Einstein's Genius Club (9 page)

For Einstein, the years between the wars saw the diminution of his scientific genius. They saw, as well, a new focus on the atom. Relativity had resolved macrophysics—the realm of gravity, time, and space. What remained was the invisible realm of what makes matter.

In some ways, Einstein remained at the center of physics purely by dint of his reputation. Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, he reestablished his status as an outsider for his stubborn rejection of quantum mechanics. A younger generation, located in the “quantum triangle” of Munich, Göttingen, and Copenhagen, succeeded in changing our worldview, as he had in relativity.
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It was, in many ways, a more startling revolution than Einstein's. Quantum mechanics gave us the structure of the atom, but it robbed us of the certainty of causation. Einstein was never reconciled to a physics in which God appeared to “throw dice.” When, in 1932, he finally accepted the usefulness and (for him, limited) success of quantum mechanics, he turned irrevocably away from mainstream physics. His search for a “theory of everything” based on relativity, a unified theory that would subsume quantum theory, was relentless and, ultimately, unsuccessful.

Fame assured Einstein of the means to carry on his work. As Germany descended into the hell of Nazism, he found himself afloat in requests for lectures and job offers. He lectured at the new California Institute of Technology in 1930 and again in 1932. He was invited to deliver the Rhodes lecture at Oxford in 1931. In 1932, while at Caltech, he met Abraham Flexner, an academic reformer and inveterate organizer, who was recruiting faculty for his newly endowed Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Flexner, determined to entice the greatest name in science, offered Einstein a six-month contract scheduled around his Berlin duties. But Einstein was as yet unwilling to abandon his home in Berlin.

Almost immediately after Hitler took power, Einstein was targeted. That the most famous scientist in the world was a Jew—not to mention a pacifist and internationalist—outraged the Nazis. In the years leading up to Hitler's election, Einstein had attended rallies, signed manifestos, and lent his name to appeals in the anti-Fascist cause. Once in power, the Nazis wasted no time in retaliating. Among the photographs in a book listing “traitors to
Germany,” Einstein's picture was captioned: “Not Yet Hanged.”
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Soon to come were book burnings, mass dismissals of Jews from academia, and concentration camps.

Einstein did not hesitate. Only three months after the Nazis took over, he cut all ties with Germany, resigning from the Prussian Academy of Sciences and turning in his passport.
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The Nazi chieftains and German newspapers spat at him, calling him a turncoat. As Einstein wrote to Max Born, “I've been promoted to an ‘evil monster.'”
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The Prussian Academy—with a very few honorable exceptions—rejected Einstein's resignation. They wanted the satisfaction of expelling him, and did so a few months later. Flexner's offer of a half-year stay was extended indefinitely. As it turned out, Einstein remained at the Institute for the rest of his life. He never set foot in Europe again.

For almost its first decade, the Institute for Advanced Study was an institution on paper only, with no buildings of its own. Offices were rented for its members from Princeton University. Its purpose was to free its scholars from teaching. Lavish salaries also made it attractive: Einstein asked for a salary of $3,000, but was given $15,000 per year—this during the early Depression, when most American professors earned about $2,000. That salary was possible because the Institute was handsomely funded by Louis Bamberger and his sister, Caroline Bamberger Fuld, who had sold their department store in 1929 a few scant weeks before Wall Street crashed.

Einstein was the second professor named; the first was the American mathematician Oswald Veblen. Until 1935, six mathematicians comprised the entire fulltime Institute—but they were a choice group: Besides Einstein and Veblen, they included the renowned mathematician Hermann Weyl, self-exiled from Göttingen, and the young John von Neumann. As a bonus, one of the visiting scholars in 1933 was the twenty-seven-year old Gödel.

If not for his fame, Einstein would very probably not have
been hired. Mathematicians were the first appointees because there was consensus about the best. Einstein was never a mathematician in the sense of a Gödel or a von Neumann; he was a physicist who used whatever abstruse mathematics he needed, but beyond that his interest and expertise dropped off. Still, general relativity had spurred new mathematical research, and he was in any case too valuable a catch to lose.

On his way to Princeton in October 1933, Einstein sailed to New York, to be met there by the mayor, a band, speeches, and the usual journalistic hoopla. But Institute officials, worried about conservative protests against Einstein as a Bolshevik, hurried him off to Princeton.
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So, at age fifty-four, Einstein settled in a most unlikely place: a small American college town nestled amid genteel wealth. Nothing could have been more different from Berlin, where art, decadence, and scientific eminence jostled with Nazis and Communists bloodying the streets, and where Hitler now reigned. The leafy Princeton streets quietly shaded an inbred little community, affluent and above all decorous. Princeton University embodied these qualities in its neo-Gothic architecture reminiscent of Oxford. From about 1920, the university's mathematics department had suddenly blossomed into one of the greatest centers of mathematics in the world, doing new research in every direction. But Fine Hall, which housed it, looked backward, at least architecturally, to old Europe and the Gilded Age of nineteenth-century America: its long corridors punctuated by stained-glass windows, its offices carpeted and lavishly furnished.
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Oswald Veblen, said to have planned the building, was the nephew of Thorstein Veblen, the famous American social thinker who satirized “conspicuous consumption”—spending lavishly to excite the envy of others—which might describe the Fine Hall of Mathematics. The corrosively ironic Thorstein Veblen was one of Einstein's favorite authors, along with Russell.

Einstein's last letter, written within days of his death in 1955, was addressed to his friend, Bertrand Russell:

Thank you for your letter of April 5. I am gladly willing to sign your excellent statement. I also agree with your choice of the prospective signers.

With kind regards, A. Einstein
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This short note was a fitting last word to a lifelong friend. It added Einstein's name to what became known as the Einstein-Russell Manifesto. The manifesto was signed by nine other scientists, among them Max Born, Linus Pauling, and Frédéric Joliot-Curie. Conceived by Russell, it called upon the American Congress, and the public, to repudiate war in the face of nuclear weapons. It met with a surprising degree of support, despite the Cold War. Certainly Einstein's signature, offered on his deathbed, lent prestige and credibility. Only days after its publication, an industrialist named Cyrus Eaton offered to fund the conference proposed by the manifesto, providing that it take place in Pugwash, Eaton's birthplace in Nova Scotia. Thus were the Pugwash Conferences and other anti-nuclear movements born.

Among public intellectuals with international stature, few were more visible in their antipathy for nuclear arms than Einstein and Russell. The two had been comrades in pacifism since World War I, when Russell in England and Einstein in Germany were the most prominent figures on either side to speak out against the slaughter. Though the two men saw little of each other throughout their lives, they lived and thought along similar lines—outspoken defenders of peace, social justice, and intellectual freedom.

As it had done for so many, World War I changed both their lives. Russell plunged into political action, gathering signatures from Cambridge dons, writing an antiwar letter to
The Nation,
and
joining the Union of Democratic Control and the No-Conscription Fellowship.
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In Germany, Einstein, who had just moved to Berlin, was appalled by the rabid nationalism of leading German intellectuals. He signed the antinationalist “Appeal to Europeans” and, for the first time, joined a political association, the Bund Neues Vater-land (New Fatherland League).

If their scientific energies had relatively short half-lives, their political energies, once unleashed by the two World Wars and their interregnum, knew no boundaries.

The two men first met sometime in the early 1930s, possibly when Russell stopped in Princeton during an American tour. Their first known correspondence seems to have been in 1931, when Einstein wrote, expressing his “highest admiration” for the mathematician turned philosopher.
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(Russell returned the compliment, calling Einstein “the leading intellect of the age.”
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) Had Plutarch lived today, he might have chosen Einstein and Russell as subjects of a modern
Parallel Lives
. By education and outlook, they were Victorians; by dint of genius, they helped define modernity. They shared the high optimism of purpose and confidence bequeathed by the European empire and the skepticism bequeathed by its inexorable demise. Both worked energetically throughout their lives. They carried on the Victorian practice of reading aloud to family. Einstein, for one, read to his invalid sister each evening from Herodotus or Xenophon—or Bertrand Russell. After his first marriage in 1894, the twenty-two-year-old Russell and his bride happily entertained each other in the evenings by reading aloud from Shakespeare, Gibbon, Plutarch, and Shelley's
Epipsychidion
.

The two men also shared an intellectual heritage. Each had discovered Kant early in life (Einstein in his early teens; Russell at Cambridge).
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John Stuart Mill and David Hume were foundational, especially Mill for Russell. In later years, Einstein remembered Hume's works as having had “considerable effect on my development.”
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(Einstein's admiration of Russell's wit, logical precision, and skepticism may have its roots in the resemblance to
Hume.) Although canonized, along with Nietzsche, Hegel, and Freud, as arch-shapers of the modern spirit, Einstein and Russell both preferred the cool rationalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Russell paid scant attention to such twentieth-century fevers as nihilism, existentialism, or the unconscious psyche. Einstein bothered with them even less and had no more to do with moral or historical relativism than the accident of the word “relativity.”
His
theory sought to rid physics of subjective relativity; indeed, the term “relativity theory” was coined by Planck, who nevertheless marveled over the “absolute, the universally valid, the invariant” uncovered by the theory. “Invariance theory” was proposed at one point as an alternative name, but “relativity” stuck.

Above all, they were committed leftists, whose politics were tempered by inconsistencies. Einstein, a lifelong enemy of nationalism, supported Zionism and the creation of Israel—“I am against nationalism but for the Jewish cause” seemed to be a compromise he could live with. He championed freedom and equality but also declared that “the creative sentient individual… alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd remains dull in thought and feeling.”
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Russell was a political radical who remained an aristocratic with an aristocrat's sense of privilege. Ever at odds with the spirit of his times, he found himself drawn to and ultimately abandoned by young turks (Wittgenstein and D. H. Lawrence, especially) because he could not or would not subscribe to their views. The First World War moved Einstein and Russell into collision with politics and changed their lives. By the 1920s, they were activists and global celebrities, Einstein the Sage of the Universe and Russell the nonconformist founder of analytical philosophy.

And yet, few men were so different, above all, in their heritage. Einstein was born into a middle-class family, but as a Jew and, for most of his life, a man without a country, he was very much the outsider. The aristocratic Russell was by birth an insider. Their given names reflect social class. Einstein's parents straddled the awkward, tentative path of assimilation, giving Albert a nonbiblical
name, but not the more assimilated “Albrecht.” “Bertrand” had the opposite purpose—to emphasize distinction. The Russell family gained prominence when Henry VIII replaced the troublesome Catholic aristocracy with loyal Protestants. He ennobled John Russell and gave him splendid estates and abbeys. Bertrand's grandfather was an earl, a title Bertrand inherited in 1931.

In character and demeanor, too, the differences were stark. One has only to think of the famous photograph of the elderly Einstein sticking his tongue out at the camera—childlike impudence mixed with self-mockery, the celebrity scoffing at anyone foolish enough to take celebrity seriously. Earthy and droll, Einstein also tended to be gentle with friends. More often than not, he was the target of his own sarcasm: “So now I too am an official member of the guild of whores,” he said upon taking the Patent Office position.
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Such antics were never Russell's style. If Einstein was the benign clown, Russell was the witty satyr. T. S. Eliot, who had been Russell's student at Harvard in 1914, caricatured Russell in “Mr. Apollinax” as an interloper at a tedious faculty party, “laugh[ing] like an irresponsible foetus” and “grinning over a screen / With seaweed in his hair.” He did not fancy the Harvard dullards, and he let them know it. His wit was often used to flay. Of the Bloomsbury set, he snarled:

They put up with me because they know I can make anyone look ridiculous—if I had less brains and less satire, they would be all down on me—as it is they whisper against me in corners, and flatter me to my face. They are a rotten crew.
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