Broca's Brain (5 page)

As a child Einstein gave little indication of what was to come. “My parents,” he recalled later, “were worried because I started to talk comparatively late, and they consulted the doctor because of it … I was at that time … certainly not younger than three.” He was an indifferent student in elementary school, where he said the teachers reminded him of drill sergeants. In Einstein’s youth, a bombastic nationalism and intellectual rigidity were the hallmarks of European education. He rebelled against the dull, mechanized methods of teaching. “I preferred to endure all sorts of punishment rather than learn to gabble by rote.” Einstein was always to detest rigid disciplinarians, in education, in science and in politics.

At five he was stirred by the mystery of a compass. And, he later wrote, “at the age of 12 I experienced a second wonder of a totally different nature in a little book dealing with Euclidean plane geometry.… Here were assertions, as for example the intersection of the three altitudes of a triangle in one point, which—though by no means evident—could nevertheless be proved with such certainty that any doubt appeared to be out of the question. This lucidity and certainty made an indescribable impression upon me.” Formal
schooling provided only a tedious interruption to such contemplations. Einstein wrote of his self-education: “At the age of 12 to 16 I familiarized myself with the elements of mathematics together with the principles of differential and integral calculus. In doing so I had the good fortune of finding books which were not too particular in their logical rigor, but which made up for this by permitting the main thoughts to stand out clearly and synoptically … I also had the good fortune of getting to know the essential results and methods of the entire field of the natural sciences in an excellent popular exposition, which limited itself almost throughout to qualitative aspects … a work which I read with breathless attention.” Modern popularizers of science may take some comfort from these words.

Not one of his teachers seems to have recognized his talents. At the Munich
Gymnasium
, the city’s leading secondary school, one of the teachers told him, “You’ll never amount to anything, Einstein.” At age fifteen it was strongly suggested that he leave school. The teacher observed, “Your very presence spoils the respect of the class for me.” He accepted this suggestion with gusto and spent many months wandering through northern Italy, a high school dropout in the 1890s. Throughout his life he preferred informal dress and manner. Had he been a teen-ager in the 1960s or 1970s rather than the 1890s, conventional people would almost certainly have called him a hippie.

Yet his curiosity about physics and his wonder about the natural universe soon overcame his distaste for formal education, and he found himself applying, with no high school diploma, to the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. He failed the entrance examination, enrolled himself in a Swiss high school to satisfy his deficiencies, and was admitted to the Federal Institute the following year. But he was still a mediocre student. He resented the prescribed curriculum, avoided the lecture room and tried to pursue his true interests. He later wrote: “The hitch in this was, of course, the fact that you had to cram all
this stuff into your mind for the examination, whether you liked it or not.”

He managed to graduate only because his close friend Marcel Grossmann assiduously attended classes and shared his notes with Einstein. On Grossmann’s death many years later, Einstein wrote: “I remember our student days. He the irreproachable student, I myself disorderly and a dreamer. He, on good terms with the teachers and understanding everything; I a pariah, discontented and little loved … Then the end of our studies—I was suddenly abandoned by everyone, standing at a loss on the threshold of life.” By immersing himself in Grossmann’s notes, he managed to graduate from college. But, he recalled, studying for the final examinations “had such a deterring effect on me that … I found the consideration of any scientific problem distasteful to me for an entire year.… It is little short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not already completely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry, because what this delicate little plant needs most, apart from initial stimulation, is freedom; without that it is surely destroyed … I believe that one could even deprive a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if one could force it with a whip to eat continuously whether it were hungry or not …” His remarks should be sobering to those of us engaged in higher education in science. I wonder how many potential Einsteins have been permanently discouraged through competitive examinations and the forced feeding of curricula.

After supporting himself with odd jobs, and being passed over for positions he considered desirable, Einstein accepted an offer as an examiner of applications at the Swiss Patent Office in Berne, an opportunity made available through the intervention of Marcel Grossmann’s father. About the same time he rejected his German nationality and became a Swiss citizen. Three years later, in 1903, he married his college sweetheart. Almost nothing is known about which patent applications Einstein approved and which he rejected. It would
be interesting to know whether any of the proposed patents stimulated his thinking in physics.

One of his biographers, Banesh Hoffman, writes that at the Patent Office, Einstein “soon learned to do his chores efficiently and this let him snatch precious morsels of time for his own surreptitious calculations, which he guiltily hid in a drawer when footsteps approached.” Such were the circumstances attending the birth of the great relativity theory. But Einstein later nostalgically recalled the Patent Office as “that secular cloister where I hatched my most beautiful ideas.”

On several occasions he was to suggest to colleagues that the occupation of lighthouse keeper would be a suitable position for a scientist—because the work would be comparatively easy and would allow the contemplation necessary to do scientific research. “For Einstein,” said his collaborator Leopold Infeld, “loneliness, life in a lighthouse, would be most stimulating, would free him from so many of the duties which he hates. In fact it would be for him the ideal life. But nearly every scientist thinks just the opposite. It was the curse of
my
life that for a long time I was not in a scientific atmosphere, that I had no one with whom to talk physics.”

Einstein also believed that there was something dishonest about making money by teaching physics. He argued that it was far better for a physicist to support himself by some other simple and honest labor, and do physics in his spare time. When making a similar remark many years later in America, Einstein mused that he would have liked to be a plumber, and was promptly awarded honorary membership in the plumbers’ union.

In 1905 Einstein published four research papers, the product of his spare time at the Swiss Patent Office, in the leading physics journal of the time, the
Annalen der Physik.
The first demonstrated that light has particle as well as wave properties, and explained the previously baffling photoelectric effect in which electrons are emitted by solids when irradiated by light. The second explored the nature of molecules by explaining the
statistical “Brownian motion” of suspended small particles. And the third and fourth introduced the Special Theory of Relativity and for the first time expressed the famous equation, E = mc
²
, which is so widely quoted and so rarely understood.

The equation expresses the convertibility of matter into energy, and vice versa. It extends the law of the conservation of energy into a law of conservation of energy and mass, stating that energy and mass can be neither created nor destroyed—although one form of energy or matter can be converted into another form. In the equation, E stands for the energy equivalent of the mass m. The amount of energy that could, under ideal circumstances, be extracted from a mass m is mc
²
, where c is the velocity of light = 30 billion centimeters per second. (The velocity of light is always written as lower-case c, never as upper-case.) If we measure m in grams and c in centimeters per second, E is measured in a unit of energy called ergs. The complete conversion of one gram of mass into energy thus releases 1 × (3 × 10
¹⁰
)
²
= 9 × 10
²⁰
ergs, which is the equivalent of the explosion of roughly a thousand tons of TNT. Thus enormous energy resources are contained in tiny amounts of matter, if only we knew how to extract the energy. Nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants are common terrestrial examples of our halting and ethically ambiguous efforts to extract the energy that Einstein showed was present in all of matter. A thermonuclear weapon, a hydrogen bomb, is a device of terrifying power—but even it is capable of extracting less than one percent of mc
²
from a mass m of hydrogen.

Einstein’s four papers published in 1905 would have been an impressive output for the full-time research work of a physicist over a lifetime; for the spare-time work of a twenty-six-year-old Swiss patent clerk in a single year it is nothing short of astonishing. Many historians of science have called 1905 the
Annus Mirabilis
, the miracle year. There had been, with uncanny resemblances, only one previous such year in the history of physics—1666, when Isaac Newton, aged twenty-four,
in enforced rural isolation (because of an epidemic of bubonic plague) produced an explanation for the spectral nature of sunlight, invented differential and integral calculus, and devised the universal theory of gravitation. Together with the General Theory of Relativity, first formulated in 1915, the 1905 papers represent the principal output of Einstein’s scientific life.

Before Einstein, it was widely held by physicists that there were privileged frames of reference, such things as absolute space and absolute time. Einstein’s starting point was that all frames of reference—all observers, no matter what their locale, velocity or acceleration—would see the fundamental laws of nature in the same way. It seems likely that Einstein’s view on frames of reference was influenced by his social and political attitudes and his resistance to the strident jingoism he found in late-nineteenth-century Germany. Indeed, in this sense the idea of relativity has become an anthropological commonplace, and social scientists have adopted the idea of cultural relativism: there are many different social contexts and world views, ethical and religious precepts, expressed by various human societies, and most of comparable validity.

Special relativity was at first by no means widely accepted. Attempting once again to break into an academic career, Einstein submitted his already published relativity paper to Berne University as an example of his work. He evidently considered it a significant piece of research. It was rejected as incomprehensible, and he was to remain at the Patent Office until 1909. But his published work did not go unnoticed, and it slowly began to dawn on a few of the leading European physicists that Einstein might well be one of the greatest scientists of all time. Still, his work on relativity remained highly controversial. In a letter of recommendation for Einstein for a position at the University of Berlin, a leading German scientist suggested that relativity was a hypothetical excursion, a momentary aberration, and that, despite it, Einstein really
was
a first-rate thinker. (His Nobel Prize, which he learned about during a visit to the Orient in 1921, was awarded
for his paper on the photoelectric effect and “other contributions” to theoretical physics. Relativity was still considered too controversial to be mentioned explicitly.)

Einstein’s views on religion and politics were connected. His parents were of Jewish origin, but they did not observe religious ritual. Nevertheless, Einstein came to a conventional religiosity “by way of the traditional education machine, the State and the schools.” But at age twelve this came to an abrupt end: “Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much of the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic free thinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the State through lies; it was a crushing impression. Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude towards the convictions which were alive in any specific social environment—an attitude which has never again left me, even though later on, because of a better insight into the causal connections, it lost some of its original poignancy.”

Just before the outbreak of World War I, Einstein accepted a professorship at the well-known Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. The desire to be at the leading center of theoretical physics was momentarily stronger than his antipathy to German militarism. The outbreak of World War I caught Einstein’s wife and two sons in Switzerland, unable to return to Germany. A few years later this enforced separation led to divorce, but on receiving the Nobel Prize in 1921, Einstein, although since remarried, donated the full $30,000 to his first wife and their children. His eldest son later became a significant figure in civil engineering, holding a professorship at the University of California, but his second son, who idolized his father, accused him—in later years, and to Einstein’s great anguish—of having ignored him during his youth.

Einstein, who described himself as a socialist, became convinced that World War I was largely the result of the scheming and incompetence of “the ruling
classes,” a conclusion with which many contemporary historians agree. He became a pacifist. When other German scientists enthusiastically supported their nation’s military enterprises, Einstein publicly condemned the war as “an epidemic delusion.” Only his Swiss citizenship prevented him from being imprisoned, as indeed happened to his friend the philosopher Bertrand Russell in England at the same time and for the same reason. Einstein’s views on the war did not increase his popularity in Germany.

However, the war did, indirectly, play a role in making Einstein’s name a household word. In his General Theory of Relativity Einstein explored the proposition—an idea still astonishing in its simplicity, beauty and power—that the gravitational attraction between two masses comes about by those masses distorting or bending ordinary Euclidean space nearby. The quantitative theory reproduced, to the accuracy to which it had been tested, Newton’s law of universal gravitation. But in the next decimal place, so to speak, general relativity predicted significant differences from Newton’s views. This is in the classic tradition of science, in which new theories retain the established results of the old but make a set of new predictions which permits a decisive distinction to be drawn between the two outlooks.