Walter Isaacson - Einstein - His Life and Universe

Pauline and Hermann had a second and final child, a daughter, in November 1881, who was named Maria but throughout her life used instead the diminutive Maja. When Albert was shown his new sister for the first time, he was led to believe that she was like a wonderful toy that he would enjoy. His response was to look at her and exclaim, “Yes, but where are the wheels?” 12It may not have been the most perceptive of questions, but it did show that during his third year his language challenges did not prevent him from making some memorable comments. Despite a few childhood squabbles, Maja was to become her brother’s most intimate soul mate.

The Einsteins settled into a comfortable home with mature trees and an elegant garden in a Munich suburb for what was to be, at least through most of Albert’s childhood, a respectable bourgeois existence. Munich had been architecturally burnished by mad King Ludwig II (1845–1886) and boasted a profusion of churches, art galleries, and concert halls that favored the works of resident Richard Wagner. In 1882, just after the Einsteins arrived, the city had about 300,000 residents, 85 percent of them Catholics and 2 percent of them Jewish, and it was the host of the first German electricity exhibition, at which electric lights were introduced to the city streets.

Einstein’s back garden was often bustling with cousins and children. But he shied from their boisterous games and instead “occupied himself with quieter things.” One governess nicknamed him “Father Bore.” He was generally a loner, a tendency he claimed to cherish throughout his life, although his was a special sort of detachment that was interwoven with a relish for camaraderie and intellectual companionship. “From the very beginning he was inclined to separate himself from children his own age and to engage in daydreaming and meditative musing,” according to Philipp Frank, a longtime scientific colleague. 13

He liked to work on puzzles, erect complex structures with his toy building set, play with a steam engine that his uncle gave him, and build houses of cards. According to Maja, Einstein was able to construct card structures as high as fourteen stories. Even discounting the recollections of a star-struck younger sister, there was probably a lot of truth to her claim that “persistence and tenacity were obviously already part of his character.”

He was also, at least as a young child, prone to temper tantrums. “At such moments his face would turn completely yellow, the tip of his nose snow-white, and he was no longer in control of himself,” Maja remembers. Once, at age 5, he grabbed a chair and threw it at a tutor, who fled and never returned. Maja’s head became the target of various hard objects. “It takes a sound skull,” she later joked, “to be the sister of an intellectual.” Unlike his persistence and tenacity, he eventually outgrew his temper. 14

To use the language of psychologists, the young Einstein’s ability to systemize (identify the laws that govern a system) was far greater than his ability to empathize (sense and care about what other humans are feeling), which have led some to ask if he might have exhibited mild symptoms of some developmental disorder. 15However, it is important to note that, despite his aloof and occasionally rebellious manner, he did have the ability to make close friends and to empathize both with colleagues and humanity in general.

The great awakenings that happen in childhood are usually lost to memory. But for Einstein, an experience occurred when he was 4 or 5 that would alter his life and be etched forever in his mind—and in the history of science.

He was sick in bed one day, and his father brought him a compass. He later recalled being so excited as he examined its mysterious powers that he trembled and grew cold. The fact that the magnetic needle behaved as if influenced by some hidden force field, rather than through the more familiar mechanical method involving touch or contact, produced a sense of wonder that motivated him throughout his life. “I can still remember—or at least I believe I can remember—that this experience made a deep and lasting impression on me,” he wrote on one of the many occasions he recounted the incident. “Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.” 16

“It’s an iconic story,” Dennis Overbye noted in Einstein in Love, “the young boy trembling to the invisible order behind chaotic reality.” It has been told in the movie IQ, in which Einstein, played by Walter Matthau, wears the compass around his neck, and it is the focus of a children’s book, Rescuing Albert’s Compass, by Shulamith Oppenheim, whose father-in-law heard the tale from Einstein in 1911. 17

After being mesmerized by the compass needle’s fealty to an unseen field, Einstein would develop a lifelong devotion to field theories as a way to describe nature. Field theories use mathematical quantities, such as numbers or vectors or tensors, to describe how the conditions at any point in space will affect matter or another field. For example, in a gravitational or an electromagnetic field there are forces that could act on a particle at any point, and the equations of a field theory describe how these change as one moves through the region. The first paragraph of his great 1905 paper on special relativity begins with a consideration of the effects of electrical and magnetic fields; his theory of general relativity is based on equations that describe a gravitational field; and at the very end of his life he was doggedly scribbling further field equations in the hope that they would form the basis for a theory of everything. As the science historian Gerald Holton has noted, Einstein regarded “the classical concept of the field the greatest contribution to the scientific spirit.” 18

His mother, an accomplished pianist, also gave him a gift at around the same time, one that likewise would last throughout his life. She arranged for him to take violin lessons. At first he chafed at the mechanical discipline of the instruction. But after being exposed to Mozart’s sonatas, music became both magical and emotional to him. “I believe that love is a better teacher than a sense of duty,” he said, “at least for me.” 19

Soon he was playing Mozart duets, with his mother accompanying him on the piano. “Mozart’s music is so pure and beautiful that I see it as a reflection of the inner beauty of the universe itself,” he later told a friend. “Of course,” he added in a remark that reflected his view of math and physics as well as of Mozart, “like all great beauty, his music was pure simplicity.” 20

Music was no mere diversion. On the contrary, it helped him think. “Whenever he felt that he had come to the end of the road or faced a difficult challenge in his work,” said his son Hans Albert, “he would take refuge in music and that would solve all his difficulties.” The violin thus proved useful during the years he lived alone in Berlin, wrestling with general relativity. “He would often play his violin in his kitchen late at night, improvising melodies while he pondered complicated problems,” a friend recalled. “Then, suddenly, in the middle of playing, he would announce excitedly, ‘I’ve got it!’ As if by inspiration, the answer to the problem would have come to him in the midst of music.” 21

His appreciation for music, and especially for Mozart, may have reflected his feel for the harmony of the universe. As Alexander Moszkowski, who wrote a biography of Einstein in 1920 based on conversations with him, noted, “Music, Nature, and God became intermingled in him in a complex of feeling, a moral unity, the trace of which never vanished.” 22

Throughout his life, Albert Einstein would retain the intuition and the awe of a child. He never lost his sense of wonder at the magic of nature’s phenomena—magnetic fields, gravity, inertia, acceleration, light beams—which grown-ups find so commonplace. He retained the ability to hold two thoughts in his mind simultaneously, to be puzzled when they conflicted, and to marvel when he could smell an underlying unity. “People like you and me never grow old,” he wrote a friend later in life. “We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.” 23