Einstein on the Run Read online

  To quote Russell’s foreword about Born and Einstein: ‘Both men were brilliant, humble and completely without fear in their public utterances. In an age of mediocrity and moral pygmies, their lives shine with an intense beauty. Something of this is reflected in their correspondence, and the world is the richer for its publication.’

  They agreed on some aspects of Britain and of Germany, but differed considerably on others. For example, in early 1937, Einstein wrote from Princeton to Born in Edinburgh: ‘I am extremely delighted that you have found such an excellent sphere of activity, and what’s more in the most civilised country of the day. And more than just a refuge. It seems to me that you, with your well-adjusted personality and good family background, will feel quite happy there.’ Then he contrasted his own position in the United States: ‘I have settled down splendidly here: I hibernate like a bear in a cave, and really feel more at home than ever before in all my varied existence. This bearishness has been accentuated still further by the death of my mate who was more attached to human beings than I.’

  Elsa Einstein died in late December 1936 after a painful illness. ‘He has been so upset by my illness,’ she wrote of her husband not long before her death to her friend Vallentin in Paris. ‘He wanders about like a lost soul. I never thought he loved me so much. And that comforts me.’ Yet Einstein himself said nothing to others about Elsa’s death, except for his minimal remark to Born. ‘The incidental way in which Einstein describes his wife’s death, in the course of a brief description of his bear-like existence, seems rather strange. For all his kindness, sociability and love of humanity, he was nevertheless totally detached from his environment and the human beings included in it,’ Born frankly commented. As Einstein himself honestly admitted, a month before his own death, in a condolence letter to the widow of his lifelong friend Besso: ‘What I most admired in [Michele] as a human being is the fact that he managed to live for many years not only in peace but in lasting harmony with a woman – an undertaking in which I twice failed rather disgracefully.’

  This difference in attitude towards human relationships between Einstein and Born – who was undoubtedly much more of a family man than Einstein – would be reflected in their attitude to post-war Germans and German responsibility for Nazism. Einstein blamed all Germans for Nazism, whereas Born was willing to draw distinctions between Germans, after the horrors of the war were over. And this was despite the fact that Born had lost thirty-four relatives and friends during the Nazi period, two-thirds of whom had committed suicide rather than face imprisonment in a concentration camp, whereas Einstein had got off much more lightly.

  ‘I did share your opinion, but I have now come to another conclusion,’ Born wrote to Einstein in 1950. ‘I think that in a higher sense responsibility en masse does not exist, but only that of individuals. I have met a sufficient number of decent Germans, only a few perhaps, but nevertheless genuinely decent. I assume that you may have modified your wartime views to some extent.’ Not so. Einstein remained adamant – not only about the German masses but also about German intellectuals. He had not changed his attitude to the Germans, he said, which dated from before the Nazi period. According to him, although all human beings were more or less the same from birth, ‘The Germans, however, have a far more dangerous tradition than any of the other so-called civilised nations. The present behaviour of these other nations towards the Germans merely proves to me how little human beings learn even from their most painful experiences.’

  In 1953, Einstein regretted Born’s decision to migrate back ‘to the land of the mass-murderers of our kinsmen’, although he blamed it partly on the parsimony of the University of Edinburgh, which had failed to provide Born with a pension – unlike Born’s former university at Göttingen in Germany. ‘But then we know only too well that the collective conscience is a miserable little plant which is always most likely to wither just when it is needed most.’

  To which Born replied: ‘I only want to tell you that the German Quakers have their headquarters in Pyrmont’, that is, the spa town in Lower Saxony where the Borns were planning to retire. ‘They are no “mass-murderers”, and many of our friends there suffered far worse things under the Nazis than you or I. One should be chary of applying epithets of this sort. The Americans have demonstrated in Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki that in sheer speed of extermination they surpass even the Nazis.’ (Later, Born even directly equated ‘Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the one hand, and Auschwitz and Belsen on the other.’) In response to Einstein’s accusation of Scottish parsimony forcing him to return, he remarked: ‘You are wrong in casting aspersions on my dear Scots; the inadequate provision for the old age of teachers and professors is quite general all over Britain, and is just as wretched in Oxford and Cambridge. If anyone is to blame it is the Swedes, who could quite well have found out about my contribution to quantum mechanics.’ Happily, the following year, 1954, just after Born’s return to Germany, the Swedish Academy in Stockholm awarded him a long-delayed Nobel prize (following its earlier awards for quantum mechanics to his collaborator Heisenberg in 1932 and Dirac/Schrödinger in 1933), partly as a consequence of the acceptance of Born’s ideas in the intervening period, promoted by Bohr and his Copenhagen school of quantum physics.

  On Britain and the Jews, by contrast, Einstein and Born were in definite agreement, both before and after the Second World War. In May 1939, Born wrote to Einstein congratulating him on a speech about Palestine, which had been reported in the British press. He commented:

  Without wishing to defend the wavering and unreliable British policy, I am of the opinion that the Jews could do nothing more stupid than to assume an antagonistic attitude towards the English. The British Empire is still a place of refuge and protection for the persecuted, and particularly for Jews. I also completely subscribe to what you are reported to have said concerning the need for and the possibility of coming to an understanding with the Arabs. I am glad that you have said what you did; your voice will be heard. I can only think my own thoughts in silence.

  However, by 1948, the time of the expiration of the British Mandate and the foundation of the state of Israel, both Born and Einstein had changed their minds. Born now wrote to Einstein:

  I was very sad when the Jews started to use terror themselves, and showed that they had learned a lesson from Hitler. Also I was so grateful towards my new ‘fatherland’, Britain, that I expected nothing evil from it. But it gradually dawned on me that our Mr Bevin [Ernest Bevin, the British foreign secretary] is playing a wicked game: first the Arabs are supplied with arms and trained; then the British army pulls out and leaves the dirty business of liquidating the Jews to the Arabs. Of course, I have no proof that it is so. Moreover, I detest nationalism of every kind, including that of the Jews. Therefore I could not get very excited about it. But gradually it has become quite obvious to me that my worst suspicions were correct. A leading article in today’s Manchester Guardian openly attacks Bevin for doing precisely what I had suspected. I am feeling very depressed, for I am completely powerless and without influence in this country. The main purpose of this letter is to tell you that you have my wholehearted support if you take any action to help. Could you not induce the American government to act before it is too late?

  To which Einstein responded in wholehearted agreement: ‘Your Palestine letter has moved me very deeply. Without any doubt, you have summed up Bevin’s policy correctly. He seems to have become infected with the infamy germ by virtue of the post he occupies.’ However, he said, Born had ‘rather too optimistic an idea of the opportunities I have to influence the game in Washington. The latter can be summed up with the maxim: never let the right hand know what the left is doing. One thumps the table with the right hand, while with the left one helps England (by an embargo, for example) in its insidious attack.’

  As for probability and certainty in physics, Einstein and Born remained in sharp but friendly dispute to the very end. In 1947, while continuing to labour on his unified field t
heory, Einstein stated his underlying belief to Born, in which he coined a phrase, ‘spooky actions at a distance’, now familiar to all physicists:

  I cannot make a case for my attitude to physics which you would consider at all reasonable. I admit, of course, that there is a considerable amount of validity in the statistical approach which you were the first to recognise 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 spooky 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 calculation difficulties 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 used to be taken for granted until quite recently. 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.

  After Einstein’s death, Born summed up this disagreement elegantly, in words that still resonate today:

  He saw in the quantum mechanics of today a useful intermediate stage between the traditional classical physics and a still completely unknown ‘physics of the future’ based on general relativity, in which – and this he regarded as indispensable for philosophical reasons – the traditional concepts of physical reality and determinism come into their own again. Thus he regarded statistical quantum mechanics to be not wrong but ‘incomplete’.

  As for his own view, he explained:

  I am convinced that ideas such as absolute certainty, absolute precision, final truth, and so on are phantoms, which should be excluded from science. . . . The relaxation of the rules of thinking seems to me the greatest blessing which modern science has given us. For the belief that there is only one truth and that oneself is in possession of it, seems to me the deepest root of all that is evil in the world.

  A final theme of the Born–Einstein letters concerns isolation as a source of scientific inspiration, and even genius. For Born, it had been a decidedly mixed blessing, but he recognised its value for Einstein. Solitude had been highly productive for Einstein in 1915–16, when he created his theory of general relativity in Berlin. Princeton seems to have encouraged his desire for it – and his concomitant unwillingness to return to the distractions of Europe. In 1936, Einstein told Born: ‘I personally feel very happy here, and find it indescribably enjoyable really to be able to lead a quiet life. It is, after all, no more than one deserves in one’s last terms, though it is granted to very few.’ And in 1952, he wrote: ‘One feels as if one were an Ichthyosaurus, left behind by accident. Most of our dear friends, but thank God also some of the less dear, are already gone.’ (‘What have you got against being an Ichthyosaurus?’ replied Born’s wife, Hedwig. ‘They were, after all, rather vigorous little beasts, probably able to look back on the experiences of a very long lifetime.’) To visitors in Princeton who had known him in Europe, Einstein would apparently often say: ‘You are surprised, aren’t you, at the contrast between my fame throughout the world, the fuss over me in the newspapers, and the isolation and quiet in which I live here? I wished for this isolation all my life, and now I have finally achieved it here in Princeton.’

  ISOLATED FROM, OR INVOLVED WITH, FELLOW PHYSICISTS?

  To what extent is this self-drawn and familiar picture of Einstein’s isolation in Princeton accurate? Not according to Buchwald and Thorne in their preface to The Born–Einstein Letters: ‘Actually, Einstein was not isolated from bright colleagues and visitors during his Princeton years. He was in lively contact with many creative physicists and mathematicians . . . and he maintained a voluminous correspondence.’

  Perhaps the truth is that both pictures are accurate: Einstein was in personal contact with highly intelligent Princeton colleagues and visitors and in written contact with other physicists (including of course Born) – yet he was also aloof. ‘He always has a certain feeling of being a stranger, and even a desire to be isolated,’ remarked his biographer Frank in 1948. ‘On the other hand, however, he has a great curiosity about everything human and a great sense of humour.’

  One of his collaborators, Infeld, gave a fascinating example of how this apparently contradictory combination worked, taken not from his highly theoretical work with Einstein and Hoffmann mentioned earlier, but from his joint book with Einstein on physics for a popular readership, The Evolution of Physics, published by Simon & Schuster in New York and Cambridge University Press in England. At this time, in 1937, Infeld (who had fled Poland because of anti-Semitism) had failed to win a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study despite Einstein’s strong personal recommendation, because Princeton colleagues did not believe in the value of Einstein’s work on the unified field theory. Infeld was therefore in serious financial difficulties when he approached Einstein with his idea for a physics book capitalising on Einstein’s fame plus Infeld’s own knowledge of English. He became uncharacteristically tongue-tied with embarrassment in front of Einstein, as described in his autobiography. After an incoherent explanation of the proposed book, Infeld finally blurted out the remark: ‘The greatest men of science wrote popular books. Books still regarded as classics. Faraday’s popular lectures, Maxwell’s Matter and Motion, the popular writings of Helmholtz and Boltzmann still make exciting reading.’ Einstein looked at him silently, stroked his moustache with his finger and then said quietly: ‘This is not at all a stupid idea. Not stupid at all.’ He got up, stretched out his hand and said: ‘We shall do it.’

  Einstein took the challenge to heart and was increasingly enthusiastic as the work progressed, saying repeatedly: ‘This was a splendid idea of yours.’ He believed that the fundamental ideas of physics could be expressed in words, commenting: ‘No scientist thinks in formulae.’ They discussed and revised the manuscript over and over again until it was in its final form, in a remarkable collaboration which captured the complexity of the subject while also making it intelligible to the ordinary reader (unlike Einstein’s own short book on relativity, as Einstein well knew). Not once did Einstein try to pull rank over Infeld. ‘Then suddenly Einstein lost all interest. His interest lasted exactly as long as our work lasted. It ended the moment our work was finished.’ When the advance copies arrived from Simon & Schuster, Infeld took them to Einstein. He was completely uninterested and did not even open the book. ‘Once a work is finished his interest in it ceases. The same applies to the reprints of his scientific papers. Later he had to autograph so many copies of our book that automatically, when he saw a blue jacket, he groped for his fountain pen.’ But for Infeld – known forever after as the ‘man who worked with Einstein’ – publication of the book was an adventure that changed both his intellectual outlook and his academic career.

  DRAWN INTO POLITICS BY NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND THE COLD WAR

  With the evolution of physics into nuclear physics in the 1930s, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan in 1945 and the end of the Second World War, Einstein was drawn into American and international politics – whether or not he would have preferred to remain aloof. His only reaction on hearing the radio announcement of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima relayed to him by his secretary Dukas was ‘Oj weh’ (Yiddish for ‘Woe is me’). But soon he began a public campaign to control atomic and nuclear weapons by calling for a new political ethics. This culminated in his appeal in 1950 against the development of the hydrogen bomb in a nationwide television programme hosted by Eleanor Roosevelt: a broadcast regarded as so subversive by the Federal Bureau of Investigation director, J. Edgar Hoover, that the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service launched a top-secret investigation aimed at revoking Einstein’s American
citizenship, so that he could be deported from America. (Even US President Dwight Eisenhower was kept in the dark, judging from his eulogy of Einstein after his death: ‘Americans are proud that he sought and found here a climate of freedom in his search for knowledge and truth.’ He further commented: ‘No other man contributed so much to the vast expansion of twentieth-century knowledge.’)

  Einstein hoped that the fresh horrors of the Second World War and the obvious potential horrors of a nuclear third world war might together be enough to force reform in international affairs. ‘We must realise we cannot simultaneously plan for war and for peace,’ he told the New York Times. As he put it on the occasion of the fifth Nobel anniversary dinner in New York in December 1945, ‘The war is won, but the peace is not.’ He began his speech: ‘Physicists find themselves in a position not unlike that of Alfred Nobel. He 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.’ And he concluded: ‘The situation calls for a courageous effort, for a radical change in our whole attitude, in the entire political concept.’ He evoked the name of Nobel: ‘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 civilisation will be doomed.’