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December 23, 2020 - February 6, 2022
“Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external,” he famously wrote in Book 1 of the Principia. “Absolute space, in its own nature, without relation to anything external, remains always similar and immovable.”
“Absolute time is not an object of perception,” he admitted. He resorted to relying on the presence of God to get him out of the dilemma. “The Deity endures forever and is everywhere present, and by existing always and everywhere, He constitutes duration and space.”
“There is no audible tick-tock everywhere in the world that can be considered as time.”
“If this seems surprising, it is because we underestimate the boldness of Einstein in stating the principle of relativity as an axiom and, by keeping faith with it, changing our notion of space and time.”
The result was an elegant conclusion: mass and energy are different manifestations of the same thing. There is a fundamental interchangeability between the two. As he put it in his paper, “The mass of a body is a measure of its energy content.”
In a letter to his father, Adler recounted the conversation and said that Einstein “had no understanding how to relate to people” and had been “treated by the professors at the Polytechnic with outright contempt.” But Adler said he deserved the job because of his genius and was likely to get it. “They have a bad conscience over how they treated him earlier. The scandal is being felt not only here but in Germany that such a man would have to sit in the patent office.”31
Combining particle theory with wave theory, he warned, would bring “a profound change.” This was not a good thing, he feared. It could undermine the certainties and determinism inherent in classical physics.
Loyalty to a party, Einstein felt, meant surrendering some independence of thought. Such conformity confounded him. “How an intelligent man can subscribe to a party I find a complete mystery,” Einstein later lamented about Adler.3
On one occasion, Einstein asked if anyone wanted to come back to his apartment. “This morning I received some work from Planck in which there must be a mistake,” he said. “We could read it together.” Tanner and another student took him up on the offer and followed him home. There they all pored over Planck’s paper. “See if you can spot the fault while I make some coffee,” he said.
One of his strengths as a thinker, if not as a parent, was that he had the ability, and the inclination, to tune out all distractions, a category that to him sometimes included his children and family. “Even the loudest baby-crying didn’t seem to disturb Father,” Hans Albert said. “He could go on with his work completely impervious to noise.”
Twenty of Europe’s most famous scientists showed up at the Grand Hotel Metropole in Brussels. At 32, Einstein was the youngest. There was Max Planck, Henri Poincaré, Marie Curie, Ernest Rutherford, and Wilhelm Wien. The chemist Walther Nernst organized the event and acted as chaperone for the quirky Ernest Solvay.
On one of their last evenings in Zurich, he and Marić went to the Hurwitz house for a farewell musical evening. Once again, the program featured Schumann, in an attempt to cheer her up. It didn’t. She instead sat by herself in a corner and did not speak to anyone.
But by not marrying, they would be protecting themselves from lapsing into a “contented bourgeois” existence and preventing their relationship “from becoming banal and from growing pale.” To him, marriage was confining, which was a state he instinctively resisted. “I’m glad our delicate relationship does not have to founder on a provincial narrow-minded lifestyle.”
“The central idea of general relativity is that gravity arises from the curvature of spacetime,” says physicist James Hartle. “Gravity is geometry.”9
Years later, when his younger son, Eduard, asked why he was so famous, Einstein replied by using a simple image to describe his great insight that gravity was the curving of the fabric of spacetime. “When a blind beetle crawls over the surface of a curved branch, it doesn’t notice that the track it has covered is indeed curved,” he said. “I was lucky enough to notice what the beetle didn’t notice.”16
Rμv– 1/2 gμv R = 8πTμv
“Matter tells spacetime how to curve, and curved space tells matter how to move.”83
“[Hans] Albert* is now entering the age at which I can mean very much to him,” he said. “I want mainly to teach him to think, judge and appreciate things objectively.”
“I resemble a farsighted man who is charmed by the vast horizon and whom the foreground bothers only when an opaque object prevents him from taking in the long view.”
“Such men make this cosmos and its construction the pivot of their emotional life, in order to find the peace and security which they cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.”25
“an old-time believer in democracy,” he again made clear that his socialist sentiments did not make him sympathetic to Soviet-style controls. “All true democrats must stand guard lest the old class tyranny of the Right be replaced by a new class tyranny of the Left,” he said.
Years later, when Adolf Hitler and his Nazis were in power, Einstein would ruefully look back on that day in Berlin. “Do you still remember the occasion some 25 years ago when we went together to the Reichstag building, convinced that we could turn the people there into honest democrats?” he wrote Born. “How naïve we were for men of forty.”53
“The Lord has put into him so much that’s beautiful, and I find him wonderful, even though life at his side is enervating and difficult,” she once said.
She came to know, from a faraway look in his eyes, when he was “seized with a problem,” as she called it, and thus should not be disturbed. He would pace up and down in his study, and she would have food sent up. When his intense concentration was over, he would finally come down to the table for a meal and, sometimes, ask to go on a walk with Elsa and her daughters.
Einstein did not believe, then or later, that these results actually corresponded to anything real. In 1939, for example, he produced a paper that provided, he said, “a clear understanding as to why these ‘Schwarzschild singularities’ do not exist in physical reality.”
On the surface, it did indeed seem to be based on a crazy notion: space has no borders because gravity bends it back on itself.
So he developed a third option: a finite universe, but one without boundaries. The masses in the universe caused space to curve, and over the expanse of the universe they caused space (indeed, the whole four-dimensional fabric of spacetime) to curve completely in on itself. The system is closed and finite, but there is no end or edge to it.
One method that Einstein employed to help people visualize this notion was to begin by imagining two-dimensional explorers on a two-dimensional universe, like a flat surface. These “flatlanders” can wander in any direction on this flat surface, but the concept of going up or down has no meaning to them. Now, imagine this variation: What if these flatlanders’ two dimensions were still on a surface, but this surface was (in a way very subtle to them) gently curved? What if they and their world were still confined to two dimensions, but their flat surface was like the surface of a globe? As
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“This suggestion of a finite but unbounded space is one of the greatest ideas about the nature of the world which has ever been conceived,” the physicist Max Born has declared.11
His theory indicated that the universe would have to be either expanding or contracting, not staying static. According to his field equations, a static universe was impossible because the gravitational forces would pull all the matter together.
When the conventional wisdom of physics seemed to conflict with an elegant theory of his, Einstein was inclined to question that wisdom rather than his theory, often to have his stubbornness rewarded. In this case, his gravitational field equations seemed to imply—indeed, screamed out—that the conventional thinking about a stable universe was wrong and should be tossed aside, just as Newton’s concept of absolute time was.13
He dubbed the new element the “cosmological term” or the “cosmological constant” (kosmologische Glied was the phrase he used). Later,* when it was discovered that the universe was in fact expanding, Einstein would call it his “biggest blunder.”
During five months in 1905, Einstein had upended physics by conceiving light quanta, special relativity, and statistical methods for showing the existence of atoms. Now he had just completed a more prolonged creative slog, from the fall of 1915 to the spring of 1917, which Dennis Overbye has called “arguably the most prodigious effort of sustained brilliance on the part of one man in the history of physics.” His first burst of creativity as a patent clerk had appeared to involve remarkably little anguish. But this later one was an arduous and intense effort, one that left him exhausted and
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The Times of London carried stories on November 7 about the defeated Germans being summoned to Paris to face treaty demands from the British and French. But it also carried the following triple-decked headline: REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE New Theory of the Universe NEWTONIAN IDEAS OVERTHROWN
“This news is distinctly shocking, and apprehensions for confidence even in the multiplication table will arise,” it editorialized on November 11.
he was a charming 40-year-old, just passing from handsome to distinctive, with a wild burst of hair, rumpled informality, twinkling eyes, and a willingness to dispense wisdom in bite-sized quips and quotes.
“Since the flood of newspaper articles, I’ve been so deluged with questions, invitations, and requests that I dream I’m burning in Hell and the postman is the Devil eternally roaring at me, hurling new bundles of letters at my head because I have not yet answered the old ones.”14
He loved being in a group playing music, discussing ideas, drinking strong coffee, and smoking pungent cigars. Yet there was a faintly visible wall that separated him from even family and close friends.31 Starting with the Olympia Academy, he frequented many parlors of the mind. But he shied away from the inner chambers of the heart.
the pioneering therapist Erik Erikson once pronounced of Einstein, “A certain alternation of isolation and outgoingness seems to have retained the character of a dynamic polarization.”37
“He had no gift for empathy,” writes historian Thomas Levenson, “no ability to imagine himself into the emotional life of anyone else.”39 When confronted with the emotional needs of others, Einstein tended to retreat into the objectivity of his science.
For nearly three centuries, the mechanical universe of Isaac Newton, based on absolute certainties and laws, had formed the psychological foundation of the Enlightenment and the social order, with a belief in causes and effects, order, even duty. Now came a view of the universe, known as relativity, in which space and time were dependent on frames of reference. This apparent dismissal of certainties, an abandonment of faith in the absolute, seemed vaguely heretical to some people, perhaps even godless. “It formed a knife,” historian Paul Johnson wrote in his sweeping history of the twentieth
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Indirectly, driven by popular misunderstandings rather than a fealty to Einstein’s thinking, relativity became associated with a new relativism in morality and art and politics. There was less faith in absolutes, not only of time and space, but also of truth and morality. In a December 1919 editorial about Einstein’s relativity theory, titled “Assaulting the Absolute,” the New York Times fretted that “the foundations of all human thought have been undermined.”48
Einstein would have been, and later was, appalled at the conflation of relativity with relativism. As noted, he had considered calling his theory “invariance,” because the physical laws of combined spacetime, according to his theory, were indeed invariant rather than relative.
its relationship with modernism was more mysteriously interactive. There are historical moments when an alignment of forces causes a shift in human outlook. It happened to art and philosophy and science at the beginning of the Renaissance, and again at the beginning of the Enlightenment. Now, in the early twentieth century, modernism was born by the breaking of the old strictures and verities. A spontaneous combustion occurred that included the works of Einstein, Picasso, Matisse, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Joyce, Eliot, Proust, Diaghilev, Freud, Wittgenstein, and dozens of other path-breakers
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pinnacle of the modernist revolution came in 1922, the year Einstein’s Nobel Prize was announced. James Joyce’s Ulysses was published that year, as was T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. There was a midnight dinner party in May at the Majestic Hotel in Paris for the opening of Renard, composed by Stravinsky and performed by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Stravinsky and Diaghilev were both there, as was Picasso. So, too, were both Joyce and Proust, who “were destroying 19th century literary certainties as surely as Einstein was revolutionizing physics.” The mechanical order and Newtonian laws that had
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“All of my life I have been trying to get it into one book,” he replied, “and he wants me to get it into one sentence!” Pressed to try, he provided a simple overview: “It is a theory of space and time as far as physics is concerned, which leads to a theory of gravitation.” What about those, especially in Germany, who attacked his theory? “No one of knowledge opposes my theory,” he answered. “Those physicists who do oppose the theory are animated by political motives.”
The reporter, being a good Chicago newspaperman, was able to spin a glorious tale, written in the third person, about the depths of his own confusion. “When the reporter came to he was vainly trying to light a three-dimensional cigarette with a three-dimensional match,” the story concluded. “It began to trickle into his brain that the two-dimensional organism referred to was himself, and far from being the 13th Great Mind to comprehend the theory he was condemned henceforth to be one of the Vast Majority who live on Main Street and ride in Fords.”
They included more than 125 complex equations that he scribbled on the blackboard while speaking in German. As one student admitted to a reporter, “I sat in the balcony, but he talked right over my head anyway.”48 At a party following one of these lectures, Einstein uttered one of his most memorable and self-revealing quotes. Someone excitedly informed him that word had just arrived of a new set of experiments improving on the Michelson-Morley technique that seemed to show that the ether existed and the speed of light was variable. Einstein simply refused to accept it. He knew that his theory
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A reporter asked him a question from the test. “What is the speed of sound?” If anyone understood the propagation of sound waves, it was Einstein. But he admitted that he did not “carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books.” Then he made a larger point designed to disparage Edison’s view of education. “The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think,” he said.
Before the war the mark had been worth 24 cents, but it had fallen to 2 cents by the beginning of 1920. At that time a mark could buy a loaf of bread. But then the bottom fell out of the currency. By the beginning of 1923, the price of a loaf went to 700 marks and by the end of that year cost 1 billion marks. Yes, 1 billion. In November 1923, a new currency, the Rentenmark, was introduced, backed by the government property; 1 trillion old marks equaled 1 new Rentenmark.
