Einstein: His Life and Universe

by Walter Isaacson

His inertia is hard to explain, but it is indicative of a change that became evident in both his personal life and his scientific work during the 1920s. He had once been a restless rebel who hopped from job to job, insight to insight, resisting anything that smacked of restraint. He had been repelled by conventional respectability. But now he personified it. From being a romantic youth who fancied himself a footloose bohemian he had settled, with but a few stabs at ironic detachment, into a bourgeois life with a doting hausfrau and a richly wallpapered home filled with heavy Biedermeier furniture. He was no longer restless. He was comfortable.

Together he and Einstein walked the Old City of Jerusalem to that holiest shrine for religious Jews, the Western Wall (or Wailing Wall) that flanks Temple Mount. But Einstein’s deepening love for his Jewish heritage did not instill any new appreciation for the Jewish religion. “Dull-minded tribal companions are praying, faces turned to the wall, rocking their bodies forward and back,” he recorded in his diary. “A pitiful sight of men with a past but without a future.”

There was a dark irony in using the photoelectric effect as a path to get Einstein the prize. His “law” was based primarily on observations made by Philipp Lenard, who had been the most fervent campaigner to have him blackballed. In his 1905 paper, Einstein had credited Lenard’s “pioneering” work.

More specifically, Einstein’s scientific successes had come in part from his rebelliousness. There was a link between his creativity and his willingness to defy authority. He had no sentimental attachment to the old order, thus was energized by upending it. His stubbornness had worked to his advantage.

But now, just as he had traded his youthful bohemian attitudes for the comforts of a bourgeois home, he had become wedded to the faith that field theories could preserve the certainties and determinism of classical science. His stubbornness henceforth would work to his disadvantage.

“To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself.”20

“I find the idea quite intolerable that an electron exposed to radiation should choose of its own free will not only its moment to jump off but also its direction,” he despaired to Born a few years later. “In that case, I would rather be a cobbler, or even an employee of a gaming house, than a physicist.”

On one of the many occasions when Einstein declared that God would not play dice, it was Bohr who countered with the famous rejoinder: Einstein, stop telling God what to do!45

The theoretical advances that occurred in the mid-1920s were shaped by Niels Bohr and his colleagues, including Heisenberg, into what became known as the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. A property of an object can be discussed only in the context of how that property is observed or measured, and these observations are not simply aspects of a single picture but are complementary to one another. In other words, there is no single underlying reality that is independent of our observations.

“If the Lord had wanted to do that, he would have done it thoroughly, and not kept to a pattern… He would have gone the whole hog. In that case, we wouldn’t have to look for laws at all.”69

“Your chain of reasoning is so wonderfully self-contained,” he wrote Weyl. “Except for agreeing with reality, it is certainly a grand intellectual achievement.”

The fact that this method paid off in general relativity, he said, “justifies us in believing that nature is the realization of the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas.”45 That is an elegant—and also astonishingly interesting—creed. It captured the essence of Einstein’s thought during the decades when mathematical “simplicity” guided him in his search for a unified field theory. And it echoed the great Isaac Newton’s declaration in book 3 of the Principia: “Nature is pleased with simplicity.”