Einstein on the Run Read online

  ‘I looked out from the window of Second Chamber, and saw the immaculately attired Lindemann standing about half-way along Middle Sands, attended by a short figure, dressed in a Middle-European style cape with frizzy hair escaping from a kind of skull cap.’ But when young Griffiths, who was shortly due in class, hurried out to be introduced to Professor Einstein, he knew that his school German was utterly inadequate for communication. Fortunately, Lindemann – a fluent speaker of German – proved to be a ‘masterly’ interpreter. The three of them went on a quick tour of some of the school buildings. Since Einstein wanted to see where the boys worked, they visited one of the classrooms. Here, on the ancient walls, marble plaques commemorating past members of the school ‘intrigued Einstein beyond measure’. A little later, on the way out, they saw another room, used as a changing-room for football, cricket and other sports. It too contained marble plaques on its walls and beneath them were pegs with sweaty games-clothes hanging from the hooks. Einstein, despite a total lack of interest in team sports, stopped to ponder. ‘But the Great Mind remained perplexed: the seconds ticked by as its owner stood plunged in thought.’ Then at last the connection dawned: ‘Ach! Ich verstehe: der Geist der Gestorbenen geht in die Beinkleider der Lebenden hinüber,’ Einstein remarked. ‘The sense eluded me then,’ remembered Griffiths, but ‘well do I remember Lindemann’s smile as he translated for my benefit: “The spirit of the departed passes into the trousers of the living.”’

  And indeed the unique encounter with Einstein and Lindemann had an inspiring coda. For after Einstein reached Oxford, he heard through Griffiths’ father of a successful textbook, Readable Relativity, by a Winchester schoolmaster, C. V. Durrell, which Griffiths junior had been studying in class. Einstein naturally wanted to see a copy. So the schoolboy copy was sent to Oxford, including its doodles, marginalia and all. Not long afterwards, ‘my Dad wrote to say that Einstein had hugely enjoyed it’ and commented that: ‘No German schoolmaster would ever have thought of doing it like that, or if he had, have done it so well.’ Soon after, Griffiths senior sent the book back, now with Einstein’s signature on its inside cover. Later, the heirloom passed into the hands of John Griffiths’ younger son, Robin, who became a mathematician.

  Apart from its charm, the story of this flying visit to Winchester captures some of the key elements in Einstein’s Anglophilia: not least his admiration for the English belief in tradition. ‘More than any other people, you Englishmen have carefully cultivated the bond of tradition and preserved the living and conscious continuity of successive generations. You have in this way endowed with vitality and reality the distinctive soul of your people and the soaring soul of humanity,’ Einstein told the Royal Society in a message celebrating the bicentenary of Newton’s death in 1927.

  It also reveals something of Einstein’s talented and worldly English host, Lindemann. On closer acquaintance he turns out to be an intriguing character, if diametrically opposite to Einstein in intellect, interests, politics and personality, not to mention dress sense. Even so, their relationship was one of both mutual respect and considerable warmth, which undoubtedly enhanced Einstein’s already favourable opinion of England.

  Though born in Germany (in 1886, seven years after Einstein), the son of a decidedly wealthy German father and an American mother, Lindemann had been brought up and educated as a British citizen. Indeed, all his life he resented the accident of his birthplace and came to regard himself as more English than the English, with an accompanying distrust for certain aspects of Germany. In his mid-teens, however, he returned to Germany for further schooling and then attended the University of Berlin. After graduating, he earned a doctorate in physics working under Walther Nernst who, as we know, sent him to the Solvay Congress in 1911, where he first encountered and befriended Einstein. Just before the outbreak of war in August 1914, however, Lindemann left Germany, to avoid being interned, and settled for good in England. In 1915, after failing to obtain a military commission because of his German background (a rejection which rattled him), he joined the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough, learned to fly the following year and soon became semi-legendary for having extricated himself from a potentially lethal aircraft spin through rapid mental calculation, navigational skill and sheer courage, while empirically testing his own theory to explain the nature of the spin. A few months after the end of the war in 1918, he was appointed to the professorship in physics at Oxford’s Clarendon Laboratory which he would hold for the rest of his scientific career. He was also a fellow of Wadham College – at the time of Einstein’s first visit to Oxford in 1921 – and in 1922 he joined Christ Church. There he would reside in a suite of fine rooms until his death in 1957, and be known as ‘The Prof’, and, after 1941, as Lord Cherwell, the scientific adviser and confidant of Sir Winston Churchill.

  As a physicist, Lindemann was highly rated, but never placed in the top rank. ‘If your father were not such a rich man, you would become a great physicist,’ Nernst once told him. Lindemann ‘was a man of intuition and flair in widely diverse fields, but he never pursued any one subject long enough to become its complete master. Much of his brilliance was shown in discussion at scientific conferences, and has not survived in published form,’ commented historian Lord Robert Blake, a Christ Church colleague, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. ‘For this reason later generations have not found it easy to understand the high esteem in which he was held by such persons as Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Max Born, Ernest Rutherford, and Henri Poincaré.’ This assessment is confirmed by Einstein’s own private summary of Lindemann, as reported by Harrod: ‘The Prof., so it went, was essentially an amateur; he had ideas, which he never worked out properly; but he had a thorough comprehension of physics. If something new came up, he could rapidly assess its significance for physics as a whole, and there were very few people in the world who could do that.’

  Lindemann’s political views explain his appeal to Churchill. They were well to the right (though never sympathetic to Nazism). ‘He was an out-and-out inequalitarian who believed in hierarchy, order, a ruling class, inherited wealth, hereditary titles, and white supremacy (the passing of which he regarded as the most significant change in the twentieth century),’ wrote Blake. When a guest in Christ Church’s Senior Common Room happened to remark ‘One shouldn’t kick a man when he’s down,’ a cynical Lindemann replied, ‘Why not? It’s the best time to do it because then he can’t kick you back.’ He himself became the butt of spiteful jokes because he spent so much time in the 1920s and 1930s moving in British aristocratic circles. Why is Lindemann like a Channel steamer? Answer: Because he runs from pier/peer to pier/peer. Yet in private he was kind-hearted and most generous to those in need, drawing on his wide contacts and personal wealth. Such attitudes – both public and private – underscored his obituary of Einstein for the Daily Telegraph in 1955. Overflowing with respect for Einstein’s science, it was not surprisingly somewhat critical of his liberal and pacifist politics: ‘Like many scientists Einstein was politically rather naïve. He hated violence and war and could not understand why his own natural sweet reasonableness was not universal. Absolutely truthful himself, he tended to be credulous in political questions and was easily and often imposed on by unscrupulous individuals and groups.’ Yet, Lindemann concluded: ‘As a man his simplicity and kindliness, his unpretentious interest in others and his sense of humour charmed all who knew him.’

  Undoubtedly, Lindemann’s difficult personality polarised his contemporaries (as it does even today). ‘It has often been asked how a prickly, eccentric, arrogant, sarcastic and uncooperative man – to use some of the adjectives from time to time levelled against Lindemann – could have developed and sustained such a warm friendship with Churchill,’ according to Adrian Fort, Lindemann’s most recent biographer. ‘The answer is of course that he did not display those characteristics to Churchill.’ Presumably the same was true in Lindemann’s somewhat less warm, and certainly less intense, friendship with Einstein.<
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  OXFORD AND THE RHODES MEMORIAL LECTURES

  It was in 1927 that Lindemann began to court Einstein for a second visit to Oxford. He had the support of the Rhodes Trust, which wished to launch the Rhodes Memorial Lectures in Oxford in memory of Cecil Rhodes, the British-born Victorian businessman, mining magnate and politician in southern Africa, whose strong support for imperialism would presumably have appealed to Lindemann – if rather less to Einstein (and not at all to most Oxford dons today). The trustees’ aim was to attract to Oxford leading figures in public life, the arts, letters, business or science from around the world, whose presence would counteract the prevailing insularity of the university (such as had been exposed in the inadequate 1919 Oxford debate on relativity between Lindemann and the philosophers Smith and Joseph). To cite the devastating words of a British government commission of inquiry into the universities at Oxford and Cambridge, reporting in 1922: ‘It is a disaster that, at a moment when we have become far more deeply involved than ever before in the affairs of countries overseas, our highest academical class is condemned through poverty to knowing little or nothing of life or learning outside this island.’

  Although the Rhodes trustees were conscious of the recondite nature of relativity, and wary of the fact that Einstein would need to speak in German, they pressed ahead with an invitation to him, given his worldwide renown. One of them, the Oxford historian and Liberal politician H. A. L. Fisher, recruited Einstein’s 1921 English host, Lord Haldane, to make the introductory approach. Haldane wrote to Einstein in Berlin in June 1927 introducing the unfamiliar Rhodes lectures: ‘The university and the trustees desire that the lectures should next year be delivered by the foremost man of science in the world, and they are unanimous in their choice of your name.’ Haldane hoped Einstein would accept, not least because this would be ‘very good for Anglo-German relations that the choice should be proclaimed to the world’. As for the subject, it should be ‘just what you select. Not too technical in detail, but extending to anything you please, mathematico-physical or otherwise.’ As for the Oxford audience, it would include ‘learned men as well as the public’. At the end of his letter Haldane mentioned that Lindemann would soon get in touch with the details of the invitation.

  Einstein was interested, but he refused, for a mixture of reasons. He frankly explained to Lindemann in July: ‘How gladly would I accept, particularly as I value highly the milieu of English intellectuals, as being the finest circle of men which I have ever come to know.’ Unfortunately, however, scientific commitments to people in Germany would prevent him from being away for such a long time. Secondly, his poor health would make ‘a long stay in foreign and unfamiliar surroundings . . . too great a burden for me, particularly bearing in mind the language difficulty’. Lastly, he modestly confessed that his current work was not at the forefront of physics, as compared with that of some other physicists who would appeal more to an Oxford audience.

  But in August he changed his mind, and gave Lindemann encouragement: ‘During the holidays I have often reproached myself because I haven’t accepted your kind invitation to Oxford.’ Perhaps he could come to the university for just four weeks during the next summer term? ‘It is very important to me that in England, where my work has received greater recognition than anywhere else in the world, I should not give the impression of ingratitude.’ However, he realised that following his earlier refusal someone else had probably been invited in his place. In which case, he trusted that Lindemann would make clear to the Rhodes trustees the warmth and gratitude he felt for their proposal.

  By now, the American educationist Abraham Flexner had been approached to give the 1928 Rhodes lectures, which he duly delivered at Rhodes House on ‘The idea of a modern university’. (In 1932–33, Flexner would persuade Einstein to join his newly founded Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.) Einstein was therefore invited to speak in the following year, 1929, and apparently accepted; but again negotiations broke down for reasons of health. In the meantime, the Rhodes lectures began to establish themselves after a well-attended series on world politics given in 1929, not at Rhodes House but at the nearby larger Sheldonian Theatre, by Jan Christiaan Smuts, the South African soldier and statesman. This success renewed the determination of both the trustees and Lindemann to secure agreement from Einstein. At last, following a personal visit to Einstein in Berlin by Lindemann in October 1930, arrangements were finalised. Einstein agreed to visit Oxford for some weeks in May 1931, give the Rhodes lectures, and live in Lindemann’s college, Christ Church.

  After his acceptance was publicly announced, there was an ominous comment from the Jewish Telegraph Agency in December 1930: ‘The movement to induce Prof. Einstein to settle permanently in England after his summer stay in England has gained momentum here as a result of a recent report from Berlin to the effect that Einstein may not return to Germany in case the Hitlerites obtain control of that country.’ It was perhaps the first clear portent of political events that would overshadow Einstein’s relationship with England during 1933.

  The opening lecture by Einstein took place in the Milner Hall at Rhodes House on 9 May 1931. Given in German (like his other two lectures) without notes but with a blackboard, its English title was simply ‘The theory of relativity’. The second lecture, in the same place on 16 May, dealt with relativity and the expanding universe: a subject then of course in a state of great flux (following Einstein’s abandonment of the cosmological constant a few months before). It required ‘two blackboards, plentifully sprinkled beforehand in the international language of mathematical symbol’ (as The Times reported). The last lecture, also in Rhodes House, on 23 May, immediately after the university had awarded Einstein an honorary doctorate in the Sheldonian Theatre, tackled Einstein’s constantly evolving unified field theory: ‘an account of his attempt to derive both the gravitational and electromagnetic fields by the introduction of a directional spatial structure’, as Nature chose to announce it.

  The scientific content of the lectures was of no lasting significance, since it either repeated Einstein’s existing published work on relativity or would quickly be rendered redundant by his (and others’) subsequent ideas. More interesting is the reaction of the very mixed Oxford audience, which included some 500 selected students, to such an unparalleled educational-cum-social occasion.

  The Oxford Times captured the atmosphere in two reports on the opening and final Einstein lectures. The first of these, headlined ‘Women and relativity’, remarked on 15 May:

  Women in large numbers flocked to hear Prof. Einstein speak on relativity at Rhodes House on Saturday morning. The front of the hall was filled with heads of houses and the back of the hall and the gallery with younger members of the university. It was unfortunate that no interpreter was provided, but Oxford seems to fight shy of interpreters. One wonders how many of those who were present thoroughly understood German, or if they could understand the language in which Prof. Einstein spoke, how many of them could follow the complexities of relativity. Prof. Einstein is a man of medium height with a wealth of black curly hair, already greying. Entirely unaffected, he had charm as well as simplicity of manner, which appealed to his audience.

  The second report on 29 May began with a reference to the just-completed doctoral ceremony at the Sheldonian:

  Prof. Einstein, wearing his new doctor’s robes, acknowledged the applause which greeted his appearance by smiling and bowing. His manner in beginning his lecture suggested that he was dealing with a difficult part of the subject, and at first he spoke earnestly from the desk, with his hands clasped in front of him, only leaving it occasionally for the blackboard. As the lecture proceeded, not only equations but a singular diagram appeared on the blackboard, and Prof. Einstein gesticulated helpfully in curves with the chalk to explain it. At this point he turned repeatedly from his audience to the board and back. Later, the diagrams were rubbed off in favour of more formulae, and the better informed members of the audience were kept busy taking t
hem down.

  By now, at least one less-informed member had fallen asleep, however. The dean of Christ Church, Henry Julian White, a biblical scholar in his seventies, slept soundly during the lecture in the front row, opposite the speaker. Einstein was amused to see this, and perhaps also learned a lesson. For after one of the lectures, he apparently remarked in his curious English that the next time he had to lecture in Oxford, ‘the discourse should be in English delivered’. Hearing this, one of his Oxford don companions, the physiologist John Scott Haldane (brother of Lord Haldane) was heard to murmur in German ‘Bewahre!’ However, Einstein did follow his advice to himself: when he gave his most important lecture in Oxford, the Herbert Spencer lecture in 1933, he had it translated into fluent English and then read it aloud.

  Not too surprisingly, given the fluid state of cosmology and of his unified field theory in 1931, Einstein showed almost no interest in preparing his Rhodes lectures for publication – unlike Smuts in 1929, whose lectures were published by the Oxford University Press in 1930. The secretary of the delegates of the press, R. W. Chapman, regarded Einstein’s lectures – however demanding their subject matter might be – as a potential ornament to the publisher’s list, and strongly pursued the possibility of their publication. But Chapman received no reply from Einstein to his follow-up letters and cables. After a final proposal (apparently suggested by Lindemann) – that Einstein might produce a reduced text of about fifty pages – went nowhere, an exasperated Chapman gave up on what he now called ‘l’affaire Einstein’.

  Two years later, at a social gathering in Oxford in 1933, Einstein intimated to the warden of Rhodes House, Sir Carleton Allen, that publication was impossible because ‘he had since discovered that everything he had put forward in the lectures was untrue’. He explained, with ‘rather comic contrition’, that ‘in my subject ideas change very rapidly’. ‘I had not the hardihood to say that that was true of most subjects,’ commented Allen, when reporting his conversation with Einstein in a letter to the secretary of the trustees, Lord Lothian. Instead, ‘I suggested that he might publish the lecture with a short note at the end – “I do not believe any of the above”, or words to the effect. He felt, however, that others might take up his ideas and convince him that what he knew to be untrue was true.’ As for Einstein’s vague suggestion that he might write an alternative book, Allen told Lothian ironically that perhaps an Einstein book on ‘My view of Hitler’ or ‘Hitler in time and space’ might help to recoup the large amount that the Rhodes Trust had spent on Einstein. In the end, his Rhodes lectures went entirely unrecorded, apart from an eight-page pamphlet printed in early May 1931, compiled probably with Lindemann’s help, and three non-technical summary reports published in The Times, apparently based on this pamphlet. But the Oxford University Press did at least get to publish Einstein’s 1933 Herbert Spencer lecture.