Walter Isaacson - Einstein - His Life and Universe

In Cuba, where he relished the warm weather, Einstein addressed the local Academy of Sciences. Then it was on to Panama, where a revolution was brewing that would depose a president who, it turned out, was also a graduate of the Zurich Polytechnic. That didn’t stop officials from offering Einstein an elaborate welcome ceremony at which he was presented a hat that “an illiterate Ecuadorian Indian worked for six months weaving.” On Christmas day, he broadcast holiday greetings to America via the ship’s radio. 47

When his ship docked in San Diego on the last morning of 1930, dozens of newsmen clambered aboard, with two of them falling off the ladder as they rushed their way onto the deck. Five hundred uniformed girls stood on the dock, waiting to serenade him. The gaudy arrival ceremony lasted four hours, filled with speeches and presentations.

Were there men, he was asked, living elsewhere in the universe? “Other beings, perhaps, but not men,” he answered. Did science and religion conflict? Not really, he said, “though it depends, of course, on your religious views.” 48

Friends who saw all the arrival hoopla on newsreels back in Germany were astonished and somewhat appalled. “I am always very amused to see and hear you in the weekly newsreel,” wrote the sharp-penned Hedwig Born, “being presented with a floral float containing lovely sea-nymphs in San Diego, and that sort of thing. However crazy things must look from the outside, I always have the feeling that the dear Lord knows what he’s up to.” 49

It was on this trip, as noted in the previous chapter, that Einstein visited the Mount Wilson Observatory, was shown evidence of the expanding universe, and renounced the cosmological constant he had added to his general relativity equations. He also paid tribute to the aging Albert Michelson, carefully praising his famous experiments that detected no ether drift, without explicitly saying that they were a basis for his special theory of relativity.

Einstein soaked in a variety of the delights that southern California could offer. He attended the Rose Bowl parade, was given a special screening of All Quiet on the Western Front, and sunbathed nude in the Mojave desert while at a friend’s house for the weekend. At a Hollywood studio, the special effects team filmed him pretending to drive a parked car, and then that evening amused him by showing how they made it seem as if he were zipping through Los Angeles, soaring up into the clouds, flying over the Rockies, and eventually landing in the German countryside. He even was offered some movie roles, which he politely declined.

He went sailing in the Pacific with Robert A. Millikan, Caltech’s president, who Einstein noted in his diary “plays the role of God” at the university. Millikan was a physicist who had won the Nobel Prize in 1923 for, as the organization noted, having “verified experimentally Einstein’s all-important photoelectric equation.” He likewise verified Einstein’s interpretation of Brownian motion. So it was understandable that, as he was building Caltech into one of the world’s preeminent scientific institutions, he worked diligently to bring Einstein there.

Despite all they had in common, Millikan and Einstein were different enough in their personal outlooks that they were destined to have an awkward relationship. Millikan was so conservative scientifically that he resisted Einstein’s interpretation of the photoelectric effect and his dismissal of the ether even after they were apparently verified by his own experiments. And he was even more conservative politically. A robust and athletic son of an Iowa preacher, he had a penchant for patriotic militarism that was as pronounced as Einstein’s aversion to it.

Moreover, Millikan was enhancing Caltech through hefty donations from like-minded conservatives. Einstein’s pacifist and socialist sentiments unnerved many of them, and they urged Millikan to restrain him from making pronouncements on earthly rather than cosmic issues. As Major General Amos Fried put it, they must avoid “aiding and abetting the teaching of treason to the youth of this country by being hosts to Dr. Albert Einstein.” Millikan responded sympathetically by denouncing Einstein’s call for military resistance and declaring that “the 2% comment, if he ever made it, is one which no experienced man could possibly have made.” 50

Millikan particularly disdained the crusading writer and union advocate Upton Sinclair, whom he called “the most dangerous man in California,” and the actor Charlie Chaplin, who equaled Einstein in global celebrity and surpassed him in left-wing sentiments. Much to Millikan’s dismay, Einstein promptly befriended both.

Einstein had corresponded with Sinclair about their shared commitment to social justice, and upon arriving in California was happy to accept his invitations to a variety of dinners, parties, and meetings. He even remained polite, though amused, while attending a farcical séance at Sinclair’s home. When Mrs. Sinclair challenged his views on science and spirituality, Elsa chided her for having such presumption. “You know, my husband has the greatest mind in the world,” she said. Mrs. Sinclair responded, “Yes, I know, but surely he doesn’t know everything.” 51

During a tour of Universal Studios, Einstein mentioned that he had always wanted to meet Charlie Chaplin. So the studio boss called him, and he came right over to join the Einsteins for lunch in the commissary. The result, a few days later, was one of the most memorable scenes in the new era of celebrity: Einstein and Chaplin arriving together, dressed in black tie, with Elsa beaming, for the premiere of City Lights. As they were applauded on their way into the theater, Chaplin memorably (and accurately) noted, “They cheer me because they all understand me, and they cheer you because no one understands you.” 52

Einstein struck a more serious pose when he addressed the Caltech student body near the end of his stay. His sermon, grounded in his humanistic outlook, was on how science had not yet been harnessed to do more good than harm. During war it gave people “the means to poison and mutilate one another,” and in peacetime it “has made our lives hurried and uncertain.” Instead of being a liberating force, “it has enslaved men to machines” by making them work “long wearisome hours mostly without joy in their labor.” Concern for making life better for ordinary humans must be the chief object of science. “Never forget this when you are pondering over your diagrams and equations!” 53

The Einsteins took a train east across America for their return sail from New York. Along the way, they stopped at the Grand Canyon, where they were greeted by a contingent of Hopi Indians (employed by the concession stand at the canyon, though Einstein did not know that), who initiated him into their tribe as “the Great Relative” and gave him a bountiful feathered headdress that resulted in some classic photographs. 54

When his train reached Chicago, Einstein gave a speech from its rear platform to a rally of pacifists who had come to celebrate him. Millikan must have been appalled. It was similar to the “2%” speech Einstein had given in New York. “The only way to be effective is through the revolutionary method of refusing military service,” he declared. “Many who consider themselves good pacifists will not want to participate in such a radical form of pacifism; they will claim that patriotism prevents them from adopting such a policy. But in an emergency, such people cannot be counted on anyhow.” 55

Einstein’s train pulled into New York City on the morning of March 1, and for the next sixteen hours Einstein mania reached new heights. “Einstein’s personality, for no clear reason, triggers outbursts of a kind of mass hysteria,” the German consul reported to Berlin.