E=mc2 (22 page)

In fact, Eddington had been back at Cambridge for several weeks now, but his photographic plates were a mess. They'd been carried by ship to West Africa, then kept in tents on a humid island, then carried into the rainstorm at the start of the eclipse, handled in and out of the camera, then brought back to the tents, and finally shipped by ocean steamer once more. The physical separations Eddington was looking for, in the movement of the distant stars, were going to be measured in tenths of a second of arc. On the small photographic plates, that came to barely a millimeter. (A thick pencil line is about one millimeter. If you have very good vision, you can just make out dust motes 1/20 of a millimeter across.) Eddington had micrometers to help, but Einstein would only be right if these tiny displacements were exactly as predicted, and
so
far, Eddington couldn't see them clearly enough to be sure if they were. The emulsion from the West Africa plates had become so jellylike in all the heat and transportation that if Eddington was honest he might never make out the necessary detail.

No one at Cambridge wanted to give up, though, for Einstein's was such a sweet theory. It was tremendous to think that the great tumbling ball of the sun was crashing down on the very fabric of space and time, sagging it so much that distant starlight started veering sideways as it got caught in the bend. Nor was it just the "traditional" mass of the sun that would be doing this. The 1905 equation entered in also. All the heat and radiation blasting out of the sun—all that "energy"—was acting as an additional form of "mass." It added to the bulk of the sun as well. (This was at the heart of what Chandra would build on, in his later sea voyage of 1930.)

Luckily, the British Empire had its traditions, and one of the prime ones was that something always went wrong. Explorers, conquerors, younger sons and even metal-eyeglassed Quaker astronomers had learned that lesson: picking it up from a lifetime of hearing about one imperial expedition after another.

And that's why Eddington had sent out a second team—an entire duplicate crew—to be sure he proved Einstein's prediction.

This second crew had a different telescope, and had been sent to a different continent (they'd been in northern Brazil), and they even had a different mechanical drive for the telescope. It was all in the finest tradition of spreading the odds, and it worked. Once the Brazil team's plates came back, and a special oversized micrometer had been built to fit around their larger plates, and Eddington and the others had measured and remeasured, the congratulatory telegrams started bursting out. Bertrand Russell, who had recently been a Fellow at Trinity, now received a message from his old friend Littlewood: "Dear Russell: Einstein's theory is completely confirmed. The predicted displacement was 1 ".72 and the observed .1"75 +/- .06."

Dyson spoke, and Eddington spoke—there's no record if any narrow-eyed parole officer from the Home Office was in the room—and then the elderly chairman stood up to speak:

If it is sustained that Einstein's reasoning holds good . . . then it is the result of one of the highest achievements of human thought.

But he was also a
Times
man through and through, and nothing like a simple lack of knowledge was going to hold him back. He kept on filing, and the headline writers pulled out the key parts of his story:

"A Book for 12 Wise Men: No More in All the World Could Comprehend It, Said Einstein When His Daring Publishers Accepted It."

He made that up. Einstein wasn't writing a book, there were no publishers involved—daring or not—and most of the physicists and astronomers attending understood easily enough what the meeting was about. Crouch had started the theory off on its track record of poor public comprehension, from which it never entirely recovered.

That only added to its fame. In almost all religions, there's a powerful difference between a priest and a prophet. A priest merely stands below an open hole in the sky, and lets the truth that's normally kept hidden up there come pouring down. (Press secretaries and nuclear technicians are examples.) A prophet, however, is someone who manages to journey up through that opening. They are individuals who can venture to that Other Side, before returning back to ordinary life, here with us on Earth. As a result, we'll try to glimpse, in the expression on their face, or in the potent equations they've plucked and brought back down, what things are like up there, in that higher realm, which so many of us believe in, but know we'll never get to visit directly,

Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela have been considered such prophets, carrying down a vision of racial harmony, their words spreading afterward with a power that came from the feeling that they had originated from that higher source. In post-World War I Europe, Einstein's findings were received with the veneration King's or Mandela's words would be granted later. And since very few people understood Einstein's work at first, all the feeling it suggested—all the desire for transcendence and for knowledge from Einstein's divine library—would soon be shifted onto images of Einstein himself. Perhaps that's why people were attracted to photos of him that had a distinctive, sadly bemused look. They matched the later, most powerful photos of Martin Luther King, where he too seemed to be sadly seeing something greater than ordinary mortals could.

Einstein tried to push back some of the fame. He called the exaggerating newspaper accounts an amusing feat of imagination. Two weeks after the public announcement, he wrote in the London
Times
that although the Germans were proudly calling him a German, and the English were proclaiming him a Swiss Jew, if his prediction ever came to be shown false, the Germans would call him a Swiss Jew, and the English would call him a German. In fact, he got it wrong: his astronomical prediction and the 1905 equation both stayed true, but English anti-Semites such as Keynes still scorned him ("a naughty Jew-boy, covered with ink"), and with the rise of Hitler the German government not only called him a Jew but supported the calls to have him killed. After leaving the Continent, and trying England, he ended up in America for the rest of his life: in 1939 signing the letter to President Roosevelt, which, albeit indirectly, helped lead to the atomic bomb; otherwise just living a quiet professorial life at 112 Mercer Street, in Princeton, New Jersey.

He never especially liked the Ivy League snobbery of Princeton ("this village of puny demi-gods upon stilts," as he described it to a European friend). There were giggling bobby-soxers; the occasional gaping tourist; at the Institute for Advanced Study—a two-mile walk from his home, which he took regularly—younger scientists kept a surface politeness, but he knew that many disparaged him behind his back as someone too old to be useful.

That alone didn't seem to bother Einstein. His goal, as always, was simply to see what had been intended for our universe by The Old One. What he had scribbled in his now-yellowing manuscripts decades before, as well as the new equations he was constantly working on now—trying to create a theory that would unify in a clear and predictable way all the known forces in the universe—still seemed, to him, the best possible track forward.

What did hurt him were different reminders of how things had worked out. One, almost too horrible to think of vividly, was implicitly brought up each time he encountered Oppenheimer, his institute's head, who'd led the Manhattan Project that had demonstrated that E=mc
²
—despite Einstein's lack of involvement—could be turned into vast fields of death in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb," Einstein once told his longtime secretary, "I would never have lifted a finger. Not a single finger!"

Then, as the years went on, there was the increasing feeling of his own powers fading away. An unintentionally tactless young assistant once asked him about this. Einstein explained that it was more difficult now to judge which of his ideas were worth pursuing—a great contrast with his younger years, when he'd been superb at identifying the key issues in a field. "Discovery in the grand manner is for young people," he'd once told a friend, ". . . and hence for me a thing of the past."

He settled into an old man's daily routine, in his simple clapboard suburban house on Mercer Street. His sister, Maja, was with him in America by now. She suffered a severe stroke in 1946, and virtually every evening after that, for the six years till her death, Einstein would drop whatever work he was doing and go to her room, where he would read aloud to her for hours. Before that, most days, there were the mock-chiding rituals with his housekeeper; the saddened disregarding of reminders of his mentally disturbed second son; sometimes visits from a friend with whom he'd enjoyed playing Bach's Double Concerto, as well as the violin parts in Purcell's or Handel's Baroque trios. But there were also the moments, settled comfortably in his upstairs study, when his steadily penciled pages of symbols lifted him back into his past, to the time when anything had seemed possible.

Albert Einstein

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. EMILIO SEGRE VISUAL ARCHIVES

Appendix

Follow-up of Other Key Participants

When
MICHAEL FARADAY
took over Davy's position at the Royal Institution, he moved permanently into the Royal Institution with his wife. He continued to make major discoveries well into his fifties, but despite many requests, he never took on a personal student.

After the execution of
ANTOINE-LAURENT LAVOISIER
, his remains were carted out of Paris, passing through one of his new tollgates that had survived the 1789 attacks. A few months after Lavoisier's death, the body of the man who'd ordered the executions, Marat's colleague Robespierre, was carted through the same gate, and placed in the same common grave. It was a converted wasteland called "Errands" ("maimed person"), which they now shared. Several fragments of the solid tollgates from the
GENERAL FARM
wall, which Lavoisier had ordered built, can be seen to this day, in the Pare Monceau, and near the metro exit at Denfert-Rochereau.

A few months before Lavoisier's arrest, a young woman, Charlotte Corday, called at the apartment of
JEAN-PAUL MARAT
, asking to see him. His guards refused, but when she insisted she had news about dangerous political opponents, he overruled them, and had her let upstairs. Since Marat had skin complaints that forced him to spend much of the day in a bathtub, it was from that position that he greeted her, discovered that the political opponents were members of her family (whom he had ordered killed), and then saw her step forward, knife out. She stabbed him to death, in an assassination later immortalized by the society painter David.

Since
MARIE ANNE PAULZE
had been only thirteen when she married Lavoisier, she was just thirty-five when her husband was killed. Although harassed by the Revolutionary government, and her wealthy apartment emptied, she outlived most of her persecutors, and enjoyed a peaceful old age.

When he went back to Denmark,
OLE ROEMER
married the daughter of his ethics professor—the man who'd first brought him to the attention of Cassini's scout. Roemer ended up becoming a senior highway inspector, then mayor of Copenhagen, then prefect of police, and for several years was also the equivalent of a Supreme Court judge. In his spare time he worked on an improved device for the measurement of temperatures, which a visiting businessman named Daniel Fahrenheit thought had some merit. Roemer died in 1710, seventeen years before the British experiments that finally proved he'd been right about the speed of light.

JEAN-DOMINIQUE CASSINI
outlived Roemer, and continued to promote only those astronomers who—erroneously— agreed with him that light traveled at an unmeasurable speed. The dynasty he established ran for almost two centuries, up till the fourth generation, ending with the Cassini who was forced to close down his greatgrandfather's proud Observatory—the building Lavoisier had seen from his prison window.

In 1997, a spacecraft with a European Space Agency (ESA) probe on board was launched on a seven year journey to Saturn. Along its way it flew past the planet Jupiter, which Roemer had used for his epochal prediction. The spacecraft was named
Cassini.
France is a major funder of the ESA.

VOLTAIRE
lived to extreme old age, writing and mocking all the way. His collected works run to over 10,000 printed pages, and did much to promote the Revolution, which began just a few years after his death. He never published significant commentaries on science after du Châtelet's death.

The manuscript that
EMILIE DU CHÂTELET
finished in her final days—
Principes Mathématiques de la Philosophic Naturelle—hecaxne
a great success in the scientific circles of its time. A first edition can be viewed at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. The????? Château de Cirey ended up shuttered and abandoned during the Revolution, but was later refurbished. Her first son never lived to see that, having become ambassador to Britain under Louis XVI, which led, after his return to France, to his arrest and subsequent death by the guillotine. "If I were King," du Châtelet once wrote, ". . . women would be worth more, and men would gain something new to emulate."

HENRI POINCARÉ
lived for seven years after Einstein's 1905 publications, still unreconciled to the fact that outside of France he wasn't recognized as a founder of relativity. In his final years he wrote eloquent, thoughtful essays on creativity. He also ensured that no one who wanted to work on Einstein's theories could be promoted in France.

MILEVA MARIC-EINSTEIN
continued looking up to her husband, even as he started an affair and their marriage broke apart. When he promised to
give
her any future Nobel Prize money as a divorce settlement, she saw nothing unusual in assuming that he would win it. (In 1922, when he did get the prize—though not for his theory of relativity, as the Swedish Academy was still not entirely convinced it would prove itself—he promptly transferred to her the substantial prize money as promised.)

She never remarried after the divorce, and having missed her chance to retake her final university exams (her grades had been just slightly too low to get a teaching job), she never found a significant career. Although her first son ended up an engineering professor at Berkeley, she became exhausted caring for their second son, who was in and out of mental institutions his whole life. She died in Zurich in 1948, increasingly depressed and alone.

MICHELE BESSO
, Einstein's closest friend from his Bern years, with whom the ideas of special relativity were first talked over, had a rich home life, and a successful career as a mechanical engineer. Even in the 1950s, when he and the now twice-married Einstein were old, their correspondence continued and even became more frequent. After Besso's death, in early 1955, Einstein wrote Besso's family: "The gift of leading a harmonious life is rarely joined to such a keen intelligence, especially to the degree one found in him. . . . what I admired most about Michele was the fact that he was able to live so many years with one woman, not only in peace but also in constant unity, something I have lamentably failed at twice. . . ."

Despite the bowling balls and child's hoe that had been thrown her way as a child,
MAJA EINSTEIN
became her big brother's closest friend. In 1906 she moved to Bern in part to be close to him, and ended up taking a doctorate (in Romance languages) from the university there, an extremely rare achievement for a woman at the time. When Einstein began teaching at that university she—and Besso—regularly attended some of his first classes, so that the authorities would be less likely to notice how few other students Einstein was then getting.

ERNEST RUTHERFORD
died suddenly in 1937, following an intestinal rupture, which was possibly linked to overvigor-ous gardening he was doing at his weekend cottage. His final words were for his wife to be sure to arrange that scholarship funds be sent to Nelson College, in New Zealand, which is where he had received the schooling that raised him from rural poverty, and prepared him for his own scholarship to England,
THE CAVENDISH LABORATORY
he left behind never again achieved the same preeminence in nuclear research. In time a new director shifted it increasingly toward biology. This included welcoming a young American, James Watson, who it was thought might work well with the physics-trained Francis Crick, in using the Cavendish's resources to try investigating the structure of DNA.

HANS GEIGER
, Rutherford's young man who'd had the knack of making such useful radiation counters, returned
to
Germany, and soon assumed senior academic positions. His years in England had, however, little effect in making him a believer in tolerance or freedom. He was one of the most active of senior German physicists in supporting the rise of Hitler, and welcoming students with swastikas. He turned against his Jewish colleagues, including ones who'd helped him over the years; as Hans Bethe and others have noted, he seemed to enjoy coldly turning down any of their requests for aid in obtaining foreign posts.

SIR JAMES CHADWICK
was holidaying with his family on the Continent when the German invasion of Poland began in 1939, and although he was assured by his hosts that there was no chance of being caught behind enemy lines, he brought his family back to England with remarkable alacrity. Having stood up
to
Oppenheimer enough to impress General Groves, he was brought into the centers of power in Washington, and turned out to be one of the most effective administrators of the Manhattan Project. He lived into the 1970s, but had been so distressed by what the bomb explosions could lead to that "I had then to start taking sleeping pills. It was the only remedy. I've never stopped since then. It's 28 years, and I don't think I've missed a single night in all those 28 years."

His participation in the Manhattan Project was central to its success, but as with a number of the participating scientists, he was hit by cancer when he was still only in middle age. He was notably calm in the hospital room during his last few months. When the Hindu Chandrasekhar came in, unsure what to say, Fermi put him at ease by asking, with a smile, if Chandra could tell him if he was going to come back as an elephant the next time.

America's largest high-energy physics research center is located about 30 miles southwest of Chicago. It is called
FERMILAB.

For many years, the workbench Meitner had used in Berlin, with all the devices she'd accumulated for the key experiment, was on display in the Deutsches Museum in Munich. It was labeled the
Arbeitstisch von Otto Hahn:
The workbench of Otto Hahn.

As a mark of Hahn's fame, when a new chemical element, number 105 was created, it was named
HAHNIUM
. In 1997, however, the name vanished from the the Periodic Table; the new element was officially relabeled Dubnium in honor of the Russian city where it had first been created.

FRITZ STRASSMANN
was disappointed at Hahn's antics, and refused the 10 percent of the Nobel Prize money that Hahn later offered him. He kept his liberal sympathies even in the midst of the war, hiding the Jewish pianist Andrea Wolffenstein for several months in his Berlin apartment— for which he was later honored at the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem, in Jerusalem. After the war Strassmann wrote to Meitner, asking her to return to Germany, but noting that he'd understand if she didn't.

LISE MEITNER
was hurt at what her lifelong partner Hahn did to her, but put it down to his desire to suppress everything about the recent German past. She left Stockholm for Cambridge, England, and in the 1960s could be seen as a slender very old woman, browsing in the bookshops. Into her mid-eighties she kept a notebook of questions to ask her young nephew. These included topics in current theoretical physics, as well as perplexing vocabulary words such as
highfalutin and juke box.
She died in relative obscurity in October 1968, a few weeks after the world-famous Hahn.

In the 1970s feminist scholars began to reexplore her career. When a new chemical element, number 109 in the Periodic Table, was created in 1982, it was named
MEITNERIUM.

Frisch played an important role at Los Alamos, though by March 1945 he was back in Cambridge, where he happened to be at the Cavendish laboratory when the young Fred Hoyle came by, in need of some listings of nuclear masses for an idea he'd had about the way elements were formed inside stars. Frisch supplied them.

After the war, with his first name now "Otto," Frisch continued to be a firm anglophile, though he always retained a suspicion that "the weather" was something which had only recently arrived in Britain, this being the only reasonable explanation as to why the populace commented on
it
so frequently. To his great pleasure, in 1947 he was offered a named professorship at Cambridge—so allowing him to share in the tradition as had an earlier immigrant, Ernest Rutherford.

LESLIE GROVES
always kept a soft spot for Oppenheimer. Retired from the army, and an executive at Remington Rand, he refused to condemn Oppenheimer wholeheartedly (as most other army staff did) at the 1954 hearings. Groves always held that Oppenheimer was "A real genius. . . . Lawrence is very bright, [but] he's not a genius, just a good hard worker. Why, Oppenheimer knows about everything. He can talk to you about anything you bring up. Well, not exactly. I guess there are a few things he doesn't know about. He doesn't know about sports."