Einstein (34 page)

We went first to police headquarters, where, as was common during the postwar period, every stranger had to report. Then we visited the Physics Laboratory of the Czech University. The professors there were pleasantly surprised by seeing Einstein, whose picture hung on the wall, appear in person in their room. By this visit Einstein wanted to express his sympathy for the new Czechoslovak Republic and its democratic policy under Masaryk’s leadership.

In Prague, as in all the cities that had belonged to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, a large part of the social life took place in the cafés. There people read newspapers and magazines, met with friends and acquaintances, and discussed business problems and scientific, artistic, or political questions. New political parties, literary circles, or large business firms were founded in cafés. Often, however, people sat alone, studying books or doing their own writing. Many students prepared for their examinations there, because their rooms were too cold, too dark, or simply too dreary. Einstein wanted to visit such places and he said to me: “We ought to visit several cafés and look in to see what the various places frequented by different social classes look like.” Thus we paid rapid visits to several cafés; in one we saw Czech nationalists, in another German nationalists; here were Jews, there Communists, actors, university professors, and so forth.

On the way home Einstein said to me: “Now we must buy something for lunch so that your wife won’t have too much bother.” At that time my wife and I cooked our meals on a gas burner such as is used for experiments in chemical or physical laboratories, a so-called Bunsen burner. This took place in the same large room in which we lived and where Einstein had also slept. We came home bringing some calf’s liver that we had purchased. While my wife began to cook the liver on the gas burner, I sat with Einstein talking about all sorts of things. Suddenly Einstein looked apprehensively at the liver and jumped at my wife: “What are you doing there? Are you boiling the liver in water? You certainly know that the boiling-point of water is too low to be able to fry liver in it. You must use a substance with a higher boiling-point such as butter or fat.” My wife had been a college student until then and knew little about cooking. But Einstein’s advice saved the lunch; and we got a source of
amusement for all our married life, because whenever “Einstein’s theory” was mentioned, my wife remembered his theory about frying calf’s liver.

That evening he lectured before the Urania association. It was Einstein’s first popular lecture that I had heard. The hall was dangerously overcrowded since everyone wanted to see the world-famous man who had overthrown the laws of the universe and proved the “curvature” of space. The ordinary public did not really know whether it was all a colossal humbug or a scientific achievement. Nevertheless, it was ready to marvel at both. As we were going in to the lecture, a very influential man in public life who had himself done a great deal to organize the meeting pushed through the crowd and said to me: “Please tell me quickly in one word, is there any truth in this Einstein or is this all bunk?” Einstein spoke as simply and clearly as possible. But the public was much too excited to understand the meaning of the lecture. There was less desire to understand, than to experience an exciting event.

After the lecture the chairman of the Urania gathered together a number of guests to spend the evening with Einstein. Several speeches were made. When Einstein’s turn came to answer, he said: “It will perhaps be pleasanter and more understandable if instead of making a speech I play a piece for you on the violin.” It was easier for him to express his feelings in this way. He played a sonata by Mozart in his simple, precise, and therefore doubly moving manner. His playing indicated something of his intense feeling for the complexity of the universe and simultaneously of the intellectual joy over the possibility of expressing it in simple formulas.

Einstein remained in Prague another evening to participate in a discussion of his theories that was to take place in the Urania before a large audience. Einstein’s main opponent was a philosopher of the Prague University, Oskar Kraus, an acute thinker in the philosophy of law, whose conception of scientific discussions, however, was more like that of a counsel at a trial. He made no attempt to explore the truth, but instead wanted only to refute his opponent by finding passages that were contradictory in the writings of Einstein’s supporters. In this he was successful. Anyone who wants to present a complex subject popularly must introduce some simplifications. But every author introduces them at different places according to his own taste or his opinion of his reader’s tastes. If every statement by a popularizer is then taken literally, contradictions must necessarily
arise. But this has nothing to do with the correctness of Einstein’s theory.

Professor Kraus was a typical proponent of the idea that one can learn various things about the geometrical and physical behavior of bodies through simple “intuition.” Anything that contradicted this intuition he considered absurd. Among these absurdities he included Einstein’s assertion that Euclid’s geometry, which we all learned in school, might not be strictly correct. Since in Kraus’s opinion the truths of ordinary geometry must be clear to every normal person, it was a puzzle to him how a person like Einstein could believe the opposite. His wife reminded me not to speak to him about Einstein’s theory. She said that he often spoke about it in his sleep and he got excited over the idea that there were people who could “believe what is absurd.” It was tormenting for him to think that such a thing was possible.

This philosopher was the chief speaker against Einstein. I presided at this discussion and endeavored to direct it in halfway quiet paths. A number of people now appeared who wanted to take advantage of an opportunity that would probably never present itself to them again. They could now fling the opinions that they had formed privately directly at the famous Einstein; he was compelled to listen to them. As a result several comical things occurred. Thus a professor of mechanical engineering at the Institute of Technology made some remarks that were false, but sounded rather reasonable. After the lecture Einstein said to me: “That laborer spoke naïvely, but not in an entirely foolish way.” When I replied that he was not a laborer, but a professor of engineering, he said: “In that case it was too naive.”

On the following day Einstein was to depart, but by early forenoon the news had already spread that Einstein was staying at the Physics Laboratory and many people hurried to speak to him. I had great difficulty in arranging a relatively quiet departure. For instance, a young man had brought a large manuscript. On the basis of Einstein’s equation
E
=
mc
²
he wanted to use the energy contained within the atom for the production of frightful explosives, and he had invented a kind of machine that could not possibly function. He told me that he had awaited this moment for years and in any case wanted to speak to Einstein personally. I finally prevailed upon Einstein to receive him. There was but little time left and Einstein said to him “Calm yourself. You haven’t lost anything if I don’t discuss your work
with you in detail. Its foolishness is evident at first glance. You cannot learn any more from a longer discussion.” Einstein had already read about a hundred such “inventions.” But twenty-five years later, in 1945, the “real thing” exploded at Hiroshima.

From Prague Einstein went to Vienna, where he also had to give a lecture. The Vienna of this postwar period was completely different from the city that Einstein had visited in 1913. It was now no longer the capital of a great empire, but only that of a little republic.

Among Einstein’s acquaintances, too, changes were noticeable. His friend Friedrich Adler had become a public figure. During the war, when the Austrian government had refused to convene the parliament and to submit its course of action to the judgment of the people’s representatives, Friedrich Adler, imbued with a fanatical desire to achieve what he considered just, had shot the head of the government during a dinner in a fashionable hotel.

Adler was arrested and condemned to death, but the Emperor commuted his sentence to life imprisonment, since Adler’s father, although leader of the Socialists, was a man highly regarded in government circles. The hypothesis was set up that Friedrich Adler was not in his right mind when he committed the assassination. This assumption made it easier to commute his sentence, but the investigation of his mental state was remarkable. While in prison, Adler had written a work on Einstein’s theory of relativity; he believed that he was able to present cogent arguments against it. This manuscript was sent by the court to expert psychiatrists and physicists. They were to determine whether any conclusion could be drawn from it that the author was mentally deranged. In this way I received a copy of the manuscript. The experts, especially the physicists, were placed in a very difficult situation. Adler’s father and family desired that this work should be made the basis for the opinion that Adler was mentally deranged. But this would necessarily be highly insulting to the author, since he believed that he had accomplished an excellent scientific achievement. Moreover, speaking objectively, there was nothing in any way abnormal
about it except that his arguments were wrong. I imagine, however, that he owed the commutation of his sentence rather to the prestige of his father and the inclination of the Imperial government to compromises than to the madness of his arguments against the theory of relativity.

In Vienna Einstein lived with the well-known physicist Felix Ehrenhaft, who in his entire mode of working was the diametrical opposite of Einstein, but whom Einstein occasionally found congenial for this very reason. Einstein was always interested in determining how much could be deduced from a few fundamental principles. The greater the extent to which natural phenomena could be fitted into a simple pattern, the more interesting they were for him. Ehrenhaft, however, was a man of the
direct experiment
. He believed only what he saw, and constantly found isolated phenomena that did not fit into the grand scheme. For this reason he was frequently regarded with disdain, especially by persons who accepted the general scheme as an article of faith. A man like Einstein, who had himself brought these general principles to life, always felt mysteriously attracted whenever he heard of irregularities. Even though he did not believe that they existed, yet he suspected that there might be the germs of new knowledge in these observations.

Ehrenhaft’s wife was a remarkable figure among the women of Vienna. She was herself a physicist and an outstanding organizer of education for girls in Austria. She was astonished when Einstein arrived with only one white collar. She asked him: “Perhaps you have forgotten something at home?” He replied: “By no means; this is all that I need.” As a good housewife she sent one of the two pair of trousers that he had brought with him to be pressed by a tailor. But to her consternation she noticed at the lecture that he had put on the unpressed pair. Mrs. Ehrenhaft also thought that he had left his bedroom slippers at home and bought him a new pair. When she met him in the hall before breakfast, she noticed that he was barefooted. She inquired whether he had not seen the slippers in his room. “They are entirely unnecessary ballast,” was his reply. He did not like shoes at all, and at home when he really wanted to relax he could often be seen in his stocking feet, sometimes even when he had visitors who were not very formal.

During his stay Einstein also came in contact with the two intellectual currents of Vienna that have most strongly influenced the intellectual life of our time: Siegmund Freud’s psychoanalysis,
and the positivistic tradition of Ernst Mach. Einstein called on Josef Breuer, a doctor who together with Freud had published the first paper on the psychological causes of hysterical paralyses, and the engineer and writer Popper-Lynkeus, the nearest friend of Ernst Mach, who once remarked that at first Popper-Lynkeus had been the only one to understand his ideas. At this time Popper-Lynkeus was already eighty years old and confined to his sofa, but intellectually he was still very alert and always eager to meet new and interesting people. He had worked out a project for the abolition of economic misery in Germany through the introduction of a general labor service. This plan was put into practice later in a distorted way by Adolf Hitler. It was a great occasion for Popper when he met Einstein who had become the true heir of Mach’s ideas in the field of physics.

Einstein’s lecture, which was given in an enormous concert hall before an audience of some three thousand people, was probably the first lecture of this kind that he had given. Even more than in Prague the public was in a remarkably excited state, the kind of mental state in which it no longer matters what one understands so long as one is in the immediate neighborhood of a place where miracles are happening.

After Einstein’s return to Berlin he was more than ever a center of general attention. Just as formerly the German professor who forgets his umbrella, the hunter who buys a hare at the butcher’s shop, or the old maid looking for a man had appeared repeatedly in the German comic journals, now the name Einstein became a generic name for anyone who writes something incomprehensible and is admired on this account. Especially the word “relative” stimulated people to the most trivial jokes. In part they were malicious, trying in some way to connect Einstein’s theory with the efforts of victorious France to squeeze as large reparations as possible out of Germany. The German government always tried to show that the country was completely impoverished, while the French doubted this. Thus a German comic journal represented Einstein in conversation with the French President Millerand, who was a vigorous advocate of the “Make Germany pay” policy. Millerand says to Einstein:
“Can’t you persuade the simple-minded Boche that even with an absolute deficit of 67,000,000,000 marks he is still
relatively
well off?”