Einstein on the Run Page 15

  BLACKBOARD MATTERS

  A more immediate source of friction between Einstein and the university was his blackboards. On 16 May, after the second lecture, Einstein told his diary with singular annoyance: ‘The lecture was indeed well-attended and nice. [But] the blackboards were picked up. (Personality cult, with adverse effect on others. One could easily see the jealousy of distinguished English scholars. So I protested; but this was perceived as false modesty.) On arrival [at Christ Church] I felt shattered. Not even a carthorse could endure so much!’

  The idea of rescuing and preserving Einstein’s blackboards seems to have come from some Oxford dons who attended his first lecture on 9 May. A memo from the then warden of Rhodes House, Sir Francis Wylie, to one of the trustees, Fisher, dated 13 May, states plainly that ‘Some of the scientists seem to be anxious to secure for preservation in the Museum the blackboard upon which Einstein draws. I was first approached about it by de Beer, who is a fellow of Merton, and now Gunther has written to me, asking whether, if it is desired, the blackboard with Einstein’s figures on it may be given to the university.’

  Gavin de Beer was an embryologist, who became a fellow of the Royal Society and director of the Natural History Museum in London. Robert Gunther was a historian of science, who founded the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford in 1926–30. Yet another Oxford academic involved in the rescue was Edmund Bowen, also a fellow of the Royal Society, whose laboratory work in photochemistry had confirmed some of Einstein’s theoretical work. Presumably, they were among the audience on 16 May for the second Rhodes House lecture. Certainly, on 19 May, Gunther formally thanked the secretary of the Rhodes trustees for ‘your present’ to the newly established museum ‘of two blackboards used by Professor Einstein in his lecture’. There was even a subsequent note dated 25 May from Rhodes House to Gunther, written after the third Einstein lecture: ‘I should be glad if you could come round and see the two blackboards which Einstein used on Saturday. They would normally be used again here tomorrow morning.’ But by then, it appears that Gunther felt that he had acquired sufficient written evidence of Einstein’s evanescent lectures.

  One of the blackboards used by Einstein at Rhodes House, Oxford, May 1931, now kept at the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford. His calculations describe the density, size and age of the expanding cosmos, and contain a mathematical error. The blackboard was preserved by Oxford dons against the wishes of Einstein and is today the most famous object in the museum.

  Letter to the Rhodes trustees from historian Robert Gunther, May 1931, thanking them for the donation of two Einstein blackboards used in his second Rhodes House lecture. Gunther was the founder of the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford. (The second blackboard was later cleaned by mistake.)

  Today – whether Einstein would approve or not – one of his Rhodes House blackboards is the most famous object in Oxford’s museum, notwithstanding the museum’s collection of some 18,000 objects dating from antiquity to the twentieth century. (The second blackboard was accidentally wiped clean of Einstein’s fragile symbols in the museum’s storeroom!) It intrigues uncomprehending visitors from around the world, many of whom come specially to see it and no other object. Its mathematical symbols neatly summarise Einstein’s cosmology paper of April 1931, based on Friedmann’s relativistic model of an expanding cosmos, with the cosmological constant set at zero and Hubble’s measurements of the expanding universe used to estimate three quantities: the density of matter, the radius of the cosmos and the timespan of the cosmic expansion (given as 10,000 million years). However, its arithmetic was not totally accurate. ‘It appears that Einstein stumbled in his use of the Hubble constant,’ according to Cormac O’Raifeartaigh, ‘resulting in a density of matter that was too high by a factor of a hundred, a cosmic radius that was too low by a factor of ten, and a timespan for the expansion that was too high by a factor of ten.’ No doubt this mistake was just one of the many ‘untrue’ elements that Einstein had in mind by the time he returned to Oxford in 1933.

  HONORARY DOCTORATE FROM OXFORD

  By contrast with the lectures and their aftermath, the award of Einstein’s honorary doctorate was free from friction, though not without its own comedy. The ceremony took place before his third lecture on 23 May 1931 in the grandeur of the Sheldonian Theatre designed by Sir Christopher Wren, in the presence of Oxford’s vice-chancellor, Frederick Homes Dudden, a theological scholar and chaplain to King George V, and naturally in front of a packed house, at least some of whose members were by now personally known to Einstein.

  Oxford’s public orator, who presented the academically attired Einstein in Latin, had perhaps the most difficult role. He was a classical scholar, A. B. Poynton, later master of University College in Oxford. ‘In so far as he understood what Relativity was about, [he] grappled manfully and ingeniously with the task of rendering it into Ancient Tongue,’ noted the Winchester College schoolboy Griffiths.

  Poynton’s speech opened with a reference to the solar eclipse in late May 1919, almost exactly twelve years before, and the fact that ‘Mercurius’ (the planet Mercury) had on that occasion been observed in the position predicted by Professor Einstein. ‘Atque utinam Mercurius hodie adesset, ut, cuius est eloquentiae, vatem suum laudaret!’ (‘If Mercury were present today, he would of course praise his poet with his own eloquence!’) At the end, the public orator attempted to relate relativity to classical philo-sophy. According to a translation of the Latin published a few days later in the Oxford Times:

  The doctrine which he interprets to us is, by its name and subject, interpreter of a relation between heaven and earth. It bids us view, under the aspect of our own velocity, all things that go on in space; to right and left, upward and downward, backward and forward. This doctrine does not in any way supersede the laws of physicists, but adds only the ‘momentous’ factor which they most desired. But it directly affects the highest philosophy, and it is not unwelcome to Oxford men, who have not the Euclidean temper of mind, but have learnt from Heraclitus that no man can step twice into the same river – nay, not even once; who are glad to believe that the Epicurean ‘swerve’ is not a puerile fiction; who, finally, in reading the Timaeus of Plato, have felt the want of a mathematical explanation of the universe more self-consistent and more in agreement with realities. This explanation has now been brought down to men by Prof. Albert Einstein, a brilliant ornament of our century.

  Laudatory as it was, the speech contained no attempt to translate the term ‘relativity’ into Latin, no reference to gravity or electromagnetism, and not even a name check for the immortal – if Cambridge-based – Newton. (Contrast The Times in its lengthy editorial on 25 May, ‘Professor Einstein at Oxford’, which noted that ‘Like Newton, Professor Einstein is not primarily an experimental physicist, but a mathematician.’) Moreover, contrary to the speech, general relativity does ‘supersede the laws of physicists’, in the sense that it is more fundamental than Newton’s laws of motion. No wonder Einstein noted in his diary in the evening that the speech was ‘serious, but not wholly accurate’. He must have based this remark on a translation given him during the day (perhaps by Lindemann), since Einstein did not understand Latin. Yet, even when the public orator was speaking, Einstein had recognised his mention of Mercurius. ‘I had noticed his face lit up when “Mercury” was named,’ according to a friend in the audience at the Sheldonian.

  She was Margaret Deneke, who had got to know Einstein soon after his arrival in Oxford. She would provide the most vivid vignettes of him among all of his contacts at the university during his visit in 1931, and subsequent visits in April–May 1932 and May–June 1933, recorded at length in her diary in translation from her frank conversations with Einstein. Not only was Deneke fluent in German, she was also intensely musical: two characteristics that immediately endeared her to Einstein.

  MUSIC AND ART WITH MARGARET DENEKE

  The younger of two surviving daughters of a wealthy London merchant banker born in Germ
any and his German-born wife who was a close friend of the celebrated pianist Clara Schumann, Margaret and her elder sister, Helena, were born in London and later moved to Oxford. In 1913, Helena was appointed bursar and tutor in German at Lady Margaret Hall, the university’s first women’s college, while Margaret became a musician/musicologist. Originally trained in the work of the great German romantic composers – Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann – she then studied modern English music under the influence of Oxford musical scholars, especially Ernest Walker and Sir Donald Tovey, and was soon interpreting English music to many school-children. Together the sisters lived in a Gothic villa named Gunfield, very close to Lady Margaret Hall, where they staged frequent performances in their music room by both famous professionals, such as Adolf Busch and Marie Soldat-Roeger, and gifted amateurs. ‘Generations of Oxford undergraduates, colleagues and friends enjoyed the Denekes’ hospitality at the many Gunfield concerts,’ according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’s entry on Helena Deneke. ‘Marga Deneke, herself a talented pianist, was choirmaster at Lady Margaret Hall and, raising considerable sums of money through concerts and lecture recitals, became one of the college’s benefactors.’ The Oxford Chamber Music Society met at Gunfield free of charge for some twenty-seven years, with Margaret Deneke making up any deficits; especially during the Second World War, the Society owed its survival to the Deneke sisters’ generosity. In May 1931, inevitably, they would be joined by a visiting amateur violinist: Einstein.

  ‘In he came with short quick steps. He had a big head and a very lofty forehead, a pale face, a shock of grey, untidy hair,’ Margaret Deneke recalled of her first meeting with Einstein on 11 May. She introduced him to Marie Soldat, who was a violin virtuoso originally discovered by Brahms and a pupil of Joseph Joachim. After dinner

  he turned to Mother with an engaging smile: ‘You have provided a delightful meal; now the enjoyable part of our evening is over and we must get down to work on our instruments. Shall we play Mozart? Mozart is my first love – the supremest of the supreme – for playing the great Beethoven I must make something of an effort, but playing Mozart is the most marvellous experience in the world.’

  The players started with Mozart; under Marie Soldat’s rich tone on her Guarnerius del Gesu [a famous 1742 violin], the professor’s borrowed violin sounded starved and raucous, but his rhythm was impeccable. Before passing on to Haydn there was an interval for a chat. Marie Soldat commented on the professor’s long violin fingers, tapering usefully at the tips. The professor said, ‘Yes I never have practised and my playing is that sort of playing, but physical build cannot be altogether divorced from mental gifts, an unusually sensitive temperament will make its mark on a body.’

  I said Adolf Busch [an intimate friend of Einstein] had got short fat fingers.

  ‘Well I must admit without any fingers at all no one can play a fiddle.’

  Before they left, the guests signed the visitors’ book. ‘In his small clear handwriting,’ Deneke observed, Einstein wrote: ‘Albert Einstein peccavit.’

  A few days later, he ‘sinned’ again. The occasion was a somewhat strained formal dinner at Rhodes House given in his honour by its warden, Wylie, the evening before Einstein’s second lecture. (Pre-dinner, poor Einstein had had to grab a needle and thread in the bachelor sleeping quarters and sew up his ill-fitting dress shirt, so that his hairy chest did not peer out during dinner.) ‘Lady Wylie thought he would enjoy himself more if music could be introduced,’ noted Deneke. ‘Professor Einstein’s English was rather halting in those days and to converse in French or German might not be too easy for the trustees.’ When the meal was finished, he, Soldat and Deneke formed a trio. According to her diary:

  we were established around the piano; the trustees saw their lion disporting himself with Bach’s Double Concerto and Handel and Purcell Sonatas. He tucked the violin under his chin with a will and tuned long and loud. Then he chose the piece he wanted and made suggestions: ‘No repeats in the Adagio please and the Allegro not too fast, there are tricky bits for me.’ We started obediently and he threw himself whole-heartedly into the music. He made no effort at all to discover what the trustees might like to hear. Unashamedly we played for our own enjoyment, without the slightest pretence about performing. The trustees smoked in silence, witnessing their guest of honour having a happy evening. I doubt if they listened.

  Indeed, according to Einstein’s somewhat franker diary, when their music started up, ‘The guests hastily left the room’!

  How good a musician was Einstein? Opinions have varied over the decades, in both Germany and beyond (not helped by the occasional confusion of Einstein with a distinguished musicologist, Alfred Einstein, his contemporary in both Germany and the United States). Clearly Deneke had some reservations about his playing, yet she was well aware that Einstein always had to use a borrowed violin during his time in Oxford in 1931. When he returned in 1932, she recorded his advice about an instrument she was thinking of buying. ‘He scrutinised the violin with great interest, and after he had played on it he advised me not to buy it as the tone was uneven.’ Instead, he recommended, she should acquire a cheap instrument and give it to the man who had treated his own violin by adding varnish and cutting away little bits to improve the tone. ‘He had had no other violin than this treated cheap fiddle, thin in its wood, but clear in voice.’ As for the opinion of professional musicians on Einstein, it is probably summarised by the comment, ‘relatively good’, given by the pianist Artur Balsam who once played with him. Undoubtedly, Einstein was an intellectual match for professional musicians in the speed of mind essential for ensemble playing, even if he lacked their tone. At the same time, as a dedicated amateur quartet player, he was (to quote an American musicologist), ‘the denizen of dimly lit music rooms of the world where enthusiastic friends and fiddlers bend together over their instruments and sleepy children yawn, and towards the end of a long evening someone says “Let’s play some Haydn and then call it a night.”’

  By no means all of Deneke’s Einstein diary for 1931–33 concerns music. She met him not only at Gunfield, but also in his rooms at Christ Church and elsewhere around Oxford, including Lady Margaret Hall, where he had agreed (somewhat reluctantly) to give a Deneke lecture named after her late father, on atomic theory. She also persuaded him to sit for a portrait by a little-known Tyrolese peasant artist, F. Rizzi, who had come to Oxford not long before Einstein’s arrival in May 1933 to do a portrait of Deneke’s mother at the family’s request. When Mrs Deneke unexpectedly died, Rizzi was left at a loose end, deprived of his main commission.

  Rizzi had never heard of Einstein, but both he and his subject got on genially when Deneke brought Rizzi to Einstein’s rooms in Christ Church. On 31 May, she returned with two big bunches of flowers supplied by Lady Margaret Hall’s gardens (which were designed and looked after for decades by her sister, Helena). She noted:

  Professor Einstein was still at his breakfast table and was delighted with the flowers. He had no coat on, no stockings but sandals on his bare feet. He pointed to the pile of letters and complained that correspondence was a great burden. I confirmed June 13 for the Deneke lecture and at his request made this entry in his diary. Then I asked if he would let Rizzi sketch him – we wanted work for the painter. He consented: ‘he can draw my portrait whilst I am at work; then I sit still anyhow.’ I promised Rizzi would be silent.

  The following morning, she brought the artist again, installed him on some curious steps leading to the room’s main window overlooking the college’s famous cathedral, and left him alone with Einstein. Around noon, the Christ Church porter – who had been instructed to protect Professor Einstein from unscheduled visitors – phoned Gunfield to say that ‘Miss Deneke’s little man was waiting in the porch’. Immediately bicycling to Christ Church, she found Rizzi in the porch surrounded by a group of people who were admiring his profile portrait of Einstein looking down at a book. (Today it hangs in
Christ Church’s Senior Common Room.) The two of them then carried it off to a photo-grapher, but all of a sudden Rizzi remembered that ‘Professor Eisenstein’, as he habitually called Einstein, had not signed the portrait. They returned to Christ Church, and found that their quarry had gone for a walk in Christ Church’s meadows. The two of them set off in hot pursuit, but Einstein had got too far ahead, and so the signature had to wait until the artist returned the next day. When Einstein finally signed the portrait in his college rooms, Rizzi told Deneke that he laughed heartily over the artist’s German aphorism: ‘Nichts koennen ist noch lange keine Moderne Kunst.’ (‘To be a Modern artist, it is not enough to lack any skills.’) Einstein’s taste in drawing, like his taste in music, was firmly in favour of the classical.