Einstein (23 page)

Einstein initially found it wondrous that certain truths could be discovered by reason alone. But he soon began to question Kant’s rigid distinction between analytic and synthetic truths. “The objects with which geometry deals seemed to be of no different type than the objects of sensory perception,” he recalled. And later he would reject outright this Kantian distinction. “I am convinced that this differentiation is erroneous,” he wrote. A proposition that seems purely analytic—such as the angles of a triangle adding up to 180 degrees—could turn out to be false in a non-Euclidean geometry or in a curved space (such as would be the case in the general theory of relativity). As he later said of the concepts of geometry and causality, “Today everyone knows, of course, that the mentioned concepts contain nothing of the certainty, of the inherent necessity, which Kant had attributed to them.”
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Hume’s empiricism was carried a step further by Ernst Mach (1838–1916), the Austrian physicist and philosopher whose writings Einstein read at the urging of Michele Besso. He became one of the favorite authors of the Olympia Academy, and he helped to instill in Einstein the skepticism about received wisdom and accepted conventions that would become a hallmark of his creativity. Einstein would later proclaim, in words that could be used to describe himself as well, that Mach’s genius was partly due to his “incorruptible skepticism and independence.”
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The essence of Mach’s philosophy was this, in Einstein’s words: “Concepts have meaning only if we can point to objects to which they refer and to the rules by which they are assigned to these objects.”
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In other words, for a concept to make sense you need an operational definition of it, one that describes how you would observe the concept in operation. This would bear fruit for Einstein when, a few years later, he
and Besso would talk about what observation would give meaning to the apparently simple concept that two events happened “simultaneously.”

The most influential thing that Mach did for Einstein was to apply this approach to Newton’s concepts of “absolute time” and “absolute space.” It was impossible to define these concepts, Mach asserted, in terms of observations you could make. Therefore they were meaningless. Mach ridiculed Newton’s “conceptual monstrosity of absolute space”; he called it “purely a thought-thing which cannot be pointed to in experience.”
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The final intellectual hero of the Olympia Academy was Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), the Jewish philosopher from Amsterdam. His influence was primarily religious: Einstein embraced his concept of an amorphous God reflected in the awe-inspiring beauty, rationality, and unity of nature’s laws. But like Spinoza, Einstein did not believe in a personal God who rewarded and punished and intervened in our daily lives.

In addition, Einstein drew from Spinoza a faith in determinism: a sense that the laws of nature, once we could fathom them, decreed immutable causes and effects, and that God did not play dice by allowing any events to be random or undetermined. “All things are determined by the necessity of divine nature,” Spinoza declared, and even when quantum mechanics seemed to show that was wrong, Einstein steadfastly believed it was right.
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Hermann Einstein was not destined to see his son become anything more successful than a third-class patent examiner. In October 1902, when Hermann’s health began to decline, Einstein traveled to Milan to be with him at the end. Their relationship had long been a mix of alienation and affection, and it concluded on that note as well. “When the end came,” Einstein’s assistant Helen Dukas later said, “Hermann asked all of them to leave the room, so he could die on his own.”

Einstein felt, for the rest of his life, a sense of guilt about that moment,
which encapsulated his inability to forge a true bond with his father. For the first time, he was thrown into a daze, “overwhelmed by a feeling of desolation.” He later called his father’s death the deepest shock he had ever experienced. The event did, however, solve one important issue. On his deathbed, Hermann Einstein gave his permission, finally, for his son to marry Mileva Mari
.
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Einstein’s Olympia Academy colleagues, Maurice Solovine and Conrad Habicht, convened in special session on January 6, 1903, to serve as witnesses at the tiny civil ceremony in the Bern registrar’s office where Albert Einstein married Mileva Mari
. No family members—not Einstein’s mother or sister, nor Mari
’s parents—came to Bern. The tight group of intellectual comrades celebrated together at a restaurant that evening, and then Einstein and Mari
went back to his apartment together. Not surprisingly, he had forgotten his key and had to wake his landlady.
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“Well, now I am a married man and I am living a very pleasant cozy life with my wife,” he reported to Michele Besso two weeks later. “She takes excellent care of everything, cooks well, and is always cheerful.” For her part, Mari
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reported to her own best friend, “I am even closer to my sweetheart, if it is at all possible, than I was in our Zurich days.” Occasionally she would attend sessions of the Olympia Academy, but mainly as an observer. “Mileva, intelligent and reserved, listened intently but never intervened in our discussions,” Solovine recalled.

Nevertheless, clouds began to form. “My new duties are taking their toll,” Mari
said of her housekeeping chores and role as a mere onlooker when science was discussed. Einstein’s friends felt that she was becoming even more gloomy. At times she seemed laconic, and distrustful as well. And Einstein, at least so he claimed in retrospect, had already become wary. He had felt an “inner resistance” to marrying Mari
, he later claimed, but had overcome it out of a “sense of duty.”

Mari
soon began to look for ways to restore the magic to their relationship. She hoped that they would escape the bourgeois drudgery that seemed inherent in the household of a Swiss civil servant and, instead, find some opportunity to recapture their old bohemian academic life. They decided—or at least so Mari
hoped—that Einstein would find a teaching job somewhere far away, perhaps near their forsaken daughter. “We will try anywhere,” she wrote to her friend in Serbia. “Do you think, for example, that in Belgrade people of our kind could find something?” Mari
said they would do anything academic, even teaching German in a high school. “You see, we still have that old enterprising spirit.”
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