Walter Isaacson - Einstein - His Life and Universe

Soon Harvey was besieged by those who wanted Einstein’s brain or a piece of it. He was summoned to Washington to meet with officials of the U.S. Army’s pathology unit, but despite their requests he refused to show them his prized possession. Guarding it had become a mission. He finally decided to have friends at the University of Pennsylvania turn part of it into microscopic slides, and so he put Einstein’s brain, now chopped into pieces, into two glass cookie jars and drove it there in the back of his Ford.

Over the years, in a process that was at once guileless as well as bizarre, Harvey would send off slides or chunks of the remaining brain to random researchers who struck his fancy. He demanded no rigorous studies, and for years none were published. In the meantime, he quit Princeton Hospital, left his wife, remarried a couple of times, and moved around from New Jersey to Missouri to Kansas, often leaving no forwarding address, the remaining fragments of Einstein’s brain always with him.

Every now and then, a reporter would stumble across the story and track Harvey down, causing a minor media flurry. Steven Levy, then of New Jersey Monthly and later of Newsweek, found him in 1978 in Wichita, where he pulled a Mason jar of Einstein’s brain chunks from a box labeled “Costa Cider” in the corner of his office behind a red plastic picnic cooler. 6Twenty years later, Harvey was tracked down again, by Michael Paterniti, a free-spirited and soulful writer for Harper’s, who turned his road trip in a rented Buick across America with Harvey and the brain into an award-winning article and best-selling book, Driving Mr. Albert.

Their destination was California, where they paid a call on Einstein’s granddaughter, Evelyn Einstein. She was divorced, marginally employed, and struggling with poverty. Harvey’s perambulations with the brain struck her as creepy, but she had a particular interest in one secret it might hold. She was the adopted daughter of Hans Albert and his wife Frieda, but the timing and circumstances of her birth were murky. She had heard rumors that made her suspect that possibly, just possibly, she might actually be Einstein’s own daughter. She had been born after Elsa’s death, when Einstein was spending time with a variety of women. Perhaps she had been the result of one of those liaisons, and he had arranged for her to be adopted by Hans Albert. Working with Robert Schulmann, an early editor of the Einstein papers, she hoped to see what could be learned by studying the DNA from Einstein’s brain. Unfortunately, it turned out that the way Harvey had embalmed the brain made it impossible to extract usable DNA. And so her questions were never answered. 7

In 1998, after forty-three years as the wandering guardian of Einstein’s brain, Thomas Harvey, by then 86, decided it was time to pass on the responsibility. So he called the person who currently held his old job as pathologist at Princeton Hospital and went by to drop it off. 8

Of the dozens of people to whom Harvey doled out pieces of Einstein’s brain over the years, only three published significant scientific studies. The first was by a Berkeley team led by Marian Diamond. 9It reported that one area of Einstein’s brain, part of the parietal cortex, had a higher ratio of what are known as glial cells to neurons. This could, the authors said, indicate that the neurons used and needed more energy.

One problem with this study was that his 76-year-old brain was compared to eleven others from men who had died at an average age of 64. There were no other geniuses in the sample to help determine if the findings fit a pattern. There was also a more fundamental problem: with no ability to trace the development of the brain over a lifetime, it was unclear which physical attributes might be the cause of greater intelligence and which might instead be the effect of years spent using and exercising certain parts of the brain.

A second paper, published in 1996, suggested that Einstein’s cerebral cortex was thinner than in five other sample brains, and the density of his neurons was greater. Once again, the sample was small and evidence of any pattern was sketchy.

The most cited paper was done in 1999 by Professor Sandra Witelson and a team at McMaster University in Ontario. Harvey had sent her a fax, unprompted, offering samples for study. He was in his eighties, but he personally drove up to Canada by himself, transporting a hunk that amounted to about one-fifth of Einstein’s brain, including the parietal lobe.

When compared to brains of thirty-five other men, Einstein’s had a much shorter groove in one area of his inferior parietal lobe, which is thought to be key to mathematical and spatial thinking. His brain was also 15 percent wider in this region. The paper speculated that these traits may have produced richer and more integrated brain circuits in this region. 10

But any true understanding of Einstein’s imagination and intuition will not come from poking around at his patterns of glia and grooves. The relevant question was how his mind worked, not his brain.

The explanation that Einstein himself most often gave for his mental accomplishments was his curiosity. As he put it near the end of his life, “I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious.” 11

That trait is perhaps the best place to begin when sifting through the elements of his genius. There he is, as a young boy sick in bed, trying to figure out why the compass needle points north. Most of us can recall seeing such needles swing into place, but few of us pursue with passion the question of how a magnetic field might work, how fast it might propagate, how it could possibly interact with matter.

What would it be like to race alongside a light beam? If we are moving through curved space the way a beetle moves across a curved leaf, how would we notice it? What does it mean to say that two events are simultaneous? Curiosity, in Einstein’s case, came not just from a desire to question the mysterious. More important, it came from a childlike sense of marvel that propelled him to question the familiar, those concepts that, as he once said, “the ordinary adult never bothers his head about.” 12

He could look at well-known facts and pluck out insights that had escaped the notice of others. Ever since Newton, for example, scientists had known that inertial mass was equivalent to gravitational mass. But Einstein saw that this meant that there was an equivalence between gravity and acceleration that would unlock an explanation of the universe. 13

A tenet of Einstein’s faith was that nature was not cluttered with extraneous attributes. Thus, there must be a purpose to curiosity. For Einstein, it existed because it created minds that question, which produced an appreciation for the universe that he equated with religious feelings. “Curiosity has its own reason for existing,” he once explained. “One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality.” 14

From his earliest days, Einstein’s curiosity and imagination were expressed mainly through visual thinking—mental pictures and thought experiments—rather than verbally. This included the ability to visualize the physical reality that was painted by the brush strokes of mathematics. “Behind a formula he immediately saw the physical content, while for us it only remained an abstract formula,” said one of his first students. 15Planck came up with the concept of the quanta, which he viewed as mainly a mathematical contrivance, but it took Einstein to understand their physical reality. Lorentz came up with mathematical transformations that described bodies in motion, but it took Einstein to create a new theory of relativity based on them.