Einstein on the Run Read online

  Einstein under guard in rural England, September 1933. On the left is his English host, Commander Oliver Locker-Lampson MP, a veteran of the First World War; directly behind Einstein stands Marjory Howard, a secretary of Locker-Lampson; further away hovers Herbert Eastoe, a local gamekeeper. The world’s press had recently announced that Nazi extremists had put a price on Einstein’s head.

  Then, on 30 August 1933, Nazi extremists shot an associate of Einstein in Czechoslovakia, the controversial German-Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing, whose photo had also been captioned ‘not yet hanged’ – for which the assassins were immediately honoured in Germany. Within days, press reports appeared suggesting that Einstein was next in line, and mentioning a hefty financial reward placed on his head. Even so, Einstein shrugged his shoulders. He told a Paris-based correspondent: ‘I really had no idea my head was worth all that.’ As for the threat, ‘I have no doubt it is really true, but in any case I await the issue with serenity.’ To his hugely anxious wife, Elsa, he argued: ‘When a bandit is going to commit a crime he keeps it secret’ – according to a local press statement she made in early September, reported in the New York Times. Nonetheless, shortly after this, Elsa Einstein successfully insisted that her husband immediately go ‘on the run’ from possible Nazi retribution.

  He discreetly departed from Belgium, took a boat across the English Channel and headed for London. But instead of going from London to his familiar berth in a historic Oxford college, he was soon settled in the depths of the English countryside.

  There, in the holiday hut on Roughton Heath near Cromer, Einstein lived and toiled peacefully at mathematics – the unified field theory, based on his general theory of relativity, which would occupy him until his dying day – while occasionally stepping out for local walks or to play his violin. He had no library, of course, but this mattered relatively little to Einstein, who had long relied chiefly on his own thoughts and calculations; all he really missed was his faithful calculating assistant, who had stayed behind in Belgium. For about three weeks, Einstein was largely undisturbed by outsiders, except for a visit from the sculptor Jacob Epstein, who modelled a remarkable bronze bust of the hermit Einstein, today on permanent display at London’s Tate Gallery.

  From this undisclosed location, Einstein informed a British newspaper reporter in mid-September: ‘I shall become a naturalised Englishman as soon as it is possible for my papers to go through.’ However, ‘I cannot tell you yet whether I shall make England my home.’

  In early October, he emerged from hiding to speak at a meeting in London intended to raise funds for desperate academic refugees from Germany. Without our long fought-for western European freedom of mind, stated Einstein in front of a gripped audience overflowing the massive Albert Hall, ‘there would have been no Shakespeare, no Goethe, no Newton, no Faraday, no Pasteur and no Lister’. Afterwards, on the steps of the hall, he told another newspaper reporter:

  I could not believe that it was possible that such spontaneous affection could be extended to one who is a wanderer on the face of the earth. The kindness of your people has touched my heart so deeply that I cannot find words to express in English what I feel. I shall leave England for America at the end of the week, but no matter how long I live I shall never forget the kindness which I have received from the people of England.

  Einstein’s flight from Nazi terror is easily understandable. But how was it that he came to take refuge in an obscure English hut? What was it about England, in particular, that appealed to Einstein as a sanctuary? And why – given his long and enriching relationship with Britain, dating back to his teenage encounters with British physics in Switzerland – would he leave the country for America, never to return to Europe?

  [B]efore Maxwell, people conceived of physical reality . . . as material points, whose changes consist exclusively of motions. . . . After Maxwell, they conceived of physical reality as represented by continuous fields, not mechanically explicable. . . . 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 programme has by no means been completely carried out yet.

  Essay written by Einstein for the centennial celebration of the

  birth of James Clerk Maxwell, published by

  Cambridge University Press, 1931

  On the walls of his apartment in 1920s Berlin, and later in his Princeton house, Einstein hung portraits of three British natural philosophers: the physicists Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell – and no other scientists. Each of this trio he unquestionably revered. ‘England has always produced the best physicists,’ Einstein said in 1925 to a young Ukrainian-Jewish woman, Esther Salaman, attending his lectures on relativity in Berlin. He advised her to study physics at the University of Cambridge: the home of Newton in the second half of the seventeenth century and later the scientific base of Maxwell, founder of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory in the 1870s. As Einstein explained to Salaman: ‘I’m not thinking only of Newton. There would be no modern physics without Maxwell’s electromagnetic equations: I owe more to Maxwell than to anyone. But remember,’ he warned her, ‘in England everything is judged by achievement.’

  While visiting England in 1930, immediately after stopping at Newton’s birthplace in Woolsthorpe to pay tribute, Einstein remarked simply, before giving a lecture at the University of Nottingham: ‘It is a pleasure and an honour to speak in the country in which my science, theoretical physics, was born.’ In his last ever interview, two weeks before his death in Princeton, much of his conversation revolved around Newton’s fascinating writings, scientific and theological, published and unpublished, without overlooking Newton’s misanthropic personality – so different from Einstein’s own. (‘Newton is the Old Testament god; it is Einstein who is the New Testament figure . . . full of humanity, pity, a sense of enormous sympathy,’ the Polish-born British mathematician Jacob Bronowski remarked in his 1970s BBC television series The Ascent of Man.)

  EARLY YEARS IN GERMANY

  Although England played little role in Einstein’s childhood and adolescence in 1880s–90s Germany, some understanding of his early years is essential to appreciate his first receptive encounters with English physics, which he studied as a teenage autodidact in Germany from the early 1890s and then, more attentively, as a university student in Switzerland. Einstein’s unconventional upbringing was what set him on the path not only to his theory of relativity and his quantum theory but also to his later, ultimately unfulfilled, pursuit of a unified field theory of gravity and electromagnetism.

  There was no hint of any intellectual distinction in Einstein’s family tree. His father, Hermann, was an easy-going businessman who was not very successful in electrical engineering and his paternal grandfather a merchant, while his mother, Pauline, a fine piano player but otherwise not gifted, also came from a business family which ran a profitable grain concern and was wealthy. Though both sides of the family were Jewish, neither was orthodox. Hermann and Pauline Einstein were thoroughly assimilated and non-observant Jews (‘entirely irreligious’, according to their son), who conversed in German, not Yiddish/Hebrew.

  Nor was there much sign of distinction in Einstein as a child. Albert Abraham – the first name a common one among the ruling Hohenzollern dynasty, the second from Einstein’s paternal grandfather – was born on 14 March 1879 in Ulm, in southern Germany, in the semi-rural province of the Swabians. Their ‘speculative brooding’, ‘often roguish and occasionally coarse humour’ and ‘pronounced, individualistic obstinacy’ Einstein would share, according to his biographer Albrecht Fölsing. He was a quiet baby, so quiet that his parents became seriously concerned and consulted a doctor about his not learning to talk. But when a daughter, Maja, was born in November 1881, Albert apparently asked promptly: Where are the wheels of my new toy? It turned out that his ambition was to speak in complete sentences: first he would try out a sentence in his head, while
moving his lips, and only then repeat it aloud. The habit lasted until his seventh year or even later. The family maidservant dubbed him ‘stupid’.

  His first school was a Catholic one in Munich, where the Einstein family had relocated in 1880. Albert was the only Jew in a class of about seventy students. But he seems to have felt anti-Semitism among the teachers only in the religious education classes, not in the rest of the school curriculum. Among the students, however, anti-Semitism was commonplace, and though it was not vicious, it encouraged Einstein’s early sense of being an outsider, a feeling that would intensify throughout adulthood.

  Academically he was good yet by no means a prodigy, both at this school and at his high school, the Luitpold Gymnasium. However, Einstein showed hardly any affection for his schooling and in later life excoriated the system of formal education current in Germany. He referred to his teachers as ‘sergeants’ and ‘lieutenants’, disliked physical training and competitive games – even intellectual games such as chess – and detested anything that smacked of the military discipline typical of the Prussian ethos of northern Germany. ‘Constraint has always been his personal enemy. His whole youth was a battle against it,’ wrote a friend and Einstein biographer, Antonina Vallentin, in 1954. ‘When he uttered the German word for it, an abrupt word, with a particular sinister sound, Zwang, everything tolerant, humorous or resigned in his expression vanished.’ In 1920, he even told a Berlin interviewer that the school matriculation exam should be abolished. ‘Let us return to Nature, which upholds the principle of getting the maximum amount of effect from the minimum of effort, whereas the matriculation test does exactly the opposite.’ As he astutely remarked in 1930 after he had become world famous: ‘To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself.’

  Part of Einstein’s problem lay in the heavy emphasis in the German Gymnasiums – as in British public schools of the period – on the humanities; that is, on classical studies and, to a lesser extent, German history and literature, to the detriment of modern foreign languages, such as French and English. Science and mathematics were regarded as the subjects with the lowest status.

  But the main problem with school was probably that Albert was a confirmed autodidact, who preferred his own company to that of his teachers and fellow students. ‘Private study’ is a phrase frequent in his early letters and adult writings on education. It was clearly his chief means of becoming educated. His sister Maja recalled that even in noisy company her brother could ‘withdraw to the sofa, take pen and paper in hand, set the inkstand precariously on the armrest, and lose himself so completely in a problem that the conversation of many voices stimulated rather than disturbed him’.

  At a relatively early age, he began reading mathematics and science books simply out of curiosity; at college in Zurich he ranged very widely in his reading, including the latest scientific journals; and as an adult he never read books simply because they were said to be classics, only if they appealed to him. ‘Einstein was more of an artist than a scholar; in other words, he did not clutter up his mind too much with other people’s ideas,’ according to the British mathematician and cosmologist Gerald Whitrow. Maybe there is a parallel here with Newton, an eclectic reader who nevertheless does not seem to have read many of the great scientific names of his own or earlier times.

  His first scientific experience occurred as a child of four or five, according to Einstein, when his father showed him a magnetic compass. ‘I can still remember,’ he wrote half a century later, ‘– 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.’

  Then, aged twelve, he experienced ‘a second wonder of a totally different nature’ while working through a book of Euclidian plane geometry. The ‘lucidity and certainty’ of the geometrical proofs, based on Euclid’s ten simple axioms, made another deep impression, and set Einstein thinking for the rest of his life on the true relationship between purely mathematical forms and the same forms found in the physical world. Hence the strong appeal to him of Johannes Kepler’s discovery that the planetary orbits are ellipses. The very word geometry, Einstein noted, was from the Greek for ‘earth-measuring’, which implied that mathematics ‘owes its existence to the need which was felt of learning something about the behaviour of real objects’.

  At the same time, Albert began reading two popular science books in German brought for him by a poor medical student, Max Talmud, who was given a weekly lunch by his parents – among the few Jewish customs the Einsteins did observe. These introduced him to the work of Newton and set him on course to be a scientist. They also convinced him – although they did not attack religion as such – that much of the Bible was untrue, and induced a ‘suspicion against every kind of authority’ which would last until his dying day.

  At school, things came to a head in 1894. A new class teacher informed Einstein that ‘he would never get anywhere in life’. When Einstein replied that surely he ‘had not committed any offence’, he was told: ‘Your mere presence here undermines the class’s respect for me.’ For the rest of his life, Einstein would be known for a mocking (and self-mocking) way with words that was sometimes biting and always at odds with his later gentle image. When as an adult he chanced upon a German psychiatrist’s book, Physique and Character, he was shaken by it and wrote down the following words in his diary, which he apparently thought applied to himself: ‘Hypersensitivity transformed into indifference. During adolescence, inwardly inhibited and unworldly. Glass pane between subject and other people. Unmotivated mistrust. Substitute paper world. Ascetic impulses.’

  At home, too, all was not going well. In 1893, after a battle with larger companies, the Einstein company had failed to get a contract for lighting an important part of Munich. The following year the company was liquidated and a new one set up in Italy, with a new factory. Maja moved there with her parents, but Albert was left alone in Munich with some distant relatives in order to take his matriculation exam. Meanwhile the beloved Einstein home in Munich was sold and quickly demolished by developers under his eyes.

  The combination of disruptions at school and at home seems to have been too much for Albert, who would never refer to this unhappy period. Without consulting his parents, he got a doctor (Talmud’s elder brother) to state that he was suffering from exhaustion and needed time off school, and convinced a teacher to give him a certificate of excellence in mathematics. The school authorities willingly released him. Then he headed south to Milan to face his surprised parents.

  EDUCATION AND EMPLOYMENT IN SWITZERLAND

  Einstein did not return to graduate, and a year later rejected his German nationality, presumably to avoid military service, becoming stateless until he was accepted as a Swiss citizen in 1901. Instead, after much private study at home in Italy in 1895, he sat the exam early for the Swiss Polytechnic in Zurich, probably the leading centre for the study of science in central Europe outside of Germany. He failed. However his brilliance in mathematics and physics was recognised, and he was encouraged to try again the following year after further schooling. On the advice of a Polytechnic professor, he went to a Swiss cantonal school in Aarau, which enjoyed a much less authoritarian atmosphere than the school in Munich. When he passed its final exam, which qualified him to begin study in Zurich in 1896, he wrote a revealing essay in (execrable) French on ‘My plans for the future’. It announced his desire to study the theoretical part of physics because of ‘my individual inclination for abstract and mathematical thinking, lack of imagination and of practical sense’, and concluded significantly: ‘Besides, I am also much attracted by a certain independence offered by the scientific profession.’

  Switzerland now became integral to Einstein’s life, during this formative intellectual period, which was also the time of his first love affair, with his fellow physics student Mileva Maric´, whom he married in 1903. ‘So far as he was ever at home, at any time in his life, it was in B
ern and Zurich, before the First World War,’ wrote the British novelist C. P. Snow after discussions with Einstein in the late 1930s. Judging from his youthful letters, his love of the soaring, solitary splendour of the alpine peaks influenced his scientific theorising. After he eventually became a professor in Zurich, Einstein’s students remembered him standing in the middle of a snowstorm under a street lamp at the foot of the Zurichberg, handing his unfurled umbrella to a companion and jotting down formulae for ten minutes while snowflakes fell on his notebook. Much later, in The Evolution of Physics, he wrote:

  creating a new theory is not like destroying an old barn and erecting a skyscraper in its place. It is rather like climbing a mountain, gaining new and wider views, discovering unexpected connections between our starting-point and its rich environment. But the point from which we started out still exists and can be seen, although it appears smaller and forms a tiny part of our broad view gained by the mastery of the obstacles on our adventurous way up.

  Thus, in the mid-1890s, Einstein would start from Newton’s laws of force and motion and Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism and ascend to the heights of the field equations of general relativity twenty years later, not by overturning Newton or Maxwell but rather by subsuming them into a more comprehensive theory, somewhat as the map of a continent subsumes a map of an individual country.