself." In Einstein's then state of mind, an appeal
from a lapsed Jew who had helped the Germans so much
in the war could have swung him in only one direction.
  "To my boundless astonishment," Blumenfeld writes,
"Einstein answered: 'What you say now is right and
convincing. With argument and counterargument we get
no further. To you Weizmann's telegram is a command. I
realize that I myself am now part of the situation and that I
must accept the invitation. Telegram Weizmann that I
agree.'" Thus he prepared to take a major step towards the
consolidation of his fame in America and of his notoriety
in Germany as the focus of anti-Semitism.
  Shortly after this meeting with Blumenfeld, Einstein
wrote to Maurice Solovine, with whom he had kept up a
desultory correspondence since the breakup of the Olympia
Academy fifteen years earlier: "I am not going entirely
willingly to America," he said, "but I am doing so only in
the interests of the Zionists, who are obligated to ask for
dollars for education in Jerusalem, and on this occasion I
am to play the role of a little tin god and a decoy. If our
places could be changed I would willingly let you go in my
place." And to the same correspondent, shortly before he
set off from Berlin, he wrote: "I, also, am not a patriot, and
I firmly believe that the Jews, given the smallness and
dependence of their colony in Palestine, will be immune
from the folly of power."
  As news of Einstein's acceptance leaked out, invitations
from the United States began to arrive in Haberlandstrasse
ùnot only from Zionist organizations but from
universities and other learned bodies eager to get the
renowned Albert Einstein to explain his theories. By mid
March it must have been satisfactorily clear to Weizmann
that whatever publicity would be coming to the Zionist
cause would be doubled by the presence of Einstein.
  However, all would not be plain sailing, and some of the
problems are detailed in a letter which Blumenfeld wrote
to Weizmann on March 15, 1921. This is extraordinarily
revealing, showing as it does the way in which Einstein's
enthusiasm for the Jewish cause was being manipulated,
and highlighting his own ingenuous outlook, a
characteristic which, it was clear, had to be put in the
balance against the advantages of his name.
  Einstein, Blumenfeld said, was no Zionist but he would
always be willing to help at specific tasks so he should not
be induced to join the organization. His interest arose from
his aversion to assimilated Jewry. He had doubts about
some of the Jewish leaders but there were none about the
help which he would give to the efforts to be made in the
United States. Already, at Elsa's request, 10,000 marks
had been put at his disposal, and it was recommended that
Weizmann should let him have further funds on the
voyage. Einstein himself was worried about running up too
many expenses, had seriously told his wife that he wanted
to travel steerage, and had insisted that detailed accounts
should be kept of all that was spent.
  Then Blumenfeld gave a warning. Weizmann had been
expecting Einstein to prepare speeches. But he was told to
be particularly careful about this since Einstein was a bad
speaker and often said things out of na∩vetΘ that caused
trouble. In spite of this there was no doubt about his value,
and Blumenfeld ended by saying how happy he was that he
had aided the cause by winning over a man who would
help to settle the American issue in their favor.
  This issue was the difference in opinion between
Weizmann and many leading Zionists as to how Zionist
aims might best be pushed forward. On the question of
tactics, many American Zionists, notably those led by
Justice Brandeis, believed that the existing Zionist
organization was adequate. Weizmann believed that in the
long struggle ahead something more ambitious would be
needed, and was already throwing his efforts into the
creation of an enlarged Jewish Agency which would
include not only Zionists but other Jews. Springing almost
directly from this was the great contrast in the amount of
cash which each group believed would be necessary.
Brandeis and his supporters talked of raising $500,000 a
year; Weizmann thought of $10,000,000. These divergent
views might have been resolved more easily had it not
been for the character of Weizmann, "overbearing and
politically ruthless," according to one version of Brandeis'
opinion. To many Americans he may well have looked like
an embryonic dictator, carving out his own empire; to
many European Jews who knew how close to the problems
he had been, neither his ambition nor his ruthlessness
seemed greater than was necessary.
  The journey began on March 21, 1921, when the
Einsteins left Berlin for Holland, where they were to
embark on the Rotterdam. They were joined on board by
the Weizmanns. "Einstein was young, gay, and
flirtatious," says Mrs. Weizmann. "His wife, I recall, told
me that she did not mind her husband's flirting with me as
'intellectual women' did not attract him; out of pity he was
attracted to women who did physical work"ùa remark
substantiated by more than one of his intimate friends.
During the voyage across the Atlantic, says Weizmann,
Einstein "explained his theory to me every day and on my
arrival I was fully convinced that he understood it."
Weizmann utilized the journey to plan the tactics of his
campaign.
  From the comparative security of his home in Berlin,
Einstein had already been burned by the hot wind of
publicity, but only on arrival in New York did he meet its
full blast. The effect was to last a lifetime and to give him
a distrust of most newspapers, even though he showed an
unexpected and masterly ease at handling a press
conference when he took the trouble. First, he had to face
the cameramen who came aboard with reporters as the
ship docked, all of them anxious to forestall the official
reception committee, which included New York's Mayor
Hylan; Alfred E. Smith, soon to be elected Governor of
New York State; and Fiorello La Guardia, president of the
City Council. "I feel like a prima donna," said Einstein as
he at last turned to the reporters and prepared for the
worst.
  One of the first questions had been a constant companion
since November, 1919: "Can you explain relativity in a
few sentences?" Ever anxious not to disappoint, and in this
case doubly so out of loyalty to Weizmann, Einstein had an
answer that became a classic. "If you will not take the
answer too seriously, and consider it only as a kind of joke,
then I can explain it as follows," he said. "It was formerly
believed that if all material things disappeared out of the
universe, time and space would be left. According to the
relativity theory, however, time and space disappear
together with the things."
  From then on he had their confidence, a smiling,
touslehaired figure in his high wing collar and knitted tie,
anxious to assure them that his theory would not change
the ideas of the man in the street, claiming that every
physicist who studied relativity could easily understand it,
and as confounded as were his interrogators by the
extraordinary interest which his work had aroused. "Well,
gentlemen," he concluded, "I hope I have passed my
examination."
  There was the inevitable demand to know whether Mrs.
Einstein understood the theory. "Oh, no," was the
philosophical reply, "although he has explained it to me so
many timesùbut it is not necessary to my happiness." She
wished to protect him from the adulatory mob. "He does
not like to be what you call a showcase," she explained.
"He would rather work and play his violin and walk in the
woods." And when he was deep into a problem, she added,
"there is no day and no night."
  The ordeal over, they went ashore. Awaiting them was
more than the official reception committee. The Jewish
areas of New York were gaily decorated, while Jewish
Legionnaires who had fought with the British to liberate
Palestine from the Turks were present in strength. Some of
the crowds wore buttons with Zionist slogans, others
waved the Jewish flag, then merely white and blue,
without the star of David that it bears today.
  What the crowds saw at the top of the gangway was
Weizmann, smiling but stiff, almost a model for Lenin in
physical features as in singlemindedness, and beside him
the shorter figure of Einstein. He wore a faded gray
overcoat, by no means new, and a black hat. In one hand
he carried a briar pipe and in the other his violin. "He
looked like an artist, a musician," wrote one reporter. "He
is of medium height with strongly built shoulders, but an
air of fragility and self-effacement." Under a broad, high
forehead were the large and luminous eyes, almost
childlike in their simplicity and unworldliness. "Great
men, a very small family on earth, can unfortunately find
nobody but themselves to imitate," Chateaubriand
commented in his Memoirs. "At once a model and a copy,
a real person and an actor playing that person, Napoleon
was his own mime." In much the same way Einstein, the
public figure now emerged from the chrysalis of the
professor, unconsciously dropped into the role of Einstein
playing Einstein.
  The two men and their wives were driven between a
police escort to the City Hall whose plaza was filled with
more than 5,000 Zionists. Here they were formally
received by New York, where there lived a third of all the
Jews in the United States. And here, it had been tacitly
arranged, Weizmann and Einstein would be given the
freedom of the city.
  At this point an unexpected hitch occurred. When the
aldermen retired to vote the freedom of the city to their
visitors, an Alderman Bruce Falconer objected. A dozen
years previously, he pointed out, New York had granted its
freedom to Dr. Cook, a gentleman whose claim to have
reached the North Pole was as fraudulent as his earlier
claim to have made the first ascent of Mount McKinley.
How did they know that Einstein had really discovered
relativity? Furthermore, while Weizmann was a British
subject, Einstein was a German, a former enemy alien.
Falconer successfully obstructed various attempts to push
through the measure but his move was counterproductive.
The following day the New York Senate in Albany gave
Weizmann and Einstein the freedom of the state, without
opposition. New York City eventually followed suit, while
the Owasco Club, the democratic party organization of the
Seventeenth Assembly District, passed a resolution noting
that "the conduct of Alderman Falconer manifests a spirit
of bigotry, narrowmindedness, and intolerance, and
displays him as a champion of anti-Semitism, which is
only a stepchild of anti-Americanism." Yet it is interesting
to note that the resolution which gave Einstein the freedom
of the state beganù"... Albert Einstein of Switzerland," a
statement that conveniently ignored both his German birth
and the fact that though he was a naturalized Swiss he was
now also a German again.
  As far as Einstein was concerned, there were three
aspects to the tour that now followed. There was his
involvement, inevitable although as slight as he could
make it, in fund-raising and inter-Zionist argument. There
was his own series of appeals for the Hebrew University,
obviously closely linked with Weizmann's but launched at
a slightly different level to a slightly different public.
Thirdy there were his lectures on relativity, and the
impression that they made on the American academic
world.
  From the first, it was clear that Weizmann's decision to
invite Einstein had been more than justified. His appeals to
the Jews of America struck deep downùeven though
many of them had radically different ideas on the
financing of the Jewish Home. For he added more than the
box-office draw of an international name and a mysterious
theory. There was something romantic not only about his
air of innocence but about the journey which had brought
him from his study halfway round the world to what less
than three years previously had been an enemy capital.
  "To every person in America," says Frank, "it recalled
the Holy Land and the legend of the Wandering Jew, thus
striking a strongly responsive chord and evoking profound
sympathies in many Christians." It needed no great stretch
of the imagination to see in Einstein, trotting down the
gangway with a pipe in one hand and a violin case in the
other, the apotheosis of all that Jewry stood for. To the
Americans, a nation of refugees, the figure had a double
attraction.
  As a member of the Weizmann party, Einstein could not
stand aside entirely from the arguments about Jewish
development in Palestine. But Weizmann had not ignored
Blumenfeld's warning about Einstein's propensity for
saying "things out of na∩vetΘ which cause us trouble." He
had given his colleague broad hints about when to stay
quiet. Einstein, for his part, kept himself well in hand. The
classic example came on the evening of April 12, after
Weizmann had spoken to 8,000 Jews at the 69th Regiment
Armory. Einstein then rose. "Your leader, Dr. Weizmann,
has spoken, and he has spoken very well for us all," he
said. "Follow him and you will do well. That is all I have
to say."
  From the controversies that followed Weizmann's first
public appeal for funds on April 17 Einstein remained as
aloof as possible. An open breach with the Brandeis party
followed the next day. This was to be healed only after
considerable wrangling, and it is difficult to estimate its
effect on Weizmann's appeal. At a single meeting on April
20, $26,000 were donated and a total of $100,000 pledged.
Next day a Keren Hayesod Bureau opened in Union Square
and was visited by a constant stream of Jews giving cash
one man unrolling a thousand dollars worth of small notes
and handing them over with the comment that he had
saved them for his old age. However, it was not until years
later that the larger contributions which were hoped for
were extracted from American pockets, and it is clear both
from the Einstein-Weizmann correspondence and from the
recollections of Zionist historians that the results of the
visit, though necessarily presented as successful, fell
considerably short of what had been expected.
  Meanwhile Einstein was addressing Jewish audiences on
the needs of the Hebrew University, "the greatest thing in
Palestine since the destruction of the Temple of
Jerusalem," as he called it. The man who in Berlin had
experienced the plight of Jews "knocking vainly at the
doors of the universities of Eastern and Central Europe"
was an ideal spokesman. "Others who have gained access
to the areas of free research only did so by undergoing a
painful, and even dishonoring process of assimilation
which robbed them again and again of their cultural
leaders," he said with feeling. "The time has now come for
our spiritual life to find a home of its own." Here, speaking
on his own ground, he could do no harm and much good,
and after his first appeal Stephen Wise, rabbi of the Free
Synagogue in New York who was later to become a close
friend, pledged $10,000 for the university.
  Einstein's lectures on relativity, which were to broaden
the knowledge of his work in the United States, began on
April 15 at Columbia University, which had awarded him
the Barnard Medal the previous year. It was the first time
he had spoken on relativityùor on anything else, it
appears ùto an English-speaking audience. He showed
the same assured naturalness he used with allies and
enemies, Presidents and street cleaners, Kings, Queens,
and charwomen. "He several times brought chuckles and
laughs from his audience by his references to the 'idiot'
behavior of certain bodies in accelerated systems," the New
York Times noted. "Also he caused much amusement when
he wished to erase some diagrams he had drawn on the
blackboard and made futile motions in the air with his
hand until Professor Pupin came to his rescue."
  At the City College of New York, where he lectured the
following week, the lectures were translated. "I happened
to be the most readily available person who understood
both his language and his mathematics," writes Morris
Raphael Cohen, "and so I was asked to translate his
lectures. This gave rise to the altogether undeserved
popular legend that I was one of the unbelievably few
people in the world who understood the Einstein theory."
  In Washington, where Einstein and Weizmann arrived
soon afterwards, an unsuccessful attempt was made to read
"a popular presentation of the relativity theory" into the
Congressional Record. Here also they visited President
Harding with a group from the National Academy of
Sciences, at whose annual dinner Einstein spoke. The
formal speeches went on and on, and as one scientist after
another accepted the Academy's annual awards Einstein
turned to his neighbor, the secretary of the Netherlands
embassy who was representing the physicist Pieter
Zeeman: "I have just got a new theory of eternity," he
confided.
  Another visit was to Princeton, where on Monday, May
9, an honorary degree was conferred and where he gave a
lecture a day for the rest of the week. It was after one of
these, during an evening discussion, that he heard of D. C.
Miller's first announcement which appeared to refute the
Michelson-Morley experiment. And here, believing that
the truth did not lie in the convolutions demanded by
Miller's results, he observed: "God is subtle but he is not
malicious" ("Raffiniert ist der Herrgott, aber boshaft ist er
nicht"). In Chicago, the next port of call, he made one
contact which was greatly to affect his future. This was
with Robert Millikan, who a few years previously had
provided experimental evidence for Einstein's
photoelectric equation. While Elsa was driven around the
sights of Chicago with Mrs. Millikan, Einstein discussed
the future of science with her husband.
  Then, a few days before he was due to sail for Europe,
leaving Weizmann to continue his Zionist work alone, the
two men visited Cleveland. Most of the Jewish shops were
closed for the occasion and the party was met at the Union
Station by a 200-car parade headed by the band of the
Third Regiment of the National Guard. "Only the
strenuous efforts of a squad of Jewish war veterans, who
fought off the people in their mad attempts to see them,"
the New York Times reported, "saved them from possible
injury."
  The near hysteria which had marked more than one
phase of the visit was not entirely the result of the newfelt
longing to be free which surged through the Jewish world
with the hopes of a National Home raised by the Balfour
Declaration, or of the intellectual cataclysm made by
relativity. Both played their part. But both were reinforced
by the extraordinary impact made by Einstein himself
during what was for most practical purposes his first
journey outside the academic world into the realm of the
uninitiated. The curtains had parted and behind them there
was seen not the austere and aloof leader of science, but an
untidy figure carrying his violin, the epitome of the
world's little man immortalized in different ways by
Chaplin, Hans Fallada, and H. G. Wells' Kipps.
Astonishment increased as it became clear that however
steely keen Einstein's relentless dedication to science
might beù and within the inner circle there was no doubt
of thatù here was the real article, genuinely humble,
honestly surprised that so much fuss should be made of
him. In Boston, where he was asked as part of a current
"quiz" to give the speed of sound, he admitted he was
sorry but he didn't knowùand why should he, since it was
a simple fact that could be looked up in a reference book?
Speaking to the National Academy of Sciences, he said
that "when a man after long years of searching chances
upon a thought which discloses something of the beauty of
this mysterious universe he should not therefore be
personally celebrated. He is already sufficiently paid by his
experience of seeking and finding."
  For the Zionists the transparent sincerity of such remarks
had turned out to be an invaluable asset, and as the
Einsteins returned to Germany, breaking their journey in
England, Weizmann had good reason to be satisfied. For
Einstein, and his reputation, the results were more
qualified. "Thank heaven, Yale did not give Einstein a
degree," went a letter to Rutherford from Bertram
Boltwood, then at the peak of his reputation. "We escaped
that by a narrow margin. If he had been over here as a
scientist and not as a Zionist it would have been entirely
appropriate, but under the circumstances I think it would
have been a mistake."

  Back in Berlin, Einstein reflected on his experiences.
There is no doubt that the Jews of America had given him
a concept of Jewry quite different from the one he had
grown up with in Europe. "It was in America," he wrote,
"that I first discovered the Jewish people. I have seen any
number of Jews, but the Jewish people I have never met
either in Berlin or elsewhere in Germany. This Jewish
people which I found in America came from Russia,
Poland, and Eastern Europe generally. These men and
women still retain a healthy national feeling; it has not yet
been destroyed by the process of atomization and
dispersion. I found these people extraordinarily ready for
selfsacrifice and practically creative."
  Einstein's optimism was further expressed when he spoke
in Berlin's Bluthner Hall on work in Palestine a few days
after his return, and in a letter to Ehrenfest on June 18 he
noted that "our activities on behalf of the Hebrew
University were very successful. ... The university seems
financially assured to the extent that the building of the
particularly important medical facilities can soon be
started. The middle classes, rather than the rich Jews, have
made this possible and, in particular, the 6,000 Jewish
doctors in America." This mood soon passed and the
Zionist leader Selig Brodetsky, reporting on his visit to
Einstein in Berlin shortly afterwards, relates that he was
told "of the failure of his mission to the United States."
Three months later Weizmann was writing almost
plaintively asking Einstein to sign a letter to the Boston
New Century Club where they had drummed up
considerable supportù"the Club has made difficulties
regarding the handing over of the money collected; of the
$20,000 promised, we have actually so far collected
$4,000," he noted. The different views are not
contradictory. Like the mythical bottle of whiskey, half-full
or half-empty, Weizmann's tour could be considered either
failure or success according to expectations. But as the
enthusiasm engendered by the visit began to slip away, the
facts began to look less rosy. It was some years before the
Hebrew University pulled in the really large contributions
hoped for in 1921.
  Einstein's already slightly jaundiced view of the tour was
increased when he realized the price to be paid for the
support gained. Forever the idealist, he could not stomach
the shifts, the horse trading, and the accommodations
necessary in an imperfect world. Above all, he could never
reconcile himself to the fact that whoever pays the piper
calls the tune; that the American Jews who provided most
of the finance for the Hebrew University would in practice
have a hand in the way it was run almost as powerful as
the Board of Governors.
  In 1921 this was still a small cloud on the horizon.
Einstein remained the great Zionist capture; it followed
therefore that he should be asked to visit Palestine on his
return from the Far East early in 1923 and to give the
inaugural address at the university. For Einstein himself
the visit was a deeply emotional experience, doubly
important to a man who had excluded emotion from his
life whenever possible.
  The Palestine Mandate, under which the former Turkish
territory was administered by the British with the ultimate
aim of creating a Jewish National Home, had been
approved by the Council of the League of Nations only six
months previously, and was not to become operative until
the end of September, 1923. But the British High
Commissioner had already been appointed, and Jewish
immigration and reconstruction were being pushed ahead.
The High Commissioner, with whom the Einsteins were to
stay, was Sir Herbert, later Lord Samuel. Like Lord
Haldane, he was both philosopher and statesman, a man
who had been deeply moved by the implications of
relativity, and one of the few outside the field of science to
become a comparatively close friend. Samuel was not only
a first-class administrator, he was also a Jew; and while
his appointment had been intended to show the British
government's favorable attitude towards Jewish
aspirations, there were repercussions which only the most
Machiavellian foresight could have predicted. For Sir
Herbert was also a British official whose neutrality must be
above suspicion. It was therefore almost inevitable that in
the Jewish-Arab disputes that spattered the unhappy
history of the country during the years of his appointment
the High Commissioner should stress his impartiality by
giving utmost consideration to the Arabs. In this he was no
more than just; but among Jews it was often felt that he
was so busy returning good for evil that he had little time
to return good for good. Therefore his long friendship with
Einstein, begun in the first months of 1923, was to be
marked more than once by differences as to what should be
done for Palestine.
  Einstein arrived with his wife at Tel Aviv on February 2,
1923, and was greeted by Colonel Frederick Kisch, who
had retired from the British army with a fine war record to
join the Zionist Executive. "Found him rather tired as he
had sat up all night," Kisch recorded in his diary, "but I
later learned that this was his own fault, as he had insisted
on traveling second class in spite of every effort to
persuade him to go into a wagon-lit which had been
reserved for him." Three days later he was formally
received by the Palestine Zionist Executive. "He made,"
Kisch recorded, "a little speech explaining the nature of
his brain which he said was such that he was afraid it
would be unproductive work for him to attempt to learn
Hebrew."
  But there was no doubt about Einstein's almost
embarrassing enthusiasm for Palestineùor of Palestine for
him. This was shown the following day. That the most
famous scientist in the worldùif the most controversial
one ùshould give such unqualified support to their efforts
genuinely roused the inhabitants and emboldened them to
think that the reward would be equally unqualified.
Einstein responded with an answering enthusiasm. The
interaction was shown when on February 6 he drove
through streets lined with crowds of waving schoolchildren
to a reception at the Lemel School organized by the
Palestine Zionist Executive and the Jewish National
Council. After he entered, there was, the Palestine Weekly
reported, "no holding back the crowd who had assembled
outside. The outer gates were stormed, and the crowd burst
into the courtyard, and tried to force the inner gates which
were stoutly held by three or four stalwarts."
  Inside, Einstein was baring his soul. "I consider this the
greatest day of my life," he said. "Hitherto I have always
found something to regret in the Jewish soul, and that is
the forgetfulness of its own peopleùforgetfulness of its
being almost. Today I have been made happy by the sight
of the Jewish people learning to recognize themselves and
to make themselves recognized as a force in the world.
This is a great age, the age of the liberation of the Jewish
soul; and it has been accomplished through the Zionist
movement, so that no one in the world will be able to
destroy it."
  The following day he was to perform his main task in
Palestine: delivery of the inaugural address at the Hebrew
University, which had been founded five years earlier as
the British and Turkish guns still faintly boomed away
fifteen miles to the north. Before the ceremony he had a
long talk with Kisch, which reveals the state of his mind.
  "Interview with Deedes," Kisch recorded; "then a walk
back from Mount Scopus to the city with Einstein to whom
I explained the political situation and some of the
intricacies of the Arab question. Einstein spoke of
Ussishkin's[Menachem Ussishkin was president of the
Zionist Executive and had been a member of the party
which visited America in 1921.] attempt to persuade him
to settle in Jerusalem. He has no intention of doing so, not
because he would sever himself from his work and friends,
but because in Europe he is free and here he would always
be a prisoner. He is not prepared to be merely an ornament
in Jerusalem."
  At 4:30 the same afternoon some hundreds of men and
women, including members of the consular corps and the
newly created Palestine government and their wives,
packed into the temporary building of the Hebrew
University on Mount Scopus. "Many ... like myself ...
could have no claim to understand his theory," wrote
Helen Bentwich, wife of Norman Bentwich, then attorney
general to the government. "But we all wanted to hear and
meet this great man, probably to be able to say in the years
to come that not only had we heard Einstein lecture about
his theory, but that we had attended the first lecture given
at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem."
  The hall was hung with Zionist flags and the insignia of
the twelve tribes. Above the platform hung the Union Jack
with a portrait of the High Commissioner and a Zionist
flag with a portrait of Dr. Herzl, while from the ceiling
descended a banner bearing the words "Orah ve Torah"
("Light and Learning").
  Ussishkin introduced Einstein with the announcement
that 2,000 years ago Titus and his avenging armies had
stood where they now stood. But today they were
inaugurating a temple of science. "Mount the platform
which has been waiting for you for 2,000 years," he
concluded grandly.
  Einstein did so, delighting those present by giving what
Samuel called "an opening sentence pro forma in a
Hebrew that was evidently unfamiliar." Then he continued
in French; and, at the end of the comparatively short
address, repeated it in German. Nevertheless the first
official words spoken from the university had been in
Hebrew.
  During the next few days Einstein toured the country,
planting a tree in the garden on Mount Carmel outside
Haifa and visiting the city's high school and technical
college. "Suitably impressed by the work so far done," he
wrote to Weizmann on a leaf torn from his notebook. "It
would be of great benefit if teaching could start at the
Tech. Coll. as everything is ready and the need is great.
Here the difficulties are great, but the mood is confident
and the work to be marveled at." In Tel Aviv he was
created a free citizen and at a banquet held in his honor he
spoke with an honesty that tact might have blue-penciled:
"I have already had the privilege of receiving the honorary
citizenship of the City of New York, but I am tenfold
happier to be a citizen of this beautiful Jewish town." At
Rishon Le Zion, which he visited from Jaffa, he promised
to "rouse the Jewish world and tell them of the strength
that has been invested here," adding that until his last hour
he would "work for our settlement and for our country."
  His enthusiasm for the opportunities which Palestine
would now be able to offer was stressed as he walked on
the Mount of Olives with the attorney general. "The Jews
had produced no genius of rank in the nineteenth century
save a mathematicianùJacobyùand Heine," he said,
according to Bentwich. "The National Home in Palestine
could release and foster their genius. For 2,000 years their
common bond had been the past, the carefully guarded
tradition. Now they had a new bond, the active cooperation
in building up a country. Then he went on to talk of other
things. He delighted in the beauty of the Arab peasant
dress and the Arab village growing out of the rock, and
equally in the beauty of life in Japan and in their sense of
corporate union. The Japanese dinner made you
understand the meaning of eternity. ... On the journey
from Japan, he had been thinking out a new theory of the
relation of light to gravity. The ship gave the best
conditions for thought; a regular life and no disturbing
influence." And then, a decade before the same thought
was to be awakened by solitude in England, Einstein
commented: "For similar reasons he found lighthouses
attractive; a man could be alone there."
  Palestine strengthed his Zionist sinews, and the memory
of it helped him during the difficult decade that lay ahead.
When he dined with the attorney general and his wife,
borrowing a violin and making up a quartet with Bentwich
and his two sisters, he not only played remarkably well,
but "looked so happy while he was playing that I enjoyed
watching as much as listening," Mrs. Bentwich
remembered. "We talked of books, and of one he said, with
a happy twinkle in his eye: 'It's not worth reading. The
author writes just like a professor.'"
  This was but one side of the coin. The other was
represented by the formality of Government House, by the
mounted troops that accompanied the High Commissioner
as he traveled with his guests, and by the boom of the
cannon which echoed every time he left the official
residence. All this worried him. He had already perfected a
technique of behaving as if formality did not existùa
technique which was perfectly sincere but which at times
gave a misleading impression of playing to the gallery or
of being eccentric for eccentricity's sake. Elsa was also
uncomfortable, but for her own reason. "I am a simple
German housewife," she told Philipp Frank. "I like things
to be cozy and comfortable and I feel unhappy in such a
formal atmosphere. For my husband it is a different
matter; he is a famous man. When he commits a breach of
etiquette, it is said that he does so because he is a man of
genius. In my case, however, it is attributed to a lack of
culture."
  Despite the contrasts between Samuel, the shrewd able
statesman, and the less worldly Einstein, the two men were
attracted to one another, and talking in the grounds of
Government House their conversation ranged across the
future not only of Israel but of relativity. Here Samuel
quoted T. H. Huxley's famous remark: "Herbert Spencer's
idea of a tragedy is a deduction killed by a fact." Einstein's
reply was recorded by Samuel: "Every theory is killed
sooner or later in that way. But if the theory has good in it,
that good is embodied and continued in the next theory."
  Einstein and his wife left Palestine for Europe in mid-
February. His final impression, as he put it to Solovine in a
letter that Easter, was that it would "become a spiritual
center but will not be able to receive a big proportion of the
Jewish people. I am, nevertheless, convinced that the
colonization will succeed." His advice was severely
practical. Kisch records that as he said good-bye to his
visitor in Jerusalem, he asked Einstein "to let us know if
during his tour he had observed that we were doing
anything which in his opinion we should not do, or if we
were leaving undone things which should be done. He
answered: 'Ramassez plus d'argent'" ("Collect more
money").
  The journey to Palestine consolidated Einstein's feelings
for Zionism and these remained strongùdespite its
nationalism, which he mistrusted as he mistrusted all
nationalisms, despite its foundation stone of a religion
which he could take no more seriously than he could take
any other revealed religion. But there was a definite limit
to the aid that he was prepared to give, and this was
illustrated following his return to Europe. When
Weizmann tried to coax him to London for a major Zionist
meeting he was met with the plea that attendance at the
League's committee meetings in Geneva would rule this
out.
  In the autumn of 1923, he felt it necessary to put down in
black and white what he would do and what he would not.
"I will do all that is asked of me, as long as I am not
expected to travel around or to visit congresses," he wrote
to Wiezmann from Berlin on October 27. "I will gladly
give my name and write letters, and talk to people here,
but as for the rest, in order to preserve my rights as a
thinker I have to stay quiet in order to work. (P.S. With
this in mind I am prepared to join the J.A.) Therefore I
cannot even now come to Holland for a meeting." But he
showed sympathy. "I know the difficulties that are put in
the way of your doing an already difficult job," he added.
"It cannot be easy to be the Chosen of the chosen people."
  Early the following year, he reinforced his attitude by
refusing to make a second journey to the United States. "I
have been there once and learned that the business was
costly to me," he wrote on February 29. "In any case, I
really cannot do any more. When one has dedicated one's
life to thought, and is capable only of that, one should stick
to it and should leave the 'worldlier' things to those who
are better equipped to understand them." Instinctively, he
wanted to stick to his physics. Emotionally, he was being
tempted outside.
  There were two other things which tended to make him
qualify his support of Zionism. One was his belief that a
first priority should be agreement with the Arabs. He was
not alone in this opinion. "A few Jewish leaders,
particularly Magnes, Hugo Bergmann, Ruppin, and
Calvaresci, were convinced that the first political aim
should be, not maximum immigration, but understanding
with the Arabs," Norman Bentwich has written. "That
conviction was expressed emphatically by Albert Einstein
when I visited him in his cottage during my stay in Berlin
in 1930. He would not remain associated, he said, with the
Zionist movement unless it tried to make peace with the
Arabs in deed as well as in word. The Jews should form
committees with the Arab peasants and workers, and not
try to negotiate only with the leaders." Earlier, in the
Jⁿdische Rundschau, Einstein spelled out the lesson,
saying that Jews were almost always forming a national
group of certain characteristics. "This seems regrettable to
Jews such as I, who consider membership of the human
species as an ideal possible to attain even though difficult."
As Arab feelings hardened, as Mandate policy appeared to
be increasingly swayed by pro-Arab sentiment, and as
practical Zionist aims were narrowed to nation-state or
nothing, such internationalist and pacifist learnings began
to make Einstein's position within the Zionist movement
frequently difficult and sometimes anomalous.
  There was also his guerrilla battle with the management
of the Hebrew University, which continued from the
university's formal opening in 1925 until the summer of
1934, a battle fought largely against the influence of Judah
Magnes, the virtual ruler of the university who exercised
his power in line with the U. S. interests which had so
largely financed it.
  Some months after Einstein gave his inaugural address
early in 1923, the Institute of Chemistry was set up. The
Institute for Microbiology followed in 1924. Early in
April, 1925, the university was formally inaugurated by
Lord Balfour and its property, until then vested in the
Zionist organization, was subsequently transferred to a
nine-man Board of Governors which met in Tel Aviv.
  Einstein was elected one of the governors and the board
met under his chairmanship in Munich in September,
1925. Here it was enlarged. An Academic Council was set
up, and a "Palestine Executive" was created so that in
future the university could almost be said to have two
masters, one in London under the stern eye of Weizmann
who was to be chairman of the board for the rest of his life,
the second in Jerusalem under the chancellor who, as the
man on the spot, alwavs had the option of acting first and
asking afterwards. The chancellor was Judah Magnes.
  Magnes exercised considerable influence in the Jewish
community in New York, where he had been a rabbi before
the First World War. He had been an uncompromising
pacifist, critical both of Weizmann's work for the British
Admiralty and of his willingness to base Zionist hopes on
the promises of an imperial power. Thus it would not have
been surprising if he and Einstein had been drawn
together, two birds of the same feather. Yet during the
decade between 1925 and 1935 the cards fell otherwise.
Weizmann supported the choice of Magnes as chancellor;
Einstein opposed it.
  The battle was fought on gentlemanly lines, but with a
good deal of hard hitting, and has the fascination of all
battles which are struggles not of right against wrong but
of right against right. The issue, which Weizmann was to
admit to Einstein with astonishing frankness, was a simple
one. For all practical purposes it was the Americans who
had financed the Hebrew University. Magnes was their
"nominee," and it was useless to complain about his
performance in office. Einstein did complainùin general
about Magnes' lack of academic experience and in
particular about the way in which, from 1925 onwards, he
ran the university.
  The trouble started at the Munich meeting. Magnes later
claimed that "when Einstein entered ... he said: 'I find
myself here among many financiers from America.' They
were in fact myself, Judge Mack, and Dr. Schloessinger. It
was on this occasion that difficulties were created with me
at the beginning."
  There were many difficulties, not the least delicate of
which concerned the minutes of the Munich meeting. The
situation is made clear by a letter which Einstein wrote to
Magnes on December 29, 1925. "I possess the minutes of
the meeting in Munich of the Board of Governors, which
you have circulated, and feel obliged as the president of
that meeting to protest strongly against the sending of
these second minutes," he complained. "It goes against all
business practice that after the acting secretary has
circulated the minutes a member should take it upon
himself to circulate to other members a different set of
minutes differing on essential points, with the claim that
these be the official minutes of the meeting." He went on
to use the word "intolerable" and ended by demanding that
the Magnes minutes be withdrawn.
  Magnes declined. He was left in possession of the field,
and Einstein wrote to him somewhat despairingly. "You
declinedùthough politelyùto withdraw the invalid
minutes which you have no right to circulate. The contents
belie the actual resolutions passed. In the circumstances I
feel that it is useless to deal further with you."
  However, he still continued to work for the good of the
university, visiting Paris in January, 1926, to lecture on it
before the Franco-Palestine Society and sparing for Zionist
activities whatever time he could squeeze from his work.
But a man in Einstein's position, brought onto committees
and governing boards for the prestige of his name rather
than for what he was expected to do, could always threaten
to play the strong card of resignation. This he now did, in
the first of a series of actions that strangely mirrors his
indecisive turnabouts with the League committee.
  Early in the summer of 1926 Weizmann visited Berlin to
discuss the unhappy university situation. Any ambiguity in
Einstein's attitude was removed by a letter he wrote to
Weizmann on July 6. "You will understand," Weizmann
replied immediately,

  that my colleagues and I who discussed the situation with you in
Berlin were most upset about its contents. Only a few days ago
we discussed within the circle of the Zionist Executive that
whatever it may cost we must, above all, avoid your resignation.
A few days ago I wrote to Dr. Magnes and made it clear that
under no circumstances will the Board of Governors allow you to
resign because of him. I pointed out to himùwithout going into
the details of your circulated address at the Munich Conference
ùthat he cannot continue to act in this high-handed fashion with
his continuous harking on the American moneybags, and that he
would be more useful to the university were he not continuously
dependent on the moods and threats of the donors. I think he will
understand my hints, and I feel it is quite possible that when he
receives your letter as well as mine he will feel it necessary to
resign. I am quite determined, as I mentioned to you in Berlin, to
stand behind you in this, even though your reasonsùmentioned
verbally in Berlinùmay be somewhat inconvenient to me. But I
am prepared to do this as I am fully convinced that your
diagnosis of the situation is correct and that sooner or later Dr.
M. will have to be got rid of.

  Weizmann concluded by reiterating his appeal that
Einstein should not resign, an act which would only leave
Magnes in undisputed control. Einstein acquiesced, at least
for the time being. But eighteen months later, on January
8, 1928, he felt it necessary to complain in stronger terms,
noting to Weizmann that "in order to preserve the
apparent authority of the Board of Governors, we have had
constantly to accept and pass faits accomplis. ..."
Furthermore, there was a new proposal that Magnes
should not only be head of administration but also the
acadamic chief of the university.
  As chairman of the board, Weizmann had mixed
feelings. "Our income," he later stressed to Einstein, "is
entirely from voluntary subscribers, and we had to depend
on Magnesùas you yourself have admittedùbecause
Magnes could secure at any rate a considerable proportion
of the budget. The same argument covered even the choice
of professors by the Board of Governors, who had to adopt
the suggestions of those who controlled the purse of the
university." To Weizmann, half a university was better
than none. Einstein disagreed, and in his letter of January
threatened to resign from the board unless action was
taken within a year. Should this not happen, he went on, "I
shall feel it my duty to sever all connections with the
university and to say so publicly. It would be much better if
we waited a generation before founding a Hebrew
University, rather than, under the pressure which is
apparent, build a botched-up one today."
  These were tough words. They were implemented a few
months later, although Einstein's concern for the
university forced him to conceal this from the world at
large. Weizmann wrote in midsummer, proposing what
Einstein subsequently described as compromises. He did
not agree with them. And on June 14, 1928, he wrote that
in the circumstances he thought it best to retire completely
from the university's affairs. "I will refrain from an official
resignation from the Board of Governors and the
Academic Council despite my earlier intentions because I
do not wish to add to the possible failure of the university's
development."
  Six days later he decided to go. "Since you have kept me
so fully informed on the development of university matters
I most certainly feel it unnecessary for you and Mr.
Brodetsky to visit me here," he wrote from Berlin. "As
things stand I feel it impossible to be responsible any
longer for matters concerning the university. Thus I ask
you to strike me from the Board of Governors and the
Academic Council and to inform the members of both
accordingly. The public will certainly not be informed of
this step by me." To Brodetsky, vice-chairman of the
board, he wrote in explanatory terms. "Among my
talkative Jewish brothers I appear like a wild man who can
make himself understood only by means of gestures," he
said.

  You must interpret my resignation in the same way, and not to a
lack of mutual understanding. Even if I never see the day when I
can revoke this act, I shall never cease to consider the welfare of
the Jerusalem university as being close to my heart. I believe I
was right to follow my instinct, without thinking too muchùit
has been the best way till now. I agree that you and Weizmann's
conciliatory attitude may have been justified by your political
needs. The main thing is that we all have the same aim: service
to the university. I hope that my method will lead to the same
fine end.

  Einstein's genuine concern for the university was a
measure of his own, individualistic Zionism. However
much he might disagree on tactics, he kept in mind "the
same fine end."
  Thus Einstein was among those invited to attend, and to
speak at, the crucial Sixteenth Zionist Congress held in
Zurich in August, 1929. In the words of Weizmann's
invitation, the congress would "be of an unusually
momentous character in view of the fact that it will be
called upon to ratify the measures taken by the Zionist
Executive for the enlargement of the Jewish Agency, so
that it may be possible for the first meeting of the Council
of the Agency to be held immediately after the congress."
  Einstein was, as always, only too happy to visit Zurich.
He took the opportunity of visiting Mileva and his
children, telling Eduard, who asked why he had come, that
he was attending a Jewish conference and adding: "I am
the Jewish Saint." Although he appears to have put up at
the Grand Dolder Hotel on the Zurichberg, he was glad to
shock Sir John and Lady Simon by telling them: "I am
staying with my first wife." He visited the shop where he
had bought "penny cigars" as a student. And he took the
trolley car to visit his old landlady, Frau Markwalder,
insisting that she should not be told of his coming since he
"did not want to play the great man."
  He had been invited to the congress because, as
Weizmann assured him, he would "greatly enhance the
importance of the proceedings and afford considerable
gratification to all supporters." This was so, although he
also gave great support to Weizmann whose name he quite
justifiably linked with that of Herzl himself and whose past
work, he said, gave him a moral right to influence their
future. There had been bitter talk of "abdication" to the
Jewish Agency, and it was claimed that the influential half
of the new organization was concerned only with a much
watered-down version of real Zionism. Little of this
argument came through at the congress, although it is
significant that in his speech Einstein, after speaking of
"the brave and dedicated minority who call themselves
Zionists," went on to say "we others. ..."
  The actual signing of the concordat with the enlarged
Jewish Agency on August 12 was a moving moment. As it
was completed Einstein took a sheet of Dolder Hotel
notepaper from his pocket and wrote on it. "An diesem
Tage ist die Saat Herzls und Weizmanns in wunderbarer
Weise gereuft. Keiner von den Anwesenden blieb
unbewegt." ("On this day the seed of Herzl and Weizmann
has borne wonderful fruit. No one present was unmoved.")
He pushed the note across the table to Weizmann, who
added: "Mille amitiΘs. Je t'embrasse."
  The Zurich meeting marked a climax in Zionist endeavor
and, for overlapping reasons, the end of one phase of
Einstein's support. The enlarged Jewish Agency with
Weizmann at its head had barely come into existence when
serious anti-Jewish riots broke out in Palestine. On
September 11, Louis Marshall, who had been a mainstay
of the non-Zionist section of the agency, died after an
operation. The following month the Wall Street crash cut
the hopes of major U. S. support and at the same time, by
triggering off the great depression in Europe, provided the
cue for the nationalist and largely anti-Semitic forces
waiting in the wings of the Weimar Republic.
  None of these developments directly affected Einstein,
although they increasingly put him at odds with many
orthodox Zionists. The complexities of the position were
emphasized by Brodetsky, who spoke in Berlin in 1929.
"Einstein was present," he said, "but I am afraid that what
I said was not well received. I told them in the best
German I could manage what we demanded of the
Mandatory government, and I said that Arabs who had
murdered Jews must be dealt with according to the law.
The audience was shocked. Einstein complained to me
afterwards that I had spoken like Mussolini. I had shown
no spirit of conciliation; I had demanded that Arab
murders should be punished. Most German Zionists agreed
with Einstein."
  Einstein's own reaction was given in a letter to
Weizmann on November 25, 1929. He noted that "our
leaders give me cause for concern," and then went on to
criticize Brodetsky's Berlin speech. "The economic and
psychological problems of the Judeo-Arabic symbiosis
were completely bypassed, but handled as an episode of
conflict," he said.

  This was even more damaging, as the more level-headed
listeners would be totally convinced of incorrect facts. ... Should
we be unable to find a way to honest cooperation and honest
pacts with the Arabs, then we have learned absolutely nothing
during our 2,000 years of suffering, and deserve all that will
come to us. Above all, in my opinion, we must avoid leaning too
much on the English. If we fail to reach real cooperation with the
leading Arabs, we will be dropped by the English, not perhaps
formally but de facto. And they will, with their traditional
"religious eye-opening," claim themselves innocent of our
dΘbΓcle, and not raise a finger.

  From Weizmann there came a pained reply. It brought a
response from Einstein in which he stuck to his guns but
did his best to be conciliatory. "I really believe that many
opportunities have been missed here," he ended, "but we
should consider them and not fight among ourselves. After
all, even if we were not as good as defenseless it would be
unworthy of us to maintain a nationalism α la Prussienne.
Don't answer me now; you need your strength too much. I
will keep quiet as much as I can and not meddle in
anything."
  The extent to which Einstein was not only willing but
apparently eager to conciliate the Arabs, whatever
provocation they might offer, was based not only on the
expediency of working with the British but on a belief that
turning the other cheek was morally right and practically
workable. This tended to alienate him from at least a
section of the Zionist movement. Yet in other ways events
pushed him more firmly into the movement. From 1930
onwards, as he saw the growth of anti-Semitism in Europe
and as his hopes of European peace began to fade, a
sharper edge was given to the Zionist question by his own
personal experiences. He now began to take a new pride in
his background and on the evening of January 29, 1930,
actually appeared in a Berlin synagogue, playing his violin
in black skullcap with the augmented choir of the new
building, to raise contributions for a Jewish community
welfare center. He had once looked on assimilation as a
mistake; now he began to think of it as an impossibility.

CHAPTER 15

PREPARING FOR
THE STORM

By the early months of 1929, Einstein was recovering from
his collapse of the previous spring. He had, says his
stepson-in-law, Rudolf Kayser, "been very patient in his
suffering. He never complained about the tediousness of
his rest cure. Sometimes, indeed, he seemed to enjoy the
atmosphere of the sick room, since it permitted him to
work undisturbed." Of his long convalescence Einstein
himself said in March, 1929: "Illness has its advantage;
one learns to think. I have only just begun to think." He
was still weak, his face drained of color so that he looked
very different from the normally almost boisterous
Einstein. Nevertheless it was clear that he was recovering.
The man responsible was Janos Plesch, whose quick
diagnosis and simple remedy had done the trick.
  Plesch, who was to dedicate his Physiology and
Pathology of the Heart and Blood Vessels to Einstein, was
volatile and high-spirited, ambitious and successful. In
some ways he was the complete contrast to Einstein who,
in a letter commenting on a draft of his old friend's
autobiography, wrote on February 3, 1944: "Finally my
judgment about your work and yourself: talented to the
fingertips, acutely sensitive and receptive, fine of feeling
but disorderly and lacking a sense of duty. A genuine
angel who was born fallen from heavenly grace through
disorderliness and vanity." Yet for more than a quarter of
a century the two men remained firm and mutually critical
friends, a contrast in opposites in some way reminiscent of
the friendship between Churchill and Lindemann.
  When Einstein began to grow strong once more, he was
past the age at which a scientist might be expected to
produce original work; it was almost time to think of the
administrative "plums" that academic life offered. After
all, he was a European before he was a German, a man
whose friendships, private and professional, linked him
with the neighboring countries of Holland, Switzerland,
and France; if he feared that the breeze of anti-Semitism
blowing across Germany might soon rise to gale force, he
could take any of the appointments in Leiden, Zurich, or
Paris that would be offered at the drop of a hint. He did
nothing of the sort. He not only continued the good fight
against indeterminacy in physics where Born and
Heisenberg could already claim substantial victories, but
pressed vigorously on with what had for almost a decade
been his main preoccupation, the construction of a field
theory uniting the forces of electromagnetism and gravity.
  And while he kept his European friendships in good
repair he stretched out to make fresh and important
contacts in both Britain and the United States. He wanted
to get on with his work. He wanted to help push Europe
away from the precipice of war. But as his fiftieth birthday
came and went he seems to have felt the future, to have
sensed that the Wehrmacht would one day reach the
Channel and Atlantic coasts, and that in Europe the best
he could hope for would be a place behind the wire. His
work continued in Berlin; but from 1929 onwards there
were increasing glances over the shoulder to countries not
only beyond the Reich but beyond the continent itself.
  The most important item in this work was his search for
a unified field theory. He had studied the forces of
electromagnetism and produced the Special Theory, a new
and more accurate yardstick for measuring the
characteristics of the physical world. He had studied the
force of gravity, found it to be not quite what men had
believed it to be, and had produced the General Theory.
But, as he wrote in Nature, "the conceptual foundations of
the [General] Theory have no relations with the
electromagnetic field. These facts suggest the following
question. Is it not possible to generalize the mathematical
foundations of the theory in such a way that we can derive
from them not only the properties of the gravitational field,
but also those of the electromagnetic field?"
  Some men answered this question with an unqualified
"No." Wolfgang Pauli, who believed that such a marriage
of the laws of electromagnetism and of gravitation was
impossible, summed it up: "What God hath put asunder no
man shall ever join." Others were more optimistic, notably
Hermann Weyl and Eddington, both of whom produced
plausible but by no means satisfactory theories which
attempted to unify the two fields. One thing appeared
certain: the scale of the task being attempted. "If the
unification of physical theories was finally possible," said
AndrΘ Mercier years later, when such a prospect still
looked remote, "its possession would put the human spirit
in possession of an ideal instrument for making it master
of the intellectual world. The scholar would find himself
both powerful and bored, like an absolute monarch whose
ideas could not be undone by human stupidity."
  Einstein set out on the formidable venture soon after he
had completed the General Theory and his correspondence
of the immediate postwar years is spattered with references
to it. In 1923 he published a preliminary paper on the
subject based on an idea already put forward by Eddington;
then, settling down after the return from his travels, gave
the problem increasing attention. By 1925 he was able to
confide to Millikan in Pasadena: "I am working with every
effort on the wider shaping of the theory connecting
gravitation and electricity. This theory is mathematically
very evident; but I do not know if one can have confidence
in it from a physical standpoint." His efforts were soon
given a further spur by the birth of quantum mechanics;
for it was part of his lifelong but unfilled hope that a
unified field theory would help to remove the new, and for
him uncongenial, statistical element which formed part of
the new physics.
  In some ways he was embarking on a search for the
physicists' Hesperides, a scientific suicide mission on
which even an Einstein might fail. This is perhaps more
certainly the view today, when it is generally felt that the
structure of the universe cannot be described by using a
single set of equations. Yet even in the 1920s the prospects
looked poor. Einstein himself knew this and the
explanation he gave late in life for devotion to this
particular task was as relevant in 1929 as in 1949. "He
agreed that the chance of success was very small," as he
told a colleague, Professor Taub of Berkeley, "but that the
attempt must be made. He himself had established his
name; his position was assured, and so he could afford to
take the risk of failure. A young man with his way to make
in the world could not afford to take a risk by which he
might lose a great career, and so Einstein felt that in this
matter he had a duty."
  One paper giving the outline of a unified field was
published in the Proceedings of the Prussian Academy of
Sciences in 1928ùprobably the paper which caused Elsa
to write of her husband to a friend: "He has solved the
problem whose solution was the dream of his life." Then,
on January 10, 1929, the Academy announced that
Einstein had submitted a new paper on a unified field
theory which was being examined. This immediately
aroused the interest of the world, and not only because the
Academy appeared to be suggesting that something
important was coming. Einstein was by this time
approaching his fiftieth birthday and the world was tickled
by the fact that towards the end of his fiftieth year the man
who had "caught light bending" might have perfected a set
of equations which would, in the popular phrase, "solve
the riddle of the universe."
  It was announced that the paper would be published at
the end of the month and extensive, ingenious, but
unsuccessful efforts were made by the world's newspapers
to secure an advance copy. In an age when liaison between
newspapers and leading scientists was less happy than
today, distortions and absurdities were more apt to creep
in, and these were particularly irksome to Einstein, who
knew that a real understanding of his work was beyond
most laymen and many scientists. It was left to the chief
Berlin correspondent of the New York Times, for which
Einstein had developed a particular fondness, to explain
that the spate of telephone calls and requests were solely
the result of the theory whose publication was to be
completed within a few days. Einstein could only murmur:
"My God."
  He was, however, persuaded to give an interview to the
Daily Chronicle. The result was a nonmathematical
explanation of what the theory was trying to do and a
striking example of Einstein's ability to give explanations
"so simple that a child could understand them." "For
years," he said,

  it has been my greatest ambition to resolve the duality of
natural laws into unity. This duality lies in the fact that physicists
have hitherto been compelled to postulate two sets of laws
those which control gravitation and those which control the
phenomena of electricity and of magnetism. ... Many physicists
have suspected that two sets of laws must be based upon one
general law, but neither experiment nor theory has, until now,
succeeded in formulating this law. I believe now that I have
found a proper form. I have thought out a special construction
which is differentiated from that of my relativity theory, and from
other theories of four-dimensional space, through certain
conditions. These conditions bring under the same mathematical
equations the laws which govern the electromagnetic field and
those which govern the field of gravitation. The relativity theory
reduced to one formula all laws which govern space, time and
gravitation, and thus it corresponded to the demand for
simplification of our physical concepts. The purpose of my work
is to further this simplification, and particularly to reduce to one
formula the explanation of the field of gravity and of the field of
electromagnetism. For this reason I call it a contribution to "a
unified field theory." ... Now, but only now, we know that the
force which moves electrons in their ellipses about the nuclei of
atoms is the same force which moves our earth in its annual
course about the sun, and is the same force which brings to us
the rays of light and heat which make life possible upon this
planet.

  The Daily Chronicle interview appeared on January 26.
The unified field paper was to be published four days later
and it now dawned on some newspapermen that its
transmission by telephone or cable to staff who were as
innocent of science as many scientists were innocent of
newspapers would present abnormal difficulties. It had
dawned slightly earlier to John Elliott, head of the New
York Herald Tribune's Berlin office. On his advice, a
number of physicists from Columbia University were
brought into the New York office for the occasion.
Meanwhile, Elliott in Berlin sent a code to New York,
which allowed the mathematical and scientific symbols to
be cabled without fear of error. All went as planned on the
thirtieth. When the Einstein paper arrived Elliott himself
began the cabling, with the Columbia men in the New
York office carrying out decipherment as the cable copy
arrived.
  The paper for which the press had been waiting consisted
of six pages covered by fairly large print and including
thirty-three equations. "To the layman," commented The
Times' Berlin correspondent, "the paper conveys next to
nothing." This was not surprising since, as Eddington
noted, "for the present, at any rate, a nonmathematical
explanation is out of the question, and in any case would
miss the main purpose of the theory, which is to weld a
number of laws into a mathematical expression of formal
simplicity." Einstein himself did the next best thing. He
wrote a 3,000-word two-part article, which was published
in both the New York and the London Times, and which
outlined "the chain of discovery." The most important
feature of the new theory was its hypothesis that the
structure of four-dimensional space could be described in
terms of a synthesis of Riemannian and Euclidean
geometry. On this rested the erection of unitary field laws
for gravitation and electromagnetism. It was new, it was
interesting, but during the next few years informed opinion
tended to support the view of Eddington. "For my part," he
wrote,

  I cannot readily give up the affine picture, where gravitational
and electrical quantities supplement one another as belonging
respectively to the symmetrical and antisymmetrical features of
world measurement; it is difficult to imagine a neater
dovetailing. Perhaps one who believes that Weyl's theory and its
affine generalization afford considerable enlightenment may be
excused for doubting whether the new theory offers sufficient
inducement to make an exchange.

  Einstein himself was soon dissatisfied and within a year
was working on a fresh theory with a new assistant, Dr.
Walther Mayer, an Austrian brought to see him in Berlin
after publication of a book which Einstein greatly admired
ùLehrbuch der Differentialgeometrie. There was at first
some difficulty in getting support for Mayerùpossibly an
indication of the Kaiser Wilhelm's long memory of
Einstein's attitude during the warùbut eventually money
for him was found by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation of
New York. He then moved from Vienna to Berlin for what
was to be more than three years of collaboration, and in
October, 1931, the Macy Foundation issued details of a
new unified field theory from Einstein and Mayer. This too
was eventually abandoned, as were the other attempts
which Einstein continued to make for the rest of his life
most of them produced, as he wrote to an old friend, "in an
agony of mathematical torment from which I am unable to
escape."
  The 1929 theory was published only a few weeks before
his fiftieth birthday. This was to see the publicationù
although not in Germanyùof what can almost be
described as an authorized biography. The circumstances
of publication were unusual. One of Einstein's two
stepsons-in-law, Rudolf Kayser, was author as well as
journalist and had a deep interest in philosophy. He got on
well with his stepfather-in-law and as the fiftieth birthday
approached Kayser asked if he could write Einstein's life.
Einstein consented. But it was clearly a reluctant consent
which he gave. For his wish to help his stepson-in-law had
to struggle with his strong distaste for personal publicity.
The result was a compromise that misled the reader. For
the biography's author was disguised under the pseudonym
of "Anton Reiser," and only the slightest hint of his
identity was given in Einstein's foreword. "The author of
this book," it said,

  is one who knows me rather intimately in my endeavor,
thoughts, beliefsùin bedroom slippers. I have read it to satisfy,
in the main, my own curiosity. What interested me was not a
desire to know what I am or look like, but rather another's
avowal of what I am.
  I found the facts of the book duly accurate, and its
characterization, throughout, as good as might be expected of
one who is perforce himself and who can no more be another
than I can.
  What has perhaps been overlooked is the irrational, the
inconsistent, the droll, even the insane, which nature,
inexhaustively operative, implants in an individual, seemingly
for her own amusement. But these things are singled out only
in the crucible of one's own mind.
  This is as it should be. For, otherwise, how could the
isolation of distance be approximated.

  As far as it went this was fair enough, but it gave no
indication that, as Reiser subsequently said, its factual
contents rested entirely on personal information from
Einstein.
  Einstein's reaction to such biographies was apparent
when, two years after the publication of Kayser's book, he
wrote to David Reichinstein, a scientist whom he had
known before the war in Zurich. Reichinstein had prepared
a hotchpotch of a biography in which factual details of
Einstein's life were interlarded with his own views on
Zionism and the Jews, and with an attempt to give "A
Piture of His Life and His Conception of the World."
"Generally," Einstein wrote to him,

  I feel that it is in bad taste if biographical or autobiographical
material is published while the person concerned is still living.
The only exceptions concern the presentation of events or
situations which the person concerned has allowed to be pushed
into the background. I have also forbidden the publication of the
Reiser book in the German language, and on the other hand have
given you permission to publish your book in foreign languages.
The latter I also consider, in fact, to be in bad taste. In both
cases, however, it serves as an excuse that the authors really
want to get the money and cannot wait until I am dead.

  He then put forward a point that hinges directly on his
relations with the Germans. "Apart from the aversion
concerned solely with taste," he continued, "I cannot
reconcile myself to publication in the German language,
since this would alienate people from my personal
background." His efforts were frustrated, and
Reichinstein's book appeared in German as well as in
Czech and English. But Kayser's life was different; and
the book that rested "entirely on personal information from
A. E." was not published in Germany.
  Einstein's ambivalence to the Germans was equaled by
their ambivalence to him, illustrated by the experience of
his fiftieth birthday. On the one hand there was such
international fame that he was driven to the refuge of
Janos Plesch's house at Gatow by journalists who wanted a
birthday interview. The German Chancellor described him
as "Germany's great savant." The University of Paris
conferred an honorary degree which he received later in
the year, staying in the German embassy and meeting
Briand with whom he discussed the need for Franco
German friendship. The Zionists announced that they were
to plant an "Einstein wood" near Jerusalem. To the
apartment in Haberlandstrasse there came presents from
great men and small men alikeùthe first which Einstein
acknowledged being an ounce of tobacco, sent by a
German laborer with the apology that it was "a relatively
small amount but gathered in a good field." To many
friends he sent a mimeographed copy of his own doggerel
verse, slipping it in the post without a covering letter:

  Everyone shows their best face today,
  And from near and far have sweetly written,
  Showering me with all things one could wish for
  That still matter to an old man.
  Everyone approaches with nice voices
  In order to make a better day of it,
  And even the innumerable spongers have paid their
  tribute.
  And so I feel lifted up like a noble eagle.
  Now the day nears its close and I send you my
  compliments.
  Everything that you did was good, and the sun
  smiles.

  It was signed, as usual, "Peccavit," followed by signature
and date.
  Yet these birthday celebrations took place beneath the
shadow of a significant tragicomedy. Some of those who
played important roles in it are unindentified although the
events in which they took part were a warning of things to
come not lost on Einstein.
  Early in 1929 Dr. Plesch approached the Berlin
authorities, whom he describes as being typical middle and
lower middle class. "I had to explain to Boess, the Mayor
of Berlin, who and what Einstein was before I could
convince him that his city numbered a really great man
amongst its inhabitants and that it was his Council's
obvious duty to show some recognition of the fact," he has
written. "I am sure the worthy Boess was not entirely
satisfied with what I told him, and pursued his inquiries
further as to who this Einstein was. Apparently the result
was satisfactory, for he finally agreed with me that it
would be a good idea to acknowledge Einstein's birthday
by presenting him with a house and garden as a mark of
the deep esteem in which he was held by the Berlin
municipality." This appears to be pitching the intellectual
level of Berlin disparagingly low, but the outcome suggests
that the judgment was justified.
  Einstein's love of small boats had remained from the
days when he had sailed the Zurichsee, tacking back and
forth with the splendid panorama of the Alps before him.
What better, the Berlin Municipal Council therefore
decided, than to choose for him a country villa on one of
the Berlin lakes? He was known to enjoy the Havel River
and it was announced that as a birthday gift he would be
presented with a fine house on its banks, a little way
upstream from its junction with the Wannsee. Illustrated
Berlin magazines quickly printed photographs of the
"Einstein House" set among pines. Only when Elsa visited
the site to make domestic inquiries did she learn that the
house was already occupied. The innhabitants furthermore
had no intention of leaving, even for a successor as
illustrious as Einstein.
  The Berlin Council certainly owned the property they had
presented; but they had already let it on an inalienable
lease. Realizing this, they changed their plans and hastily
announced that a nearby plot would be presented to
Einstein. Significantly, the gift was now to consist only of
the land; Einstein would have to build his own house at his
own expense. To this he readily agreedùonly to be faced
with another difficulty. For when other property on the
estate had been leased, it had been agreed by the Council
that no further building would be allowed to disturb the
amenities or the view. Einstein might get his land; he
would not be allowed to build on it.
  At this point, doubts as to Berlin efficiency became mixed
with darker suspicions. These were increased when the
Council selected yet a third plot, only to discover after the
bequest was announced that the property was not theirs to
present. German humor is not always of its legendary
stodginess and the Council was quickly made a laughing
stock. To resolve the problem, Einstein was asked to select
his own site; the Council would pay for it. Elsa was not
long in choosing a site in the village of Caputh, a few
miles from Potsdam. The Council agreed to the choice and
a motion for the purchase of the land was moved at the
next session. At last all seemed to be settled. But now a
member of a leading nationalist party came into the open.
Did Einstein deserve this municipal gift, he demanded?
The Council, forced to the vote, did not know. The subject
was moved forward for further discussion at the next
meeting.
  It is difficult to disentangle the varying parts played in
the sorry business by muddle, red tape, and the internal
politics of the Berlin authorities. "The decisive power,"
says Frank, "lay in the hands of persons who sabotaged the
work of the apparent rulers. The officials of the city of
Berlin carried out the orders of the Municipal Council in
such a way as to result in failure and to make the
republican administration look ridiculous." This may well
have been so. But there was also the ever-present
groundswell of anti-Semitism, which like any other radical
prejudice is likely to win support in a society where ballots
govern by quantity rather than quality.
  Einstein now acted with desperation but dignity, writing
to the Mayor, thanking him for the Council's friendly
intentions, noting that his birthday was now past. He
declined the gift. By this time, however, he and Elsa had
become fond of the plot they had chosen. So they bought it,
and built their own house on it. "In this way, without
wanting it, we have acquired a beautiful home of our own
situated in the woods near the water," Elsa told Professor
Frank. "But we have spent most of our savings. Now we
have no money, but we have our land and property. This
gives one a much greater sense of security." Einstein,
unworldlywise in so many things, knew better. He had
once warned Frank that no more than ten years might be
left to him in Germany. Eight had already passed.
  The new home had all the qualities of genuinely rural
surroundings even though it lay only a few miles from the
center of Berlin. Beyond Potsdam, on the road that led to
Werder-on-the-Havel, Caputh was at that time little more
than one straggling street, and was rarely visited by the
weekend crowds from the capital. North of it stretched the
sandy heaths and pine forests, interspersed by lakes and
streams, which continue for mile after mile to the Baltic.
Just outside the village the ground rises to the edge of the
trees and here, only a few minutes from the Havelsee, on
which white sails could usually be seen, the Einsteins built
what was to be for a few years a good deal more than a
weekend cottage.
  The young architect ingeniously combined sophistication
with a simple style that fitted the surroundings, and the
half-timbered construction concealed a comfortable
roominess increased by smooth brown paneling and large
windows giving on to the distant prospect of red Caputh
roofs, the Havelsee, and the enclosing forest. This was also
the view from the long upstairs room which Einstein used
as combined study and bedroom. Books lined the walls, the
bed filled a recess, while in front of the tall French
windows which opened onto a balcony there stood the
large paper-cluttered desk at which he worked. And on the
Havelsee there was berthed the Tummler, the small boat
given him as a fiftieth birthday present by friends. It was a
fine scene. Had he known his Bishop Heber, he might have
considered it as another Ceylon, where "every prospect
pleases and only man is vile."
  While the argument over his birthday present had been
going on, the theory of relativity had been used to pull him
into a religious controversy from which there emerged one
of his much-quoted statements of faith. It began when
Cardinal O'Connell of Boston, who had attacked
Einstein's General Theory on previous occasions, told a
group of Catholics that it "cloaked the ghastly apparition
of atheism" and "befogged speculation, producing
universal doubt about God and His Creation." Einstein,
who had often reiterated his remark of 1921 to Archibshop
Davidsonù"It makes no difference. It is purely abstract
science"ùwas at first uninterested. Then, on April 24,
Rabbi Herbert Goldstein of the Institutional Synagogue,
New York, faced Einstein with the simple five-word
cablegram: "Do you believe in God?"
  "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the
orderly harmony of what exists," he replied, "not in a God
who concerns himself with fates and actions of human
beings."
  Years later he expanded this in a letter to Solovine, the
survivor of the Olympia Academy. "I can understand your
aversion to the use of the term 'religion' to describe an
emotional and psychological attitude which shows itself
most clearly in Spinoza," he wrote. "[But] I have not found
a better expression than 'religious' for the trust in the
rational nature of reality that is, at least to a certain extent,
accessible to human reason."
  In 1929 his statement was enough for Goldstein, who
pointed out that "Spinoza, who is called the God-
intoxicated man, and who saw God manifest in all nature,
certainly could not be called an atheist. Furthermore," he
went on, "Einstein points to a unity. Einstein's theory if
carried out to its logical conclusion would bring to
mankind a scientific formula for monotheism. He does
away with all thought of dualism or pluralism. There can
be no room for any aspect of polytheism. This latter
thought may have caused the Cardinal to speak out. Let us
call a spade a spade."
  On this occasion Einstein was merely hinting tentatively
at the belief which he held in common with many
scientists who distrusted revealed religions and did not see
that a future life was an essential for ethical behavior in
this one: the belief that much if not all of both science and
religion concerned complementary but separate aspects of
human affairs. Like T. H. Huxley, he was aware that great
though science was, it "could never lay its hands, could
never touch, even with the tip of its finger, that dream with
which our little life is rounded."
  At Caputh, where he settled in during 1929, Einstein
tried to isolate himself from unwanted visitors, newspaper
correspondents, and the uncategorizable cranks who
sought a few words with him. As there was no telephone,
visitors took the train to Potsdam, the local bus to Caputh,
then continued on foot, often arriving unannounced. Here
came the group of Americans who wanted Einstein's
advice on the organization of a Kellogg League that would
appeal to all people opposed to war. Here came Otto Hahn
from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute to discuss the work
which a few years later unlocked the door to nuclear
fission. And here, in the summer of 1930, came
Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian philosopher and mystic.
  Einstein and Tagore talked for the afternoon in the
grounds, and what was described as the "authorized
version" of their conversation subsequently appeared in the
American Hebrew. In view of Einstein's statement that the
report "should, of course, never have been published," too
much faith should not be put in the account, which was
headed "The Nature of Reality." Nevertheless, it rings
true, and there are exchanges which have the authentic
Einstein touch as when, after Tagore had denied that truth
or beauty was independent of man, his companion asked:
"If there would be no human beings any more, the Apollo
of Belvedere would no longer be beautiful?" To Tagore's
"No," Einstein noted that he agreed "with regard to this
conception of beauty, but not with regard to truth," adding:
"I cannot prove that my conception is right, but that is my
religion." The conversation, which ended with Einstein's
exclamatory "Then I am more religious than you are!",
contained two statements of dogmatic, if intuitive faith. "I
cannot prove that scientific truth must be conceived as a
truth that is valid independent of reality," he said, "but I
believe it firmly. I believe, for instance, that the
Pythagorean theorem in geometry states something that is
approximately true, independent of the existence of man.
Anyway, if there is a reality independent of man, there is
also a truth relative to this reality; and in the same way the
negation of the first engenders a negation of the existence
of the latter." And later he continued: "Our natural point
of view in regard to the existence of truth apart from
humanity cannot be explained or proved. But it is a belief
which nobody can lackùnot primitive beings even. We
attribute to truth a superhuman objectivity, it is
indispensable for us, this reality which is independent of
our existence and our experience and our mindùthough
we cannot say what it means."
  Contemplation of first principles progressively occupied
Einstein's attention. One visitor, Dr. Chaim Tschernowitz,
has given a vivid account of a summer trip with him on the
Havelsee during which their discussions were often
metaphysical. "The conversation drifted back and forth
from profundities about the nature of God, the universe,
and man to questions of a lighter and more vivacious
nature. ... ," he has written. "Suddenly [Einstein] lifted his
head, looked upward at the clear skies, and said: 'We
know nothing about it all. All our knowledge is but the
knowledge of schoolchildren.' 'Do you think,' I asked,
'that we shall ever probe the secret?' 'Possibly,' he said
with a movement of his shoulders, 'we shall know a little
more than we do now. But the real nature of things, that
we shall never know, never.'" As Born said of Einstein
after his death, "He knew, as did Socrates, that we know
nothing."
  Meanwhile he worked on, at the unified field theory, at
the problems posed by quantum mechanics, intrigued by
the prospects being opened up in cosmology by the new
telescopes of California, and in nuclear physics by the
accumulating knowledge of the atom. In his own specialty
he was lucky; in the days before computers he demanded
no equipment, and as for helpers, Dr. Mayer sufficed. "The
kind of work I do can be done anywhere," he said when his
friend Philipp Frank apologized that he might be late for a
rendezvous near the Astrophysical Observatory. "Why
should I be less capable of reflecting about my problems on
the Potsdam bridge than at home?"
  When the demon was with him nothing else mattered.
JoffΘ, the Russian physicist, recalls how while staying in
Berlin he visited Einstein to describe his recent work on
the mechanical and electrical properties of crystals. "He
asked me to explain in detail," JoffΘ has written.

  I remember that I arrived at his house about three o'clock and
began the account of my work. After about an hour his wife came
in and asked Einstein to see, about five o'clock, someone who
had come fom Hamburg to make the acquaintance of the great
man. Einstein hated this sort of thing, but he obviously got little
support from his family. He therefore led me into a nearby park
where we were able to continue the conversation undisturbed. As
soon as the danger of a meeting had passed we returned to his
study. In two hours I had explained all the essentials to him; and
now Einstein began the process of turning the information to his
own use. One can describe this process as the organic absorption
of new information into an already existing uniform picture of
nature.

  "It was eight when we had our evening meal," JoffΘ goes
on. "But even during this the discussion and mental
probing of the subject did not cease. The intake of
intellectual nourishment went on while the intake of
material nourishment was left to instructions from his
wife: what he should put on his fork and when he should
put it into his mouth. For Einstein's attention was far from
the macaroni we were eating."
  After the meal, the discussion continued. Midnight came
and wentùand so did the last train for Werder where JoffΘ
was living. He tentatively remarked that the talk could be
carried on at some other time, but the idea made no
impression on Einstein. "Finally, at two in the morning,"
says JoffΘ, "the discussion ended; everything was settled,
all doubts had been cleared up. Once again, a piece had
been fitted into the contradictory jigsaw which was
Einstein's picture of the world. Neither I nor many other
scholars would have been capable of so long and so
systematic an intellectual exercise. But for Einstein it was
obviously commonplace."
  It was natural that JoffΘ should go out of his way to
consult the scientist who had by this time become, despite
the reputation of Planck, Born, and von Laue, and the
potential fame of Heisenberg, the man physicists most
wished to see when they visited Berlin. And it was natural
that after mathematicians and scientists throughout the
world had contributed to a special award that was to bear
Max Planck's name, Einstein should be the first to receive
it.
  The presentation was to take place at five in the afternoon
and after a morning's work Einstein visited Plesch for a
lunch over which they discussed the crisis in the theory of
causality. Then Einstein lay down on a couch and went to
sleep. He woke at four, said: "They'll expect me to say
something or the other," sat down at the doctor's writing
desk, took a bootmaker's bill which was the nearest piece
of paper to hand, and scribbled away for twenty minutes.
Half an hour later, in the packed hall of tlhe Institute of
Physics, Planck took the platform and after a conventional
speech handed over the medal.
  "Then Einstein spoke," writes Plesch. "'I knew that an
honor of this sort would move me deeply,' he began, 'and
therefore I have put down on paper what I would like to
say to you as thanks. I will read it.' And out of his
waistcoat pocket came my bootmaker's bill with the
scribble on the back, and he read out what he had written
about the principle of causality. And because, as he said,
no reasoning being could get on at all without causality he
established the principle of supercausality. The atmosphere
was tense and most moving." Afterwards Plesch claimed
his bootmaker's bill. Einstein also handed him the medal,
of solid gold and with a bust relief of Planck. "It was still
in the case," Plesch noted. "He never took it out or looked
at it again."
  This award, and the stream of comparable honors and
invitations from abroadùa sign that Einstein's reputation
was still uneroded despite his growing isolation in the
crisis over indeterminacyùwere fair enough indications of
the position he still held in the German scientific
community. Outside it, the situation was very different. In
1920 when he had been a convenient focus of attack for
the nationalists and the anti-Semites, the battle had been
fought on the extremist fringe, in an atmosphere
exacerbated both by the humiliations of the German defeat
and the aggravations aroused by Einstein's own war-time
record and his left-wing pacifist beliefs. A decade later it
was not merely the extremists who were involved. Now it
was necessary to attract a larger audience and it was here
that Einstein was such a useful weapon in the hands of
those already optimistic of ending the Republic. For to the
less discriminating and more credulous it was
comparatively easy to portray the complexities of relativity
as the culminating confidence trick of a Jewish conspiracy.
Not everyone would believe this, of course. But Einstein as
a symbol was far more vulnerable to attack than a hero of
the medical sciences, a popular Jewish author, or a leader
in any of the professions whose achievements were easy to
understand and difficult to deride.
  The dangers of the situation were increased by Einstein's
own na∩vetΘ. This has been emphasized by Lancelot Law
Whyte, a young British physicist studying in Berlin at the
time. Whyte had met Einstein, greatly admired him, and
had so gained the master's confidence as to become
translator of the 3,000-word article on the unified field
which Einstein wrote for The Times early in 1929. Whyte
has put down what many were no doubt thinking. "Late in
1928," he says, "it seemed to me that, by giving favors to
Jews and foreign visitors which he was not giving to
German colleagues and students, Einstein was in a sense
helping to produce anti-Semitism. I was disturbed by this;
it did not correspond with my image of him as a noble and
wise person, and it made me uncomfortable that he had
been so kind to me."
  Shortly afterwards Whyte consulted "a senior figure."
"You do not understand," said this colleague.

  There is already so much anti-Semitism and jealousy of
Einstein on the part of duller German scholars, and such a gulf
between the German and modern sides of the university that it is
impossible for Einstein to be above the battle, the same to all
men. He is a Jew, he inevitably dislikes much that is going on,
and he is already for many a hated symbol. A German teacher or
student from some other German university could not approach
him as you have done. The universities reflect a chasm in
Germany; on the one side intellect and internationalism, and on
the other the re-creation of something peculiarly German after
the disaster of 1918.

  From this situation it was possible to draw only one
conclusion. "After this talk in 1929," Whyte says, "I had
an uncomfortable feeling that since Einstein could not
escape his outstanding responsibility as a symbol, he
should not remain for longer than he could help in a
university where he could not treat all alike. The fact was
that his presence in Germany was acting as a focus and
stimulant of anti-Semitism. He was the hero compelled by
fate to become an instrument of evil, as again later in
relation to nuclear energy."
  Shortly afterwards Norman Bentwich, who as attorney
general in Palestine had walked on Mount Scopus with
Einstein seven years earlier, visited Berlin with his wife. "I
was disturbed by grim signs of the rising anti-Semitic
flood and the growing strength of the Nazi political party,"
he has written. "When we had spent a week there the
previous year, on our tour through Europe, all seemed
serene and hopeful. Now many Jewish shops had been
sacked, and the Jews, who in 1929 were almost derisive
about Hitler, were seriously alarmed. I visited Einstein in
his sailing retreat on one of the lakes; and for all his
serenity he was anxious." Soon he was more so, and a few
months later was seriously advising a young correspondent
not to become a mathematics master "because of the
extraordinarily bad prospects ... and the additional
difficulty which is bound up with the 'jⁿdischen
NationalitΣt' "ùa difficult piece of advice since with him,
"work with science means everything."
  Good enough reason for his worry arrived soon
afterwards, with the publication in Leipzig of an ill
tempered little book called 100 Authors Against Einstein
(Hundert Autoren Gegen Einstein). With the exception of
Lenard and Stark, few scientists of even middling
reputation could be induced to condemn relativity, a fact
which clearly made the Leipzig publication part of a
careful propaganda drive. Some of the contents could be
plausibly claimed as respectable, but the promoters had to
scrape the bottom of the scientific barrel to find their quota
of contributors. Professor Mellin of Helsingfors wrote on
"The Untenability of the Relativity Theory" ("Die
Unhaltbarkeit der RelativitΣtstheorie"); Professor Dr. Hans
Driesch of Leipzig on "My Chief Objections to Relativity
Theory" ("Meine HaupteinwΣnde Gegen der
RelativitΣtstheorie"); and Professor Dr. le Roux of Rennes
on "The Bankruptcy of the Relativity Theory." "Der
Bankrott der RelativitΣtstheorie"). Dr. Arvid Reuterdahl of
Minnesota contributed a long disquisition on "Einsteinism:
His Deceitful Conclusions and Frauds," in which he not
only attacked the alleged priority of Einstein's theory but
claimed that the bombastic style of his story had turned
him into the Barnum of science.
  Einstein was well aware that this was merely the tip of
the anti-Semitic iceberg. More than once he spoke to his
wife of taking a post abroad, of renouncing German
nationality for the second time, and of holding up for
public examination the attitude of Germany towards the
Jews. Perhaps it would have been better for the Jews had
he done so. But he hesitated; the magnet provided by the
society of the Berlin physicists proved too powerful.
Science ⁿber alles.
  On July 17, 1931, he went so far as to draft a letter to
Max Planck. "I feel impelled to call your attention to a
matter which is closely related to the conditions of my
employment," this went.

  You will surely recall that after the war I declared my
willingness to accept German citizenship, in addition to my
Swiss citizenship. The events of recent days suggest that it is not
advisable to maintain this situation. Therefore, I should be
grateful if you saw to it that my German citizenship were
revoked, and to advise me whether such a change will permit me
to maintain my position in the Academy of Sciences (which I
sincerely hope).
  Concern for the many people who are financially dependent
on me, as well as a certain need for personal independence,
compels me to take this step. I very much hope that you will
understand and that you will not interpret this request as an
act of ingratitude towards a country and an institution which
have granted me enviable living and working conditions
during the best years of my life. So far, I have always rejected
offers from abroad, however tempting, which would have
forced me to leave the scene of my work. I hope I shall be able
to maintain this attitude also in the future.

  The letter was never posted and was still in its original
envelope when in 1933, after Einstein's refusal to return to
Germany following the rise of Hitler, his papers were
retrieved from Germany by diplomatic bag through the
French embassy. It is easy to infer what happened. With
his built-in wish to cause the minimum trouble to
everyone, Einstein would decide to have a private word
with Planck before anything was put on record. And
Planck, that figure of quintessential German loyalty, would
have little difficulty in persuading his colleague, once
again, where duty lay. He did not have to parade his
national loyalty, nor his inner conviction that civil servants
did not desert their posts in the hour of need. He had
merely, from the scientific pedestal on which Einstein
rightly placed him, to note that if a man genuinely wished
to probe the secrets of nature there was no place better
fitted for the work than Berlin.
  Einstein genuinely agreed. Moreover he hoped that he
would "be able to maintain this attitude." Since 1923 he
had, it is true, been a visiting lecturer at Leiden. He had
gladly given his services in Switzerland when required.
But in spite of his feelings about Germans and Germany,
he had remained faithful to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.
  Yet now, as the 1930s started their disastrous course
downhill, Einstein's faith in the future of Europe in
general and of Germany in particular began to wane. This
was revealed not only by his increasingly pessimistic
utterances, publicly on platforms and privately to friends,
in magazine and newspaper articles, but also in the new
pattern of life soon produced by acceptance of two different
sets of engagements. One was with the California Institute
of Technology which he agreed to visit for a few weeks
early in 1931 on what was mutually if loosely expected to
be the start of a long-term regular engagement. The other
was at Christ Church, Oxford, where he accepted a
research fellowship which allowed him to spend one term
a year in the university. His work in Berlin would of
course continue as before; but it would dovetail
conveniently into an annual program which would involve
departure from Germany for the United States in
December, return during the late winter or early spring,
then summer in Oxford before a return to Berlin in the
early autumn. This plan had the advantage of retaining his
links with Planck, von Laue, and his other colleagues
while providing two alternative refuges against the rise of
anti-Semitism or the outbreak of war. Meanwhile, adding
to the luster of German science, he continued to feed the
hand that bit him.
  Before the start of these series of visits to California and
to Oxford, which developed under the increasingly sinister
pressure of events in Germany, Einstein made three other
significant journeys abroad, one to Holland and Belgium,
two to Britain. The first was the most important. It led to
one meeting which helped to topple him from his pacifist
stance in the summer of 1933, but it was also a journey
important to the world in general and to Japan in
particular. In Belgium, Einstein forged a link which ran
directly from the Belgian royal family to a study in
Princeton, to the fear that Belgian uranium might come
under German control, and thence to a letter alerting
President Roosevelt to the possibilities of nuclear weapons.
  In 1929 he made one of his regular trips to Leiden. He
called as usual on his uncle CΣsar in Antwerp, just across
the frontier. And here he received an invitation to visit the
Queen of the Belgians at Laeken on Monday, May 20.
King Albert, epitome of the liberal-minded constitutional
monarch, still a symbolic figure from the First World War,
a trench-coated King defying the German invaders in
Flanders fields, had a genuine interest in science and was
absent only because of an appointment in Switzerland.
Queen Elizabeth, formerly Princess Elizabeth of Bavaria,
was unconventional and artistic, and on May 20 Einstein
and his violin spent the first of many musical afternoons at
the Palace, Her Majesty "playing second fiddle." There
followed, according to the Queen's own notes in her
agenda book, tea under the chestnuts and a walk in the
grounds, followed by dinner at 7:30. A few days later she
sent him prints of the photographs she had taken, hoping
he would come again soon, passing on the King's regrets
that he had been away, and adding, according to her draft
reply: "It was unforgettable for me when you came down
from your peak of knowledge and gave me a tiny glimpse
into your ingenious theory."
  The meeting marked the start of an unusual friendship.
During the next four yearsùas long as Einstein remained
in Europeùhe would rarely visit Belgium without being
invited to the palace at Laeken. He was the usual Einstein,
being missed at the railway station by the royal chauffeur
who failed to recognize the drably dressed figure with
violin case; alarming a small cafΘ by requesting the use of
a telephone and then asking direct for the Queen; and
generally behaving in the simple, unpremeditated way of a
man with his mind on other things.
  A full description of every visit went back to Elsa. In
recounting one meeting he recorded that Her Majesty, an
English guest, a lady-in-waiting, and he had played trios
and quartets for several hours. "Then they all went away,"
he continued, "and I stayed behind alone for dinner with
the Kings, vegetarian style, no servants. Spinach with
hard-boiled eggs and potatoes, period." This casualness
has been described by Antonina Vallentin, who records
how one day at Caputh Einstein was searching for a piece
of paper. "With impatient gestures he was emptying the
contents of [his] pockets on the table," she writes.

  They were the pockets of a schoolboy; penknife, pieces of
string, bits of biscuits, chits, bus tickets, change, tobacco dropped
out of his pipe. At last, with a rustle of parchment, a large sheet
of paper fell out. It was a poem that the Queen of the Belgians
had dedicated to him. At the bottom of the large ivory-colored
pages there were a few words and a few figures in Einstein's
small, regular handwriting. I bent over the table. Immortal
calculations side by side with the royal signature that cut across
the page, I read: "Autobus 50 pfennig, newspaper, stationery,
etc." Daily expenses, noted with care, entangled side by side
with the loop of the regal 'E.'

  King Albert died in a climbing accident in 1934. Queen
Elizabeth lived on, and the quarter-century that followed
her first meeting with Einstein was marked by a long
series of letters. Einstein's were extremely outspokenùas
though Her Majesty lived at such a far-removed level that
he could write with a familiarity unusual in
correspondence between royalty and commoner. Perhaps
their mutual links with southern Germanyùor the
similarity of their experiences, Einstein rejecting the
Fatherland and Her Majesty having her adopted country
invaded by itù aroused a common sympathy. Whatever
the particular fuel which kept the friendship alight, there
were to be repercussions, unsuspected in 1929, of that first
invitation and the walk under the chestnut trees.
  The following year Einstein made two visits to England.
Before he left Berlin for the first, he received a request
from Professor Veblen whom he had met in Princeton nine
years previously. A new faculty lounge was being built in
the university for the mathematics and physics department.
Could they have permission to use on it his phrase which
had lodged in Veblen's memoryù"God is subtle but he is
not malicious"? Einstein consented, adding that what he
had meant was that "Nature conceals her mystery by
means of her essential grandeur, not by her cunning" ("Die
Natur verbirgt ihr Geheimnis durch die Erhabenheit ihres
Wesens, aber nich durch List"), and the original phrase
was carved on the room's marble fireplace.
  Shortly afterwards he left for England, going first to
Nottingham where he gave to the university a general
survey of relativity and the unified field theory. Then he
traveled on to Cambridge to accept an honorary degree, a
happy occasion since it enabled him to meet Eddington,
whose knighthood was announced in the King's Birthday
Honors during the visit. Einstein had been invited to stay
at the Cambridge Observatory with Eddington and his
sister in 1920, 1925, and 1926, but had been unable to
accept due to pressure of work and official engagements. "I
would like to come to England," he had written in 1926,
"if for no other reason than the pleasure of talking with
you. ... I would so much like to talk with you that for this
alone it would be profitable for me to learn the English
language." Now the opportunity had arrived and the two
men spent a week together.
  In the autumn he came to London for a special dinner of
the ORTùan organization for helping Jews in Eastern
Europeùstaying with Lord Samuel in Porchester Terrace
where, as he later described it, he played a "star-guest
role." In this way, he said, in accepting Samuel's
invitation, "the business of a Jewish Holy One not only
becomes easy for me but is even reduced to a pleasure."
But he skillfully evaded a further invitation "to meet . . .
many prominent men," pleading that he had a prior
appointment in Switzerland where he was anxious to
discuss the health of his younger son.
  Samuel's notes of Einstein's visit, written a few hours
after his guest's departure, cast some interesting sidelights
on Einstein at the age of fifty. At luncheon one day the two
men were joined by Edmond Kapp, who a decade
previously had sketched Einstein lecturing in Vienna. By
now a well-known portraitist, Kapp made roughs of
Einstein's head, later marrying them with his action
sketches of Vienna to produce one of his best studies. By
this time Einstein was a habitual "subject." When Samuel
remarked that he must be constantly troubled by painters
or sculptors Einstein agreed; during his journey to
England, he told them, he had got into conversation with a
man who asked him his occupation. "Je suis modΦle," he
replied. During the meal he mentioned that he was still
frequently being attacked in Germanyù"parce que je suis
Rouge et Juif." Samuel, knowing that Einstein's politics
were pink rather than red, commented: "Mais pas trΦs
Rouge." "Et pas trΦs Juif," added Einstein.
  After the ORT banquetùwhere in his speech he paid
tribute to his fellow guests, Bernard Shaw and H. G.
Wells, "for whose conceptions of life I have a special
sympathy" ùhe remarked on the difference in the way in
which people had shaken hands with him. Some were
nervous, some curious, some proud. The men were proud
on account of their positions, the women on account of
their beauty. "He said to me on the way to the station,"
Samuel continues, "that never in his early years had he
imagined for a moment that he would take part in affairs
of a public character such as this, which had brought him
on this journey, or which arose from his interest in
Palestine. He had expected that he should spend all his life
in more solitary pursuits. He added that he did not really
feel himself fitted for these tasks. 'Je suis pas "praktisch."
' " The following day he "dropped in" on the Weizmanns.
"He was much amused at the ORT dinner, where, he says,
people made the impression of a monkeys' assembly," says
Mrs. Weizmann. "They were mostly concerned over whom
to shake hands with firstùLord Rothschild or Einstein
himself."
  Soon after he arrived back in Berlin he was visited by
Arthur Fleming, chairman of the Board of Trustees of the
California Institute of Technology. The visit appears to
have been made on the suggestion of Richard Chase
Tolman, the institute's professor of physical chemistry and
mathematical physics for reasons which were soon
selfevident. "The result was better than Tolman expected,"
Fleming wrote to a colleague, "so that when I first met
Einstein at his home in the country, and invited him to
come to us with the money provided by Mr. Thomas
Cochran, his first question was, 'You have a man named
Tolman at your institution?' I said we had, and he then
asked if Tolman were a visitor or one of our men. I
informed him that he was one of ours."
  Tolman was handling much of the theoretical work at
Mount Wilson Observatory concerning the nature and size
of the universe. Einstein was eager to discuss this firsthand
with the men concerned, and he quickly agreed to visit the
institute as a research associate early in 1931.
  When the news was announced he was soon brought up
once more against the interest of the United States in all he
said and did. By this time he was well aware of the power
of his name; but nearly a decade had passed since his first
visit to America and his recollection of the unrelenting
eagerness with which the inhabitants seized their
enthusiasms had faded. Before the end of the week, fifty
cables a day were arriving from across the Atlantic. U. S.
mail began to outnumber German letters. Elsa, who was
left to handle the welter of invitations, stated firmly that
the professor would be traveling purely on holiday; that he
wished to be left alone; and, finally, that she would not
allow him to land in New York, but would insist that he
remained on board while their Belgian ship continued its
journey south, through the Panama Canal, and up to
California.
  Despite these efforts at nonengagement, Einstein agreed
to one proposal which contributed an hors d'oeuvre of
controversy before the start of his visit. This was a request
to write for the New York Times an article on religion and
science, a perennial subject on which the views of a
nonpracticing Jew who had given a fresh description of the
universe were particularly pertinent. Ever since he had
been thrust into the limelight his views on religion had
been sought not only by the press but by friends,
colleagues, and acquaintances. Ernest Strauss, who worked
with him in Princeton, quoted him in the Encyclopedia
Americana as describing religious thought as "an attempt
to find an out where there is no door." His friend Max
Born observed that "he had no belief in the Church, but
did not think that religious faith was a sign of stupidity,
nor unbelief a sign of intelligence." There was a whiff of
wishful thinking in some of the views credited to him.
Thus Ben-Gurion, asked if he believed in God, replied: "I
once talked to Einstein. Even he, with his great formula
about energy and mass, agreed that there must be
something behind the energy." And Prince Hubertus of
Lowenstein reports him as saying, in the United States,
before the Second World War: "In view of such harmony
in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am
able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no
God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote
me for support of such views."
  Maybe. To some extent the differences between Einstein
and more conventional believers were semantic, a point
brought out in his "Religion and Science" which, on
Sunday, November 9, occupied the entire first page of the
New York Times Magazine. "Everything that men do or
think," it began, "concerns the satisfaction of the needs
they feel or the escape from pain." Einstein then went on
to outline three states of religious development, starting
with the religion of fear that moved primitive peoples, and
which in due course became the moral religion whose
driving force was social feelings. This in turn could
become the "cosmic religious sense ... which recognizes
neither dogmas nor God made in man's image." And he
then put the key to his ideas in two sentences. "I assert that
the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and noblest
driving force behind scientific research." And, as a
corollary, "the only deeply religious people of our largely
materialistic age are the earnest men of research."
  A leading article in the New York Times the following
day was mildly noncommittal, a reasonable enough
attitude in view of the obvious fact that the word "religion"
had a different meaning for Einstein than for most people.
By contrast, at opposite ends of the range, were Dr. Nathan
Krass and Dr. Fulton Sheen. Dr. Krass, rabbi of the
Temple Emanuel of 64th Street and Fifth Avenue, took it
favorably: "The religion of Albert Einstein will not be
approved by certain sectarians but it must and will be
approved by the Jews." Dr. Sheen, on the other hand, told
1,200 members of the Catholic Teachers Association that
the Times had "degraded itself" by publishing Einstein's
article, which he described as "the sheerest kind of
stupidity and nonsense." He asked whether anyone would
be willing to lay down his life for the Milky Way, and
concluded: "There is only one fault with his cosmical
religion: he put an extra letter in the wordùthe letter 's.'"
  Einstein's use of the usual word "religion" to cover his
own unusual ethical attitudes was only one example of the
way in which his outlook was contrary to that of the
country he was now to visit for the second time: "An
impersonal God, a deterministic universe, a churchless
religion, disregard of money and material gains, world
government, pacifism, and socialismùall of these are
pretty generally thought to be un-American and more or
less subversive." Einstein believed in the lot. In addition,
he despised publicity, as he made clear to the American
journalist he agreed to see on November 22, shortly before
leaving for the United States. To him he deplored the
letters which had been arriving at the Haberlandstrasse
house from manufacturers of disinfectants, toilet waters,
musical instruments, and clothesùdangling thousands of
dollars for permission to say that Einstein had found their
goods satisfactory. "Is it not a sad commentary on the
commercialism and, I must add, the corruption of our time
that business firms make these offers with no thought of
wanting to insult me," he asked. "It evidently means that
this form of corruptionùfor corruption it isùis
widespread." He was still unable to realize that the
enthusiasm for his presence, which was so frequently
exploited to aid the causes of Zionism or of peace, could
not be switched on or off at will. Much as he wished to
utilize mass psychology in the battle for good causes, he
yet deplored it. "My own case is, alas, an illustration," he
said. "Why popular fancy should seize me, a scientist
dealing in abstract things and happy if left alone, is one of
those manifestations of mass psychology that are beyond
me. I think it is terrible that this should be so and I suffer
more than anybody can imagine." This was true. It was
also ingenuous.
  At Antwerp, where he and Elsa embarked on the
Belgenland on December 2, 1930, he repeated that this
was merely a holiday trip, although agreeing that he would
be visiting the El Paso Observatory and would discuss with
his American friends questions in which they were
mutually interested. "If you really want to send a message
to the press," he told reporters, "let it be that I want to be
left alone. Personally I consider it indecent to delve into
people's private affairs, and the world would certainly fare
better if newspapers cared more for things that really
matter instead of dealing with trifles." And to the news
that he would be able to speak to his friends by
radiotelephone he replied: "I hope these journalists are not
going to call me up in the middle of the ocean and ask me
how I slept the night before."
  At Southampton, which according to a diary entry
impressed him with England's might, the press appears to
have been less importunate, and he noted that in England
"even the reporters practice reserve. Honor to whom honor
is due. A single 'no' is enough. The world can learn much
from themùbut not I who still dress carelessly, even for
the holy sacrament of dinner. ..."
  As the liner pulled out into the Atlantic, Einstein was left
comparatively at peace in the three flower-filled
staterooms which had been allotted him and which went
with "the excessive and pretentious attention [which]
makes me uncomfortable." Here he was to work
throughout much of the voyage with Dr. Mayer,
permanently guarded from intrusion by a member of the
crew stationed outside the door to his usite.
  But the radiotelephone continued to bring news: of the
V÷lkischer Beobachter, which was violently attacking him
for traveling on a Belgian ship instead of the German
Europa, due to arrive in New York the same day (but not
sailing on to the West Coast); and of the National German
Jewish Union, taking up the old stick that Einstein was
using his scientific fame to propagate Zionism, a charge
which it would have been difficult to deny. Before the end
of the voyage there came a further report from Berlin,
quoting a Dr. Boris Brutzkus who recounted how Einstein
had told him that he would settle in a quiet resort in the
south of France if Hitler ever came to power.
  On this final point, Einstein felt forced to comment. "One
should not speak publicly about conditions which one
hopes will not come to pass," he said. "Still less should
one under such circumstances make any decision in
advance or even make public such decisions." He refused
to be drawn. But it seemed clear to others, if not to him,
that he must be summing up the prospects in America
should he be forced from Germany. There, after all, he
could hope to continue his work in peace.
  During the voyage, a working one for Einstein and Dr.
Mayer, Elsa was persuaded that it would, after all, be
better for them to go ashore in New York. Einstein himself
agreed that it would be simpler for him to meet the press
when the ship came into harbor. As the New York Times
had already noted, "It is probably accurate for the Berlin
paper to advise him that he cannot hope to keep his
features out of the New York press unless he locks himself
in the purser's safe. And even then there will be pictures
taken of the safe."
  The occasion, when it came, had an air of comedy. Fifty
reporters and fifty photographers swooped on their victim.
Einstein, good natured but bewildered, was called upon
"within the brief quarter of an hour to define the fourth
dimension in one word, state his theory of relativity in one
sentence, give his views on prohibition, comment on
politics and religion, and discuss the virtues of his violin."
The German consul, Paul Schwarz, helped interpret; Elsa
did her best to stage-manage the occasion, mothering her
husband away from the trick questions, explaining,
protecting, and sympathizing with those who wanted the
theory of relativity described in a few onesyllable words.
  "The reporters asked particularly inane questions to
which I replied with cheap jokes that were received with
enthusiasm," was Einstein's own diary account of the
occasion. He proved remarkably adroit at handling his
questioners, answering the scientific conundrums so that
the replies were comprehensible, sidestepping the more
irrelevant demands, and interspersing his remarks with the
occasional debating point or colorful phrase. Asked
whether there was any relation between science and
metaphysics, he declared that science itself was
metaphysics. And asked what he thought of Hitler, he
replied: "I do not enjoy Mr. Hitler's acquaintance. Hitler is
living on the empty stomach of Germany. As soon as
economic conditions in Germany improve he will cease to
be important."

  He also broadcast from the ship, not once but twice, thus
satisfying two companies and earning $1,000 for his
welfare fund for the Berlin poor. The central message of
his statement was, in effect, a challenge to America. This
is how he put it:

  It is in your country, my friends, that those latent forces which
eventually will kill any serious monster of professional
militarism will be able to make themselves felt more clearly and
definitely. Your political and economic condition today is such
that if you ever set your hand to this job in all seriousness you
will be able entirely to destroy the dreadful tradition of military
violence under which the sad memories of the past andùto a
certain extentùof the world continue to suffer even after the
terrific warning of the Great War. It is along these lines of
endeavor that your mission lies at the present moment, and
should you be able and willing to accept this high duty I know
that you will build for yourselves an enduring monument.

  After the broadcasts Einstein went ashore, for five
crowded days of speechmaking and sight-seeing, returning
every night to the Belgenland where he could be protected
from the hundreds of visitors who wished to invoke his
personal aid. He received the keys of New York at a
ceremony attended by Mayor Walker and President Butler
of Columbia University. He saw his statue adorning
Riverside Church overlooking the Hudson Riverùthe only
statue of a living man among the thinkers who had
changed the world from the days of Socrates and Plato. He
celebrated the Jewish festival of Hanukkah at a crowded
meeting in Madison Square Garden, and on the fourteenth
he gave his famous "two percent" pacifist speech to the
New History Society at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. [Discussed
elsewhere] He visited the New York Times and he visited the
Metropolitan Opera, where he was spontaneously cheered
when the audience noticed him sitting quietly in a box.
Here he was handed a slip of paper on which the
Metropolitan's publicity director had written: "Relativity:
There is no hitching post in the universeùso far as we
know." Einstein studied it carefully, added: "Read, and
found correct," and then signed it. And here, spying the
press photographers who were awaiting him, he nimbly
about-faced and escaped from themùa Marx brothers
incident in which the publicity director was seen running
after the world's most famous scientist plaintively calling:
"Mr. Einstein, Mr. Einstein."
  The dislike of publicity was genuine enough, even if at
times it gave the impression of a Lawrence of Arabia
backing into the limelight. But once the cordon had been
broken through Einstein could be amiable enough. Thus a
young Berliner, refused permission to sketch him when he
returned on board, merely sat in the Bergenland's
restaurant and sketched while Einstein ate. The great man
was amused, signed the sketch, and added: "Dieses fette
satte Schwien/Soll Professor Einstein sein" ("This fat,
wellsated pig you see/ Professor Einstein purports to be").
He continued to evade the trail of autograph hunters,
although those who wrote to him got strictly business
treatment. "If the autograph is wanted very badly, if the
letter brings, say, three dollars for the Berlin poor," Elsa
said, "the doctor will be happy. And with pictures for
autograph with, say, five dollars, the doctor will be
happy." The little account book which she showed,
containing the details of what Einstein sent to the Berlin
poor, was, she claimed, his favorite reading.
  The Einsteins sailed from New York on December 16,
touched at Havana three days laterù"luxurious clubs side
by side with naked poverty, mainly affecting the colored
people," he noted in his diaryùthen passed through the
Panama Canal before turning northwards up the coast of
California. As they neared their destination the other
passengers made the most of the last opportunities of being
photographed with Einstein. So much so that resignation
at last gave place to annoyance. But there was of course
one consolation. "The autograph business for the benefit of
charity is flourishing," Einstein noted in his diary. He was
reported to be charging a dollar a time.
  At the end of the month, the Belgenland reached San
Diego. Einstein gave a New Year's broadcast over the
local radio, attended local festivities including one public
reception at which local Jews presented him with an
inscribed gold "mezuzah" containing a Hebrew prayer,
and another at which he was given a floral float. "However
crazy such things may look from the outside," Hedwig
Born wrote to him, after watching the scene on a newsreel,
"I always have the feeling that the Good Lord knows very
well what he is up to. In the same way that Gretchen
senses the Devil in Faust, so he makes people sense in
youùwell, just Einstein."
  From San Diego the Einsteins were driven to Pasadena.
Here they soon chose a small bungalow, the "shingled
gingerbread house," as Einstein called it, where they were
to live for their two-month stay at the institute. As a
celebrity Einstein was much sought after even in a land of
celebrities. Upton Sinclair, who took him to see
Eisenstein's famous film about life in Mexico, later
claimed a local millionairess had contributed $10,000 to
Caltech on the promise of meeting him. He and Elsa dined
with Charlie Chaplin "as a result of expressions of mutual
desire on the part of himself and the professor to meet each
other." And during a visit to Hollywood he was given a
special showing of Remarque's All Quiet on the Western
Front, already banned in Germany. "I thank you for all the
things you have said of me," he said at the special dinner
which followed. "If I believed them I would not be sane,
and since I know I am sane, I do not believe them."
Adulation was not unqualified, and Sinclair recalls a brief
exchange when the Einsteins visited Professor Graham
Laing and his wife. Mrs. Laing had queried Einstein's
views on God, which had brought Elsa out of her corner
with the declaration: "My husband has the greatest mind
in the world." "Yes," came the reply, "but he doesn't know
everything"ùa statement with which Einstein himself
would heartily have agreed.
  All this, however, was the froth on an important working
tour. The purpose of Einstein's visit, he announced on
arriving, "would be to fit into the life of the California
Institute of Technology and discuss problems with noted
scientists more intimately than is possible by
correspondence." The day after his arrival he gave a
further clue to the reason for his visit. "New observations
by Hubble and Humason"ùboth workers at the Mount
Wilson Observatory above Pasadenaù"concerning the red
shift of light in distant nebulas make it appear likely that
the general structure of the universe is not static," he said.
"Theoretical investigations made by Lemaεtre and Tolman
fit well into the General Theory of Relativity." Einstein
had in fact traveled halfway round the world to see
whether it was really necessary to revise the picture of the
universe with which he had virtually founded modern
cosmology in 1917; and, if so, in what way.
  Only thirteen years separated his "Cosmological
Considerations" from 1930, but within that period a
revolution had taken place in cosmology quite as
shattering as the revolution in physics which separated the
work of Lorentz and J. J. Thomson in the last years of the
nineteenth century from that of Planck and Einstein in the
first years of the twentieth. In 1917 he mathematical
projections of the universe provided by Einstein and de
Sitter were given due consideration, even though
astronomers had not entirely abandoned a belief that the
Milky Way, the galaxy which contains the sun and its
solar system among millions of other stars, formed the
entire universe. However, it was not denied that some of
the faint mysterious patches of light scattered across the
night sky might be other galaxies lying unimagined
distances away. V. M. Slipher at the Lowell Observatory
certainly thought so and suggested that at least some of
them were receding from the Milky Way.
  After the end of the war, evidence began to accumulate.
Like evidence for the subnuclear world of the atom it came
with the advance of technology, in this case with the use of
ever more powerful telescopes, notably the 100-inch
instrument on Mount Wilson above Pasadena. Here Edwin
Hubble had from 1920 been probing into Jean's
"mysterious universe." It seemed clear to him that some of
the light patches in the sky were merely clouds of gas
illuminated from stars that lay within the galaxy of the
Milky Way. But about others there was doubt that slowly
began to be removed. In 1924 he was able to observe
individual stars within the Andromeda M 31 nebula.
Shortly afterwards it became evident that such stars were
some 800,000 light-years awayùeight times the distance
of the farthest star in the Milky Way. Thus the galaxy of
which the solar system formed part was but a portion of
the universe: how small a portion became more and more
obvious within the next few years as improvements in
techniques and equipment revealed the existence of other
galaxies millions and even billions of light-years away.
  These discoveries were dramatically supported within two
years, by both theoretical cosmology and observational
astronomy. The story is chronologically tangled and has
some similarity with the simultaneous but independent
work on evolution by Darwin and Wallace and the near
simultaneous but independent development of radar in
Britain, the United States, and Germany.
  Listening to Hubble's account of his Andromeda
discoveries at a meeting of the National Academy of
Sciences in Washington had been a young Belgian priest
who, after studying astrophysics in Cambridge, had moved
to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was AbbΘ
Lemaεtre, "the mathematician for whom symmetry was
nearly as important as truth." Shortly afterwards, Lemaεtre
returned to Belgium, and in a paper published in 1927
showed not only that the "Einstein world" would have to
be unstable, but that it would in fact expand along the lines
of de Sitter's world. A unique and startling feature of
Lemaεtre's cosmology was that his presupposed world had
started as a "primeval atom" or "cosmic egg," which had
initially contained all the matter in the universe and whose
disintegration had marked the beginning of time and
space. Thus the contemporary universe was merely one
phase in an evolving universe. This could have started as a
greatly modified "Einstein world" before turning into a
continuously expanding de Sitter world in which the
galaxies were moving ever farther away from one another
and in which the density of matter was becoming less
while its amount remained static. Lemaεtre's paper passed
virtually unnoticed at the time. But two years later Hubble
at Mount Wilson made the sensational announcement that
the galaxies were receding at a speed proportional to their
distanceùreceding not only from the Milky Way but also
from each other. All intergalactic distances were in fact
increasing simultaneously, and the entire universe was
expanding at a rate which doubled its dimensions roughly
every 1,300 million years.
  Spurred on by these revelations, Eddington began an
inquiry with one of his research students into whether or
not the "Einstein world" was stable. They soon received a
copy of Lemaεtre's paper. This helped to convince them
that the answer was "No." Thus by the middle of 1930
Hubble the astronomer, Lemaεtre the unknown
theoretician, and Eddington the astrophysicist agreed that
Einstein's formula for a stable universe could not be valid.
  But there was an ironic corollary to this. The "Einstein
world" had been produced with the aid of the cosmological
constant and this had been necessary, in Einstein's own
words, "only for the purpose of making possible a
quasistatic distribution of matter, as required by the fact of
the small velocities of the stars." But now Hubble's
discoveries were revealing that some at least of the
galaxies, and of course the stars within them, were moving
at speeds which were sizable proportions of the speed of
light. Thus there had been no need for the cosmological
constant in the first place.
  One other point was that Lemaεtre had included in his
paper an equation which gave a term for the rate of
recession of the galaxies. Hubble had put a figure to this
term and with its aid the Lemaεtre equation could be used
to provide a radius for the initial "Einstein world." This
given, Einstein's original work could still give a figure for
the total mass of the universe. What it could no longer do
was give a picture of what was happening to that mass, for
this depended on the character of the cosmological
constant. If this were zero it was possible to postulate a
universe which had begun some 10,000 million years ago
with a "big bang" and which had been expanding
uniformly ever since. If it were positive, as Lemaεtre had
envisaged, then his primeval atom had begun to
disintegrate some 60,000 million years ago and the result
had begun to stabilize itself after some 50,000 million
the contemporary expansion being caused by an upsetting
of that stabilization and not by the initial "big bang."
While both these theories envisage the evolution of the
universe as arising from a unique situation, use of a
negative value for the cosmological constant provides a
third blueprint: that of the alternately expanding and
contracting universe. These possibilitiesùto which that of
a universe constantly expanding, but kept in a steady state
by the continuous creation of fresh matter, had not yet
been addedùformed the highlights of a development
which had been going on since 1920. They were still under
constant and sometimes acrimonious discussion in the
scientific world when Einstein arrived in Pasadena.
  He remained based there throughout January and
February, meeting the aged Michelson of the Michelson-
Morley experiment at a dinner given in honor of them
both.[It was for long accepted that at this dinner Einstein
attributed special relativity to the work of Michelson, since
a widespread version of his speech has him saying: "You
uncovered an insidious defect in the ether theory of light,
as it then existed, and stimulated the ideas of H. A.
Lorentz and Fitzgerald, out of which the Special Theory of
Relativity developed. Without your work this theory would
today be scarcely more than an interesting speculation. ..."
Gerald Holton has by careful detective work (see Iris, Vol.
60, Pt. 2, No. 202, Summer, 1969) discovered that
Einstein in fact put a third sentence between these two
"These in turn led the way to the General Theory of
Relativity and to the theory of gravitation"ù thus putting
a slightly different gloss on the occasion.] He was taken for
short "rest" visits to a number of Californian ranches
sending back from one of them a delighted card to Queen
Elizabeth of the Belgians, who had visited the ranch
during a state visit to America in 1919ùand he cruised off
Long Beach with Millikan.
  Real work started when he met Tolman and Dr. Paul
Epstein, the professor of theoretical physics. Following
this, he was driven up the long circuitous road which
winds out above Pasadena and then back to the top of the
Sierra Madre, from one of whose summits the Mount
Wilson Observatory looks down upon the town. Here Elsa,
when told that the giant telescope was required for
establishing the structure of the universe, is claimed to
have made a reply that may be apocryphal but is in true
Elsa style: "Well, well, my husband does that on the back
of an old envelope." Here Einstein conferred with Hubble.
  And here, early in February, he officially announced that
he had abandoned the idea of a closed spherical universe.
Later he was to agree with the more complex theory of an
alternately expanding and contracting universe, a decision
which comforted Dean Inge, who noted that this was a
"revolutionary change, for it means a return to the old
theory of cosmic cycles" which had always attracted him.
"Jeans and Eddington say that it is utterly impossible," he
went on, "but if I may take refuge behind Einstein I am
content." Early in 1930 Einstein did no more than agree
that his initial idea had to be given up, and it is typical that
he did so only after he had personally met Hubble and
peered with him through the magnifiers at the revealing
pictures of galaxies from what was then the largest
telescope in the world.
  In mid-February, a fortnight before he was to leave
Pasadena, Einstein addressed several hundred students.
His speech must have been surprising to many members of
the faculty, particularly to Millikan, whose natural
inclination was to believe that all was for the best in the
best of all possible worlds. For instead of singing the
praises of scientific progress, Einstein asked why it had
brought such little happiness. In war it had enabled men to
mutilate one another more efficiently and in peace it had
enslaved man to the machine. "You feel that this old chap
in front of you is singing an ugly tune," he said.

  I do it, however, for the purpose of making some suggestions to
you. If you want your life's work to be useful to mankind, it is
not enough that you understand applied science as such. Concern
for man himself must always constitute the chief objective of all
technological effort, concern for the big, unsolved problems of
how to organize human work and the distribution of commodities
in such a manner as to assure that the results of our scientific
thinking may be a blessing to mankind, and not a curse.

  Millikan, who was to receive angry protests about the
"two percent" speech which Einstein had made in New
York on his way to Pasadena, was worried about what
would happen during his guests' overland return to the
East Coast. But nothing sensational did. On March 3
Einstein broke his journey in Chicago, where he was
welcomed by a peace group and spoke from the rear
platform of his train. In New York he found a waiting
delegation from the War Resisters League, but the chance
of an explosive afterdinner speech whose sentiments might
brush off onto Caltech and discourage its wealthy
supportersùand which would in any case have offended
Millikan's conservative soulùwas fortuitously removed by
Weizmann.
  The Jewish leader had cabled an urgent appeal for help
which Einstein received before he left Pasadena.
"Financial position movement and work Palestine
extremely difficult in danger of immediate collapse
especially harmful now that political situation much
improved through satisfactory conclusion negotiations
government," he had read.

  We are making all efforts here but as you know resources
Europe limited. I am urged come America help drive. Serious
work here and necessity going Palestine for negotiations with
Arab friends prevents my undertaking trip now must be
postponed till April. You are the only man to render real
assistance this critical moment by responding invitation our
American friends and attending very few banquets in States. I
know this imposes heavy burden but having done so much for
Palestine I hope you won't refuse come to its assistance at this
anxious time.

  Einstein did not refuse. He rarely did. And the whole of
his evening in New York was spent in preparation for, and
at, a fund-raising dinner organized by the American
Palestine Campaign at the Hotel Astor.
  When he returned to the docks he found banner-bearing
pacifist groups awaiting him and he subsequently cabled
the leaders a message of goodwill: "Only resistance to
military service can bring success to the pacifist
movement." Two years later he was urging that only
resistance to the pacifist movement would bring success
against Hitler.
  In mid-March he arrived back in Berlin. Less than two
months later he left Germany again, this time for Oxford
to receive an honorary degree and give the Rhodes
Lectures.
  The Rhodes Trust had been set up only in 1926, and in
1927 Einstein had been asked to become the second
lecturer. This was a singular honor and his efforts to dodge
its acceptance have an almost contrived air. The first
approach was made my Lindemann, on the urging of H. A.
L. Fisher, Warden of New College and a Rhodes Trustee.
In his letter to Berlin, Lindemann noted that acceptance
would be "of great political significance" and "a
conciliatory international gesture." If Einstein wished to
"try the cloistered life," he could have rooms and service
in college; if he wished to bring his wife, then a hotel
would be found. The point that "even London and
Cambridge" were within reach was added as a final
inducement. Sir Otto Beit, one of the Rhodes Trustees, was
conscripted to invoke the help of Lord Haldane, who
supported the invitation, while the German ambassador in
London, Count Bernstorff, wrote to "the competent
authorities in Berlin and [had] asked them to urge
Professor Einstein to accept the invitation."
  However, this was rejected, partly because it had been
proposed that the visit should be for a complete term of
eight weeks. "Firstly, my current activities and obligations
here do not permit me to absent myself for a long time as
my work is too much interlaced with that of other people,"
Einstein replied from Berlin to Lord Haldane on July 8.
"Secondly, my general health would scarcely permit of a
transfer abroad for so long, a transfer which by want of
verbal knowledge of the English language would put an
exceptional strain upon me. Finally, I really do not have
sufficient matter of real importance to submit, so that I
cannot rid myself of the thought that my visit would be a
case of carrying coals to Newcastle (Eulen nach Athen
tragen)." He therefore asked to be excused, stressing that
this was not due to any lack of sympathy for Britain, and
ended with the expression: "If I could feel that I could
come up to expectations I would accept the invitation."
  To Lindemann Einstein replied in similar terms. But he
did not want to disappoint him. "Perhaps," he therefore
went on, "I can make amends and do what you ask at the
same time. If you cannot find anyone else at Oxford and if
a stay of four weeks in Oxford would be sufficient, I should
be willing to come during next summer term. It is very
important to me that I do not give an impression of
ingratitude to England, where my work has received the
greatest recognition."
  By this time, however, other arrangements had been put
in hand and the Trustees were, as Fisher wrote to Einstein,
"put in the difficult position, which they understand has
already been explained to you through Professor
Lindemann, of having to wait till their offer elsewhere was
refused or accepted, before they could write definitely to
you."
  However, although this first approach came to nothing,
the Trust had the tenacious quality of its founder, and in
1930 its secretary, Philip Kerr, asked Lindemann whether
he could induce Einstein to come in 1931, giving a single
lecture if he felt unable to do more. At first Einstein
accepted. Then, after arriving back in Berlin from
Cambridge, he had second thoughts. "I unfortunately felt
so unwell," he wrote to Lindemann on June 12, "that I find
myself forced to withdraw my undertaking to Oxford. Also
my doctor has advised me very strongly against it, and so I
must, with heavy heart, give it up and at least I am glad to
be able to write this to you now so that I shall not cause
any fruitless preparations to be made."
  However, Lindemann was not the man to give up easily.
In October, 1930, he was in Berlin. He saw Einstein;
almost as important, he saw Mrs. Einstein; and from the
Adion he wrote to Kerrùby now Lord Lothian. "I am glad
to say that his health seems quite restored, and that he is in
very good form," he said. "... He told me that he could
understand English quite well now and although he does
not speak it he had found no difficulty in discussions in
America as he speaks very slowly and almost everybody
knows either French or German. ..." (And he added later
that he would like to arrange for Einstein to have rooms in
Christ Church, "which he told me he would like and which
I think would be eminently conducive to obtain the object
you have in view."
  It seems clear that the visit was not yet finally settled, but
that Lindemann had turned upon Elsa the considerable
charm he could exercise when he wished. Drawing
Einstein to Oxford was worth an effort, and in February,
1931, he learned that he had done the trick. On the twenty
fourth he wrote to Elsa saying how delighted he was that
Einstein had finally agreed to come. "I will take every care
that he has all he wants and will use my best endeavors to
prevent his being bothered and troubled in any way," he
went on. "He can of course have as many meals as he likes
alone in his rooms and I will endeavor to preserve him as
much as possible from importunate invitations.
  "I am taking steps to see that he can get some sailing, so
that I hope he will not feel that he is wasting his time here
altogether."
  There was little danger of that. But even before his
departure from Berlin Einstein was trying to refuse
engagements. "Dear colleague," he wrote to Lindemann,

  the Oxford Luncheon Club has written to me and, so to speak,
twisted my arm to persuade me not only to fill my stomach in
Oxford but also to make a speech. Unfortunately, the people
there are so well educated that they not only know everything
which in my ignorance I could not tell them but, what is more
important, a great deal that I have never learned. In these
circumstances I must ask you, nervously: must this be, or can it
be avoided without offending tact or tradition: Write to me,
please, quickly so that I need not cause them inconvenience by
delay.

  Lindemann intervened and there was no Luncheon Club
address.
  On arrival in Oxford Einstein was taken under
Lindemann's wing and given the services of the latter's
indefatigable servant and general factotum, James Harvey.
In addition, Lindemann acted as his mentor and guide,
showing him the sights, and introducing him to his various
friends and acquaintances. Among these were John Scott
Haldane the physiologist, and his wife Kathleen, parents of
J. B. S. Haldane, enfant terrible among the geneticists.
"We were such good friends that my husband took a great
deal of trouble to ensure that the professor should have an
appreciative audience ...," Mrs. Haldane has said. Efforts
were necessary, since although the Milner Hall of the new
Rhodes House was full at the inaugural lecture, many of
the audience slipped away while it was still on. "I don't
blame them," J. S. Haldane commented. "If their maths
are good enough to follow him their German certainly is
not." By the end, only a small audience was left and
Einstein promised that the next time "the discourse should
be in English delivered." Haldane was heard to murmur
"Gott bewahre!"
  The first lecture was on relativity, the second on
cosmological theory, and the third on the unified field
theory. While the first and last were largely syntheses of
views which Einstein had already expounded at length, the
second dealt with his recent abandoning of the
cosmological constant. He admitted that this presented two
problems. It would be difficult to know from what the
expansion of the universe had started; and while its age
worked out at about 1010 years, there was already
considerable evidence that the earth itself was older than
this. Another point was that his theory now limited the
radius of the universe to 108 light-years, a distance to
which the Mount Wilson telescope had already almost
penetrated. As he said, if they went further, this would
"put the varnish on" his theory.
  Even in Oxford, where eccentrics are the rule rather than
the exception, Einstein made his mark. The
undergraduates loved him and Mrs. Haldane has recalled
how a group of them helped him down from the pony trap
into which he had been hurried when the Haldanes feared
he would miss an important appointment. As he descended
from the trap at Tom Gate a big button from his Ulster was
torn off in the basketwork of the vehicle. The young girl
driving him disentangled it and ran after him. "I wouldn't
worry, Miss," said the college porter. "The gentleman will
never miss it. He has one odd button on his coat already."
  It was in Tom Quad that Einstein was discovered one day
by Gilbert Murray with, as Arnold Toynbee describes it, a
faraway look on his face. "The faraway thought behind
that faraway look was evidently a happy one for, at that
moment, the exile's countenance was serene and smiling,"
Toynbee has written. "'Dr. Einstein, do tell me what you
are thinking,' Murray asked. 'I am thinking,' Einstein
answered, 'that, after all, this is a very small star.' All the
universe's eggs were not in this basket that was now
infested by the Nazis; and for a cosmogoner, this thought
was convincingly consoling."
  Some indication of Einstein's life during his first stay in
Oxford is given in the letter which Lindemann received
from Elsa after her husband had been at Christ Church a
week. "He writes me enthusiastic letters," she said.

  Oxford, the calm cloisters of the college, and the noble
surroundings combine to produce a refreshing and calming effect
upon him. I am grateful to you for all the care and attention
which you are so kindly showing him. I have, however, one
request to make. My husband has no secretary or assistant. And a
crowd of questions and letters of every kind come to him,
although I keep back here everything I can, and send him
virtually nothing. It is, therefore, unavoidably necessary for him
to get some help. Don't ask him, please, because he will refuse
out of his endless modesty. You would, however, be doing him a
great kindness if you could simply arrange that every other day a
secretary should appear and write his letters. We covet here
things in his own handwriting but we get very little of it because
he has so much else to write.

  The "great kindness" was performed for the rest of his
stay.
  In Oxford he saw an England very different from the
formality of Lord Haldane's London residence, an England
where his Jewishness, his German ancestry, and his stature
as a scientist all tended to be taken for granted and then
passed over so that he could be weighed and considered as
a human being. He liked the experience; he enjoyed
Lindemann's friends, he soaked up the atmosphere of an
Oxford that has largely disappeared in the last fifty years;
and whenever he wished he broke through the screens
raised to ensure him privacy.
  One typical picture has been drawn by Margaret Deneke,
a leading figure at Oxford whose house was a mecca for
music lovers. "We knew of his great interest in music," she
says of Einstein.

  and we had great artists playing quartets and enjoying music in
our house. They were people whose names were known to him
and he was delighted to be invited to join. So he came to us.
Afterwards we discovered that outsiders were not supposed to
invite him, but he had found his way here and he chose to go on
coming. We used to borrow instruments for him. He did not
bring his violin. He played trios and quartets. He did not lead,
and he always preferred to be the second violin. Now and again
he would lose his place or they had to repeat something so that
he came in at the right moment.

  On May 23 he received an honorary doctorate of science.
He spent a few days making final courtesy calls. Then he
left for home, arriving in Berlin during the first days of
June. "The situation here is horrible," he wrote to
Lindemann, after thanking him for all his help. "All
money values have disappeared, and the people are
disturbed and embittered against the government. The
future that lies ahead is threatening and dark."
  These words, written casually in a thank-you letter, may
well have had their impact on Lindemann who during the
next few years was to be the savior of so many German
Jews. Touring Germany in his chauffeur-driven Mercedes,
one of the few physicists whom the headwaiters of
Europe's grand hotels would automatically bow to the best
table, Lindemann did a great deal to extricate the cream of
the country's scientists from the Reich as Hitler rose to
power. Some at least of this was foreshadowed as he wrote
to Lord Lothian in June, commenting on the success of
Einstein in Oxford. "He threw himself into all the
activities of Oxford science, attended the Colloquiums and
meetings for discussion and proved so stimulating and
thought-provoking that I am sure his visit will leave a
permanent mark on the progress of our subject," he noted.
"... I have hopes that this period as Rhodes Lecturer may
initiate more permanent connections with this university
which can only prove fertile and advantageous in every
respect."
  The first move came quickly. It was proposed that
Einstein should be made a "Research Student," the most
honorific post to which the college could elect him. This
was a personal triumph for Einstein on more than one
count. Inside Christ Church a considerable internal fight
was being carried on about endowing research at all: on
one side was the party mobilized by Lindemann and the
Senior Censor, Roy (now Sir Roy) Harrod, the economist;
against them was ranged a body of opinion which insisted
that research men were unclubbable and would completely
upset Common Room life. The latter party was supported
by one college official, who stated strongly that the college
endowments had not been given to subsidize "some
German Jew."
  Then, without obvious reason, it became clear that
Einstein's candidacy was being favored. The reason for the
change of balance is interesting. Einstein had in Christ
Church used the rooms of R. H. Dundas, who was
traveling. On his return Dundas opened his Visitor's Book
to find the following written in German by Einstein:

  Dundas lets his rooms decay
  While he lingers far away,
  Drinking wisdom at the source
  Where the sun begins its course.

  That his walls may not grow cold
  He's installed a hermit old,
  One that undeterredly preaches
  What the Art of Numbers teaches

  Shelves of towering folios
  Meditate in solemn rows;
  Find it strange that one can dwell
  Here without their aid so well

  Grumble: Why's this creature staying
  With his pipe and piano-playing?
  Why should this barbarian roam?
  Could he not have stopped at home?

  Often, though, his thoughts will stray
  To the owner far away,
  Hoping one day face to face
  To behold him in this place

  With hearty thanks and greetings

  Dundas was charmed with the verses. So much so that he
became a keen supporter of Einstein's research fellowship.
All at once everyone remembered how they had taken to
Einstein, what good company he had been. Einstein's
doggerel ensured that the Dean was able formally to make
the proposal with no chance of its being rejected. In fact
there was only one protesterùa former student who wrote
to say that such appointments endangered his pension
rights. The letter was ill-received.
  News of the offer came on June 29 through Lindemann,
who pointed out that Einstein would be able to stay in
Oxford for one term a year without giving up his Berlin
appointments. The appointment as a senior member of
Christ Churchù"called 'Fellows' (Socii) in most Colleges,
'Students' at Christ Church (not in the sense of
Studiosum)" as Lindemann explainedùwould be for five
years at a stipend of ú 400 per year with the use of a set of
rooms in college and dinner allowance when he dined in
Hall: and it was hoped that he "would be able to visit
Oxford for something like a month during term time in the
course of the year at such periods as may be convenient."
  Einstein accepted quickly, "very pleased," as he wrote to
Lindemann, "to be able to keep in contact with Oxford and
with you personally so regularly." But already, in the
summer of 1931, there was more to it than mere love of
Oxford. "Extraordinary things are happening here," he
continued in his letter from Berlin. "Parliament has to a
certain extent renounced its authority and inevitably a kind
of dictatorship has been set up. Let us hope that this will
not lead to intolerable internal stresses." As events turned
out, he was to appear as a Student at Christ Church during
only two years of his appointment. To what must have
been the chagrin of some men in Oxford, the outstanding ú
1,200 of his stipend went to help other German Jews.
  The Christ Church offer had formally come as Einstein
was completing arrangements for a second visit to the
California Institute of Technology. Earlier in the year
Fleming had proposed that he should come to Pasadena on
a regular basis and Einstein had tentatively accepted.
Fleming appears to have acted largely on his own
initiative, a circumstance common to his later years and
one which added an air of chaos to some of the institute's
proceedings, and details of the offer are not clear.
However, he gave his own version at a meeting called to
consider the proposed appointment in the early autumn of
1931, and this was described in a long letter to Hale from
A. A. Noyes, director of chemical research at Caltech.
"Fleming," this said,

  read not his own letters to Einstein, but two replies he had
received from Einstein, the second one written in July stating
that he (Einstein) had definitely accepted the permanent
appointment, with $5,000 annually plus $15,000 in any year
when he comes for ten weeks to the institute plus a $3,000
annuity to his widow. Einstein himself proposed reducing the
annual payment from the $25,000 proposed by Fleming to
$20,000, and the proposed annuity from some larger sum to
$3,000. Fleming said that Einstein cabled him in August asking
to know whether the arrangement was definite, as his plans for
the present year must be consummated, but we have never been
able to get out of Fleming just what reply he made to that last
cablegram of Einstein, though I made two attempts. It seems
probable, however, that Fleming told Einstein that the
arrangement was definite for this year, but that the permanent
plan must await action by the trustees.

  This was in fact what happened. Millikan, who would
shortly be in Europe, was given the job of ensuring that the
institute netted Einstein for the coming season but that any
offer of a permanent post was evaded for the time being. In
addition, he was given an even more delicate task. "Board
is of opinion commitment of $20,000 all inclusive has
been made for coming year," he was informed soon after
reaching Europe by E. C. Barrett, the institute secretary.
"If Einstein thinks so, board will carry out this
commitment. If Einstein does not feel we have made such
commitment board voted that you offer $15,000 or
thereabouts all inclusive."
  However, Millikan the faithful servant of the institute
took a worldly view of Einstein's vagueness about money.
"Now the $7,000 figure which we talked about for a ten or
twelve weeks' annual stay in Pasadena," he wrote on
October 11,

  was one which I had already suggested to some of my financial
friends as a dignified and suitable one for such a service as
Professor Einstein would there render, and I hope soon to be in a
position to suggest such an arrangement as a continuing one
and that too without putting a strain upon the finances of the
institute. ... For the present year, in view of some previous
correspondence which I believe has already been had, I am sure
the trustees expect us to decide upon a considerably larger figure
and they are prepared to meet it whatever it is that we have
determined upon. In other words, they want you, and we all want
you very much to come.

  Despite Einstein's apparent otherworldliness, despite the
fact that he once used a check as a bookmarker instead of
paying it into the bank, his character yet contained a
strong streak of peasant awareness that quickly noted any
attempt at financial sleight of hand.
  His reply to Millikan, written from Caputh on October
19, 1931, was not, therefore, as surprising as it probably
appeared to Millikan. "Thank you very much for your
friendly and full letter," he wrote. "But I have now decided
to remain here for this winter and have informed Herr
Fleming and confirmed it in the following letter.

  Dear Herr Fleming,
  Herr Professor Millikan has laid your new proposals before
me. On the strength of that, we have made up our minds to
remain in Europe this winter. We have decided this chiefly
because it is repugnant to me, in the present difficult
situation, to accept this invitation. Besides, I must confess to
you frankly that the ways and means with which the
negotiations have been conducted with me, are, to say the
least of it, somewhat peculiar. After your first written offer,
you received from me a detailed counterproposal. To this I
received no answer at all. After five weeks I finally sent you a
telegram in which I asked you to inform me of your decision
concerning the establishment of our winter program. Your
telegraphed reply promised the forwarding of a contract at the
latest on September 3. But nothing came of this.
  Now recently Professor Millikan came with entirely new
proposals which entirely ignore our previous negotiations. So
it is not to be wondered at if I have decided to recover from
the harassing negotiations during the winter in the south
European sun, and to gather new strength for the future.
  With most sincere greetings, Yours, A. Einstein

  "I am very pleased about your and [your wife's] friendly
visit," he continued to Professor Millikan. "It was very
good of you to let me know some days in advance so that I
was certain to be free."
  So far so good. But this was not the end of the encounter.
What happened next is not entirely clear. But the outcome
was revealed when Elsa wrote to Millikan almost a month
later, on November 14, sending the contract, signed by
Einstein. She added details about the secretarial help that
would be required after they arrived in Pasadena at the end
of December, and referred to the domestic arrangements
which involved the renting of the same private house in
Pasadena that they had occupied the previous year.
  The sudden change on Einstein's part may well have
been due to a further appeal on the part of Fleming. It is
certainly true that when the Einsteins arrived in Pasadena
at the end of 1931 they were accommodated not in private
quarters but in the splendid premises of the Athenaeum,
the faculty club where Fleming had given up his own
apartment for the occasion.
  Einstein's second journey to Pasadena was thus made in
the same one-visit circumstances as the first. But the
question of a journey each year had now been raised. He
had been led by Millikan to assume that this was still a
distinct possibility if not a likelihood, and this was no
doubt in his mind when in December he made a significant
entry in his diary; "I decided today," it went, "that I shall
essentially give up my Berlin position and shall be a bird
of passage for the rest of my life." It was in this frame of
mind that he arrived in Pasadena for the second time, a
significant condition in view of a meeting which was
shortly to come.
  This was with Abraham Flexner, the American
educationalist then preparing to set up a new kind of
educational institute, made possible when Mr. Louis
Bamberger and Mrs. Felix Fulds had two years previously
provided $5 million for what Flexner called a "haven
where scholars and scientists may regard the world and its
phenomena as their laboratory without being carried off in
the maelstrom of the immediate." Its small number of
selected staff would have no duties in the usual sense of
the word and the Institute for Advanced Study, as it was to
become, thus offered something comparable to the
conditions which had drawn Einstein to Berlin two
decades previously: no routine and a lot of time to think.
  It had been agreed that the institute, whose location had
not yet been decided, would first concentrate on
mathematical studies, and early in 1932 Flexner visited
Pasadena to get the advice of Millikan. There was one
obvious suggestionùwhy not have a word with Einstein?
"I drove over to the Athenaeum where he and Mrs.
Einstein were staying and met him for the first time,"
Flexner has written. "I was fascinated by his noble
bearing, his simple charming manner, and his genuine
humility. We walked up and down the corridors of the
Athenaeum for upwards of an hour, I explaining, he
questioning. Shortly after twelve, Mrs. Einstein appeared
to remind him that he had a luncheon engagement. 'Very
well,' he said in his kindly way, 'we have time for that. Let
us talk a little while longer.'"
  Before they parted, Flexner said that he would be in
Europe later in the year. Einstein would be spending the
spring term at Oxford with Lindemann and it was agreed
that they would meet again. "I had no idea," Flexner later
recorded, "that he would be interested in being concerned
with the institute, but he gave me the best of reasons for
thinking that an informal organization such as I had in
mind would be much more important at this stage of our
development and at the stage of the world's development
than another organized university." This then was
Flexner's story: that at this point he entertained no idea of
attracting Einstein from Caltech to his new institute.
Nevertheless, he left Pasadena having carefully made his
arrangements for a further meeting.
  During this visit to Pasadena Einstein lectured on space
curvature and in a joint statement issued with de Sitter,
also visiting the institute, said that recent studies further
strengthened the idea of an expanding universe. Hand in
hand with his scientific work went a long series of pacifist
statements which gravely worried Millikan and which
were to have their effect on Einstein's visit the following
year. To a mass disarmament meeting in the high school at
Whittier he spoke of the grave danger of militarism, and
pinned his hopes on the Disarmament Conference, due to
start soon in Geneva. At a meeting on world affairs
sponsored by the Los Angeles University of International
Relations held in Pasadena, in February, he claimed that
"disarmament cannot take place by easy stages but must
come in one swoop or not at all." The following day he
told a mass meeting in Santa Barbara that renunciation of
at least some political sovereignty was essential to peace,
while at the end of the month he recommended to listeners
in the Pasadena Civic Auditorium that the decisions of an
international court should "be enforced by all the nations
acting in common." Here, although his pacifist friends
may not have noticed it, were indications that Einstein's
renunciation of force had a qualification: that it should be
outlawed for national but not necessarily international
ends.
  He returned to Berlin in the spring, and early in May set
out for England once again, first to deliver the Rouse Ball
Lecture on Mathematics in Cambridge and then to make
his first visit to Oxford as a Research Student. He was
given rooms in Christ Church and dined at High Table
most evenings. "He was a charming person," says Sir Roy
Harrod,

  and we entered into relations of easy intimacy with him. He
divided his time between his mathematics and playing the violin;
as one crossed the quad, one was privileged to hear the strains
coming from his rooms. In our Governing Body I sat next to him;
we had a green baize tablecloth; under cover of this he held a
wad of paper on his knee, and I observed that all through our
meetings his pencil was in incessant progress, covering sheet
after sheet with equations. His general conversation was not
stimulating, like that of the Prof. I am afraid I did not have the
sense that, so far as human affairs were concerned, I was in the
presence of a wise man or a deep thinker. Rather I had the idea
that he was a very good man, a simple soul, and rather naive
about worldly matters. He had his little fund of amusing stories
on an unsophisticated level.

  On one occasion Lindemann was able to shine before his
guest. "Einstein happened to mention at High Table some
mathematical proposition which he took to be well
established but for which he had never been able to furnish
himself with the proof," says Harrod. "The Prof returned
the next day, claiming to have thought of the proof in his
bath; Einstein was satisfied with it." What is more,
Einstein remained satisfied. Twelve years later, writing to
Lindemann, by this time Lord Cherwell and Churchill's
personal scientific adviser, he added as a P. S. to his letter:
"Do you remember the beautiful proof about prime factors
you found while sitting in your bathtub?"
  It appears to have been on this visit that Einstein was
finally conscripted by Lindemann into the forces fighting
for the site of the new Radcliffe Observatory, which it was
claimed should be situated in Oxford rather than in South
Africa. This bitter contest of university politics was being
fought on grounds which were more parochial than
scientific, and it is difficult not to believe that Einstein's
involvement was a tribute to his innocence rather than to
deep convictions. As Lindemann's biographer says, "The
Prof must have felt a glow of triumph when he induced the
great Einstein to testify emphatically upon the university
side." Einstein's testimony was certainly unqualified.
  "I have examined the affidavits of Professors Lindemann,
Milne, and Plaskett, and am in complete agreement with
the arguments and views expressed therein," it ran.
  However, not even this was enough. When Lindemann
and others took the issue to court, they lost their case. The
telescope was built near Pretoria.
  Before Einstein left Oxford, Flexner arrived. They met in
Christ Church and on a fine morning began pacing the
lawn of the quadrangle, coming closer and closer to grips
with the problem of the new institute. "As it dawned on me
during our conversation," Flexner has written, "that
perhaps he might be interested in attaching himself to an
institute of the proposed kind, before we parted I said to
him: 'Professor Einstein, I would not presume to offer you
a post in this new institute, but if on reflection you decide
that it would afford you the opprtunities which you value,
you would be welcome on your own terms.'" Einstein was
apparently noncommittal: but he agreed that as Flexner
was visiting Berlin later in the year they could well meet
again.
  He returned from England at the end of May, 1932.
Berlin was already ominously different from the city of
even a few months previously. In April there had taken
place what was, on the face of it, an encouraging
presidential election. For the octogenarian Field Marshal
Hindenburg, representing the Democrats and Socialists,
had been reelected, defeating the leader of the National
Socialist party, Adolf Hitler. However, the President soon
showed where his sympathies lay. In May he forced
Brⁿning, the Reich Chancellor, on whose support he had
largely won the election, to give way to von Papen, a man
determined to end the Weimar Republic. Von Papen's
ostensibly non-party, but in fact ultra-right wing, cabinet
was formed a few days later. It quickly expelled the
Socialist-Center Prussian cabinet under a form of martial
law and dissolved the Reichstag. Rule by bayonet had
arrived.
  What this landslide to the right meant to Jews in general
and Einstein in particular was indicated when on June 2
Deputy Kube announced to the Prussian Diet that "when
we clean house the exodus of the Children of Israel will be
a child's game in comparison." To leave no doubt of his
meaning, he added that "a people that possesses a Kant
will not permit an Einstein to be tacked onto it." Human
wisdom, noted Edgar Mowrer, "whispered that a people
that refused an Einstein would be unworthy of a Kant."
  Many in Germany still hoped that a quasi-military
government with strong monarchist leanings would keep
the Nazi party in its place. Einstein had no such illusions.
Frank records that when a professor expressed the hope
one evening at Caputh during this summer of 1932,
Einstein replied: "I am convinced that a military regime
will not prevent the imminent National Socialist
revolution. The military dictatorship will suppress the
popular will and the people will seek protection against the
rule of the Junkers and the officers in a right-radical
revolution."
  It was against this background that Abraham Flexner
made his promised visit to Berlin. "It was a cold day," he
has written.

  I was still wearing my winter clothes and heavy overcoat.
Arriving at Einstein's country home, beautiful and commodious,
I found him seated on the veranda wearing summer flannels. He
asked me to sit down. I asked whether I might wear my overcoat.
"Oh, yes," he replied. "Aren't you chilly?" I asked, surveying his
costume. "No," he replied, "my dress is according to this season,
not according to the weather; it is summer."
  We sat then on the veranda and talked until evening, when
Einstein invited me to stay to supper. After supper we talked
until almost eleven. By that time it was perfectly clear that
Einstein and his wife were prepared to come to America. I
told him to name his own terms and he promised me to write
within a few days.

  Einstein accompanied his guest back to the bus for
Berlin, walking through the rain hatless and in an old
sweater. "I am full of enthusiasm (Ich bin Feuer und
Flamme dafⁿr)," he said as they parted.
  The following Monday Flexner prepared a memorandum
covering the details of what was to become Einstein's
official appointment for virtually the rest of his life. These
included, in Flexner's words, location of the new institute
"contiguous to Princeton University, residence from
autumn until about the middle of April, salary, pension,
etc., and an independent appointment for Professor
Mayer."
  When the question of salary had first been raised Einstein
said that he wanted $3,000 a year. "Could I live on less?"
he asked, according to Flexner's later recollections. "You
couldn't live on that," he had replied. "Let Mrs. Einstein
and me arrange it." The result was a salary of $16,000 a
year, to be continued after retirement.
  Einstein had been careful to explain two things: that he
would once again be spending the winter months in
Pasadena, and that he still had his obligations both to the
Prussian Academy of Sciences and to Christ Church,
Oxford. Judging by the memories of Hermann Weyl, who
was to join him in the institute, there were other
reservations. Recalling a meeting between Einstein and
himself, Flexner, and Dr. Frank Aydelotte, a trustee of the
new institute and later successor to Flexner, Weyl declared
that whatever doubts and thoughts they had about turning
their backs on Germany to join Flexner's new institute
were soon dispelled by Hitler's rise to power.
  On June 22, Elsa explained the situation in a letter to
California. "My dear Professor Millikan," she wrote,

  you are aware how much my husband wishes to obtain an
appointment for Dr. Mayer, and therefore, almost as a matter of
course, my husband has accepted the post which offers this to Dr.
Mayer. In addition my husband values his work very much. So
the die is cast; my husband has accepted Flexner's offer. I know
what a wonderful time we had in Pasadena. We shall never
forget it. But Albert has felt the burden of not being able to take
care of Mayer. And he was so relieved when this was done. Will
you, under the circumstances, still want my husband in Pasadena
next winter? I doubt it.

  It is clear from this, even it not from Einstein's own
careful letter, that acceptance of Flexner's offer was a
significant change of emphasis from West Coast to East,
from the old Caltech to the new institute. That Millikan
himself saw it in this light is obvious from the disgruntled
letter which he wrote to Flexner. With an air of surpriseù
that ignored his introduction of Flexner to Einstein the
previous yearùhe noted that he had "just had a letter from
Dr. Einstein saying that you are establishing in Princeton a
theoretical research institute and that he has accepted some
sort of a permanent part-time annual commitment to
participate in the work of this institute beginning in the
fall of 1933, and that this is likely to make his continued
association with the corresponding institute which has
been laborously [sic] built up during the past ten years
impossible."
  Millikan was not, he implied, thinking of his own
institute, but of more important things. "Whether the
progress of science in the United States would be advanced
by such a move, or whether Professor Einstein's
productivity will be increased by such a transfer, is at least
debatable," he went on. "The work in which his interest
and his activity lies is certainly much more strongly
developed here than it is at Princeton, and I am inclined to
think that with the astrophysical advances that are in
prospect here this will continue to be the case." He
concluded with the hope that Flexner might still
collaborate with his own institute in some joint venture
and that, even if this were not possible, Einstein might be
able to "spend half the time which he would normally be
in this country in Princeton and half the time here. ..."
  Flexner, with the Einstein contract safely in his pocket,
could afford the lofty reply. After noting that "altogether
by accident" he had been in Oxford at the same time as
Einsteinùa remark ingeniously dissimilar from the
account which he was to write when Millikan was dead
he defended himself in slightly injured terms. "I cannot
believe that annual residence for brief periods at several
places is sound or wholesome. Looking at the entire matter
from Professor Einstein's point of view, I believe that you
and all his friends will rejoice that it has been possible to
create for him a permanent post of the character above
indicated."
  The question of the coming autumn visit was soon
resolved: Millikan would be as glad as ever to see Einstein
ùnot least, one must feel, because this would strengthen
his hand against whatever blandishments Flexner was
offering. What was to happen after Einstein had begun to
visit Princetonù"maybe a solution will be found so that he
can from time to time come to Pasadena," Elsa wrote to
Millikan on August 13ùwas left in the air. But Einstein
never visited Pasadena after the winter of 1932-33.
  Some comment must be made on this battle for Einstein's
last years. The first is that vacillation over Fleming's
initial offer, and then its supersession by Millikan's, left a
nasty taste in the mouth for Einstein. Had he known the
truth about Flexner's cutting-out operation against
Caltech, he might have had much the same feeling about
the offer from Princeton. In any case, he was shrewd
enough to see how the land lay and will have had no
qualms against playing off such opponents against each
other. With Einstein, getting the best conditions for his
work justified anything. He was certainly anxious to take
Mayer with him wherever he went, and this was a useful
point for Elsa to make. Just how she made it was
immaterial, for once he had come to a decision, Einstein
left the details to her, not worrying overmuch how his
decision was implemented.
  The appointment was, moreover, still only a part-time
winter affair. This feature of the contract was made clear
in a statement from Berlin. "I have received leave of
absence from the Prussian Academy for five months of the
year for five years," this explained. "Those five months I
expect to spend at Princeton. I am not abandoning
Germany. My permanent home will still be in Berlin."
  And now, prepared for the worst as he continued to hope
for the best, he began to get ready for his third trip to
Pasadena.
  Before his departure he again visited Belgium, calling on
the King and Queen at Laeken. In a letter of thanks to Her
Majesty dated September 19 he wrote that "it was a great
happiness for me to explain to you something of the
mysteries in front of which physicists stand silent."
  Then, unexpectedly, he received news from Weizemann
about the Hebrew University. There had been a meeting
between Magnes and Weizmann. The details were not
passed on but the upshot was that an impartial Structure
Committee was to investigate the whole situation. From
this fact, Weizmann went confidently on. "Now I come to
a request for you to rejoin the Board of Governors," he
wrote.

  a request which I know would be backed by everyone who
really has the university at heart. I remind you of a promise you
gave me, that you would do so under my leadership. All those
who have fought for reforms, which now look like being
successfully carried through, would see a great moral boost in
your return, quite apart from the other good it would do. We
cannot lose you, although we cannot offer you a "scientific home"
as Princeton can. But who knows! Now that I shall be spending a
longer time in Jerusalem I have every intention of improving the
physics and chemistry, and perhaps you will then visit us.

  Einstein replied that he was delighted to hear the news.
He poured out advice about the department of physics
almost as though he was already back on the Board of
Governors. But this was merely physics taking control. He
added that he would be glad to rejoin the board if there
were university reforms; but he made it clear that he did
not take Weizmann's assurances entirely at their face
value, and implied that the new committee would first
have to produce results. As for visiting Palestine, this was
studiously ignored. Weizmann, as well as Flexner and
Millikan and Lindemann, was shopping for Einstein as
events in Germany made it less and less likely that he
would be able to remain in the country much longer.
Einstein measured all the offers and hints by the usual
yardstick: the extent to which they would enable him to get
on with his work.
  Now, in the late autumn, he prepared for Pasadena again.
For a short while it looked as though there might not be
any need. For while anti-Semitic opposition to Einstein
was increasing in Germany, a ground swell of protest was
building up in the United States. The board of the National
Patriotic Council issued a statement describing him as a
German Bolshevist and adding that his theory "was of no
scientific value or purpose, not understandable because
there is nothing to understand," an assessment that
brought an immediate response from Einstein: "Wouldn't
it be funny if they didn't let me in? Why, the whole world
would laugh at America." The possibility was less
ludicrous than it sounded, for the American Women's
League now issued a formal statement demanding that the
U. S. State Department should not grant an entry visa to a
man such as Einstein, a member of the War Resisters
International whom they described as a Communist.
  Common sense suggested that the protest should be
ignored, but Einstein's delight at making the opposition
look foolish came to the top. "Never before have I
experienced from the fair sex such energetic rejection of
all advances; or if I have, never from so many at once," he
said in a public statement.

  But are they not quite right, these watchful citizenesses? Why
should one open one's doors to a person who devours hard-boiled
capitalists with as much appreciation and gusto as the Cretan
Minotaur in days gone by devoured luscious Greek maidens, and
on top of that is low down enough to reject every sort of war,
except the unavoidable war with one's own wife? Therefore give
heed to your clever and patriotic womenfolk and remember that
the Capitol of mighty Rome was once saved by the cackling of its
faithful geese.

  As far as pacifism was concerned the protests from
America were sound enough. But they were wildly out
regarding Einstein's attitude to communism and to Soviet
Russia. Only a few months previously he had refused to
sign an appeal from Henri Barbusse, a man with whose
pacifist views he greatly sympathized, solely on account of
its "glorification of Soviet Russia." He had, he told
Barbusse, reached some somber conclusions about the
country. "At the top there appears to be a personal struggle
in which the foulest means are used by power-hungry
individuals acting from purely selfish motives. At the
bottom there seems to be complete suppression of the
individual and of freedom of speech. One wonders what
life is worth under such conditions." But these views were
unknown. What was known was Einstein's view that the
Russia of the interwar years had no aggressive intentions.
More than once he said that he believed Lenin was a great
man; and a decade earlier he had tried to intercede in the
cause of Zionism with the Russians in Berlin. But he
would have been as ready to intercede with the devil had
he thought that good would come of it. His view of the
Revolution was a complex if balanced one in which he
weighed the bad against the good with considerable
judgment; but the balance was concealed by his own
default and if he was wrongly accused he had no one to
blame but himself.
  The visa was finally granted, and early in December he
and Elsa completed their preparations. Despite the earlier
statement that he intended to keep a permanent home in
Berlin, despite his unwavering hope and brave front, he
was under no illusions as he spent the final days of
November in the house at Caputh that he had come to
love. As he left it for Berlin and the train to Antwerp
where he and his wife were to board ship for the States he
turned to her with the warning: "Before you leave our villa
this time, take a good look at it." When she asked why, he
replied: "You will never see it again." Elsa, says Philipp
Frank, thought he was being rather foolish.

CHAPTER 16

GOOD-BYE TO BERLIN

Einstein and Elsa arrived in California early in January,
1933, the third visit in three years. It now looked as
though this might be a regular thing, even though the
summer months were securely earmarked for Princeton
and commitments in Berlin would further limit his free
time. Millikan certainly hoped so, and had gone to great
lengths to land his catch for this visit when it seemed that
the institute might not find the necessary money.
  Salvation eventually came from the Oberlaender Trust of
Philadelphia, set up "to enable American men and women
without regard to race, creed, or color, who are actively
engaged in work that affects the public welfare, to become
better acquainted with similar activities in German
speaking countries." In 1931 Millikan had been given an
Oberlaender grant "to contact German scholars, lecturers,
and universities." The following year, after further
contacts with Millikan, the Trust voted "to appropriate the
sum of $7,000 to cover the expenses of Professor Einstein
in America some time during the academic year 1932-33.
The money to be forwarded through Professor Millikan as
a grant to Professor Einstein, exclusively for scientific
work." However, there was a rider to the exclusivity. For
while Millikan was completing arrangements with
Einstein, he wrote to the Trust agreeing that his guest
should make "one broadcast which will be helpful to
German-American relations." This was the fee which was
to be paid by Einstein for the support which made possible
his third visit to Pasadena. Whether he fully appreciated
this before setting out is not recorded. But Millikan's wish
to keep faith with the Trust certainly increased anxiety that
Einstein might queer the pitch for what was to be in many
ways a propaganda broadcast.
  Dourly conservative, faintly militarist, and with more
than a touch of right-wing enthusiasm, Millikan had cause
for worry. Einstein's persistence in advocating his pacifist
ideal during earlier visits had done much to foster the
undercurrent of objection which flowed through the
American scene and which not even the general adulation
could entirely conceal. And it had already caused more
than one of his scientific colleagues to perform verbal
gymnastics in his defense. Thus Millikan himself, a man
who lacked pacifist learnings as much as Einstein lacked
the aggressive instinct, had been forced to reply to an
impassioned appeal from Major General Amos A. Fried,
who wrote to him to "protest against Americans who, in
the name of science, are aiding and abetting the teaching
of treason to the youth of this country by being hosts to Dr.
Albert Einstein." Fried went on to say that when he had
last talked with Millikan, $100,000 worth of radium was
being presented to Madame Curie who was, he ended, in
his opinion worth a million Albert Einsteins.
  The answer to General Fried throws interesting light on
Einstein and also helps to explain Millikan's somewhat
panic-stricken efforts to prevent him from speaking on
nonscientific matters. "It is quite true," he replied on
March 8

  that Einstein has been exploited by all sorts of agencies that had
their special axes to grind. Part of these have been of the Charlie
Chaplin type and part of the Upton Sinclair type. The latter in
particular have misquoted him to such an extent that I am not
very much suprised that a man like yourself should have been
misinformed by the flood of literature of this type.
  I am not saying that Einstein has not made blunders of his
own, for he has. He is an exceedingly straightforward, honest,
and childlike sort, and has only recently, through rather bitter
experience, been learning the lesson of the danger of trusting
everybody who pretends to be actuated by high motives. Even
more than that, he has not always been wise in his utterances,
and in one or two instances has made very bad slips which I
think he now realizes himself, and I think in practically all the
speeches and interviews which he has made out here he has
been often times extraordinarily profound, penetrating, and
wise. But when he went east last year he is reported by the
papers to have said a number of things which I would
condemn as unsound as hard as you doùfor example, the two
percent comment, if he ever made it, is one which no
experienced man could possibly have made. It takes all of us
some time to learn wisdom.
  Of course I am only writing to you now to let you know that I
think you have fallen into the same error that Einstein has
fallen into, and have trusted to reports of designing people
who are not trustworthy, and because of that trust have made
a fundamental error in your estimate of the man. I should not
have confidence in my own judgment alone, but it is that he is
a man of the finest qualities and character, who has made
errors, indeed, but not so many as most of us have.

  Millikan did what he could. He stood up in honorable
fashion to defend what he had no particular wish to
defend. But underneath his confident exterior he was
seriously worried that his guest might make another "two
percent" speech that would invalidate the coming
broadcast or affect the flow of money into the institute
from rich patrons. This much is clear from his private
comments to the Trust after Einstein had met reporters on
arrival in Pasadena. He "handled himself," wrote Millikan
"with a skill which, I am sure if your trustees had seen,
would help to relieve their minds as to any possible
adverse influence which he might exert in the way of
furnishing additional ammunition to those who have been
spreading these grotesquely foolish reports about his
connection with influences aimed at the undermining of
American institutions and ideals. ..."
  The broadcast to "help German-American relations" was
to be made on January 23 and until then Millikan's
security measures worked, although only at the cost of
revealing to Einstein how limited his freedom of action
really was. He had agreed to make no public appearances
except those personally arranged by Millikan "under
dignified auspices." "But even after this conversation,"
Millikan informed the Trust.

  I suddenly found that some wholly nonrepresentative group of
so-called "War Resisters" at the University of California at Los
Angeles had come over to see him, representing that it was just a
private gathering of no public significance, and he had been
unwise enough to believe them and agree to say something. I
then found that this group had issued handbills which they had
spread all over the institutions of southern California that he was
to appear last Sunday and speak. I saw at once that this situation
was full of dynamite, and went straight to him and told him that
he would have to cancel the engagement, and he then saw the
necessity and authorized me to cancel it for him. I accordingly
telephoned UCLA and got the whole thing eliminated, with the
Los Angeles press explaining the cancellation in a way which
was really helpful, I think. The form in which it went in was, as a
matter of fact, prepared in our office. ...

  Einstein appears to have acquiesced without protest at
this adroit piece of manipulation. Millikan, had he
remembered his guest's reaction to the institute's sleight of
financial hand the previous year, might have felt some
qualms about the future. However, the present had been
saved and Einstein's broadcast "On German-American
Agreement" was the one-shot success which everyone had
hoped it would be.
  The broadcast was preceded by a full-dress dinner at the
Athenaeum and here Einstein first met Leon Watters, a
wealthy Jewish biochemist who was to become an intimate
friend for the last two decades of his life. Watters, a New
Yorker, had the previous month begun to finance work at
the institute and as a result found himself and his wife
placed by Millikan at the top table, separated from
Einstein only by a woman of considerable wealth who was
also supporting the institute financially. "I soon noted,"
Watters later wrote,

  that, while the lady was doing considerable talking, Einstein
was only nodding. He seemed somewhat ill at ease. I leaned over
and offered him a cigarette from my case. He hesitated, then
smiled, took one, lighted it, and consumed it in three strong
puffs. While the coffee was being served I took a cigar from my
pocket and wrote the following verse on a card which I attached
to the cigar and proffered it to him. He shook his head and said:
"No thanks: I prefer my pipe." But he noticed the card, read it,
and burst out laughing. On the card I had written a verse from a
poem by Bert Leston Taylor, reading: "When men are calling one
another names and making faces/ And all the world's a jangle
and a jar/ I mediate [sic] on interstellar space/ And smoke a mild
segar."
  That seemed to loosen his tongue. He asked me to spell out
my name for him and I showed him my place card. He asked
me if I were teaching at California Institute of Technology and
I explained that I was not and that I was only a visitor. Was I
alone?

  In some ways Watters, with his chauffeur-driven car and
his apartment on Fifth Avenue, with his dilettante
approach to science, was the antithesis of all that Einstein
believed in. Yet an interior practical kindness was enough
to bind him both to Einstein and to Elsa as the long and
deeply personal correspondence between them was later to
show. The foundations for it were laid that evening as
Watters and the rest of the carefully picked guests followed
Einstein to the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. Here the
program, entitled "Symposium on America and the
World," sponsored by the Southern California College
Student Body Presidents' Association, was to be broadcast
by the National Broadcasting Company.
  Einstein began by speaking of two obstacles. "The first of
these," he said, "is the obstacle of the black dress suit.
When men come together on ceremonial occasions attired
in their dress clothes, they create about themselves as a
matter of routine an atmosphere from which the realities of
life with their severity are excluded. There is an
atmosphere of well-sounding oratory that likes to attach
itself to dress clothes. Away with it." After this typical
Einsteinian opening he discussed the emotion-laden
content of some wordsù"heretic" in relation to the
Inquisition, "Communist" in the United States, "Jew"
among the reactionary group in Germany, and "bourgeois"
in Russia. "I should like to call it the obstacle of the
taboo," he said of this feature of human relationships. He
then went on, in mild and rational words, to speak of the
prospects for American-German relations, and of the
economic situation. "It was," the New York Times noted in
an editorial, "exactly the same kind of thing that we had
got hundreds of times from other people. The spirit of the
Einstein address was fine, even lofty; but it cast not a
single fresh ray of light upon a dark situation."
Meanwhile, in Germany, Hitler was preparing to accept
the call of the Germans.
  Einstein remained in Pasadena for another seven weeks,
obeying Millikan's injunction to hold his tongue and
paying occasional rest visits to places such as the Rayben
Farm Hope Ranch, from which he sent this brief poem on
a card to the Queen of the Belgians: "A tree stands in the
cloister garden/ Which was planted by your hand./ It sends
a little twig as greeting/ Because there it must forever
stand./ It sends a friendly greeting with Yours, A.
Einstein."
  However humiliating his enforced silence may have been,
he could be grateful to Millikan for extricating him from
one embarrassing situation. For it was on his host's
instructions that he finally declined to be guest of honor at
a banquet of the Arts, Literature, and Science National
Convention. Earl C. Bloss, the convention's first vice-
president, had written to Millikan explaining that many of
the invited guests were withholding acceptance and adding
that it had recently been "unanimously decided that the
success of our banquet would be unquestioned if we were
to replace Professor Einstein's presence with some other
outstanding gentleman." A suitably high-ranking naval
officer was finally obtained. Millikan was duly informed
that the convention more than appreciated "what you have
done by withholding the presence of Professor Einstein."
  Such exhibitions of the anger and distrust which
Einstein's pacifist and left-wing statements aroused in
Americans did much to explain Millikan's apprehension
as the time for his visitor's departure approached. Earlier
he had written to the Oberlaender Trust saying that he
feared "the possible efforts of all kinds of radical groups to
exploit him when he gets away from Pasadena, especially
if he goes eastùas I think perhaps he plans to doùby
train instead of by boat." Early in February his worst fears
were realized. Einstein was to return east by train.
Moreover, he was to make one address in Chicago and
another in New York. In view "of the near slips which we
have been fortunate enough to avoid making," Millikan
wondered what the Trust in Philadelphia could do.
  The answer was that it could do very little. The secretary,
Mr. Thomas, wrote from the Trust to Einstein, noting that
he had had no reply to earlier letters, stating that he had
heard of plans to make addresses, and saying rather
plaintively that he would like to know about them as soon
as possible. The scanty evidence suggests that if Einstein
gave Mr. Thomas' letters any attention at all he stuffed
them into his pocket determined that on leaving Pasadena
he would make up for the silence so far forced upon him.
As it turned out, other events were to dominate his
thoughts. Looking back, the reasons are self-evident. For
while Einstein was again discussing the riddle of the
universe with Hubble and Tolman at Mount Wilson,
lecturing to students, and generally acting as a scientific
liaison officer between Caltech and the Berlin of the
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, events in Germany had rolled
forward with ominous inevitability. During the last month
of 1932 Kurt von Schleicher had become Chancellor; for
some weeks he had desperately tried to form a stable
government. He failed, the third man to do so in as many
years. On January 30, President Hindenburg turned to the
one leader he felt might at least square the circleùAdolf
Hitler.
  The effect on Einstein was immediate and unqualified,
perhaps surprisingly so for a man so mild mannered, so
uninterested in the balances and counterbalances of
politics, so eternally hopeful that with goodwill the worst
might be avoided. But now he knew that his "Never see it
again" prophecy on leaving Caputh was more likely to be
borne out than the return to Germany foreshadowed in his
October statement. His first action was to cancel the
lecture due to be given at the Prussian Academy on his
return to Berlin. By February 27 he was writing to a
friend, Mrs. Margarete Lebach, that he "dare not enter
Germany because of Hitler." A few hours later the Reich-
stag was in flames, set alight by the subnormal Dutchman
van der Lubbe. Within a few days the incident had been
exploited by the new Nazi government to rush through
emergency decrees which gave them totalitarian powers.
And on March 2 any remaining doubts that Einstein's
unique position might guard him from the government's
growing anti-Jewish wrath were dispelled by a leading
article in the V÷lkischer Beobachter on "cultural
internationalism," "international treason," and "pacifist
excesses." In it, Einstein was singled out for attack,
together with Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Arnold Zweig,
and a short list of Germany's leading intellectuals,
academics, and artists.
  On March 10, Einstein made his decision public. In a
long interview with Evelyn Seeley of the New York World
Telegram on the eve of his departure from Pasadena he
said: "As long as I have any choice in the matter, I shall
live only in a country where civil liberty, tolerance, and
equality of all citizens before the law prevail. Civil liberty
implies freedom to express one's political convictions, in
speech and in writing; tolerance implies respect for the
convictions of others whatever they may be. These
conditions do not exist in Germany at the present time."
  Concluding the interview, Einstein said that he would
probably settle in Switzerland. He then rose to attend a
final seminar at the institute. As he left the room, Los
Angeles, a score of miles away, was shaken by the worst
earthquake in its history. Symbolically, the reporter was
able to note that "as he left for the seminar, walking across
the campus, Dr. Einstein felt the ground shaking under his
feet."
  Thus in mid-March, 1933, Einstein arrived at the
position he had correctly forecast to Infeld little more than
a decade previously. He was no longer able to live in what
was both the country of his birth and, since 1919, the
country of his voluntary adoption. As in 1920, there were
no doubt elements in Germany which were national,
civilized, and libertarian; as in 1920, they formed a
minority, helpless and silent. Einstein's disillusion was
thus compounded. For the rest of his life he felt a double
grudge against Germany: first that he had been born there
and, worse still, that he had been misguided enough to
take German nationality again when he might easily have
remained simply a Swiss.
  Even so, it is clear that he had not even begun to
comprehend the nature of the revolution that was sweeping
Germany. Had he done so he would not have written to
Planck as he wrote on March 9ùnot only suggesting that
specialists might leave Germany to work on an
international scientific committee, but asking whether
Planck would put up the idea to the Academy.
  "I was recently with Professor Hale of the Mount Wilson
Observatory, who is the current president of the Research
Council," he wrote.

  He said that he wants to make an attempt to cut out politics
entirely from the work of international scientific cooperation.
This is what he wants to do:
  First he wishes to set up a working committee of specialists
from all countries, with the aim of transferring scientific
methods from one discipline to another (for example, the
transfer of physical methods into the biological sciences). He
naturally wants to give a share of this work to German
research workers. But he does not want it to seem as if such
invitations bypass, as it were, the German scientific
institutions. He wishes to attract from every country only
those genuinely interested specialists who have no political
axes to grind. He hopes that all really well-disposed scientists
will help him and also that the institutions of individual
countries will approve of it, if one takes care to remove all
political influences from the scientific work, and so to bring
about again the state of affairs which was once taken as a
matter of course.
  Herr Hale wants to know your view about this. He wants to
know whether you would be prepared to submit the idea to
the Academy in a friendly way. He thinks that I should write
to you first since you, writing to me, can truly express your
opinion. I will use your answer only in so far as you wish, and
as it is needed to express your point of view.
  Then, if you and the Academy are well disposed to this, we
will consider the people who might be able to carry out useful
work on the problems to be handled by the commission. Any
suggestions as to names would be valuable to the commission
or to Herr Hale; this, then, would be the second exercise.
  I myself would be very happy if Herr Hale, with all his
efforts for science, were successful. There cannot be the
slightest doubt about the genuineness of his wish; his ideals,
governed by devotion to research, are more than a guarantee
of this.
  Please send your answer c/o Herr Ehrenfest, Leiden,
Holland, as I am not yet sure where I shall pitch my tent.

  The answer, in the negative, arrived towards the end of
April and Einstein sent it off without delay to Hale from
the Belgian resort where he had temporarily made his
home.
  He and Elsa had left Pasadena on March 11, traveling
overland to New York by way of Chicago, as expected.
The repercussions were less than Millikan had feared,
partly because he had agreed to attend a birthday luncheon
arranged by a local committee in aid of the Hebrew
University, and his time for other matters was therefore
limited. But he did what he could, and finally agreed to
attend a pacifist meeting on the morning of the fourteenth.
"After he came and found us interested in serious
discussions he would not leave us even when eleven
o'clock came, the hour for the luncheon to claim him,"
according to a report by Mrs. Lloyd, one of the organizers.
"At eleven fifteen Mrs. Einstein rose and reminded him of
the committee. He asked her to sit down and said he
wanted another quarter of an hour with us. So we enjoyed
a full hour of his valuable discussion on international,
political, and psychological subjects."
  Thus far there appears to have been no crack in his
pacifist armor. "His firm faith in the decent impulses of
the human heart is evident and inspiring," wrote Mrs.
Lloyd. "The peace campaign must go on. Let the Youth
Peace Council whose representatives sit with us note his
plain teaching. Let all pacifists take courage and be as
extreme as they like. Einstein will never abandon the
peace movement because it is too bold." Only thirteen
weeks later the plain teaching was to be different. Were he
a Belgian, Einstein then declared, he would give military
service "cheerfully, in the belief that I would thereby be
helping to save European civilization."
  From the pacifist meeting he went on to the luncheon,
attended by, among others, Arthur Compton of the
University of Chicago, and the governor of Illinois. He
spoke of the problem of "finding a method of distribution
which would work as well as that of production" and he
spoke of organizing international affairs so that war could
be abolished. But this was subdued stuff, very different
from the "two percent" speech of 1931. It was, already,
almost as if Einstein were beginning to doubt his own
pacifism.
  The following day he traveled on to New York where he
arrived shortly after Weizmann had left for Palestineù
one of those missed meetings which might have altered
history. In New York he spoke at a function held for the
joint good of the Jewish Telegraph Agency and the Hebrew
University. Dr. Rosenbach, the noted American
bibliophile, was in charge and had organized a dinner for
more than 600 at the Commodore Hotel.
  "He wrote to Dr. Karl Compton of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and Dr. Harlow Shapley of
Harvard asking them to speak on the program," says
Rosenbach's biographer.

  They sent out invitations, and in his name a barrage of
promotional publicity went out to the press. Both the eminent
American scientists accepted the invitation, but Shapley was
concerned about the position of the microphone (he could not
have picked a worse person to whom to mention details of that
kind), was worried lest "the publicity submerge the spirit," was
upset by rumors that Einstein's genial gullibility had been taken
advantage of by high-pressure fund raisers; in fact, he wanted
detailed assurance that the whole program would be on a
dignified level. Dr. Rosenbach gave him that assurance.

  It was on a dignified level; Einstein's Zionism was
quickly submerged in physics and Rosenbach's lost in the
world of books. Congressman Sol Bloom had given up his
seat beside Einstein to Harlow Shapley, and the two
scientists were soon absorbed in the universe, Einstein
using his body to illustrate a point, the ribs being the
heavens and his backbone the Milky Way. Soon afterwards
he made a sketch for his dinner companion on the back of
a place cardùonly to find it snatched away as a souvenir
by an onlooker. Rosenbach was not long in reaching his
true love and, after mentioning the two good causes for
which the dinner was being held, presented Einstein with a
first edition of Napier's Rabdologiae.
  The following day Einstein squeezed in a visit to
Princeton, conferred there with Oswald Veblen, and went
on a preliminary round of house hunting in preparation for
his return in the autumn. Back in New York he was driven
with his wife to a synagogue where the eight-day-old son
of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency's managing director
became their godchild, and where Einstein wrote on the
back of a photograph of himself a poem "To little Albert
Landau on the occasion of his entering the world."

  If others often plague thee
  And do or say evil of thee,
  Think also they came here
  Without having asked for it.
  Think, though you may not like it,
  You, too, plagued others often.
  As this cannot be altered,
  Think gently of everyone.

  That duty performed, Einstein had but a few more hours
in New York. So far, his only public reaction to the news
from Germany had been his measured statement that he
would not be returning. This was reasonable enough; and
it gave no weapons to his enemies. Now, with only a few
hours to go before sailing for Europe, he attended a
reception at the Waldorf-Astoria to launch The Fight
Against War, an anthology of his pacifist writings to be
published later in the year. So far, he had spoken openly
only of his own personal position in relation to the new
German government; he had given the world no other
reaction of the world's most famous Jew to the rise of the
world's most famous Jew-baiter. That was the way he
wanted it.
  Now, at the Waldorf-Astoria, he stepped into the ring,
attacking the German Academy of Arts, pointing out that
in Germany pacifists were considered enemies of the state,
and saying that the world should be made more aware of
the dangers of Hitlerism. All this made it easier for the
German authorities to attack him. They would of course
have done so anyway. But his honesty in speaking out,
without reserve and while on a "mission of molding public
opinion to better German-American relations," as Millikan
had put it in one letter to the Oberlaender Trustùmade
their task that much simpler. He issued no plea for U. S.
intervention, and he was not atrocity-mongering; but by
the time reports reached Germany via the New York
correspondents it could easily enough be represented as
such, and it was fuel for the virulent anti-Einstein
campaign exemplified by the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger.
"Good news from Einsteinùhe's not coming back," this
said. "... Relativity is in little demand by us now. On the
contrary. The ideals of national honor and love of country
which Herr Einstein wanted to abolish have become
absolute values to us. So the outlook for Einstein here is
very bad."
  It was in this atmosphere that he and his wife left for
Europe. It appears that they had been given a final
warning by the German consul in New York, Dr. Paul
Schwarz, whom Einstein had known in Berlin. Details of
the meeting are vague, and the secondhand accounts
contradictory. But the truth seems to be that Schwarz
formally told Einstein that it would be safe for him to
return to Germany but informally warned him against it.
His warning may not have been as blunt as one reported
version: "If you go to Germany, Albert, they'll drag you
through the streets by the hair," but it was strong enough
to convince him that his decision had been not only ethical
but wise.
  As the Belgenland crossed the Atlantic, Einstein playing
the violin at benefit concerts for refugee musicians, there
came more news from Germany. Bruno Walter, the Jewish
conductor, had fled to Austria. The offices of the Zionist
Federation of Germany had been searched. In Ulm, the
state commissioner for the city's administration had
ordered that Einsteinstrasse, named eleven years
previously should in future be known as Fichtestrasse, after
the German nationalist philosopher. Preparations were
being made for the purge of the Civil Service which was
soon to remove every one of even partial Jewish descent,
and for control of the universities by Bernard Rust,
Minister for Education, who was to oust more than 1,600
Jewish lecturers and professors from their jobs. The time
was coming when all books by Jews would have to be
marked "Translated from the Hebrew"ùand when only a
daring professor would declare: "It is a mistake to believe
that Einstein's original papers were translated from the
Hebrew."
  In mid-ocean, news came that the Einsteins' home in
Caputh had been searched, the pretext being that an arms
cache might be found there. "The raid . . . by an armed
crowd is but one example of the arbitrary acts of violence
now taking place throughout Germany," said Einstein in a
statement issued on the ship. "These acts are the result of
the government's overnight transfer of police powers to a
raw and rabid mob of the Nazi militia. My summer home
has often in the past been honored by the presence of
guests. They were always welcome. No one had any reason
to break in."
  The Belgenland docked on March 28 at Antwerp, where
the Einsteins were welcomed by the mayor, Camille
Huysmans, and a group of professors from Ghent
University. The latter was headed by Professor A. de
Groodt, and Einstein and his wife gratefully accepted the
offer of a temporary refuge at "Cantecroy," a historic
manor house outside Antwerp which was the de Groodt's
family home.[Frans G. L. A. de Groodt, Professor de
Groodt's eldest son, says that his parents, in consultation
with a number of friends, hαd telegraphed to Einstein on
the Belgenland, begging him not to sail on to Hamburg but
to come ashore in Antwerp. "I remember that it needed
some insistence to persuade Einstein not to return to his
country," he says. This is curious, but may well indicate
the turmoil of Einstein's mind during these critical days.]
Their next move had now to be decided.

CHAPTER 17

SHOPPING FOR EINSTEIN

Between the spring and the autumn of 1933 Einstein was
driven to action in three different fields. Virtually barred
from Germany, he had to decide where to settle. Faced
with a Third Reich under Hitler, he had to reconsider his
pacifist beliefs. And as the future of the Jewish scholars
driven from Germany grew into a major issue, he felt
forced to bring into the open his long-standing argument
with the Hebrew University. These climaxes in his life, all
the direct result of Hitler's rise to the chancellorship,
developed simultaneously as he continued with his work,
amiably agreed to lecture to all and sundry, and was
reluctantly transformed into a symbol of the anti-Nazi
forces which began to form throughout the continent. They
give to his life a muddled and incoherent pattern paralleled
by Europe as it reacted in its own way to the rise of the
National Socialist party.
  One of Einstein's first actions after reaching Antwerp
revealed how the events of the previous few weeks had
hardened his opinions. In Pasadena, talking to Miss Seeley
of the New York World-Telegram, he had remarked that
his citizenship (of Germany) was "a strange affair" but had
gone on to say that "for an internationally minded man,
citizenship of a specific country is not important.
Humanity is more important than national citizenship."
  Now he was convinced that the Nazi actions satisfied
some urge in the Prussian character. He remembered his
youth in Munich and he remembered what he had done
then. How right he had been thirty-seven years ago! How
wrong he had been to believe that Weimar had changed
everything! Once again, he decided to renounce his
German citizenship.
  He was driven to Brussels and here in the German
embassy he formally surrendered the rights of full German
citizenship he had taken with such determination after the
war. He retained his Swiss nationality so he could hand in
his German passport. Descending the steps of the German
embassy, Albert Einstein, the Swabian from Ulm, left
German territory for the last time.
  At the same time he unknowingly set a riddle for the
German authorities. For without their consent a German
continued to remain a German whatever he said or did;
and within a few months, as Einstein's formal withdrawal
from Prussian nationality was being considered, the
authorities began to ask whether it might not be better for
them to refuse his renunciation, and then themselves take
away his nationality. Two points of view emerged at a
meeting held at the Ministry of the Interior in Berlin on
the morning of August 16, when officials met to discuss
the first list of men whose citizenship, it was proposed,
should be taken away under new regulations passed the
previous month. There were seven of them: George
Bernhardt, Rudolf Breitscheid, Albert Einstein, Lion
Feuchtwanger, Heinrich Mann, the Communist leader
Munzenberg, and Philipp Scheidemann. Of Einstein it was
proposed, in the words of the minutes, that "in view of the
world position which he holds, the withdrawal of his
citizenship rights should not be announced, at least not
immediately, even though he could be accused of the same
crimes as the others; instead, his application for the ending
of his Prussian citizenship should be accepted. Reasons for
this are: the prejudicial reaction of other countries towards
Germany, particularly England, which has made provision
for giving him English nationality should he be expelled."
The Gestapo representative was among those who
objected, especially as Einstein's possessions had already
been confiscated. "As Einstein allows his worldfamous
name to be used as the cover for lying propaganda, his
omission from the first list would not be understood and
would be sharply criticized in Germany," ran this
argument. One compromise suggested by the Foreign
Office was that he should be deprived of his citizenship but
that his scientific equipment should be freed. Finally the
meeting ended without a decision being taken, the Gestapo
representative repeating his concern that "the
postponement should not take too long, in case Einstein's
actions made it impossible to put him in the first list that
was to be issued."
  Einstein was of course to know nothing of this, now or in
the future. His immediate problem was to decide where to
go. A return to Switzerland seemed likely. His personal
feeling for the country and its people remained strong, and
Zurich would have welcomed him back. Yet he had firm
links with Holland, where Lorentz had died only five years
previously, and the ties with Switzerland were tangled by
the fact that Mileva was still living in Zurich. For the
moment therefore he remained in Belgium.
  Here, in the last days of March, he received a letter which
was to have considerable repercussions later in the year. It
came from one of the more colorful, if more enigmatic,
characters who was to cross Einstein's path. This was
Commander Locker-Lampson. English barrister and
journalist, Member of Parliament for the Handsworth
Division of Birmingham, he was the younger son of
Frederick Locker, the Victorian poet, and in the First
World War had pursued an adventurous career, first in the
Royal Naval Air Service and then in armoured cars, which
he commanded in Belgium, Lapland, Prussia, Austrian
Galacia, and Russia. It was in character that Locker
Lampson should have served under the Grand Duke
Nicholas and later been invited to murder Rasputin by one
of the men who eventually carried out the assassination.
  On the face of it, the mutual attraction of Einstein, the
natural-born pacifist, and Locker-Lampson, the
naturalborn fighter who had "Combative" as the first word
of his telegraphic address, seems almost absurd. On the
face of it, their only similarity was that both were
"outsiders" in the same way that Churchill and Lloyd
Georgeùboth of whom were introduced to Einstein by the
politicianùwere "outsiders" who hunted without the pack.
The simplest explanation of their friendship is probably
the most accurate: mutual support for the underdog which
had produced in Locker-Lampson a hatred of the Nazi
government equaled only by his hatred of the Communists.
In addition, the commander must fully have appreciated
that association with Einstein would bring his name into
the news, where he was not averse to seeing it. This fact,
though too plain in the record to be smudged, should not
hide the genuine feeling with which he acted.
  Locker-Lampson, writing from the House of Commons,
began by recalling a chance meeting with Einstein at
Oxford a few years previously. "This letter," he continued,

  is first of all to assure you, my dear professor, of how sincerely
a great number of my people sympathize with you and your
German fellow believers in your sufferings. That even Einstein
should be without a home has moved me deeply and perhaps this
justifies me, a modest M.P., in approaching you, the greatest
scientist of our age. I hope, my dear professor, that you will
therefore see nothing more in my humble offer than a simple
tribute of my boundless respect and the wish to be allowed to
serve you in my way. And so, my dear professor, would you do
me the great happinessùI venture to ask simply thisùof you,
and your wife, taking over my small house in London, such as it
is, for about a year, whenever it is convenient to you? It consists
of a hall, a dining room, a sitting room and drawing room, two or
three bedrooms, three staff bedrooms, as well as well-appointed
kitchens. It goes without saying that you would live in the house
as my guest, that is, there would be no cost and the service would
be at my expense. My house would naturally not be as
comfortable as your own, but who knows whether England's own
"ether" with its atmosphere of Fair Play might not help you to
explore still more deeply the mysteries of Relativity. With
sincere regards, Your truly, Oliver Locker-Lampson.

  Einstein politely declined the offer and moved with his
wife to Le Coq-sur-Mer, a small resort near Ostend built,
like the other beads on the long chain of Belgian coast
villages, between the sand dunes and the network of
streams and irrigation channels that stretches
northeastwards towards the Leopold Canal and the Dutch
frontier. Here he made a base for his last six months in
Europe. And from here he severed his link with the
Prussian Academy, the magnet whose distinguished
company had first drawn him to Berlin almost exactly two
decades earlier.
  For although German nationality had been discarded,
membership of the Prussian Academy of Sciencesùthat
"greatest benefit ... which you can confer on me," as he
described it when first addressing his fellow membersù
still remained. He might indeed be expelled in due course.
But it was not only to avoid this that he now, on March 28,
wrote to Berlin formally announcing his resignation on the
grounds that he was no longer able to serve the Prussian
state. A more important reason was the embarrassing
position into which he feared that his old friends Nernst
and Planck would be thrust. If he were expelled they would
find it dangerous to protest yet disloyal not to.
  Not all of Einstein's faith was justified. Nernst, it is true,
declared that the Academy was proud of such non-
German members as Voltaire, d'Alembert, and
Maupertuis, and need not, under all circumstances,
demand service to the Prussian state. Yet Planck's reply,
which reached Einstein early in April, was of a rather
different character. He felt that Einstein's resignation was
the only way of resolving the situation "honorably," and
that this "spared Einstein's friends immeasurable grief," a
clear enough indication that not all these friends were
willing to stand up and be counted.
  This was only the first disillusionment. Early in April
Einstein learned how the Academy was dealing with the
situation. On the first of the month one of its permanent
secretaries, Dr. Ernst Neymann, issued the following
statement:

  The Prussian Academy of Sciences heard with indignation from
the newspapers of Albert Einstein's participation in atrocity
mongering in France and America. It immediately demanded an
explanation. In the meantime Einstein has announced his
withdrawal from the Academy, giving as his reason that he
cannot continue to serve the Prussian state under its present
government. Being a Swiss citizen, he also, it seems, intends to
resign the Prussian nationality which he acquired in 1913 simply
by becoming a full member of the Academy.
  The Prussian Academy of Sciences is particularly distressed
by Einstein's activities as an agitator in foreign countries, as it
and its members have always felt themselves bound by the
closest ties to the Prussian state and, while abstaining strictly
from all political partisanship have always stressed and
remained faithful to the national idea. It has, therefore, no
reason to regret Einstein's withdrawal.

  Anyone who doubted what the coming of the Nazis
meant might have been warned by this miserable fudge of
the facts, perpetrated by what had once been a proud
institution. Einstein was the last man to shrink from trying
to put the record straight, and he now wrote to the
Academy the first of a series of crossing letters which
passed between Le Coq and Berlin. He denied atrocity-
mongering, while admitting to what, in the newly created
hysteria of the German times, would be considered little
else. He had, he admitted, "described the present state of
affairs in Germany as a state of psychic distemper in the
masses," and also made some remarks about its causes. He
had also, in a document which he had allowed the
International League for Combating Anti-Semitism to use,
"called upon all sensible people, who are still faithful to
the ideals of a civilization in peril, to do their utmost to
prevent this mass psychosis, which is exhibiting itself in
such terrible symptoms in Germany today, from spreading
further."
  He ended with a protest and an appeal.

  It would have been an easy matter for the Academy to get hold
of a correct version of my words before issuing the sort of
statement about me that it has. The German press has reproduced
a deliberately distorted version of my words, as indeed was only
to be expected with the press muzzled as it is today. I am ready
to stand by every word I have published. In return, I expect the
Academy to communicate this statement of mine to its members
and also to the German public before which I have been
slandered, especially as it has itself had a hand in slandering me
before that public.

  But before the Academy could deal with this letter, H.
von Ficker, its senior permanent secretary, had already
replied officially to Einstein's resignation, which had been
accepted on March 30. His letter deplored Einstein's
action in "disseminating erroneous views and unfounded
rumors. We had confidently expected that one who had
belonged to our Academy for so long would have ranged
himself, irrespective of his own political sympathies, on
the side of the defenders of our nation against the flood of
lies which has been let loose upon it," it concluded. "In
these days of mudslinging, some of it vile, some of it
ridiculous, a good word for the German people from you in
particular might have produced a great effect, especially
abroad. Instead of which your testimony has served as a
handle to the enemies not merely of the present
government but of the German people. This has come as a
bitter and grievous disappointment to us, which would no
doubt have led inevitably to a parting of the ways even if
we had not received your resignation."
  In his reply, Einstein protested against the idea of
speaking up on behalf of the German people. "By giving
such testimony in the present circumstances," he
concluded, "I should have been contributing, even if only
indirectly, to the barbarization of manners and the
destruction of all existing cultural values. It is for this
reason that I felt compelled to resign from the Academy,
and your letter only shows me how right I was to do so."
  This exchangeùclosely followed by his expulsion from
the Bavarian Academy of Sciencesùdrew a sharp line
across his life. While the Berlin of 1933 could hardly have
been foreseen from the Berlin of 1913, the rallying of the
Academy behind the new German government reinforced
the question mark which had hung over the offer from
Nernst and Planck two decades previously. It suggested, by
implication, that his acceptance had been wrong, and that
his original suspicions of the Prussian spirit had been
right. Moreover it sharpened and deepened his feelings
about the German people as a whole, so that from now
onwards he would find it less easy to look on them as did
the easygoing British or the even more easygoing
Americans. From now onwards the words "German
menace" had for Einstein a significance more readily
understood by the French and by the Russians. From now
onwards, moreover, there could be no doubt about his
public position as a martyr. As his old friend Rabbi Wise
wrote from the United States on May 9, "We are all very
proud of the part you have played and, above all, the
distinction which has been yours in being expelled from
the [Nazified] Prussian Academy."
  Yet even Einstein, percipient though he was about the
future, can have had little idea of the wrath to come.
Hitler's purge of the civil serviceùwhose laws
automatically applied to the universitiesùbegan on April
1 with the removal from office of those of Jewish descent.
Bernard Rust, the Minister of Education in Prussia who
was soon to be given control by Hitler over all education in
Germany, had no remorse about the scores of professors
and lecturers who were summarily sacked. "It is less
important that a professor make discoveries," he noted,
"than that he train assistants and students in the proper
views of the world."
  These measures went virtually unopposed. Thirteen years
earlier, the anti-Jewish movement of which Einstein
became the focal point had brought nodding acquiescence,
if not downright approval, from a sizable percentage of the
German people. They had not changed. And on May 10 in
Berlinùeven Berlin, where cosmopolitanism and culture
had always been a little higher up the scale than elsewhere
in Germanyùhere in Berlin 40,000 inhabitants watched
and cheered what William Shirer has called "a scene
which had not been witnessed in the Western world since
the late Middle Ages": the sight of 5,000 swastikabearing
students burning in a massive pile before the Opera House
2,000 volumes that included the works of Einstein and
Freud, Thomas Mann, Remarque and Stefan Zweig, and of
Americans such as Helen Keller and Upton Sinclair. After
the flames had leaped upwards, wrote one observer later,
there was a sudden silence. Perhaps it was not only
conscience. Perhaps some among the crowd caught a
psychic glimpse of the flames that exactly a decade later
would be sweeping through far larger parts of Berlin.
  However, it was not only the mob that acquiesced.
Thirteen days later, on May 23, Professor Ernst Krieck
asserted during his investiture as the new rector of the
University of Frankfurt that the German universities could
never have struggled from their paralysis without a folk
renascence. "The chief characteristic of this renascence is
the replacement of the humanistic ideal by the national
and political," he said. "Nowadays the task of the
universities is not to cultivate objective science but
soldierlike militant science, and their foremost task is to
form the will and character of their students."
  Nor was Krieck alone among the academics in such
sentiments. On the day that he spoke in Frankfurt, the
twenty-second annual meeting of the Kaiser Wilhelm
Society was held in Berlin. Planck presided. No one in
Germany could be permitted to stand aside, "rifle at rest,"
he said. There should be only one idealù"the
consolidation of all available forces for the reconstruction
of the Fatherland." And he then read the following
message sent by the society to Chancellor Hitler: "The
Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of the
Sciences begs leave to tender reverential greetings to the
Chancellor, and its solemn pledge that German science is
also ready to cooperate joyously in the reconstruction of
the new national state."
  Although a shock to Einstein, it was perhaps hardly
surprising that Planck should have stood firm for his
country and seen Einstein's resignation from the Academy
as the only honorable solution to a problem which Einstein
had apparently created for himself. Even Max von Laue
had written to him stating that the scientist should keep
silent on political matters. "In general," Einstein wrote to
Ehrenfest, "the lack of courage on the part of the educated
class in Germany has been catastrophic."
  It was in this climate that between April 4 and May 15 no
less than 164 German professors resigned or were
dismissedù25 from Berlin; 23 from Frankfurt; 6,
including Max Born and James Franck, from G÷ttingen; 7
from Hamburg; and others from Heidelberg, Bonn, Jena,
Leipzig, and Kiel. And it was in this climate that the Nazi
attack on Einstein gathered weight.
  On April 2 his Berlin bank account was taken over by the
authorities and cash and securities totaling 30,000 marks
confiscated on the grounds that they would otherwise be
used for treasonable purposes. His Haberlandstrasse
apartment was formally closed and a lock put on the door.
Shortly afterwards his summer house at Caputh was
seized. On April 12 his two stepdaughters left Germany for
France and on the same day Dr. Walther Mayer arrived at
Le Coq. Dr. Plesch, the man who had discovered the real
cause of Einstein's heart trouble a few years earlier, also
left. And in Le Coq there arrived a special album
published in Germany and containing photographs of
leading opponents of the Nazi government. On the first
page was a portrait of Einstein. Underneath it were the
words: "Discovered a much-contested theory of relativity.
Was greatly honored by the Jewish press and the
unsuspecting German people. Showed his gratitude by
lying atrocity propaganda against Adolf Hitler abroad."
And then, in parentheses, there were the words "Noch
ungehangt" ù"Not yet hanged."
  As with the more general attack on science, so with the
specific attack on Einstein: a German Nobel Prize winner
supported the case. "The most important example of the
dangerous influence of Jewish circles on the study of
nature has been provided by Herr Einstein with his
mathematically botched-up theories consisting of some
ancient knowledge and a few arbitrary additions," Lenard
asserted in the V÷lkischer Beobachter. "This theory now
gradually falls to pieces, as is the fate of all ideas that are
estranged from nature. Even scientists who have otherwise
done solid work cannot escape the reproach that they have
allowed the theory of relativity to get a foothold in
Germany because they did not see, or did not want to see,
how wrong it is, quite apart from the field of science itself,
to regard this Jew as a good German."
  Throughout all this, and the worse that was to come,
despite his strong feelings and his personal involvement,
Einstein continued to keep part of himself outside the
battle, interestedly looking on. He was still, in some ways,
the man of 1920 in the Berlin opera box, loudly
applauding the anti-Einstein tirades on the stage. The
external, impersonal attitude remained. There still exists
one of the hideously anti-Semitic cartoons then published
in Germany which shows Einstein as a Jewish vulture;
across the bottom of it is Einstein's autograph,
superimposed possibly for a friend, possibly for a collector,
a signature without comment, inscription, or emotion. He
felt deeply about the irrationality of anti-Semitism, he
deplored its cruelties and its humiliations long before the
extermination programs of the Final Solution got under
way. But his reaction was disdainful. As with so many
other human problems, he was the outsider looking in. He
could afford to be dispassionate; so long, that is, as he was
able to get on with his work.
  As he sat on the Belgian dunes with Dr. Mayer in the
spring of 1933, doggedly searching for an answer to the
riddle of a unified field theory, the question of where he
was to work in future was still the one that mattered most.
There were many ways of answering it, since the news that
Einstein would not be returning to Germany had been
quickly followed by a flood of academic offers. Some of
them were, as he wrote to Paul Langevin, "political
demonstrations which I considered important and did not
want to spoil." The result was that he accepted them
indiscriminately, without much thought, and to the
eventual embarrassment both of himself and of those who
made the offers.
  He agreed to lecture to the Foundation Universitaire in
Brussels; a week later accepted the offer of a chair at the
University of Madrid and agreed to move to Spain in
April, 1934ùan acceptance from which he withdrew
following an attack by the Spanish Catholic press.
Meanwhile his friends in France had been active, and on
April 14, the government started to rush through a special
bill to create a new chair of mathematical physics for him
at the CollΦge de France. In its preamble, the bill noted
that in 1840 the chair of Slavonic literature had been
founded for Adam Mieckiewicz, and it was recommended
that the Third Republic should not be less liberal than the
July Monarchy. However, early in May the dates of the
lectures in Brussels were fixed. "Since I cannot do any of
these things during the summer vacation, it is not clear to
me when and for how long I could come to Paris,"
Einstein wrote rather plaintively to Langevin on May 5.
  Both his perplexity with the present and his plans for the
future were expressed in a letter to his old friend Solovine:
"I have not got round to replying to your letter, so great
has been the flood of letters and of men," he said. "I am
afraid that this epidemic of hatred and violence is
spreading everywhere. It comes like a tidal wave from
below, so that the upper layers are isolated, anguished,
demoralized, and swelled up by the flood. I now have more
professorial chairs than reasonable ideas in my head. The
devil makes a fool of himself with their size!
  "But enough of nonsense. We hope to see you again one
day when everything around me is calm once more." And
then, as a P.S.: "If you meet any academic refugee Jews
from Germany, tell them to get in touch with me. I want,
with some friends, to try to start a liberal university abroad
(in England?) for Jewish dozents and professors, so that we
can at least do something for the most urgent needs, and
create a kind of intellectual refuge."
  Two days later, Einstein put down his ideas for this
"intellectual refuge" in a letter to Leo Szilard, his former
student-colleague from Berlin, who was himself
organizing help from England for the wave of Jewish
intellectuals moving from Germany. Szilard was a man of
almost infinite imagination and panache, packed with
ideas for the salvation of the world and equally at home in
science, technology, or international morality. A few years
earlier he had tried to launch a scheme for "Twelve Just
Men" who by the wisdom of their arguments would bring
peace to a world reluctant to have it. Szilard put up the
scheme to H. N. Brailsford, the British Socialist leader
with whom Einstein had been in contact in 1919, and
Brailsford in turn asked Einstein's opinion. He gave
cautious approval but noted that Szilard might "exaggerate
the significance of reason in human affairs."
  Now Szilard, who was to play an important, although
largely unsung, part in creating the Academic Assistance
Council, entered Einstein's life once again. Typically, he
had an ambitious plan for helping refugee Jewish
professors. "Your plan doesn't really set me on fire,"
Einstein wrote to him from Belgium on April 26. "I have
the strong feeling that in this way the only men who will
be placed are already known, and that one will not be able
to take care by this method of the university teachers who
are still unknown, or of the students. I believe, rather, that
one ought to try to form a kind of refugee Jewish
University which would be best placed in England. A visit
to me now would not be useful, as I am tremendously
overworked."
  Szilard was not a man easy to discourage, and the
following month he crossed the Channel to Belgium where
he saw Einstein on May 14. "Though he is still at some
sympathy for his original plan," he wrote on the same day
to an unidentified correspondent, "he is perfectly willing to
cooperate in view of the fact that our plan is further
advanced than the other one. I shall stay in touch with him
and will ask for his help in such a way as I think fit." He
did stay in touch, even though Einstein's own interest in
founding a "Jewish Refugee University" in England soon
evaporated. There were many reasons for this, including
pressure of other work and, probably more influential, the
fact that in both England and the United States academic
aid organizations sprang up and showed every sign of
being able to handle the worst of the problem.
  Perhaps the winds which shifted Einstein out of this
particular field as quickly as they had blown him in were
really favorable, for he was singularly ill equipped to
handle the complicated task involved in the resettlement of
refugee academics. He himself quickly appreciated this, for
by mid-July he was stating the position accurately enough
to his friend Dr. Gustav Bucky, a Leipzig radiologist
whom he had known in Berlin, and who had already
moved to New York. "Your belief that I stand at the center
of organized relief is not correct," he wrote. "I am here in
an out-of-the-way place and I have neither the talent for
organization which is required nor close contact with the
necessary people. I can intervene only occasionally, and in
very special cases, by means of the trust which people put
in me." As his friend Philipp Frank has said: "Einstein
might have done more for the refugees if he had
undertaken to study the situation at various universities
and to take advantage of the personal, economic, and
political factors involved, but such action was not possible
for him. The people who are the most outstanding
intellectually and also the kindest are not always very
practical."
  He might also have done more had his guerrilla war with
the administration of the Hebrew University not suddenly
erupted into a major engagement. For now, as the situation
in Germany made it essential for the Jews to form a united
front, he brought his breach with the university into the
open with an unthinking timing that had the quality of
Greek drama.
  In August, 1932, the Board of Governors, meeting in
London, had elected the committee for the purpose, in
Weizmann's words, "of drawing up a constitution for the
university, and of introducing into that constitution as
many practical reforms as possible, with a view to making
the young and struggling university into an institution
rather more worthy of the name." Sir Herbert Samuel,
Professor Norman Bentwichùwho a decade earlier had
seen much of Einstein during his visit to PalestineùSir
Philip Hartog, and Weizmann himself were members.
Despite the cautious description by Weizmann, the
committee represented a first step towards dealing with
Einstein's criticisms of the way Magnes was running the
university; and when Weizmann met Einstein in Berlin in
the autumn of 1932, shortly before he was to leave for the
United States, Einstein tentatively agreed that on certain
conditions he might rejoin the Board of Governors. But
these had not yet been brought about.
  This was the situation when, soon after his arrival in
Belgium in the spring of 1933, Einstein received a cable
from Weizmann in Jerusalem which invited him to join
the university. Weizmann had received no reply when he
left Palestine on April 19. "But on my arrival in Cairo the
following day," he wrote to Einstein on reaching London,
"I was met by a statement in the press to the effect that you
had considered this invitation and had refused it because
you were dissatisfied with the management of the
university." Only half-believing, Weizmann telephoned
Magnes in Jerusalem. "He read out to me, over the
telephone," Weizmann continued, "the letter just received
from you in which you state that you are refusing our
invitation because you have been informed from four
different and independent sources that the position of the
university is so deplorable that it is undesirable for you to
allow your name to be associated with it."
  Weizmann's shock would have been all the greater had
he known that Einstein had already unburdened himself to
Samuel, who had recently invited him to a banquet to be
held in London in support of the university. In his refusal
Einstein made the same points he was to make to
Weizmann.
  "I think Dr. Magnes is most responsible for the enormous
damage and disadvantages which have been brought to the
university by his leadership, an opinion which I have
already openly expressed several times. Whatever might be
said in his favor, that which must be said in his disfavor
predominates," he wrote.
  "If ever people want my collaboration his immediate
resignation is my condition sine qua non. Only after that
could I consider the conditions which might lead to
successful work. The need of Jewish knowledge is
immense; I receive letters, inquiries, and proposals every
day proving to me that swift assistance is necessary.
  "Changes should be made," he repeated, before
concluding: "If this is not possible, I think it best to leave
the university to its fate. In this case I shall try to help in
other ways in the present emergency."
  This private attack was supported in public by interviews
which were a good deal more damaging than the
statements Weizmann had heard in Cairo. Einstein had
told the Jewish Telegraph Agency that he had turned down
the Jerusalem offer in view of his "long-standing
differences with the university management," and had then
added: "I declined in strong terms to accept this invitation
because I feel that the conditions prevailing at the
university are such as to make fruitful work impossible
until some radical improvement in the management is
introduced."
  To the representative of the Jewish Chronicle he had
been even more outspoken, declaring that "it was
deplorable that this university, on which such great hopes
had been based, was not in a position to play the role and
to cater for spiritual needs in the way that might have been
expected of it at this critical time." He spoke of deficiences
of the administrative and directing boards. "It really
depends on those professors who have been driven out of
Germany, whether they would care to associate themselves
with the Hebrew University," he concluded. As far as he
was concerned, he had resigned five years ago and he did
not wish to be "responsible" for it any longer.
  Such statements, awaiting Weizmann in London, were
almost certainly justified by conditions in Jerusalem. But
they were doubly damning at a time when the Jews in
general and the Jerusalem authorities in particular were
being overwhelmed by the refugee tide from Germany. But
for Einstein's indisputably open character, it would be easy
to assume that he had merely got his blow in first, that his
denunciations were a clever move by a master of tactics.
This was not so. He had acted with innocent intent,
repeating the unthinking carelessness of his resignation
from the League's commission when news of his about
face had come secondhand to those most concerned. As
then, his attitude arose merely from the combination of
thoughtlessness and innocence that so often satisfied
Einstein even though it spread dismay among his friends.
  Weizmann's immediate response to the news that he had
made his criticisms so public was a bitter four and a half
page letter in which he recapitulated the details of what
Einstein had said and done. "In commenting on them," he
continued.

  I feel that I must begin by saying quite frankly that the action
you have thus taken seems to me to be so surprising, and so
unjust even, in substance and in manner, alike towards the
university and towards me personally, that the only thing I can do
is to ask you to explain it, and, if you are satisfied (as I hope you
will be) that it is unjust, to withdraw it. You are the bearer of a
great name, and so the injustice cuts more deeply, especially as I
am so entirely at a loss to account for it.

  Years earlier, Max Brod had in his novel made Tycho
Brahe confront Kepler/Einstein: "You are no serpent, you
never lie or constrain yourself," he says. "Thus you really
serve, not truth, but only yourself; that is to say, your own
purity and inviolateness. But I see not only myself, I see
also my relations with those among whom I must live in
the determination to serve truth with the aid of adroitness
and every shrewd device." One can almost hear Weizmann
speaking.
  Einstein did not withdraw. Neither did he back up his
charges in detail; the only informant he named was
Professor Yahuda, the scholar who had brought the
Spanish offer from Madrid, who had been refused a chair
at the Hebrew University by Magnes, and who can hardly
be considered an impartial witness. Furthermore, in his
reply to Weizmann on May 7, he reaffirmed his action. For
good measure he suggested that Weizmann had committed
a breach of faith by not resigning from the university board
when he himself had done so.
  The cat had now been firmly put among the pigeons.
Samuel and Hartog, who had planned a dinner to raise
funds for German Jewish refugees already at the
university, had to call it off. From Jerusalem, Magnes
wrote to Weizmann and to Einstein saying to both that an
inquiry should be set up and that he was willing to
withdraw from the univeristy if any charges against him
were proved.
  Throughout this imbroglio, which was to continue
unabated in one form or another until he finally left
Europe for the United States in the autumn, Einstein
moved as though not fully aware of the turmoil he had
created. He had simply done and said what he thought was
right. That completed, he got on with the things that
mattered to him; detached and, if not exactly serene, at
least a good deal less worried than most of those around
him. "In spite of all the agitations and distractions," he
wrote to Solovine in mid-May, "I have carried out with my
scientific colleagues here a beautiful piece of work which
makes me most happy."
  As Weizmann grappled with realities, as the Jewish
exodus continued to France and the temporary security of
Austria and Czechoslovakia, and as Hitler prepared the
Third Reich for its thousand years of power, Einstein, his
future still undecided, began to get ready for his visit as a
Research Student to Christ Church.
  "Could I come to Oxford this year in June?" he wrote to
Lindemann. "Do you think that Christ Church could find a
small room for me? It need not be so grand as in the two
previous years." It was a simple letter, innocent in the
typical Einstein way of the fact that the Oxford term ended
in mid-June, and adding that he had "worked out with
Professor Mayer a couple of wonderful new results of a
mathematical-physical kind." But there was one sentence
which came oddly and humanly from Einstein, the self
styled Swiss and the man who did not put down roots
anywhere. He thought Lindemann had probably heard of
his "little duel with the Prussian Academy"; and he added:
"I shall never see the land of my birth again."
  Lindemann replied by return, hoping that Einstein would
be able to come at the beginning of June. "I was in Berlin
for four or five weeks at Easter," he went on,

  and saw a great many of your colleagues. The general feeling
was much against the action taken by the Academy, which was
the responsibility of one of the secretaries without consultation
with the members. I can tell you more about it when you come.
Everybody sent you their kind regards, more especially
Schr÷dinger, but it was felt that it would be damaging to all
concerned to write to you, especially as the letter would almost
certainly not be forwarded. Conditions there were extremely
curious. It seems, however, that the Nazis have got their hands
on the machine and they will probably be there for a long time.

  Lindemann concluded with an outline of what was to
become a scheme greatly affecting not only Oxford but
Britain's scientific effort in the Second World War. "It
appears to me," he wrote,

  that the present circumstances in Germany might provide us
with an opportunity to get one or two good theoretical physicists
to Oxford, at any rate for two or three years. Professor
Sommerfeld told me that many of the privatdozenten of Jewish
origin would be deprived of their positions and in the
circumstances would be ready to come here at a very small
salary. I need scarcely say that very little money is available and
that it would cause a lot of feeling, even if it were possible to
place them in positions normally occupied by Englishmen. The
only chance is to get extra supernumary jobs. These may be
feasible and it occurred to me that if the unmarried were given
rooms and food in college, only a very small amount of actual
cash would be required for them to be reasonably comfortable for
the time being. Sommerfeld suggested Bethe and London as
possible men. I wonder whether you think well of them and
whether you would be prepared to support their candidature. If
so, a line from you would be invaluable in persuading colleges to
make the offer.

  The offer was a generous one, genuinely made. But the
unnamed Berlin scientist quoted by Frank was also right.
"What we are now doing in Germany is organizing a
bargain sale of good merchandise at reduced prices," he
had said of the Nazis' summer purges. "Shrewd persons
will certainly seize this opportunity to buy something from
us."
  Einstein replied noncommitally, agreed to come to
England as soon as his three lectures were given in
Brussels, and added despondently: "I think the Nazis have
got the whip hand in Berlin. I am reliably informed that
they are collecting war material and in particular airplanes
in a great hurry. If they are given another year or two the
world will have another fine experience at the hands of the
Germans."
  A fortnight later he left Le Coq and its sand dunes for
Brussels, speaking on three separate evenings to invited
audiences at the Fondation Universitaire. After the first
packed lecture, he was asked whether he thought he had
been understood by everyone: "By Professor D., perhaps,"
he replied, "certainly by Le Chanoine Lemaεtre, but as for
the rest Iùdon't think so." He was right. The second
lecture was given in a half-empty room, the third to a mere
handful of listeners.
  He had planned to travel direct from Brussels to Oxford
but a few days before leaving Le Coq learned that his
younger son Eduard was ill in Zurich. "I could not wait six
weeks before going to see him," he wrote to Lindemann. "I
should never have had a quiet moment in England. You
are not a father yourself, but I know you will understand."
  On June 1 he arrived in Oxford. Despite the disagreement
which had prefaced his election to the Research Fellowship
he was extremely popular and an ambitious program had
been prepared for him. The first day after his arrival he
attended the Boyle Memorial Lecture, given to the Junior
Scientific Society in the University Museum by Rutherford,
and proposed the vote of thanks. It was an impressive
occasion, Rutherford the big booming extrovert who had
searched the interior of the atom contrasting once again
with the smaller figure of Einstein whose mind had
grappled with the immensities of space.
  "I can almost see Einstein now," writes one of the
undergraduates who attended the meeting.

  a poor forlorn little figure, obviously disappointed at the way in
which he had just been expelled from Germany by the Nazis. As
he delivered his speech, it seemed to me that he was more than a
little doubtful about the way in which he would be received in a
British university. However, the moment he sat down he was
greeted by a thunderous outburst of applause from us all. Never
in all my life shall I forget the wonderful change which took
place in Einstein's face at that moment. The light came back into
his eyes, and his whole face seemed transfigured with joy and
delight when it came home to him in this way that, no matter
how badly he had been treated by the Nazis, both he himself and
his undoubted genius were at any rate greatly appreciated at
Oxford.

  Three days later he received a letter from Weizmann,
about to leave Britain for an important visit to the United
States but suggesting that Einstein and he should meet.
Einstein, preparing the Herbert Spencer Lecture, the
Deneke Lecture which was to follow, and the first George
Gibson Lecture which he was to give in Glasgow on the
twentieth, replied that he could not spare the time. He did
not wish to be wooed away from his better judgment by
oratory and personal pleas.
  Weizmann replied with a three-page letter that is a minor
masterpiece. He repeated his amazement at the stories of
maladministration at the Hebrew University, while
admitting that many things there were "far from
satisfactory." He admitted that the university was
dependent on Magnes since he alone could secure the hard
cash necessary to keep it afloat. "The same argument
covered even the choice of professors by the Board of
Governors, who had to adopt the suggestions of those who
controlled the purse of the university," he went on. Having
thus presumably drawn Einstein into his line of argument,
he came out with two propositions. The first was simple.
"Would you," he asked, "support a proposal to dismiss
some of the Jerusalem people whom we have now an
opportunity of substituting by much more distinguished
people?"
  The second proposal was more subtle. Weizmann himself
was "trying to create a completely independent institute in
Rehovot, which will be able to make a fresh start, and will
not be involved in the past of the Jerusalem University."
Then he dangled what he hoped was the bait. "What I
hope and believe is this," he went on

  that this institute will definitely replace, and within a relatively
short period of time, the chemistry department of the university
in Jerusalem. If you undertake to do something on the same lines
for physics and mathematics ... what could we not do for the
university? And physics would, in a way, be easier because
physics does not yet exist in Jerusalem. Two great faculties
would do much to raise the status of the university.

  He concluded by rounding up the arguments, pleading
forgiveness for inflicting such a long letter on his friend,
and finally made a moving appeal for Einstein's
cooperation.
  The letter exhibits all the skill of the master political
advocate. If anything could have drawn Einstein to
Palestine it was probably this. Yet its failure was
inevitable. The Hebrew University was important; but to
Einstein it was less important than physics. And as far as
physics was concerned, his present arrangements with
Flexner had two great advantages over anything dangled
by Weizmann. Einstein was not a political animal, and he
had no wish to become entangled in the skein of
diplomatic maneuvers which would inevitably hamper the
scientific work of a man building a new department in
such conditions. Secondly, he was not by nature the team
worker, the man who excelled in directing the energies of
younger men. He did not want to direct; he wanted to get
on with his thinks.
  "Dear Mr. Weizmann," he replied by return,

  The people who (unconnected with each other) have informed
me have my fullest confidence and I know them to be upstanding
and to have insight in regard to the situation at the university. I
am therefore convinced that only a decisive change of personnel
would alter things. If this is not done, then one cheats the people
who have donated the money. The creation of an independent
institute of chemistry is probably the best thing for you, in order
to make it work. But to create it with the existing one still intact
is a wasteful thing that I cannot condone. I also feel that the
splitting up of the different departments, especially
geographically, is most unwelcome. In these circumstances I feel
it to be a waste to meet to talk, even at a larger committee. I am
not able to negotiate or to influence; I only see the facts regarding
the men and their objective and their moral insufficiency. My
point of view in these circumstances can only be that I take no
responsibility whatsoever. There is no ill feeling on my part; I
just can't see a way in which I can be of any use. Friendly
greetings, yours, A. E.

  The letter was as decisive as Einstein could make it.
Weizmann realized it was so. He also realized that the
outspoken refusal gave him an opportunity that could be
exploited by a series of Byzantine maneuvers.
  Shortly afterwards he left for the United States. One of
his first engagements was at a dinner of the American
Jewish Physicians Committee founded by Einstein and
himself in 1921. He addressed its 500 members on June 29
and for the first time he brought the argument fully into
the open in the United States.
  One of the speakers proposedùas one of them was
almost certain to proposeùthat Einstein should join the
Hebrew University. This was just the opportunity for
which Weizmann was waiting. Einstein, he said, had
refused. "Without wishing to enter on a controversy," he
went on, "I must say that, unfortunately, Professor Einstein
has severely criticized the university recently. The
criticism was provoked by the invitation of Chancellor
Judah Leon Magnes and myself, sent to him from
Jerusalem. He had been offered a chair in Madrid (which
he has since accepted), a chair in the CollΦge de France, a
chair in Leiden, a chair in Oxford; and we did not want to
compete with those four distinguished universities; yet we
thought Jerusalem, although it cannot offer him the same
facilities, has certainly a claim on himùparticularly since
he does not need any special equipment but only a pencil
and a piece of paperùand that we could afford him in
Jerusalem." He concluded with the hope that they would
still be able to draw him to Jerusalemùand with the
brusque comment that Einstein's idea of founding a
refugee university was "a fantastic project ... [that] would
mean the creation of a Jewish intellectual concentration
camp."
  Einstein responded immediately through the Jewish
Telegraphic Agency and in what he no doubt thought were
uncompromising terms. "Dr. Weizmann knows very well
that, by his declaration, he has misled public opinion," he
replied from Belgium. "He knows only too well the reasons
for my refusal, and he has repeatedly recognized them to
be justified in our private conversations. He knows, too,
under what circumstances I would be prepared to
undertake work for the Hebrew University."
  Weizmann's ingenuity in interpreting this statement was
shown three days later when, at the annual convention of
the Zionist Organization of America, he blandly
announced that Einstein had "made peace with the Hebrew
University in Jerusalem and agreed to accept a chair at the
institution." This was stretching interpretation a little far.
His only justification for the statement appears to have
been a further promise of investigation into the university
which Weizmann now made, and his extrapolated
assumption that this would satisfy Einstein.
  But the upshot was as anticipated. With Einstein's
attitude openly criticized by Weizmann, an investigation
would now be favored. Later in the month Sir Philip
Hartog wrote that he was willing to chair a committee or
commission which would specifically inquire into
conditions in the university. Weizmann agreed, and the
Survey Committee was finally set up in the autumn. Its
members visited Jerusalem at the end of 1933 to
investigate "with a view as to such reform as may be found
desirable, and to the framing of plans for the development
of the university." In the words of Magnes' biographer,
Norman Bentwich, the committee "proposed radical
changes in the administration and in his position. Action
was shelved for a year; but things could never be the same
to him thereafter, and he accepted a change in his
functions."
  On September 23, 1935, Rabbi Stephen Wise, returning
from Palestine, reported to Einstein the outcome of the
crucial meeting of the university's Board of Governors. "It
retired Magnes from the academic direction of things and
made him the president, which means that he becomes a
more or less decorative figure," he said. In his place there
was appointed as Rector Professor Hugo Bergmann, whom
Einstein had, quite coincidentally, known in Prague two
decades earlier. Writing in New Palestine, Einstein trusted
that the university would "now exert that power of
attraction on our young scholars which it has failed to do
in the past because of previous circumstances." Doing a
vice-chancellor's job, Magnes had been known as
chancellor; now, ostensibly upgraded to a presidency, he
was to have powers comparable to a chancellor at a British
university. These powers were in some ways considerable,
and he remained a trusted link with the British
administration; yet effectually the move gave game, set,
and match to Einstein, who had proposed almost this very
thing a decade previously.
  From the evidence that remainsùthe extensive
Weizmann correspondence, the Report of the Survey
Committee with Magnes' replies to its conclusions, and
the reminiscences of those who still surviveùit is clear
that throughout the whole episode, spread across the
decade from 1925 to 1935, Einstein made the worst of a
good case. His motives were impeccable. But vacillating
over his membership of the Board of Governors and then
detonating his own charges in the spring of 1933, he
substantiated Magnes' claim that the Survey Committee
was appointed almost solely because of Einstein's
complaints. "Even the events in Germany, which required
united Jewish action to make the university worthy of its
mission as a sanctuary for Jewish scholars, scientists, and
students from Germany, did not cause Professor Einstein
to abate his public and private attacks," Magnes noted.
"On the contrary he was persuaded to make them even
more bitter." The result was that Weizmann, coping with
the day-by-day practical problems of leading the Zionist
cause, was able to bring in the reforms he wanted only
after a good deal of unnecessary negotiating, subterfuge,
and delay. Throughout it all, Einstein's integrity could not
be faulted, but it was not enough. ["His] faith has the
stirring and driving quality of all truly spiritual leaders
who are in the world but not of it," his old friend Morris
Raphael Cohen concluded in reviewing The World As I
See It. "It needs to be supplemented by a more realistic
vision of the brute actualities of our existence." Einstein's
outspoken honesty could be a formidable weapon; but it
was double-edged and during the argument with Magnes it
was sometimes wielded to the danger of friend and foe
alike.

CHAPTER 18

OF NO ADDRESS

The end of the long disagreement about the Hebrew
University still lay two years ahead as Einstein dissuaded
Weizmann from visiting him at Oxford and prepared to
put the finishing touches to his Herbert Spencer Lecture.
  He spoke in Rhodes House, "On the Method of
Theoretical Physics," from an English translation, and he
surprised many of the audience with his opening sentence.
"If you want to find out anything from the theoretical
physicists about the methods they use, I advise you to stick
closely to one principle," he said. "Don't listen to their
words, fix your attention on their deeds. To the discoverer
in this field the products of his imagination appear so
necessary and natural that he regards them, and would
have them regarded by others, not as creations of thought
but as given realities." The emphasis on imagination was
maintained as he went on. "I am convinced," he said in
one much-quoted passage,

  that we can discover by means of purely mathematical
constructions the concepts and the laws connecting them with
each other, which furnish the key to the understanding of natural
phenomena. Experience may suggest the appropriate
mathematical concepts, but they certainly cannot be deduced
from it. Experience remains, of course, the sole criterion of the
physical utility of a mathematical construction. But the creative
principle resides in mathematics. In a certain sense, therefore, I
hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients
dreamed.

  Two days later, to a packed audience in Lady Margaret
Hall he gave the Deneke Lecture, dealing with the inner
meaning of physics and apparently concluding with the
comment: "The deeper we search, the more we find there
is to know, and as long as human life exists I believe it
will always be so." The "apparently" is necessary. On this
occasion Einstein spoke only from notes, and no script of
the lecture survives despite the efforts made at the time to
coax some form of written version from him.
  From Oxford he traveled north to Glasgow to give the
first George Gibson Lecture. He arrived in the city
unexpectedly and found himself, totally unrecognized, in
the center of a huge crowd which had gathered to welcome
the film star Thelma Todd. Luckily, he was soon seen by a
local reporter who telephoned the university. A rescue
operation soon brought Einstein safely home to port. Miss
Todd, speaking of the incident later, was contrite: "I wish I
had known," she said. "I'd have lent Einstein some of my
crowd."
  That afternoon he spoke for twenty minutes in the
university's Bute Hall, addressing the attentive audience in
English on "The Origins of the General Theory of
Relativity." He began by saying that he was glad to talk
about the history of his own scientific work. "Not that I
have an unduly high opinion of the importance of my own
endeavors," he went on.

  But to write the history of the work of another requires an
understanding of his mental processes which can be better
achieved by professional historians; while to explain one's own
former way of thinking is very much easier. In this respect one is
in an incomparably more favorable position than anyone else,
and it would be a mistake from a sense of false modesty to pass
by an opportunity to put the story on record.

  His exposition was one of the clearest ever given of the
process which led from the Special to the General Theory
and which, after numerous errors, led Einstein "penitently
to the Riemann curvature, which enabled [him] to find the
relation to the empirical facts of astronomy." He himself
was impressed with the seeming simplicity of the work he
had described. For he ended his lecture with words which
stuck in many memories.

  Once the validity of this mode of thought has been recognized,
the final results appear almost simple; any intelligent
undergraduate can understand them without much trouble. But
the years of searching in the dark for a truth that one feels, but
cannot express; the intense desire and the alternations of
confidence and misgiving, until one breaks through to clarity and
understanding, are only known to him who has himself
experienced them.

  A few days later, after receiving the by now customary
honorary degree, he returned to Belgium, turning down the
offer of a stay in Canterbury which had come from Hewlett
Johnson, the "Red Dean," who recalled that twelve years
earlier he had listened to Einstein's lecture in Manchester.
"This is a large, quiet, and very beautiful deanery,"
Johnson wrote, "and nothing would please me more than
that you should come here for a month or more and work
in undisturbed surroundings. You could have your own
rooms and see me, or anybody else, just as often or as
seldom as you liked."
  Einstein's refusal is significant. In his invitation, Johnson
stressed Einstein's "Labors for peace," a hint of his own
long-term efforts for the Communist version of pacifism.
But at this particular moment in his life, Einstein was
anxious to dissociate himself from the smear of
communism as well as worried about his own pacifism.
  Both points were crystallized soon after his return to Le
Coq. In Britain and the United States it was frequently
claimed that he was a member of the Communist
International, and how he himself tended thoughtlessly to
give support to the charge is described by Dr. Max
Gottschalk, a Belgian Jewish scholar who recalls that
Einstein now decided to give his patronage to the peace
congress in Amsterdam. "When we pointed out that it was
really a Communist congress," he says, "Einstein replied:
'I saw that it was a peace congress and I didn't concern
myself with the organizer.' He also signed during these
same months a protest organized by Flemish youth. We
told him about the subversive character of the group. He
said that he had only seen in the protest a claim for
equality before the law and in the light of the facts as he
understood them [that] was justified."
  But now the weapon that he so generously presented to
his enemies was being wielded against him. He had to do
something about it. On July 7 he therefore wrote to The
Times and to the New York Times. "I have received a copy
of a circular issued by the Better America Federation,
containing photographs of me purporting to show that I
am connected with the Third [Communist] Internaional,"
he said. "I have never had anything to do with the Third
International, and have never been in Russia. Furthermore,
it is manifest that the pictures purporting to be my
photographs do not resemble me. The pictures are
probably an attempted forgery inspired by political
motives."
  While he thus became the center of one storm, he was
busy creating a second, struggling with his own conscience
and finally confirming one of the most agonizing decisions
of his life. For now, to the alarm of his friends and the
dismay of his supporters, he crossed the great divide
between pacifism and nonpacifism, renouncing his earlier
conviction that the use of force was never justified;
implying, in the words of his former colleagues, that he
lined himself up with those who would "save European
civilization by means of fire bombs, poison gas, and
bacteria"; announcing without a flicker, like the cool
customer he was, that the change was not in himself but in
the European situation, and that nonviolence was no
longer enough.
  Einstein's rejection of the pacifist cause did not come
suddenly. The blunt statement which he issued in the late
summer of 1933 may give this impression, but the truth is
more complex. The first hint of a change in his all-out
pacifist beliefs came in November, 1932, when, shortly
before leaving Berlin for the United States, he issued a
statement on certain disarmament proposals put forward
by Edouard Herriot, the French Premier. Included in these
was one for an international police force, and Einstein
agreed that this should be armed withùand would
presumably be allowed to useùtruly effective weapons.
The idea appears to have become even less objectionable
during the next few months, and while in America he even
raised it with the War Resisters International.
  Th genuine pacifist reaction was summed up by Lord
Ponsonby in a letter to the secretary of the International. "I
am quite sure we should avoid advocating anything like
new forms of military organization," he said. "Professor
Einstein's mention of the fusing of small professional
armies and the eventual establishment of an international
police force reminds me of the French proposals and is a
policy advocated here by Lord Davies and others. I
personally have always strongly opposed it for two main
reasons." It would be an admission that force could help
solve international disputes; and it would not work. A copy
of Ponsonby's letter had little effect on Einstein, whose
doubts about the current practicality of pacifism were
further increased during his visit to Britain in June. For in
Glasgow he met Lord Davies, head of the New
Commonwealth Society, whose books on an international
force he later described as "the best and most effective
publications in their field. I could not have expressed my
own position as well or as completely as you have."
  Thus Einstein was already moving away from his
unqualified pacifism when he returned to Le Coq from
Britain late in June. This is apparent in a letter he wrote
on July 1 to the Rev. J. B. Th. Hugenholtz, who had visited
him the previous summer at Caputh, and who now revived
his idea of an International Peace House in The Hague. It
was a long shadow of attitudes to come.
  "I must confess freely that the time seems inauspicious
for further advocacy of certain propositions of the radical
pacifist movement," Einstein wrote. "For example, is one
justified in advising a Frenchman or a Belgian to refuse
military service in the face of German rearmament? Ought
one to campaign for such a policy? Frankly, I do not
believe so. It seems to me that in the present situation we
must support a supranational organization of force rather
than advocate the abolition of all forces. Recent events
have taught me a lesson in this respect." Support for this
"supranational organization," a body that would give
existing military alliances a new uniform, was indeed
spitting in the temple.
  Einstein sent a statement to the Biosophical Review of
New York which reiterated the position outlined to
Hugenholtz, but this was not published until the autumn.
Outwardly, therefore, the attitude of Albert Einstein, the
most famous of those who had expelled themselves from
Germany on the rise of Hitler, was still that of the
confirmed pacifist. The revelation came before the end of
the month.
  While he had been lecturing in Oxford, two Belgians had
been arrested for refusing to undertake military service.
Their case had been taken up by Alfred Nahon, a young
French pacifist living in Belgium who now appealed to
Einstein to appear for the defense.
  Before Einstein had time to reply, intervention came from
an unexpected quarter. "The husband of the second
fiddler," said a letter delivered to Einstein at Le Coq,
"would like to see you on an urgent matter." The second
fiddler was Queen Elizabeth, with whom Einstein had
been playing quartets on at least three occasions during
May; her husband had faced a German invasion twenty
years previously and had every reason to fear the power of
a Germany led by the Nationalist Socialist party.
  Einstein traveled to Brussels and met King Albert in the
palace at Laeken. The audience was handled
circumspectly, and for good reason. For in some quarters
Einstein's continued presence in Belgium was regarded as
a distinctly mixed blessing. It would be unfair to suggest
that the country harbored any sizable pro-German party;
yet there existedùas indeed there existed in Englandùan
overall wish to mollify rather than to criticize dictators.
Nowhere in Belgium was much more than three hours'
drive from the German frontier, and if threats that Einstein
might be kidnapped or assassinated were exaggerated, this
was not certain at the time. International incidents should
be avoided, and it is significant that no offers of a
permanent appointment appear to have been made to
Einstein from any Belgian university.
  In this climate, intervention by a constitutional monarch
in a matter involving military service had to be handled
with care, and the King appears to have kept no record of
the views which he put to Einstein, or of Einstein's
reaction. The latter is, however, clearly implied in the
exchange of letters that followed the audience. The
comment of the editors of Einstein on Peace that "the
discussion with the King apparently helped Einstein to
come to a decision on the crucial matter of war resistence"
seems justified. If so, the Queen's invitation that Einstein
should bring his violin to Laeken four years earlier had
produced its first ripple on public affairs.
  "Your Majesty," Einstein wrote on July 14,

  the matter of the conscientious objectors is constantly on my
mind. It is a grave question, far transcending the special case
before me.
  I have already indicated why, despite my close association
with the War Resisters' movement, I shall not intervene:
  1. In the present threatening situation, created by the events
in Germany, Belgium's armed forces can only be regarded as
a means of defense, not an instrument of aggression. And
now, of all times, such defense forces are urgently needed.
  2. If anyone is to intervene in the case, it should not be one
who enjoys your country's hospitality.
  I should like to venture some additional remarks, however.
Men who, by their religious and moral convictions, are
constrained to refuse military service should not be treated as
criminals. Nor should anyone be permitted to sit in judgment
on the question of whether such a refusal is rooted in deep
conviction or in less worthy motives.
  In my view there exists a more dignified and more effective
way of testing and utilizing such men. They should be offered
the alternative of accepting more onerous and hazardous work
than military service. If their conviction is deep enough, they
will choose this course; and there will probably never be
many of such people. As substitute work I have in mind
certain types of mine labor, stoking furnaces aboard ships,
hospital service in infectious-disease wards or in certain
sections of mental institutions, and possibly other services of
a similar nature.
  Anyone who voluntarily accepts such service without pay is
possessed of remarkable qualities and really deserves even
more than merely being accepted as a conscientious objector.
Certainly, he should not be treated as a criminal. Were
Belgium to enact such a law or merely establish such a
custom, it would constitute noteworthy progress toward true
humanity.

  This was a letter typical of Einstein; humane and
courteous, thoughtful of the wider services which men
might render to one another. Yet it was still a letter written
on the brink of decision; it burked the entire issue of
whether "mine labor, stoking furnaces aboard ships," and
such services might not be quite as essential to a country's
war effort as service in the armed forces.
  The King's reply, dated from Ostend on the twenty
fourth, was friendly but noncommittal and to avoid the
accusation of being unconstitutional he was careful to
speak of anonymous "Belgian governments" rather than
the specific current administration. "My dear professor, I
have received with great pleasure the letter you have so
kindly written me, and I send you my warmest thanks,"
His Majesty began.

  I am most responsive to what you say about Belgium and the
sincerity of its foreign policy.
  Belgian governments intend to stay out of the conflicts that
are taking place in or among its neighbor countries; under no
circumstances will they consent to discriminatory practices
which the great majority of Belgians consider unacceptable.
As you have said it so well, our army is defensive in
character. To serve in it means to serve the will of a free
people intent on maintaining the place which is legitimately
theirs in the society of nations.
  We are delighted that you have set foot on our soil. There
are men who by their work and intellectual stature belong to
mankind rather than to any one country, yet the country they
choose as their asylum takes keen pride in that fact.
  The Queen joins me in sending you best wishes for a
pleasant stay in Belgium. Please accept my expression of high
esteem. Albert.

  There is an air of fencing about the exchange and it
seems likely that the King was still not certain of what
Einstein would do next. Judging by past record, he had
every reason to keep his fingers crossed.
  However, Einstein's mind had already been made up. On
July 20 he wrote to Nahon. He asked that the contents of
his letter should be publicizedùa letter in which Albert
Einstein, who had once declared that he "would rather be
hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable
business" as war, had changed his tune.
  "What I shall tell you will greatly surprise you," he said.

  Until quite recently we in Europe could assume that personal
war resistance constituted an effective attack on militarism.
Today we face an altogether different situation. In the heart of
Europe lies a power, Germany, that is obviously pushing toward
war with all available means. This has created such a serious
danger to the Latin countries, especially Belgium and France,
that they have come to depend completely on their armed forces.
As for Belgium, surely so small a country cannot possibly misuse
its armed forces; rather, it needs them desperately to protect its
very existence. Imagine Belgium occupied by present-day
Germany! Things would be far worse than in 1914, and they
were bad enough even then. Hence I must tell you candidly: were
I a Belgian, I should not, in the present circumstances, refuse
military service; rather, I should enter such service cheerfully in
the belief that I would thereby be helping to save European
civilization.
  This does not mean that I am surrendering the principle for
which I have stood heretofore. I have no greater hope than that
the time may not be far off when refusal of military service
will once again be an effective method of serving the cause of
human progress.
  Please bring this letter to the attention of your friends,
especially the two who are now in prison.

  "The friends" were not the only ones whose attention was
now drawn to his changed attitude. At first the news was
passed round only in pacifist circulars, but on August 18
Einstein's letter was published in La Patrie Humaine.
Protests were pained and vociferous. Three days later,
Lord Ponsonby wrote expressing his "deep
disappointment." H. Runham Brown, secretary of the War
Resisters International, declared Einstein's letter to be "a
great blow to our cause," while the Press Service of the
International Antimilitaristic Commission claimed that
"The apostasy of Einstein is a great victory for German
National Socialism," a statement whose line of reasoning
is perverse rather than obscure. Romain Rolland bitterly
remarked in his diary that Einstein was now failing the
very objectors whom he had encouraged only two years
previously. The International League of Fighters for Peace,
the Belgian War Resisters Committee, and many other
organizations felt that Einstein's disavowal of all they
stood for had the sniff of treason. To all, he replied in
much the same terms: Germany was now a threat to the
peace of Europe and could only be resisted by force.
Circumstances altered cases.
  As the protests continued to arrive, Einstein felt forced to
issue a general statement. "My ideal remains the
settlement of all international disputes by arbitration," he
proclaimed. "Until a year and a half ago, I considered
refusal to do military service one of the most effective steps
to the achievement of that goal. At that time, throughout
the civilized world there was not a single nation which
actually intended to overwhelm any other nation by force. I
remain wholeheartedly devoted to the idea that belligerent
actions must be avoided and improved relations among
nations must be accomplished. For that very reason I
believe nothing should be done that is likely to weaken the
organized power of those European countries which today
represent the best hope of realizing that idea."
  Fourteen years later he admitted that "England, France,
and the United States had to pay dearly for remaining
more or less unarmed from 1925 to 1935; this fact merely
served to encourage the arrogance of the Germans." For
long he also had encouraged them. Now he decided, as H.
G. Wells had decided in the First World War, that "Every
sword that is drawn against Germany is now a sword of
peace."
  The justification that Einstein gives for his
bouleversement is valid as far as it goes. The European
situation of the 1920s was indeed very different from the
situation a decade later, when for the first time since 1919
a European country was deliberately turning to the threat
of war to achieve its aims. Decent men did reluctantly
admit that pacifism had to be abandoned. Circumstances
did alter cases. But there is an important rider to the
situation, and it lies in the contradiction between
Einstein's admission that comparative disarmament had
encouraged the Germans ùa polite euphemism for
muddled good intentions helping to bring about the very
situation it was hoped to avoidùand his hope that "refusal
of military service" would "once again be effective." For
the essence of his argument was that after pacifism had
been tucked away for a while in order to deal with an
aggressive Germany, it could be pulled from the drawer
and worn once again, a garment for fine days when all was
set fair.
  There are two other significant points that should not be
smudged. Despite his readiness to abandon pacifism at the
very point when it was put to the test, and despite his
support for an international force, Einstein continued to
regard himself as a pacifist, an attitude to which many of
his former friends not unnaturally took exception. In
addition it is notable that he concentrated his new-found
belief in military defense against Germany in particular
rather than against dictators in general. Certainly it was
Germany which in 1933 represented the major threat to
the peace of the world. Yet even in later years his
admission that tyranny must be met by force only rarely
flowed over to deal with the cases of Italy or Japan, let
alone Russia. His vigor was concentrated to the exclusion
of almost all else against the Germany whose evils he saw
as a natural extension of his experiences at the Luitpold
Gymnasium. His honesty, his international standing, his
Jewishness, all helped to reinforce the anti-Nazi
figurehead into which this vigor had turned him. As such
he had his uses. But after 1933 not only Zionists and
members of the League but also pacifists could plainly see
his limitations as well. And after 1933 Wilfred Trotter's
warning became even more self-evident "It is necessary,"
he once said, "to guard ourselves from thinking that the
practice of the scientific method enlarges the powers of the
human mind. Nothing is more flatly contradicted by
experience than the belief that a man, distinguished in one
or even more departments of science, is more likely to
think sensibly about ordinary affairs than anyone else."
  Einstein's position as a symbol of the anti-German forces
now beginning to coalesce was emphasized while the affair
of the two Belgian conscripts was still under way. For
during the second half of July he became the centerpiece of
what was essentially a political operation. The prime
instigator is not known, but on July 20 the indefatigable
Locker-Lampson wrote to Lindemann, whom he had first
met during his time as private secretary to Winston
Churchill. "My dear Prof," he said, "someone has seen
Einstein and is bringing him to England and has asked me
to put him up at my cottage this weekend. I have therefore
arranged to do this and am taking him to Winston's on
Saturday. I do hope you are likely to be there."
  Einstein arrived a few days later and was taken first to
Locker-Lampson's home at Esher, Surrey, a few miles
from London. From here he was escorted not to one
interview but to a trio. First he met Churchill, with whom
he was photographed in the gardens of Chartwell. "He is
an eminently wise man," he wrote to his wife the same
day; "it became very clear to me that these people have
made their plans well ahead and are determined to act
soon." Next he had lunch with Sir Austen Chamberlain,
whom Locker-Lampson had accompanied to the Peace
Conference in Paris fourteen years earlier. Finally he was
taken to Lloyd George's country home at Churt, and it was
here that Einstein, signing the visitor's book in the
rambling Surrey house before meeting the former Prime
Minister, paused for a moment when he came to the
column "Address." Then he wrote "Ohne"ù"Without
any."
  The following day Locker-Lampson made the most of the
incident when he spoke in the House of Commons, seeking
leave to introduce a bill "to promote and extend
opportunities of citizenship for Jews resident outside the
British Empire." Einstein, grave and silent in white linen
suit, looked on from the Distinguished Visitors' gallery. It
was a moving incident, taking place at a time when
Europe had reached a watershed of history, and oddly
reflecting both the best and the worst in contemporary
Englandùthe eccentric outsider taking up arms for the
downtrodden, and the House which agreed in principle,
but quickly moved on to other things.
  "I do not happen to possess a drop, as far as I know, of
Jewish blood in my veins," Locker-Lampson began. He
had, he pointed out, spoken up for the Germans after the
war but he thanked God that they had not wonù"they
might have treated England as they have treated the Jews
today." Then he came to Einstein, "the man without a
home." "The Huns have stolen his savings. The roadhog
and the racketeer of Europe have plundered his place.
They have even taken away his violin." It was not very
eloquent. But what it lacked in finesse it made up for in
sincerityùwhich no doubt encouraged the V÷lkischer
Beobachter to describe the incident a few days later as an
"Einsteinian Jew Show in the House of Commons."
  Locker-Lampson's private bill was the victim partly of
apathy, partly of the British parliamentary system, since
there was no chance of a second reading before the session
ended on November 17. This, in turn, meant the automatic
lapsing of the bill. There is no doubt of Locker-Lampson's
sympathy for Einstein. Yet it would be ingenuous to
believe that the invitation to Britain and the attempted
introduction of the citizenship bill was the result only of
disinterested goodwill. In the Britain of July, 1933, a few
keen-sighted men, anti-Fascists before their time, sensed
the dangers to come; among them were Churchill,
Lindemann, and Locker-Lampson. To them Einstein was
not only a man deserving of honest support but, as so
often, a pawn in the great game.
  Now he returned to Belgium, apparently accepting an
open invitation from Locker-Lampson to visit him again
before leaving Europe for his winter visit to Princeton. He
had only a short time to wait before being thrust into a
more glaring limelight.
  On August 31, The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror was
published by the World Committee for the Victims of
German Fascismùby coincidence on the same day that
Professor Theodor Lessing, a German who had fled to
Czechoslovakia, was tracked down by Nazi thugs and
murdered in Marienbad. The central core of the book was
the allegation that the Nazis had themselves instigated the
burning of the Reichstag, a claim which looked plausible
enough in 1933 whatever the facts known about it today.
Einstein had given his name as head of the committee in
his usual generous way. Now he found himself saddled
with part authorship and was forced to issue a retraction.
"My name appeared in the French and English editions as
if I had written it," he said.

  That is not true. I did not write a word of it. The fact that I did
not write it does not matter, and [sic] the truth has a certain
importance. I was on the committee which authorized the book,
but I certainly did not write any of it, although I agree with the
spirit of it. The cause of all this is that the regime in Germany is
one of revenge; and I happen to be chosen as one of the
victimized.

  Naturally enough, this disclaimer had little effect on
those who were baying for blood. "Einstein's Newest
Infamy," a German newspaper banner underlined in red,
was typical, and early in September it was reported that
"Fehme," the extreme German nationalist organization,
had earmarked $5,000 for the man who would kill
Einstein. The news that this sum had been "put on his
head" caused him to touch his white hair and remark
smilingly: "I did not know it was worth so much."
  Ellen Wilkinson, the British Labour M.P. who was a
member of the committee which had published the book,
traveled to Le Coq where she met Einstein on September
2. "I implored him to resign, to let us take his name off our
notepaper," she said. "'No,' he said quietly. 'They shall
not force me to do that. The work your committee has done
is good.'"
  All this provided a dramatic context for the events of the
next few weeks. For Einstein was now to return to
England, and to remain there as Locker-Lampson's guest
until, a month later, he spoke at a packed meeting in the
Royal Albert Hall before leaving Britain and Europe for
the last time. Sensational overtones were given to the
story. Thus it was subsequently claimed that Einstein had
fled from the continent on hearing of the assassination of
Lessing; that he had been brought to England secretly in
Locker-Lampson's yacht; that an armed guard had
constantly kept watch over him in England; and,
inevitably, that special police protection was given in
England after warnings of assassination attempts. The
truth is that when he left England for Belgium in July
Einstein had said that he expected to be returning in
September; that Locker- Lampson never had a yacht; that
the "armed guards" consisted of Locker-Lampson's two
girl secretaries and a farm hand who were given sporting
rifles partly as a joke, partly as local color for
photographers; and that neither Scotland Yard nor the
Special Branch were warned of any murder threats. The
assassination story was, in fact, made up by Locker
Lampson and "leaked" to a London evening paper when
the sale of tickets for the "Einstein meeting" at the Royal
Albert Hall was flagging.
  Bearing all this in mind, the seriousness of any personal
threat to Einstein in the late summer of 1933 appears
questionable. With the Final Solution so well documented,
there is no need to believe that this particular assassination
would have been beyond the infamy of the Nazis, and their
record suggests that it would not have been beyond their
stupidity. But Einstein himself had the most common
sense comment. "When a bandit is going to commit a
crime he keeps it a secret," he remarked on first hearing of
the threats. The Belgian police had much the same attitude
and their chief, quoted by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency,
gives an impression of what is usually regarded as British
phlegm: "The professor is taking everything quietly. When
he was told that there was reputed to be a price upon his
head he was only mildly surprised. He knows he is being
guarded by police, but he gives me to understand that he
does not wish to discuss the measures that are being taken.
He told me that he is not afraid. I went this morning to ask
him if he thought any further measures were required for
his protection. He replied they were not needed."
  This lofty disregard for his own safety was in the marrow
of the man. All that worried him was the interference with
his work that police surveillance often caused. Elsa was
another matter and it was Elsa who on Friday, September
8, asked a visiting reporter from England ùPatrick
Murphy of the Sunday Expressùto telephone Locker
Lampson and ask whether Einstein could come back as a
guest without delay. Locker-Lampson swung into action,
eager to be host once more, especially in such dramatic
circumstances, and on Saturday Einstein was driven with
Murphy to Ostend. In the cabin of the Channel boat he
soon had out his notebook and was hard at work.
  Arrived in London, he was taken for the night to a small
boardinghouse in Earl's Court run by Locker- Lampson's
former housekeeper, thankful that for once the hurried
departure had enabled him to travel light. "If I traveled
with two huge trunks my wife would still have a little
paper parcel with excess luggage," he confided to Murphy.
  The following morning, he was driven by the
commander's two girl secretaries northeast from London,
through Newmarket where the three lunched, Einstein
making himself understood as well as he could with his
slight conversational English, and then on to Cromer on
the east coast. Here Locker-Lampson ran a holiday hotel in
which a room had been reserved. But Einstein was taken
instead to Roughton Heath, a sandy stretch of moorland
three miles from the town where the commander owned a
stretch of land. Here he was installed in one of the holiday
chalets. His stay was surrounded by a grotesque mixture of
pseudo-secrecy and publicity. "If any unauthorized person
comes near they will get a charge of buckshot," threatened
the commander. But the local Cromer photographer was
allowed to take pictures of Einstein in his sweater and
sandals, while the girl "guards," carrying sporting guns,
posed for the agencies whose pictures went round the
world.
  Here Einstein stated significantly to a reporter:

  I shall become a naturalized Englishman as soon as it it
possible for my papers to go through. Commander Locker
Lampson has already suggested to your Parliament that England
should adopt me immediately instead of my having to wait the
usual five years. Parliament will give us the answer when it
reassembles. I cannot tell you yet whether I shall make England
my home. I do not know where my future lies. I shall be here for
a month, and then cross to America to fulfill engagements for a
lecture tour.
  Professor Millikan, the great American research worker, has
invited me to make Pasadena University [sic], in California,
my home. They have there the finest observatory in the world.
That is a temptation. But, although I try to be universal in
thought, I am European by instinct and inclination. I shall
want to return here.

  Einstein spent about a month on Roughton Heath, living
and eating in the small wooden building allocated to him,
working with Dr. Mayer, who soon joined him from
Belgium, and sometimes walking for an hour or more over
the rough heathlands, "talking to the goats," as he told one
of the commander's secretaries.
  His presence outside Cromer had become an open secret
and there were many visitors to the Locker- Lampson
"encampment." One was Sir Samuel Hoare, the former
British foreign minister. With Hoare Einstein discussed
the European situation; and, invigorated by the
comparative solitude of Roughton Heath, he brought up
again the idea that he had made to Norman Bentwich in
Jerusalem a decade agoùthat lighthouses would be good
places in which young scientists could carry out routine
work because the loneliness encouraged them to think.
  Another visitor was Einstein's stepson-in-law Dmitri
Marianoff, commissioned by a French paper to produce a
popular article on relativity and a little uncertain of what
his stepfather-in-law's reaction would be to yet another
request for potted science.
  To Roughton Heath there also came Jacob Epstein, who
was able to obtain three sittings for a bust. These were the
only meetings of sculptor and scientist and recall one of
the more famous pieces of doggerel which grew in such
profusion round Einstein:

  Three wonderful people called Stein;
  There's Gert and there's Ep and there's Ein.
  Gert writes in blank verse
  Ep's sculptures are worse
  And nobody understands Ein.

  "Ein" appeared in a pullover with his wild hair floating
in the wind, Epstein remembered in his autobiography.
"His glance contained a mixture of the humane, the
humorous, and the profound. This was a combination
which delighted me. He resembled," he added in a phrase
which was later to be echoed elsewhere, "the aging
Rembrandt."
  The sittings took place in Einstein's small hut which
already contained a piano and was hardly the best place for
the job. "I asked the girl attendants, of which there were
several, secretaries of Commander Lampson, to remove the
door, which they did," writes Epstein. "But they
facetiously asked whether I would like the roof off next. I
thought I should have liked that too, but I did not demand
it, as the attendant 'angels' seemed to resent a little my
intrusion into the retreat of their professor. After the third
day they thawed and I was offered beer at the end of the
sitting."
  Each session lasted two hours. At the first Einstein was
so surrounded with smoke that work was almost
impossible. "At the second I asked him to smoke in the
interval," says Epstein. "His manner was full of charm and
bonhomie. He enjoyed a joke and had many a jibe at the
Nazi professors, one hundred of whom in a book had
condemned his theory. 'Were I wrong,' he said, 'one
professor would have been quite enough.'"
  When the sittings were over he relaxed at a piano. On
one occasion, he took out his violin and scraped away
happily. "He looked altogether like a wandering gypsy, but
the sea air was damp and the violin execrable and he gave
up," Epstein wrote.
  If these were the days of men who were anti-Nazi before
their time, there were others who were still rabidly anti
Jewish. Briefly left unattended while on exhibition in
London a few weeks later, the bust of the world's greatest
scientist by the world's greatest sculptorùboth Jewsùwas
discovered on the floor of the gallery. Fortunately, the
damage was easily repaired.
  The vandalism was explicable. For while Einstein was
thus living in isolation, a transformation had been taking
place comparable to that which fourteen years earlier had
lifted him from the obscurity of academic science to the
center of the world stage. For more than a decade he had
symbolized the otherworldliness of the theoretical
physicist, a figure whose sometimes comic appearance was
redeemed and made real by the transparent honesty of his
beliefs, the depth of his humanity, and the earthiness of his
humor which touched a chord of sympathy in ordinary
men. Now, as Hitler proclaimed that the Third Reich
would last for a thousand years, and the lamps really began
to go out in Europe, the image changed once again. Now,
despite himself, he became the symbol of men who had at
last, reluctantly, been forced to take up arms. But not all
felt that it was right to fight against Hitler and the Nazi
threat. Just as there were those in Britain, in France, and
even in the Reich who felt that the time had arrived to
make a stand against the growing rearmanent of Germany,
so did others believe that the new German government
must be built up as a bulwark against the Russian threat
from the East. Thus in Europe, more poignantly than in
the United States, Einstein became a symbol of that
ideological schism that three years later, with the outbreak
of the Spanish Civil War, was to split Britain down the
mental middle.
  The position was neatly summarized by the New
Statesman, which stated in "Miscellany" that "... to our
generation Einstein has been made to become a double
symbol."

  ... a symbol of the mind traveling in the cold regions of space,
and a symbol of the brave and generous, outcast, pure in heart
and cheerful in spirit.... See him as he squats on Cromer beach
doing sums, Charlie Chaplin with the brow of Shakespeare,
whilst yet another school-boy, Locker-Lampson, mounts guard
against the bullies. So it is not accident that the Nazi lads vent a
particular fury against him. He does truly stand for what they
most dislike, the opposition of the blond beastùintellectualist,
individualist, supernationalist, pacifist, inky, plump. It is
unthinkable that the nasty lads should not kick Albert.

  But it was not only the nasty lads. Some of the
comparatively nice ones, the pacifists who considered
themselves dishonorably betrayed, by this time regarded
Einstein as "an evil renegade," as he described it the day
after he arrived in England.
  During the golden month of September, 1933, Einstein
was thus a man beset from all sides: by the German
establishment, by the "Hands Off Hitler" movement in
Britain, and by his former pacifist friends with their
accusations of betrayal. And now there came a more bitter
personal blow; the news from Leiden that Paul Ehrenfest,
perhaps after Lorentz the man for whom he felt the deepest
affection and respect, had committed suicide. The
circumstances were tragic. He had first shot his young son,
whom he only blinded, and then himself. The immediate
cause of the suicide, Einstein was later to suggest, lay deep
in "a conflict of conscience that in some form or other is
spared no university teacher who has passed, say, his
fiftieth year."
  The message from Holland snapped one of Einstein's
links with the days before the First World War and with
his crucial move to Berlin in the spring of 1914. Before he
left Europe he received other news which in the most
ironic of ways concerned another friend of the same
period.
  Earlier in the summer he had received a note from Haber,
who had saved Germany on two counts during the First
World War. In spite of being the blondest and least
distinguishable of Jews; in spite of having himself and his
entire family baptized into the Christian faith, he was not
to be spared. On April 30 he was forced to resign from the
Kaiser Wilhelm. One reportùfrom the Jewish Telegraphic
Agencyùsaid that he appealed to the authorities to let him
retire on pension in five months' time. If this was the case,
the appeal failed. "For more than forty years," said his
letter to the authorities, "I have selected my collaborators
on the basis of their intelligence and their character and
not on the basis of their grandmothers, and I am not
willing to change, for the rest of my life, this method
which I have found so good." In his farewell letter to the
staff he stressed that for twenty-two years the institute had
striven under his leadership to serve mankind in peace and
the Fatherland in war. "So far as I can judge the result, it
has been favorable and has brought things of value both to
science and the defense of our land."
  Now the man who had helped the Fatherland in its hour
of need turned to his fellow member of the Kaiser Wilhelm
who had wished only for the Fatherland's down-fall. "He
informs me of his intention to apply for a position at the
Hebrew University in Jerusalem," Einstein told Philipp
Frank. "There you have it, the whole world is topsy-turvy."
  But Einstein, who had been warned by Haber against
supporting the Zionists in 1921, now dissuaded Haber
from going to Palestine. His reason was simple. While
Weizmann was trying to induce well-known men such as
Weyl, James Franck, and Einstein himself to the
university, Einstein believed that the young and potentially
brilliant among the flood of refugees had first call on any
posts which the university had to offer. Older men, whose
names were already made, should be farther down the
queue.
  Einstein's discouragement was effective and Haber came
to England. But here his past caught up with him and,
settling in Cambridge, he found that England liked him as
little as he liked England. "Lord Rutherford," says Max
Born, himself a refugee in Cambridge by this time,
"declined an invitation to my house when Haber would
also be there, because he did not want to shake hands with
the inventor of chemical warfare." Haber moved to
Switzerland and in the late summer he traveled up the
Visp Valley to meet Weizmann in Zermatt. Here the
Zionist leader persuaded him to take a post in the Seiff
Institute in Palestine. "The climate will be good for you,"
he said. "You will find a modern laboratory, able
assistants. You will work in peace and honor. It will be a
return home for youùyour journey's end." Now
Weizmann passed the news to Einstein. "I am happy that
despite my warnings, he has decided to go to Jerusalem,"
he replied. "It can only be a good thing in connection with
the situation, as he can only be a good influence and would
do nothing that would smack of foul compromise."
  There was a postscript of which Einstein heard only in
the United States. Early in 1934 Haber set out on the first
leg of his journey to the promised land. He reached Basel.
And there he died, alone, and still incredulous that his
services to the Fatherland did not give him a privileged
shelter from the gale which was sweeping Europe.
  Haber was still preparing for the move to Palestine when
Einstein left Roughton Heath during the first days of
October. He was bound for London, billed as star speaker
at a mass meeting in the Royal Albert Hall, organized with
typical thrust by Locker-Lampson. The initiative had come
from the Academic Assistance Council, the prototype of so
many rescue organizations which the Hitler purge brought
into existence. As the Belgenland with Einstein on board
was docking in Antwerp six months earlier, William (later
Lord) Beveridge, director of the London School of
Economics, had been sitting in a Vienna cafΘ reading the
long list of German professors already being dismissed
from their posts under the new Nazi statutes. He wished to
help them and he was encouraged during a meeting with
Leo Szilard, who had arrived in the city one step ahead of
the German authorities. "It was agreed," Szilard has
written.

  that Beveridge, when he got back to England, and when he got
the most important things he had on the docket out of the way,
would try to form a committee which would set itself the task of
finding places for those who have to leave German universities.
He suggested that I come to London and that I occasionally prod
him on this, and that if I were to prod him long enough and
frequently enough, he thought he would do it. Soon thereafter he
left, and soon after he left, I left and went to London.

  Arrived back in England, Beveridge formed the
Academic Freedom Fund to which members of the L.S.E.
could contribute. In May, staying with George Trevelyan,
Master of Trinity, he had discovered that Rutherford was
ready to head an organization to help refugees from
German universities. When he first heard of Einstein's
exchange with the Prussian Academy, Rutherford's
reaction had perhaps lacked the indignation that might
have been expected, and he had written to de Hevesy: "I
see that Einstein has resigned his Berlin post but I
presume he is financially well fixed in the U.S.A. due to
the special endowment there." Now, however, he swung
his energies unreservedly behind the Academic Assistance
Councilù the forerunner of similar organizations in
France, Switzerland, and Holland, and of the Emergency
Committee for Aid to Displaced German Scholars in the
United States.
  The council met in June, but the Albert Hall meeting of
October 3 was its first major attempt to reveal to the
nonacademic public the size and scope of the purge now
thrusting from Germany so many of the men who might
have saved her in the war that lay only six years away. A
meeting of some sort had been the idea of the council's
secretary, Walter Adams, then a lecturer in history at
University College, London, and later director of the
London School of Economics.
  Adams drove out to Cromer a few days after Einstein had
arrived. "First we were confronted by one beautiful girl
with a gun," he says. "Then there was a second one, also
with a gun. Finally we saw Einstein who was walking
round inside what seemed to be a little hedged compound."
  He quickly came to the point. Einstein as quickly agreed
to speak on behalf of the council. But it appears that
neither then, nor for some while, did he fully appreciate
what was involved. As he understood it, there would be a
smallish meeting at which a number of well-known people
would be asked to speak and would appeal for funds. But,
in Adams' words, "once he had agreed, Locker went away,
picked up the telephone, and hired the Albert Hall."
Organization was then prodded forward by the commander
and carried out by the Refugee Assistance Fund, an
amalgamation of the Academic Assistance Council, the
International Students Service, the Refugee Professionals
Committee, and the German Emergency Committee of the
Society of Friends.
  On the evening of October 3 Lord Rutherford was in the
chair; others on the platform included not only Einstein
but also Sir James Jeans, now at the height of his fame; Sir
William Beveridge; and Sir Austen Chamberlain. The hall
was packed; its 10,000 seats were all taken and the
overflow of hundreds sat or stood in the gang-ways. It was
not only the famous names that had brought them. Locker
Lampson's carefully leaked story that an attempt might be
made on Einstein's life had drawn those in search of
drama. For some there was the spicy attraction of a
declaration on the back of each ticket, which had to be
signed before its holder was allowed in: "I hereby
undertake not to create any disturbance or in any way
impede the progress and proper conduct of the meeting."
  The danger of trouble, if only local trouble, was real
enough, and large numbers of police were stationed
outside the hall to deal with protests from the British
Union of Fascists. More than 1,000 students, many from
the University of London, acted as stewardsùlargely to
handle the expected protests from Nazi sympathizers
inside the hall. There were none.
  Despite the big names on the platform, it was Einstein
most of them wanted to hear. There is some disagreement
about what he said and the published versions differ
considerably. A truncated text appears in Einstein's own
Out of My Later Years, and the version printed in Einstein
on Peace, revised by the editors from the German
manuscript in Einstein's papers, omits the famous
"scientists and lighthouse keepers" statement which he
interpolated apparently on the spur of the moment.
  He spoke in English and all versions agree that he
succeeded in outlining the German menace without
mentioning Germany. This was largely at the instigation
of the council itself, whose manifesto noted that "the issue
raised at the moment is not a Jewish one alone; many who
have suffered or are threatened have no Jewish connection.
The issue, though raised acutely at the moment in
Germany, is not confined to that country." Einstein
thought it wrong, he later noted, specifically to condemn
the country of which he had until recently been considered
a national and he spoke, therefore, "as a man, as a good
European, and as a Jew." He omitted a reference in his
prepared notes to "the seizure of power, which results from
preaching doctrines of hate and vengeance in a great
country," and he also omitted a reference to "stories of
clandestine German rearmament."
  These reasons for describing the German purge without
mentioning Germany were supported by those who did not
wish to anger if it were still possible to appease, that is, to
"pacify by satisfying demands." Thus Sir William Bragg,
by this time one of the key figures in the scientific
establishment, noted to Rutherford on being asked to
become treasurer of the Academic Assistance Council that
"it is possible I suppose to do more harm than good by
angering the people in power in Germany." Sir Austen
Chamberlain felt even more strongly that while it might be
right to protest it was wrong to protest too definitely. He
was, Rutherford was informed, "particularly anxious that
there should be no implication in the speeches of hostility
to Germany and would prefer that the word 'Germany'
should not occur."
  Towards the end of his speech Einstein extemporized,
remembering back to his recent days in Norfolk. "I lived in
solitude in the country and noticed how the monotony of a
quiet life stimulates the creative mind," he said.

  There are certain callings in our modern organization which
entail such an isolated life without making a great claim on
bodily and intellectual effort. I think of such occupations as the
services in lighthouses and lightships. Would it not be possible
to fill such places with young people who wish to think out
scientific problems especially of a mathematical or philosophical
nature? In this way, perhaps, a greater number of creative
individuals could be given in opportunity for mental development
than is possible at present. In these times of economic depression
and political upheaval such considerations seem to be worth
attention.

  Einstein's performance was direct, simple, and moving.
He radiated the personal magnetism that typified the born
actor and the natural politician. Like them, he believed
what he said at the moment he said it, and he gained by
contrast with the platitudinous comments of the other
speakers. Only Sir James Jeans pushed through to the
uncomfortable truth: that men such as Einsteinù
comparable to those whom the council might helpù"do
not labor for private gain, neither for themselves, nor for
their family, nor for their tribe, nor for their country." The
meeting certainly consolidated the position of those
seeking help for academic refugees, and it brought in not
only hard cash but offers of aid from universities
throughout the country. Yet Britain's sneaking feeling that
a strong Germany would be a bulwark against Russia, and
the strong business, political, and traditional links which
since Victorian times had stretched into Germany,
combined with an innocent trust in the English Channel to
limit the impact of such appeals on the general public.
  There were certainly those for whom Einstein was now,
even more than before, a symbol of intellectual freedom.
But there were certainly others in Britain who would have
agreed with Einstein's old colleague Dufour-Feronce,
former German secretary of the League to whom he had
explained his resignation in 1932. "I am convinced that in
time things will right themselves and meetings such as the
Albert Hall meeting for Einstein will only tend to inflame
the situation and not improve it. ..," he wrote to Lloyd
George's secretary: "It is a pity that so great a scientist
should lend his name for propaganda against the country
of his birth. But although born in Bavaria, he was never
really a German in sentiment."
  The meeting over, Einstein completed his preparations
for leaving Europe, apparently unaware that one of the
figures from his Zurich days was in Britainùthe Friedrich
Adler whose flat had once been above his own, who had
helped push him into the Zurich chair, and whose antiwar
feelings had culminated in 1916 in his assassination of the
Austrian Prime Minister. After being released from prison,
Adler had quickly been elected to the Austrian National
Assembly. And while Einstein had been preparing his
Albert Hall speech, Adler had been addressing the British
Socialist party conference at Hastings as secretary of the
Labour and Socialist International, defending his
assassination of Stⁿrgkh on the grounds that it offered the
best chance of ending the war. An exchange of views
between the two former colleagues would have been
interesting.
  One of Einstein's last meetings in England was with
Rabbi M. L. Perizweig, chairman of the World Union of
Jewish Students of which Einstein was honorary president.
After the meeting, Einstein issued a statement that had a
slightly ominous ring. "The value of Judaism," this went,

  lies exclusively in its spiritual and ethical content, and in the
way in which it has found expression in the lives of individual
Jews. Study has therefore always rightly been regarded among us
as a sacred activity. That, however, does not mean to say that we
ought to strive to earn a livelihood through the learned
professions, as is now unfortunately too often the case. In these
difficult times we must explore every possibility of adjusting
ourselves to practical needs, without thereby surrendering our
love for the things of the spirit or the right to pursue our studies.

  To make not too fine a point, he was indicating that not
all refugees from Germany would be able to follow the
academic lives they planned.
  Before Einstein sailed from England another meeting
failed to materialize. It is tantalizing to speculate on what
might have happened had it done so. On October 4
Lindemann drove to London from Oxford, telephoned
Locker- Lampson, and made it clear that he hoped to meet
Einstein the following day. With his firm intention of
building up Oxford science in general and the Clarendon
in particular with the help of refugee scientists, it is
inconceivable that he was not now hopeful of
strengthening the existing links with Einstein.
  What happened next is not clear. But on the fifth Einstein
wrote to Lindemann saying he had learned of the attempt
to speak to him on the telephone, "but as I heard nothing
more I take it that you have returned to Oxford." He
ended, "in the hope of our next happy meeting," and it is
evident that he expected to return to Oxford, as scheduled,
in the summer of 1934.
  On the seventh he emphasized to reporters that he was
only going to the United States for six months although he
did not know what he would do when he returned. Only a
couple of months earlier he had prefaced his Herbert
Spencer Lecture with the assurance that the links between
himself and Oxford University were "becoming
progressively stronger," and many at Oxford expected that
he would soon be added to the select band already settling
there under Lindemann's auspices. Lindemann himself,
according to Christ Church legend, claimed for years
afterwards that "Locker-Lampson frightened Einstein from
Europe."
  Einstein left Southampton for New York on the evening
of the seventh, joining the Westernland on which Elsa had
already embarked at Antwerp. As the liner made its way
down Southampton Water, past the clustered lights of the
Isle of Wight, he apparently still believed that in due
course he might be offered British nationality.
  The voyage was uneventful. During its later stages plans
were completed for disembarkation. In the months that had
elapsed since the Belgenland sailed from New York
Einstein had learned a lot about avoiding publicityùboth
the personal kind, which genuinely irked him, and the
even less pleasant publicity of the pro-Nazi and anti-Nazi
groups. There would be no repetition of the earlier
occasions on which he had been cornered; this time he was
determined to avoid those interviews which had, as The
Times said, "in 1930 made relativity seem even less
comprehensible than it is."
  As the Westernland sailed up the approaches to New
York Harbor Einstein and his wife, Dr. Mayer and Miss
Dukas, completed their preparations. At the Battery a
tugboat came aside. In it were two trustees of the Institute
for Advanced Study, who now helped their visitors aboard.
The Westernland continued on its way and long before it
docked Einstein and his party had been transferred to a car
and were, unknown to those awaiting him at the 23rd
Street Pier in Manhattan, being driven to Princeton.
  He was taken to the temporary home rented for him. He
changed into casual clothes and walked out alone to
explore his new environment.
  On Nassau Street, which runs the length of the town,
there stood the Baltimore, at which was sold "The Balt," a
special ice-cream cone which was a favorite among
students. "Einstein's boat was not yet at the pier in New
York," says the Rev. John Lampe, then a divinity student
at Princeton Seminary, who had just entered the
Baltimore.

  Yet Einstein walked through the doorway just as the waitress
behind the counter handed me my special icecream cone! The
great man looked at the cone, smiled at me, turned to the girl,
and pointed his thumb first at the cone and then at himself.
  I wish I could say that I had the generosity of presence of
mind to pay for Einstein's first typically American treat. But
that would not be the truth. When the waitress handed his
cone over the counter, Einstein gave her a coin and she made
change, muttering something like "This one goes in my
memory book."
  Einstein and I stood there together, then, nibbling our ice
cream cones and looking out the window into Nassau Street.
Neither of us said anything. We finished the cones about the
same instant and I think I held the door for him as he stepped
out.

  Einstein had arrived in the United States for good.

PART FIVE

THE ILLUSTRIOUS
IMMIGRANT

CHAPTER 19

LIVING WITH THE LEGEND

When Einstein came to Princeton he was still a Research
Student of Christ Church, due to visit Oxford for some
weeks during 1934, 1935, and 1936. A Private Member's
Bill still lay on the table of the House of Commons which
could make it possible for him to be granted British
nationality. The attractions of Europe were still great and
nothing could quite replace the intellectual climate of the
Berlin he had known, the closeness to Bohr in
Copenhagen, the ease with which he could visit Leiden,
Zurich, or Oxford. Years previously, Rutherford had told a
friend that leaving England for Canada, after three years
with J. J. Thomson at the Cavendish, had been leaving
"the Physical World," meaning the world of physics. And
when Einstein had first confided to Janos Plesch his plans
to go to Princeton, the latter had asked: "Do you want to
commit suicide?" Einstein always remembered the remark.
Thus his advent in the town was simply the arrival of the
"bird of passage" he had described in his diary two years
before.
  At first the settling in was not necessarily permanent.
The "bird of passage" would have a six-months' perch
with the institute every year. Not much more was
absolutely certain during the autumn of 1933. He might
still return to the continent for visits, long or short, even if
he did not live there regularly for a part of the year.
Gradually this prospect faded, eventually merging into an
unspoken acceptance that he would never again see
Europe.
  That he should finally have decided to settle permanently
in New Jersey says much for the treatment he was
accorded in Princeton, and for the quality of life there in
the 1930s. Set conveniently midway between New York
and Philadelphia, the town meanders along its one main
street much as it did when Washington dated his farewell
address to the army from the town. White-painted wooden
-frame houses stretch into undulating country that is not
unduly North American. The nostalgic pseudo-English
buildings of the university, in one respect a monument to
architectural poverty, provide some solace to those who
have crossed the Atlantic from necessity rather than
choice. Einstein, never particularly partial to human
beings, had some feeling for places, preferring the quieter
demonstrations of nature, the hills rather than the heights,
the areas where the formal transition from winter through
spring to summer, and from the blaze of the dying fall to
winter came regularly and without commotion. Princeton
satisfied these comparatively simple yearnings, and he
settled down to the winter months as content as any
refugee could expect to be.
  He was helped by one other accident of circumstance.
Princeton was then, even more than today, surrounded by a
"green belt" of estates owned by former university alumni.
These in turn created the atmosphere which permeated the
town, one of rich, conservative-Republican businessmen,
some faintly anti-Semitic. As a group they were rather
displeased with the sudden descent on their town of
distinguished refugees whose intellectual eminence tended
to overshadow their own social position. With a few
notable exceptions they made no attempt to establish
contact with the newcomers. That suited Einstein.
  The upheaval from Europe was not as great as it would
have been for most people. "I have never known a place
that to me was a homeland," he regretted a few years later
to his friend Leon Watters. "No country, no city has such a
hold on me." Even Zurich, even Berlin, did not have quite
that. Later, when he had lived in Princeton for two
decades, as long as he had lived anywhere, he found that
its tree-lined streets and quiet houses, each a comfortable
island in its own garden, had almost begun to have the
quality of home.
  In addition, the atmosphere of the institute itself had its
attractions. There were no undergraduates, no fraternities,
no football teams, no grants, no degrees. Instead there was
an intellectual monasticism which allowed him and other
scholarsùwho already included among refugees from
Germany Erwin Panofsky, Ernst Herzfeld, and Dr. Otto
Nathan, who became Einstein's friend and literary
executorùto get on with their thoughts without
interruption. There was another side to the coin, however.
In Berlin Einstein had enjoyed the best of both worlds with
his freedom from responsibilities and his equal freedom to
hold seminars when he wished and to put the impress of
his ideas wherever he thought the results might justify the
trouble. In Princeton, where the only "students" were men
who had already acquired their doctorates, he tended to
regret the lack of contact with younger minds which batted
about ideas with the uninhibited pleasure of inexperience.
He thus had some mixed feelings, quite in accord, as his
friend Frank put it, "with his divided attitude towards
contact with his fellow men in general."
  In the winter of 1933 the institute was the work place for
eighteen academics whose only obligation was the nominal
one of being in residence from October until the end of
April. The elegant building which eventually housed the
institute on the outskirts of the town was not started until
1938, and the new organization was divided between the
big frame house on Alexander Street, near the center of the
town, and the university buildings where Einstein was
given quarters.
  He and Elsa were soon established nearby, in No. 2,
Library Place, a small rented house only a few hundred
yards from the university campus. Around it, and around
the tousled head of Einstein, which was already haloed by
the saintly white aureole that was to become his hallmark,
there began to evolve a new set of legends. Within a few
months he had been given a special place in American
mythology, a place occupied not by the master of
incomprehensible relativity but by the valiant David
shaking his fist at Goliath-Hitler. When the young political
scientist David Mitrany arrived in the United States to join
the institute the questioning of the customs officer ended
as he explained his destination. "Oh, you mean the
Einstein Institute," said the officer, and, pointing to his
package of books: "That's all right, brother, take them
away."
  As Einstein became a part of the Princeton scene, he
became also the great man to whom the small girl down
the street was claimed to bring her "sums" regularly, the
man to whom the local bus driver said in desperation as
the stranger fumbled with his new money: "Bad at
arithmetic." With his reputation for having changed man's
ideas of the universe, his pervasive humility, and his
builtin ability to let the world make a fool of itself, he was
tailor-made for apocrypha, and from the winter of 1933
onwards this grew round him just as it had grown in
Berlin in the 1920s. The stories are illuminating, not for
their truth but for what Einstein was expected to be and to
do. His kindliness was as well established as his physical
presence and if the small girl with her sums had not
existed she would have been invented. He was a genuinely
humble man, and it was natural that the earlier "Can't you
count" story, almost certainly starting as a chance aside
before being embroidered into a score of variations which
traveled wherever he played his violin, should be
transferred across the Atlantic.
  Sometimes nature apes art, sometimes the real man is
more than any legend would dare claim. Churchill
Einsenhart, son of the former dean of Princeton
University's Graduate School, tells how a telephone call
was taken in the dean's office shortly after Einstein's
arrival. "May I speak with Dean Eisenhart, please?" the
speaker asked. On being told that the dean was out, the
caller said: "Perhaps you can tell me where Dr. Einstein
lives." But it had been agreed that everything should be
done to protect him from inquisitive callers, so the request
was politely refused. "The voice on the telephone dropped
to a near whisper," writes Eisenhart, "and continued:
'Please do not tell anybody, but I am Dr. Einstein. I am on
my way home and have forgotten where my house is.'" So,
too, there were occasions on which he could not remember
his unlisted phone number.
  The absentmindedness was no more assumed than the
untidiness. It did not have to be. What looked like
caricature was the man himself, merely amused as the
Princeton University students, puzzled as well as honored
by the settler in their midst, chanted: "The bright boys,
they all study maths/And Albie Einstein points the
paths./Although he seldom takes the air/We wish to God
he'd cut his hair." For Einstein was the practical
Bohemian, the man who genuinely acted the way he did
because his mind and his time were devoted to essentials.
"We are slaves of bathrooms, Frigidaires, cars, radios, and
millions of other things," said Infeld, who joined Einstein
in Princeton in 1936 and soon became an intimate.
Einstein tried to reduce them to the absolute minimum.
Long hair minimizes the need for the barber. Socks can be
done without. One leather jacket solves the coat problem
for many years. Suspenders are superfluous, as are
nightshirts and pajamas. It is a minimum problem which
Einstein has solved, and shoes, trousers, shirt, jacket are
the very necessary things; it would be difficult to reduce
them further."
  This was the Einstein, sockless and suspenderless, who
soon settled in, protected by the agreement that he should
be left in peace to acclimatize. Both he and Elsa gradually
became accepted, not least because he was always good
company while Elsa, despite her obvious enjoyment of
Princeton's "high society," had a naturalness that soon
won confidence. Thus Einstein, asked at a dinner given by
Dean Eisenhart which historical person he would most like
to meet, was expected to choose Newton or Archimedes.
But his choice was Mosesù"I would like to ask him if he
ever thought that his people would obey his law so long."
And Elsa, invited to tea by the wife of the president of the
university, took a long time to speak on finding that she
was the guest of honor. At last she was coaxed into a
conversation with a group of faculty wives who were
liberally quoting their husbands: "Well," she said, "My
husband always says ... he's a physicist ... and he always
says...."
  A hint of this new status that they were being given in the
United States came at the beginning of November when
Roosevelt invited Einstein to dine at the White House. The
way this was handled by the institute was a warning of
things to come, and of the battle with Abraham Flexner
that was only to end when the director was replaced by Dr.
Frank Aydelotte.
  Early in November, Colonel MacIntyre, President
Roosevelt's secretary, telephoned the institute, where
Einstein's secretary accepted the President's invitation on
his behalf. Shortly afterwards, MacIntyre was surprised to
receive a telephone call from Flexner. In the words of a
memorandum from the White House Social Bureau, he
"stated very strongly that appointments could not be made
for Professor Einstein except through him." Lest there
should be any doubt about the implication, Flexner
followed up the call with a letter to the President. "With
genuine and profound reluctance I felt myself compelled
this afternoon to explain to your secretary, Mr. [sic]
MacIntyre, that Professor Einstein had come to Princeton
for the purpose of carrying on his scientific work in
seclusion and that it was absolutely impossible to make
any exception which would inevitably bring him into
public notice," he wrote.

  You are aware of the fact that there exists in New York an
irresponsible group of Nazis. In addition, if the newspapers had
access to him or if he accepted a single engagement or invitation
that could possibly become public, it would be practically
impossible for him to remain in the post which he has accepted
in this institute or in America at all. With his consent and at his
desire I have declined on his behalf invitations from high
officials and from scientific societies in whose work he is really
interested.

  This was not good enough. Far from failing to accept "a
single engagement," Einstein made his American debut as
a violinist at a public concert, attended as guest of honor a
dinner given by Governor Lehmann, was officially
welcomed as a resident of New Jersey, and attended public
celebrations to set the first type for an enlarged edition of
the Jewish Daily Bulletin, all within a few months of his
arrival. But it gives some idea of Flexner's proprietorial
attitude towards the scholars and scientists he had brought
up and it suggests that the "irresponsible group of Nazis"
was an excuse for keeping Einstein from a President who
might expect him to spread his energies across the United
Statesùpossibly even to the California Institute of
Technology. Certainly the implication of Flexner's letter
was that Einstein had personally agreed to refuse the
President's invitation.
  Roosevelt himself might have continued to think this had
not Henry Morgenthau, then Undersecretary of the
Treasury, written casually to Einstein mentioning the
invitation that had been refused. "You can hardly
imagine," Einstein wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt on learning the
news, "of what great interest it would have been for me to
meet the man who is tackling with gigantic energy the
greatest and most difficult problem of our time. However,
as a matter of fact, no invitation whatever has reached me.
I only learned that such an invitation was intended but
believed that the plan had been dropped." He ended by
saying that he was writing "because it means a great deal
to me to avoid the ugly impression that I had been
negligent or discourteous in this matter." The incident
foreshadowed what he later described to a colleague as his
"little war in the beerglass" with Flexner. And it helps to
explain his later comment to his friend Leon Watters:
"When I first came to Princeton I thought I understood
Flexner; since then I find him an enigma. I feel that I am
not kept advised as to what is going on. There is anti
Semitism at Princeton."
  A second invitation to the White House quickly followed
Einstein's letter, and he and Elsa arrived in Washington
on January 24. They dined with the President and Mrs.
Roosevelt and stayed the night, their long afterdinner
conversations being in German which, Einstein later
recalled, the President spoke very well. There is no direct
record of what they talked about. But there is indirect
evidence in eight lines of doggerel which Einstein wrote
before leaving, a copy of which is preserved in the White
House archives.
  The German runs as follows:

  In der Hauptstadt stolzer Pracht
  Wo das Schicksal wird gewacht
  KΣmpfet froh ein stolzer Mann
  Der die L÷sung schaffen kann
  Beim GerprΣche gestern Nacht
  Herzlich Ihrer wird gedacht
  Was berichtet werden muss
  Darum sende ich diesen Gruss.

  The translation by the White House Bureau runs:

  In the Capital's proud magnificence
  Where destiny is made
  Cheerfully fights a proud man
  Who can provide the solution.
  In our conversation of last night
  There were cordial thoughts of you
  Which must be spoken
  So I send this greeting.

  But the copy in the White House archives is written by
Elsa; it gives, moreover, no clue to the "you" of whom
Einstein and Roosevelt had cordial thoughts. But this is
clear from the original verses, written in Einstein's hand
on a small postcard. The card, now in the Royal Archives,
Brussels, was addressed to Queen Elizabeth of the
Belgians.
  The situation in Europeùand presumably Belgium's
position next to a swiftly rearming Germanyùis unlikely
to have been the only subject discussed that evening and
the question of U. S. nationality appears to have been
raised. This may have been so. A few weeks earlier
Roosevelt had received a letter from Representative F. H.
Shoemaker suggesting that he should "by Executive Order
extend to Professor Einstein citizenship in the United
States, thus making it possible for Professor Einstein to
continue his scientific work and research, thus extending
the helping hand, instead of perhaps the reproachful
word." Roosevelt's secretary replied that Congress had
never provided for U. S. citizenship to be given by
Executive Order, but that no doubt the Secretary of Labor
would write to Einstein telling him how to take out
naturalization papers if he wished to do so. However,
Einstein was at this date quite satisfied to hold only Swiss
nationalityùand until the summer of 1936 continued to
live in the United States only on a temporary visitor's visa.
  The question of nationality was publicly raised two
months later. On Wednesday, March 28, Congressman
Kenney of New Jersey proposed a Joint Resolution in the
House of Representatives to admit Einstein to U. S.
citizenship. It went as follows:

  Whereas Professor Einstein has been accepted by the
scientific world as a savant and a genius; and
  Whereas his activities as a humanitariun have placed him
high in the regard of countless of his fellowmen; and
  Whereas he has publicly declared on many occasions to be a
lover of the United States and an admirer of its Constitution;
and
  Whereas the United States is known in the world as a haven
of liberty and true civilization: Therefore be it
  1.    Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives
  2.    of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
  3.    That Albert Einstein is hereby unconditionally
admitted to
  4.    the character and privileges of a citizen of the United
States.

  The following day, presumably by coincidence, it was
officially announced in Berlin that Einstein had been
formally deprived of German citizenship by an order
promulgated by Wilhelm Frick, Minister of the Interior.
By this time the list of the previous summer had
lengthened. When Einstein's name had been put on the
first list of men who might be deprived of their nationality,
there had been only six more. Now his name appeared
with thirty-six others.
  Einstein made no public comment although years later he
drew a grisly parallel to the German action. "The Hitler
regime pompously threw me out after I had already
renounced my nationality," he wrote. "To me it is
analogous to the case of Mussolini who was hung up even
when it was known he was dead." As far as the
congressman's action was concerned, Einstein's feeling
was made plain to his friends: he was quite satisfied with
his Swiss citizenship ùa point which he made to Kenney
on April 11 in a letter asking him to drop the motion.
  This move came as Einstein's plans for the immediate
future were, according to his own evidence written at the
time, still in the balance. On Friday, March 30, he and
Elsa went to New York and met a number of Elsa's
relatives arriving from Europe on the S. S. Albert Ballin.
On the Sunday he attended a Carnegie Hall concert at
which he was presented with a scroll of honor before going
on to a dinner of the National Labor Committee for the
Jewish Worker in Palestine. Both were announced as
farewell occasions, and Einstein was reported to be sailing
for Antwerp on Tuesday, April 3. But on Monday the
second the Jewish Telegraphic Agencyùalways among the
best-informed sources on Einstein's activitiesùannounced
that he had changed his plans and would be staying
indefinitely in the United States. The New York papers
announced that he had been about to leave for a visit to
France and Belgium, and the Agency quoted a statement
from his secretary saying: "Many different circumstances
had entered into his decision."
  In fact Einstein had been hovering for some months.
Plans for his visit to Oxford, due in the spring or summer
of 1934, had been discussed with Lindemann from
November, 1933, onwards. But he was increasingly
anxious to cancel it and on December 17 wrote saying that
conditions in the United States were so favorable that he
was able to forego the ú 400 from Christ Church. Could it
not be used elsewhere, he asked; a suggestion that was
finally to harden into the proposal that it should support
Jewish refugees from Germany. However, Lindemann was
a determined fighter and early in 1934 Einstein received
an invitation from Locker-Lampson almost certainly
written at Lindemann's instigation, urging him to come to
England.
  He was still reluctant to leave America. But he had
written to Mrs. Roosevelt earlier on inferring that he
would be in Princeton only "until the end of March, 1934";
as late as March 22 he told Max Born that "if at all
possible [he was] going to fritter away the summer
somewhere in America. Why should an old fellow like me
not enjoy relative peace and quiet for once?" It is clear,
therefore, that his final decision was not made until the
end of March. Judging by a letter to Lindemann written by
Erwin Shr÷dinger, it was made on the twenty-eighth.
  Schr÷dinger had by this time been awarded a Fellowship
at Magdalen. But he was visiting America and had called
on Einstein partly out of friendship, partly as an emissary
from Lindemann. Now, on March 29, he reported back:

  Dear Lindemann, I suppose you are waiting for news from me
concerning our friend A. E. and his coming to Oxford. I did not
want to write to you before I had the feeling that his answer was
really definitiveùand of course I did not wish to urge him,
because I feared that might still reduce the likeliness of a
positive answer. But now I asked him once more, adding that it
would of course be wishable for you to know as soon as possible.
Well, I am sorry to say, that he asked me to write to you a
definite no. I really wanted to cable but unfortunately I said so
and he had objections to it. The reason for his decision is really
that he is frightened of all the ado and the fuss and the
consequent duties that would be laid upon him, if he came to
Europe at all. He considers the only way of escaping is to stay in
America this summerùI also told him that his idea of so to
speak transferring the grant, that was at his disposition for this
purpose, on another or some other refugees, who need it, was not
feasible. He understands this of course, though he regrets it.

  Einstein not only regretted it. He refused to take No for
an answer. He himself now wrote to Christ Church, stating
that he did not propose to visit Oxford that year. He did
not therefore consider himself entitled to the ú 400 that
went with his Studentship, but hoped that the governing
body would apply all or part of this to help scientific
refugees. The request was repeated for two more years. "I
fear," he wrote to Lindemann at the beginning of 1935,
when asked whether he would be visiting Oxford, "that I
shall not be able to come to Europe again so soon because
if I come to Oxford I must also go to Paris and Madrid and
I lack the courage to undertake all this. And so I am going
to remain here. ... You can use the money which was
granted to me, therefore, in the same way as last year."
  Had Einstein returned to Europe in the spring of 1934, he
would have been involved at two levels. As a public
symbol of opposition to Hitler he would have had to speak,
to lobby, to steep himself in the political ferment, an
occupation for which he had no liking, even when deeply
committed to a cause. Further, there were personal
involvements which would inevitably take up his time and
his energies. His first wife and his two sons were safe in
Switzerland; his eldest stepdaughter, Ilse, had gone to
Amsterdam with her husband while Margot had remained
in Belgium. There were other relatives, his and Elsa's,
scattered across Europe. If he crossed the Atlantic he
would inevitably be drawn more directly into discussion
about their future.
  Now, with the decision, in Schr÷dinger's words, "to stay
in America this summer," there came the search for a
cottage away from Princeton, preferably where he could
sail. Elsa handled the search, turning for help to Leon
Watters, whom they had first met at Pasadena in January,
1933. Like Dr. Bucky, the radiologist from Leipzig with
whom the Einsteins renewed their friendship during their
first months in the United States, Watters left a large
collection of letters and reminiscences which throw
valuable light on the last two decades of Einstein's life.
Early in 1933 plans were being made to celebrate the
fiftieth anniversary of the Hebrew Technical Institute for
Boys which Watters ran in New York, and he hoped that
Einstein might be induced to attend. "In considering how I
might approach him," Watters later wrote,

  I recalled that in the course of my conversation with him at
Pasadena I had mentioned a somewhat rare book which I had
acquired. Its title was Memorabilia Mathematica and it
contained interesting anecdotes concerning famous
mathematicians and physicists. Einstein had expressed a desire
to see it and I thought that presenting it to him might afford an
excuse for calling on him.
  Arriving [at Einstein's house in Princeton] I asked my
chauffeur, Martin Flattery, to go to the door, ring the bell, and
ask if I might see the professor. He came back to the car
promptly and reported that a lady had told him that the
Einsteins were not at home. I wrote a short note and asked the
chauffeur to leave it at the house with the book I had brought.
While thus engaged, I thought I discerned someone looking
through the curtained window of the house and motioning to
Martin. He went to the door again and came running back
with a broad grin on his face, saying I was to come in. As I
crossed the threshold Mrs. Einstein grasped my hand warmly
and was most abject in apologizing for having sent out word
that they were not at home. She said that she had not
recognized the name and explained that she had to resort to
subterfuge to shield themselves from incessant annoyance by
visitors. I apologized on my part for coming unannounced.
After a short chat she called out "Albert!" and in a moment
Einstein came down the stairs. He had on a worn gray
sweater, a pair of baggy trousers, and slippers, holding a pipe
in his hand, and greeted me warmly. I continued to stand till
he invited me to sit down, he taking a chair opposite me while
fondling the book I had brought him.

  Einstein was by now being deluged by demands to speak
for charity, to attend dinners for charity, to give his name
to a multitude of good causes. He usually declined; the
exceptions were to help either the growing stream of
Jewish refugees from Europe or the Jews in Palestine. "For
a cause like yours I will gladly come," he told Watters.
  The meeting sealed a friendship which quickly
developed. Within three weeks the Einsteins had visited
Watters' institute, spent some time with him at his New
York home, and accepted his offer of help in their search
for a country cottage. "Both of us feel," Elsa wrote to him
on April 5, "that we have found a friend in you. If our life
were not so hectic and busy we would very much like to
have your company more. We will meet again as soon as it
is possible."
  They did meet again, and often, and in April, 1934, there
began a long and revealing correspondence between
Elsaùalways eager to push her husband into what she
thought of as "society"ùand the rich biochemist. Einstein
wrote too, but it is his wife's letters which paint the
homely picture of the great man, anxious to avoid public
appearances, intent on getting on with work, being coaxed
into a synagogue for "the first time in his adult life," and
relaxing only in the small boat which he would sail with a
ferocious intensity that drew admiration from the experts
and fear from his friends.
  Watters himself is for a few years a minor Boswell in his
recording of the extrovert Einstein. This is the Einstein
arriving with his friend at what turned out to be a New
York charity party and remarking of his host's floral
exhibition: "One flower is beautiful, a surfeit of flowers is
vulgar." It is the Einstein stopping Watters'
chauffeurdriven car, jumping out to post his own letters,
and replying to the obvious question with the answer that
he "didn't wish to incommode us." It is also the Einstein
who cannot or will not see that his own idea of equality
can be embarrassing. "Just as we were all seated at the
table," writes Watters in describing how they arrived back
at the Einstein home after one Sunday drive, "Einstein
rose from his chair, went outside, came back with my
chauffeur, and seated him at the table next to himself.
Flattery, a decidedly modest person, felt ill at ease, and just
as soon as the meal was finished, he made the excuse that
he had to do some work on the car and thus escaped. This
was the second time that he had been an unwilling guest at
their table."
  Watters also records an incident which casts light on the
aloofness which permeated so many of Einstein's personal
relationships. One evening he said, with a sense of regret
and longing, that he had never put down roots. "As a
youth," Watters says, "he had never enjoyed the
companionship of other youths, as a student he had never
become intimate with his fellow students and took no part
in their activities; as a noted scientist people did him
homage; he never met them on a scale of equality that
leads to lasting friendship. From all this I realized his
craving for someone in whom he could confide." The
statement does little justice to Einstein's close personal
friendship with Ehrenfest which continued for more than
twenty years or that with Besso which went on for more
than twice as long. It reflects the lonely exile in his fifties
rather than the younger man at the center of things,
dashing off his friendly postcards to all and sundry. Yet it
also indicated that Einstein knew what he had lost through
a combination of temperament and determination to plow
his own furrow.
  But such confidences came only some years after their
meeting in 1934. During the first months of their
acquaintanceship, Elsa conscripted Watters' help in the
choice of the summer sailing retreat. Before the matter
could be finally decided there came news from Europe that
her daughter Ilse was seriously ill in Paris. Elsa announced
that she must go to her at once.
  What would happen to Einstein? For seventeen years,
broken only by short unaccompanied journeys abroad, he
had been guided and cosseted by Elsa through the
minefields of everyday life. Now he was to be left, if not on
his ownùfor there was always the incomparable Miss
Dukasùat least without Elsa, in a country where he was
still something of a stranger. He had no wish to stay in
Princeton, and it was finally arranged that he should go
after his wife's departure to "The Studio" at Watch Hill,
Rhode Island, standing on the Sound just where it meets
the sea. Here he would share their rented cottage for the
early summer with Dr. and Mrs. Bucky, their two sons,
and Miss Dukas, who would keep house and deal with
correspondence that would not wait.
  At noon on May 19 Elsa sailed from New York on the
French liner Paris. Her husband, having seen her off, was
taken by Watters to his apartment and instructed to lie
down before lunch. "I am not tired but I will not be
insubordinate," he said, relaxing while Liszt's "Lorelei"
was played on the Ampico. "Was it restful?" Watters asked
as they went into lunch. "The sofa yes, the music not
muchùtoo sugary." Einstein replied. He was driven to a
brief interview with his old friend Dr. Schwarz, the former
German consul who had by this time been dismissed; then
back to Princeton to prepare for his move to Watch Hill
with the Buckys.
  While Einstein's friendship with Watters reflects his
unwavering interest in Jewish causes, and the determined
fight that American Zionists carried on for the use of his
name, that with Bucky shows something different. The
doctor was not only a radiologist and physician but also an
inventor, and the correspondence shows that Einstein's
intuition for seeing the strengths and weaknesses of a good
idea, developed in the Patent Office thirty years earlier,
had not left him. The two men patented a camera,
discussed means of using gravitation to measure altitudes,
and also of "obtaining a proportional description of sound
waves by magnetic means."
  Some of the father's ingenuity seems to have been shown
by the Bucky boys. At "The Studio" they had, says
Watters,

  set up an excellent short-wave radio set with a directional
antenna. On the porch was a signboard showing at what time
each country would broadcast: England, France, Holland,
Germany, etc. This was during the period when Hitler was
occupying the center of the world stage. When we heard his
turgid, shrieking voice come over the air, we all agreed that his
antics, had they not had tragic consequences, could have been
rightly designated as comic.

  Watters visited the Rhode Island mΘnage early in July.
He learned much about Einstein's habits. When no visitors
were present, he was served first and alone. The Buckys
dined by themselves later. Miss Dukas did most of the
cooking which consisted usually of macaroni, noodles,
other soft foods, and little meat.
  At Watch Hill, Einstein spent most of his available time
in the 17-foot boat which he kept at a small quay within
walking distance of the cottage. His boat on the Havelsee
outside Berlin had been, wrote Plesch, "perhaps the one
thing that it hurt him to have to leave behind when the
time came to shake the dust of Germany from his feet";
and until old age joined forces with ill-health he continued
to sail, not only on Princeton's Carnegie Lake but
throughout the summer vacation. His choice would be
sometimes a hamlet on the eastern coast, sometimes a spot
on one of the seaboard's inland lakes. Once he was
persuaded by his friend to go to Florida instead. They had
a hard time. Florida, as far as Einstein was concerned, was
"too snobbish."
  Sailing, like music, was with Einstein not so much a
hobby as an extension of himself in which the essentials of
his character and temperament were revealed. Thus it was
inevitable that he should politely return an outboard motor
which had been presented to him. He never drove a car
"the Herr Professor does not drive. It is too complicated,"
Elsa explained to one visitorùwas over fifty when he
handled a camera for the first time and barely learned to
use a typewriter. A motor of any sort was a mechanical
barrier. "The natural counterplay of wind and water
delighted him most," says Bucky, who often sailed with
him. "Speed, records, and above all competition were
against his nature. He had a childlike delight when there
was a calm and the boat came to a standstill, or when the
boat ran aground."
  He carried his passion for bare essentials to the point of
refusing to have life jackets or belts on boardùeven
though he never learned to swim. He would have liked
gliding, he would have loved skiing, and it was possibly
only a lack of facilities which kept him from the first and a
built-in physical lazinessù"I like sailing," he said,
"because it is the sport which demands the least energy"
ùwhich kept him from the second. He never studied
navigation and never looked at a compass when in a boat,
making up for this with a good sense of direction ùwhich
he rarely showed on landùand what Watters called "the
ability to forecast a storm with uncanny accuracy." Wind
and weather had an obvious link with stress and strain,
action and reaction, and the basis of physics, and his long
theoretical experience clearly gave him an intuitive
knowledge of how to handle a boat. This was appreciated
by the designer, W. Sterling Burgess, who some years
later, when Einstein was on holiday at Newport, came to
confer with him. "Burgess had made a number of drawings
from which to determine the best configuration of the hull
of the new American yacht, and he had several pages of
computations and equations," says Watters. "Einstein
patiently listened while Burgess read his notes; then he sat
for a few minutes in thought and, taking pencil and paper,
gave Burgess his answer."
  Two other traits were revealed to friends who sailed with
him. One was his indifference to danger or death, reflected
in such fearlessness of rough weather that more than once
he had to be towed in after his mast had been blown down.
Another was his perverse delight in doing the unexpected.
"Once when out sailing with him," writes Watters, "and
while we were engaged in an interesting conversation, I
suddenly cried out 'Achtung' for we were almost upon
another boat. He veered away with excellent control and
when I remarked what a close call we had had, he started
to laugh and sailed directly toward one boat after another,
much to my horror; but he always veered off in time, and
then laughed like a naughty boy." On another occasion
Watters pointed out that they had sailed too close to a
group of projecting rocks; Einstein replied by skimming
the boat across a barely submerged shelf. In his boat, as in
physics, he sailed close to the wind.
  Einstein enjoyed his first summer in America, even
though the news, both from his wife in France and from
friends who had succeeded in leaving Germany, grew
steadily worse. Elsa arrived in Paris to find her younger
daughter, Margot, caring for a sister who was dying.
Within a few weeks she was returning across the Atlantic
with her elder daughter's ashes, kept in a casket in the
Einstein home until it disappeared after her own death two
years later.
  Ilse's husband was Rudolf Kayser, who after the Nazis'
rise to power had emigrated to Holland, where he edited
his stepfather-in-law's writings published as Mein
Weltbild. Kayser now crossed the Atlantic and in due
course joined the Einsteins in Princeton. Margot also
came, with her husband, from whom she subsequently
obtained a divorce. Eventually they were joined by Hans
Albert, Einstein's elder son, who left Mileva in Zurich to
care for his younger brother, already diagnosed as a
schizophrenic for whom there was in those days little hope
of cure. Two years later, only a few months before the
outbreak of the Second World War, Einstein was reunited
with his sister Maja, who arrived in America from Italy.
Of the relatives who remained in Europe the closest were
Uncle CΣsar and his two children, with whom Einstein
kept up a lively correspondence that continued into the
first years of the war.
  The emigrants typified the growing stream of Jews from
Germanyùand later from Austria and Czechoslovakiaù
who crossed the Atlantic during the second half of the
1930s. Einstein could not isolate himself from their
fortunes ùthe personal fortunes of his own family or the
fate of the refugee Jewry in generalùhowever much the
voice of physics encouraged him to do so.
  From his arrival in the United States until that country's
entry into the war with Germany in 1941 his research in
Princeton was therefore carried on against a background of
extracurricular work. This ranged from fund raising to
giving confidential advice on posts into which particular
men might be fitted. He wrote letters, pulled strings, and
unashamedly used all the considerable force of the small
tidy "A. Einstein" at the foot of the page. He was as lavish
with money as with time. "I am in a somewhat difficult
situation because I am supposed to help in bringing the
fiancΘ of a relative of mine over here, and I have already
given too many affidavits for my financial status," he
wrote to Watters on one occasion. "I would be forced to put
$2,000 for months into a foreign account." There is no
record of the response. It would be surprising if Watters
had not come to the rescue.
  Einstein disliked all that this work involved, and for
several reasons. "My husband is, as you will understand,
surfeited with publicity," Elsa wrote on his behalf in reply
to one request to speak in New York for a $2,000 charity
fee. "Public appearance is, for him, impossible for the
moment. I hope he will make some again next season. But
now every public activity and appearance is repugnant to
him. He has had so much of it." He disliked soft-soaping
people, a dislike epitomized when he pleaded with a friend
to speak in his place: "You know I can't make speeches. I
can't lie." But this did not mean that his colleague could
do so. "Oh, no. You know how to be gracious."
  He disliked wasting his time, writing to Weizmann on
one occasion that "it really is a scandal that people who
could occupy their time far better, have to attend at such a
money-raising circus." His health limited what he could
do, so that in 1937 he had to reject an invitation to visit
Londonù"My physical condition ... is so bad that I am
treated like an egg without a shell and can under no
circumstances entertain traveling either to England or to
Palestine." He was now satisfied with the post-Magnes
Hebrew Universityù"it tickles my vanity to know that
through my stubbornness I contributed a little towards this
improvement"ùbut there were still occasions when his
views failed to chime with official Zionist policy. Thus in
1938 some of his comments about "narrow nationalism" in
Palestine brought forth a letter from Weizmann. He
politely assumed that Einstein's "thoughts were being
misrepresented"; but used nearly 2,000 words in an
attempt to put the matter straight. Nevertheless, Einstein
did what he could, and from 1934 his speeches, appeals,
and letter-signings multiply. During the first half of the
1930s he had pleaded that England and France should
remain unarmed. Now he helped cope with the results.
  "Politically," he wrote to Lindemann on December 17,

  I have voiced my opinion much less than it may seem, since the
press makes a great deal of fuss over me without my intending it
or wishing it. All the same I am of the opinion that a
conscientious person who has a certain amount of influence
cannot in times like the present keep completely silent, since
such silence can lead to wrong interpretation which is
undesirable in the present circumstances.

  The circumstances were not only the increasing
persecution of the Jews but also a process which Einstein
knew would move Lindemann as much as it moved him:
the division of physics into Aryan right and Jewish wrong.
  The first attempts at this, made in the backwash of the
1918 defeat, had been deepened by political propaganda
during the decade that followed. But the straight
condemnation of relativity as a Jewish theory seemed
almost sane compared with the huge edifice of mumbo
jumbo being created as Einstein settled into Princeton. At
one end of the German academic spectrum stood Professor
Mueller of the Technical College of Aachen, seeing
Einstein and his work as part of a Jewish plot to pollute
science. "The [relativity] theory was," he stated in Jewry
and Science,

  directed from beginning to end towards the goal of transforming
the livingùthat is, the non-Jewishùworld of living essence,
born from a mother earth and bound up with blood, and
bewitching it into spectral abstraction in which all idividual
differences of people and nations, and all inner limits of the
races, are lost in unreality, and in which only an unsubstantial
diversity of geometric dimensions survives which produces all
events out of the compulsion of its godless subjection to laws.

  At much the same level was Professor Tomaschek,
director of the Institute of Physics at Dresden. "Modern
physics," he claimed, "is an instrument of [world] Jewry
for the destruction of Nordic science. True physics is the
creation of the German spirit. ... In fact, all European
science is the fruit of Aryan, or, better, German thought."
Presumably this sounded like common sense to a writer
who could claim that "statistical laws in physics must be
racially understood."
  At a higher level were the men whose reputation
automatically gave them a hearing. Not all had the
comparative harmlessness of Professor Stark, who had
been forced to retire from his chair in the University of
Wurzburg in 1922 because of his polemics against
Einstein, but who now bounced back with the claim that
"the founders of research in physics, and the great
discoverers from Galileo to Newton to the physical
pioneers of our time, were almost exclusively of Aryan,
predominantly of the Nordic, race." There was also the
irrepressible Lenard, who had ordered that the word
"ampere," commemorating the French physicist in the unit
of electrical current, should be replaced by the German
"weber" after Wilhelm Weber on the instruments in his
Heidelberg laboratory. His fourvolume Deutsche Physik,
printed in Gothic type to epitomize "the German spirit,"
illustrated his paranoia. "Jewish science soon found many
industrious interpreters of non-Jewish or practically non
Jewish blood," he said. "One may summarise them all by
calling to mind the probably pure-minded Jew, Albert
Einstein. His 'theories of relativity' seek to revolutionize
and dominate the whole of physics. In fact these theories
are now down and out [ausgespielt]. They were never even
intended to be true."
  This line of attack was epitomized by the opening words
of Lenard's fourth volume. "German physics? one asks. I
might rather have said Aryan Physics or the Physics of the
Nordic Species of Man. The Physics of those who have
fathomed the depths of Reality, seekers after Truth, the
Physics of the very founders of Science. But, I shall be
answered, 'Science is and remains international.' It is
false. Science, like every other human product, is racial
and conditioned by blood." Bruno Thurring, lecturing to
the Heidelberg Association of Students of Science on
September 4, 1936, pointed up the same argument.
Einstein, he claimed, was not the pupil of Copernicus,
Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, but their determined
opponent. "His theory is not the keystone of a
development, but a declaration of total war," he went on,
"waged with the purpose of destroying what lies at the
basis of this development, namely, the world view of
German man."
  If this negation of scientific inquiry had been confined to
the lunatic fringe of the universities fewer men would have
decided to pull up their emotional roots and leave quietly
in the night for an unknown future wherever fortune
provided it. But its implications stretched out wider,
corrupting all they touched. Some did decide to fight on
within Germany itself. Von Laue, visiting Einstein in
Princeton shortly before the outbreak of war, explained
why he had to return: "I hate them so much I must be close
to them. I have to go back." Others concluded that it was
their duty to acquiesce, others remained enigmatic, while
yet others decided it was their duty to pack their bags and
go.
  Among those who had been Einstein's colleagues, the
most notable to leave Germany with honest speed was Max
Born, as unyielding in his opposition to Hitler as he later
was to nuclear weapons, coming first to Cambridge and
then to Edinburgh. In Hamburg, Einstein's old colleague
Otto Stern declared on Hitler's accession to power that he
would resign from his chair. He was dissuaded by his staff,
but reiterated that he would leave at the first hint of
interference with his department. It came in June. Stern
walked from his laboratory, never to return. Shortly
afterwards he left Germany for the United States where, at
the Carnegie Institute of Technology, he was awarded the
Nobel Prize, acted as adviser to the Manhattan Project,
which built the first nuclear weaponsùand later helped
awaken Einstein to the problems they posed for the
postwar world. Erwin Freundlich left the Einstein Tower
at Potsdamùgoing first to Istanbul, where a brave but
unsuccessful effort was made to create a new center of
Western learning; then to Prague: and, after the dΘbΓcle of
the Munich Agreement, to St. Andrews, Scotland, where
he was offered a post on the initiative of Eddington and
spent the rest of his working life. Schr÷dinger went to
Oxford and, subsequently, to Belgium and Dublin. Leo
Szilard, one of the first Hungarians to see the implications
of Hitler's conquest of the chancellory, came to England
via Austria and subsequently, for lack of support in
Britain, crossed the Atlantic.
  Szilard highlights the most momentous result of the year
which brought Hitler to power, Einstein to Princeton, and
drove no less than six Nobel Prize winners from Germany;
a result which can be seen in any story of the world's first
nuclear weapons. Einstein, Szilard, Teller, Wigner, Peierls
and Frisch, Otto Stern, Hans Bethe, and Victor
Weisskopfùthese are only a few of the men who left
Europe under attack, or threat of attack, from the Nazi
government; who played their part in the work which led
to Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and who might, but for the
policy of the National Socialist party, have written a very
different opening chapter to the story of the nuclear age.
  The grotesque Nazi interpretation of the new physical
theories produced during the first third of the century, the
expulsion of the Jews and the effect of this on the situation
in Palestine, together with what seemed to be the
inevitable approach of world war, formed the background
against which Einstein settled into his work at the Institute
for Advanced Study. He was much sought after. The
prospect of a musical evening or of some new development
in science were the bait most commonly used to draw him
from the relative seclusion of Princeton. But he was not in
demand solely because he was the most famous scientist in
the world. He was in his mid-fifties, unsociable rather than
the reverse, a dropper of bricks as much by intent as by
accident. Yet in the true dictionary definition of "a favor
specially vouchsafed by God," a charisma did not only set
him apart but made almost any meeting with him a
memorable occasion. There would invariably be some
attitude, some phrase, that would be remembered long
afterwards and which could be attached to him alone.
  When Harvard wanted to confer an honorary degree on
him, he was coaxed to the occasion by Harlow Shapley,
who at Mount Wilson had laid the foundations for galactic
astronomy, offering a private evening of chamber music at
his house. Elsa, unable to come, gave her usual list of
instructions. "He is a sensitive plant," she wrote. "He
should smoke no cigar. He can have coffee for breakfast,
but in the evening he must have Sanka; otherwise he will
not sleep well." Einstein followed his instructions, says
Shapley. "When we rose from the dinner table and the
men went into the library, he said "no" to the proffered
cigar. Sadly he got out his pipe. Later I tempted him again.
This time he took a cigar, saying softly, 'Ach, mein
Weib.'"
  At the end of the evening the guests began to go, but not
rapidly. "Who would want to go away hastily from an
Einstein evening?" says Shapley.

  He might say somethingùand indeed he did. He whispered it to
me as I was sending the fiddlers along. "They remind me of
time," he said.
  "But it is only eleven o'clock. The time is not late: they will
be gone in a few minutes."
  "But they remind me of time," he persisted.
  "How so?"
  "Always goingùbut never gone."

  Once he was induced to visit Rockefeller Medical Center
in New York, then run by Abraham Flexner's brother.
Here Dr. Alexis Carrel, whose extracurricular interests
were spiritualism and extrasensory perception, was
working with Lindbergh on an apparatus for the perfusion
of human organs, a device which helped open the way to
the modern heart transplant. Carrel had invited Einstein to
inspect the apparatus with its pulsating exhibits. Thirty
years later Lindbergh still remembers Einstein coming into
the room with Carrel. The latter, expounding his
spiritualism, was saying: "But doctor, what would you say
if you observed this phenomenon yourself?"
  "I still would not believe it," Einstein replied.
  By the start of 1935 he had become reconciled to the fact
that Europe would never again be his home; even a
sentimental visit would present problemsù"so many
obligations would await me there that I seem unable to
find the courage for such a project," he wrote to the
Belgian Queen-Mother in February. Three months later he
arrived in Hamilton, Bermuda, with his stepdaughter,
Margot, and Miss Dukas. He played the usual hide-and
seek with reporters, stayed long enough to make formal
visa applications to the U. S. consul necessary under U. S.
law since they still held only visitors' permits, and
returned to Princeton at the end of a week. Now they were
able to take out the papers which eventually meant
naturalization. Long before this Einstein had put down his
first real roots in the United States. In August, 1935, he
bought 112 Mercer Street, the comfortable two-story house
in its own piece of ground that was to become in time one
of the most famous houses in the worldùthe "very old and
beautiful house with a long garden," as Elsa described it in
a letter to Uncle CΣsar in Belgium. Mercer Street is a rib
which runs from the university site on Princeton's main
backbone, a broad tree-lined avenue making for open
parklike country in which the Institute for Advanced Study
was built. No. 112, 120 years old, quiet and comfortable
behind its veranda and green shutters, had little to
distinguish it from many similar white-painted houses.
Tidy hedge, neat lawn, five-stepped approach to the porch,
broad interior stairs leading up to the bedroomsùall these
were the hallmarks of anonymity as were the trees back
and front which enclosed the house in its own personal
countryside.
  The first change in the house came with the creation of
Einstein's study, an upper room overlooking the back
garden. Half the wall was replaced with a huge window,
which seemed to bring the trees into the room, so that
Einstein could say it was hardly like being indoors. Two of
the remaining walls were transformed into floor-to-ceiling
bookshelves. The center of the room was almost filled with
a large low table, usually covered with a debris of pencils,
pads, and pipes. In front of the window stood his desk. For
ornaments there were portraits of Faraday, Maxwell and,
soon afterwards, of Gandhi, "the only statesman," in
Einstein's opinion, "who represented that higher
conception of human relations in the political sphere to
which we must aspire with all our powers." On the walls
hung a simple diploma: that of his honorary membership
of the Berner Naturforschende Gesellschaft. In the rooms
below, contrasting grotesquely with the colonial -style
surroundings, was the bulky and outmoded furniture from
5, Haberlandstrasse, surprisingly released by the Nazis and
finally brought to the United States on Elsa's
instructions.[Einstein's scientific papers were taken from
the Haberlandstrasse apartment to Rudolf Kayser's flat,
and from there to the French Embassy. They then left
Germany in the diplomatic bag. Treatment of refugees was
still haphazard, and one Jewish Physicist who left
Germany in 1933ùand who was to play a key role in the
Allies' nuclear war effortùwas followed by his scientific
equipment some months afterwards.] It seems that
Einstein hated it.
  With this home as headquarters, he became a feature of
the Princeton scene. First reactions had been qualified.
"Princeton is a wonderful little spot," he wrote to Queen
Elizabeth of Belgium soon after his arrival, "a quaint and
ceremonious village of puny demigods on stilts. Yet, by
ignoring certain special conventions, I have been able to
create for myself an atmosphere conducive to study and
free from distraction. Here, the people who compose what
is called 'society' enjoy even less freedom than their
counterparts in Europe. Yet they seem unaware of this
restriction since their way of life tends to inhibit
personality development from childhood." And, more than
a year later, he could write, to the same correspondent: "...
as an elderly man, I have remained estranged from the
society here...." As always, he would have been unhappy
as the odd man in.
  This early frigidity between Einstein and the inhabitants
of the small New Jersey township was easy to understand.
Never the most gregarious of men, he felt a shy European
reserve among this nation of extroverts; on their side, even
the most friendly were slightly put off by an isolating whiff
of genius as they considered this quiet eccentric- looking
fellow who had in some mysterious fashion convinced the
experts that neither space nor time was what they thought
it was.
  The phase passed. Long before the outbreak of war,
Einstein had been accorded his own niche inside the
Princeton community. They still felt that he was
uncomfortably unique. A good many held reservations
about his uncompromising views on politics and his
unconventional views on religion. But it was tacitly agreed
that these matters could be ignored, that Einstein could be
accepted in spite of them. His greatness would be
overlooked as a pardonable eccentricity. They would pass
the time of day with him, allow their children to make
friends, and would generally agree that however
outrageous his views, however shy and retiring he might
be, he was yet a decent neighbor. As opinion softened, they
began to regard their genius as after all a man of flesh and
blood, tortured by the usual human anxieties and fears.
They were almost right.
  The tragedy which began as he and Elsa were settling
into the new home was a human enough link with other
men's lives. Only a few months after they had moved in,
Elsa was affected by a swelling of the eye. Specialists
confirmed that this, as she had feared, was a symptom of
heart and kidney troubles. Hospital treatment in New York
was proposed. But she soon came back to Mercer Street, to
a drastic cure which involved complete immobilization. "I
was very, very ill," she wrote in December to Watters,
"and I do not believe that I will ever again be completely
well. It has fagged me too completely. But it goes a little
better now and with that I must be satisfied. I have lain
almost two months now and naturally I cannot stand up,
let alone walk. That I must learn all over again." Einstein,
she added, "sticks frightfully to his problems. I have never
before seen him so engrossed in his work. Even at night he
is without rest and his problems plague him."
  Einstein's devotion to physics throughout these trying
months was not a sign of callousness. With such dedicated
menùwhether their interests be politics or science or art
the normal emotions take their turn. Compared with the
problems of the universe, family duties were small beer, a
priority that was reinforced as he grew older. Talking late
one evening with Watters, he looked intently at a picture
of Watters' recently dead wife. "The individual," he
reflected, "counts for little; man's individual troubles are
insignificant; we place too much importance on the
trivialities of living." Yet despite this there was still a
subtle difference between the first wife with whom he lived
for a decade and the second with whom he lived for two.
Elsa herself sensed it, observing after Einstein had boasted
to Watters that he wore the same clothes all the year
round: "For his first wife he dressed up: for me, he will
not." Beneath this she enjoyed his genius despite the
hardships that went with it. "You cannot analyze him,
otherwise you will misjudge him," she wrote in one
percipient letter to a friend. "Such a genius should be
irreproachable in every respect. But no, nature doesn't
behave like this. Where she gives extravagantly, she takes
away extravagantly. You have to see him all of one piece.
You cannot put him under one heading or another
heading. Otherwise you have unpleasantness. God has
given him so much nobility, and I find him wonderful,
although life with him is exhausting and complicated, and
not only in one way but in others."["Man darf ihn nicht
zergliedern, sonst kommt man auf
'Ausfallserscheinungen.' Solch ein Genie hat solche, oder
glaubt man, er sei untadelig nach jeder Hinsicht mit
nichten, so verfΣhrt die Natur nicht. Wo sie so uferlos
verschwendet, da nimmt sie in anderer Beziehung auch
fort, und das kommt dann zu Ausfallserscheinungen! Man
muss ihn als 'Ganzes' betrachten, darf ihn nicht einreihen
in diese oder jene Rubrik! Sonst erlebt man
Unerquickliches. Aber der Herrgott hat schon viel Sch÷nes
in ihn hineingelegt, und ich find ihn wundervoll, trotzdem
das Leben an seiner Seite aufreibend u. komplicirt ist,
nicht nur in dieser, in jeder Hinsicht. ..."]
  At the start of their twenty years together, they had
achieved a working arrangement. While he devoted
himself to discovering how God made the world, she
reduced to an absolute minimum the mundane problems of
life. To an extent which offended the matriarchal society of
the United States, he thought while she toiled, a division
illustrated by a homely incident when they dined outdoors
with two friends one summer night. As the air freshened,
the hostess asked her husband to fetch her coat. Elsa was
horrified: "I would never ask the Professor to do that."
  For his part, "the Professor" supported the family and
irradiated genius from his own private world. "Your wife,"
Mrs. Eisenhart, wife of the dean of Princeton University
Graduate School, said to him soon after his arrival, "seems
to do absolutely everything for you. Just exactly what do
you do for her?" Einstein replied: "I give her my
understanding."
  The understanding was tested in 1936. At first Elsa
seemed to recover and when the summer came they both
traveled to Saranac Lake, 300 miles north of New York
and high in the Adirondacks. But here, as she wrote to
Leon Watters, she passed a very sad summer. To Watters,
Elsa confided a great deal. "Einstein," he later wrote,
"absorbed in his intellectual pursuits, found little time to
fulfill the duties expected of a husband." It was true, he
went on, that Elsa "enjoyed the sharing of the many
honors which were bestowed on him and the many travels
with him, but she missed the sympathy and tenderness
which she craved, and found herself much alone in these
respects." This sounds harshùparticularly as Elsa's friend
Antonina Vallentin quotes her as writing of her husband
during the illness, "He had been so upset by my illness. He
wanders about like a lost soul. I never thought he loved me
so much." The impression given in her letters to Watters is
rather different. And now, in September, writing to him
from Saranac Lake after hearing that Watters is to remarry
following the death of his first wife, she says how sure she
is that Mrs. Watters will accustom herself to New York;
and, in any case, Watters was a most considerate and
loving husband. She would, she makes clear, have been
happy to send Einstein to Watters for lessons; but, dear
God, it was too late for that to be of use. The two versions
of Einstein the loving husband and the Albert who had to
be taught are not mutually exclusive. Elsa had to pay her
price, although she paid it willingly.
  Back in Princeton her condition continued to deteriorate.
The ground floor of the Mercer Street home began to
resemble a hospital ward. Einstein, forsaking the institute,
worked on in his first-floor study. No more could be done
and Elsa died on December 21, still grieving for the
daughter she had lost in Paris two years previously, still
proud of what Albert was accomplishing. "He is in very
good form. He has accomplished a lot lately," she had said
during her illness. "He himself believes his latest work to
be the best he has ever done."
  After her death he got down to it with even more self
centered concentration. "I have settled down splendidly
here," he wrote to Born. "I hibernate like a bear in its cave,
and really feel more at home than ever before in all my
varied existence. This bearishness has been accentuated
further by the death of my mate, who was more attached to
human beings than I."[After noting that "the incidental
way in which Einstein announces his wife's death ... seems
rather strange," Born comments: "For all his kindness,
sociability, and love of humanity, he was nevertheless
totally detached from his environment and the human
beings included in it."] From the beginning of 1937 he
once more, and without distraction, devoted himself to the
institute. His absorption had been intense since his first
days at Princeton. Asked by the Buckys to pass a long
weekend with them, he had replied that he could not, for
the time being, think of such an undertaking because he
did not want to interrupt the work at the institute for so
long a period of time. Offered a brief break by Leon
Watters, he rejected it on the grounds that "in the near
future my theoretical experiments will take up so much of
my time that an interruption of such length would
constitute a real damage. It is a sad fact that Man does not
live for pleasure alone." And even in the summer of 1935
when he was working hard during the August holidays at
Old Lyme, Connecticut, he refused a similar invitation,
saying: "I cannot leave my work and my sailing boat so
long.... When a man is as well off as I am he should be
grateful and not ask for more."
  He had plunged into pacifist waters and plunged out
when he found they were taking him the wrong way. He
was still a Zionist at heart and as far as the Hebrew
University was concerned he was about to win a
considerable victory at considerable cost. He still hoped to
do good, although by slightly more judicious means. But
now, thank God, he could for most practical purposes
concentrate on his cobbler's last, a physicist devoting
himself to physics in a new world which might in due
course, with only passing help from him, help to redress
the balance of the old. "One must be happy," he had
written to his Uncle CΣsar in Belgium in 1935, "if one has
one's peaceful little room in which one can forget the
bustle of life."
  Thus he was always anxious to get backùeven from his
beloved sailboatùto the intellectual workshop of
Princeton. He could of course work anywhereù"as well on
a Potsdam bridge as at my home." Nevertheless his room
in the institute or his study in Mercer Street was his
natural habitat. It was here that he could best carry on his
main work and continue his stubborn rearguard battle
against the new movements in physics which he had
started nearly a third of a century before.
  Einstein's attitude to quantum mechanics drew him
further and further from the mainstream of theoretical
physics. He himself was well aware of this. To Solovine,
the member of the Olympia Academy with whom he kept
up a sporadic correspondence, he wrote of being "highly
appreciated as a genuine old museum piece and a
curiosity." He told his old friend Infeld, who arrived in the
United States in 1935, that "in Princeton they regard me as
an old fool." Infeld, at first incredulous, later agreed.
"Einstein, during my stay in Princeton, was regarded by
most of the professors here more like a historic relic than
as an active scientist," he wrote. The Princeton professors
were not alone, and Max Born, noting that Einstein was
unable to get him an invitation to the institute, saw one
obvious explanation: "Probably I was regarded there as a
fossil, as he was himself, and two such relics from times
past were too much for the modern masters of Princeton."
  This view was widespread throughout physics and was
summed up after Einstein's death by Robert Oppenheimer,
who became director of the institute in 1947. His judgment
is that during that last twenty-five years of Einstein's life
his tradition in a certain sense failed him. "They were the
years he spent at Princeton and this, though a source of
sorrow, should not be concealed," he said.

  He had a right to that failure. . . . He spent those years first in
trying to prove that the quantum theory had inconsistencies in it.
No one could have been more ingenious in thinking up
unexpected and clever examples, but it turned out that the
inconsistencies were not there: and often their resolution could
be found in earlier work of Einstein himself. When that did not
work, after repeated efforts, Einstein had simply to say that he
did not like the theory. He did not like the elements of
indeterminacy. He did not like the abandonment of continuity or
of causality. These were things that he had grown up with, saved
by him, and enormously enlarged; and to see them lost, even
though he had put the dagger in the hand of their assassin by his
own work, was very hard on him. He fought with Bohr in a noble
and furious way, and he fought with the theory which he had
fathered but which he hated. It was not the first time that this has
happened in science.

  Thus Einstein's scientific position in Princeton, the aura
of greatness which he radiated, and the extraordinary
influence of his personality on the minds of his assistants
and collaborators continued in spite of his contemporary
standing in theoretical physics rather than because of it. A
decade and a half earlier, when he was at the height of his
powers in Berlin, his idea of how scientific problems
should be tackled, his facility for "making physics melt in
his mouth," had created an overwhelming impression on
his listeners. Now, even though many of his firmly held
beliefs were fighting for their lives, the magic still
remained.
  "As I look back to our work," says Professor Nathan
Rosen, who succeeded Mayer as Einstein's assistant,

  I think that the things which impressed me most were the
simplicity of his thinking and his faith in the ability of the human
mind to understand the workings of nature. Throughout his life,
Einstein believed that human reason was capable of leading to
theories that would provide correct descriptions of physical
phenomena. In building a theory, his approach had something in
common with that of an artist; he would aim for simplicity and
beauty (and beauty for him was, after all, essentially simplicity).
The crucial question that he would ask, when weighing an
element of a theory, was: "Is it reasonable?" No matter how
successful a theory appeared to be, if it seemed to him not to be
reasonable (the German word that he used was "vernunftig"), he
was convinced that the theory could not provide a really
fundamental understanding of nature.

  A strikingly similar picture of Einstein during the later
1930s, as one part of him remained above the
contemporary scientific battle, is given by another
assistant, Banesh Hoffmann, who stressed that Einstein's
method, though based on a profound knowledge of
physics, "was essentially aesthetic and intuitive. Watching
him, and talking with him," he says, "I came to
understand the nature of science in a way that I could not
possibly have understood it merely from reading his
writings or the writings of other great physicists or of
philosophers and historians of science. Except for the fact
that he was the greatest physicist since Newton, one might
almost say that he was not so much a scientist as an artist
of science."
  When Elsa died, Einstein was only a few months from
his fifty-eighth birthday. By all the rules of the game his
creative life was finished. He had what lesser men could
have regarded as a well-paid sinecure, beyond students,
beyond competition, beyond the need to struggle upward.
Yet the extraordinary thing was that now, at a time when
most scientists were ready to drop into administration, and
those with a dislike for it were happy enough to potter on,
Einstein stuck to his last with the fierce determination of a
master craftsman determined not to waste a minute of the
waking day.
  At the institute until his retirement in 1945 and at Mercer
Street until his death a decade later, he worked with a
succession of colleagues and assistants on three different
but closely interlocked areas of research. First, and
certainly the most important in his own view, was his
persistent search for a unified field theory. He never found
it. He worked on a variety of solutions; each seemed to
offer hope; each had eventually to be discarded. As he
himself has said, only a man with his name already made
could afford to do the job. Only a man with Einstein's deep
vision would have found satisfaction in it.
  His attitude to what even the comprehending scientist
tended to see as a thankless task is highlighted by two
stories. One day his accountant and friend, Leo Matters-
dorf, asked whether he felt he was nearing his goal. "He
replied 'No,'" says Mattersdorf, "and he added: 'God
never tells us in advance whether the course we are to
follow is the correct one.' He had tried at least 99 solutions
and none worked but he had learned a lot. 'At least,' he
said, 'I know 99 ways that won't work.'"
  There was also his statement to David Mitrany, one of the
few people in Princeton who became a genuine confidant.
The friendship had started after Mitrany, walking to the
institute one morning, gave a friendly wave to Einstein on
the other side of the street. The same thing happened the
following morning, and the next. "After that," says
Mitrany, "we decided to walk together." To this figure
from the older happier Europeùwho as a young journalist
had in 1921 reported Einstein's first speech in England for
the Manchester GuardianùEinstein confided a great deal.
He even talked about his work, which he did not usually
discuss with men outside the subject. One day he thought
he was at last on the track of a satisfactory unified field
theory. Six months later he mentioned, almost casually,
that the path led into a dead end; but he would, he threw
off, be publishing it soon. Mitrany asked why. "To save
another fool from wasting six months on the same idea."
  Second only to the problems of a unified field was
development of the General Theory of Relativity,
particularly so that it could accommodate the new
discoveries and speculations of cosmology. Here Einstein
was moving from the fringes of his own field into an area
already being transformed by technological advance. Here,
with his conception of the universe as he had first
described it in 1917 and as he had later amended it,
Einstein had much to offer. But he was now one man
among many.
  The third subject was the quantum theory as it had been
developed a decade earlier, a theory which now seemed to
satisfy the apparent duality of nature, but which in the
process allowed indeterminacy to lord it over the universe.
Here Einstein obstinately stuck. He refused to accept the
possibility that the new order was satisfactory, and over the
years made successive efforts to demolish it.
  One of the most important of these efforts came when,
together with two colleagues, B. Podolsky and Nathan
Rosen, he at first appeared to have struck a mortal blow at
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the idea that had
become if not the backbone at least an important item in
the body of quantum mechanics. The paper which Einstein
produced with his two fellow workers asked: "Can
Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be
Considered Complete?" When the article is stripped of its
essential mathematics, it is easy to see how its simple
statements constituted a major attack on the new ideas
which had almost displaced those of Einstein's youth.
  Heisenberg had claimed that in the study of very small
objects, such as subatomic particles, their systems were
inevitably disturbed in such a way that it was impossible to
measure at the same time with equal accuracy two
associated quantities. As measurement of position
increased in accuracy, measurement of momentum became
more uncertain; increasing certainty about the time of a
subatomic event would inevitably be matched by
increasing uncertainty about the energy involved.
  Einstein and his colleagues began by pointing out that in
judging the merits of any theory one had to consider both
its agreement with human experience and the
completeness which the description gave of the physical
world. After this preliminary statement they went on to
what was the nub of their ingenious exposition. They took
a situation which could arise in quantum mechanics of two
interacting systems, called for convenience system A and
system B. After a while the interaction was allowed to
stop. But by taking a measurement of one quantity in
system A, it was still possible to get its value in system B;
and by measuring an associated quantity in system A it was
possible to get its value in system B. But according to
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle this was not possible;
therefore, it was concluded, the description provided by
quantum mechanics was incomplete.
  The new physics had an answer to this. "I have used this
opportunity to take up my old discussions with Einstein in
the hope that we once may reach to an understanding
regarding the actual position in atomic theory, which to
my mind he does not quite realize," Bohr wrote to
Rutherford. This attempt appeared in the next issue of the
Physical Review, Bohr asking the same question as
Einstein, but providing a different answer. Einstein refused
to be convinced, clinging to the attitude which he
maintained to the end of his life: that the description of
nature provided by quantum mechanics was not incorrect
but incomplete, a temporary makeshift which would
eventually be superseded.
  The problems took up most of Einstein's working days at
the institute. But he was as much on the lookout for fresh
ideas and bright young people as he had been in Berlin.
The institute was until 1940 virtually a part of the
university, and Einstein would often sit in on student
seminars. Sometimes he learned with surprise how his
own theoretical work of the prewar years had been
absorbed into common practice. This was the case even
with his famous E=mc2. In his original paper he had noted
that it was "not impossible that with bodies whose energy
content is variable to a high degree (e.g., with radium
salts) the theory may be successfully put to the test." He
had sown the seed and left it at that. And he was hardly
aware that by the 1930s many physicists were making such
tests. "One of my most vivid memories," writes Professor
A. E. Condon,

  is of a seminar at Princeton (1934) when a graduate student was
reporting on researches of this kind and Einstein was in the
audience. Einstein had been so preoccupied with other studies
that he had not realized that such confirmation of his early
theories had become an everyday affair in the physical
laboratory. He grinned like a small boy and kept saying over and
over, "Ist das wirklich so?" (Is it really true) as more and more
specific evidence of his E = mc2 relation was being presented.

  In addition to listening, he sometimes lectured, and he
still displayed his mastery of the subject. One instance is
recalled by Churchill Eisenhart. "When he had finished,"
he says,

  one of the other mathematicians present proceeded to deduce
Professor Einstein's principal result in short order from certain
results of other authors in the then available scientific literature.
The audience waited breathlessly for Professor Einstein's
response. He rose, thanked his colleague for this very concise
and elegant derivation of his own principal result, reminded all
present that the assumptions underlying the results upon which
the discussant's short proof had been based were somewhat
different from those which he himself had started, and concluded
by thanking his colleague for thus revealing that his result had a
somewhat broader base of validity than he himself had
appreciated. The approving buzz of the audience testified to the
fact that Albert Einstein had clearly not lost but gained from the
intended criticism.

  His ability as a lecturer, together with his reputation as
the most famous scientist of the century, made him a
natural choice as guest speaker when the American
Association for the Advancement of Science held its
annual meeting at Pittsburgh, even though he was still
dubious about addressing large public audiences in
English. Leon Watters stage-managed the occasion,
organizing Einstein's stay with mutual friends in the city,
taking him there by train and later recording how Einstein,
sitting in one train and watching another on a neighboring
track, said that he had never before had the chance of
watching how connecting rods worked.
  The meeting was remembered for Einstein's Willard
Gibbs Lecture on "Elementary Derivation of the
Equivalence of Mass and Energy," given in English after a
great deal of persuasion had been brought to bear. Legend
claims that on the morning of the great day a notice
appeared in the personal columns of the local paper,
inserted by a well-wisher and reading: "Don't be afraid,
Albert, I am sure you can do it." Einstein did do it,
speaking before two long blackboards which filled most of
the stage. Watters and a colleague sat in the front row,
ready to prompt if he stumbled over his English. It was not
necessary. The only hitch came when he remarked that his
line of reasoning was simple. He was greeted by shouts of
"No."
  Before the lecture there was the press conference.
Between 30 and 40 correspondents were invited and it was
agreed that none of them should try to get an exclusive
statement. One girl reporter, ignoring this, succeeded in
getting Einstein alone and asked whether he ever
conversed about subjects other than physics. He gave her a
quick comprehending look and replied: "Yes, but not with
you."
  The conference, with reporters providing the usual
barrage of questions, was to produce one historic reply,
repeated with various renderings over the years, and much
quoted a decade later. "Do you think that it will be possible
to release the enormous amount of energy shown by your
equation, by bombardment of the atom?" he was asked. "I
feel that it will not be possible for practical purposes," he
replied. "Splitting the atom by bombardment is like
shooting at birds in the dark in a region where there are
few birds."
  Most physicists agreed, although one of the few who did
not was Leo Szilard, Einstein's former collaborator in
Berlin, who had already lodged his secret patent with the
British Admiralty. But most still held the view of Lord
Rutherford, given at the Leicester meeting of the British
Association for the Advancement of Science in 1933,
where he issued a word of warning "... to those who look
for sources of power in atomic transmutationsùsuch
expectations are the merest moonshine."[Discussed
elsewhere]
  Einstein's ability to think simply about physics and
describe its essentials in terms that ordinary men and
women could understand was further deployed in The
Evolution of Physics, which he wrote in 1937 with
Leopold Infeld. During 1935, towards the end of the one
year appointment of his assistant Nathan Rosen, he
received a letter from Infeld, by this time a lecturer in the
Polish university of Lvov. Poland's recent nonaggression
pact with Germany augured ill for men of left-wing
opinions and Infeld feared that he might soon be forced to
leave. On Einstein's instigation he was given a small grant
which enabled him to work at Princeton, where he arrived
early in 1936.
  It was sixteen years since the two men had met. "Quietly
he took a piece of chalk, went to the blackboard and
started to deliver a perfect lecture," Infeld later wrote.

  The calmness with which Einstein spoke was striking. There
was nothing of the restlessness of a scientist who, explaining the
problems with which he has lived for years, assumed that they
are equally familiar to the listener and proceeds quickly with his
exposition. Before going into details Einstein sketched the
philosophical background for the problems on which he was
working. Walking slowly and with dignity round the room, going
to the blackboard from time to time to write down mathematical
equations, keeping a dead pipe in his mouth, he formed his
sentences perfectly. Everything he said could have been printed
as he said it and every sentence would make perfect sense. The
exposition was simple, profound, and clear.

  Infeld's grant at the institute was for one year: it was not
renewed, even though Einstein intervened on his friend's
behalf. Having burned his bridges in Europe, Infeld was
thus in danger of being left financially high and dry. He
realized that there was one way out of his problem. He had
been working for a year with Einstein. Why should they
not collaborate in writing a popular book on science?
There would obviously be no difficulty in finding a
publisher, half of the advance might cover another year's
stay in the United States, and who knew what might not
turn up during that time? With a great deal of hesitation he
put forward the idea, adding that it might possibly be a
stupid proposition. Einstein knew that his colleague was
desperate. "This is not at all a stupid idea. Not stupid at
all," he replied. Then he got up, stretched out his hand to
Infeld, and said: "We shall do it."
  Between them, the two men produced what they modestly
called "a simple chat between you and me." Yet the book,
describing the rise and fall of the mechanical view of the
natural world, the concept of field, the idea of relativity,
and the development of the quantum theory, is far more
than a survey of physics as the subject was understood in
the 1930s. Just as Einstein discerned a link between the
values of science and the values of art, just as he thought a
simple theory was better than a complicated one, and just
as he would have appreciated the later use of the word
"elegant" to describe an experiment, so did he and Infeld
describe the "connection between the world of ideas and
the world of phenomena." They had, they wrote, "tried to
show the active forces which compel science to invent
ideas corresponding to the reality of our world ... to give
some idea of the eternal struggle of the inventive human
mind for a fuller understanding of the laws governing
physical phenomena."
  The success of The Evolution of Physics in 1938 was a
bright spot in a grim period. Einstein still had his science,
and the consolation which it brought can be judged from a
letter he wrote to the Belgian Queen-Mother early in 1939.
"The work has proved fruitful this past year," he said.

  I have hit upon a hopeful trail, which I follow painfully but
steadfastly in company with a few youthful fellow workers.
Whether it will lead to truth or fallacyùthis I may be unable to
establish with any certainty in the brief time left to me. But I am
grateful to destiny for having made my life into an exciting
experience so that life has appeared meaningful ...

  But even Einstein could not isolate himself entirely from
the march of events in the outside world. In March, 1938,
Austria found herself nipped between Nazi Germany on
the north and Fascist Italy on the south, and the German
army was ordered inùto the cheers of what was probably a
majority of the population, ignorant of what was being
prepared for them. In October, Czechoslovakia was offered
up to the same occupiers, a democratic passenger thrown
to the pursuing wolves in an effort to gain time for the
building of fighter forces and the erection of the vital radar
chain.
  For Einstein, ignorant of the arguments which might
justify appeasementùbut, arguably, did notùthis
mounting record of capitulation, followed in March, 1939,
by the abandonment of Prague itself, was particularly
painful. He, after all, had learned his lesson even if he had
learned it late. "A strange breed of pacifist, you will
probably say to me!" he had written when asked to address
a world peace congress. "But I cannot shut my eyes to
realities. It is no exaggeration to say that the British and,
to some extent, French pacifists are largely responsible for
the desperate situation today because they prevented
energetic measures from being taken at a time when it
would have been relatively easy to adopt them." But while
he had learned that pacifism was no answer to the
dictators, Britain and France still appeared to be beating
the retreat as unashamedly as ever.
  In April, 1938, unsuccessfully trying to launch a new
scheme to save the Jews after the German invasion of
Austria, he regretted the breakdown of the system of
collective security and "that this deplorable retrogression
in the life of nations can be reversed only by paying a
heavy price in human life." Less than a year later, writing
to the Queen-Mother in the letter already quoted, he noted
that he had been too troubled to write in good cheer. "The
moral decline we are compelled to witness, and the
suffering it engenders, are so oppressive that one cannot
ignore them even for a moment. No matter how deeply one
immerses oneself in work, a haunting feeling of
inescapable tragedy persists."
  To the sense of coming doom there was added, as his
sixtieth birthday came and went, a feeling of personal
limitation. This he confided to Watters, as he confided
much else. After an introspective evening, his host jotted
down what he remembered of their conversation. "I find
my physical powers decreasing as I grow older," he
remembers Einstein saying.

  I find that I require more sleep now. I doubt if my mental
capacity has diminished. I grasp things as quickly as I did when I
was younger. My power, my particular ability, lies in visualizing
the effects, consequences, and possibilities, and the bearings on
present thought of the discoveries of others. I gasp things in a
broad way easily. I cannot do mathematical calculations easily. I
do them not willingly and not readily. Others perform these
details better. ...

  He would go on with his work, of course. He would
continue to help all and sundry: unknown Jewish refugees,
disestablished professors whom he could guide into
temporary positions, relatives such as his sister Maja who
arrived in the United States from Florence, fearing the
future too much to continue living under Mussolini. There
seemed to be prospects of little else as the summer of 1939
approached.

CHAPTER 20

EINSTEIN, THE BOMB,
AND THE BOARD
OF ORDNANCE

By the start of 1939 Einstein had spent more than five
years in the United States. He had settled in satisfactorily,
a self-styled bird of passage which had at last come to rest.
He was a part of the Princeton scene, a landmark figure
whose worldwide fame was ignored by the local
inhabitants partly for decency's sake, partly because of the
genuine affection in which many of them had come to hold
him. At times the man who was essentially European
missed the familiar sights and sounds of Leiden, the
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, and the gray buildings of the
ETH in Zurich where so many corners reminded him of
his earlier days. Nevertheless, Einstein liked America. He
liked the openness and the natural generosity of the
people. He liked their willingness to be lavish about
research. At times he almost felt comfortable, less a
refugee from Europe.
  His work still concentrated on the search for a unified
field theory, a point which he drove home on his sixtieth
birthday in March, 1939. Answering a questionnaire from
the National Association of Science Writers, he said he
had been engaged on the work for more than twenty years
but that the mathematical constructions so far devised had
not stood the test of experiment. "A year ago I discovered a
new solution and I am now engaged with two collaborators
in developing the results to a point where they could be
checked with experimental facts," he went on. "From this
statement the layman can at least recognize one thing;
namely, that the pursuit of such a goal requires almost
unlimited patience, particularly in view of the fact that
there is nothing to give assurance of the attainment of this
goal." The lack of assurance did not worry him. He was
content enough and he frequently noted that "every man
may draw comfort from Lessing's fine saying that the
search for truth is more precious than its possession."
  But as the Germans prepared to follow up the Munich
victory, things went from worse to worst. One consequence
was that Einstein now found himself permanently joined in
America by his old friend and colleague from Prague,
Philipp Frank. Late in 1938 Frank had been invited to
Harvard as visiting professor, and had begun a series of
lectures on the quantum theory and the philosophical
foundations of modern physics when the Germans
marched into what was left of Czechoslovakia. He was to
remain in the United States for the rest of his life.
  Meanwhile, the Wehrmacht prepared for the late
summer's campaign across the plains of Poland. And
meanwhile scientists throughout the world debated the
implications of an event which had taken place in the
Kaiser Wilhelm during the last weeks of 1938. For here
Einstein's old friend Otto Hahn had split in two the
nucleus of the uranium atom. The event not only ushered
in the nuclear age and ended the age of innocence in
physics; it also drew Einstein into the mainstream of world
eventsùand in circumstances still shrouded by a good deal
of mythology, ignorance, and special pleading.
  The importance of Hahn's discovery of nuclear fission in
the long trail of events which led to atomic weapons is
well known. So is Einstein's later involvement in that
trail, even though its significance is often misunderstood.
Less appreciated is the ironic way in which theoretical
research produced the prospect of an ultimate weapon just
as the world was preparing for war. No dramatist would
have dared to arrange such fortuitous events in such
apparently contrived order.
  If one is to appreciate where Einstein stands, and to
assess what he did during the crucial periods of 1939-41
and 1944-45 as well as what he did not do, it is necessary
to recapitulate these events and to explain their
significance. The interpretation of Hahn's experiments
early in 1939 by Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch
led on to applications far more important than any others
which sprang from that generation of investigators that
included the Curies and J. J. Thomson, Planck,
Rutherford, Bohr, and Einstein. It is true that their work
had already changed the world in many ways which it
would have been difficult to forecast at the start of the
century. The electron of Lorentz and Thomson was already
becoming the basis of great industries. The
electromagnetic waves forecast by Maxwell and discovered
by Hertz had already made near instantaneous
communication practicable across the globe. The X rays
discovered by R÷ntgen were giving advance warning of
disease where none would have before been possible. The
effect of the radium so laboriously purified and
investigated by the Curies was giving the hope of life to
patients who before had no hope. Einstein's explanation of
the photoelectric effect had already helped to prod forward
television from experiment to reality. The revolutionaries
who had gathered in Brussels for the First Solvay Congress
less than three decades earlier already had ample practical
results to show for what had seemed, so recently, to be
largely theoretical discussions.
  Yet it was only now that physics began to touch with the
tips of its fingers that most stupendous of possibilities: the
use of the energy locked within the nucleus of the atom. It
was not that this awesome prospect had lain beyond the
imagination. As early as 1903 Rutherford had made what a
correspondent, Sir William Dampier-Whetham, called his
"playful suggestion that, could a proper detonator be
found, it was just conceivable that a wave of atomic
disintegration might be started through matter, which
would indeed make this old world vanish in smoke."
Planck, mulling over Einstein's E = mc2, declared in 1908
of the atom's "latent energy" that "though the actual
production of such a 'radical' process might have appeared
extremely small only a decade ago, it is now in the range
of the possible...." They thought about the possibility often
enough. Yet throughout the first part of the century,
ignorance of the subnuclear world was a barrier stout
enough to keep such projects within the realm of science
fiction, or of those apparently impractical optimists who
declared that a lump of fuel no bigger than a man's hand
might one day drive a liner across the Atlantic.
  The problem was transformed as knowledge increased.
From being a theoretical conundrum it became a problem
of practical technology. How would it be possible to
penetrate the heart of the atomic nucleus with a bullet
which would split the nucleus apart and release the energy
which bound it together as one piece? How, moreover,
could this be done not once or twice but on a vast
multiplicity of occasions so that the immense number of
atoms comprising the material under attack would release
their energy in the minimum of time? The great steps
forward in experimental physics made by Rutherford at
Manchester in 1919 and by Cockcroft and Walton in 1932
had little direct effect on this central and tantalizing
problem. Rutherford bombarded nitrogen with the particles
which were constantly being naturally ejected by radium.
About one in every million of the ejected particles
penetrated a nitrogen nucleus and transmuted it into the
nucleus of an oxygen atom. But although the energy
released by this transformation was greater than that of the
bullet particle, most particles missed the target and passed
between the clouds of electrons encircling the nucleus.
Much the same happened in Cambridge when Cockcroft
and Walton used streams of hydrogen protons, artificially
speeded up by the use of high voltages, to bombard targets
of lithium. The "bullets" were not natural but artificially
produced, and the "hits" were far more numerous than
those which Rutherford had obtained; but the result still
remained a net loss of energy. It was still true that more
had to be put into the nuclear stockpot than could be
obtained from it. Einstein's comment on the problem still
heldù"like shooting at birds in the dark in a region where
there are few birds."
  In public, Rutherford held much the same view,
dismissing the use of nuclear energy as "moonshine"
almost until his death in 1937. In private, he had doubts,
warning Lord Hankey, then secretary of Britain's
Committee of Imperial Defence, that the work of the
Cavendish on nuclear transformations might one day have
an important impact on defense and that someone should
"keep an eye on the matter."[It is generally believed that
Rutherford publicly maintained his "moonshine" attitude
to the use of atomic energy to the end of his life. This is
not entirely true. Giving the Watt Anniversary Lecture in
Greenock in January, 1936, he noted that "the recent
discovery of the neutron, the proof of its extraordinary
effectiveness in producing transformations at very low
velocities, opens up new possibilities if only a method
could be found of producing slow neutrons in quantity with
little expenditure of energy." He went on to point out that
"at the moment" natural radioactive bodies were the only
known sources of getting useful energy from atoms and
that this was too small a scale to be of more than scientific
interest. But he was obviously already thinking about the
"new possibilities."] Rutherford's scepticism had
something in common with Einstein's views on
indeterminacy, and his reluctance to admit that God might
"play dice with the world." Both men, investigating nature
as they found it, had pushed science along particular paths;
with the years, both became increasingly reluctant to
follow that path to the end.
  Yet by the later 1930s, events were slowly moving
towards the situation in which men like Einstein were to
be faced with an agonizing choice. Only a few days before
Cockcroft and Walton's experiments in Cambridge, the
first performances of Wings Over Europe had taken place
in London. Writing of the playùwhich asks but does not
answer the questions posed by nuclear weaponsù
Desmond McCarthy set the scene for the main
involvement of Einstein's later years. "The destiny of
man," he said, "has slipped (we are all aware of it) from
the hands of politicians into the hands of scientists, who
know not what they do, but pass responsibility for results
on to those whose sense of proportion and knowledge are
inadequate to the situations created by science."
  Not yet, maybe. But the following year of 1933, which
was to mark a crisis in human affairs with the coming of
Hitler, and in Einstein's with his final departure from
Europe, was also to see a new turn given to physics by Leo
Szilard. In England he noted a newspaper account of
Rutherford's "moonshine" description of the prospects of
liberating atomic energy. A few days later, he says, "It
suddenly occurred to me that if we could find an element
which is split by neutrons and which would emit two
neutrons when it absorbed one neutron, such an element, if
assembled in sufficiently large mass, could sustain a
nuclear chain reaction."
  Szilard's flash of inspiration was to have its
consequences. One was the filing in the spring of 1934 of a
patent which described the laws governing such a chain
reaction. "I assigned this patent to the British Admiralty
because in England a patent could at that time be kept
secret only if it was assigned to the government," he has
said. "The reason for secrecy was my conviction that if a
nuclear reaction can be made to work it can be used to set
up violent explosions." With this in mind he had
previously approached the British War Office. But the War
Office was not interested. Neither, for that matter, was the
Admiralty. More important than the patent itself was the
conviction behind it, a conviction which was to produce its
own chain reaction six years later.
  As important as Szilard among the figures now gathering
in the wings was Enrico Fermi, a refugee from Fascist
Italy. While Szilard had postulated the splitting of the
nucleus but had failed to find experimental facilities in
Britain for seeing if this could be done, Fermi had gone
through a similar experience. In Italy he had used the
chargeless neutrons discovered by Chadwick to bombard
the heaviest known element, the metal uranium. The result
had been a transformation of the uranium; but it was a
transformation which took place in only a minute
percentage of the atoms involved, and its true nature was
missed by Fermi. What had happened, he believed, was the
creation of a few atoms not found naturally on earth, the
first of what came to be known as the transuranic
elements.
  Among those physicists not so sure about this was Lise
Meitner, the young Austrian who had listened in rapt
attention to Einstein in Salzburg almost three decades
earlier, and Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman, the two
German chemists with whom she worked in the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute. All three began to repeat the Fermi
experiments, which had also been carried out by Irene and
FrΘdΘric Joliot-Curie in Paris with what appeared to be
comparable results. Grotesquely, the operation was
disturbed by the German invasion of Austria; for the
Anschluss automatically brought FrΣulein Meitner German
citizenship. Since she was a Jewess it also brought the
threat of the concentration camp. She moved on, first to
Holland and then to Sweden.
  Meanwhile the work continued in Berlin under Hahn and
Strassman. It finished a few days before Christmas, 1938,
and Hahn immediately sent to Lise Meitner a copy of his
paper describing the findings. By the first of a long series
of coincidences which mark the release of nuclear energy,
Lise Meitner's nephew, Otto Frisch, a worker in Niels
Bohr's Copenhagen Institute, was spending the Christmas
with her in Sweden.
  Aunt and nephew discussed Hahn's paper during a long
walk in the snow-covered woods outside Stockholm, a
walk that was to help shape the future of the human race.
For Lise Meitner and her nephew discerned what Hahn
had done: split the nucleus of the uranium atom into two
roughly equal parts, and released a staggering amount of
energy. "The picture," Frisch says, "was that of two fairly
large nuclei flying apart with an energy of nearly two
hundred million electron volts, more than ten times the
energy involved in any other nuclear reaction." Bohr,
about to leave Europe for the Fifth Washington Conference
on Theoretical Physics, was immediately telephoned the
news, which he took across the Atlantic. Within a few
hours of his statement at the Conference, the Berlin
experiments were being repeated, notably by Szilard and
by Fermi who had both arrived in the United States by this
time.
  But an important uncertainty remained. The fission of a
uranium nucleus in a microscopic specimen certainly
released an immense amount of energy. But for the process
to be developed into a weapon such fissions would have to
be repeated through a block of the metal. Fissions had been
produced at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute by neutrons, and
the crucial question was whether the process released other
neutrons which would, in their turn, produce further
fissions. Would the flicker of nuclear fire act as a detonator
or would it merely peter harmlessly out?
  Only a few weeks after Bohr had spoken to the packed
and excited meeting in Washington this question was
answered in Paris by a CollΦge de France team led by
Joliot-Curie. For in Paris it was confirmed that the fission
of the uranium nucleus with the resulting immense release
of energy did unloose neutrons hitherto locked inside the
nucleus. The number was not yet certain; but it appeared
obvious that in the right conditions it would be sufficient
to cause yet further fissions. These, in turn, would create
still more, feeding the nuclear fire until in a minute
fraction of a second the release of energy would be
indescribably more damaging than that of a chemical
explosion.
  Thus it seemed, in the early spring of 1939, as though the
world might at last be at the start of a nuclear arms race.
In the United States George B. Pegram, dean of graduate
faculties at Columbia University, urged on by Szilard and
Fermi, wrote to Admiral Hooper of the U. S. Navy,
warning him of "the possibility that uranium might be
used as an explosive that would liberate a million times as
much energy per pound as any known explosive." In
France, the members of the CollΦge de France team filed
five patents covering the use of nuclear energy, number
three being for the construction of a uranium bomb. In
Holland, the physicist Uhlenbeck informed his government
of the situation and the Minister of Finance ordered 50
tons of uranium ore from Belgium's Union MiniΦre,
remarking: "Clever, these physicists." And in Britain,
where in April research into the possibility of a nuclear
weapon was officially brought under the charge of Sir
Henry Tizard, both the Treasury and the Foreign Office
were approached by the Committee of Imperial Defence
with one object in mind: to secure the necessary uranium
for research and to ensure that, as far as was possible,
stocks were kept from the Germans. In 1939 the greatest
known supply lay in the Belgian Congo, where it was
mined as ore by the Union MiniΦre, and on May 10, 1939,
Tizard met the company's president, M. Edgar Sengier,
from whom he obtained certain assurances.
  In Germany Dr. Siegfried Flugge, one of Hahn's
colleagues, produced a paper for Naturwissenschaften in
which the building of a "uranium device" was considered.
"Available quantitative calculations have too great a
margin of error to allow us to raise this possibility into a
certainty," he concluded. "Be this as it may, it is
nevertheless a remarkable advance that such possibilities
can be considered at all, an advance sufficient to justify
thorough discussion in this paper, even if our hopes should
not be fulfilled." And on April 24 Paul Harteck in
Hamburg wrote with his colleague W. Groth to the
German War Office, proposing that nuclear explosives
should be investigated. Shortly afterwards, two separate
groups, neither of whom acknowledged the existence of
the other, began work in Germany on "the uranium
problem." One was headed by Professor Erich Schumann,
director of the research section of the German army's
ordnance department, the other by Professor Abraham
Esau, the official in charge of physics in the German
Ministry of Education.
  All thisùthe French patents, British earmarking of
uranium stocks, and German preparationsùtook place
months before Einstein signed the famous letter to
Roosevelt. Vannevar Bush, director of the U. S. Office of
Scientific Research and Development, and later the key
man in America's wartime defense science, has summed
up the situation neatly: "The show was going before that
letter was even written." Nevertheless, Einstein's
intervention was to be significant for reasons that have
nothing to do with the chauvinism of national priorities.
  The role which Einstein was to play was singularly
dramatic. For fate now compounded the joke it had
perpetrated in 1919. Then the introverted scientist, only
too anxious to keep to his study, had been propelled into
the center of public affairs. Now Einstein, until recently
the dedicated pacifist and still a man who detested the use
of force, was to help launch the weapons which killed
more than 130,000 men, women, and children in a few
seconds. However, this is only part of the story. The truth,
more complicated and more ironic, has been obscured for a
quarter of a century by romantic misconceptions, failure to
examine the documents, and a good deal of special
pleading and dodgery.
  New material, including the extensive Szilard Archives
in San Diego, and fresh papers unearthed in Washington
and elsewhere, shows that Einstein's initial letter to
Roosevelt was written when he believed the prospect of
nuclear weapons to be slightùbut when the first moves
towards them had already been taken elsewhere. It shows
that Charles Lindbergh was the first choice of intermediary
with the President. It shows that Einstein signed not one
letter but three, of which the third, which helped to spark
off the creation of the Manhattan Project, was arguably the
most important. It shows that he produced a theoretical
study for gaseous diffusion, later an important process in
the Manhattan Projectùalthough it is not certain that he
fully realized what the study was forùand that he would
have been more deeply involved had Washington
suspicions of his history not made this "utterly
impossible." Moreover, it shows that by December, 1944,
he was almost certainly aware in general terms of the
progress that had been made in the Manhattan Project and
that he was stopped only by Niels Bohr from what might
have been a disastrous political step. As final irony, a
second memorandum which he tried to bring to
Roosevelt's notice in March, 1945, included not only the
suggestion that a bomb should not be dropped on Japan,
but also the idea that the United States might build up an
"overwhelming superiority" vis-α-vis the Russians. All
these were milestones on a road opened in July, 1939, by
Leo Szilard, who comprehensively stage-managed Einstein
not only in 1939 but in 1945.
  Following Bohr's initial description of fission in January,
Szilard had been almost continuously at work in Columbia
and had become even more convinced that a nuclear chain
reaction was possible. Like Tizard in Britain, he
appreciated the danger of Germany's acquiring stocks of
uranium, and like Tizard he knew that the Union MiniΦre
controlled virtually the world stocks of uranium ore. At
this point he discussed the situation with Eugene Wigner
of Princeton University, also a physicist of note, also a
refugee from Hungary. "Both Wigner and I began to worry
about what would happen if the Germans got hold of some
of the vast quantities of uranium which the Belgians had
in the Congo," Szilard has written.

  So we began to think, through what channels we could approach
the Belgian government and warn them against selling any
uranium to Germany.
  It occurred to me that Einstein knew the Queen of the
Belgians [by now the Queen-Mother], and I suggested to
Wigner that we visit Einstein, tell him about the situation,
and ask him whether he might not write to the Queen. We
knew that Einstein was somewhere on Long Island but we
didn't know precisely where, so I phoned his Princeton office
and I was told he was staying at Dr. Moore's cabin at Peconic,
Long Island. Wigner had a car and we drove out to Peconic
and tried to find Dr. Moore's cabin. We drove around for
about half an hour. We asked a number of people, but no one
knew where Dr. Moore's cabin was. We were on the point of
giving up and about to return to New York when I saw a boy
of about seven or eight years of age standing at the curb. I
leaned out of the window and I asked, "Say, do you by any
chance know where Professor Einstein lives?" The boy knew
and he offered to take us there, though he had never heard of
Dr. Moore's cabin.

  It is typical that Szilard, the skilled operator-by
unconventional-means, should feel that a quiet private note
from Einstein to Queen Elizabeth might help prevent
Germany from acquiring raw materials for the most
violent explosive in the world.
  Once in Dr. Moore's house, the two visitors explained
their fears and their hopes, and Szilard described what
Einstein later called "a specific system he [had] devised
and which he thought would make it possible to set up a
chain reaction." According to a letter written by Szilard to
Carl Seelig in 1955, Einstein said that he "had not been
aware of the possibility of a chain reaction in uranium." A
few years later Einstein's statement was given by Szilard
as, "that never occurred to me (Daran habe ich gar nicht
gedacht)."
  Eugene Wigner, the only member of the trio still alive,
does not in fact recollect Einstein's remark, although he
does have a feeling that he had discussed chain reactions
with Einstein some weeks earlier. These had been a major
subject of debate among physicists since Bohr's dramatic
announcement at the end of January. Bohr himself had
spoken with Einstein in Princeton and it might seem
unlikely that chain reactions were not talked about. In
addition, many articles, comments, and papers on the
subject had by July, 1939, appeared in scientific journals,
more than twenty in Nature alone. Furthermore, Einstein's
old friend Rudolf Ladenburg, who had invited him to the
Salzburg meeting just thirty years previously, was himself
carrying out work on fission problems in Princeton
University's Palmer Laboratory only a few hundred yards
from Einstein's home.
  Bearing all this in mind, Einstein's remark seems at first
glance to have been an extraordinary one. Is it really
possible that in the summer of 1939 he should never have
considered the possibility of a chain reaction, even though
the subject had been the nub of controversy in the
physicists' world? The answer is that it is not only possible
but likely. To think otherwise is to misjudge the extent to
which Einstein had by this time isolated himself from the
mainstream of physics. The weekly copies of Nature and of
Science arrived regularly at 112 Mercer Street but they
were usually filed away without being looked at unless
they contained some paper Einstein had been specially
recommended to read. He no longer joined in the seminars
and discussions that his colleagues held. In some ways he
was comparable to the Berne Patent Office clerk of 1905
whose strength lay partly in his isolation from the detail of
current developments. His continuing preoccupation with
the unified field theory made him once again the man
whose life demanded, above all, "time for quiet thought
and reflection." Professor Aage Bohr, Niels Bohr's son
and one of Denmark's most distinguished physicists, has
said that Einstein "was deeply involved in his own work
and I hardly think that he was following the current
developments in nuclear physics." Furthermore, Professor
Rosenfeld, working with Bohr in Princeton in the Spring
of 1939, believes that "during that visit Bohr and Einstein
hardly discussed the matter of possible military
implications of the nuclear developments."
  Even had they done so, Einstein might still have been
extremely sceptical about the practicability of nuclear
weapons. For as early as February 15, Bohr had put
forward in the Physical Review the sobering proposal that
only the U-235 nuclei could easily be split; and that the
nuclei of the U-238ùwhich comprised the overwhelming
bulk of the elementùwould usually absorb any of the
neutrons which hit them. Experimental proof of this theory
was not to be given for another year. It was, Frisch has
said, "a surprising conclusion based on rather subtle
arguments." Not all scientists agreed with it, and even
those who did so included many who still believed that it
would be possible to make a nuclear explosion by using a
block of the element which contained the different isotopes
in their naturally occurring proportions. But if Bohr were
right it would be necessary to separate a substantial
quantity of U-235 before a "nuclear fire" could be
produced. This problem of isotope separationùcomparable
to sorting a vast number of particulate sand grains from
their chemically identical companions on the seashore
looked totally insoluble in 1939. Indeed, it looked totally
insoluble four years later, even to Bohr. When, in spring,
1943, he was invited to England from German-occupied
Denmark by James Chadwick, Bohr sent back a secret
message through intelligence channels: "I have, to the best
of my judgment, convinced myself that in spite of all
future prospects any immediate use of the latest marvelous
discoveries of atomic physics is impracticable." He thought
at the time, says his son, "that isotope separation on the
needed scale was beyond industrial potentialities and it
was a surprise for him on his arrival in England in
October, 1943, to learn how far the project had advanced."
  The exact depth of Einstein's scepticism as he sat in the
Long Island cottage with Szilard and Wigner on that
summer afternoon is unknown. Yet he himself has gone on
the record with one revealing statement about nuclear
energy: "I did not, in fact, foresee that it would be released
in my time. I only believed that it was theoretically
possible." Scientific scepticism, however great or little it
was, may well have been increased by wishful thinking.
Einstein's old friend Lindemann was so repelled by the
idea of such destructive power being available to human
hands that "he could scarcely believe that the universe was
constructed in this way." Sir Henry Tizard, who had
launched precautionary measures in England, had raised
the question to a colleague in surprisingly similar terms:
"Do you really think that the universe was made in this
way?"
  There is no evidence to suggest that Einstein was any less
sceptical about the chance of nuclear weapons in the
summer of 1939 than Bohr was to be four years later; but if
he could not genuinely share his visitors' scientific views,
he could share their fears. There was always the one-in-a
million chance that a bomb would prove feasible. Since
nuclear fission had been discovered in the Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute, it was wise to take precautions. If there were even
a bare chance that nuclear weapons could be made, then
the Americans should not lag behind the Germans.
  Here Einstein parted company with his old friend Max
Born, who worked in Edinburgh throughout the war and
took no part in the Allied nuclear effort since, as he has
said, "my colleagues knew that I was opposed to taking
part in war work of this character which seemed so
horrible." Had his attitude convinced his colleagues,
postwar history might have been different. For one day a
young German working in his laboratory was asked to join
the British nuclear team. "He was inclined to accept,"
Born has said. "I told him of my attitude to such kind of
work, and tried to warn him not to involve himself in these
things. But he was filled with tremendous hatred of the
Nazis, and accepted." Thus Klaus Fuchs, who was to
provide Russiaùand possibly Britainùwith vital details of
the H-bomb, left Edinburgh for Birmingham and Los
Alamos.
  In retrospect, too late, Einstein agreed with Born. "I
made one great mistake in my lifeùwhen I signed the
letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom
bombs be made," he said in old age to Linus Pauling, "but
there was some justificationùthe danger that the Germans
would make them." The mistake was in fact a double one.
The danger from the Germans never materialized; but in
America an almost superhuman technological effort gave
the lie to Bohr's "impracticable."
  At this first meeting with Szilard and Wigner in July,
1939, Einstein agreed that Belgian stocks of uranium
should not be allowed to fall into German hands. But the
situation was delicate, even for native-born Americans, let
alone for two Hungarians and a German-born Swiss who
had relinquished his first nationality but had not yet
become American. Szilard therefore proposed a
transitional step. "Before contacting the Belgian
government," he says, "it seemed desirable to advise the
State Department of the step we proposed to take. Wigner
suggested that we draft a letter to the Belgian government,
send a copy to the State Department, and give the State
Department two weeks in which to object if they are
opposed to Professor Einstein's sending such a letter."
Thus, as a first step, the Queen-Mother was bypassed.
Instead, Einstein dictated a letter to a Belgian cabinet
minister, mentioning "the danger to the Belgian state" that
seemed to be apparent, and it was agreed that a copy
should be sent to the Belgian ambassador in Washington.
  On his return to Columbia University, Szilard typed out a
draft and put it in the post to Einstein, together with the
letter which he felt should be sent to the State Department.
  Here the process might have stuck. But now history
nudged the project back on course; ironically using for its
deus ex machina Dr. Gustav Stolper, not only a German
refugee but a former member of the Reichstag.
  "Somehow," says Szilard, referring to what had been
arranged before he left Einstein's house,

  this procedure seemed to be an awkward one and so I decided
to consult friends with more experience in things practical than
we were. I went to see in New York Dr. Gustav Stolper and told
him of our need to establish contact in this manner with the U. S.
government. He recommended that I talk with Dr. Alexander
Sachs. Dr. Sachs seemed very much interested and said that he
would be willing to take a letter in person to President Roosevelt
if Professor Einstein were willing to write such a letter.

  It is probable that Alexander Sachs, a well-known
economist and an intimate of the President, did not at the
time know much of Einstein's earlier history, since he has
gone on record as saying that he has "always been of the
view that the real warmongering, combined with
defeatism, is done by the pacifists." However, Sachs was
helpful. Szilard recognized a useful contact and on July 19
wrote again to Einstein, saying that Sachs had
recommended a direct approach to Roosevelt and that he
himself would be willing to help. Enclosed, Szilard added,
was a draft of the letter he felt should be sent to the White
House. Would Einstein make any proposed corrections
over the telephone or did he think that a second meeting
was necessary?
  Einstein favored a meeting, and a few days later Szilard
was at Peconic once again. This time, Wigner having left
for the West Coast, his companion was Edward Teller of
George Washington University, another of the brilliant
Hungarians who had found refuge in the United States,
and one later to become famous, or notorious, as "the
father of the H-bomb."
  There is, understandably enough, some difference in
recollection about the details of this second meeting.
According to Teller, "at the time [of the visit] Szilard had
a final formulation of the letter with him. We had tea with
Einstein. Einstein read the letter, made very little
comment, and signed it." Later Szilard wrote: "As I
remember, Einstein dictated a letter in German which
Teller took down and I used this German text as a guide in
preparing two drafts of a letter to the President, a shorter
one and a longer one, and left it up to Einstein to choose
which he liked best. I wondered how many words we could
expect the President to read. How many words does the
fission of uranium rate?"
  As far as they go, Szilard's recollections appear accurate
on this point. But his papers reveal more. For when he sent
the short and the long versions to Einstein on August 2
the date he put on bothùhe accompanied them with a note
saying that Sachs now thought Bernard Baruch or Karl
Compton might be the best man to get the letter to
Roosevelt, but that he personally favored Colonel
Lindbergh.
  The last suggestion was unexpected, since it was felt in
some quarters that Lindbergh was not particularly allergic
to the Nazis. However, Einstein dutifully complied. He
returned to Szilard not his own choice of letters, but both
of them, both signed. Szilard could make up his own mind
which one to send, but Einstein's accompanying note
urged him to curb his inner resistance and not to "be too
clever"ùanother indication that Einstein's views about the
practicability of a bomb were different from Szilard's. At
the same time he wrote, as requested, a note to Lindbergh,
whom he had last met at the Rockefeller Center.
  "Dear Herr Lindbergh," says the copy which Szilard
made of this letter before sending it on.

  I would like to ask you to do me a favor of receiving my friend
Dr. Szilard and think very carefully about what he will tell you.
To one who is outside of science, the matter he will bring up may
seem fantastic. However, you will certainly become convinced
that a possibility is presented here which has to be very carefully
watched in the public interest, even though the results so far are
not immediately impressive. With all respects and friendly
wishes, A. E.

  Szilard acknowledged Einstein's letters on August 9 and
said he would note the "admonition" about being too
clever. Five days later he wrote to Lindbergh, enclosing
Einstein's letter of introduction and suggesting that
Lindbergh might approach Roosevelt. At the same time he
sent to Sachs the longer of the two letters which Einstein
had signed.
  This letter, by now famous, ran as follows:

  Sir: Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has
been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that
the element uranium may be turned into a new and important
source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the
situation seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick
action on the part of the administration. I believe, therefore, that
it is my duty to bring to your attention the following facts and
recommendations.
  In the course of the last four months it has been made
probableùthrough the work of Joliot in France as well as
Fermi and Szilard in Americaùthat it may become possible
to set up nuclear chain reactions in a large mass of uranium,
by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new
radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears
almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate
future.
  This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of
bombs, and it is conceivableùthough much less certainùthat
extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be
constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat or
exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port
together with some of the surrounding territory. However,
such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for
transportation by air.
  The United States has only very poor ores of uranium in
moderate quantities. There is some good ore in Canada and
the former Czechoslovakia, while the most important source
of uranium is the Belgian Congo.
  In view of this situation you may think it desirable to have
some permanent contact maintained between the
administration and the group of physicists working on chain
reaction in America. One possible way of achieving this might
be for you to entrust with this task a person who has your
confidence and who could perhaps serve in an unofficial
capacity. His task might comprise the following:
  (a) To approach government departments, keep them
informed of further developments, and put forward
recommendations for government action, giving particular
attention to the problem of securing a supply of uranium ore
for the United States.
  (b) To speed up the experimental work which is at present
being carried on within the limits of the budgets of the
university laboratories, by providing funds, if such funds be
required, through his contacts with private persons who are
willing to make contributions for this cause, and perhaps also
by obtaining the cooperation of industrial laboratories which
have the necessary equipment.
  I understand that Germany has actually stopped the sale of
uranium from Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken
over. That she should have taken such early action might
perhaps be understood on the ground that the son of the
German Undersecretary of State, von WeizsΣcker, is attached
to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Berlin, where some of the
American work on uranium is now being repeated.
  Yours very truly,
  A. Einstein.

  Whatever the details of how it was written, it is clear that
this letter, with its "possible" and "almost certain," was the
work of Szilard. And it is interesting that despite all his
intuition he was still thinking of fission in terms of
creating mere "bombs," while "extremely powerful bombs
of a new type" were apparently in a different category and
were still "much less certain." As far as Einstein was
concerned, this was an understatement. But, making "the
greatest mistake" of his life, he signed on the dotted line.
  Szilard now had two irons in the fireùthe potential
introduction to Lindbergh and the letter which reposed in
Sach's office. Neither appeared to be getting hot.
Lindbergh did not long recall the letter from Einstein. "If
such a note was written and forwarded it may have been
lost in the heavy mail that came in that year," he has said.
The same presumably happened to the reminder which
Szilard sent him on September 13. No record remains of
what happened next, but on September 27 Szilard wrote to
Einstein saying: "Lindbergh is not our man." By this time
the Germans had not only invaded Poland but had
effectively conquered most of it, and he gloomily added
that as Belgium would eventually be overrun the
Americans should try to buy 50 tons of uranium as soon as
possible.
  Six days later he wrote with equal gloom that "Sachs
confessed that he is still sitting on the letter," and that it
was "possible that Sachs was useless."
  However, this was far from so. Sachs knew the way
official machinery works and was merely biding his time.
"Our system is such that national public figures ... are, so
to speak, punch-drunk with printer's ink," he has said. "So
I thought there was no point in transmitting material
which would be passed on to someone lower down." The
outbreak of war, with Roosevelt's resulting involvement in
the neutrality laws, caused initial delay and it was not until
October 11 that Sachs saw Roosevelt and handed over the
Einstein letter with a memorandum prepared by Szilard.
This memorandum, rather oddly in view of all that had
prefaced it, mentioned first the possibility that nuclear
fission might be used to provide power; went on to suggest
potential uses in medicine; and only then stated that it
might be utilized in a weapon. It mentioned also that in
the previous March an unsuccessful attempt had been
made to hold up publication of information on fission ùan
attempt frustrated by the Frenchùand that a further
attempt might now be made.
  At the meeting with Roosevelt, Sachs, according to the
official American history of events, "read aloud his
covering letter, which emphasized the same ideas as the
Einstein communication but was more pointed on the need
for funds. As the interview drew to a close, Roosevelt
remarked, 'Alex, what you are after is to see that the Nazis
don't blow us up.' Then he called in 'Pa Watson'"ù
General Edwin M. Watson, the President's secretaryù
"and announced. 'This requires action.'" Sachs left the
room with Watson and by evening the Briggs committee
had been set up, a small group of men presided over by Dr.
Lyman J. Briggs, director of the U.S. Bureau of Standards,
charged with investigating the potentialities of nuclear
fission.
  The first meeting of the committee was held ten days
later and was attended by Szilard, Teller, and Wigner. A
conspicuous absentee was Einstein. The official history of
the U. S. bomb project implies that he had been invited but
had declined to come; but it seems clear from Szilard's
papers that no invitation had been issued. At the meeting it
was decided to set up an expanded group to coordinate the
research being carried out in American universities.
Einstein was formally invited to become a member of this
group. He just as formally declined.
  However, any assumption that Einstein, having started
the official machinery, was willing to let it move at its own
leisurely pace is contradicted by the events of the next few
months. For Einstein, far from writing only the first letter
to Roosevelt and then letting affairs take their course, did
very much more.
  In the new year there was, as Sachs stated in his postwar
evidence to the Senate, "pressureùby Einstein and the
speakerùfor a new framework and an accelerated tempo
for the project. ... Dr. Einstein and myself were dissatisfied
with the scope and the pace of the work and its progress."
The pressure began after Sachs visited Einstein at
Princeton in February. Here they discussed, among other
things, the report in a current issue of Science of the latest
work by Joliot-Curie's team at the CollΦge de France in
Paris. "While we felt that it was very important that ... this
exchange of ideas among free scientists should be carried
on because they served as links and as stimuli to future
work," says Sachs, "their accessibility through publications
to Germany constituted an important problem."
  However, the most important outcome of this meeting
was the further nudge which it gave to the U. S. work. "Dr.
Einstein said that he thought the work at Columbia was
the more important," says Sachs. "He further said that
conditions should be created for its extension and
acceleration." There were further meetings between the
two men within the next few weeks and Einstein then
agreed to write another letter outlining the current
situation. "I had felt," says Sachs, "that Dr. Einstein's
authority was such that, combined with his insight and
concern, it would affect the tempo of the work."
  The letter, written to Sachs for transmission to Roosevelt,
was dated March 7, 1940.
  "In view of our common concern in the bearings of
certain experimental work on problems connected with the
national defense," it said,

  I wish to draw your attention to the development which has
taken place since the conference that was arranged through your
good offices in October last year between scientists engaged in
this work and governmental representatives.
  Last year, when I realized that results of national importance
might arise out of the research on uranium, I thought it my
duty to inform the administration of this possibility. You will
perhaps remember that in the letter which I addressed to the
President I also mentioned the fact that C. F. von WeizsΣcker,
son of the German Undersecretary of State, was collaborating
with a group of chemists working upon uranium at one of the
Kaiser Wilhelm Institutesùnamely, the Institute of
Chemistry.
  Since the outbreak of the war, interest in uranium has
intensified in Germany. I have now learned that research there
is carried out in great secrecy and that it has been extended to
another of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, the Institute of
Physics. The latter has been taken over by the government and
a group of physicists, under the leadership of C. F. von
WeizsΣcker, who is now working there on uranium in
collaboration with the Institute of Chemistry. The former
director was sent away on a leave of absence, apparently for
the duration of the war.
  Should you think it advisable to relay this information to the
President, please consider yourself free to do so. Will you be
kind enough to let me know if you are taking action in this
direction?
  Dr. Szilard has shown me the manuscript which he is
sending to the Physics Review in which he describes in detail
a method of setting up a chain reaction in uranium. The
papers will appear in print unless they are held up, and the
question arises whether something ought to be done to
withhold publication.
  I have discused with Professor Wigner of Princeton
University the situation in the light of the information
available. Dr. Szilard will let you have a memorandum
informing you of the progress made since October last year so
that you will be able to take such action as you think in the
circumstances advisable. You will see that the line he has
pursued is different and apparently more promising than the
line pursued by M. Joliot in France, about whose work you
may have seen reports in the papers.

  This letter is of interest for two reasons. It emphasizes,
once again, how fear of a German atomic bomb was the
main spur to the early nuclear work, American as well as
British. And it alsoùno doubt at Szilard's instigationù
recommends by implication the censorship of scientific
discovery in the nuclear field, a proposal which had been
put by Szilard to the French team in the CollΦge de France
almost exactly a year earlier and had been curtly turned
down. In fact, as Sachs later said, "Dr. Szilard, Dr.
Wigner, and Dr. Einstein were all of the same view, that
there had to be secrecy against leaks to the enemy."
  From the Szilard papers one gets the impression that
Sachs' comment was a polite gloss on the situation. What
Szilard and Einstein were saying was obvious: either "the
uranium question" was of importance, in which case the
government should take it more seriously; alternatively, it
was of little importance, in which case Szilard would
publish information that could be of considerable
consequence to the future. It is inconceivable that Szilard,
who knew what he was doing, would implement such a
threat; nevertheless, arm-twisting sometimes works. It
worked in this case.
  Even so, the first reaction to the Einstein letter of March
7 was tepid. The Briggs committee recommended that
until a report of the work going on at Columbia University
had been received, "the matter should rest in abeyance."
Sachs disagreed, and finally persuaded Roosevelt to call
another meeting between Briggs and army and navy
representatives at which the question of enlarging the
project should be thrashed out. Roosevelt, writing to Sachs
on April 5 and noting that Watson would fix "a time
convenient to you and Dr. Einstein," took it for granted
that Einstein was part of the organization. Watson himself,
who noted that "perhaps Dr. Einstein would have some
suggestions to offer as to the attendance of the other
professors," apparently thought so as well.
  Sachs again visited Einstein at Princeton. "It became
clear," he subsequently told the Senate, "that indisposition
on account of a cold, and the great shyness and humility of
that really saintly scientist, would make Dr. Einstein recoil
from participating in large groups and would prevent his
attendance. So he delegated me to report for him, too."
  Precisely. As usual, Szilard had the situation well in
hand. "In case you wish to decline," he had written to
Einstein on April 19, "we shall prepare a polite letter of
regret in English which you can use if you think it
advisable." Here, as at more than one other point during
the prologue to the Manhattan Project, Szilard emerges as
a combination of stage manager and producer, organizing
into their correct places not only Sachs, Briggs, and
Watson, but also Albert Einstein.
  In his letter, Einstein regretted his absence and referred
to the work of Wigner and Szilard. "I am convinced," he
went on,

  as to the wisdom and the urgency of creating the conditions
under which that and related work can be carried out with greater
speed and on a larger scale than hitherto. I was interested in a
suggestion made by Dr. Sachs that the Special Advisory
Committee supply names of persons to serve as a board of
trustees for a nonprofit organization which, with the approval of
the government committee, could secure from governmental or
private sources or both, the necessary funds for carrying out the
work. Given such a framework and the necessary funds, it (the
large-scale experiments and exploration of practical applications)
could be carried out much faster than through a loose cooperation
of university laboratories and government departments.

  This letter was implemented less than two months later.
For then the drastically reorganized Briggs committee was
brought under the wing of the National Defense Research
Committee (NRDC) which Roosevelt created, and a
special committee of the National Academy of Sciences set
up to inform the government of any developments in
nuclear fission that might affect defense.
  Two points should be made. The first is that Einstein's
demand for "large-scale experiments and exploration of
practical applications" does not mean that he necessarily
thought the bomb was now a likely proposition. What he
was after was the facts. If a self-sustaining chain reaction
proved impossible then, as he had said when publishing
his own negative results on the unified field theory, "at
least it will prevent other people from making the same
mistakes."
  The second point is that this letter, foreshadowing the
setting up of the Manhattan Project in 1942ùthe
"nonprofit organization which ... could secure ... the
necessary funds for carrying out the work"ùwas perhaps
even more important than the initial letter to Roosevelt.
And like the rest of the pressure that Einstein had
exercised since the summer of 1939 it contrasts strongly
with his later claim: "My participation in the production of
the atomic bomb consists of one single act: I signed a letter
to President Roosevelt."
  The initial approach to Roosevelt produced the Briggs
committee, which in turn produced the new organization
under the National Defense Research Committee; this led
to the Manhattan Project and the bombs on Japan. With
this in mind, what is the meaning of the statement by
Oppenheimer, scientific head of the project, that Einstein's
letter "had very little effect"; of the evaluation of Arthur
Compton, a key worker in the field, that the result of the
Government Committee set up following Einstein's letter
"was to retard rather than to advance the development of
American uranium research"?
  The explanation lies partly in the momentum which
research into nuclear fission had already gained
throughout the world, partly in the results of research
carried out in Britain by workers who convincingly showed
that a nuclear weapon was possible even if their own
country was unable to make it. By the summer of 1940,
when the Briggs committee was transformed, Hans Halban
and Lew Kowarski, two important members of the French
team which a year previously had shown a chain reaction
to be possible, had reached England and were
contemplating going to America. In the United States itself
Szilard and Fermi were only two of the workers at the
head of research teams which owed comparatively little to
official help. In Germany research was known to be going
ahead. In Britain, where Frisch and Rudolf Peierls had
made the discovery that the amount of separated uranium
required for a bomb weighed pounds rather than tons,
numbers of physicists were at work on detailed studies of
the time, money, labor, and raw materials required to
make a specific nuclear weapon. All this would have
carried the world into the nuclear age whether or not
Einstein had signed a letter to Roosevelt.
  There was also the specific impact of the Maud Report,
the account of Britain's plans for building a bomb, which
was completed in the summer of 1941. On October 3,
copies were handed to Dr. Vannevar Bush. On the ninth,
according to James Baxter, official historian of the Office
of Scientific Research and Development, Bush "had a long
conversation with the President and the Vice-President in
which he reported the British view that a bomb could be
constructed from U-235 produced by a diffusion plant."
And two days later Roosevelt wrote to Churchill proposing
that the British and the U. S. should work together. It
would appear chauvinistic for a British writer to assess the
significance of these dates. But two Americans may be
allowed to speak: "Though the Americans were aware of
this weapon as a possibility," Arthur Compton has written,
"it was more than a year later before it became for us the
focus of attention. In 1940 it was still difficult for us in
America to concentrate our thought on war, while for the
British it was their prime concern." And the official
historians of the American effort, writing in The New
World, have this to say of the Maud Report: "[It] gave
Bush and [Dr. James] Conant what they had been looking
for: a promise that there was a reasonable chance for
something militarily useful during the war in progress.
The British did more than promise; they outlined a
concrete program. None of the recommendations Briggs
had made and neither of the two National Academy reports
had done as much."
  All this fills out Bush's bare statement that "the show had
been going long before Einstein's letter." But it does not
relegate the letter to a place of no importance. Donald
Fleming, writing in An American Primer of the British
scientists who sat on the Maud Committee, and of the visit
to England of Pegram and Urey in the autumn of 1941,
puts the situation in perspective. "Their optimistic report
of July, 1941, and the detailed case they made to American
scientists who visited England in the fall, played a major,
perhaps critical, part of the American decision to make a
big push on the eve of Pearl Harbor rather than later. It
does not follow that Einstein's letter of August, 1939,
served no purpose. The decision of December 6, 1941,
would have been comparatively empty if the Americans
had no base to build upon." In other words, America
would have built the bomb without Einstein. But they
might not have had it ready for the war against Japan.
Instead, the bomb would have been ready for Korea; by
which time, without much doubt, the Russians would have
had one too.
  Einstein's letter of April, 1940, setting the U. S.
administration along the road towards what was to become
the Manhattan Project, ended the first phase of his wartime
involvement with nuclear weapons. The second, which
came a year and a half later, is one of extraordinary irony.
For it shows Einstein eager to help the war effort ùbut
kept from it by men unaware that Einstein himself had set
the whole U.S. machine moving two years earlier.
  On December 6, 1941, a few hours before the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor, the Office of Scientific Research
and Development began a greatly expanded program of
research into nuclear weapons. A key technological
problem for it was the separation of U-235 from its
chemically identical isotopes. One likely method was
gaseous diffusion, in which uranium in gaseous form is
passed through an immense number of barriers pierced
with extremely small holes. The U-235, with three fewer
neutrons than the almost ubiquitous U-238, is able to pass
through more quickly, and the lighter isotope can
eventually be concentrated. Many purely theoretical
problems are associated with the barriers. They had to be
solved without delay and early in December Bush turned to
Einstein for help.
  The request was made through Dr. Frank Aydelotte, by
this time in Dr. Flexner's shoes as Director of the Institute
for Advanced Study. Einstein worked at the problem
which Bush gave him and on December 19, 1941,
Aydelotte sent the handwritten solution to Bush at the
Office of Scientific Research and Development in
Washington. "As I told you over the telephone," he said in
his covering letter,

  Einstein was very much interested in your problem, has worked
at it for a couple of days and produced the solution, which I
enclose herewith. Einstein asks me to say that if there are other
angles of the problem that you want him to develop or if you
wish any parts of this amplified, you need only let him know and
he will be glad to do anything in his power. I very much hope
that you will make use of him in any way that occurs to you,
because I know how deep is his satisfaction at doing anything
which might be useful in the national effort.
  I hope you can read his handwriting. Neither he nor I felt
free, in view of the necessary secrecy, to give the manuscript
to anyone to copy. In this, as in all other respects, we shall be
glad to do anything that will facilitate your work.

  Bush passed on Einstein's calculations to Dr. Harold
Urey, head of the American gaseous-diffusion project, and
Urey in due course discussed them with Bush. One thing
quickly became clear: if Einstein's work was to be really
useful, the problem would have to be presented to him in
much more detail. But this was impossible. And it was
impossible for reasons which Bush gave Aydelotte in a
letter on December 30. "I am not going to tell him any
more than I have told him, for a number of reasons," he
wrote.

  If my statement of the problem is not sufficient to make it clear,
I will of course be very glad to make the statement as precise as
possible, but I really believe that my statement placed the
problem in its exact form. The reason that I am not going farther
is that I am not at all sure that if I place Einstein in entire contact
with his subject he would not discuss it in a way that it should
not be discussed, and with this doubt in my mind I do not feel
that I ought to take him into confidence on the subject to the
extent of showing just where this thing fits into the defense
picture, and what the military aspects of the matter might be. If I
were to explain more than I already have, I feel sure that the rest
of the story would immediately follow. I wish very much that I
could place the whole thing before him and take him fully into
confidence, but this is utterly impossible in view of the attitude
of people here in Washington who have studied into his whole
history.

  So Einstein, who had put his name to a letter warning
that a single nuclear weapon might destroy a whole port,
was to be kept from knowing "where this thing fits into the
defense picture"! The extraordinary contradiction is in fact
simply explained. For as Bush has written of Einstein's
letter, "in my many discussions with President Roosevelt
on the subject he did not mention it."
  Trying to get an answer from Einstein without telling
him too much, unaware of his earlier involvement, Bush
asked for help on a subject that was academicùeven
though it was clearly so secret that Einstein thought it
unwise to have the answer copied. Thus it is not absolutely
certain that when he produced the solution, and showed
his "deep ... satisfaction at doing anything which might be
useful in the national effort," Einstein knew that he was
working towards a nuclear weapon. But it is a strong
assumption. He would, after all, have been "glad to do
anything in his power" now that the United States was at
last at war with Germany.
  The exclusion of Einstein from the inner counsels of the
scientists who drove the Manhattan Project to its
conclusion was to have one important result in 1945. For it
effectively prevented him from using his enormous
prestige when the future of the bomb was being discussed.
By that time he was the outsider, unable even to declare
openly that he knew of the bomb's existence without
betraying what his friends and acquaintances had let him
know, consciously or unconsciously. Thus the prophet of E
= mc2 did not, in theory, know of the bomb's existence
until it was dropped in anger. Sometimes this has been too
much for history to bear. One account mentions "Dr.
Einstein" at Los Alamosùwhich Einstein never visited
without spoiling the story by adding that the name was a
local soubriquet for someone else. And one biography not
only has a drawn frontispiece showing Einstein "at the
first test of the atomic bomb" but soberly has him speaking
a farrago of nonsense there. In fact, Einstein remained
officiallyùalthough not unofficiallyùunaware of
America's nuclear effort until, on August 6, 1945, he
heard at Saranac Lake the radio announcement of the
Hiroshima bombing.
  This, the most publicized period of Einstein's connection
with nuclear weapons, runs from July, 1939, until, very
approximately, the American entry into the war in
December, 1941. Before the end of it he had taken U. S.
citizenship, together with his stepdaughter Margot and
Helen Dukas. Not every American was pleased. A letter in
The Tablet complained of "Einstein the refugee Jewish
Communist taking an oath of allegiance to the U. S.
government," while a long article in a book entitled The
Fifth Column in Our Schools attacked Einstein's right to
become a U. S. citizen at all. "If Albert Einstein is right
and there is no personal God, then America is founded on
fable and falsehood," this went.

  If there is no God then the citizen has no God-given rights.
Then all the rights set forth in the Constitution are sham and
delusion. If man has no Creator, then our fathers fought for a lie;
then the rights of citizenship are based on a lie. Then Professor
Einstein has subscribed to a lie, in the very act of pledging
allegiance to a form of government whichùaccording to his
philosophyùis founded on a lie.

  The reasoning was tortuous; it was not uncommon, and
fuel was added to the criticism with Einstein's support for
Bertrand Russell, who was first appointed to, and then
sacked from, a professorship at the City College of New
York. Russell's Marriage and Morals was used as the
cudgel to belabor him in a savage attack which described
the distinguished philosopher as "lecherous, libidinous,
lustful, venerous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, irreverent,
narrow-minded, untruthful, and bereft of moral fiber."
Einstein was no longer surprised by this attitude of the
Christian mob. "It keeps repeating itself," he wrote in a
doggerel verse to Russell. "In this world so fine and
honest;/the parson alarms the populace/; The genius is
executed. (Es wiederholt sich immer wieder/ In dieser
Welt so fein und bieder/ Der Pfaff den Poebel alarmiert/
Der Genius wird executiert.)"
  The institute buildings were finally completed in 1940
and before the end of the year Einstein moved from his
rooms in the university to the new and rather splendid
quarters in their parklike setting on the outskirts of the
town. Here he was allocated an imposing room with leaded
windows, long curtains, and even an Oriental rug on the
floor.
  In Princeton, where familiarity had bred acceptance, his
presence was taken for granted. Everywhere else in the
United States Einstein was still a name which made news,
and in 1944 there was a flurry of excitement when there
appeared a biography by his former stepson-in-law, Dmitri
Marianoff, with the aid of another professional writer.
Marianoff had separated from Margot in the summer of
1934, soon after arriving in America. Now he was cashing
in on the Berlin days. "He is said to have lived with the
Einstein family for eight years," Einstein said in a public
denunciation of the book. "He never lived at my house for
even a year, only for a few months at a time." The book
was popularly written and harmless enough. But it was,
Einstein stated, "generally unreliable," and the bits which
he had read were "not true at all."
  He was naturally enough sensitive about his name. After
all, it was often his name which did the trick; as, for
instance, in prizing a message from Roosevelt for the
American Fund for Palestinian Institutions when it held a
dinner in his honor at the Waldrof-Astoria in the summer
of 1944. Roosevelt declined a first request to send a
message "stressing the important work of the beneficiary
institutions in contemporary life and in the war effort of
Palestine." But a second appeal produced a Roosevelt
message extending "hearty greetings to all who gather at
the dinner in honor of Professor Albert Einstein." This, in
the words of a memorandum from the White House, was
"a compromiseùa little compliment to Professor
Einsteinù silence about the fund raising."
  He was, inevitably, the much sought-after distinguished
guest for all manner of scientific gatherings, and he was
drawn from the oasis of Princeton to attend the Carnegie
Hall meeting celebrating the 400th anniversary of
Copernicus' death. Since Copernicus was a revolutionary,
a number of modern revolutionaries were invited. They
included Einstein, T. H. Morgan the geneticist, Igor
Sikorsky the helicopter designer, and Henry Ford. Einstein
was one of the two who made brief speeches.
  "It was in broken English, and Einstein's English had
been pretty badly broken," says Harlow Shapley, who
helped to organize the occasion.

  He pointed out that it was not inappropriate for him to appear
"because Copernicus was the great leader of scientists and he
was our teacher"ùor some such connection. It was a modest talk
in pidgin English and the audience just roared. Carnegie Hall
rattled with applause. In the front row were some of my friends
from the Century Club. I had sent them tickets so they could
come, and they did and applauded wildly. They are of course
good Republicans and careful clubmen; that they would applaud
this relativity man and his doings was a little surprising. That
night I asked some of them about it and was told: "Well, I think
the reason we applauded was that we'd always insisted that we
couldn't understand one damn word of this relativity nonsense.
And here we hear Relativity himself talking about it and still we
couldn't understand it."

  The members of the Century Club may have shown little
logic. They accurately reflected lay opinion in midwar
Einstein was still "Relativity himself." He was also the
most famous living Jew, and it is a revelation of his
attitude to nonscientific affairs that during the early years
of the war his letters to relatives in German-occupied
Belgium exposed them to considerable risk. They exist
today, full of local gossip and still in the envelopes that
had been twice slit open for the contents to be approved
first by the American and then by the German censors. To
conceal who they came from, the sender was given as
Marianoff, Margot's married name; but the address was
"112 Mercer Street, Princeton," a straight pointer to the
Koch family's kinship with Hitler's bΩte juive.
  During these wartime years, Einstein was to many
scientists the ultimate court of appeal and this fact drew
him, the most amiable of men, into some cantankerous
disputes. One was with the supporters of Felix Ehrenhaft,
who had been turned out of Vienna after the Nazis came to
power and forced to abandon the great electromagnet
whose construction had been the light of his life. The
experience may have pushed him beyond reason. Certainly
his power of rational argument decreased and his
insistence that the electronic charge was not constant was
maintained against all comers. A capable experimenter
who had "gradually developed into a kind of swindler" was
one description by Einstein; a later one was "a strongly
paranoiac creature." Einstein thought that some of
Ehrenhaft's claims were nonsense, and openly said so.
This brought down on his head requests to "repair the
great injustice done to Felix Ehrenhaft by your attitude
towards him and through the unfounded and defaming
reports about his discoveries which you spread not only
among his colleagues but also in financial circles, among
bankers who wanted to help him carry on with his
research." Einstein had little time for such complaints. As
far as he could, he ignored them.
  He also tried to ignore his involvement with Wilhelm
Reich. This eccentric distraught figure seems already to
have slipped down the slope towards charlatanry or
madness by the time he asked Einstein to investigate his
discovery of "a specific biologically effective energy which
behaves in many respects differently to all that is known
about electromagnetic energy." Reich first wrote to
Einstein on December 30, 1940, informing him that he
had been Freud's assistant at the Polyclinic in Vienna from
1922 until 1930, and was now teaching "experimental and
clinical biopsychology" in New York. Anyone other than
Einstein would have been warned by the letter, which
continued with the admission that he had not reported his
discovery to the Academy of Physics because of "extremely
bad experience." But Reich added that it might possibly
"be used in the fight against the Fascist pestilence."
Einstein, who had encouraged the country forward in what
still seemed to be the one-in-a-million chance of using
nuclear fission for this very purpose, was the last man to
resist such a bait.
  Reich called on Einstein in his Mercer Street home on
January 13, 1941. "He told me," his wife wrote later, "that
the conversation with Einstein had been extremely friendly
and cordial, that Einstein was easy to talk to, that their
conversation had lasted almost five hours. Einstein was
willing to investigate the phenomena that Reich had
described to him, and a special little accumulator would
have to be built and taken to him." Certainly there was a
further visit, and certainly Einstein tested the apparatus.
But his query "What else do you do?" when told by Reich
that he was not a physicist but a psychiatrist, probably
contained an unnoticed hint of scepticism.
  Einstein found a commonplace explanation of the
phenomena which Reich had noted, and said so in polite
terms. The postscriptùcontained in The Einstein Affair, a
privately printed booklet from Reich's own pressùwas
spread across the following three years of their
correspondence. Reich disputed Einstein's findings and
Einstein was dismayed that his name might be wrongly
used to support Reich's theory. Briefly, the theory "has not
my confidence," as he put it. Reich took the easy way out,
and blamed the Communists.
  It was not only in the United States that Einstein's name
meant a lot, and the British Association requested a
message from him for their 1942 meeting. The text was
prepared in German, but was broadcast by Einstein in
English, from the United States; reception in England was
poor and the published text was a compromise of printed
German and spoken English. One result was a long-lasting
rumor that Einstein had traveled to Britain in wartime to
deliver an address.
  At the time, what he said sounded conventional enough.
But an inner significance comes from the fact that it was
given by the man who had written the letter to Roosevelt.
"What hopes and fears does the scientific method imply for
mankind?" Einstein asked towards the end of it.

  I do not think that is the right way to put the question. Whatever
this tool may produce in the hands of men depends entirely upon
the nature of the aims alive in mankind. Once these aims exist,
the scientific method furnishes means to realize them. But it
cannot furnish these aims itself. The scientific method itself
would not have led to anything, it would not even have been born
at all, without a passionate striving for clear understanding.
Perfection of means and confusion of aims seem, in my opinion
to characterize our age. If we desire passionately the safety, the
welfare, and the free development of all men, we should not lack
the means to approach such a state. Even if only a small part of
mankind strives for such an aim, their superiority will prove
itself in the long run.

  Anything that would aid the "fight against the Fascist
pestilence" drew Einstein's immediate support. In 1943 he
was asked by the Book and Author Committee of the
Fourth War Loan drive to donate his original paper of
1905 for sale. Like many others, it had been destroyed
when he received printed copies. However, he agreed to
write it out once more in longhand, adding above it: "The
following pages are a copy of my first paper concerning
the theory of relativity. I made this copy in November
1943. The original manuscript not [sic] longer exists
having been discarded by me after its publication. The
publication bears the title 'Elektrodynamik bewegter
K÷rper' (Annalen der Physik; vierte Folge, Vol. 17, 1905).
A. Einstein 21. X1. 1943." Miss Dukas dictated it to him
from his published paper. "I could have said this more
simply," he said more than once.
  He also handed over an unpublished manuscript on "The
Bivector Field," and the two manuscripts were auctioned
in Kansas City on February 4, 1944, the Kansas City
Insurance Company investing $6.5 million in war bonds
for the relativity paperùand subsequently presenting it to
the Library of Congressùwhile W. T. Kemper, Jr., a
custodian of insurance funds, invested $5 million of
impounded funds to obtain the second paper.

  By this time Einstein had again become directly involved
in defense work. On August 13, 1943, he had written to
his friend Gustav Bucky that he now had "closer relations
with the navy and Office of Scientific Research and
Development in Washington." And Vannevar Bush, the
organization's director, writes: "Some friends of Einstein
visited me and told me that he was disturbed because he
was not active in the war effort. I accordingly appointed
him a member of a committee where it seemed to me his
particular skills would be most likely to be of service."
What the committee was has never been discovered, but
from internal evidence it is unlikely to have been
concerned with nuclear research.
  No such question mark hangs over Einstein's
engagement with the U. S. Navy's Bureau of Ordnance.
An announcement from Washington on June 24, 1943,
stated that "his naval assignment will be on a part-time
contractual basis and he will continue his association with
the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N. J., where
most of his studies on behalf of the Bureau of Ordnance
will be undertaken." Records of the General Services
Administration, St. Louis, Missouri, show that Einstein
"was intermittently employed in Special Service Contract
of the Department of the Navy, Washington, D. C., as a
Scientist from May 31, 1943, to June 30, 1944. As a
Technicist from July 1, 1944, to June 30, 1945, and also as
a Consultant for Research on Explosives from July 1,
1945, to June 30, 1946." Star Shell, the Bureau of
Ordnance publication, later stated that his work concerned
"the theory of explosion, seeking to determine what laws
govern the more obscure waves of detonation, why certain
explosives have marked directional effect and other highly
technical theories," while the St. Louis records further add
that Einstein's service "was performed in the development
of bombs and underwater weapons."
  His duties were on a personal services basis which,
according to Admiral Furer's official history, "allowed the
Bureau to secure the services of persons which it would not
otherwise have attracted." Among the eminent scientists
thus employed were Dr. von Neumann, who furnished the
theoretical foundation for the air-burst principle used in
the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima; Dr. John Kirkwood,
who developed theoretical methods for determining the
relative effectiveness of explosives; and Dr. George
Gamow, who worked on the theory of initiation and
detonation of explosives.
  Einstein said, on accepting the consultantship, that he
would be unable to travel to Washington regularly and that
someone from the Division of High Explosives for which
he would be working must come to him at Princeton.
"Since I happened to have known Einstein earlier, on
nonmilitary grounds, I was selected to carry out this job,"
writes George Gamow.

  Thus on every other Friday I took a morning train to Princeton,
carrying a briefcase tightly packed with confidential and secret
Navy projects. There was a great variety of proposals, such as
exploding a series of underwater mines placed along a parabolic
path that would lead to the entrance of a Japanese naval base,
with "follow-up" aerial bombs to be dropped on the flight decks
of Japanese aircraft carriers. Einstein would meet me in his study
at home, wearing one of his famous soft sweaters, and we would
go through all the proposals, one by one. He approved practically
all of them, saying, "Oh yes, very interesting, very, very,
ingenious," and the next day the admiral in charge of the bureau
was very happy when I reported to him Einstein's comments.

  One other idea was that of producing a certain effect by
using a convergent detonation wave formed by combining
two explosives with different propagation velocities. After
Einstein had approved it, plans were made for a model test
at Indian Head, the navy proving grounds on the Potomac
River. But then, recalls Gamow, the highexplosives factory
in Pittsburgh which was to make the device shied away
from it. "On the next day my project was moved from the
top of the priority list to the bottom," he says, "and I
suddenly realized what was being worked on at a
mysterious place in New Mexico with the address: P. O.
Box 1663, Santa FΘ. Years later, when I was fully cleared
for work on the A-bomb and went to Los Alamos, I
learned that my guess had been correct." Gamow gives no
indication of whether he mentioned the incident, or passed
on his guess, to Einstein. It seems likely.
  Einstein's attitude to this work was by no means half
hearted. He wrote to Bucky in July, 1943 saying he would
be staying in Princeton for the summer and commenting:
"So long as the war lasts and I work for the navy I do not
wish to begin anything else." The following year he was
reported to have spent his sixty-fifth birthday hard at work,
and his colleagues, according to the New York Times, said
"he preferred it that way in view of the amount of work to
be done."
  Only part of his time was devoted to the navy but there is
no indication that he shirked it or shrank from that part.
Indeed, there was no reason why he should. Events had
taught him, in the words of his friend Max Born, "that the
ultimate ethical values, on which all human existence is
based, must, as a last resort, be defended even by force and
with the sacrifice of human lives." This reluctant
admission had first been made in the summer of 1933.
Now "his satisfaction at doing anything which might be
useful in the national effort" pressed his actions yet further
against the grain of his normal inclinations.
Circumstances altered cases; even in pacifism there were
no absolutes. The war had to be won. All this was
commonplace enough. Many decent men did what they did
in wartime only with reluctance, admitting ruefully that at
times life offers only a choice between evils.
  Yet the real tragedy of Einstein's situation can be judged
not by the record of the war years, when his work for the
Services was openly acknowledged, but by the postwar
period when he banished to the back of his mind what he
had done as though it were a nightmare rather than the
reality. Writing in 1950 to A. J. Muste, a leading
American pacifist who was opposing production of the
hydrogen bomb, he stated that his only contribution to the
atomic bomb had been "a letter to Roosevelt."
Furthermore, he went on, it would "be quite ridiculous if I
were to issue a statement declaring my refusal to
participate in armament work. Since the military
authorities are well aware of my position, it would never
occur to them to invite me to participate in such work." It
can be claimed, perhaps only with special pleading, that
Einstein had by this time overlooked his two significant
letters to Dr. Briggs; that he was unaware of what lay
behind the manuscript, too secret to be copied, which he
prepared for Bush in December, 1941; and that his
pacifism vis-α-vis armament work referred to peacetime
rather than wartime. Yet in 1952, replying to a
correspondent who raised the question of the atomic bomb,
he went further. "You are mistaken in regarding me as a
kind of chieftain of those scientists who abuse science for
military purposes," he replied. "I have never worked in the
field of applied science, let alone for the military. I
condemn the military mentality of our time just as you do.
Indeed, I have been a pacifist all my life and regard
Gandhi as the only truly great political figure of our age."
  Were Einstein different from the man who emerges so
clearly both from the archives and from reminiscence, the
discrepancy between what he did and what he later said
would be simple to explain. But his weakness in a
predatory world was that of the man who speaks the truth
by an inner compulsion; thus his ability to disregard his
wartime activity suggests a psychological failing rather
than dishonesty.
  His reluctance to think back to the war must also be seen
in association with two other things. One was his natural,
and later almost paranoiac, distrust of the Germans, a
distrust which he finally appreciated had paved the road to
Hiroshima and which, when he considered the Japanese
holocaust, must have filled him with mixed emotions. The
other was his decision in December, 1944, when he had
learned of the peril of nuclear weapons, to "abstain from
any action" which might "complicate the delicate task of
the statesmen."
  For as the war rose to its climax with the Allied invasion
of Europe and the prospect of the Wehrmacht being driven
back to Germany in defeat, the consequences of his action
in July, 1939, became even more difficult to ignore.
  It is generally believed that Einstein was totally ignorant
of the progress made by the Manhattan Project until the
announcement that the first bomb had been dropped on
Hiroshima. He himself never pushed such a claimùa fact
adequately explained by the evidence now available. He
cannot have failed to note the permanent disappearance
from the academic scene of such men as Szilard, Fermi,
Compton, Teller, Wigner, and a host of others who had
been involved in uranium research during 1939 and 1940.
He could not fail to have noted the sudden dropping from
academic discussion of all news about nuclear fission. And
if he took more than a cursory interest in the subject of
uranium itselfùthe very nub of his initial worry ùhe may
even have noted the reference on page 825 of the U. S.
Minerals Yearbook of 1943 which said: "The uranium
industry in 1943 was greatly stimulated by a government
program having materials priority over all other mineral
procurement, but most of the facts were buried in War
Department secrecy."
  In addition, there was the case of his own Danish alter
ego. In October, 1943, Niels Bohr had made one of the
most spectacular escapes of the war, sailing with his son
across the Kattegat to Sweden in a small boat and being
taken first to England in a high-flying Mosquito and then
to the United States. Bohr spent most of the summer of
1944 at Los Alamos, where he "instigated some of the
most important experiments on the velocity selector ...
enlivened discussions on bomb assembly, and ...
participated very actively in the design of the initiator."
  Bohr also visited Einstein in Princeton. He arrived while
other friends were there, and only as these friends were
leaving did Einstein hurry downstairs and warn them that
on no account must they mention that Bohr was in the
United States. His presence in America was officially
secret since he was traveling in the name of John Baker,
and had even been given a British passport for the purpose
ùreportedly the only foreigner ever to have been granted
one.
  Bohr was a man of honor. He kept confidences. He no
doubt denied himself the pleasure of describing to Einstein
the technological successes with which he had been
brought face to face at Los Alamos. But he now knew that
two years previously Fermi had succeeded in producing the
first self-sustaining chain reaction in the famous squash
court in Chicago. He knew that the forecast he had made
in his secret message to Chadwick a year earlier was
incorrect. And it is clear from subsequent events that he
was one of the first scientists to become genuinely
concerned with postwar control of whatever new weapons
the war produced.
  It is unlikely that Einstein knew much of the
technological details involved in the Manhattan Project.
For one thing, General Groves' policy of
compartmentalization made it difficult for any one man to
know more than the necessary minimumùor to impart it,
even if he wished to do so. More important, Einstein
would not have been interested in purely technological
detail. However, by the winter of 1944 he had talked on
many occasions with an adviser to the Manhattan Project,
had discussed with him the need to prevent a postwar arms
race for weapons that would cause "destruction even more
evil than that of today," and had desperately written to
Bohr invoking his aid. The evidence is not that Einstein
knew how, or even if, the new weapons were to be used to
finish the war; but it implies beyond all reasonable doubt
that by the end of 1944 he knew that they were nearing
completion.
  The adviser was Otto Stern, Einstein's old colleague from
the Prague days, who had crossed the Atlantic in 1934.
Soon after America entered the war, Stern had served as
consultant to one of the early radar schemes. Then,
following the start of the Manhattan Project, he had
become a consultant assigned to the Metallurgical
Laboratory at the University of Chicago, where the first
nuclear pile went into operation in 1942. He continued to
live in Pittsburgh, working as adviser to the other
Manhattan Project consultants at the Carnegie Institute of
Technology. Perhaps more important, he traveled to
Chicago for the information meetings held there about
every six weeks. Exactly how much he knew about the
detailed progress of the bomb is not certain; there is every
indication that it was considerable.
  Stern paid a number of visits to Einstein, who after one of
them said how terribly worried he was about the
development of new weapons after the end of the war. No
record of their discussions is likely to have been made, but
their nature can be inferred from the climax which they
produced.
  This came in mid-December, 1944. Stern visited Einstein
on Monday, December 11. Once again they discussed
weapons. This time Einstein appears to have become
gravely alarmed. The following day he sat down and wrote
to Bohr. He wrote to him at the Danish Legation in
Washington, and he appears to have dropped the "John
Baker" pseudonym and addressed him plainly as Professor
Niels Bohr.
  Writing of the news which so greatly disturbed him, he
said that his reaction had been that

  when the war is over, then there will be in all countries a
pursuit of secret war preparations with technological means
which will lead inevitably to preventive wars and to destruction
even more terrible than the present detruction of life. The
politicians do not appreciate the possibilities and consequently
do not know the extent of the menace. Every effort must be made
to avert such a development. I share your view of the situation
but I see no way of doing anything promising.

  He then referred to the visit from Stern of the previous
day. "It seemed to us," he continued,

  that there is one possibility, however slight it may be. There are
in the principal countries scientists who are really influential and
who know how to get a hearing with political leaders. There is
you yourself with your international connections, Compton here
in the U.S.A., Lindemann in England, Kapitza and Joffe in
Russia, etc. The idea is that these men should bring combined
pressure on the political leaders in their countries in order to
bring about an internationalization of military powerùa method
that has been rejected for too long as being too adventurous. But
this radical step with all its far-reaching political assumptions
regarding extranational government seems the only alternative to
a secret technical arms race.
  We agreed that I should lay this before you. Don't say, at
first sight, "Impossible" but wait a day or two until you have
got used to the idea. [He concluded by saying that if there was
even a chance in a thousand of something being done, there
should be further discussion.]

  This letter could hardly have been more fortuitously ill
timed; the names it mentioned could hardly have been
more fortuitously ill chosen. In April, Bohr had received in
London a letter from the Russian physicist Peter Kapitza
which had invited him and his family to settle in Russia.
The British intelligence authorities had vetted Bohr's
innocuous reply. In May he had secured a meeting with
Churchill in London, largely through Lindemann's
intervention, and had tried to impress on the British Prime
Minister the need for bringing the Russians into a scheme
for postwar control of nuclear energy. The interview was a
tragic failure; Bohr was unable to explain and Churchill
was unwilling to listen. In August Bohr was better
received by Roosevelt, who listened sympathetically for an
hour, agreed that an approach should be made to Russia,
and promised to raise the matter direct with Churchill
whom he was due to meet at Hyde Park the following
month. But in September Roosevelt and Churchill did
more than rule out any idea of an approach to the
Russians. They also initialed an aide-mΘmoire the last
clause of which said: "Enquiries should be made regarding
the activities of Professor Bohr and steps taken to ensure
that he is responsible for no leakage of information
particularly to the Russians." Bohr's friends loyally rallied
to his support but he was "distressed that the whole
business had now become enmeshed in the interstices of
American politics. ..." He had moved, both in Britain and
the United States, among the men who pulled the levers of
power and he had put to them proposals that were well
thought out and practical where Einstein's were by
comparison unreal. Nevertheless, he had been brusquely
brushed off.
  Bohr was in an awkward situation. He knew his Einstein.
He knew that to a man of such trusting idealism the
niceties of diplomatic protocol meant little. Whether he
feared that Einstein might himself try to write to Kapitza
or JoffΘ is not certain, but if he did the fearùwith all his
knowledge of how "the secret" of the bomb was being kept
from the Russiansùmust have haunted him. What is
beyond doubt is that when Bohr received Einstein's letter
from the embassy he hastened to Princeton; that in a long
interview he persuaded Einstein to keep quiet; and that in
an official capacity he reported on the incident to
Washington in a private note that must have done much to
vindicate the attitude of the "people ... in Washington"
who three years earlier decided to restrict Einstein's
knowledge of the Manhattan Project.
  He arrived at Mercer Street on Friday, December 22, and
his report of what happened, dated merely "December,
1944," was typed on quarto paper, apparently by Bohr
himself and certainly in his own brand of English, with
himself referred to as "B" and Einstein referred to as "X."
It began by stating that he had visited Einstein, to whom
he had explained that it "would be quite illegitimate [sic]
and might have the most deplorable consequences if
anyone who was brought into confidence about the matter
concerned, on his own hands should take steps of the kind
suggested."
  The note then continued as follows;

  Confidentially B could, however, inform X that the responsible
statesmen in America and England were fully aware of the scope
of the technical development, and that their attention had been
called to the dangers to world security as well as to the unique
opportunity for furthering a harmonious relationship between
nations, which the great scientific advance involves. In response
X assured B that he quite realized the situation and would not
only abstain from any action himself, but would alsoùwithout
any reference to his confidential conversation with Bù impress
on the friends with whom he had talked about the matter, the
undesirability of all discussions which might complicate the
delicate task of the statesmen.

  There is no reason to doubt the accuracy of Bohr's note.
There is no reason to doubt that Einstein was here, as
elsewhere, a man of his word. And the inevitable
conclusion is that from December, 1944, until the
dropping of the bombs on Japan eight months later
Einstein not only knew far more of the developing nuclear
situation than any of his scientist friends realized but used
his confidential and undisclosable information from Bohr
to impress on them "the undesirability of all discussions
which might complicate the delicate task of the
statesmen."
  First he had to deal with Otto Stern. He waited until the
Christmas celebrations were half over. Then, on December
26, he sat down to write what must have been, even for
Einstein, an extraordinarily difficult letterùone that
would prevent Stern from making any ill-advised move yet
would not reveal the visit from Bohr; a letter, moreover,
that would be innocuous if it fell into the wrong hands.
  "Dear Stern," it went,

  A cloud of deep secrecy has settled on me following my letter to
B. so that I can report no more on the matter than that we are not
the first who have faced similar things. I have the impression that
one must strive seriously to be responsible, that one does best not
to speak about the matter for the time being, and that it would in
no way help, at the present moment, to bring it to public notice.
  It is difficult for me to speak in such a nebulous way, but for
the moment I cannot do anything else.
  With the best of wishes,

  Here, as on previous occasions, Einstein had stepped into
a dark arena and been tripped by his own ignorance of
what was going on. Furthermore his freedom of action,
already limited by lack of official knowledge about the
Manhattan Project, was now further hampered by what he
had been told only in confidence. This was to be important
in more ways than one. These arguments, and the earlier
exchanges between Otto Stern and Einstein, were
concerned with what was to happen after the war. Yet for
practical purposes they also made it more difficult for
Einstein to make his voice heard in any discussion which
might be raised about use of the bomb in the Pacific or
even in Europe, where a week before Bohr's visit the
Germans had launched the Ardennes offensive, a salutary
reminder that they were not yet beaten.
  First questions about the actual use of the bomb were
raised in March, 1945, by Leo Szilard, who since
February, 1942, had been chief physicist at the
Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago. Germany was now
seen to be within a few weeks of defeat, while it was
already known to a few men, almost certainly including
Szilard, that the Third Reich was nowhere near producing
a nuclear weapon.
  The story there had been strange. In the United States
Einstein had been kept virtually outside the nuclear effort
once he had started it; in Germany there had been, by
contrast, a movement which tended to rehabilitate the
much-condemned "Jewish physics" which he represented.
Certainly a number of German physicists, fearful that the
current denigration of theoretical physics would seriously
hamper their country, held a meeting in Munich in
November, 1940, and officially agreed that:

  1. Theoretical physics is an indispensable part of all physics. 2.
The Special Theory of Relativity belongs to the experimentally
verified facts of physics. Its application to cosmic problems,
however, it still uncertain. 3. The theory of relativity has nothing
to do with a general relativistic philosophy. No new concepts of
time and space have been introduced. And 4. Modern quantum
theory is the only method known to describe quantitatively the
properties of the atom. As yet, no one has been able to go beyond
this mathematical formalism to obtain a deeper understanding of
the atomic structure.

  Two years later another meeting was held, this time in
Seefeld, in the Austrian Tyrol. Here a somewhat similar
compromise was achieved, softening the decision that
relativity had to be accepted with the consolation that
"before Einstein, Aryan scientists like Lorentz, Hasen÷hrl,
PoincarΘ, etc., had created the foundations of the theory of
relativity and Einstein merely followed up the already
existing ideas consistently and added the cornerstone."
  Not all Germans were happy that such intellectual
convolutions should remain unnoticed outside the Third
Reich, and at least one effort was made to inform Einstein
of what was going on. It consisted of a single typed sheet
posted from Hamburg in 1942. It found its way onto the
desk in the Foreign Office of Einstein's old friend, David
Mitrany, who on the outbreak of war had come back across
the Atlantic to work for the British. The note asked that
the following message should be passed on to Einstein:

  In his article W. Lenz (Hamburg), puts forward the thesis that
you were not the only one responsible for the Relativity Theory,
but rather that Henri PoincarΘ was a fellow culprit. He does this
with the explicit purpose of clearing it of the reproach that it
sprang solely from a Jewish mind, and thereby, so to speak, of
making it "hoffΣhig" [presentable] in the Third Reich. For if it
was established also by PoincarΘ, then it is proved that physicists
were bound to come upon it, and to it is really Aryan after all.
  There is no way of preventing the publication of the article.
It will appear in the Naturwissenschaften. Possibly they will
add as a postscript and commentary certain quotations from
PoincarΘ's lecture called "La MΘcanique Nouvelle 1909ù10"
which in my opinion proves absolutely that the author had
indeed known the mathematical aspect of the theory, but that
he did not take the steps which were really decisive in the
establishment of the theory. But it is not certain whether this
postscript will appear together with the article.

  The need to cloak relativity in particular and "Jewish
physics" in general with a respectability enabling them to
be used without reproach by German physicists was part
and parcel of the nuclear research which in Germany
paralleled the work being carried out in the United States
and Britain. In all three countries the crucial decision
whether to follow up laboratory work with industrial
exploitation had to be taken in 1942. In Britain it was
decided that industrial resources were inadequate, and the
British effort was moved across the Atlantic. In the United
States, America embarked on the multimillion-dollar
Manhattan Project. In Germany, where the theoretical
results were discussed at a high-level Berlin conference on
June 4, 1942, the decision was the reverse. For a variety of
reasons, Heisenberg and his colleagues had not been as
successful in their theoretical work as the Allies. But they
had achieved quite a lot: they had demonstrated the
theoretical possibility of a weapon. Yet no serious attempt
to move on to the higher ground of industrial production
was now made. This was sensible enough. During the first
two years of the war the Germans had been so militarily
successful that no need for nuclear weapons was foreseen.
But now the balance had swung too much the other way.
"At the time," says Heisenberg of the 1942 meeting,

  the war situation was already too tense for long-term technical
projects. An order is supposed to have been issued prohibiting
technical developments which would require more than half a
year for completion. This situation spared the German physicists
the decision whether to plead for an attempt to produce atom
bombs; they knew, on the basis of their technical experience, that
such an attempt could not lead to success in less than three or
four years. An attempt of this sort would have undoubtedly
hastened German defeat, because the extensive manpower and
materials necessary for it would have to be borrowed from other
sources, thereby lessening the production of tanks and
aeroplanes.

  In addition there were two other reasons: Hitler could not
be interested in nuclear fission; and the anti-Jewish purges
of the previous decade had skimmed off from Germany too
much of the country's scientific cream.
  Heisenberg and his colleagues carried on. During the last
months of the war he and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for
Physics of which he had been made director in 1941 were
evacuated to Hechingen, bringing the end of Germany's
wartime nuclear fission story back to the little village
where Elsa Einstein had been born. But they were still
only at the stage of academic researchùa fact which had
become plain to an American mission in December, 1944.
Code-named "Alsos"ùa curious choice since "groves," its
translation from the Greek, was a lead to General Groves
of the Manhattan Projectùit had followed up the Allied
advance across Europe. With the capture of von
WeizsΣcker's papers in Strasbourg, it discovered that the
Allies need fear no nuclear weapons from Germany. As
Heisenberg himself said later, "Whatever one may think
about motives, it remains a fact that a serious attempt to
produce atom bombs in Germany was not undertaken,
although in principleùbut perhaps not in practiceùthe
path to it had been open since 1942."
  It seems that this was the case. But clinching evidence
has been withheld. After the collapse of Germany in May,
1945, the leading German physicists who had been
involved on nuclear researchùHeisenberg, Hahn, and
about a dozen othersùwere taken to France, and then
unexpectedly brought to a house on the outskirts of
Cambridge by Professor R. V. Jones, then director of
scientific intelligence in the British Air Ministry. "I had
them brought to Farm Hall," he has written, "to save them
from a threat they never knewùfor I had been told that an
American general proposed to solve the problem of nuclear
energy in postwar Germany by having them shot while
they were still in 'Dustbin,' the special transit camp in
France." In England their rooms were fitted with secret
microphones. Their conversations were recorded and their
reactions to the news of Hiro- shima, provided by the
radio, were taken down in detail. Small sections of the
transcripts have been printed in English in General
Groves' reminiscences; but the Germans have maintained
that these are mistranslations. The original texts have not
been made availableùdue largely, it appears, to British
reluctance to admit that the incident ever took place.
  During the closing months of 1944 information on the
position of German nuclear research was made available in
Washington to a few members of the Manhattan Project. It
is most unlikely, says Goudsmidt, the Alsos leader, that
Einstein was aware of it until well after the war. But
Szilard was no doubt informed. And in the spring of 1945,
Szilard began to ask himself, he records: "What is the
purpose of continuing the development of the bomb, and
how would the bomb be used if the war with Japan has not
ended by the time we have the first bomb?" As in 1939, he
wished to bring the matter to the notice of the President.
As in 1939, he approached Einstein, visiting him in
Princetonùand presumably being trailed by the
Manhattan Project's intelligence agents, who followed him
as they followed other leading members of the Project.
  In Princeton Einstein gladly wrote another letter of
introduction to the President. "Unusual circumstances
which I shall describe further below induce me to take this
action in spite of the fact that I do not know the substance
of the considerations and recommendations which Dr.
Szilard proposes to submit to you," he said. After recalling
the circumstances of his approach in 1939, he continued.

  The terms of secrecy under which Dr. Szilard is working at
present do not permit him to give me information about his work;
however, I understand that he now is greatly concerned about the
lack of adequate contact between scientists who are doing this
work and those members of your cabinet who are responsible for
formulating policy. In the circumstances I consider it my duty to
give Dr. Szilard this introduction, and I wish to express the hope
that you will be able to give his presentation of the case your
personal attention.

  Just how much additional information Einstein had by
this time gained either from Stern or from others is not
clear. But there is a significant statement given in the
June, 1945, edition of the Contemporary Jewish Record.
This contains an interview with Einstein which took place
"shortly before" he retired from the institute in April,
1945, four months before the bombs on Japan. The
interviewer asked "whether the disintegration of atoms
would not soon be able to release the tremendous atomic
energies for warfare." "Unhappily," Einstein replied, "such
a possibility is not entirely in the utopian domain. When
military art is able to utilize nuclear atomic energies it will
not be houses or blocks of houses that will destroyed [sic]
in a few secondsùit will be entire cities." Taken with the
correspondence of the previous December, this suggests
that Einstein's assumed ignorance of what Szilard's
memorandum concerned was no more than a euphemism
to protect the author from the allegation of having talked
too much.
  However, this does not mean that Einstein knew the
details of Szilard's proposals. It is unlikely that he did.
And this was probably just as well. For while the
memorandum did question the use of the bomb in the war
against Japan, it did so for reasons with which Einstein
would not necessarily have sympathized. The consequence
of its use, Szilard warned, might be that in the ensuing
arms race the United States would lose its initial
advantage. And he asked whether the chances of eventual
international control of nuclear weapons might not be
obtained "by developing in the next two years modern
methods of production which would give us an
overwhelming superiority in this field at the time when
Russia might be approached."
  Four months later Szilard was to be one of those who
went clearly and unmistakably on record in opposition on
moral grounds to the use of these bombs "in the present
phase of the war." But the memorandum that Einstein
supported was something different. "Scrambling his
technology to cloak his reference to the hydrogen bomb,"
say the official U. S. historians, "Szilard divided atomic
development into two stages.[Dr. Gertrud Weiss Szilard,
Leo Szilard's widow, questions the view that he was in fact
referring to the hydrogen bomb.] The first was reaching
fruition. If the United States were well along on the second
when it approached Russia, the better the chances of
success. If international control proved a vain hope, the
worst possible course would be to delay developing the
second stage." This, one feels, was not exactly what
Einstein had in mind as Szilard left Mercer Street in
March with his letter to the President.
  However, the effort was to be abortive as far as Roosevelt
was concerned. Einstein's letter was dated March 25. "I
decided to transmit the memorandum and the letter to the
President through Mrs. Roosevelt, who once before had
channeled communications from the Project to the
President," Szilard has written. "I have forgotten now
precisely what I wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt. I suppose that I
sent her a copy of Einstein's letterùbut not the
memorandum. This I could not do. The memorandum I
couldn't send her, because the memorandum would have
been considered secret."
  Mrs. Roosevelt gave Szilard an appointment for May 8.
Shortly afterwards Szilard showed his memorandum to A.
H. Compton, director of the Metallurgical Laboratory. "I
hope that you will get the President to read this," he said.
"Elated by finding no resistance where I expected
resistance, I went back to my office," says Szilard. "I
hadn't been in my office for five minutes when there was a
knock on the door and Compton's assistant came in,
telling me that he had just heard over the radio that
President Roosevelt had died."
  Some weeks later, Szilard took his memorandum to
President Truman. Einstein's letter went too, but there is
no evidence that it had any influence on Truman, who read
Szilard's document and said: "I see now this is a serious
matter." He then referred it to Byrnes, the new Secretary of
State. "President Truman asked me to see Szilard, who
came down to Spartanburg [South Carolina, Byrnes'
home], bringing with him Dr. H. C. Urey and another
scientist," Byrnes had written.

  As the Einstein letter had indicated he would, Szilard
complained that he and some of his associates did not know
enough about the policy of the government with regard to the use
of the bomb. He felt that scientists, including himself, should
discuss the matter with the cabinet, which I did not feel
desirable. His general demeanor and his desire to participate in
policy-making made an unfavorable impression on me, but his
associates were neither as aggressive nor apparently as
dissatisfied.

  Szilard, like many other scientists who attempted to
influence U. S. policy during the next few months, failed
in his purpose. In the words of the Frank memorandum,
signed by many of the Manhattan Project scientists, and as
summarized in the official U. S. history, "statesmen who
did not realize that the atom had changed the world were
laying futile plans for peace while scientists who knew the
facts stood helplessly by." And after July 16, when the
nuclear weapon was successfully tested in the New Mexico
desert, the statesmen went ahead with plans for its use over
Japan.
  Einstein left Princeton for his usual summer holiday. At
Saranac on August 6 he heard on the radio the news that
his earlier views had, indeed, been a mistake: a chain
reaction had given a proof of his E = mc2 far more
spectacular than any given in the laboratory. To a New
York Times reporter who visited Einstein's house to tell
him the news, he said, "The world is not yet ready for it."
It is also claimed by the editors of Einstein on Peace that
he exclaimed: "Oh, weh!" At first he refused to make any
public comment. Instead, Miss Dukas made a statement on
his behalf. "Although it can be said that the professor
thoroughly understands the fundamental science of the
atomic bomb," this went, "military expediency demands
that he remain uncommunicative on the subject until the
authorities release details."
  On August 11, he made his first public comment on the
bomb, during a half-hour interview with Richard Lewis, an
Albany Times-Union staff writer. He began by trying to
damp down the hysteria which had swept the world. "In
developing atomic or nuclear energy, science did not draw
upon supernatural strength, but merely imitated the actions
of the sun's rays," he said. "Atomic power is no more
unnatural than when I sail a boat on Saranac Lake." He
was asked about reports of secondary radiation which
might cause sterilization or leukemia and answered: "I will
not discuss that." He continued: "I have done no work on
the subject, no work at all. I am interested in the bomb the
same as any other person; perhaps a little more interested.
However, I do not feel justified to say anything about it."
He added that he thought it would be many years before
atomic energy could be used for commercial purposes, but
that substances other than uranium-235 might be found
"and probably would be found" to accelerate its
commercial use, an indication that he knew of the great U.
S. achievement in manufacturing, on a commercial scale,
the plutonium which had been used in the test bomb and in
the second of those dropped on Japan. "You will do
everyone a favor by not writing any story. I don't believe
anyone will be interested," he concluded.
  With this exhortation and belief he faced the future,
unaware that within a few days the Smyth Report, issued
in Washington, would describe the genesis of the
American nuclear effort and reveal to the world at least
some of the part he had played in it.
  Einstein's wartime attitude towards the bomb has
sometimes been described as muddled and ambivalent. It
was, on the contrary, quite logical; once he had reluctantly
agreed that force could only be met by force, as he had
agreed in 1933, all the rest followed. When there seemed a
chance that the Germans might be able to utilize a new
weapon of frightening proportions it followed that he
should encourage the United States to counter itùeven
though he personally rated the danger very slight. When,
in the summer of 1940, the nuclear project seemed likely
to be stillborn, it was natural that he should further urge
the authorities into the action that produced the Manhattan
Project. When he learned in the winter of 1944 that the
new weapon was in fact a practical proposition, this must
have seemed to justify his earlier action: what was possible
in the United States might well be possible in the Third
Reich. But when the war had been won, postwar control
would be essential.
  Later, as the background to the bombing of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki began to be known, Einstein supported those
scientists who claimed that the bombs should not have
been used. This also followed. He agreed that force had to
be met by force, and he supported the Allied bombing of
German civilians as morally justified, yet he believed that
justification could be stretched only to cover the minimum
force necessary to achieve desired moral ends. On the facts
available this did not include the Japanese bombings.
  However, Einstein was the last man to wriggle. During
the war he wrote to a conscientious objector saying that he
had given up pacifism since he could maintain it only at
the risk of allowing the whole world to fall into the hands
of the most terrible enemies of mankind. "Organized
power can be opposed only by organized power," he went
on. "Much as I regret this, there is no other way." And
twelve years later, replying to the Japanese journal Kaizo
which had reproached him for involvement with nuclear
weapons, he wrote: "While I am a convinced pacifist there
are circumstances in which I believe the use of force is
appropriate ùnamely, in the face of an enemy
unconditionally bent on destroying me and my people."
  It is not absolutely certain that he would have agreed,
even reluctantly, with the use of nuclear weapons against
Germany if only this could have prevented her conquest of
the world; but it is a very strong assumption.

CHAPTER 21

THE CONSCIENCE OF
THE WORLD

When the war with Japan ended in August, 1945, with the
destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombsù
and the threat of more to come although no more were yet
readyùEinstein was sixty-six. He had officially retired
from the Institute for Advanced Study in April, but the
change in status was more formal than real. He still
retained his study there. He still worked on, as he had for
more than twenty years, at his search for the elusive field
theory, always a step ahead of him like a scientific will- o'
the-wisp. In some ways he appeared to have shrunk back
into the Einstein of pre-1914 days, an almost quaint
survival of the day before yesterday, smiling to the
Princeton children from his own private world, occupied
only with his science and the ways in which the laws of
nature were ordered.
  He was still the symbol of relativity, but that was an old
song, as distant from the world of the United Nations and
postwar problems as Queen Victoria or the Louisiana
Purchase. In 1933 he had been a symbol of the world's
distaste for what was happening in Germany; a rallying
point for Jewish efforts to deal with the practical problems
of the refugees. But all that, too, was now part of the past.
The world had eventually taken up arms, fought the good
fight, and was now faced with the problem of clearing up
the mess. A defeated Germany and a defeated Japan had to
be dealt with, an Italy whose status was what you liked to
make it had to be encouraged to work her passage back
into the council of nations. In Palestine it was becoming
more and more clear that the British would be unable to
hold Arabs and Jews apart much longer, and a question
mark hung over what was to follow the Mandate.
Dominating all, there loomed the riddle of Russia's
intentions and the grim thought that the worst of
American and British suspicions might be justified. None
of this seemed to belong to the world of Albert Einstein, a
combination of the century's greatest brain and dear old
gentleman.
  The situation was transformed by the publication on
August 11 of the Smyth ReportùAtomic Energy for
Military Purposes. The quiet recluse of Mercer Street
suddenly became the man who had revolutionized modern
warfare and upset both the applecart of military power and
the accepted morality of war. What is more, the E = mc2 of
1905 and the 1939 letter to President Roosevelt came from
the man whose reputation in science had once been
equaled by his position as a vociferous pacifist. This was
some consolation to scientists who did not really like
responsibility for the death of 120,000 civilians, even in
the best of causes, and to the nonscientific population,
most of whom were glad that the decision to drop the
bombs was no business of theirs. The outcome was
inevitable. Almost overnight Einstein became the
conscience of the world.
  As such he wrote, spoke, and broadcast throughout the
ten years that remained to him. His attitude to all that had
gone before August 6, 1945, was virtually limited to two
points: the claim that his only action had been to sign a
single letter to Roosevelt, and his statement that had he
known about the Frank memorandum, pleading that the
bomb should not be used on Japan without warning, then
he would have supported it. Instead of holding an inquest
on the past he looked to the future.
  Towards the end of August, 1945, he had written a
laudatory letter to Raymond Gram Swing of the American
Broadcasting Company. This brought about a meeting
between the two men. The result was Einstein's first major
public statement on nuclear affairs, "Atomic War or Peace,
by Albert Einstein as told to Raymond Swing." Although
the "as told to" formula is often open to suspicion, there is
no reason to doubt the accuracy of this example; Einstein's
views as outlined to Swing were those which he held for
the rest of his life. They are extremely revealing, not least
in the parallel they show between his atttiude to the United
Nations and to the League of Nations twenty years earlier.
  Everything was in clear black and white. "I do not believe
that the secret of the bomb should be given to the Soviet
Union. ... The secret of the bomb should be committed to a
world government, and the United States should
immediately announce its readiness to do so. Such a world
government should be established by the United States, the
Soviet Union, and Great Britain, the only three powers
which possess great military strength." All the rest sprang
from this: the invitation to the Russians to present the first
draft of a world government, "since the United States and
Great Britain have the secret of the atomic bomb and the
Soviet Union does not"; and the power of the world
government "to interfere in countries where a minority is
oppressing the majority and, therefore, is creating the kind
of instability that leads to war."
  Einstein himself admitted in the same article that the
current advantage of the United States and Britain was a
wasting asset since "we shall not have the secret of the
bomb for very long." And he admitted that conditions in
Spain and the Argentine "should be dealt with since the
abandonment of nonintervention in certain circumstances
is part of keeping the peace." Each of these two
qualifications drove a coach and horses through his main
argument. If Russia would soon have "the secret," there
would be no incentive for her to surrender her hard-earned
sovereignty to a world government whose two other
members she had every reason to distrust. And "dealing
with" Spainùor with the Argentineùwould mean an
aggressive war which would have been given little support
by any world government.
  Here, as on other occasions, Einstein handed a weapon to
his enemies. Shortly before publication of the Atlantic
Monthly article, Representative John Rankin, a Mississippi
politician of ultraconservative views, strongly attacked
Einstein in the House of Representatives for allegedly
supporting an anti-Franco organization. "This foreign
born agitator would have us plunge into another European
war in order to further the spread of communism
throughout the world," he claimed. ".... It is about time the
American people got wise to Einstein." The slightly
hysterical attack was off target since Einstein had made
every effort to prevent the organization concerned from
using his name. A few weeks later Rankin could more
reasonably have asked how Spain could be "dealt with"
without war.
  However, this was a minor point when compared with
Einstein's assumption that Russia would be willing to co-
operate in the creation of a world government. In the
prewar years, he had certainly condemned a Russia which
denied the freedoms taken for granted in a democracy. But
now the story was changed; now the heroic actions of the
Red army, without which even the power of America
might have been overstretched in the struggle against the
Axis nations, blinded him to the facts of political life.
Russia had been "the most loyal supporter of the League of
Nations." He complained that the United States, on the
question of supranational control of atomic energy, "made
only a conditional proposition, and this on terms which the
Soviet Union is determined not to accept." And when the
defection of Igor Gouzenko laid bare the scope of Russian
espionage in North America he complained, almost with
an air of surprise, that this seemed to have adversely
affected U. S.ùRussian relations. He still criticized the
Soviet Union; he still deplored her denial of academic and
scientific freedom. But in his reactions to the grave nuclear
problems of the immediate postwar years, he was
unwilling to face the unpleasant truth: that Russia, far
from being amenable to joining any supranational
organization that genuinely wielded nuclear power, was
determined to go it alone and get the bomb as well.
  Not all physicists were so remote from real lfie. Szilard
had revealed in his March, 1945, letter to Roosevelt that
he had a keen awareness of practicalities; even Bohr, in
many ways the epitome of the idealist with his head in the
clouds, had been brushed by circumstances into hard
contact with the reality of what could, and could not, be
accomplished in the immediate postwar world. And
Einstein's friend Bertrand Russell also shared the vision
he lacked. "I have no hope of reasonableness in the Soviet
government," Russell wrote to him on November 19, 1947,
after Einstein had suggested alterations in a statement on
nuclear weapons that Russell was preparing.

  I think the only hope of peace (and that a slender one) lies in
frightening Russia. I favored appeasement before 1939, wrongly,
as I now think; I do not want to repeat the same mistake....
Generally, I think it useless to make any attempt whatever to
conciliate Russia. The hope of achieving anything by this method
seems to me "wishful thinking." I came to my present view of
Soviet government when I went to Russia in 1920; all that has
happened since has made me feel more certain that I was right.

  Einstein's attitude was very different. Just how different
was revealed by an interview which he gave in the summer
of 1946 to Norman Thomas, the veteran socialist leader.
Einstein personally approved a record of the interview
which shows that in discussion of an international security
force he "suggested that it might be well to have Russians
in the service of the world organization stationed in
America, and Americans stationed in Russia." An analogy
was given of "the way in which the old Austro- Hungarian
empire allocated the troops of the different nationalities
comprising it." It is difficult to know whether public
raising of the idea would have done world government
more harm in the United States or in the Soviet Union.
  Einstein's implied confidence that the Russians would
cooperate is doubly surprising since he had only recently
been given a good illustration of the reverse. He had
agreed, together with a number of other scientists and
intellectuals, to contribute to One World or None, a book
designed to inform the American public of the new
situation created by the bomb, and a message asking
Russian scientists to do so was sent over his name to the
president of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. After
considerable delay, and apparently much lobbying, the
request was refused. President Vavilov, replying for those
who had been asked, noted that "because of technical
difficulties they are deprived of the possibility to express
their concrete opinion with respect to the facts proposed
for publication."
  Any doubts about the Russian attitude were dispelled in
November, 1947, after Einstein had written an "Open
Letter to the General Assembly of the United Nations" for
United Nations World. This called for a strengthening of
the United Nations, criticized the veto with which the
Russians were hamstringing operations, and made a
further plea for world government. Russian reaction came
the following month in an Open Letter on "Dr. Einstein's
Mistaken Notions...," signed by four leading Russian
scientists, including Vavilov and A. F. JoffΘ, Einstein's old
friend of Berlin days. There was fulsome praise for
Einstein, followed by a recapitulation of Russia's struggle
against Allied intervention after the First World War, and
of her fight against Germany in the Second. "And now,"
the letter continued, "the proponents of a 'world super-
state' are asking us voluntarily to surrender this
independence for the sake of a 'world government' which
is nothing but a flamboyant signboard for the world
supremacy of the capitalist monopolies."
  The replyùregarded even by Einstein as a "semiofficial
statement"ùwould have been enough to knock most men
from the argument. Einstein hung on. But it is significant
that when in April, 1948, the Emergency Committee of
Atomic Scientists endorsed the idea of world government
in a major policy statement, it noted that "this cannot be
achieved overnight." Einstein had argued that something
almost as instant was essential.
  The Emergency Committee, the most prestigious of the
early postwar bodies which attempted to guide the public
into the nuclear age, was one over whose activities
Einstein at first appears to have exercised considerable
influence. He had been an early member of the National
Committee on Atomic Information, formed to represent
more than fifty educational, religious, and civic
organizations. In 1946 this took on the job of satisfying the
ever-growing demand for information about the real
implications of the bomb. It was soon clear that this was a
professional task demanding a new organization headed by
an impressive name to give it moral and scientific
standing. Harold Oram, a New York fund raiser, believed
that $20,000 a month might be raised, and was soon in
Princeton visiting Einstein. "What happened next is not
entirely clear," says Alice Kimball Smith in her detailed
analysis of the scientists' movement in America, A Peril
and a Hope. "Perhaps Oram and Einstein together
proposed an 'emergency committee,' though one observer
suspects that the vagueness of the original proposals left
Einstein somewhat out on a limb from which Szilard,
Urey, and others united to rescue him." Whatever the
details, the outcome was the Emergency Committee of
Atomic Scientists, with Einstein as president and
chairman of trustees, Harold Urey as vice-president and
vice-chairman, and Szilard, Weisskopf, Linus Pauling, and
Hans Bethe among the other trustees.
  With headquarters in Princeton and offices in Chicago
and Madison Avenueùthe latter soon graced by the
Epstein bust of Einsteinùthe committee went into action.
On May 23, 1946, an appeal went out over Einstein's
signature for $200,000 to be spent on "a nationwide
campaign to inform the American people that a new type
of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move
toward higher levels," and less than a fortnight later he
recorded a similar appeal for the newsreels. Later, in June,
his views were given in a long interview with Michael
Amrine published in the New York Times. It stressed the
need for "a great chain reaction of awareness and
communication," and made the point that to "maintain the
threat of military power" was to "cling to old methods in a
world which is changed forever." Soon afterwards came
formal incorporation in the state of New Jersey of the
Emergency Committee, followed by a conference in
Princeton in November; and, early in 1947, another appeal
over Einstein's name, this time for $1 million to enable the
trustees "to carry to our fellow citizens an understanding of
the simple facts of atomic energy and its implications for
society." But the appeal also noted that "this basic power
of the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concept
of narrow nationalisms." Whether true or not, this
immediately added political overtones to what was
basically an appeal for educational funds, and produced a
critical reaction from those who did not believe that peace
would be made more secure by appeals to world
government. Not all protests came from the back-
woodsmen. Thus Dr. Charles G. Abbot of the Smithsonian
Institution wrote to Einstein saying:

  A long life has satisfied me that the pledged word of treaties,
public opinion, and confederations are all powerless to prevent
unscrupulous leaders from aggressive measures. As for world
government, I regard the very idea as chimerical for centuries to
come. Also one country, now and for many years, has been at war
with us by spying methods.
  Recognizing fully the truth of your two propositions (a) no
secret (b) no defense (that is materially), I feel that our only
chance lies in T. Roosevelt's famous saying "Walk softly but
carry a big stick." That has a psychological power....
  With these convictions, I think the Emergency Committee
will be doing a disservice to this nation. For they will tend to
cause people to rely on agreements, which will be broken
reeds, no better.

  Another correspondent, arguing that the Russians would
"continue to bicker and refuse to submit to any kind of
disarmament and [would] insist on impossible demands
from the Western world only to gain time to perfect their
own weapons," claimed that the time to press demands for
a genuinely free world had been when the Russians were
hard put to it at Stalingrad.
  Despite criticisms which made the most of the
Emergency Committee's tendency, difficult to avoid, of
mixing straight nuclear education with political
implications, the work went on successfully until the
immediate postwar need for it ended. The committee gave
widespread support to educational work and kept the
incomparable Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists afloat
through a stormy financial period. As its chairman,
Einstein in November, 1947, received the annual award of
the Foreign Press Association "in recognition of his valiant
efforts to make the world's nations understand the need of
outlawing atomic energy as a means of war, and of
developing it as an instrument of peace." He wrote, spoke,
gave interviews, and drew on his often scanty reserves of
health and energy to an extent which went beyond the call
of duty. His output, always well intentioned and sometimes
extremely percipient, if inevitably repetitious and usually
unavailing, is well chronicled in Einstein on Peace.
  Yet it is clear from the papers of the committee, as from
the detailed analysis of the scientists' movement in
America given by Alice Kimball Smith, that the effect of
what Einstein said and did during this period was
extremely limited. After the great wash of words subsided
the breakwaters still remained. Weisskopf, a member of
the committee, puts it this way: "I do not remember that
Einstein ever had any influence on our discussions. He
very rarely took part in them. His only help was the
influence of his name. He was not much informed about
the details of the problems and tried to stay away from any
decision-making discussions."
  As far as the U. S. manufacture of the hydrogen bomb
was concerned, Einstein's honesty combined with his
common sense to limit his effectiveness. He was of course
against it. But when asked to use his influence to delay the
decision he replied that such an idea "seems to me quite
impracticable. As long as competitive armament prevails,
it will not be possible to halt the process in one country."
As with immediate postwar control of atomic bombs, he
saw the issue in all-or-nothing terms; and it was even more
difficult to dissuade the authorities now than it had been to
encourage them to carry out work "with greater speed and
on a larger scale" in the spring of 1940.
  Apart from his obsession for getting back to the scientific
work forever playing round in his brainùas dominant now
as it had been when in a letter to Weizmann he had
qualified the help he could give Zionism[Discussed elsewhere]
Einstein's personal role was circumscribed by two other
factors. One was his ignorance of the scientific-military
machinery that had been built as the Manhattan Project
grew from 1942 onwards. Szilard and Weisskopf and
Bethe, as well as Compton and many others, knew how the
machine worked. Einstein hardly knew what its parts
were. This ignorance was compounded by his instinctive
dislike of mixing with the men in command. As J. Robert
Oppenheimer once put it, "he did not have that convenient
and natural converse with statesmen and men of power
that was quite appropriate to Rutherford and Bohr, perhaps
the two physicists of this century who most nearly rivaled
him in eminence."
  Einstein's strength lay less in diplomatic haggling and
compromise than in the bold imaginative gesture outside
the normal round. Thus it is doubly galling that he should
have missed by a hair's-breadth one great chance of
making a decisive impact on the postwar nuclear debate.
The chance was all but presented by Weizmann, who in
December, 1945, conceived an ambitious idea for bringing
Einstein to what was still Palestine. He planned to utilize
Alexander Sachs, who had been brought in by Szilard six
years previously, and if it was probably bad tactics to
remind Einstein of the part he had played in prodding
forward nuclear weapons, this is the only flaw in the
scheme outlined in Weizmann's "Suggested Draft Letter to
Professor Einstein." "Reflecting upon the impetus that you
gave in 1939 to an enterprise that telescoped in a few years
what otherwise might have taken a generation to
accomplish," this said, "I have been moved to ask our good
friend Alex to play once more an intermediary role and to
submit to you some thoughts of mine regarding a unique
service that I fervently hope you will find yourself in a
position to render to the Yishur [general settlement] in
Palestine and to the furtherance of science." The service
was a visit to the country in the spring of 1946, and
Weizmann quickly tried to deal with the obvious
objections.

  Such a visit can be arranged to conform to the very
requirements of your personal physician by assuring that the
travel is direct from here to Haifa, that is, without any change,
under the most comfortable accommodation available for yourself
together with medical and other aides, not only for the journey
but also in Palestine. For this we would consult with and be
guided by what your physician recommends. Indeed, a stay of a
month to six weeks in Palestineùsay from the middle of April to
the end of Mayùcould be made to be beneficial for your health,
as it would certainly tone up the body and the spirit of Jewry.

  However, this was not all. The cornerstone of a new
Institute of Science was to be laid that spring. "In
connection with the inauguration of this institute,"
Weizmann went on,

  it has occurred to me that a select number of those who had
contributed importantly to the telescoped fruition of atomic
research and its application could be invited for the occasion,
jointly by the Hebrew University and the Institute, and to
contribute to a symposium on the import of that research for
human progress and peace. Such a group to be selected, with
your aid, as representative of the £cumenical order of science
instead of only the nations involved in the atomic bomb
production, might thus issue from Palestine not only a synthesis
of the current scie ntificview but a message "for the healing of
the nations and humanity."

  This was the grand scheme which Weizmann conceived.
He finally wrote on December 28, and shortly afterwards
the letter was in Sachs' hands. Sachs drove to Princeton,
handed it over, and then took a short stroll with Einstein.
During the walk they discussed the proposal, and on their
return to Mercer Street Einstein said he would consider
making the journey if Sachs would come too. "But then,"
says Sachs, "some twinge experienced by him and
reflected in his face led him to say: 'But my poor health
doesn't permit.' The letter was handed back to me...."
  But the rejected invitation contained only the first half of
Weizmann's initial idea, the visit to Palestine. There was
no mention of atomic research, of a symposium on the
importance of nuclear research for human progress and
peace, or of a message "for the healing of the nations and
humanity." What Einstein rejected was the idea of a
simple visitùthinking, no doubt, of "the ado and the fuss
and the consequent duties" which he had spoken of to
Schr÷dinger in 1934. Whether he would have rejected the
more significant appeal is another matter.
  Einstein's influence on the development of postwar
nuclear attitudes was thus at first glance a good deal less
than mythology suggests. His ideas for world government,
in which he wrapped up so tightly the solution of the
nuclear dilemma, were considered wildly impractical by
those with experience of day-to-day international relations,
while those who favored them rarely appreciated that they
rested on force as surely as the policies of the Pentagon or
the Kremlin. The hamstringing of the May- Johnson Bill,
which would have put nuclear energy in the hands of the
military and which Einstein disliked, was largely the work
of men from the Manhattan Project, spurred on by Szilard.
And it is difficult to point to any one act of government,
any decisive swing of public opinion, and unhesitatingly
declare: "Without Einstein, things would have been
different."
  Yet Einstein was, to most, the one figure inextricably
linked with the bomb, the man who sincerely regretted the
way in which it had been used. His name still caught the
eye. Even without the resplendent halo of hair which made
him a photographer's delight, he retained more than a
touch of the guru. Ordinary people listened to him. So, to
varying extents, did the men who were in the front line of
the postwar battle to control nuclear energy. It was not a
popular battle to fight and it was one in which their
opponents could summon upùwith different degrees of
justificationùpatriotism, common sense, and the will of
the people. It was fortifying, therefore, that they could
count on the moral support of a man like Einstein;
however wooly his proposals for action might be, he was a
man whom most people felt, and usually with good reason,
sensed right from wrong with almost uncanny intuition.
Therefore it would not be right to underrate the unrecorded
influence that Einstein may well have had on others:
although he can be credited with no great victory, his mere
presence added to the moral muscle of those who claimed
that the great issues of nuclear weapons should be argued
out with reason rather than emotion. Thus there are two
perfectly defendable views of Einstein's influence on
nuclear thinking during the postwar decade. He did more
than his adversaries claimed even if he did less than his
well-wishers sometimes imagine.
  Einstein's concern with the nuclear debate logically drew
him out into two other discussions which spread across
America as scientists discovered themselves unexpectedly
in the corridors of power and as the nation began to argue
about the new situation which had been created. One dealt
with the social responsibilities of science and scientists;
the other with civil liberties and academic freedom, a
subject which grew in importance as the rights and wrongs
of nuclear rearmament became inextricably entangled with
both national and international politics.
  As far as science was concerned, the nature of Einstein's
work had from the early days tended to shield him from
the ways in which science could be exploited for good or
evil. For him science was an investigation of the laws of
nature. Certainly his old friend Haber exploited these laws
in the cause of gas warfare, but that was surely only a
temporary aberration? Surely the "small group of scholars
and intellectuals" whom he had described to Ehrenfest in
1915 as forming "the only 'fatherland' which is worthy of
serious concern to people like ourselves," was a group
which must be above the battle?
  This attitude had begun to change in the years that
immediately followed the First World War. The movement
was speeded up by the coming of the Nazis, and when even
his good friend von Laue told him in 1933 "that the
scientist should observe silence in political matters, i.e.,
human affairs in the broader sense," he had been forced to
reply that he did not share the view. The evolution
continued. From regarding scientists as a group almost
aloof from the rest of the world, he began to consider them
first as having responsibilities and rights on a level with
the rest of men, and finally as a group whose exceptional
position demanded the exercise of exceptional
responsibilities. "By painful experience," he wrote in a
message to the World Congress of Intellectuals held in
Wroclaw (Breslau) in 1948,

  we have learned that rational thinking does not suffice to solve
the problems of our social life. . . . We scientists, whose tragic
destiny it has been to help make the methods of annihilation ever
more gruesome and more effective, must consider it our solemn
and transcendent duty to do all in our power in preventing these
weapons from being used for the brutal purpose for which they
were invented. What task could possibly be more important to
us? What social aim could be closer to our hearts?[Einstein's
friend, Otto Nathan, took the message to the Congress. The tone
of the meeting was anti-American and Nathan was asked to
delete a number of passages from Einstein's message, notably
those dealing with the need for a supranational organization. He
refused. The organizers thereupon read as "Einstein's message"
a totally different letter which he had previously written to the
Franco-Polish Organizing Committee.]

  "The bomb" lay at the heart of the problem. But Einstein
well knew that the position of the scientist in society had
been radically altered by other developments and that in
many fields other than nuclear physics new guidelines had
to be drawn. Here his views were realistic rather than
starry-eyed. Just as he saw science and religion as
complementary, one searching for the "whats" while the
other sought the "whys," so did he look upon an
understanding of science as necessary to good government.
But he was willing to render unto Caesar only those things
which were Caesar's; and he would have experienced little
of the fashionable shock at the view that scientists should
be "on tap but not on top." Einstein's own position was put
squarely in his address at the Nobel anniversary dinner in
New York in December, 1945. "We physicists are not
politicians, nor has it ever been our wish to meddle in
political affairs," he said. "However, we happen to know a
few things that the politicians do not know, and we feel it
our duty to speak up and remind those in responsible
positions that there can be no easy escape into
indifference; that there is no time left for petty bargaining
and procrastination." Yet Einstein himself provides no
guide to the place that scientists should or should not
occupy outside their own fields. Einstein was, even more
obviously than most human beings, a one-off model. His
genius was linked with attributes not only of the saint but
also of the rogue elephant, and scientists in government, at
whatever level they operate or advise, must be counter
balanced by the more humdrum qualities. As Rutherford
showed, they need not lack the sparks of the great
imaginative mind; as Szilard showed, they can retain a
quirkiness fringing on eccentricity. But if they are to serve
without disaster they must have something less than
Einstein's white-hot fanaticism and must devote more time
than he did to ordinary men and women.
  On academic freedom, on the right of minorities to
disagree, and on what he considered the almost sacred
duty of dissent, emotion tied in with intellect, for his life
had been marked by a long series of rear-guard actions in
support of temporarily retreating causes. In Germany,
between the wars, his attitude was epitomized by the
Gumbel case in which he publicly supported the pacifist
professor of Heidelberg University's department of
philosophy, almost harried from his post by nationalist
attacks. In the United States, after 1945, he threw his
support wholeheartedly behind those who defied the draft
law on grounds of conscience and, later, those who refused
to incriminate themselves before the House Un-American
Activities Committee. But the editors of Einstein on Peace
have stressed that "Einstein, who passionately defended
the intellectual and moral freedom of the individual,
frequently emphasized with equal conviction the
obligations which a truly free individual must assume
toward the community of which he is an integral part."
Thus the long list of cases and letters which they quote
exhibits a splendid reserve. Einstein is as careful to be fair,
to hold the balance between individual and public interest,
as he had been almost forty years earlier when helping to
draw up the "Manifesto to Europeans."
  Not until 1953 did he at last boil over. The case was that
of William Frauenglass, a Brooklyn teacher called to give
evidence before one of the congressional committees
investigating political beliefs and associations. Frauenglass
approached Einstein and Einstein replied with a letter
which he said "need not be considered 'confidential.'" It
was published in the New York Times on June 12 and its
point was made in three central paragraphs. "The problem
with which the intellectuals of this country are confronted
is very serious," he began.

  Reactionary politicians have managed to instill suspicions of all
intellectual efforts into the public by dangling before their eyes a
danger from without. Having succeeded so far, they are now
proceeding to suppress the freedom of teaching and to deprive of
their positions all those who do not prove submissive, i.e., to
starve them out.
  What ought the minority of intellectuals to do against this
evil? Frankly, I can only see the revolutionary way of
noncooperation in the sense of Gandhi's. Every intellectual
who is called before one of the committees ought to refuse to
testify, i.e., he must be prepared for jail and economic ruin, in
short, for the sacrifice of his personal welfare in the interests
of the cultural welfare of his country.
  However, this refusal to testify must not be based on the
well-known subterfuge of invoking the Fifth Amendment
against possible self-incrimination, but on the assertion that it
is shameful for a blameless citizen to submit to such an
inquisition and that this kind of inquisition violates the spirit
of the Constitution.

  The claim that it is wrong to obey the law when it is a
really bad one brought down on Einstein's head the
anticipated bucketload of hot coals. The New York Times
said in an editorial that "to employ the unnatural and
illegal forces of civil disobedience, as Professor Einstein
advises, is in this case to attack one evil with another." A
majority of papers followed suit, while in academic circles
support was less than Einstein might have expected. "If
enough people are ready to take this grave step," he had
concluded after advocating a refusal to testify, "they will
be successful. If not then the intellectuals of this country
deserve nothing better than the slavery which is intended
for them."
  He continued to be unhappy and in November, 1954,
commenting on The Reporter's articles on the situation of
scientists in America, made one of his most quoted
statements: "If I would be a young man again and had to
decide how to make my living, I would not try to become a
scientist or scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be
a plumber or a peddler in the hope to find that modest
degree of independence still available under present
circumstances." This brought down a rebuke for being so
willing to abandon the scientific ship. He replied in a letter
published only after his death. "I want to suggest," he said,

  that the practices of those ignoramuses who use their public
positions of power to tyrannize over profesional intellectuals
must not be accepted by intellectuals without a struggle. Spinoza
followed this rule when he turned down a professorship at
Heidelberg and (unlike Hegel) decided to earn his living in a way
that would not force him to mortgage his freedom. The only
defense a minority has is passive resistance.

  Just where some of the intellectuals stood was not quite
clear and earlier in the year there had been an incident
whose significance was not appreciated at the time. On
March 13, 1954, some 200 educators, clergymen, and
authors met in Princeton for a conference on "The
Meaning of Academic Freedom," held by the Emergency
Civil Liberties Committee in observance of Einstein's
seventy- fifth birthday the following day. He answered, in
writing, a number of questions which had been put to him.
But he did not attend the conference, held in the Nassau
Inn only a few hundred yards from Mercer Street. Norman
Thomas, the veteran socialist leader, has given a clue to
the reason. Thomas had intervened in the celebrations, he
has written, at the request both of the American
Committee for Cultural Freedom and the American Jewish
Committee, and with the approval of J. Robert
Oppenheimer, the Director of the Institute for Advanced
Study. At that juncture in American affairs, he has said,
there was worry that Dr. Einstein's name would be
exploited, not for the defense of civil liberties but for the
aggrandizement of a committee, some of whose members
and spokesmen were stated to have been at last pretty
indiscriminate apologists for communism. Almost to the
end Einstein remained the object of manipulation and
countermanipulation.
  Thus on the central problem of the bomb, which had
transformed the world even though the world was reluctant
to admit it, on the responsibilities of science and the
academic freedom to discuss what should be done about
them, his attitude was forecastable and clearcut. As the
conscience of the world he might be na∩ve but he was
morally impregnable. But Einstein was also the German
who had turned from his country twice, the German Jew
who was appalled at the way the Germans had treated the
Jews. Here, if anywhere, was the touchstone of how he
really felt about the human race. And here, as he had
written to Ehrenfest in another context thirty years
previously, "impulse was stronger than judgment." Here
Einstein, as though reflecting the dichotomy that so often
marks his life, succeeded in matching white with black.
His first impulse, conditioned by the Luitpold Gymnasium
if not entirely governed by it, and certainly remembered
with disadvantages through the years, had been to detest
the Prussians and the Prussian spirit, an attitude which
during the First World War had substituted "German" for
"Prussian." A transformation had been worked by Weimar
and reinforced by the events of the immediate postwar
year, so that by September, 1919, he was writing that it
was "a priori incredible that the inhabitants of a whole
great country should be branded as morally inferior." Soon
he was subordinating early impulse to fresh judgment,
stressing how wrong it was to categorize men by the places
in which they had been born. And throughout the 1920s,
shunning Solvay because Germans were excluded as
Germans, happy to be fΩted in Berlin as the republic's
unofficial ambassador returned from America and Britain,
innocently thinking that bygones were bygones, Einstein
became a symbol of the international man for whom
condemnation of a nation as a nation was a mistake as
much as a crime.
  The coming of Hitler brought impulse to the fore again.
With the fervor of all lapsed converts, Einstein once more
began to see the problem in terms of unshaded black and
white. "The Germans," he told one visitor seeking his
views in 1935, "are cruel. No people in the world take such
delight in cruelty as they do. I thought I knew Germans,
but during the past two years I have learned to know better
the cruelty of which they are capable." After Hitler had
reoccupied the Rhineland, he wrote that "Germans believe
in an unwritten tradition that good faith and compliance
with agreements should be practiced only among
themselves, but are not extended to foreigners and foreign
countries." And, forgetting his own reactions to Weimar,
he noted of Germany that "The nation has been on the
decline mentally and morally since 1870." The outbreak of
war reinforced his feeling. "Behind the Nazi party," he
said, "stands the German people, who elected Hitler after
he had in his book and in his speeches made his shameful
intentions clear beyond the possibility of
misunderstanding." And asked what educational measures
should be taken in Germany after the war, he had a simple
reply: "The Germans can be killed or constrained, but they
cannot be re-educated to a democratic way of thinking and
acting within a foreseeable period of time."
  All this was understandable, even if it was not rational.
In wartime it had a stern plausibility, and the horrors of
the concentration camps revealed by the defeat of Germany
did not make it less so. Yet if the catalogue of war and
recrimination was not to continue forever, generation by
generation, someone had to stretch a hand across the gap
that appeared to separate two different kinds of human and
discover what was reality and what mirage. Two decades
back Einstein had not looked on "reconciliation" as a dirty
word.
  Yet now, with the peace, his black detestation of all
things German reasserted itself. It was not only the
rearming of Germany as a providentially supplied weapon
against Russia that he detested. That was enough to stick
in the gullets of many decent men. Einstein's detestation
went deeper, was more irrational, ignored the forgiveness
of both Jews and Germans who had suffered far more than
he. At heart, perhaps he could never forgive the fact that
he himself had been born a German. The result looks today
like a deep chink in his humanity.
  He thought it was essential to prevent Germans from
obtaining great political power and noted that "this cannot
be accomplished if the Germans are once more allowed to
own and exploit their raw materials resources without
outside control." And the Einstein who had resigned from
the League committee when the French marched into the
Ruhr now wrote: "If the Ruhr is left to the Germans the
terrible sacrifices of the English-speaking world will have
been in vain." Einstein, with Morgenthau, would have
been happy to see the Reich transformed from an industrial
nation into an agricultural country, and his old friend
James Franck, appealing for a relaxation of postwar
restraints in Germany, received a dusty answer: "I am
firmly convinced that it is absolutely indispensable to
prevent the restoration of German industrial power for
many years," he was told. ". . . I firmly object to any
attempt from Jewish quarters to reawaken the kind of soft
sentimental feelings which permitted Germany to prepare
a war of aggression without any interference on the part of
the rest of the worldùand this long before the Nazis came
to power.... Should your appeal be circulated, I shall not
fail to do whatever I can to oppose it." And the merest hint
that Churchill, not notably soft on the Germans, might let
them work their passage back to respectability brought a
brusque comment in a letter to Janos Plesch. "Cannot you
see to it that your Churchill is put into cold storage until
the next national calamity," he wrote. "Otherwise his
activity will cause one unnecessarily."
  His attitude towards Germany at the personal level was
even more revealing than his views on the position that the
country should occupy in the postwar world. Its tone was
set in his uncompromising reply to Arnold Sommer- feld,
who in October, 1946, invited him to rejoin the Bavarian
Academy. "It was a real joy for me to receive your letter
after all these dark years," Einstein replied. "None of us
would have dreamed of all the horror we have been
through." He went on, "The Germans slaughtered my
Jewish brethren; I will have nothing further to do with
them, not even with a relatively harmless academy. I feel
differently about the few people who, insofar as it was
possible, remained steadfast against Nazism. I am happy to
learn that you were among them." Others were presumably
von Laue and Planck, as well as Hahn and Heisenberg, by
now president and director respectively of the Max Planck
Institute with which the Allied occupation authorities had
replaced the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.
  Otto Hahn himself asked whether Einstein would become
a foreign member of the new organization. He was met
with a firm "No." Although Hahn was "one of the few men
who remained decent," Einstein said, "the conduct of the
German intellectualsùseen as a groupùwas no better
than that of the mob." He refused to become an honorary
member of a society much after his own heart, the German
Association of World Government. He refused to become
an honorary citizen of Ulm, or of West Berlin. His
resolution was shown in a letter written by his secretary
about a German Foreign Office official. "As he did not
resign from his office when Hitler came to power," she
said, "Professor Einstein has no interest in him
whatsoeverùdespite his Jewish wife." And when
President Heuss told him of plans to reform the Peace
Section of the former Prussian order "Pour le MΘrite," he
was told by Einstein: "Because of the mass murder which
the Germans inflicted upon the Jewish people, it is evident
that a self-respecting Jew could not possibly wish to be
associated in any way with any official German institution.
The renewal of my membership in the Pour le MΘrite order
is therefore out of the question."
  The same unforgiving spirit was shown in a letter to his
old friend Born in September, 1950. "I have not changed
my attitude to the Germans which, by the way, dates not
just from the Nazi period," this went. "All human beings
are more or less the same from birth. The Germans,
however, have a far more dangerous tradition than any of
the other so-called civilized nations. The present behavior
of these other nations towards the Germans merely proves
to me how little human beings learn from their most
painful experiences." And two years later, when Born
retired from his post at Edinburgh and moved to Bad
Pyrmont in northern Germany, he was taken to task for
"migrating back to the land of the mass murderers of our
kinsmen." Born, noting that the German Quakers had
their headquarters in Bad Pyrmont, replied in a letter that
contained two points. "They are no mass murderers," he
said, and "many of our friends there suffered far worse
thing under the Nazis than you or I." And then, no doubt
remembering his own refusal to work on nuclear weapons
and Einstein's letter to Roosevelt, he went on: "The
Americans have demonstrated in Dresden, Hiroshima, and
Nagasaki that in sheer speed of extermination they surpass
even the Nazis."
  This was perhaps a failure to compare like with like; and
Einstein's feelings, like Born's, were those of the now
distant 1950s. Memories of the gas chambers, of Dresden
and Hiroshima, were then stronger. Some of Einstein's
friends, putting in a plea of mitigation for his attitude,
believe that maybe a few more years would have made a
difference. Later events might, just possibly, have
discouraged what was dangerously near an inverted
Herrenvolk doctrine that appealed to race as much as to
the history of that last 100 years. In particular, Einstein
might have been swayedùirrationally, but swayed
neverthelessù by the eventual accession to power of the
Social Democrats. He had been swung round full circle in
1919 and although he later wrote that "the postwar
democratic constitution of the Weimar Republic fitted the
German people about as well as the giant's clothes fitted
Tom Thumb," he might well have admitted that Brandt's
Germany could turn over a new leaf, a concession he
would never give to Adenauer's or to Ulbricht's.
  This is possible; but it looks unlikely. By the end of the
Second World War Einstein was refusing to see Hitler as
the scapΘgoat of the popular papers; what was wrong was
not a madman but that such a figure could express the will
of the thousands burning deep. What he had experienced
at the Luitpold Gymnasium was not the exception but the
norm. If he thought back seriously to the halcyon days of
Weimar, when for a few years it seemed that a new
Germany was rising from the old, he thought also of the
old saying, "Once bitten, twice shy." Even had he
experienced a twinge of doubt, even had he started to be
influenced by Born's arguments, by the dictates of
common sense or by the growing evidence of a postwar
German spirit very different from the old, he might have
thought it wrong to change his stance. By now he was too
much a symbol of all that Jewry had suffered at Germany's
hands; by now, for Einstein, reason would have been
treason.
  It was in this frame of mind that in the autumn of 1947
he heard of the death of Max Planck, that servant of the
state whose first son had been killed at Verdun and whose
second had been executed by his own countrymen after the
attempt to kill Hitler in 1944. Einstein's attitude was
curiously in contrast to that of Born. The physicist who
had returned to live in "the land of mass murderers" wrote
somewhat critically of Planck as the man in whom "the
Prussian tradition of service to the state and allegiance to
the government was deeply rooted ... I think he trusted that
violence and oppression would subside in time and
everything return to normal. He did not see that an
irreversible process was going on." Einstein remembered
another side to Planck. He had, significantly enough, not
written to him since the end of the war. Now the man who
hated the Prussian spirit wrote to the widow of the man
who typified at least some elements of that spirit.
  "Your husband has come to the end of his days after
doing great things and suffering bitterly," he wrote.

  It was a beautiful and fruitful period that I was allowed to live
through with him. His gaze was directed on eternal truths, yet he
played an active part in all that concerned humanity and the
world around him. How different, and how much better it would
be for mankind, if there were more like him. But this cannot be;
it seems that fine characters in every age and continent must
remain apart from the world, unable to influence events.
  The hours which I was allowed to spend in your house, and
the many close conversations which I had with your dear
husband, will remain among my happiest memories for the
rest of my life. Nothing can alter the fact that a tragic event
has affected us both. May you draw comfort in your days of
loneliness from the thought that you brought happiness and
contentment into the life of your respected husband. From this
distant place I share your grief and greet you with all the
former affection.

  When it came to Planck, and to the scientific spirit that
he stood for, it was as if the years between 1913 and 1947
had not existed. Even so, it was a generous letter.
  Yet Einstein, who ruled out any reconciliation between
Germany and the rest of the world in general, let alone
between Germany and the Jews, still hoped for something
comparable between Jews and Arabs. For this reason he
had campaigned against the creation of yet another nation
state, putting his views clearly in one typical statement to
the National Labor Committee for Palestine. "My
awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the
idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a
measure of temporal power, no matter how modest," he
said. "I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will
sustainùespecially from the development of a narrow
nationalism within our own ranks, against which we have
already had to fight strongly, even without a Jewish state."
But in the postwar world other ethnic and religious groups
were trying to give themselves the covering of political
independence. Now it was certain that a Jewish state
would arise from the ruins of the Mandate.
  Nor was this all. With the British desperately trying to
restrict immigration during the last months of their
control, extremists increasingly took the law into their own
hands. It was not only the rise of Hitler that justified the
use of force; in Palestine the situation quickly degenerated
into guerrilla warfare. And now Einstein decided to
swallow his pacifism once again.
  In the spring of 1948 Lina Kocherthaler, Einstein's
cousin in Montevideo, was approached by those wishing to
raise funds for the Haganah, the Jewish resistance
movement in Palestine. Would Einstein send them a letter
which could be sold by auction? Einstein not only replied
by return mail, on May 4, 1948, ten days before the end of
the Palestine Mandate, but enclosed a declaration headed:
"To my Jewish brothers in Montevideo" which revealingly
outlines his position.

  If we wait until the Great Powers and the United Nations
fulfill their commitments to us then our Palestinian brothers
will be under the ground before this is accomplished. These
people have done the only thing possible in the present
deplorable conditions of the world. They have taken their
destiny in their own hands and fought for their rights. This
they may be able to do successfully in the long run, if the rest
of the world's Jews help them. Our Palestinians show
themselves in this just as capable and resolute as in the
economic field.
  On the destiny of our Palestinians will depend, in the long
run, the destiny of the remaining Jews in the world. For no
one respects or bothers about those who do not fight for their
rights. We may regret that we have to use methods which are
repulsive and stupid to us, methods of which the human race
has not yet been able to free itself. But to help bring about
better conditions in the international sphere, we must first of
all maintain our existence by all means at our disposal.

  On the arrival of this letter it was decided to form in
Montevideo a committee of Jewish academics, and to hold
a banquet at which the letter could be auctioned. The
banquet was on July 17; and most of the moneyùroughly
$5,000ùcame from the buyer of the Einstein letter.
  Thus the instinctive pacifist was once more driven into
admitting that force was necessary. Further, the arms
which he detested were now to create a nation-state which
he believed to be contrary to genuine Jewish needs. "In this
last priod of the fulfillment of our dreams there was but
one thing that weighed heavily upon me," he said in a
statement to the Hebrew University in 1949; "the fact that
we were compelled by the adversities of our situation to
assert our rights through force of arms; it was the only way
to avert complete annihilation." This regret, mixed with
perplexity at the juxtaposition of good ends and evil
means, remained with him for the rest of his life. With his
failure to move opinion an inch along the road to nuclear
control through world government, and his refusal to
budge from an almost draconian approach to Germany, it
completes a trilogy. Only science mitigated these tragedies,
a field in which he was both humble enough to see his life
as a link in a long chain, and confident enough to know
that he had been essential.

CHAPTER 22

TWO STARS
AT THE END OF
THE ROCKET

Einstein's nonscientific interests after the Second World
War were parallel to those which followed the war of
1914-18. Then he had wanted to abolish all weapons, to
bring Germany back into the comity of Europe and help
create a Jewish homeland that would not be a nationstate;
now his aims were control of nuclear weapons, a Germany
safe within an economic straitjacket, and the survival of
Israel. There were other comparisons which suggest that
outside science as well as inside it, Einstein would always
be cast as the lonely and tragic figure. Not least was the
feeling that America of the later 1940s was tying him with
the bonds he had first felt in the Germany of the 1920s.
The country of his adoption seemed to be going the same
way as the country of his birth.
  Pessimism about America, an intuitive fear for its future,
developed in Einstein long before it was felt by most of his
American colleagues. There was reason enough for this.
He worked on at the institute as he had worked on at the
Kaiser Wilhelm. He listened to the distortions of his own
stand on nuclear weapons much as he had listened to
descriptions of the General Theory as part of an
international Jewish conspiracy. And as Senator Joseph
McCarthy swam into power, kept afloat on a sea of
ignorance, he no doubt remembered that "the great masses
of the people ... will more easily fall victims to a great lie
than to a small one." The whole scene began to look
uncomfortably familiar.
  "America," he wrote to Janos Plesch in the autumn of
1947, "has changed pretty much since 1928. It has become
pretty military and aggressive. The fear of Russia is the
means of making it digestible to the plebs. As one of the
younger Don Quixotes I preach against it even here, but
without any prospect of success." Not only was there no
prospect of success, but his reaction to the pressures which
built up as the cold war grew in intensity made him again
the target for attack. In Germany he had thought of
emigration many times before he had been forced to go.
Now, according to his relatives in South America, to
whom he confided his feelings and fears in a long series of
intimate letters, he "considered leaving the United States
and finding another home in which scholarship and the
things of the spirit were guaranteed more freedom."
  He decided to stay. One cannot be sure how serious was
his thought of emigrating once again. But however deep
his misgivings about America, however strongly he at
times felt that the lunatic fringe was in control, he retained
some faith that the country would eventually solve its
dilemmas without the episodes of self-destruction which
seemed such a recurrent feature of German history. He
hoped on, so that five years after his Don Quixote letter to
Plesch, he could write to him more equably. I still lose my
temper dutifully about politics," he said, "but I no longer
flap my wingsùI only ruffle my feathers. The majority of
fools remain invincible." He had got over the hump. He
was determined to stick it out in Princeton, and a note of
resignation was beginning to creep into his letters. "It is a
curious drama in which we all appear," he wrote to his
cousin Lina in South America, a relative on the Koch side
of the family; "good, when one does not take it too
seriously. The play has neither beginning nor end and only
the players change." And to FrΣulein Markwalder, the
daughter of his old landlady in Zurich, with whom he had
sailed on the Zurichsee half a century before: "I have been
in America now for seventeen years without having
adopted anything of this country's mentality. One has to
guard against becoming superficial in thought and feeling;
it lies in the air here. You have never changed your human
surroundings and you can hardly realize what it is to be an
old gypsy. It is not so bad."
  Attempts were made to coax him to Israel. "He said he
was too old," reports Brodetsky, who visited him in 1948.
"I told him that according to Jewish tradition, as he was
only sixty-nine, he had another fifty-one years to live to
reach the age of Moses. He repeated that he was too old.
But I could see that he had many other claims at
Princeton."
  Quite apart from claimsùnotably those of people with
whom he still worked at the instituteùthere were ties, the
most important being his own poor health. Since the
breakdown of 1928, when he was approaching his fiftieth
birthday, he had been forced to take life more easily. His
smoking which had always been strictly rationed by Elsa,
was now more drastically cut. He compromised by keeping
a tiny pipe and tobacco hidden in his desk, and would
occasionally be tempted to half-fill it. Then he would go
outside and borrow a matchùnot a box, for that would be
too tempting and sinful, but a single match with which he
might or might not get the pipe going. He had also been
put on first a fat-free and later a salt-free diet by Dr.
Ehrmann, his regular Berlin doctor who had emigrated to
New York before the war. Einstein hated it all, but he was
never one to kick against the pricks, and his good-
humored resignation comes out in two incidents.
  When a box of candy was being passed round after dinner
at Mercer Street one night he took merely a deep sniff.
"You see, that's all my doctor allows me to do," he said.
"The devil has put a penalty on all things we enjoy in life.
Either we suffer in our health, or we suffer in our soul, or
we get fat." A friend asked him why it was the devil and
not God who had imposed the penalty. "What's the
difference?" he answered. "One has a plus in front, the
other a minus." On another occasion his doctor came to
Mercer Street with medicine in the form of both pills and
drops, not knowing which his patient would prefer. He
chose the drops. "I still remember him standing there,
counting the drops into a water glass and handing it over
to Einstein," says a colleague. "He swallowed the whole
thing down, then turned a little green in the face, and
started to throw up. After that he turned to his doctor and
asked him: 'Do you feel better now?'"
  Until 1945 his poor health was inconvenient rather than
crippling. But ever since his illness in 1917 he had
suffered periodically from stomach cramp, nausea, and
vomiting, and in 1945 it was decided that an operation was
necessary. He recovered normally but was much weakened
and even by the end of the following year still found it
necessary to take a rest after lunch. In 1948 a second
operation in the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital revealed an
aneurysm in the main artery and two years later an
examination showed that the condition had worsened.
From 1950 Einstein knew that time was running out.
  The threat made little difference. He was as careless of
himself now as he had been as a youth or in the hungry
days of the First World War. As long as he could get on
with his work nothing else mattered. He got on with it
relentlessly and with an inner determination which
contrasted strongly with the outer picture of a frail old
man. Those who saw him in his working habitat were
impressed. "One unforgettable memory," says a visitor
during these last years,

  is of Einstein slightly ill and forced to keep to his bed. It
occupied almost the entire room. The blinds were drawn. The
light attached to the head of the bed lit up the back of his head
and the board on which were the sheets of paper which he
covered with lines of regular writing. He was covered with an
eiderdown from which his naked body emerged at one end and
his feet at the other. The picture was that of an impressive
Rembrandt.

  The slow but steady deterioration in his condition would
alone have tied him to Princeton. But there was also his
work. Here his principal worry was still the removal of
indeterminacy from physics, which had been the main
epistemological result of quantum mechanics, a result
which to the end of his life he continued to regard as
merely transitory. He suffered from no illusions. He knew
that he was fighting a rearguard action against his
colleagues, and he had no doubts about how they regarded
him. To Conrad Habicht, a survivor of the Olympia
Academy, he wrote in 1948: "I still work indefatigably at
science but I have become an evil renegade who does not
wish physics to be based on probabilities."
  And with Max Born he continued to discuss, in the
greatest detail, and with an almost pathetic attempt to
reconcile the irreconcilable, the chasm which had opened
up between him and so many of his contemporaries. The
two men had been intimates since 1916. They had agreed
to differ in the twenties; unknown to both, their paths had
diverged when Einstein had helped launch the U. S.
nuclear weapons project and Born had refused to join the
British enterprise. They differed over the Germans. Yet
they remained mutual fathers-confessor for their hopes and
fears in physics, and it was to Born that Einstein gave the
fullest explanation of how he saw the situation during the
last decade of his life. "I cannot make a case for my
attitude in physics which you would consider at all
reasonable," he wrote.

  I admit, of course, that there is a considerable amount of
validity in the statistical approach which you were the first to
recognize clearly as necessary, given the framework of the
existing formalism. I cannot seriously believe in it because the
theory cannot be reconciled with the idea that physics should
represent a reality in time and space, free from ghostly actions at
a distance. I am, however, not yet firmly convinced that it can
really be achieved with a continuous field theory, although I have
discovered a possible way of doing this which so far seems quite
reasonable. The difficulties of calculation are so great that I will
be biting the dust long before I myself can be fully convinced of
it. But I am quite convinced that someone will eventually come
up with a theory, whose objects, connected by laws, are not
probabilities but considered facts, as was until recently taken for
granted. I cannot, however, base this conviction on logical
reasons, but can only produce my little finger as witness, that is I
offer no authority which would be able to command any kind of
respect outside of my own hand.

  This stubborn belief continued to keep him the outsider,
the old man mirroring the young rebel who had dared
claim that light could be both wave and corpuscle and that
time and space were not what they seemed to be. There
were occasions when he was humorously sceptical of what
was going on in science. Thus at his seventieth birthday
celebrations he sat all day in the lecture hall of the institute
listening to a series of invited papers, and at the end was
asked if he had found them tiring. "They would have been
tiring if I had understood them," he replied.
  Yet it was accepted that few men knew as much as
Einstein about the nature of the physical world. Few were
to have one of the new artificially created elements named
after them, the einsteinium which as the ninety-ninth was
added to lawrencium, mendelevium, fermium, and curium
ùand was later joined by rutherfordium and hahnium.
Even fewer knew as much about the spurs to creative
scientific activity, and it followed as a matter of course that
when Aydelotte retired from the directorship of the
institute in 1947, Lewis Strauss, one of the trustees, should
seek his advice on a successor. Einstein would neither
comment on the names put forward nor himself suggest
any candidates. "I besought him to tell me, at the very
least, what ideal qualities the trustees should seek in a
director of the institute," Strauss has written." 'Ah, that I
can do easily,' he replied with a smile. 'You should look
for a very quiet man who will not disturb people who are
trying to think.'"
  He might succeed in recommending a quiet manùit
turned out to be J. Robert Oppenheimerùbut his powers
failed when it came to persuading the institute to invite
Max Born to Princeton. And Born, however hard he tried,
could never coax Einstein back across the Atlantic. Thus
their basic disagreements had to be shuttled back and forth
through the post. It was different with Einstein and Bohr,
since Bohr, a nonresident member of the institute, could
visit Princeton whenever he wished. He came once in
1946, for the bicentennial celebrations of Princeton
University, and again in 1948 for the spring semester at
the institute. On both occasions he had long exchanges
with Einstein, carrying on the argument which had started
at the Solvay Congresses two decades previously. They
were not particularly happy exchanges and Abraham Pais,
then a temporary member of the institute, has described
how one day Bohr came into his room "in a state of angry
despair," saying "I am sick of myself." Pais asked what
was wrong. "He told me," he has written, "he had just been
downstairs to see Einstein. As always, they had got into an
argument about the meaning of quantum mechanics. And,
as remained true to the end, Bohr had been unable to
convince Einstein of his views. There can be no doubt that
Einstein's lack of assent was a very deep frustration to
Bohr."
  Those lucky enough to be present at the meetings
watched an interplay between master and master that had
an heroic quality quite distinct from its relevance to
physics. Both the 1946 and the 1948 visits also produced
those dramatic highlights which seemed inseparable from
contact between the two men, as though their mere
presence in a room together was enough to strike flint
against iron and make the sparks fly.
  One such engagement occurred when Einstein attended a
major address by Bohr in the institute's main mathematics
building. He was collected from Mercer Street by Dr.
Mitrany who, accustomed to his friend's sweatered
informality, was surprised to see him in dark suit, collar,
and tie. They took their places in the lecture hall amongst
an august company. Everyone settled down for a highly
technical two-hour lecture which only Einstein and a
handful of others could follow with more than polite
interest. Bohr progressed towards the heart of the
epistemological and scientific argument. Einstein listened,
attentive from the start, then more than attentive, then
with obviously mounting impatience. Finally the strain
was too much. He rose from his seat, and walked to the
platform in front of the long roller blackboard that covered
the entire wall. Then, chalk in hand, he interrupted the
lecturer. What had been a monologue became a dialogue.
Bohr understood. He, like Einstein, knew this was not
arrogance but submission to fate. Only Einstein could
adequately contradict what he believed was wrong even if
he could not prove it was wrong. Not to do so would be
dereliction of duty.
  During the 1946 visit Bohr had been asked to contribute
to Albert EinsteinùPhilosopher-Scientist, a volume being
prepared in honor of Einstein's seventieth birthday three
years later. He agreed to write a history of their
epistemological arguments and completed it during his
stay at the institute in 1949. While at work on the article
he invited Pais to his office. "We went there," says Pais.

  ... After we had entered, Bohr asked me to sit down ("I always
need an origin for the coordinate system") and soon started to
pace furiously around the oblong table in the center of the room.
He then asked me if I could put down a few sentences as they
would emerge during his pacing. It should be explained that, at
such sessions, Bohr never had a full sentence ready. He would
often dwell on one word, coax it, implore it, to find the
continuation. This could go on for many minutes. At that moment
the word was "Einstein." There Bohr was, almost running around
the table and repeating: "Einstein ... Einstein ..." It would have
been a curious sight for someone not familiar with Bohr. After a
little while he walked to the window, gazed out, repeating every
now and then: "Einstein ... Einstein. ..."
  At that moment the door opened very softly and Einstein
tiptoed in.
  He beckoned to me with a finger on his lips to be very quiet,
his urchin smile on his face. He was to explain a few minutes
later the reason for his behavior. Einstein was not allowed by
his doctor to buy tobacco. However, the doctor had not
forbidden him to steal tobacco, and this was precisely what he
set out to do now. Always on tiptoe he made a beeline for
Bohr's tobacco pot which stood on the table at which I was
sitting. Meanwhile Bohr, unaware, was standing at the
window, muttering "Einstein ... Einstein. ..." I was at a loss
what to do, especially because I had at that moment not the
faintest idea what Einstein was up to.
  Then Bohr, with a firm "Einstein," turned around. There
they were, face to face, as if Bohr had summoned him forth. It
is an understatement to say that for a moment Bohr was
speechless. I myself, who had seen it coming, had distinctly
felt uncanny for a moment, so I could well understand Bohr's
own reaction. A moment later the spell was broken when
Einstein explained his mission and soon we were all bursting
with laughter.

  Bohr and Einstein continued their argument. They agreed
to go on differing, Bohr confident that he had reached
bedrock, Einstein as confident that they were still dealing
with the lower subsoil of physics. Below, he continued to
believe, lay the ideas which would bring back the world he
had known half a century ago. If it were based on anything
more than elderly optimism, the hope of restoring the
images he had helped destroy during an iconoclastic youth
was based on that old panacea for a fragmented physics, a
satisfactory unified field theory. He still intuitively
believed that this would allow the laws of quantum
mechanics to be derived from nonstatistical laws
governing not probabilities but facts and he had pressed on
relentlessly during his early years at the institute,
throughout the war and into the peace, still in hot pursuit
of the set of equations which would show that God did not
really play dice with the world.
  In 1942 he had written to an old Jewish friend, Hans
Muhsam: "I am an old man mainly known as a crank who
doesn't wear socks. But I am working at a more fantastic
rate than ever, and I still hope to solve my pet problem of
the unified physical field. I feel as if I were flying in an
airplane high in the skies without quite knowing how I
will ever reach the ground." Two years later he told
Muhsam that he might still live to see whether he was a
hope, as every variant entails tremendous mathematical
justified in believing in his equations: "It is no more than a
hope, as every variant entails tremendous mathematical
difficulties. I did not write to you for so long because,
despite my conscience pricking and a sincere desire to
write, I am in an agony of mathematical torment from
which I am unable to escape." The comparison with the
early months of the First World War, when he had
struggled with the complexities of the General Theory, is
striking.
  That there was so little to show for the work had been
explained in a letter to Solovine years earlier. "For me,
interest in science is restricted to the study of principles,
and this offers the best explanation of my work. That I
have published so few papers derives from the same
circumstance: in consequence of my ardent desire to
understand the principles is that much of my time has been
spent on fruitless efforts." He still had doubts, which were
not concealed from his old friends. Thus to Solovine he
also wrote: "You seem to think that I look back upon my
life's work with serene satisfaction. Viewed more closely,
however, things are not so bright. There is not an idea of
which I can be certain. I am not even sure that I am on the
right road." To Hermann Weyl he conceded that, after all,
"who knows, perhaps He is a little malicious."
  Yet he never completely despaired. He worked on, past
his seventieth birthday, and at last began to see what he
thought was light at the end of the tunnel. By the autumn
he was ready with "A Generalized Theory of Gravitation."
A typewritten copy of the manuscript was exhibited at the
Christmas meeting of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science and the theory, with its twenty
eight mathematical formulas, was published two months
later as a fourteen-page appendix to the fourth edition of
The Meaning of Relativity.
  A new theory from Einstein, offering at the age of
seventy a key to the riddle of the universe to replace the
one he had provided at the age of fifty, caused a major stir
in the scientific world and its ground-swell reached out to
the man in the street. Low drew a cartoon which quickly
became famous showing Einstein bringing a giant key on
New Year's Day to a Father Time who was exclaiming:
"About time, too!" There were numerous headlines;
phrases such as "master theory" were freely bandied about.
Some of the more weighty journals began to outline what
Einstein's thirty years of thought had yielded, a new and
more convenient tool with which it was hoped that the
laws of nature could be described.
  What no one attempted to explain was how the tool could
be used. The reason was simple. Infeld considered that he
would need a year to understand it and added: "Like
Chinese, you have to study it first."
  However, it was not only the remoteness of the theory
from even most scientific minds that was a stumbling
block to acceptance. Unlike the General Theory of 1915, it
could not apparently be tested. Thus in the new edition of
The Meaning of Relativity Einstein was forced to preface
his fresh set of equations with the statement: "In the
following I shall present an attempt at the solution of this
problem which appears to me highly convincing although,
due to mathematical difficulties, I have not yet found a
practicable way to confront the results of the theory with
experimental evidence." [Only a few months before his
death, in December, 1954, Einstein signed a note for the
sixth edition of the book, which was to be published in
1956. "For the present edition," he said, I have completely
revised the 'Generalization of Gravitation Theory' under
the title 'Relativistic Theory of the Nonsymmetric Field.'
For I have succeededùin part in collaboration with an
assistant B. Kaufmanù in simplifying derivations as well
as the form of the field equations. The whole theory
becomes thereby more transparent, without changing its
content."] He knew the limitations of what had been half a
lifetime's work; typically, he made light of them, replying
to an inquiry about the chances of experimental evidence:
"Come back in twenty years' time."
  His real feelings were expressed in a letter to Carl Seelig.
"The mathematical conclusiveness of the theory cannot be
opposed," he wrote.

  The question of its physical validity, however is still completely
undecided. The reason for this is that comparison of calculated
solutions with experiment entails field equations that cannot be
formulated. This position can last for a very long time. From this
you can see clearly in what direction my efforts lie. There is little
prospect that I shall see any success in the short time that
remains to me.

  Almost two decades later, Einstein's theory of a unified
field remains unsubstantiated and current thought veers
away from-the idea of the universe being built in this way.
Tough realist that he was, Einstein would be only
moderately put out by the view. He knew that at the least
he was clearing a good deal of scientific scrub. He might
be regarded as a scientific curiosity; nevertheless, he was
spending his last years doing a job which could be
attempted by only a handful of men in the world.
Therefore Einstein, a familiar figure on the treelined
streets of Princeton in his shabby coat, old muffler, and
black knitted cap, was still fired by an inner certitude no
less invincible than in the days in Berne and Zurich. Then
he had been the silent dark horse, content to work on
alone, confident of Albert Einstein. The older version of
the man was quite as sure of the work needing to be done,
happy to ignore how the rest of the world regarded him.
For half a century he had stuck to his last, a Mr. Standfast
of physics. He had no cause to regret the decision now.
  His routine was simple. He would breakfast between nine
and ten, at the same time taking his "adrenalin cure"ù
reading the current political situation in the daily papers.
In the winter he would be picked up from Mercer Street at
about 10:30 by the green station wagon from the institute.
He would usually walk home. In the summer he would go
on foot and ride back in the early afternoon heat. On the
way to the institute, says Ernst Strauss, his assistant from
1944 until 1947, who accompanied him on occasions, a
stranger would sometimes waylay him, and say how much
he had wanted to meet him. "Einstein would pose with the
waylayer's wife, children, or grandchildren as desired and
exchange a few good-humored words. Then he would go
on, shaking his head, saying: 'Well, the old elephant has
gone through his tricks again.'"
  At the institute, he would work until one o'clock,
sometimes alone, sometimes with his assistant, soaring up
into the mathematical stratosphere where the battle had to
be fought, always with his forces well disposed, always
optimistic of eventual success, even optimistic about
failures which he would face with: "Well, we've learned
something." Soon after one o'clock he would put his notes
into a thin worn briefcase and make for Mercer Street,
sometimes stopping to chat with the two Oppenheimer
children; occasionally he was accompanied by one of the
younger faculty members or by one of the visiting
professors. More frequently he walked alone. He did not
like keeping good men from their duty and Helen Dukas,
asking him on one occasion whether she should bring
home a brilliant young mathematician just appointed to the
institute, was told: "No: let him get on with his work."
  At 1:30 he would eat, then rest until the late afternoon
when after a cup of tea he would work, see visitors, or
more frequently deal with the correspondence which had
been sorted by Helen Dukas earlier in the day. Supper
came soon after 6:30 and then there would be another bout
of work or more letters. Sometimes he would listen to the
radio, and occasionally there were private visitors. He had
by this time given up his violin, saying that he was not
good enough, but continued to play Bach or Mozart each
day on his Bechstein grand. Nor was this all. "It is true
that I have improvised much on the piano with delight,"
he wrote early in 1954 to the coordinator of a group of
amateur musicians at Harvard Observatory, "but I
discovered without much astonishment that it was not
worth the paper and ink to be written down." On Sundays,
friends would collect him for a drive into the country or to
the coast which was only an hour away. He still hated to be
seen in public, and he often repeated his old claim that like
Midas he changed everything he touchedù but in his case
it turned not into gold but into a circus.
  Such was the life that went on behind the barrier raised
against inquisitive callers, visitors who wanted only a
glimpse of the great man or of the place where he worked
and lived, and correspondents who produced an echo of
the crankeries with which he had had to deal during his
first days of fame in Berlin. "Thank God," Miss Dukas
once wrote of his morning post, "most of it can go straight
into the wastepaper basket."
  But there were sometimes unexpected repercussions.
Thus when the IBM Corporation invited him to the
unveiling of a new computer they failed to receive an
answer. Dean Eisenhart of the Graduate School, Princeton
University, was asked to investigate when a follow-up
invitation, immaculately typed like the first one on an IBM
executive machine, also failed to produce a reply. "He
explained," says his son, Churchill Eisenhart,

  that something must be amiss, because Dr. Einstein was
scrupulous about replying to all such invitations. He walked over
to Dr. Einstein's house and explained the situation. Dr. Einstein
dumped the contents of a very large wastebasket on the floor and
examined an item here and there. Finally his face lighted up. He
handed one of the invitational letters to my father, saying: "It
looks as if it were printed. I never read printed circulars."

  Life at Mercer Street was quiet and unpretentious,
homely and unaffected, not blatantly the life of a geniusù
in fact a life in surroundings which were sometimes
unexpected. "My eye," said one visitor, "was immediately
caught by two inlaid cabinets containing various objects of
religious art. On a canopied central shelf of one was a
rather beautiful Madonna and Child; on a side table was a
statuette of a Chinese philosopher beggar man; on the wall
hung a picture of the period of early Italian Christian
painting."
  In this house, more home of artist or polymath than
theoretical physicist, Einstein was the centerpiece of a trio
of women. Dominating it was Helen Dukas, since Elsa's
death the person on whom the main burden of the
household had fallenùthe housekeeper and shopper, the
cook and secretary, the organizer of peace and quiet, the
filer of correspondence who for lack of space was forced to
store boxes of letters in the cellar and who often wished
that Gutenberg had never lived. Only after Einstein's
death was the priceless collection taken to the institute to
be housed in the room safe, guarded with entry door and
combination lock, that had once held the miscellaneous
nuclear secrets of the former director, J. Robert
Oppenheimer.
  Also at Mercer Street there was Margot, the stepdaughter
who had grown so like Einstein in attitude and outlook
that it was difficult to think of them as linked only by
collateral lines on the family tree. Thirdly there was Maja,
two years younger than her brother, for whom Einstein
possibly felt more affection than for anyone. "Her manner
of speaking and the sound of her voice, as well as the
childlike and yet sceptical formulation of every statement,
are unusually similar to her brother's mode of expression,"
Frank noted; "it is amazing to listen to her; it arouses a
sense of uneasiness to find a replica of even the minor
traits of a genius."
  Brother and sister read much together in what Einstein
called "our enviable peaceful den." From 1946, when she
began to be crippled by arteriosclerosis, he would read to
her every evening and he continued to do so as, from the
end of 1950, her condition became more critical. Margot
nursed her. But, with intelligence scarcely impaired by
advancing illness. Maja died in December, 1951. "Now I
miss her more than I can easily explain," wrote Einstein to
his cousin in South America.
  Since the start of the century, his life had presented a
series of unexpected contradictions. The Patent Office
official had been hoisted into academic life. The hater of
all things German had been tempted to Berlin. The man
who wanted only a quiet life had in 1919 had become the
most famous scientist in the world. The pacifist had been
forced to support armed resistance, and the man who
regarded all war as murder had helped push the buttons
that killed 120,000. Now there was to come a final twist.
In 1952 the image of the old eccentric, pottering along in
his seventies, was to be brusquely shattered. Albert
Einstein, the man who had always decried force, was
invited to become President of Israel, that realization of
Zionist hopes, the state which had successfully staked out
its frontiers by force of arms and was defending them
against all comers.
  The proposal, practical, outrageous, or pathetic according
to viewpoint, splendid in its audacity if grotesque in its
implications, followed the death of Chaim Weizmann, who
had become first President soon after declaration of the
state of Israel in May, 1948. Weizmann died on Sunday,
November 9, 1952, and a few days later Einstein was
mooted as successor in the Tel Aviv newspaer Maariv. It
seems likely that this was a trial balloon to discover public
reaction. If so, it was flown by the Prime Minister, David
Ben-Gurion. "The presidency in Israel is a symbol," he
said later.

  It carries with it no power. I thought to myself: if we are looking
for a symbol, why not have the most illustrious Jew in the world,
and possibly the greatest man aliveù Einstein? That's all there
was to it. Had he accepted, I would have submitted his name to
the Knessetùin Israel the Knesset elects the Presidentùand I
am quite sure that the motion for his election would have been
carried by acclamation.

  Einstein, like most of his friends, refused to take the idea
seriously and when the New York Times asked for his
reaction on the evening of Sunday the sixteenth, he refused
to comment. Shortly afterwards, the telephone in Mercer
Street rang again and the operator said that Washington
was on the line. "Herr Gott," exclaimed Helen Dukas, who
had answered: "Washington! What is wrong now?" This
time it was Abba Eban, the Israeli ambassador to the
United States, who was making an informal inquiry.
Would Einstein accept the presidency if it were offered by
a vote of the Knesset?
  His reply was in keeping with his reputation. "His main
and urgent thought," says Professor Mitrany, who was
with him when the call came through "was how to spare
the ambassador the embarrassment of his inevitable
refusal."
  To Eban the situation was equally clear: "Einstein was
visibly moved by the splendor and audacity of the
thought," he has said, "but his rejection was firm and
vehement: 'I know a little about nature,' he said, 'and
hardly anything about men.' He implored me to accept his
negative decision as final and do everything possible to
divert and banish the press whose representatives were
laying siege to his house in Mercer Street."
  But Eban's instructions had come direct from the Prime
Minister. He finally convinced Einstein that it would be
improper for him to reject the proposal on the telephone,
and the following day made a formal telegraphed request
that he should receive his deputy to seek his "reaction on a
matter of the utmost urgency and importance."
  Einstein telephoned Eban, again declining the invitation.
However, on Tuesday the eighteenth a formal letter was
brought to Princeton by the Israeli Minister, David Goiten.
"Acceptance would entail moving to Israel and taking its
citizenship," said the letter. "The Prime Minister assures
me that in such circumstances complete facility and
freedom to pursue your great scientific work would be
afforded by the government and people who are fully
conscious of the supreme significance of your labors."
  It was a persuasive appeal to a man for whom the
creation of Israel was a political act of an essentially moral
quality. Its refusal illuminates a good deal of Einstein's life
in three starkly honest paragraphs. "I am deeply moved by
the offer from our state of Israel, and at once saddened and
ashamed that I cannot accept it," this said.

  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. For these reasons alone
I should be unsuited to fulfill the duties of that high office, even
if advancing age was not making increasing inroads on my
strength.
  I am the more distressed over these circumstances because
my relationship to the Jewish people has become my strongest
human bond, ever since I became fully aware of our
precarious situation among the nations of the world.
  Now that we have lost the man who for so many years,
against such great and tragic odds, bore the heavy burden of
leading us towards political independence, I hope with all my
heart that a successor may be found whose experience and
personality will enable him to accept the formidable and
responsible task.

  Thus the matter endedùafter the editor-in-chief of
Maariv had made an impassioned entreaty for
reconsideration of the idea, and after Einstein had pointed
out that however formal his functions, as President he
would be responsible for the country's actions and these
might conflict with his conscience.
  Einstein as President was a prospect which aroused
diverse emotions among those who knew him best.
Weizmann had been a biochemist by profession. Therefore
it might be claimed that the idea of a theoretical physicist
holding such a post was nothing to startle the world. Yet
their links with learning and their support for Zionism
were the only things which the two men had in common;
in many ways their qualities were diametrically contrasted.
Certainly the very characteristics of steely determination
and ruthlessness which had enabled Weizmann to bring
Zionism safely home to port were, except when applied to
science, not in Einstein's makeup. It is possible to claim
that such a world figure, transparently remote from the
petty squabbles of nationalism, would never be suspected
of ulterior motives, that he would be listened to where
other men would be ignored. It is more likely that his
innocence of public affairs would have made him easy
meat for the predators of the international scene, however
symbolic his appointment. The proposal was, in any case,
stillborn. "In order to preserve my rights as a thinker, I
have to stay quiet in order to work," Einstein had written
to Weizmann in circumscribing his Zionist activities
nearly thirty years previously. That still held. He still put
science first, second, and third.
  As his seventy-fifth birthday approached there were still
many ways in which it seemed that while age had matured
him it had hardly changed him basically. It was more than
sixty years since he had decided to devote his life to a
single quest, to order his days to an almost inhuman sense
of priorities; nearly forty since he had reluctantly been
drawn out into contact with the world of politics and
power by the demands of Zionism and European peace.
Yet what Einstein now stood for echoed his earlier beliefs
in remarkable fashion, so that the obiter dicta of his last
years ring like crystallized and polished examples of the
casual ideas he had tossed off to fellow students at the
ETH or to colleagues who broke in on his thoughts while
he was remaking man's picture of the universe. He had
tossed Mach overboard after long and careful thought, but
most of the rest remained.
  Luckily, he was almost as unstinting in his writing to a
few close friends as of the time he devoted to work; thus it
is possible to glean from his letters as adequate picture of
how he regarded the world towards the end of his life.
About the great central issue, he was in no doubt. "I have
read with great interest your timely remarks about the fact
that science in itself is by no means a moral leader and
that something is needed that you call religion," he wrote
to Leon Watters. "I must confess, however, that in my
opinion the main problem begins here. Without a
remarkable change in the traditions concerning moral
values, nothing can be achieved. The old religions are, in
my opinion, no longer influential and there is no general
formula which can bring about moral revival."
  About the problem of force, the dichotomy of ends and
means, he appears to have returned to his instinctive
pacifism, looking on the need to oppose Hitler and to
sustain Israel by arms as exceptions which proved the rule.
But they were, of course, the only two cases with which he
had personally to deal. "I miss no occasion," he wrote to a
friend in Paris, "to try to make the people aware of the
great possibilities offered by Gandhi's method, which
gives strength to the minority of morally and intellectually
independent people."
  As far as his own life was concerned, one thing seemed
quite clear. "I made one great mistake in my life," he said
to Linus Pauling, who spent an hour with him on the
morning of November 11, 1954, "... when I signed the
letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom
bombs be made; but there was some justificationùthe
danger that the Germans would make them." In a message
to the American Friends of the Hebrew University, he
stressed the Jewish ideal of the person who enriched the
spiritual life of his people and added: "This implies a
definite repudiation of what is commonly called
materialism." It was a temptation to which he had never
succumbed; enjoyment of "the pleasures that nature
provides" was the nearest he came to it. So too with the
more insidious temptations of great success. "The only way
to escape the personal corruption of praise is to go on
working," he said. "One is tempted to stop and listen to it.
The only thing is to turn away and go on working. Work.
There is nothing else."
  Some of his last scientific judgments have been put on
record by the Canadian astronomer, Dr. A. Vibert
Douglas, Eddington's biographer, who traveled to
Princeton in January, 1954. Einstein began by paying a
striking tribute to Eddington, whose The Mathematical
Theory of Relativity he considered the finest presentation
of the subject in any language. "He spoke," says Dr.
Douglas,

  of the literary value, the beauty, and brilliance of Eddington's
writing in those books aimed at giving to the intelligent lay
reader at least some understanding, some insight into the
significance of the new scientific ideasù but with a smile he
added that a scientist is mistaken if he thinks he is making the
layman understand: a scientist should not attempt to popularize
his theories, if he does "he is a fakirùit is the duty of a scientist
to remain obscure."

  This point, which Einstein also made in other places
during his later years, was in strong contrast to his earlier
attempts to explain relativity in simple language. It is
difficult not to see here a reflection of the disillusion with
the masses which surfaced during the latter part of his life.
  "In regard to the developments in the early years made by
Weyl and Eddington, the later theories of the expanding
universe of Friedmann, Lemaεtre, and Eddington, the still
later kinematic relativity of E. A. Milne, and the yet more
recent theories of continuous creation of matter of Jordan,
Bondi, and Hoyle, the comments of Dr. Einstein were brief
and critical," says Dr. Douglas. "He definitely disliked the
hypothesis of continuous creation, he felt the necessity for
a 'beginning'; he regarded Milne's brilliant mathematical
mind as lacking in critical judgment; he was not attracted
by the idea of Lemaεtre's primeval atom; and he concluded
by saying of his own and all the others: 'Every man has his
own cosmology and who can say that his own theory is
right.'" Thus, after two decades, what Thomson had said
as a joke [Discussed elsewhere] was repeated by Einstein in
earnest.
  Dr. Douglas knew that in Einstein's Berlin study there
had once hung portraits of Newton and of Maxwell. Now
all she saw was a portrait of Gandhi and another of a
German musician. "The greatest man of our age," was
how Einstein now described Gandhi; and, of Dr.
Schweitzer, whose name was mentioned: "Yes, he too is a
very great man."
  "There remained one special thing I wanted to ask him
Who were the greatest men, the most powerful thinkers
whom he had known?" writes Dr. Douglas. "The answer
came without hesitation, 'Lorentz.'" None of the other
theoretical physicists and cosmologists named were on the
same level. "No, this one was too uncritical, that one was
uneven, another was of a lesser stature ... but, he added, 'I
never met Willard Gibbs; perhaps, had I done so, I might
have placed him beside Lorentz.'" There was one other
name in Dr. Douglas' thoughts: Minkowski, whose work
almost half a century earlier had lifted the Special Theory
of Relativity from a physical to a mathematical concept.
Where would Einstein place him? "He was my very great
teacher in Zurich," he said, "but I am not a good enough
mathematician to know where to place him."
  His near idolatry for Lorentz had lasted all his life, and a
few weeks before his death he described what the
magnetism was. "Everything that emanated from his
supremely great mind was as clear and beautiful as a good
work of art," he wrote in a contribution to a memorial
volume published in Holland. There was his humor, his
smile, his mastery of physics and mathematics.
Nevertheless, Einstein went on, he "was perfectly aware
that the human intellect cannot penetrate very deeply into
the essential core of things. It was not until my later years
that I was able fully to appreciate this half-sceptical, half
humble disposition."
  Just as he dotted the i's and crossed the t's of his
scientific beliefs during the last year or so of his life, so did
he recapitulate his religious convictions. To Dr. Douglas
he stated: "If I were not a Jew I would be a Quaker." And
in an interview with Professor William Hermanns, he said:
"I cannot accept any concept of God based on the fear of
life or the fear of death or blind faith. I cannot prove to you
that there is no personal God, but if I were to speak of Him
I would be a liar."
  As to what one could believe in, the answer was simple
enough. "I believe in the brotherhood of man and the
uniqueness of the individual. But if you ask me to prove
what I believe, I can't. You know them to be true but you
could spend a whole lifetime without being able to prove
them. The mind can proceed only so far upon what it
knows and can prove. There comes a point where the mind
takes a higher plane of knowledge, but can never prove
how it got there. All great discoveries have involved such a
leap." Thus, fifty years on from the papers of 1905, there
came the unequivocal renunciation of Mach and his
concept of divination through sensation alone.
  As to the spur which pricked all men onwards, that too
was simple enough to explain. "The important thing is not
to stop questioning," he said. "Curiosity has its own reason
for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when [one]
contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the
marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries
merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day.
Never lose a holy curiosity."
  Einstein had tried to comprehend. Looking back from the
vantage point of 1954 he could rightly claim to have
played a major part in two achievements as great as man
had ever accomplished. He had helped show that time and
space were not the inelastic things which they were
thought to be, but were relative to the sum total of
circumstances in which they were considered. Thus he had
changed the meaning attached to the word "reality." He
had also encouraged physicists into accepting the dual
nature of matter, that matter which had, as Sir Lawrence
Bragg so percipiently stated, the perverse characteristic of
being "coagulated from waves into particles by the
advancing sieve of time."
  These were important achievements at an intellectual
level where few dared tread. Einstein had reached that
level carrying little of the emotional baggage that lumbers
most men. In some ways, of course, it made his task easier.
He travels fastest who travels not only alone, but light; yet
even in science this had brought items on the debit side.
His inability to feel the human tragedy emotionally as well
as intellectually had helped to disrupt his first marriage, a
troublesome vexatious mistake which seems at times to
have driven him to the point of desperation just when he
wished to concentrate on the job in hand. These personal
troubles had been overcome with his marriage to Elsa, who
from 1919 helped to clear the path of greatness without
complaint. To this extent the disabilities produced by his
emotional isolationùby being, as he had described it to
Besso as a young man, "rather cool and a bit of a hard
nut"ùhad been overcome. He could get on with his work
without worrying too much about anyone else. Outside that
work, however, the aloofness which he did little to
discourage brought its own reward: a man genuinely eager
to do good, he found the best of his intentions frustrated
with maddening regularity.
  Early in 1955 he was invited to conferences in Berne and
Berlin to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of his most
famous paper. He declined. His excuses were in character.
"Old age and poor health make such a trip impossible," he
replied to von Laue in Berlin,

  and I must say that I am not sorry, for anything resembling a
personality cult has always been distasteful to me. In the present
case, moreover, many people have contributed to the advance of
this theory, and it is far from completed. ... If many years of
search have taught me anything, it is that we are much farther
from an understanding of elementary particles than most men
realize (yourself excluded), and a festive pageant would hardly
benefit the present state of affairs.

  To Pauli, who invited him to the Swiss conference, he
replied: "It would seem that the expectations attached to
the General Theory of Relativity are extraordinarily
diverse. This is good, for with us scientists the
philosophical expression 'War is the father of all things'
has not the fatal flavor that is usually attached to it."
  He would have enjoyed the Berne meeting, even though
its appraisal of the General Theory lacked the initial
scientific rapture of 1919. For the unqualified acceptance
and the experimental verification that had long ago put the
Special Theory beyond all dispute were still lacking here.
While there was no doubt that gravity did affect light, the
extent of its effect had become increasingly questioned as
experimental methods improved. "A lot of work will have
to be done before the astronomers really can say what is
the value of the observed light deflection and whether the
red shift is in existence at all," noted Freundlich at the
conference. Some of this work now has been done. But
Born, to whom the General Theory continued to remain
"the greatest feat of human thinking about nature," voiced
qualifications which still hold.
  Einstein would have accepted the point. More than thirty
years before, walking in the grounds of the Governor's
House in Jerusalem, he had remarked of Herbert Spencer's
idea of tragedyù"a deduction killed by a fact"ù "Every
theory is killed sooner or later in that way. But if the
theory has good in it, that good is embodied and continued
in the next theory."
  The jubilee meetings could carry on well enough without
him. Others could glitter in the scientific limelight while
he, the man who had started it all, wound quietly towards
the end of his life without fuss, an onlooker more than ever
removed from the affairs of the world. At least, that was
the way it looked. Yet now, at almost the last minute of the
last hour, Einstein was again to be drawn into the
whirlpool of public affairs, willingly and almost excitedly,
as though determined to refute the idea that his life would
end not with a bang but a whimper. The offer of the
Presidency of Israel had come unexpectedly, a star blazing
out through the twilight at the end of a long life. Now
another arrived, and one which lit up a possible road to
peace in a way that even now is not fully appreciated.
  In mid-February he received a letter from Bertrand
Russell. Both men had, in Russell's words "opposed the
First World War but considered the Second unavoidable."
Both distrusted orthodoxy and both had been appalled by
the destructive possibilities of the hydrogen bomb. Yet if
both had in general sought the same objectives their
methods had been as diametrically opposed as their
characters. While Einstein had been content to continue
with his work under the aegis of the Kaiser Wilhelm,
Russell had gone to prison. While Einstein had aloofly
despaired of the intelligence of mankind, Russell had
reacted by sitting as a protest in public squares. Einstein,
for all his genuine feeings, had rarely stepped from behind
the protection of his own interior world; Russell had
insisted that he too should be heard, tormented, anguished,
and combative.
  But now Russell turned to Einstein for help. He was, he
wrote on February 11, profoundly disquieted by the nuclear
arms race. "I think that eminent men of science ought to
do something dramatic to bring home to the public and
governments the disasters that may occur. Do you think it
would be possible to get, say, six men of the very highest
scientific repute, headed by yourself, to make a very
solemn statement about the imperative necessity of
avoiding war?" The statement would best be signed by
men of opposing political creeds, and should deal not
merely with the dangers of the hydrogen bomb but with
those of bacteriological warfare, thus emphasizing "the
general proposition that war and science can no longer
coexist." The letter added that the statement might appeal
to neutral countries to set up commissions of their own
nationals to investigate the effect, on them, of a third
world war.
  Einstein replied on February 16, 1955, with a letter
which took Russell's proposal one step further. What he
suggested was "a public declaration, signed by a small
number of peopleùsay, twelve persons, whose scientific
achievements (scientific in the widest sense) have gained
them international stature and whose declarations will not
lose any effectiveness on account of their political
affiliations." Such men might even include Joliot-Curie, a
leading Communist, "provided they were counterbalanced
by men from the other camp." Bohr was an obvious
candidate from the uncommitted countries which Einstein
hoped would supply half the signatures.
  There followed another letter from Russell and a further
reply from Einstein who had by this time written to Bohr.
Thus Russell's initial idea was considerably influenced by
Einstein and the outcome was quite rightly known as the
Russell-Einstein Declaration. This was sent to Einstein by
Russell on April 5; it recapitulated the dangers of
contemporary war, with special emphasis on hydrogen
bombs. And it ended with the following resolution, to be
put to a world convention of scientists:

  In view of the fact that in any future world war nuclear weapons
will certainly be employed, and that such weapons threaten the
continued existence of mankind, we urge the governments of the
world to realize, and to acknowledge publicly, that their purposes
cannot be furthered by a world war, and we urge them,
consequently, to find peaceful means for the settlement of all
matters of dispute between them.

  While Russell's declaration was still in the post with its
accompanying letter, Einstein struck out on his own,
writing to Nehru and in effect asking for his intervention
in the area where an East-West war seemed most likely.
This was in China, where the Nationalist government's
toehold on the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu
threatened to lead the United States into an Asiatic
quagmire. He enclosed with his letters a plan, prepared by
Szilard, for the evacuation of the two islands for a definite
period. Superficially this appeared the most obvious of
nonstarters but Einstein presumably felt that nothing but
good would come of Nehru's intervention, whatever form
it might take.
  Three officers of the Society for Social Responsibilities in
Science now fortuitously called on him with a proposal for
an open letter which they hoped he might sign. He
explained that something similar was already afoot, that
Russell was behind the move, and that he had written to
Russell saying: "You understand such things. You are the
general. I am just a foot soldier; give the command and I
will follow." But he seems to have known that he had little
time left. "He was on the porch of his house as he spoke,"
writes one of his visitors. "Though it was not cold he was
wrapped in a blanket. And somehow the air of parting was
around." The intuition was justified.
  Russell's letter had stirred Einstein in a way which few
things had stirred him during recent years, and he now
decided that the time had come to make a major statement
on the position of Israel, whose Independence Day in May
was to be held in circumstances even more ominous than
usual. The threats from her ring of Arab neighbors were
growing while the announcement that Czechoslovakia and
Russia were both to supply Egypt with arms added a new
and more dangerous menace. Countermeasures were in
fact already under way and Mr. Dulles had agreed to
release to the Israelis a dozen MystΘre fighters from the U.
S. contingent to NATO as well as twenty-four Sabrejets
from another source. But these measures were still
unknown to the general public. This included Einstein
who only a few weeks earlier had claimed that the current
Eisenhower adminstration was seeking "to win the
sympathy of the Arab nations by sacrificing Israel."
  He was therefore particularly receptive when, early in
April, the Israeli authorities in Washington asked if he
would make an Independence Day statement dealing with
the country's scientific and cultural activities and stressing
the peaceful uses of atomic energy. "I should very much
like to assist the cause of Israel in the difficult and
dangerous conditions prevailing today," he replied on
April 4. But, in the present circumstances, cultural and
scientific developments were hardly relevant. What
Einstein thought might be most effective was "a somewhat
critical analysis of the policies of the Western nations with
regard to Israel and the Arab states." He went on to say
that if such a statement was to be meaningful it would
have to be prepared in cooperation with responsible Israeli
officials.
  Here was a unique opportunity. The Israeli ambassador,
Abba Eban, seized it with both hands and on April 11
arrived at Mercer Street with the Israeli consul, Reuven
Dafni. "Professor Einstein told me," he later wrote,

  that he saw the rebirth of Israel as one of the few political acts
in his lifetime which had an essential moral quality. He believed
that the conscience of the world should, therefore, be involved in
Israel's preservation. He had always refused the requests of
television and radio networks to project his views to public
opinion. This issue, however, seemed to him to be of such
importance that he was actually taking the initiative, through me,
of seeking the opportunity to address the American people and
the world. He showed me the draft which he had begun to
prepare. He had reached the end of a long preamble on the cold
war and wished to hear my views at greater length before
discussing the political aspects of the Middle Eastern situation.

  Eban and his colleague talked with Einstein for some
while, and it was agreed that Dafni should return in a few
days when Einstein had put the draft of his proposed
address into more finished form.
  On the same day, the eleventh, he received the expected
statement from Russell, and an accompanying list of
scientists who would be asked to sign it. "I am gladly
willing to sign your excellent statement," he replied
without delay. "I also agree with your choice of the
prospective signers." Thus in one sentence he helped
launch the manifesto calling for a conference to appraise
the perils of war and leading directly to the long series of
influential Pugwash conferences attended by prominent
scientists from the United States, Britain, and Russia,
among more than a dozen countries.[Full details of the
course and influence of the Pugwash conferences are given
in Pugwash: A History of the Conferences on Science and
World Affairs, by J. Rotblat (Prague: Czechoslovak
Academy of Sciences, 1967).]
  The following day Einstein was in pain. But he refused to
allow the doctor to be called and it was without his
knowledge that Helen Dukas telephoned Margot, then ill
in the local hospital, and said that Einstein's personal
doctor should be told.
  Despite the pain, Einstein worked on his Independence
Day broadcast, to be further discussed with the Israeli
consul the next day. The five paragraphs which survive
presented the conflict between Israel and Egypt as
interdependent with larger problems. "And the big
problem in our time," he went on in characteristic style,
"is the division of mankind into two hostile camps: the
Communist World and the so-called Free World. Since the
significance of the terms 'Free' and 'Communist' is in this
context hardly clear to me, I prefer to speak of a power
conflict between East and West, although, the world being
round, it is not even clear what precisely is meant by the
terms 'East' and 'West.'"
  On the thirteenth, he was still in pain. But in the
morning he received both the Israeli consul and Janos
Plesch, who had come from New York. He went over his
draft with Dafni. He also made additional notes. Some
mystery surrounds their fate. The editors of Einstein on
Peace, one of whom was Einstein's literary executor,
describe them as "not available"; but they could find
nothing to support a later rumor that the notes had been
stolen from the Princeton hospital. And they criticize a
"reconstruction" of Einstein's planned address, based on
information provided by Dafni, subsequently published in
the New York Times. The most likely conclusion is that the
notes, whatever happened to them, were too critical of
"East," of "West," or of both sides in the power game, to
be openly admitted as coming from Einstein.
  Dafni left Mercer Street by midday. Soon afterwards,
Einstein complained of extreme tiredness and lack of
appetite. After a light meal he lay down to rest; in
midafternoon he collapsed. Helen Dukas, managing the
situation singlehanded, called the doctor who soon arrived
with two colleagues, helped as an electrocardiogram was
taken, fixed up a bed in the study, and prepared for a long
vigil. The patient, given morphia injections, passed a quiet
night.
  Dr. Dean, who found Einstein "very stoical" and "his
usual kind shy self," had diagnosed a small leakage of
blood from a hardened aorta, and on the morning of
Thursday the fourteenth Dr. Frank Glenn, the cardiac and
aortic surgeon, arrived from New York. So did Dr.
Ehrmann and Dr. Bucky. One question had to be settled
quickly: whether or not to operate. By 1955 this was
possible although the chances of survival during such an
operation were still low. Some experts put it at fifty
percent; but without it they were minimal.
  Years earlier, when Einstein had first learned of his
condition and been told that his aorta might burst unless
he took care, he had brusquely replied: "Let it burst." Now
he was similarly uncompromising. He asked how long
death would take and was told that it might come in a
moment, might take hours, or might take days. He was, his
doctor said, "violently opposed" to surgery. To Helen
Dukas, the later protested: "The end comes some time:
does it matter when?" Just as in physics he had developed
into the conservative revolutionary, so in medicine he
tended to distrust what he thought of as radical
innovations; it had once been impossible to operate on a
man in his condition, and he would have none of it now.
  Friday night passed quietly and on Saturday morning he
seemed to be better. Then, once again, there was intense
pain and he was unable to move. On the arrival of the
doctor, hastily called by Helen Dukas, he at first refused to
budge. Most patients would have been quickly overruled,
but even now it was not easy to overrule Einstein. Finally,
he was persuaded that hospital was best; characteristically,
the argument which counted was that the nursing was too
much for Miss Dukas.
  On the way to the hospital he talked animatedly to one of
the volunteer ambulance men. After arrival he began to
feel better and he soon telephoned Mercer Street. First he
wanted his spectacles; then he wanted writing material. If
there was still time left it should not be wasted.
  On Sunday, Margot was wheeled in to see him. "I did not
recognize him at first, so changed was he by the pain and
the lack of blood in his face," she wrote to Hedwig Born.
"But his manner was the same. He was glad that I was
looking a little better, joked with me, and faced his own
state with complete superiority; he talked with perfect
calm, even with slight humor about the doctors, and was
waiting for his end as if for an expected 'natural
phenomenon.'"
  He would go in his own time, and insisted on one thing:
"Do not let the house become a museum." He had already
asked that his office at the institute should not be preserved
as he had used it, but passed on for the use of others. He
did not want Mercer Street turned into a place of
pilgrimage and he would have had little sympathy for
those who in later years called at No. 112 asking to see his
study; for those who were to write to the institute for
mementos; or for the correspondents who from as far away
as India wrote to his son Hans Albert pleading for a piece
of anything that Albert Einstein had touched. He would
have been surprised that an opera based on his life should
be written for presentation in East Berlin, and been
astonished at the million words that were cabled out of
Princeton as the press moved in after his death. He would
have exploded in one of his hearty gusts of laughter at the
value of his signature and the hundreds of dollars which
were soon to be the market price of his letters. He had
wanted all this to die with him.
  He had insisted that his brain should be used for research
and that he be cremated; but his ashes were to be scattered
at an undisclosed place. Again, no point of pilgrimage. He
would have agreed with his literary executor, Otto Nathan,
who was to write that the less published about Einstein's
illness and the developments that led to his death, the
better; Nathan did not see why the public should have an
interest in the details, or why he and others should satisfy
it if they had.
  Hans Albert and Nathan arrived in Princeton on Sunday.
With the first, Einstein discussed science; with the latter,
politics and the danger of German rearmament. He was
equable now, and late in the afternoon Dr. Dean even felt
that the aneurysm might be repairing itself. With a
recurrence of pain in the evening Einstein was given
another injection; but he was sleeping peacefully when
Dean took a final look at him at 11 P.M.
  In the small hours, soon after midnight, nurse Alberta
Roszel noticed a difference in his breathing. Becoming
alarmed, she called for assistance, and with the aid of
another nurse cranked up the head of the bed.
  He was muttering in German, the language of his
despised compatriots, still the only tongue with which he
felt comfortable. It was with Germans that he had first won
his spurs and in Berlin that he had first become world
famous. It was only in German that he could contemplate
the course of his life: his dedication to science and
subjugation of everything else; the self-imposed emotional
asceticism; his belief that the human race was naturally
aggressive and Germans more aggressive than the rest. It
was in German that the last thoughts of one of the greatest
brains since Newton's came to the surface through the
unconscious mind.
  Perhaps he should not have been so bearish about people?
Perhaps he should never have gone to Berlin, made the
way that much easier for the aggressors with his pacifism,
or hated the Germans so much that he encouraged
Roosevelt into the nuclear age? Perhaps he should not
always have put science first? But on this there was of
course no room for doubt, no cause for regret. As he took
two deep breaths and died, it is unlikely that Einstein
regretted very much, if he regretted anything at all. But
Mrs. Roszel did not understand his German. And anyway,
as Elsa had felt nearly twenty years before, dear God it was
too late now.

  AFTERWORD

  During the last few decades, experiments aimed at
checking Einstein's theories of relativity have been more
numerous than those which followed his death in 1955.
Many of the recent attempts have been made possible by
experience gained with increasingly effective particle
accelerators, built primarily for nuclear research, which
speed up particles to energies at which they approach the
speed of light. To these new facilities there have been
added those brought about by the exploration of space;
rockets and satellites, manned and unmanned, have been
used in a wide variety of experiments, while a reflector
placed at the lunar "Tranquillity Base" by America's
Apollo astronauts has since 1969 been giving the distance
between earth and moon with an accuracy of some 20
inches, an operation which has helped confirm the General
Theory by ruling out certain major deviations in the
moon's orbit predicted by alternative theories of gravity.
  This greatly intensified interest in relativityùwhich had
followed the two decades of the 1940s and 1950s, when
most physicists were concentrating on atomic and nuclear
physicsùhas produced virtually nothing to undermine the
basic ideas with which Einstein startled the world during
the early years of the century. What has been generated are
fresh problems in cosmology which have followed, among
other events, the discovery of quasarsùquasistellar radio
sources ùand of "black holes," astronomical bodies with
such high gravitational fields that the relativistic curving
of space round them causes gravitational self-closure. But
here it has been not so much relativity itself as its
significance in helping solve such problems which has
come under discussion.
  Other theories which involve some modification of the
field equations of general relativity, such as the
scalartensor theory of C. Brans and R. H. Dicke, or the
steady- state cosmological theory of Hermann Bondi,
Thomas Gold, and Fred Hoyle, which envisages the
continual creation of new matter at a rate to make constant
the density of matter in the universe despite its continuing
expansion, have been much discussed since 1955. But the
general consensus of opinion among physicists and
astronomers is that the currently available evidence does
not support these alternatives to general relativity.
  The same quality of unchanging durability which
continues to suffuse Einstein's scientific work is also true
of his nonscientific influence and of the way in which his
position as a human being is considered. The information
that has filtered out into public knowledge since his death
has reinforced rather than changed the image. The picture
of Einstein as shy world-shaker is as unqualified today as
it was when he died in Princeton, pad and pencil beside
the bed so that until the last moments no clue should be
left unrecorded as to "how God made this world."
  But if the significance of Einstein's work, and the
character of the man himself, have both remained
unchanged over the years, technological advance has been
able not only to reinforce his theories but to strengthen
some of the foundations on which these theories were
formed. Thus, the sophistication of modern equipment has
enabled a postulate essential to Einstein's general theory to
be confirmed to a new order of accuracy. This is the
assumption of the equivalence of a uniform gravitational
field and a uniform acceleration. Until recent years the
only series of measurements to test the assumption had
been those started in 1888 by Lorand E÷tv÷s and continued
by his colleagues after his death in 1919. But during the
1960s fresh work in the United States and Russia tested
the equivalence principle, that in America being carried
out by Robert H. Dicke of Princeton University. While
E÷tv÷s had compared the earth's gravitational and
centrifugal effects upon equal masses of different
substances, Dicke compared the forces arising from the
sun's gravitational attraction and the orbital motion of the
earth about the sun. The required rotation of the balance
through 180║ took place automatically every 12 hours with
the daily rotation of the earth; the results, provided over a
number of years, supported the equivalence principle with
a precision more than 100 times that of the earlier
experiments.
  Meanwhile, an important development had taken place in
the 1960s and 1970s on what might be called the
antirelativity front. This was the failure of Herbert Dingle
to win support for his decades-long argument that the
theory of special relativity was untenable. Although a
respected astrophysicist and philosopher of science, Dingle
was severely criticized by many physicists for his attack on
relativity, particularly in the columns of Nature. In closing
the correspondence published there by Dingle and his
opponents, the editor commented: "By now there is all too
much evidence to show that issues like these have a habit
of springing to life long after the stuffing seems to have
been knocked out of them by the force of reason."
  The highly technical brush with Dingle killed off most of
the residual beliefs that Einstein had been basically wrong
although, as Nature inferred, nothing would kill them
completely. "It does not follow, of course, that those who,
for one reason or another, find Einstein's version of the
theory of special relativity unpalatable will promptly be
forced to toe the line," it said. "After all, there is nothing
to prevent those who wish to bring back the ether, or who
would like the velocity of light to be otherwise then
constant, from seeking other ways of saving the
appearances. As the saying goes, it is a free country, and
there is nothing to prevent people from tilting at windmills
if they choose."
  Of more significance to the arguments over relativity
than Dingle's failure to support his contentions to the
satisfaction of most physicists have been new observations
of the sun carried out by Dicke, whose experiments
superseded those of E÷tv÷s. One of the proponents of the
scalar-tensor theory, Dicke began a series of experiments
in the mid-1960s whose results brought a headline in
Nature of "Einstein in Crisis?" and the comment: "In spite
of the great aesthetic and philosophical appeal of
Einstein's general theory of relativity, it is still, after 50
years of widespread acceptance, one of the least well
founded theories in physics as far as experimental
confirmation is concerned." Not all physicists would agree,
yet it is certainly true that Einstein's explanation of the
precession of the orbit of Mercury appeared to be an
essential empirical prop to the general theory.
  Yet from 1966 onward, Dicke argued that Einstein's
theory did not, after all, completely account for the
observed precession. Whereas Einstein had assumed that
the sun is spherically symmetrical, Dicke claimed, on
observational grounds, that the sun showed a significant
difference in length between its polar and equatorial
diameters. The resulting oblateness, or squashed orange
form, was attributed to an uneven distribution of mass
within the sun which, on Dicke's calculations, had the
effect of reducing the Einstein perihelion precession of
Mercury's orbit by about three seconds of an arc a century.
Dicke argued that to conform with the observed
precession, Einstein's tensor theory of gravitation should
be replaced by a scalar-tensor theory of gravitation that
was capable of giving the correct result. Later
investigations, however, have thrown doubt on the
measurements of solar oblateness and their interpretation,
and it is not generally believed that the scalar-tensor
theory is required to account for the observed motion of
Mercury. Moreover, measurement of the apparent
deflection of a radio galaxy occulted by the Moon has been
found to be in better agreement with Einstein's theory than
with Dicke's.
  The good chances of obtaining increasingly precise
figures under modern conditions are illustrated by the
follow-up to the landing of a fused silica reflector on the
moon in 1969. It had been designed to return light to its
source regardless of angle of incidence, and after Apollo's
return to earth a beam of light was generated in a ruby
laser and aimed on the reflector through the 107-inch
telescope of Mount McDonald Observatory at Mount
Locke, Texas. The lapse between transmission and
reception gave the moon-to-earth distance with a greater
precision than ever before.
  Other experiments involving astronomical radar, or
similar techniques, have become increasingly frequent.
Thus, in 1964 Irwin Shapiro of the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology used astronomical radar to measure the
reduction in speed of light passing through the
gravitational field of the sun, which was predicted by
relativity. The radar installation at Haystack Observatory
was chosen, and was used to measure the delay in radar
pulses sent to Mercury and Venus on routes passing close
to the sun and then reflected back to earth, an extremely
sensitive low-noise maser being used to amplify the faint
reflected signals. The most recent repetition of this
experiment has confirmed the excess time-delay predicted
by general relativity as compared with the corresponding
Newtonian value to within 0.1 percent, making this the
most sensitive test so far of Einstein's theory.
  The following decade, workers at the Smithsonian
Astrophysical Laboratory obtained further confirmation
that, as predicted by the principle of equivalence, clocks
run faster as the gravitational field to which they are
subjected weakens. This was done by launching a stable
clock by rocket to 10,000 kilometers in a near-vertical
trajectory, allowing the frequency shift in the maser signal
to earth to be measured for 100 minutes and, after
correction, comparing this with the value predicted by
relativity theory. The value was confined to within 0.02
percentù an accuracy some 50 times that which it had
been possible to measure on earth. As Nature remarked:
"Clearly the new result is a significant boost for the theory
of relativity and the same is true of other recent
experiments using very stable oscillators."
  A different kind of support for relativity came in the
1970s with a crucial experiment on time-dilation made in
the CERN storage ring at Geneva where sub-atomic
particles can be accelerated to speeds approaching that of
light. Since the days of the first particle accelerators, built
just before and during the first years of the Second World
War, the power of such machines had increased
enormously. By the 1970s they were operating at energies
of several thousand million electron volts, enabling an
orbiting electron to be given a relativistic mass some
10,000 times its rest mass. In such conditions the speed of
the orbiting particle was so near that of light that the
difference amounted only to one part in a hundred million.
  In the CERN experiment, the particles used were muons,
a species of massive electron, which were accelerated in
the ring to a speed approximately 99.94 percent that of
light. They moved, moreover, in a closed circular orbit, a
condition that simulated those of the outward and return
journeys of the twin paradox. Now, the muon is known to
decay into an electron and two neutrinos in a small
fraction of a second. But such an extremely short time can
be measured experimentally with considerable accuracy.
As Tom Wilkie stated in Nature, which gave a full report
of the experiment on July 28, 1977: "To move in a circle
[the muons] must undergo a centripetal acceleration, that
is, they are in a non-inertial frame, and so they mimic the
moving twin. We would expect the CERN muons to
remain younger than their stay-at-home brethren." This
was, in fact, what happened, the figures tallying with those
forecast by relativity.
  These, and comparable experiments, repeated tests which
physicists had made since they began to investigate
relativity experimentally, although they did so with a
precision which would have been unthinkable even a
generation earlier. Something of a different order was
begun on March 29, 1979, when what appeared to be two
quasars were observed from the Kitt Park National
Observatory. The similarity of the radio emissions made by
them was soon noted and it was recollected that Einstein's
general theory had predicted that strong gravitational
fields could not only bend light but could, acting as a lens,
split distant images. Might not the two quasars, it was
asked, in reality be two images of a single quasar produced
by a gravitational lens of the kind Einstein had predicted?
  However, an essential to such a gravitational lens was a
massive intervening object, so compact that it might act
effectively as a point mass, creating two images of any
object behind it and nearly on the same line of sight. This
massive object was in fact soon found by the giant Mount
Palomar telescope: a major galaxy, midway between the
two quasar locations. Additional observations were now
made by the Jodrell Bank radio-telescope in Britain, the
Very Large Array of the National Radio Astronomy
Observatory in the United States, by Dr. Ray Weismann of
the University of Arizona, by other observatories in the
Netherlands and West Germany, and by the International
Ultraviolet Explorer Satellite. All appeared to confirm the
theory of the gravitational lens. Chapter and verse had
now almost certainly been provided for confirmation of yet
another relativistic prediction.
  The overall effect of these varied experiments that have
taken place since Einstein's death has been to confirm the
validity of his life's work, even though details of it may be
modifiedùmuch as Newton's view of the universe was
modified rather than destroyed by Einstein. The only area
in which he has received little support and no confirmation
is that of the unified field theory which he believed existed
and whose details he believed to be capable of discovery if
only the right paths were followed. From the 1920s
onward, the search for the unified field theory was to
absorb a great deal of his intellectual powers. Today its
existence looks as unlikely as ever; many physicists believe
that in pursuing it Einstein was being led on by a mirage,
and that a very different approach to the problem of
unifying physics is required.
  The success of relativistic ideas during the second half of
the century has lessened neither discussion of their
implications, particularly on cosmology, nor discussion of
Einstein himself, as man as well as scientist. Both
increased in 1979 as the centenary of his birth was
celebrated and as conventions and seminars were held in
his honor in Berne, Jerusalem, West Germany, Princeton,
and New York, and as the Smithsonian Institution's
National Museum of History and Technology held an
Einstein Exhibition in Washington.
  Three events have cast fresh light on man and scientist
since his death: the discovery of a small cache of Einstein
letters in Leiden and the publication of his correspondence
with Michelangelo Besso and with Maurice Solovine. The
Leiden material came to light after a number of letters
from de Sitter had been found among the Einstein papers
in Princeton. At the time, the archives of the Sterrewacht
at Leiden, where de Sitter had worked during the First
World War, were being moved from the old observatory,
and it was some months before Professor Franz Kahn and
his wife, visiting the Sterrewacht, were able to investigate.
After a fruitless search in twenty-nine boxes, during which
the de Sitter correspondence was indexed, the thirtieth box
was found to contain seventeen letters and postcards from
Einstein.
  The first letter, dated June 22, 1916, dealt with the
problems raised by gravitational waves, a subject discussed
by the two men intermittently throughout the next two
months. Only in March 1917 did Einstein, after deploring
what he obviously believed was a rigged academic
appointment, say: "Now to our business." This business
was the construction of a model for the universe which
could be tied to observation, a matter about which, says
Professor Kahn in an article on the correspondence (first
published in Natuuren Technik in May 1975 and reprinted
in Nature Oct. 9, 1975), Einstein was uneasy. "I compare
space to a cloth," he wrote to de Sitter; "... one can observe
a certain portion ... we speculate how to extrapolate the
cloth, what holds its tangential tension in equilibrium ...
whether it is infinitely extended, or finite and closed.
Heine has given the answer in a poem, 'and an idiot
expects an answer.'" As Professor Kahn notes: "Now, 60
years later, we astronomical idiots are still waiting for the
answer."
  The correspondence goes on to reveal some of the
detailed differences between Einstein's conception of the
universe and de Sitter's, differences which were to be
drawn toward the melting pot in the 1920s as Hubble and
his colleagues at Mount Wilson verified the apparent
recession of the galaxies and the continued expansion of
the universe.
  However, the Leiden correspondence, like almost every
other collection of Einstein material, contains glosses on
his attitude to subjects other than science. Thus, there is a
card to de Sitter saying: "It is good of you that you are
throwing a bridge over this abyss of misunderstanding.
With this card you will receive the reprint you asked for,
plus some others for the colleague. When peace comes I
shall write to him." The abyss of misunderstanding was
the First World War, the colleague almost certainly
Eddington, who was subsequently to organize the eclipse
expeditions which produced the shattering first
experimental confirmation of the general theory.
  Once Einstein's attitude to war is raised, it can be asked
how his influence on politico-scientific matters should be
judged in the light of current affairs.
  Overwhelmingly, his name is linked with nuclear
weapons. However, Vannevar Bush's comment on
Einstein's famous first letter to Roosevelt should not be
forgotten: "The show was going before that letter was even
written." In fact, Einstein's "responsibility," a
responsibility which rested heavily on his conscience, is
considerably more complex than at first appears. Even
when the trail is followed back to E=mc2, it should be
remembered that Rutherford had speculatedùbefore
Einstein's first paper on relativity had surprised the
worldùon the "wave of atomic disintegration [which]
might be started through matter, which would indeed
make this old world vanish in smoke." Yet neither
Einstein's later letters encouraging nuclear research nor
the admittedly small help he was allowed to give to isotope
separation should be totally ignored. Today it is clear that
to a man with as wide- awake a conscience as Einstein
enjoyed, there was every reason to regret that fear of
German success had persuaded him to action, whatever the
significance of those actions was ultimately to be.
  It is in his influence on reactions to "the bomb" that
Einstein was so quintessentially important. That influence
may not have been as considerable as his friends had
hoped, but it was at least as much as his enemies had
expected. It continued after his death, moreover, due to the
purely fortuitous circumstance of the aureole of white hair,
the figure of a "Charlie Chaplin with the brow of a
Homer," as the New Statesman called him, a figure whose
words continued to gain attention when, from the grave,
they appealed to human beings not to destroy themselves.
  In his last days, moreover, one of his actions brought
repercussions that still continue. This was his signing of
what came to be known as the Russell-Einstein
Declaration, a statement from which there sprang the
Pugwash Movement. The movement had its critics, and
still has, but it is difficult not to believe that with its
bringing together of scientists from both sides of the Iron
Curtain it has worked on the side of the angels.
  On Germany, and on Israel, whatever influence Einstein
exerted has been bypassed by events. His unquenchable
distrust of Germany, epitomized in his almost bitter
arguments with his old friend Max Born, can today be
viewed with sympathy if regret. His unforgiving reaction
to what happened in the holocaust, sharpened by the
background of his own German birth, was in strong
contrast with the overall humanity of his views on almost
every other subject. As to Israel, his strong feelings had
been leavened since the 1920s by the belief that
accommodation with the Arabs was essential, and he died
before being able to make useful impact on the situation
which was deteriorating still further in the 1950s.
  To the end he devoted himself to the cause of world
government, the only hope, as he saw it, of avoiding a war
whose devastation, he appears to have known soon after
1945, would be the result of weapons whose power would
be infinitely more destructive than those of the first
primitive nuclear bombs. Here it is difficult to quantify
what Einstein's influence has been. But he has helped to
arm the idea with logic and as a propagandist has kept it
more in the public eye than it otherwise would have been.
  The fact that his influence has been much what was to be
expectedùpervasive but difficult to pin downùis
paralleled by the image of Einstein the man that has
become sharper as details of his personal characteristics
have seeped out by reminiscence over the years. All has
tended to reinforce the fact that in one respect he was
unlike so many great men of history. With him, no feet of
clay; Einstein revealed has left the image as it was before.
Those who wrote or talked about him were, it is true,
almost without exception parti pris: nevertheless, even
when this factor is discounted, it is clear that the human
qualities that so shimmered about him during his life were
those of reality and not of myth.
  Two typical incidents give clues to his unaffected love of
children and to his ability to make real contact with them,
as with most laymen, a characteristic that formed part of
his strength. Eugene Wigner, one of the world's leading
physicists and a friend of Einstein at Princeton, has
recalled that when his wife took a folder of papers to
Einstein's home, he asked her about the Wigner children.
"She had to admit that they had chicken pox and
according to local regulations were not allowed to leave
the car," Wigner has written. "Einstein said at once, 'Oh, I
did have chicken pox myself, seeing them won't hurt me.'
And he went down and had a nice conversation with the
two. They long remembered it (and my wife doubts very
much that he knew what chicken pox was)."
  With this easygoing relationship there went an ability to
communicate with young people that has the stigmata of
genius. Just as it is easier to understand relativity by
reading Einstein rather than many of his exegesists, so his
explanations to young friends were always understandable
ùperformances comparable to those of Lord Rutherford,
who used to claim that any scientific theory should be
explicable to a barmaid. One example was revealed when
Einstein's letters to Michelangelo Besso were published.
Besso's son Vero used to listen to Einstein with great
attention, says Professor Speziali, who edited the
correspondence. "One day in 1904 (or 1905?)," he says,
"[Einstein] made for Vero a splendid kite, and they walked
into the country in the direction of a small mountain south
of Bern, taking the kite with them. At the foot of the
mountain one of them tried out the kite, and then put the
string into Vero's hand. Was it papa's friend Albert who
made the first try? That was unimportant. What Vero
never forgot was that Einstein not only made the kite but
could explain to him why it flew."
  Thus, on three levels a summing-up of Einstein, decades
after his death, can claim that as a physicist his genius is
quite undiluted by modern techniques that can test his
theories with a rigor unimaginable in his own day; that his
influence on public affairs, certainly pervasive but of a
strength less than he would have wished, was of a kind to
be applauded by all those who still retain hope for the
human race; and that as a human being the reality of his
life equaled the myth. No man of his intellectual ability, no
man who had so decisively changed the concepts of the
universe, could hope for more.

  POSTSCRIPT

  by Sir Bernard Lovell

  There are only a few examples in history where almost
everyone intuitively associates a single individual with a
decisive scientific advanceùCopernicus with the helio-
centric theory and Newton with the concept of gravity, for
example. Now, a hundred years after the birth of Einstein
it is evident that his name will be linked in the historical
context with the theory of relativity. Although this
association will persist in the popular imagination, it may
be overlooked that Einstein was not awarded the Nobel
prize for his relativistic theories but for his work on the
quantum theory of the photoelectric effect. His immense
achievement is that in one year at the age of 26 he
published a series of papers introducing three
revolutionary concepts into physicsùthe idea that light
incident on the photoelectric surface must be quantised,
the proof that the random motions of a suspension in a
liquid (the Brownian motion) must be caused by
bombardment by the molecules of the liquid, and the
special theory of relativity.
  The intricacies of the mathematics in the relativistic
theories obscure the dramatic impact of the concepts on
human thought. After the publication of the special theory
in 1905 it was no longer possible to maintain the simple
Newtonian beliefs in the absolute nature of space and time,
and the theory contained the implicit proof of the
equivalence of mass and energy. Eleven years later
Einstein published his general theory of relativity,
concerning bodies in accelerated motion as distinct from
the uniform motions of the special theory. The general
theory raised deep philosophical and physical problems
about the nature of the universe and the gravitational field
which remain unresolved. Naturally, such revolutionary
concepts have been challenged and alternative theories
have been proposed. However, in the few years which have
elapsed since Mr. Clark wrote his remarkable book a
number of scientific measurements have confirmed the
superiority of the relativistic theories over all competitors.
Furthermore, it is now clear that the discovery in 1965 of
the isotropic microwave background radiation from the sky
confirms, apparently without ambiguity, that the universe
has evolved from an extremely dense initial condition
within the last ten billion years. We believe that these
measurements relate to an epoch very close to the singular
initial conditions implicit as the cosmological consequence
of the general theory. One hundred years after Einstein's
birth his entire scientific output remains an untarnished
monument to one of the greatest scientists of all time.
Einstein's greatness is manifest not merely in his theories
but also in his realisation that general relativity was not a
final description of natureùan insight which led him to
search unsuccessfully during the next 40 years for the
more complete unified theory.
  We do not know whether Einstein's final search was
doomed to failure because no such unification of the laws
of nature is possible. Although general relativity has been
found to be correct whenever subject to observational test
the destruction of the belief in the absolute nature of
Newtonian space and time has introduced profound
difficulties in man's attempt to comprehend the nature of
the universe. The discoveries of recent years have
narrowed the avenues of escape from the fundamental
dilemmas imposed on our view of nature by the theories of
Einstein and throw into relief his intellectual courage.
  Einstein's courage was manifest in human affairs far
beyond his realisation that he was propounding theories
which, if found to be correct, would erode the stable
Newtonian concepts of space and time. A German by birth,
he suffered the human vicissitudes of two world wars and
finally escaped the Hitler purge in 1933. He was exploited
by the Zionists after 1919, and he lived to see the terrifying
practical consequences of the equivalence of mass and
energy implicit as a principle in the special theory.
Einstein would live in history as a very great
mathematician and physicist. The significance of Mr.
Clark's book is not merely that he enables the reader to
appreciate this, but that he reveals Einstein as one of the
great human phenomena of the civilised worldùa man in
whom the complexities of his mathematics are matched by
the depth of his philosophical disputes and by the
intricacies of his political associations, first in Europe and
then in America. No doubt many volumes about Einstein
will be published in celebration of the centenary of his
birth, but the scope of Mr. Clark's book and his insight
into the nature of Einstein's life and work will endow his
book with a special and lasting significance.

  APRIL 1978
Ideas and Opinions

Albert Einstein

Based on MEIN WELTBILD, edited by Carl Seelig,
and other sources
New translations and revisions by Sonja Bargmann

PART I

IDEAS AND OPINIONS

PARADISE LOST

Written shortly after the establishment in 1919 of the
League of Nations and first published in French.
Also published in Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam:
Querido Verlag, 1934.

  As late as the seventeenth century the savants and
artists of all Europe were so closely united by the
bond of a common ideal that cooperation between
them was scarcely affected by political events. This
unity was further strengthened by the general use of
the Latin language.
  Today we look back at this state of affairs as at a
lost paradise. The passions of nationalism have
destroyed this community of the intellect, and the
Latin language which once united the whole world is
dead. The men of learning have become
representatives of the most extreme national
traditions and lost their sense of an intellectual
commonwealth.
  Nowadays we are faced with the dismaying fact
that the politicians, the practical men of affairs, have
become the exponents of international ideas. It is
they who have created the League of Nations.

MY FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE U. S. A.

An interview for Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant,
1921. Appeared in Berliner Tageblatt, July 7, 1921.

  I must redeem my promise to say something about
my impressions of this country. That is not
altogether easy for me. For it is not easy to take up
the attitude of impartial observer when one is
received with such kindness and undeserved respect
as I have been in America. First of all let me say
something on this score.
  The cult of individuals is always, in my view,
unjustified. To be sure, nature distributes her gifts
unevenly among her children. But there are plenty
of the well-endowed, thank God, and I am firmly
convinced that most of them live quiet, unobtrusive
lives. It strikes me as unfair, and even in bad taste,
to select a few of them for boundless admiration,
attributing superhuman powers of mind and
character to them. This has been my fate, and the
contrast between the popular estimate of my
powers and achievements and the reality is simply
grotesque. The awareness of this strange state of
affairs would be unbearable but for one pleasing
consolation: it is a welcome symptom in an age
which is commonly denounced as materialistic, that
it makes heroes of men whose goals lie wholly in the
intellectual and moral sphere. This proves that
knowledge and justice are ranked above wealth and
power by a large section of the human race. My
experience teaches me that this idealistic outlook is
particularly prevalent in America, which is decried
as a singularly materialistic country. After this
digression I come to my proper theme, in the hope
that no more weight will be attached to my modest
remarks than they deserve.
  What first strikes the visitor with amazement is
the superiority of this country in matters of
technology and organization. Objects of everyday
use are more solid than in Europe, houses much
more practically designed. Everything is designed to
save human labor. Labor is expensive, because the
country is sparsely inhabited in comparison with its
natural resources. The high price of labor was the
stimulus which evoked the marvelous development
of technical devices and methods of work. The
opposite extreme is illustrated by over-populated
China or India, where the low price of labor has
stood in the way of the development of machinery.
Europe is halfway between the two. Once the
machine is sufficiently highly developed it becomes
cheaper in the end than the cheapest labor. Let the
Fascists in Europe, who desire on narrow-minded
political grounds to see their own particular
countries more densely populated, take heed of this.
However, the anxious care with which the United
States keep out foreign goods by means of
prohibitive tariffs certainly contrasts oddly with the
general picture. . . . But an innocent visitor must not
be expected to rack his brains too much, and when
all is said and done, it is not absolutely certain that
every question admits of a rational answer.
  The second thing that strikes a visitor is the
joyous, positive attitude to life. The smile on the
faces of the people in photographs is symbolical of
one of the greatest assets of the American. He is
friendly, self-confident, optimistic--and without
envy. The European finds intercourse with
Americans easy and agreeable.
  Compared with the American the European is
more critical, more self-conscious, less kind-hearted
and helpful, more isolated, more fastidious in his
amusements and his reading, generally more or less
of a pessimist.
  Great importance attaches to the material comforts
of life, and equanimity, unconcern, security are all
sacrificed to them. The American lives even more
for his goals, for the future, than the European. Life
for him is always becoming, never being. In this
respect he is even further removed from the Russian
and the Asiatic than the European is.
  But there is one respect in which he resembles the
Asiatic more than the European does: he is less of
an individualist than the European--that is, from the
psychological, not the economic, point of view.
  More emphasis is laid on the "we" than the "I." As
a natural corollary of this, custom and convention
are extremely strong, and there is much more
uniformity both in outlook on life and in moral and
esthetic ideas among Americans than among
Europeans. This fact is chiefly responsible for
America's economic superiority over Europe.
Cooperation and the division of labor develop more
easily and with less friction than in Europe, whether
in the factory or the university or in private charity.
This social sense may be partly due to the English
tradition.
  In apparent contradiction to this stands the fact
that the activities of the State are relatively
restricted as compared with those in Europe. The
European is surprised to find the telegraph, the
telephone, the railways, and the schools
predominantly in private hands. The more social
attitude of the individual, which I mentioned just
now, makes this possible here. Another
consequence of this attitude is that the extremely
unequal distribution of property leads to no
intolerable hardships. The social conscience of the
well-to-do is much more highly developed than in
Europe. He considers himself obliged as a matter of
course to place a large portion of his wealth, and
often of his own energies, too, at the disposal of the
community; public opinion, that all-powerful force,
imperiously demands it of him. Hence the most
important cultural functions can be left to private
enterprise and the part played by the government in
this country is, comparatively, a very restricted one.
  The prestige of government has undoubtedly been
lowered considerably by the Prohibition law. For
nothing is more destructive of respect for the
government and the law of the land than passing
laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret
that the dangerous increase of crime in this country
is closely connected with this.
  There is also another way in which Prohibition, in
my opinion, undermines the authority of the
government. The public house is a place which gives
people the opportunity to exchange views and ideas
on public affairs. As far as I can see, such an
opportunity is lacking in this country, the result
being that the Press, which is mostly controlled by
vested interests, has an excessive influence on public
opinion.
  The overestimation of money is still greater in this
country than in Europe, but appears to me to be on
the decrease. It is at last beginning to be realized that
great wealth is not necessary for a happy and
satisfactory life.
  In regard to artistic matters, I have been genuinely
impressed by the good taste displayed in the
modern buildings and in articles of common use; on
the other hand, the visual arts and music have little
place in the life of the nation as compared with
Europe.
  I have a warm admiration for the achievements of
American institutes of scientific research. We are
unjust in attempting to ascribe the increasing
superiority of American research work exclusively
to superior wealth; devotion, patience, a spirit of
comradeship, and a talent for cooperation play an
important part in its successes.
  One more observation to finish. The United States
is the most powerful among the technically
advanced countries in the world today. Its influence
on the shaping of international relations is
absolutely incalculable. But America is a large
country and its people have so far not shown much
interest in great international problems, among
which the problem of disarmament occupies first
place today. This must be changed, if only in
America's own interest. The last war has shown that
there are no longer any barriers between the
continents and that the destinies of all countries are
closely interwoven. The people of this country
must realize that they have a great responsibility in
the sphere of international politics. The part of
passive spectator is unworthy of this country and is
bound in the end to lead to disaster all round.

REPLY TO THE WOMEN OF AMERICA

Einstein's response to the protest of a women's
organization against his visit to the United States.
Published in Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido
Verlag, 1934.

  Never yet have I experienced from the fair sex such
energetic rejection of all advances; or if I have, never
from so many at once.
  But are they not quite right, these watchful
citizenesses? Why should one open one's doors to a
person who devours hard-boiled capitalists with as
much appetite and gusto as the Cretan Minotaur in
days gone by devoured luscious Greek maidens, and
on top of that is low-down enough to reject every
sort of war, except the unavoidable war with one's
own wife? Therefore give heed to your clever and
patriotic womenfolk and remember that the Capitol
of mighty Rome was once saved by the cackling of
its faithful geese.

THE WORLD AS I SEE IT

Originally published in Forum and Century, Vol. 84,
pp. 193-194, the thirteenth in the Forum series,
"Living Philosophies." Included also in Living
Philosophies (pp. 3-7), New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1931.

  How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is
here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows
not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But
without deeper reflection one knows from daily life
that one exists for other people--first of all for those
upon whose smiles and well-being our own
happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the
many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are
bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times
every day I remind myself that my inner and outer
life are based on the labors of other men, living and
dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in
the same measure as I have received and am still
receiving. I am strongly drawn to a frugal life and am
often oppressively aware that I am engrossing an
undue amount of the labor of my fellow-men. I
regard class distinctions as unjustified and, in the
last resort, based on force. I also believe that a
simple and unassuming life is good far everybody,
physically and mentally.
  I do not at all believe in human freedom in the
philosophical sense. Everybody acts not only under
external compulsion but also in accordance with
inner necessity. Schopenhauer's saying, "A man can
do what he wants, but not want what he wants,"
has been a very real inspiration to me since my
youth; it has been a continual consolation in the face
of life's hardships, my own and others', and an
unfailing well-spring of tolerance. This realization
mercifully mitigates the easily paralyzing sense of
responsibility and prevents us from taking ourselves
and other people all too seriously; it is conducive to
a view of life which, in particular, gives humor its
due.
  To inquire after the meaning or object of one's own
existence or that of all creatures has always seemed
to me absurd from an objective point of view. And
yet everybody has certain ideals which determine
the direction of his endeavors and his judgments. In
this sense I have never looked upon ease and
happiness as ends in themselves--this ethical basis I
call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals which have
lighted my way, and time after time have given me
new courage to face life cheerfully, have been
Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of
kinship with men of like mind, without the
occupation with the objective world, the eternally
unattainable in the field of art and scientific
endeavors, life would have seemed to me empty.
The trite objects of human efforts--possessions,
outward success, luxury--have always seemed to me
contemptible.
  My passionate sense of social justice and social
responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my
pronounced lack of need for direct contact with
other human beings and human communities. I am
truly a "lone traveler" and have never belonged to
my country, my home, my friends, or even my
immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face
of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance
and a need for solitude--feelings which increase with
the years. One becomes sharply aware, but without
regret, of the limits of mutual understanding and
consonance with other people. No doubt, such a
person loses some of his innocence and unconcern;
on the other hand, he is largely independent of the
opinions, habits, and judgments of his fellows and
avoids the temptation to build his inner equilibrium
upon such insecure foundations.
  My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be
respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is
an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient
of excessive admiration and reverence from my
fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my
own. The cause of this may well be the desire,
unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas
to which I have with my feeble powers attained
through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that it is
necessary for the achievement of the objective of an
organization that one man should do the thinking
and directing and generally bear the responsibility.
But the led must not be coerced, they must be able
to choose their leader. An autocratic system of
coercion, in my opinion, soon degenerates. For force
always attracts men of low morality, and I believe it
to be an invariable rule that tyrants of genius are
succeeded by scoundrels. For this reason I have
always been passionately opposed to systems such
as we see in Italy and Russia today. The thing that
has brought discredit upon the form of democracy
as it exists in Europe today is not to be laid to the
door of the democratic principle as such, but to the
lack of stability of governments and to the
impersonal character of the electoral system. I
believe that in this respect the United States of
America have found the right way. They have a
President who is elected for a sufficiently long
period and has sufficient powers really to exercise
his responsibility. What I value, on the other hand,
in the German political system is the more extensive
provision that it makes for the individual in case of
illness or need. The really valuable thing in the
pageant of human life seems to me not the political
state, but the creative, sentient individual, the
personality; it alone creates the noble and the
sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in
thought and dull in feeling.
  This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd
life, the military system, which I abhor. That a man
can take pleasure in marching in fours to the strains
of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has
only been given his big brain by mistake;
unprotected spinal marrow was all he needed. This
plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished
with all possible speed. Heroism on command,
senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense
that goes by the name of patriotism--how
passionately I hate them! How vile and despicable
seems war to me! I would rather be hacked in pieces
than take part in such an abominable business. My
opinion of the human race is high enough that I
believe this bogey would have disappeared long ago,
had the sound sense of the peoples not been
systematically corrupted by commercial and
political interests acting through the schools and the
Press.
  The most beautiful experience we can have is the
mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which
stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
Whoever does not know it and can no longer
wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his
eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of
mystery--even if mixed with fear--that engendered
religion. A knowledge of the existence of something
we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the
profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty,
which only in their most primitive forms are
accessible to our minds--it is this knowledge and
this emotion that constitute true religiosity; in this
sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.
I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and
punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that
we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would
I want to conceive of an individual that survives his
physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd
egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with
the mystery of the eternity of life and with the
awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure
of the existing world, together with the devoted
striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny,
of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.

THE MEANING OF LIFE

Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  What is the meaning of human life, or, for that
matter, of the life of any creature? To know an
answer to this question means to be religious. You
ask: Does it make any sense, then, to pose this
question? I answer: The man who regards his own
life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is
not merely unhappy but hardly fit for life.

THE TRUE VALUE OF A HUMAN BEING

Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  The true value of a human being is determined
primarily by the measure and the sense in which he
has attained liberation from the self.

GOOD AND EVIL

Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  It is right in principle that those should be the best
loved who have contributed most of the elevation of
the human race and human life. But if one goes on to
ask who they are, one finds oneself in no
inconsiderable difficulties. In the case of political,
and even of religious, leaders it is often very
doubtful whether they have done more good or
harm. Hence I most seriously believe that one does
people the best service by giving them some
elevating work to do and thus indirectly elevating
them. This applies most of all to the great artist, but
also in a lesser degree to the scientist. To be sure, it
is not the fruits of scientific research that elevate a
man and enrich his nature, but the urge to
understand, the intellectual work, creative or
receptive. Thus, it would surely be inappropriate to
judge the value of the Talmud by its intellectual
fruits.

ON WEALTH

Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  I am absolutely convinced that no wealth in the
world can help humanity forward, even in the hands
of the most devoted worker in this cause. The
example of great and pure individuals is the only
thing that can lead us to noble thoughts and deeds.
Money only appeals to selfishness and irresistibly
invites abuse.
  Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus, or Gandhi
armed with the money-bags of Carnegie?

SOCIETY AND PERSONALITY

Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  When we survey our lives and endeavors, we soon
observe that almost the whole of our actions and
desires is bound up with the existence of other
human beings. We notice that our whole nature
resembles that of the social animals. We eat food
that others have produced, wear clothes that others
have made, live in houses that others have built. The
greater part of our knowledge and beliefs has been
communicated to us by other people through the
medium of a language which others have created.
Without language our mental capacities would be
poor indeed, comparable to those of the higher
animals; we have, therefore, to admit that we owe
our principal advantage over the beasts to the fact of
living in human society. The individual, if left alone
from birth, would remain primitive and beastlike in
his thoughts and feelings to a degree that we can
hardly conceive. The individual is what he is and has
the significance that he has not so much in virtue of
his individuality, but rather as a member of a great
human community, which directs his material and
spiritual existence from the cradle to the grave.
  A man's value to the community depends
primarily on how far his feelings, thoughts, and
actions are directed toward promoting the good of
his fellows. We call him good or bad according to his
attitude in this respect. It looks at first sight as if
our estimate of a man depended entirely on his
social qualities.
  And yet such an attitude would be wrong. It can
easily be seen that all the valuable achievements,
material, spiritual, and moral, which we receive from
society have been brought about in the course of
countless generations by creative individuals.
Someone once discovered the use of fire, someone
the cultivation of edible plants, and someone the
steam engine.
  Only the individual can think, and thereby create
new values for society, nay, even set up new moral
standards to which the life of the community
conforms. Without creative personalities able to
think and judge independently, the upward
development of society is as unthinkable as the
development of the individual personality without
the nourishing soil of the community.
  The health of society thus depends quite as much
on the independence of the individuals composing it
as on their close social cohesion. It has rightly been
said that the very basis of Graeco-European-
American culture, and inparticular of its brilliant
flowering in the Italian Renaissance, which put an
end to the stagnation of medieval Europe, has been
the liberation and comparative isolation of the
individual.
  Let us now consider the times in which we live.
How does society fare, how the individual? The
population of the civilized countries is extremely
dense as compared with former times; Europe today
contains about three times as many people as it did
a hundred years ago. But the number of leading
personalities has decreased out of all proportion.
Only a few people are known to the masses as
individuals, through their creative achievements.
Organization has to some extent taken the place of
leading personalities, particularly in the technical
sphere, but also to a very perceptible extent in the
scientific.
  The lack of outstanding figures is particularly
striking in the domain of art. Painting and music
have definitely degenerated and largely lost their
popular appeal. In politics not only are leaders
lacking, but the independence of spirit and the sense
of justice of the citizen have to a great extent
declined. The democratic, parliamentarian regime,
which is based on such independence, has in many
places been shaken; dictatorships have sprung up
and are tolerated, because men's sense of the dignity
and the rights of the individual is no longer strong
enough. In two weeks the sheeplike masses of any
country can be worked up by the newspapers into
such a state of excited fury that men are prepared to
put on uniforms and kill and be killed, for the sake
of the sordid ends of a few interested parties.
Compulsory military service seems to me the most
disgraceful symptom of that deficiency in personal
dignity from which civilized mankind is suffering
today. No wonder there is no lack of prophets who
prophesy the early eclipse of our civilization. I am
not one of these pessimists; I believe that better
times are coming. Let me briefly state my reasons
for such confidence.
  In my opinion, the present manifestations of
decadence are explained by the fact that economic
and technologic developments have highly
intensified the struggle for existence, greatly to the
detriment of the free development of the individual.
But the development of technology means that less
and less work is needed from the individual for the
satisfaction of the community's needs. A planned
division of labor is becoming more and more of a
crying necessity, and this division will lead to the
material security of the individual. This security and
the spare time and energy which the individual will
have at his disposal can be turned to the
development of his personality. In this way the
community may regain its health, and we will hope
that future historians will explain the morbid
symptoms of present-day society as the childhood
ailments of an aspiring humanity, due entirely to the
excessive speed at which civilization was advancing.

INTERVIEWERS

Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  To be called to account publicly for everything one
has said, even in jest, in an excess of high spirits or
in momentary anger, may possibly be awkward, yet
up to a point it is reasonable and natural. But to be
called to account publicly for what others have said
in one's name, when one cannot defend oneself, is
indeed a sad predicament. "But to whom does such
a thing happen?" you will ask. Well, everyone who
is of sufficient interest to the public to be pursued
by interviewers. You smile incredulously, but I have
had plenty of direct experience and will tell you
about it.
  Imagine the following situation. One morning a
reporter comes to you and asks you in a friendly
way to tell him something about your friend N. At
first you no doubt feel something approaching
indignation at such a proposal. But you soon
discover that there is no escape. If you refuse to say
anything, the man writes: "I asked one of N's
supposedly best friends about him. But he
prudently avoided my questions. This in itself
enables the reader to draw the inevitable
conclusions." There is, therefore, no escape, and
you give the following information: "Mr. N is a
cheerful, straightforward man, much liked by all his
friends. He can find a bright side to any situation.
His enterprise and industry know no bounds; his
job takes up his entire energies. He is devoted to his
family and lays everything he possesses at his
wife's feet. . . ."
  Now for the reporter's version: "Mr. N takes
nothing very seriously and has a gift for making
himself liked, particularly as he carefully cultivates a
hearty and ingratiating manner. He is so completely
a slave to his job that he has no time for the
considerations of any non-personal subject or for
any extracurricular mental activity. He spoils his
wife unbelievably and is utterly under her thumb. . .
."
  A real reporter would make it much more spicy,
but I expect this will be enough for you and your
friend N. He reads the above, and some more like it,
in the paper next morning, and his rage against you
knows no bounds, however cheerful and benevolent
his natural disposition may be. The injury done to
him gives you untold pain, especially as you are
really fond of him.
  What's your next step, my friend? If you know,
tell me quickly so that I may adopt your method
with all speed.

CONGRATULATIONS TO A CRITIC

Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  To see with one's own eyes, to feel and judge
without succumbing to the suggestive power of the
fashion of the day, to be able to express what one
has seen and felt in a trim sentence or even in a
cunningly wrought word--is that not glorious? Is it
not a proper subject for congratulation?

TO THE SCHOOLCHILDREN OF JAPAN

Einstein visited Japan in 1922. This message
published in Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido
Verlag, 1934.

  In sending this greeting to you Japanese
schoolchildren, I can lay claim to a special right to
do so. For I have myself visited your beautiful
country, seen its cities and houses, its mountains
and woods, and the Japanese boys who had learned
to love their country for its beauty. A big fat book
full of colored drawings by Japanese children lies
always on my table.
  If you get my message of greeting from all this
distance, remember that ours is the first age in
history to bring about friendly and understanding
intercourse between people of different
nationalities; in former times nations passed their
lives in mutual ignorance, and in fact in hatred or
fear of one another. May the spirit of brotherly
understanding gain more and more ground among
them. With this in mind I, an old man, greet you
Japanese schoolchildren from afar and hope that
your generation may some day put mine to shame.

MESSAGE IN THE TIME-CAPSULE

World's Fair, 1939.

  Our time is rich in inventive minds, the inventions
of which could facilitate our lives considerably. We
are crossing the seas by power and utilize power
also in order to relieve humanity from all tiring
muscular work. We have learned to fly and we are
able to send messages and news without any
difficulty over the entire world through electric
waves.
  However, the production and distribution of
commodities is entirely unorganized so that
everybody must live in fear of being eliminated from
the economic cycle, in this way suffering for the
want of everything. Furthermore, people living in
different countries kill each other at irregular time
intervals, so that also for this reason anyone who
thinks about the future must live in fear and terror.
This is due to the fact that the intelligence and
character of the masses are incomparably lower than
the intelligence and character of the few who
produce something valuable for the community.
  I trust that posterity will read these statements
with a feeling of proud and justified superiority.

REMARKS ON BERTRAND RUSSELL'S
THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE

From The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, Vol. V of
"The Library of Living Philosophers," edited by
Paul Arthur Schilpp, 1944. Translated from the
original German by Paul Arthur Schilpp. Tudor
Publishers.

  When the editor asked me to write something
about Bertrand Russell, my admiration and respect
for that author at once induced me to say yes. I owe
innumerable happy hours to the reading of Russell's
works, something which I cannot say of any other
contemporary scientific writer, with the exception
of Thorstein Veblen. Soon, however, I discovered
that it is easier to give such a promise than to fulfill
it. I had promised to say something about Russell as
philosopher and epistemologist. After having in full
confidence begun with it, I quickly recognized what
a slippery field I had ventured upon, having, due to
lack of experience, until now cautiously limited
myself to the field of physics. The present
difficulties of his science force the physicist to come
to grips with philosophical problems to a greater
degree than was the case with earlier generations.
Although I shall not speak here of those difficulties,
it was my concern with them, more than anything
else, which led me to the position outlined in this
essay.
  In the evolution of philosophic thought through
the centuries the following question has played a
major r⌠le: what knowledge is pure thought able to
supply independently of sense perception? Is there
any such knowledge? If not, what precisely is the
relation between our knowledge and the raw material
furnished by sense impressions? An almost
boundless chaos of philosophical opinions
corresponds to these questions and to a few others
intimately connected with them. Nevertheless there
is visible in this process of relatively fruitless but
heroic endeavors a systematic trend of development,
namely, an increasing skepticism concerning every
attempt by means of pure thought to learn
something about the "objective world," about the
world of "things" in contrast to the world of mere
"concepts and ideas." Be it said parenthetically that,
just as on the part of a real philosopher, quotation
marks are used here to introduce an illegitimate
concept, which the reader is asked to permit for the
moment, although the concept is suspect in the eyes
of the philosophical police.
  During philosophy's childhood it was rather
generally believed that it is possible to find
everything which can be known by means of mere
reflection. It was an illusion which anyone can
easily understand if, for a moment, he dismisses
what he has learned from later philosophy and from
natural science; he will not be surprised to find that
Plato ascribed a higher reality to "ideas" than to
empirically experienceable things. Even in Spinoza
and as late as in Hegel this prejudice was the
vitalizing force which seems still to have played the
major r⌠le. Someone, indeed, might even raise the
question whether, without something of this
illusion, anything really great can be achieved in the
realm of philosophic thought--but we do not wish
to ask this question.
  This more aristocratic illusion concerning the
unlimited penetrative power of thought has as its
counterpart the more plebeian illusion of na∩ve
realism, according to which things "are" as they are
perceived by us through our senses. This illusion
dominates the daily life of men and of animals; it is
also the point of departure in all of the sciences,
especially of the natural sciences.
  These two illusions cannot be overcome
independently. The overcoming of na∩ve realism has
been relatively simple. In his introduction to his
volume, An Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth, Russell
has characterized this process in a marvelously
concise fashion:

  We all start from "na∩ve realism," i.e., the doctrine
that things are what they seem. We think that grass
is green, that stones are hard, and that snow is cold.
But physics assures us that the greenness of grass,
the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow are
not the greenness, hardness, and coldness that we
know in our own experience, but something very
different. The observer, when he seems to himself to
be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be
believed, observing the effects of the stone upon
himself. Thus science seems to be at war with itself:
when it most means to be objective, it finds itself
plunged into subjectivity against its will. Na∩ve
realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows
that naive realism is false. Therefore na∩ve realism, if
true, is false; therefore it is false. (pp. 14-15)

  Apart from their masterful formulation these lines
say something which had never previously occurred
to me. For, superficially considered, the mode of
thought in Berkeley and Hume seems to stand in
contrast to the mode of thought in the natural
sciences. However, Russell's just cited remark
uncovers a connection: if Berkeley relies upon the
fact that we do not directly grasp the "things" of the
external world through our senses, but that only
events causally connected with the presence of
"things" reach our sense organs, then this is a
consideration which gets its persuasive character
from our confidence in the physical mode of
thought. For, if one doubts the physical mode of
thought in even its most general features, there is no
necessity to interpolate between the object and the
act of vision anything which separates the object
from the subject and makes the "existence of the
object" problematical.
  It was, however, the very same physical mode of
thought and its practical successes which have
shaken the confidence in the possibility of
understanding things and their relations by means of
purely speculative thought. Gradually the
conviction gained recognition that all knowledge
about things is exclusively a working-over of the
raw material furnished by the senses. In this general
(and intentionally somewhat vaguely stated) form
this sentence is probably today commonly
accepted. But this conviction does not rest on the
supposition that anyone has actually proved the
impossibility of gaining knowledge of reality by
means of pure speculation, but rather upon the fact
that the empirical (in the above-mentioned sense)
procedure alone has shown its capacity to be the
source of knowledge. Galileo and Hume first upheld
this principle with full clarity and decisiveness.
  Hume saw that concepts which we must regard as
essential, such as, for example, causal connection,
cannot be gained from material given to us by the
senses. This insight led him to a skeptical attitude as
concerns knowledge of any kind. If one reads
Hume's books, one is amazed that many and
sometimes even highly esteemed philosophers after
him have been able to write so much obscure stuff
and even find grateful readers for it. Hume has
permanently influenced the development of the best
of philosophers who came after him. One senses
him in the reading of Russell's philosophical
analyses, whose acumen and simplicity of
expression have often reminded me of Hume.
  Man has an intense desire for assured knowledge.
That is why Hume's clear message seemed crushing:
the sensory raw material, the only source of our
knowledge, through habit may lead us to belief and
expectation but not to the knowledge and still less
to the understanding of lawful relations. Then Kant
took the stage with an idea which, though certainly
untenable in the form in which he put it, signified a
step towards the solution of Hume's dilemma:
whatever in knowledge is of empirical origin is never
certain (Hume). If, therefore, we have definitely
assured knowledge, it must be grounded in reason
itself. This is held to be the case, for example, in the
propositions of geometry and in the principle of
causality. These and certain other types of
knowledge are, so to speak, a part of the
implements of thinking and therefore do not
previously have to be gained from sense data (i.e.,
they are a priori knowledge). Today everyone
knows, of course, that the mentioned concepts
contain nothing of the certainty, of the inherent
necessity, which Kant had attributed to them. The
following, however, appears to me to be correct in
Kant's statement of the problem: in thinking we use,
with a certain "right," concepts to which there is no
access from the materials of sensory experience, if
the situation is viewed from the logical point of
view.
  As a matter of fact, I am convinced that even much
more is to be asserted: the concepts which arise in
our thought and in our linguistic expressions are
all--when viewed logically--the free creations of
thought which cannot inductively be gained from
sense experiences. This is not so easily noticed only
because we have the habit of combining certain
concepts and conceptual relations (propositions) so
definitely with certain sense experiences that we do
not become conscious of the gulf--logically
unbridgeable--which separates the world of sensory
experiences from the world of concepts and
propositions.
  Thus, for example, the series of integers is
obviously an invention of the human mind, a
self-created tool which simplifies the ordering of
certain sensory experiences. But there is no way in
which this concept could be made to grow, as it
were, directly out of sense experiences. It is
deliberately that I choose here the concept of
number, because it belongs to pre-scientific thinking
and because, in spite of that fact, its constructive
character is still easily recognizable. The more,
however, we turn to the most primitive concepts of
everyday life, the more difficult it becomes amidst
the mass of inveterate habits to recognize the
concept as an independent creation of thinking. It
was thus that the fateful conception--fateful, that is
to say, for an understanding of the here-existing
conditions--could arise, according to which the
concepts originate from experience by way of
"abstraction," i.e., through omission of a part of its
content. I want to indicate now why this conception
appears to me to be so fateful.
  As soon as one is at home in Hume's critique one is
easily led to believe that all those concepts and
propositions which cannot be deduced from the
sensory raw material are, on account of their
"metaphysical" character, to be removed from
thinking. For all thought acquires material content
only through its relationship with that sensory
material. This latter proposition I take to be entirely
true; but I hold the prescription for thinking which
is grounded on this proposition to be false. For this
claim--if only carried through
consistently--absolutely excludes thinking of any
kind as "metaphysical."
  In order that thinking might not degenerate into
"metaphysics," or into empty talk, it is only
necessary that enough propositions of the
conceptual system be firmly enough connected with
sensory experiences and that the conceptional
system, in view of its task of ordering and surveying
sense experience, should show as much unity and
parsimony as possible. Beyond that, however, the
"system" is (as regards logic) a free play with
symbols according to (logically) arbitrarily given
rules of the game. All this applies as much (and in
the same manner) to the thinking in daily life as to
the more consciously and systematically
constructed thinking in the sciences.
  It will now be clear what is meant if I make the
following statement: by his clear critique Hume did
not only advance philosophy in a decisive way but
also--though through no fault of his--created a
danger for philosophy in that, following his critique,
a fateful "fear of metaphysics" arose which has
come to be a malady of contemporary empiricistic
philosophizing; this malady is the counterpart to
that earlier philosophizing in the clouds, which
thought it could neglect and dispense with what was
given by the senses.
  No matter how much one may admire the acute
analysis which Russell has given us in his latest
book on Meaning and Truth, it still seems to me
that even there the specter of the metaphysical fear
has caused some damage. For this fear seems to me,
for example, to be the cause for conceiving of the
"thing" as a "bundle of qualities," such that the
"qualities" are to be taken from the sensory raw
material. Now the fact that two things are said to be
one and the same thing, if they coincide in all
qualities, forces one to consider the geometrical
relations between things as belonging to their
qualities. (Otherwise one is forced to look upon the
Eiffel Tower in Paris and a New York skyscraper as
"the same thing.") [Compare Russell's An Inquiry
Into Meaning and Truth, 119-120, chapter on
"Proper Names.╙] However, I see no
"metaphysical" danger in taking the thing (the object
in the sense of physics) as an independent concept
into the system together with the proper
spatio-temporal structure.
  In view of these endeavors I am particularly
pleased to note that, in the last chapter of the book,
it finally turns out that one can, after all, not get
along without "metaphysics." The only thing to
which I take exception there is the bad intellectual
conscience which shines through between the lines.

A MATHEMATICIAN'S MIND

Testimonial for An Essay on the Psychology of
Invention in the Mathematical Field by Jacques S.
Hadamard, Princeton University Press, 1945.

  Jacques Hadamard, a French mathematician,
conducted a psychological survey of mathematicians
to determine their mental processes at work. Below
are two of the questions followed by Albert
Einstein's answers.

  It would be very helpful for the purpose of
psychological investigation to know what internal or
mental images, what kind of "internal words"
mathematicians make use of; whether they are
motor, auditory, visual, or mixed, depending on the
subject which they are studying.
  Especially in research thought, do the mental
pictures or internal words present themselves in the
full consciousness or in the fringe-consciousness . .
.?

MY DEAR COLLEAGUE:
  In the following, I am trying to answer in brief
your questions as well as I am able. I am not
satisfied myself with those answers and I am willing
to answer more questions if you believe this could
be of any advantage for the very interesting and
difficult work you have undertaken.
  (A) The words or the language, as they are written
or spoken, do not seem to play any r⌠le in my
mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which
seem to serve as elements in thought are certain
signs and more or less clear images which can be
"voluntarily" reproduced and combined.
  There is, of course, a certain connection between
those elements and relevant logical concepts. It is
also clear that the desire to arrive finally at logically
connected concepts is the emotional basis of this
rather vague play with the above-mentioned
elements. But taken from a psychological
viewpoint, this combinatory play seems to be the
essential feature in productive thought--before there
is any connection with logical construction in words
or other kinds of signs which can be communicated
to others.
  (B) The above-mentioned elements are, in my case,
of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional
words or other signs have to be sought for
laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the
mentioned associative play is sufficiently
established and can be reproduced at will.
  (C) According to what has been said, the play with
the mentioned elements is aimed to be analogous to
certain logical connections one is searching for.
  (D) Visual and motor. In a stage when words
intervene at all, they are, in my case, purely
auditive, but they interfere only in a secondary
stage, as already mentioned.
  (E) It seems to me that what you call full
consciousness is a limit case which can never be
fully accomplished. This seems to me connected
with the fact called the narrowness of consciousness
(Enge des Bewusstseins).
  Remark: Professor Max Wertheimer has tried to
investigate the distinction between mere associating
or combining of reproducible elements and between
understanding (organisches Begreifen); I cannot
judge how far his psychological analysis catches the
essential point.

THE STATE AND THE INDIVIDUAL
CONSCIENCE

An open letter to the Society for Social Responsibility
in Science, published in Science, Vol. 112, December
22, 1950, p. 760.

DEAR FELLOW-SCIENTISTS:
  The problem of how man should act if his
government prescribes actions or society expects an
attitude which his own conscience considers wrong
is indeed an old one. It is easy to say that the
individual cannot be held responsible for acts carried
out under irresistible compulsion, because the
individual is fully dependent upon the society in
which he is living and therefore must accept its
rules. But the very formulation of this idea makes it
obvious to what extent such a concept contradicts
our sense of justice.
  External compulsion can, to a certain extent, reduce
but never cancel the responsibility of the individual.
In the Nuremberg trials this idea was considered to
be self-evident. Whatever is morally important in
our institutions, laws, and mores can be traced back
to interpretation of the sense of justice of countless
individuals. Institutions are in a moral sense
impotent unless they are supported by the sense of
responsibility of living individuals. An effort to
arouse and strengthen this sense of responsibility of
the individual is an important service to mankind.
  In our times scientists and engineers carry
particular moral responsibility, because the
development of military means of mass destruction
is within their sphere of activity. I feel, therefore,
that the formation of the Society for Social
Responsibility in Science satisfies a true need. This
society, through discussion of the inherent
problems, will make it easier for the individual to
clarify his mind and arrive at a clear position as to
his own stand; moreover, mutual help is essential
for those who face difficulties because they follow
their conscience.

APHORISMS FOR LEO BAECK

From the two-volume commemorative publication in
honor of the eightieth birthday of Leo Baeck, May
23, 1953.

  I salute the man who is going through life always
helpful, knowing no fear, and to whom
aggressiveness and resentment are alien. Such is the
stuff of which the great moral leaders are made who
proffer consolation to mankind in their self-created
miseries.

  The attempt to combine wisdom and power has
only rarely been successful and then only for a short
while.

  Man usually avoids attributing cleverness to
somebody else--unless it is an enemy.

  Few people are capable of expressing with
equanimity opinions which differ from the
prejudices of their social environment. Most people
are even incapable of forming such opinions.

  The majority of the stupid is invincible and
guaranteed for all time. The terror of their tyranny,
however, is alleviated by their lack of consistency.

  In order to form an immaculate member of a flock
of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep.

  The contrasts and contradictions that can
permanently live peacefully side by side in a skull
make all the systems of political optimists and
pessimists illusory.

  Whoever undertakes to set himself up as judge in
the field of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by
the laughter of the gods.

  Joy in looking and comprehending is nature's most
beautiful gift.

About Freedom

ON ACADEMIC FREEDOM

Apropos of the Gumbel case, 1931. E. J. Gumbel,
professor at the University of Heidelberg, Germany,
had courageously exposed political assassinations
by German Nazis and other members of the extreme
right. In consequence he was violently attacked,
particularly by right-wing students. Published in
Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  Numerous are the academic chairs, but rare are
wise and noble teachers. Numerous and large are the
lecture halls, but far from numerous the young
people who genuinely thirst for truth and justice.
Numerous are the wares that nature produces by the
dozen, but her choice products are few.
  We all know that, so why complain? Was it not
always thus and will it not always thus remain?
Certainly, and one must take what nature gives as
one finds it. But there is also such a thing as a spirit
of the times, an attitude of mind characteristic of a
particular generation, which is passed on from
individual to individual and gives its distinctive mark
to a society. Each of us has to do his little bit
toward transforming this spirit of the times.
  Compare the spirit which animated the youth in
our universities a hundred years ago with that
prevailing today. They had faith in the amelioration
of human society, respect for every honest opinion,
the tolerance for which our great minds had lived
and fought. In those days men strove for a larger
political unity, which at that time was called
Germany. It was the students and the teachers at
the universities in whom these ideals were alive.
  Today also there is an urge toward social progress,
toward tolerance and freedom of thought, toward a
larger political unity, which we today call Europe.
But the students at our universities have ceased as
completely as their teachers to embody the hopes
and ideals of the people. Anyone who looks at our
times soberly and dispassionately must admit this.
  We are assembled today to take stock of ourselves.
The external reason for this meeting is the Gumbel
case. This apostle of justice has written about
unexpiated political crimes with devoted industry,
high courage, and exemplary fairness, and has done
the community a signal service by his books. And
this is the man whom the students and a good many
of the faculty of his university are today doing their
best to expel.
  Political passion cannot be allowed to go to such
lengths. I am convinced that every man who reads
Mr. Gumbel's books with an open mind will get the
same impression from them as I have. Men like him
are needed if we are ever to build up a healthy
political society.
  Let every man judge by himself, by what he has
himself read, not by what others tell him.
  If that happens, this Gumbel case, after an
unedifying beginning, may still do good.

FASCISM AND SCIENCE

A letter to Signor Rocco, Minister of Justice and
Education under Mussolini, 1925-1932. Published in
Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

MY DEAR SIR:
  Two of the most eminent and respected men of
science in Italy have applied to me in their
difficulties of conscience and requested me to write
to you with the object of preventing, if possible, a
cruel hardship with which men of learning are
threatened in Italy. I refer to an oath of loyalty to
the Fascist system. The burden of my request is
that you should please advise Signor Mussolini to
spare the flower of Italy's intellect this humiliation.
  However much our political convictions may
differ, I know that we agree on one basic point: we
both admire the outstanding accomplishments of the
European intellect and see in them our highest
values. Those achievements are based on the
freedom of thought and of teaching, on the principle
that the desire for truth must take precedence over
all other desires. It was this basis alone that enabled
our civilization to take its rise in Greece and to
celebrate its rebirth in Italy at the Renaissance. This,
our most valuable possession, has been paid for by
the martyr's blood of pure and great men, for whose
sake Italy is still loved and revered today.
  I do not intend to argue with you about what
inroads on human liberty may be justified by
reasons of state. But the pursuit of scientific truth,
detached from the practical interests of everyday
life, ought to be treated as sacred by every
government, and it is in the highest interests of all
that honest servants of truth should be left in peace.
This is also undoubtedly in the interests of the
Italian state and its prestige in the eyes of the world.

ON FREEDOM

From Freedom, Its Meaning, edited by Ruth Nanda
Anshen, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company,
1940. Translated by James Gutmann.

  I know that it is a hopeless undertaking to debate
about fundamental value judgments. For instance, if
someone approves, as a goal, the extirpation of the
human race from the earth, one cannot refute such a
viewpoint on rational grounds. But if there is
agreement on certain goals and values, one can argue
rationally about the means by which these
objectives may be attained. Let us, then, indicate
two goals which may well be agreed upon by nearly
all who read these lines.
  1. Those instrumental goods which should serve to
maintain the life and health of all human beings
should be produced by the least possible labor of
all.
  2. The satisfaction of physical needs is indeed the
indispensable precondition of a satisfactory
existence, but in itself it is not enough. In order to be
content, men must also have the possibility of
developing their intellectual and artistic powers to
whatever extent accords with their personal
characteristics and abilities.
  The first of these two goals requires the promotion
of all knowledge relating to the laws of nature and
the laws of social processes, that is, the promotion
of all scientific endeavor. For scientific endeavor is a
natural whole, the parts of which mutually support
one another in a way which, to be sure, no one can
anticipate. However, the progress of science
presupposes the possibility of unrestricted
communication of all results and
judgments--freedom of expression and instruction in
all realms of intellectual endeavor. By freedom I
understand social conditions of such a kind that the
expression of opinions and assertions about general
and particular matters of knowledge will not involve
dangers or serious disadvantages for him who
expresses them. This freedom of communication is
indispensable for the development and extension of
scientific knowledge, a consideration of much
practical import. In the first instance it must be
guaranteed by law. But laws alone cannot secure
freedom of expression; in order that every man may
present his views without penalty, there must be a
spirit of tolerance in the entire population. Such an
ideal of external liberty can never be fully attained
but must be sought unremittingly if scientific
thought, and philosophical and creative thinking in
general, are to be advanced as far as possible.
  If the second goal, that is, the possibility of the
spiritual development of all individuals, is to be
secured, a second kind of outward freedom is
necessary. Man should not have to work for the
achievement of the necessities of life to such an
extent that he has neither time nor strength for
personal activities. Without this second kind of
outward liberty, freedom of expression is useless for
him. Advances in technology would provide the
possibility of this kind of freedom if the problem of
a reasonable division of labor were solved.
  The development of science and of the creative
activities of the spirit in general requires still another
kind of freedom, which may be characterized as
inward freedom. It is this freedom of the spirit
which consists in the independence of thought from
the restrictions of authoritarian and social prejudices
as well as from unphilosophical routinizing and
habit in general. This inward freedom is an
infrequent gift of nature and a worthy objective for
the individual. Yet the community can do much to
further this achievement, too, at least by not
interfering with its development. Thus schools may
interfere with the development of inward freedom
through authoritarian influences and through
imposing on young people excessive spiritual
burdens; on the other hand, schools may favor such
freedom by encouraging independent thought. Only
if outward and inner freedom are constantly and
consciously pursued is there a possibility of
spiritual development and perfection and thus of
improving man's outward and inner life.

ADDRESS ON RECEIVING LORD & TAYLOR
AWARD

Broadcast by radio (tape-recorded) May 4, 1953.

  I gladly accept this award as an expression of
friendly sentiments. It gives me great pleasure,
indeed, to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible
nonconformist warmly acclaimed. To be sure, we
are concerned here with nonconformism in a remote
field of endeavor, and no Senatorial committee has
as yet felt impelled to tackle the important task of
combating, also in this field, the dangers which
threaten the inner security of the uncritical or else
intimidated citizen.
  As for the words of warm praise addressed to me,
I shall carefully refrain from disputing them. For
who still believes that there is such a thing as
genuine modesty? I should run the risk of being
taken for just an old hypocrite. You will surely
understand that I do not find the courage to brave
this danger.
  Thus all that remains is to assure you of my
gratitude.

MODERN INQUISITIONAL METHODS

Letter to William Frauenglass, a teacher in
Brooklyn, N.Y., who had refused to testify before a
Congressional Committee. Published June 12, 1953,
in the New York Times.

May 16, 1953
DEAR MR. FRAUENGLASS:
  Thank you for your communication. By "remote
field" I referred to the theoretical foundations of
physics.
  The problem with which the intellectuals of this
country are confronted is very serious. The
reactionary politicians have managed to instill
suspicion of all intellectual efforts into the public by
dangling before their eyes a danger from without.
Having succeeded so far, they are now proceeding to
suppress the freedom of teaching and to deprive of
their positions all those who do not prove
submissive, i.e., to starve them.
  What ought the minority of intellectuals to do
against this evil? Frankly, I can only see the
revolutionary way of non-cooperation in the sense
of Gandhi's. Every intellectual who is called before
one of the committees ought to refuse to testify, i.e.,
he must be prepared for jail and economic ruin, in
short, for the sacrifice of his personal welfare in the
interest of the cultural welfare of his country.
  However, this refusal to testify must not be based
on the well-known subterfuge of invoking the Fifth
Amendment against possible self-incrimination, but
on the assertion that it is shameful for a blameless
citizen to submit to such an inquisition and that this
kind of inquisition violates the spirit of the
Constitution.
  If enough people are ready to take this grave step
they will be successful. If not, then the intellectuals
of this country deserve nothing better than the
slavery which is intended for them.

P.S. This letter need not be considered
"confidential."

HUMAN RIGHTS

Address to Chicago Decalogue Society, February
20, 1954.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:
  You are assembled today to devote your attention
to the problem of human rights. You have decided to
offer me an award on this occasion. When I learned
about it, I was somewhat depressed by your
decision. For in how unfortunate a state must a
community find itself if it cannot produce a more
suitable candidate upon whom to confer such a
distinction?
  In a long life I have devoted all my faculties to
reach a somewhat deeper insight into the structure
of physical reality. Never have I made any
systematic effort to ameliorate the lot of men, to
fight injustice and suppression, and to improve the
traditional forms of human relations. The only thing
I did was this: in long intervals I have expressed an
opinion on public issues whenever they appeared to
me so bad and unfortunate that silence would have
made me feel guilty of complicity.
  The existence and validity of human rights are not
written in the stars. The ideals concerning the
conduct of men toward each other and the desirable
structure of the community have been conceived and
taught by enlightened individuals in the course of
history. Those ideals and convictions which resulted
from historical experience, from the craving for
beauty and harmony, have been readily accepted in
theory by man--and at all times, have been trampled
upon by the same people under the pressure of their
animal instincts. A large part of history is therefore
replete with the struggle for those human rights, an
eternal struggle in which a final victory can never be
won. But to tire in that struggle would mean the ruin
of society.
  In talking about human rights today, we are
referring primarily to the following demands:
protection of the individual against arbitrary
infringement by other individuals or by the
government; the right to work and to adequate
earnings from work; freedom of discussion and
teaching; adequate participation of the individual in
the formation of his government. These human
rights are nowadays recognized theoretically,
although, by abundant use of formalistic, legal
maneuvers, they are being violated to a much greater
extent than even a generation ago. There is, however,
one other human right which is infrequently
mentioned but which seems to be destined to
become very important: this is the right, or the
duty, of the individual to abstain from cooperating
in activities which he considers wrong or pernicious.
The first place in this respect must be given to the
refusal of military service. I have known instances
where individuals of unusual moral strength and
integrity have, for that reason, come into conflict
with the organs of the state. The Nuremberg Trial of
the German war criminals was tacitly based on the
recognition of the principle: criminal actions cannot
be excused if committed on government orders;
conscience supersedes the authority of the law of
the state.
  The struggle of our own days is being waged
primarily for the freedom of political conviction and
discussion as well as for the freedom of research and
teaching. The fear of Communism has led to
practices which have become incomprehensible to
the rest of civilized mankind and exposed our
country to ridicule. How long shall we tolerate that
politicians, hungry for power, try to gain political
advantages in such a way? Sometimes it seems that
people have lost their sense of humor to such a
degree that the French saying, "Ridicule kills," has
lost its validity.

About Religion

RELIGION AND SCIENCE

Written expressly for the New York Times
Magazine. Appeared there November 9, 1930 (pp.
1-4). The German text was published in the Berliner
Tageblatt, November 11, 1930.

  Everything that the human race has done and
thought is concerned with the satisfaction of deeply
felt needs and the assuagement of pain. One has to
keep this constantly in mind if one wishes to
understand spiritual movements and their
development. Feeling and longing are the motive
force behind all human endeavor and human
creation, in however exalted a guise the latter may
present themselves to us. Now what are the feelings
and needs that have led men to religious thought and
belief in the widest sense of the words? A little
consideration will suffice to show us that the most
varying emotions preside over the birth of religious
thought and experience. With primitive man it is
above all fear that evokes religious notions--fear of
hunger, wild beasts, sickness, death. Since at this
stage of existence understanding of causal
connections is usually poorly developed, the human
mind creates illusory beings more or less analogous
to itself on whose wills and actions these fearful
happenings depend. Thus one tries to secure the
favor of these beings by carrying out actions and
offering sacrifices which, according to the tradition
handed down from generation to generation,
propitiate them or make them well disposed toward
a mortal. In this sense I am speaking of a religion of
fear. This, though not created, is in an important
degree stabilized by the formation of a special
priestly caste which sets itself up as a mediator
between the people and the beings they fear, and
erects a hegemony on this basis. In many cases a
leader or ruler or a privileged class whose position
rests on other factors combines priestly functions
with its secular authority in order to make the latter
more secure; or the political rulers and the priestly
caste make common cause in their own interests.
  The social impulses are another source of the
crystallization of religion. Fathers and mothers and
the leaders of larger human communities are mortal
and fallible. The desire for guidance, love, and
support prompts men to form the social or moral
conception of God. This is the God of Providence,
who protects, disposes, rewards, and punishes; the
God who, according to the limits of the believer's
outlook, loves and cherishes the life of the tribe or
of the human race, or even life itself; the comforter
in sorrow and unsatisfied longing; he who preserves
the souls of the dead. This is the social or moral
conception of God.
  The Jewish scriptures admirably illustrate the
development from the religion of fear to moral
religion, a development continued in the New
Testament. The religions of all civilized peoples,
especially the peoples of the Orient, are primarily
moral religions. The development from a religion of
fear to moral religion is a great step in peoples' lives.
And yet, that primitive religions are based entirely
on fear and the religions of civilized peoples purely
on morality is a prejudice against which we must be
on our guard. The truth is that all religions are a
varying blend of both types, with this
differentiation: that on the higher levels of social life
the religion of morality predominates.
  Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic
character of their conception of God. In general,
only individuals of exceptional endowments, and
exceptionally high-minded communities, rise to any
considerable extent above this level. But there is a
third stage of religious experience which belongs to
all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure
form: I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very
difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone wire is
entirely without it, especially as there is no
anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding
to it.
  The individual feels the futility of human desires
and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order
which reveal themselves both in nature and in the
world of thought. Individual existence impresses
him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience
the universe as a single significant whole. The
beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear
at an early stage of development, e.g., in many of
the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets.
Buddhism, as we have learned especially from the
wonderful writings of Schopenhauer, contains a
much stronger element of this.
  The religious geniuses of all ages have been
distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which
knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's
image; so that there can be no church whose central
teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely
among the heretics of every age that we find men
who were filled with this highest kind of religious
feeling and were in many cases regarded by their
contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as
saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus,
Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to
one another.
  How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated
from one person to another, if it can give rise to no
definite notion of a God and no theology? In my
view, it is the most important function of art and
science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in
those who are receptive to it.
  We thus arrive at a conception of the relation of
science to religion very different from the usual one.
When one views the matter historically, one is
inclined to look upon science and religion as
irreconcilable antagonists, and for a very obvious
reason. The man who is thoroughly convinced of the
universal operation of the law of causation cannot
for a moment entertain the idea of a being who
interferes in the course of events--provided, of
course, that he takes the hypothesis of causality
really seriously. He has no use for the religion of
fear and equally little for social or moral religion. A
God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable to
him for the simple reason that a man's actions are
determined by necessity, external and internal, so
that in God's eyes he cannot be responsible, any
more than an inanimate object is responsible for the
motions it undergoes. Science has therefore been
charged with undermining morality, but the charge is
unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based
effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties
and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man
would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be
restrained by fear of punishment and hope of
reward after death.
  It is therefore easy to see why the churches have
always fought science and persecuted its devotees.
On the other hand, I maintain that the cosmic
religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive
for scientific research. Only those who realize the
immense efforts and, above all, the devotion without
which pioneer work in theoretical science cannot be
achieved are able to grasp the strength of the
emotion out of which alone such work, remote as it
is from the immediate realities of life, can issue.
What a deep conviction of the rationality of the
universe and what a yearning to understand, were it
but a feeble reflection of the mind revealed in this
world, Kepler and Newton must have had to enable
them to spend years of solitary labor in
disentangling the principles of celestial mechanics!
Those whose acquaintance with scientific research is
derived chiefly from its practical results easily
develop a completely false notion of the mentality
of the men who, surrounded by a skeptical world,
have shown the way to kindred spirits scattered
wide through the world and the centuries. Only one
who has devoted his life to similar ends can have a
vivid realization of what has inspired these men and
given them the strength to remain true to their
purpose in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic
religious feeling that gives a man such strength. A
contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this
materialistic age of ours the serious scientific
workers are the only profoundly religious people.

THE RELIGIOUS SPIRIT OF SCIENCE

Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  You will hardly find one among the profounder
sort of scientific minds without a religious feeling of
his own. But it is different from the religiosity of
the na∩ve man. For the latter, God is a being from
whose care one hopes to benefit and whose
punishment one fears; a sublimation of a feeling
similar to that of a child for its father, a being to
whom one stands, so to speak, in a personal
relation, however deeply it may be tinged with awe.
  But the scientist is possessed by the sense of
universal causation. The future, to him, is every
whit as necessary and determined as the past. There
is nothing divine about morality; it is a purely
human affair. His religious feeling takes the form of
a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural
law, which reveals an intelligence of such
superiority that, compared with it, all the
systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an
utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the
guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he
succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of
selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to
that which has possessed the religious geniuses of
all ages.

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Part I from an address at Princeton Theological
Seminary, May 19, 1939; published in Out of My
Later Years, New York: Philosophical Library,
1950. Part II from Science, Philosophy and
Religion, A Symposium, published by the Conference
on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their
Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, Inc., New
York, 1941.

I.

  During the last century, and part of the one before,
it was widely held that there was an unreconcilable
conflict between knowledge and belief. The opinion
prevailed among advanced minds that it was time
that belief should be replaced increasingly by
knowledge; belief that did not itself rest on
knowledge was superstition, and as such had to be
opposed. According to this conception, the sole
function of education was to open the way to
thinking and knowing, and the school, as the
outstanding organ for the people's education, must
serve that end exclusively.
  One will probably find but rarely, if at all, the
rationalistic standpoint expressed in such crass
form; for any sensible man would see at once how
one-sided is such a statement of the position. But it
is just as well to state a thesis starkly and nakedly,
if one wants to clear up one's mind as to its nature.
  It is true that convictions can best be supported
with experience and clear thinking. On this point
one must agree unreservedly with the extreme
rationalist. The weak point of his conception is,
however, this, that those convictions which are
necessary and determinant for our conduct and
judgments cannot be found solely along this solid
scientific way.
  For the scientific method can teach us nothing else
beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by,
each other. The aspiration toward such objective
knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is
capable, and you will certainly not suspect me of
wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic
efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear
that knowledge of what is does not open the door
directly to what should be. One can have the
clearest and most complete knowledge of what is,
and yet not be able to deduct from that what should
be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective
knowledge provides us with powerful instruments
for the achievements of certain ends, but the
ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must
come from another source. And it is hardly
necessary to argue for the view that our existence
and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting
up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The
knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so
little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove
even the justification and the value of the aspiration
toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face,
therefore, the limits of the purely rational
conception of our existence.
  But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking
can play no part in the formation of the goal and of
ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for
the achievement of an end certain means would be
useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end.
Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of
means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a
sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To
make clear these fundamental ends and valuations,
and to set them fast in the emotional life of the
individual, seems to me precisely the most
important function which religion has to perform in
the social life of man. And if one asks whence
derives the authority of such fundamental ends,
since they cannot be stated and justified merely by
reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy
society as powerful traditions, which act upon the
conduct and aspirations and judgments of the
individuals; they are there, that is, as something
living, without its being necessary to find
justification for their existence. They come into
being not through demonstration but through
revelation, through the medium of powerful
personalities. One must not attempt to justify them,
but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly.
  The highest principles for our aspirations and
judgments are given to us in the Jewish-Christian
religious tradition. It is a very high goal which, with
our weak powers, we can reach only very
inadequately, but which gives a sure foundation to
our aspirations and valuations. If one were to take
that goal out of its religious form and look merely at
its purely human side, one might state it perhaps
thus: free and responsible development of the
individual, so that he may place his powers freely
and gladly in the service of all mankind.
  There is no room in this for the divinization of a
nation, of a class, let alone of an individual. Are we
not all children of one father, as it is said in religious
language? Indeed, even the divinization of humanity,
as an abstract totality, would not be in the spirit of
that ideal. It is only to the individual that a soul is
given. And the high destiny of the individual is to
serve rather than to rule, or to impose himself in any
other way.
  If one looks at the substance rather than at the
form, then one can take these words as expressing
also the fundamental democratic position. The true
democrat can worship his nation as little as can the
man who is religious, in our sense of the term.
  What, then, in all this, is the function of education
and of the school? They should help the young
person to grow up in such a spirit that these
fundamental principles should be to him as the air
which he breathes. Teaching alone cannot do that.
  If one holds these high principles clearly before
one's eyes, and compares them with the life and
spirit of our times, then it appears glaringly that
civilized mankind finds itself at present in grave
danger. In the totalitarian states it is the rulers
themselves who strive actually to destroy that spirit
of humanity. In less threatened parts it is
nationalism and intolerance, as well as the
oppression of the individuals by economic means,
which threaten to choke these most precious
traditions.
  A realization of how great is the danger is
spreading, however, among thinking people, and
there is much search for means with which to meet
the danger--means in the field of national and
international politics, of legislation, or organization
in general. Such efforts are, no doubt, greatly
needed. Yet the ancients knew something which we
seem to have forgotten. All means prove but a blunt
instrument, if they have not behind them a living
spirit. But if the longing for the achievement of the
goal is powerfully alive within us, then shall we not
lack the strength to find the means for reaching the
goal and for translating it into deeds.

II.

  It would not be difficult to come to an agreement
as to what we understand by science. Science is the
century-old endeavor to bring together by means of
systematic thought the perceptible phenomena of
this world into as thoroughgoing an association as
possible. To put it boldly, it is the attempt at the
posterior reconstruction of existence by the process
of conceptualization. But when asking myself what
religion is I cannot think of the answer so easily.
And even after finding an answer which may satisfy
me at this particular moment, I still remain
convinced that I can never under any circumstances
bring together, even to a slight extent, the thoughts
of all those who have given this question serious
consideration.
  At first, then, instead of asking what religion is I
should prefer to ask what characterizes the
aspirations of a person who gives me the impression
of being religious: a person who is religiously
enlightened appears to me to be one who has, to the
best of his ability, liberated himself from the fetters
of his selfish desires and is preoccupied with
thoughts, feelings, and aspirations to which he clings
because of their superpersonal value. It seems to me
that what is important is the force of this
superpersonal content and the depth of the
conviction concerning its overpowering
meaningfulness, regardless of whether any attempt
is made to unite this content with a divine Being, for
otherwise it would not be possible to count Buddha
and Spinoza as religious personalities. Accordingly,
a religious person is devout in the sense that he has
no doubt of the significance and loftiness of those
superpersonal objects and goals which neither
require nor are capable of rational foundation. They
exist with the same necessity and matter-of-factness
as he himself. In this sense religion is the age-old
endeavor of mankind to become clearly and
completely conscious of these values and goals and
constantly to strengthen and extend their effect. If
one conceives of religion and science according to
these definitions then a conflict between them
appears impossible. For science can only ascertain
what is, but not what should be, and outside of its
domain value judgments of all kinds remain
necessary. Religion, on the other hand, deals only
with evaluations of human thought and action: it
cannot justifiably speak of facts and relationships
between facts. According to this interpretation the
well-known conflicts between religion and science in
the past must all be ascribed to a misapprehension
of the situation which has been described.
  For example, a conflict arises when a religious
community insists on the absolute truthfulness of
all statements recorded in the Bible. This means an
intervention on the part of religion into the sphere
of science; this is where the struggle of the Church
against the doctrines of Galileo and Darwin belongs.
On the other hand, representatives of science have
often made an attempt to arrive at fundamental
judgments with respect to values and ends on the
basis of scientific method, and in this way have set
themselves in opposition to religion. These conflicts
have all sprung from fatal errors.
  Now, even though the realms of religion and
science in themselves are clearly marked off from
each other, nevertheless there exist between the two
strong reciprocal relationships and dependencies.
Though religion may be that which determines the
goal, it has, nevertheless, learned from science, in the
broadest sense, what means will contribute to the
attainment of the goals it has set up. But science can
only be created by those who are thoroughly
imbued with the aspiration toward truth and
understanding. This source of feeling, however,
springs from the sphere of religion. To this there
also belongs the faith in the possibility that the
regulations valid for the world of existence are
rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot
conceive of a genuine scientist without that
profound faith. The situation may be expressed by
an image: science without religion is lame, religion
without science is blind.
  Though I have asserted above that in truth a
legitimate conflict between religion and science
cannot exist, I must nevertheless qualify this
assertion once again on an essential point, with
reference to the actual content of historical religions.
This qualification has to do with the concept of
God. During the youthful period of mankind's
spiritual evolution human fantasy created gods in
man's own image, who, by the operations of their
will were supposed to determine, or at any rate to
influence, the phenomenal world. Man sought to
alter the disposition of these gods in his own favor
by means of magic and prayer. The idea of God in
the religions taught at present is a sublimation of
that old concept of the gods. Its anthropomorphic
character is shown, for instance, by the fact that
men appeal to the Divine Being in prayers and plead
for the fulfillment of their wishes.
  Nobody, certainly, will deny that the idea of the
existence of an omnipotent, just, and omnibeneficent
personal God is able to accord man solace, help, and
guidance; also, by virtue of its simplicity it is
accessible to the most undeveloped mind. But, on
the other hand, there are decisive weaknesses
attached to this idea in itself, which have been
painfully felt since the beginning of history. That is,
if this being is omnipotent, then every occurrence,
including every human action, every human thought,
and every human feeling and aspiration is also His
work; how is it possible to think of holding men
responsible for their deeds and thoughts before such
an almighty Being? In giving out punishment and
rewards He would to a certain extent be passing
judgment on Himself. How can this be combined
with the goodness and righteousness ascribed to
Him?
  The main source of the present-day conflicts
between the spheres of religion and of science lies in
this concept of a personal God. It is the aim of
science to establish general rules which determine
the reciprocal connection of objects and events in
time and space. For these rules, or laws of nature,
absolutely general validity is required--not proven.
It is mainly a program, and faith in the possibility of
its accomplishment in principle is only founded on
partial successes. But hardly anyone could be found
who would deny these partial successes and ascribe
them to human self-deception. The fact that on the
basis of such laws we are able to predict the
temporal behavior of phenomena in certain domains
with great precision and certainty is deeply
embedded in the consciousness of the modern man,
even though he may have grasped very little of the
contents of those laws. He need only consider that
planetary courses within the solar system may be
calculated in advance with great exactitude on the
basis of a limited number of simple laws. In a similar
way, though not with the same precision, it is
possible to calculate in advance the mode of
operation of an electric motor, a transmission
system, or of a wireless apparatus, even when
dealing with a novel development.
  To be sure, when the number of factors coming
into play in a phenomenological complex is too
large, scientific method in most cases fails us. One
need only think of the weather, in which case
prediction even for a few days ahead is impossible.
Nevertheless no one doubts that we are confronted
with a causal connection whose causal components
are in the main known to us. Occurrences in this
domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction
because of the variety of factors in operation, not
because of any lack of order in nature.
  We have penetrated far less deeply into the
regularities obtaining within the realm of living
things, but deeply enough nevertheless to sense at
least the rule of fixed necessity. One need only think
of the systematic order in heredity, and in the effect
of poisons, as for instance alcohol, on the behavior
of organic beings. What is still lacking here is a grasp
of connections of profound generality, but not a
knowledge of order in itself.
  The more a man is imbued with the ordered
regularity of all events the firmer becomes his
conviction that there is no room left by the side of
this ordered regularity for causes of a different
nature. For him neither the rule of human nor the
rule of divine will exists as an independent cause of
natural events. To be sure, the doctrine of a personal
God interfering with natural events could never be
refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this
doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in
which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to
set foot.
  But I am persuaded that such behavior on the part
of the representatives of religion would not only be
unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is able
to maintain itself not in clear light but only in the
dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind,
with incalculable harm to human progress. In their
struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion
must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a
personal God, that is, give up that source of fear and
hope which in the past placed such vast power in
the hands of priests. In their labors they will have to
avail themselves of those forces which are capable
of cultivating the Good, the True, and the Beautiful
in humanity itself. This is, to be sure, a more
difficult but an incomparably more worthy task.
[This thought is convincingly presented in Herbert
Samuel's book, Belief and Action.] After religious
teachers accomplish the refining process indicated
they will surely recognize with joy that true religion
has been ennobled and made more profound by
scientific knowledge.
  If it is one of the goals of religion to liberate
mankind as far as possible from the bondage of
egocentric cravings, desires, and fears, scientific
reasoning can aid religion in yet another sense.
Although it is true that it is the goal of science to
discover rules which permit the association and
foretelling of facts, this is not its only aim. It also
seeks to reduce the connections discovered to the
smallest possible number of mutually independent
conceptual elements. It is in this striving after the
rational unification of the manifold that it
encounters its greatest successes, even though it is
precisely this attempt which causes it to run the
greatest risk of falling a prey to illusions. But
whoever has undergone the intense experience of
successful advances made in this domain is moved
by profound reverence for the rationality made
manifest in existence. By way of the understanding
he achieves a far-reaching emancipation from the
shackles of personal hopes and desires, and thereby
attains that humble attitude of mind toward the
grandeur of reason incarnate in existence, and which,
in its profoundest depths, is inaccessible to man.
This attitude, however, appears to me to be
religious, in the highest sense of the word. And so it
seems to me that science not only purifies the
religious impulse of the dross of its
anthropomorphism but also contributes to a
religious spiritualization of our understanding of life.
  The further the spiritual evolution of mankind
advances, the more certain it seems to me that the
path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the
fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but
through striving after rational knowledge. In this
sense I believe that the priest must become a teacher
if he wishes to do justice to his lofty educational
mission.

RELIGION AND SCIENCE:
IRRECONCILABLE?

A response to a greeting sent by the Liberal
Ministers' Club of New York City. Published in The
Christian Register, June, 1948.

  Does there truly exist an insuperable contradiction
between religion and science? Can religion be
superseded by science? The answers to these
questions have, for centuries, given rise to
considerable dispute and, indeed, bitter fighting. Yet,
in my own mind there can be no doubt that in both
cases a dispassionate consideration can only lead to
a negative answer. What complicates the solution,
however, is the fact that while most people readily
agree on what is meant by "science," they are likely
to differ on the meaning of "religion."
  As to science, we may well define it for our
purpose as "methodical thinking directed toward
finding regulative connections between our sensual
experiences." Science, in the immediate, produces
knowledge and, indirectly, means of action. It leads
to methodical action if definite goals are set up in
advance. For the function of setting up goals and
passing statements of value transcends its domain.
While it is true that science, to the extent of its
grasp of causative connections, may reach important
conclusions as to the compatibility and
incompatibility of goals and evaluations, the
independent and fundamental definitions regarding
goals and values remain beyond science's reach.
  As regards religion, ou the other hand, one is
generally agreed that it deals with goals and
evaluations and, in general, with the emotional
foundation of human thinking and acting, as far as
these are not predetermined by the inalterable
hereditary disposition of the human species.
Religion is concerned with man's attitude toward
nature at large, with the establishing of ideals for the
individual and communal life, and with mutual
human relationship. These ideals religion attempts
to attain by exerting an educational influence on
tradition and through the development and
promulgation of certain easily accessible thoughts
and narratives (epics and myths) which are apt to
influence evaluation and action along the lines of the
accepted ideals.
  It is this mythical, or rather this symbolic, content
of the religious traditions which is likely to come
into conflict with science. This occurs whenever this
religious stock of ideas contains dogmatically fixed
statements on subjects which belong in the domain
of science. Thus, it is of vital importance for the
preservation of true religion that such conflicts be
avoided when they arise from subjects which, in
fact, are not really essential for the pursuance of the
religious aims.
  When we consider the various existing religions as
to their essential substance, that is, divested of their
myths, they do not seem to me to differ as basically
from each other as the proponents of the
"relativistic" or conventional theory wish us to
believe. And this is by no means surprising. For the
moral attitudes of a people that is supported by
religion need always aim at preserving and
promoting the sanity and vitality of the community
and its individuals, since otherwise this community
is bound to perish. A people that were to honor
falsehood, defamation, fraud, and murder would be
unable, indeed, to subsist for very long.
  When confronted with a specific case, however, it
is no easy task to determine clearly what is desirable
and what should be eschewed, just as we find it
difficult to decide what exactly it is that makes good
painting or good music. It is something that may be
felt intuitively more easily than rationally
comprehended. Likewise, the great moral teachers of
humanity were, in a way, artistic geniuses in the art
of living. In addition to the most elementary
precepts directly motivated by the preservation of
life and the sparing of unnecessary suffering, there
are others to which, although  they are apparently
not quite commensurable to the basic precepts, we
nevertheless attach considerable importance. Should
truth, for instance, be sought unconditionally even
where its attainment and its accessibility to all
would entail heavy sacrifices in toil and happiness?
There are many such questions which, from a
rational vantage point, cannot easily be answered or
cannot be answered at all. Yet, I do not think that
the so-called "relativistic" viewpoint is correct, not
even when dealing with the more subtle moral
decisions.
  When considering the actual living conditions of
present-day civilized humanity from the standpoint
of even the most elementary religious commands,
one is bound to experience a feeling of deep and
painful disappointment at what one sees. For while
religion prescribes brotherly love in the relations
among the individuals and groups, the actual
spectacle more resembles a battlefield than an
orchestra. Everywhere, in economic as well as in
political life, the guiding principle is one of ruthless
striving for success at the expense of one's
fellowmen. This competitive spirit prevails even in
school and, destroying all feelings of human
fraternity and cooperation, conceives of
achievement not as derived from the love for
productive and thoughtful work, but as springing
from personal ambition and fear of rejection.
  There are pessimists who hold that such a state of
affairs is necessarily inherent in human nature; it is
those who propound such views that are the
enemies of true religion, for they imply thereby that
religious teachings are utopian ideals and unsuited to
afford guidance in human affairs. The study of the
social patterns in certain so-called primitive
cultures, however, seems to have made it
sufficiently evident that such a defeatist view is
wholly unwarranted. Whoever is concerned with
this problem, a crucial one in the study of religion as
such, is advised to read the description of the
Pueblo Indians in Ruth Benedict's book, Patterns of
Culture. Under the hardest living conditions, this
tribe has apparently accomplished the difficult task
of delivering its people from the scourge of
competitive spirit and of fostering in it a temperate,
cooperative conduct of life, free of external pressure
and without any curtailment of happiness.
  The interpretation of religion, as here advanced,
implies a dependence of science on the religious
attitude, a relation which, in our predominantly
materialistic age, is only too easily overlooked.
While it is true that scientific results are entirely
independent from religious or moral considerations,
those individuals to whom we owe the great creative
achievements of science were all of them imbued
with the truly religious conviction that this universe
of ours is something perfect and susceptible to the
rational striving for knowledge. If this conviction
had not been a strongly emotional one and if those
searching for knowledge had not been inspired by
Spinoza's Amor Dei Intellectualis, they would
hardly have been capable of that untiring devotion
which alone enables man to attain his greatest
achievements.

THE NEED FOR ETHICAL CULTURE

Letter read on the occasion of the seventy-fifth
anniversary of the Ethical Culture Society, New
York, January, 1951. Published in Mein Weltbild,
Zurich: Europa Verlag, 1953.

  I feel the need of sending my congratulations and
good wishes to your Ethical Culture Society on the
occasion of its anniversary celebration. True, this is
not a time when we can regard with satisfaction the
results which honest striving on the ethical plane
has achieved in these seventy-five years. For one
can hardly assert that the moral aspect of human life
in general is today more satisfactory than it was in
1876.
  At that time the view obtained that everything was
to be hoped for from enlightenment in the field of
ascertainable scientific fact and from the conquest of
prejudice and superstition. All this is of course
important and worthy of the best efforts of the
finest people. And in this regard much has been
accomplished in these seventy-five years and has
been disseminated by means of literature and the
stage. But the clearing away of obstacles does not
by itself lead to an ennoblement of social and
individual life. For along with this negative result, a
positive aspiration and effort for an ethical-moral
configuration of our common life is of overriding
importance. Here no science can save us. I believe,
indeed, that overemphasis on the purely intellectual
attitude, often directed solely to the practical and
factual, in our education, has led directly to the
impairment of ethical values. I am not thinking so
much of the dangers with which technical progress
has directly confronted mankind, as of the stifling of
mutual human considerations by a "matter-of-fact"
habit of thought which has come to lie like a killing
frost upon human relations.
  Fulfillment on the moral and esthetic side is a goal
which lies closer to the preoccupations of art than it
does to those of science. Of course, understanding
of our fellow-beings is important. But this
understanding becomes fruitful only when it is
sustained by sympathetic feeling in joy and in
sorrow. The cultivation of this most important
spring of moral action is that which is left of religion
when it has been purified of the elements of
superstition. In this sense, religion forms an
important part of education, where it receives far
too little consideration, and that little not
sufficiently systematic.
  The frightful dilemma of the political world
situation has much to do with this sin of omission
on the part of our civilization. Without "ethical
culture" there is no salvation for humanity.

About Education

THE UNIVERSITY COURSES AT DAVOS

In 1928 Einstein participated in the international
university courses conducted at Davos, famous
Swiss resort for tubercular patients. This address
preceded his lecture, "Fundamental Concepts in
Physics and Their Development." Published in Mein
Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  Senatores boni viri senatus autem bestia. So a
friend of mine, a Swiss professor, once wrote in his
facetious way to a university faculty which had
annoyed him. Communities tend to be guided less
than individuals by conscience and a sense of
responsibility. How much misery does this fact
cause mankind! It is the source of wars and every
kind of oppression, which fill the earth with pain,
sighs, and bitterness.
  And yet nothing truly valuable can be achieved
except by the disinterested cooperation of many
individuals. Hence the man of good will is never
happier than when some communal enterprise is
afoot and is launched at the cost of heavy sacrifices,
with the single object of promoting life and culture.
  Such pure joy was mine when I heard about the
university courses at Davos. A work of rescue is
being carried out here, with intelligence and a wise
moderation, which is based on a grave need, though
it may not be a need that is immediately obvious to
everyone. Many a young man goes to this valley
with his hopes fixed on the healing power of its
sunny mountains and regains his bodily health. But
thus withdrawn for long periods from the
will-hardening discipline of normal work and a prey
to morbid reflection on his physical condition, he
easily loses his mental resilience, the sense of being
able to hold his own in the struggle for existence. He
becomes a sort of hot-house plant and, when his
body is cured, often finds it difficult to get back to
normal life. This is in particular true for university
students. Interruption of intellectual training in the
formative period of youth is very apt to leave a gap
which can hardly be filled later.
  Yet, as a general rule, intellectual work in
moderation, so far from retarding cure, indirectly
helps it forward, just as moderate physical work
will. It is with this realization that the university
courses are being instituted for the purpose not
merely of preparing these young people for a
profession but of stimulating them to intellectual
activity as such. They are to provide work, training,
and hygiene in the sphere of the mind.
  Let us not forget that this enterprise is admirably
suited to establish relations between individuals of
different nationalities, relations which help to
strengthen the idea of a European community. The
effects of the new institution in this direction are
likely to be all the more advantageous as a result of
the fact that the circumstances of its birth rule out
every sort of political purpose. The best way to
serve the cause of internationalism is by cooperating
in some life-giving work.
  For all these reasons I rejoice that through the
energy and intelligence of the founders, the
university courses at Davos have already attained
such a measure of success that the enterprise has
outgrown the troubles of infancy. May it prosper,
enriching the inner lives of numbers of valuable
human beings and rescuing many from the poverty
of sanatorium life.

TEACHERS AND PUPILS

A talk to a group of children. Published in Mein
Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

MY DEAR CHILDREN:
  I rejoice to see you before me today, happy youth
of a sunny and fortunate land.
  Bear in mind that the wonderful things you learn in
your schools are the work of many generations,
produced by enthusiastic effort and infinite labor in
every country of the world. All this is put into your
hands as your inheritance in order that you may
receive it, honor it, add to it, and one day faithfully
hand it on to your children. Thus do we mortals
achieve immortality in the permanent things which
we create in common.
  If you always keep that in mind you will find a
meaning in life and work and acquire the right
attitude toward other nations and ages.

EDUCATION AND EDUCATORS

A letter to a young girl. Published in Mein Weltbild,
Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  I have read about sixteen pages of your manuscript
and it made me--smile. It is clever, well observed,
honest; it stands on its own feet up to a point, and
yet it is so typically feminine, by which I mean
derivative and steeped in personal resentment. I
suffered at the hands of my teachers a similar
treatment; they disliked me for my independence
and passed me over when they wanted assistants (I
must admit, though, that I was somewhat less of a
model student than you). But it would not have
been worth my while to write anything about my
school life, and still less would I have liked to be
responsible for anyone's printing or actually reading
it. Besides, one always cuts a poor figure if one
complains about others who are struggling for their
place in the sun, too, after their own fashion.
  Therefore, pocket your temperament and keep
your manuscript for your sons and daughters, in
order that they may derive consolation from it
and--not give a damn for what their teachers tell
them or think of them.
  Incidentally I am only coming to Princeton to do
research, not to teach. There is too much education
altogether, especially in American schools. The only
rational way of educating is to be an example--if one
can't help it, a warning example.

EDUCATION AND WORLD PEACE

A message to the Progressive Education
Association, November 23, 1934.

  The United States, because of its geographic
location, is in the fortunate position of being able to
teach sane pacifism in the schools, for there exists
no serious danger of foreign aggression and hence
there is no necessity for inculcating in youth a
military spirit. There is, however, a danger that the
problem of educating for peace may be handled from
an emotional, rather than a realistic standpoint.
Little will be gained without a thorough
understanding of the underlying difficulties of the
problem.
  American youth should understand, first of all,
that even though actual invasion of American
territory is unlikely, the United States is liable to be
involved in international entanglements at any time.
Reference need only be made to America's
participation in the World War to prove the need for
such understanding.
  Security for the United States, as for other
countries, lies only in a satisfactory solution of the
world peace problem. Youth must not be allowed to
believe that safety can be obtained through political
isolation. On the contrary, a serious concern for the
general peace problem should be aroused.
Especially should young people be brought to a
clear understanding of how great a responsibility
American politicians assumed in failing to support
President Wilson's liberal plans at the conclusion of
the World War and afterward, thereby hampering
the work of the League of Nations in the solution of
this problem.
  It should be pointed out that nothing can be gained
merely by demanding disarmament, so long as there
are powerful countries not unwilling to use
militaristic methods for the attainment of more
advantageous world positions. Moreover, the
justification of such proposals as those supported
by France, for example, to safeguard individual
countries through the establishment of international
institutions should be explained. In order to obtain
this security, international treaties are needed for
common defense against an aggressor. These treaties
are necessary, but are not in themselves sufficient.
One more step should be taken. Military means of
defense should be internationalized, merging and
exchanging forces on such a broad scale that military
forces stationed in any one country are not withheld
for that country's exclusive goals. In preparation for
such steps as these, youth must understand the
importance of the problem.
  The spirit of international solidarity should also be
strengthened, and chauvinism should be combated as
a hindrance to world peace. In the schools, history
should be used as a means of interpreting progress
in civilization, and not for inculcating ideals of
imperialistic power and military success. In my
opinion, H. G. Wells' World History is to be
recommended to students for this point of view.
Finally, it is at least of indirect importance that in
geography, as well as in history, a sympathetic
understanding of the characteristics of various
peoples be stimulated, and this understanding
should include those peoples commonly designated
as "primitive" or "backward."

ON EDUCATION

From an address at Albany, N. Y., on the occasion of
the celebration of the tercentenary of higher
education in America, October 15, 1936. Translated
by Lina Arronet. Published in Out of My Later
Years: New York, Philosophical Library, 1950.

  A day of celebration generally is in the first place
dedicated to retrospect, especially to the memory of
personages who have gained special distinction for
the development of the cultural life. This friendly
service for our predecessors must indeed not be
neglected, particularly as such a memory of the best
of the past is proper to stimulate the well-disposed
of today to a courageous effort. But this should be
done by someone who, from his youth, has been
connected with this State and is familiar with its
past, not by one who like a gypsy has wandered
about and gathered his experiences in all kinds of
countries.
  Thus, there is nothing else left for me but to speak
about such questions as, independently of space and
time, always have been and will be connected with
educational matters. In this attempt I cannot lay any
claim to being an authority, especially as intelligent
and well-meaning men of all times have dealt with
educational problems and have certainly repeatedly
expressed their views clearly about these matters.
From what source shall I, as a partial layman in the
realm of pedagogy, derive courage to expound
opinions with no foundations except personal
experience and personal conviction? If it were really
a scientific matter, one would probably be tempted
to silence by such considerations.
  However, with the affairs of active human beings it
is different. Here knowledge of truth alone does not
suffice; on the contrary this knowledge must
continually be renewed by ceaseless effort, if it is
not to be lost. It resembles a statue of marble which
stands in the desert and is continuously threatened
with burial by the shifting sand. The hands of
service must ever be at work, in order that the
marble continue lastingly to shine in the sun. To
these serving hands mine also shall belong.
  The school has always been the most important
means of transferring the wealth of tradition from
one generation to the next. This applies today in an
even higher degree than in former times, for through
modern development of the economic life, the
family as bearer of tradition and education has been
weakened. The continuance and health of human
society is therefore in a still higher degree dependent
on the school than formerly.
  Sometimes one sees in the school simply the
instrument for transferring a certain maximum
quantity of knowledge to the growing generation.
But that is not right. Knowledge is dead; the school,
however, serves the living. It should develop in the
young individuals those qualities and capabilities
which are of value for the welfare of the
commonwealth. But that does not mean that
individuality should be destroyed and the individual
become a mere tool of the community, like a bee or
an ant. For a community of standardized individuals
without personal originality and personal aims
would be a poor community without possibilities
for development. On the contrary, the aim must be
the training of independently acting and thinking
individuals, who, however, see in the service of the
community their highest life problem. So far as I can
judge, the English school system comes nearest to
the realization of this ideal.
  But how shall one try to attain this ideal? Should
one perhaps try to realize this aim by moralizing?
Not at all. Words are and remain an empty sound,
and the road to perdition has ever been accompanied
by lip service to an ideal. But personalities are not
formed by what is heard and said, but by labor and
activity.
  The most important method of education
accordingly always has consisted of that in which
the pupil was urged to actual performance. This
applies as well to the first attempts at writing of the
primary boy as to the doctor's thesis on graduation
from the university, or as to the mere memorizing of
a poem, the writing of a composition, the
interpretation and translation of a text, the solving
of a mathematical problem or the practice of
physical sport.
  But behind every achievement exists the
motivation which is at the foundation of it and
which in turn is strengthened and nourished by the
accomplishment of the undertaking. Here there are
the greatest differences and they are of greatest
importance to the educational value of the school.
The same work may owe its origin to fear and
compulsion, ambitious desire for authority and
distinction, or loving interest in the object and a
desire for truth and understanding, and thus to that
divine curiosity which every healthy child
possesses, but which so often is weakened early.
The educational influence which is exercised upon
the pupil by the accomplishment of one and the
same work may be widely different, depending
upon whether fear of hurt, egoistic passion, or
desire for pleasure and satisfaction is at the bottom
of this work. And nobody will maintain that the
administration of the school and the attitude of the
teachers do not have an influence upon the molding
of the psychological foundation for pupils.
  To me the worst thing seems to be for a school
principally to work with methods of fear, force, and
artificial authority. Such treatment destroys the
sound sentiments, the sincerity, and the
self-confidence of the pupil. It produces the
submissive subject. It is no wonder that such
schools are the rule in Germany and Russia. I know
that the schools in this country are free from this
worst evil; this also is so in Switzerland and
probably in all democratically governed countries. It
is comparatively simple to keep the school free
from this worst of all evils. Give into the power of
the teacher the fewest possible coercive measures,
so that the only source of the pupil's respect for the
teacher is the human and intellectual qualities of the
latter.
  The second-named motive, ambition or, in milder
terms, the aiming at recognition and consideration,
lies firmly fixed in human nature. With absence of
mental stimulus of this kind, human cooperation
would be entirely impossible; the desire for the
approval of one's fellow-man certainly is one of the
most important binding powers of society. In this
complex of feelings, constructive and destructive
forces lie closely together. Desire for approval and
recognition is a healthy motive; but the desire to be
acknowledged as better, stronger, or more intelligent
than a fellow being or fellow scholar easily leads to
an excessively egoistic psychological adjustment,
which may become injurious for the individual and
for the community. Therefore the school and the
teacher must guard against employing the easy
method of creating individual ambition, in order to
induce the pupils to diligent work.
  Darwin's theory of the struggle for existence and
the selectivity connected with it has by many
people been cited as authorization of the
encouragement of the spirit of competition. Some
people also in such a way have tried to prove
pseudo-scientifically the necessity of the
destructive economic struggle of competition
between individuals. But this is wrong, because man
owes his strength in the struggle for existence to the
fact that he is a socially living animal. As little as a
battle between single ants of an ant hill is essential
for survival, just so little is this the case with the
individual members of a human community.
  Therefore one should guard against preaching to
the young man success in the customary sense as
the aim of life. For a successful man is he who
receives a great deal from his fellowmen, usually
incomparably more than corresponds to his service
to them. The value of a man, however, should be
seen in what he gives and not in what he is able to
receive.
  The most important motive for work in the school
and in life is the pleasure in work, pleasure in its
result, and the knowledge of the value of the result
to the community. In the awakening and
strengthening of these psychological forces in the
young man, I see the most important task given by
the school. Such a psychological foundation alone
leads to a joyous desire for the highest possessions
of men, knowledge and artist-like workmanship.
  The awakening of these productive psychological
powers is certainly less easy than the practice of
force or the awakening of individual ambition but is
the more valuable for it. The point is to develop the
childlike inclination for play and the childlike desire
for recognition and to guide the child over to
important fields for society; it is that education
which in the main is founded upon the desire for
successful activity and acknowledgment. If the
school succeeds in working successfully from such
points of view, it will be highly honored by the
rising generation and the tasks given by the school
will be submitted to as a sort of gift. I have known
children who preferred schooltime to vacation.
  Such a school demands from the teacher that he be
a kind of artist in his province. What can be done
that this spirit be gained in the school? For this
there is just as little a universal remedy as there is
for an individual to remain well. But there are certain
necessary conditions which can be met. First,
teachers should grow up in such schools. Second,
the teacher should be given extensive liberty in the
selection of the material to be taught and the
methods of teaching employed by him. For it is true
also of him that pleasure in the shaping of his work
is killed by force and exterior pressure.
  If you have followed attentively my meditations
up to this point, you will probably wonder about
one thing. I have spoken fully about in what spirit,
according to my opinion, youth should be
instructed. But I have said nothing yet about the
choice of subjects for instruction, nor about the
method of teaching. Should language predominate or
technical education in science?
  To this I answer: in my opinion all this is of
secondary importance. If a young man has trained
his muscles and physical endurance by gymnastics
and walking, he will later be fitted for every
physical work. This is also analogous to the training
of the mind and the exercising of the mental and
manual skill. Thus the wit was not wrong who
defined education in this way: "Education is that
which remains, if one has forgotten everything he
learned in school." For this reason I am not at all
anxious to take sides in the struggle between the
followers of the classical philologic-historical
education and the education more devoted to natural
science.
  On the other hand, I want to oppose the idea that
the school has to teach directly that special
knowledge and those accomplishments which one
has to use later directly in life. The demands of life
are much too manifold to let such a specialized
training in school appear possible. Apart from that,
it seems to me, moreover, objectionable to treat the
individual like a dead tool. The school should
always have as its aim that the young man leave it
as a harmonious personality, not as a specialist.
This in my opinion is true in a certain sense even for
technical schools, whose students will devote
themselves to a quite definite profession. The
development of general ability for independent
thinking and judgment should always be placed
foremost, not the acquisition of special knowledge.
If a person masters the fundamentals of his subject
and has learned to think and work independently, he
will surely find his way and besides will better be
able to adapt himself to progress and changes than
the person whose training principally consists in the
acquiring of detailed knowledge.
  Finally, I wish to emphasize once more that what
has been said here in a somewhat categorical form
does not claim to mean more than the personal
opinion of a man, which is founded upon nothing
but his own personal experience, which he has
gathered as a student and as a teacher.

ON CLASSIC LITERATURE

Written for the Jungkaufmann, a monthly publication
of the "Schweizerischer Kaufmaennischer Verein,
Jugendbund," February 29, 1952.

  Somebody who reads only newspapers and at best
books of contemporary authors looks to me like an
extremely near-sighted person who scorns
eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the
prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never
gets to see or hear anything else. And what a person
thinks on his own without being stimulated by the
thoughts and experiences of other people is even in
the best case rather paltry and monotonous.
  There are only a few enlightened people with a
lucid mind and style and with good taste within a
century. What has been preserved of their work
belongs among the most precious possessions of
mankind. We owe it to a few writers of antiquity
that the people in the Middle Ages could slowly
extricate themselves from the superstitions and
ignorance that had darkened life for more than half a
millennium.
  Nothing is more needed to overcome the
modernist's snobbishness.

ENSURING THE FUTURE OF MANKIND

Message for Canadian Education Week, March 2-8,
1952. Published in Mein Weltbild, Zurich: Europa
Verlag, 1953.

  The discovery of nuclear chain reactions need not
bring about the destruction of mankind, any more
than did the discovery of matches. We only must do
everything in our power to safeguard against its
abuse. In the present stage of technical
development, only a supranational organization,
equipped with a sufficiently strong executive
power, can protect us. Once we have understood
that, we shall find the strength for the sacrifices
necessary to ensure the future of mankind. Each one
of us would be at fault if the goal were not reached
in time. There is the danger that everyone waits idly
for others to act in his stead.
  The progress of science in our century will be
highly appreciated by every knowledgeable person,
even by the casual observer who only encounters
the technical applications of science. Nevertheless,
its recent achievements will not be overrated if the
fundamental problems of science are kept in mind. If
we ride in a train, we seem to move with incredible
speed as long as we watch only nearby objects. But
if we direct our attention to prominent features of
the landscape, like high mountains, the scenery
seems to change very slowly. It is just the same
with the fundamental problems in science.
  In my opinion, it is not reasonable even to talk of
"our way of life" or that of the Russians. In both
cases we are dealing with a collection of traditions
and customs which do not form an organic whole. It
certainly makes more sense to ask which
institutions and traditions are harmful, and which
are useful, to human beings; which make life
happier, or more painful. We then must endeavor to
adopt whatever appears best, irrespective of
whether, at present, we find it realized at home or
somewhere else.
  Now to the salaries of teachers. In a healthy
society, every useful activity is compensated in a
way to permit of a decent living. The exercise of any
socially valuable activity gives inner satisfaction;
but it cannot be considered as part of the salary.
The teacher cannot use his inner satisfaction to fill
the stomachs of his children.

EDUCATION FOR INDEPENDENT THOUGHT

From the New York Times, October 5, 1952.

  It is not enough to teach man a specialty. Through
it he may become a kind of useful machine but not a
harmoniously developed personality. It is essential
that the student acquire an understanding of and a
lively feeling for values. He must acquire a vivid
sense of the beautiful and of the morally good.
Otherwise he--with his specialized
knowledge--more closely resembles a well-trained
dog than a harmoniously developed person. He
must learn to understand the motives of human
beings, their illusions, and their sufferings in order to
acquire a proper relationship to individual
fellow-men and to the community.
  These precious things are conveyed to the younger
generation through personal contact with those who
teach, not--or at least not in the main--through
textbooks. It is this that primarily constitutes and
preserves culture. This is what I have in mind when
I recommend the "humanities" as important, not just
dry specialized knowledge in the fields of history
and philosophy.
  Overemphasis on the competitive system and
premature specialization on the ground of immediate
usefulness kill the spirit on which all cultural life
depends, specialized knowledge included.
  It is also vital to a valuable education that
independent critical thinking be developed in the
young human being, a development that is greatly
jeopardized by overburdening him with too much
and with too varied subjects (point system).
Over-burdening necessarily leads to superficiality.
Teaching should be such that what is offered is
perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty.

About Friends

JOSEPH POPPER-LYNKAEUS

1838-1921. Austrian. By profession, engineer.
Famous as a writer for his pungent criticism of State
and Society and for his courageous program to
alleviate social evils. Some of his books were
banned in Imperial Austria. This statement appeared
in Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag,
1934.

  Popper-Lynkaeus was more than a brilliant
engineer and writer. He was one of the few
outstanding personalities who embody the
conscience of a generation. He has drummed into us
that society is responsible for the fate of every
individual and shown us a way to translate the
consequent obligation of the community into fact.
The community or state was no fetish to him; he
based its right to demand sacrifices of the individual
entirely on its duty to give the individual
personality a chance of harmonious development.

GREETING TO GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

On the occasion of a visit of Einstein's to England in
1930. This message was published in Mein
Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  There are few enough people with sufficient
independence to see the weaknesses and follies of
their contemporaries and remain themselves
untouched by them. And these isolated few usually
soon lose their zeal for putting things to rights when
they have come face to face with human obduracy.
Only to a tiny minority is it given to fascinate their
generation by subtle humor and grace and to hold
the mirror up to it by the impersonal agency of art.
Today I salute with sincere emotion the supreme
master of this method, who has delighted--and
educated--us all.

IN HONOR OF ARNOLD BERLINER'S
SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY

From Die Naturwissenschaften, Vol. 20, p. 913,
1932. Berliner, a German physicist, was editor of
that weekly from 1913 to 1935, when, as a Jew, he
was deposed by the Nazi regime. Seven years later
at the age of eighty, about to be deported, Berliner
committed suicide.

  I should like to take this opportunity of telling my
friend Berliner and the readers of this periodical
why I rate him and his work so highly. It has to be
done here because it is our only chance of getting
such things said; our training in objectivity has led
to a tabu on everything personal, which we mortals
may only transgress on quite exceptional occasions
such as this.
  And now, after this dash of liberty, back to the
objectivity! The area of scientific investigation has
been enormously extended, and theoretical
knowledge has become vastly more profound in
every department of science. But the assimilative
power of the human intellect is and remains strictly
limited. Hence it was inevitable that the activity of
the individual investigator should be confined to a
smaller and smaller section of human knowledge.
Worse still, this specialization makes it increasingly
difficult to keep even our general understanding of
science as a whole, without which the true spirit of
research is inevitably handicapped, in step with
scientific progress. A situation is developing similar
to the one symbolically represented in the Bible by
the story of the tower of Babel. Every serious
scientific worker is painfully conscious of this
involuntary relegation to an ever-narrowing sphere
of knowledge, which threatens to deprive the
investigator of his broad horizon and degrades him
to the level of a mechanic.
  We have all suffered under this evil, without
making any effort to mitigate it. But Berliner has
come to the rescue, as far as the German-speaking
world is concerned, in the most admirable way. He
realized that the existing popular periodicals were
sufficient to instruct and stimulate the layman; but
he also recognized the necessity of a well-balanced
periodical directed with particular care for the
information of the scientist who desired to
familiarize himself with the development in
scientific problems, methods, and results in such a
way as to be able to form a judgment of his own.
Through many years of hard work he has devoted
himself to this object with great intelligence and no
less great determination, and done us all, and
science, a service for which we cannot be too
grateful.
  It was necessary for him to secure the cooperation
of the successful scientists and induce them to say
what they had to say in a form as far as possible
intelligible to the non-specialist. He often told me of
the battles he had to fight in pursuing this objective,
describing his difficulties to me in the following
riddle: Question: What is a scientific author?
Answer: A cross between a mimosa and a
porcupine. Berliner's achievement was only possible
because his longing for a clear, comprehensive view
of as large as possible an area of scientific
investigation has remained so strongly alive. This
feeling also drove him to produce a textbook of
physics, the fruit of many years of strenuous work,
of which a medical student said to me the other day:
"I don't know how I should ever have got a clear
idea of the principles of modern physics in the time
at my disposal without this book."
  Berliner's fight for clarity and a comprehensive
view of science has done a great deal to bring to life
in many minds the problems, methods, and results
of science. The scientific life of our time is no longer
conceivable without his periodical. It is just as
important to make knowledge live and to keep it
alive as to solve specific problems.

H. A. LORENTZ'S WORK IN THE CAUSE
OF INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION

Written in 1927. H. A. Lorentz, a Dutch theoretical
physicist, was one of the greatest scientists of his
times. His work covered many fields of physics, but
his most outstanding contributions were to the
theory of electromagnetism in all its ramifications.
His discoveries prepared the ground for many of the
modern developments in physics, most particularly
for the theory of relativity. After World War 1,
Lorentz put a great deal of effort into the
reorganization of international cooperation,
particularly among scientists. Owing to his
undisputed prestige and the respect which he enjoyed
among scholars of all countries, his endeavors met
with success. During the last years of his life he was
chairman of the League of Nations' Committee of
Intellectual Cooperation. This essay appeared in
Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  With the extensive specialization of scientific
research which the nineteenth century brought
about, it has become rare for a man occupying a
leading position in one of the sciences to manage at
the same time to do valuable service to the
community in the sphere of international
organization and international politics. Such service
demands not only strength, insight, and a reputation
based on solid achievements, but also a freedom
from national prejudice and a devotion to the
common ends of all, which have become rare in our
times. I have met no one who combined all these
qualities in himself so perfectly as H. A. Lorentz.
The marvelous thing about the effect of his
personality was this: Independent and stubborn
natures, such as are particularly common among
men of learning, do not readily bow to another's will
and for the most part only accept his leadership
grudgingly. But when Lorentz is in the presidential
chair, an atmosphere of happy cooperation is
invariably created, however much those present
may differ in their aims and habits of thought. The
secret of this success lies not only in his swift
comprehension of people and things and his
marvelous command of language, but above all in
this, that one feels that his whole heart is in the
business in hand, and that when he is at work, he
has room for nothing else in his mind. Nothing
disarms the recalcitrant so much as this.
  Before the War, Lorentz's activities in the cause of
international relations were confined to presiding at
congresses of physicists. Particularly noteworthy
among these were the Solvay Congresses, the first
two of which were held at Brussels in 1909 and
1911. Then came the European war, which was a
crushing blow to all who had the improvement of
human relations in general at heart. Even before the
war was over, and still more after its end, Lorentz
devoted himself to the work of international
reconciliation. His efforts were especially directed
toward the re-establishment of fruitful and friendly
cooperation between men of learning and scientific
societies. An outsider can hardly conceive what
uphill work this was. The accumulated resentment
of the war period had not yet died down, and many
influential men persisted in the irreconcilable
attitude into which they had allowed themselves to
be driven by the pressure of circumstances.
Lorentz's efforts resembled those of a doctor with a
recalcitrant patient who refuses to take the
medicines carefully prepared for his benefit.
  But Lorentz was not to be deterred, once he had
recognized a course of action as the right one. Right
after the war, he joined the governing body of the
"Conseil de recherche" which was founded by the
scholars of the victorious countries, and from which
the scholars and learned societies of the Central
Powers were excluded. His object in taking this
step, which caused great offense to the academic
world of the Central Powers, was to influence this
institution in such a way that it could be expanded
into something truly international. He and other
right-minded men succeeded, after repeated efforts,
in securing the removal of the offensive
exclusion-clause from the statutes of the "Conseil."
The goal, which was the restoration of normal and
fruitful cooperation between learned societies, is,
however, not yet attained, because the academic
world of the Central Powers, exasperated by nearly
ten years of exclusion from practically all
international scientific gatherings, has got into a
habit of keeping itself to itself. Now, however, there
are good grounds for hoping that the ice will soon be
broken, thanks to the tactful efforts of Lorentz,
prompted by pure enthusiasm for the good cause.
  Lorentz has also devoted his energies to the service
of international cultural ends in another way, by
consenting to serve on the League of Nations'
Committee of Intellectual Cooperation, which was
called into existence some five years ago with
Bergson as chairman. For the last year Lorentz has
presided over the Committee, which, with the active
support of its subordinate, the Paris Institute, is to
act as a go-between in the domain of intellectual and
artistic activity among the various spheres of
culture. There, too, the beneficent influence of this
wise, humane, and modest personality, whose
unspoken but faithfully followed device is, "Not
mastery but service," will lead people on the right
way.
  May his example contribute to the triumph of that
spirit!

ADDRESS AT THE GRAVE OF H. A.
LORENTZ

Lorentz, born 1853, died 1928. This address was
published in Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido
Verlag, 1934.

  It is as the representative of the German-speaking
academic world and in particular the Prussian
Academy of Sciences, but above all as a pupil and
affectionate admirer that I stand at the grave of the
greatest and noblest man of our times. His genius led
the way from Maxwell's work to the achievements
of contemporary physics, to which he contributed
important building stones and methods.
  He shaped his life like an exquisite work of art
down to the smallest detail. His never-failing
kindness and generosity and his sense of justice,
coupled with a sure and intuitive understanding of
people and human affairs, made him a leader in any
sphere he entered. Everyone followed him gladly,
for they felt that he never set out to dominate but
only to serve. His work and his example will live on
as an inspiration and a blessing to many generations.

H. A. LORENTZ, CREATOR AND
PERSONALITY

Message delivered at Leyden, Holland, 1953, for the
commemoration of the one hundredth anniversary of
the birth of Lorentz. Published in Mein Weltbild,
Zurich: Europa Verlag, 1953.

  At the turn of the century the theoretical
physicists of all nations considered H. A. Lorentz
as the leading mind among them, and rightly so. The
physicists of our time are mostly not fully aware of
the decisive part which H. A. Lorentz played in
shaping the fundamental ideas in theoretical
physics. The reason for this strange fact is that
Lorentz's basic ideas have become so much a part of
them that they are hardly able to realize quite how
daring these ideas have been and to what extent they
have simplified the foundations of physics.
  When H. A. Lorentz started his creative scientific
work, Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism had
already won out. But there was inherent in this
theory a peculiar complexity of the fundamental
principles which prevented its essential features
from revealing themselves distinctly. Though the
field concept had indeed displaced the concept of
action at a distance, the electric and magnetic fields
were not yet conceived as primary entities, but
rather as states of ponderable matter which latter
was treated as a continuum. Consequently the
electric field appeared decomposed into the electric
field strength and the dielectric displacement. In the
simplest case, these two fields were connected by
the dielectric constant, but in principle they were
considered and treated as independent entities. The
magnetic field was treated similarly. It was in
accordance with this basic idea to treat empty space
as a special case of ponderable matter in which the
relation between field strength and displacement
happened to be particularly simple. In particular,
this interpretation brought it about that the electric
and magnetic field could not be conceived
independent of the state of motion of matter, which
was considered the carrier of the field.
  A good idea of the interpretation of Maxwell's
electrodynamics then prevailing may be gained from
the study of H. Hertz's investigation on the
electrodynamics of moving bodies.
  Then came H. A. Lorentz's decisive simplification
of the theory. He based his investigations with
unfaltering consistency upon the following
hypotheses:
  The seat of the electromagnetic field is the empty
space. In it there are only one electric and one
magnetic field vector. This field is generated by
atomistic electric charges upon which the field in
turn exerts ponderomotive forces. The only
connection between the electromagnetic field and
ponderable matter arises from the fact that
elementary electric charges are rigidly attached to
atomistic particles of matter. For the latter
Newton's law of motion holds.
  Upon this simplified foundation Lorentz based a
complete theory of all electromagnetic phenomena
known at the time, including those of the
electrodynamics of moving bodies. It is a work of
such consistency, lucidity, and beauty as has only
rarely been attained in an empirical science. The
only phenomenon that could not be entirely
explained on this basis, i.e., without additional
assumptions, was the famous Michelson-Morley
experiment. Without the localization of the
electro-magnetic field in empty space this
experiment could not conceivably have led to the
theory of special relativity. Indeed, the essential
step was just the reduction of electromagnetism to
Maxwell's equations in empty space or--as it was
expressed at that time--in ether.
  H. A. Lorentz even discovered the "Lorentz
transformation," later called after him, though
without recognizing its group character. To him
Maxwell's equations in empty space held only for a
particular coordinate system distinguished from all
other coordinate systems by its state of rest. This
was a truly paradoxical situation because the theory
seemed to restrict the inertial system more strongly
than did classical mechanics. This circumstance,
which from the empirical point of view appeared
completely unmotivated, was bound to lead to the
theory of special relativity.
  Thanks to the generosity of the University of
Leiden, I frequently spent some time there staying
with my dear and unforgettable friend, Paul
Ehrenfest. Thus I had often the opportunity to
attend Lorentz's lectures which he gave regularly to
a small circle of young colleagues after he had
already retired from his professorship. Whatever
came from this supreme mind was as lucid and
beautiful as a good work of art and was presented
with such facility and ease as I have never
experienced in anybody else.
  If we younger people had known H. A. Lorentz
only as a sublime mind, our admiration and respect
for him would have been unique. But what I feel
when I think of H. A. Lorentz is far more than that.
He meant more to me personally than anybody else
I have met in my lifetime.
  Just as he was in command of physics and of the
mathematical formalism, thus he also was in
command of himself without effort and strain. His
quite unusual lack of human frailties never had a
depressing effect on others. Everybody felt his
superiority, but nobody felt oppressed by it.
Though he had no illusions about people and human
affairs, he was full of kindness toward everybody
and everything. Never did he give the impression of
domineering, always of serving and helping. He was
extremely conscientious without allowing anything
to assume undue importance; a subtle humor
guarded him, which was reflected in his eyes and in
his smile. And it fits that, notwithstanding all his
devotion to science, he was convinced that our
comprehension cannot penetrate too deeply into the
essence of things. Only in my later years was I able
to appreciate fully this half-skeptical, half-humble
attitude.
  In spite of my honest attempts I find that
language--or at least my language--cannot do justice
to the subject of this short piece of writing.
Therefore I shall only quote two short sayings of
Lorentz's that impressed me particularly deeply:
  "I am happy to belong to a nation that is too small
to commit big follies."
  To a man who in a conversation during the first
World War tried to convince him that in the human
sphere fate is determined by might and force he gave
this reply:
  "It is conceivable that you are right. But I would
not want to live in such a world."

MARIE CURIE IN MEMORIAM

Statement for the Curie Memorial Celebration,
Roerich Museum, New York, November 23, 1935.
Published in Out of My Later Years, New York:
Philosophical Library, 1950.

  At a time when a towering personality like Mme.
Curie has come to the end of her life, let us not
merely rest content with recalling what she has
given to mankind in the fruits of her work. It is the
moral qualities of its leading personalities that are
perhaps of even greater significance for a generation
and for the course of history than purely intellectual
accomplishments. Even these latter are, to a far
greater degree than is commonly credited, dependent
on the stature of character.
  It was my good fortune to be linked with Mme.
Curie through twenty years of sublime and
unclouded friendship. I came to admire her human
grandeur to an ever growing degree. Her strength, her
purity of will, her austerity toward herself, her
objectivity, her incorruptible judgment--all these
were of a kind seldom found joined in a single
individual. She felt herself at every moment to be a
servant of society, and her profound modesty never
left any room for complacency. She was oppressed
by an abiding sense for the asperities and inequities
of society. This is what gave her that severe
outward aspect, so easily misinterpreted by those
who were not close to her--a curious severity
unrelieved by any artistic strain. Once she had
recognized a certain way as the right one, she
pursued it without compromise and with extreme
tenacity.
  The greatest scientific deed of her life--proving the
existence of radioactive elements and isolating
them--owes its accomplishment not merely to bold
intuition out to a devotion and tenacity in execution
under the most extreme hardships imaginable, such
as the history of experimental science has not often
witnessed.
  If but a small part of Mme. Curie's strength of
character and devotion were alive in Europe's
intellectuals, Europe would face a brighter future.

MAHATMA GANDHI

On the occasion of Gandhi's seventieth birthday in
1939. Published in Out of My Later Years, New
York: Philosophical Library, 1950.

  A leader of his people, unsupported by any
outward authority: a politician whose success rests
not upon craft nor the mastery of technical devices,
but simply on the convincing power of his
personality; a victorious fighter who has always
scorned the use of force; a man of wisdom and
humility, armed with resolve and inflexible
consistency, who has devoted all his strength to the
uplifting of his people and the betterment of their
lot; a man who has confronted the brutality of
Europe with the dignity of the simple human being,
and thus at all times risen superior.
  Generations to come, it may be, will scarce believe
that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood
walked upon this earth.

MAX PLANCK IN MEMORIAM

Read at the Max Planck Memorial Services, 1948.
Published in Out of My Later Years, New York:
Philosophical Library, 1950.

  A man to whom it has been given to bless the
world with a great creative idea has no need for the
praise of posterity. His very achievement has
already conferred a higher boon upon him.
  Yet it is good--indeed, it is indispensable--that
representatives of all who strive for truth and
knowledge should be gathered here today from the
four corners of the globe. They are here to bear
witness that even in these times of ours, when
political passion and brute force hang like swords
over the anguished and fearful heads of men, the
standard of our ideal search for truth is being held
aloft undimmed. This ideal, a bond forever uniting
scientists of all times and in all places, was
embodied with rare completeness in Max Planck.
  Even the Greeks had already conceived the
atomistic nature of matter and the concept was
raised to a high degree of probability by the
scientists of the nineteenth century. But it was
Planck's law of radiation that yielded the first exact
determination--independent of other
assumptions--of the absolute magnitudes of atoms.
More than that, he showed convincingly that in
addition to the atomistic structure of matter there is
a kind of atomistic structure to energy, governed by
the universal constant h, which was introduced by
Planck.
  This discovery became the basis of all
twentieth-century research in physics and has
almost entirely conditioned its development ever
since. Without this discovery it would not have
been possible to establish a workable theory of
molecules and atoms and the energy processes that
govern their transformations. Moreover, it has
shattered the whole framework of classical
mechanics and electrodynamics and set science a
fresh task: that of finding a new conceptual basis for
all physics. Despite remarkable partial gains, the
problem is still far from a satisfactory solution.
  In paying homage to this man, the American
National Academy of Sciences expresses its hope
that free research, for the sake of pure knowledge,
may remain unhampered and unimpaired.

MESSAGE IN HONOR OF MORRIS RAPHAEL
COHEN

For the Morris Raphael Cohen Student Memorial
Fund, November 15, 1949.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:
  It was a pleasure to learn that there are people in
the turbulent metropolis who are not completely
absorbed by the obtrusive impressions of the
moment. Your symposium bears witness that the
relations among thinking human beings are
threatened neither by the pretentious present nor by
the dividing line of death. The majority of those
who are particularly close to us are no longer among
the living; Morris Cohen has been lately included in
their number.
  I knew him well as an extraordinarily helpful,
conscientious man of unusually independent
character and I rather frequently had the pleasure of
discussing with him problems of common interest.
But when I occasionally tried to tell something
about his spiritual personality, I realized painfully
that I was not acquainted enough with the working
of his mind.
  To fill this lacuna--at least scantily--I took his
book Logic and Scientific Method, which he had
published jointly with Ernest Nagel. I did not do
this comfortably but with a well-founded unrest
because there was so little time. But when I had
started reading, I became so fascinated that the
external occasion of my reading receded somewhat
into the background.
  When, after several hours, I came to myself again, I
asked myself what it was that had so fascinated me.
The answer is simple. The results were not
presented as ready-made, but scientific curiosity
was first aroused by presenting contrasting
possibilities of conceiving the matter. Only then the
attempt was made to clarify the issue by thorough
argument. The intellectual honesty of the author
makes us share the inner struggle in his mind. It is
this which is the mark of the born teacher.
Knowledge exists in two forms--lifeless, stored in
books, and alive in the consciousness of men. The
second form of existence is after all the essential
one; the first, indispensable as it may be, occupies
only an inferior position.

PART II

ON POLITICS, GOVERNMENT, AND
PACIFISM

THE INTERNATIONAL OF SCIENCE

Written shortly after World War I. Published in
Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  At a sitting of the Academy during the War, at the
time when nationalism and political infatuation had
reached its height, Emil Fischer spoke the following
emphatic words: "It's no use, gentlemen, science is
and remains international." The really great
scientists have always known this and felt it
passionately, even though in times of political strife
they may have remained isolated among their
colleagues of inferior caliber. In every camp during
the War this group of voters betrayed their sacred
trust. The International Association of Academies
was broken up. Congresses were and still are held
from which colleagues from ex-enemy countries are
excluded. Political considerations, advanced with
much solemnity, prevent the triumph of the purely
objective ways of thinking without which our great
aims must necessarily be frustrated.
  What can right-minded people, people who are
proof against the emotional temptations of the
moment, do to repair the damage? With the majority
of intellectual workers still so excited, truly
international congresses on the grand scale cannot
yet be held. The psychological obstacles to the
restoration of the international associations of
scientific workers are still too formidable to be
overcome by the minority whose ideas and feelings
are of a more comprehensive kind. Men of this kind
can aid in the great work of restoring the
international societies to health by keeping in close
touch with like-minded people all over the world,
and steadfastly championing the international cause
in their own spheres. Success on a large scale will
take time, but it will undoubtedly come. I cannot let
this opportunity pass without paying tribute, in
particular, to the large number of our English
colleagues whose desire to preserve the
confraternity of the intellect has remained alive
through all these difficult years.
  The attitude of the individual is everywhere better
than the official pronouncements. Right-minded
people should bear this in mind and not allow
themselves to be exasperated or misled: senatores
boni viri, senatus autem bestia.
  If I am full of confident hope concerning the
progress of international organization, that feeling is
based not so much on my confidence in the
intelligence and high-mindedness of my fellows, but
rather on the imperative pressure of economic
developments. And since these depend largely on
the work even of reactionary scientists, they, too,
will help to create the international organization
against their wills.

A FAREWELL

A letter written in 1923 regarding Einstein's
resignation from the League of Nations' Committee
of Intellectual Cooperation, in protest at the
inadequacy of the League. Albert Dufour-Feronce, at
the time a high official in the German Foreign Office,
later became first German Under-Secretary of the
League of Nations. In 1924 Einstein, to counteract
the exploitation of his earlier decision by German
chauvinists in their propaganda against
international cooperation, rejoined the Committee of
Intellectual Cooperation. Published in Mein
Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

DEAR MR. DUFOUR-FERONCE:
  Your kind letter must not go unanswered,
otherwise you may get a mistaken notion of my
attitude. The grounds for my resolve to go to
Geneva no more are as follows: experience has,
unhappily, taught me that the Commission, taken as
a whole, stands for no serious determination to
make real progress in the task of improving
international relations. It looks to me far more like
an embodiment of the principle ut aliquid fieri
videatur. The Commission seems to me even worse
in this respect than the League taken as a whole.
  It is precisely because I desire to work with all my
might for the establishment of an international
arbitrating and regulative authority superior to the
state, and because I have this object so very much at
heart, that I feel compelled to leave the Commission.
  The Commission has given its blessing to the
oppression of the cultural minorities in all countries
by causing a National Commission to be set up in
each of them, which is to form the only channel of
communication between the intellectuals of a
country and the Commission. It has thereby
deliberately abandoned its function of giving moral
support to the national minorities in their struggle
against cultural oppression.
  Further, the attitude of the Commission in the
matter of combating the chauvinistic and militaristic
tendencies of education in the various countries has
been so lukewarm that no serious efforts in this
fundamentally important sphere can be hoped for
from it.
  The Commission has invariably failed to give moral
support to those individuals and associations who
have thrown themselves without reserve into the
task of working for an international order and
against the military system.
  The Commission has never made any attempt to
resist the appointment of members whom it knew
to stand for tendencies the very reverse of those
they were bound in duty to advance.
  I will not bother you with any further arguments,
since you will understand my resolve well enough
from these few hints. It is not my business to draw
up an indictment but merely to explain my position.
If I nourished any hope whatever I should act
differently--of that you may be sure.

THE INSTITUTE OF INTELLECTUAL
COOPERATION

Probably written in 1926. Published in Mein
Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  During this year the leading politicians of Europe
have for the first time drawn the logical conclusion
from the realization that our continent can only
regain its prosperity if the latent struggle between
the traditional political units ceases. The political
organization of Europe must be strengthened, and a
gradual attempt made to abolish tariff barriers. This
great end cannot be achieved by treaties alone. The
minds of the people must, above all, be prepared for
it. We must try gradually to awaken in them a sense
of solidarity which will not, as heretofore, stop at
frontiers. It is with this in mind that the League of
Nations created the Commission de co-opΘration
intellectuelle. This commission was to be a strictly
international and entirely non-political body, whose
business it was to put the intellectuals of all the
nations, who were isolated by the War, in touch
with each other. It proved a difficult task; for it has,
alas, to be admitted that--at least in the countries
with which I am most closely acquainted--the artists
and men of learning permit themselves to be
governed by narrow nationalism to a far greater
extent than the men of affairs.
  Hitherto this commission has met twice a year. To
make its efforts more effective, the French
government has decided to create and maintain a
permanent Institute of Intellectual Cooperation,
which is just now to be opened. It is a generous act
on the part of the French government and as such
deserves the thanks of all.
  It is an easy and grateful task to rejoice and praise
and to say nothing about the things one regrets or
disapproves of. But honesty alone can help our
work forward, so I will not shrink from combining
criticism with this greeting to the newborn child.
  I have daily occasion for observing that the greatest
obstacle which the work of our commission has to
encounter is the lack of confidence in its political
impartiality. Everything must be done to strengthen
that confidence and anything avoided that might
harm it.
  When, therefore, the French government sets up
and maintains an Institute out of public funds in
Paris as a permanent organ of the Commission, with
a Frenchman as its Director, the outside observer
can hardly avoid the impression that French
influence predominates in the Commission. This
impression is further strengthened by the fact that a
Frenchman has also been chairman of the
Commission itself thus far. Although the individuals
in question are men of the highest reputation,
esteemed and respected everywhere, nevertheless
the impression remains.
  Dixi et salvavi animam meam. I hope with all my
heart that the new Institute by constant interaction
with the Commission will succeed in promoting
their common ends and winning the confidence and
recognition of intellectual workers all over the
world.

THOUGHTS ON THE WORLD ECONOMIC
CRISIS

This and the following two articles were written
during the world economic crisis of the 1930's.
Although prevailing conditions are not the same and
some of the suggested remedies have been used by
various countries, these articles should be included.
Published in Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido
Verlag, 1934.

  If there is anything that can give a layman in the
sphere of economics the courage to express an
opinion on the nature of the alarming economic
difficulties of the present day, it is the hopeless
confusion of opinions among the experts. What I
have to say is nothing new and does not pretend to
be anything more than the expression of the opinion
of an independent and honest man who, unburdened
by class or national prejudices, desires nothing but
the good of humanity and the most harmonious
possible scheme of human existence. If in what
follows I write as if I were sure of the truth of what
I am saying, this is merely done for the sake of an
easier mode of expression; it does not proceed from
unwarranted self-confidence or a belief in the
infallibility of my somewhat simple intellectual
conception of problems which are in reality
uncommonly complex.
  As I see it, this crisis differs in character from past
crises in that it is based on an entirely new set of
conditions, arising out of the rapid progress in
methods of production. Only a fraction of the
available human labor in the world is now needed for
the production of the total amount of consumption
goods necessary to life. Under a completely
laissez-faire economic system, this fact is bound to
lead to unemployment.
  For reasons which I do not propose to analyze
here, the majority of people are compelled to work
for the minimum wage on which life can be
supported. If two factories produce the same sort of
goods, other things being equal, that factory will be
able to produce them more cheaply which employs
fewer workmen--i.e., makes the individual worker
work as long and as hard as human nature permits.
From this it follows inevitably that, with methods
of production as they are today, only a portion of
the available labor can be used. While unreasonable
demands are made on this portion, the remainder is
automatically excluded from the process of
production. This leads to a fall in sales and profits.
Businesses go smash, which further increases
unemployment and diminishes confidence in
industrial concerns and therewith public
participation in the mediating banks; finally the
banks become insolvent through the sudden
withdrawal of accounts and the wheels of industry
therewith come to a complete standstill.
  The crisis has also been attributed to other causes
which we will now consider.
  Over-production. We have to distinguish between
two things here--real over-production and apparent
over-production. By real over-production I mean a
production so great that it exceeds the demand. This
may perhaps apply to motor cars and wheat in the
United States at the present moment, although even
that is doubtful. By "over-production" people
usually mean a condition in which more of one
particular article is produced than can, in existing
circumstances, be sold, in spite of a shortage of
consumption goods among consumers. This I call
apparent over-production. In this case it is not the
demand that is lacking but the consumers'
purchasing-power. Such apparent over-production
is only another word for a crisis and therefore
cannot serve as an explanation of the latter; hence
people who try to make over-production
responsible for the present crisis are merely juggling
with words.
  Reparations. The obligation to pay reparations lies
heavy on the debtor nations and their economies. It
compels them to go in for dumping and so harms the
creditor-nations too. This is beyond dispute. But
the appearance of the crisis in the United States, in
spite of the high tariff-wall, proves that this cannot
be the principal cause of the world crisis. The
shortage of gold in the debtor countries due to
reparations can at most serve as an argument for
putting an end to these payments; it cannot provide
an explanation of the world crisis.
  Erection of new tariff-walls. Increase in the
unproductive burden of armaments. Political
insecurity owing to latent danger of war. All these
things make the situation in Europe considerably
worse without really affecting America. The
appearance of the crisis in America shows that they
cannot be its principal causes.
  The dropping-out of the two powers, China and
Russia. Also this blow to world trade cannot make
itself very deeply felt in America and therefore
cannot be the principal cause of the crisis.
  The economic rise of the lower classes since the
War. This, supposing it to be a reality, could only
produce a scarcity of goods, not an excessive
supply.
  I will not weary the reader by enumerating further
contentions which do not seem to me to get to the
heart of the matter. Of one thing I feel certain: this
same technical progress which, in itself, might
relieve mankind of a great part of the labor
necessary to its subsistence, is the main cause of our
present misery. Hence there are those who would in
all seriousness forbid the introduction of technical
improvements. This is obviously absurd. But how
can we find a more rational way out of our dilemma?
  If we could somehow manage to prevent the
purchasing-power of the masses, measured in terms
of goods, from sinking below a certain minimum,
stoppages in the industrial cycle such as we are
experiencing today would be rendered impossible.
  The logically simplest but also most daring method
of achieving this is a completely planned economy,
in which consumption goods are produced and
distributed by the community. That is essentially
what is being attempted in Russia today. Much will
depend on what results this forced experiment
produces. To hazard a prophecy here would be
presumption. Can goods be produced as
economically under such a system as under one
which leaves more freedom to individual enterprise?
Can this system maintain itself at all without the
terror that has so far accompanied it, to which none
of us westerners would care to expose himself?
Does not such a rigid, centralized economic system
tend toward protectionism and toward resistance to
advantageous innovations? We must take care,
however, not to allow these misgivings to become
prejudices which prevent us from forming an
objective judgment.
  My personal opinion is that those methods are in
general preferable which respect existing traditions
and habits so far as that is in any way compatible
with the end in view. Nor do I believe that a sudden
transference of economy into governmental
management would be beneficial from the point of
view of production; private enterprise should be left
its sphere of activity, in so far as it has not already
been eliminated by industry itself by the device of
cartelization.
  There are, however, two respects in which this
economic freedom ought to be limited. In each
branch of industry the number of working hours per
week ought so to be reduced by law that
unemployment is systematically abolished. At the
same time minimum wages must be fixed in such a
way that the purchasing power of the workers
keeps pace with production.
  Further, in those industries which have become
monopolistic in character through organization on
the part of the producers, prices must be controlled
by the state in order to keep the issue of capital
within reasonable bounds and prevent the artificial
strangling of production and consumption.
  In this way it might perhaps be possible to
establish a proper balance between production and
consumption without too great a limitation of free
enterprise and at the same time to stop the
intolerable tyranny of the owners of the means of
production (land and machinery) over the
wage-earners, in the widest sense of the term.

PRODUCTION AND PURCHASING POWER

  Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  I do not believe that the remedy for our present
difficulties lies in a knowledge of productive
capacity and consumption, because this knowledge
is likely, in the main, to come too late. Moreover,
the trouble in Germany seems to me to be not
hypertrophy of the machinery of production but
deficient purchasing power in a large section of the
population, which has been cast out of the
productive process through the rationalization of
industry.
  The gold standard has, in my opinion, the serious
disadvantage that a shortage in the supply of gold
automatically leads to a contraction of credit and
also of the amount of currency in circulation, to
which contraction prices and wages cannot adjust
themselves sufficiently quickly.
  The natural remedies of our troubles are, in my
opinion, as follows:
  (1) A statutory reduction of working hours,
graduated for each department of industry, in order
to get rid of unemployment, combined with the
fixing of minimum wages for the purpose of
adjusting the purchasing-power of the masses to the
amount of goods available.
  (2) Control of the amount of money in circulation
and of the volume of credit in such a way as to keep
the price level steady, abolishing any monetary
standard.
  (3) Statutory limitation of prices for such articles
as have been practically withdrawn from free
competition by monopolies or the formation of
cartels.

PRODUCTION AND WORK

Answer to a communication. Published in Mein
Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  The fundamental trouble seems to me to be the
almost unlimited freedom of the labor market
combined with extraordinary progress in the
methods of production. To satisfy the needs of the
world today nothing like all the available labor is
wanted. The result is unemployment and unhealthy
competition among the workers, both of which
reduce purchasing-power and thereby put the whole
economic system intolerably out of gear.
  I know Liberal economists maintain that every
economy in labor is counterbalanced by an increase
in demand. But, to begin with, I don't believe that;
and even if it were true, the above-mentioned factors
would always operate to force the standard of living
of a large portion of the human race down to an
unnaturally low level.
  I also share your conviction that steps absolutely
must be taken to make it possible and necessary for
the younger people to take part in the productive
process. Further, that the older people ought to be
excluded from certain sorts of work (which I call
"unqualified" work), receiving instead a certain
income, as having by that time done enough work of
a kind accepted by society as productive.
  I, too, am in favor of abolishing large cities, but not
of settling people of a particular type, e.g., old
people, in particular towns. Frankly, the idea strikes
me as horrible.
  I am also of the opinion that fluctuations in the
value of money must be avoided, by substituting for
the gold standard a standard based on certain classes
of goods selected according to the conditions of
consumption--as Keynes, if I am not mistaken, long
ago proposed. With the introduction of this system
one might consent to a certain amount of "inflation,"
as compared with the present monetary situation, if
one could believe that the state would really make a
rational use of the windfall thus accruing to it.
  The weaknesses of your plan lie, so it seems to
me, in the sphere of psychology, or rather, in your
neglect of it. It is no accident that capitalism has
brought with it progress not merely in production
but also in knowledge. Egoism and competition are,
alas, stronger forces than public spirit and sense of
duty. In Russia, they say, it is impossible to get a
decent piece of bread. . . . Perhaps I am
over-pessimistic concerning state and other forms of
communal enterprise, but I expect little good from
them. Bureaucracy is the death of any achievement.
I have seen and experienced too many dreadful
warnings, even in comparatively model Switzerland.
  I am inclined to the view that the state can only be
of real use to industry as a limiting and regulative
force. It must see to it that competition among the
workers is kept within healthy limits, that all
children are given a chance to develop soundly, and
that wages are high enough for the goods produced
to be consumed. But it can exert a decisive influence
through its regulative function if its measures are
framed in an objective spirit by independent
experts.

ADDRESS TO THE STUDENTS'
DISARMAMENT MEETING

Delivered before a group of German pacifist
students, about 1930. Published in Mein Weltbild,
Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  Preceding generations have presented us with a
highly developed science and technology, a most
valuable gift which carries with it possibilities of
making our life free and beautiful to an extent such
as no previous generation has enjoyed. But this gift
also brings with it dangers to our existence as great
as any that have ever threatened it.
  The destiny of civilized humanity depends more
than ever on the moral forces it is capable of
generating. Hence the task that confronts our age is
certainly no easier than the tasks our immediate
predecessors successfully performed.
  The necessary supply of food and consumer goods
can be produced in far fewer hours of work than
formerly. Moreover, the problem of distribution of
labor and of manufactured goods has become far
more difficult. We all feel that the free play of
economic forces, the unregulated and unrestrained
pursuit of wealth and power by the individual, no
longer leads automatically to a tolerable solution of
these problems. Production, labor, and distribution
need to be organized on a definite plan, in order to
prevent the elimination of valuable productive
energies and the impoverishment and demoralization
of large sections of the population.
  If unrestricted sacred egoism leads to dire
consequences in economic life, it is still worse as a
guide in international relations. The development of
mechanical methods of warfare is such that human
life will become intolerable if people do not discover
before long a way of preventing war. The
importance of this object is only equaled by the
inadequacy of the attempts hitherto made to attain
it.
  People seek to minimize the danger by limitation
of armaments and restrictive rules for the conduct of
war. But war is not a parlor game in which the
players obediently stick to the rules. Where life and
death are at stake, rules and obligations go by the
board. Only the absolute repudiation of all war can
be of any use here. The creation of an international
court of arbitration is not enough. There must be
treaties guaranteeing that the decisions of this court
shall be made effective by all the nations acting in
concert. Without such a guarantee the nations will
never have the courage to disarm seriously.
  Suppose, for example, that the American, English,
German, and French governments insisted that the
Japanese government put an immediate stop to their
warlike operations in China, under pain of a
complete economic boycott. Do you suppose that
any Japanese government would be found ready to
take the responsibility of plunging its country into
the perilous adventure of defying this order? Then
why is it not done? Why must every individual and
every nation tremble for their existence? Because
each seeks his own wretched momentary advantage
and refuses to subordinate it to the welfare and
prosperity of the community.
  That is why I began by telling you that the fate of
the human race was more than ever dependent on its
moral strength today. The way to a joyful and
happy existence is everywhere through renunciation
and self-limitation.
  Where can the strength for such a process come
from? Only from those who have had the chance in
their early years to fortify their minds and broaden
their outlook through study. Thus we of the older
generation look to you and hope that you will strive
with all your might and achieve what was denied to
us.

THE DISARMAMENT CONFERENCE OF 1932

From The Nation, Vol. 133, p. 300. 1931. Original
German text published in Mein Weltbild,
Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

I.

  May I begin with an article of political faith? It
runs as follows: the state is made for man, not man
for the state. The same may be said of science.
These are old sayings, coined by men for whom
human personality has the highest human value. I
should shrink from repeating them, were it not that
they are forever threatening to fall into oblivion,
particularly in these days of organization and
stereotypes. I regard it as the chief duty of the state
to protect the individual and give him the
opportunity to develop into a creative personality.
  That is to say, the state should be our servant and
not we its slaves. The state transgresses this
commandment when it compels us by force to
engage in military and war service, the more so since
the object and the effect of this slavish service is to
kill people belonging to other countries or interfere
with their freedom of development. We are only to
make such sacrifices to the state as will promote the
free development of individual human beings. To
every American all this may be a platitude, but not
to every European. Hence we may hope that the
fight against war will find strong support among
Americans.
  And now for the Disarmament Conference. Ought
one to laugh, weep, or hope when one thinks of it?
Imagine a city inhabited by fiery-tempered,
dishonest, and quarrelsome citizens. The constant
danger to life there is felt as a serious handicap
which makes all healthy development impossible.
The City Council desires to remedy this abominable
state of affairs, although all the counselors and the
rest of the citizens insist on continuing to carry a
dagger in their belts. After years of preparation the
City Council determines to compromise and raises
the question, how long and how sharp the dagger is
allowed to be which anyone may carry in his belt
when he goes for a walk. As long as the cunning
citizens do not suppress knifing by legislation, the
courts, and the police, things go on in the old way,
of course. A definition of the length and sharpness
of the permitted dagger will only help the strongest
and most turbulent and leave the weaker at their
mercy. You will all understand the meaning of this
parable. It is true that we have a League of Nations
and a Court of Arbitration. But the League is not
much more than a meeting-place and the Court has
no means of enforcing its decisions. These
institutions provide no security for any country in
case of an attack upon it. If you bear this in mind,
you will judge the attitude of the French, their
refusal to disarm without security, less harshly than
it is usually judged at present.
  Unless we can agree to limit the sovereignty of the
individual state by binding every one of them to
take joint action against any country which openly
or secretly resists a judgment of the Court of
Arbitration, we shall never get out of a state of
universal anarchy and terror. No sleight of hand can
reconcile the unlimited sovereignty of the individual
country with security against attack. Will it need
new disasters to induce the countries to undertake
to enforce every decision of the recognized
international court? The progress of events so far
scarcely justifies us in hoping for anything better in
the near future. But everyone who cares for
civilization and justice must exert all his strength to
convince his fellows of the necessity for laying all
countries under an international obligation of this
kind.
  It will be urged against this notion, not without a
certain justification, that it overestimates the
efficacy of machinery, and neglects the
psychological, or rather the moral, factor. Spiritual
disarmament, people insist, must precede material
disarmament. They say further, and truly, that the
greatest obstacle to international order is that
monstrously exaggerated spirit of nationalism which
also goes by the fair-sounding but misused name of
patriotism. During the last century and a half this
idol has acquired an uncanny and exceedingly
pernicious power everywhere.
  To estimate this objection at its proper worth, one
must realize that a reciprocal relation exists between
external machinery and internal states of mind. Not
only does the machinery depend on traditional
modes of feeling and owe its origin and its survival
to them, but the existing machinery in its turn
exercises a powerful influence on national modes of
feeling.
  The present deplorably high development of
nationalism everywhere is, in my opinion,
intimately connected with the institution of
compulsory military service or, to call it by its
sweeter name, national armies. A state which
demands military service of its inhabitants is
compelled to cultivate in them a nationalistic spirit,
thereby laying the psychological foundation for
their military usefulness, In its schools it must
idolize, alongside with religion, its instrument of
brutal force in the eyes of the youth.
  The introduction of compulsory military service is
therefore, to my mind, the prime cause of the moral
decay of the white race, which seriously threatens
not merely the survival of our civilization but our
very existence. This curse, along with great social
blessings, started with the French Revolution, and
before long dragged all the other nations in its train.
  Therefore, those who desire to cultivate an
international spirit and to combat chauvinism must
take their stand against compulsory military service.
Is the severe persecution to which conscientious
objectors to military service are subjected today a
whit less disgraceful to the community than those to
which the martyrs of religion were exposed in
former centuries? Can you, as the Kellogg Pact does,
condemn war and at the same time leave the
individual to the tender mercies of the war machine
in each country?
  If, in view of the Disarmament Conference, we are
not merely to restrict ourselves to the technical
problems of organization, but also to tackle the
psychological question more directly from the
standpoint of educational motives, we must try
along international lines to create legal means by
which the individual can refuse to serve in the army.
Such a regulation would undoubtedly produce a
great moral effect.
  Let me summarize my views: Mere agreements to
limit armaments furnish no sort of security.
Compulsory arbitration must be supported by an
executive force, guaranteed by all the participating
countries, which is ready to proceed against the
disturber of the peace with economic and military
sanctions. Compulsory military service, as the
hotbed of unhealthy nationalism, must be combated;
most important of all, conscientious objectors must
be protected on an international basis.

II.

  The benefits that the inventive genius of man has
conferred on us in the last hundred years could make
life happy and carefree, if organization had been able
to keep pace with technical progress. As it is, in the
hands of our generation these hard-won
achievements are like a razor wielded by a child of
three. The possession of marvelous means of
production has brought care and hunger instead of
freedom.
  The results of technical progress are most baleful
where they furnish means for the destruction of
human life and the hard-won fruits of toil, as we of
the older generation experienced to our horror in the
World War. More dreadful even than the
destruction, in my opinion, is the humiliating
slavery into which war plunges the individual. Is it
not a terrible thing to be forced by society to do
things which all of us as individuals regard as
abominable crimes? Only a few had the moral
greatness to resist; them I regard as the real heroes
of the World War.
  There is one ray of hope, I believe that today the
responsible leaders of the nations do, in the main,
honestly desire to abolish war. The resistance to
this absolutely necessary step arises from those
unfortunate national traditions which are handed on
like a hereditary disease from generation to
generation through the workings of the educational
system. But the principal vehicle of this tradition is
military training and its glorification, and, equally,
that portion of the Press which is controlled by
heavy industry and the military. Without
disarmament there can be no lasting peace.
Conversely, the continuation of the armament race
on the present scale will inevitably lead to new
catastrophes.
  That is why the Disarmament Conference of 1932
will decide the fate of this generation and the next.
When one thinks how pitiable, on the whole, have
been the results of former conferences, it becomes
clear that it is the duty of all intelligent and
responsible people to exert their full powers to
remind public opinion again and again of the
importance of the 1932 Conference. Only if the
statesmen have behind them the will to peace of a
decisive majority in their own countries can they
attain their great end, and for the formation of this
public opinion each one of us is responsible in every
word and deed.
  The doom of the Conference would be sealed if the
delegates came to it with ready-made instructions
for a policy: to impose it on the Conference would
at once become a matter of prestige. This seems to
be generally realized. For meetings between the
statesmen of two nations at a time, which have
become very frequent of late, have been used to
prepare the ground for the Conference by
conversations about the disarmament problem. This
seems to me a very happy device, for two men or
groups of men can usually discuss things together
most reasonably, honestly, and dispassionately
when there is no third person present in front of
whom they think they must be careful what they
say. Only if exhaustive preparations of this kind are
made for the Conference, if surprises are thereby
ruled out, and if an atmosphere of confidence is
created by genuine good will, can we hope for a
happy issue.
  In these great matters success is not a matter of
cleverness, still less of cunning, but of honesty and
confidence. The moral element cannot be displaced
by reason, thank heaven, I am inclined to say.
  The individual must not merely wait and criticize.
He must serve the cause as best he can. The fate of
the world will be such as the world deserves.

AMERICA AND THE DISARMAMENT
CONFERENCE OF 1932

  Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  The Americans of today are filled with the cares
arising out of the economic conditions in their own
country. The efforts of their responsible leaders are
directed primarily to remedying the serious
unemployment at home. The sense of being
involved in the destiny of the rest of the world, and
in particular of the mother country of Europe, is
even less strong than in normal times.
  But the free play of economic forces will not by
itself automatically overcome these difficulties.
Regulative measures by the community are needed
to bring about a sound distribution of labor and
consumers' goods among mankind; without this even
the people of the richest country suffocate. The fact
is that since the amount of work needed to supply
everybody's needs has been reduced through the
improvement of technical methods, the free play of
economic forces no longer produces a state of affairs
in which all the available labor can find employment.
Deliberate regulation and organization are becoming
necessary to make the results of technical progress
beneficial to all.
  If the economic situation cannot be cleared up
without systematic regulation, how much more
necessary is such regulation for dealing with the
international problems of politics! Few of us still
cling to the notion that acts of violence in the shape
of wars are either advantageous or worthy of
humanity as a method of solving international
problems. But we are not consistent enough to make
vigorous efforts on behalf of the measures which
might prevent war, that savage and unworthy relic
of the age of barbarism. It requires some power of
reflection to see the issue clearly and a certain
courage to serve this great cause resolutely and
effectively.
  Anybody who really wants to abolish war must
resolutely declare himself in favor of his own
country's resigning a portion of its sovereignty in
favor of international institutions: he must be ready
to make his own country amenable, in case of a
dispute, to the award of an international court. He
must, in the most uncompromising fashion, support
disarmament all round, as is actually envisaged in
the unfortunate Treaty of Versailles; unless military
and aggressively patriotic education is abolished, we
can hope for no progress.
  No event of the last few years reflects such
disgrace on the leading civilized countries of the
world as the failure of all disarmament conferences
so far; for this failure is due not only to the intrigues
of ambitious and unscrupulous politicians but also
to the indifference and slackness of the public in all
countries. Unless this is changed we shall destroy all
the really valuable achievements of our
predecessors.
  I believe that the American people are only
imperfectly aware of the responsibility which rests
with them in this matter.
  They no doubt think "Let Europe go to the dogs, if
she is destroyed by the quarrelsomeness and
wickedness of her inhabitants. The good seed of our
Wilson has produced a mighty poor crop in the
stony group of Europe. We are strong and safe and
in no hurry to mix ourselves up in other people's
affairs."
  Such an attitude is neither noble nor far-sighted.
America is partly to blame for the difficulties of
Europe. By ruthlessly pressing her claims she is
hastening the economic and therewith the moral
decline of Europe; she has helped to Balkanize
Europe and therefore shares the responsibility for
the breakdown of political morality and the growth
of that spirit of revenge which feeds on despair.
This spirit will not stop short of the gates of
America--I had almost said, has not stopped short.
Look around, and beware!
  The truth can be briefly stated:--The Disarmament
Conference comes as a final chance, to you no less
than to us, of preserving the best that civilized
humanity has produced. And it is on you, as the
strongest and comparatively soundest among us,
that the eyes and hopes of all are focused.

THE QUESTION OF DISARMAMENT

  Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  The greatest obstacle to the success of the
disarmament plan was the fact that people in general
left out of account the chief difficulties of the
problem. Most objects are gained by gradual steps:
for example, the supersession of absolute monarchy
by democracy. Here, however, we are concerned
with an objective which cannot be reached step by
step.
  As long as the possibility of war remains, nations
will insist on being as perfectly prepared in a
military sense as they can, in order to emerge
triumphant from the next war. It will also be
impossible to avoid educating the youth in warlike
traditions and cultivating narrow national vanity
joined to the glorification of the warlike spirit, as
long as people have to be prepared for occasions
when such a spirit will be needed for the purpose of
war. To arm is to give one's voice and make one's
preparations, not for peace but for war. Therefore
people will not disarm step by step; they will
disarm at one blow or not at all.
  The accomplishment of such a far-reaching change
in the life of nations presupposes a mighty moral
effort, a deliberate departure from deeply ingrained
tradition. Anyone who is not prepared to make the
fate of his country in case of a dispute depend
entirely on the decisions of an international court of
arbitration, and to enter into a treaty to this effect
without reserve, is not really resolved to avoid war.
It is a case of all or nothing.
  It is undeniable that previous attempts to ensure
peace have failed through aiming at inadequate
compromises.
  Disarmament and security are only to be had in
combination. The one guarantee of security is an
undertaking by all nations to give effect to the
decisions of the international authority.
  We stand, therefore, at the parting of the ways.
Whether we find the way of peace or continue along
the old road of brute force, so unworthy of our
civilization, depends on ourselves. On the one side
the freedom of the individual and the security of
society beckon to us; on the other, slavery for the
individual and the annihilation of our civilization
threaten us. Our fate will be according to our
deserts.

ARBITRATION

  Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  Systematic disarmament within a short period is
only possible in combination with a guarantee of all
nations for the security of each individual one, based
on a permanent court of arbitration independent of
governments.
  Unconditional obligation of all countries not
merely to accept the decisions of the court of
arbitration but also to carry them out.
  Separate courts of arbitration for Europe with
Africa, America, and Asia (Australia to be
apportioned to one of these). A joint court of
arbitration for questions involving issues that cannot
be settled within the limits of any one of these three
regions.

TO SIGMUND FREUD

A private letter written around 1931 or the
beginning of 1932. published in Mein Weltbild,
Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

DEAR PROFESSOR FREUD:
  It is admirable how the yearning to perceive the
truth has overcome every other yearning in you.
You have shown with impelling lucidity how
inseparably the combative and destructive instincts
are bound up in the human psyche with those of
love and life. But at the same time there shines
through the cogent logic of your arguments a deep
longing for the great goal of internal and external
liberation of mankind from war. This great aim has
been professed by all those who have been
venerated as moral and spiritual leaders beyond the
limits of their own time and country without
exception, from Jesus Christ to Goethe and Kant. Is
it not significant that such men have been
universally accepted as leaders, even though their
efforts to mold the course of human affairs were
attended with but small success?
  I am convinced that the great men, those whose
achievements in howsoever restricted a sphere set
them above their fellows, share to an overwhelming
extent the same ideal. But they have little influence
on the course of political events. It almost looks as
if this domain on which the fate of nations depends
has inescapably to be given over to the violence and
irresponsibility of political rulers.
  Political leaders or governments owe their position
partly to force and partly to popular election. They
cannot he regarded as representative of the best
elements, morally or intellectually, in their
respective nations. The intellectual elite have no
direct influence on the history of nations in these
days; their lack of cohesion prevents them from
taking a direct part in the solution of contemporary
problems. Don't you think that a change might be
brought about in this respect by a free association of
people whose previous achievements and actions
constitute a guarantee of their ability and purity of
aim? This association of an international nature,
whose members would need to keep in touch with
each other by a constant interchange of opinions,
might, by defining its attitude in the
Press--responsibility always resting with the
signatories on any given occasion--acquire a
considerable and salutary moral influence over the
settlement of political questions. Such an
association would, of course, be a prey to all the ills
which so often lead to degeneration in learned
societies, dangers which are inseparably bound up
with the imperfections of human nature. But should
not an effort in this direction be risked in spite of
this? I look upon such an attempt as nothing less
than an imperative duty.
  If an intellectual association of standing, such as I
have described, could be formed, it would also have
to make a consistent effort to mobilize the religious
organizations for the fight against war. It would give
countenance to many whose good intentions are
paralyzed today by a melancholy resignation.
Finally, I believe that an association formed of
persons such as I have described, each highly
esteemed in his own line, would be well suited to
give valuable moral support to those elements in the
League of Nations which are really working toward
the great objective for which that institution exists.
  I had rather put these proposals to you than to
anyone else in the world, because you, least of all
men, are the dupe of your desires and because your
critical judgment is supported by a most grave sense
of responsibility.

PEACE

Since the time this article was written, it has been
generally recognized that the view expressed here,
which prevailed in the 1930's, is too narrow an
interpretation of causes. Nevertheless the conclusion
still holds true. Published in Mein Weltbild,
Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  The importance of securing international peace was
recognized by the really great men of former
generations. But the technical advances of our times
have turned this ethical postulate into a matter of
life and death for civilized mankind today, and made
it a moral duty to take an active part in the solution
of the problem of peace, a duty which no
conscientious man can shirk.
  One has to realize that the powerful industrial
groups concerned in the manufacture of arms are
doing their best in all countries to prevent the
peaceful settlement of international disputes, and
that rulers can only achieve this great end if they are
sure of the vigorous support of the majority of their
people. In these days of democratic government the
fate of nations hangs on the people themselves; each
individual must always bear that in mind.

THE PACIFIST PROBLEM

  Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:
  I am very glad of this opportunity of saying a few
words to you about the problem of pacifism. The
course of events in the last few years has once more
shown us how little we are justified in leaving the
struggle against armaments and against the war spirit
to the governments. On the other hand, the
formation of large organizations with a large
membership can in itself bring us very little nearer
to our goal. In my opinion, the best method in this
case is the violent one--conscientious objection,
which must be aided by organizations that give
moral and material support to the courageous
conscientious objectors in each country. In this way
we may succeed in making the problem of pacifism
an acute one, a real struggle to which forceful spirits
will be attracted. It is an illegal struggle, but a
struggle for the true rights of the people against their
governments as far as they demand criminal acts of
their citizens.
  Many who think themselves good pacifists will
jibe at this out and out pacifism, on patriotic
grounds. Such people are not to be relied on in the
hour of crisis, as the World War amply proved.
  I am most grateful to you for according me an
opportunity to give you my views in person.

COMPULSORY SERVICE

  Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  Instead of permission being given to Germany to
introduce compulsory service, it ought to be taken
away from all other powers: to begin with none but
mercenary armies should be permitted, the size and
equipment of which should be discussed at Geneva.
This would also be better for France than to be
forced to permit compulsory service in Germany.
The fatal psychological effect of the military
education of the people and the violation of the
individual's rights which it involves would thus be
avoided.
  Moreover, it would be much easier for two
countries agreeing to compulsory arbitration for the
settlement of all disputes concerning their mutual
relations to combine such mercenary forces into a
single organization with mixed units. This would
mean financial relief and increased security for both
of them. Such a process of amalgamation might
extend to larger and larger combinations, and finally
lead to an international police, which would have to
decay gradually with the increase of international
security.
  Will you discuss this proposal with our friends by
way of setting the ball rolling? Of course I do not in
the least insist on this particular proposal. But I do
think it essential that we should came forward with
a positive program; a merely negative policy is
unlikely to produce any practical results.

WOMEN AND WAR

Retort to American women. The "defenseless
civilian" is Albert Einstein. Published in Mein
Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  In my opinion, the patriotic women ought to be
sent to the front in the next war instead of the men.
It would at least be a novelty in this dreary sphere
of infinite confusion. And besides, why should not
such heroic feelings on the part of the fair sex find a
more picturesque outlet than in attacks on a
defenseless civilian?

THREE LETTERS TO FRIENDS OF PEACE

  Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

I.

  It has come to my knowledge that out of the
greatness of your soul you are quietly
accomplishing a splendid work, impelled by
solicitude for humanity and its fate. Small is the
number of them that see with their own eyes and
feel with their own hearts. But it is their strength
that will decide whether the human race must
relapse into that state of stupor which a deluded
multitude appears today to regard as the ideal.
  O that the nations might see, before it is too late,
how much of their self-determination they have got
to sacrifice in order to avoid the struggle of all
against all! The power of conscience and of the
international spirit has proved itself inadequate. At
present it is being so weak as to tolerate parleying
with the worst enemies of civilization. There is a
kind of compliance which is a crime against
humanity, though it passes for political wisdom.
  We cannot despair of humanity, since we are
ourselves human beings. And it is a comfort that
there still exist individuals like yourself, whom one
knows to be alive and undismayed.

II.

  To be quite frank, a declaration like the one before
me in a country which submits to conscription in
peace-times seems to me worthless. What you must
fight for is liberation from universal military service.
Verily, the French nation has had to pay heavily for
the victory of 1918; for that victory has been largely
responsible for holding it down in the most
degrading of all forms of slavery.
  Let your efforts in this struggle be unceasing. You
have a mighty ally in the German reactionaries and
militarists. If France clings to universal military
service, it will be impossible in the long run to
prevent its introduction into Germany. For the
demand of the Germans for equal rights will succeed
in the end; and then there will be two German
military slaves to every French one, which would
certainly not be in the interests of France.
  Only if we succeed in abolishing compulsory
service altogether will it be possible to educate the
youth in the spirit of reconciliation, joy in life, and
love toward all living creatures.
  I believe that a refusal on conscientious grounds to
serve in the army when called up, if carried out by
50,000 men at the same moment, would be
irresistible. The individual can accomplish little here,
nor can one wish to see the best among us devoted
to destruction at the hands of the machinery behind
which stand three great powers: stupidity, fear, and
greed.

III.

  The point with which you deal in your letter is one
of prime importance. The armament industry is
indeed one of the greatest dangers that beset
mankind. It is the hidden evil power behind the
nationalism which is rampant everywhere. . . .
  Possibly something might be gained by
nationalization. But it is extremely hard to
determine exactly what industries should be
included. Should the aircraft industry? And how
much of the metal industry and the chemical
industry?
  As regards the munitions industry and the export
of war material, the League of Nations has busied
itself for years with efforts to get this loathsome
traffic controlled--with what little success, we all
know. Last year I asked a well-known American
diplomat why Japan was not forced by a
commercial boycott to desist from her policy of
force. "Our commercial interests are too strong" was
the answer. How can one help people who rest
satisfied with a statement like that?
  You believe that a word from me would suffice to
get something done in this sphere? What an illusion!
People flatter me as long as I do not get in their
way. But if I direct my efforts toward objects which
do not suit them, they immediately turn to abuse
and calumny in defense of their interests. And the
onlookers mostly keep out of the limelight, the
cowards! Have you ever tested the civil courage of
your countrymen? The silently accepted motto is
"Leave it alone and say nothing about it." You may
be sure that I shall do everything in my power along
the lines you indicate, but nothing can be achieved
as directly as you think.

ACTIVE PACIFISM

  Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  I consider myself lucky to have witnessed the great
peace demonstration which the Flemish people has
undertaken. To all concerned in it I feel impelled to
call out, in the name of all men of good will who care
for the future: "In this hour of reflection and
awakening of the conscience we feel deeply united
with you."
  We must not conceal from ourselves that no
improvement in the present depressing situation is
possible without a severe struggle; for the handful of
those who are really determined to do something is
minute in comparison with the mass of the
lukewarm and the misguided. And those who have
an interest in keeping the machinery of war going are
a very powerful body; they will stop at nothing to
make public opinion subservient to their murderous
ends.
  It looks as if the ruling statesmen of today were
really trying to secure permanent peace. But the
ceaseless piling-up of armaments shows only too
clearly that they are unequal to coping with the
hostile forces which are preparing for war. In my
opinion, deliverance can only come from the
peoples themselves. If they wish to avoid the
degrading slavery of war-service, they must declare
with no uncertain voice for complete disarmament.
As long as armies exist, any serious conflict will lead
to war. A pacifism which does not actively fight
against the armament of nations is and must remain
impotent.
  May the conscience and the common sense of the
peoples be awakened, so that we may reach a new
stage in the life of nations, where people will look
back on war as an incomprehensible aberration of
their forefathers!

OBSERVATIONS ON THE PRESENT
SITUATION IN EUROPE

  Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  The distinguishing feature of the present political
situation of the world, and in particular of Europe,
seems to me to be this, that political development
has failed, both materially and intellectually, to keep
pace with economic necessity, which has changed
its character in a comparatively short time. The
interests of each country must be subordinated to
the interests of the wider community. The struggle
for this new orientation of political thought and
feeling is a severe one, because it has the tradition of
centuries against it. But the survival of Europe
depends on its successful issue. It is my firm
conviction that once the psychological impediments
are overcome, the solution of the real problems will
not be such a terribly difficult matter. In order to
create the right atmosphere, the most essential thing
is personal cooperation between men of like mind.
May our united efforts succeed in building a bridge
of mutual trust between the nations!

GERMANY AND FRANCE

  Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  Mutual trust and cooperation between France and
Germany can only come about if the French demand
for security against military attack is satisfied. But
should France frame demands in accordance with
this, such a step would certainly be taken very ill in
Germany.
  A procedure like the following seems, however, to
be possible. Let the German government of its own
free will propose to the French that they should
jointly make representations to the League of
Nations that it should suggest to all member states
to bind themselves to the following:--
  (1) To submit to every decision of the international
court of arbitration.
  (2) To proceed with all its economic and military
force, in concert with the other members of the
League, against any state which breaks the peace or
resists an international decision made in the interests
of world peace.

CULTURE AND PROSPERITY

  Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  If one would estimate the damage done by the great
political catastrophe to the development of human
civilization, one must remember that culture in its
higher forms is a delicate plant which depends on a
complicated set of conditions and is wont to
flourish only in a few places at any given time. For
it to blossom there is needed, first of all, a certain
degree of prosperity which enables a fraction of the
population to work at things not directly necessary
to the maintenance of life; second, a moral tradition
of respect for cultural values and achievements, in
virtue of which this class is provided with the
means of living by the other classes, those who
provide the immediate necessities of life.
  During the past century Germany has been one of
the countries in which both conditions were
fulfilled. The prosperity was, taken as a whole,
modest but sufficient; the tradition of respect for
culture, vigorous. On this basis the German nation
has brought forth fruits of culture which form an
integral part of the development of the modern
world. The tradition, in the main, still stands,
though the prosperity is gone. The industries of the
country have been cut off almost completely from
the sources of raw materials on which the existence
of the industrial part of the population was based.
The surplus necessary to support the intellectual
worker has suddenly ceased to exist. With it the
tradition which depends on it will inevitably
collapse also, and a fruitful nursery of culture turn
to wilderness.
  The human race, in so far as it sets a value on
culture, has an interest in preventing such
impoverishment. It will give what help it can in the
immediate crisis and reawaken that higher
community of feeling, now thrust into the
background by national egotism, for which human
values have a validity independent of politics and
frontiers. It will then procure for every nation
conditions of work under which it can exist and
under which it can bring forth fruits of culture.

MINORITIES

  Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  It seems to be a universal fact that
minorities--especially when the individuals
composing them can be recognized by physical
characteristics--are treated by the majorities among
whom they live as an inferior order of beings. The
tragedy of such a fate lies not merely in the unfair
treatment to which these minorities are
automatically subjected in social and economic
matters, but also in the fact that under the
suggestive influence of the majority most of the
victims themselves succumb to the same prejudice
and regard their kind as inferior beings. This second
and greater part of the evil can be overcome by
closer association and by deliberate education of the
minority, whose spiritual liberation can thus be
accomplished.
  The resolute efforts of the American Negroes in
this direction deserve approval and assistance.

THE HEIRS OF THE AGES

  Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  Previous generations were able to look upon
intellectual and cultural progress as simply the
inherited fruits of their forebears' labors, which
made life easier and more beautiful for them. But the
calamities of our times show us that this was a fatal
illusion.
  We see now that the greatest efforts are needed if
this legacy of humanity's is to prove a blessing and
not a curse. For whereas formerly it was enough for
a man to have freed himself to some extent from
personal egotism to make him a valuable member of
society, today he must also be required to overcome
national and class egotism. Only if he reaches those
heights can he contribute toward improving the lot
of humanity.
  As regards this most important need of the age, the
inhabitants of a small state are better placed than
those of a great power, since the latter are exposed,
both in politics and economics, to the temptation to
gain their ends by brute force. The agreement
between Holland and Belgium, which is the only
bright spot in European events during the last few
years, encourages one to hope that the small nations
will play a leading part in the attempt to liberate the
world from the degrading yoke of militarism through
the renunciation of the individual country's
unlimited right of self-determination.

THE WAR IS WON, BUT THE PEACE IS NOT

From an address on the occasion of the Fifth Nobel
Anniversary Dinner at the Hotel Astor in New York,
December 10, 1945. Published in Out of My Later
Years, New York: Philosophical Library, 1950.

  Physicists find themselves in a position not unlike
that of Alfred Nobel. Alfred Nobel invented the
most powerful explosive ever known up to his time,
a means of destruction par excellence. In order to
atone for this, in order to relieve his human
conscience, he instituted his awards for the
promotion of peace and for achievements of peace.
Today, the physicists who participated in forging
the most formidable and dangerous weapon of all
times are harassed by an equal feeling of
responsibility, not to say guilt. And we cannot
desist from warning, and warning again, we cannot
and should not slacken in our efforts to make the
nations of the world, and especially their
governments, aware of the unspeakable disaster
they are certain to provoke unless they change their
attitude toward each other and toward the task of
shaping the future. We helped in creating this new
weapon in order to prevent the enemies of mankind
from achieving it ahead of us, which, given the
mentality of the Nazis, would have meant
inconceivable destruction and the enslavement of the
rest of the world. We delivered this weapon into the
hands of the American and the British people as
trustees of the whole of mankind, as fighters for
peace and liberty. But so far we fail to see any
guarantee of peace, we do not see any guarantee of
the freedoms that were promised to the nations in
the Atlantic Charter. The war is won, but the peace
is not. The great powers, united in fighting, are now
divided over the peace settlements. The world was
promised freedom from fear, but in fact fear has
increased tremendously since the termination of the
war. The world was promised freedom from want,
but large parts of the world are faced with starvation
while others are living in abundance. The nations
were promised liberation and justice. But we have
witnessed, and are witnessing even now, the sad
spectacle of "liberating" armies firing into
populations who want their independence and social
equality, and supporting in those countries, by force
of arms, such parties and personalities as appear to
be most suited to serve vested interests. Territorial
questions and arguments of power, obsolete though
they are, still prevail over the essential demands of
common welfare and justice. Allow me to be more
specific about just one case, which is but a
symptom of the general situation: the case of my
own people, the Jewish people.
  So long as Nazi violence was unleashed only, or
mainly, against the Jews, the rest of the world
looked on passively, and even treaties and
agreements were made with the patently criminal
government of the Third Reich. Later, when Hitler
was on the point of taking over Rumania and
Hungary, at the time when Maidanek and Oswiecim
were in Allied hands, and the methods of the gas
chambers were well known all over the world, all
attempts to rescue the Rumanian and Hungarian
Jews came to naught because the doors of Palestine
were closed to Jewish immigrants by the British
government, and no country could be found that
would admit those forsaken people. They were left
to perish like their brothers and sisters in the
occupied countries.
  We shall never forget the heroic efforts of the small
countries, of the Scandinavian, the Dutch, the Swiss
nations, and of individuals in the occupied parts of
Europe who did all in their power to protect Jewish
lives. We do not forget the humane attitude of the
Soviet Union who was the only one among the big
powers to open her doors to hundreds of thousands
of Jews when the Nazi armies were advancing in
Poland. But after all that has happened, and was not
prevented from happening, how is it today? While
in Europe territories are being distributed without
any qualms about the wishes of the people
concerned, the remainders of European Jewry,
one-fifth of its prewar population, are again denied
access to their haven in Palestine and left to hunger
and cold and persisting hostility. There is no
country, even today, that would be willing or able to
offer them a place where they could live in peace
and security. And the fact that many of them are
still kept in the degrading conditions of
concentration camps by the Allies gives sufficient
evidence of the shamefulness and hopelessness of
the situation. These people are forbidden to enter
Palestine with reference to the principle of
democracy, but actually the Western powers, in
upholding the ban of the White Paper, are yielding
to the threats and the external pressure of five vast
and underpopulated Arab States. It is sheer irony
when the British Foreign Minister tells the poor lot
of European Jews they should remain in Europe
because their genius is needed there, and, on the
other hand, advises them not to try to get at the
head of the queue lest they might incur new hatred
and persecution. Well, I am afraid they cannot help
it; with their six million dead they have been pushed
at the head of the queue, of the queue of Nazi
victims, much against their will.
  The picture of our postwar world is not bright. So
far as we, the physicists, are concerned, we are no
politicians and it has never been our wish to meddle
in politics. But we know a few things that the
politicians do not know. And we feel the duty to
speak up and to remind those responsible that there
is no escape into easy comforts, there is no distance
ahead for proceeding little by little and delaying the
necessary changes into an indefinite future, there is
no time left for petty bargaining. The situation calls
for a courageous effort, for a radical change in our
whole attitude, in the entire political concept. May
the spirit that prompted Alfred Nobel to create his
great institution, the spirit of trust and confidence,
of generosity and brotherhood among men, prevail
in the minds of those upon whose decisions our
destiny rests. Otherwise, human civilization will be
doomed.

ATOMIC WAR OR PEACE

From Atlantic Monthly, Boston, November, 1945,
and November, 1947. As told to Raymond Swing.

I.

  The release of atomic energy has not created a new
problem. It has merely made more urgent the
necessity of solving an existing one. One could say
that it has affected us quantitatively, not
qualitatively. So long as there are sovereign nations
possessing great power, war is inevitable. That is
not an attempt to say when it will come, but only
that it is sure to come. That was true before the
atomic bomb was made. What has been changed is
the destructiveness of war.
  I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out
in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps
two-thirds of the people of the earth might be killed.
But enough men capable of thinking, and enough
books, would be left to start again, and civilization
could be restored.
  I do not believe that the secret of the bomb should
be given to the United Nations Organization. I do
not believe it should be given to the Soviet Union.
Either course would be like a man with capital, and
wishing another man to work with him on some
enterprise, starting out by simply giving that man
half of his money. The other man might choose to
start a rival enterprise, when what is wanted is his
cooperation. The secret of the bomb should be
committed to a world government, and the United
States should immediately announce its readiness to
give it to a world government. This government
should be founded by the United States, the Soviet
Union, and Great Britain, the only three powers
with great military strength. All three of them
should commit to this world government all of their
military strength. The fact that there are only three
nations with great military power should make it
easier, rather than harder, to establish such a
government.
  Since the United States and Great Britain have the
secret of the atomic bomb and the Soviet Union
does not, they should invite the Soviet Union to
prepare and present the first draft of a constitution
of the proposed world government. That will help
dispel the distrust of the Russians, which they
already feel because the bomb is being kept a secret
chiefly to prevent their having it. Obviously the
first draft would not be the final one, but the
Russians should be made to feel that the world
government will assure them their security.
  It would be wise if this constitution were to be
negotiated by a single American, a single Briton, and
a single Russian. They would have to have advisers,
but these advisers should only advise when asked. I
believe three men can succeed in writing a workable
constitution acceptable to them all. Six or seven
men, or more, probably would fail. After the three
great powers have drafted a constitution and
adopted it, the smaller nations should be invited to
join the world government. They should be free to
stay out, and though they should feel perfectly
secure in staying out, I am sure they would wish to
join. Naturally they should be entitled to propose
changes in the constitution as drafted by the Big
Three. But the Big Three should go ahead and
organize the world government, whether the smaller
nations join or not.
  The power of this world government would be
over all military matters, and there need be only one
further power. That is to interfere in countries
where a minority is oppressing a majority, and so is
creating the kind of instability that leads to war.
Conditions such as exist in Argentina and Spain
should be dealt with. There must be an end to the
concept of non-intervention, for to end it is part of
keeping the peace.
  The establishment of this world government must
not have to wait until the same conditions of
freedom are to be found in all three of the great
powers. While it is true that in the Soviet Union the
minority rules, I do not consider that internal
conditions there are of themselves a threat to world
peace. One must bear in mind that the people in
Russia did not have a long political education, and
changes to improve Russian conditions had to be
carried through by a minority for the reason that
there was no majority capable of doing it. If I had
been born a Russian, I believe I could have adjusted
myself to this situation.
  It should not be necessary, in establishing a world
government with a monopoly of military authority,
to change the structure of the three great powers. It
would be for the three individuals who draft the
constitution to devise ways for their different
structures to be fitted together for collaboration.
  Do I fear the tyranny of a world government? Of
course I do. But I fear still more the coming of
another war or wars. Any government is certain to
be evil to some extent. But a world government is
preferable to the far greater evil of wars, particularly
with their intensified destructiveness. If such a
world government is not established by a process of
agreement, I believe it will come anyway, and in a
much more dangerous form. For war or wars will
end in one power being supreme and dominating the
rest of the world by its overwhelming military
strength.
  Now we have the atomic secret, we must not lose
it, and that is what we should risk doing, if we give
it to the United Nations Organization or to the
Soviet Union. But we must make it clear as quickly
as possible that we are not keeping the bomb a
secret for the sake of our power, but in the hope of
establishing peace through a world government, and
we will do our utmost to bring this world
government into being.
  I appreciate that there are persons who favor a
gradual approach to world government, even though
they approve of it as the ultimate objective. The
trouble with taking little steps, one at a time, in the
hope of reaching the ultimate goal, is that while they
are being taken, we continue to keep the bomb
without making our reason convincing to those who
do not have it. That of itself creates fear and
suspicion, with the consequence that the relations of
rival sovereignties deteriorate dangerously. So while
persons who take only a step at a time may think
they are approaching world peace, they actually are
contributing by their slow pace to the coming of
war. We have no time to spend in this way. If war is
to be averted, it must be done quickly.
  We shall not have the secret very long. I know it is
argued that no other country has money enough to
spend on the development of the atomic bomb,
which assures us the secret for a long time. It is a
mistake often made in this country to measure
things by the amount of money they cost. But other
countries which have the materials and the men and
care to apply them to the work of developing
atomic power can do so, for men and materials and
the decision to use them, and not money, are all that
are needed.
  I do not consider myself the father of the release of
atomic energy. My part in it was quite indirect. I
did not, in fact, foresee that it would be released in
my time. I believed only that it was theoretically
possible. It became practical through the accidental
discovery of chain reaction, and this was not
something I could have predicted. It was discovered
by Hahn in Berlin, and he himself misinterpreted
what he discovered. It was Lise Meitner who
provided the correct interpretation, and escaped
from Germany to place the information in the hands
of Niels Bohr.
  I do not believe that a great era of atomic science is
to be assured by organizing science, in the way large
corporations are organized. One can organize to
apply a discovery already made, but not to make
one. Only a free individual can make a discovery.
There can be a kind of organizing by which
scientists are assured their freedom and proper
conditions of work. Professors of science in
American universities, for instance, should be
relieved of some of their teaching so as to have time
for more research. Can you imagine an organization
of scientists making the discoveries of Charles
Darwin?
  Nor do I believe that the vast private corporations
of the United States are suitable to the needs of
these times. If a visitor should come to this country
from another planet, would he not find it strange
that in this country so much power is permitted to
private corporations without their having
commensurate responsibility? I say this to stress
that the American government must keep the
control of atomic energy, not because socialism is
necessarily desirable, but because atomic energy was
developed by the government, and it would be
unthinkable to turn over this property of the people
to any individuals or groups of individuals. As to
socialism, unless it is international to the extent of
producing world government which controls all
military power, it might more easily lead to wars
than capitalism, because it represents a still greater
concentration of power.
  To give any estimate when atomic energy can be
applied to constructive purposes is impossible.
What now is known is only how to use a fairly large
quantity of uranium. The use of small quantities,
sufficient, say, to operate a car or an airplane, so far
is impossible, and one cannot predict when it will be
achieved. No doubt, it will be achieved, but nobody
can say when. Nor can one predict when materials
more common than uranium can be used to supply
atomic energy. Presumably all materials used for
this purpose will be among the heavier elements of
high atomic weight. Those elements are relatively
scarce due to their lesser stability. Most of these
materials may have already disappeared by
radioactive disintegration. So though the release of
atomic energy can be, and no doubt will be, a great
boon to mankind, that may not be for some time.
  I myself do not have the gift of explanation with
which I am able to persuade large numbers of people
of the urgency of the problems the human race now
faces. Hence I should like to commend someone
who has this gift of explanation, Emory Reves,
whose book, The Anatomy of the Peace, is
intelligent, clear, brief, and, if I may use the abused
term, dynamic on the topic of war and need for
world government.
  Since I do not foresee that atomic energy is to be a
great boon for a long time, I have to say that for the
present it is a menace. Perhaps it is well that it
should be. It may intimidate the human race to bring
order into its international affairs, which, without
the pressure of fear, it undoubtedly would not do.

II.

  Since the completion of the first atomic bomb
nothing has been accomplished to make the world
more safe from war, while much has been done to
increase the destructiveness of war. I am not able to
speak from any firsthand knowledge about the
development of the atomic bomb, since I do not
work in this field. But enough has been said by
those who do to indicate that the bomb has been
made more effective. Certainly the possibility can
be envisaged of building a bomb of far greater size,
capable of producing destruction over a larger area.
It also is credible that an extensive use could be
made of radioactivated gases which would spread
over a wide region, causing heavy loss of life
without damage to buildings.
  I do not believe it is necessary to go on beyond
these possibilities to contemplate a vast extension
of bacteriological warfare. I am skeptical that this
form presents dangers comparable with those of
atomic warfare. Nor do I take into account a danger
of starting a chain reaction of a scope great enough
to destroy part or all of this planet. I dismiss this on
the ground that if it could happen from a man-made
atomic explosion it would already have happened
from the action of the cosmic rays which are
continually reaching the earth's surface.
  But it is not necessary to imagine the earth being
destroyed like a nova by a stellar explosion to
understand vividly the growing scope of atomic war
and to recognize that unless another war is
prevented it is likely to bring destruction on a scale
never before held possible and even now hardly
conceived, and that little civilization would survive
it.
  In the first two years of the atomic era another
phenomenon is to be noted. The public, having been
warned of the horrible nature of atomic warfare, has
done nothing about it, and to a large extent has
dismissed the warning from its consciousness. A
danger that cannot be averted had perhaps better be
forgotten; or a danger against which every possible
precaution has been taken also had probably better
be forgotten. That is, if the United States had
dispersed its industries and decentralized its cities,
it might be reasonable for people to forget the peril
they face.
  I should say parenthetically that it is well that this
country has not taken these precautions, for to have
done so would make atomic war still more probable,
since it would convince the rest of the world that we
are resigned to it and are preparing for it. But
nothing has been done to avert war, while much has
been done to make atomic war more horrible; so
there is no excuse for ignoring the danger.
  I say that nothing has been done to avert war since
the completion of the atomic bomb, despite the
proposal for supranational control of atomic energy
put forward by the United States in the United
Nations. This country has made only a conditional
proposal, and on conditions which the Soviet Union
is now determined not to accept. This makes it
possible to blame the failure on the Russians.
  But in blaming the Russians the Americans should
not ignore the fact that they themselves have not
voluntarily renounced the use of the bomb as an
ordinary weapon in the time before the achievement
of supranational control, or if supranational control
is not achieved. Thus they have fed the fear of other
countries that they consider the bomb a legitimate
part of their arsenal so long as other countries
decline to accept their terms for supranational
control.
  Americans may be convinced of their
determination not to launch an aggressive or
preventive war. So they may believe it is
superfluous to announce publicly that they will not
a second time be the first to use the atomic bomb.
But this country has been solemnly invited to
renounce the use of the bomb--that is, to outlaw
it--and has declined to do so unless its terms for
supranational control are accepted.
  I believe this policy is a mistake. I see a certain
military gain from not renouncing the use of the
bomb in that this may be deemed to restrain another
country from starting a war in which the United
States might use it. But what is gained in one way is
lost in another. For an understanding over the
supranational control of atomic energy has been
made more remote. That may be no military
drawback so long as the United States has the
exclusive use of the bomb. But the moment another
country is able to make it in substantial quantities,
the United States loses greatly through the absence
of an international agreement, because of the
vulnerability of its concentrated industries and its
highly developed urban life.
  In refusing to outlaw the bomb while having the
monopoly of it, this country suffers in another
respect, in that it fails to return publicly to the
ethical standards of warfare formally accepted
previous to the last war. It should not be forgotten
that the atomic bomb was made in this country as a
preventive measure; it was to head off its use by the
Germans, if they discovered it. The bombing of
civilian centers was initiated by the Germans and
adopted by the Japanese. To it the Allies responded
in kind--as it turned out, with greater
effectiveness--and they were morally justified in
doing so. But now, without any provocation, and
without the justification of reprisal or retaliation, a
refusal to outlaw the use of the bomb save in
reprisal is making a political purpose of its
possession. This is hardly pardonable.
  I am not saying that the United States should not
manufacture and stockpile the bomb, for I believe
that it must do so; it must be able to deter another
nation from making an atomic attack when it also
has the bomb. But deterrence should be the only
purpose of the stockpile of bombs. In the same way
I believe that the United Nations should have the
atomic bomb when it is supplied with its own
armed forces and weapons. But it, too, should have
the bomb for the sole purpose of deterring an
aggressor or rebellious nations from making an
atomic attack. It should not use the atomic bomb on
its own initiative any more than the United States or
any other power should do so. To keep a stockpile
of atomic bombs without promising not to initiate
its use is exploiting the possession of the bombs for
political ends. It may be that the United States
hopes in this way to frighten the Soviet Union into
accepting supranational control of atomic energy.
But the creation of fear only heightens antagonism
and increases the danger of war. I am of the opinion
that this policy has detracted from the very real
virtue in the offer of supranational control of atomic
energy.
  We have emerged from a war in which we had to
accept the degradingly low ethical standards of the
enemy. But instead of feeling liberated from his
standards, and set free to restore the sanctity of
human life and the safety of noncombatants, we are
in effect making the low standards of the enemy in
the last war our own for the present. Thus we are
starting toward another war degraded by our own
choice.
  It may be that the public is not fully aware that in
another war atomic bombs will be available in large
quantities. It may measure the dangers in the terms
of the three bombs exploded before the end of the
last war. The public also may not appreciate that, in
relation to the damage inflicted, atomic bombs
already have become the most economical form of
destruction that can be used on the offensive. In
another war the bombs will be plentiful and they
will be comparatively cheap. Unless there is
determination not to use them that is far stronger
than can be noted today among American political
and military leaders, and on the part of the public
itself, atomic warfare will be hard to avoid. Unless
Americans come to recognize that they are not
stronger in the world because they have the bomb,
but weaker because of their vulnerability to atomic
attack, they are not likely to conduct their policy at
Lake Success or in their relations with Russia in a
spirit that furthers the arrival at an understanding.
  But I do not suggest that the American failure to
outlaw the use of the bomb except in retaliation is
the only cause of the absence of an agreement with
the Soviet Union over atomic control. The Russians
have made it clear that they will do everything in
their power to prevent a supranational regime from
coming into existence. They not only reject it in the
range of atomic energy: they reject it sharply on
principle, and thus have spurned in advance any
overture to join a limited world government.
  Mr. Gromyko has rightly said that the essence of
the American atomic proposal is that national
sovereignty is not compatible with the atomic era.
He declares that the Soviet Union cannot accept this
thesis. The reasons he gives are obscure, for they
quite obviously are pretexts. But what seems to be
true is that the Soviet leaders believe they cannot
preserve the social structure of the Soviet state in a
supranational regime. The Soviet government is
determined to maintain its present social structure,
and the leaders of Russia, who hold their great
power through the nature of that structure, will
spare no effort to prevent a supranational regime
from coming into existence, to control atomic energy
or anything else.
  The Russians may be partly right about the
difficulty of retaining their present social structure
in a supranational regime, though in time they may
be brought to see that this is a far lesser loss than
remaining isolated from a world of law. But at
present they appear to be guided by their fears, and
one must admit that the United States has made
ample contributions to these fears, not only as to
atomic energy but in many other respects. Indeed
this country has conducted its Russian policy as
though it were convinced that fear is the greatest of
all diplomatic instruments.
  That the Russians are striving to prevent the
formation of a supranational security system is no
reason why the rest of the world should not work to
create one. It has been pointed out that the Russians
have a way of resisting with all their arts what they
do not wish to have happen; but once it happens,
they can be flexible and accommodate themselves to
it. So it would be well for the United States and
other powers not to permit the Russians to veto an
attempt to create supranational security. They can
proceed with some hope that once the Russians see
they cannot prevent such a regime they may join it.
  So far the United States has shown no interest in
preserving the security of the Soviet Union. It has
been interested in its own security, which is
characteristic of the competition which marks the
conflict for power between sovereign states. But
one cannot know in advance what would be the
effect on Russian fears if the American people
forced their leaders to pursue a policy of
substituting law for the present anarchy of
international relations. In a world of law, Russian
security would be equal to our own, and for the
American people to espouse this wholeheartedly,
something that should be possible under the
workings of democracy, might work a kind of
miracle in Russian thinking.
  At present the Russians have no evidence to
convince them that the American people are not
contentedly supporting a policy of military
preparedness which they regard as a policy of
deliberate intimidation. If they had evidences of a
passionate desire by Americans to preserve peace in
the one way it can be maintained, by a supranational
regime of law, this would upset Russian calculations
about the peril to Russian security in current trends
of American thought. Not until a genuine,
convincing offer is made to the Soviet Union, backed
by an aroused American public, will one be entitled
to say what the Russian response would be.
  It may be that the first response would be to reject
the world of law. But if from that moment it began
to be clear to the Russians that such a world was
coming into existence without them, and that their
own security was being increased, their ideas
necessarily would change.
  I am in favor of inviting the Russians to join a
world government authorized to provide security,
and if they are unwilling to join, to proceed to
establish supranational security without them. Let
me admit quickly that I see great peril in such a
course. If it is adopted it must be done in a way to
make it utterly clear that the new regime is not a
combination of power against Russia. It must be a
combination that by its composite nature will
greatly reduce the chances of war. It will be more
diverse in its interests than any single state, thus
less likely to resort to aggressive or preventive war.
It will be larger, hence stronger than any single
nation. It will be geographically much more
extensive, and thus more difficult to defeat by
military means. It will be dedicated to supranational
security, and thus escape the emphasis on national
supremacy which is so strong a factor in war.
  If a supranational regime is set up without Russia,
its service to peace will depend on the skill and
sincerity with which it is done. Emphasis should
always be apparent on the desire to have Russia
take part. It must be clear to Russia, and no less so
to the nations comprising the organization, that no
penalty is incurred or implied because a nation
declines to join. If the Russians do not join at the
outset, they must be sure of a welcome when they
do decide to join. Those who create the organization
must understand that they are building with the final
objective of obtaining Russian adherence.
  These are abstractions, and it is not easy to outline
the specific lines a partial world government must
follow to induce the Russians to join. But two
conditions are clear to me: the new organization
must have no military secrets; and the Russians
must be free to have observers at every session of
the organization, where its new laws are drafted,
discussed, and adopted, and where its policies are
decided. That would destroy the great factory of
secrecy where so many of the world's suspicions are
manufactured.
  It may affront the military-minded person to
suggest a regime that does not maintain any military
secrets. He has been taught to believe that secrets
thus divulged would enable a war-minded nation to
seek to conquer the earth. (As to the so-called secret
of the atomic bomb, I am assuming the Russians will
have this through their own efforts within a short
time.) I grant there is a risk in not maintaining
military secrets. If a sufficient number of nations
have pooled their strength they can take this risk,
for their security will be greatly increased. And it
can be done with greater assurance because of the
decrease of fear, suspicion, and distrust that will
result. The tensions of the increasing likelihood of
war in a world based on sovereignty would be
replaced by the relaxation of the growing confidence
in peace. In time this might so allure the Russian
people that their leaders would mellow in their
attitude toward the West.
  Membership in a supranational security system
should not, in my opinion, be based on any
arbitrary democratic standards. The one requirement
from all should be that the representatives to a
supranational organization--assembly and
council--must be elected by the people in each
member country through a secret ballot. These
representatives must represent the people rather
than any government--which would enhance the
pacific nature of the organization.
  To require that other democratic criteria be met is,
I believe, inadvisable. Democratic institutions and
standards are the result of historic developments to
an extent not always appreciated in the lands which
enjoy them. Setting arbitrary standards sharpens the
ideological differences between the Western and
Soviet systems.
  But it is not the ideological differences which now
are pushing the world in the direction of war.
Indeed, if all the Western nations were to adopt
socialism, while maintaining their national
sovereignty, it is quite likely that the conflict for
power between East and West would continue. The
passion expressed over the economic systems of the
present seems to me quite irrational. Whether the
economic life of America should be dominated by
relatively few individuals, as it is, or these
individuals should be controlled by the state, may
be important, but it is not important enough to
justify all the feelings that are stirred up over it.
  I should wish to see all the nations forming the
supranational state pool all their military forces,
keeping for themselves only local police. Then I
should like to see these forces commingled and
distributed as were the regiments of the former
Austro-Hungarian Empire. There it was appreciated
that the men and officers of one region would serve
the purposes of empire better by not being
stationed exclusively in their own provinces, subject
to local and racial pulls.
  I should like to see the authority of the
supranational regime restricted altogether to the field
of security. Whether this would be possible I am
not sure. Experience may point to the desirability of
adding some authority over economic matters, since
under modern conditions these are capable of
causing national upsets that have in them the seeds
of violent conflict. But I should prefer to see the
function of the organization altogether limited to the
tasks of security. I also should like to see this
regime established through the strengthening of the
United Nations, so as not to sacrifice continuity in
the search for peace.
  I do not hide from myself the great difficulties of
establishing a world government, either a beginning
without Russia or one with Russia. I am aware of
the risks. Since I should not wish it to be
permissible for any country that has joined the
supra-national organization to secede, one of these
risks is a possible civil war. But I also believe that
world government is certain to come in time, and
that the question is how much it is to be permitted
to cost. It will come, I believe, even if there is
another world war, though after such a war, if it is
won, it would be world government established by
the victor, resting on the victor's military power,
and thus to be maintained permanently only through
the permanent militarization of the human race.
  But I also believe it can come through agreement
and through the force of persuasion alone, hence at
low cost. But if it is to come in this way, it will not
be enough to appeal to reason. One strength of the
communist system of the East is that it has some of
the character of a religion and inspires the emotions
of a religion. Unless the cause of peace based on law
gathers behind it the force and zeal of a religion, it
hardly can hope to succeed. Those to whom the
moral teaching of the human race is entrusted surely
have a great duty and a great opportunity. The
atomic scientists, I think, have become convinced
that they cannot arouse the American people to the
truths of the atomic era by logic alone. There must
be added that deep power of emotion which is a
basic ingredient of religion. It is to be hoped that not
only the churches but the schools, the colleges, and
the leading organs of opinion will acquit themselves
well of their unique responsibility in this regard.

THE MILITARY MENTALITY

From The American Scholar, New York, Summer,
1947.

  It seems to me that the decisive point in the
situation lies in the fact that the problem before us
cannot be viewed as an isolated one. First of all, one
may pose the following question: from now on
institutions for learning and research will more and
more have to be supported by grants from the state,
since, for various reasons, private sources will not
suffice. Is it at all reasonable that the distribution of
the funds raised for these purposes from the
taxpayer should be entrusted to the military? To
this question every prudent person will certainly
answer: "No!" For it is evident that the difficult task
of the most beneficent distribution should be placed
in the hands of people whose training and life's
work give proof that they know something about
science and scholarship.
  If reasonable people, nevertheless, favor military
agencies for the distribution of a major part of the
available funds, the reason for this lies in the fact
that they subordinate cultural concerns to their
general political outlook. We must then focus our
attention on these practical political viewpoints,
their origins and their implications. In doing so we
shall soon recognize that the problem here under
discussion is but one of many, and can only be fully
estimated and properly adjudged when placed in a
broader framework.
  The tendencies we have mentioned are something
new for America. They arose when, under the
influence of the two World Wars and the consequent
concentration of all forces on a military goal, a
predominantly military mentality developed, which
with the almost sudden victory became even more
accentuated. The characteristic feature of this
mentality is that people place the importance of
what Bertrand Russell so tellingly terms "naked
power" far above all other factors which affect the
relations between peoples. The Germans, misled by
Bismarck's successes in particular, underwent just
such a transformation of their mentality--in
consequence of which they were entirely ruined in
less than a hundred years.
  I must frankly confess that the foreign policy of
the United States since the termination of hostilities
has reminded me, sometimes irresistibly, of the
attitude of Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II, and I
know that, independent of me, this analogy has
most painfully occurred to others as well. It is
characteristic of the military mentality that
non-human factors (atom bombs, strategic bases,
weapons of all sorts, the possession of raw
materials, etc.) are held essential, while the human
being, his desires and thoughts--in short, the
psychological factors--are considered as
unimportant and secondary. Herein lies a certain
resemblance to Marxism, at least in so far as its
theoretical side alone is kept in view. The individual
is degraded to a mere instrument; he becomes
"human matΘriel." The normal ends of human
aspiration vanish with such a viewpoint. Instead,
the military mentality raises "naked power" as a
goal in itself--one of the strangest illusions to which
men can succumb.
  In our time the military mentality is still more
dangerous than formerly because the offensive
weapons have become much more powerful than the
defensive ones. Therefore it leads, by necessity, to
preventive war. The general insecurity that goes
hand in hand with this results in the sacrifice of the
citizen's civil rights to the supposed welfare of the
state. Political witch-hunting, controls of all sorts
(e.g., control of teaching and research, of the press,
and so forth) appear inevitable, and for this reason
do not encounter that popular resistance, which,
were it not for the military mentality, would
provide a protection. A reappraisal of all values
gradually takes place in so far as everything that
does not clearly serve the utopian ends is regarded
and treated as inferior.
  I see no other way out of prevailing conditions
than a farseeing, honest, and courageous policy with
the aim of establishing security on supranational
foundations. Let us hope that men will be found,
sufficient in number and moral force, to guide the
nation on this path so long as a leading r⌠le is
imposed on her by external circumstances. Then
problems such as have been discussed here will
cease to exist.

EXCHANGE OF LETTERS WITH MEMBERS
OF THE RUSSIAN ACADEMY

From Moscow New Times, November 26, 1947,
and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Chicago,
February, 1948.

AN OPEN LETTER: DR. EINSTEIN'S MISTAKEN
NOTIONS

  The celebrated physicist, Albert Einstein, is famed
not only for his scientific discoveries; of late years
he has paid much attention to social and political
problems. He speaks over the radio and writes in
the press. He is associated with a number of public
organizations. Time and again he raised his voice in
protest against the Nazi barbarians. He is an
advocate of enduring peace, and has spoken against
the threat of a new war, and against the ambition of
the militarists to bring American science completely
under their control.
  Soviet scientists, and the Soviet people in general,
are appreciative of the humanitarian spirit which
prompts these activities of the scientist, although
his position has not always been as consistent and
clear-cut as might be desired. However, in some of
Einstein's more recent utterances there have been
aspects which seem to us not only mistaken, but
positively prejudicial to the cause of peace which
Einstein so warmly espouses.
  We feel it our duty to draw attention to this, in
order to clarify so important a question as to how
most effectively to work for peace. It is from this
point of view that the idea of a "world government"
which Dr. Einstein has of late been sponsoring must
be considered.
  In the motley company of proponents of this idea,
besides out-and-out imperialists who are using it as
a screen for unlimited expansion, there are quite a
number of intellectuals in the capitalist countries
who are captivated by the plausibility of the idea,
and who do not realize its actual implications. These
pacifist and liberal-minded individuals believe that a
"world government" would be an effective panacea
against the world's evils and a guardian of enduring
peace.
  The advocates of a "world government" make wide
use of the seemingly radical argument that in this
atomic age state sovereignty is a relic of the past,
that it is, as Spaak, the Belgian delegate, said in the
UN General Assembly, an "old-fashioned" and even
"reactionary" idea. It would be hard to imagine an
allegation that is further from the truth.
  In the first place, the idea of a "world government"
and "superstate" are by no means products of the
atomic age. They are much older than that. They
were mooted, for instance, at the time the League of
Nations was formed.
  Further, these ideas have never been progressive in
these modern times. They are a reflection of the fact
that the capitalist monopolies, which dominate the
major industrial countries, find their own national
boundaries too narrow. They need a world-wide
market, world-wide sources of raw materials, and
world-wide spheres of capital investment. Thanks
to their domination in political and administrative
affairs, the monopoly interests of the big powers are
in a position to utilize the machinery of government,
in their struggle for spheres of influence and their
efforts economically and politically to subjugate
other countries, to play the master in these
countries as freely as in their own.
  We know this very well from the past experience
of our own country. Under tsarism, Russia, with her
reactionary regime, which was servilely
accommodating to the interests of capital, with her
low-paid labor and vast natural resources, was an
alluring morsel to foreign capitalists. French, British,
Belgian, and German firms battened on our country
like birds of prey, earning profits which would have
been inconceivable in their own countries. They
chained tsarist Russia to the capitalist West with
extortionate loans. Supported by funds obtained
from foreign banks, the tsarist government brutally
repressed the revolutionary movement, retarded the
development of Russian science and culture, and
instigated Jewish pogroms.
  The Great October Socialist Revolution smashed
the chains of economic and political dependence that
bound our country to the world capitalist
monopolies. The Soviet Government made our
country for the first time a really free and
independent state, promoted the progress of our
Socialist economy, technology, science, and culture
at a speed hitherto unwitnessed in history, and
turned our country into a reliable bulwark of
international peace and security. Our people upheld
their country's independence in the civil war, in the
struggle against the intervention of a bloc of
imperialist states, and in the great battles of the war
against the Nazi invaders.
  And now the proponents of a "world superstate"
are asking us voluntarily to surrender this
independence for the sake of a "world government,"
which is nothing but a flamboyant signboard for the
world supremacy of the capitalist monopolies.
  It is obviously preposterous to ask of us anything
like that. And it is not only with regard to the Soviet
Union that such a demand is absurd. After World
War II, a number of countries succeeded in breaking
away from the imperialist system of oppression and
slavery. The peoples of these countries are working
to consolidate their economic and political
independence, debarring alien interference in their
domestic affairs. Further, the rapid spread of the
movement for national independence in the colonies
and dependencies has awakened the national
consciousness of hundreds of millions of people,
who do not desire to remain in the status of slaves
any longer.
  The monopolies of the imperialist countries,
having lost a number of profitable spheres of
exploitation, and running the risk of losing more, are
doing their utmost to deprive the nations that have
escaped from their mastery of the state
independence which they, the monopolies, find so
irksome, and to prevent the genuine liberation of the
colonies. With this purpose, the imperialists are
resorting to the most diverse methods of military,
political, economic, and ideological warfare.
  It is in accordance with this social behest that the
ideologians of imperialism are endeavoring to
discredit the very idea of national sovereignty. One
of the methods they resort to is the advocacy of
pretentious plans for a "world state," which will
allegedly do away with imperialism, wars, and
national enmity, ensure the triumph of universal
law, and so on.
  The predatory appetites of the imperialist forces
that are striving for world supremacy are thus
disguised under the garb of a pseudo-progressive
idea which appeals to certain
intellectuals--scientists, writers, and others--in the
capitalist countries.
  In an open letter which he addressed last
September to the United Nations delegations, Dr.
Einstein suggested a new scheme for limiting
national sovereignty. He recommends that the
General Assembly be reconstructed and converted
into a permanently functioning world parliament
endowed with greater authority than the Security
Council, which, Einstein declares (repeating what
the henchmen of American diplomacy are asserting
day in and day out), is paralyzed by the veto right.
The General Assembly, reconstructed in accordance
with Dr. Einstein's plan, is to have final powers of
decision, and the principle of the unanimity of the
Great Powers is to be abandoned.
  Einstein suggests that the delegates to the United
Nations should be chosen by popular election and
not appointed by their governments, as at present.
At a first glance, this proposal may seem
progressive and even radical. Actually, it will in no
way improve the existing situation.
  Let us picture to ourselves what elections to such a
"world parliament" would mean in practice.
  A large part of humanity still lives in colonial and
dependent countries dominated by the governors,
the troops, and the financial and industrial
monopolies of a few imperialist powers. "Popular
election" in such countries would in practice mean
the appointment of delegates by the colonial
administration or the military authorities. One does
not have to go far for examples; one need only recall
the parody of a referendum in Greece, which was
carried out by her royalist-fascist rulers under the
protection of British bayonets.
  But things would be not much better in the
countries where universal suffrage formally exists.
In the bourgeois-democratic countries, where capital
dominates, the latter resorts to thousands of tricks
and devices to turn universal suffrage and freedom
of ballot into a farce. Einstein surely knows that in
the last Congressional elections in the United States
only 39 per cent of the electorate went to the polls;
he surely knows that millions of Negroes in the
Southern states are virtually deprived of the
franchise, or are forced, not infrequently under
threat of lynching, to vote for their bitterest
enemies, such as the late arch-reactionary and
Negrophobe, Senator Bilbo.
  Poll taxes, special tests, and other devices are
employed to rob millions of immigrants, migrant
workers, and poor farmers of the vote. We will not
mention the widespread practice of purchasing
votes, the r⌠le of the reactionary press, that
powerful instrument for influencing the masses
wielded by millionaire newspaper proprietors, and
so forth.
  All this shows what popular elections to a world
parliament, as suggested by Einstein, would amount
to under existing conditions in the capitalist world.
Its composition would be no better than the present
composition of the General Assembly. It would be a
distorted reflection of the real sentiments of the
masses, of their desire and hope for lasting peace.
  As we know, in the General Assembly and the UN
committees, the American delegation has a regular
voting machine at its disposal, thanks to the fact
that the overwhelming majority of the members of
the UN are dependent on the United States and are
compelled to adapt their foreign policy to the
requirements of Washington. A number of
Latin-American countries, for instance, countries
with single-crop agricultural systems, are bound
hand and foot to the American monopolies, which
determine the prices of their produce. Such being the
case, it is not surprising that, under pressure of the
American delegation, a mechanical majority has
arisen in the General Assembly which votes in
obedience to the orders of its virtual masters.
  There are cases when American diplomacy finds it
preferable to realize certain measures, not through
the State Department, but under the flag of the
United Nations. Witness the notorious Balkan
committee or the commission appointed to observe
the elections in Korea. It is with the object of
converting the UN into a branch of the State
Department that the American delegation is forcing
through the project for a "Little Assembly," which
would in practice replace the Security Council, with
its principle of unanimity of the Great Powers that
is proving such an obstacle to the realization of
imperialist schemes.
  Einstein's suggestion would lead to the same result,
and thus, far from promoting lasting peace and
international cooperation, would only serve as a
screen for an offensive against nations which have
established regimes that prevent foreign capital from
extorting its customary profits. It would further the
unbridled expansion of American imperialism, and
ideologically disarm the nations which insist upon
maintaining their independence.
  By the irony of fate, Einstein has virtually become
a supporter of the schemes and ambitions of the
bitterest foes of peace and international cooperation.
He has gone so far in this direction as to declare in
advance in his open letter that if the Soviet Union
refuses to join his newfangled organization, other
countries would have every right to go ahead
without it, while leaving the door open for eventual
Soviet participation in the organization as a member
or as an "observer."
  Essentially this proposal differs very little from
the suggestions of frank advocates of American
imperialism, however remote Dr. Einstein may be
from them in reality. The sum and substance of
these suggestions is that if UN cannot be converted
into a weapon of United States policy, into a screen
for imperialist schemes and designs, that
organization should be wrecked and a new
"international" organization formed in its place,
without the Soviet Union and the new democracies.
  Does Einstein not realize how fatal such plans
would be to international security and international
cooperation?
  We believe that Dr. Einstein has entered a false and
dangerous path; he is chasing the mirage of a "world
state" in a world where different social, political,
and economic systems exist. Of course there is no
reason why states with different social and
economic structures should not cooperate
economically and politically, provided that these
differences are soberly faced. But Einstein is
sponsoring a political fad which plays into the
hands of the sworn enemies of sincere international
cooperation and enduring peace. The course he is
inviting the member states of the United Nations to
adopt would lead not to greater international
security, but to new international complications. It
would benefit only the capitalist monopolies, for
whom new international complications hold out the
promise of more war contracts and more profits.
  It is because we so highly esteem Einstein as an
eminent scientist and as a man of public spirit who
is striving to the best of his ability to promote the
cause of peace, that we consider it our duty to
speak with utter frankness and without diplomatic
adornment.

ALBERT EINSTEIN'S REPLY

  Four of my Russian colleagues have published a
benevolent attack upon me in an open letter carried
by the New Times. I appreciate the effort they have
made and I appreciate even more the fact that they
have expressed their point of view so candidly and
straightforwardly. To act intelligently in human
affairs is only possible if an attempt is made to
understand the thoughts, motives, and
apprehensions of one's opponent so fully that one
can see the world through his eyes. All well-meaning
people should try to contribute as much as possible
to improving such mutual understanding. It is in this
spirit that I should like to ask my Russian
colleagues and any other reader to accept the
following answer to their letter. It is the reply of a
man who anxiously tries to find a feasible solution
without having the illusion that he himself knows
"the truth" or "the right path" to follow. If in the
following I shall express my views somewhat
dogmatically, I do it only for the sake of clarity and
simplicity.
  Although your letter, in the main, is clothed in an
attack upon the non-socialistic foreign countries,
particularly the United States, I believe that behind
the aggressive front there lies a defensive mental
attitude which is nothing else but the trend toward
an almost unlimited isolationism. The escape into
isolationism is not difficult to understand if one
realizes what Russia has suffered at the hands of
foreign countries during the last three decades--the
German invasions with planned mass murder of the
civilian population, foreign interventions during the
civil war, the systematic campaign of calumnies in
the western press, the support of Hitler as an
alleged tool to fight Russia. However understandable
this desire for isolation may be, it remains no less
disastrous to Russia and to all other nations; I shall
say more about it later on.
  The chief object of your attack against me concerns
my support of "world government." I should like to
discuss this important problem only after having
said a few words about the antagonism between
socialism and capitalism; for your attitude on the
significance of this antagonism seems to dominate
completely your views on international problems. If
the socio-economic problem is considered
objectively, it appears as follows: technological
development has led to increasing centralization of
the economic mechanism. It is this development
which is also responsible for the fact that economic
power in all widely industrialized countries has
become concentrated in the hands of relatively few.
These people, in capitalist countries, do not need to
account for their actions to the public as a whole;
they must do so in socialist countries in which they
are civil servants similar to those who exercise
political power.
  I share your view that a socialist economy
possesses advantages which definitely
counterbalance its disadvantages whenever the
management lives up, at least to some extent, to
adequate standards. No doubt, the day will come
when all nations (as far as such nations still exist)
will be grateful to Russia for having demonstrated,
for the first time, by vigorous action the practical
possibility of planned economy in spite of
exceedingly great difficulties. I also believe that
capitalism, or, we should say, the system of free
enterprise, will prove unable to check
unemployment, which will become increasingly
chronic because of technological progress, and
unable to maintain a healthy balance between
production and the purchasing power of the people.
  On the other hand we should not make the mistake
of blaming capitalism for all existing social and
political evils, and of assuming that the very
establishment of socialism would be able to cure all
the social and political ills of humanity. The danger
of such a belief lies, first, in the fact that it
encourages fanatical intolerance on the part of all the
"faithful" by making a possible social method into a
type of church which brands all those who do not
belong to it as traitors or as nasty evil-doers. Once
this stage has been reached, the ability to understand
the convictions and actions of the "unfaithful"
vanishes completely. You know, I am sure, from
history how much unnecessary suffering such rigid
beliefs have inflicted upon mankind.
  Any government is in itself an evil in so far as it
carries within it the tendency to deteriorate into
tyranny. However, except for a very small number
of anarchists, every one of us is convinced that
civilized society cannot exist without a government.
In a healthy nation there is a kind of dynamic
balance between the will of the people and the
government, which prevents its degeneration into
tyranny. It is obvious that the danger of such
deterioration is more acute in a country in which the
government has authority not only over the armed
forces but also over all the channels of education and
information as well as over the economic existence
of every single citizen. I say this merely to indicate
that socialism as such cannot be considered the
solution to all social problems but merely as a
framework within which such a solution is possible.
  What has surprised me most in your general
attitude, expressed in your letter, is the following
aspect: You are such passionate opponents of
anarchy in the economic sphere, and yet equally
passionate advocates of anarchy, e.g., unlimited
sovereignty, in the sphere of international politics.
The proposition to curtail the sovereignty of
individual states appears to you in itself
reprehensible, as a kind of violation of a natural
right. In addition, you try to prove that behind the
idea of curtailing sovereignty the United States is
hiding her intention of economic domination and
exploitation of the rest of the world without going
to war. You attempt to justify this indictment by
analyzing in your fashion the individual actions of
this government since the end of the last war. You
attempt to show that the Assembly of the United
Nations is a mere puppet show controlled by the
United States and hence the American capitalists.
  Such arguments impress me as a kind of
mythology; they are not convincing. They make
obvious, however, the deep estrangement among the
intellectuals of our two countries which is the result
of a regrettable and artificial mutual isolation. If a
free personal exchange of views should be made
possible and should be encouraged, the intellectuals,
possibly more than anyone else, could help to create
an atmosphere of mutual understanding between the
two nations and their problems. Such an atmosphere
is a necessary prerequisite for the fruitful
development of political cooperation. However,
since for the time being we depend upon the
cumbersome method of "open letters" I shall want
to indicate briefly my reaction to your arguments.
  Nobody would want to deny that the influence of
the economic oligarchy upon all branches of our
public life is very powerful. This influence,
however, should not be overestimated. Franklin
Delano Roosevelt was elected president in spite of
desperate opposition by these very powerful
groups and was re-elected three times; and this took
place at a time when decisions of great consequence
had to be made.
  Concerning the policies of the American
Government since the end of the war, I am neither
willing, nor able, nor entitled to justify or explain
them. It cannot be denied, however, that the
suggestions of the American Government with
regard to atomic weapons represented at least an
attempt toward the creation of a supranational
security organization. If they were not acceptable,
they could at least have served as a basis of
discussion for a real solution of the problems of
international security. It is, indeed, the attitude of
the Soviet Government, that was partly negative
and partly dilatory, which has made it so difficult
for well-meaning people in this country to use their
political influence as they would have wanted, and
to oppose the "war mongers." With regard to the
influence of the United States upon the United
Nations Assembly, I wish to say that, in my
opinion, it stems not only from the economic and
military power of the United States but also from
the efforts of the United States and the United
Nations to lead toward a genuine solution of the
security problem.
  Concerning the controversial veto power, I believe
that the efforts to eliminate it or to make it
ineffective have their primary cause less in specific
intentions of the United States than in the manner in
which the veto privilege has been abused.
  Let me come now to your suggestion that the
policy of the United States seeks to obtain
economic domination and exploitation of other
nations. It is a precarious undertaking to say
anything reliable about aims and intentions. Let us
rather examine the objective factors involved. The
United States is fortunate in producing all the
important industrial products and foods in her own
country, in sufficient quantities. The country also
possesses almost all important raw materials.
Because of her tenacious belief in "free enterprise,"
she cannot succeed in keeping the purchasing power
of the people in balance with the productive
capacity of the country. For these very same
reasons there is a constant danger that
unemployment will reach threatening dimensions.
  Because of these circumstances the United States
is compelled to emphasize her export trade. Without
it, she could not permanently keep her total
productive machinery fully utilized. These
conditions would not be harmful if the exports were
balanced by imports of about the same value.
Exploitation of foreign nations would then consist in
the fact that the labor value of exports would
considerably exceed that of imports. However,
every effort is being made to avoid this, since almost
every import would make a part of the productive
machinery idle.
  This is why foreign countries are not able to pay
for the export commodities of the United States,
payment which, in the long run, would indeed be
possible only through imports by the latter. This
explains why a large portion of all the gold has come
to the United States. On the whole, this gold cannot
be utilized except for the purchase of foreign
commodities, which, because of the reasons already
stated, is not practicable. There it lies, this gold,
carefully protected against theft, a monument to
governmental wisdom and to economic science! The
reasons which I have just indicated make it difficult
for me to take the alleged exploitation of the world
by the United States very seriously.
  However, the situation just described has a serious
political facet. The United States, for the reasons
indicated, is compelled to ship part of its
production to foreign countries. These exports are
financed through loans which the United States is
granting foreign countries. It is, indeed, difficult to
imagine how these loans will ever be repaid. For all
practical purposes, therefore, these loans must be
considered gifts which may be used as weapons in
the arena of power politics. In view of the existing
conditions and in view of the general characteristics
of human beings, this, I frankly admit, represents a
real danger. Is it not true, however, that we have
stumbled into a state of international affairs which
tends to make every invention of our minds and
every material good into a weapon and,
consequently, into a danger for mankind?
  This question brings us to the most important
matter, in comparison to which everything else
appears insignificant indeed. We all know that
power politics, sooner or later, necessarily leads to
war, and that war, under present circumstances,
would mean a mass destruction of human beings and
material goods, the dimensions of which are much,
much greater than anything that has ever before
happened in history.
  Is it really unavoidable that, because of our
passions and our inherited customs, we should be
condemned to annihilate each other so thoroughly
that nothing would be left over which would deserve
to be conserved? Is it not true that all the
controversies and differences of opinion which we
have touched upon in our strange exchange of letters
are insignificant pettinesses compared to the danger
in which we all find ourselves? Should we not do
everything in our power to eliminate the danger
which threatens all nations alike?
  If we hold fast to the concept and practice of
unlimited sovereignty of nations it only means that
each country reserves the right for itself of pursuing
its objectives through warlike means. Under the
circumstances, every nation must be prepared for
that possibility; this means it must try with all its
might to be superior to anyone else. This objective
will dominate more and more our entire public life
and will poison our youth long before the
catastrophe is itself actually upon us. We must not
tolerate this, however, as long as we still retain a
tiny bit of calm reasoning and human feelings.
  This alone is on my mind in supporting the idea of
"World Government," without any regard to what
other people may have in mind when working for
the same objective. I advocate world government
because I am convinced that there is no other
possible way of eliminating the most terrible danger
in which man has ever found himself. The objective
of avoiding total destruction must have priority over
any other objective.
  I am sure you are convinced that this letter is
written with all the seriousness and honesty at my
command; I trust you will accept it in the same
spirit.

ON RECEIVING THE ONE WORLD AWARD

From an address at Carnegie Hall, April 27, 1948.
Published in Out of My Later Years, New York:
Philosophical Library, 1950.

  I am greatly touched by the signal honor which
you have wished to confer upon me. In the course
of my long life I have received from my fellow-men
far more recognition than I deserve, and I confess
that my sense of shame has always outweighed my
pleasure therein. But never, on any previous
occasion, has the pain so far outweighed the
pleasure as now. For all of us who are concerned for
peace and the triumph of reason and justice must
today be keenly aware how small an influence
reason and honest good-will exert upon events in the
political field. But however that may be, and
whatever fate may have in store for us, yet we may
rest assured that without the tireless efforts of those
who are concerned with the welfare of humanity as
a whole, the lot of mankind would be still worse
than in fact it even now is.
  In this time of decisions so heavy with fate, what
we must say to our fellow-citizens seems above all
to be this: where belief in the omnipotence of
physical force gets the upper hand in political life,
this force takes on a life of its own, and proves
stronger than the men who think to use force as a
tool. The proposed militarization of the nation not
only immediately threatens us with war; it will also
slowly but surely destroy the democratic spirit and
the dignity of the individual in our land. The
assertion that events abroad force us to arm is
wrong, we must combat it with all our strength.
Actually, our own rearmament, through the reaction
of other nations to it, will bring about that very
situation on which its advocates seek to base their
proposals.
  There is only one path to peace and security: the
path of supranational organization. One-sided
armament on a national basis only heightens the
general uncertainty and confusion without being an
effective protection.

A MESSAGE TO INTELLECTUALS

From the message to the Peace Congress of
Intellectuals at Wroclav, never delivered, but
released to the press on August 29, 1948.

  We meet today, as intellectuals and scholars of
many nationalities, with a deep and historic
responsibility placed upon us. We have every
reason to be grateful to our French and Polish
colleagues whose initiative has assembled us here for
a momentous objective: to use the influence of wise
men in promoting peace and security throughout the
world. This is the age-old problem with which
Plato, as one of the first, struggled so hard: to apply
reason and prudence to the solution of man's
problems instead of yielding to atavist instincts and
passions.
  By painful experience we have learned that rational
thinking does not suffice to solve the problems of
our social life. Penetrating research and keen
scientific work have often had tragic implications for
mankind, producing, on the one hand, inventions
which liberated man from exhausting physical labor,
making his life easier and richer; but on the other
hand, introducing a grave restlessness into his life,
making him a slave to his technological environment,
and--most catastrophic of all--creating the means for
his own mass destruction. This, indeed, is a tragedy
of overwhelming poignancy!
  However poignant that tragedy is, it is perhaps
even more tragic that, while mankind has produced
many scholars so extremely successful in the field of
science and technology, we have been for a long time
so inefficient in finding adequate solutions to the
many political conflicts and economic tensions
which beset us. No doubt, the antagonism of
economic interests within and among nations is
largely responsible to a great extent for the
dangerous and threatening condition in the world
today. Man has not succeeded in developing
political and economic forms of organization which
would guarantee the peaceful coexistence of the
nations of the world. He has not succeeded in
building the kind of system which would eliminate
the possibility of war and banish forever the
murderous instruments of mass destruction.
  We scientists, whose tragic destination has been to
help in making the methods of annihilation more
gruesome and more effective, must consider it our
solemn and transcendent duty to do all in our power
in preventing these weapons from being used for the
brutal purpose for which they were invented. What
task could possibly be more important for us? What
social aim could be closer to our hearts? That is why
this Congress has such a vital mission. We are here
to take counsel with each other. We must build
spiritual and scientific bridges linking the nations of
the world. We must overcome the horrible obstacles
of national frontiers.
  In the smaller entities of community life, man has
made some progress toward breaking down
anti-social sovereignties. This is true, for example,
of life within cities and, to a certain degree, even of
society within individual states. In such
communities tradition and education have had a
moderating influence and have brought about
tolerable relations among the peoples living within
those confines. But in relations among separate
states complete anarchy still prevails. I do not
believe that we have made any genuine advance in
this area during the last few thousand years. All too
frequently conflicts among nations are still being
decided by brutal power, by war. The unlimited
desire for ever greater power seeks to become active
and aggressive wherever and whenever the physical
possibility offers itself.
  Throughout the ages, this state of anarchy in
international affairs has inflicted indescribable
suffering and destruction upon mankind; again and
again it has depraved the development of men, their
souls and their well-being. At times it has almost
annihilated whole areas.
  However, the desire of nations to be constantly
prepared for warfare has, in addition, still other
repercussions upon the lives of men. The power of
every state over its citizens has grown steadily
during the last few hundred years, no less in
countries where the power of the state has been
exercised wisely, than in those where it has been
used for brutal tyranny. The function of the state to
maintain peaceful and ordered relations among and
between its citizens has become increasingly
complicated and extensive largely because of the
concentration and centralization of the modern
industrial apparatus. In order to protect its citizens
from attacks from without a modern state requires a
formidable, expanding military establishment. In
addition, the state considers it necessary to educate
its citizens for the possibilities of war, an
"education" not only corrupting to the soul and
spirit of the young, but also adversely affecting the
mentality of adults. No country can avoid this
corruption. It pervades the citizenry even in
countries which do not harbor outspoken aggressive
tendencies. The state has thus become a modern idol
whose suggestive power few men are able to escape.
  Education for war, however, is a delusion. The
technological developments of the last few years
have created a completely new military situation.
Horrible weapons have been invented, capable of
destroying in a few seconds huge masses of human
beings and tremendous areas of territory. Since
science has not yet found protection from these
weapons, the modern state is no longer in a position
to prepare adequately for the safety of its citizens.
  How, then, shall we be saved?
  Mankind can only gain protection against the
danger of unimaginable destruction and wanton
annihilation if a supranational organization has alone
the authority to produce or possess these weapons.
It is unthinkable, however, that nations under
existing conditions would hand over such authority
to a supra-national organization unless the
organization would have the legal right and duty to
solve all the conflicts which in the past have led to
war. The functions of individual states would be to
concentrate more or less upon internal affairs; in
their relation with other states they would deal only
with issues and problems which are in no way
conducive to endangering international security.
  Unfortunately, there are no indications that
governments yet realize that the situation in which
mankind finds itself makes the adoption of
revolutionary measures a compelling necessity. Our
situation is not comparable to anything in the past.
It is impossible, therefore, to apply methods and
measures which at an earlier age might have been
sufficient. We must revolutionize our thinking,
revolutionize our actions, and must have the courage
to revolutionize relations among the nations of the
world. ClichΘs of yesterday will no longer do today,
and will, no doubt, be hopelessly out of date
tomorrow. To bring this home to men all over the
world is the most important and most fateful social
function intellectuals have ever had to shoulder. Will
they have enough courage to overcome their own
national ties to the extent that is necessary to induce
the peoples of the world to change their deep-rooted
national traditions in a most radical fashion?
  A tremendous effort is indispensable. If it fails
now, the supranational organization will be built
later, but then it will have to be built upon the ruins
of a large part of the now existing world. Let us
hope that the abolition of the existing international
anarchy will not need to be bought by a
self-inflicted world catastrophe the dimensions of
which none of us can possibly imagine. The time is
terribly short. We must act now if we are to act at
all.

WHY SOCIALISM?

  From Monthly Review, New York, May, 1949.

  Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on
economic and social issues to express views on the
subject of socialism? I believe for a number of
reasons that it is.
  Let us first consider the question from the point of
view of scientific knowledge. It might appear that
there are no essential methodological differences
between astronomy and economics: scientists in
both fields attempt to discover laws of general
acceptability for a circumscribed group of
phenomena in order to make the interconnection of
these phenomena as clearly understandable as
possible. But in reality such methodological
differences do exist. The discovery of general laws
in the field of economics is made difficult by the
circumstance that observed economic phenomena
are often affected by many factors which are very
hard to evaluate separately. In addition, the
experience which has accumulated since the
beginning of the so-called civilized period of human
history has--as is well known--been largely
influenced and limited by causes which are by no
means exclusively economic in nature. For example,
most of the major states of history owed their
existence to conquest. The conquering peoples
established themselves, legally and economically, as
the privileged class of the conquered country. They
seized for themselves a monopoly of the land
ownership and appointed a priesthood from among
their own ranks. The priests, in control of
education, made the class division of society into a
permanent institution and created a system of
values by which the people were thenceforth, to a
large extent unconsciously, guided in their social
behavior.
  But historic tradition is, so to speak, of yesterday;
nowhere have we really overcome what Thorstein
Veblen called "the predatory phase" of human
development. The observable economic facts belong
to that phase and even such laws as we can derive
from them are not applicable to other phases. Since
the real purpose of socialism is precisely to
overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase
of human development, economic science in its
present state can throw little light on the socialist
society of the future.
  Second, socialism is directed toward a social-ethical
end. Science, however, cannot create ends and, even
less, instill them in human beings; science, at most,
can supply the means by which to attain certain
ends. But the ends themselves are conceived by
personalities with 1ofty ethical ideals and--if these
ends are not stillborn, but vital and vigorous--are
adopted and carried forward by those many human
beings who, half-unconsciously, determine the slow
evolution of society.
  For these reasons, we should be on our guard not
to overestimate science and scientific methods when
it is a question of human problems; and we should
not assume that experts are the only ones who have
a right to express themselves on questions affecting
the organization of society.
  Innumerable voices have been asserting for some
time now that human society is passing through a
crisis, that its stability has been gravely shattered. It
is characteristic of such a situation that individuals
feel indifferent or even hostile toward the group,
small or large, to which they belong. In order to
illustrate my meaning, let me record here a personal
experience. I recently discussed with an intelligent
and well-disposed man the threat of another war,
which in my opinion would seriously endanger the
existence of mankind, and I remarked that only a
supranational organization would offer protection
from that danger. Thereupon my visitor, very
calmly and coolly, said to me: "Why are you so
deeply opposed to the disappearance of the human
race?"
  I am sure that as little as a century ago no one
would have so lightly made a statement of this kind.
It is the statement of a man who has striven in vain
to attain an equilibrium within himself and has more
or less lost hope of succeeding. It is the expression
of a painful solitude and isolation from which so
many people are suffering in these days. What is the
cause? Is there a way out?
  It is easy to raise such questions, but difficult to
answer them with any degree of assurance. I must
try, however, as best I can, although I am very
conscious of the fact that our feelings and strivings
are often contradictory and obscure and that they
cannot be expressed in easy and simple formulas.
  Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being
and a social being. As a solitary being, he attempts
to protect his own existence and that of those who
are closest to him, to satisfy his personal desires,
and to develop his innate abilities. As a social being,
he seeks to gain the recognition and affection of his
fellow human beings, to share in their pleasures, to
comfort them in their sorrows, and to improve their
conditions of life. Only the existence of these varied,
frequently conflicting strivings accounts for the
special character of a man, and their specific
combination determines the extent to which an
individual can achieve an inner equilibrium and can
contribute to the well-being of society. It is quite
possible that the relative strength of these two
drives is, in the main, fixed by inheritance. But the
personality that finally emerges is largely formed by
the environment in which a man happens to find
himself during his development, by the structure of
the society in which he grows up, by the tradition
of that society, and by its appraisal of particular
types of behavior. The abstract concept "society"
means to the individual human being the sum total
of his direct and indirect relations to his
contemporaries and to all the people of earlier
generations. The individual is able to think, feel,
strive, and work by himself; but he depends so
much upon society--in his physical, intellectual, and
emotional existence--that it is impossible to think of
him, or to understand him, outside the framework of
society. It is "society" which provides man with
food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language,
the forms of thought, and most of the content of
thought; his life is made possible through the labor
and the accomplishments of the many millions past
and present who are all hidden behind the small
word "society."
  It is evident, therefore, that the dependence of the
individual upon society is a fact of nature which
cannot be abolished--just as in the case of ants and
bees. However, while the whole life process of ants
and bees is fixed down to the smallest detail by
rigid, hereditary instincts, the social pattern and
interrelationships of human beings are very variable
and susceptible to change. Memory, the capacity to
make new combinations, the gift of oral
communication have made possible developments
among human beings which are not dictated by
biological necessities. Such developments manifest
themselves in traditions, institutions, and
organizations; in literature; in scientific and
engineering accomplishments; in works of art. This
explains how it happens that, in a certain sense, man
can influence his life through his own conduct, and
that in this process conscious thinking and wanting
can play a part.
  Man acquires at birth, through heredity, a
biological constitution which we must consider fixed
and unalterable, including the natural urges which are
characteristic of the human species. In addition,
during his lifetime, he acquires a cultural
constitution which he adopts from society through
communication and through many other types of
influences. It is this cultural constitution which,
with the passage of time, is subject to change and
which determines to a very large extent the
relationship between the individual and society.
Modern anthropology has taught us, through
comparative investigation of so-called primitive
cultures, that the social behavior of human beings
may differ greatly, depending upon prevailing
cultural patterns and the types of organization
which predominate in society. It is on this that
those who are striving to improve the lot of man
may ground their hopes: human beings are not
condemned, because of their biological constitution,
to annihilate each other or to be at the mercy of a
cruel, self-inflicted fate.
  If we ask ourselves how the structure of society
and the cultural attitude of man should be changed in
order to make human life as satisfying as possible,
we should constantly be conscious of the fact that
there are certain conditions which we are unable to
modify. As mentioned before, the biological nature
of man is, for all practical purposes, not subject to
change. Furthermore, technological and demographic
developments of the last few centuries have created
conditions which are here to stay. In relatively
densely settled populations with the goods which
are indispensable to their continued existence, an
extreme division of labor and a highly centralized
productive apparatus are absolutely necessary. The
time--which, looking back, seems so idyllic--is gone
forever when individuals or relatively small groups
could be completely self-sufficient. It is only a
slight exaggeration to say that mankind constitutes
even now a planetary community of production and
consumption.
  I have now reached the point where I may indicate
briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the
crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the
individual to society. The individual has become
more conscious than ever of his dependence upon
society. But he does not experience this dependence
as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective
force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or
even to his economic existence. Moreover, his
position in society is such that the egotistical drives
of his make-up are constantly being accentuated,
while his social drives, which are by nature weaker,
progressively deteriorate. All human beings,
whatever their position in society, are suffering
from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly
prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure,
lonely, and deprived of the na∩ve, simple, and
unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find
meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only
through devoting himself to society.
  The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it
exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the
evil. We see before us a huge community of
producers the members of which are unceasingly
striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their
collective labor--not by force, but on the whole in
faithful compliance with legally established rules. In
this respect, it is important to realize that the means
of production--that is to say, the entire productive
capacity that is needed for producing consumer
goods as well as additional capital goods--may
legally be, and for the most part are, the private
property of individuals.
  For the sake of simplicity, in the discussion that
follows I shall call "workers" all those who do not
share in the ownership of the means of
production--although this does not quite correspond
to the customary use of the term. The owner of the
means of production is in a position to purchase the
labor power of the worker. By using the means of
production, the worker produces new goods which
become the property of the capitalist. The essential
point about this process is the relation between
what the worker produces and what he is paid, both
measured in terms of real value. In so far as the labor
contract is "free," what the worker receives is
determined not by the real value of the goods he
produces, but by his minimum needs and by the
capitalists' requirements for labor power in relation
to the number of workers competing for jobs. It is
important to understand that even in theory the
payment of the worker is not determined by the
value of his product.
  Private capital tends to become concentrated in
few hands, partly because of competition among the
capitalists, and partly because technological
development and the increasing division of labor
encourage the formation of larger units of
production at the expense of the smaller ones. The
result of these developments is an oligarchy of
private capital the enormous power of which cannot
be effectively checked even by a democratically
organized political society. This is true since the
members of legislative bodies are selected by
political parties, largely financed or otherwise
influenced by private capitalists who, for all
practical purposes, separate the electorate from the
legislature. The consequence is that the
representatives of the people do not in fact
sufficiently protect the interests of the
underprivileged sections of the population.
Moreover, under existing conditions, private
capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly,
the main sources of information (press, radio,
education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed
in most cases quite impossible, for the individual
citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make
intelligent use of his political rights.
  The situation prevailing in an economy based on
the private ownership of capital is thus
characterized by two main principles: first, means
of production (capital) are privately owned and the
owners dispose of them as they see fit; second, the
labor contract is free. Of course, there is no such
thing as a pure capitalist society in this sense. In
particular, it should be noted that the workers,
through long and bitter political struggles, have
succeeded in securing a somewhat improved form of
the "free labor contract" for certain categories of
workers. But taken as a whole, the present-day
economy does not differ much from "pure"
capitalism.
  Production is carried on for profit, not for use.
There is no provision that all those able and willing
to work will always be in a position to find
employment; an "army of unemployed" almost
always exists. The worker is constantly in fear of
losing his job. Since unemployed and poorly paid
workers do not provide a profitable market, the
production of consumers' goods is restricted, and
great hardship is the consequence. Technological
progress frequently results in more unemployment
rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all.
The profit motive, in conjunction with competition
among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in
the accumulation and utilization of capital which
leads to increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited
competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to
that crippling of the social consciousness of
individuals which I mentioned before.
  This crippling of individuals I consider the worst
evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system
suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive
attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained
to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for
his future career.
  I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate
these grave evils, namely through the establishment
of a socialist economy, accompanied by an
educational system which would be oriented toward
social goals. In such an economy, the means of
production arc owned by society itself and are
utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy,
which adjusts production to the needs of the
community, would distribute the work to be done
among all those able to work and would guarantee a
livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The
education of the individual, in addition to promoting
his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop
in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow-men
in place of the glorification of power and success in
our present society.
  Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a
planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned
economy as such may be accompanied by the
complete enslavement of the individual. The
achievement of socialism requires the solution of
some extremely difficult socio-political problems:
how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching
centralization of political and economic power, to
prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful
and overweening? How can the rights of the
individual be protected and therewith a democratic
counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be
assured?

NATIONAL SECURITY

Contribution to Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt's television
program concerning the implications of the H-bomb,
February 13, 1950.

  I am grateful to you, Mrs. Roosevelt, for the
opportunity to express my conviction in this most
important political question.
  The idea of achieving security through national
armament is, at the present state of military
technique, a disastrous illusion. On the part of the
U.S.A. this illusion has been particularly fostered
by the fact that this country succeeded first in
producing an atomic bomb. The belief seemed to
prevail that in the end it would be possible to
achieve decisive military superiority. In this way,
any potential opponent would be intimidated, and
security, so ardently desired by all of us, brought to
us and all of humanity. The maxim which we have
been following during these last five years has been,
in short: security through superior military power,
whatever the cost.
  This mechanistic, technical-military psychological
attitude has had its inevitable consequences. Every
single act in foreign policy is governed exclusively
by one viewpoint: how do we have to act in order to
achieve utmost superiority over the opponent in
case of war? Establishing military bases at all
possible strategically important points on the globe.
Arming and economic strengthening of potential
allies. Within the country: concentration of
tremendous financial power in the hands of the
military; militarization of the youth; close
supervision of the loyalty of the citizens, in
particular, of the civil servants, by a police force
growing more conspicuous every day. Intimidation
of people of independent political thinking. Subtle
indoctrination of the public by radio, press, and
schools. Growing restriction of the range of public
information under the pressure of military secrecy.
  The armament race between the U.S.A. and the
U.S.S.R., originally supposed to be a preventive
measure, assumes hysterical character. On both
sides, the means to mass destruction are perfected
with feverish haste--behind the respective walls of
secrecy. The hydrogen bomb appears on the public
horizon as a probably attainable goal. Its accelerated
development has been solemnly proclaimed by the
President. If it is successful, radioactive poisoning
of the atmosphere and hence annihilation of any life
on earth has been brought within the range of
technical possibilities. The ghostlike character of
this development lies in its apparently compulsory
trend. Every step appears as the unavoidable
consequence of the preceding one. In the end, there
beckons more and more clearly general annihilation.
  Is there any way out of this impasse created by
man himself? All of us, and particularly those who
are responsible for the attitude of the U.S.A. and the
U.S.S.R., should realize that we may have
vanquished an external enemy, but have been
incapable of getting rid of the mentality created by
the war. It is impossible to achieve peace as long as
every single action is taken with a possible future
conflict in view. The leading point of view of all
political action should therefore be: what can we do
to bring about a peaceful coexistence and even loyal
cooperation of the nations? The first problem is to
do away with mutual fear and distrust. Solemn
renunciation of violence (not only with respect to
means of mass destruction) is undoubtedly
necessary. Such renunciation, however, can be
effective only if at the same time a supranational
judicial and executive body is set up empowered to
decide questions of immediate concern to the
security of the nations. Even a declaration of the
nations to collaborate loyally in the realization of
such a "restricted world government" would
considerably reduce the imminent danger of war.
  In the last analysis, every kind of peaceful
cooperation among men is primarily based on
mutual trust and only secondly on institutions such
as courts of justice and police. This holds for
nations as well as for individuals. And the basis of
trust is loyal give and take.
  What about international control? Well, it may be
of secondary use as a police measure. But it may be
wise not to overestimate its importance. The times
of Prohibition come to mind and give one pause.

THE PURSUIT OF PEACE

U.N. radio interview, June 16, 1950, recorded in the
study of Einstein's Princeton, N.J., home.

  Q: Is it an exaggeration to say that the fate of the
world is hanging in the balance?
  A: No exaggeration. The fate of humanity is
always in the balance . . . but more truly now than
at any known time.
  Q: How can we awaken all the peoples to the
seriousness of the moment?
  A: I believe this can be answered. A remedy can't
be found in preparing for the event of war, but in
starting from the conviction that security from
military disaster can be realized only by patient
negotiation and through creation of a legal basis for
the solution of international problems, supported
by a sufficiently strong executive agency--in short, a
kind of world government.
  Q: Is the current atomic armaments race leading to
another world war or--as some people maintain--a
way to prevent war?
  A: Competitive armament is not a way to prevent
war. Every step in this direction brings us nearer to
catastrophe. The armaments race is the worst
method to prevent open conflict. On the contrary,
real peace cannot be reached without systematic
disarmament on a supranational scale. I repeat,
armament is no protection against war, but leads
inevitably to war.
  Q: Is it possible to prepare for war and a world
community at the same time?
  A: Striving for peace and preparing for war are
incompatible with each other, and in our time more
so than ever.
  Q: Can we prevent war?
  A: There is a very simple answer. If we have the
courage to
decide ourselves for peace, we will have peace.
  Q: How?
  A: By the firm will to reach agreement. This is
axiomatic. We are not engaged in a play but in a
condition of utmost danger to existence. If you are
not firmly decided to resolve things in a peaceful
way, you will never come to a peaceful solution.
  Q: What is your estimate of the future effect of
atomic energy on our civilization in the next ten or
twenty years?
  A: Not relevant now. The technical possibilities
we now have already are satisfactory enough . . . if
the right use would be made of them.
  Q: What is your opinion of the profound changes
in our living predicted by some scientists . . . for
example, the possibility of our need to work only
two hours a day?
  A: We are always the same people. There are not
really profound changes. It is not so important if we
work five hours or two. Our problem is social and
economic, at the international level.
  Q: What would you suggest doing with the present
supply of atom bombs already stockpiled?
  A: Give it to a supranational organization. During
the interval before solid peace one must have some
protecting power. One-sided disarmament is not
possible; this is out of the question. Arms must be
entrusted only to an international authority. There
is no other possibility . . . systematic disarmament
connected with supranational government. One
must not look too technically on the problem of
security. The will to peace and the readiness to
accept every step needed for this goal are most
important.
  Q: What can a private individual do about war or
peace?
  A: Individuals can cause anyone who tries to be
elected (for Congress, etc.) to give clear promise to
work for international order and restriction of
national sovereignty in favor of that order.
Everybody is involved in forming public opinion . . .
and he must really understand what is needed . . .
and he must have the courage to speak out.
  Q: United Nations Radio is broadcasting to all the
corners of the earth, in twenty-seven languages.
Since this is a moment of great danger, what word
would you have us broadcast to the peoples of the
world?
  A: Taken on the whole, I would believe that
Gandhi's views were the most enlightened of all the
political men in our time. We should strive to do
things in his spirit . . . not to use violence in fighting
for our cause, but by non-participation in what we
believe is evil.

"CULTURE MUST BE ONE OF THE
FOUNDATIONS FOR WORLD
UNDERSTANDING"

  From Unesco Courier, December, 1951.

  In order to grasp the full significance of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is well to
be fully aware of the world situation that gave birth
to the United Nations and to Unesco. The
devastation wrought by the wars of the last half
century had brought home the fact to everybody
that, with the present-day level of technical
achievement, the security of nations could be based
only on supranational institutions and rules of
conduct. It is understood that, in the long run, an
all-destroying conflict can be avoided only by the
setting up of a world federation of nations.
  So--as a modest beginning of international
order--the United Nations was founded. This
organization, however, is but a meeting ground for
delegates of national governments and not for the
peoples' representatives acting independently on the
basis of their own personal convictions.
Furthermore, U.N. decisions do not have binding
force on any national government; nor do any
concrete means exist by which the decisions can be
enforced.
  The effectiveness of the United Nations is still
further reduced by the fact that membership has
been refused to certain nations, whose exclusion
seriously affects the supra character of the
organization. Yet, in itself, the fact that international
problems are brought up and discussed in the broad
light of day favors the peaceful solution of conflicts.
The existence of a supranational platform of
discussion is apt to accustom the peoples gradually
to the idea that national interests must be
safeguarded by negotiation and not by brute force.
  This psychological or educational effect I regard as
the United Nations' most valuable feature. A world
federation presupposes a new kind of loyalty on the
part of man, a sense of responsibility that does not
stop short at the national boundaries. To be truly
effective, such loyalty must embrace more than
purely political issues. Understanding among
different cultural groups, mutual economic and
cultural aid are the necessary additions.
  Only by such endeavor will the feeling of
confidence be established that was lost owing to the
psychological effect of the wars and sapped by the
narrow philosophy of militarism and power
politics. No effective institution for the collective
security of nations is possible without
understanding and a measure of reciprocal
confidence.
  To the U.N. was added Unesco, the agency whose
function it is to pursue these cultural tasks. It has in
a greater measure than U.N. been able to avoid the
paralyzing influence of power politics.
  Realizing that healthy international relations can be
created only among populations made up of
individuals who themselves are healthy and enjoy a
measure of independence, the United Nations
elaborated a Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
which was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly
on December 10, 1948.
  The Declaration establishes a number of
universally comprehensible standards that are
designed to protect the individual, to prevent his
being exploited economically, and to safeguard his
development and the free pursuit of his activities
within the social framework.
  To spread these standards among all U.N. Member
States is rightly regarded and aimed at as an
important objective. Unesco has accordingly
instituted this third celebration for the purpose of
drawing attention far and wide to these fundamental
aspirations as a basis on which to restore the
political health of the peoples.
  It was scarcely to be avoided that the Declaration
should take the form of a legalistic document, which
in its rigidity may lead to endless discussion. It is
impossible for such a text to take the great diversity
of conditions of life in the different countries fully
into account; in addition, it is unavoidable that such
a text admits various interpretations of detail. The
general tendency of the Declaration, however, is
unmistakable and provides a suitable, generally
acceptable basis for judgment and action.
  To give formal recognition to standards and to
adopt them as the guiding lines of action in the teeth
of all the adversities of a changing situation are two
very different things--as the impartial observer may
see particularly in the history of religious
institutions. Then and only then will the Declaration
exert effective influence, when the United Nations
itself shows by its decisions and actions that it does
embody, de facto, the spirit of this, its own
Declaration.

ON THE ABOLITION OF THE THREAT OF
WAR

Written September 20, 1952. Published in Japanese
magazine, Kaizo (Tokyo), Autumn, 1952.

  My part in producing the atomic bomb consisted
in a single act: I signed a letter to President
Roosevelt, pressing the need for experiments on a
large scale in order to explore the possibilities for
the production of an atomic bomb.
  I was fully aware of the terrible danger to mankind
in case this attempt succeeded. But the likelihood
that the Germans were working on the same
problem with a chance of succeeding forced me to
this step. I could do nothing else although I have
always been a convinced pacifist. To my mind, to
kill in war is not a whit better than to commit
ordinary murder.
  As long, however, as the nations are not resolved
to abolish war through common actions and to solve
their conflicts and protect their interests by peaceful
decisions on a legal basis, they feel compelled to
prepare for war. They feel obliged to prepare all
possible means, even the most detestable ones, so as
not to be left behind in the general armament race.
This road necessarily leads to war, a war which
under the present conditions means universal
destruction.
  Under these circumstances the fight against means
has no chance of success. Only the radical abolition
of wars and of the threat of war can help. This is
what one has to work for. One has to be resolved
not to let himself be forced to actions that run
counter to this goal. This is a severe demand on an
individual who is conscious of his dependence on
society. But it is not an impossible demand.
  Gandhi, the greatest political genius of our time,
has pointed the way. He has shown of what
sacrifices people are capable once they have found
the right way. His work for the liberation of India is
a living testimony to the fact that a will governed by
firm conviction is stronger than a seemingly
invincible material power.

SYMPTOMS OF CULTURAL DECAY

Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Vol. VIII, No. 7,
October, 1952.

  The free, unhampered exchange of ideas and
scientific conclusions is necessary for the sound
development of science, as it is in all spheres of
cultural life. In my opinion, there can be no doubt
that the intervention of political authorities of this
country in the free exchange of knowledge between
individuals has already had significantly damaging
effects. First of all, the damage is to be seen in the
field of scientific work proper, and, after a while, it
will become evident in technology and industrial
production.
  The intrusion of the political authorities into the
scientific life of our country is especially evident in
the obstruction of the travels of American scientists
and scholars abroad and of foreign scientists seeking
to come to this country. Such petty behavior on the
part of a powerful country is only a peripheral
symptom of an ailment which has deeper roots.
  Interference with the freedom of the oral and
written communication of scientific results, the
widespread attitude of political distrust which is
supported by an immense police organization, the
timidity and the anxiety of individuals to avoid
everything which might cause suspicion and which
could threaten their economic position--all these are
only symptoms, even though they reveal more
clearly the threatening character of the illness.
  The real ailment, however, seems to me to lie in the
attitude which was created by the World War and
which dominates all our actions; namely, the belief
that we must in peacetime so organize our whole life
and work that in the event of war we would be sure
of victory. This attitude gives rise to the belief that
one's freedom and indeed one's existence are
threatened by powerful enemies.
  This attitude explains all of the unpleasant facts
which we have designated above as symptoms. It
must, if it does not rectify itself, lead to war and to
very far-reaching destruction. It finds its expression
in the budget of the United States.
  Only if we overcome this obsession can we really
turn our attention in a reasonable way to the real
political problem, which is, "How can we contribute
to make the life of man on this diminishing earth
more secure and more tolerable?"
  It will be impossible to cure ourselves of the
symptoms we have mentioned and many others if
we do not overcome the deeper ailment which is
affecting us.

PART III

ON THE JEWISH PEOPLE

A LETTER TO PROFESSOR DR. HELLPACH,
MINISTER OF STATE

Written in response to an article by Professor
Hellpach which appeared in the Vossische Zeitung
in 1929. Published in Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam:
Querido Verlag, 1934.

DEAR MR. HELLPACH:
  I have read your article on Zionism and the Zurich
Congress and feel, as a strong devotee of the Zionist
idea, that I must answer you, even if only shortly.
  The Jews are a community bound together by ties
of blood and tradition, and not of religion only: the
attitude of the rest of the world toward them is
sufficient proof of this. When I came to Germany
fifteen years ago I discovered for the first time that I
was a Jew, and I owe this discovery more to
Gentiles than Jews.
  The tragedy of the Jews is that they are people of
a definite historical type, who lack the support of a
community to keep them together. The result is a
want of solid foundations in the individual which
amounts in its extremer forms to moral instability. I
realized that salvation was only possible for the race
if every Jew in the world should become attached to
a living society to which he as an individual might
rejoice to belong and which might enable him to bear
the hatred and the humiliations that he has to put up
with from the rest of the world.
  I saw worthy Jews basely caricatured, and the
sight made my heart bleed. I saw how schools,
comic papers, and innumerable other forces of the
Gentile majority undermined the confidence even of
the best of my fellow-Jews, and felt that this could
not be allowed to continue.
  Then I realized that only a common enterprise dear
to the heart of Jews all over the world could restore
this people to health. It was a great achievement of
Herzl's to have realized and proclaimed at the top of
his voice that, the traditional attitude of the Jews
being what it was, the establishment of a national
home or, more accurately, a center in Palestine, was
a suitable object on which to concentrate our efforts.
  All this you call nationalism, and there is
something in the accusation. But a communal
purpose without which we can neither live nor die
in this hostile world can always be called by that
ugly name. In any case it is a nationalism whose aim
is not power but dignity and health. If we did not
have to live among intolerant, narrow-minded, and
violent people, I should be the first to throw over all
nationalism in favor of universal humanity.
  The objection that we Jews cannot be proper
citizens of the German state, for example, if we
want to be a "nation," is based on a
misunderstanding of the nature of the state which
springs from the intolerance of national majorities.
Against that intolerance we shall never be safe,
whether we call ourselves a people (or nation) or
not.
  I have put all this with brutal frankness for the
sake of brevity, but I know from your writings that
you are a man who stands to the sense, not the
form.

LETTER TO AN ARAB

  Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

March 15, 1930

SIR:
  Your letter has given me great pleasure. It shows
me that there is good will available on your side,
too, for solving the present difficulties in a manner
worthy of both our nations. I believe that these
difficulties are more psychological than real, and
that they can be got over if both sides bring honesty
and good will to the task.
  What makes the present position so bad is the fact
that Jews and Arabs confront each other as
opponents before the mandatory power. This state
of affairs is unworthy of both nations and can only
be altered by our finding a via media on which both
sides agree.
  I will now tell you how I think that the present
difficulties might be remedied; at the same time I
must add that this is only my personal opinion,
which I have discussed with nobody. I am writing
this letter in German because I am not capable of
writing it in English myself and because I want to
bear the entire responsibility for it myself. You will,
I am sure, be able to get some Jewish friend of
conciliation to translate it.

  A Privy Council is to be formed to which the Jews
and Arabs shall each send four representatives, who
must be independent of all political parties:--
  Each group to be composed as follows:--
  A doctor, elected by the Medical Association.
  A lawyer, elected by the lawyers.
  A working men's representative, elected by the
trade unions.
  An ecclesiastic, elected by the ecclesiastics.
  These eight people are to meet once a week. They
undertake not to espouse the sectional interests of
their profession or nation but conscientiously and to
the best of their power to aim at the welfare of the
whole population of the country. Their
deliberations shall be secret and they are strictly
forbidden to give any information about them, even
in private. When a decision has been reached on any
subject in which not less than three members on
each side concur, it may be published, but only in
the name of the whole Council. If a member dissents
he may retire from the Council, but he is not
thereby released from the obligation to secrecy. If
one of the elective bodies above specified is
dissatisfied with a resolution of the Council, it may
replace its representative by another.
  Even if this "Privy Council" has no definite
powers, it may nevertheless bring about the gradual
composition of differences, and secure a united
representation of the common interests of the
country before the mandatory power, clear of the
dust of ephemeral politics.

THE JEWISH COMMUNITY

A speech delivered at the Savoy Hotel, London,
October 29, 1930. Published in Mein Weltbild,
Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:
  It is no easy matter for me to overcome my natural
inclination to a life of quiet contemplation. But I
could not remain deaf to the appeal of the ORT and
OZE societies [Jewish charitable associations.]; for
in responding to it I am responding, as it were, to
the appeal of our sorely oppressed Jewish nation.
  The position of our scattered Jewish community is
a moral barometer for the political world. For what
surer index of political morality and respect for
justice can there be than the attitude of the nations
toward a defenseless minority, whose peculiarity
lies in their preservation of an ancient cultural
tradition?
  This barometer is low at the present moment, as
we are painfully aware from the way we are treated.
But it is this very lowness that confirms me in the
conviction that it is our duty to preserve and
consolidate our community. Embedded in the
tradition of the Jewish people there is a love of
justice and reason which must continue to work for
the good of all nations now and in the future. In
modern times this tradition has produced Spinoza
and Karl Marx.
  Those who would preserve the spirit must also
look after the body to which it is attached. The
OZE society literally looks after the bodies of our
people. In Eastern Europe it is working day and
night to help our people there, on whom the
economic depression has fallen particularly heavily,
to keep body and soul together; while the ORT
society is trying to get rid of a severe social and
economic handicap under which the Jews have
labored since the Middle Ages. Because we were
then excluded from all directly productive
occupations, we were forced into the purely
commercial ones. The only way of really helping the
Jew in eastern countries is to give him access to new
fields of activity, for which he is struggling all over
the world. This is the grave problem which the ORT
society is successfully tackling.
  It is to you English fellow-Jews that we now
appeal to help us in this great enterprise which
splendid men have set on foot. The last few years,
nay, the last few days have brought us a
disappointment which must have touched you
particularly. Do not gird at fate but rather look on
these events as a reason for remaining true to the
cause of the Jewish commonwealth. I am convinced
that in doing so we shall also indirectly be
promoting those general human ends which we must
always recognize as the highest.
  Remember that difficulties and obstacles are a
valuable source of health and strength to any
society. We should not have survived for thousands
of years as a community if our bed had been of
roses; of that I am quite sure.
  But we have a still fairer consolation. Our friends
are not exactly numerous, but among them are men
of noble spirit endowed with a strong sense of
justice, who have devoted their lives to uplifting
human society and liberating the individual from
degrading oppression.

* * *

  To you all I say that the existence and destiny of
our people depends less on external factors than on
ourselves. It is our duty to remain faithful to the
moral traditions which have enabled us to survive
for thousands of years despite the heavy storms
that have broken over our heads. In the service of
life sacrifice becomes grace.

ADDRESSES ON RECONSTRUCTION IN
PALESTINE

From 1920 on, observing the spread of
anti-Semitism in Germany after World War I,
Einstein, who up to that time had expressed little
interest in religious matters, became a strong
supporter of the Zionist movement. In 1921 he came
to New York, with Professor Chaim Weizmann, later
to become the first president of the State of Israel, to
raise funds for the Jewish National Fund and the
Hebrew University in Jerusalem (founded in 1918).
The first three talks below were delivered, however,
during his third visit to the United States in 1931-32.
(His second American visit had occurred in 1930.)
The fourth talk was made many years earlier upon
his return from America to Berlin in 1921, while the
fifth, though more recent, nevertheless pre-dated his
settling in Princeton (1933). All were published in
Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

I.

  Ten years ago, when I first had the pleasure of
addressing you in behalf of the Zionist cause, almost
all our hopes were still fixed on the future. Today
we can look back on these ten years with joy; for in
that time the united energies of the Jewish people
have accomplished a piece of splendidly successful,
constructive work in Palestine, which certainly
exceeds anything that we dared then to hope for.
  We have also successfully stood the severe test to
which the events of the last few years have
subjected us. Ceaseless work, supported by a noble
purpose, is leading slowly but surely to success.
The latest pronouncements of the British
government indicate a return to a juster judgment of
our case; this we recognize with gratitude.
  But we must never forget what this crisis has
taught us--namely, that the establishment of
satisfactory relations between the Jews and the
Arabs is not England's affair but ours. We--that is to
say, the Arabs and ourselves--have got to agree on
the main outlines of an advantageous partnership
which shall satisfy the needs of both nations. A just
solution of this problem and one worthy of both
nations is an end no less important and no less
worthy of our efforts than the promotion of the
work of construction itself. Remember that
Switzerland represents a higher stage of political
development than any national state, precisely
because of the greater political problems which had
to be solved before a stable community could be
built up out of groups of different nationality.
  Much remains to be done, but one at least of
Herzl's aims has already been realized: the Palestine
job has given the Jewish people an astonishing
degree of solidarity and the optimism without which
no organism can lead a healthy life.
  Anything we may do for the common purpose is
done not merely for our brothers in Palestine but for
the well-being and honor of the whole Jewish
people.

II.

  We are assembled today for the purpose of
recalling to mind our age-old community, its destiny
and its problems. It is a community of moral
tradition, which has always shown its strength and
vitality in times of stress. In all ages it has produced
men who embodied the conscience of the western
world, defenders of human dignity and justice.
  So long as we ourselves care about this community
it will continue to exist to the benefit of mankind, in
spite of the fact that it possesses no self-contained
organization. A decade or two ago a group of
far-sighted men, among whom the unforgettable
Herzl stood out above the rest, came to the
conclusion that we needed a spiritual center in order
to preserve our sense of solidarity in difficult times.
Thus arose the idea of Zionism and the work of
settlement in Palestine, the successful realization of
which we have been permitted to witness, at least in
its highly promising beginnings.
  I have had the privilege of seeing, to my great joy
and satisfaction, how much this achievement has
contributed to the convalescence of the Jewish
people; for the Jews are exposed, as a minority
among the nations, not merely to external dangers
but also to internal ones of a psychological nature.
  The crisis which the work of construction has had
to face in the last few years has lain heavy upon us
and is not yet completely surmounted. But the most
recent reports show that the world, and especially
the British government, is disposed to recognize the
great things which lie behind our struggle for the
Zionist ideal. Let us at this moment remember with
gratitude our leader Weizmann, whose zeal and
circumspection helped the good cause to success.
  The difficulties we have been through have also
brought some good in their train. They have shown
us once more how strong is the bond which unites
the Jews of all countries in a common destiny. The
crisis has also purified our attitude to the question
of Palestine, purged it of the dross of nationalism. It
has been clearly proclaimed that we are not seeking
to create a political society, but that our aim is, in
accordance with the old tradition of Jewry, a
cultural one in the widest sense of the world. That
being so, it is for us to solve the problem of living
side by side with our brother the Arab in an open,
generous, and worthy manner. We have here an
opportunity of showing what we have learned in the
thousands of years of our martyrdom. If we choose
the right path, we shall succeed and give the rest of
the world a fine example.
  Whatever we do for Palestine, we do it for the
honor and well-being of the whole Jewish people.

III.

  I am delighted to have the opportunity of
addressing a few words to the youth of this country
which is faithful to the common aims of Jewry. Do
not be discouraged by the difficulties which
confront us in Palestine. Such things serve to test
the will to live of our community.
  Certain proceedings and pronouncements of the
English administration have been justly criticized.
We must not, however, let the matter rest at that,
but draw what lesson we can from the experience.
  We need to pay great attention to our relations
with the Arabs. By cultivating these carefully we
shall be able in future to prevent things from
becoming so dangerously strained that people can
take advantage of them to provoke acts of hostility.
This goal is perfectly within our reach, because our
work of construction has been, and must continue to
be, carried out in such a manner as to serve the real
interests of the Arab population also.
  In this way we shall be able to avoid getting
ourselves quite so often into the position,
disagreeable for Jews and Arabs alike, of having to
call in the mandatory power as arbitrator. We shall
thereby be following not merely the dictates of
Providence but also our traditions, which alone give
the Jewish community meaning and stability. For
our community is not, and must never become, a
political one; this is the only permanent source
whence it can draw new strength and the only
ground on which its existence can be justified.

IV.

  For the last two thousand years the common
property of the Jewish people has consisted
entirely of its past. Scattered over the wide world,
our nation possessed nothing in common except its
carefully guarded tradition. Individual Jews no
doubt produced great work, but it seemed as if the
Jewish people as a whole had not the strength left
for great collective achievements.
  Now all that is changed. History has set us a great
and noble task in the shape of active cooperation in
the building up of Palestine. Eminent members of
our race are already at work with all their might on
the realization of this aim. The opportunity is
presented to us of setting up centers of civilization
which the whole Jewish people can regard as its
work. We nurse the hope of erecting in Palestine a
home of our own national culture which shall help
to awaken the Near East to new economic and
spiritual life.
  The object which the leaders of Zionism have
before their eyes is not a political but a social and
cultural one. The community in Palestine must
approach the social ideal of our forefathers as it is
laid down in the Bible, and at the same time become
a seat of modern intellectual life, a spiritual center
for the Jews of the whole world. In accordance with
this notion, the establishment of a Jewish university
in Jerusalem constitutes one of the most important
aims of the Zionist organization.
  During the last few months I have been to America
in order to help raise the material basis for this
University there. The success of this enterprise was
a natural one. Thanks to the untiring energy and
splendid self-sacrificing spirit of the Jewish doctors
in America we have succeeded in collecting enough
money for the creation of a Medical Faculty, and
the preliminary work is being started at once. After
this success I have no doubt that the material basis
for the other faculties will soon be forthcoming. The
Medical Faculty is first of all to be developed as a
research institute and to concentrate on making the
country healthy, a most important item in the work
of development. Teaching on a large scale will only
become important later on. As a number of highly
competent scientific workers have already signified
their readiness to take up appointments at the
University, the establishment of a Medical Faculty
seems to be placed beyond all doubt. I may add that
a special fund for the University, entirely distinct
from the general fund for the development of the
country, has been opened. For the latter,
considerable sums have been collected during these
months in America, thanks to the indefatigable
labors of Professor Weizmann and other Zionist
leaders, chiefly through the self-sacrificing spirit of
the middle classes. I conclude with a warm appeal to
the Jews in Germany to contribute all they can, in
spite of the present economic difficulties, for the
building up of the Jewish home in Palestine. This is
not a matter of charity but an enterprise which
concerns all Jews and the success of which promises
to be a source of the highest satisfaction to all.

V.

  For us Jews, Palestine is not just a charitable or
colonial enterprise, but a problem of central
importance for the Jewish people. Palestine is not
primarily a place of refuge for the Jews of Eastern
Europe but the embodiment of the re-awakening
corporate spirit of the whole Jewish nation. Is it the
right moment for this corporate sense to be
awakened and strengthened? This is a question to
which I feel compelled, not merely by my
spontaneous feelings but on rational grounds, to
return an unqualified "yes."
  Let us just cast our eyes over the history of the
Jews in Germany during the past hundred years. A
century ago our forefathers, with few exceptions,
lived in the ghetto. They were poor, without
political rights, separated from the Gentiles by a
barrier of religious traditions, habits of life, and legal
restrictions; their intellectual development was
restricted to their own literature, and they had
remained almost unaffected by the mighty advance
of the European intellect which dates from the
Renaissance. And yet these obscure, humble people
had one great advantage over us: each of them
belonged in every fiber of his being to a community
in which he was completely absorbed, in which he
felt himself a fully privileged member, and which
demanded nothing of him that was contrary to his
natural habit of thought. Our forefathers in those
days were pretty poor specimens intellectually and
physically, but socially speaking they enjoyed an
enviable spiritual equilibrium.
  Then came emancipation, which suddenly opened
up undreamed-of possibilities to the individual.
Some few rapidly made a position for themselves in
the higher walks of business and social life. They
greedily lapped up the splendid triumphs which the
art and science of the western world had achieved.
They joined in the process with burning enthusiasm,
themselves making contributions of lasting value. At
the same time they imitated the external forms of
Gentile life, departed more and more from their
religious and social traditions, and adopted Gentile
customs, manners, and habits of thought. It seemed
as though they were completely losing their identity
in the superior numbers and more highly organized
culture of the nations among whom they lived, so
that in a few generations there would be no trace of
them left. A complete disappearance of Jewish
nationality in Central and Western Europe seemed
inevitable.
  But events turned out otherwise. Nationalities of
different race seem to have an instinct which
prevents them from fusing. However much the Jews
adapted themselves, in language, manners, and to a
great extent even in the forms of religion, to the
European peoples among whom they lived, the
feeling of strangeness between the Jews and their
hosts never disappeared. This spontaneous feeling
is the ultimate cause of anti-Semitism, which is,
therefore, not to be got rid of by well-meaning
propaganda. Nationalities want to pursue their own
path, not to blend. A satisfactory state of affairs can
only be brought about by mutual toleration and
respect.
  The first step in that direction is that we Jews
should once more become conscious of our existence
as a nationality and regain the self-respect that is
necessary to a healthy existence. We must learn
once more to glory in our ancestors and our history
and once again take upon ourselves, as a nation,
cultural tasks of a sort calculated to strengthen our
sense of the community. It is not enough for us to
play a part as individuals in the cultural
development of the human race; we must also tackle
tasks which only nations as a whole can perform.
Only so can the Jews regain social health.
  It is from this point of view that I would have you
look at the Zionist movement. Today history has
assigned to us the task of taking an active part in the
economic and cultural reconstruction of our native
land. Enthusiasts, men of brilliant gifts, have cleared
the way, and many excellent members of our race
are prepared to devote themselves heart and soul to
the cause. May every one of them fully realize the
importance of this work and contribute, according to
his powers, to its success!

WORKING PALESTINE

  Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  Among Zionist organizations "Working Palestine"
is the one whose work is of most direct benefit to
the most valuable class of people living there,
namely, those who are transforming deserts into
flourishing settlements by the labor of their hands.
These workers are a selection, made on the
voluntary basis, from the whole Jewish nation, an
elite composed of strong, confident, and unselfish
people. They are not ignorant laborers who sell the
labor of their hands to the highest bidder, but
educated, intellectually vigorous, free men, from
whose peaceful struggle with a neglected soil the
whole Jewish nation are the gainers, directly and
indirectly. By lightening their heavy lot as far as we
can we shall be saving the most valuable sort of
human life; for the first settlers' struggle on ground
not yet made habitable is a difficult and dangerous
business involving a heavy personal sacrifice. How
true this is, only they can judge who have seen it
with their own eyes. Anyone who helps to improve
the equipment of these men is helping on the good
work at a crucial point.
  It is, moreover, this working class alone that has
the power to establish healthy relations with the
Arabs, which is the most important political task of
Zionism. Administrations come and go; but it is
human relations that finally tune the scale in the
lives of nations. Therefore to support "Working
Palestine" is at the same time to promote a humane
and worthy policy in Palestine and to oppose an
effective resistance to those undercurrents of narrow
nationalism from which the whole political world,
and in a less degree the small political world of
Palestine affairs, is suffering.

JEWISH RECOVERY

  Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  I gladly accede to your paper's request that I
should address an appeal to the Jews of Hungary on
behalf of Keren Hajessod.
  The greatest enemies of the national consciousness
and honor of the Jews are fatty degeneration--by
which I mean the unconscionableness which comes
from wealth and ease--and a kind of inner
dependence on the surrounding Gentile world which
has grown out of the loosening of the fabric of
Jewish society. The best in man can only flourish
when he loses himself in a community. Hence the
moral danger of the Jew who has lost touch with his
own people and is regarded as a foreigner by the
people of his adoption. Only too often a
contemptible and joyless egoism has resulted from
such circumstances. The weight of outward
oppression on the Jewish people is particularly
heavy at the moment. But this very bitterness has
done us good. A revival of Jewish national life, such
as the last generation could never have dreamed of,
has begun. Through the operation of a newly
awakened sense of solidarity among the Jews, the
scheme of colonizing Palestine, launched by a
handful of devoted and judicious leaders in the face
of apparently insuperable difficulties, has already
prospered so far that I feel no doubt about its
permanent success. The value of this achievement
for the Jews everywhere is very great. Palestine will
be a center of culture for all Jews, a refuge for the
most grievously oppressed, a field of action for the
best among us, a unifying ideal, and a means of
attaining inward health for the Jews of the whole
world.

CHRISTIANITY AND JUDAISM

  Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  If one purges the Judaism of the Prophets and
Christianity as Jesus Christ taught it of all
subsequent additions, especially those of the
priests, one is left with a teaching which is capable
of curing all the social ills of humanity.
  It is the duty of every man of good will to strive
steadfastly in his own little world to make this
teaching of pure humanity a living force, so far as he
can. If he makes an honest attempt in this direction
without being crushed and trampled underfoot by
his contemporaries, he may consider himself and the
community to which he belongs lucky.

JEWISH IDEALS

  Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an
almost fanatical love of justice and the desire for
personal independence--these are the features of the
Jewish tradition which make me thank my stars that
I belong to it.
  Those who are raging today against the ideals of
reason and individual liberty and are trying to
establish a spiritless state-slavery by brute force
rightly see in us their irreconcilable foes. History
has given us a difficult row to hoe; but so long as we
remain devoted servants of truth, justice, and
liberty, we shall continue not merely to survive as
the oldest of living peoples, but by creative work to
bring forth fruits which contribute to the
ennoblement of the human race, as heretofore.

IS THERE A JEWISH POINT OF VIEW?

  Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  In the philosophical sense there is, in my opinion,
no specifically Jewish point of view. Judaism seems
to me to be concerned almost exclusively with the
moral attitude in life and to life. I look upon it as the
essence of an attitude to life which is incarnate in
the Jewish people rather than the essence of the
entirely to the others; the while he tries in vain to
conceal from himself and them the fact that the
relation is not reciprocal. Hence that pathetic
creature, the baptized Jewish Geheimrat of
yesterday and today. In most cases it is not
pushfulness and lack of character that have made
him what he is but, as I have said, the suggestive
power of an environment superior in numbers and
influence. He knows, of course, that many admirable
sons of the Jewish people have made important
contributions to the glory of European civilization;
but have they not all, with a few exceptions, done
much the same as he?
  In this case, as in many mental disorders, the cure
lies in a clear knowledge of one's condition and its
causes. We must be conscious of our alien race and
draw the logical conclusions from it. It is no use
trying to convince the others of our spiritual and
intellectual equality by arguments addressed to the
reason, when the attitude of these others does not
originate in their intellects at all. Rather must we
emancipate ourselves socially, and supply our social
needs, in the main, ourselves. We must have our
own students' societies and adopt an attitude of
courteous but consistent reserve to the Gentiles.
And let us live after our own fashion there and not
ape dueling and drinking customs which are foreign
to our nature. It is possible to be a civilized
European and a good citizen and at the same time a
faithful Jew who loves his race and honors his
fathers. If we remember this and act accordingly, the
problem of anti-Semitism, in so far as it is of a social
nature, is solved for us.

OUR DEBT TO ZIONISM

From an address on the occasion of the celebration
of the "Third Seder" by the National Labor
Committee for Palestine, at the Commodore Hotel in
New York City, April 17, 1938. Published in New
Palestine, Washington, D. C.: April 28, 1938.

  Rarely since the conquest of Jerusalem by Titus
has the Jewish community experienced a period of
greater oppression than prevails at the present time.
In some respects, indeed, our own time is even more
troubled, for man's possibilities of emigration are
more limited today than they were then.
  Yet we shall survive this period, too, no matter
how much sorrow, no matter how heavy a loss in
life it may bring. A community like ours, which is a
community purely by reason of tradition, can only
be strengthened by pressure from without. For
today every Jew feels that to be a Jew means to
bear a serious responsibility not only to his own
community, but also toward humanity. To be a Jew,
after all, means first of all, to acknowledge and
follow in practice those fundamentals in
humaneness laid down in the Bible--fundamentals
without which no sound and happy community of
men can exist.
  We meet today because of our concern for the
development of Palestine. In this hour one thing,
above all, must be emphasized: Judaism owes a
great debt of gratitude to Zionism. The Zionist
movement has revived among Jews the sense of
community. It has performed productive work
surpassing all the expectations anyone could
entertain. This productive work in Palestine, to
which self-sacrificing Jews throughout the world
have contributed, has saved a large number of our
brethren from direst need. In particular, it has been
possible to lead a not inconsiderable part of our
youth toward a life of joyous and creative work.
  Now the fateful disease of our time---exaggerated
nationalism, borne up by blind hatred--has brought
our work in Palestine to a most difficult stage.
Fields cultivated by day must have armed
protection at night against fanatical Arab outlaws.
All economic life suffers from insecurity. The spirit
of enterprise languishes and a certain measure of
unemployment (modest when measured by
American standards) has made its appearance.
  The solidarity and confidence with which our
brethren in Palestine face these difficulties deserve
our admiration. Voluntary contributions by those
still employed keep the unemployed above water.
Spirits remain high, in the conviction that reason and
calm will ultimately reassert themselves. Everyone
knows that the riots are artificially fomented by
those directly interested in embarrassing not only
ourselves but especially England. Everyone knows
that banditry would cease if foreign subsidies were
withdrawn.
  Our brethren in other countries, however, are in no
way behind those in Palestine. They, too, will not
lose heart but will resolutely and firmly stand
behind the common work. This goes without saying.
  Just one more personal word on the question of
partition. I should much rather see reasonable
agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living
together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state.
Apart from practical consideration, my awareness
of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of
a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure
of temporal power no matter how modest. I am
afraid of the inner damage Judaism will
sustain--especially from the development of a
narrow nationalism within our own ranks, against
which we have already had to fight strongly, even
without a Jewish state. We are no longer the Jews of
the Maccabee period. A return to a nation in the
political sense of the word would be equivalent to
turning away from the spiritualization of our
community which we owe to the genius of our
prophets. If external necessity should after all
compel us to assume this burden, let us bear it with
tact and patience.
  One more word on the present psychological
attitude of the world at large, upon which our
Jewish destiny also depends. Anti-Semitism has
always been the cheapest means employed by
selfish minorities for deceiving the people. A
tyranny based on such deception and maintained by
terror must inevitably perish from the poison it
generates within itself. For the pressure of
accumulated injustice strengthens those moral forces
in man which lead to a liberation and purification of
public life. May our community through its
suffering and its work contribute toward the release
of those liberating forces.

WHY DO THEY HATE THE JEWS?

  From Collier's Magazine, New York, November 26,
1938.

  I should like to begin by telling you an ancient
fable, with a few minor changes--a fable that will
serve to throw into bold relief the mainsprings of
political anti-Semitism:
  The shepherd boy said to the horse: "You are the
noblest beast that treads the earth. You deserve to
live in untroubled bliss; and indeed your happiness
would be complete were it not for the treacherous
stag. But he practiced from youth to excel you in
fleetness of foot. His faster pace allows him to reach
the water holes before you do. He and his tribe
drink up the water far and wide, while you and your
foal are left to thirst. Stay with me! My wisdom
and guidance shall deliver you and your kind from a
dismal and ignominious state."
  Blinded by envy and hatred of the stag, the horse
agreed. He yielded to the shepherd lad's bridle. He
lost his freedom and became the shepherd's slave.
  The horse in this fable represents a people, and the
shepherd lad a class or clique aspiring to absolute
rule over the people; the stag, on the other hand,
represents the Jews.
  I can hear you say: "A most unlikely tale! No
creature would be as foolish as the horse in your
fable." But let us give it a little more thought. The
horse had been suffering the pangs of thirst, and his
vanity was often pricked when he saw the nimble
stag outrunning him. You, who have known no such
pain and vexation, may find it difficult to
understand that hatred and blindness should have
driven the horse to act with such ill-advised, gullible
haste. The horse, however, fell an easy victim to
temptation because his earlier tribulations had
prepared him for such a blunder. For there is much
truth in the saying that it is easy to give just and
wise counsel--to others!--but hard to act justly and
wisely for oneself. I say to you with full conviction:
We all have often played the tragic role of the horse
and we are in constant danger of yielding to
temptation again.
  The situation illustrated in this fable happens again
and again in the life of individuals and nations. In
brief, we may call it the process by which dislike
and hatred of a given person or group are diverted to
another person or group incapable of effective
defense. But why did the r⌠le of the stag in the fable
so often fall to the Jews? Why did the Jews so often
happen to draw the hatred of the masses? Primarily
because there are Jews among almost all nations and
because they are everywhere too thinly scattered to
defend themselves against violent attack.
  A few examples from the recent past will prove
the point: Toward the end of the nineteenth century
the Russian people were chafing under the tyranny
of their government. Stupid blunders in foreign
policy further strained their temper until it reached
the breaking point. In this extremity the rulers of
Russia sought to divert unrest by inciting the
masses to hatred and violence toward the Jews.
These tactics were repeated after the Russian
government had drowned the dangerous revolution
of 1905 in blood--and this maneuver may well have
helped to keep the hated regime in power until near
the end of the World War.
  When the Germans had lost the World War
hatched by their ruling class, immediate attempts
were made to blame the Jews, first for instigating
the war and then for losing it. In the course of time,
success attended these efforts. The hatred
engendered against the Jews not only protected the
privileged classes, but enabled a small,
unscrupulous, and insolent group to place the
German people in a state of complete bondage.
  The crimes with which the Jews have been charged
in the course of history--crimes which were to
justify the atrocities perpetrated against them--have
changed in rapid succession. They were supposed
to have poisoned wells. They were said to have
murdered children for ritual purposes. They were
falsely charged with a systematic attempt at the
economic domination and exploitation of all
mankind. Pseudo-scientific books were written to
brand them an inferior, dangerous race. They were
reputed to foment wars and revolutions for their
own selfish purposes. They were presented at once
as dangerous innovators and as enemies of true
progress. They were charged with falsifying the
culture of nations by penetrating the national life
under the guise of becoming assimilated. In the same
breath they were accused of being so stubbornly
inflexible that it was impossible for them to fit into
any society.
  Almost beyond imagination were the charges
brought against them, charges known to their
instigators to be untrue all the while, but which time
and again influenced the masses. In times of unrest
and turmoil the masses are inclined to hatred and
cruelty, whereas in times of peace these traits of
human nature emerge but stealthily.
  Up to this point I have spoken only of violence
and oppression against the Jews--not of
anti-Semitism itself as a psychological and social
phenomenon existing even in times and
circumstances when no special action against the
Jews is under way. In this sense, one may speak of
latent anti-Semitism. What is its basis? I believe that
in a certain sense one may actually regard it as a
normal manifestation in the life of a people.
  The members of any group existing in a nation are
more closely bound to one another than they are to
the remaining population. Hence a nation will never
be free of friction while such groups continue to be
distinguishable. In my belief, uniformity in a
population would not be desirable, even if it were
attainable. Common convictions and aims, similar
interests, will in every society produce groups that,
in a certain sense, act as units. There will always be
friction between such groups--the same sort of
aversion and rivalry that exists between individuals.
  The need for such groupings is perhaps most
easily seen in one field of politics, in the formation
of political parties. Without parties the political
interests of the citizens of any state are bound to
languish. There would be no forum for the free
exchange of opinions. The individual would be
isolated and unable to assert his convictions.
Political convictions, moreover, ripen and grow only
through mutual stimulation and criticism offered by
individuals of similar disposition and purpose; and
politics is no different from any other field of our
cultural existence. Thus it is recognized, for
example, that in times of intense religious fervor
different sects are likely to spring up whose rivalry
stimulates religious life in general. It is well known,
on the other hand, that centralization--that is,
elimination of independent groups--leads to
one-sidedness and barrenness in science and art
because such centralization checks and even
suppresses any rivalry of opinions and research
trends.

JUST WHAT IS A JEW?

  The formation of groups has an invigorating effect
in all spheres of human striving, perhaps mostly due
to the struggle between the convictions and aims
represented by the different groups. The Jews, too,
form such a group with a definite character of its
own, and anti-Semitism is nothing but the
antagonistic attitude produced in the non-Jews by
the Jewish group. This is a normal social reaction.
But for the political abuse resulting from it, it might
never have been designated by a special name.
  What are the characteristics of the Jewish group?
What, in the first place, is a Jew? There are no quick
answers to this question. The most obvious answer
would be the following: A Jew is a person
professing the Jewish faith. The superficial
character of this answer is easily recognized by
means of a simple parallel. Let us ask the question:
What is a snail? An answer similar in kind to the one
given above might be: A snail is an animal inhabiting
a snail shell. This answer is not altogether incorrect;
nor, to be sure, is it exhaustive; for the snail shell
happens to be but one of the material products of
the snail. Similarly, the Jewish faith is but one of the
characteristic products of the Jewish community. It
is, furthermore, known that a snail can shed its shell
without thereby ceasing to be a snail. The Jew who
abandons his faith (in the formal sense of the word)
is in a similar position. He remains a Jew.
  Difficulties of this kind appear whenever one seeks
to explain the essential character of a group.
  The bond that has united the Jews for thousands
of years and that unites them today is, above all, the
democratic ideal of social justice, coupled with the
ideal of mutual aid and tolerance among all men.
Even the most ancient religious scriptures of the
Jews are steeped in these social ideals, which have
powerfully affected Christianity and
Mohammedanism and have had a benign influence
upon the social structure of a great part of mankind.
The introduction of a weekly day of rest should be
remembered here--a profound blessing to all
mankind. Personalities such as Moses, Spinoza, and
Karl Marx, dissimilar as they may be, all lived and
sacrificed themselves for the ideal of social justice;
and it was the tradition of their forefathers that led
them on this thorny path. The unique
accomplishments of the Jews in the field of
philanthropy spring from the same source.
  The second characteristic trait of Jewish tradition
is the high regard in which it holds every form of
intellectual aspiration and spiritual effort. I am
convinced that this great respect for intellectual
striving is solely responsible for the contributions
that the Jews have made toward the progress of
knowledge, in the broadest sense of the term. In
view of their relatively small number and the
considerable external obstacles constantly placed in
their way on all sides, the extent of those
contributions deserves the admiration of all sincere
men. I am convinced that this is not due to any
special wealth of endowment, but to the fact that
the esteem in which intellectual accomplishment is
held among the Jews creates an atmosphere
particularly favorable to the development of any
talents that may exist. At the same time a strong
critical spirit prevents blind obeisance to any mortal
authority.
  I have confined myself here to these two
traditional traits, which seem to me the most basic.
These standards and ideals find expression in small
things as in large. They are transmitted from parents
to children; they color conversation and judgment
among friends; they fill the religious scriptures; and
they give to the community life of the group its
characteristic stamp. It is in these distinctive ideals
that I see the essence of Jewish nature. That these
ideals are but imperfectly realized in the group--in
its actual everyday life--is only natural. However, if
one seeks to give brief expression to the essential
character of a group, the approach must always be
by the way of the ideal.

WHERE OPPRESSION IS A STIMULUS

  In the foregoing I have conceived of Judaism as a
community of tradition. Both friend and foe, on the
other hand, have often asserted that the Jews
represent a race; that their characteristic behavior is
the result of innate qualities transmitted by heredity
from one generation to the next. This opinion gains
weight from the fact that the Jews for thousands of
years have predominantly married within their own
group. Such a custom may indeed preserve a
homogeneous race--if it existed originally; it cannot
produce uniformity of the race--if there was
originally a racial intermixture. The Jews, however,
are beyond doubt a mixed race, just as are all other
groups of our civilization. Sincere anthropologists
are agreed on this point; assertions to the contrary
all belong to the field of political propaganda and
must be rated accordingly.
  Perhaps even more than on its own tradition, the
Jewish group has thrived on oppression and on the
antagonism it has forever met in the world. Here
undoubtedly lies one of the main reasons for its
continued existence through so many thousands of
years.
  The Jewish group, which we have briefly
characterized in the foregoing, embraces about
sixteen million people--less than one per cent of
mankind, or about half as many as the population of
present-day Poland. Their significance as a political
factor is negligible. They are scattered over almost
the entire earth and are in no way organized as a
whole--which means that they are incapable of
concerted action of any kind.
  Were anyone to form a picture of the Jews solely
from the utterances of their enemies, he would have
to reach the conclusion that they represent a world
power. At first sight that seems downright absurd;
and yet, in my view, there is a certain meaning
behind it. The Jews as a group may be powerless,
but the sum of the achievements of their individual
members is everywhere considerable and telling,
even though these achievements were made in the
face of obstacles. The forces dormant in the
individual are mobilized, and the individual himself
is stimulated to self-sacrificing effort, by the spirit
that is alive in the group.
  Hence the hatred of the Jews by those who have
reason to shun popular enlightenment. More than
anything else in the world, they fear the influence of
men of intellectual independence. I see in this the
essential cause for the savage hatred of Jews raging
in present-day Germany. To the Nazi group the
Jews are not merely a means for turning the
resentment of the people away from themselves, the
oppressors; they see the Jews as a nonassimilable
element that cannot be driven into uncritical
acceptance of dogma, and that, therefore--as long as
it exists at all--threatens their authority because of
its insistence on popular enlightenment of the
masses.
  Proof that this conception goes to the heart of the
matter is convincingly furnished by the solemn
ceremony of the burning of the books staged by the
Nazi regime shortly after its seizure of power. This
act, senseless from a political point of view, can
only be understood as a spontaneous emotional
outburst. For that reason it seems to me more
revealing than many acts of greater purpose and
practical importance.
  In the field of politics and social science there has
grown up a justified distrust of generalizations
pushed too far. When thought is too greatly
dominated by such generalizations,
misinterpretations of specific sequences of cause
and effect readily occur, doing injustice to the actual
multiplicity of events. Abandonment of
generalization, on the other hand, means to
relinquish understanding altogether. For that reason
I believe one may and must risk generalization, as
long as one remains aware of its uncertainty. It is in
this spirit that I wish to present in all modesty my
conception of anti-Semitism, considered from a
general point of view.
  In political life I see two opposed tendencies at
work, locked in constant struggle with each other.
The first, optimistic trend proceeds from the belief
that the free unfolding of the productive forces of
individuals and groups essentially leads to a
satisfactory state of society. It recognizes the need
for a central power, placed above groups and
individuals, but concedes to such power only
organizational and regulatory functions. The second,
pessimistic trend assumes that free interplay of
individuals and groups leads to the destruction of
society; it thus seeks to base society exclusively
upon authority, blind obedience, and coercion.
Actually this trend is pessimistic only to a limited
extent: for it is optimistic in regard to those who are,
and desire to be, the bearers of power and authority.
The adherents of this second trend are the enemies
of the free groups and of education for independent
thought. They are, moreover, the carriers of political
anti-Semitism.
  Here in America all pay lip service to the first,
optimistic, tendency. Nevertheless, the second
group is strongly represented. It appears on the
scene everywhere, though for the most part it hides
its true nature. Its aim is political and spiritual
dominion over the people by a minority, by the
circuitous route of control over the means of
production. Its proponents have already tried to
utilize the weapon of anti-Semitism as well as of
hostility to various other groups. They will repeat
the attempt in times to come. So far all such
tendencies have failed because of the people's sound
political instinct.
  And so it will remain in the future, if we cling to
the rule: Beware of flatterers, especially when they
come preaching hatred.

THE DISPERSAL OF EUROPEAN JEWRY

From an address by radio for the United Jewish
Appeal, broadcast March 22, 1939. Published in
Out of My Later Years, New York: Philosophical
Library, 1950.

  The history of the persecutions which the Jewish
people have had to suffer is almost inconceivably
long. Yet the war that is being waged against us in
Central Europe today falls into a special category of
its own. In the past we were persecuted despite the
fact that we were the people of the Bible; today,
however, it is just because we are the people of the
Book that we are persecuted. The aim is to
exterminate not only ourselves but to destroy,
together with us, that spirit expressed in the Bible
and in Christianity which made possible the rise of
civilization in Central and Northern Europe. If this
aim is achieved, Europe will become a barren waste.
For human community life cannot long endure on a
basis of crude force, brutality, terror, and hate.
  Only understanding for our neighbors, justice in
our dealings, and willingness to help our fellow men
can give human society permanence and assure
security for the individual. Neither intelligence nor
inventions nor institutions can serve as substitutes
for these most vital parts of education.
  Many Jewish communities have been uprooted in
the wake of the present upheaval in Europe.
Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and
children have been driven from their homes and
made to wander in despair over the highways of the
world. The tragedy of the Jewish people today is a
tragedy which reflects a challenge to the
fundamental structure of modern civilization.
  One of the most tragic aspects of the oppression
of Jews and other groups has been the creation of a
refugee class. Many distinguished men in science,
art, and literature have been driven from the lands
which they enriched with their talents. In a period
of economic decline these exiles have within them
the possibilities for reviving economic and cultural
effort; many of these refugees are highly skilled
experts in industry and science. They have a
valuable contribution to make to the progress of the
world. They are in a position to repay hospitality
with new economic development and the opening
up of new opportunities of employment for native
populations. I am told that in England the admission
of refugees was directly responsible for giving jobs
to 15,000 unemployed.
  As one of the former citizens of Germany who
have been fortunate enough to leave that country, I
know I can speak for my fellow refugees, both here
and in other countries, when I give thanks to the
democracies of the world for the splendid manner in
which they have received us. We, all of us, owe a
debt of gratitude to our new countries, and each and
every one of us is doing the utmost to show our
gratitude by the quality of our contributions to the
economic, social, and cultural work of the countries
in which we reside.
  It is, however, a source of gravest concern that the
ranks of the refugees are being constantly increased.
The developments of the past week have added
several hundred thousand potential refugees from
Czechoslovakia. Again we are confronted with a
major tragedy for a Jewish community which had a
noble tradition of democracy and communal service.
  The power of resistance which has enabled the
Jewish people to survive for thousands of years is a
direct outgrowth of Jewish adherence to the Biblical
doctrines on the relationships among men. In these
years of affliction our readiness to help one another
is being put to an especially severe test. Each of us
must personally face this test, that we may stand it
as well as our fathers did before us. We have no
other means of self-defense than our solidarity and
our knowledge that the cause for which we are
suffering is a momentous and sacred cause.

THE JEWS OF ISRAEL

From a radio broadcast for the United Jewish
Appeal, November 27, 1949. Published in Out of
My Later Years, New York: Philosophical Library,
1950.

  There is no problem of such overwhelming
importance to us Jews as consolidating that which
has been accomplished in Israel with amazing energy
and an unequaled willingness for sacrifice. May the
joy and admiration that fill us when we think of all
that this small group of energetic and thoughtful
people has achieved give us the strength to accept
the great responsibility which the present situation
has placed upon us.
  When appraising the achievement, however, let us
not lose sight of the cause to be served by this
achievement: rescue of our endangered brethren,
dispersed in many lands, by uniting them in Israel;
creation of a community which conforms as closely
as possible to the ethical ideals of our people as
they have been formed in the course of a long
history.
  One of these ideals is peace, based on
understanding and self-restraint, and not on
violence. If we are imbued with this ideal, our joy
becomes somewhat mingled with sadness, because
our relations with the Arabs are far from this ideal at
the present time. It may well be that we would have
reached this ideal, had we been permitted to work
out, undisturbed by others, our relations with our
neighbors, for we want peace and we realize that our
future development depends on peace.
  It was much less our own fault or that of our
neighbors than of the Mandatory Power that we did
not achieve an undivided Palestine in which Jews
and Arabs would live as equals, free, in peace. If one
nation dominates other nations, as was the case in
the British Mandate over Palestine, she can hardly
avoid following the notorious device of Divide et
Impera. In plain language this means: create discord
among the governed people so they will not unite in
order to shake off the yoke imposed upon them.
Well, the yoke has been removed, but the seed of
dissension has borne fruit and may still do harm for
some time to come--let us hope not for too long.
  The Jews of Palestine did not fight for political
independence for its own sake, but they fought to
achieve free immigration for the Jews of many
countries where their very existence was in danger;
free immigration also for all those who were longing
for a life among their own. It is no exaggeration to
say that they fought to make possible a sacrifice
perhaps unique in history.
  I do not speak of the loss in lives and property
fighting an opponent who was numerically far
superior, nor do I mean the exhausting toil which is
the pioneer's lot in a neglected arid country. I am
thinking of the additional sacrifice that a population
living under such conditions has to make in order to
receive, in the course of eighteen months, an influx
of immigrants who comprise more than one-third of
the total Jewish population of the country. In order
to realize what this means you have only to
visualize a comparable feat of the American Jews.
Let us assume there were no laws limiting the
immigration into the United States; imagine that the
Jews of this country volunteered to receive more
than one million Jews from other countries in the
course of one year and a half, to take care of them,
and to integrate them into the economy of this
country. This would be a tremendous achievement,
but still very far from the achievement of our
brethren in Israel. For the United States is a big,
fertile country, sparsely populated, with a high
living standard and a highly developed productive
capacity, not to compare with small Jewish
Palestine whose inhabitants, even without the
additional burden of mass immigration, lead a hard
and frugal life, still threatened by enemy attacks.
Think of the privations and personal sacrifices
which this voluntary act of brotherly love means for
the Jews of Israel.
  The economic means of the Jewish Community in
Israel do not suffice to bring this tremendous
enterprise to a successful end. For a hundred
thousand out of more than three hundred thousand
persons who immigrated to Israel since May, 1948,
no homes or work could be made available. They
had to be concentrated in improvised camps under
conditions which are a disgrace to all of us.
  It must not happen that this magnificent work
breaks down because the Jews of this country do
not help sufficiently or quickly enough. Here, to my
mind, is a precious gift with which all Jews have
been presented: the opportunity to take an active
part in this wonderful task.

PART IV

ON GERMANY

MANIFESTO--MARCH, 1933

  Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  As long as I have any choice, I will only stay in a
country where political liberty, tolerance, and
equality of all citizens before the law prevail.
Political liberty implies the freedom to express one's
political opinions orally and in writing; tolerance
implies respect for any and every individual
opinion.
  These conditions do not obtain in Germany at the
present time. Those who have done most for the
cause of international understanding, among them
some of the leading artists, are being persecuted
there.
  Any social organism can become psychically
distempered just as any individual can, especially in
times of difficulty. Nations usually survive these
distempers. I hope that healthy conditions will soon
supervene in Germany and that in future her great
men like Kant and Goethe will not merely be
commemorated from time to time but that the
principles which they taught will also prevail in
public life and in the general consciousness.

CORRESPONDENCE WITH THE
PRUSSIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

  Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

THE ACADEMY'S DECLARATION OF APRIL 1, 1933
AGAINST EINSTEIN

  The Prussian Academy of Sciences heard with
indignation from the newspapers of Albert
Einstein's participation in the atrocity-mongering in
France and America. It immediately demanded an
explanation. In the meantime Einstein has
announced his withdrawal from the Academy, giving
as his reason that he cannot continue to serve the
Prussian state under its present government. Being a
Swiss citizen, he also, it seems, intends to resign the
Prussian citizenship which he acquired in 1913
incidental to his becoming a full member of the
Academy.
  The Prussian Academy of Sciences is particularly
distressed by Einstein's activities as an agitator in
foreign countries, as it and its members have always
felt themselves bound by the closest ties to the
Prussian state and, while abstaining strictly from all
political partisanship, have always stressed and
remained faithful to the national idea. It has
therefore no reason to regret Einstein's withdrawal.
For the Prussian Academy of Sciences
(signed) Prof. Dr. Ernst Heymann,
Perpetual Secretary

EINSTEIN'S DECLARATION TO THE ACADEMY

Le Coq, near Ostende. April 5, 1933
  I have received information from a thoroughly
reliable source that the Academy of Sciences has
spoken in an official statement of "Albert Einstein's
participation in atrocity-mongering in America and
France."
  I hereby declare that I have never taken any part in
atrocity-mongering, and I must add that I have seen
nothing of any such mongering anywhere. In general,
people have contented themselves with reproducing
and commenting on the official statements and
orders of responsible members of the German
government, together with the program for the
annihilation of the German Jews by economic
methods.
  The statements I have issued to the Press were
concerned with my intention to resign my position
in the Academy and renounce my Prussion
citizenship; I gave as my reason for these steps that
I did not wish to live in a country where the
individual does not enjoy equality before the law,
and freedom of speech and teaching.
  Further, I described the present state of affairs in
Germany as a state of psychic distemper in the
masses and made some remarks about its causes.
  In a document which I allowed the International
League for Combating Anti-Semitism to make use of
for the purpose of enlisting support and which was
not intended for the Press at all, I also called upon
all sensible people, who are still faithful to the ideals
of civilization in peril, to do their utmost to prevent
this mass-psychosis, which manifests itself in such
terrible symptoms in Germany today, from
spreading any further.
  It would have been an easy matter for the
Academy to get hold of a correct version of my
words before issuing the sort of statement about me
that it has. The German Press has reproduced a
deliberately distorted version of my words, as
indeed was only to be expected with the Press
muzzled as it is today.
  I am ready to stand by every word I have
published. In return, I expect the Academy to
communicate this statement of mine to its members
and also to the German public before which I have
been slandered, especially as it has itself had a hand
in slandering me before that public.

TWO COMMUNICATIONS OF THE PRUSSIAN ACADEMY

Berlin, April 7, 1933
DEAR SIR:
  As the present Principal Secretary of the Prussian
Academy I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your
communication dated March 28 announcing your
resignation of your membership of the Academy.
  The Academy has taken note of your resignation in
its plenary session of March 30, 1933.
  While the Academy profoundly regrets the turn
events have taken, this regret concerns the fact that
a man of the highest scientific authority, whom
many years of work among Germans and many
years of membership of our society must have made
familiar with the German character and German
habits of thought, should have chosen this moment
to associate himself with a body of people abroad
who--partly no doubt through ignorance of actual
conditions and events--have done much damage to
our German people by disseminating erroneous
views and unfounded rumors. We had confidently
expected that one who had belonged to our
Academy for so long would have ranged himself,
irrespective of his own political sympathies, on the
side of the defenders of our nation against the flood
of lies which has been let loose upon it. In these
days of mud-slinging, some of it vile, some of it
ridiculous, a good word for the German people from
you in particular might have produced a great effect
abroad. Instead of which your testimony has served
as a handle to the enemies not merely of the present
Government but of the German people. This has
come as a bitter and grievous disappointment to us,
which would no doubt have led inevitably to a
parting of the ways even if we had not received
your resignation.
Yours faithfully,
(signed) von Ficker

April 11, 1933
  The Academy would like to point out that its
statement of April 1, 1933 was based not merely on
German but principally on foreign, particularly
French and Belgian, newspaper reports which Herr
Einstein has not contradicted; in addition, it had
before it his much canvassed statement to the
League for Combating Anti-Semitism, in which he
deplores Germany's relapse into the barbarism of
long-passed ages. Moreover, the Academy affirms
that Herr Einstein, who according to his own
statement has taken no part in atrocity-mongering,
has at least done nothing to counteract unjust
suspicions and slanders, which, in the opinion of the
Academy, it was his duty as one of its senior
members to do. Instead of that Herr Einstein has
made statements, and in foreign countries at that,
which, coming from a man of world-wide
reputation, were bound to be exploited and abused
by the enemies not merely of the present German
Government but of the whole German people.
For the Prussian Academy of Sciences
(signed) H. von Ficker
E. Heymann
Perpetual Secretaries

ALBERT EINSTEIN'S ANSWER

Le Coq-sur-Mer, Belgium. April 12, 1933
  I have received your communication of the 7th
instant and deeply deplore the mental attitude
displayed in it.
  As regards the facts, I can only reply as follows:
What you say about my behavior is, at bottom,
merely another form of the statement you have
already published, in which you accuse me of having
taken part in atrocity-mongering against the German
people. I have already, in my last letter,
characterized this accusation as slanderous.
  You have also remarked that a "good word" on my
part for "the German people" would have produced
a great effect abroad. To this I must reply that such
a testimony as you suggest would have been
equivalent to a repudiation of all those notions of
justice and liberty for which I have stood all my life.
Such testimony would not be, as you put it, a good
word for the German people; on the contrary, it
would only have helped the cause of those who are
seeking to undermine the ideas and principles which
have won for the German people a place of honor in
the civilized world. By giving such testimony in the
present circumstances I should have been
contributing, even if only indirectly, to moral
corruption and the destruction of all existing cultural
values.
  It was for this reason that I felt compelled to resign
from the Academy, and your letter only shows me
how right I was to do so.

CORRESPONDENCE WITH THE
BAVARIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

  Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

From the Academy
Munich, April 8, 1933
TO PROFESSOR ALBERT EINSTEIN
SIR:
  In your letter to the Prussian Academy of Sciences
you have given the present state of affairs in
Germany as the reason for your resignation. The
Bavarian Academy of Sciences, which some years
ago elected you a corresponding member, is also a
German Academy, closely allied to the Prussian and
other German Academies; hence your withdrawal
from the Prussian Academy of Sciences is bound to
affect your relations with our Academy.
  We must therefore ask you how you envisage your
relations with our Academy after what has passed
between yourself and the Prussian Academy.
The President of the Bavarian
Academy of Sciences

ALBERT EINSTEIN'S ANSWER

Le Coq-sur-Mer, April 21, 1933
  I have given it as the reason for my resignation
from the Prussian Academy that in the present
circumstances I have no wish either to be a German
citizen or to remain in any position of dependence
on the Prussian Ministry of Education.
  These reasons would not, in themselves, involve
the severing of my relations with the Bavarian
Academy. If I nevertheless desire my name to be
removed from the list of members, it is for a
different reason.
  The primary duty of an Academy is to further and
protect the scientific life of a country. And yet the
learned societies of Germany have, to the best of
my knowledge, stood by and said nothing while a
not inconsiderable proportion of German scholars
and students and also of academically trained
professionals have been deprived of all chance of
getting employment or earning a living in Germany.
I do not wish to belong to any society which
behaves in such a manner, even if it does so under
external pressure.

A REPLY TO THE INVITATION TO
PARTICIPATE IN A MEETING AGAINST
ANTI-SEMITISM

The following lines are Einstein's answer to an
invitation to take part in a French manifestation
against anti-Semitism in Germany. Published in
Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  I have considered carefully and from every angle
this most important proposal, which concerns a
question that I have more closely at heart than any
other. As a result I have come to the conclusion that
I must not take a personal part in this extremely
important manifestation, for two reasons:
  In the first place I am still a German citizen, and in
the second I am a Jew. As regards the first point I
must add that I have been active in German
institutions and have always been treated with full
confidence in Germany. However deeply I may
regret that such horrible things are happening there,
however strongly I am bound to condemn the
terrible aberrations occurring with the approval of
the government, it is nevertheless impossible for me
to take part personally in an enterprise set under
way by responsible members of a foreign
government. In order that you may appreciate this
fully, suppose that a French citizen in a more or less
analogous situation had got up a protest against the
French government's action in conjunction with
prominent German statesmen. Even if you fully
admitted that the protest was amply warranted by
the facts, you would still, I expect, regard the
behavior of your fellow citizen as an act of
disloyalty. If Zola had felt it necessary to leave
France at the time of the Dreyfus case, he would
still certainly not have associated himself with a
protest by German official personages, however
much he might have approved of their action. He
would have confined himself to--blushing for his
countrymen.
  In the second place a protest against injustice and
violence is incomparably more valuable if it comes
entirely from individuals who have been prompted
purely by sentiments of humanity and a love of
justice. This cannot be said of a man like me, a Jew
who regards other Jews as his brothers. To him, an
injustice done to the Jews is the same as an injustice
done to himself. He must not be the judge in his
own case, but wait for the judgment of impartial
outsiders.
  These are my reasons. But I should like to add that
I have always honored and admired that highly
developed sense of justice which is one of the
noblest features of the French tradition.

TO THE HEROES OF THE BATTLE OF
THE WARSAW GHETTO

From Bulletin of the Society of Polish Jews, New
York, 1944.

  They fought and died as members of the Jewish
nation, in the struggle against organized bands of
German murderers. To us these sacrifices are a
strengthening of the bond between us, the Jews of
all the countries. We strive to be one in suffering and
in the effort to achieve a better human society, that
society which our prophets have so clearly and
forcibly set before us as a goal.
  The Germans as an entire people are responsible
for these mass murders and must be punished as a
people if there is justice in the world and if the
consciousness of collective responsibility in the
nations is not to perish from the earth entirely.
Behind the Nazi party stands the German people,
who elected Hitler after he had in his book and in his
speeches made his shameful intentions clear beyond
the possibility of misunderstanding. The Germans
are the only people who have not made any serious
attempt of counteraction leading to the protection of
the innocently persecuted. When they are entirely
defeated and begin to lament over their fate, we
must not let ourselves be deceived again, but keep in
mind that they deliberately used the humanity of
others to make preparation for their last and most
grievous crime against humanity.

PART V

CONTRIBUTIONS TO SCIENCE

INTRODUCTION

By Valentine Bargmann, Professor of Mathematical
Physics, Princeton University.

I.

  The following is a brief synopsis of the
development of Einstein's principal physical
theories. In each case we give the date of the
publication of the fundamental ideas and the date of
the publication of the definitive form of the theory,
leaving out the numerous--no less
important--papers containing applications and
refinements of the theories.

I. Theory of Relativity.
  a) Special theory.
  The first paper on the special theory of relativity
(written in 1905, when Einstein was an employee of
the Swiss Patent Office at Berne) presents the
theory already in final form. In a second paper
published a short time later Einstein drew the most
important conclusion from the theory, namely, the
equivalence of mass and energy, expressed in the
celebrated equation, E = mc2.
  b) General theory.
  The history of the general theory of relativity is
considerably longer. In a survey of the special
theory of relativity, which appeared as early as
1907, Einstein pointed out the necessity of a
generalization and presented the fundamental idea
that the generalization must be based on the
equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass. A
paper written in 1911 discusses some of the
conclusions from the general theory concerning the
influence of gravitation on light: (1) the influence of
a gravitational field on the frequency of spectral
lines (gravitational red shift); (2) the bending of light
rays by the gravitational field of the sun. (Some
details were later to be modified.)
  After much further work--mainly on the
mathematical foundation of the theory--the
definitive form of general relativity was reached and
published in 1916. (By that time Einstein had
already derived the third "astronomical effect" of
general relativity, namely, the motion of the
Mercury perihelion.)
  c) Further work on the general theory.
  The problems of general relativity have occupied
Einstein to this day. We mention three which
appear to have particular importance: (1)
cosmology, (2) the problem of motion, (3) unified
field theory.
  (1) All of modern cosmology goes back to
Einstein's paper of 1917, in which he first applied
general relativity to the questions of cosmology and
thereby put cosmological speculation on a firm
basis. (While Einstein considered, at that time, a
static universe, the later development has mostly
favored the "expanding universe," in view of strong
astronomical evidence. Cosmology is still actively
pursued by many scientists who attempt to find a
coherent theory consistent with the increasing
amount of astronomical data.)
  (2) General relativity was originally based on two
independent hypotheses: the field equations for the
gravitational field, and the law of motion for material
particles. In 1927 Einstein already attacked the
problem of deducing the law of motion from the
field equations, and repeatedly returned to it. The
definitive solution was obtained in 1949 (in
collaboration with L. Infeld). Thus it was shown
that the field equations alone suffice as a basis for
the theory.
  From the beginning, the theory of general relativity
was mainly a theory of the gravitational field, in so
far as the field equations for the gravitational field
followed in an essentially unambiguous way from
the basic ideas of general relativity. Other fields
could be incorporated into the framework of general
relativity in an equally unambiguous way, once their
structure was known. But the connection was
somewhat "loose," because general relativity could
not predict either the existence or the structure of
any other field (for example, that of the
electromagnetic field). Therefore, several scientists
(e.g., Weyl, Kaluza, Eddington) tried early to extend
or to generalize the theory so as to achieve a unified
theory of all fields--or at least the gravitational and
the electromagnetic fields. For various reasons the
early attempts were not satisfactory. Einstein
himself has steadily worked on this problem since
1923, repeatedly modifying the form of the theory.
The latest version was initiated in 1945 and received
its definitive form in 1953 (published as Appendix
II to the fourth edition of The Meaning of
Relativity).

II. Quantum Theory.
  Soon after the inauguration of the quantum theory
by Max Planck in 1900, Einstein became the
foremost pioneer in the new field. His first
contribution appeared in the same year (1905)--and
even in the same volume of the Annalen der
Physik--as his first paper on relativity. It introduced
the concept of light quanta or photons and provided
the basis for much of the further work in quantum
theory, in particular for Bohr's theory of the atom.
In 1917 there appeared one of Einstein's most
significant later papers on this subject, in which, in
addition to a penetrating analysis of the properties
of photons, he gave a new derivation of Planck's law
of radiation based on the concept of transition
probabilities. This concept has remained basic ever
since.
  Among Einstein's other contributions we mention
the first application of the quantum theory to the
theory of specific heats (1907), and the particularly
important papers on the quantum theory of gases
(1924-25). These introduced in full generality the
new type of statistics which is now known as
Bose-Einstein statistics, and also contained
far-reaching ideas on electron waves, which
Schroedinger credited with guiding him in his work
on wave mechanics.

III. Kinetic Theory of Matter.
  In the years 1902-04 Einstein wrote a series of
papers in which he independently established the
theory of statistical mechanics in a manner
analogous to that of the great American physicist, J.
W. Gibbs. (Statistical mechanics or the kinetic
theory of matter derives the thermal properties of
matter in bulk from the assumption that matter
consists of atoms [ultimate particles] which move
according to the laws of mechanics.) The most
significant sequel was a third important paper which
Einstein wrote in 1905, that on Brownian motion. In
it Einstein predicted, on the basis of the kinetic
theory, the motion of minute particles suspended in
a liquid. (Such a motion had been observed about
one hundred years earlier by the English botanist,
Robert Brown.) Conversely, the experimental
investigation of such motions (in particular the work
of the French physicist Perrin, which was inspired
by Einstein's theory) led to a verification of the
basic hypotheses of the kinetic theory of matter.

PRINCIPLES OF THEORETICAL PHYSICS


Inaugural address before the Prussian Academy of
Sciences, 1914. Einstein became a member of the
Prussian Academy in 1913. In 1933, after the advent
of the Hitler regime, he resigned from the Academy.
(See correspondence, pp. 205 ff. of this volume.)
Published in Proceedings of the Prussian Academy
of Sciences, 1914.

GENTLEMEN:
  First of all, I have to thank you most heartily for
conferring the greatest benefit on me that anybody
can confer on a man like myself. By electing me to
your Academy you have freed me from the
distractions and cares of a professional life and so
made it possible for me to devote myself entirely to
scientific studies. I beg that you will continue to
believe in my gratitude and my industry even when
my efforts seem to you to yield but a poor result.
  Perhaps I may be allowed α propos of this to make
a few general remarks on the relation of my sphere
of activity, which is theoretical physics, toward
experimental physics. A mathematician friend of
mine said to me the other day half in jest: "The
mathematician can do a lot of things, but never what
you happen to want him to do just at the moment."
Much the same often applies to the theoretical
physicist when the experimental physicist calls him
in. What is the reason for this peculiar lack of
adaptability?
  The theorist's method involves his using as his
foundation general postulates or "principles" from
which he can deduce conclusions. His work thus
falls into two parts. He must first discover his
principles and then draw the conclusions which
follow from them. For the second of these tasks he
receives an admirable equipment at school. If,
therefore, the first of his problems has already been
solved for some field or for a complex of related
phenomena, he is certain of success, provided his
industry and intelligence are adequate. The first of
these tasks, namely, that of establishing the
principles which are to serve as the starting point of
his deduction, is of an entirely different nature. Here
there is no method capable of being learned and
systematically applied so that it leads to the goal.
The scientist has to worm these general principles
out of nature by perceiving in comprehensive
complexes of empirical facts certain general features
which permit of precise formulation.
  Once this formulation is successfully
accomplished, inference follows on inference, often
revealing unforeseen relations which extend far
beyond the province of the reality from which the
principles were drawn. But as long as no principles
are found on which to base the deduction, the
individual empirical fact is of no use to the theorist;
indeed he cannot even do anything with isolated
general laws abstracted from experience. He will
remain helpless in the face of separate results of
empirical research; until principles which he can
make the basis of deductive reasoning have revealed
themselves to him.
  This is the kind of position in which theory finds
itself at present in regard to the laws of heat
radiation and molecular motion at low temperatures.
About fifteen years ago nobody had yet doubted
that a correct account of the electrical, optical, and
thermal properties of matter was possible on the
basis of Galileo-Newtonian mechanics applied to
molecular motion and of Maxwell's theory of the
electromagnetic field. Then Planck showed that in
order to establish a law of heat radiation consonant
with experience, it was necessary to employ a
method of calculation whose incompatibility with
the principles of classical physics became clearer
and clearer. For with this method of calculation,
Planck introduced into physics the quantum
hypothesis, which has since received brilliant
confirmation. With this quantum hypothesis he
dethroned classical physics as applied to the case
where sufficiently small masses move at sufficiently
low speeds and sufficiently high rates of
acceleration, so that today the laws of motion
propounded by Galileo and Newton can only be
accepted as limiting laws. In spite of assiduous
efforts, however, the theorists have not yet
succeeded in replacing the principles of mechanics
by others which fit in with Planck's law of heat
radiation or the quantum hypothesis. No matter
how definitely it has been established that heat is to
be explained by molecular motion, we have
nevertheless to admit today that our position in
regard to the fundamental laws of this motion
resembles that of astronomers before Newton in
regard to the motions of the planets.
  I have just now referred to a group of facts for the
theoretical treatment of which the principles are
lacking. But it may equally well happen that clearly
formulated principles lead to conclusions which fall
entirely, or almost entirely, outside the sphere of
reality at present accessible to our experience. In
that case it may need many years of empirical
research to ascertain whether the theoretical
principles correspond with reality. We have an
instance of this in the theory of relativity.
  An analysis of the fundamental concepts of space
and time has shown us that the principle of the
constant velocity of light in empty space, which
emerges from the optics of bodies in motion by no
means forces us to accept the theory of a stationary
luminiferous ether. On the contrary, it has been
possible to frame a general theory which takes
account of the fact that experiments carried out on
the earth never reveal any translatory motion of the
earth. This involves using the principle of relativity,
which says that the laws of nature do not alter their
form when one passes from the original (admissible)
system of co-ordinates to a new one which is in
uniform translatory motion with respect to it. This
theory has received substantial confirmation from
experience and has led to a simplification of the
theoretical description of groups of facts already
connected.
  On the other hand, from the theoretical point of
view this theory is not wholly satisfactory, because
the principle of relativity just formulated favors
uniform motion. If it is true that no absolute
significance must be attached to uniform motion
from the physical point of view, the question arises
whether this statement must not also be extended to
non-uniform motions. It has turned out that one
arrives at an unambiguous extension of the relativity
theory if one postulates a principle of relativity in
this extended sense. One is led thereby to a general
theory of gravitation which includes dynamics. For
the present, however, we have not the necessary
array of facts to test the legitimacy of our
introduction of the postulated principle.
  We have ascertained that inductive physics asks
questions of deductive, and vice versa, the answers
to which demand the exertion of all our energies.
May we soon succeed in making permanent
progress by our united efforts!

PRINCIPLES OF RESEARCH

Address delivered at a celebration of Max Planck's
sixtieth birthday (1918) before the Physical Society in
Berlin. Published in Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam:
Querido Verlag, 1934. Max Planck (1858-1947)
was for many years professor of theoretical physics
at the University of Berlin. By far the most
outstanding of his contributions to physics is his
quantum theory, which he advanced in 1900 and
which has provided the basis for the whole
development of modern atomic physics. Next to
Planck it was Einstein who did the pioneering work
in the young field, above all in his theory of light
quanta or photons (1905) and his theory of specific
heats (1907). It was he who perceived more than
anyone else the fundamental and pervasive
character of the quantum concept in all its
ramifications.

  In the temple of science are many mansions, and
various indeed are they that dwell therein and the
motives that have led them thither. Many take to
science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual
power; science is their own special sport to which
they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of
ambition; many others are to be found in the temple
who have offered the products of their brains on
this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were an
angel of the Lord to come and drive all the people
belonging to these two categories out of the temple,
the assemblage would be seriously depleted, but
there would still be some men, of both present and
past times, left inside. Our Planck is one of them,
and that is why we love him.
  I am quite aware that we have just now
light-heartedly expelled in imagination many
excellent men who are largely, perhaps chiefly,
responsible for the building of the temple of science;
and in many cases our angel would find it a pretty
ticklish job to decide. But of one thing I feel sure: if
the types we have just expelled were the only types
there were, the temple would never have come to be,
any more than a forest can grow which consists of
nothing but creepers. For these people any sphere
of human activity will do, if it comes to a point;
whether they become engineers, officers, tradesmen,
or scientists depends on circumstances. Now let us
have another look at those who have found favor
with the angel. Most of them are somewhat odd,
uncommunicative, solitary fellows, really less like
each other, in spite of these common characteristics,
than the hosts of the rejected. What has brought
them to the temple? That is a difficult question and
no single answer will cover it. To begin with, I
believe with Schopenhauer that one of the strongest
motives that leads men to art and science is escape
from everyday life with its painful crudity and
hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own
ever shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs
to escape from personal life into the world of
objective perception and thought; this desire may be
compared with the townsman's irresistible longing
to escape from his noisy, cramped surroundings into
the silence of high mountains, where the eye ranges
freely through the still, pure air and fondly traces
out the restful contours apparently built for
eternity.
  With this negative motive there goes a positive
one. Man tries to make for himself in the fashion
that suits him best a simplified and intelligible
picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to
substitute this cosmos of his for the world of
experience, and thus to overcome it. This is what
the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher,
and the natural scientist do, each in his own fashion.
Each makes this cosmos and its construction the
pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this
way the peace and security which he cannot find in
the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.
  What place does the theoretical physicist's picture
of the world occupy among all these possible
pictures? It demands the highest possible standard
of rigorous precision in the description of relations,
such as only the use of mathematical language can
give. In regard to his subject matter, on the other
hand, the physicist has to limit himself very
severely: he must content himself with describing
the most simple events which can be brought within
the domain of our experience; all events of a more
complex order are beyond the power of the human
intellect to reconstruct with the subtle accuracy and
logical perfection which the theoretical physicist
demands. Supreme purity, clarity, and certainty at
the cost of completeness. But what can be the
attraction of getting to know such a tiny section of
nature thoroughly, while one leaves everything
subtler and more complex shyly and timidly alone?
Does the product of such a modest effort deserve to
be called by the proud name of a theory of the
universe?
  In my belief the name is justified; for the general
laws on which the structure of theoretical physics is
based claim to be valid for any natural phenomenon
whatsoever. With them, it ought to be possible to
arrive at the description, that is to say, the theory,
of every natural process, including life, by means of
pure deduction, if that process of deduction were
not far beyond the capacity of the human intellect.
The physicist's renunciation of completeness for his
cosmos is therefore not a matter of fundamental
principle.
  The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at
those universal elementary laws from which the
cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is
no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting
on sympathetic understanding of experience, can
reach them. In this methodological uncertainty, one
might suppose that there were any number of
possible systems of theoretical physics all equally
well justified; and this opinion is no doubt correct,
theoretically. But the development of physics has
shown that at any given moment, out of all
conceivable constructions, a single one has always
proved itself decidedly superior to all the rest.
Nobody who has really gone deeply into the matter
will deny that in practice the world of phenomena
uniquely determines the theoretical system, in spite
of the fact that there is no logical bridge between
phenomena and their theoretical principles; this is
what Leibnitz described so happily as a
"pre-established harmony." Physicists often accuse
epistemologists of not paying sufficient attention to
this fact. Here, it seems to me, lie the roots of the
controversy carried on some years ago between
Mach and Planck.
  The longing to behold this pre-established
harmony is the source of the inexhaustible patience
and perseverance with which Planck has devoted
himself, as we see, to the most general problems of
our science, refusing to let himself be diverted to
more grateful and more easily attained ends. I have
often heard colleagues try to attribute this attitude
of his to extraordinary will-power and
discipline--wrongly, in my opinion. The state of
mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is
akin to that of the religious worshiper or the lover;
the daily effort comes from no deliberate intention
or program, but straight from the heart. There he
sits, our beloved Planck, and smiles inside himself at
my childish playing-about with the lantern of
Diogenes. Our affection for him needs no threadbare
explanation. May the love of science continue to
illumine his path in the future and lead him to the
solution of the most important problem in
present-day physics, which he has himself posed
and done so much to solve. May he succeed in
uniting quantum theory with electrodynamics and
mechanics in a single logical system.

WHAT IS THE THEORY OF RELATIVITY?

Written at the request of The London Times.
Published November 28, 1919.

  I gladly accede to the request of your colleague to
write something for The Times on relativity. After
the lamentable breakdown of the old active
intercourse between men of learning, I welcome this
opportunity of expressing my feelings of joy and
gratitude toward the astronomers and physicists of
England. It is thoroughly in keeping with the great
and proud traditions of scientific work in your
country that eminent scientists should have spent
much time and trouble, and your scientific
institutions have spared no expense, to test the
implications of a theory which was perfected and
published during the war in the land of your
enemies. Even though the investigation of the
influence of the gravitational field of the sun on light
rays is a purely objective matter, I cannot forbear to
express my personal thanks to my English
colleagues for their work; for without it I could
hardly have lived to see the most important
implication of my theory tested.
  We can distinguish various kinds of theories in
physics. Most of them are constructive. They
attempt to build up a picture of the more complex
phenomena out of the materials of a relatively
simple formal scheme from which they start out.
Thus the kinetic theory of gases seeks to reduce
mechanical, thermal, and diffusional processes to
movements of molecules--i.e., to build them up out
of the hypothesis of molecular motion. When we
say that we have succeeded in understanding a
group of natural processes, we invariably mean that
a constructive theory has been found which covers
the processes in question.
  Along with this most important class of theories
there exists a second, which I will call
"principle-theories." These employ the analytic, not
the synthetic, method. The elements which form
their basis and starting-point are not hypothetically
constructed but empirically discovered ones, general
characteristics of natural processes, principles that
give rise to mathematically formulated criteria which
the separate processes or the theoretical
representations of them have to satisfy. Thus the
science of thermodynamics seeks by analytical
means to deduce necessary conditions, which
separate events have to satisfy, from the universally
experienced fact that perpetual motion is
impossible.
  The advantages of the constructive theory are
completeness, adaptability, and clearness, those of
the principle theory are logical perfection and
security of the foundations.
  The theory of relativity belongs to the latter class.
In order to grasp its nature, one needs first of all to
become acquainted with the principles on which it is
based. Before I go into these, however, I must
observe that the theory of relativity resembles a
building consisting of two separate stories, the
special theory and the general theory. The special
theory, on which the general theory rests, applies to
all physical phenomena with the exception of
gravitation; the general theory provides the law of
gravitation and its relations to the other forces of
nature.
  It has, of course, been known since the days of the
ancient Greeks that in order to describe the
movement of a body, a second body is needed to
which the movement of the first is referred. The
movement of a vehicle is considered in reference to
the earth's surface, that of a planet to the totality of
the visible fixed stars. In physics the body to which
events are spatially referred is called the coordinate
system. The laws of the mechanics of Galileo and
Newton, for instance, can only be formulated with
the aid of a coordinate system.
  The state of motion of the coordinate system may
not, however, be arbitrarily chosen, if the laws of
mechanics are to be valid (it must be free from
rotation and acceleration). A coordinate system
which is admitted in mechanics is called an "inertial
system." The state of motion of an inertial system
is according to mechanics not one that is determined
uniquely by nature. On the contrary, the following
definition holds good: a coordinate system that is
moved uniformly and in a straight line relative to an
inertial system is likewise an inertial system. By the
"special principle of relativity" is meant the
generalization of this definition to include any
natural event whatever: thus, every universal law of
nature which is valid in relation to a coordinate
system C, must also be valid, as it stands, in relation
to a coordinate system C(, which is in uniform
translatory motion relatively to C.
  The second principle, on which the special theory
of relativity rests, is the "principle of the constant
velocity of light in vacuo." This principle asserts
that light in vacuo always has a definite velocity of
propagation (independent of the state of motion of
the observer or of the source of the light). The
confidence which physicists place in this principle
springs from the successes achieved by the
electrodynamics of Maxwell and Lorentz.
  Both the above-mentioned principles are
powerfully supported by experience, but appear
not to be logically reconcilable. The special theory
of relativity finally succeeded in reconciling them
logically by a modification of kinematics--i.e., of the
doctrine of the laws relating to space and time (from
the point of view of physics). It became clear that
to speak of the simultaneity of two events had no
meaning except in relation to a given coordinate
system, and that the shape of measuring devices and
the speed at which clocks move depend on their
state of motion with respect to the coordinate
system.
  But the old physics, including the laws of motion
of Galileo and Newton, did not fit in with the
suggested relativist kinematics. From the latter,
general mathematical conditions issued, to which
natural laws had to conform, if the above-mentioned
two principles were really to apply. To these,
physics had to be adapted. In particular, scientists
arrived at a new law of motion for (rapidly moving)
mass points, which was admirably confirmed in the
case of electrically charged particles. The most
important upshot of the special theory of relativity
concerned the inert masses of corporeal systems. It
turned out that the inertia of a system necessarily
depends on its energy-content, and this led straight
to the notion that inert mass is simply latent energy.
The principle of the conservation of mass lost its
independence and became fused with that of the
conservation of energy.
  The special theory of relativity, which was simply
a systematic development of the electrodynamics of
Maxwell and Lorentz, pointed beyond itself,
however. Should the independence of physical laws
of the state of motion of the coordinate system be
restricted to the uniform translatory motion of
coordinate systems in respect to each other? What
has nature to do with our coordinate systems and
their state of motion? If it is necessary for the
purpose of describing nature, to make use of a
coordinate system arbitrarily introduced by us, then
the choice of its state of motion ought to be subject
to no restriction; the laws ought to be entirely
independent of this choice (general principle of
relativity).
  The establishment of this general principle of
relativity is made easier by a fact of experience that
has long been known, namely, that the weight and
the inertia of a body are controlled by the same
constant (equality of inertial and gravitational mass).
Imagine a coordinate system which is rotating
uniformly with respect to an inertial system in the
Newtonian manner. The centrifugal forces which
manifest themselves in relation to this system must,
according to Newton's teaching, be regarded as
effects of inertia. But these centrifugal forces are,
exactly like the forces of gravity, proportional to the
masses of the bodies. Ought it not to be possible in
this case to regard the coordinate system as
stationary and the centrifugal forces as gravitational
forces? This seems the obvious view, but classical
mechanics forbid it.
  This hasty consideration suggests that a general
theory of relativity must supply the laws of
gravitation, and the consistent following up of the
idea has justified our hopes.
  But the path was thornier than one might suppose,
because it demanded the abandonment of Euclidean
geometry. This is to say, the laws according to
which solid bodies may be arranged in space do not
completely accord with the spatial laws attributed
to bodies by Euclidean geometry. This is what we
mean when we talk of the "curvature of space." The
fundamental concepts of the "straight line," the
"plane," etc., thereby lose their precise significance
in physics.
  In the general theory of relativity the doctrine of
space and time, or kinematics, no longer figures as a
fundamental independent of the rest of physics. The
geometrical behavior of bodies and the motion of
clocks rather depend on gravitational fields, which in
their turn are produced by matter.
  The new theory of gravitation diverges
considerably, as regards principles, from Newton's
theory. But its practical results agree so nearly with
those of Newton's theory that it is difficult to find
criteria for distinguishing them which are accessible
to experience. Such have been discovered so far:

  1. In the revolution of the ellipses of the planetary
orbits round the sun (confirmed in the case of
Mercury).
  2. In the curving of light rays by the action of
gravitational fields (confirmed by the English
photographs of eclipses).
  3. In a displacement of the spectral lines toward
the red end of the spectrum in the case of light
transmitted to us from stars of considerable
magnitude (unconfirmed so far). [This criterion has
since been confirmed.]

  The chief attraction of the theory lies in its logical
completeness. If a single one of the conclusions
drawn from it proves wrong, it must be given up; to
modify it without destroying the whole structure
seems to be impossible.
  Let no one suppose, however, that the mighty
work of Newton can really be superseded by this or
any other theory. His great and lucid ideas will
retain their unique significance for all time as the
foundation of our whole modern conceptual
structure in the sphere of natural philosophy.

  Note: Some of the statements in your paper
concerning my life and person owe their origin to
the lively imagination of the writer. Here is yet
another application of the principle of relativity for
the delectation of the reader: today I am described in
Germany as a "German savant," and in England as a
"Swiss Jew." Should it ever be my fate to be
represented as a bΩte noire, I should, on the
contrary, become a "Swiss Jew" for the Germans
and a "German savant" for the English.

GEOMETRY AND EXPERIENCE

Lecture before the Prussian Academy of Sciences,
January 27, 1921. The last part appeared first in a
reprint by Springer, Berlin, 1921.

  One reason why mathematics enjoys special
esteem, above all other sciences, is that its
propositions are absolutely certain and indisputable,
while those of all other sciences are to some extent
debatable and in constant danger of being
overthrown by newly discovered facts. In spite of
this, the investigator in another department of
science would not need to envy the mathematician if
the propositions of mathematics referred to objects
of our mere imagination, and not to objects of
reality. For it cannot occasion surprise that different
persons should arrive at the same logical conclusions
when they have already agreed upon the
fundamental propositions (axioms), as well as the
methods by which other propositions are to be
deduced therefrom. But there is another reason for
the high repute of mathematics, in that it is
mathematics which affords the exact natural sciences
a certain measure of certainty, to which without
mathematics they could not attain.
  At this point an enigma presents itself which in all
ages has agitated inquiring minds. How can it be that
mathematics, being after all a product of human
thought which is independent of experience, is so
admirably appropriate to the objects of reality? Is
human reason, then, without experience, merely by
taking thought, able to fathom the properties of real
things?
  In my opinion the answer to this question is,
briefly, this: as far as the propositions of
mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain;
and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to
reality. It seems to me that complete clarity as to
this state of things became common property only
through that trend in mathematics which is known
by the name of "axiomatics." The progress achieved
by axiomatics consists in its having neatly separated
the logical-formal from its objective or intuitive
content; according to axiomatics the logical-formal
alone forms the subject matter of mathematics,
which is not concerned with the intuitive or other
content associated with the logical-formal.
  Let us for a moment consider from this point of
view any axiom of geometry, for instance, the
following: through two points in space there always
passes one and only one straight line. How is this
axiom to be interpreted in the older sense and in the
more modern sense?
  The older interpretation: everyone knows what a
straight line is, and what a point is. Whether this
knowledge springs from an ability of the human
mind or from experience, from some cooperation of
the two or from some other source, is not for the
mathematician to decide. He leaves the question to
the philosopher. Being based upon this knowledge,
which precedes all mathematics, the axiom stated
above is, like all other axioms, self-evident, that is, it
is the expression of a part of this a priori
knowledge.
  The more modern interpretation: geometry treats
of objects which are denoted by the words straight
line, point, etc. No knowledge or intuition of these
objects is assumed but only the validity of the
axioms, such as the one stated above, which are to
be taken in a purely formal sense, i.e., as void of all
content of intuition or experience. These axioms are
free creations of the human mind. All other
propositions of geometry are logical inferences from
the axioms (which are to be taken in the nominalistic
sense only). The axioms define the objects of which
geometry treats. Schlick in his book on
epistemology has therefore characterized axioms
very aptly as "implicit definitions."
  This view of axioms, advocated by modern
axiomatics, purges mathematics of all extraneous
elements, and thus dispels the mystic obscurity
which formerly surrounded the basis of
mathematics. But such an expurgated exposition of
mathematics makes it also evident that mathematics
as such cannot predicate anything about objects of
our intuition or real objects. In axiomatic geometry
the words "point," "straight line," etc., stand only
for empty conceptual schemata. That which gives
them content is not relevant to mathematics.
  Yet on the other hand it is certain that mathematics
generally, and particularly geometry, owes its
existence to the need which was felt of learning
something about the behavior of real objects. The
very word geometry, which of course, means
earth-measuring, proves this. For earth-measuring
has to do with the possibilities of the disposition of
certain natural objects with respect to one another,
namely, with parts of the earth, measuring-lines,
measuring-wands, etc. It is clear that the system of
concepts of axiomatic geometry alone cannot make
any assertions as to the behavior of real objects of
this kind, which we will call practically-rigid bodies.
To be able to make such assertions, geometry must
be stripped of its merely logical-formal character by
the coordination of real objects of experience with
the empty conceptual schemata of axiomatic
geometry. To accomplish this, we need only add the
proposition: solid bodies are related, with respect to
their possible dispositions, as are bodies in
Euclidean geometry of three dimensions. Then the
propositions of Euclid contain affirmations as to the
behavior of practically-rigid bodies.
  Geometry thus completed is evidently a natural
science; we may in fact regard it as the most ancient
branch of physics. Its affirmations rest essentially
on induction from experience, but not on logical
inferences only. We will call this completed
geometry "practical geometry," and shall distinguish
it in what follows from "purely axiomatic
geometry." The question whether the practical
geometry of the universe is Euclidean or not has a
clear meaning, and its answer can only be furnished
by experience. All length-measurements in physics
constitute practical geometry in this sense, so, too,
do geodetic and astronomical length measurements,
if one utilizes the empirical law that light is
propagated in a straight line, and indeed in a straight
line in the sense of practical geometry.
  I attach special importance to the view of
geometry which I have just set forth, because
without it I should have been unable to formulate
the theory of relativity. Without it the following
reflection would have been impossible: in a system
of reference rotating relatively to an inertial system,
the laws of disposition of rigid bodies do not
correspond to the rules of Euclidean geometry on
account of the Lorentz contraction; thus if we admit
non-inertial systems on an equal footing, we must
abandon Euclidean geometry. Without the above
interpretation the decisive step in the transition to
generally covariant equations would certainly not
have been taken. If we reject the relation between
the body of axiomatic Euclidean geometry and the
practically-rigid body of reality, we readily arrive at
the following view, which was entertained by that
acute and profound thinker, H. PoincarΘ: Euclidean
geometry is distinguished above all other
conceivable axiomatic geometries by its simplicity.
Now since axiomatic geometry by itself contains no
assertions as to the reality which can be
experienced, but can do so only in combination with
physical laws, it should be possible and
reasonable--whatever may be the nature of
reality--to retain Euclidean geometry. For if
contradictions between theory and experience
manifest themselves, we should rather decide to
change physical laws than to change axiomatic
Euclidean geometry. If we reject the relation
between the practically-rigid body and geometry,
we shall indeed not easily free ourselves from the
convention that Euclidean geometry is to be retained
as the simplest.
  Why is the equivalence of the practically-rigid
body and the body of geometry--which suggests
itself so readily--rejected by PoincarΘ and other
investigators? Simply because under closer
inspection the real solid bodies in nature are not
rigid, because their geometrical behavior, that is,
their possibilities of relative disposition, depend
upon temperature, external forces, etc. Thus the
original, immediate relation between geometry and
physical reality appears destroyed, and we feel
impelled toward the following more general view,
which characterizes PoincarΘ's standpoint.
Geometry (G) predicates nothing about the behavior
of real things, but only geometry together with the
totality (P) of physical laws can do so. Using
symbols, we may say that only the sum of (G) +
(P) is subject to experimental verification. Thus (G)
may be chosen arbitrarily, and also parts of (P); all
these laws are conventions. All that is necessary to
avoid contradictions is to choose the remainder of
(P) so that (G) and the whole of (P) are together in
accord with experience. Envisaged in this way,
axiomatic geometry and the part of natural law
which has been given a conventional status appear
as epistemologically equivalent.
  Sub specie aeterni PoincarΘ, in my opinion, is right.
The idea of the measuring-rod and the idea of the
clock coordinated with it in the theory of relativity
do not find their exact correspondence in the real
world. It is also clear that the solid body and the
clock do not in the conceptual edifice of physics
play the part of irreducible elements, but that of
composite structures, which must not play any
independent part in theoretical physics. But it is my
conviction that in the present stage of development
of theoretical physics these concepts must still be
employed as independent concepts; for we are still
far from possessing such certain knowledge of the
theoretical principles of atomic structure as to be
able to construct solid bodies and clocks
theoretically from elementary concepts.
  Further, as to the objection that there are no really
rigid bodies in nature, and that therefore the
properties predicated of rigid bodies do not apply
to physical reality--this objection is by no means so
radical as might appear from a hasty examination.
For it is not a difficult task to determine the
physical state of a measuring-body so accurately
that its behavior relative to other measuring-bodies
shall be sufficiently free from ambiguity to allow it
to be substituted for the "rigid" body. It is to
measuring-bodies of this kind that statements about
rigid bodies must be referred.
  All practical geometry is based upon a principle
which is accessible to experience, and which we will
now try to realize. Suppose two marks have been
put upon a practically-rigid body. A pair of two
such marks we shall call a tract. We imagine two
practically-rigid bodies, each with a tract marked out
on it. These two tracts are said to be "equal to one
another" if the marks of the one tract can be brought
to coincide permanently with the marks of the
other. We now assume that:
  If two tracts are found to be equal once and
anywhere, they are equal always and everywhere.
  Not only the practical geometry of Euclid, but also
its nearest generalization, the practical geometry of
Riemann, and therewith the general theory of
relativity, rest upon this assumption. Of the
experimental reasons which warrant this assumption
I will mention only one. The phenomenon of the
propagation of light in empty space assigns a tract,
namely, the appropriate path of light, to each
interval of local time, and conversely. Thence it
follows that the above assumption for tracts must
also hold good for intervals of clock-time in the
theory of relativity. Consequently it may be
formulated as follows: if two ideal clocks are going
at the same rate at any time and at any place (being
then in immediate proximity to each other), they
will always go at the same rate, no matter where and
when they are again compared with each other at
one place. If this law were not valid for natural
clocks, the proper frequencies for the separate
atoms of the same chemical element would not be in
such exact agreement as experience demonstrates.
The existence of sharp spectral lines is a convincing
experimental proof of the above-mentioned
principle of practical geometry. This, in the last
analysis, is the reason which enables us to speak
meaningfully of a Riemannian metric of the
four-dimensional space-time continuum.
  According to the view advocated here, the question
whether this continuum has a Euclidean,
Riemannian, or any other structure is a question of
physics proper which must be answered by
experience, and not a question of a convention to be
chosen on grounds of mere expediency. Riemann's
geometry will hold if the laws of disposition of
practically-rigid bodies approach those of Euclidean
geometry the more closely the smaller the
dimensions of the region of space-time under
consideration.
  It is true that this proposed physical interpretation
of geometry breaks down when applied immediately
to spaces of sub-molecular order of magnitude. But
nevertheless, even in questions as to the
constitution of elementary particles, it retains part
of its significance. For even when it is a question of
describing the electrical elementary particles
constituting matter, the attempt may still be made
to ascribe physical meaning to those field concepts
which have been physically defined for the purpose
of describing the geometrical behavior of bodies
which are large as compared with the molecule.
Success alone can decide as to the justification of
such an attempt, which postulates physical reality
for the fundamental principles of Riemann's
geometry outside of the domain of their physical
definitions. It might possibly turn out that this
extrapolation has no better warrant than the
extrapolation of the concept of temperature to parts
of a body of molecular order of magnitude.
  It appears less problematical to extend the
concepts of practical geometry to spaces of cosmic
order of magnitude. It might, of course, be objected
that a construction composed of solid rods departs
the more from ideal rigidity the greater its spatial
extent. But it will hardly be possible, I think, to
assign fundamental significance to this objection.
Therefore the question whether the universe is
spatially finite or not seems to me an entirely
meaningful question in the sense of practical
geometry. I do not even consider it impossible that
this question will be answered before long by
astronomy. Let us call to mind what the general
theory of relativity teaches in this respect. It offers
two possibilities:
  1. The universe is spatially infinite. This is
possible only if in the universe the average spatial
density of matter, concentrated in the stars,
vanishes, i.e., if the ratio of the total mass of the
stars to the volume of the space through which they
are scattered indefinitely approaches zero as greater
and greater volumes are considered.
  2. The universe is spatially finite. This must be so,
if there exists an average density of the ponderable
matter in the universe which is different from zero.
The smaller that average density, the greater is the
volume of the universe.
  I must not fail to mention that a theoretical
argument can be adduced in favor of the hypothesis
of a finite universe. The general theory of relativity
teaches that the inertia of a given body is greater as
there are more ponderable masses in proximity to it;
thus it seems very natural to reduce the total inertia
of a body to interaction between it and the other
bodies in the universe, as indeed, ever since
Newton's time, gravity has been completely reduced
to interaction between bodies. From the equations
of the general theory of relativity it can be deduced
that this total reduction of inertia to interaction
between masses--as demanded by E. Mach, for
example--is possible only if the universe is spatially
finite.
  Many physicists and astronomers are not
impressed by this argument. In the last analysis,
experience alone can decide which of the two
possibilities is realized in nature. How can
experience furnish an answer? At first it might seem
possible to determine the average density of matter
by observation of that part of the universe which is
accessible to our observation. This hope is illusory.
The distribution of the visible stars is extremely
irregular, so that we on no account may venture to
set the average density of star-matter in the universe
equal to, let us say, the average density in the
Galaxy. In any case, however great the space
examined may be, we could not feel convinced that
there were any more stars beyond that space. So it
seems impossible to estimate the average density.
  But there is another road, which seems to me more
practicable, although it also presents great
difficulties. For if we inquire into the deviations of
the consequences of the general theory of relativity
which are accessible to experience, from the
consequences of the Newtonian theory, we first of
all find a deviation which manifests itself in close
proximity to gravitating mass, and has been
confirmed in the case of the planet Mercury. But if
the universe is spatially finite, there is a second
deviation from the Newtonian theory, which, in the
language of the Newtonian theory, may be
expressed thus: the gravitational field is such as if it
were produced, not only by the ponderable masses,
but in addition by a mass-density of negative sign,
distributed uniformly throughout space. Since this
fictitious mass-density would have to be extremely
small, it would be noticeable only in very extensive
gravitating systems.
  Assuming that we know, let us say, the statistical
distribution and the masses of the stars in the
Galaxy, then by Newton's law we can calculate the
gravitational field and the average velocities which
the stars must have, so that the Galaxy should not
collapse under the mutual attraction of its stars, but
should maintain its actual extent. Now if the actual
velocities of the stars--which can be measured--were
smaller than the calculated velocities, we should
have a proof that the actual attractions at great
distances are smaller than by Newton's law. From
such a deviation it could be proved indirectly that
the universe is finite. It would even be possible to
estimate its spatial dimensions.
  Can we visualize a three-dimensional universe
which is finite, yet unbounded?
  The usual answer to this question is "No," but that
is not the right answer. The purpose of the
following remarks is to show that the answer should
be "Yes." I want to show that without any
extraordinary difficulty we can illustrate the theory
of a finite universe by means of a mental picture to
which, with some practice, we shall soon grow
accustomed.
  First of all, an observation of epistemological
nature. A geometrical-physical theory as such is
incapable of being directly pictured, being merely a
system of concepts. But these concepts serve the
purpose of bringing a multiplicity of real or
imaginary sensory experiences into connection in
the mind. To "visualize" a theory therefore means to
bring to mind that abundance of sensible experiences
for which the theory supplies the schematic
arrangement. In the present case we have to ask
ourselves how we can represent that behavior of
solid bodies with respect to their mutual disposition
(contact) which corresponds to the theory of a finite
universe. There is really nothing new in what I have
to say about this; but innumerable questions
addressed to me prove that the curiosity of those
who are interested in these matters has not yet been
completely satisfied. So, will the initiated please
pardon me, in that part of what I shall say has long
been known?
  What do we wish to express when we say that our
space is infinite? Nothing more than that we might
lay any number of bodies of equal sizes side by side
without ever filling space. Suppose that we are
provided with a great many cubic boxes all of the
same size. In accordance with Euclidean geometry
we can place them above, beside, and behind one
another so as to fill an arbitrarily large part of space;
but this construction would never be finished; we
could go on adding more and more cubes without
ever finding that there was no more room. That is
what we wish to express when we say that space is
infinite. It would be better to say that space is
infinite in relation to practically-rigid bodies,
assuming that the laws of disposition for these
bodies are given by Euclidean geometry.
  Another example of an infinite continuum is the
plane. On a plane surface we may lay squares of
cardboard so that each side of any square has the
side of another square adjacent to it. The
construction is never finished; we can always go on
laying squares--if their laws of disposition
correspond to those of plane figures of Euclidean
geometry. The plane is therefore infinite in relation
to the cardboard squares. Accordingly we say that
the plane is an infinite continuum of two
dimensions, and space an infinite continuum of three
dimensions. What is here meant by the number of
dimensions, I think I may assume to be known.
  Now we take an example of a two-dimensional
continuum which is finite, but unbounded. We
imagine the surface of a large globe and a quantity of
small paper discs, all of the same size. We place one
of the discs anywhere on the surface of the globe. If
we move the disc about, anywhere we like, on the
surface of the globe, we do not come upon a
boundary anywhere on the journey. Therefore we
say that the spherical surface of the globe is an
unbounded continuum. Moreover, the spherical
surface is a finite continuum. For if we stick the
paper discs on the globe, so that no disc overlaps
another, the surface of the globe will finally become
so full that there is no room for another disc. This
means exactly that the spherical surface of the globe
is finite in relation to the paper discs. Further, the
spherical surface is a non-Euclidean continuum of
two dimensions, that is to say, the laws of
disposition for the rigid figures lying in it do not
agree with those of the Euclidean plane. This can be
shown in the following way. Take a disc and
surround it in a circle by six more discs, each of
which is to be surrounded in turn by six discs, and
so on. If this construction is made on a plane
surface, we obtain an uninterrupted arrangement in
which there are six discs touching every disc except
those which lie on the outside. On the spherical
surface the construction also seems to promise
success at the outset, and the smaller the radius of
the disc in proportion to that of the sphere, the
more promising it seems. But as the construction
progresses it becomes more and more patent that
the arrangement of the discs in the manner indicated,
without interruption, is not possible, as it should be
possible by the Euclidean geometry of the plane. In
this way creatures which cannot leave the spherical
surface, and cannot even peep out from the
spherical surface into three-dimensional space,
might discover, merely by experimenting with discs,
that their two-dimensional "space" is not Euclidean,
but spherical space.
  From the latest results of the theory of relativity it
is probable that our three-dimensional space is also
approximately spherical, that is, that the laws of
disposition of rigid bodies in it are not given by
Euclidean geometry, but approximately by spherical
geometry, if only we consider parts of space which
are sufficiently extended. Now this is the place
where the reader's imagination boggles. "Nobody can
imagine this thing," he cries indignantly. "It can be
said, but cannot be thought. I can imagine a spherical
surface well enough, but nothing analogous to it in
three dimensions."
  We must try to surmount this barrier in the mind,
and the patient reader will see that it is by no means
a particularly difficult task. For this purpose we
will first give our attention once more to the
geometry of two-dimensional spherical surfaces. In
the adjoining figure let K be the spherical surface,
touched at S by a plane, E, which, for facility of
presentation, is shown in the drawing as a bounded
surface. Let L be a disc on the spherical surface.
Now let us imagine that at the point N of the
spherical surface, diametrically opposite to S, there
is a luminous point, throwing a shadow L( of the
disc L upon the plane E. Every point on the sphere
has its shadow on the plane. If the disc on the
sphere K is moved, its shadow L( on the plane E
also moves. When the disc L is at S, it almost
exactly coincides with its shadow. If it moves on the
spherical surface away from S upwards, the disc
shadow L( on the plane also moves away from S on
the plane outwards, growing bigger and bigger. As
the disc L approaches the luminous point N, the
shadow moves off to infinity, and becomes
infinitely great.
  Now we put the question: what are the laws of
disposition of the disc-shadows L( on the plane E?
Evidently they are exactly the same as the laws of
disposition of the discs L on the spherical surface.
For to each original figure on K there is a
corresponding shadow figure on E.
If two discs on K are touching, their shadows on E
also touch. The shadow-geometry on the plane
agrees with the disc-geometry on the sphere. If we
call the disc-shadows rigid figures, then spherical
geometry holds good on the plane E with respect to
these rigid figures. In particular, the plane is finite
with respect to the disc-shadows, since only a finite
number of the shadows can find room on the plane.
  At this point somebody will say, "That is
nonsense. The disc-shadows are not rigid figures.
We have only to move a two-foot rule about on the
plane E to convince ourselves that the shadows
constantly increase in size as they move away from
S on the plane toward infinity." But what if the
two-foot rule were to behave on the plane E in the
same way as the disc-shadows L(? It would then be
impossible to show that the shadows increase in
size as they move away from S; such an assertion
would then no longer have any meaning whatever. In
fact the only objective assertion that can be made
about the disc-shadows is just this, that they are
related in exactly the same way as are the rigid discs
on the spherical surface in the sense of Euclidean
geometry.
  We must carefully bear in mind that our statement
as to the growth of the disc-shadows, as they move
away from S toward infinity, has in itself no
objective meaning, as long as we are unable to
compare the disc-shadows with Euclidean rigid
bodies which can be moved about on the plane E. In
respect of the laws of disposition of the shadows
L(, the point S has no special privileges on the plane
any more than on the spherical surface.
  The representation given above of spherical
geometry on the plane is important for us, because
it readily allows itself to be transferred to the
three-dimensional case.
  Let us imagine a point S of our space, and a great
number of small spheres, L(, which can all be
brought to coincide with one another. But these
spheres are not to be rigid in the sense of Euclidean
geometry; their radius is to increase (in the sense of
Euclidean geometry) when they are moved away
from S toward infinity; it is to increase according to
the same law as the radii of the disc-shadows L( on
the plane.
  After having gained a vivid mental image of the
geometrical behavior of our L( spheres, let us
assume that in our space there are no rigid bodies at
all in the sense of Euclidean geometry, but only
bodies having the behavior of our L( spheres. Then
we shall have a clear picture of three-dimensional
spherical space, or, rather of three-dimensional
spherical geometry. Here our spheres must be called
"rigid" spheres. Their increase in size as they depart
from S is not to be detected by measuring with
measuring-rods, any more than in the case of the
disc-shadows on E, because the standards of
measurement behave in the same way as the
spheres. Space is homogeneous, that is to say, the
same spherical configurations are possible in the
neighborhood of every point. Our space is finite,
because, in consequence of the "growth" of the
spheres, only a finite number of them can find room
in space.
  In this way, by using as a crutch the practice in
thinking and visualization which Euclidean geometry
gives us, we have acquired a mental picture of
spherical geometry. We may without difficulty
impart more depth and vigor to these ideas by
carrying out special imaginary constructions. Nor
would it be difficult to represent the case of what is
called elliptical geometry in an analogous manner.
My only aim today has been to show that the
human faculty of visualization is by no means
bound to capitulate to non-Euclidean geometry.

ON THE THEORY OF RELATIVITY

Lecture at King's College, London, 1921. Published
in Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag,
1934.

  It is a particular pleasure to me to have the
privilege of speaking in the capital of the country
from which the most important fundamental notions
of theoretical physics have issued. I am thinking of
the theory of mass motion and gravitation which
Newton gave us and the concept of the
electromagnetic field, by means of which Faraday
and Maxwell put physics on a new basis. The
theory of relativity may indeed be said to have put a
sort of finishing touch to the mighty intellectual
edifice of Maxwell and Lorentz, inasmuch as it
seeks to extend field physics to all phenomena,
gravitation included.
  Turning to the theory of relativity itself, I am
anxious to draw attention to the fact that this theory
is not speculative in origin; it owes its invention
entirely to the desire to make physical theory fit
observed fact as well as possible. We have here no
revolutionary act but the natural continuation of a
line that can be traced through centuries. The
abandonment of certain notions connected with
space, time, and motion hitherto treated as
fundamentals must not be regarded as arbitrary, but
only as conditioned by observed facts.
  The law of the constant velocity of light in empty
space, which has been confirmed by the
development of electrodynamics and optics, and the
equal legitimacy of all inertial systems (special
principle of relativity), which was proved in a
particularly incisive manner by Michelson's famous
experiment, between them made it necessary, to
begin with, that the concept of time should be made
relative, each inertial system being given its own
special time. As this notion was developed, it
became clear that the connection between immediate
experience on one side and coordinates and time on
the other had hitherto not been thought out with
sufficient precision. It is in general one of the
essential features of the theory of relativity that it is
at pains to work out the relations between general
concepts and empirical facts more precisely. The
fundamental principle here is that the justification
for a physical concept lies exclusively in its clear
and unambiguous relation to facts that can be
experienced. According to the special theory of
relativity, spatial coordinates and time still have an
absolute character in so far as they are directly
measurable by stationary clocks and bodies. But
they are relative in so far as they depend on the
state of motion of the selected inertial system.
According to the special theory of relativity the
four-dimensional continuum formed by the union of
space and time (Minkowski) retains the absolute
character which, according to the earlier theory,
belonged to both space and time separately. The
influence of motion (relative to the coordinate
system) on the form of bodies and on the motion of
clocks, also the equivalence of energy and inert
mass, follow from the interpretation of coordinates
and time as products of measurement.
  The general theory of relativity owes its existence
in the first place to the empirical fact of the
numerical equality of the inertial and gravitational
mass of bodies, for which fundamental fact classical
mechanics provided no interpretation. Such an
interpretation is arrived at by an extension of the
principle of relativity to coordinate systems
accelerated relatively to one another. The
introduction of coordinate systems accelerated
relatively to inertial systems involves the
appearance of gravitational fields relative to the
latter. As a result of this, the general theory of
relativity, which is based on the equality of inertia
and weight, provides a theory of the gravitational
field.
  The introduction of coordinate systems accelerated
relatively to each other as equally legitimate
systems, such as they appear conditioned by the
identity of inertia and weight, leads, in conjunction
with the results of the special theory of relativity,
to the conclusion that the laws governing the
arrangement of solid bodies in space, when
gravitational fields are present, do not correspond to
the laws of Euclidean geometry. An analogous result
follows for the motion of clocks. This brings us to
the necessity for yet another generalization of the
theory of space and time, because the direct
interpretation of spatial and temporal coordinates
by means of measurements obtainable with
measuring rods and clocks now breaks down. That
generalization of metric, which had already been
accomplished in the sphere of pure mathematics
through the researches of Gauss and Riemann, is
essentially based on the fact that the metric of the
special theory of relativity can still claim validity
for small regions in the general case as well.
  The process of development here sketched strips
the space-time coordinates of all independent
reality. The metrically real is now only given
through the combination of the space-time
coordinates with the mathematical quantities which
describe the gravitational field.
  There is yet another factor underlying the
evolution of the general theory of relativity. As
Ernst Mach insistently pointed out, the Newtonian
theory is unsatisfactory in the following respect: if
one considers motion from the purely descriptive,
not from the causal, point of view, it only exists as
relative motion of things with respect to one
another. But the acceleration which figures in
Newton's equations of motion is unintelligible if one
starts with the concept of relative motion. It
compelled Newton to invent a physical space in
relation to which acceleration was supposed to
exist. This introduction ad hoc of the concept of
absolute space, while logically unexceptionable,
nevertheless seems unsatisfactory. Hence Mach's
attempt to alter the mechanical equations in such a
way that the inertia of bodies is traced back to
relative motion on their part not as against absolute
space but as against the totality of other ponderable
bodies. In the state of knowledge then existing, his
attempt was bound to fail.
  The posing of the problem seems, however,
entirely reasonable. This line of argument imposes
itself with considerably enhanced force in relation to
the general theory of relativity, since, according to
that theory, the physical properties of space are
affected by ponderable matter. In my opinion the
general theory of relativity can solve this problem
satisfactorily only if it regards the world as spatially
closed. The mathematical results of the theory force
one to this view, if one believes that the mean
density of ponderable matter in the world possesses
some finite value, however small.

THE CAUSE OF THE FORMATION OF
MEANDERS IN THE COURSES OF RIVERS
AND OF THE SO-CALLED BAER'S LAW

Read before the Prussian Academy, January 7,
1926. Published in the German periodical, Die
Naturwissenschaften, Vol. 14, 1926.

  It is common knowledge that streams tend to curve
in serpentine shapes instead of following the line of
the maximum declivity of the ground. It is also well
known to geographers that the rivers of the northern
hemisphere tend to erode chiefly on the right side.
The rivers of the southern hemisphere behave in the
opposite manner (Baer's law). Many attempts have
been made to explain this phenomenon, and I am not
sure whether anything I say in the following pages
will be new to the expert; some of my
considerations are certainly known. Nevertheless,
having found nobody who was thoroughly familiar
with the causal relations involved, I think it is
appropriate to give a short qualitative exposition of
them.
  First of all, it is clear that the erosion must be
stronger the greater the velocity of the current where
it touches the bank in question, or rather the more
steeply it falls to zero at any particular point of the
confining wall. This is equally true under all
circumstances, whether the erosion depends on
mechanical or on physico-chemical factors
(decomposition of the ground). We must then
concentrate our attention on the circumstances
which affect the steepness of the velocity gradient
at the wall.
  In both cases the asymmetry as regards the fall in
velocity in question is indirectly due to the
formation of a circular motion to which we will next
direct our attention.
  I begin with a little experiment which anybody can
easily repeat. Imagine a flat-bottomed cup full of
tea. At the bottom there are some tea leaves, which
stay there because they are rather heavier than the
liquid they have displaced. If the liquid is made to
rotate by a spoon, the leaves will soon collect in the
center of the bottom of the cup. The explanation of
this phenomenon is as follows: the rotation of the
liquid causes a centrifugal force to act on it. This in
itself would give rise to no change in the flow of the
liquid if the latter rotated like a solid body. But in
the neighborhood of the walls of the cup the liquid
is restrained by friction, so that the angular velocity
with which it rotates is less there than in other
places nearer the center. In particular, the angular
velocity of rotation, and therefore the centrifugal
force, will be smaller near the bottom than higher
up. The result of this will be a circular movement of
the liquid of the type illustrated in Fig. 1 which goes
on increasing until, under the influence of ground
friction, it becomes stationary. The tea leaves are
swept into the center by the circular movement and
act as proof of its existence.
  The same sort of thing happens with a curving
stream (Fig. 2). At every cross-section of its course,
where it is bent, a centrifugal force operates in the
direction of the outside of the curve (from A to B).
This force is less near the bottom, where the speed
of the current is reduced by friction, than higher
above the bottom. This causes a circular movement
of the kind illustrated in the diagram. Even where
there is no bend in the river, a circular movement of
the kind shown in Fig. 2 will still take place, if only
on a small scale, as a result of the earth's rotation.
The latter produces a Coriolis-force, acting
transversely to the direction of the current, whose
right-hand horizontal component amounts to 2 (
sin   per unit of mass of the liquid, where v is the
velocity of the current,   the speed of the earth's
rotation, and   the geographical latitude. As ground
friction causes a diminution of this force toward the
bottom, this force also gives rise to a circular
movement of the type indicated in Fig. 2.
  After this preliminary discussion we come back to
the question of the distribution of velocities over the
cross-section of the stream, which is the controlling
factor in erosion. For this purpose we must first
realize how the (turbulent) distribution of velocities
develops and is maintained. If the water which was
previously at rest were suddenly set in motion by
the action of a uniformly distributed accelerating
force, the distribution of velocities over the
cross-section would at first be uniform. A
distribution of velocities gradually increasing from
the confining walls toward the center of the
cross-section would only establish itself after a
time, under the influence of friction at the walls. A
disturbance of the (roughly speaking) stationary
distribution of velocities over the cross-section
would only gradually set in again under the influence
of fluid friction.
  Hydrodynamics pictures the process by which
this stationary distribution of velocities is
established in the following way. In a plane
(potential) flow all the vortex-filaments are
concentrated at the walls. They detach themselves
and slowly move toward the center of the
cross-section of the stream, distributing themselves
over a layer of increasing thickness. The velocity
gradient at the walls thereby gradually diminishes.
Under the action of the internal friction of the liquid
the vortex filaments in the interior of the
cross-section are gradually absorbed, their place
being taken by new ones which form at the wall. A
quasi-stationary distribution of velocities is thus
produced. The important thing for us is that the
attainment of the stationary distribution of
velocities is a slow process. That is why relatively
insignificant, constantly operative causes are able to
exert a considerable influence on the distribution of
velocities over the cross-section. Let us now
consider what sort of influence the circular motion
due to a bend in the river or the Coriolis-force, as
illustrated in Fig. 2, is bound to exert on the
distribution of velocities over the cross section of
the river. The particles of liquid in most rapid
motion will be farthest away from the walls, that is
to say, in the upper part above the center of the
bottom. These most rapid parts of the water will be
driven by the circulation toward the right-hand wall,
while the left-hand wall gets the water which comes
from the region near the bottom and has a specially
low velocity. Hence in the case depicted in Fig. 2
the erosion is necessarily stronger on the right side
than on the left. It should be noted that this
explanation is essentially based on the fact that the
slow circulating movement of the water exerts a
considerable influence on the distribution of
velocities, because the adjustment of velocities by
internal friction which counteracts this consequence
of the circulating movement is also a slow process.
  We have now revealed the causes of the formation
of meanders. Certain details can, however, also be
deduced without difficulty from these facts. Erosion
will be comparatively extensive not merely on the
right-hand wall but also on the right half of the
bottom, so that there will be a tendency to assume a
profile as illustrated in Fig. 3.
  Moreover, the water at the surface will come from
the left-hand wall, and will therefore, on the
left-hand side especially, be moving less rapidly
than the water rather lower down. This has, in fact,
been observed. It should further be noted that the
circular motion possesses inertia. The circulation
will therefore only achieve its maximum beyond the
place of the greatest curvature, and the same
naturally applies to the asymmetry of the erosion.
Hence in the course of the erosion an advance of the
wave-line of the meander-formation is bound to take
place in the direction of the current. Finally, the
larger the cross-section of the river, the more slowly
will the circular movement be absorbed by friction;
the wave-line of the meander-formation will
therefore increase with the cross-section of the river.

THE MECHANICS OF NEWTON AND
THEIR INFLUENCE ON THE
DEVELOPMENT OF THEORETICAL
PHYSICS

On the occasion of the two hundreth anniversary of
Newton's death. Published in Vol. 15 of the German
periodical, Die Naturwissenschaften, i1927.

  It is just two hundred years ago that Newton
closed his eyes. We feel impelled at such a moment
to remember this brilliant genius, who determined
the course of western thought, research, and practice
like no one else before or since. Not only was he
brilliant as an inventor of certain key methods, but
he also had a unique command of the empirical
material available in his day, and he was
marvelously inventive as regards detailed
mathematical and physical methods of proof. For all
these reasons he deserves our deepest reverence.
The figure of Newton has, however, an even greater
importance than his genius warrants because destiny
placed him at a turning point in the history of the
human intellect. To see this vividly, we have to
realize that before Newton there existed no
self-contained system of physical causality which
was somehow capable of representing any of the
deeper features of the empirical world.
  No doubt the great materialists of ancient Greece
had insisted that all material events should be traced
back to a strictly regular series of atomic
movements, without admitting any living creature's
will as an independent cause. And no doubt
Descartes had in his own way taken up this quest
again. But it remained a bold ambition, the
problematical ideal of a school of philosophers.
Actual results of a kind to support the belief in the
existence of a complete chain of physical causation
hardly existed before Newton.
  Newton's object was to answer the question: is
there any simple rule by which one can calculate the
movements of the heavenly bodies in our planetary
system completely, when the state of motion of all
these bodies at one moment is known? Kepler's
empirical laws of planetary movement, deduced
from Tycho Brahe's observations, confronted him,
and demanded explanation. [Today everybody
knows what prodigious industry was needed to
discover these laws from the empirically ascertained
orbits. But few pause to reflect on the brilliant
method by which Kepler deduced the real orbits
from the apparent ones--i.e., from the movements as
they were observed from the earth.] These laws
gave, it is true, a complete answer to the question of
how the planets move round the sun: the elliptical
shape of the orbit, the sweeping of equal areas by
the radii in equal times, the relation between the
major axes and the periods of revolution. But these
rules do not satisfy the demand for causal
explanation. They are three logically independent
rules, revealing no inner connection with each other.
The third law cannot simply be transferred
quantitatively to other central bodies than the sun
(there is, e.g., no relation between the period of
revolution of a planet round the sun and that of a
moon round its planet). The most important point,
however, is this: these laws are concerned with the
movement as a whole, and not with the question
how the state of motion of a system gives rise to that
which immediately follows it in time; they are, as we
should say now, integral and not differential laws.
  The differential law is the only form which
completely satisfies the modern physicist's demand
for causality. The clear conception of the differential
law is one of Newton's greatest intellectual
achievements. It was not merely this conception
that was needed but also a mathematical formalism,
which existed in a rudimentary way but needed to
acquire a systematic form. Newton found this also
in the differential and the integral calculus. We need
not consider the question here whether Leibnitz hit
upon the same mathematical methods independently
of Newton, or not. In any case it was absolutely
necessary for Newton to perfect them, since they
alone could provide him with the means of
expressing his ideas.
  Galileo had already made a significant beginning
toward a knowledge of the law of motion. He
discovered the law of inertia and the law of bodies
falling freely in the gravitational field of the earth,
namely, that a mass (more accurately, a mass-point)
which is unaffected by other masses moves
uniformly and in a straight line. The vertical speed
of a free body in the gravitational field increases
uniformly with time. It may seem to us today to be
but a short step from Galileo's discoveries to
Newton's law of motion. But it should be observed
that both the above statements are so formulated as
to refer to the motion as a whole, while Newton's
law of motion provides an answer to the question:
how does the state of motion of a mass-point
change in an infinitely short time under the influence
of an external force? It was only by considering
what takes place during an infinitely short time
(differential law) that Newton reached a formulation
which applies to all motion whatsoever. He took the
concept of force from the science of statics which
had already reached a high stage of development. He
was only able to connect force and acceleration by
introducing the new concept of mass, which was
supported, strange to say, by an illusory definition.
We are so accustomed today to form concepts
corresponding to differential quotients that we can
now hardly grasp any longer what a remarkable
power of abstraction it needed to obtain the general
differential law by a double limiting process in the
course of which the concept of mass had in addition
to be invented.
  But a causal concept of motion was still far from
being achieved. For the motion was only determined
by the equation of motion in cases where the force
was given. Inspired no doubt by the laws of
planetary motions, Newton conceived the idea that
the force operating on a mass was determined by the
position of all masses situated at a sufficiently small
distance from the mass in question. It was not till
this connection was established that a completely
causal concept of motion was achieved. How
Newton, starting from Kepler's laws of planetary
motion, performed this task for gravitation and so
discovered that the moving forces acting on the stars
and gravity were of the same nature, is well known.
It is the combination

Law of Motion plus Law of Attraction

which constitutes that marvelous edifice of thought
which makes it possible to calculate the past and
future states of a system from the state obtaining at
one particular moment, in so far as the events take
place under the influence of the forces of gravity
alone. The logical completeness of Newton's
conceptual system lay in this, that the only causes
of the acceleration of the masses of a system are
these masses themselves.
  On the basis of the foundation here briefly
sketched, Newton succeeded in explaining the
motions of the planets, moons, and comets down to
the smallest details, as well as the tides and the
precessional movement of the earth--a deductive
achievement of unique magnificence. The discovery
that the cause of the motions of the heavenly bodies
is identical with the gravity with which we are so
familiar from everyday life must have been
particularly impressive.
  But the importance of Newton's achievement was
not confined to the fact that it created a workable
and logically satisfactory basis for the actual science
of mechanics; up to the end of the nineteenth
century it formed the program of every worker in
the field of theoretical physics. All physical events
were to be traced back to masses subject to
Newton's laws of motion. The law of force simply
had to be extended and adapted to the type of event
under consideration. Newton himself tried to apply
this program to optics, assuming light to consist of
inert corpuscles. Even the wave theory of light made
use of Newton's law of motion, after it had been
applied to continuously distributed masses.
Newton's equations of motion were the sole basis of
the kinetic theory of heat, which not only prepared
people's minds for the discovery of the law of the
conservation of energy but also led to a theory of
gases which has been confirmed down to the last
detail, and a more profound view of the nature of
the second law of thermodynamics. The
development of electricity and magnetism has
proceeded up to modern times along Newtonian
lines (electrical and magnetic substance, forces acting
at a distance). Even the revolution in
electrodynamics and optics brought about by
Faraday and Maxwell, which formed the first great
fundamental advance in theoretical physics since
Newton, took place entirely under the µgis of
Newton's ideas. Maxwell, Boltzmann, and Lord
Kelvin never wearied of tracing the electromagnetic
fields and their dynamic interactions back to the
mechanical action of hypothetical continuously
distributed masses. As a result, however, of the lack
of success, or at any rate of any marked success of
those efforts, a gradual shift in our fundamental
notions has taken place since the end of the
nineteenth century; theoretical physics has
outgrown the Newtonian frame which gave stability
and intellectual guidance to science for nearly two
hundred years.
  Newton's fundamental principles were so
satisfactory from the logical point of view that the
impetus to overhaul them could only spring from
the demands of empirical fact. Before I go into this I
must emphasize that Newton himself was better
aware of the weaknesses inherent in his intellectual
edifice than the generations of learned scientists
which followed him. This fact has always aroused
my deep admiration, and I should like, therefore, to
dwell on it for a moment.
  I. Newton's endeavors to represent his system as
necessarily conditioned by experience and to
introduce the smallest possible number of concepts
not directly referable to empirical objects is
everywhere evident; in spite of this he set up the
concept of absolute space and absolute time. For
this he has often been criticized in recent years. But
in this point Newton is particularly consistent. He
had realized that observable geometrical quantities
(distances of material points from one another) and
their course in time do not completely characterize
motion in its physical aspects. He proved this in the
famous experiment with the rotating vessel of water.
Therefore, in addition to masses and temporally
variable distances, there must be something else that
determines motion. That "something" he takes to be
relation to "absolute space." He is aware that space
must possess a kind of physical reality if his laws
of motion are to have any meaning, a reality of the
same sort as material points and their distances.
  The clear realization of this reveals both Newton's
wisdom and also a weak side to his theory. For the
logical structure of the latter would undoubtedly be
more satisfactory without this shadowy concept; in
that case only things whose relations to perception
are perfectly clear (mass-points, distances) would
enter into the laws.
  II. Forces acting directly and instantaneously at a
distance, as introduced to represent the effects of
gravity, are not in character with most of the
processes familiar to us from everyday life. Newton
meets this objection by pointing to the fact that his
law of gravitational interaction is not supposed to
be a final explanation but a rule derived by induction
from experience.
  III. Newton's theory provided no explanation for
the highly remarkable fact that the weight and the
inertia of a body are determined by the same
quantity (its mass). Newton himself was aware of
the peculiarity of this fact.
  None of these three points can rank as a logical
objection to the theory. In a sense they merely
represent unsatisfied desires of the scientific mind in
its struggle for a complete and uniform conceptual
grasp of natural phenomena.
  Newton's theory of motion, considered as a
program for the whole of theoretical physics,
received its first blow from Maxwell's theory of
electricity. It became clear that the electric and
magnetic interactions between bodies were effected,
not by forces operating instantaneously at a
distance, but by processes which are propagated
through space at a finite speed. In addition to the
mass point and its motion, there arose according to
Faraday's concept a new kind of physical reality,
namely, the "field." At first people tried, adhering to
the point of view of mechanics, to interpret the field
as a mechanical state (of motion or stress) of a
hypothetical medium (the ether) permeating space.
But when this interpretation refused to work in
spite of the most obstinate efforts, people gradually
got used to the idea of regarding the "electromagnetic
field" as the final irreducible constituent of physical
reality. We have H. Hertz to thank for definitely
freeing the concept of the field from all
encumbrances derived from the conceptual armory
of mechanics, and H. A. Lorentz for freeing it from a
material substratum; according to the latter the only
thing left as substratum for the field was physical
empty space (or ether), which even in the mechanics
of Newton had not been destitute of all physical
functions. By the time this point was reached,
nobody any longer believed in immediate
momentary action at a distance, not even in the
sphere of gravitation, although no field theory of the
latter was clearly indicated owing to lack of
sufficient factual knowledge. The development of
the theory of the electromagnetic field--once
Newton's hypothesis of forces acting at a distance
had been abandoned--led also to the attempt to
explain the Newtonian law of motion on
electromagnetic lines or to replace it by a more
accurate one based on the field-theory. Even though
these efforts did not meet with complete success,
still the fundamental concepts of mechanics had
ceased to be looked upon as fundamental
constituents of the physical cosmos.
  The theory of Maxwell and Lorentz led inevitably
to the special theory of relativity, which, since it
abandoned the notion of absolute simultaneity,
excluded the existence of forces acting at a distance.
It followed from this theory that mass is not a
constant quantity but depends on (indeed it is
equivalent to) the energy content. It also showed
that Newton's law of motion was only to be
regarded as a limiting law valid for small velocities;
in its place it set up a new law of motion in which
the speed of light in vacuo figures as the limiting
velocity.
  The general theory of relativity formed the last
step in the development of the program of the
field-theory. Quantitatively it modified Newton's
theory only slightly, but for that all the more
profoundly qualitatively. Inertia, gravitation, and
the metrical behavior of bodies and clocks were
reduced to a single field quality; this field itself was
again postulated as dependent on bodies
(generalization of Newton's law of gravity or rather
the field law corresponding to it, as formulated by
Poisson). Space and time were thereby divested not
of their reality but of their causal absoluteness--i.e.,
affecting but not affected--which Newton had been
compelled to ascribe to them in order to formulate
the laws then known. The generalized law of inertia
takes over the function of Newton's law of motion.
This short account is enough to show how the
elements of Newtonian theory passed over into the
general theory of relativity, whereby the three
defects above mentioned were overcome. It looks as
if in the framework of the theory of general
relativity the law of motion could be deduced from
the field law corresponding to the Newtonian law of
force. Only when this goal has been completely
reached will it be possible to talk about a pure
field-theory.
  In a more formal sense also Newton's mechanics
prepared the way for the field-theory. The
application of Newton's mechanics to continuously
distributed masses led inevitably to the discovery
and application of partial differential equations,
which in their turn first provided the language for
the laws of the field-theory. In this formal respect
Newton's conception of the differential law
constitutes the first decisive step in the
development which followed.
  The whole evolution of our ideas about the
processes of nature, with which we have been
concerned so far, might be regarded as an organic
development of Newton's ideas. But while the
process of perfecting the field-theory was still in
full swing, the facts of heat-radiation, the spectra,
radioactivity, etc., revealed a limitation of the
applicability of this whole conceptual system which
today still seems to us virtually impossible to
overcome notwithstanding immense successes in
many instances. Many physicists maintain--and
there are weighty arguments in their favor--that in
the face of these facts not merely the differential law
but the law of causation itself--hitherto the ultimate
basic postulate of all natural science--has collapsed.
Even the possibility of a spatio-temporal
construction, which can be unambiguously
coordinated with physical events, is denied. That a
mechanical system can have only discrete
permanent energy-values or states--as experience
almost directly shows--seems at first sight hardly
deducible from a field-theory which operates with
differential equations. The de Broglie-Schr÷dinger
method, which has in a certain sense the character of
a field-theory, does indeed deduce the existence of
only discrete states, in surprising agreement with
empirical facts. It does so on the basis of differential
equations applying a kind of resonance-argument,
but it has to give up the localization of particles and
strictly causal laws. Who would presume today to
decide the question whether the law of causation
and the differential law, these ultimate premises of
the Newtonian view of nature, must definitely be
abandoned?

ON SCIENTIFIC TRUTH

Answers to questions of a Japanese scholar.
Published in Gelegentliches, 1929, which appeared
in a limited edition on the occasion of Einstein's
fiftieth birthday.

  I. It is difficult even to attach a precise meaning to
the term "scientific truth." Thus the meaning of the
word "truth" varies according to whether we deal
with a fact of experience, a mathematical
proposition, or a scientific theory. "Religious truth"
conveys nothing clear to me at all.
  II. Scientific research can reduce superstition by
encouraging people to think and view things in
terms of cause and effect. Certain it is that a
conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the
rationality or intelligibility of the world lies behind
all scientific work of a higher order.
  III. This firm belief, a belief bound up with deep
feeling, in a superior mind that reveals itself in the
world of experience, represents my conception of
God. In common parlance this may be described as
"pantheistic" (Spinoza).
  IV. Denominational traditions I can only consider
historically and psychologically; they have no other
significance for me.

JOHANNES KEPLER

On the occasion of the three hundredth anniversary
of Kepler's death. Published in the Frankfurter
Zeitung (Germany), November 9, 1930.

  In anxious and uncertain times like ours, when it is
difficult to find pleasure in humanity and the course
of human affairs, it is particularly consoling to think
of such a supreme and quiet man as Kepler. Kepler
lived in an age in which the reign of law in nature
was as yet by no means certain. How great must his
faith in the existence of natural law have been to give
him the strength to devote decades of hard and
patient work to the empirical investigation of
planetary motion and the mathematical laws of that
motion, entirely on his own, supported by no one
and understood by very few! If we would honor his
memory fittingly, we must get as clear a picture as
we can of his problem and the stages of its solution.
  Copernicus had opened the eyes of the most
intelligent to the fact that the best way to get a clear
grasp of the apparent movements of the planets in
the heavens was to regard them as movements round
the sun conceived as stationary. If the planets
moved uniformly in a circle round the sun, it would
have been comparatively easy to discover how these
movements must look from the earth. Since,
however, the phenomena to be dealt with were
much more complicated than that, the task was far
harder. First of all, these movements had to be
determined empirically from the observations of
Tycho Brahe. Only then did it become possible to
think about discovering the general laws which these
movements satisfy.
  To grasp how difficult a business it was even to
determine the actual movements round the sun one
has to realize the following. One can never see
where a planet really is at any given moment, but
only in what direction it can be seen just then from
the earth, which is itself moving in an unknown
manner round the sun. The difficulties thus seemed
practically insurmountable.
  Kepler had to discover a way of bringing order into
this chaos. To start with, he saw that it was
necessary first to try to find out about the motion
of the earth itself. This would simply have been
impossible if there existed only the sun, the earth,
and the fixed stars, but no other planets. For in that
case one could ascertain nothing empirically except
how the direction of the straight sun-earth line
changes in the course of the year (apparent
movement of the sun with reference to the fixed
stars). In this way it was possible to discover that
these sun-earth directions all lay in a plane
stationary with reference to the fixed stars, at least
according to the accuracy of observation achieved in
those days, when there were no telescopes. By this
means it could also be ascertained in what manner
the line sun-earth revolves round the sun. It turned
out that the angular velocity of this motion varied in
a regular way in the course of the year. But this was
not of much use, as it was still not known how the
distance from the earth to the sun alters in the
course of the year. Only when these changes were
known, could the real shape of the earth's orbit and
the manner in which it is described be ascertained.
  Kepler found a marvelous way out of this
dilemma. To begin with it followed from
observations of the sun that the apparent path of
the sun against the background of the fixed stars
differed in speed at different times of the year, but
that the angular velocity of this movement was
always the same at the same time of the
astronomical year, and therefore that the speed of
rotation of the straight line earth-sun was always
the same when it pointed to the same region of the
fixed stars. It was thus legitimate to suppose that
the earth's orbit was closed, described by the earth
in the same way every year--which was by no
means obvious a priori. For the adherents of the
Copernican system it was thus as good as certain
that this must also apply to the orbits of the rest of
the planets.
  This certainly made things easier. But how to
ascertain the real shape of the earth's orbit? Imagine
a brightly shining lantern M somewhere in the plane
of the orbit. Assume we know that this lantern
remains permanently in its place and thus forms a
kind of fixed triangulation point for determining the
earth's orbit, a point which the inhabitants of the
earth can take a sight on at any time of year. Let this
lantern M be further away from the sun than the
earth. With the help of such a lantern it was
possible to determine the earth's orbit, in the
following way:
  First of all, in every year there comes a moment
when the earth E lies exactly on the line joining the
sun S and the lantern M. If at this moment we look
from the earth E at the lantern M, our line of sight
will coincide with the line SM (sun-lantern).
Suppose the latter to be marked in the heavens.
Now imagine the earth in a different position and at
a different time. Since the sun S and the lantern M
can both be seen from the earth, the angle at E in the
triangle SEM is known. But we also know the
direction of SE in relation to the fixed stars through
direct solar observations, while the direction of the
line SM in relation to the fixed stars has previously
been ascertained once for all. In the triangle SEM we
also know the angle at S. Therefore, with the base
SM arbitrarily laid down on a sheet of paper, we
can, in virtue of our knowledge of the angles at E
and S, construct the triangle SEM. We might do this
at frequent intervals during the year; each time we
should get on our piece of paper a position of the
earth E with a date attached to it and a certain
position in relation to the permanently fixed base
SM. The earth's orbit would thereby be empirically
determined, apart from its absolute size, of course.
  But, you will say, where did Kepler get his lantern
M? His genius and nature, benevolent in this case,
gave it to him. There was, for example, the planet
Mars; and the length of the Martian year--i.e., one
rotation of Mars round the sun--was known. At one
point, it may happen that the sun, the earth, and
Mars lie very nearly on a straight line. This position
of Mars regularly recurs after one, two, etc.,
Martian years, as Mars moves in a closed orbit. At
these known moments, therefore, SM always
presents the same base, while the earth is always at
a different point in its orbit. The observations of the
sun and Mars at these moments thus constitute a
means of determining the true orbit of the earth, as
Mars then plays the part of our imaginary lantern.
Thus it was that Kepler discovered the true shape
of the earth's orbit and the way in which the earth
describes it, and we who come after--Europeans,
Germans, or even Swabians--may well admire and
honor him for it.
  Now that the earth's orbit had been empirically
determined, the true position and length of the line
SE at any moment was known, and it was not so
terribly difficult for Kepler to calculate the orbits
and motions of the rest of the planets, too, from
observations--at least in principle. It was
nevertheless an immense task, especially considering
the state of mathematics at the time.
  Now came the second and no less arduous part of
Kepler's life-work. The orbits were empirically
known, but their laws had to be guessed from the
empirical data. First he had to make a guess at the
mathematical nature of the curve described by the
orbit, and then try it out on a vast assemblage of
figures. If it did not fit, another hypothesis had to
be devised and again tested. After tremendous
search, the conjecture that the orbit was an ellipse
with the sun at one of its foci was found to fit the
facts. Kepler also discovered the law governing the
variation in speed during one revolution, which is
that the line sun-planet sweeps out equal areas in
equal periods of time. Finally he also discovered
that the squares of the periods of revolution round
the sun vary as the cubes of the major axes of the
ellipses.
  Our admiration for this splendid man is
accompanied by another feeling of admiration and
reverence, the object of which is no man but the
mysterious harmony of nature into which we are
born. The ancients already devised the lines
exhibiting the simplest conceivable form of
regularity. Among these, next to the straight line and
the circle, the most important were the ellipse and
the hyperbola. We see the last two embodied--at
least very nearly so--in the orbits of the heavenly
bodies.
  It seems that the human mind has first to construct
forms independently before we can find them in
things. Kepler's marvelous achievement is a
particularly fine example of the truth that
knowledge cannot spring from experience alone but
only from the comparison of the inventions of the
intellect with observed fact.

MAXWELL'S INFLUENCE ON THE
EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF PHYSICAL
REALITY

On the one hundredth anniversary of Maxwell's
birth. Published, 1931, in James Clerk Maxwell: A
Commemoration Volume, Cambridge University
Press.

  The belief in an external world independent of the
perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science.
Since, however, sense perception only gives
information of this external world or of "physical
reality" indirectly, we can only grasp the latter by
speculative means. It follows from this that our
notions of physical reality can never be final. We
must always be ready to change these notions--that
is to say, the axiomatic basis of physics--in order to
do justice to perceived facts in the most perfect way
logically. Actually a glance at the development of
physics shows that it has undergone far-reaching
changes in the course of time.
  The greatest change in the axiomatic basis of
physics--in other words, of our conception of the
structure of reality--since Newton laid the
foundation of theoretical physics was brought about
by Faraday's and Maxwell's work on
electromagnetic phenomena. We will try in what
follows to make this clearer, keeping both earlier and
later developments in sight.
  According to Newton's system, physical reality is
characterized by the concepts of space, time,
material point, and force (reciprocal action of
material points). Physical events, in Newton's view,
are to be regarded as the motions, governed by fixed
laws, of material points in space. The material point
is our only mode of representing reality when
dealing with changes taking place in it, the solitary
representative of the real, in so far as the real is
capable of change. Perceptible bodies are obviously
responsible for the concept of the material point;
people conceived it as an analogue of mobile bodies,
stripping these of the characteristics of extension,
form, orientation in space, and all "inward" qualities,
leaving only inertia and translation and adding the
concept of force. The material bodies, which had led
psychologically to our formation of the concept of
the "material point," had now themselves to be
regarded as systems of material points. It should be
noted that this theoretical scheme is in essence an
atomistic and mechanistic one. All happenings were
to be interpreted purely mechanically--that is to
say, simply as motions of material points according
to Newton's law of motion.
  The most unsatisfactory side of this system (apart
from the difficulties involved in the concept of
"absolute space" which have been raised once more
quite recently) lay in its description of light, which
Newton also conceived, in accordance with his
system, as composed of material points. Even at
that time the question, What in that case becomes of
the material points of which light is composed,
when the light is absorbed?, was already a burning
one. Moreover, it is unsatisfactory in any case to
introduce into the discussion material points of
quite a different sort, which had to be postulated for
the purpose of representing ponderable matter and
light respectively. Later on, electrical corpuscles
were added to these, making a third kind, again with
completely different characteristics. It was, further,
a fundamental weakness that the forces of reciprocal
action, by which events are determined, had to be
assumed hypothetically in a perfectly arbitrary
way. Yet this conception of the real accomplished
much: how came it that people felt themselves
impelled to forsake it?
  In order to put his system into mathematical form
at all, Newton had to devise the concept of
differential quotients and propound the laws of
motion in the form of total differential
equations--perhaps the greatest advance in thought
that a single individual was ever privileged to make.
Partial differential equations were not necessary for
this purpose, nor did Newton make any systematic
use of them; but they were necessary for the
formulation of the mechanics of deformable bodies;
this is connected with the fact that in these
problems the question of how bodies are supposed
to be constructed out of material points was of no
importance to begin with.
  Thus the partial differential equation entered
theoretical physics as a handmaid, but has gradually
become mistress. This began in the nineteenth
century when the wave-theory of light established
itself under the pressure of observed fact. Light in
empty space was explained as a matter of vibrations
of the ether, and it seemed idle at that stage, of
course, to look upon the latter as a conglomeration
of material points. Here for the first time the partial
differential equation appeared as the natural
expression of the primary realities of physics. In a
particular department of theoretical physics the
continuous field thus appeared side by side with the
material point as the representative of physical
reality. This dualism remains even today, disturbing
as it must be to every orderly mind.
  If the idea of physical reality had ceased to be
purely atomic, it still remained for the time being
purely mechanistic; people still tried to explain all
events as the motion of inert masses; indeed no
other way of looking at things seemed conceivable.
Then came the great change, which will be
associated for all time with the names of Faraday,
Maxwell, and Hertz. The lion's share in this
revolution fell to Maxwell. He showed that the
whole of what was then known about light and
electro-magnetic phenomena was expressed in his
well-known double system of differential equations,
in which the electric and the magnetic fields appear
as the dependent variables. Maxwell did, indeed, try
to explain, or justify, these equations by the
intellectual construction of a mechanical model.
  But he made use of several such constructions at
the same time and took none of them really
seriously, so that the equations alone appeared as
the essential thing and the field strengths as the
ultimate entities, not to be reduced to anything else.
By the turn of the century the conception of the
electromagnetic field as an ultimate entity had been
generally accepted and serious thinkers had
abandoned the belief in the justification, or the
possibility, of a mechanical explanation of
Maxwell's equations. Before long they were, on the
contrary, actually trying to explain material points
and their inertia on field theory lines with the help
of Maxwell's theory, an attempt which did not,
however, meet with complete success.
  Neglecting the important individual results which
Maxwell's life-work produced in important
departments of physics, and concentrating on the
changes wrought by him in our conception of the
nature of physical reality, we may say this: before
Maxwell people conceived of physical reality--in so
far as it is supposed to represent events in
nature--as material points, whose changes consist
exclusively of motions, which are subject to total
differential equations. After Maxwell they
conceived physical reality as represented by
continuous fields, not mechanically explicable,
which are subject to partial differential equations.
This change in the conception of reality is the most
profound and fruitful one that has come to physics
since Newton; but it has at the same time to be
admitted that the program has by no means been
completely carried out yet. The successful systems
of physics which have been evolved since rather
represent compromises between these two schemes,
which for that very reason bear a provisional,
logically incomplete character, although they may
have achieved great advances in certain particulars.
  The first of these that calls for mention is
Lorentz's theory of electrons, in which the field and
the electrical corpuscles appear side by side as
elements of equal value for the comprehension of
reality. Next come the special and general theories of
relativity, which, though based entirely on ideas
connected with the field-theory, have so far been
unable to avoid the independent introduction of
material points and total differential equations.
  The last and most successful creation of theoretical
physics, namely quantum-mechanics, differs
fundamentally from both the schemes which we will
for the sake of brevity call the Newtonian and the
Maxwellian. For the quantities which figure in its
laws make no claim to describe physical reality
itself, but only the probabilities of the occurrence of
a physical reality that we have in view. Dirac, to
whom, in my opinion, we owe the most perfect
exposition, logically, of this theory, rightly points
out that it would probably be difficult, for example,
to give a theoretical description of a photon such as
would give enough information to enable one to
decide whether it will pass a polarizer placed
(obliquely) in its way or not.
  I am still inclined to the view that physicists will
not in the long run content themselves with that sort
of indirect description of the real, even if the theory
can eventually be adapted to the postulate of general
relativity in a satisfactory manner. We shall then, I
feel sure, have to return to the attempt to carry out
the program which may be described properly as
the Maxwellian--namely, the description of physical
reality in terms of fields which satisfy partial
differential equations without singularities.

ON THE METHOD OF THEORETICAL
PHYSICS

The Herbert Spencer lecture, delivered at Oxford,
June 10, 1933. Published in Mein Weltbild,
Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  If you want to find out anything from the
theoretical physicists about the methods they use, I
advise you to stick closely to one principle: don't
listen to their words, fix your attention on their
deeds. To him who is a discoverer in this field, the
products of his imagination appear so necessary and
natural that he regards them, and would like to have
them regarded by others, not as creations of thought
but as given realities.
  These words sound like an invitation to you to
walk out of this lecture. You will say to yourselves,
the fellow's a working physicist himself and ought
therefore to leave all questions of the structure of
theoretical science to the epistemologists.
  Against such criticism I can defend myself from
the personal point of view by assuring you that it is
not at my own instance but at the kind invitation of
others that I have mounted this rostrum, which
serves to commemorate a man who fought hard all
his life for the unity of knowledge. Objectively,
however, my enterprise can be justified on the
ground that it may, after all, be of interest to know
how one who has spent a lifetime in striving with all
his might to clear up and rectify its fundamentals
looks upon his own branch of science. The way in
which he regards its past and present may depend
too much on what he hopes for the future and aims
at in the present; but that is the inevitable fate of
anybody who has occupied himself intensively with
a world of ideas. The same thing happens to him as
to the historian, who in the same way, even though
perhaps unconsciously, groups actual events round
ideals which he has formed for himself on the
subject of human society.
  Let us now cast an eye over the development of
the theoretical system, paying special attention to
the relations between the content of the theory and
the totality of empirical fact. We are concerned with
the eternal antithesis between the two inseparable
components of our knowledge, the empirical and the
rational, in our department.
  We reverence ancient Greece as the cradle of
western science Here for the first time the world
witnessed the miracle of a logical system which
proceeded from step to step with such precision
that every single one of its propositions was
absolutely indubitable--I refer to Euclid's geometry.
This admirable triumph of reasoning gave the human
intellect the necessary confidence in itself for its
subsequent achievements. If Euclid failed to kindle
your youthful enthusiasm, then you were not born
to be a scientific thinker.
  But before mankind could be ripe for a science
which takes in the whole of reality, a second
fundamental truth was needed, which only became
common property among philosophers with the
advent of Kepler and Galileo. Pure logical thinking
cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical
world; all knowledge of reality starts from
experience and ends in it. Propositions arrived at by
purely logical means are completely empty as
regards reality. Because Galileo saw this, and
particularly because he drummed it into the
scientific world, he is the father of modern
physics--indeed, of modern science altogether.
  If, then, experience is the alpha and the omega of
all our knowledge of reality, what is the function of
pure reason in science?
  A complete system of theoretical physics is made
up of concepts, fundamental laws which are
supposed to be valid for those concepts and
conclusions to be reached by logical deduction. It is
these conclusions which must correspond with our
separate experiences; in any theoretical treatise their
logical deduction occupies almost the whole book.
  This is exactly what happens in Euclid's geometry,
except that there the fundamental laws are called
axioms and there is no question of the conclusions
having to correspond to any sort of experience. If,
however, one regards Euclidean geometry as the
science of the possible mutual relations of
practically rigid bodies in space, that is to say,
treats it as a physical science, without abstracting
from its original empirical content, the logical
homogeneity of geometry and theoretical physics
becomes complete.
  We have thus assigned to pure reason and
experience their places in a theoretical system of
physics. The structure of the system is the work of
reason; the empirical contents and their mutual
relations must find their representation in the
conclusions of the theory. In the possibility of such
a representation lie the sole value and justification of
the whole system, and especially of the concepts
and fundamental principles which underlie it. Apart
from that, these latter are free inventions of the
human intellect, which cannot be justified either by
the nature of that intellect or in any other fashion a
priori.
  These fundamental concepts and postulates, which
cannot be further reduced logically, form the
essential part of a theory, which reason cannot
touch. It is the grand object of all theory to make
these irreducible elements as simple and as few in
number as possible, without having to renounce the
adequate representation of any empirical content
whatever.
  The view I have just outlined of the purely
fictitious character of the fundamentals of scientific
theory was by no means the prevailing one in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But it is
steadily gaining ground from the fact that the
distance in thought between the fundamental
concepts and laws on one side and, on the other, the
conclusions which have to be brought into relation
with our experience grows larger and larger, the
simpler the logical structure becomes--that is to say,
the smaller the number of logically independent
conceptual elements which are found necessary to
support the structure.
  Newton, the first creator of a comprehensive,
workable system of theoretical physics, still
believed that the basic concepts and laws of his
system could be derived from experience. This is no
doubt the meaning of his saying, hypotheses non
fingo.
  Actually the concepts of time and space appeared
at that time to present no difficulties. The concepts
of mass, inertia, and force, and the laws connecting
them, seemed to be drawn directly from experience.
Once this basis is accepted, the expression for the
force of gravitation appears derivable from
experience, and it was reasonable to expect the same
in regard to other forces.
  We can indeed see from Newton's formulation of it
that the concept of absolute space, which comprised
that of absolute rest, made him feel uncomfortable;
he realized that there seemed to be nothing in
experience corresponding to this last concept. He
was also not quite comfortable about the
introduction of forces operating at a distance. But
the tremendous practical success of his doctrines
may well have prevented him and the physicists of
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from
recognizing the fictitious character of the
foundations of his system.
  The natural philosophers of those days were, on
the contrary, most of them possessed with the idea
that the fundamental concepts and postulates of
physics were not in the logical sense free inventions
of the human mind but could be deduced from
experience by "abstraction"--that is to say, by
logical means. A clear recognition of the
erroneousness of this notion really only came with
the general theory of relativity, which showed that
one could take account of a wider range of empirical
facts, and that, too, in a more satisfactory and
complete manner, on a foundation quite different
from the Newtonian. But quite apart from the
question of the superiority of one or the other, the
fictitious character of fundamental principles is
perfectly evident from the fact that we can point to
two essentially different principles, both of which
correspond with experience to a large extent; this
proves at the same time that every attempt at a
logical deduction of the basic concepts and
postulates of mechanics from elementary
experiences is doomed to failure.
  If, then, it is true that the axiomatic basis of
theoretical physics cannot be extracted from
experience but must be freely invented, can we ever
hope to find the right way? Nay, more, has this
right way any existence outside our illusions? Can
we hope to be guided safely by experience at all
when there exist theories (such as classical
mechanics) which to a large extent do justice to
experience, without getting to the root of the
matter? I answer without hesitation that there is, in
my opinion, a right way, and that we are capable of
finding it. Our experience hitherto justifies us in
believing that nature is the realization of the
simplest conceivable mathematical ideas. I am
convinced that we can discover by means of purely
mathematical constructions the concepts and the
laws connecting them with each other, which furnish
the key to the understanding of natural phenomena.
Experience may suggest the appropriate
mathematical concepts, but they most certainly
cannot be deduced from it. Experience remains, of
course, the sole criterion of the physical utility of a
mathematical construction. But the creative
principle resides in mathematics. In a certain sense,
therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp
reality, as the ancients dreamed.
  In order to justify this confidence, I am compelled
to make use of a mathematical concept. The
physical world is represented as a four-dimensional
continuum. If I assume a Riemannian metric in it and
ask what are the simplest laws which such a metric
can satisfy, I arrive at the relativistic theory of
gravitation in empty space. If in that space I assume
a vector-field or an anti-symmetrical tensor-field
which can be derived from it, and ask what are the
simplest laws which such a field can satisfy, I arrive
at Maxwell's equations for empty space.
  At this point we still lack a theory for those parts
of space in which electrical charge density does not
disappear. De Broglie conjectured the existence of a
wave field, which served to explain certain quantum
properties of matter. Dirac found in the spinors
field-magnitudes of a new sort, whose simplest
equations enable one to a large extent to deduce the
properties of the electron. Subsequently I
discovered, in conjunction with my colleague, Dr.
Walter Mayer, that these spinors form a special
case of a new sort of field, mathematically
connected with the four-dimensional system, which
we called "semivectors." The simplest equations
which such semivectors can satisfy furnish a key to
the understanding of the existence of two sorts of
elementary particles, of different ponderable mass
and equal but opposite electrical charge. These
semivectors are, after ordinary vectors, the simplest
mathematical fields that are possible in a metrical
continuum of four dimensions, and it looks as if
they described, in a natural way, certain essential
properties of electrical particles.
  The important point for us to observe is that all
these constructions and the laws connecting them
can be arrived at by the principle of looking for the
mathematically simplest concepts and the link
between them. In the limited number of the
mathematically existent simple field types, and the
simple equations possible between them, lies the
theorist's hope of grasping the real in all its depth.
  Meanwhile the great stumbling-block for a
field-theory of this kind lies in the conception of the
atomic structure of matter and energy. For the
theory is fundamentally non-atomic in so far as it
operates exclusively with continuous functions of
space, in contrast to classical mechanics, whose
most important element, the material point, in itself
does justice to the atomic structure of matter.
  The modern quantum theory in the form associated
with the names of de Broglie, Schr÷dinger, and
Dirac, which operates with continuous functions,
has overcome these difficulties by a bold piece of
interpretation which was first given a clear form by
Max Born. According to this, the spatial functions
which appear in the equations make no claim to be a
mathematical model of the atomic structure. Those
functions are only supposed to determine the
mathematical probabilities to find such structures, if
measurements are taken, at a particular spot or in a
certain state of motion. This notion is logically
unobjectionable and has important successes to its
credit. Unfortunately, however, it compels one to
use a continuum the number of whose dimensions is
not that ascribed to space by physics hitherto (four)
but rises indefinitely with the number of the
particles constituting the system under
consideration. I cannot but confess that I attach
only a transitory importance to this interpretation. I
still believe in the possibility of a model of
reality--that is to say, of a theory which represents
things themselves and not merely the probability of
their occurrence.
  On the other hand, it seems to me certain that we
must give up the idea of a complete localization of
the particles in a theoretical model. This seems to
me to be the permanent upshot of Heisenberg's
principle of uncertainty. But an atomic theory in the
true sense of the word (not merely on the basis of
an interpretation) without localization of particles in
a mathematical model is perfectly thinkable. For
instance, to account for the atomic character of
electricity, the field equations need only lead to the
following conclusions: A region of three-dimensional
space at whose boundary electrical density vanishes
everywhere always contains a total electrical charge
whose size is represented by a whole number. In a
continuum-theory atomic characteristics would be
satisfactorily expressed by integral laws without
localization of the entities which constitute the
atomic structure.
  Not until the atomic structure has been
successfully represented in such a manner would I
consider the quantum-riddle solved.

THE PROBLEM OF SPACE, ETHER, AND THE
FIELD IN PHYSICS

Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  Scientific thought is a development of
pre-scientific thought. As the concept of space was
already fundamental in the latter, we must begin
with the concept of space in pre-scientific thought.
There are two ways of regarding concepts, both of
which are indispensable to understanding. The first
is that of logical analysis. It answers the question,
How do concepts and judgments depend on each
other? In answering it we are on comparatively safe
ground. It is the certainty by which we are so much
impressed in mathematics. But this certainty is
purchased at the price of emptiness of content.
Concepts can only acquire content when they are
connected, however indirectly, with sensible
experience. But no logical investigation can reveal
this connection; it can only be experienced. And yet
it is this connection that determines the cognitive
value of systems of concepts.
  Take an example. Suppose an archaeologist
belonging to a later culture finds a textbook of
Euclidean geometry without diagrams. He will
discover how the words "point," "straightline,"
"plane" are used in the propositions. He will also
recognize how the latter are deduced from each
other. He will even be able to frame new
propositions according to the rules he recognized.
But the framing of these propositions will remain an
empty play with words for him as long as "point,"
"straightline," "plane," etc., convey nothing to him.
Only when they do convey something will
geometry possess any real content for him. The
same will be true of analytical mechanics, and indeed
of any exposition of a logically deductive science.
  What does it mean that "straightline," "point,"
"intersection," etc., convey something? It means
that one can point to the sensible experiences to
which those words refer. This extra-logical problem
is the problem of the nature of geometry, which the
archaeologist will only be able to solve intuitively
by examining his experience for anything he can
discover which corresponds to those primary terms
of the theory and the axioms laid down for them.
Only in this sense can the question of the nature of
a conceptually presented entity be reasonably
raised.
  With our pre-scientific concepts we are very much
in the position of our archaeologist in regard to the
ontological problem. We have, so to speak,
forgotten what features in the world of experience
caused us to frame those concepts, and we have
great difficulty in calling to mind the world of
experience without the spectacles of the
old-established conceptual interpretation. There is
the further difficulty that our language is compelled
to work with words which are inseparably
connected with those primitive concepts. These are
the obstacles which confront us when we try to
describe the essential nature of the pre-scientific
concept of space.
  One remark about concepts in general, before we
turn to the problem of space: concepts have
reference to sensible experience, but they are never,
in a logical sense, deducible from them. For this
reason I have never been able to understand the
quest of the a priori in the Kantian sense. In any
ontological question, our concern can only be to
seek out those characteristics in the complex of
sense experiences to which the concepts refer.
  Now as regards the concept of space: this seems to
presuppose the concept of the solid body. The
nature of the complexes and sense-impressions
which are probably responsible for that concept has
often been described. The correspondence between
certain visual and tactile impressions, the fact that
they can be continuously followed through time,
and that the impressions can be repeated at any
moment (touch, sight), are some of those
characteristics. Once the concept of the solid body
is formed in connection with the experiences just
mentioned--which concept by no means
presupposes that of space or spatial relation--the
desire to get an intellectual grasp of the relations of
such solid bodies is bound to give rise to concepts
which correspond to their spatial relations. Two
solid bodies may touch one another or be distant
from one another. In the latter case, a third body can
be inserted between them without altering them in
any way; in the former, not. These spatial relations
are obviously real in the same sense as the bodies
themselves. If two bodies are equivalent with
respect to filling out one such interval, they will also
prove equivalent for other intervals. The interval is
thus shown to be independent of the selection of
any special body to fill it; the same is universally
true of spatial relations. It is evident that this
independence, which is a principal condition of the
usefulness of framing purely geometrical concepts,
is not necessary a priori. In my opinion, this
concept of the interval, detached as it is from the
selection of any special body to occupy it, is the
starting point of the whole concept of space.
  Considered, then, from the point of view of sense
experience, the development of the concept of space
seems, after these brief indications, to conform to
the following schema--solid body; spatial relations
of solid bodies; interval; space. Looked at in this
way, space appears as something real in the same
sense as solid bodies.
  It is clear that the concept of space as a real thing
already existed in the extra-scientific conceptual
world. Euclid's mathematics, however, knew nothing
of this concept as such; it confined itself to the
concepts of the object, and the spatial relations
between objects. The point, the plane, the straight
line, the segment are solid objects idealized. All
spatial relations are reduced to those of contact (the
intersection of straight lines and planes, points lying
on straight lines, etc.). Space as a continuum does
not figure in the conceptual system at all. This
concept was first introduced by Descartes, when he
described the point-in-space by its coordinates.
Here for the first time geometrical figures appear, in
a way, as parts of infinite space, which is conceived
as a three-dimensional continuum.
  The great superiority of the Cartesian treatment of
space is by no means confined to the fact that it
applies analysis to the purposes of geometry. The
main point seems rather to be this: the Greeks favor
in their geometrical descriptions particular objects
(the straight line, the plane); other objects (e.g., the
ellipse) are only accessible to this description by a
construction or definition with the help of the point,
the straight line, and the plane. In the Cartesian
treatment, on the other hand, all surfaces, for
example, appear, in principle, on equal footing,
without any arbitrary preference for linear
structures in building up geometry.
  In so far as geometry is conceived as the science of
laws governing the mutual spatial relations of
practically rigid bodies, it is to be regarded as the
oldest branch of physics. This science was able, as I
have already observed, to get along without the
concept of space as such, the ideal corporeal
forms--point, straight line, plane, segment--being
sufficient for its needs. On the other hand, space as
a whole, as conceived by Descartes, was absolutely
necessary to Newtonian physics. For dynamics
cannot manage with the concepts of the mass point
and the (temporally variable) distance between mass
points alone. In Newton's equations of motion, the
concept of acceleration plays a fundamental part,
which cannot be defined by the temporally variable
intervals between points alone. Newton's
acceleration is only conceivable or definable in
relation to space as a whole. Thus to the geometrical
reality of the concept of space a new
inertia-determining function of space was added.
When Newton described space as absolute, he no
doubt meant this real significance of space, which
made it necessary for him to attribute to it a quite
definite state of motion, which yet did not appear to
be fully determined by the phenomena of
mechanics. This space was conceived as absolute in
another sense also; its inertia-determining effect was
conceived as autonomous, i.e., not to be influenced
by any physical circumstance whatever; it affected
masses, but nothing affected it.
  And yet in the minds of physicists space remained
until the most recent time simply the passive
container of all events, without taking any part in
physical occurrences. Thought only began to take a
new turn with the wave-theory of light and the
theory of the electromagnetic field of Faraday and
Maxwell. It became clear that there existed in free
space states which propagated themselves in waves,
as well as localized fields which were able to exert
forces on electrical masses or magnetic poles
brought to the spot. Since it would have seemed
utterly absurd to the physicists of the nineteenth
century to attribute physical functions or states to
space itself, they invented a medium pervading the
whole of space, on the model of ponderable
matter--the ether, which was supposed to act as a
vehicle for electromagnetic phenomena, and hence
for those of light also. The states of this medium,
imagined as constituting the electromagnetic fields,
were at first thought of mechanically, on the model
of the elastic deformations of solid bodies. But this
mechanical theory of the ether was never quite
successful so that gradually a more detailed
interpretation of the nature of etheric fields was
given up. The ether thus became a kind of matter
whose only function was to act as a substratum for
electrical fields which were by their very nature not
further analyzable. The picture was, then, as
follows: space is filled by the ether, in which the
material corpuscles or atoms of ponderable matter
swim around; the atomic structure of the latter had
been securely established by the turn of the century.
  Since the interaction of bodies was supposed to be
accomplished through fields, there had also to be a
gravitational field in the ether, whose field-law had,
however, assumed no clear form at that time. The
ether was only supposed to be the seat of all forces
acting across space. Since it had been realized that
electrical masses in motion produce a magnetic field,
whose energy provided a model for inertia, inertia
also appeared as a field-action localized in the ether.
  The mechanical properties of the ether were at first
a mystery. Then came H. A. Lorentz's great
discovery. All the phenomena of electromagnetism
then known could be explained on the basis of two
assumptions: that the ether is firmly fixed in
space--that is to say, unable to move at all, and that
electricity is firmly lodged in the mobile elementary
particles. Today his discovery may be expressed as
follows: physical space and the ether are only
different terms for the same thing; fields are
physical states of space. For if no particular state of
motion can be ascribed to the ether, there does not
seem to be any ground for introducing it as an entity
of a special sort alongside of space. But the
physicists were still far removed from such a way
of thinking; space was still, for them, a rigid,
homogeneous something, incapable of changing or
assuming various states. Only the genius of
Riemann, solitary and uncomprehended, had already
won its way by the middle of the last century to a
new conception of space, in which space was
deprived of its rigidity, and the possibility of its
partaking in physical events was recognized. This
intellectual achievement commands our admiration
all the more for having preceded Faraday's and
Maxwell's field theory of electricity. Then came the
special theory of relativity with its recognition of
the physical equivalence of all inertial systems. The
inseparability of time and space emerged in
connection with electrodynamics, or the law of the
propagation of light. Hitherto it had been silently
assumed that the four-dimensional continuum of
events could be split up into time and space in an
objective manner--i.e., that an absolute significance
attached to the "now" in the world of events. With
the discovery of the relativity of simultaneity, space
and time were merged in a single continuum in a way
similar to that in which the three dimensions of
space had previously been merged into a single
continuum. Physical space was thus extended to a
four-dimensional space which also included the
dimension of time. The four-dimensional space of
the special theory of relativity is just as rigid and
absolute as Newton's space.
  The theory of relativity is a fine example of the
fundamental character of the modern development
of theoretical science. The initial hypotheses
become steadily more abstract and remote from
experience. On the other hand, it gets nearer to the
grand aim of all science, which is to cover the
greatest possible number of empirical facts by
logical deduction from the smallest possible number
of hypotheses or axioms. Meanwhile, the train of
thought leading from the axioms to the empirical
facts or verifiable consequences gets steadily longer
and more subtle. The theoretical scientist is
compelled in an increasing degree to be guided by
purely mathematical, formal considerations in his
search for a theory, because the physical experience
of the experimenter cannot lead him up to the
regions of highest abstraction. The predominantly
inductive methods appropriate to the youth of
science are giving place to tentative deduction. Such
a theoretical structure needs to be very thoroughly
elaborated before it can lead to conclusions which
can be compared with experience. Here, too, the
observed fact is undoubtedly the supreme arbiter;
but it cannot pronounce sentence until the wide
chasm separating the axioms from their verifiable
consequences has been bridged by much intense,
hard thinking. The theorist has to set about this
Herculean task fully aware that his efforts may only
be destined to prepare the death blow to his theory.
The theorist who undertakes such a labor should not
be carped at as "fanciful"; on the contrary, he should
be granted the right to give free reign to his fancy,
for there is no other way to the goal. His is no idle
daydreaming, but a search for the logically simplest
possibilities and their consequences. This plea was
needed in order to make the listener or reader more
inclined to follow the ensuing train of ideas with
attention; it is the line of thought which has led from
the special to the general theory of relativity and
thence to its latest offshoot, the unified field theory.
In this exposition the use of mathematical symbols
cannot be completely avoided.
  We start with the special theory of relativity. This
theory is still based directly on an empirical law,
that of the constancy of the velocity of light. Let P
be a point in empty space, P( an infinitely close
point at a distance d . Let a flash of light be emitted
from P at a time t and reach P( at a time t + dt. Then

d(2=c2dt2

If dx1, dx2, dx3 are the orthogonal projections of d(,
and the imaginary time coordinate (-1ct=x4 is
introduced, then the above-mentioned law of the
constancy of the velocity of light propagation takes
the form

ds2 = dx12 + dx22 + dx32 + dx42 = 0

Since this formula expresses a real situation, we may
attribute a real meaning to the quantity ds, even if
the neighboring points of the four-dimensional
continuum are so chosen that the corresponding ds
does not vanish. This may be expressed by saying
that the four-dimensional space (with an imaginary
time-coordinate) of the special theory of relativity
possesses a Euclidean metric.
  The fact that such a metric is called Euclidean is
connected with the following. The postulation of
such a metric in a three-dimensional continuum is
fully equivalent to the postulation of the axioms of
Euclidean geometry. The defining equation of the
metric is then nothing but the Pythagorean theorem
applied to the differentials of the coordinates.
  In the special theory of relativity those coordinate
changes (by transformation) are permitted for which
also in the new coordinate system the quantity ds2
(fundamental invariant) equals the sum of the
squares of the coordinate differentials. Such
transformations are called Lorentz transformations.
  The heuristic method of the special theory of
relativity is characterized by the following principle:
only those equations are admissible as an expression
of natural laws which do not change their form when
the coordinates are changed by means of a Lorentz
transformation (covariance of equations with
respect to Lorentz transformations).
  This method led to the discovery of the necessary
connection between momentum and energy,
between electric and magnetic field strength,
electrostatic and electrodynamic forces, inert mass
and energy; and the number of independent
concepts and fundamental equations in physics was
thereby reduced.
  This method pointed beyond itself. Is it true that
the equations which express natural laws are
covariant with respect to Lorentz transformations
only and not with respect to other transformations?
Well, formulated in that way the question really has
no meaning, since every system of equations can be
expressed in general coordinates. We must ask: Are
not the laws of nature so constituted that they are
not materially simplified through the choice of any
one particular set of coordinates?
  We will only mention in passing that our empirical
law of the equality of inert and gravitational masses
prompts us to answer this question in the
affirmative. If we elevate the equivalence of all
coordinate systems for the formulation of natural
laws into a principle, we arrive at the general theory
of relativity, provided we retain the law of the
constancy of the velocity of light or, in other words,
the hypothesis of the objective significance of the
Euclidean metric at least for infinitely small portions
of four-dimensional space.
  This means that for finite regions of space the
(physically meaningful) existence of a general
Riemannian metric is postulated according to the
formula

ds2=( g(( dx( dx(
       ((

where the summation is to be extended to all index
combinations from 1,1 to 4,4.
  The structure of such a space differs quite
basically in one respect from that of a Euclidean
space. The coefficients g(( are for the time being
any functions whatever of the coordinates x1 to x4,
and the structure of the space is not really
determined until these functions g(( are really
known. One can also say: the structure of such a
space is as such completely undetermined. It is only
determined more closely by specifying laws which
the metrical field of the g(( satisfy. On physical
grounds it was assumed that the metrical field was
at the same time the gravitational field.
  Since the gravitational field is determined by the
configuration of masses and changes with it, the
geometric structure of this space is also dependent
on physical factors. Thus, according to this theory
space is--exactly as Riemann guessed--no longer
absolute; its structure depends on physical
influences. (Physical) geometry is no longer an
isolated self-contained science like the geometry of
Euclid.
  The problem of gravitation was thus reduced to a
mathematical problem: it was required to find the
simplest fundamental equations which are covariant
with respect to arbitrary coordinate transformation.
This was a well-defined problem that could at least
be solved.
  I will not speak here of the experimental
confirmation of this theory, but explain at once why
the theory could not rest permanently satisfied with
this success. Gravitation had indeed been deduced
from the structure of space, but besides the
gravitational field there is also the electromagnetic
field. This had, to begin with, to be introduced into
the theory as an entity independent of gravitation.
Terms which took account of the existence of the
electromagnetic field had to be added to the
fundamental field equations. But the idea that there
exist two structures of space independent of each
other, the metric-gravitational and the
electromagnetic, was intolerable to the theoretical
spirit. We are prompted to the belief that both sorts
of field must correspond to a unified structure of
space.

NOTES ON THE ORIGIN OF THE GENERAL
THEORY OF RELATIVITY

Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

  I gladly accede to the request that I should say
something about the history of my own scientific
work. Not that I have an exaggerated notion of the
importance of my own efforts, but to write the
history of other men's work demands a degree of
absorption in other people's ideas which is much
more in the line of the trained historian; to throw
light on one's own earlier thinking appears
incomparably easier. Here one has an immense
advantage over everybody else, and one ought not to
leave the opportunity unused out of modesty.
  When by the special theory of relativity I had
arrived at the equivalence of all so-called inertial
systems for the formulation of natural laws (1905),
the question whether there was not a further
equivalence of coordinate systems followed
naturally, to say the least of it. To put it in another
way, if only a relative meaning can be attached to
the concept of velocity, ought we nevertheless to
persevere in treating acceleration as an absolute
concept?
  From the purely kinematic point of view there was
no doubt about the relativity of all motions
whatever; but physically speaking, the inertial
system seemed to occupy a privileged position,
which made the use of coordinate systems moving
in other ways appear artificial.
  I was of course acquainted with Mach's view,
according to which it appeared conceivable that
what inertial resistance counteracts is not
acceleration as such but acceleration with respect to
the masses of the other bodies existing in the world.
There was something fascinating about this idea to
me, but it provided no workable basis for a new
theory.
  I first came a step nearer to the solution of the
problem when I attempted to deal with the law of
gravity within the framework of the special theory
of relativity. Like most writers at the time, I tried to
frame a field-law for gravitation, since it was no
longer possible, at least in any natural way, to
introduce direct action at a distance owing to the
abolition of the notion of absolute simultaneity.
  The simplest thing was, of course, to retain the
Laplacian scalar potential of gravity, and to
complete the equation of Poisson in an obvious way
by a term differentiated with respect to time in such
a way that the special theory of relativity was
satisfied. The law of motion of the mass point in a
gravitational field had also to be adapted to the
special theory of relativity. The path was not so
unmistakably marked out here, since the inert mass
of a body might depend on the gravitational
potential. In fact, this was to be expected on
account of the principle of the inertia of energy.
  These investigations, however, led to a result
which raised my strong suspicions. According to
classical mechanics, the vertical acceleration of a
body in the vertical gravitational field is independent
of the horizontal component of its velocity. Hence
in such a gravitational field the vertical acceleration
of a mechanical system or of its center of gravity
works out independently of its internal kinetic
energy. But in the theory I advanced, the
acceleration of a falling body was not independent
of its horizontal velocity or the internal energy of a
system.
  This did not fit in with the old experimental fact
that all bodies have the same acceleration in a
gravitational field. This law, which may also be
formulated as the law of the equality of inertial and
gravitational mass, was now brought home to me in
all its significance. I was in the highest degree
amazed at its existence and guessed that in it must
lie the key to a deeper understanding of inertia and
gravitation. I had no serious doubts about its strict
validity even without knowing the results of the
admirable experiments of E÷tv÷s, which--if my
memory is right--I only came to know later. I now
abandoned as inadequate the attempt to treat the
problem of gravitation, in the manner outlined
above, within the framework of the special theory
of relativity. It clearly failed to do justice to the
most fundamental property of gravitation. The
principle of the equality of inertial and gravitational
mass could now be formulated quite clearly as
follows: In a homogeneous gravitational field all
motions take place in the same way as in the
absence of a gravitational field in relation to a
uniformly accelerated coordinate system. If this
principle held good for any events whatever (the
"principle of equivalence"), this was an indication
that the principle of relativity needed to be extended
to coordinate systems in non-uniform motion with
respect to each other, if we were to reach a natural
theory of the gravitational fields. Such reflections
kept me busy from 1908 to 1911, and I attempted
to draw special conclusions from them, of which I
do not propose to speak here. For the moment the
one important thing was the discovery that a
reasonable theory of gravitation could only be
hoped for from an extension of the principle of
relativity.
  What was needed, therefore, was to frame a theory
whose equations kept their form in the case of
non-linear transformations of the coordinates.
Whether this was to apply to arbitrary (continuous)
transformations of coordinates or only to certain
ones, I could not for the moment say.
  I soon saw that the inclusion of non-linear
transformations, as the principle of equivalence
demanded, was inevitably fatal to the simple
physical interpretation of the coordinates--i.e., that
it could no longer be required that coordinate
differences should signify direct results of
measurement with ideal scales or clocks. I was much
bothered by this piece of knowledge, for it took me
a long time to see what coordinates at all meant in
physics. I did not find the way out of this dilemma
until 1912, and then it came to me as a result of the
following consideration:
  A new formulation of the law of inertia had to be
found which in case of the absence of a "real
gravitational field" passed over into Galileo's
formulation for the principle of inertia if an inertial
system was used as coordinate system. Galileo's
formulation amounts to this: A material point,
which is acted on by no force, will be represented in
four-dimensional space by a straight line, that is to
say, by a shortest line, or more correctly, an
extremal line. This concept presupposes that of the
length of a line element, that is to say, a metric. In
the special theory of relativity, as Minkowski had
shown, this metric was a quasi-Euclidean one, i.e.,
the square of the "length" ds of a line element was a
certain quadratic function of the differentials of the
coordinates.
  If other coordinates are introduced by means of a
non-linear transformation, ds2 remains a
homogeneous function of the differentials of the
coordinates, but the coefficients of this function
(g(() cease to be constant and become certain
functions of the coordinates. In mathematical terms
this means that physical (four-dimensional) space
has a Riemannian metric. The timelike extremal lines
of this metric furnish the law of motion of a material
point which is acted on by no force apart from the
forces of gravity. The coefficients (g(() of this
metric at the same time describe the gravitational
field with reference to the coordinate system
selected. A natural formulation of the principle of
equivalence had thus been found, the extension of
which to any gravitational field whatever formed a
perfectly natural hypothesis.
  The solution of the above-mentioned dilemma was
therefore as follows: A physical significance
attaches not to the differentials of the coordinates
but only to the Riemannian metric corresponding to
them. A workable basis had now been found for the
general theory of relativity. Two further problems
remained to be solved, however.
  1. If a field-law is expressed in terms of the special
theory of relativity, how can it be transferred to the
case of a Riemannian metric?
  2. What are the differential laws which determine
the Riemannian metric (i.e., g(() itself?
  I worked on these problems from 1912 to 1914
together with my friend Grossmann. We found that
the mathematical methods for solving problem 1 lay
ready in our hands in the absolute differential
calculus of Ricci and Levi-Civita.
  As for problem 2, its solution obviously required
the construction (from the g(() of the differential
invariants of the second order. We soon saw that
these had already been established by Riemann (the
tensor of curvature). We had already considered the
right field-equation for gravitation two years before
the publication of the general theory of relativity,
but we were unable to see how they could be used
in physics. On the contrary, I felt sure that they
could not do justice to experience. Moreover I
believed that I could show on general considerations
that a law of gravitation invariant with respect to
arbitrary transformations of coordinates was
inconsistent with the principle of causality. These
were errors of thought which cost me two years of
excessively hard work, until I finally recognized
them as such at the end of 1915, and after having
ruefully returned to the Riemannian curvature,
succeeded in linking the theory with the facts of
astronomical experience.
  In the light of knowledge attained, the happy
achievement seems almost a matter of course, and
any intelligent student can grasp it without too
much trouble. But the years of anxious searching in
the dark, with their intense longing, their
alternations of confidence and exhaustion and the
final emergence into the light--only those who have
experienced it can understand that.

PHYSICS AND REALITY

From The Journal of the Franklin Institute, Vol.
221, No. 3. March, 1936.

I. GENERAL CONSIDERATION CONCERNING THE
METHOD OF SCIENCE

  It has often been said, and certainly not without
justification, that the man of science is a poor
philosopher. Why, then, should it not be the right
thing for the physicist to let the philosopher do the
philosophizing? Such might indeed be the right thing
at a time when the physicist believes he has at his
disposal a rigid system of fundamental concepts and
fundamental laws which are so well established that
waves of doubt cannot reach them; but, it cannot be
right at a time when the very foundations of physics
itself have become problematic as they are now. At
a time like the present, when experience forces us to
seek a newer and more solid foundation, the
physicist cannot simply surrender to the
philosopher the critical contemplation of the
theoretical foundations; for, he himself knows best,
and feels more surely where the shoe pinches. In
looking for a new foundation, he must try to make
clear in his own mind just how far the concepts
which he uses are justified, and are necessities.
  The whole of science is nothing more than a
refinement of everyday thinking. It is for this reason
that the critical thinking of the physicist cannot
possibly be restricted to the examination of the
concepts of his own specific field. He cannot
proceed without considering critically a much more
difficult problem, the problem of analyzing the
nature of everyday thinking.
  Our psychological experience contains, in colorful
succession, sense experiences, memory pictures of
them, images, and feelings. In contrast to
psychology, physics treats directly only of sense
experiences and of the "understanding" of their
connection. But even the concept of the "real
external world" of everyday thinking rests
exclusively on sense impressions.
  Now we must first remark that the differentiation
between sense impressions and images is not
possible; or, at least it is not possible with absolute
certainty. With the discussion of this problem,
which affects also the notion of reality, we will not
concern ourselves but we shall take the existence of
sense experiences as given, that is to say, as psychic
experiences of a special kind.
  I believe that the first step in the setting of a "real
external world" is the formation of the concept of
bodily objects and of bodily objects of various
kinds. Out of the multitude of our sense experiences
we take, mentally and arbitrarily, certain repeatedly
occurring complexes of sense impressions (partly in
conjunction with sense impressions which are
interpreted as signs for sense experiences of others),
and we correlate to them a concept--the concept of
the bodily object. Considered logically this concept
is not identical with the totality of sense
impressions referred to; but it is a free creation of
the human (or animal) mind. On the other hand, this
concept owes its meaning and its justification
exclusively to the totality of the sense impressions
which we associate with it.
  The second step is to be found in the fact that, in
our thinking (which determines our expectation), we
attribute to this concept of the bodily object a
significance, which is to a high degree independent
of the sense impressions which originally give rise
to it. This is what we mean when we attribute to the
bodily object "a real existence." The justification of
such a setting rests exclusively on the fact that, by
means of such concepts and mental relations
between them, we are able to orient ourselves in the
labyrinth of sense impressions. These notions and
relations, although free mental creations, appear to
us as stronger and more unalterable than the
individual sense experience itself, the character of
which as anything other than the result of an illusion
or hallucination is never completely guaranteed. On
the other hand, these concepts and relations, and
indeed the postulation of real objects and, generally
speaking, of the existence of "the real world," have
justification only in so far as they are connected
with sense impressions between which they form a
mental connection.
  The very fact that the totality of our sense
experiences is such that by means of thinking
(operations with concepts, and the creation and use
of definite functional relations between them, and
the coordination of sense experiences to these
concepts) it can be put in order, this fact is one
which leaves us in awe, but which we shall never
understand. One may say "the eternal mystery of
the world is its comprehensibility." It is one of the
great realizations of Immanuel Kant that the
postulation of a real external world would be
senseless without this comprehensibility.
  In speaking here of "comprehensibility," the
expression is used in its most modest sense. It
implies: the production of some sort of order among
sense impressions, this order being produced by the
creation of general concepts, relations between these
concepts, and by definite relations of some kind
between the concepts and sense experience. It is in
this sense that the world of our sense experiences is
comprehensible. The fact that it is comprehensible
is a miracle.
  In my opinion, nothing can be said a priori
concerning the manner in which the concepts are to
be formed and connected, and how we are to
coordinate them to sense experiences. In guiding us
in the creation of such an order of sense experiences,
success alone is the determining factor. All that is
necessary is to fix a set of rules, since without such
rules the acquisition of knowledge in the desired
sense would be impossible. One may compare these
rules with the rules of a game in which, while the
rules themselves are arbitrary, it is their rigidity
alone which makes the game possible. However, the
fixation will never be final. It will have validity only
for a special field of application (i.e., there are no
final categories in the sense of Kant).
  The connection of the elementary concepts of
everyday thinking with complexes of sense
experiences can only be comprehended intuitively
and it is unadaptable to scientifically logical fixation.
The totality of these connections--none of which is
expressible in conceptual terms--is the only thing
which differentiates the great building which is
science from a logical but empty scheme of
concepts. By means of these connections, the
purely conceptual propositions of science become
general statements about complexes of sense
experiences.
  We shall call "primary concepts" such concepts as
are directly and intuitively connected with typical
complexes of sense experiences. All other notions
are--from the physical point of view--possessed of
meaning only in so far as they are connected, by
propositions, with the primary notions. These
propositions are partially definitions of the
concepts (and of the statements derived logically
from them) and partially propositions not derivable
from the definitions, which express at least indirect
relations between the "primary concepts," and in
this way between sense experiences. Propositions
of the latter kind are "statements about reality" or
laws of nature, i.e., propositions which have to
show their validity when applied to sense
experiences covered by primary concepts. The
question as to which of the propositions shall be
considered as definitions and which as natural laws
will depend largely upon the chosen representation.
It really becomes absolutely necessary to make this
differentiation only when one examines the degree to
which the whole system of concepts considered is
not empty from the physical point of view.

STRATIFICATION OF THE SCIENTIFIC
SYSTEM

  The aim of science is, on the one hand, a
comprehension, as complete as possible, of the
connection between the sense experiences in their
totality, and, on the other hand, the accomplishment
of this aim by the use of a minimum of primary
concepts and relations. (Seeking, as far as possible,
logical unity in the world picture, i.e., paucity in
logical elements.)
  Science uses the totality of the primary concepts,
i.e., concepts directly connected with sense
experiences, and propositions connecting them. In
its first stage of development, science does not
contain anything else. Our everyday thinking is
satisfied on the whole with this level. Such a state of
affairs cannot, however, satisfy a spirit which is
really scientifically minded; because the totality of
concepts and relations obtained in this manner is
utterly lacking in logical unity. In order to
supplement this deficiency, one invents a system
poorer in concepts and relations, a system retaining
the primary concepts and relations of the "first
layer" as logically derived concepts and relations.
This new "secondary system" pays for its higher
logical unity by having elementary concepts
(concepts of the second layer), which are no longer
directly connected with complexes of sense
experiences. Further striving for logical unity brings
us to a tertiary system, still poorer in concepts and
relations, for the deduction of the concepts and
relations of the secondary (and so indirectly of the
primary) layer. Thus the story goes on until we
have arrived at a system of the greatest conceivable
unity, and of the greatest poverty of concepts of the
logical foundations, which is still compatible with
the observations made by our senses. We do not
know whether or not this ambition will ever result
in a definitive system. If one is asked for his
opinion, he is inclined to answer no. While wrestling
with the problems, however, one will never give up
the hope that this greatest of all aims can really be
attained to a very high degree.
  An adherent to the theory of abstraction or
induction might call our layers "degrees of
abstraction"; but I do not consider it justifiable to
veil the logical independence of the concept from the
sense experiences. The relation is not analogous to
that of soup to beef but rather of check number to
overcoat.
  The layers are furthermore not clearly separated. It
is not even absolutely clear which concepts belong
to the primary layer. As a matter of fact, we are
dealing with freely formed concepts, which, with a
certainty sufficient for practical use, are intuitively
connected with complexes of sense experiences in
such a manner that, in any given case of experience,
there is no uncertainty as to the validity of an
assertion. The essential thing is the aim to represent
the multitude of concepts and propositions, close to
experience, as propositions, logically deduced from
a basis, as narrow as possible, of fundamental
concepts and fundamental relations which
themselves can be chosen freely (axioms). The
liberty of choice, however, is of a special kind; it is
not in any way similar to the liberty of a writer of
fiction. Rather, it is similar to that of a man engaged
in solving a well-designed word puzzle. He may, it
is true, propose any word as the solution; but, there
is only one word which really solves the puzzle in
all its parts. It is a matter of faith that nature--as she
is perceptible to our five senses--takes the character
of such a well-formulated puzzle. The successes
reaped up to now by science do, it is true, give a
certain encouragement for this faith.
  The multitude of layers discussed above
corresponds to the several stages of progress which
have resulted from the struggle for unity in the
course of development. As regards the final aim,
intermediary layers are only of temporary nature.
They must eventually disappear as irrelevant. We
have to deal, however, with the science of today, in
which these strata represent problematic partial
successes which support one another but which also
threaten one another, because today's system of
concepts contains deep-seated incongruities which
we shall meet later on.
  It will be the aim of the following lines to
demonstrate what paths the constructive human
mind has entered, in order to arrive at a basis of
physics which is logically as uniform as possible.

II. MECHANICS AND THE ATTEMPTS TO BASE ALL
PHYSICS UPON IT

  An important property of our sense experiences,
and, more generally, of all of our experiences, is their
temporal order. This kind of order leads to the
mental conception of a subjective time, an ordering
scheme for our experience. The subjective time leads
then via the concept of the bodily object and of
space to the concept of objective time, as we shall
see later on.
  Ahead of the notion of objective time there is,
however, the concept of space; and ahead of the
latter we find the concept of the bodily object. The
latter is directly connected with complexes of sense
experiences. It has been pointed out that one
property which is characteristic of the notion
"bodily object" is the property which provides that
we coordinate to it an existence, independent of
(subjective) time, and independent of the fact that it
is perceived by our senses. We do this in spite of
the fact that we perceive temporal alterations in it.
PoincarΦ has justly emphasized the fact that we
distinguish two kinds of alterations of the bodily
object, "changes of state" and "changes of position."
The latter, he remarked, are alterations which we can
reverse by voluntary motions of our bodies.
  That there are bodily objects to which we have to
ascribe, within a certain sphere of perception, no
alteration of state, but only alterations of position,
is a fact of fundamental importance for the
formation of the concept of space (in a certain
degree even for the justification of the notion of the
bodily object itself). Let us call such an object
"practically rigid."
  If, as the object of our perception, we consider
simultaneously (i.e., as a single unit) two practically
rigid bodies, then there exist for this ensemble such
alterations as can not possibly be considered as
changes of position of the whole, notwithstanding
the fact that this is the case for each one of the two
constituents. This leads to the notion of "change of
relative position" of the two objects; and, in this
way, also to the notion of "relative position" of the
two objects. It is found moreover that among the
relative positions, there is one of a specific kind
which we designate as "contact." [It is in the nature
of things that we are able to talk about these objects
only by means of concepts of our own creation,
concepts which themselves are not subject to
definition. It is essential, however, that we make use
only of such concepts concerning whose
coordination to our experience we feel no doubt.]
Permanent contact of two bodies in three or more
"points" means that they are united to a quasi-rigid
compound body. It is permissible to say that the
second body forms then a (quasi-rigid) continuation
of the first body and may, in its turn, be continued
quasi-rigidly. The possibility of the quasi-rigid
continuation of a body is unlimited. The totality of
all conceivable quasi-rigid continuations of a body
B0 is the infinite "space" determined by it.
  In my opinion, the fact that every bodily object
situated in any arbitrary manner can be put into
contact with the quasi-rigid continuation of some
given body B0 (body of reference), this fact is the
empirical basis of our conception of space. In
pre-scientific thinking, the solid earth's crust plays
the role of B0 and its continuation. The very name
geometry indicates that the concept of space is
psychologically connected with the earth as an ever
present body of reference.
  The bold notion of "space" which preceded all
scientific geometry transformed our mental concept
of the relations of positions of bodily objects into
the notion of the position of these bodily objects in
"space." This, of itself, represents a great formal
simplification. Through this concept of space one
reaches, moreover, an attitude in which any
description of position is implicitly a description of
contact; the statement that a point of a bodily object
is located at a point P of space means that the object
touches the point P of the standard body of
reference B0 (supposed appropriately continued) at
the point considered.
  In the geometry of the Greeks, space plays only a
qualitative role, since the position of bodies in
relation to space is considered as given, it is true,
but is not described by means of numbers.
Descartes was the first to introduce this method. In
his language, the whole content of Euclidean
geometry can axiomatically be founded upon the
following statements: (1) Two specified points of a
rigid body determine a segment. (2) We may
associate triples of numbers X1, X2, X3, to points of
space in such a manner that for every segment P( -
P( under consideration, the coordinates of whose
end points are X1(, X2(, X3(; X1(, X2(, X3(, the
expression

s2 = (X1( - X1()2 + (X2( - X2()2 + (X3( - X3()2

is independent of the position of the body, and of the
positions of any and all other bodies.
  The (positive) number s is called the length of the
segment, or the distance between the two points P(
and P( of space (which are coincident with the
points P( and P( of the segment).
  The formulation is chosen, intentionally, in such a
way that it expresses clearly, not only the logical
and axiomatic, but also the empirical content of
Euclidean geometry. The purely logical (axiomatic)
representation of Euclidean geometry has, it is true,
the advantage of greater simplicity and clarity. It
pays for this, however, by renouncing a
representation of the connection between the
conceptual construction and the sense experiences
upon which connection, alone, the significance of
geometry for physics rests. The fatal error that
logical necessity, preceding all experience, was the
basis of Euclidean geometry and the concept of
space belonging to it, this fatal error arose from the
fact that the empirical basis, on which the axiomatic
construction of Euclidean geometry rests, had fallen
into oblivion.
  In so far as one can speak of the existence of rigid
bodies in nature, Euclidean geometry is a physical
science, which must be confirmed by sense
experiences. It concerns the totality of laws which
must hold for the relative positions of rigid bodies
independently of time. As one may see, the
physical notion of space also, as originally used in
physics, is tied to the existence of rigid bodies.
  From the physicist's point of view, the central
importance of Euclidean geometry rests in the fact
that its laws are independent of the specific nature
of the bodies whose relative positions it discusses.
Its formal simplicity is characterized by the
properties of homogeneity and isotropy (and the
existence of similar entities).
  The concept of space is, it is true, useful, but not
indispensable for geometry proper, i.e., for the
formulation of rules about the relative positions of
rigid bodies. By contrast, the concept of objective
time, without which the formulation of the
fundamentals of classical mechanics is impossible, is
linked with the concept of the spatial continuum.
  The introduction of objective time involves two
postulates which are independent of each other.
  1. The introduction of the objective local time by
connecting the temporal sequence of experiences
with the readings of a "clock," i.e., of a periodically
recurring closed system.
  2. The introduction of the notion of objective time
for the events in the whole space, by which notion
alone the idea of local time is extended to the idea of
time in physics.
  Note concerning 1. As I see it, it does not mean a
"petitio principii" if one puts the concept of
periodical recurrence ahead of the concept of time,
while one is concerned with the clarification of the
origin and of the empirical content of the concept of
time. Such a conception corresponds exactly to the
precedence of the concept of the rigid (or
quasi-rigid) body in the interpretation of the
concept of space.
  Further discussion of 2. The illusion which
prevailed prior to the enunciation of the theory of
relativity--that, from the point of view of experience
the meaning of simultaneity in relation to spatially
distant events and, consequently, that the meaning
of physical time is a priori clear--this illusion had
its origin in the fact that in our everyday experience
we can neglect the time of propagation of light. We
are accustomed on this account to fail to
differentiate between "simultaneously seen" and
"simultaneously happening"; and, as a result, the
difference between time and local time is blurred.
  The lack of definiteness which, from the point of
view of its empirical significance, adheres to the
notion of time in classical mechanics was veiled by
the axiomatic representation of space and time as
given independently of our sense experiences. Such
a use of notions--independent of the empirical basis
to which they owe their existence--does not
necessarily damage science. One may, however,
easily be led into the error of believing that these
notions, whose origin is forgotten, are logically
necessary and therefore unalterable, and this error
may constitute a serious danger to the progress of
science.
  It was fortunate for the development of mechanics
and hence also for the development of physics in
general, that the lack of definiteness in the concept
of objective time remained hidden from the earlier
philosophers as regards its empirical interpretation.
Full of confidence in the real meaning of the
space-time construction, they developed the
foundations of mechanics which we shall
characterize, schematically, as follows:
  (a) Concept of a material point: a bodily object
which--as regards its position and motion--can be
described with sufficient accuracy as a point with
coordinates X1, X2, X3. Description of its motion
(in relation to the "space" B0) by giving X1, X2, X3,
as functions of the time.
  (b) Law of inertia: the disappearance of the
components of acceleration for a material point
which is sufficiently far away from all other points.
  (c) Law of motion (for the material point): Force =
mass x acceleration.
  (d) Laws of force (interactions between material
points).
  In this, (b) is merely an important special case of
(c). A real theory exists only when the laws of force
are given. The forces must in the first place only
obey the law of equality of action and reaction in
order that a system of points--permanently
connected to each other by forces--may behave like
one material point.
  These fundamental laws, together with Newton's
law for the gravitational force, form the basis of the
mechanics of celestial bodies. In this mechanics of
Newton, and in contrast to the above conceptions of
space derived from rigid bodies, the space B0 enters
in a form which contains a new idea; it is not for
every B0 that validity is asserted (for a given law of
force) for (b) and (c), but only for a B0 in an
appropriate state of motion (inertial system). On
account of this fact, the coordinate space acquired
an independent physical property which is not
contained in the purely geometrical notion of space,
a circumstance which gave Newton considerable
food for thought (pail-experiment). [This defect of
the theory could only be eliminated by such a
formulation of mechanics as would claim validity for
all  B0. This is one of the steps which led to the
general theory of relativity. A second defect, also
eliminated only by the introduction of the general
theory of relativity, lies in the fact that there is no
reason given by mechanics itself for the equality of
the gravitational and inertial mass of the material
point.]
  Classical mechanics is only a general scheme; it
becomes a theory only by explicit indication of the
force laws (d) as was done so very successfully by
Newton for celestial mechanics. From the point of
view of the aim of the greatest logical simplicity of
the foundations, this theoretical method is deficient
in so far as the laws of force cannot be obtained by
logical and formal considerations, so that their
choice is a priori to a large extent arbitrary. Also
Newton's law of gravitation is distinguished from
other conceivable laws of force exclusively by its
success.
  In spite of the fact that, today, we know
positively that classical mechanics fails as a
foundation dominating all physics, it still occupies
the center of all of our thinking in physics. The
reason for this lies in the fact that, regardless of
important progress reached since the time of
Newton, we have not yet arrived at a new
foundation of physics concerning which we may be
certain that the manifold of all investigated
phenomena, and of successful partial theoretical
systems, could be deduced logically from it. In the
following lines I shall try to describe briefly how the
matter stands.
  First we try to get clearly in our minds how far the
system of classical mechanics has shown itself
adequate to serve as a basis for the whole of
physics. Since we are dealing here only with the
foundations of physics and with its development,
we need not concern ourselves with the purely
formal progresses of mechanics (equations of
Lagrange, canonical equations, etc.). One remark,
however, appears indispensable. The notion
"material point" is fundamental for mechanics. If
now we seek to develop the mechanics of a bodily
object which itself can not be treated as a material
point--and strictly speaking every object
"perceptible to our senses" is of this category--then
the question arises: How shall we imagine the object
to be built up out of material points, and what
forces must we assume as acting between them? The
formulation of this question is indispensable, if
mechanics is to pretend to describe the object
completely.
  It is in line with the natural tendency of mechanics
to assume these material points, and the laws of
forces acting between them, as invariable, since
temporal changes would lie outside of the scope of
mechanical explanation. From this we can see that
classical mechanics must lead us to an atomistic
construction of matter. We now realize, with special
clarity, how much in error are those theorists who
believe that theory comes inductively from
experience. Even the great Newton could not free
himself from this error ("Hypotheses non fingo"
["I make no hypotheses."]).
  In order to save itself from becoming hopelessly
lost in this line of thought (atomism), science
proceeded first in the following manner. The
mechanics of a system is determined if its potential
energy is given as a function of its configuration.
Now, if the acting forces are of such a kind as to
guarantee the maintenance of certain structural
properties of the system's configuration, then the
configuration may be described with sufficient
accuracy by a relatively small number of
configuration variables qr; the potential energy is
considered only in so far as it is dependent upon
these variables (for instance, description of the
configuration of a practically rigid body by six
variables).
  A second method of application of mechanics,
which avoids the consideration of a subdivision of
matter down to "real" material points, is the
mechanics of so-called continuous media. This
mechanics is characterized by the fiction that the
density and the velocity of matter depend
continuously upon coordinates and time, and that
the part of the interactions not explicitly given can
be considered as surface forces (pressure forces)
which again are continuous functions of position.
Herein we find the hydrodynamic theory, and the
theory of elasticity of solid bodies. These theories
avoid the explicit introduction of material points by
fictions which, in the light of the foundation of
classical mechanics, can only have an approximate
significance.
  In addition to their great practical significance,
these categories of science have--by developing new
mathematical concepts--created those formal tools
(partial differential equations) which have been
necessary for the subsequent attempts at a new
foundation of all of physics.
  These two modes of application of mechanics
belong to the so-called "phenomenological" physics.
It is characteristic of this kind of physics that it
makes as much use as possible of concepts which
are close to experience but, for this reason, has to
give up, to a large extent, unity in the foundations.
Heat, electricity, and light are described by separate
variables of state and material constants other than
the mechanical quantities; and to determine all of
these variables in their mutual and temporal
dependence was a task which, in the main, could
only be solved empirically. Many contemporaries
of Maxwell saw in such a manner of presentation
the ultimate aim of physics, which they thought
could be obtained purely inductively from
experience on account of the relative closeness of
the concepts used to experience. From the point of
view of theories of knowledge St. Mill and E. Mach
took their stand approximately on this ground.
  In my view, the greatest achievement of Newton's
mechanics lies in the fact that its consistent
application has led beyond this phenomenological
point of view, particularly in the field of heat
phenomena. This occurred in the kinetic theory of
gases and in statistical mechanics in general. The
former connected the equation of state of the ideal
gases, viscosity, diffusion, and heat conductivity of
gases and radiometric phenomena of gases, and gave
the logical connection of phenomena which, from
the point of view of direct experience, had nothing
whatever to do with one another. The latter gave a
mechanical interpretation of the thermodynamic
ideas and laws and led to the discovery of the limit
of applicability of the notions and laws of the
classical theory of heat. This kinetic theory, which
by far surpassed phenomenological physics as
regards the logical unity of its foundations,
produced, moreover, definite values for the true
magnitudes of atoms and molecules which resulted
from several independent methods and were thus
placed beyond the realm of reasonable doubt. These
decisive progresses were paid for by the
coordination of atomistic entities to the material
points, the constructively speculative character of
these entities being obvious. Nobody could hope
ever to "perceive directly" an atom. Laws
concerning variables connected more directly with
experimental facts (for example: temperature,
pressure, speed) were deduced from the
fundamental ideas by means of complicated
calculations. In this manner physics (at least part of
it), originally more phenomenologically constructed,
was reduced, by being founded upon Newton's
mechanics for atoms and molecules, to a basis
further removed from direct experiment, but more
uniform in character.

III. THE FIELD CONCEPT

  In explaining optical and electrical phenomena,
Newton's mechanics has been far less successful
than it had been in the fields cited above. It is true
that Newton tried to reduce light to the motion of
material points in his corpuscular theory of light.
Later on, however, as the phenomena of
polarization, diffraction, and interference of light
forced upon this theory more and more unnatural
modifications, Huygens' undulatory theory of light
prevailed. Probably this theory owes its origin
essentially to the phenomena of crystal optics and
to the theory of sound, which was then already
elaborated to a certain degree. It must be admitted
that Huygens' theory also was based in the first
instance upon classical mechanics; the
all-penetrating ether had to be assumed as the carrier
of the waves, but no known phenomenon suggested
the way in which the ether was built up from
material points. One could never get a clear picture
of the internal forces governing the ether, nor of the
forces acting between the ether and "ponderable"
matter. The foundations of this theory remained,
therefore, eternally in the dark. The true basis was a
partial differential equation, the reduction of which
to mechanical elements remained always
problematic.
  For the theoretical conception of electric and
magnetic phenomena one introduced, again, masses
of a special kind, and between these masses one
assumed the existence of forces acting at a distance,
similar to Newton's gravitational forces. This special
kind of matter, however, appeared to be lacking in
the fundamental property of inertia; and the forces
acting between these masses and the ponderable
matter remained obscure. To these difficulties there
had to be added the polar character of these kinds of
matter which did not fit into the scheme of classical
mechanics. The basis of the theory became still
more unsatisfactory when electrodynamic
phenomena became known, notwithstanding the fact
that these phenomena brought the physicist to the
explanation of magnetic phenomena through
electrodynamic phenomena and, in this way, made
the assumption of magnetic masses superfluous.
This progress had, indeed, to be paid for by
increasing the complexity of the forces of interaction
which had to be assumed as existing between
electrical masses in motion.
  The escape from this unsatisfactory situation by
the electric field theory of Faraday and Maxwell
represents probably the most profound
transformation of the foundations of physics since
Newton's time. Again, it has been a step in the
direction of constructive speculation which has
increased the distance between the foundation of the
theory and sense experiences. The existence of the
field manifests itself, indeed, only when electrically
charged bodies are introduced into it. The
differential equations of Maxwell connect the spatial
and temporal differential coefficients of the electric
and magnetic fields. The electric masses are nothing
more than places of non-vanishing divergence of the
electric field. Light waves appear as undulatory
electromagnetic field processes in space.
  To be sure, Maxwell still tried to interpret his field
theory mechanically by means of mechanical ether
models. But these attempts receded gradually to the
background following the representation of the
theory--purged of any unnecessary trimmings--by
Heinrich Hertz, so that in this theory the field
finally took the fundamental position which had
been occupied in Newton's mechanics by the
material points. Primarily, however, this applied
only for electromagnetic fields in empty space.
  In its initial stage the theory was yet quite
unsatisfactory for the interior of matter, because
there, two electric vectors had to be introduced,
which were connected by relations dependent on the
nature of the medium, these relations being
inaccessible to any theoretical analysis. An
analogous situation arose in connection with the
magnetic field, as well as in the relation between
electric current density and the field.
  Here H. A. Lorentz found a way out which
showed, at the same time, the way to an
electrodynamic theory of bodies in motion, a theory
which was more or less free from arbitrary
assumptions. His theory was built on the following
fundamental hypotheses:
  Everywhere (including the interior of ponderable
bodies) the seat of the field is the empty space. The
participation of matter in electromagnetic
phenomena has its origin only in the fact that the
elementary particles of matter carry unalterable
electric charges, and, on this account, are subject on
the one hand to the actions of ponderomotive forces
and on the other hand possess the property of
generating a field. The elementary particles obey
Newton's law of motion for material points.
  This is the basis on which H. A. Lorentz obtained
his synthesis of Newton's mechanics and Maxwell's
field theory. The weakness of this theory lies in the
fact that it tried to determine the phenomena by a
combination of partial differential equations
(Maxwell's field equations for empty space) and
total differential equations (equations of motion of
points), which procedure was obviously unnatural.
The inadequacy of this point of view manifested
itself in the necessity of assuming finite dimensions
for the particles in order to prevent the
electromagnetic field existing at their surfaces from
becoming infinitely large. The theory failed,
moreover, to give any explanation concerning the
tremendous forces which hold the electric charges on
the individual particles. H. A. Lorentz accepted
these weaknesses of his theory, which were well
known to him, in order to explain the phenomena
correctly at least in general outline.
  Furthermore, there was one consideration which
pointed beyond the frame of Lorentz's theory. In
the environment of an electrically charged body
there is a magnetic field which furnishes an
(apparent) contribution to its inertia. Should it not
be possible to explain the total inertia of the
particles electromagnetically? It is clear that this
problem could be worked out satisfactorily only if
the particles could be interpreted as regular
solutions of the electromagnetic partial differential
equations. The Maxwell equations in their original
form do not, however, allow such a description of
particles, because their corresponding solutions
contain a singularity. Theoretical physicists have
tried for a long time, therefore, to reach the goal by a
modification of Maxwell's equations. These
attempts have, however, not been crowned with
success. Thus it happened that the goal of erecting a
pure electromagnetic field theory of matter remained
unattained for the time being, although in principle
no objection could be raised against the possibility
of reaching such a goal. The lack of any systematic
method leading to a solution discouraged further
attempts in this direction. What appears certain to
me, however, is that, in the foundations of any
consistent field theory, the particle concept must
not appear in addition to the field concept. The
whole theory must be based solely on partial
differential equations and their singularity-free
solutions.

IV. THE THEORY OF RELATIVITY

  There is no inductive method which could lead to
the fundamental concepts of physics. Failure to
understand this fact constituted the basic
philosophical error of so many investigators of the
nineteenth century. It was probably the reason why
the molecular theory and Maxwell's theory were
able to establish themselves only at a relatively late
date. Logical thinking is necessarily deductive; it is
based upon hypothetical concepts and axioms. How
can we expect to choose the latter so that we might
hope for a confirmation of the consequences derived
from them?
  The most satisfactory situation is evidently to be
found in cases where the new fundamental
hypotheses are suggested by the world of
experience itself. The hypothesis of the
non-existence of perpetual motion as a basis for
thermodynamics affords such an example of a
fundamental hypothesis suggested by experience;
the same holds for Galileo's principle of inertia. In
the same category, moreover, we find the
fundamental hypotheses of the theory of relativity,
which theory has led to an unexpected expansion
and broadening of the field theory, and to the
superseding of the foundations of classical
mechanics.
  The success of the Maxwell-Lorentz theory has
given great confidence in the validity of the
electromagnetic equations for empty space, and
hence, in particular, in the assertion that light travels
"in space" with a certain constant speed c. Is this
assertion of the constancy of light velocity valid for
every inertial system? If it were not, then one
specific inertial system or, more accurately, one
specific state of motion (of a body of reference)
would be distinguished from all others. This,
however, appeared to contradict all mechanical and
electromagnetic-optical experimental facts.
  For these reasons it was necessary to raise to the
rank of a principle the validity of the law of
constancy of light velocity for all inertial systems.
From this, it follows that the spatial coordinates X1,
X2, X3, and the time X4, must be transformed
according to the "Lorentz-transformation" which is
characterized by the invariance of the expression

ds2 = dx12 + dx22 + dx32 - dx42

(if the unit of time is chosen in such a manner that
the speed of light c = 1).
  By this procedure time lost its absolute character,
and was adjoined to the "spatial" coordinates as of
algebraically (nearly) similar character. The absolute
character of time and particularly of simultaneity
was destroyed, and the four-dimensional description
was introduced as the only adequate one.
  In order to account, also, for the equivalence of all
inertial systems with regard to all the phenomena of
nature, it is necessary to postulate invariance of all
systems of physical equations which express
general laws with respect to Lorentz
transformations. The elaboration of this requirement
forms the content of the special theory of relativity.
  This theory is compatible with the equations of
Maxwell; but it is incompatible with the basis of
classical mechanics. It is true that the equations of
motion of the material point can be modified (and
with them the expressions for momentum and
kinetic energy of the material point) in such a
manner as to satisfy the theory; but, the concept of
the force of interaction, and with it the concept of
potential energy of a system, lose their basis,
because these concepts rest upon the idea of
absolute simultaneity. The field, as determined by
differential equations, takes the place of the force.
  Since the foregoing theory allows interaction only
by fields, it requires a field theory of gravitation.
Indeed, it is not difficult to formulate such a theory
in which, as in Newton's theory, the gravitational
fields can be reduced to a scalar which is the
solution of a partial differential equation. However,
the experimental facts expressed in Newton's theory
of gravitation lead in another direction, that of the
general theory of relativity.
  It is an unsatisfactory feature of classical
mechanics that in its fundamental laws the same
mass constant appears in two different r⌠les,
namely as "inertial mass" in the law of motion, and
as "gravitational mass" in the law of gravitation. As
a result, the acceleration of a body in a pure
gravitational field is independent of its material; or,
in a uniformly accelerated coordinate system
(accelerated in relation to an "inertial system") the
motions take place as they would in a homogeneous
gravitational field (in relation to a "motionless"
system of coordinates). If one assumes that the
equivalence of these two cases is complete, then one
attains an adaptation of our theoretical thinking to
the fact that the gravitational and inertial masses are
equal.
  From this it follows that there is no longer any
reason for favoring, as a matter of principle, the
"inertial systems"; and, we must admit on an equal
footing also non-linear transformations of the
coordinates (x1, x2, x3, x4). If we make such a
transformation of a system of coordinates of the
special theory of relativity, then the metric

ds2 = dx12 + dx22 + dx32 - dx42

goes over into a general (Riemannian) metric of the
form

ds2 = g(( dx(( dx( (summed over ( and ()

where the g((, symmetrical in ( and (, are certain
functions of x1 . . . x4 which describe both the
metric properties, and the gravitational field in
relation to the new system of coordinates.
  The foregoing improvement in the interpretation of
the mechanical basis must, however, be paid for in
that--as becomes evident on closer scrutiny--the
new coordinates can no longer be interpreted as
results of measurements on rigid bodies and clocks,
as they could in the original system (an inertial
system with vanishing gravitational field).
  The passage to the general theory of relativity is
realized by the assumption that such a
representation of the field properties of space
already mentioned, by functions g(( (that is to say,
by a Riemann metric), is also justified in the general
case in which there is no system of coordinates in
relation to which the metric takes the simple
quasi-Euclidean form of the special theory of
relativity.
  Now the coordinates, by themselves, no longer
express metric relations, but only the "closeness" of
objects whose coordinates differ but little from one
another. All transformations of the coordinates have
to be admitted so long as these transformations are
free from singularities. Only such equations as are
covariant in relation to arbitrary transformations in
this sense have meaning as expressions of general
laws of nature (postulate of general covariance).
  The first aim of the general theory of relativity was
a preliminary version which, while not meeting the
requirements for constituting a closed system, could
be connected in as simple a manner as possible with
"directly observable facts." If the theory were
restricted to pure gravitational mechanics, Newton's
gravitational theory could serve as a model. This
preliminary version may be characterized as
follows:
  1. The concept of the material point and of its
mass is retained. A law of motion is given for it, this
law of motion being the translation of the law of
inertia into the language of the general theory of
relativity. This law is a system of total differential
equations, the system characteristic of the geodesic
line.
  2. Newton's law of interaction by gravitation is
replaced by the system of the simplest generally
covariant differential equations which can be set up
for the g((-tensor. It is formed by equating to zero
the once contracted Riemannian curvature tensor
(R(( = 0).
  This formulation permits the treatment of the
problem of the planets. More accurately speaking, it
allows the treatment of the problem of motion of
material points of practically negligible mass in the
(centrally symmetric) gravitational field produced
by a material point supposed to be "at rest." It does
not take into account the reaction of the "moving"
material points on the gravitational field, nor does it
consider how the central mass produces this
gravitational field.
  Analogy with classical mechanics shows that the
following is a way to complete the theory. 0ne sets
up as field equations

Rik - 1/2gikR = - Tik

where R represents the scalar of Riemannian
curvature, Tik the energy tensor of the matter in a
phenomenological representation. The left side of
the equation is chosen in such a manner that its
divergence disappears identically. The resulting
disappearance of the divergence of the right side
produces the "equations of motion" of matter, in the
form of partial differential equations for the case
where Tik introduces, for the description of the
matter, only four further independent functions (for
instance, density, pressure, and velocity
components, where there is between the latter an
identity, and between pressure and density an
equation of condition).
  By this formulation one reduces the whole
mechanics of gravitation to the solution of a single
system of covariant partial differential equations.
The theory avoids all the shortcomings which we
have charged against the basis of classical mechanics.
It is sufficient--as far as we know--for the
representation of the observed facts of celestial
mechanics. But it is similar to a building, one wing
of which is made of fine marble (left part of the
equation), but the other wing of which is built of
low-grade wood (right side of equation). The
phenomenological representation of matter is, in
fact, only a crude substitute for a representation
which would do justice to all known properties of
matter.
  There is no difficulty in connecting Maxwell's
theory of the electromagnetic field with the theory
of the gravitational field so long as one restricts
himself to space free of ponderable matter and free
of electric density. All that is necessary is to put on
the right-hand side of the above equation for Tik the
energy tensor of the electromagnetic field in empty
space and to adjoin to the so modified system of
equations the Maxwell field equation for empty
space, written in general covariant form. Under
these conditions there will exist, between all these
equations, a sufficient number of differential
identities to guarantee their consistency. We may
add that this necessary formal property of the total
system of equations leaves arbitrary the choice of
the sign of the member Tik, a fact which later turned
out to be important.
  The desire to have, for the foundations of the
theory, the greatest possible unity has resulted in
several attempts to include the gravitational field
and the electromagnetic field in one unified formal
picture. Here we must mention particularly the
five-dimensional theory of Kaluza and Klein.
Having considered this possibility very carefully, I
feel that it is more desirable to accept the lack of
internal uniformity of the original theory, because I
do not think that the totality of the hypotheses at
the basis of the five-dimensional theory contains
less arbitrary features than does the original theory.
The same statement may be made for the projective
version of the theory, which has been elaborated
with great care, in particular, by v. Dantzig and by
Pauli.
  The foregoing considerations concern, exclusively,
the theory of the field, free of matter. How are we
to proceed from this point in order to obtain a
complete theory of atomically constituted matter?
In such a theory, singularities must certainly be
excluded, since without such exclusion the
differential equations do not completely determine
the total field. Here, in the field theory of general
relativity, we meet the same problem of a
field-theoretical representation of matter as was met
originally in connection with the pure Maxwell
theory.
  Here again the attempt of a field-theoretical
construction of particles leads apparently to
singularities. Here also the endeavor has been made
to overcome this defect by the introduction of new
field variables and by elaborating and extending the
system of field equations. Recently, however, I
discovered, in collaboration with Dr. Rosen, that the
above-mentioned simplest combination of the field
equations of gravitation and electricity produces
centrally symmetrical solutions which can be
represented as free of singularity (the well-known
centrally symmetrical solutions of Schwarzschild
for the pure gravitational field, and those of Reissner
for the electric field with consideration of its
gravitational action). We shall refer to this shortly in
the paragraph next but one. In this way it seems
possible to get for matter and its interactions a pure
field theory free of additional hypotheses, one
moreover whose test by submission to facts of
experience does not lead to difficulties other than
purely mathematical ones, which difficulties,
however, are very serious.

V. QUANTUM THEORY AND THE FUNDAMENTALS OF
PHYSICS

  The theoretical physicists of our generation are
expecting the erection of a new theoretical basis for
physics which would make use of fundamental
concepts greatly different from those of the field
theory considered up to now. The reason is that it
has been found necessary to use--for the
mathematical representation of the so-called
quantum phenomena--entirely new methods.
  While the failure of classical mechanics, as revealed
by the theory of relativity, is connected with the
finite speed of light (its not being  ), it was
discovered at the beginning of our century that there
were other kinds of inconsistencies between
deductions from mechanics and experimental facts,
which inconsistencies are connected with the finite
magnitude (its not being zero) of Planck's constant
h. In particular, while molecular mechanics requires
that both heat content and (monochromatic)
radiation density of solid bodies should decrease in
proportion to the decreasing absolute temperature,
experience has shown that they decrease much more
rapidly than the absolute temperature. For a
theoretical explanation of this behavior it was
necessary to assume that the energy of a mechanical
system cannot assume arbitrary values, but only
certain discrete values whose mathematical
expressions were always dependent upon Planck's
constant h. Moreover, this conception was essential
for the theory of the atom (Bohr's theory). For the
transitions of these states into one another--with or
without emission or absorption of radiation--no
causal laws could be given, but only statistical ones;
and a similar conclusion holds for the radioactive
decay of atoms, which was carefully investigated
about the same time. For more than two decades
physicists tried vainly to find a uniform
interpretation of this "quantum character" of
systems and phenomena. Such an attempt was
successful about ten years ago, through the agency
of two entirely different theoretical methods of
attack. We owe one of these to Heisenberg and
Dirac, and the other to de Broglie and Schr÷dinger.
The mathematical equivalence of the two methods
was soon recognized by Schr÷dinger. I shall try here
to sketch the line of thought of de Broglie and
Schr÷dinger, which lies closer to the physicist's
method of thinking, and shall accompany the
description with certain general considerations.
  The question is first: How can one assign a discrete
succession of energy values H  to a system specified
in the sense of classical mechanics (the energy
function is a given function of the coordinates qr
and the corresponding momenta pr)? Planck's
constant h relates the frequency H /h to the energy
values H . It is therefore sufficient to assign to the
system a succession of discrete frequency values.
This reminds us of the fact that in acoustics a series
of discrete frequency values is coordinated to a
linear partial differential equation (for given
boundary conditions) namely, the sinusoidal
periodic solutions. In corresponding manner,
Schr÷dinger set himself the task of coordinating a
partial differential equation for a scalar function ( to
the given energy function ((qr, pr), where the qr and
the time t are independent variables. In this he
succeeded (for a complex function () in such a
manner that the theoretical values of the energy H ,
as required by the statistical theory, actually
resulted in a satisfactory manner from the periodic
solutions of the equation.
  To be sure, it did not happen to be possible to
associate a definite movement, in the sense of
mechanics of material points, with a definite
solution ((qr, t) of the Schr÷dinger equation. This
means that the ( function does not determine, at
any rate exactly, the story of the qr as functions of
the time t. According to Born, however, an
interpretation of the physical meaning of the (
functions was shown to be possible in the following
manner: (( (the square of the absolute value of the
complex function () is the probability density at
the point under consideration in the
configuration-space of the qr, at the time t. It is
therefore possible to characterize the content of the
Schrodinger equation in a manner, easy to be
understood, but not quite accurate, as follows: it
determines how the probability density of a
statistical ensemble of systems varies in the
configuration-space with the time. Briefly: the
Schrodinger equation determines the change of the
function ( of the qr with time.
  It must be mentioned that the results of this theory
contain--as limiting values--the results of particle
mechanics if the wave-lengths encountered in the
solution of the Schrodinger problem are everywhere
so small that the potential energy varies by a
practically infinitely small amount for a distance of
one wave-length in the configuration-space. Under
these conditions the following can in fact be shown:
We choose a region G0 in the configuration-space
which, although large (in every direction) in relation
to the wave-length, is small in relation to the
relevant dimensions of the configuration-space.
Under these conditions it is possible to choose a
function ( for an initial time t0 in such a manner
that it vanishes outside the region G0, and behaves,
according to the Schrodinger equation, in such a
manner that it retains this property--approximately
at least--also for a later time, but with the region G0
having passed at that time t into another region G. In
this manner one can, with a certain degree of
approximation, speak of the motion of the region G
as a whole, and one can approximate this motion by
the motion of a point in the configuration-space.
This motion then coincides with the motion which
is required by the equations of classical mechanics.
  Experiments on interference made with particle
rays have given a brilliant proof that the wave
character of the phenomena of motion as assumed
by the theory does, really, correspond to the facts.
In addition to this, the theory succeeded, easily, in
demonstrating the statistical laws of the transition
of a system from one quantum state to another
under the action of external forces, which, from the
standpoint of classical mechanics, appears as a
miracle. The external forces were here represented
by small time dependent additions to the potential
energy. Now, while in classical mechanics, such
additions can produce only correspondingly small
changes of the system, in the quantum mechanics
they produce changes of any magnitude however
large, but with correspondingly small probability, a
consequence in perfect harmony with experience.
Even an understanding of the laws of radioactive
decay, at least in broad outline, was provided by the
theory.
  Probably never before has a theory been evolved
which has given a key to the interpretation and
calculation of such a heterogeneous group of
phenomena of experience as has quantum theory. In
spite of this, however, I believe that the theory is
apt to beguile us into error in our search for a
uniform basis for physics, because, in my belief, it
is an incomplete representation of real things,
although it is the only one which can be built out of
the fundamental concepts of force and material
points (quantum corrections to classical mechanics).
The incompleteness of the representation leads
necessarily to the statistical nature (incompleteness)
of the laws. I will now give my reasons for this
opinion.
  I ask first: How far does the ( function describe a
real state of a mechanical system? Let us assume the
(r to be the periodic solutions (put in the order of
increasing energy values) of the Schrodinger
equation. I shall leave open, for the time being, the
question as to how far the individual (r are
complete descriptions of physical states. A system
is first in the state (1 of lowest energy (1. Then
during a finite time a small disturbing force acts
upon the system. At a later instant one obtains then
from the Schrodinger equation a ( function of the
form

( = (cr(r

where the cr are (complex) constants. If the (r are
"normalized," then  c1  is nearly equal to 1,  c2  etc.
is small compared with 1. One may now ask: Does
??? describe a real state of the system? If the answer
is yes, then we can hardly do otherwise than
ascribe  [Because, according to a well-established
consequence of the relativity theory, the energy of a
complete system (at rest) is equal to its inertia (as a
whole). This, however, must have a well-defined
value.] to this state a definite energy (, and, in
particular, an energy which exceeds (1 by a small
amount (in any case (1 < ( < (2). Such an
assumption is, however, at variance with the
experiments on electron impact such as have been
made by J. Franck and G. Hertz, if one takes into
account Millikan's demonstration of the discrete
nature of electricity. As a matter of fact, these
experiments lead to the conclusion that energy
values lying between the quantum values do not
exist. From this it follows that our function ( does
not in any way describe a homogeneous state of the
system, but represents rather a statistical
description in which the cr represent probabilities
of the individual energy values. It seems to be clear,
therefore, that Born's statistical interpretation of
quantum theory is the only possible one. The (
function does not in any way describe a state which
could be that of a single system; it relates rather to
many systems, to "an ensemble of systems" in the
sense of statistical mechanics. If, except for certain
special cases, the ( function furnishes only
statistical data concerning measurable magnitudes,
the reason lies not only in the fact that the operation
of measuring introduces unknown elements, which
can be grasped only statistically, but because of the
very fact that the ( function does not, in any sense,
describe the state of one single system. The
Schrodinger equation determines the time variations
which are experienced by the ensemble of systems
which may exist with or without external action on
the single system.
  Such an interpretation eliminates also the paradox
recently demonstrated by myself and two
collaborators, and which relates to the following
problem.
  Consider a mechanical system consisting of two
partial systems A and B which interact with each
other only during a limited time. Let the ( function
before their interaction be given. Then the
Schr÷dinger equation will furnish the ( function
after the interaction has taken place. Let us now
determine the physical state of the partial system A
as completely as possible by measurements. Then
quantum mechanics allows us to determine the (
function of the partial system B from the
measurements made, and from the ( function of the
total system. This determination, however, gives a
result which depends upon which of the physical
quantities (observables) of A have been measured
(for instance, coordinates or momenta). Since there
can be only one physical state of B after the
interaction which cannot reasonably be considered
to depend on the particular measurement we
perform on the system A separated from B it may
be concluded that the ( function is not
unambiguously coordinated to the physical state.
This coordination of several ( functions to the same
physical state of system B shows again that the (
function cannot be interpreted as a (complete)
description of a physical state of a single system.
Here also the coordination of the ( function to an
ensemble of systems eliminates every difficulty. [A
measurement on A, for example, thus involves a
transition to a narrower ensemble of systems. The
latter (hence also its ( function) depends upon the
point of view according to which this reduction of
the ensemble of systems is carried out.]
  The fact that quantum mechanics affords, in such a
simple manner, statements concerning (apparently)
discontinuous transitions from one state to another
without actually giving a description of the specific
process--this fact is connected with another,
namely, the fact that the theory, in reality, does not
operate with the single system, but with a totality
of systems. The coefficients cr of our first example
are really altered very little under the action of the
external force. With this interpretation of quantum
mechanics one can understand why this theory can
easily account for the fact that weak disturbing
forces are able to produce changes of any magnitude
in the physical state of a system. Such disturbing
forces produce, indeed, only correspondingly small
changes of the statistical density in the ensemble of
systems, and hence only infinitely weak changes of
the ( functions, the mathematical description of
which offers far less difficulty than would be
involved in the mathematical description of finite
changes experienced by part of the single systems.
What happens to the single system remains, it is
true, entirely unclarified by this mode of
consideration; this enigmatic event is entirely
eliminated from the description by the statistical
approach.
  But now I ask: Is there really any physicist who
believes that we shall never get any insight into
these important changes in the single systems, in
their structure and their causal connections,
regardless of the fact that these single events have
been brought so close to us, thanks to the marvelous
inventions of the Wilson chamber and the Geiger
counter? To believe this is logically possible
without contradiction; but, it is so very contrary to
my scientific instinct that I cannot forego the search
for a more complete conception.
  To these considerations we should add those of
another kind which also appear to indicate that the
methods introduced by quantum mechanics are not
likely to give a useful basis for the whole of
physics. In the Schr÷dinger equation, absolute time,
and also the potential energy, play a decisive role,
while these two concepts have been recognized by
the theory of relativity as inadmissible in principle.
If one wishes to escape from this difficulty, he must
found the theory upon field and field laws instead of
upon forces of interaction. This leads us to apply
the statistical methods of quantum mechanics to
fields, that is, to systems of infinitely many degrees
of freedom. Although the attempts so far made are
restricted to linear equations, which, as we know
from the results of the general theory of relativity,
are insufficient, the complications met up to now by
the very ingenious attempts are already terrifying.
They certainly will multiply if one wishes to obey
the requirements of the general theory of relativity,
the justification of which in principle nobody
doubts.
  To be sure, it has been pointed out that the
introduction of a space-time continuum may be
considered as contrary to nature in view of the
molecular structure of everything which happens on
a small scale. It is maintained that perhaps the
success of the Heisenberg method points to a purely
algebraical method of description of nature, that is,
to the elimination of continuous functions from
physics. Then, however, we must also give up, on
principle, the space-time continuum. It is
conceivable that human ingenuity will some day find
methods which will make it possible to proceed
along such a path. At the present time, however,
such a program looks like an attempt to breathe in
empty space.
  There is no doubt that quantum mechanics has
seized hold of a good deal of truth, and that it will
be a touchstone for any future theoretical basis, in
that it must be deducible as a limiting case from that
basis, just as electrostatics is deducible from the
Maxwell equations of the electromagnetic field or as
thermodynamics is deducible from classical
mechanics. However, I do not believe that quantum
mechanics can serve as a starting point in the search
for this basis, just as, vice versa, one could not find
from thermodynamics (resp. statistical mechanics)
the foundations of mechanics.
  In view of this situation, it seems to be entirely
justifiable seriously to consider the question as to
whether the basis of field physics cannot by any
means be put into harmony with quantum
phenomena. Is this not the only basis which, with
the presently available mathematical tools, can be
adapted to the requirements of the general theory of
relativity? The belief, prevailing among the
physicists of today, that such an attempt would be
hopeless, may have its root in the unwarranted
assumption that such a theory must lead, in first
approximation, to the equations of classical
mechanics for the motion of corpuscles, or at least
to total differential equations. As a matter of fact,
up to now we have never succeeded in a
field-theoretical description of corpuscles free of
singularities, and we can, a priori, say nothing about
the behavior of such entities. One thing, however, is
certain: if a field theory results in a representation of
corpuscles free of singularities, then the behavior of
these corpuscles in time is determined solely by the
differential equations of the field.

VI. RELATIVITY THEORY AND CORPUSCLES

  I shall now show that, according to the general
theory of relativity, there exist singularity-free
solutions of field equations which can be interpreted
as representing corpuscles. I restrict myself here to
neutral particles because, in another recent
publication in collaboration with Dr. Rosen, I have
treated this question in detail, and because the
essentials of the problem can be completely
exhibited in this case.
  The gravitational field is entirely described by the
tensor g((. In the three-index symbols ((((, there
appear also the contravariant g(( which are defined
as the minors of the g(( divided by the determinant
g(= g ▀ ). In order that the Rik shall be defined and
finite, it is not sufficient that there shall be, in the
neighborhood of every point of the continuum, a
system of coordinates in which the g(( and their
first differential quotients are continuous and
differentiable, but it is also necessary that the
determinant g shall nowhere vanish. This last
restriction disappears, however, if one replaces the
differential equations Rik = 0 by g2Rik = 0, the
left-hand sides of which are whole rational functions
of the gik and of their derivatives.
  These equations have the centrally symmetrical
solution given by Schwarzschild

           -1
ds2=--------dr2-r2(d(2+sin2(d(2)+(1-2m/r)dt2
       1-2m/r

This solution has a singularity at r = 2m, since the
coefficient of dr2 (i.e., g11), becomes infinite on this
hypersurface. If, however, we replace the variable r
by ( defined by the equation

(2 = r - 2m

we obtain

ds2=-4(2m+()d(2-(2m+(2)2(d(2+sin(2d(2)
    +((2/2m+(2)dt2

This solution behaves regularly for all values of (.
The vanishing of the coefficient of dt2 (i.e., g44) for
( = 0 results, it is true, in the consequence that the
determinant g vanishes for this value; but, with the
methods of writing the field equations actually
adopted, this does not constitute a singularity.
  If ( varies from -  to + , then r varies from +  to r
= 2m and then back to + , while for such values of r
as correspond to r < 2m there are no corresponding
real values of (. Hence the Schwarzschild solution
becomes a regular solution by representing the
physical space as consisting of two identical
"sheets" in contact along the hypersurface ( = 0
(i.e., r = 2m), on which the determinant g vanishes.
Let us call such a connection between the two
(identical) sheets a "bridge." Hence the existence of
such a bridge between the two sheets in the finite
realm corresponds to the existence of a material
neutral particle which is described in a manner free
from singularities.
  The solution of the problem of the motion of
neutral particles evidently amounts to the discovery
of such solutions of the gravitational equations
(written free of denominators), as contain several
bridges.
  The conception sketched above corresponds, a
priori, to the atomistic structure of matter in so far
as the "bridge" is by its nature a discrete element.
Moreover, we see that the mass constant m of the
neutral particles must necessarily be positive, since
no solution free of singularities can correspond to
the Schwarzschild solution for a negative value of m.
Only the examination of the several-bridge-problem
can show whether or not this theoretical method
furnishes an explanation of the empirically
demonstrated equality of the masses of the particles
found in nature, and whether it takes into account
the facts which the quantum mechanics has so
wonderfully comprehended.
  In an analogous manner, it is possible to
demonstrate that the combined equations of
gravitation and electricity (with appropriate choice
of the sign of the electrical member in the
gravitational equations) produce a singularity-free
bridge-representation of the electric corpuscle. The
simplest solution of this kind is that for an electrical
particle without gravitational mass.
  So long as the considerable mathematical
difficulties concerned with the solution of the
several-bridge-problem are not overcome, nothing
can be said concerning the usefulness of the theory
from the physicist's point of view. However, it
constitutes, as a matter of fact, the first attempt
toward the consistent elaboration of a field theory
which presents a possibility of explaining the
properties of matter. In favor of this attempt one
should also add that it is based on the simplest
possible relativistic field equations known today.

SUMMARY

  Physics constitutes a logical system of thought
which is in a state of evolution, whose basis cannot
be distilled, as it were, from experience by an
inductive method, but can only be arrived at by free
invention. The justification (truth content) of the
system rests in the verification of the derived
propositions by sense experiences, whereby the
relations of the latter to the former can only be
comprehended intuitively. Evolution is proceeding
in the direction of increasing simplicity of the logical
basis. In order further to approach this goal, we
must resign to the fact that the logical basis departs
more and more from the facts of experience, and that
the path of our thought from the fundamental basis
to those derived propositions, which correlate with
sense experiences, becomes continually harder and
longer.
  Our aim has been to sketch, as briefly as possible,
the development of the fundamental concepts in
their dependence upon the facts of experience and
upon the endeavor to achieve internal perfection of
the system. These considerations were intended to
illuminate the present state of affairs, as it appears
to me. (It is unavoidable that a schematic historic
exposition is subjectively colored.)
  I try to demonstrate how the concepts of bodily
objects, space, subjective and objective time, are
connected with one another and with the nature of
our experience. In classical mechanics the concepts
of space and time become independent. The concept
of the bodily object is replaced in the foundations
by the concept of the material point, by which
means mechanics becomes fundamentally atomistic.
Light and electricity produce insurmountable
difficulties when one attempts to make mechanics
the basis of all physics. We are thus led to the field
theory of electricity, and, later on to the attempt to
base physics entirely upon the concept of the field
(after an attempted compromise with classical
mechanics). This attempt leads to the theory of
relativity (evolution of the notion of space and time
into that of the continuum with metric structure).
  I try to demonstrate, furthermore, why in my
opinion quantum theory does not seem capable to
furnish an adequate foundation for physics: one
becomes involved in contradictions if one tries to
consider the theoretical quantum description as a
complete description of the individual physical
system or event.
  On the other hand, the field theory is as yet unable
to explain the molecular structure of matter and of
quantum phenomena. It is shown, however, that the
conviction of the inability of field theory to solve
these problems by its methods rests upon prejudice.

THE FUNDAMENTS OF THEORETICAL
PHYSICS

From Science, Washington, D.C. May 24, 1940.

  Science is the attempt to make the chaotic
diversity of our sense-experience correspond to a
logically uniform system of thought. In this system
single experiences must be correlated with the
theoretic structure in such a way that the resulting
coordination is unique and convincing.
  The sense-experiences are the given subject-matter.
But the theory that shall interpret them is
man-made. It is the result of an extremely laborious
process of adaptation: hypothetical, never
completely final, always subject to question and
doubt.
  The scientific way of forming concepts differs
from that which we use in our daily life, not
basically, but merely in the more precise definition
of concepts and conclusions; more painstaking and
systematic choice of experimental material; and
greater logical economy. By this last we mean the
effort to reduce all concepts and correlations to as
few as possible logically independent basic concepts
and axioms.
  What we call physics comprises that group of
natural sciences which base their concepts on
measurements; and whose concepts and
propositions lend themselves to mathematical
formulation. Its realm is accordingly defined as that
part of the sum total of our knowledge which is
capable of being expressed in mathematical terms.
With the progress of science, the realm of physics
has so expanded that it seems to be limited only by
the limitations of the method itself.
  The larger part of physical research is devoted to
the development of the various branches of physics,
in each of which the object is the theoretical
understanding of more or less restricted fields of
experience, and in each of which the laws and
concepts remain as closely as possible related to
experience. It is this department of science, with its
ever-growing specialization, which has
revolutionized practical life in the last centuries, and
given birth to the possibility that man may at last be
freed from the burden of physical toil.
  On the other hand, from the very beginning there
has always been present the attempt to find a
unifying theoretical basis for all these single
sciences, consisting of a minimum of concepts and
fundamental relationships, from which all the
concepts and relationships of the single disciplines
might be derived by logical process. This is what we
mean by the search for a foundation of the whole of
physics. The confident belief that this ultimate goal
may be reached is the chief source of the passionate
devotion which has always animated the researcher.
It is in this sense that the following observations are
devoted to the foundations of physics.
  From what has been said it is clear that the word
foundations in this connection does not mean
something analogous in all respects to the
foundations of a building. Logically considered, of
course, the various single laws of physics rest upon
this foundation. But whereas a building may be
seriously damaged by a heavy storm or spring flood,
yet its foundations remain intact, in science the
logical foundation is always in greater peril from
new experiences or new knowledge than are the
branch disciplines with their closer experimental
contacts. In the connection of the foundation with
all the single parts lies its great significance, but
likewise its greatest danger in face of any new
factor. When we realize this, we are led to wonder
why the so-called revolutionary epochs of the
science of physics have not more often and more
completely changed its foundation than has actually
been the case.
  The first attempt to lay a uniform theoretical
foundation was the work of Newton. In his system
everything is reduced to the following concepts: (1)
Mass points with invariable mass; (2) action at a
distance between any pair of mass points; (3) law of
motion for the mass point. There was not, strictly
speaking, any all-embracing foundation, because an
explicit law was formulated only for the
actions-at-a-distance of gravitation; while for other
actions-at-a-distance nothing was established a
priori except the law of equality of actio and
reactio. Moreover, Newton himself fully realized
that time and space were essential elements, as
physically effective factors, of his system, if only
by implication.
  This Newtonian basis proved eminently fruitful
and was regarded as final up to the end of the
nineteenth century. It not only gave results for the
movements of the heavenly bodies, down to the
most minute details, but also furnished a theory of
the mechanics of discrete and continuous masses, a
simple explanation of the principle of the
conservation of energy and a complete and brilliant
theory of heat. The explanation of the facts of
electrodynamics within the Newtonian system was
more forced; least convincing of all, from the very
beginning, was the theory of light.
  It is not surprising that Newton would not listen
to a wave theory of light; for such a theory was
most unsuited to his theoretical foundation. The
assumption that space was filled with a medium
consisting of material points that propagated light
waves without exhibiting any other mechanical
properties must have seemed to him quite artificial.
The strongest empirical arguments for the wave
nature of light, fixed speeds of propagation,
interference, diffraction, polarization were either
unknown or else not known in any well-ordered
synthesis. He was justified in sticking to his
corpuscular theory of light.
  During the nineteenth century the dispute was
settled in favor of the wave theory. Yet no serious
doubt of the mechanical foundation of physics
arose, in the first place because nobody knew where
to find a foundation of another sort. Only slowly,
under the irresistible pressure of facts, there
developed a new foundation of physics,
field-physics.
  From Newton's time on, the theory of
action-at-a-distance was constantly found artificial.
Efforts were not lacking to explain gravitation by a
kinetic theory, that is, on the basis of collision
forces of hypothetical mass particles. But the
attempts were superficial and bore no fruit. The
strange part played by space (or the inertial system)
within the mechanical foundation was also clearly
recognized, and criticized with especial clarity by
Ernst Mach.
  The great change was brought about by Faraday,
Maxwell, and Hertz--as a matter of fact
half-unconsciously and against their will. All three
of them, throughout their lives, considered
themselves adherents of the mechanical theory.
Hertz had found the simplest form of the equations
of the electromagnetic field, and declared that any
theory leading to these equations was Maxwellian
theory. Yet toward the end of his short life he wrote
a paper in which he presented as the foundation of
physics a mechanical theory freed from the
force-concept.
  For us, who took in Faraday's ideas so to speak
with our mother's milk, it is hard to appreciate their
greatness and audacity. Faraday must have grasped
with unerring instinct the artificial nature of all
attempts to refer electromagnetic phenomena to
actions-at-a-distance between electric particles
reacting on each other. How was each single iron
filing among a lot scattered on a piece of paper to
know of the single electric particles running round in
a nearby conductor? All these electric particles
together seemed to create in the surrounding space a
condition which in turn produced a certain order in
the filings. These spatial states, today called fields,
if their geometrical structure and interdependent
action were once rightly grasped, would, he was
convinced, furnish the clue to the mysterious
electromagnetic interactions. He conceived these
fields as states of mechanical stress in a space-filling
medium, similar to the states of stress in an
elastically distended body. For at that time this was
the only way one could conceive of states that were
apparently continuously distributed in space. The
peculiar type of mechanical interpretation of these
fields remained in the background--a sort of
placation of the scientific conscience in view of the
mechanical tradition of Faraday's time. With the
help of these new field concepts Faraday succeeded
in forming a qualitative concept of the whole
complex of electromagnetic effects discovered by
him and his predecessors. The precise formulation
of the time-space laws of those fields was the work
of Maxwell. Imagine his feelings when the
differential equations he had formulated proved to
him that electromagnetic fields spread in the form of
polarized waves and with the speed of light! To few
men in the world has such an experience been
vouchsafed. At that thrilling moment he surely
never guessed that the fiddling nature of light,
apparently so completely solved, would continue to
baffle succeeding generations. Meantime, it took
physicists some decades to grasp the full
significance of Maxwell's discovery, so bold was the
leap that his genius forced upon the conceptions of
his fellow-workers. Only after Hertz had
demonstrated experimentally the existence of
Maxwell's electromagnetic waves did resistance to
the new theory break down.
  But if the electromagnetic field could exist as a
wave independent of the material source, then the
electrostatic interaction could no longer be explained
as action-at-a-distance. And what was true for
electrical action could not be denied for gravitation.
Everywhere Newton's actions-at-a-distance gave
way to fields spreading with finite velocity.
  Of Newton's foundation there now remained only
the material mass points subject to the law of
motion. But J. J. Thomson pointed out that an
electrically charged body in motion must, according
to Maxwell's theory, possess a magnetic field whose
energy acted precisely as does an increase of kinetic
energy to the body. If, then, a part of kinetic energy
consists of field energy, might that not then be true
of the whole of the kinetic energy? Perhaps the
basic property of matter, its inertia, could be
explained within the field theory? The question led
to the problem of an interpretation of matter in
terms of field theory, the solution of which would
furnish an explanation of the atomic structure of
matter. It was soon realized that Maxwell's theory
could not accomplish such a program. Since then
many scientists have zealously sought to complete
the field theory by some generalization that should
comprise a theory of matter; but so far such efforts
have not been crowned with success. In order to
construct a theory, it is not enough to have a clear
conception of the goal. One must also have a formal
point of view which will sufficiently restrict the
unlimited variety of possibilities. So far this has not
been found; accordingly the field theory has not
succeeded in furnishing a foundation for the whole
of physics.
  For several decades most physicists clung to the
conviction that a mechanical substructure would be
found for Maxwell's theory. But the unsatisfactory
results of their efforts led to gradual acceptance of
the new field concepts as irreducible
fundamentals--in other words, physicists resigned
themselves to giving up the idea of a mechanical
foundation.
  Thus physicists held to a field-theory program.
But it could not be called a foundation, since
nobody could tell whether a consistent field theory
could ever explain on the one hand gravitation, on
the other hand the elementary components of
matter. In this state of affairs it was necessary to
think of material particles as mass points subject to
Newton's laws of motion. This was the procedure
of Lorentz in creating his electron theory and the
theory of the electromagnetic phenomena of moving
bodies.
  Such was the point at which fundamental
conceptions had arrived at the turn of the century.
Immense progress was made in the theoretical
penetration and understanding of whole groups of
new phenomena; but the establishment of a unified
foundation for physics seemed remote indeed. And
this state of things has even been aggravated by
subsequent developments. The development during
the present century is characterized by two
theoretical systems essentially independent of each
other: the theory of relativity and the quantum
theory. The two systems do not directly contradict
each other; but they seem little adapted to fusion
into one unified theory. We must briefly discuss the
basic idea of these two systems.
  The theory of relativity arose out of efforts to
improve, with reference to logical economy, the
foundation of physics as it existed at the turn of the
century. The so-called special or restricted relativity
theory is based on the fact that Maxwell's equations
(and thus the law of propagation of light in empty
space) are converted into equations of the same
form, when they undergo Lorentz transformation.
This formal property of the Maxwell equations is
supplemented by our fairly secure empirical
knowledge that the laws of physics are the same
with respect to all inertial systems. This leads to the
result that the Lorentz transformation--applied to
space and time coordinates--must govern the
transition from one inertial system to any other.
The content of the restricted relativity theory can
accordingly be summarized in one sentence: all
natural laws must be so conditioned that they are
covariant with respect to Lorentz transformations.
From this it follows that the simultaneity of two
distant events is not an invariant concept and that
the dimensions of rigid bodies and the speed of
clocks depend upon their state of motion. A further
consequence was a modification of Newton's law of
motion in cases where the speed of a given body
was not small compared with the speed of light.
There followed also the principle of the equivalence
of mass and energy, with the laws of conservation
of mass and energy becoming one and the same.
Once it was shown that simultaneity was relative
and depended on the frame of reference, every
possibility of retaining actions-at-a-distance within
the foundation of physics disappeared, since that
concept presupposed the absolute character of
simultaneity (it must be possible to state the
location of the two interacting mass points "at the
same time").
  The general theory of relativity owes its origin to
the attempt to explain a fact known since Galileo's
and Newton's time but hitherto eluding all
theoretical interpretation: the inertia and the weight
of a body, in themselves two entirely distinct
things, are measured by one and the same constant,
the mass. From this correspondence follows that it
is impossible to discover by experiment whether a
given system of coordinates is accelerated, or
whether its motion is straight and uniform and the
observed effects are due to a gravitational field (this
is the equivalence principle of the general relativity
theory). It shatters the concepts of the inertial
system, as soon as gravitation enters in. It may be
remarked here that the inertial system is a weak
point of the Galilean-Newtonian mechanics. For
there is presupposed a mysterious property of
physical space, conditioning the kind of
coordinate-systems for which the law of inertia and
the Newtonian law of motion hold good.
  These difficulties can be avoided by the following
postulate: natural laws are to be formulated in such
a way that their form is identical for coordinate
systems of any kind of states of motion. To
accomplish this is the task of the general theory of
relativity. On the other hand, we deduce from the
restricted theory the existence of a Riemannian
metric within the time-space continuum, which,
according to the equivalence principle, describes
both the gravitational field and the metric properties
of space. Assuming that the held equations of
gravitation are of the second differential order, the
field law is clearly determined.
  Aside from this result, the theory frees field
physics from the disability it suffered from, in
common with the Newtonian mechanics, of
ascribing to space those independent physical
properties which heretofore had been concealed by
the use of an inertial system. But it cannot be
claimed that those parts of the general relativity
theory which can today be regarded as iinal have
furnished physics with a complete and satisfactory
foundation. In the first place, the total field appears
in it to be composed of two logically unconnected
parts, the gravitational and the electromagnetic. And
in the second place, this theory, like the earlier field
theories, has not up till now supplied an explanation
of the atomistic structure of matter. This failure has
probably some connection with the fact that so far
it has contributed nothing to the understanding of
quantum phenomena. To take in these phenomena,
physicists have been driven to the adoption of
entirely new methods, the basic characteristics of
which we shall now discuss.
  In the year nineteen hundred, in the course of a
purely theoretic investigation, Max Planck made a
very remarkable discovery: the law of radiation of
bodies as a function of temperature could not be
derived solely from the laws of Maxwellian
electrodynamics. To arrive at results consistent with
the relevant experiments, radiation of a given
frequency had to be treated as though it consisted of
energy atoms of the individual energy hv, where h is
Planck's universal constant. During the years
following, it was shown that light was everywhere
produced and absorbed in such energy quanta. In
particular Niels Bohr was able largely to understand
the structure of the atom, on the assumption that
atoms can have only discrete energy values, and that
the discontinuous transitions between them are
connected with the emission or absorption of such
an energy quantum. This threw some light on the
fact that in their gaseous state elements and their
compounds radiate and absorb only light of certain
sharply defined frequencies. All this was quite
inexplicable within the frame of the hitherto existing
theories. It was clear that at least in the field of
atomistic phenomena the character of everything
that happens is determined by discrete states and
by apparently discontinuous transitions between
them, Planck's constant h playing a decisive role.
  The next step was taken by de Broglie. He asked
himself how the discrete states could be understood
by the aid of the current concepts, and hit on a
parallel with stationary waves, as for instance in the
case of the proper frequencies of organ pipes and
strings in acoustics. True, wave actions of the kind
here required were unknown; but they could be
constructed, and their mathematical laws fomulated,
employing Planck's constant h. De Broglie
conceived an electron revolving about the atomic
nucleus as being connected with such a hypothetical
wave train, and made intelligible to some extent the
discrete character of Bohr's "permitted" paths by
the stationary character of the corresponding waves.
  Now in mechanics the motion of material points is
determined by the forces or fields of force acting
upon them. Hence it was to be expected that those
fields of force would also influence de Broglie's
wave fields in an analogous way. Erwin Schr÷dinger
showed how this influence was to be taken into
account, re-interpreting by an ingenious method
certain formulations of classical mechanics. He even
succeeded in expanding the wave mechanical theory
to a point where without the introduction of any
additional hypotheses, it became applicable to any
mechanical system consisting of an arbitrary number
of mass points, that is to say possessing an
arbitrary number of degrees of freedom. This was
possible because a mechanical system consisting of
n mass points is mathematically equivalent to a
considerable degree to one single mass point moving
in a space of 3 n dimensions.
  On the basis of this theory there was obtained a
surprisingly good representation of an immense
variety of facts which otherwise appeared entirely
incomprehensible. But on one point, curiously
enough, there was failure: it proved impossible to
associate with these Schr÷dinger waves definite
motions of the mass points--and that, after all, had
been the original purpose of the whole construction.
  The difficulty appeared insurmountable, until it
was overcome by Born in a way as simple as it was
unexpected. The de Broglie-Schr÷dinger wave fields
were not to be interpreted as a mathematical
description of how an event actually takes place in
time and space, though, of course, they have
reference to such an event. Rather they are a
mathematical description of what we can actually
know about the system. They serve only to make
statistical statements and predictions of the results
of all measurements which we can carry out upon
the system.
  Let me illustrate these general features of quantum
mechanics by means of a simple example: we shall
consider a mass point kept inside a restricted region
G by forces of finite strength. If the kinetic energy
of the mass point is below a certain limit, then the
mass point, according to classical mechanics, can
never leave the region G. But according to quantum
mechanics, the mass point, after a period not
immediately predictable, is able to leave the region
G, in an unpredictable direction, and escape into
surrounding space. This case, according to Gamow,
is a simplified model of radioactive disintegration.
  The quantum theoretical treatment of this case is
as follows: at the time t0 we have a Schr÷dinger
wave system entirely inside G. But from the time t0
onwards, the waves leave the interior of G in all
directions, in such a way that the amplitude of the
outgoing wave is small compared to the initial
amplitude of the wave system inside G. The further
these outside waves spread, the more the amplitude
of the waves inside G diminishes, and
correspondingly the intensity of the later waves
issuing from G. Only after infinite time has passed
is the wave supply inside G exhausted, while the
outside wave has spread over an ever-increasing
space.
  But what has this wave process to do with the
first object of our interest, the particle originally
enclosed in G? To answer this question, we must
imagine some arrangement which will permit us to
carry out measurements on the particle. For
instance, let us imagine somewhere in the
surrounding space a screen so made that the particle
sticks to it on coming into contact with it. Then,
from the intensity of the waves hitting the screen at
some point, we draw conclusions as to the
probability of the particle hitting the screen there at
that time. As soon as the particle has hit any
particular point of the screen, the whole wave field
loses all its physical meaning; its only purpose was
to make probability predictions as to the place and
time of the particle hitting the screen (or, for
instance, its momentum at the time when it hits the
screen).
  All other cases are analogous. The aim of the
theory is to determine the probability of the results
of measurement upon a system at a given time. On
the other hand, it makes no attempt to give a
mathematical representation of what is actually
present or goes on in space and time. On this point
the quantum theory of today differs fundamentally
from all previous theories of physics, mechanistic as
well as field theories. Instead of a model description
of actual space-time events, it gives the probability
distributions for possible measurements as
functions of time.
  It must be admitted that the new theoretical
conception owes its origin not to any flight of fancy
but to the compelling force of the facts of
experience. All attempts to represent the particle
and wave features displayed in the phenomena of
light and matter, by direct recourse to a. space-time
model, have so far ended in failure. And Heisenberg
has convincingly shown, from an empirical point of
view, that any decision as to a rigorously
deterministic structure of nature is definitely ruled
out, because of the atomistic structure of our
experimental apparatus. Thus it is probably out of
the question that any future knowledge can compel
physics again to relinquish our present statistical
theoretical foundation in favor of a deterministic one
which would deal directly with physical reality.
Logically the problem seems to offer two
possibilities, between which we are in principle
given a choice. In the end the choice will be made
according to which kind of description yields the
formulation of the simplest foundation, logically
speaking. At the present, we are quite without any
deterministic theory directly describing the events
themselves and in consonance with the facts.
  For the time being, we have to admit that we do
not possess any general theoretical basis for
physics, which can be regarded as its logical
foundation. The field theory, so far, has failed in the
molecular sphere. It is agreed on all hands that the
only principle which could serve as the basis of
quantum theory would be one that constituted a
translation of the field theory into the scheme of
quantum statistics. Whether this will actually come
about in a satisfactory manner, nobody can venture
to say.
  Some physicists, among them myself, cannot
believe that we must abandon, actually and forever,
the idea of direct representation of physical reality
in space and time; or that we must accept the view
that events in nature are analogous to a game of
chance. It is open to every man to choose the
direction of his striving; and also every man may
draw comfort from Lessing's fine saying, that the
search for truth is more precious than its
possession.

THE COMMON LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE

Broadcast recording for Science Conference,
London, September 28, 1941. Published in
Advancement of Science, London, Vol. 2, No. 5.

  The first step toward language was to link
acoustically or otherwise commutable signs to
sense-impressions. Most likely all sociable animals
have arrived at this primitive kind of
communication--at least to a certain degree. A higher
development is reached when further signs are
introduced and understood which establish relations
between those other signs designating
sense-impression. At this stage it is already possible
to report somewhat complex series of impressions;
we can say that language has come to existence. If
language is to lead at all to understanding, there must
be rules concerning the relations between the signs
on the one hand, and on the other hand there must
be a stable correspondence between signs and
impressions. In their childhood individuals
connected by the same language grasp these rules
and relations mainly by intuition. When man
becomes conscious of the rules concerning the
relations between signs, the so-called grammar of
language is established.
  In an early stage the words may correspond
directly to impressions. At a later stage this direct
connection is lost in so far as some words convey
relations to perceptions only if used in connection
with other words (for instance such words as: "is,"
"or," "thing"). Then word-groups rather than single
words refer to perceptions. When language becomes
thus partially independent from the background of
impressions a greater inner coherence is gained.
  Only at this further development where frequent
use is made of so-called abstract concepts, language
becomes an instrument of reasoning in the true sense
of the word. But it is also this development which
turns language into a dangerous source of error and
deception. Everything depends on the degree to
which words and word-combinations correspond to
the world of impression.
  What is it that brings about such an intimate
connection between language and thinking? Is there
no thinking without the use of language, namely in
concepts and concept-combinations for which
words need not necessarily come to mind? Has not
every one of us struggled for words although the
connection between "things" was already clear?
  We might be inclined to attribute to the act of
thinking complete independence from language if the
individual formed or were able to form his concepts
without the verbal guidance of his environment. Yet
most likely the mental shape of an individual,
growing up under such conditions, would be very
poor. Thus we may conclude that the mental
development of the individual and his way of
forming concepts depend to a high degree upon
language. This makes us realize to what extent the
same language means the same mentality. In this
sense thinking and language are linked together.
  What distinguishes the language of science from
language as we ordinarily understand the word?
How is it that scientific language is international?
What science strives for is an utmost acuteness and
clarity of concepts as regards their mutual relation
and their correspondence to sensory data. As an
illustration let us take the language of Euclidean
geometry and algebra. They manipulate with a small
number of independently introduced concepts,
respectively symbols, such as the integral number,
the straight line, the point, as well as with signs
which designate the fundamental operations, that is,
the connections between those fundamental
concepts. This is the basis for the construction, and
respectively the definition of all other statements
and concepts. The connection between concepts and
statements on the one hand and the sensory data on
the other hand is established through acts of
counting and measuring whose performance is
sufficiently well determined.
  The supernational character of scientific concepts
and scientific language is due to the fact that they
have been set up by the best brains of all countries
and all times. In solitude, and yet in cooperative
effort as regards the final effect, they created the
spiritual tools for the technical revolutions which
have transformed the life of mankind in the last
centuries. Their system of concepts has served as a
guide in the bewildering chaos of perceptions so that
we learned to grasp general truths from particular
observations.
  What hopes and fears does the scientific method
imply for mankind? I do not think that this is the
right way to put the question. Whatever this tool in
the hand of man will produce depends entirely on
the nature of the goals alive in this mankind. Once
these goals exist, the scientific method furnishes
means to realize them. Yet it cannot furnish the very
goals. The scientific method itself would not have
led anywhere, it would not even have been born
without a passionate striving for clear
understanding.
  Perfection of means and confusion of goals
seem--in my opinion--to characterize our age. If we
desire sincerely and passionately the safety, the
welfare, and the free development of the talents of
all men, we shall not be in want of the means to
approach such a state. Even if only a small part of
mankind strives for such goals, their superiority will
prove itself in the long run.

E = M C2
From Science Illustrated, New York, April, 1946.

  In order to understand the law of the equivalence
of mass and energy, we must go back to two
conservation or "balance" principles which,
independent of each other, held a high place in
pre-relativity physics. These were the principle of
the conservation of energy and the principle of the
conservation of mass. The first of these, advanced
by Leibnitz as long ago as the seventeenth century,
was developed in the nineteenth century essentially
as a corollary of a principle of mechanics.
  Consider, for example, a pendulum whose mass
swings back and forth between the points A and B.
At these points the mass m is higher by the amount
h than it is at C, the lowest point of the path (see
drawing). At C, on the other hand, the lifting height
has disappeared and instead of it the mass has a
velocity v. It is as though the lifting height could be
converted entirely into velocity, and vice versa. The
exact relation would be expressed as mgh=(m/2)v2
with g representing the acceleration of gravity. What
is interesting here is that this relation is independent
of both the length of the pendulum and the form of
the path through which the mass moves.
  The significance is that something remains constant
throughout the process, and that something is
energy. At A and at B it is an energy of position, or
"potential" energy; at C it is an energy of motion, or
"kinetic" energy. If this concept is correct, then the
sum mgh+m(v2/2) must have the same value for any
position of the pendulum, if h is understood to
represent the height above C, and v the velocity at
that point in the pendulum's path. And such is
found to be actually the case. The generalization of
this principle gives us the law of the conservation of
mechanical energy. But what happens when friction
stops the pendulum?
  The answer to that was found in the study of heat
phenomena. This study, based on the assumption
that heat is an indestructible substance which flows
from a warmer to a colder object, seemed to give us
a principle of the "conservation of heat." On the
other hand, from time immemorial it has been
known that heat could be produced by friction, as in
the fire-making drills of the Indians. The physicists
were for long unable to account for this kind of heat
"production." Their difficulties were overcome only
when it was successfully established that, for any
given amount of heat produced by friction, an
exactly proportional amount of energy had to be
expended. Thus did we arrive at a principle of the
"equivalence of work and heat." With our pendulum,
for example, mechanical energy is gradually
converted by friction into heat.
  In such fashion the principles of the conservation
of mechanical and thermal energies were merged into
one. The physicists were thereupon persuaded that
the conservation principle could be further extended
to take in chemical and electromagnetic
processes--in short, could be applied to all fields. It
appeared that in our physical system there was a
sum total of energies that remained constant through
all changes that might occur.
  Now for the principle of the conservation of mass.
Mass is defined by the resistance that a body
opposes to its acceleration (inert mass). It is also
measured by the weight of the body (heavy mass).
That these two radically different definitions lead to
the same value for the mass of a body is, in itself, an
astonishing fact. According to the
principle--namely, that masses remain unchanged
under any physical or chemical changes--the mass
appeared to be the essential (because unvarying)
quality of matter. Heating, melting, vaporization, or
combining into chemical compounds would not
change the total mass.
  Physicists accepted this principle up to a few
decades ago. But it proved inadequate in the face of
the special theory of relativity. It was therefore
merged with the energy principle--just as, about
sixty years before, the principle of the conservation
of mechanical energy had been combined with the
principle of the conservation of heat. We might say
that the principle of the conservation of energy,
having previously swallowed up that of the
conservation of heat, now proceeded to swallow
that of the conservation of mass--and holds the field
alone.
  It is customary to express the equivalence of mass
and energy (though somewhat inexactly) by the
formula E = mc2, in which c represents the velocity
of light, about 186,000 miles per second. E is the
energy that is contained in a stationary body; m is
its mass. The energy that belongs to the mass m is
equal to this mass, multiplied by the square of the
enormous speed of light--which is to say, a vast
amount of energy for every unit of mass.
  But if every gram of material contains this
tremendous energy, why did it go so long
unnoticed? The answer is simple enough: so long as
none of the energy is given off externally, it cannot
be observed. It is as though a man who is fabulously
rich should never spend or give away a cent; no one
could tell how rich he was.
  Now we can reverse the relation and say that an
increase of E in the amount of energy must be
accompanied by an increase of E/c2 in the mass. I
can easily supply energy to the mass--for instance,
if I heat it by ten degrees. So why not measure the
mass increase, or weight increase, connected with
this change? The trouble here is that in the mass
increase the enormous factor c2 occurs in the
denominator of the fraction. In such a case the
increase is too small to be measured directly; even
with the most sensitive balance.
  For a mass increase to be measurable, the change of
energy per mass unit must be enormously large. We
know of only one sphere in which such amounts of
energy per mass unit are released: namely,
radioactive disintegration. Schematically, the
process goes like this: An atom of the mass M splits
into two atoms of the mass M( and M(, which
separate with tremendous kinetic energy. If we
imagine these two masses as brought to rest--that is,
if we take this energy of motion from them--then,
considered together, they are essentially poorer in
energy than was the original atom. According to the
equivalence principle, the mass sum M( + M( of the
disintegration products must also be somewhat
smaller than the original mass M of the disintegrating
atom--in contradiction to the old principle of the
conservation of mass. The relative difference of the
two is on the order of one-tenth of one percent.
  Now, we cannot actually weigh the atoms
individually. However, there are indirect methods
for measuring their weights exactly. We can likewise
determine the kinetic energies that are transferred to
the disintegration products M( and M(. Thus it has
become possible to test and confirm the equivalence
formula. Also, the law permits us to calculate in
advance, from precisely determined atomic weights,
just how much energy will be released with any
atomic disintegration we have in mind. The law says
nothing, of course, as to whether--or how --the
disintegration reaction can be brought about.
  What takes place can be illustrated with the help of
our rich man. The atom M is a rich miser who,
during his life, gives away no money (energy). But
in his will he bequeaths his fortune to his sons M(
and M(, on condition that they give to the
community a small amount, less than
one-thousandth of the whole estate (energy or
mass). The sons together have somewhat less than
the father had (the mass sum M( + M( is somewhat
smaller than the mass M of the radioactive atom).
But the part given to the community, though
relatively small, is still so enormously large
(considered as kinetic energy) that it brings with it a
great threat of evil. Averting that threat has become
the most urgent problem of our time.

ON THE GENERALIZED THEORY OF
GRAVITATION

From Scientific American, Vol. 182, No. 4. April,
1950.

  The editors of Scientific American have asked me
to write about my recent work which has just been
published. It is a mathematical investigation
concerning the foundations of field physics.
  Some readers may be puzzled: didn't we learn all
about the foundations of physics when we were still
at school? The answer is "yes" or "no," depending
on the interpretation. We have become acquainted
with concepts and general relations that enable us to
comprehend an immense range of experiences and
make them accessible to mathematical treatment. In
a certain sense these concepts and relations are
probably even final. This is true, for example, of the
laws of light refraction, of the relations of classical
thermodynamics as far as it is based on the concepts
of pressure, volume, temperature, heat, and work,
and of the hypothesis of the non-existence of a
perpetual motion machine.
  What, then, impels us to devise theory after
theory? Why do we devise theories at all? The
answer to the latter question is simply: because we
enjoy "comprehending," i.e., reducing phenomena
by the process of logic to something already known
or (apparently) evident. New theories are first of all
necessary when we encounter new facts which
cannot be "explained" by existing theories. But this
motivation for setting up new theories is, so to
speak, trivial, imposed from without. There is
another, more subtle motive of no less importance.
This is the striving toward unification and
simplification of the premises of the theory as a
whole (i.e., Mach's principle of economy,
interpreted as a logical principle).
  There exists a passion for comprehension, just as
there exists a passion for music. That passion is
rather common in children, but gets lost in most
people later on. Without this passion, there would
be neither mathematics nor natural science. Time
and again the passion for understanding has led to
the illusion that man is able to comprehend the
objective world rationally, by pure thought, without
any empirical foundations--in short, by
metaphysics. I believe that every true theorist is a
kind of tamed metaphysicist, no matter how pure a
"positivist" he may fancy himself. The
metaphysicist believes that the logically simple is
also the real. The tamed metaphysicist believes that
not all that is logically simple is embodied in
experienced reality, but that the totality of all
sensory experience can be "comprehended" on the
basis of a conceptual system built on premises of
great simplicity. The skeptic will say that this is a
"miracle creed." Admittedly so, but it is a miracle
creed which has been borne out to an amazing extent
by the development of science.
  The rise of atomism is a good example. How may
Leucippus have conceived this bold idea? When
water freezes and becomes ice--apparently
something entirely different from water--why is it
that the thawing of the ice forms something which
seems indistinguishable from the original water?
Leucippus is puzzled and looks for an
"explanation." He is driven to the conclusion that in
these transitions the "essence" of the thing has not
changed at all. Maybe the thing consists of
immutable particles and the change is only a change
in their spatial arrangement. Could it not be that the
same is true of all material objects which emerge
again and again with nearly identical qualities?
  This idea is not entirely lost during the long
hibernation of Occidental thought. Two thousand
years after Leucippus, Bernoulli wonders why gas
exerts pressure on the walls of a container. Should
this be "explained" by mutual repulsion of the parts
of the gas, in the sense of Newtonian mechanics?
This hypothesis appears absurd, for the gas
pressure depends on the temperature, all other
things being equal. To assume that the Newtonian
forces of interaction depend on temperature is
contrary to the spirit of Newtonian mechanics.
Since Bernoulli is aware of the concept of atomism,
he is bound to conclude that the atoms or
(molecules) collide with the walls of the container
and in doing so exert pressure. After all, one has to
assume that atoms are in motion; how else can one
account for the varying temperature of gases?
  A simple mechanical consideration shows that this
pressure depends only on the kinetic energy of the
particles and on their density in space. This should
have led the physicists of that age to the conclusion
that heat consists in random motion of the atoms.
Had they taken this consideration as seriously as it
deserved to be taken, the development of the theory
of heat--in particular the discovery of the
equivalence of heat and mechanical energy--would
have been considerably facilitated.
  This example is meant to illustrate two things. The
theoretical idea (atomism in this case) does not arise
apart from and independent of experience; nor can it
be derived from experience by a purely logical
procedure. It is produced by a creative act. Once a
theoretical idea has been acquired, one does well to
hold fast to it until it leads to an untenable
conclusion.
  As for my latest theoretical work, I do not feel
justified in giving a detailed account of it before a
wide group of readers interested in science. That
should be done only with theories which have been
adequately confirmed by experience. So far it is
primarily the simplicity of its premises and its
intimate connection with what is already known
(viz., the laws of the pure gravitational field) that
speak in favor of the theory to be discussed here. It
may, however, be of interest to a wide group of
readers to become acquainted with the train of
thought which can lead to endeavors of such an
extremely speculative nature. Moreover, it will be
shown what kinds of difficulties are encountered
and in what sense they have been overcome.
  In Newtonian physics the elementary theoretical
concept on which the theoretical description of
material bodies is based is the material point, or
particle. Thus matter is considered a priori to be
discontinuous. This makes it necessary to consider
the action of material points on one another as
"action at a distance." Since the latter concept seems
quite contrary to everyday experience, it is only
natural that the contemporaries of Newton--and
indeed Newton himself--found it difficult to accept.
Owing to the almost miraculous success of the
Newtonian system, however, the succeeding
generations of physicists became used to the idea of
action at a distance. Any doubt was buried for a
long time to come.
  But when, in the second half of the nineteenth
century, the laws of electrodynamics became
known, it turned out that these laws could not be
satisfactorily incorporated into the Newtonian
system. It is fascinating to muse: Would Faraday
have discovered the law of electromagnetic induction
if he had received a regular college education?
Unencumbered by the traditional way of thinking,
he felt that the introduction of the "field" as an
independent element of reality helped him to
coordinate the experimental facts. It was Maxwell
who fully comprehended the significance of the field
concept; he made the fundamental discovery that
the laws of electrodynamics found their natural
expression in the differential equations for the
electric and magnetic fields. These equations implied
the existence of waves, whose properties
corresponded to those of light as far as they were
known at that time.
  This incorporation of optics into the theory of
electromagnetism represents one of the greatest
triumphs in the striving toward unification of the
foundations of physics; Maxwell achieved this
unification by purely theoretical arguments, long
before it was corroborated by Hertz's experimental
work. The new insight made it possible to dispense
with the hypothesis of action at a distance, at least
in the realm of electromagnetic phenomena; the
intermediary field now appeared as the only carrier
of electromagnetic interaction between bodies, and
the field's behavior was completely determined by
contiguous processes, expressed by differential
equations.
  Now a question arose: Since the field exists even in
a vacuum, should one conceive of the field as a state
of a "carrier," or should it rather be endowed with an
independent existence not reducible to anything
else? In other words, is there an "ether" which
carries the field; the ether being considered in the
undulatory state, for example, when it carries light
waves?
  The question has a natural answer: Because one
cannot dispense with the field concept, it is
preferable not to introduce in addition a carrier with
hypothetical properties. However, the pathfinders
who first recognized the indispensability of the field
concept were still too strongly imbued with the
mechanistic tradition of thought to accept
unhesitatingly this simple point of view. But in the
course of the following decades this view
imperceptibly took hold.
  The introduction of the field as an elementary
concept gave rise to an inconsistency of the theory
as a whole. Maxwell's theory, although adequately
describing the behavior of electrically charged
particles in their interaction with one another, does
not explain the behavior of electrical densities, i.e., it
does not provide a theory of the particles
themselves. They must therefore be treated as mass
points on the basis of the old theory. The
combination of the idea of a continuous field with
that of material points discontinuous in space
appears inconsistent. A consistent field theory
requires continuity of all elements of the theory, not
only in time but also in space, and in all points of
space. Hence the material particle has no place as a
fundamental concept in a field theory. Thus even
apart from the fact that gravitation is not included,
Maxwell's electrodynamics cannot be considered a
complete theory.
  Maxwell's equations for empty space remain
unchanged if the spatial coordinates and the time are
subjected to a particular kind of linear
transformations--the Lorentz transformations
("covariance" with respect to Lorentz
transformations). Covariance also holds, of course,
for a transformation which is composed of two or
more such transformations; this is called the "group"
property of Lorentz transformations.
  Maxwell's equations imply the "Lorentz group,"
but the Lorentz group does not imply Maxwell's
equations. The Lorentz group may indeed be
defined independently of Maxwell's equations as a
group of linear transformations which leave a
particular value of the velocity--the velocity of
light--invariant. These transformations hold for the
transition from one "inertial system" to another
which is in uniform motion relative to the first. The
most conspicuous novel property of this
transformation group is that it does away with the
absolute character of the concept of simultaneity of
events distant from each other in space. On this
account it is to be expected that all equations of
physics are covariant with respect to Lorentz
transformations (special theory of relativity). Thus it
came about that Maxwell's equations led to a
heuristic principle valid far beyond the range of the
applicability or even validity of the equations
themselves.
  Special relativity has this in common with
Newtonian mechanics: The laws of both theories are
supposed to hold only with respect to certain
coordinate systems: those known as "inertial
systems." An inertial system is a system in a state
of motion such that "force-free" material points
within it are not accelerated with respect to the
coordinate system. However, this definition is
empty if there is no independent means for
recognizing the absence of forces. But such a means
of recognition does not exist if gravitation is
considered as a "field."
  Let A be a system uniformly accelerated with
respect to an "inertial system" I. Material points,
not accelerated with respect to I, are accelerated
with respect to A, the acceleration of all the points
being equal in magnitude and direction. They behave
as if a gravitational field exists with respect to A, for
it is a characteristic property of the gravitational
field that the acceleration is independent of the
particular nature of the body. There is no reason to
exclude the possibility of interpreting this behavior
as the effect of a "true" gravitational field (principle
of equivalence). This interpretation implies that A is
an "inertial system," even though it is accelerated
with respect to another inertial system. (It is
essential for this argument that the introduction of
independent gravitational fields is considered
justified even though no masses generating the field
are defined. Therefore, to Newton such an argument
would not have appeared convincing.) Thus the
concepts of inertial system, the law of inertia and
the law of motion are deprived of their concrete
meaning--not only in classical mechanics but also in
special relativity. Moreover, following up this train
of thought, it turns out that with respect to A time
cannot be measured by identical clocks; indeed, even
the immediate physical significance of coordinate
differences is generally lost. In view of all these
difficulties, should one not try, after all, to hold on
to the concept of the inertial system, relinquishing
the attempt to explain the fundamental character of
the gravitational phenomena which manifest
themselves in the Newtonian system as the
equivalence of inert and gravitational mass? Those
who trust in the comprehensibility of nature must
answer: No.
  This is the gist of the principle of equivalence: In
order to account for the equality of inert and
gravitational mass within the theory it is necessary
to admit non-linear transformations of the four
coordinates. That is, the group of Lorentz
transformations and hence the set of the
"permissible" coordinate systems has to be
extended.
  What group of coordinate transformations can then
be substituted for the group of Lorentz
transformations? Mathematics suggests an answer
which is based on the fundamental investigations of
Gauss and Riemann: namely, that the appropriate
substitute is the group of all continuous (analytical)
transformations of the coordinates. Under these
transformations the only thing that remains
invariant is the fact that neighboring points have
nearly the same coordinates; the coordinate system
expresses only the topological order of the points in
space (including its four-dimensional character). The
equations expressing the laws of nature must be
covariant with respect to all continuous
transformations of the coordinates. This is the
principle of general relativity.
  The procedure just described overcomes a
deficiency in the foundations of mechanics which
had already been noticed by Newton and was
criticized by Leibnitz and, two centuries later, by
Mach: inertia resists acceleration, but acceleration
relative to what? Within the frame of classical
mechanics the only answer is: inertia resists
acceleration relative to space. This is a physical
property of space--space acts on objects, but
objects do not act on space. Such is probably the
deeper meaning of Newton's assertion spatium est
absolutum (space is absolute). But the idea
disturbed some, in particular Leibnitz, who did not
ascribe an independent existence to space but
considered it merely a property of "things"
(contiguity of physical objects). Had his justified
doubts won out at that time, it hardly would have
been a boon to physics, for the empirical and
theoretical foundations necessary to follow up his
idea were not available in the seventeenth century.
  According to general relativity, the concept of
space detached from any physical content does not
exist. The physical reality of space is represented
by a field whose components are continuous
functions of four independent variables--the
coordinates of space and time. It is just this
particular kind of dependence that expresses the
spatial character of physical reality.
  Since the theory of general relativity implies the
representation of physical reality by a continuous
field, the concept of particles or material points
cannot play a fundamental part, nor can the concept
of motion. The particle can only appear as a limited
region in space in which the field strength or the
energy density are particularly high.
  A relativistic theory has to answer two questions:
(1) What is the mathematical character of the field?
(2) What equations hold for this field?
  Concerning the first question: from the
mathematical point of view the field is essentially
characterized by the way its components transform
if a coordinate transformation is applied. Concerning
the second question: the equations must determine
the field to a sufficient extent while satisfying the
postulates of general relativity. Whether or not this
requirement can be satisfied depends on the choice
of the field-type.
  The attempt to comprehend the correlations among
the empirical data on the basis of such a highly
abstract program may at first appear almost
hopeless. The procedure amounts, in fact, to putting
the question: what most simple property can be
required from what most simple object (field) while
preserving the principle of general relativity?
Viewed from the standpoint of formal logic, the dual
character of the question appears calamitous, quite
apart from the vagueness of the concept "simple."
Moreover, from the standpoint of physics there is
nothing to warrant the assumption that a theory
which is "logically simple" should also be "true."
  Yet every theory is speculative. When the basic
concepts of a theory are comparatively "close to
experience" (e.g., the concepts of force, pressure,
mass), its speculative character is not so easily
discernible. If, however, a theory is such as to
require the application of complicated logical
processes in order to reach conclusions from the
premises that can be confronted with observation,
everybody becomes conscious of the speculative
nature of the theory. In such a case an almost
irresistible feeling of aversion arises in people who
are inexperienced in epistemological analysis and
who are unaware of the precarious nature of
theoretical thinking in those fields with which they
are familiar.
  On the other hand, it must be conceded that a
theory has an important advantage if its basic
concepts and fundamental hypotheses are "close to
experience," and greater confidence in such a theory
is certainly justified. There is less danger of going
completely astray, particularly since it takes so
much less time and effort to disprove such theories
by experience. Yet more and more, as the depth of
our knowledge increases, we must give up this
advantage in our quest for logical simplicity and
uniformity in the foundations of physical theory. It
has to be admitted that general relativity has gone
further than previous physical theories in
relinquishing "closeness to experience" of
fundamental concepts in order to attain logical
simplicity. This holds already for the theory of
gravitation, and it is even more true of the new
generalization, which is an attempt to comprise the
properties of the total field. In the generalized
theory the procedure of deriving from the premises
of the theory conclusions that can be confronted
with empirical data is so difficult that so far no such
result has been obtained. In favor of this theory are,
at this point, its logical simplicity and its "rigidity."
Rigidity means here that the theory is either true or
false, but not modifiable.
  The greatest inner difficulty impeding the
development of the theory of relativity is the dual
nature of the problem, indicated by the two
questions we have asked. This duality is the reason
why the development of the theory has taken place
in two steps so widely separated in time. The first
of these steps, the theory of gravitation, is based on
the principle of equivalence discussed above and
rests on the following consideration: According to
the theory of special relativity, light has a constant
velocity of propagation. If a light ray in a vacuum
starts from a point, designated by the coordinates
x1, x2 and x3 in a three dimensional coordinate
system, at the time x4, it spreads as a spherical
wave and reaches a neighboring point (x1 + dx1, x2
+ dx2, x3 + dx3) at the time x4 + dx4. Introducing
the velocity of light, c, we write the expression:

  _____________________
(dx12 + dx22 + dx32 = cdx4

This can also be written in the form:

dx12 + dx22 + dx32 - c2 dx42 = 0

  This expression represents an objective relation
between neighboring space-time points in four
dimensions, and it holds for all inertial systems,
provided the coordinate transformations are
restricted to those of special relativity. The relation
loses this form, however, if arbitrary continuous
transformations of the coordinates are admitted in
accordance with the principle of general relativity.
The relation then assumes the more general form:

(gikdxidxk=0
ik

The gik are certain functions of the coordinates
which transform in a definite way if a continuous
coordinate transformation is applied. According to
the principle of equivalence, these gik functions
describe a particular kind of gravitational field: a
field which can be obtained by transformation of
"field-free" space. The gik satisfy a particular law of
transformation. Mathematically speaking, they are
the components of a "tensor" with a property of
symmetry which is preserved in all transformations;
the symmetrical property is expressed as follows:

gik = gki

  The idea suggests itself: May we not ascribe
objective meaning to such a symmetrical tensor,
even though the field cannot be obtained from the
empty space of special relativity by a mere
coordinate transformation? Although we cannot
expect that such a symmetrical tensor will describe
the most general field, it may well describe the
particular case of the "pure gravitational field." Thus
it is evident what kind of field, at least for a special
case, general relativity has to postulate: a
symmetrical tensor field.
  Hence only the second question is left: What kind
of general covariant field law can be postulated for a
symmetrical tensor field?
  This question has not been difficult to answer in
our time, since the necessary mathematical
conceptions were already at hand in the form of the
metric theory of surfaces, created a century ago by
Gauss and extended by Riemann to manifolds of an
arbitrary number of dimensions. The result of this
purely formal investigation has been amazing in
many respects. The differential equations which can
be postulated as field law for gik cannot be of lower
than second order, i.e., they must at least contain
the second derivatives of the gik with respect to the
coordinates. Assuming that no higher than second
derivatives appear in the field law, it is
mathematically determined by the principle of
general relativity. The system of equations can be
written in the form:

Rik = 0

The Rik transform in the same manner as the gik,
i.e., they too form a symmetrical tensor.
  These differential equations completely replace the
Newtonian theory of the motion of celestial bodies
provided the masses are represented as singularities
of the field. In other words, they contain the law of
force as well as the law of motion while eliminating
"inertial systems."
  The fact that the masses appear as singularities
indicates that these masses themselves cannot be
explained by symmetrical gik fields, or
"gravitational fields." Not even the fact that only
positive gravitating masses exist can be deduced
from this theory. Evidently a complete relativistic
field theory must be based on a field of more
complex nature, that is, a generalization of the
symmetrical tensor field.
  Before considering such a generalization, two
remarks pertaining to gravitational theory are
essential for the explanation to follow.
  The first observation is that the principle of
general relativity imposes exceedingly strong
restrictions on the theoretical possibilities. Without
this restrictive principle it would be practically
impossible for anybody to hit on the gravitational
equations, not even by using the principle of special
relativity, even though one knows that the field has
to be described by a symmetrical tensor. No amount
of collection of facts could lead to these equations
unless the principle of general relativity were used.
This is the reason why all attempts to obtain a
deeper knowledge of the foundations of physics
seem doomed to me unless the basic concepts are in
accordance with general relativity from the
beginning. This situation makes it difficult to use
our empirical knowledge, however comprehensive,
in looking for the fundamental concepts and
relations of physics, and it forces us to apply free
speculation to a much greater extent than is
presently assumed by most physicists. I do not see
any reason to assume that the heuristic significance
of the principle of general relativity is restricted to
gravitation and that the rest of physics can be dealt
with separately on the basis of special relativity,
with the hope that later on the whole may be fitted
consistently into a general relativistic scheme. I do
not think that such an attitude, although historically
understandable, can be objectively justified. The
comparative smallness of what we know today as
gravitational effects is not a conclusive reason for
ignoring the principle of general relativity in
theoretical investigations of a fundamental character.
In other words, I do not believe that it is justifiable
to ask: what would physics look like without
gravitation?
  The second point we must note is that the
equations of gravitation are ten differential equations
for the ten components of the symmetrical tensor
gik. In the case of a non-general relativistic theory, a
system is ordinarily not overdetermined if the
number of equations is equal to the number of
unknown functions. The manifold of solutions is
such that within the general solution a certain
number of functions of three variables can be chosen
arbitrarily. For a general relativistic theory this
cannot be expected as a matter of course. Free
choice with respect to the coordinate system
implies that out of the ten functions of a solution, or
components of the field, four can be made to assume
prescribed values by a suitable choice of the
coordinate system. In other words, the principle of
general relativity implies that the number of
functions to be determined by differential equations
is not 10 but 10 - 4 = 6. For these six functions only
six independent differential equations may be
postulated. Only six out of the ten differential
equations of the gravitational field ought to be
independent of each other, while the remaining four
must be connected to those six by means of four
relations (identities). And indeed there exist among
the left-hand sides, Rik, of the ten gravitational
equations four identities--"Bianchi's
identities"--which assure their "compatibility."
  In a case like this--when the number of field
variables is equal to the number of differential
equations--compatibility is always assured if the
equations can be obtained from a variational
principle. This is indeed the case for the
gravitational equations.
  However, the ten differential equations cannot be
entirely replaced by six. The system of equations is
indeed "overdetermined," but due to the existence of
the identities it is overdetermined in such a way that
its compatibility is not lost, i.e., the manifold of
solutions is not critically restricted. The fact that
the equations of gravitation imply the law of motion
for the masses is intimately connected with this
(permissible) overdetermination.
  After this preparation it is now easy to understand
the nature of the present investigation without
entering into the details of its mathematics. The
problem is to set up a relativistic theory for the
total field. The most important clue to its solution is
that there exists already the solution for the special
case of the pure gravitational field. The theory we
are looking for must therefore be a generalization of
the theory of the gravitational field. The first
question is: what is the natural generalization of the
symmetrical tensor field?
  This question cannot be answered by itself, but
only in connection with the other question: what
generalization of the field is going to provide the
most natural theoretical system? The answer on
which the theory under discussion is based is that
the symmetrical tensor field must be replaced by a
non-symmetrical one. This means that the condition
gik = gki for the field components must be dropped.
In that case the field has sixteen instead of ten
independent components.
  There remains the task of setting up the relativistic
differential equations for a non-symmetrical tensor
field. In the attempt to solve this problem one meets
with a difficulty which does not arise in the case of
the symmetrical field. The principle of general
relativity does not suffice to determine completely
the field equations, mainly because the
transformation law of the symmetrical part of the
field alone does not involve the components of the
antisymmetrical part or vice versa. Probably this is
the reason why this kind of generalization of the
field has hardly ever been tried before. The
combination of the two parts of the field can only
be shown to be a natural procedure if in the
formalism of the theory only the total field plays a
role, and not the symmetrical and antisymmetrical
parts separately.
  It turned out that this requirement can indeed be
satisfied in a natural way. But even this
requirement, together with the principle of general
relativity, is still not sufficient to determine
uniquely the field equations. Let us remember that
the system of equations must satisfy a further
condition: the equations must be compatible. It has
been mentioned above that this condition is satisfied
if the equations can be derived from a variational
principle.
  This has indeed been achieved, although not in so
natural a way as in the case of the symmetrical field.
It has been disturbing to find that it can be achieved
in two different ways. These variational principles
furnished two systems of equations--let us denote
them by E1 and E2--which were different from each
other (although only slightly so), each of them
exhibiting specific imperfections. Consequently
even the condition of compatibility was insufficient
to determine the system of equations uniquely.
  It was, in fact, the formal defects of the systems
E1 and E2 that indicated a possible way out. There
exists a third system of equations, E3, which is free
of the formal defects of the systems E1 and E2 and
represents a combination of them in the sense that
every solution of E3 is a solution of E1 as well as of
E2. This suggests that E3 may be the system we
have been looking for. Why not postulate E3, then,
as the system of equations? Such a procedure is not
justified without further analysis, since the
compatibility of E1 and that of E2 do not imply
compatibility of the stronger system E3, where the
number of equations exceeds the number of field
components by four.
  An independent consideration shows that
irrespective of the question of compatibility the
stronger system, E3, is the only really natural
generalization of the equations of gravitation.
  But E3 is not a compatible system in the same
sense as are the systems E1 and E2, whose
compatibility is assured by a sufficient number of
identities, which means that every field that satisfies
the equations for a definite value of the time has a
continuous extension representing a solution in
four-dimensional space. The system E3, however, is
not extensible in the same way. Using the language
of classical mechanics, we might say: in the case of
the system E3 the "initial condition" cannot be
freely chosen. What really matters is the answer to
the question: is the manifold of solutions for the
system E3 as extensive as must be required for a
physical theory? This purely mathematical problem
is as yet unsolved.
  The skeptic will say: "It may well be true that this
system of equations is reasonable from a logical
standpoint. But this does not prove that it
corresponds to nature." You are right, dear skeptic.
Experience alone can decide on truth. Yet we have
achieved something if we have succeeded in
formulating a meaningful and precise question.
Affirmation or refutation will not be easy, in spite
of an abundance of known empirical facts. The
derivation, from the equations, of conclusions which
can be confronted with experience will require
painstaking efforts and probably new mathematical
methods.

MESSAGE TO THE ITALIAN SOCIETY FOR
THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE

Sent to the forty-second meeting of the "Societα
ltaliana per il Progresse de la Scienze," Lucca
(Italy), 1950. Published in English in the Unesco
periodical, Impact, Autumn, 1950.

  Let me first thank you most sincerely for your
kindness in inviting me to attend the meeting of the
"Society for the Advancement of Science." I should
gladly have accepted the invitation if my health had
permitted me to do so. All I can do under the
circumstances is to address you briefly from my
home across the ocean. In doing so, I am under no
illusion that I have something to say which would
actually enlarge your insight and understanding.
However, we are living in a period of such great
external and internal insecurity and with such a lack
of firm objectives that the mere confession of our
convictions may be of significance even if these
convictions, like all value judgments, cannot be
proven through logical deductions.
  There arises at once the question: should we
consider the search for truth or, more modestly
expressed, our efforts to understand the knowable
universe through constructive logical thought as an
autonomous objective of our work? Or should our
search for truth be subordinated to some other
objective, for example, to a "practical" one? This
question cannot be decided on a logical basis. The
decision, however, will have considerable influence
upon our thinking and our moral judgment, provided
that it is born out of deep and unshakable
conviction. Let me then make a confession: for
myself, the struggle to gain more insight and
understanding is one of those independent
objectives without which a thinking individual
would find it impossible to have a conscious,
positive attitude toward life.
  It is the very essence of our striving for
understanding that, on the one hand, it attempts to
encompass the great and complex variety of man's
experience, and that on the other, it looks for
simplicity and economy in the basic assumptions.
The belief that these two objectives can exist side
by side is, in view of the primitive state of our
scientific knowledge, a matter of faith. Without such
faith I could not have a strong and unshakable
conviction about the independent value of
knowledge.
  This, in a sense, religious attitude of a man engaged
in scientific work has some influence upon his
whole personality. For apart from the knowledge
which is offered by accumulated experience and
from the rules of logical thinking, there exists in
principle for the man in science no authority whose
decisions and statements could have in themselves a
claim to "Truth." This leads to the paradoxical
situation that a person who devotes all his strength
to objective matters will develop, from a social
point of view, into an extreme individualist who, at
least in principle, has faith in nothing but his own
judgment. It is quite possible to assert that
intellectual individualism and scientific eras emerged
simultaneously in history and have remained
inseparable ever since.
  Someone may suggest that the man of science as
sketched in these sentences is no more than an
abstraction which actually does not exist in this
world, not unlike the homo oeconomicus of classical
economics. However, it seems to me that science as
we know it today could not have emerged and could
not have remained alive if many individuals, during
many centuries, would not have come very close to
the ideal.
  Of course, not everybody who has learned to use
tools and methods which, directly or indirectly,
appear to be "scientific" is to me a man of science. I
refer only to those individuals in whom scientific
mentality is truly alive.
  What, then, is the position of today's man of
science as a member of society? He obviously is
rather proud of the fact that the work of scientists
has helped to change radically the economic life of
men by almost completely eliminating muscular
work. He is distressed by the fact that the results of
his scientific work have created a threat to mankind
since they have fallen into the hands of morally
blind exponents of political power. He is conscious
of the fact that technological methods made possible
by his work have led to a concentration of economic
and also of political power in the hands of small
minorities which have come to dominate completely
the lives of the masses of people who appear more
and more amorphous. But even worse: the
concentration of economic and political power in
few hands has not only made the man of science
dependent economically; it also threatens his
independence from within; the shrewd methods of
intellectual and psychic influences which it brings to
bear will prevent the development of really
independent personalities.
  Thus the man of science, as we can observe with
our own eyes, suffers a truly tragic fate. Striving in
great sincerity for clarity and inner independence, he
himself, through his sheer superhuman efforts, has
fashioned the tools which are being used to make
him a slave and to destroy him also from within. He
cannot escape being muzzled by those who have the
political power in their hands. As a soldier he is
forced to sacrifice his own life and to destroy the
lives of others even when he is convinced of the
absurdity of such sacrifices. He is fully aware of the
fact that universal destruction is unavoidable since
the historical development has led to the
concentration of all economic, political, and military
power in the hands of national states. He also
realizes that mankind can be saved only if a
supranational system, based on law, would be
created to eliminate for good the methods of brute
force. However, the man of science has slipped so
much that he accepts the slavery inflicted upon him
by national states as his inevitable fate. He even
degrades himself to such an extent that he helps
obediently in the perfection of the means for the
general destruction of mankind.
  Is there really no escape for the man of science?
Must he really tolerate and suffer all these
indignities? Is the time gone forever when, aroused
by his inner freedom and the independence of his
thinking and his work, he had a chance of
enlightening and enriching the lives of his fellow
human beings? In placing his work too much on an
intellectual basis, has he not forgotten about his
responsibility and dignity? My answer is: while it is
true that an inherently free and scrupulous person
may be destroyed, such an individual can never be
enslaved or used as a blind tool.
  If the man of science of our own days could find
the time and the courage to think over honestly and
critically his situation and the tasks before him and
if he would act accordingly, the possibilities for a
sensible and satisfactory solution of the present
dangerous international situation would be
considerably improved.

MESSAGE ON THE 410TH ANNIVERSARY
OF THE DEATH OF COPERNICUS

On the occasion of the commemoration evening held
at Columbia University, New York, in December,
1953.

  We are honoring today, with joy and gratitude, the
memory of a man who, more than almost anyone
else, contributed to the liberation of the mind from
the chains of clerical and scientific dominance in the
Occident.
  It is true that some scholars in the classic Greek
period had become convinced that the earth is not
the natural center of the world. But this
comprehension of the universe could not gain real
recognition in antiquity. Aristotle and the Greek
school of astronomers continued to adhere to the
geocentric conception, and hardly anyone had any
doubt about it.
  A rare independence of thought and intuition as
well as a mastery of the astronomical facts, not
easily accessible in those days, were necessary to
expound the superiority of the heliocentric
conception convincingly. This great accomplishment
of Copernicus not only paved the way to modern
astronomy; it also helped to bring about a decisive
change in man's attitude toward the cosmos. Once it
was recognized that the earth was not the center of
the world, but only one of the smaller planets, the
illusion of the central significance of man himself
became untenable. Hence, Copernicus, through his
work and the greatness of his personality, taught
man to be modest.
  No nation should find pride in the fact that such a
man developed in its midst. For national pride is
quite a petty weakness which is hardly justifiable in
face of a man of such inner independence as
Copernicus.

RELATIVITY AND THE PROBLEM OF SPACE

From the revised edition of Relativity, the Special
and the General Theory: A Popular Exposition.
Translated by Robert W. Lawson. London: Methuen,
1954.

  It is characteristic of Newtonian physics that it has
to ascribe independent and real existence to space
and time as well as to matter, for in Newton's law of
motion the concept of acceleration appears. But in
this theory, acceleration can only denote
"acceleration with respect to space." Newton's
space must thus be thought of as "at rest," or at
least as "unaccelerated," in order that one can
consider the acceleration, which appears in the law
of motion, as being a magnitude with any meaning.
Much the same holds with time, which of course
likewise enters into the concept of acceleration.
Newton himself and his most critical
contemporaries felt it to be disturbing that one had
to ascribe physical reality both to space itself as
well as to its state of motion; but there was at that
time no other alternative, if one wished to ascribe to
mechanics a clear meaning.
  It is indeed an exacting requirement to have at all to
ascribe physical reality to space, and especially to
empty space. Time and again since remotest times
philosophers have resisted such a presumption.
Descartes argued somewhat on these lines: space is
identical with extension, but extension is connected
with bodies; thus there is no space without bodies
and hence no empty space. The weakness of this
argument lies primarily in what follows. It is
certainly true that the concept of extension owes its
origin to our experiences of laying out or bringing
into contact solid bodies. But from this it cannot be
concluded that the concept of extension may not be
justified in cases which have not themselves given
rise to the formation of this concept. Such an
enlargement of concepts can be justified indirectly
by its value for the comprehension of empirical
results. The assertion that extension is confined to
bodies is therefore of itself certainly unfounded. We
shall see later, however, that the general theory of
relativity confirms Descartes' conception in a
roundabout way. What brought Descartes to his
seemingly odd view was certainly the feeling that,
without compelling necessity, one ought not to
ascribe reality to a thing like space, which is not
capable of being "directly experienced." [This
expression is to be taken cum grano salis.]
  The psychological origin of the idea of space, or of
the necessity for it, is far from being so obvious as it
may appear to be on the basis of our customary
habit of thought. The old geometers deal with
conceptual objects (straight line, point, surface), but
not really with space as such, as was done later in
analytical geometry. The idea of space, however, is
suggested by certain primitive experiences. Suppose
that a box has been constructed. Objects can be
arranged in a certain way inside the box, so that it
becomes full. The possibility of such arrangements
is a property of the material object "box," something
that is given with the box, the "space enclosed" by
the box. This is something which is different for
different boxes, something that is thought quite
naturally as being independent of whether or not, at
any moment, there are any objects at all in the box.
When there are no objects in the box, its space
appears to be "empty."
  So far, our concept of space has been associated
with the box. It turns out, however, that the storage
possibilities that make up the box-space are
independent of the thickness of the walls of the box.
Cannot this thickness be reduced to zero, without
the "space" being lost as a result? The naturalness of
such a limiting process is obvious, and now there
remains for our thought the space without the box, a
self-evident thing, yet it appears to be so unreal if
we forget the origin of this concept. One can
understand that it was repugnant to Descartes to
consider space as independent of material objects, a
thing that might exist without matter. [Kant's
attempt to remove the embarrassment by denial of
the objectivity of space can, however, hardly be
taken seriously. The possibilities of packing
inherent in the inside space of a box are objective in
the same sense as the box itself, and as the objects
which can be packed inside it. ] (At the same
time, this does not prevent him from treating space
as a fundamental concept in his analytical
geometry.) The drawing of attention to the vacuum
in a mercury barometer has certainly disarmed the
last of the Cartesians. But it is not to be denied that,
even at this primitive stage, something
unsatisfactory clings to the concept of space, or to
space thought of as an independent real thing.
  The ways in which bodies can be packed into
space (box) are the subject of three-dimensional
Euclidean geometry, whose axiomatic structure
readily deceives us into forgetting that it refers to
realizable situations.
  If now the concept of space is formed in the
manner outlined above, and following on from
experience about the "filling" of the box, then this
space is primarily a bounded space. This limitation
does not appear to be essential, however, for
apparently a larger box can always be introduced to
enclose the smaller one. In this way space appears
as something unbounded.
  I shall not consider here how the concepts of the
three-dimensional and the Euclidean nature of space
can be traced back to relatively primitive
experiences. Rather, I shall consider first of all from
other points of view the r⌠le of the concept of space
in the development of physical thought.
  When a smaller box s is situated, relatively at rest,
inside the hollow space of a larger box S, then the
hollow space of s is a part of the hollow space of S,
and the same "space," which contains both of them,
belongs to each of the boxes. When s is in motion
with respect to S, however, the concept is less
simple. One is then inclined to think that s encloses
always the same space, but a variable part of the
space S. It then becomes necessary to apportion to
each box its particular space, not thought of as
bounded, and to assume that these two spaces are in
motion with respect to each other.
  Before one has become aware of this complication,
space appears as an unbounded medium or container
in which material objects swim around. But it must
now be remembered that there is an infinite number
of spaces, which are in motion with respect to each
other. The concept of space as something existing
objectively and independent of things belongs to
pre-scientific thought, but not so the idea of the
existence of an infinite number of spaces in motion
relatively to each other. This latter idea is indeed
logically unavoidable, but is far from having played
a considerable r⌠le even in scientific thought.
  But what about the psychological origin of the
concept of time? This concept is undoubtedly
associated with the fact of "calling to mind," as well
as with the differentiation between sense
experiences and the recollection of these. Of itself it
is doubtful whether the differentiation between
sense experience and recollection (or a mere mental
image) is something psychologically directly given
to us. Everyone has experienced that he has been in
doubt whether he has actually experienced
something with his senses or has simply dreamed
about it. Probably the ability to discriminate
between these alternatives first comes about as the
result of an activity of the mind creating order.
  An experience is associated with a "recollection,"
and it is considered as being "earlier" in comparison
with "present experiences." This is a conceptual
ordering principle for recollected experiences, and
the possibility of its accomplishment gives rise to
the subjective concept of time, i.e., that concept of
time which refers to the arrangement of the
experiences of the individual.
  What do we mean by rendering objective the
concept of time? Let us consider an example. A
person A ("I") has the experience "it is lightning." At
the same time the person A also experiences such a
behavior of the person B as brings the behavior of B
into relation with his own experience "it is
lightning." Thus it comes about that A associates
with B the experience "it is lightning." For the
person A the idea arises that other persons also
participate in the experience "it is lightning." "It is
lightning" is now no longer interpreted as an
exclusively personal experience, but as an experience
of other persons (or eventually only as a "potential
experience"). In this way arises the interpretation
that "it is lightning," which originally entered into
the consciousness as an "experience," is now also
interpreted as an (objective) "event." It is just the
sum total of all events that we mean when we speak
of the "real external world."
  We have seen that we feel ourselves impelled to
ascribe a temporal arrangement to our experiences,
somewhat as follows. If ▀ is later than   and   later
than ▀, then   is also later than   ("sequence of
experiences"). Now what is the position in this
respect with the "events" which we have associated
with the experiences? At first sight it seems obvious
to assume that a temporal arrangement of events
exists which agrees with the temporal arrangement
of the experiences. In general, and unconsciously
this was done, until skeptical doubts made
themselves felt. [For example, the order of
experiences in time obtained by acoustical means
can differ from the temporal order gained visually,
so that one cannot simply identify the time
sequence of events with the time sequence of
experiences.] In order to arrive at the idea of an
objective world, an additional constructive concept
still is necessary: the event is localized not only in
time, but also in space.
  In the previous paragraphs we have attempted to
describe how the concepts space, time, and event
can be put psychologically into relation with
experiences. Considered logically, they are free
creations of the human intelligence, tools of thought,
which are to serve the purpose of bringing
experiences into relation with each other, so that in
this way they can be better surveyed. The attempt
to become conscious of the empirical sources of
these fundamental concepts should show to what
extent we are actually bound to these concepts. In
this way we become aware of our freedom, of
which, in case of necessity, it is always a difficult
matter to make sensible use.
  We still have something essential to add to this
sketch concerning the psychological origin of the
c≥ncepts space-time-event (we will call them more
briefly "space-like," in contrast to concepts from
the psychological sphere). We have linked up the
concept of space with experiences using boxes and
the arrangement of material objects in them. Thus
this formation of concepts already presupposes the
concept of material objects (e.g., "boxes"). In the
same way persons, who had to be introduced for the
formation of an objective concept of time, also play
the r⌠le of material objects in this connection. It
appears to me, therefore, that the formation of the
concept of the material object must precede our
concepts of time and space.
  All these space-like concepts already belong to
pre-scientific thought, along with concepts like pain,
goal, purpose, etc., from the field of psychology.
Now it is characteristic of thought in physics, as of
thought in natural science generally, that it
endeavors in principle to make do with "space-like"
concepts alone, and strives to express with their aid
all relations having the form of laws. The physicist
seeks to reduce colors and tones to vibrations; the
physiologist, thought and pain to nerve processes,
in such a way that the psychical element as such is
eliminated from the causal nexus of existence, and
thus nowhere occurs as an independent link in the
causal associations. It is no doubt this attitude,
which considers the comprehension of all relations
by the exclusive use of only "space-like" concepts
as being possible in principle, that is at the present
time understood by the term "materialism" (since
"matter" has lost its r⌠le as a fundamental concept).
  Why is it necessary to drag down from the
Olympian fields of Plato the fundamental ideas of
thought in natural science, and to attempt to reveal
their earthly lineage? Answer: In order to free these
ideas from the taboo attached to them, and thus to
achieve greater freedom in the formation of ideas or
concepts. It is to the immortal credit of D. Hume
and E. Mach that they, above all others, introduced
this critical conception.
  Science has taken over from pre-scientific thought
the concepts space, time, and material object (with
the important special case "solid body"), and has
modified them and rendered them more precise. Its
first significant accomplishment was the
development of Euclidean geometry, whose
axiomatic formulation must not be allowed to blind
us to its empirical origin (the possibilities of laying
out or juxtaposing solid bodies). In particular, the
three-dimensional nature of space as well as its
Euclidean character are of empirical origin (it can be
wholly filled by like constituted "cubes").
  The subtlety of the concept of space was enhanced
by the discovery that there exist no completely rigid
bodies. All bodies are elastically deformable and
alter in volume with change in temperature. The
structures, whose possible configurations are to be
described by Euclidean geometry, cannot therefore
be characterized without reference to the content of
physics. But since physics after all must make use
of geometry in the establishment of its concepts, the
empirical content of geometry can be stated and
tested only in the framework of the whole of
physics.
  In this connection atomistics must also be borne in
mind, and its conception of finite divisibility; for
spaces of sub-atomic extension cannot be measured
up. Atomistics also compels us to give up, in
principle, the idea of sharply and statically defined
bounding surfaces of solid bodies. Strictly speaking,
there are no precise laws, even in the macro-region,
for the possible configurations of solid bodies
touching each other.
  In spite of this, no one thought of giving up the
concept of space, for it appeared indispensable in
the eminently satisfactory whole system of natural
science. Mach, in the nineteenth century, was the
only one who thought seriously of an elimination of
the concept of space, in that he sought to replace it
by the notion of the totality of the instantaneous
distances between all material points. (He made this
attempt in order to arrive at a satisfactory
understanding of inertia.)

THE FIELD

  In Newtonian mechanics, space and time play a
dual r⌠le. First, they play the part of carrier or
frame for things that happen in physics, in reference
to which events are described by the space
coordinates and the time. In principle, matter is
thought of as consisting of "material points," the
motions of which constitute physical happening.
When matter is thought of as being continuous, this
is done, as it were, provisionally in those cases
where one does not wish to or cannot describe the
discrete structure. In this case small parts (elements
of volume) of the matter are treated similarly to
material points, at least in so far as we are concerned
merely with motions and not with occurrences
which, at the moment, it is not possible or serves no
useful purpose to attribute to motions (e.g.,
temperature changes, chemical processes). The
second r⌠le of space and time was that of being an
"inertial system." Inertial systems were considered
to be distinguished among all conceivable systems of
reference in that, with respect to them, the law of
inertia claimed validity.
  In this, the essential thing is that "physical
reality," thought of as being independent of the
subjects experiencing it, was conceived as
consisting, at least in principle, of space and time on
one hand, and of permanently existing material
points, moving with respect to space and time, on
the other. The idea of the independent existence of
space and time can be expressed drastically in this
way: if matter were to disappear, space and time
alone would remain behind (as a kind of stage for
physical happening).
  This standpoint was overcome in the course of a
development which, in the first place, appeared to
have nothing to do with the problem of space-time,
namely, the appearance of the concept of field and
its final claim to replace, in principle, the idea of a
particle (material point). In the framework of
classical physics, the concept of field appeared as
an auxiliary concept, in cases in which matter was
treated as a continuum. For example, in the
consideration of the heat conduction in a solid body,
the state of the body is described by giving the
temperature at every point of the body for every
definite time. Mathematically, this means that the
temperature T is represented as a mathematical
expression (function) of the space coordinates and
the time t (temperature field). The law of heat
conduction is represented as a local relation
(differential equation), which embraces all special
cases of the conduction of heat. The temperature is
here a simple example of the concept of field. This
is a quantity (or a complex of quantities), which is a
function of the coordinates and the time. Another
example is the description of the motion of a liquid.
At every point there exists at any time a velocity,
which is quantitatively described by its three
"components" with respect to the axes of a
coordinate system (vector). The components of the
velocity at a point (field components), here also are
functions of the coordinates (x, y, z) and the time (t).
  It is characteristic of the fields mentioned that they
occur only within a ponderable mass; they serve
only to describe a state of this matter. In accordance
with the historical development of the field concept,
where no matter was available there could also exist
no field. But in the first quarter of the nineteenth
century it was shown that the phenomena of the
interference and the diffraction of light could be
explained with astonishing accuracy when light was
regarded as a wave-field, completely analogous to
the mechanical vibration field in an elastic solid
body. It was thus felt necessary to introduce a field,
that could also exist in "empty space" in the absence
of ponderable matter.
  This state of affairs created a paradoxical situation,
because, in accordance with its origin, the field
concept appeared to be restricted to the description
of states in the inside of a ponderable body. This
seemed to be all the more certain, inasmuch as the
conviction was held that every field is to be regarded
as a state capable of mechanical interpretation, and
this presupposed the presence of matter. One thus
felt compelled, even in the space which had hitherto
been regarded as empty, to assume everywhere the
existence of a form of matter, which was called
"ether."
  The emancipation of the field concept from the
assumption of its association with a mechanical
carrier finds a place among the psychologically most
interesting events in the development of physical
thought. During the second half of the nineteenth
century, in connection with the researches of
Faraday and Maxwell, it became more and more
clear that the description of electromagnetic
processes in terms of field was vastly superior to a
treatment on the basis of the mechanical concepts of
material points. By the introduction of the field
concept in electrodynamics, Maxwell succeeded in
predicting the existence of electromagnetic waves,
the essential identity of which with light waves
could not be doubted, if only because of the equality
of their velocity of propagation. As a result of this,
optics was, in principle, absorbed by
electrodynamics. One psychological effect of this
immense success was that the field concept
gradually won greater independence from the
mechanistic framework of classical physics.
  Nevertheless, it was at first taken for granted that
electromagnetic fields had to be interpreted as states
of the ether, and it was zealously sought to explain
these states as mechanical ones. But as these efforts
always met with frustration, science gradually
became accustomed to the idea of renouncing such a
mechanical interpretation. Nevertheless, the
conviction still remained that electromagnetic fields
must be states of the ether, and this was the
position at the turn of the century.
  The ether-theory brought with it the question: how
does the ether behave from the mechanical point of
view with respect to ponderable bodies? Does it
take part in the motions of the bodies, or do its
parts remain at rest relatively to each other? Many
ingenious experiments were undertaken to decide
this question. The following important facts should
be mentioned in this connection: the "aberration" of
the fixed stars in consequence of the annual motion
of the earth, and the "Doppler effect," i.e., the
influence of the relative motion of the fixed stars on
the frequency of the light reaching us from them, for
known frequencies of emission. The results of all
these facts and experiments, except for one, the
Michelson-Morley experiment, were explained by
H. A. Lorentz on the assumption that the ether does
not take part in the motions of ponderable bodies,
and that the parts of the ether have no relative
motions at all with respect to each other. Thus the
ether appeared, as it were, as the embodiment of a
space absolutely at rest. But the investigation of
Lorentz accomplished still more. It explained all the
electromagnetic and optical processes within
ponderable bodies known at that time, on the
assumption that the influence of ponderable matter
on the electric field--and conversely--is due solely to
the fact that the constituent particles of matter carry
electrical charges, which share the motion of the
particles. Concerning the experiment of Michelson
and Morley, H. A. Lorentz showed that the result
obtained at least does not contradict the theory of
an ether at rest.
  In spite of all these beautiful successes the state of
the theory was not yet wholly satisfactory, and for
the following reasons. Classical mechanics, of which
it could not be doubted that it holds with a close
degree of approximation, teaches the equivalence of
all inertial systems or inertial "spaces" for the
formulation of natural laws, i.e., the invariance of
natural laws with respect to the transition from one
inertial system to another. Electromagnetic and
optical experiments taught the same thing with
considerable accuracy. But the foundation of
electromagnetic theory taught that a particular
inertial system must be given preference, namely,
that of the luminiferous ether at rest. This view of
the theoretical foundation was much too
unsatisfactory. Was there no modification that, like
classical mechanics, would uphold the equivalence
of inertial systems (special principle of relativity)?
  The answer to this question is the special theory
of relativity. This takes over from the theory of
Maxwell-Lorentz the assumption of the constancy
of the velocity of light in empty space. In order to
bring this into harmony with the equivalence of
inertial systems (special principle of relativity), the
idea of the absolute character of simultaneity must
be given up; in addition, the Lorentz
transformations for the time and the space
coordinates follow for the transition from one
inertial system to another. The whole content of the
special theory of relativity is included in the
postulate: the laws of nature are invariant with
respect to the Lorentz transformations. The
importance of this requirement lies in the fact that it
limits the possible natural laws in a definite manner.
  What is the position of the special theory of
relativity in regard to the problem of space? In the
first place we must guard against the opinion that
the four-dimensionality of reality has been newly
introduced for the first time by this theory. Even in
classical physics the event is localized by four
numbers, three spatial coordinates and a time
coordinate; the totality of physical "events" is thus
thought of as being embedded in a four-dimensional
continuous manifold. But on the basis of classical
mechanics this four-dimensional continuum breaks
up objectively into the one-dimensional time and
into three-dimensional spatial sections, the latter of
which contain only simultaneous events. This
resolution is the same for all inertial systems. The
simultaneity of two definite events with reference to
one inertial system involves the simultaneity of
these events in reference to all inertial systems. This
is what is meant when we say that the time of
classical mechanics is absolute. According to the
special theory of relativity it is otherwise. The sum
total of events which are simultaneous with a
selected event exist, it is true, in relation to a
particular inertial system, but no longer
independently of the choice of the inertial system.
The four-dimensional continuum is now no longer
resolvable objectively into sections, which contain
all simultaneous events; "now" loses for the
spatially extended world its objective meaning. It is
because of this that space and time must be regarded
as a four-dimensional continuum that is objectively
unresolvable, if it is desired to express the purport
of objective relations without unnecessary
conventional arbitrariness.
  Since the special theory of relativity revealed the
physical equivalence of all inertial systems, it
proved the untenability of the hypothesis of an
ether at rest. It was therefore necessary to renounce
the idea that the electromagnetic field is to be
regarded as a state of a material carrier. The field
thus becomes an irreducible element of physical
description, irreducible in the same sense as the
concept of matter in the theory of Newton.
  Up to now we have directed our attention to
finding in what respect the concepts of space and
time were modified by the special theory of
relativity. Let us now focus our attention on those
elements which this theory has taken over from
classical mechanics. Here also, natural laws claim
validity only when an inertial system is taken as the
basis of space-time description. The principle of
inertia and the principle of the constancy of the
velocity of light are valid only with respect to an
inertial system. The field-laws also can claim to have
meaning and validity only in regard to inertial
systems. Thus, as in classical mechanics, space is
here also an independent component in the
representation of physical reality. If we imagine
matter and field to be removed, inertial space or,
more accurately, this space together with the
associated time remains behind. The
four-dimensional structure (Minkowski-space) is
thought of as being the carrier of matter and of the
field. Inertial spaces, with their associated times, are
only privileged four-dimensional coordinate systems
that are linked together by the linear Lorentz
transformations. Since there exist in this
four-dimensional structure no longer any sections
which represent "now" objectively, the concepts of
happening and becoming are indeed not completely
suspended, but yet complicated. It appears
therefore more natural to think of physical reality as
a four-dimensional existence, instead of, as hitherto,
the evolution of a three-dimensional existence.
  This rigid four-dimensional space of the special
theory of relativity is to some extent a
four-dimensional analogue of H. A. Lorentz's rigid
three-dimensional ether. For this theory also the
following statement is valid: the description of
physical states postulates space as being initially
given and as existing independently. Thus even this
theory does not dispel Descartes' uneasiness
concerning the independent, or indeed, the a priori
existence of "empty space." The real aim of the
elementary discussion given here is to show to what
extent these doubts are overcome by the general
theory of relativity.

THE CONCEPT OF SPACE IN THE GENERAL THEORY
OF RELATIVITY

  This theory arose primarily from the endeavor to
understand the equality of inertial and gravitational
mass. We start out from an inertial system S1,
whose space is, from the physical point of view,
empty. In other words, there exists in the part of
space contemplated neither matter (in the usual
sense) nor a field (in the sense of the special theory
of relativity). With reference to S1 let there be a
second system of reference S2 in uniform
acceleration. Then S2 is thus not an inertial system.
With respect to S2 every test mass would move
with an acceleration, which is independent of its
physical and chemical nature. Relative to S2,
therefore, there exists a state which, at least to a
first approximation, cannot be distinguished from a
gravitational field. The following concept is thus
compatible with the observable facts: S2 is also
equivalent to an "inertial system"; but with respect
to S2 a (homogeneous) gravitational field is present
(about the origin of which one does not worry in
this connection). Thus when the gravitational field is
included in the framework of the consideration, the
inertial system loses its objective significance,
assuming that this "principle of equivalence" can be
extended to any relative motion whatsoever of the
systems of reference. If it is possible to base a
consistent theory on these fundamental ideas, it will
satisfy of itself the fact of the equality of inertial
and gravitational mass, which is strongly confirmed
empirically.
  Considered four-dimensionally, a non-linear
transformation of the four coordinates corresponds
to the transition from S1 to S2. The question now
arises: what kind of non-linear transformations are
to be permitted, or, how is the Lorentz
transformation to be generalized? In order to answer
this question, the following consideration is
decisive.
  We ascribe to the inertial system of the earlier
theory this property: differences in coordinates are
measured by stationary "rigid" measuring rods, and
differences in time by clocks at rest. The first
assumption is supplemented by another, namely,
that for the relative laying out and fitting together of
measuring rods at rest, the theorems on "lengths" in
Euclidean geometry hold. From the results of the
special theory of relativity it is then concluded, by
elementary considerations, that this direct physical
interpretation of the coordinates is lost for systems
of reference (S2) accelerated relatively to inertial
systems (S1). But if this is the case, the coordinates
now express only the order or rank of the
"contiguity" and hence also the number of
dimensions of the space, but do not express any of
its metrical properties. We are thus led to extend the
transformations to arbitrary continuous
transformations. [This inexact mode of expression
will perhaps suffice here.]This implies the general
principle of relativity: Natural laws must be
covariant with respect to arbitrary continuous
transformations of the coordinates. This
requirement (combined with that of the greatest
possible logical simplicity of the laws) limits the
natural laws concerned incomparably more strongly
than the special principle of relativity.
  This train of ideas is based essentially on the field
as an independent concept. For the conditions
prevailing with respect to S2 are interpreted as a
gravitational field, without the question of the
existence of masses which produce this field being
raised. By virtue of this train of ideas it can also be
grasped why the laws of the pure gravitational field
are more directly linked with the idea of general
relativity than the laws for fields of a general kind
(when, for instance, an electromagnetic field is
present). We have, namely, good ground for the
assumption that the "field-free" Minkowski-space
represents a special case possible in natural law, in
fact, the simplest conceivable special case. With
respect to its metrical character, such a space is
characterized by the fact that dx12 + dx22 + dx32 is
the square of the spatial separation, measured with a
unit gauge, of two infinitesimally neighboring points
of a three-dimensional "space-like" cross section
(Pythagorean theorem), whereas dx4 is the temporal
separation, measured with a suitable time gauge, of
two events with common (x1, x2, x3). All this
simply means that an objective metrical significance
is attached to the quantity

ds2 = dx12 + dx22 + dx32 - dx42 (1)

as is readily shown with the aid of the Lorentz
transformations. Mathematically, this fact
corresponds to the condition that ds2 is invariant
with respect to Lorentz transformations.
  If now, in the sense of the general principle of
relativity, this space (cf. eq. (1)) is subjected to an
arbitrary continuous transformation of the
coordinates, then the objectively significant quantity
ds is expressed in the new system of coordinates by
the relation

ds2 = gikdxidxk (1a)

which has to be summed up over the indices i and k
for all combinations 11, 12, . . . up to 44. The terms
gik now are not constants, but functions of the
coordinates, which are determined by the arbitrarily
chosen transformation. Nevertheless, the terms gik
are not arbitrary functions of the new coordinates,
but just functions of such a kind that the form (1a)
can be transformed back again into the form (1) by a
continuous transformation of the four coordinates.
In order that this may be possible, the functions gik
must satisfy certain general covariant equations of
condition, which were derived by B. Riemann more
than half a century before the formulation of the
general theory of relativity ("Riemann condition").
According to the principle of equivalence, (1a)
describes in general covariant form a gravitational
field of a special kind, when the functions gik
satisfy the Riemann condition.
  It follows that the law for the pure gravitational
field of a general kind must be satisfied when the
Riemann condition is satisfied; but it must be
weaker or less restricting than the Riemann
condition. In this way the field law of pure
gravitation is practically completely determined, a
result which will not be justified in greater detail
here.
  We are now in a position to see how far the
transition to the general theory of relativity modifies
the concept of space. In accordance with classical
mechanics and according to the special theory of
relativity, space (space-time) has an existence
independent of matter or field. In order to be able to
describe at all that which fills up space and is
dependent on the coordinates, space-time or the
inertial system with its metrical properties must be
thought of as existing to start with, for otherwise
the description of "that which fills up space" would
have no meaning. [If we consider that which fills
space (e.g., the field) to be removed, there still
remains the metric space in accordance with (1),
which would also determine the inertial behavior of
a test body introduced into it.] On the basis of the
general theory of relativity, on the other hand, space
as opposed to "what fills space," which is
dependent on the coordinates, has no separate
existence. Thus a pure gravitational field might have
been described in terms of the gik (as functions of
the coordinates), by solution of the gravitational
equations. If we imagine the gravitational field, i.e.,
the functions gik, to be removed, there does not
remain a space of the type (1), but absolutely
nothing, and also no "topological space." For the
functions gik describe not only the field, but at the
same time also the topological and metrical
structural properties of the manifold. A space of the
type (1), judged from the standpoint of the general
theory of relativity, is not a space without field, but
a special case of the gik field, for which--for the
coordinate system used, which in itself has no
objective significance--the functions gik have values
that do not depend on the coordinates. There is no
such thing as an empty space, i.e., a space without
field. Space-time does not claim existence on its
own, but only as a structural quality of the field.
  Thus Descartes was not so far from the truth when
he believed he must exclude the existence of an
empty space. The notion indeed appears absurd, as
long as physical reality is seen exclusively in
ponderable bodies. It requires the idea of the field as
the representative of reality, in combination with
the general principle of relativity, to show the true
kernel of Descartes' idea; there exists no space
"empty of field."

GENERALIZED THEORY OF GRAVITATION

  The theory of the pure gravitational field on the
basis of the general theory of relativity is therefore
readily obtainable, because we may be confident
that the "field-free" Minkowski-space with its
metric in conformity with (1) must satisfy the
general laws of field. From this special case the law
of gravitation follows by a generalization which is
practically free from arbitrariness. The further
development of the theory is not so unequivocally
determined by the general principle of relativity; it
has been attempted in various directions during the
last few decades. It is common to all these attempts,
to conceive physical reality as a field, and moreover,
one which is a generalization of the gravitational
field, and in which the field law is a generalization of
the law for the pure gravitational field. After long
probing I believe that I have now found1 the most
natural form for this generalization, but I have not
yet been able to find out whether this generalized
law can stand up against the facts of experience.
[The generalization can be characterized in the
following way. In accordance with its derivation
from empty "Minkowski space," the pure
gravitational field of the functions gik has the
property of symmetry given by gik = gki (g12 =
g21, etc.). The generalized field is of the same kind,
but without this property of symmetry. The
derivation of the field law is completely analogous
to that of the special case of pure gravitation.]
  The question of the particular field law is
secondary in the preceding general considerations.
At the present time, the main question is whether a
field theory of the kind here contemplated can lead
to the goal at all. By this is meant a theory which
describes exhaustively physical reality, including
four-dimensional space, by a field. The present-day
generation of physicists is inclined to answer this
question in the negative. In conformity with the
present form of the quantum theory, it believes that
the state of a system cannot be specified directly,
but only in an indirect way by a statement of the
statistics of the results of measurements attainable
on the system. The conviction prevails that the
experimentally assured duality (corpuscular and
wave structure) can be realized only by such a
weakening of the concept of reality. I think that
such a far-reaching theoretical renunciation is not for
the present justified by our actual knowledge, and
that one should not desist from pursuing to the end
the path of the relativistic field theory.
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
NOTES

Translated and edited by
Paul Arthur Schilpp

Preface

The late Albert Einstein's Autobiographisches
(Autobiographical Notes) is a unique and precious
document. It constitutes the only major attempt
Professor Einstein ever made to write anything even
approaching an autobiography. [The minor
exception is an eight page "Autobiographische
Skizze," which appeared in Carl Selig's Helle Zeit
Dunkle Zeit, in Memoriam Albert Einstein (Europa
Verlag, Zⁿrich, 1956, pp. 9-17). For him that meant
only relating how his mind developed and how one
train of thought and of consideration led to others: in
brief, how, when, and why he happened to think as
he did and to what conclusions such thinking led him
at any specific time. Although it is an eminently
personal account, it says almost nothing about his
private or family life and almost nothing about the
tremendous events that shook the world during his
lifetime and encircled his everyday existence. In other
words, it is a scientific Selbst Darstellung
(self-portrait) by the greatest and most original
scientific thinker of the twentieth century.
  It was written at the invitation and earnest request
of the editor--and I might say it took quite some
persuasion--for Volume VII of our Library of Living
Philosophers, the volume entitled Albert Einstein:
Philosopher Scientist (originally published in 1949).
Since 1949 it has appeared in English (or even in its
original German) only in the various editions of that
volume. It is now appearing--again in both languages,
side by side--for the first time as a separate volume in
commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of
Einstein's birth, March 14, 1879.
  The English translation, originally made by the
editor, has had the benefit of a thorough inspection
and (when necessary) revision by Professor Peter
Bergmann, noted physicist at Syracuse University,
who for five years was Dr. Einstein's scientific
assistant at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton. Professor Bergmann and the administrators
of the Einstein estate, Dr. Otto Nathan and Miss
Helen Dukas, have been most courteously helpful,
which the editor here gladly and gratefully
acknowledges.
  And it is, in fact, through the intercession of Dr.
Nathan that we are able to reproduce here, as our
frontispiece, the beautiful and distinctive photo graph
by Mr. Philippe Halsman.
  Other acknowledgement of appreciation is due the
Hegeler Foundation and the administrators of Open
Court Publishing Company of La Salle, Illinois, who,
in almost record time, succeeded in producing this
book in its special holiday format in time for the
Einstein centennial, an event that Southern Illinois
University at Carbondale is pleased to celebrate
during a special "Einstein Week," February 23
through March 3, 1979.

Paul Arthur Schilpp

Carbondale, Illinois
June 1978

A. Einstein

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
NOTES

Autobiographical Notes

Here I sit in order to write, at the age of sixty-seven,
something like my own obituary. I am doing this not
merely because Dr. Schilpp has persuaded me to do
it, but because I do, in fact, believe that it is a good
thing to show those who are striving alongside of us
how our own striving and searching appears in
retrospect. After some reflection, I felt how imperfect
any such attempt is bound to be. For, however brief
and limited one's working life may be, and however
predominant may be the way of error, the exposition
of that which is worthy of communication does
nonetheless not come easy--today's person of
sixty-seven is by no means the same as was the one
of fifty, of thirty, or of twenty. Every reminiscence is
colored by one's present state, hence by a deceptive
point of view. This consideration could easily deter
one. Nevertheless much can be gathered out of one's
own experience that is not open to another
consciousness.
  When I was a fairly precocious young man I became
thoroughly impressed with the futility of the hopes
and strivings that chase most men restlessly through
life. Moreover, I soon discovered the cruelty of that
chase, which in those years was much more carefully
covered up by hypocrisy and glittering words than is
the case today. By the mere existence of his stomach
everyone was condemned to participate in that chase.
The stomach might well be satisfied by such
participation, but not man insofar as he is a thinking
and feeling being. As the first way out there was
religion, which is implanted into every child by way
of the traditional education machine. Thus I
came--though the child of entirely irreligious (Jewish)
parents--to a deep religiousness, which, however,
reached an abrupt end at the age of twelve. Through
the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached
the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible
could not be true. The consequence was a positively
fanatic [orgy of] freethinking coupled with the
impression that youth is intentionally being deceived
by the state through lies; it was a crushing
impression. Mistrust of every kind of authority grew
out of this experience, a skeptical attitude toward the
convictions that were alive in any specific social
environment--an attitude that has never again left me,
even though, later on, it has been tempered by a better
insight into the causal connections.
  It is quite clear to me that the religious paradise of
youth, which was thus lost, was a first attempt to
free myself from the chains of the "merely personal,"
from an existence dominated by wishes, hopes, and
primitive feelings. Out yonder there was this huge
world, which exists independently of us human
beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal
riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection
and thinking. The contemplation of this world
beckoned as a liberation, and I soon noticed that many
a man whom I had learned to esteem and to admire
had found inner freedom and security in its pursuit.
The mental grasp of this extra-personal world within
the frame of our capabilities presented itself to my
mind, half consciously, half unconsciously, as a
supreme goal. Similarly motivated men of the present
and of the past, as well as the insights they had
achieved, were the friends who could not be lost. The
road to this paradise was not as comfortable and
alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has
shown itself reliable, and l have never regretted having
chosen it.
  What I have said here is true only in a certain sense,
just as a drawing consisting of a few strokes can do
justice to a complicated object, full of perplexing
details, only in a very limited sense. If an individual
enjoys well-ordered thoughts, it is quite possible that
this side of his nature may grow more pronounced at
the cost of other sides and thus may determine his
mentality in increasing degree. In this case it may well
be that such an individual sees in retrospect a
uniformly systematic development, whereas the
actual experience takes place in kaleidoscopic
particular situations. The great variety of the external
situations and the narrowness of the momentary
content of consciousness bring about a sort of
atomizing of the life of every human being. In a man
of my type, the turning point of the development lies
in the fact that gradually the major interest disengages
itself to a far-reaching degree from the momentary and
the merely personal and turns toward the striving for
a conceptual grasp of things. Looked at from this
point of view, the above schematic remarks contain as
much truth as can be stated with such brevity.
  What, precisely, is "thinking"? When, on the
reception of sense impressions, memory pictures
emerge, this is not yet "thinking." And when such
pictures form sequences, each member of which calls
forth another, this too is not yet "thinking." When,
however, a certain picture turns up in many such
sequences, then--precisely by such return--it becomes
an organizing element for such sequences, in that it
connects sequences in themselves unrelated to each
other. Such an element becomes a tool, a concept. I
think that the transition from free association or
"dreaming" to thinking is characterized by the more or
less preeminent role played by the "concept." It is by
no means necessary that a concept be tied to a
sensorily cognizable and reproducible sign (word); but
when this is the case, then thinking becomes thereby
capable of being communicated.
  With what right--the reader will ask--does this man
operate so carelessly and primitively with ideas in
such a problematic realm without making even the
least effort to prove anything? My defense: all our
thinking is of this nature of free play with concepts;
the justification for this play lies in the degree of
comprehension of our sensations that we are able to
achieve with its aid. The concept of "truth" can not
yet be applied to such a structure; to my thinking this
concept becomes applicable only when a far-reaching
agreement (convention) concerning the elements and
rules of the game is already at hand.
  I have no doubt but that our thinking goes on for the
most part without use of signs (words) and beyond
that to a considerable degree unconsciously. For how,
otherwise, should it happen that sometimes we
"wonder" quite spontaneously about some
experience? This "wondering" appears to occur when
an experience comes into conflict with a world of
concepts already sufficiently fixed within us.
Whenever such a conflict is experienced sharply and
intensively it reacts back upon our world of thought
in a decisive way. The development of this world of
thought is in a certain sense a continuous flight from
"wonder."
  A wonder of this kind I experienced as a child of
four or five years when my father showed me a
compass. That this needle behaved in such a
determined way did not at all fit into the kind of
occurrences that could find a place in the unconscious
world of concepts (efficacy produced by direct
"touch"). I can still remember--or at least believe I can
remember--that this experience made a deep and
lasting impression upon me. Something deeply hidden
had to be behind things. What man sees before him
from infancy causes no reaction of this kind; he is not
surprised by the falling of bodies, by wind and rain,
nor by the moon, nor by the fact that the moon does
not fall down, nor by the differences between living
and nonliving matter.
  At the age of twelve I experienced a second wonder
of a totally different nature--in a little book dealing
with Euclidean plane geometry, which came into my
hands at the beginning of a school year. Here were
assertions, as for example the intersection of the three
altitudes of a triangle at one point, that--though by no
means evident-could nevertheless be proved with
such certainty that any doubt appeared to be out of
the question. This lucidity and certainty made an
indescribable impression upon me. That the axioms
had to be accepted unproved did not disturb me. In
any case it was quite sufficient for me if I could base
proofs on propositions whose validity appeared to
me beyond doubt. For example, I remember that an
uncle told me about the Pythagorean theorem before
the holy geometry booklet had come into my hands.
After much effort I succeeded in "proving" this
theorem on the basis of the similarity of triangles; in
doing so it seemed to me "evident" that the relations
of the sides of the right-angled triangles would have to
be completely determined by one of the acute angles.
Only whatever did not in similar fashion seem to be
"evident" appeared to me to be in need of any proof
at all. Also, the objects with which geometry is
concerned seemed to be of no different type from the
objects of sensory perception, "which can be seen
and touched." This primitive conception, which
probably also lies at the bottom of the well-known
Kantian inquiry concerning the possibility of
"synthetic judgments a priori," rests obviously upon
the fact that the relation of geometrical concepts to
objects of direct experience (rigid rod, finite interval,
etc.) was unconsciously present.
  If thus it appeared that it was possible to achieve
certain knowledge of the objects of experience by
means of pure thinking, this "wonder" rested upon an
error. Nevertheless, for anyone who experiences it for
the first time, it is marvelous enough that man is
capable at all of reaching such a degree of certainty
and purity in pure thinking as the Greeks showed us
for the first time to be possible in geometry.
  Now that I have allowed myself to be carried away
sufficiently to interrupt my barely started obituary, I
shall not hesitate to state here in a few sentences my
epistemological credo, although in what precedes
something has already incidentally been said about
this. This credo actually evolved only much later and
very slowly and does not correspond to the point of
view I held in younger years.
  I see on the one side the totality of sense experiences
and, on the other, the totality of the concepts and
propositions that are laid down in books. The
relations between the concepts and propositions
among themselves are of a logical nature, and the
business of logical thinking is strictly limited to the
achievement of the connection between concepts and
propositions among themselves according to firmly
laid down rules, which are the concern of logic. The
concepts and propositions get "meaning," or
"content," only through their connection with sense
experiences. The connection of the latter with the
former is purely intuitive, not itself of a logical nature.
The degree of certainty with which this connection, or
intuitive linkage, can be undertaken, and nothing else,
differentiates empty fantasy from scientific "truth."
The system of concepts is a creation of man, together
with the rules of syntax, which constitute the
structure of the conceptual systems. Although the
conceptual systems are logically entirely arbitrary,
they are restricted by the aim of permitting the most
nearly possible certain (intuitive) and complete
coordination with the totality of sense experiences;
secondly they aim at the greatest possible sparsity of
their logically independent elements (basic concepts
and axioms), i.e., their undefined concepts and
underived [postulated] propositions.
  A proposition is correct if, within a logical system,
it is deduced according to the accepted logical rules. A
system has truth-content according to the certainty
and completeness of its possibility of coordination
with the totality of experience. A correct proposition
borrows its "truth" from the truth-content of the
system to which it belongs.
  A remark as to the historical development. Hume
saw clearly that certain concepts, as for example that
of causality, cannot be deduced from the material of
experience by logical methods. Kant, thoroughly
convinced of the indispensability of certain concepts,
took them--just as they are selected--to be the
necessary premises of any kind of thinking and
distinguished them from concepts of empirical origin.
I am convinced, however, that this distinction is
erroneous or, at any rate, that it does not do justice to
the problem in a natural way. All concepts, even
those closest to experience, are from the point of view
of logic freely chosen posits, just as is the concept of
causality, which was the point of departure for this
inquiry in the first place.
  And now back to the obituary. At the age of twelve
through sixteen I familiarized myself with the
elements of mathematics, including the principles of
differential and integral calculus. In doing so I had the
good fortune of encountering books that were not too
particular regarding logical rigor, but that permitted
the principal ideas to stand out clearly. This
occupation was, on the whole, truly fascinating; there
were peaks whose impression could easily compete
with that of elementary geometry--the basic idea of
analytical geometry, the infinite series, the concepts
of derivative and integral. I also had the good fortune
of getting to know the essential results and methods
of the entire field of the natural sciences in an
excellent popular exposition, which limited itself
almost throughout to qualitative aspects (Bernstein's
Popular Books on Natural Science, a work of five or
six volumes), a work that I read with breathless
attention. I had also already studied some theoretical
physics when, at the age of seventeen, I entered the
Polytechnic Institute of Zⁿrich as a student of
mathematics and physics.
  There I had excellent teachers (for example, Hurwitz,
Minkow-ski), so that I should have been able to
obtain a mathematical training in depth. I worked
most of the time in the physical laboratory, however,
fascinated by the direct contact with experience. The
balance of the time I used, in the main, in order to
study at home the works of Kirchhoff, Helmholtz,
Hertz, etc. The fact that I neglected mathematics to a
certain extent had its cause not merely in my stronger
interest in the natural sciences than in mathematics
but also in the following peculiar experience. I saw
that mathematics was split up into numerous
specialties, each of which could easily absorb the
short lifetime granted to us. Consequently, I saw
myself in the position of Buridan's ass, which was
unable to decide upon any particular bundle of hay.
Presumably this was because my intuition was not
strong enough in the field of mathematics to differ
entiate clearly the fundamentally important, that
which is really basic, from the rest of the more or less
dispensable erudition. Also, my interest in the study
of nature was no doubt stronger; and it was not clear
to me as a young student that access to a more
profound knowledge of the basic principles of
physics depends on the most intricate mathematical
methods. This dawned upon me only gradually after
years of independent scientific work. True enough,
physics also was divided into separate fields, each of
which was capable of devouring a short lifetime of
work without having satisfied the hunger for deeper
knowledge. The mass of insufficiently connected
experimental data was overwhelming here also. In this
field, however, I soon learned to scent out that which
might lead to fundamentals and to turn aside from
everything else, from the multitude of things that
clutter up the mind and divert it from the essentials.
The hitch in this was, of course, that one had to cram
all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations,
whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a
deterring effect [upon me] that, after I had passed the
final examination, I found the consideration of any
scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire
year. Yet I must say that in Switzerland we had to
suffer far less under such coercion, which smothers
every truly scientific impulse, than is the case in
many another locality. There were altogether only
two examinations; aside from these, one could just
about do as one pleased. This was especially the case
if one had a friend, as did I, who attended the lectures
regularly and who worked over their content
conscientiously. This gave one freedom in the choice
of pursuits until a few months before the examination,
a freedom I enjoyed to a great extent, and I have
gladly taken into the bargain the resulting guilty
conscience as by far the lesser evil. It is, in fact,
nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of
instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy
curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside
from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom;
without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It
is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of
seeing and searching can be promoted by means of
coercion and a sense of duty. To the contrary, I
believe that it would be possible to rob even a healthy
beast of prey of its voraciousness if it were possible,
with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to take food
continuously even when not hungry, especially if the
food handed out under such coercion were to be
selected accordingly.
  Now to the field of physics as it presented itself at
that time. In spite of great productivity in particulars,
dogmatic rigidity prevailed in matters of principle: In
the beginning (if there was such a thing), God created
Newton's laws of motion together with the necessary
masses and forces. This is all; everything beyond this
follows from the development of appropriate
mathematical methods by means of deduction. What
the nineteenth century achieved on the strength of
this basis, especially through the application of
partial differential equations, was bound to arouse the
admiration of every receptive person. Newton was
probably first to reveal, in his theory of the
propagation of sound, the efficacy of partial
differential equations. Euler had already created the
foundation of hydrodynamics. But the more
sophisticated development of the mechanics of
discrete masses, as the basis of all physics, was the
achievement of the nineteenth century. What made
the greatest impression upon the student, however,
was not so much the technical development of
mechanics or the solution of complicated problems as
the achievements of mechanics in areas that
apparently had nothing to do with mechanics: the
mechanical theory of light, which conceived of light as
the wave motion of a quasi-rigid elastic ether; and
above all the kinetic theory of gases: the independence
of the specific heat of monatomic gases from the
atomic weight, the derivation of the equation of the
state of a gas and its relation to the specific heat, the
kinetic theory of the dissociation of gases, and above
all the quantitative relationship between viscosity,
heat conduction, and diffusion of gases, which also
furnished the absolute magnitude of the atom. These
results supported at the same time mechanics as the
foundation of physics and of the atomic hypothesis,
which latter was already firmly rooted in chemistry.
In chemistry, however, only the ratios of the atomic
masses played any role, not their absolute
magnitudes, so that atomic theory could be viewed
more as a visualizing symbol than as knowledge
concerning the actual composition of matter. Apart
from this it was also of profound interest that the
statistical theory of classical mechanics was able to
deduce the basic laws of thermodynamics, something
in essence already accomplished by Boltzmann.
  We must not be surprised, therefore, that, so to
speak, all physicists of the previous century saw in
classical mechanics a firm and definitive foundation
for all physics, indeed for the whole of natural
science, and that they never grew tired in their
attempts to base Maxwell's theory of
electromagnetism, which, in the meantime, was
slowly beginning to win out, upon mechanics as well.
Even Maxwell and H. Hertz, who in retrospect are
properly recognized as those who shook the faith in
mechanics as the final basis of all physical thinking, in
their conscious thinking consistently held fast to
mechanics as the confirmed basis of physics. It was
Ernst Mach who, in his History of Mechanics, upset
this dogmatic faith; this book exercised a profound
influence upon me in this regard while I was a
student. I see Mach's greatness in his incorruptible
skepticism and independence; in my younger years,
however, Mach's epistemological position also
influenced me very greatly, a position that today
appears to me to be essentially untenable. For he did
not place in the correct light the essentially
constructive and speculative nature of all thinking and
more especially of scientific thinking; in consequence,
he condemned theory precisely at those points where
its constructive-speculative character comes to light
unmistakably, such as in the kinetic theory of atoms.
  Before I enter upon a critique of mechanics as the
foundation of physics, something general will have to
be said first about the points of view from which
physical theories may be analyzed critically at all.
The first point of view is obvious: the theory must
not contradict empirical facts. However evident this
demand may in the first place appear, its application
turns out to be quite delicate. For it is often, perhaps
even always, possible to retain a general theoretical
foundation by adapting it to the facts by means of
artificial additional assumptions. In any case,
however, this first point of view is concerned with
the confirmation of the theoretical foundation by the
available empirical facts.
  The second point of view is not concerned with the
relationship to the observations but with the premises
of the theory itself, with what may briefly but
vaguely be characterized as the "naturalness" or
"logical simplicity" of the premises (the basic
concepts and the relations between these). This point
of view, whose exact formulation meets with great
difficulties, has played an important role in the
selection and evaluation of theories from time
immemorial. The problem here is not simply one of a
kind of enumeration of the logically independent
premises (if anything like this were at all possible
without ambiguity), but one of a kind of reciprocal
weighing of incommensurable qualities. Furthermore,
among theories with equally "simple" foundations,
that one is to be taken as superior which most
sharply delimits the otherwise feasible qualities of
systems (i.e., contains the most specific claims). Of
the "scope" of theories I need not speak here,
inasmuch as we are confining ourselves to such
theories as have for their object the totality of all
physical phenomena. The second point of view may
briefly be characterized as concerned with the "inner
perfection" of the theory, whereas the first point of
view refers to the "external confirmation." The
following I reckon as also belonging to the "inner
perfection" of a theory: We prize a theory more
highly if, from the logical standpoint, it does not
involve an arbitrary choice among theories that are
equivalent and possess analogous structures.
  I shall not attempt to excuse the lack of precision of
the assertions contained in the last two paragraphs on
the grounds of insufficient space at my disposal; I
must confess herewith that I cannot at this point, and
perhaps not at all, replace these hints by more precise
definitions. I believe, however, that a sharper
formulation would be possible. In any case it turns
out that among the "oracles" there usually is
agreement in judging the "inner perfection" of the
theories and even more so concerning the degree of
"external confirmation."
  And now to the critique of mechanics as the basis of
physics.
  From the first point of view (confirmation by
experiment) the incorporation of wave optics into the
mechanical picture of the world was bound to arouse
serious misgivings. If light was to be interpreted as
undulatory motion in an elastic body (ether), this had
to be a medium that permeates everything, because of
the transversality of the light waves, in the main
resembling a solid body, yet incompressible, so that
longitudinal waves did not exist. This other had to
lead a ghostly existence alongside the rest of matter,
inasmuch as it seemed to offer no resistance whatever
to the motion of "ponderable" bodies. In order to
explain the indices of refraction of transparent bodies
as well as the processes of emission and absorption of
radiation, one would have had to assume complicated
interactions between the two types of matter,
something that was not even seriously tried, let alone
achieved.
  Furthermore, the electromagnetic forces necessitated
the introduction of electric masses that, although they
had no noticeable inertia, yet interacted with each
other and whose interaction was, moreover, in
contrast to the force of gravitation, of a polar type.
  What eventually made the physicists abandon, after
hesitating a long time, their faith in the possibility
that all physics could be founded upon Newton's
mechanics, was the electrodynamics of Faraday and
Maxwell. For this theory and its confirmation by
Hertz's experiments showed that there are
electromagnetic phenomena that by their very nature
are detached from all ponderable matter--namely the
waves in empty space that consist of electromagnetic
"fields." If mechanics was to be maintained as the
foundation of physics, Maxwell's equations had to be
interpreted mechanically. This was zealously but
fruitlessly attempted, whereas the equations
themselves turned out to be increasingly fruitful. One
got used to operating with these fields as independent
substances without finding it necessary to account for
their mechanical nature; thus mechanics as the basis of
physics was being abandoned, almost imperceptibly,
because its adaptation to the facts presented itself
finally as a hopeless task. Since then, there exist two
types of conceptual elements: on the one hand,
material points with forces at a distance between
them and, on the other hand, the continuous field. We
are at an intermediate state of physics without a
uniform basis for the whole, a state that--although
unsatisfactory--is far from having been overcome.
  Now for a few remarks concerning the critique of
mechanics as the foundation of physics from the
second, the "interior," point of view. In today's state
of science, i.e., after the abandonment of the
mechanical foundation, such a critique retains only a
methodological relevance. But such a critique is well
suited to show the type of argumentation that, in the
selection of theories in the future, will have to play an
ever greater role the more the basic concepts and
axioms are removed from what is directly observable,
so that the confrontation of the implications of theory
by the facts becomes constantly more difficult and
more drawn out. First in line to be mentioned is
Mach's argument, which, incidentally, had already
been clearly recognized by Newton (bucket
experiment). From the standpoint of purely
geometrical description, all "rigid" coordinate systems
are logically equivalent. The equations of mechanics
(for example the law of inertia) claim validity only
when referred to a specific class of such systems, i.e.,
the "inertial systems." In this connection the
coordinate system as a material object is without any
significance. Hence to justify the need for this specific
choice one must search for something that exists
beyond the objects (masses, distances) with which
the theory deals. For this reason "absolute space" as
originally determinative was quite explicitly
introduced by Newton as the omnipresent active
participant in all mechanical events; by "absolute" he
obviously means: uninfluenced by the masses and by
their motion. What makes this state of affairs appear
particularly ugly is the fact that there are supposed to
be infinitely many inertial systems, relative to each
other in uniform and irrotational translation, which are
supposed to be distinguished among all other rigid
systems.
  Mach conjectures that in a truly reasonable theory
inertia would have to depend upon the interaction of
the masses, precisely as was true for Newton's other
forces, a conception that for a long time I considered
in principle the correct one. It presupposes
implicitly, however, that the basic theory should be
of the general type of Newton's mechanics: masses
and their interaction as the original concepts. Such an
attempt at a resolution does not fit into a consistent
field theory, as will be immediately recognized.
  How sound, however, Mach's critique is in essence
can be seen particularly clearly from the following
analogy. Let us imagine people who construct a
mechanics, who know only a very small part of the
earth's surface and who also cannot see any stars.
They will be inclined to ascribe special physical
attributes to the vertical dimension of space (direction
of the acceleration of falling bodies) and, on the
ground of such a conceptual basis, will offer reasons
that the earth is in most places horizontal. They
might not let themselves be influenced by the
argument that in its geometrical properties space is
isotropic and that it is therefore unsatisfactory to
postulate basic physical laws according to which
there is to be a preferential direction; they will
probably be inclined (analogously to Newton) to
assert the absoluteness of the vertical, as proved by
experience, as something with which one simply
would have to come to terms. The preference given to
the vertical over all other spatial directions is
precisely analogous to the preference given to inertial
systems over other rigid coordinate systems.
  Now to [a consideration of] other arguments that
also concern themselves with the inner simplicity, or
naturalness, of mechanics. If one accepts the concepts
of space (including geometry) and time without
critical doubts, then there exists no reason to object to
the idea of action at a distance, even though such a
concept is unsuited to the ideas one forms on the
basis of the raw experience of daily life. However,
there is another consideration that makes mechanics,
taken as the basis of physics, appear primitive.
Essentially there are two laws:

(1) the law of motion
(2) the expression for the force or the potential
energy.

The law of motion is precise, although empty as long
as the expression for the forces is not given. For
postulating the latter, however, there is an enormous
degree of arbitrariness, especially if one drops the
requirement, which is not very natural in any case,
that the forces depend only on the coordinates (and
not, for example, on their derivatives with respect to
time). Within the framework of that theory alone it is
entirely arbitrary that the forces of gravitation (and
electricity), which come from one point, are governed
by the potential function (l/r). Additional remark: it
has long been known that this function is the
spherically symmetric solution of the simplest
(rotation-invariant) differential equation (2f = 0; it
would therefore not have been far fetched to regard
this as a clue that this function was to be considered
as resulting from a spatial law, an approach that
would have eliminated the arbitrariness in the force
law. This is really the first insight that suggests a
turning away from the theory of action at a distance, a
development that--prepared by Faraday, Maxwell,
and Hertz--really begins only later in response to the
external pressure of experimental data.
  I would also like to mention, as one internal
asymmetry of this theory, that the inertial mass that
occurs in the law of motion also appears in the law of
the gravitational force, but not in the expressions for
the other forces. Finally I would like to point to the
fact that the division of energy into two essentially
different parts, kinetic and potential energy, must be
felt to be unnatural; H. Hertz felt this to be so
disturbing that, in his very last work, he attempted to
free mechanics from the concept of potential energy
(i.e., from the concept of force).

Enough of this. Newton, forgive me; you found just
about the only way possible in your age for a man of
highest reasoning and creative power. The concepts
that you created are even today still guiding our
thinking in physics, although we now know that they
will have to be replaced by others farther removed
from the sphere of immediate experience, if we aim at
a profounder understanding of relationships.
  "Is this supposed to be an obituary?" the astonished
reader will likely ask. I would like to reply:
essentially yes. For the essential in the being of a man
of my type lies precisely in what he thinks and how
he thinks, not in what he does or suffers.
Consequently, the obituary can limit itself in the main
to the communicating of thoughts that have played a
considerable role in my endeavors. A theory is the
more impressive the greater the simplicity of its
premises, the more different kinds of things it relates,
and the more extended its area of applicability. Hence
the deep impression that classical thermodynamics
made upon me. It is the only physical theory of
universal content concerning which I am convinced
that, within the framework of the applicability of its
basic concepts, it will never be overthrown (for the
special attention of those who are skeptics on
principle).
  The most fascinating subject at the time that I was a
student was Maxwell's theory. What made this
theory appear revolutionary was the transition from
action at a distance to fields as the fundamental
variables. The incorporation of optics into the theory
of electromagnetism, with its relation of the speed of
light to the electric and magnetic absolute system of
units as well as the relation of the index of refraction
to the dielectric constant, the qualitative relation
between the reflection coefficient of a body and its
metallic conductivity--it was like a revelation. Aside
from the transition to field theory, i.e., the expression
of the elementary laws through differential equations,
Maxwell needed only one single hypothetical
step--the introduction of the electrical displacement
current in the vacuum and in the dielectrica and its
magnetic effect, an innovation that was almost
preordained by the formal properties of the
differential equations. In this connection I cannot
suppress the remark that the pair Faraday-Maxwell
has a most remarkable inner similarity with the pair
Galileo-Newton--the former of each pair grasping the
relations intuitively, and the second one formulating
those relations exactly and applying them
quantitatively.
  What rendered the insight into the essence of
electromagnetic theory so much more difficult at that
time was the following peculiar situation. Electric or
magnetic "field intensities" and "displacements" were
treated as equally elementary variables, empty space
as a special instance of a dielectric body. Matter
appeared as the bearer of the field, not space. By this
it was implied that the carrier of the field should have
velocity, and this was naturally to apply to the
"vacuum" (ether) also. Hertz's electrodynamics of
moving bodies rests entirely upon this fundamental
attitude.
  It was the great merit of H. A. Lorentz that he
brought about a change here in a convincing fashion.
In principle a field exists, according to him, only in
empty space. Matter--considered to consist of
atoms--is the only seat of electric charges; between
the material particles there is empty space, the seat of
the electromagnetic field, which is produced by the
position and velocity of the point charges located on
the material particles. Dielectric behavior,
conductivity, etc., are determined exclusively by the
type of mechanical bindings between the particles
that constitute the bodies. The particle charges create
the field, which, on the other hand, exerts forces upon
the charges of the particles, thus determining the
motion of the latter according to Newton's law of
motion. If one compares this with Newton's system,
the change consists in this: action at a distance is
replaced by the field, which also describes the
radiation. Gravitation is usually not taken into
account because of its relative smallness; its inclusion,
however, was always possible by enriching the
structure of the field, that is to say, by expanding
Maxwell's field laws. The physicist of the present
generation regards the point of view achieved by
Lorentz as the only possible one; at that time,
however, it was a surprising and audacious step,
without which the later development would not have
been possible.
  If one views this phase of the development of
theory critically, one is struck by the dualism that lies
in the fact that the material point in Newton's sense
and the field as continuum are used as elementary
concepts side by side. Kinetic energy and field energy
appear as essentially different things. This appears all
the more unsatisfactory as, according to Maxwell's
theory, the magnetic field of a moving electric charge
represents inertia. Why not then the whole of inertia?
Then only field energy would be left, and the particle
would be merely a domain containing an especially
high density of field energy. In that case one could
hope to deduce the concept of the mass point
together with the equations of motion of the particles
from the field equations--the disturbing dualism
would have been removed.
  H. A. Lorentz knew this very well. However,
Maxwell's equations did not permit the derivation of
the equilibrium of the electricity that constitutes a
particle. Only different, nonlinear field equations
could possibly accomplish such a thing. But no
method existed for discovering such field equations
without deteriorating into adventurous arbitrariness.
In any case, one could believe that it would be
possible by and by to find a new and secure
foundation for all of physics upon the path so
successfully initiated by Faraday and Maxwell.

Accordingly, the revolution begun by the introduction
of the field was by no means finished. Then it
happened that, around the turn of the century,
independently of what we have just been discussing,
a second fundamental crisis set in, the seriousness of
which was suddenly recognized owing to Max
Planck's investigations into heat radiation (1900). The
history of this event is all the more remarkable
because, at least in its first phase, it was not in any
way influenced by any surprising discoveries of an
experimental nature.
  On thermodynamic grounds Kirchhoff had
concluded that the energy density and the spectral
composition of radiation in a cavity enclosed by
impervious walls of the temperature T, must be
independent of the nature of the walls. That is to say,
the monochromatic density of radiation ( is a
universal function of the frequency v and of the
absolute temperature T. Thus arose the interesting
problem of determing this function ((v,T). What
could theoretically be ascertained about this function?
According to Maxwell's theory the radiation had to
exert a pressure on the walls, determined by the total
energy density. From this Boltzmann concluded, by
means of pure thermodynamics, that the entire energy
density of the radiation (f(dv) is proportional to T4.
In this way he found a theoretical justification of a
law that had previously been discovered empirically
by Stefan; i.e., in this way he connected this empirical
law with the basis of Maxwell's theory. Thereafter,
by way of an ingenious thermodynamic
consideration, which also made use of Maxwell's
theory, W. Wien found that the universal function (
of the two variables v and T would have to be of the
form

(((3f(v/T)

whereby f(v/T) is a universal function of the one
variable v/T. It was clear that the theoretical
determination of this universal function f was of
fundamental importance--this was precisely the task
that confronted Planck. Careful measurements had led
to a rather precise empirical determination of the
function f. Relying on those empirical measurements,
he succeeded in the first place in finding a statement
that rendered the measurements very well indeed:

     8╣rb(3             1
 (= ------  -   --------------
         c3             exp(bv/kT)-1

whereby h and k are two universal constants, the first
of which led to quantum theory. Because of the
denominator, this formula looks a bit queer. Was it
possible to derive it theoretically? Planck actually did
find a derivation, the imperfections of which remained
at first hidden, which latter fact was most fortunate
for the development of physics. If this formula was
correct, it permitted, with the aid of Maxwell's
theory, the calculation of the average energy E of a
quasi-monochromatic oscillator within the field of
radiation:

             bv
 E=---------------
      exp(bv/kT)-1

Planck preferred to attempt calculating this latter
magnitude theoretically. In this effort,
thermodynamics, for the time being, no longer proved
helpful, and neither did Maxwell's theory. This
expression had one aspect that was most encouraging.
For high temperatures (with v fixed) it yielded the
expression

E=kT

This is the same expression obtained in the kinetic
theory of gases for the average energy of a mass point
capable of oscillating elastically in one dimension. For
in kinetic gas theory one gets

E =(R/N)T,

where R denotes the gas constant, anti N the number
of molecules per mole, from which constant one can
compute the absolute size of the atom. Equating these
two expressions one gets

N=R/k

The one constant of Planck's formula consequently
furnishes exactly the correct size of the atom. The
numerical value agreed satisfactorily with the
determinations of N by means of kinetic gas theory,
though the latter were not very accurate.
  This was a great success, which Planck clearly
recognized. But the matter has a serious drawback,
which Planck fortunately overlooked at first. For the
same considerations demand in fact that the relation E
= kT would also have to be valid for low
temperatures. In that case, however, it would be all
over with Planck's formula and with the constant h.
From the existing theory, therefore, the correct
conclusion would have been: the average kinetic
energy of the oscillator is either given incorrectly by
the theory of gases, which would imply a refutation
of [statistical] mechanics; or else the average energy of
the oscillator follows incorrectly from Maxwell's
theory, which would imply a refutation of the latter.
Under such circumstances it is most probable that
both theories are correct only in the limit, but are
otherwise false; this is indeed the situation, as we
shall see in what follows. If Planck had drawn this
conclusion, he probably would not have made his
great discovery, because pure deductive reasoning
would have been left without a foundation.
  Now back to Planck's reasoning. On the basis of the
kinetic theory of gases Boltzmann had discovered
that, aside from a constant factor, entropy was equal
to the logarithm of the "probability" of the state
under consideration. Through this insight he
recognized the nature of processes that, within the
meaning of thermodynamics, are "irreversible." Seen
from the molecular-mechanical point of view,
however, all processes are reversible. If one calls a
state defined in terms of the molecular theory a
microscopically described one, or, more briefly, a
micro-state, and a state described in terms of
thermodynamics a macro-state, then an immensely
large number (Z) of states belong to a macroscopic
condition. Z then is a measure of the probability of a
chosen macro-state. This idea appears to be of
outstanding importance also because its applicability
is not limited to a microscopic description on the
basis of mechanics. Planck recognized this and
applied Boltzmann's principle to a system consisting
of very many resonators of the same frequency v.
The macroscopic state is given by the total energy of
the oscillation of all resonators, a micro-state by the
fixation of the (instantaneous) energy of each
individual resonator. In order to be able to express the
number of micro-states belonging to a macro-state by
means of a finite number, he [Planck] divided the total
energy into a large but finite number of identical
energy elements ( and asked: in how many ways can
these energy elements be divided among the
resonators. The logarithm of this number, then,
furnishes the entropy and thus (via thermodynamics)
the temperature of the system. Planck got his
radiation formula if he chose his energy elements ( to
have the magnitude ( = hv. The decisive element in
this procedure is that the result depends on taking for
( a definite finite value, i.e., on not going to the limit (
= 0. This form of reasoning does not make obvious
the fact that it contradicts the mechanical and
electrodynamic basis upon which the derivation
otherwise depends. Actually, however, the derivation
presupposes implicitly that energy can be absorbed
and emitted by the individual resonator only in
"quanta" of magnitude hv, i.e., that the energy of a
mechanical structure capable of oscillations as well as
the energy of radiation can be transferred only in such
quanta--in contradiction to the laws of mechanics and
electrodynamics. The contradiction with dynamics
was here fundamental; whereas the contradiction with
electrodynamics might be less fundamental. For the
expression for the density of radiation energy, though
compatible with Maxwell's equations, is not a
necessary consequence of these equations. That this
expression furnishes important mean values is shown
by the fact that the Stefan-Boltzmann law and Wien's
law, which are based on it, are in agreement with
experience.
  All of this was quite clear to me shortly after the
publication of Planck's fundamental work; so that,
without having a substitute for classical mechanics, I
could nevertheless see to what kind of consequences
this law of temperature radiation leads for the
photoelectric effect and for other related phenomena
of the transformation of radiation energy, as well as
for the specific heat of (especially) solid bodies. All
my attempts, however, to adapt the theoretical
foundation of physics to this [new type of]
knowledge failed completely. It was as if the ground
had been pulled out from under one, with no firm
foundation to be seen anywhere upon which one
could have built. That this insecure and contradictory
foundation was sufficient to enable a man of Bohr's
unique instinct and sensitivity to discover the
principal laws of the spectral lines and of the electron
shells of the atoms, together with their significance for
chemistry, appeared to me as a miracle--and appears
to me a miracle even today. This is the highest form
of musicality in the sphere of thought.
  My own interest in those years was less concerned
with the detailed consequences of Planck's results,
however important these might be. My main question
was: What general conclusions can be drawn from the
radiation formula concerning the structure of radiation
and even more generally concerning the
electromagnetic foundation of physics? Before I take
this up, I must briefly mention a number of
investigations that relate to the Brownian motion and
related objects (fluctuation phenomena) and that in
essence rest upon classical molecular mechanics. Not
acquainted with the investigations of Boltzmann and
Gibbs, which had appeared earlier and actually
exhausted the subject, I developed the statistical
mechanics and the molecular-kinetic theory of
thermodynamics based upon it. My principal aim in
this was to find facts that would guarantee as much as
possible the existence of atoms of definite finite size.
In the midst of this I discovered that, according to
atomistic theory, there would have to be a movement
of suspended microscopic particles capable of being
observed, without knowing that observations
concerning the Brownian motion were already long
familiar. The simplest derivation rested upon the
following consideration. If the molecular kinetic
theory is essentially correct, a suspension of visible
particles must possess the same kind of osmotic
pressure satisfying the gas laws as a solution of
molecules. This osmotic pressure depends upon the
actual magnitude of the molecules, i.e., upon the
number of molecules in a gram-equivalent. If the
density of the suspension is inhomogeneous, the
osmotic pressure is inhomogeneous, too, and gives
rise to a compensating diffusion, which can be
calculated from the known mobility of the particles.
This diffusion can, on the other hand, also be
considered the result of the random
displacement--originally of unknown magnitude--of
the suspended particles owing to thermal agitation.
By comparing the amounts obtained for the diffusion
current from both types of reasoning, one obtains
quantitatively the statistical law for those
displacements, i.e. the law of the Brownian motion.
The agreement of these considerations with
experience together with Planck's determination of the
true molecular size from the law of radiation (for high
temperatures) convinced the skeptics, who were quite
numerous at that time (Ostwald, Mach), of the reality
of atoms. The hostility of these scholars toward
atomic theory can undoubtedly be traced back to their
positivistic philosophical attitude. This is an
interesting example of the fact that even scholars of
audacious spirit and fine instinct can be hindered in
the interpretation of facts by philosophical
prejudices. The prejudice--which has by no means
disappeared--consists in the belief that facts by
themselves can and should yield scientific knowledge
without free conceptual construction. Such a
misconception is possible only because one does not
easily become aware of the free choice of such
concepts, which, through success and long usage,
appear to be immediately connected with the
empirical material.
  The success of the theory of the Brownian motion
showed again conclusively that classical mechanics
always led to trustworthy results whenever it was
applied to motions in which the higher time
derivatives of the velocity are negligible. Upon this
recognition a relatively direct method can be based
that permits us to learn something concerning the
constitution of radiation from Planck's formula. One
may argue that in a space filled with radiation a freely
moving (vertically to its plane),
quasi-monochromatically reflecting mirror would have
to go through a kind of Brownian movement, the
mean kinetic energy of which equals 1/2(R/N)T (R =
gas constant for one gram-molecule, N = the number
off molecules per mole, T = absolute temperature). If
radiation were not subject to local fluctuations, the
mirror would gradually come to rest because, owing
to its motion, it reflects more radiation on its front
than on its reverse side. The mirror, however, must
experience certain random fluctuations of the pressure
exerted upon it because of the fact that the wave
packets, constituting the radiation, interfere with one
another. These can be computed from Maxwell's
theory. This calculation, then, shows that these
pressure variations (especially in the case of small
radiation densities) are by no means sufficient to
impart to the mirror the average kinetic energy
1/2(R/N) T. In order to get this result one has to
assume rather that there exists a second type of
pressure variations, not derivable from Maxwell's
theory, corresponding to the assumption that
radiation energy consists of indivisible point-like
localized quanta of energy hv [and of momentum
hv/c, (c = velocity of light)], which are reflected
undivided. This way of looking at the problem
showed in a drastic and direct way that a type of
immediate reality has to be ascribed to Planck's
quanta, that radiation must, therefore, possess a kind
of molecular structure as far as its energy is
concerned, which of course contradicts Maxwell's
theory. Considerations about radiation based directly
on Boltzmann's entropy probability relation
(probability taken to equal statistical temporal
frequency) also lead to the same result. This dual
nature of radiation (and of material corpuscles) is a
major property of reality, which has been interpreted
by quantum mechanics in an ingenious and amazingly
successful fashion. This interpretation, which is
looked upon as essentially definitive by almost all
contemporary physicists, appears to me to be only a
temporary expedient; a few remarks to this [point]
will follow later.

Reflections of this type made it clear to me as long
ago as shortly after 1900, i.e., shortly after Planck's
trailblazing work, that neither mechanics nor
electrodynamics could (except in limiting cases) claim
exact validity. Gradually I despaired of the possibility
of discovering the true laws by means of constructive
efforts based on known facts. The longer and the
more desperately I tried, the more I came to the
conviction that only the discovery of a universal
formal principle could lead us to assured results. The
example I saw before me was thermodynamics. The
general principle was there given in the theorem: The
laws of nature are such that it is impossible to
construct a perpetuum mobile (of the first and second
kind). How, then, could such a universal principle be
found? After ten years of reflection such a principle
resulted from a paradox upon which I had already hit
at the age of sixteen: If I pursue a beam of light with
the velocity c (velocity of light in a vacuum), I should
observe such a beam of light as an electromagnetic
field at rest though spatially oscillating. There seems
to be no such thing, however, neither on the basis of
experience nor according to Maxwell's equations.
From the very beginning it appeared to me intuitively
clear that, judged from the standpoint of such an
observer, everything would have to happen according
to the same laws as for an observer who, relative to
the earth, was at rest. For how should the first
observer know, or be able to determine, that he is in a
state of fast uniform motion?
  One sees that in this paradox the germ of the special
relativity theory is already contained. Today
everyone knows, of course, that all attempts to
clarify this paradox satisfactorily were condemned to
failure as long as the axiom of the absolute character
of time, or of simultaneity, was rooted unrecognized
in the unconscious. To recognize clearly this axiom
and its arbitrary character already implies the
essentials of the solution of the problem. The type of
critical reasoning required for the discovery of this
central point was decisively furthered, in my case,
especially by the reading of David Hume's and Ernst
Mach's philosophical writings.
  One had to understand clearly what the spatial
coordinates and the time fixation of an event signified
in physics. The physical interpretation of the spatial
coordinates presupposed a rigid body of reference,
which, moreover, had to be in a more or less definite
state of motion (inertial system). In a given inertial
system the coordinates denoted the results of certain
measurements with rigid (stationary) rods. (One
should always be aware that the presupposition of
the existence in principle of rigid rods is a
presupposition suggested by approximate experience
but is, in principle, arbitrary.) With such an
interpretation of the spatial coordinates the question
of the validity of Euclidean geometry becomes a
problem of physics.
  If, then, one tries to interpret the time of an event
analogously, one needs a means for the measurement
of the difference in time (a periodic process, internally
determined, and realized by a system of sufficiently
small spatial extension). A clock at rest relative to the
system of inertia defines a local time. The local times
of all space points taken together are the "time,"
which belongs to the selected system of inertia, if a
means is given to "set" these clocks relative to each
other. One sees that a priori it is not at all necessary
that the "times" thus defined in different inertial
systems agree with one another. One would have
noticed this long ago if, for the practical experience of
everyday life, light did not present (because of the
large value of c) the means for fixing an absolute
simultaneity.
  The presuppositions of the existence (in principle)
of (ideal, or perfect) measuring rods and clocks are not
independent of each other; a light signal that is
reflected back and forth between the ends of a rigid
rod constitutes an ideal clock, provided that the
postulate of the constancy of the light velocity in
vacuum does not lead to contradictions.
  The above paradox may then be formulated as
follows. According to the rules of connection, used in
classical physics, between the spatial coordinates and
the time of events in the transition from one inertial
system to another, the two assumptions of

(1) the constancy of the light velocity
(2) the independence of the laws (thus especially also
of the law of the constancy of the light velocity) from
the choice of inertial system (principle of special
relativity)

are mutually incompatible (despite the fact that both
taken separately are based on experience).
  The insight fundamental for the special theory of
relativity is this: The assumptions (1) and (2) are
compatible if relations of a new type ("Lorentz
transformation") are postulated for the conversion of
coordinates and times of events. With the given
physical interpretation of coordinates and time, this is
by no means merely a conventional step but implies
certain hypotheses concerning the actual behavior of
moving measuring rods and clocks, which can be
experimentally confirmed or disproved.
  The universal principle of the special theory of
relativity is contained in the postulate: The laws of
physics are invariant with respect to Lorentz
transformations (for the transition from one inertial
system to any other arbitrarily chosen inertial
system). This is a restricting principle for natural
laws, comparable to the restricting principle of the
nonexistence of the perpetuum mobile that underlies
thermodynamics.
  First a remark concerning the relation of the theory
to "four-dimensional space." It is a widespread error
that the special theory of relativity is supposed to
have, to a certain extent, first discovered or, at any
rate, newly introduced, the four-dimensionality of the
physical continuum. This, of course, is not the case.
Classical mechanics, too, is based on the
four-dimensional continuum of space and time. But in
the four-dimensional continuum of classical physics
the subspaces with constant time value have an
absolute reality, independent of the choice of the
frame of reference. Because of this, the
four-dimensional continuum breaks down naturally
into a three-dimensional and a one-dimensional (time),
so that the four dimensional point of view does not
force itself upon one as necessary. The special theory
of relativity, on the other hand, creates a formal
dependence between the way in which the space
coordinates on the one hand, and the time coordinates
on the other, must enter into the natural laws.
  Minkowski's important contribution to the theory
lies in the following: Before Minkowski's
investigation it was necessary to carry out a Lorentz
transformation on a law in order to test its invariance
under such transformations; but he succeeded in
introducing a formalism so that the mathematical form
of the law itself guarantees its invariance under
Lorentz transformations. By creating a
four-dimensional tensor calculus, he achieved the
same thing for the four dimensional space that the
ordinary vector calculus achieves for the three spatial
dimensions. He also showed that the Lorentz
transformation (apart from a different algebraic sign
due to the special character of time) is nothing but a
rotation of the coordinate system in the
four-dimensional space.
  First, a critical remark concerning the theory as it is
characterized above. It is striking that the theory
(except for the four-dimensional space) introduces
two kinds of physical things, i.e., (1) measuring rods
and clocks, (2) all other things, e.g., the
electromagnetic field, the material point, etc. This, in a
certain sense, is inconsistent; strictly speaking,
measuring rods and clocks should emerge as solutions
of the basic equations (objects consisting of moving
atomic configurations), not, as it were, as theoretically
self sufficient entities. The procedure justifies itself,
however, because it was clear from the very beginning
that the postulates of the theory are not strong
enough to deduce from them equations for physical
events sufficiently complete and sufficiently free
from arbitrariness in order to base upon such a
foundation a theory of measuring rods and clocks. If
one did not wish to forego a physical interpretation of
the coordinates in general (something that, in itself,
would be possible), it was better to permit such
inconsistency--with the obligation, however, of
eliminating it at a later stage of the theory. But one
must not legitimize the sin just described so as to
imagine that distances are physical entities of a
special type, intrinsically different from other
physical variables ("reducing physics to geometry,"
etc.).
  We now shall inquire into the insights of a definitive
nature that physics owes to the special theory of
relativity.
  (1) There is no such thing as simultaneity of distant
events; consequently, there is also no such thing as
immediate action at a distance in the sense of
Newtonian mechanics. Although the introduction of
actions at a distance, which propagate at the speed of
light, remains feasible according to this theory, it
appears unnatural; for in such a theory there could be
no reasonable expression for the principle of
conservation of energy. It therefore appears
unavoidable that physical reality must be described in
terms of continuous functions in space. The material
point, therefore, can hardly be retained as a basic
concept of the theory.
  (2) The principles of the conservation of linear
momentum and of energy are fused into one single
principle. The inert mass of an isolated system is
identical with its energy, thus eliminating mass as an
independent concept.
  Remark. The speed of light c is one of the quantities
that occurs in physical equations as a "universal
constant." If, however, one introduces as the unit of
time, instead of the second, the time in which light
travels 1 cm, c no longer occurs in the equations. In
this se nse one could say that the constant c is only
an apparent universal constant.
  It is obvious and generally accepted that one could
eliminate two more universal constants from physics
by introducing, instead of the gram and the
centimeter, properly chosen "natural" units (for
example, mass and radius of the electron).
  If one considers this done, then only
"dimensionless" constants could occur in the basic
equations of physics. Concerning such, I would like
to state a proposition that at present cannot be based
upon anything more than upon a faith in the
simplicity, i.e., intelligibility, of nature: there are no
arbitrary constants of this kind; that is to say, nature
is so constituted that it is possible logically to lay
down such strongly determined laws that within
these laws only rationally completely determined
constants occur (not constants, therefore, whose
numerical value could be changed without destroying
the theory).

The special theory of relativity owes its origin to
Maxwell's equations of the electromagnetic field.
Conversely, the latter can be grasped formally in
satisfactory fashion only by way of the special
theory of relativity. Maxwell's equations are the
simplest Lorentz-invariant field equations that can be
postulated for an antisymmetric tensor derived from a
vector field. This in itself would be satisfactory, if we
did not know from quantum phenomena that
Maxwell's theory does not do justice to the energetic
properties of radiation. But as to how Maxwell's
theory would have to be modified in a natural fashion,
for this even the special theory of relativity offers no
adequate foothold. Also, to Mach's question: "how
does it come about that inertial systems are
physically distinguished above all other coordinate
systems?" this theory offers no answer.
  That the special theory of relativity is only the first
step of a necessary development became completely
clear to me only in my efforts to represent gravitation
in the framework of this theory. In classical
mechanics, interpreted in terms of the field, the
potential of gravitation appears as a scalar field (the
simplest theoretical possibility of a field with a single
component). Such a scalar theory of the gravitational
field can easily be made invariant under the group of
Lorentz transformations. The following program
appears natural, therefore: The total physical field
consists of a scalar field (gravitation) and a vector
field (electromagnetic field); later insights may
eventually make necessary the introduction of still
more complicated types of fields; but to begin with
one did not need to bother about this.
  The possibility of realization of this program was,
however, in doubt from the very first, because the
theory had to combine the following things:

(1) From the general considerations of special
relativity theory it was clear that the inertial mass of a
physical system increases with the total energy
(therefore, e.g., with the kinetic energy).
(2) From very accurate experiments (especially from
the torsion balance experiments of E÷tv÷s) it was
empirically known with very high accuracy that the
gravitational mass of a body is exactly equal to its
inertial mass.
  It followed from (1) and (2) that the weight of a
system depends in a precisely known manner on its
total energy. If the theory did not accomplish this or
could not do it naturally, it was to be rejected. The
condition is most naturally expressed as follows: The
acceleration of a system falling freely in a given
gravitational field is independent of the nature of the
falling system (especially therefore also of its energy
content).

  It turned out that, within the framework of the
program sketched, this simple state of affairs could
not at all, or at any rate not in any natural fashion, be
represented in a satisfactory way. This convinced me
that within the structure of the special theory of
relativity there is no niche for a satisfactory theory of
gravitation.
  Now it came to me: the fact of the equality of
inertial and gravitational mass, i.e., the fact of the
independence of the gravitational acceleration from
the nature of the falling substance, may be expressed
as follows: In a gravitational field (of small spatial
extension) things behave as they do in a space free of
gravitation, if one introduces into it, in place of an
"inertial system," a frame of reference accelerated
relative to the former.
  If then one interprets the behavior of a body with
respect to the latter frame of reference as caused by a
"real" (not merely apparent) gravitational field, it is
possible to regard this frame as an "inertial system"
with as much justification as the original reference
system.
  So, if one considers pervasive gravitational fields,
not a priori restricted by spatial boundary conditions,
physically possible, then the concept of "inertial
system" becomes completely empty. The concept of
"acceleration relative to space" then loses all meaning
and with it the principle of inertia along with the
paradox of Mach.
  The fact of the equality of inertial and gravitational
mass thus leads quite naturally to the recognition that
the basic postulate of the special theory of relativity
(invariance of the laws under Lorentz
transformations) is too narrow, i.e., that an invariance
of the laws must be postulated also relative to
nonlinear transformations of the coordinates in the
four-dimensional continuum.
  This happened in 1908. Why were another seven
years required for the construction of the general
theory of relativity? The main reason lies in the fact
that it is not so easy to free oneself from the idea that
coordinates must have a direct metric significance.
The transformation took place in approximately the
following fashion.
  We start with an empty, field-free space, as it
occurs--related to an inertial system--within the
meaning of the special theory of relativity, as the
simplest of all imaginable physical situations. If we
now think of a noninertial system introduced by
assuming that the new system is uniformly
accelerated against the inertial system (in a
three-dimensional description) in one direction
(conveniently defined), then there exists with
reference to this system a static parallel gravitational
field. The reference system may be chosen to be rigid,
Euclidean in its three-dimensional metric properties.
But the time in which the field appears as static is not
measured by equally constituted stationary clocks.
From this special example one can already recognize
that the immediate metric significance of the
coordinates is lost once one admits nonlinear
transformations of the coordinates. To do the latter is,
however, obligatory if one wants to do justice to the
equality of gravitational and inertial mass through the
foundations of the theory, and if one wants to
overcome Mach's paradox regarding the inertial
systems.
  If, then, one must give up the notion of assigning to
the coordinates an immediate metric meaning
(differences of coordinates = measurable lengths, or
times), one cannot but treat as equivalent all
coordinate systems that can be created by the
continuous transformations of the coordinates.
  The general theory of relativity, accordingly,
proceeds from the following principle: Natural laws
are to be expressed by equations that are covariant
under the group of continuous coordinate
transformations. This group replaces the group of the
Lorentz transformations of the special theory of
relativity, which forms a subgroup of the former.
  This postulate by itself is of course not sufficient to
serve as point of departure for the derivation of the
basic equations of physics. One might even deny, to
begin with, that the postulate by itself involves a real
restriction for the physical laws; for it will always be
possible to reformulate a law, conjectured at first only
for certain coordinate systems, so that the new
formulation becomes formally generally covariant.
Further, it is evident right away that an infinitely large
number of field laws can be formulated that have this
property of covariance. The eminent heuristic
significance of the general principle of relativity is
that it leads us to the search for those systems of
equations that are in their general covariant
formulation the simplest ones possible; among these
we shall have to look for the field equations of
physical space. Fields that can be transformed into
each other by such transformations describe the same
real situation.
  The major question for anyone searching in this field
is this: Of which mathematical type are the variables
(functions of the coordinates) that permit the
expression of the physical properties of space
("structure")? Only after that: Which equations are
satisfied by those variables?
  The answer to these questions is today by no means
certain. The path chosen by the first formulation of
the general theory of relativity can be characterized as
follows. Even though we do not know by what kind
of field variables (structure) physical space is to be
characterized, we do know with certainty a special
case; that of the "field-free" space in the special
theory of relativity. Such a space is characterized by
the fact that for a properly chosen coordinate system
the expression

ds2=dx12+dx22+dx32-dx42 (1)

belonging to two neighboring points, represents a
measurable quantity (square of distance), and thus has
a real physical meaning. Referred to an arbitrary
system this quantity is expressed as follows:

ds2=gikdxidxk (2)

whereby the indices run from 1 to 4. The gik form a
(real) symmetrical tensor. If, after carrying out a
transformation on field (1), the first derivatives of the
gik with respect to the coordinates do not vanish,
there exists a gravitational field with reference to this
system of coordinates in the sense of the above
consideration, but of a very special type. Thanks to
Riemann's investigation of n-dimensional metric
spaces, this special field can be characterized
invariantly:

(1) Riemann's curvature-tensor Riklm, formed from the
coefficients of the metric (2), vanishes.
(2)The trajectory of a mass-point in reference to the
inertial system (relative to which (1) is valid) is a
straight line, hence an extremal (geodesic). This last
statement, however, is already a characterization of
the law of motion based on (2).

The universal law of physical space must be a
generalization of the law just characterized. I now
assumed that there are two steps of generalization:

  (a) the pure gravitational field
  (b) the general field (which is also to include
quantities that somehow correspond to the
electromagnetic field).

The case (a) was characterized by the fact that the
field can still be represented by a Riemann metric (2),
i.e., by a symmetric tensor, but without a
representation of the form (1) (save on an
infinitesimal scale). This means that in the case (a) the
Riemann tensor does not vanish. It is clear, however,
that in this case a field law must hold that is some
generalization (loosening) of this law. If this
generalized law also is to be of the second order of
differentiation and linear in the second derivatives,
then only the equation obtained by a single
contraction

0=Rkl=gimRiklm..

was a prospective field law in the case (a). It appears
natural, moreover, to assume that also in the case (a)
the geodesic line is still to represent the law of motion
of the material point.
  It seemed hopeless to me at that time to venture the
attempt of representing the total field (b) and to
ascertain field laws for it. I preferred, therefore, to set
up a preliminary formal frame for the representation
of the entire physical reality; this was necessary in
order to be able to investigate, at least preliminarily,
the effectiveness of the basic idea of general relativity.
This was done as follows.
  In Newton's theory one can write the field law of
gravitation thus:

(2( =0

(f = gravitation potential), valid wherever the density
of matter, (, vanishes. In general one has (Poisson's
equation)

(2( = 4(k(  (( = mass density).

In the relativistic theory of the gravitational field, Rik
takes the place of (2f. On the right-hand side we shall
then have to replace ( also by a tensor. Since we
know from the special theory of relativity that the
(inertial) mass equals the energy, we shall have to put
on the right-hand side the tensor of energy
density--more precisely, of the entire energy density
that does not belong to the pure gravitational field. In
this way one arrives at the field equation

Rik-(1/2)gikR=-kTik

The second member on the left hand side is added
because of formal considerations; for the left-hand
side is written in such a way that its divergence, in the
sense of the absolute differential calculus, vanishes
identically. The right-hand side is a formal
condensation of all things whose comprehension in
the sense of a field theory is still problematic. Not for
a moment, of course, did I doubt that this formulation
was merely a makeshift in order to give the general
principle of relativity a preliminary closed-form
expression. For it was essentially no more than a
theory of the gravitational field, which was isolated
somewhat artificially from a total field of as yet
unknown structure.
  If anything in the theory as sketched--apart from the
postulate of invariance of the equations under the
group of continuous coordinate transformations--can
possibly be claimed to be definitive, then it is the
theory of the limiting case of a pure gravitational field
and its relation to the metric structure of space. For
this reason, in what immediately follows we shall
speak only of the equations of the pure gravitational
field.
  The peculiarity of these equations lies, on the one
hand, in their complicated structure, especially their
nonlinear character with respect to the field variables
and their derivatives, and, on the other hand, in the
almost compelling necessity with which the
transformation group determines this complicated
field law. If one had stopped with the special theory
of relativity, i.e., with the invariance under the
Lorentz group, then the field law Rik = 0 would
remain invariant also within the frame of this
narrower group. But, from the point of view of the
narrower group, there would be no of hand grounds
for representing gravitation by a structure as involved
as the symmetric tensor gik. If, nonetheless, one
would find sufficient reasons for it, there would then
arise an immense number of field laws out of
quantities gik, all of which are covariant under Lorentz
transformations (not, however, under the general
group). Even if, however, of all the conceivable
Lorentz-invariant laws, one had accidentally guessed
precisely the law belonging to the wider group, one
would still not have achieved the level of
understanding corresponding to the general principle
of relativity. For, from the standpoint of the Lorentz
group, two solutions would incorrectly have to be
viewed as physically different if they can be
transformed into each other by a nonlinear
transformation of coordinates, i.e., if from the point
of view of the wider group they are merely different
representations of the same field.
  One more general remark concerning structure and
group. It is clear that in general one will judge a theory
to be the more nearly perfect the simpler a "structure"
it postulates and the broader the group concerning
which the field equations are invariant. One sees now
that these two desiderata get in each other's way. For
example: according to the special theory of relativity
(Lorentz group) one can set up a covariant law for the
simplest structure imaginable (a scalar field), whereas
in the general theory of relativity (wider group of the
continuous transformations of coordinates) there is an
invariant field law only for the more complicated
structure of the symmetric tensor. We have already
given physical reasons for the fact that in physics
invariance under the wider group has to be required;
from a purely mathematical standpoint I can see no
necessity for sacrificing the simpler structure to the
generality of the group. [To remain with the narrower
 group and at the same time to base the relativity theory
 of gravitation upon the more complicated [tensor]
 structure implies a naive inconsequence. Sin remains
 sin, even if it is committed by otherwise ever so
respectable men.]
  The group of general relativity is the first one
requiring that the simplest invariant law be no longer
linear and homogeneous in the field variables and their
derivatives. This is of fundamental importance for the
following reason. If the field law is linear (and
homogeneous), then the sum of two solutions is again
a solution; so it is, for example, in Maxwell's field
equations for the vacuum. In such a theory it is
impossible to deduce from the field equations alone an
interaction between structures that separately
represent solutions of the system. That is why all
theories up to now required, in addition to the field
equations, special equations for the motion of material
bodies under the influence of the fields. In the
relativistic theory of gravitation, it is true, the law of
motion (geodesic line) was originally postulated
independently in addition to the field law.
Subsequently, though, it turned out that the law of
motion need not (and must not) be assumed
independently, but that it is already implicitly
contained within the law of the gravitational field.
  The essence of this truly involved situation can be
visualized as follows: A single material point at rest
will be represented by a gravitational field that is
everywhere finite and regular, except where the
material point is located: there the field has a
singularity. If, however, one computes the field
belonging to two material points at rest by integrating
the field equations, then this field has in addition to
the singularities at the positions of the material points
a curve of singular points connecting the two points.
It is possible, however, to stipulate a motion of the
material points so that the gravitational field
determined by them does not become singular
anywhere except at the material points. These are
precisely those motions described in first
approximation by Newton's laws. One may say,
therefore: The masses move in such fashion that the
solution of the field equations is nowhere singular
except at the mass points. This property of the
gravitational equations is intimately connected with
their nonlinearity, and this, in turn, results from the
wider group of transformations.
  Now it would of course be possible to object: If
singularities are permitted at the locations of the
material points, what justification is there for
forbidding the occurrence of singularities elsewhere?
This objection would be justified if the equations of
gravitation were to be considered as equations of the
total field. [Since this is not the case], however, one
will have to say that the field of a material particle
will differ the more from a pure gravitational field the
closer one comes to the location of the particle. If one
had the field equations of the total field, one would be
compelled to demand that the particles themselves
could be represented as solutions of the complete
field equations that are free of irregularities
everywhere. Only then would the general theory of
relativity be a complete theory.
  Before I enter upon the question of the completion
of the general theory of relativity, I must take a stand
with reference to the most successful physical theory
of our period, viz., the statistical quantum theory,
which assumed a consistent logical form about
twenty-five years ago, (Schr÷dinger, Heisenberg,
Dirac, Born). At present this is the only theory that
permits a unitary grasp of experiences concerning the
quantum character of micro-mechanical events. This
theory, on the one hand, and the theory of relativity
on the other, are both considered correct in a certain
sense, although all efforts to fuse them into a single
whole so far have not met with success. This is
probably why among contemporary theoretical
physicists there exist entirely differing opinions as to
what the theoretical foundation of the physics of the
future will look like. Will it be a field theory? Will it
be in essence a statistical theory? I shall briefly
indicate my own thoughts on this point.
  Physics is an attempt conceptually to grasp reality
as something that is considered to be independent of
its being observed. In this sense one speaks of
"physical reality." In pre-quantum physics there was
no doubt as to how this was to be understood. In
Newton's theory reality was determined by a material
point in space and time, in Maxwell's theory by the
field in space and time. In quantum mechanics the
situation is less transparent. If one asks: does a (
function of the quantum theory represent a real fact in
the same sense as a material system of points or an
electromagnetic field? one hesitates to reply with a
simple "yes" or "no." Why? What the ( function (at
a definite time) states, is this: What is the probability
for finding a definite physical quantity q (or p) in a
definite given interval if I measure it at time t? The
probability is here to be viewed as an empirically
determinable, and therefore certainly a "real" quantity,
which I may determine if I create the same (-function
very often and each time perform a q-measurement.
But what about the single measured value of q? Did
the respective individual system have this q-value
even before the measurement? To this question there
is no definite answer within the framework of the
[existing] theory, since the measurement is a process
that implies a finite disturbance of the system from
the outside; it would therefore be conceivable that the
system obtains a definite numerical value for q (or p),
the measured numerical value, only through the
measurement itself. For the further discussion I shall
assume two physicists, A and B, who represent
different conceptions concerning the real situation as
described by the (-function.

A. The individual system (before the measurement)
has a definite value of q (or p) for all variables of the
system, specifically that value which is determined by
a measurement of this variable. Proceeding from this
conception, he will state: The (-function is not a
complete description of the exact state of the system,
but only an incomplete representation; it expresses
only what we know about the system because of
previous measurements.

B. The individual system (before the measurement)
has no definite value of q (or p). The measured value
is produced by the act of measurement itself
consistent with the probability appropriate to the
(-function. Proceeding from this conception, he will
(or, at least, he may) state: The (-function is an
exhaustive description of the real situation of the
system.

  Now we present to these two physicists the
following case. There is to be a system that at the
time t of our observation consists of two component
systems S1 and S2, which at this time are spatially
separated and (in the sense of the classical physics)
interact with each other but slightly. The total system
is to be described completely in terms of quantum
mechanics by a known (-function, say (12. All
quantum theoreticians now agree upon the following.
If I make a complete measurement of S1, I obtain from
the results of the measurement and from (12 an
entirely definite (-function (2 of the system S2. The
character of (2 then depends upon what kind of
measurement I perform on S1.
  Now it appears to me that one may speak of the real
state of the partial system S2. To begin with, before
performing the measurement on S1, we know even
less of this real state than we know of a system
described by the (-function. But on one assumption
we should, in my opinion, insist without
qualification: the real state of the system S2 is
independent of any manipulation of the system S1,
which is spatially separated from the former.
According to the type of measurement I perform on
S1, I get, however, a very different (2 for the second
partial system ((2, (21, . . . ). Now, however, the real
state of S2 must be independent of what happens to
S1. For the same real state of S2 it is possible therefore
to find (depending on one's choice of the
measurement performed on S1) different types of
(-function. (One can escape from this conclusion
only by either assuming that the measurement of S1
(telepathically) changes the real state of S2 or by
denying altogether that spatially separated entities
possess independent real states. Both alternatives
appear to me entirely unacceptable.)
  If now the physicists A and B accept this reasoning
as valid, then B will have to give up his position that
the (-function constitutes a complete description of a
real state. For in this case it would be impossible that
two different types of (-functions could be assigned
to the identical state of S2.
  The statistical character of the present theory would
then follow necessarily from the incompleteness of
the description of the systems in quantum mechanics,
and there would no longer exist any ground for the
assumption that a future foundation of physics must
be based upon statistics.
  It is my opinion that the contemporary quantum
theory represents an optimal formulation of the
relationships, given certain fixed basic concepts,
which by and large have been taken from classical
mechanics. I believe, however, that this theory offers
no useful point of departure for future development.
This is the point at which my expectation deviates
most widely from that of contemporary physicists.
They are convinced that it is impossible to account
for the essential aspects of quantum phenomena
(apparently discontinuous and temporally not
determined changes of the state of a system,
simultaneously corpuscular and undulatory qualities
of the elementary carriers of energy) by means of a
theory that describes the real state of things [objects]
by continuous functions of space for which
differential equations are valid. They are also of the
opinion that in this way one cannot understand the
atomic structure of matter and of radiation. They
rather expect that systems of differential equations,
which might be considered for such a theory, in any
case would have no solutions that would be regular
(free from singularities) everywhere in
four-dimensional space. Above everything else,
however, they believe that the apparently
discontinuous character of elementary processes can
be described only by means of an essentially
statistical theory, in which the discontinuous changes
of the systems are accounted for by continuous
changes of the probabilities of the possible states.
  All of these remarks seem to me to be quite
impressive. But the crux of the matter appears to me
to be this question: What can be attempted with some
hope of success in view of the present situation of
physical theory? Here it is the experiences with the
theory of gravitation that determine my expectations.
In my opinion, these equations are more likely to tell
us something precise than all other equations of
physics. Take, for instance, Maxwell's equations of
empty space by way of comparison. These are
formulations corresponding to our experiences with
infinitely weak electromagnetic fields. This empirical
origin already determines their linear form; it has,
however, already been emphasized above that the
true laws cannot be linear. Such linear laws fulfill the
superposition principle for their solutions; hence they
contain no assertions concerning the interaction of
elementary bodies. The true laws cannot be linear, nor
can they be derived from such. I have learned
something else from the theory of gravitation: no
collection of empirical facts however comprehensive
can ever lead to the setting up of such complicated
equations. A theory can be tested by experience, but
there is no way from experience to the construction of
a theory. Equations of such complexity as are the
equations of the gravitational field can be found only
through the discovery of a logically simple
mathematical condition that determines the equations
completely or almost completely. Once one has
obtained those sufficiently strong formal conditions,
one requires only little knowledge of facts for the
construction of the theory; in the case of the
equations of gravitation it is the four-dimensionality
and the symmetric tensor as expression for the
structure of space that, together with the invariance
with respect to the continuous transformation group,
determine the equations all but completely.
  Our task is that of finding the field equations for the
total field. The desired structure must be a
generalization of the symmetric tensor. The group
must not be any narrower than that of the continuous
transformations of coordinates. If one introduces a
richer structure, then the group will no longer
determine the equations as strongly as in the case of
the symmetrical tensor as structure. Therefore it
would be most beautiful if one were to succeed in
expanding the group once more in analogy to the step
that led from special relativity to general relativity.
More specifically, I have attempted to draw upon the
group of the complex transformations of the
coordinates. All such endeavors were unsuccessful. I
also gave up an open or concealed increase in the
number of dimensions of space, an endeavor
originally undertaken by Kaluza that, with its
projective variant, even today has its adherents. We
shall limit ourselves to the four-dimensional space and
to the group of the continuous real transformations of
coordinates. After many years of fruitless searching, I
consider the solution sketched in what follows the
one that is logically most satisfying.
  In place of the symmetric gik (gik = gki), the
nonsymmetric tensor gik is introduced. This quantity
is composed of a symmetric part Sik and of a real or
purely imaginary antisymmetric aik, thus:

gik=sik+aik

  Viewed from the standpoint of the group, the
combination of s and a is arbitrary, because the
tensors s and a individually have tensor character. It
turns out, however, that these gik (viewed as a whole)
play a quite analogous role in the construction of the
new theory to the symmetric gik in the theory of the
pure gravitational field.
  This generalization of the space structure seems
natural also from the standpoint of our physical
knowledge, because we know that the electromagnetic
field involves an antisymmetric tensor.
  For the theory of gravitation it is furthermore
essential that from the symmetric gik it is possible to
form the scalar density ├|gik| as well as the
contravariant tensor gik according to the definition

gikgil = (kl  ((ki Kronecker tensor).

These structures can be defined in precise
correspondence for the nonsymmetric gik, including
tensor densities.
  In the theory of gravitation it is further essential
that, for a given symmetric gik-field, a field ( can be
defined, which is symmetric in the subscripts and
which, considered geometrically, governs the parallel
displacement of a vector. Analogously for the
nonsymmetric gik a nonsymmetric (ikl can be defined,
according to the formula

gik,l-gsk(ilS-gis(lks=0   (A)

which accords with the corresponding relation of the
position symmetric g, only that, of course, one must
pay attention here to the of the lower indices in the g
and (.
  Just as in the theory with symmetric gik, it is
possible to form a curvature Rklmi out of the (, and
from it a contracted curvature Rkl. Finally, by
employing a variational principle together with (A), it
is possible to find compatible field equations:

                                                 ____
gis,s = 0 (gik = (1/2)(gik-gki) ├-|gik|)   (B1)

( iss = 0 ((iss = (1/2) ((iss-(sis))         (B2)

Rik = 0                                                 (C1)

Rkl,m+Rlm,k+Rmk,l = 0                          (C2)

Each of the two equations (B1), (B2) is a consequence
of the other if (A) is satisfied. Rkl denotes the
symmetric, Rkl the antisymmetric part of Rkl.
  If the antisymmetric part of gik vanishes, these
formulas reduce to (A) and (C1)--the case of the pure
gravitational field.
  I believe that these equations constitute the most
natural generalization of the equations of gravitation.
[The theory here proposed, according to my
view, has a fair probability of being found valid, if the
way to an exhaustive description of physical reality
on the basis of the continuum turns out to be at all
feasible.] The proof of their physical usefulness is a
tremendously difficult task, inasmuch as mere
approximations will not suffice. The question is:
What solutions do these equations have that are
regular everywhere?

This exposition has fulfilled its purpose if it shows
the reader how the efforts of a life hang together and
why they have led to expectations of a certain kind.

A. Einstein

Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton, New Jersey
[ca. 1946]






















































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