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THE DRAMA OF ALBERT EINSTEIN 



By Antonina Vallentin 



THE DRAMA. OF ALBERT EINSTEIN 
H. G. WELLS 

Tens i SAW: A LIFE OF GOYA 

MIRABEAU 
LEONARDO DA VINCI 

FRUSTRATION: STRESEMANtf's RACE WITH DEATH 
POET IN EXILE: *i'f$ K LIFE OF HEINRICH HEINE 



EINSTEIN AT THE WINDOW OF HIS STUDY, PRINCETON 
"God does not play at dice/* 



Tht DRAMA of 
ALBERT EINSTEIN 



by Antonina Vallentin 



TRANSLATED BY MOURA BUDBERG 




Doubleday 6- Company, Inc., Garden City, N.Y., 1954 



Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 54-5715 

Copyright, 1954, by Antonina Valkntin 

Att Rights Reserved 
Printed in the United States 

at 

The Country Life Press, Garden City, tf.Y. 
First Edition 

PHOTOGRAPHS BY LOTTE JACOBI 



THE DRAMA OF ALBERT EINSTEIN 



God does not play at dice. 

ALBERT EINSTEIN 



Chapter I 



ALBERT EINSTEIN has never quite accepted the fact that 
he is a celebrity. Few men have been quite so spectacularly 
and steadily successful, but fame is no more to Einstein than 
a traveling companion he manages to forget it from time 
to time, but there it is, always beside him, irritating him by 
its very permanency. It is not part of his real nature and to 
understand him properly one has to forget about it. 

Albert Einstein's life has been a constant struggle between 
his love of anonymity and the burdens of his fame, and at 
times only his sense of humor has saved Tn'm from complete 
exasperation. He has never let himself be carried away by the 
enthusiasm he provokes. He bows without embarrassment 
to the frenzied applause which greets him, but there is a 
conspiratorial twinlde in his eye for his relations and friends 
as if calling them to witness that these strange proceedings 
have nothing to do with him. His smile of amusement is 
always tinged with the same faint surprise, as though he 
recognizes that the crowd has to have an idol but still cannot 

- 9 



imagine why they should have picked on him to fill the role. 

The British Ambassador to Berlin, Sir Horace Rumbold, 
once told him the story of how his son, arriving from school, 
had asked with one foot still on the train: "Daddy, have you 
met Einstein?" When the Ambassador had to admit that he 
had not yet had that honor, the boy shrugged his shoulders 
pityingly, implying that his father had wasted his time in 
Berlin. "I was quite withered by his contempt," said Sir 
Horace. Einstein shook his head, amused yet puzzled. "I 
really don't know why it is," he said, "that, having written 
a few papers that only a handful of people in the whole world 
are able to understand, I have apparently acquired such 
fame." He spoke with detachment, as though describing 
some peculiar phenomenon. He evidently considered the 
problem insoluble, but he spoke with astonishment as well as 
resignation. 

The contrast between his almost legendary reputation and 
its esoteric origins is, in fact, striking. One of Einstein's 
assistants describes how, around 1917, a physicist talking to 
Sir Arthur Eddington, the famous English astronomer and 
one of the scientists most instrumental to Einstein's glory, 
said: "You, Sir Arthur, are one of the three men in the world 
who understand the theory of relativity." A slightly pained 
expression crossed Eddington's face and his questioner 
hastened to add: "There's no need to be embarrassed, Pro- 
fessor, you are much too modest." 

"It's not a question of modesty," protested Sir Arthur, "I 
was only asking myself who the third could be." 

But there must be some reason why admiration for Ein- 
stein has reached such a high spiritual level and has pene- 
trated so deeply into the minds of the masses. He has caught 

10 - 



the imagination of the man in the street in Paris, London, 
Berlin, and Tokyo. When a film on Einstein was shown at 
the Museum of Natural History in New York the scene he- 
came a riot which necessitated police intervention. It would 
take a philosopher and a sociologist together to analyze the 
extent of Einstein's fame and the sensational forms it has 
taken. A study of this curious phenomenon, the homage of 
the humble to the great, would be a major contribution to 
our understanding of our times. 

This fame, the like of which few living men have ex- 
perienced, has remained unaff ected by passing tastes, changes 
in values, and contemporary problems. Einstein is, as some- 
body remarked, the only immovable idol of our troubled age. 
This celebrity has often been tested, and has sometimes 
been made the subject of jokes. Two American students 
once made a bet. They addressed an envelope to "Professor 
Albert Einstein, Europe." It arrived at its destination with 
the normal delay. "How excellent the postal service is!" was 
Einstein's only comment. 

There is nothing more difficult than to escape from the sort 
of mesmerism which a great name seems to exercise: but 
to understand Einstein properly, it is essential to try to break 
free from it. It is equally important, too, to free oneself from 
the spell exercised by his appearance the immense head 
made even larger by the huge shock of hair: a striking head 
too well known from photographs. With age Einstein has 
gained in intensity of expression: most certainly his peculiar 
fascination has increased. As a young man and even in 
middle age, Einstein had regular features, plump cheeks, a 
round chin masculine good looks of the type that played 
havoc at the turn of the century. His short nose, with its 

11 



finely chiseled bridge, spread outward toward the nostrils, 
giving an impression o sensuality. His large, generous mouth 
looked red under his black mustache, and contrasted with 
his dull skin with its slightly sallow tinge. The lower half 
of his face might have belonged to a sensualist who found 
plenty of reasons to love life and enjoy it. His round head 
was finely set on his powerful neck with its pale, easily tanned 
skin. His large, square shoulders were those of a standard- 
bearer. His muscular body grew heavy in later life, not in 
the way that the bodies of inactive people do, carelessly and 
sluggishly, but haphazardly and reluctantly, like those who 
retire from a life in the open explorers, sea captains. But 
when you came to the eyes this first impression vanished: 
they were dark, compelling, slightly protruding eyes. The 
picture of the fine physical specimen in love with life had to 
give way to a new concept of him. 

He might have been a poet, or certainly a musician. These 
brilliant, sparkling eyes might have been lost in a dream of 
harmony, as if the dreamer were one with the sound. His 
hands also seemed made for a violin. Hands which were 
large and sensual, judging from the palms, narrowed toward 
the tapering fingers, with rounded nails the hands and 
fingers of a musician. But above the striking eyes came the 
forehead. It was not particularly high in itself, or impres- 
sively wide. But the lobes were strong, stretching the pol- 
ished skin, and almost forming a semicircle as they descended 
to the temples. This bone structure prepared one for the 
exceptional. Even if the head had been shaved, the space 
tinder it would have seemed vast, but it was overhung by 
his hair, which was black as the night when he was young. 
It formed a turbulent background for his face, as it stood 

12 * 



off from his forehead, rebellious and straight, full of an in- 
dependent vitality. Today his hair is spectacularly white. The 
first silver streaks that appeared ran from both sides of his 
forehead, so that he looked like Michelangelo's Moses. As 
they increased, the silver and black locks, flowing in the wind, 
looked almost iridescent. 

Today his appearance is unforgettable. It attracts imme- 
diate attention. One feels either immeasurably flattered or 
stupidly embarrassed whenever one is near Einstein. But he 
himself seems impervious to the sensation he creates. His 
self-assurance is not like that of the famous personalities who 
walk through a crowd with complete indifference. His un- 
self-consciousness is so complete that one can hardly believe 
he is not putting it on. He actually does not realize that there 
is anything unusual going on around him. It is true that he 
can see the attention fixed on him; he is aware of an atmos- 
phere of respect; he hears his name mentioned all around 
him; and he is even conscious, secretly, of the bores he wishes 
to avoid. But all this attention means no more to him than 
the noise of the windmill to the sleeping miller. It is not, and 
never has been, a source of amusement to him. On the other 
hand, it has ceased to annoy him. 

Einstein has achieved a detachment which few other 
people have ever attained. He is equally disassociated from 
the impression he makes on the world and from the reper- 
cussions of his fame. He was incidentally responsible for one 
of the rare revealing sentences about himself when he 
thanked G. B. Shaw for the flattering words "addressed to 
my mythical namesake who makes my life a singular bur- 
den." This detachment is so complete that very often in his 
presence it is difficult to remember that one is indeed with 

IS 



him. It would be so easy to think one was in the presence o 
his double yet even the doubles of celebrities are conscious 
of having something exceptional about them. Einstein is un- 
conscious of being exceptional to a degree that is difficult to 
imagine. I have even had the suspicion that he really believes 
himself to be exactly like everyone else. 

One day at Princeton, in the small, quiet university town 
where he has lived for years, he wanted to see the film The 
Life of Emile Zola. He arrived at the movie theater with his 
assistant, bought tickets and went in, and then discovered 
that the performance would not start for another quarter of 
an hour. They decided to go for a walk. 

TBut we have given up our tickets/* Einstein murmured 
anxiously to the ticket collector. "Will you recognize us?" 

The man laughed, thinking Einstein must be joking.  
the customary formalities, and those who had not known 
him long would explain patiently, as to a backward child. 
They^would repeat: "This is done . . /* "Why is it done?" 
he would ask. Until you noticed his smile he seemed like a 
malicious child. "Tails? Why tails? I never had any and never 
missed them.** Once his wife employed all her powers of 

26 



persuasion, her charm and humor, to make him order evening 
clothes, for one solemn occasion, and after violent resistance 
from him a compromise was eventually reached: a dinner 
jacket, instead of tails. Afterward he merely said, yes, he did 
have a dinner jacket in his cupboard which he was even 
ready to exhibit, until the day came when "the fine thing," 
as he called it, had grown too small and was no longer pre- 
sentable. 

He defended himself against submission to conventions 
with obstinacy and wit. He was only really at his ease in an 
open-necked shirt and sandals. He preferred old clothes a 
mended sweater, an ancient waistcoat to any material 
strange to the touch: a shabby dressing gown was always 
more comfortable than any grand new one given him as a 
present. Luxurious gifts had a way of disappearing from one 
day to the next: they were given away to some poor wretch 
whom Einstein would persuade to hurry off discreetly with 
his parcel before the family noticed it. 

In his battle against material things Einstein showed his 
pity for those who complicate their lives with the trifles they 
carry around with them. When he was invited to a series of 
conferences at the Sorbonne, the German Ambassador to 
France, Von Hoesch, insisted that he should stay at the 
embassy. He could not refuse. But against the luxurious set- 
ting of the former home of Josephine Beauharnais Einstein 
appeared completely incongruous. "You know, Einstein has 
arrived with only one pair of shoes,** the Ambassador con- 
fided to me. "My valet has to clean them several times a day." 
Einstein in his turn complained that his shoes were con- 
stantly disappearing. "I keep telling the good man that I'm 
going out, that it is still raining, that he shouldn't polish 

* 27 



them when they are going to get dirty right away, but he 
doesn't understand me." 

One day when he had come to see us in Geneva, I noticed 
as he was leaving that it was raffling in torrents. He had 
nothing on his head, so I offered him one of my husband's 
hats. "What for? I knew it would rain, that's why I didn't 
take my hat it dries less quickly than my hair surely that 
is obvious!'* he said to me, laughing. 

Once he left for London with a suitcase well packed by his 
wife. He returned to Berlin with all the clothes still folded 
and untouched. He had had no opportunity to wear them, 
he said. He was wearing shoes but no socks, and explained 
to me triumphantly: *Tve discovered that one can easily 
wear shoes without socks socks, you know, get holes in them 
my wife does nothing but mend them. Ill never wear any 
again now that I can do without them." The argument 
seemed conclusive to him. 

In all this quiet victory of Einstein's over material encum- 
brances was reflected the memory of what happened when 
life had been hard for him after he left his sheltered child- 
hood. The privations of a penniless boy in a foreign country 
taught him a lesson he remembered all his life. The founda- 
tion of security on which the youth of sixteen had based his 
future life was flimsy. He had to get a job quickly, to earn 
his living. He had given up his matriculation when leaving 
Munich and now he had to make up for it, as no free career 
was open to him without it 

His father's business prospered no better in Italy than it 
had in Germany, and he was unable to help his son. Other 
members of the family had done better. Dispersed over all 
the world, they had maintained the solidarity, characteristic 

. 98 . 



of Jewish families, which does not imply affection so much 
as a tradition of mutual responsibility. Albert Einstein aimed 
at the Polytechnic in Zurich and hoped his mathematics 
would enable him, to pass his entrance exams. Rich relations 
helped out by supplying a hundred Swiss francs a month, 
but they had no suspicion of the forces they were helping 
to unleash, and one of the most remarkable scientific careers 
in history was launched out of family charity, exercised more 
from a sense of duty than any confidence in the boy's gifts 
or any interest in science. 

His career began with a failure. His knowledge of mathe- 
matics was not enough to make up for gaps in other fields. 
Although he was morally mature beyond his age, the young 
man had to return to the school desk like any dunce or time 
waster. It was the ordinary canton school in the small Swiss 
town of Aarau. One of his teachers took a particular interest 
in the strange youth, such a mixture of self-confidence and 
shyness, of indifference and curiosity. The fact that he was in 
a small town must have helped TIJTYI overcome the dismay of 
his initial failure, for he had never liked the bustling life of 
big cities. Long solitary walks in fields or forests are still 
better for his work than hunching over a desk. Watching 
him kick the ground, on a walk, as though testing it with his 
toe before putting his boot down, one would suppose that 
some strange atavism remains in him, as if he had inherited 
a love of the soil from generations of peasants. In Aarau the 
hills were close by and Nature gave him self-confidence as 
no human being could have done. 

After passing the examinations for the Zurich Polytechnic, 
he decided to devote himself to teaching instead of specializ- 
ing as an engineer, his original intention. 



"There is such a thing as a passionate desire to understand, 
just as there is a passionate love for music. This passion is 
common with children, but it usually vanishes as they grow 
up. Without it, there would be no natural science and no 
mathematics/* Thus Einstein wrote in 1950, in connection 
with his scientific memoir on the theory of generalized 
gravitation. This passion has always remained with him. It 
has never been blunted and it still dominates the man of 
seventy-five, as it guided the young man on his chosen path 
with the sureness of a sleepwalker. The birth of a theory 
that was to shake the world originated with this passion, the 
violence of this curiosity. The question that fascinated the 
youth of sixteen was: What would happen if a man should 
try to imprison a ray of light? The question was naturally 
more complex, but as scientific formulae were beyond me, 
it was with these simple words that Einstein explained what 
he himself considered to be the starting point of his lif ework. 

Once he had asked himself the question, the problem 
haunted him. It was always present as he continued his 
studies at the Polytechnic and struggled with the material 
difficulties in his path. In spite of an intense interest in mathe- 
matics, he decided to study to be a teacher of physics. 
Mathematics, he said to himself, was divided into so many 
specialized fields that any one of them could absorb the short 
span of a man's life. "I was like Buridan's donkey, who could 
not decide which stack of hay to choose,** he said later. His 
choice was dictated by his contempt for automatically ac- 
quired knowledge, which he would have had to absorb be- 
fore reaching essential principles. It sums up his lasting sense 
of economy in all unnecessary intellectual effort. One could 
call it a reluctance to use a very fine instrument for coarse 
work. 



During his first visit to America in 1921, lie was given a 
questionnaire covering all the intellectual equipment a 
student was supposed to carry with him through life, once 
his university studies ended. To one question as to the speed 
of sound, Einstein replied: *T don't know. I don't crowd my 
memory with facts that I can easily find in an encyclopedia." 

Looking back on his years of study, he must have said to 
himself, with regret, that his intuition in the mathematical 
field cannot have been sufficient to enable him to distinguish 
between things of fundamental importance and the heap of 
information with which he could have dispensed. 

In contrast to this resistance to what he considered the 
dead weight of knowledge, the work in the laboratory fasci- 
nated him by its direct contact with experiment. But he 
was forced to proclaim later the absolute priority of pure 
speculation. Summing up this conviction in recently pub- 
lished notes, he writes: "A theory can be checked by experi- 
ment, but there is no path that leads from experiment to a 
theory that has not yet been established." 

This fascination for laboratory work arose from a charac- 
teristic one would not have expected in him. One might have 
thought that, having worked with principles which the man 
in the street could not grasp, he had arrived at a divorce 
from reality. His aloofness from daily chores also might have 
created the impression that there was a screen between him 
and the material side of Jif e. In fact there is nothing of the 
absent-minded scientist about him. The vagueness often 
observed in him is put on, a kind of protection against 
an intrusive presence. Though concentration on his work 
removes him from the outside world, when not so absorbed 
his attention is curiously alert, arrested often in the most 
unexpected way by an apparently uninteresting phenomenon. 

SI 



He is intensely observant: his glance fixes on some detail 
and lingers over something which other people do not even 
notice. His interest will be aroused suddenly by statements 
made by specialists on questions which one would have 
thought alien to his world, secrets of craftsmanship and 
details of engineering. Everything ingenious in the material 
sphere engages his attention. If you watch him handle some 
object, he seems to take possession of it. He does not touch 
things as though he wanted to push them away as people do 
when their thoughts are elsewhere; he follows the outline 
and sounds the surface, seeming to penetrate into all its 
properties. He has a taste for solid things such as steel struc- 
tures; he likes to watch a thing in the making. He feels at 
home in a world of stable laws, in a reality ruled by unaltera- 
ble material facts. 

I saw him one day talking with a building engineer. His 
fingers passed tenderly over the blueprint for a bridge spread 
on the table. He underlined certain details, and showed that 
labor and material could be saved by a better disposition of 
the arches. The engineer watched him with wide-eyed, naive 
surprise. ""People think that Albert is a dreamer/' said Mrs. 
Einstein. Trie really is a very practical man." She seemed 
proud that her husband had his feet on the ground. Had 
Einstein carried out his initial plan of study, he might have 
become a remarkable technician. 

The experiments in the laboratory which so fascinated 
him were the most attractive part of the Polytechnic pro- 
gram. All his life he has retained a distaste for education 
when it stuffs young minds with facts, names, or formulae. 
He is apt to say that one need not go to a university to 
learn these they can be found in books. Education should 

32 




EINSTEIN AND HIS SISTER MAYA AS CHILDREN 

Photos on Einstein family cups. 

"They lived in a sheltered and peaceful atmosphere . . " 




EINSTEIN AND HIS SISTER MAYA, ABOUT 1885 



be devoted wholly to helping young people to think, to give 
them the training no textbook can provide. "It is truly a 
miracle that modern education hasn't completely stifled the 
sacred curiosity of research," he said. As a student, he felt 
deeply the horrible oppression and the constraint of examina- 
tions. He felt as if he were living under the guillotine, in im- 
minent fear of a deadline being put to his time. Now, in his 
seventies, he remembers his years of study with a kind of 
resentment at the time it all took. "I believe that you could 
even ruin the appetite of a healthy animal if you forced it to 
eat under threat of a whip, even when it is not hungry, and 
especially if you made an appropriate choice of the food it 
must swallow." 

Constraint has always been his personal enemy. His whole 
youth was a battle against it. When he uttered the German 
word for it, an abrupt word, with a peculiarly sinister sound, 
Zwang, everything tolerant, humorous, or resigned in his ex- 
pression vanished. He spat out the word as one does a fish- 
bone. While editing his biographical notes in the peace of 
his Princeton study, where no power on earth would seem 
any longer to threaten his absolute liberty, Einstein remem- 
bered the havoc it played with his life. "The constraint was 
so terrifying that after I had passed the final examination, I 
found myself unable to think of any scientific problem for 
almost a year." That year must have been a painful one. He 
had made sacrifices himself in order to secure a livelihood 
independent of family charity. He had often gone hungry. 
He had few needs and was careless in appearance. A misera- 
ble room and an old suit did not upset him, but insufficient 
food was another matter. He never spoke of his privations, 
but his health suffered from it and when he showed signs 

83 



of exhaustion later on, Mrs. Einstein would explain that "it 
was the effect of what he had endured when he was so poor/ 3 
She could not spoil him enough; a picture of the "poor boy" 
haunted her. The serious illness which recently made it 
necessary for him to undergo a grave operation was the price 
paid for the poverty of his youth. 

No matter how hungry he was, Einstein meticulously put 
aside twenty francs from the hundred francs his family gave 
him each month to pay for his naturalization. By the time he 
passed his examination he was a Swiss subject. His papers 
were in order. He asked for what seemed to htm the most 
obvious post that of an assistant, which professors usually 
granted to gifted pupils. But no professor had marked his 
exceptional faculties, none had enough interest in him to 
forward his career. In vain he tried to join the university 
through this little door. What disconcerted him most was 
that the refusals were not even backed by some forceful, 
weighty argument. They left him with a sense of bitterness 
that was rare with Mm. It was not because of the humiliation 
of pleading, or that the refusals undermined his self-confi- 
dence, but because of the hypocrisy he sensed behind the 
conspiracy of silence that confronted him. Once, years after, 
he wrote to an American student who had sent him a passion- 
ate indictment on the injustice of professors, of which she 
felt herself a victim : "I, too, once was treated so by my profes- 
sors, who did not like my spirit of independence, and though 
they needed an assistant, refused to appoint me as one." But 
he wrote to the American further that one only made oneself 
ridiculous by fostering personal resentments. He advised her 
to put her temper in her pocket and her manuscript in her 
desk 

34 



Einstein never harbors grudges. He always hastens to 
forget any wrong done to him personally. He deliberately 
sweeps away from his memory all painful incidents, all his 
most humiliating encounters with stupidity or malice. Once, 
after he had received honorary degrees from many universi- 
ties, he was awarded one by Zurich. He burst into laughter, 
honest laughter with no irony in it, but he read out to us, his 
eyes glittering with amusement, the answer he composed to 
thank the Alma Mater that had shown so little initial interest 
in him for bestowing the honor. He looked like an urchin 
with his tongue in his cheek as he watched our reactions. 

The young man had been forced, owing to this failure, to 
look for a job. He tried for a professorship in physics at a 
lycee, but was unsuccessful, both in Zurich and in smaller 
Swiss towns. Did he really seem so little qualified for the 
post he sought or was it perhaps some apprehension of genius 
which put off the administrators who might otherwise have 
hired him? Einstein still wonders and does not know whether 
he was just too insignificant or whether there was already an 
odor of sulphur about him. He began to answer newspaper 
advertisements, rushing hither and thither when he read of a 
vacancy, any vacancy. He found a post as temporary assist- 
ant in a technical school in Winterthur which kept him going 
for several months. With gratitude he took on a modest post 
as tutor at a boarding school in Schaffihausen, looking after 
two backward boys. He liked the job, but he had his own 
ideas about teaching physics. He lost the job because he 
wanted to teach freely, in his own way. He could find no 
other place in secondary education. 

All his life Einstein has regretted not having been a school- 
teacher. It may be just a sentimental reflex; as a toy coveted 

35 - 



in a poor childhood might haunt a man grown rich. The 
regret is sincere, though it puzzles those who know his lack 
of enthusiasm for regular instruction, and his choice later 
on of positions not entailing the obligations of following a 
scheduled course. His own work and ideas absorbed him to 
such an extent that he tended to propound them before an 
audience ill equipped to understand him. He had no desire 
to impose any moral laws, and even less to exercise authority. 
What he did regret, as a great pleasure that he never experi- 
enced, was the task of awakening curiosity in minds which 
had not yet been blunted by conventional education. Put 
more simply, it is contact with childhood which he feels he 
has always missed. 

Whenever Einstein speaks to a child one realizes what 
barriers exist in his relationship with adults. He is quick to 
reach an understanding with children and they have only 
to look at each other to become accomplices. It is not the re- 
emergence of the backward child or boy in Einstein. Chil- 
dren's minds have for him the same fascination as the authen- 
tic material of inanimate objects: he loves their naivete, 
still unaffected by conventional restraints, their impetuous 
questions, and their lack of embarrassment about the gaps 
they reveal in their knowledge. Above all Einstein shares 
their laughter and that mysterious sense of humor that makes 
grownups exclaim: "What on earth are they laughing about?" 
(The humorous verses Einstein composed for my daughter 
when she was small were never beyond her comprehension, 
And so Einstein goes on regretting never having been a 
schoolteacher. He thinks of children as lost in a universe 
of physical phenomena. He knows that he can make the great 
laws of nature accessible to them. He loves an explanation to 

36 



be both exact and clear. He once interrupted a grandiloquent 
statement on a scientific discovery by a visitor with: "If it is 
something that one can understand, one can also explain it 
clearly/ 7 It annoys him that the automatic way in which 
physics is so often taught to children is responsible for the 
number of adults excluded forever from awareness of that 
miraculous universe. I talked to him about my own ignorance 
of the most elementary facts, as I had a blind spot for even 
the basic principles of mathematics and physics. tfe What non- 
sense!" he said aggressively. "It is merely that you haven't 
been taught properly/' The telephone interrupted us. **You 
see,** I said, "I have been told how a telephone works, but I 
still don't grasp it" "Why, it's very simple," and he explained 
it so clearly that it became quite obvious and also wonderful. 
"You see what a good teacher of elementary physics I might 
have been," he said, laughing at my sense of achievement. 
Afterward he made a point of ^plaining discoveries which, 
without Trim, would still be enigmas to me. He has a tireless 
patience in answering the most ignorant questions. He takes 
joy in pointing out the action of the great laws of the universe* 
in prosaic, everyday happenings. 

Once I saw him stir the tea in his cup with concentrated 
attention, playing with his spoon as if wrapped in a dream. 
The whirlpool he had produced in the cup so completely 
absorbed him that he did not even hear his wife speaking to 
him. The rest of us lowered our voices, aware that his 
thoughts were far away. Suddenly he glanced at us with 
mischievous defiance. "Who can explain why a tea leaf in a 
cup that you stir remains on the top and in the middle?" 
Obviously, none of us knew, and even had we thought we 
did we would not have risked an explanation in his presence. 

- 37 



For a moment lie was silent, then said triumphantly: "You 
see, there were several tea leaves that fell to the bottom of 
the cup because they were heavier. When I began to stir, they 
gathered in the middle, owing to the centrifugal force. But 
die whirlpool that I produced is not uniform it is arrested 
at the edges by friction and its force of rotation there is 
weaker than in the middle. It is also weaker at the bottom of 
the cup and that is why the leaves are carried toward the 
middle and to the top, until the rotating movement is sta- 
bilized by the influence of the friction exercised from the 
depth." 

Einstein spoke simply, making us participants in his own 
discovery; and we felt we could have discovered it without 
him. He went on: "The same thing happens at the river 
bends. It explains the erosion that goes on at the shore and 
the formation of windings. Can't you see how simple it is?" 
It was, in fact, very simple everything is very simple when 
he explains it with ordinary words. But when he stops speak- 
ing the heavy door of the lost universe shuts behind him 
again. 

This taste for playing with problems like so many billiard 
balls is so strong that Heinrich Simon, the editor of the 
Frankfurter Zeitung, once let him, at his own request, write 
scientific riddles. The condition was that they should be 
published anonymously. Heinrich Simon was amazed. An 
American paper had offered Einstein a fabulous sum for an 
article and failed to get a statement of a few lines. The same 
man was willing to sit down and in his fine, clear writing 
formulate "posers" which he might have tried on the students 
in his class and now was giving away. The readers of the 
Frankfurter Zeitung never suspected the authorship of the 

38 



scientific problems over which they racked their brains. 
Heinrich Simon, who found it difficult to keep the secret, 
told me that readers did not always find them easy, but they 
were always highly instructive. "It is, after all, so simple/' 
said Einstein. That conviction is the key to his work, which 
he^affirmed in 1936 in a paper on "Physics and Reality": 
"The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it 
is comprehensible." 



39 



Chapter III 



"EVERY scientist ought to have a shoemakers job," Ein- 
stein once said. He found one of the sort in 1902, after a 
long and anxious search, thanks to a schoolfellow who was 
touched by his obvious poverty and who asked his father to 
intervene for Einstein with the director of the Federal Office 
of Patents in Bern. Here again he almost met with failure. 
The director was looking for someone capable of judging 
whether a request for a patent had any justification. 'What 
do you know about patents?'* he asked. "Nothing," replied 
Einstein. The interview might have ended there and then, 
but the frankness of this brief admission intrigued the man, 
who had been informed of the financial straits of the candi- 
date. A long conversation proved that the applicant did know 
enough to recognize the value of an invention. 

With this well-paid job, a small fortune in Einstein's eyes, 
his struggle for existence came to an end. He could now 
consider getting married. He had met at the university a 
Serbian student, Mileva Marie, who also intended to be- 

41 



come a teacher o physics. Perhaps the difference in their 
origins, the contrast in their characters, attracted him. His 
youth may have been drawn subconsciously toward the 
support of a woman slightly older than himself, or perhaps 
lie simply felt the need of an understanding response. Albert 
Einstein is not the sort of man who ever fully communicates 
his thoughts to other people: but he likes to use them as the 
sounding board of his own ideas. He needs appropriate an- 
swers in a conversation that is chiefly a monologue. 

His purely personal feelings have been consciously rele- 
gated more and more to the background of his existence. 
He spoke once of the "puritanical reserve" necessary to the 
scientist who, seeking truth, must remain removed from all 
disturbing emotions. With him this puritanical reserve is 
not the natural reserve of a man whose private life has been 
invaded by fame, nor merely a refractory instinct rejecting 
ill display of sentiment, but rather a conscious distribution of 
values according to their true worth. 

Summing up his life on the eve of his seventieth birthday, 
Einstein confined himself to an account of what had been for 
him a great spiritual adventure. He realized how inadequate 
his story was to dispel curiosity about him as a human being, 
and added mischievously: "Is this what is called an obituary? 
The surprised reader may well wonder. I am almost ready to 
reply: essentially, yes, it is for the essential in the destiny of 
a man of my sort is what and how he thinks and not what he 
does or what he goes through." The true story of Albert 
Einstein unfolds on two planes, that of his private life and 
that of his thought. What happens to him in his private life 
has always been on a lower level for him, only externally 
affecting his real destiny. His real world has been the world 
of thought and science. 



On this lower level Albert Einstein, when twenty-three 
years old, settled down in Bern, married, and founded a 
family. Two sons were born in succession. The younger 
looked like him he had his father's large, bulging, and 
sparkling eyes and shape of face. He inherited some part 
of his gifts and his taste for music, but he suffered from his 
mother's heredity, for she came of a mentally unbalanced 
family. 

Albert Einstein loved his sons as much as he could love 
anyone. They caused him the joys and torments all children 
cause their parents, but parental joy and torment were sub- 
ordinated to his work. On the lower worldly level also he 
was engrossed with the work in the Patent Office, judging 
the quality of applications and often editing imprecise and 
loosely worded formulations. His "job as a shoemaker" inter- 
ested him. His gifts as a jack-of-all-trades revealed them- 
selves, and he even invented an apparatus for measuring 
short electric voltages. 

But his thoughts were elsewhere. To understand what 
happened in the years following his new-found security, one 
must consider not only the creative miracle of genius but 
also the curious capacity he had for absenting himself from 
his immediate worldly surroundings. A separation seemed to 
take place between his mind and his body not unlike the 
ecstasy of a saint. The word "transfiguration" acquired an 
almost literal sense. But Einstein's "absences" were, in their 
external aspect, as alien as possible to ecstatic conditions; 
they were so realistic and commonplace that a superficial 
observer might never have noticed them. 

Albert Einstein would be there, his senses radiantly alive to 
the simple and sensual pleasures of life. You might be sitting 

43 - 



alone with him, or with two or three others, or the room 
might even be full of people. He had just finished a sentence. 
You would think he was following the conversation intently. 
Suddenly he would fall silent and stop listening to you. 
He would rise to his feet without a word, or remain sitting 
motionless. The effect would be the same. He would be 
unreachable. You could start talking noisily, or lapse into an 
even more embarrassing silence, with everybody staring at 
him, but he would neither see nor hear. This had nothing 
in common with the absent-mindedness of a man wrapped 
up in his own thoughts, who continues to circulate in a world 
of reality, causing absurd misunderstandings. With Einstein, 
the eclipse was and is total. Nothing, as far as one could see, 
changed in his expression. The shadow of a smile might still 
linger around his lips, he might still frown if some pain- 
ful matter had been the subject of discussion, but the 
thoughts of the moment before had vanished. The eyelids 
might droop, heavy, slightly purple in color, or the eyes be 
wide open, but they would be dark and lusterless as the 
eyes of a blind man. He might appear lost to us for a long 
time, and then return to u*s as if he had never realized his 
absence; he might remain without movement for a time that 
to us appeared an eternity, or return so rapidly that we 
thought we had been dreaming. His returns were as abrupt 
as his departures. But one never quite lost the feeling that 
his presence among us was only a temporary loan. 

At the Federal Patent Office during the three years that 
he conscientously performed his duties there, the same thing 
must often have happened. As soon as he got back his inter- 
est in scientific research, and recovered from the saturation 
of knowledge he needed for his examination, he attacked 

44 - 



the problem of light rays which had haunted him ever since 
he was sixteen. He spoke once of the "desperate efforts" 
pursued by him over many years to find a solution. His fu- 
ture collaborator, Professor Infeld, pointed out that these 
characteristic efforts illustrated first and foremost what he 
called Einstein's capacity for wonder. Perhaps that capacity 
which appears not only in the field of pure speculation is 
one of his chief characteristics: he faces every phenomenon 
as though it were quite new, as though it had not yet found 
its stable place in the universe, and asks Why? as though 
nothing had ever before been said on the subject He accepts 
no solution on trust Infeld points out another ability of Ein- 
stein's: to ponder for years over the same problem "until 
darkness is transformed into the light of understanding," and 
his gift of finding formulae for simple, imaginary experi- 
ments, "experiments that could never be performed in prac- 
tice, but which, when properly analyzed, strangely clarify 
our understanding of the world around us/* 

During this time of extraordinary creative richness Ein- 
stein attended to many other problems that came his way, 
edited papers on various subjects, and treated them all as 
of equal importance. The theory that scientists the world 
over agreed had caused a break with the experience of many 
centuries, and the creation of a new universe, first saw the 
light in a specialized German publication, the Year Book 
of Physics, a bulky volume filled with the most diverse 
contributions. Einstein published one article in it each year 
after 1901, when he completed his studies. The 1905 volume 
contained five contributions from Trim. They were all on 
different subjects. Perhaps the author did not wish to empha- 
size one subject more than another. But the one entitled 

45 - 



"A New Definition of Molecular Dimensions" was to give 
Tiim his chance at a university career. Another dealt with the 
quantum law of the emission and absorption of light and 
explained the phenomenon known in physics as "photo- 
electrical effect." The principle formulated by Einstein has 
influenced research in the physics of the quantum and spec- 
troscopy everywhere. His formulation of this law gave birth 
to television and other applications of the photoelectric cell. 
This was the contribution that won for him the Nobel Prize. 
A third article took as its starting point the experiment made 
by the botanist Robert Brown on the movement of minute 
particles suspended in liquid. The fourth paper was the 
longest of all. Its title in no way augured the revolution that 
it was to create: "On the Electrodynamics of Bodies in Move- 
ment/* But men with a knowledge of scientific publications 
note a purely superficial difference: this particular article 
contains no references, quotes no authority, and has few 
footnotes and those few serve only to explain the text. Even- 
tually, the experts were unanimous in declaring that what 
might have been but an outline of the theory of relativity 
was in fact a complete paper on the subject. Einstein himself 
must have been conscious of the importance of the solution 
he had arrived at. It was learned much later that he had a 
total collapse after it, exhausted by his superhuman effort. 
He was ill for a fortnight. The shock was very violent. 

Einstein never forgot the moment when the ultimate light 
was revealed to him. He was conscious of living through a 
supreme experience. He knew no greater human emotion: no 
violent passion or deep distress could compare in intensity 
with the transformation of the universe which had taken 
place before his eyes. In an essay written in January 1940 on 

46 - 



the foundation of theoretical physics, after speaking of the 
new concepts of fields discovered by Faraday, Einstein 
wrote: "The precise enunciation of the laws of these fields in 
space-time was the work of Maxwell. Can we visualize what 
he must have gone through when the differential equations 
that he had formulated proved that the electromagnetic 
fields are propagated in the shape of polarized waves and 
with the speed of light? . . . To few people in this world has 
it been given to witness such an experiment/* he added with 
one of his rare glimpses of emotiqn, reminded no doubt of 
his own happiness. 

Perhaps it was struggle required to reach his final convic- 
tions, perhaps it was the very intensity of his creative pow- 
ers, but he seemed (was it from birth or from that moment?) 
unconscious of everything life could offer him and impervious 
to emotion. In his affections as well as in his thoughts, he 
seemed to be only lending a presence which he might with- 
draw at any time. 

Spurred on by this supreme effort, Albert Einstein not only 
reconsidered theories of physics and questioned mechanical 
laws that had seemed safe against attack, but in his outline of 
the theory of relativity, as well as in a short article the fifth 
which appeared in the Year Book of Physics under the title 
"Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on Its Energy Content?" 
he gave warning of a power that was to shake the world. 
For the first time the formula rendering the use of atomic 
energy theoretically possible appeared in print, and the pos- 
sibility of annihilating humanity became a subject of specula- 
tion. The old concept of our universe had been upset by one 
man. Writing about the consideration of all values that be- 
gan to take place, Bafchelard raised the question: "Is so little 

47 



required to shake a spatial universe? Can a single experiment 
of the twentieth century annihilate (a follower of Sartre 
would plunge into nothingness) more than two or three cen- 
turies of rational thought? Yes, a single decimal sufficed." 

The date 1905 in the science books is often given as the 
decisive date in the new physics. One cannot, however, "date" 
great matters so clearly. Though the formula of the theory 
had appeared in print, and was safely stowed in the Year 
Book of Physics, there was no immediate revolution as the 
result of these new, still unassimilated ideas. Once again, as 
at the beginning of his career, Einstein's work was met with 
curious indifference. Nothing happened, absolutely nothing. 
Those who were later on to grasp the immense importance of 
these theories seem not to have noticed the article in which 
he developed them for the first time. His future collaborator, 
Professor Infeld, describes the years of silence that followed 
the publication of the first paper on relativity. Here and there 
an isolated scientist bent over the article and had some glim- 
mering of the changing universe. But with whom could he 
share the deep impression it produced? Where were the 
scientists qualified to discuss this genius, this stranger with 
no university credits, no university chair, no claim to justify 
such audacity of thought? 

A long way from Zurich, in the University of Cracow, a 
Polish professor, Witkowski, exclaimed on reading the arti- 
cle: "A new Copernicus has been born." He roused enthusi- 
asm in one of his pupils who later became a remarkable 
physicist. This young professor, Loria by name, spoke of 
Einstein's article to other colleagues, repeating the words 
of his teacher: "A new Copernicus has been born." Einstein? 
the name meant nothing to his colleagues. The professor 



talked with such f ervor to the German physicist Max Born 
that they went to the library to look for the 1905 Year Book 
of Physics, and Max Born wrote: "One of the most remarka- 
ble volumes in all scientific literature is Volume 17, Series 4, 
of the Year Book of Physics, 1905." Max Born himself became 
one of the first contributors to research in this field of rela- 
tivity. "But it was not before 1908 or 1909 that the attention 
of a great number of scientists was drawn towards Einstein's 
results,** wrote Infeld. Three or four years more went by. Is 
Einstein's later spectacular success to be explained by some 
mysterious law governing f ame, working now to compensate 
for all the early indifference? Fully conscious of his personal 
contribution, did Einstein expect immediate response, and 
was he eaten up with bitterness, with impatience? If so, he 
never expressed it. Little things he said such as: "The scien- 
tific mills are the slowest to grind their corn," may easily have 
referred to someone else. When he talks of the beginning of 
his career, he speaks of it as of something happening to an- 
other man. There was certainly no sense of frustration in 
him, and the patience he had then to exercise perhaps helped 
to render hrm immune to his later glory. 

Though the importance of his work was not at once 
recognized, its scope was noticed sufficiently to produce the 
impression that his modest position was somehow inade- 
quate. But one could not, after all, offer a Chair to a civil 
servant of the Federal Patent Office! In all the Germanic 
countries the line of demarcation between the secondary 
school and the university is strictly defined. A future univer- 
sity professor must justify himself by some work of distinc- 
tion to reach the first stage, the grade of lecturer. One of the 
articles published in the Year Book of Physicsnot the one 

49 



on the theory of relativity was considered sufficient to 
"qualify" Einstein. But since a lectureship does not bring 
with it any remuneration other than the scanty contributions 
of the students, Einstein could not think of abandoning his 
"livelihood." A compromise was finally found: while he was 
waiting for a professorship at Zurich to come through, the 
University of Bern let him keep the patent job and combine 
it with addresses to students as a university lecturer. 

One of his colleagues reports that Einstein, pursuing his 
own work in his mind, showed little interest in university 
matters and did not take enough trouble in preparing his 
lectures. The physicist who had proposed him for the Chair 
in Zurich, himself a professor there, came to Bern to get a 
report on his protege. Disappointed, he told Einstein that the 
lectures he addressed to his students would not be appro- 
priate for the position he had planned for him. "I do not 
especially wish to transfer to Zurich/* said Einstein quickly, 
like a man who wants above all to be left in peace. Still, he 
knew that he could not keep on working in Bern forever. He 
had to think of his career and it was inconceivable to refuse 
a Chair. There was, however, a rival on his path who was 
already established in the University of Zurich and who had 
been a former colleague in the Polytechnic. Friedrich Adler's 
father, Victor Adler, was leader of the Austrian Social Demo- 
crat Party; he was well known and had a large following 
abroad. Socialist circles in Zurich were very much on his son's 
side. A famous name might easily have eclipsed a stranger. 
Once more Einstein's career was in jeopardy. But integrity 
was a god to Friedrich Adler. It was he who intervened with 
the university authorities and stood aside. One of Einstein's 
biographers, Professor Frank, describes Adler s impatient 

50 * 



tone in promoting his rival: "If we can win a man like Ein- 
stein for our university, it would be ridiculous to nominate 
me; my faculties as a man of research in the field of physics 
are not in the same class as Einstein's.*' He insisted that politi- 
cal sympathies should not be allowed to interfere with the 
nomination. 

Einstein's university career began with this disinterested 
pleading by a man whose political convictions were well 
known. He was later to give spectacular proof of them in his 
own hour of fame. For one day, at a particularly critical 
moment in the First World War, Friedrich Adler walked 
into a Vienna restaurant and shot the Prime Minister, Count 
Stiirgkh, because he held hrm responsible for the disastrous 
and long-drawn-out war. 

Among the strange twists of fate that link the career of 
Einstein with great international events is the fact that 
Friedrich Adler, in prison on the eve of his death sentence, 
was correcting a paper of his own, refuting the theory of 
relativity. This theory, however, was by now so well estab- 
lished in the scientific world that it was on the strength of the 
arguments he expressed against it that an attempt was made 
to save Adler's life on the grounds that he was out of his mind 
at the moment of the murder. 

From 1909, the year of Einstein's appointment as professor 
extraordinary at Zurich (he was not yet holder of a Chair), 
though his remuneration was no higher than it had been as 
an official in Bern, his obligations increased. The family 
budget was balanced only by taking in students as lodgers. 

The appreciation of the scientific world came to Einstein 
gradually and this fact, curiously enough, permitted Trim to 
advance rapidly in his university career. Only a year had 

51 - 



passed and he was just over thirty when he was granted a 
Chair. In 1910 he was called to the German University at 
Prague. This nomination was merely an incident in his ca- 
reer, but it brought hi to two important turning points in 
his personal life. The regulations concerning government 
employment in Austria forced him to declare his religion. 
He had had no ties with the Jewish community since he left 
Munich, and no more links with Jewish tradition. His wife 
was Greek Orthodox. But he had not lost his youthful in- 
transigence. In university circles a more or less disguised 
anti-Semitism existed, particularly in Austria though the 
Austrian who was later to preach racial discrimination had 
not yet made his appearance. At that time it was sufficient 
to state one's religion on paper, in this way severing all con- 
nection with Jewry, to overcome many obstacles. Einstein's 
friends insisted that he should make what could be called a 
concession to prejudice. They quoted to him many "conver- 
sions'* for the sake of a career, but it was precisely these op- 
portunist arguments and these laws enforced by the Emperor 
Francis Joseph that brought Einstein to the reaffirmation of 
one of the principles of his life. The young professor filled in 
his questionnaire in his clear and regular handwriting: "Re- 
ligion Israelite." The decision was forced on him from out- 
side. It became more and more deeply rooted in him. 

A further change took place in his private life. The move, 
with all that it involved in the way of adaptation to the new 
milieu, to changed conditions in everyday life, served to 
accentuate the friction that existed between him and his wife. 
The special political circumstances that reigned in Prague 
must have weighed hard on Mileva Einstein, who was par- 
ticularly sensitive to the Skv problem. The Czech masses 

52 



were restless and angry at unfair discrimination against them. 
The dual monarchy maintained the fiction of equal civil 
rights. But the German-speaking Austrians considered them- 
selves the elite in a city which, had been the first in Central 
Europe to found a university; they treated the Slav elements 
with a contempt that was fed on old jokes from imperial 
Vienna. For them Czech was an inferior language used for 
addressing servants. 

In university life burning problems are reflected in small 
vexations and deep susceptibilities, and Albert Einstein did 
not "play the game"; he seemed not to notice that he was 
expected to identify himself with his surroundings. He re- 
mained aloof, unable to share petty resentments and vanities. 
His colleagues* narrow view of the world had little attraction 
for him. Now and then it aroused his sense of humor, but 
his amusement found little echo either at home or among his 
colleagues. In university circles he was like a visitor with 
strange manners. His successor in Prague, Professor Frank, 
was received on his arrival by the dean with: "In your spe- 
cialty, we ask only for one thing: to be a more or less normal 
man." 

The new professor was surprised. "Is that so rare a quality 
among physicists?" 

**You are not going to make me believe that your predeces- 
sor was a normal man?" replied the dean. 

Einstein stayed only two years in Prague. He did not know 
how people felt about him. He was absorbed in his work, 
isolated as though on a desert island, and hardly noticed 
other people. He was documenting and widening the theory 
of relativity as he had expounded it in 1905 and it was later, 
because of its restricted nature, characterized as "specific." *I 

53 - 



only became fully conscious of the fact/' lie said, "that the 
specific theory of relativity was only a first step towards a 
necessary evolution when I tried to integrate gravitation into 
the framework of that theory /* In 1912 six articles which he 
published in the Year Book of Physics were devoted for the 
most part to the problem of gravitation. The integration he 
attempted proved difficult. "The path was more arduous than 
had been expected," he wrote later, "because it was in con- 
tradiction to Euclid's Geometry/* 

At one time Einstein tried to describe the processes of 
scientific work and in doing so he exposed the workshop of 
his mind. Starting with primary concepts directly linked to 
sense experiences and with theorems which are interdepend- 
ent, the scientist tries to discover the logical unity in the 
image of the universe. He goes beyond what Einstein calls 
the ^secondary layer* to arrive at a system of the greatest 
conceivable unity. He considered it an error to designate 
these superimposed layers of thought as "degrees of abstrac- 
tion/* "I do not consider it right to conceal the logical inde- 
pendence of a fundamental concept from the sense experi- 
ment.** And he adds, in that picturesque language which he 
frequently uses: "The connection is not comparable to that of 
soup to beef, but more to that of the cloakroom ticket to the 
overcoat/* 

In his attempt to throw light on how scientific thought 
functions, Einstein emphasizes that "the fundamental con- 
cepts and theorems and the relations between them should 
be as narrow as possible but freely selected/* But the free- 
dom given to the scientist in his choice of axioms is different 
from that of any other form of creative effort. "It is not like 
the freedom of a novelist, but rather like that of a man try- 

- 54 



ing to solve a cleverly designed crossword puzzle. He may 
suggest any word as a solution, but there is only one word 
that can really solve the puzzle in all its parts.'* Einstein at 
that time was only halfway on the path to his unique solution 
of the mystery. Following this path with characteristic 
tenacity, he challenged almost casually those whom he had 
not yet convinced, and the challenge had consequences 
whose spectacular repercussions even he could not foresee. 

In examining the influences of gravitation on light, he de- 
clared, making another breach in Newtonian physics, that a 
light ray undergoes a deviation in proportion to the gravita- 
tion, so that it acquires the shape of a parabola. He wrote 
this from his desk perhaps he looked up at an exceptionally 
bright night sky as he did so, perhaps his eyes remained 
fixed on his paper, but it wouldn't have mattered: there was 
a picture of the star-studded sky in his mind's eye. By 
thought alone, and by application of the logic that leads to 
the unity of the world, he established the laws that govern 
this inaccessible world. In the paper he went on to prepare 
for the Year Book of Physics., he stressed that this deviation 
of light rays of stationary stars must be visible during an 
eclipse of the sun and that it would therefore be possible to 
verify his theory by experiment. He concluded his article: 
"It would be urgently desirable for astronomers to become 
interested in this question, even if the considerations given 
here appear insufficiently founded or even adventurous.'* 

Thus the suggestion was launched. A test of the immense 
design Einstein had sketched and now was filling in was 
called for and said to be in the realm of the possible. In that 
world of thought where nothing is lost, the idea went on its 
way. 

55 



From this point on, Einstein was no longer a solitary 
searcher, a mere man of promise, with brilliant gifts and bold 
ideas which frightened his conservative colleagues. In 1910 
Professor Planck, originator of the quantum theory, most 
eminent among the theoreticians of physics in Germany, was 
asked to give an opinion on Einstein's scientific contribution, 
and declared: If Einstein's theory is proven to be correct, 
as I expect it will be, he will be considered as the Copernicus 
of the twentieth century/* This was a happy comparison it 
had already been made once before. But there was still an 
"if in Planck's statement. In the meantime Einstein's contri- 
bution to science continued, quite apart from his revolution- 
ary theory. Max Born wrote later: "In my opinion, he would 
have been one of the greatest theoreticians of physics even 
if he had never written a line on relativity." 

The Zurich Polytechnic realized belatedly its mistake in 
not clinging to the former student who was one day to be its 
chief pride. It now offered a Chair to the candidate who had 
been rejected so coldly only a few years before. And in 1912 
Einstein returned to lecture to the selfsame benches where 
once he had sat and listened. He returned to the town, whose 
streets he had once tramped in hunger, as a man who had 
"arrived," no longer the professor extraordinary who could 
not balance his family budget without the humiliation of 
lodgers in his own home. At first, back in the familiar atmos- 
phere in which he had first met his wife, their relations may 
have improved. But their differences were too deep-rooted 
for the breach to be altogether healed. And their stay in 
Zurich was not long enough to bring together two people 
who were by now virtually estranged. 

The year after his nomination to Zurich, Albert Einstein 

- 56 - 



received the most flattering invitation that could have been 
given to a man of thirty-four. Germany's two most eminent 
physicists, Planck and Nernst, proposed him as a member of 
the scientific institute founded by the Emperor, the Kaiser 
Wilhelm Institute. The two scientists went to Zurich to per- 
suade Einstein of the enormous advantages offered to him. 
He would have a Chair at the university, without the obliga- 
tion of regular lectures, and apart from this he would have 
more time to devote to his scientific work, with a high salary 
and membership in the Prussian Academy of Science the 
equivalent of a marshal's baton offered to a young lieutenant. 
The proposal was enough to dazzle even a man as insensitive 
to material advantages and honors as Einstein. The Berlin of 
1913 vibrated with an intense intellectual life and was the 
cradle of great spiritual movements as well as of new scien- 
tific ideas. This city to which Einstein was summoned was a 
place of unlimited possibilities, thanks to the extraordinary 
prosperity of its economic system. Berlin prided itself on 
being in the forefront of civilization, appreciating everything 
that was new, whether laborious research, audacious thought, 
or artistic inspiration. The University of Berlin counted 
among its professors the greatest names in almost every 
sphere. If neither honors nor position could impress Einstein, 
he had the feeling of the humble for the influence exercised 
by personality and a deep respect for spiritual values and 
scientific achievement. 

But, flattered as he must have been, nevertheless Einstein 
was cautious. The professor of a university was a govern- 
ment servant. As a civil servant he acquired with his post 
German nationality. Einstein had not lost the convictions of 
his youth which had once made him break with the country 

57 



of his birth. His Swiss nationality had given him the feeling 
of being international rather than national, "a citizen of the 
world." The obstinacy with which he defended his point of 
view was so instinctive that it might have sprung from some 
presentiment of the future. 

The problem he had raised was a hard one for the German 
scientists to swallow, but they were eager to benefit from his 
growing fame. Besides, there was a precedent. The faculty 
of letters had among its prominent personalities a French- 
man, Professor Haguenin, who before accepting his nomina- 
tion had stipulated that he wished to keep his nationality. 
Einstein and Haguenin were the only ones in this large uni- 
versity body to remain foreigners while becoming Prussian 
civil servants. 

In the autumn of 1913 Einstein left Zurich and went to 
Berlin alone. His separation from his wife, at first temporary, 
soon became final. He knew that it was inevitable when he 
went and was deeply distressed when he left his sons: it was 
probably the only time in his life when anyone saw him cry. 



58 



Chapter IV 



AT FIRST it seemed no more than the ordinary newspaper 
headline to those who were engrossed in their own work 
and did not follow political events very closely: the murder 
of the Archduke occurred in the middle of a peaceful sum- 
mer, -whose brilliant sunshine made man-made disasters seem 
curiously unreal. A few more weeks of waiting, with the 
weather still wonderful, raised everyone's hopes. 

The declaration of war hit Berlin as if the sky had fallen. 
War was still an unknown factor, for no one had seen it at 
close quarters. But the instinct of the masses revolted per- 
haps not so much against this still unknown war as against 
the end of peace and against a break in the solidarity of the 
working classes everywhere. 

On the afternoon of August 1, 1914, when it still seemed 
possible that the disaster could be averted, the crowd 
marched through the streets of Berlin crying, "Down with 
the war!" The workmen who walked in close ranks, and the 
public orators who climbed upon improvised platforms, an- 

59 



grily addressing the crowd, seemed like a tidal wave which 
might really sweep away the arrogant military caste with 
their sham Lohengrin at their head. Next day the crowd, 
even denser and more excited, stampeded in the square in 
front of the palace. The Kaiser appeared. The crowd was 
delirious with enthusiasm. This war which Wilhelm II had 
declared suddenly appeared to them as a long-awaited re- 
lease, a holy war: but had they any idea what it was to be 
a release from? These thousands of voices rising from the 
square sounded like a single angry outcry, an ancient ele- 
mental force that had existed long before these men, women, 
and children who acclaimed the Emperor as their military 
idol were born. There were no more protests, no more looks 
of anguish or caution on the radiant faces to whom war had 
been promised. The brothers and sisters of the same men 
who only yesterday had cried, '"Down with the war," perhaps 
even those men themselves, now created out of the Schloss- 
platz a volcano of popular feeling, a tumult of warlike ardor. 
Einstein, like all those who lived through these hours in 
Berlin and saw this delirium, was never to forget how a 
crowd could be completely won over to a destructive im- 
pulse. "My pacifism is instinctive/' he said later. He was 
always afraid of the chaos created in man by incitement to 
war, by the call to hatred, and by the deformation of truth. 
He saw the intellectual elite, as well as the crowd deluded 
into believing in a conspiracy of the powers of evil directed 
against a peaceful Germany, and that the war was a neces- 
sary struggle if the threatened homes, moral values, and 
driving power of Germany were to survive. Einstein recog- 
nized in this explosion of enthusiasm and wrath, of self- 
confidence and contempt for all that is different or foreign, 

60 



the reaction that arises from fear of solitude, from need of 
solidarity, from a love of sacrifice and self-effacement so 
strong that it destroys all critical sense and having recog- 
nized it as such, he was never able to forget it. He remained 
as impervious to the intoxication of the crowd as he did to 
the patriotic anger that blinded the German elite. "This 
blindness, incomprehensible to me, has struck like an epi- 
demic many who have always seemed to think and feel 
clearly up till now,** he wrote to Romain Holland. 

His status as a neutral protected him from the necessity 
of making a .stand. On the strength of it he was able to refuse 
to sign the manifesto of the ninety-three intellectuals, the 
capitulation of German spiritual independence. But he did 
not retreat altogether into the protective shelter of neutrality. 
In the same month of October when this manifesto ap- 
peared, he signed a countermanifesto, written by that in- 
domitable German pacifist Professor G. Nicolai, who later 
achieved fame with his spectacular escape by airplane from 
wartime Germany. This Appeal to Europeans had, if I am 
not mistaken, only three signatures: the third one was that 
of Wilhelm Foerster, president of the International Office of 
Weights and Measures, father of another great German paci- 
fist, F. W. Foerster. There were not many indeed who dared 
to dissent from the concert of hatred. "Will future centu- 
ries,** Einstein wrote to Romain Rolland, "really be justified 
in glorifying our Europe in which three centuries of intense 
cultural work have only brought about the transition from 
religious mania to nationalist mania?'* His sense of humor 
came to the rescue. In this letter, dated March 1915, he 
added: "Even the scientists of various countries behave as 

61 



though eight months ago they had had their brains ampu- 
tated." 

His reputation as an eccentric saved him from the most 
savage attacks of his indignant colleagues. Nevertheless in 
" their eyes he was a moral leper. He was to remember that 
when he came for the first time to Paris. He had been in- 
vited by Madame Curie and when he sat down in the salon 
he glanced at the row of chairs beside him which no one 
dared to occupy and smiled across at young Frederic Joliot. 
"Come and sit next to me, for I feel exactly as if I were at a 
meeting of the Prussian Academy where two chairs are 
always left empty beside mine,* he explained, laughing. 

As a reaction against the general neurosis, the Union of 
the New Fatherland was founded in Berlin at the beginning 
of the war, to "fight chauvinism and prepare public opinion 
for a peace that would respect the honor of all the belliger- 
ent parties." They were merely a handful of men and women 
who had not allowed to quote Einstein's words their brains 
to be amputated. They felt very isolated amid the angry 
outcries which followed. It was through the papers and 
through the Bund, whose activities he highly approved, that 
Einstein learned of the position taken up by Romain Holland. 
He wrote to him at once to express his admiration for his 
courage and to put at his disposal **my feeble forces in case 
you might want to use me as an instrument, either owing to 
my position or my relations with the foreign and German 
members of the Academy of Science/* In fact he knew that 
his influence was limited. When Romain Rolland asked him 
one day if he was able to express his ideas to his German 
friends, if he was able to discuss politics with them, he shook 
his head. Nothing could break through the barriers of mis- 



understanding. All Einstein could do was shower questions 
upon them to shake them from their complacency, and "they 
don't like that very much, 9 * he added with a laugh. The 
scientists, mathematicians, and the physicists were the most 
accessible of the Germans, while the humanists of the uni- 
versity proved to be the most affected by the frenzy of na- 
tionalism. At the root of this mania for war Einstein found 
once again his ceaseless enemy, the system of education, 
which, by being blindly submissive to the state, exalted 
national pride and reduced a nation that boasted of itself as 
the nation of "thinkers and poets" to a nation of slaves. This 
submission was not so much a national characteristic as a 
result of that discipline of thought that had dominated his 
own frustrated youth. 

By the time the war began Einstein had no illusions left 
as to its outcome. Although he took part in all the scattered 
protests and clandestine activities like those of the Bund 
Neues Vaterland, which was suppressed in 1915, he knew 
them to be wholly inadequate. But his doubts about the ef- 
fectiveness of any action had never stopped him. It was this 
that showed the fundamental difference between the state 
of mind of the average German and the strength of the feel- 
ings which moved Einstein himself. He was aware of the 
difference in these grave moments, when even men of good 
will refused to take responsibilities for fear of finding them- 
selves isolated. Einstein recognized that Germany herself 
was incapable of revolt or of any sort of daring initiative 
that would lead to a spiritual rebirth. Respect for power was 
too deeply rooted in the German mind; it corresponded too 
well to their desire to dominate others. Talking once to 
Romain Rolland, Einstein used the word affame to describe 



the Germans. He was aware that this desire for power, this 
thirst for conquest and respect for success, was a compensa- 
tion for a feeling very close to an inferiority complex. Bru- 
tality, even at its lowest, concealed something like aT desire 
to be not only respected but loved, in the words of the 
ironical ditty well known in Germany: "If you don't want 
to be my brother, 111 bash your skull in." The Germany 
which violated Belgian neutrality, the Germany of the crimes 
of Louvain and the attack on tie Lusitania, was still naive 
enough to be surprised at the hatred these crimes aroused 
in the civilized world. When the Council of the Berlin Uni- 
versity met and the professors got together in a beer cellar 
after the session, their conversations invariably began with 
one question: "Why does the whole world hate us?" (Ein- 
stein told this to Remain Holland with a laugh, but in his 
laughter there was perplexity at the German capacity for 
self-deception. ) 

Einstein understood on the one hand that it was their lack 
of self-criticism that gave rise to this spirit of submission 
among Germans and to jheir resentment of isolation: on the 
other hand he was conscious of their great capacity for or- 
ganization, their gift for adaptation, and their ingeniousness. 
He knew from the first year of the war that nothing but total 
defeat would put an end to German militarism and to the 
oppressive social framework. Himself a native of peaceful 
Swabia, he saw in Prussia the incarnation of all the German 
virtues but also all the German vices. The kingdoms and 
principalities of the south had still preserved a certain spirit 
of tolerance and humanity. When at a meeting of all German 
universities the question was put whether all links with the 
other universities of the world should be severed, the Univer- 

64 




EINSTEIN AS A STUDENT-AARAU, SWITZERLAND, 1896 
... the young man had to return to the school desk like any dunce." 




EINSTEIN IN 1905 

**A new Copernicus has been born/ 3 



sity of Berlin alone approved the motion against the opposi- 
tion of all the universities of southern Germany. Einstein 
knew, nevertheless, that differences of opinion and resent- 
ments, like the hatred between Bavaria and Prussia, were 
forgotten in time of danger and that the common ordeal of 
the war reinforced the unity of the empire, so that it would 
be difficult to return to the federal system. Nevertheless he 
still cherished a dream, knowing it was no more than this, 
of a disunited Germany, where the southern provinces would 
join with Austria. 

He spoke of this to Romain Holland when they met at 
Vevey in September 1915. He had come to Zurich with a 
Swiss friend on purpose to see the man who in the eyes of 
the pacifists of the world was the incarnation of a free con- 
science. They met on the veranda of the hotel where Rolland 
was living, on a soft autumn afternoon, "among swarms of 
bees, who came to rob the flowers and the ivy." Einstein was 
thirty-six at that time, but his black curly hair was already 
streaked with gray. Rolland found him "very alive and gay; 
he cannot help giving an amusing twist to the most serious 
thoughts." He discovered the absolute independence and 
serenity of his mind: none of his previous visitors had pro- 
duced the same impression. He noted in his diary: "Einstein 
is incredibly detached in his judgments on his native coun- 
try. No other German has such detachment." But the meet- 
ing saddened Rolland. "All that he has told me points to the 
impossibility of concluding a lasting peace with Germany 
without defeating her first." Einstein told him, too, that 
"whatever the result of the war, the chief victim will be 
France." Rolland thought the severity with which Einstein 
judged the Germans was excessive; his criticism he thought 

- 65 



too sarcastic and his prophecies too gloomy. In the end the 
meeting left him perplexed: Einstein's personality somehow 
eluded him. "Another man would suffer if he felt himself so 
isolated in thought in this dreadful year. But not Einstein: 
he just laughs/* He was surprised that Einstein should have 
been able, under such conditions, to work on his theory 
about which the Swiss friend had whispered to him: "It is 
the greatest revolution in thought since Newton/' 

It would have been more difficult for Einstein to preserve 
the calm necessary for his work, and stand the increasing 
privations that the war effort imposed upon Germany, had he 
been wholly alone in the foreign Prussian capital. But on 
arriving in Berlin he found support, and soon after shelter, 
with one of his uncles and the latter's daughter. The meeting 
between Einstein and his cousin Elsa was the beginning of 
the only permanent personal relationship in his life: thence- 
forward their relationship dominated his private life. He 
had known her as a child, when she used to visit his younger 
sister, but having as a boy no interest in little girls, he had 
completely forgotten her existence. Now he met a woman 
who was already mature, who had been divorced after an 
unhappy marriage, and who was the doting mother of two 
wistful and frail little girls. She must have been very charm- 
ing; people who met her later in life disregarded the total 
lack of coquetry in her manner to admire her regular fea- 
tures and remarkably fair complexion. Her lively expression 
saved her from being merely pretty. She had bright blue, 
extremely myopic eyes, and a humorous mouth. Einstein, 
distrustful of all intrusions into his private life, must have 
been on the defensive against every stranger, but with Elsa 
it was as if he rediscovered something with which he had 

66 



been familiar all his life and his defenses disappeared. They 
had many memories in common, both their own and their 
elders'; they recalled old times, in a language spiced with 
dialect, inherited proverbs and sayings; they put forward 
mysterious interpretations of events long past: tiny incidents 
that were both tragic and grotesque. They would exchange 
understanding glances, like those of old friends, and smiles 
that were much older than their relationship as man and 
wife. They met on a common ground of friendship and self- 
confidence which remained with them always. The quiet 
care with which Elsa looked after her cousin was sometimes 
concealed by an air of vagueness: perhaps deliberately, for 
too great an appearance of efficiency might have repelled a 
man who was so indifferent to worldly things. Elsa protected 
him against the hostile world as she was to protect hfm later 
on against the assaults of admiration or curiosity. Their mar- 
riage, when it took place, seemed the most obvious thing in 
the world to both of them. She was not the sharer in his 
scientific work that he had once thought he had found in 
Mileva. Elsa's quick intelligence would have certainly let her 
glimpse the world in which her husband lived, but she ab- 
stained, deliberately, and Einstein has always been grateful 
to her for having left this line of demarcation between them. 
Whenever he was working particularly hard, Elsa saw that 
he had silence around him and made his everyday life as 
easy as possible, so that the transition from the intellectual 
effort should be smooth and unobtrusive. When he emerged 
from his study where he had been closeted for many hours 
with his assistant, followed by clouds of smoke and pulling at 
his pipe, with his eyes shining, Elsa would slowly bring him 
back to reality as though awakening a sleepwalker; she 

67 



would gradually bring to his attention the people around him 
and the food on his plate, which he was chopping with his 
knife like a blind man. One day, in a moment of relaxation, 
she asked him: "People talk a lot about your work at the 
moment Everybody keeps asking me for news. I appear so 
stupid when I have to say that I know nothing. Couldn't you 
just tell me a little about it? 9 * 

"Yes," said Einstein, "it must be irritating for you." He 
thought for a moment. He smiled; it was a tender smile. Elsa 
gazed at him with her vague, serene, shortsighted glance. 
"Well,* 7 he began with a visible effort. He stopped, then sud- 
denly his face lit up happily. "Well, if people ask you, you 
can tell them that you know all about it, but can't tell them 
as it is a great secret/' He was delighted to have discovered 
this solution. Horrified as he was by a groping approach to 
scientific facts and the commonplace transformation to 
which his ideas were subjected, he was deeply grateful to 
Elsa when she burst out laughing at his suggestion. 

Apart from the mutual confidence in which they reveled, 
and the similarity of their simple tastes, they had another 
trait in common: a very special and personal sense of pro- 
portion. One never knew how or against what background 
they would look at either men or things. One could only be 
certain that their way of looking at them would have little 
in common with anyone else's. Elsa had the greater merit in 
acquiring such independence of judgment: she lived on the 
same level as other human beings, while with Einstein it 
was as if he moved from one planet to another. 

Elsa had an acute gift of observation, which was softened 
by the natural tolerance of her nature. She would analyze 
a human being with her shortsighted eyes and she would 

. fift . 



discover at once the secret of ids personality. Very often she 
knew more about people she met for the first time than their 
closest friends would ever know; she was a merciless judge, 
but pity overcame her as soon as she pronounced her verdict. 

Above all she had a sense of humor that triumphed over 
all the great and small difficulties of life. An incident that 
might have caused anybody else to have a nervous break- 
down made her shriek with laughter, gay laughter that swept 
away all irritations like so many cobwebs. She made any 
daily tragedy the subject for a comedy which she would re- 
enact like a trained actress. In fact she had been on the stage 
and had given lessons in elocution to pay for her children's 
education. She could -mimic to perfection the important per- 
sonalities that later filled the house, as well as romantic 
vagabonds; she gave imitations of herself, usually in not too 
favorable a light, and imitated her husband in his battle 
with the petty side of life. Albert Einstein was the first to 
laugh at his wife's illustrations of incidents, in which his 
halo of celebrity was often ridiculed. 

Destiny, when it united Albert Einstein and Elsa at this 
moment of their lives, before the sudden blaze of his glory, 
must have foreseen the disaster that an ambitious woman 
might have made of his life. 

In the peace of his new home it was much easier for Ein- 
stein to devote himself more and more to the increasingly 
engrossing adventure of his work. He was nearing the goal 
he had pursued for ten long years. On November 28, 1915, 
at the height of the war, Einstein wrote to a physicist friend, 
Arnold Sommerfeld, who had written hn" several unan- 
swered letters: "This last month I have lived through the 
most exciting and the most exacting period of my life: and 



it would be true to say that it has also been the most fruitful. 
Writing letters has been out of the question. I realized that 
up till now my field equations of gravitation had been en- 
tirely devoid of foundation. When all my confidence in the 
old theory vanished, I saw clearly that a satisfactory solution 
could only be reached by linking it with the theory of the 
Riemann variations. The wonderful thing that happened 
then was that not only did the theory of Newton result from 
it, as a first approximation, but also the perihelian motion of 
Mercury (43" per century) as a second approximation. For 
the deviation of light by the sun, I obtained twice this fig- 
ure/* 

To Sommerfeld's slightly skeptical reaction, Einstein re- 
plied on a postcard dated February 8, 1916, with the brevity 
and assurance of a man who has acquired a final certainty: 
"You will be convinced of the general theory of relativity as 
soon as you have studied it. Therefore I will not utter a word 
in its defense/' 

Referring to Planck in a speech a little later, Einstein 
actually described his own state of mind at the time. He bor- 
rowed a sentence from Leibnitz to explain the love of 
research that stimulates every scientist, the "desire for a 
pre-established harmony/* It was, according to him, mistaken 
to attribute (as is generally done) Planck's indefatigable 
tenacity and patience to his unusual strength of will and 
rigorous discipline, for the "emotional condition that allows 
similar achievements to be accomplished is more like that of 
a deeply religious man or of a man in love; the daily effort is 
not dictated by either a purpose or a program, but by an 
immediate need." 

In 1916 there appeared in the Year Book of Physics, as 



well as in a separate publication, the work he had mentioned 
to Sommerfeld: "The Foundations of the Theory of General 
Relativity/* This, Einstein's main work, took up sixty-four 
pages. Rarely, perhaps never before in the history of human 
thought, has so small a publication had such a tremendous 
effect on the world. Einstein himself was aware that a great 
victory had been won and he was fully conscious of his own 
contribution. One day, much kter, his collaborator, Infeld, 
said to him: 

"I believe that the special theory of relativity would have 
been formulated with but little delay whether or not you 
had done it/" 

"Yes, that is true," said Einstein. He thought, indeed, that 
a scientist like Langevin, for instance, might have developed 
it; for according to Einstein, Langevin had clearly realized 
its essential features. However, he added immediately: "But 
this is not true of the general theory of relativity. I doubt 
whether it would have been known yet/* 

This awareness of his achievement and his feeling of a 
spiritual triumph had nothing to do with self-satisfaction. 
It was more like the joy of a believer in seeing a miracle 
accomplished in front of him, an almost humble joy. Einstein 
described later this faith that possessed him: "In a certain 
sense I hold it to be true that pure thought can grasp reality 
as the ancients dreamed it/* 

But the moment when this work of Einstein's first saw the 
light could not have been more ill chosen or more unpropi- 
tious for the diffusion of his ideas. The war in Germany was 
at its height and the atmosphere was tense. It was a year of 
crimes against humanity the horrors of gas warfare and 
the submarine war; it was the year that nearly destroyed a 



whole generation. Atrocities were rife in a country that did 
not yet realize that it was being deceived, and still believed 
in a near victory, where medals were coined in advance for 
the entry of German troops into Paris, and the sinister attack 
on the Lusitania was commemorated by a medal depicting 
a skeleton welcoming passengers in a ticket office. Through- 
out the whole of Germany resounded the war cry of hatred 
against "perfidious Albion/* the words of a peace-loving poet 
twisted by blind German anger. 

In this increasingly restrictive atmosphere Albert Einstein 
suffered both from the constraint of silence and from the 
complete isolation into which he was forced. Priding himself 
as he did on his independence of exterior circumstances, he 
was nonetheless more deeply affected than he would have 
liked to admit by the horrors of this seemingly endless war. 
"I know men in Germany/* he wrote to Remain Holland, 
"who, in their private lives, are guided by an almost com- 
plete altruism, but who have awaited with great impatience 
the declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare/* Morally 
shaken, he was physically even more vulnerable. The priva- 
tions suffered by the inhabitants of large cities were a severe 
strain on his health, but he refused to take the slightest ad- 
vantage of his position to secure extra privileges. Bread was 
inedible, rations were insufficient, lard, meat, and sugar were 
all non-existent, and bitter cabbages served as a base for 
everything. Despite Elsa's ingenuity there was never enough 
to eat and in the three years of war he lost sixty pounds. 
When he went to Switzerland to see his children in July 
1917 his host was terrified at how thin and tired he seemed. 

He went to rest in Arosa with his sons, and his friends 
began a campaign to keep hm\ in Switzerland and prevent 

- 72 



his return to Germany, where he would be running the risk 
of permanently ruining his health. Even a month's rest did 
not suffice to improve his condition noticeably. The least 
exertion was still difficult for him, and he wrote to Romain 
Holland, "Even the smallest effort takes its toll/' Rolland, 
moved by the accounts he heard from friends of Einstein's 
physical and moral condition, joined in the efforts being 
made to dissuade him from returning to Germany. "I know 
that you will not be careful of your health as you should, 
which is both a crime against science and a source of pain to 
your friends/' he wrote, and added, "It is hard for me to 
believe that you have lost that optimism which struck me 
so much in you. I still have a bright and cheerful memory 
of it." Einstein was very touched "by your friendly interest 
in a man you have only seen once," he wrote, with that naive 
surprise which he so frequently expressed when he realized 
that others were worried about him. 

He was still too weak to make the trip to Villeneuve, but 
he wrote to Rolland at length about conditions in Germany. 
"As a result of the military victories of 1870 and of those in 
the fields of commerce and industry, the country has arrived 
at a sort of religion of power. It dominates almost all of the 
intellectuals and has almost completely dispossessed the 
ideals of the times of Goethe and Schiller. I am firmly con- 
vinced that this aberration can only be driven back or re- 
pressed by the duress of facts/' He returned to this theme 
several times in his letter, as if he were trying to dissipate 
illusions which he knew to be tenacious. "Only facts can turn 
the deluded masses away from their false belief that we live 
for the state and that the proper goal of the state is power, 
at any price. As long as German statesmen go on hoping that 



a change in the present balance of power will occur sooner 
or later one cannot hope for any important changes in the 
situation/* 

Einstein was by no means alone in thinking that a German 
victory or even a semidef eat would be the end of all liberty 
of spirit in Germany. At the time of the great German of- 
fensive, the director of a liberal newspaper said to the writer 
Bernhard Kellermann, who was going to the front, "If it suc- 
ceeds there will be nothing left for us but to become ex- 
patriates.** 

Because of the state of his health Einstein had seen almost 
no one during his stay in Switzerland. But he had warned his 
friends in letters, as he had warned Romain Holland, and in 
these letters, which were circulated from hand to hand, the 
man who was returning to Germany, where any indiscretions 
could have grave consequences, in effect urged the Allies to 
carry the war to the end, to the complete surrender of Ger- 
many. 'Without this," he wrote, "we ourselves will never be 
able to rid ourselves of the yoke/' Only one human voice 
managed to penetrate the noise of war; and it was the voice 
of a scientist who spoke the language of the enemy. 

The English scientists listened and what they heard deeply 
disturbed them. They pored with passionate interest over 
the article Einstein published in the reports of the Prussian 
Academy of Science: "Cosmological Notes on the Theory of 
General Relativity.** 

"Modern cosmology was born in that year of 1917,** Ein- 
stein's collaborator, Professor Infeld, wrote later. And he 
added: "Though it would be difficult to exaggerate the im- 
portance of this paper, Einstein's original ideas as viewed 
from the perspective of the present day are antiquated, if not 

74 * 



wrong.* 7 Since Einstein had worked out his cosmology 
through the effort of pure thought, and had been able to 
materialize, as he said, the dreams of the ancients, the meth- 
ods of observation of the universe had been multiplied and 
had acquired a power that he himself did not suspect at the 
time. The human eye penetrated beyond the nebulae into 
this universe, which Einstein pictured as a finite universe, 
with curved space populated with matter, and not as an in- 
finite universe, a void around an island of matter. 

Certain phenomena observed by these powerful means, 
such as the tendency of the spectrum of the nebulae to dis- 
place itself toward the red the red shift of the nebulae, as 
it was calledseemed to other scientists, like Inf eld, a breach 
in Einstein's theory. It never ceased, however, to occupy the 
minds of astronomers, physicists, and mathematicians. A new 
spatial notion was born. Ideas about the structure of the 
universe, more or less modified, will never be what they were 
before him. 

The effect was immediate. Einstein's suggestion to the 
astronomers that they direct their attention to the theory of 
relativity was accepted. In March 1917 the official organ of 
the Royal Astronomical Society, the Astronomer Royal, an- 
nounced that on May 29, 1919, a total eclipse of the sun would 
take place and that therefore there would be particularly 
favorable conditions at that time for submitting Einstein's 
theory to a decisive experiment. 

The mind of one man had spanned the abyss of hatred and 
sorrow that existed between nation and nation: it was a span, 
however, invisible to those who fought and died in the vain 
hope that there would be no more wars. 



At that dark moment in the world conflict the words which 
Prince Louis de Broglie was later to utter acquired their 
fullest significance: "The theories of Einstein can be com- 
pared to burning flares, throwing a brief but powerful light 
on an immense and unknown region/' 



76 



Chapter V 



IT WAS like a great epic or adventure into the unknown an 
escape beyond the barriers of human misery which war had 
erected. Two great expeditions were organized in February 
1919. One was to Sobral, in the north of Brazil; the other to 
the island of Principe, in the Gulf of Guinea. But neither of 
these expeditions, organized at great expense, was aiming to 
explore hitherto unknown regions or study unusual ways of 
life. They were organized to surprise the sky at a moment 
when the total eclipse of the sun allows men to penetrate 
further into its mysteries. In the old days treasure hunters 
would sometimes set out with nothing to guide them but 
their faith in an old map, found by accident. These two mod- 
ern expeditions left because of their faith in one man, who 
had elaborated a bold theory, guided only by his scientific 
logic. Never before was tihere an adventure of such daring, 
so totally confined to the domains of pure thought. 

Sir Arthur Eddington, the great British astronomer, has 
described the expedition to Principe, which he insisted on 



joining himself. Nothing was left to the last minute. The 
expedition arrived a month before the eclipse. On the day 
itself dawn broke in a clouded, misty sky. When the eclipse 
became total, the dark disk of the moon, surrounded with 
its halo, appeared among the clouds as one often sees it at 
night when the stars are invisible. "There was nothing to do 
but carry out the arranged program and hope for the best." 
A strange, ghostly half-light covered the earth, accompanied 
by deep silence, broken only by whispered conversations, 
the click of the observers changing their plates, and the in- 
exorable ticking of the metronome squandering the precious 
seconds. Suddenly a flame shone out above the invisible sun 
and remained floating in space hundreds of millions of miles 
above the surface of the sun. The team at Principe had no 
time to take in this strange sight: they were too anxious 
about the success of the experiment. 

The sky clouded over more and more: it seemed deter- 
mined to thwart the efforts of man and baffle his curiosity. 
On the first photograph there was no sign of a star. About 
sixteen photographs were taken, however, with exposures 
varying from two to twenty seconds. Toward the end of the 
eclipse, the clouds vanished and the last photographs were 
clear. In many of them one or other of the essential stars was 
missing. But one plate eventually succeeded in capturing 
the light of five stars, and this was good enough to be used 
for an examination of the Einstein theory. 

Months passed by, devoted to the careful examination of 
the results obtained, and to a comparison of the photographs 
brought from Sobral with those taken at the Greenwich 
Observatory. After repeatedly verified calculations, the devi- 
ation of light of 1.64 seconds was established: the deviation 

78 



that Einstein, from his writing desk, had fixed at 1.75 sec- 
onds. 

In February 1952 a new expedition was organized by the 
University of Chicago to verify an akeady ancient experi- 
ment. The stars visible only during a total eclipse of the sun 
were photographed in Khartoum. The expedition had at its 
disposal every new apparatus; it was far better equipped 
than the English astronomers had been in 1919. Owing to 
this progress and the perfected methods of American re- 
search, die Khartoum experiment proved to be even more 
conclusive than that of Sobral and Principe. The deviation 
of light established came closer to the figure arrived at by 
Einstein 1.70 seconds. But the success of the earlier experi- 
ment had by now been generally recognized. 

It was at the beginning of November 1919, at a solemn 
joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronom- 
ical Society in London, that the results achieved were made 
public, amid considerable tension. A philosopher who was 
present compared it later to a Greek drama in which the 
chorus awaits the verdict of destiny. The president of the 
Royal Society opened the meeting by describing Einstein's 
theory as one of the greatest achievements in the history of 
human thought. "It is not the discovery of an outlying island, 
but of a whole continent of new scientific ideas. It is the 
greatest discovery in connection with gravitation that has 
been made since Newton first enunciated its principles." 

The hall in which the meeting took place was dominated 
by a large portrait of Newton. The shadows of a great man 
of the past and of the absent stranger loomed over the audi- 
ence. A stranger, under suspicion because of the very lan- 
guage in which he had enunciated his theory, had dared to 

79 



challenge one of the most glorious names in English history. 

Looking back on this hour of triumph which he was not 
there to share, Einstein wrote in his notes for his autobiog- 
raphy: "Forgive me, Newton: you had discovered the only 
path possible in your tim