Einstein: His Life and Universe

by Walter Isaacson

The newspapers reported that his name was on a list of assassination targets, and one rumor had it that there was a $5,000 bounty on his head. Upon hearing this, Einstein touched that head and cheerfully proclaimed, “I didn’t know it was worth that much!”

“The time seems inauspicious for further advocacy of certain propositions of the radical pacifist movement,” he wrote to a Dutch minister who wanted his support for a peace organization. “For example, is one justified in advising a Frenchman or a Belgian to refuse military service in the face of German rearmament?” Einstein felt the answer was now clear. “Frankly, I do not believe so.”

“The husband of the second violinist would like to talk to you on an urgent matter.” It was a cryptic way for King Albert to identify himself that Einstein, but few others, would recognize.

I must tell you candidly: Under today’s conditions, if I were a Belgian, I would not refuse military service, but gladly take it upon me in the knowledge of serving 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.

“To prevent the greater evil, it is necessary that the lesser evil—the hated military—be accepted for the time being.”

“I am the same ardent pacifist I was before. But I believe that we can advocate refusing military service only when the military threat from aggressive dictatorships toward democratic countries has ceased to exist.”66

The charge of inconsistency would have amused Einstein. For a scientist, altering your doctrines when the facts change is not a sign of weakness.

The two young women posed next to him holding hunting shotguns for a picture that was given to the press agencies, and Locker-Lampson declared, “If any unauthorized person comes near they will get a charge of buckshot.” Einstein’s own assessment of his security was less intimidating. “The beauty of my bodyguards would disarm a conspirator sooner than their shotguns,” he told a visitor.

He surrendered, for example, to Elsa’s nagging that he smoked too much and on Thanksgiving bet her that he would be able to abstain from his pipe until the new year. When Elsa boasted of this at a dinner party, Einstein grumbled, “You see, I am no longer a slave to my pipe, but I am a slave to that woman.” Einstein kept his word, but “he got up at daylight on New Year’s morning, and he hasn’t had his pipe out of his mouth since except to eat and sleep,” Elsa told neighbors a few days after the deal was over.

“Strenuous intellectual work and looking at God’s nature are the reconciling, fortifying yet relentlessly strict angels that shall lead me through all of life’s troubles,”

Yet beneath the surface of many romances that evolve into partnerships, there is a depth not visible to outside observers.

In retrospect, the rise of the Nazis created a fundamental moral challenge for America. At the time, however, this was not so clear. That was especially true in Princeton, which was a conservative town, and at its university, which harbored a surprising number of students who shared the amorphous anti-Semitic attitude found among some in their social class. A survey of incoming freshmen in 1938 produced a result that is now astonishing, and should have been back then as well: Adolf Hitler polled highest as the “greatest living person.” Albert Einstein was second.

“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.”

Einstein also became a supporter of racial tolerance. When Marian Anderson, the black contralto, came to Princeton for a concert in 1937, the Nassau Inn refused her a room. So Einstein invited her to stay at his house on Mercer Street, in what was a deeply personal as well as a publicly symbolic gesture. Two years later, when she was barred from performing in Washington’s Constitution Hall, she gave what became a historic free concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Whenever she returned to Princeton, she stayed with Einstein, her last visit coming just two months before he died.

“If and when war comes,” he said, “Hitler will realize the harm he has done Germany by driving out the Jewish scientists.”

That was even true of gravity. If the sun suddenly disappeared, it would not affect the earth’s orbit for about eight minutes, the amount of time it would take the change in the gravitational field to ripple to the earth at the speed of light.

In simpler words: at any moment the second particle, which we have not observed, has a position that is real and a momentum that is real. These two properties are features of reality that quantum mechanics does not account for; thus the answer to the title’s question should be no, quantum mechanics’ description of reality is not complete.

When the EPR paper reached Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, he realized that he had once again been cast in the role, which he played so well at the Solvay Conferences, of defending quantum mechanics from yet another Einstein assault. “This onslaught came down on us as a bolt from the blue,” a colleague of Bohr’s reported. “Its effect on Bohr was remarkable.” He had often reacted to such situations by wandering around and muttering, “Einstein… Einstein… Einstein!” This time he added some collaborative doggerel as well: “Podolsky, Opodolsky, Iopodolsky, Siopodolsky…”

“No doubt, however, you smile at me and think that, after all, many a young whore turns into an old praying sister, and many a young revolutionary becomes an old reactionary.”

reactionary.

We could regard matter as the regions in space where the field is extremely strong.

“It is open to every man to choose the direction of his striving,” he explained, “and every man may take comfort from the fine saying that the search for truth is more precious than its possession.”

Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, had created the award “to atone for having invented the most powerful explosives ever known up to his time.” He was in a similar situation. “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,” he said.

“No, as long as there will be man, there will be war.”

“If the idea of world government is not realistic,” he said in 1948, “then there is only one realistic view of our future: wholesale destruction of man by man.”

“I do not know how the Third World War will be fought,” he answered, “but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth—rocks.”

“Each step appears as the inevitable consequence of the one that went before,” he said of the arms race. “And at the end, looming ever clearer, lies general annihilation.”

There was, however, one group for which Einstein could feel little tolerance after the war. “The Germans, as a whole nation, are responsible for these mass killings and should be punished as a people,”

“The Germans butchered millions of civilians according to a well-prepared plan,” he wrote. “They would do it again if only they were able to. Not a trace of guilt or remorse is to be found among them.”

“The crimes of the Germans are really the most abominable ever to be recorded in the history of the so-called civilized nations,” he wrote the physicist Otto Hahn. “The conduct of the German intellectuals—viewed as a class—was no better than that of the mob.”

“I am not a German but a Jew by nationality,” he declared as the war ended.

With Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in Princeton, 1951

“Politics is for the present, while our equations are for eternity.”

Gödel was famous for his “incompleteness theory,” a pair of logical proofs that purport to show that any useful mathematical system will have some propositions that cannot be proven true or false based on the postulates of that system.

For his part, Einstein remained focused on his own white whale, which he pursued not with the demonic drive of Ahab but the dutiful serenity of Ishmael.

“It’s like being in an airship in which one can cruise around in the clouds but cannot see clearly how one can return to reality, i.e., earth,” he lamented to a friend.11

When a colleague asked him one day why he was spending—perhaps squandering—his time in this lonely endeavor, he replied that even if the chance of finding a unified theory was small, the attempt was worthy. He had already made his name, he noted. His position was secure, and he could afford to take the risk and expend the time. A younger theorist, however, could not take such a risk, for he might thus sacrifice a promising career. So, Einstein said, it was his duty to do it.21

When he got frustrated, Bohr sometimes would simply sputter the same word over and over. Soon he was doing so with Einstein’s name. He walked to the window and kept muttering, over and over, “Einstein… Einstein…” At one such moment, Einstein softly opened the door, tiptoed in, and signaled to Pais not to say anything. He had come to steal a bit of tobacco, which his doctor had ordered him not to buy. Bohr kept muttering, finally spurting out one last loud “Einstein” and then turning around to find himself staring at the cause of his anxieties. “It is an understatement to say that for a moment Bohr was speechless,” Pais recalled. Then, after an instant, they all burst into laughter.

am generally regarded as sort of a petrified object,” he noted to Max Born, then a professor in Edinburgh, one of those friends whose affection had lasted so long. “I find this role not too distasteful, as it corresponds very well with my temperament… I simply enjoy giving more than receiving in every respect, do not take myself nor the doings of the masses seriously, am not ashamed of my weaknesses and vices, and naturally take things as they come with equanimity and humor.”

A few hours later, a telegram arrived from Israel’s ambassador in Washington, Abba Eban. Could the embassy, it asked, send someone the next day to see him officially? “Why should that man come all that way,” Einstein lamented, “when I only will have to say no?”

“I am not the person for that and I cannot possibly do it,” Einstein said. “I cannot tell my government that you phoned me and said no,” Eban replied. “I have to go through the motions and present the offer officially.”

McCarthy

“Besides, I believe that older people who have scarcely anything to lose ought to be willing to speak out in behalf of those who are young and are subject to much greater restraint.”

“Brief is this existence, as a fleeting visit in a strange house,” he said. “The path to be pursued is poorly lit by a flickering consciousness.”

By then Einstein had finally discovered what was fundamental about America: it can be swept by waves of what may seem, to outsiders, to be dangerous political passions but are, instead, passing sentiments that are absorbed by its democracy and righted by its constitutional gyroscope.

“The attitude we adopt toward the Arab minority will provide the real test of our moral standards as a people,”

Is everything all right? his assistant asked. Everything is all right, he replied, but I am not.

“It is tasteless to prolong life artificially,” he told Dukas. “I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.”

The next morning, in a fifth-grade class at a Princeton school, the teacher asked her students what news they had heard. “Einstein died,” said one girl, eager to be the first to come up with that piece of information. But she quickly found herself topped by a usually quiet boy who sat in the back of the class. “My dad’s got his brain,” he said.

“I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious.”