Walter Isaacson - Einstein - His Life and Universe

In the opening section of the first volume, Bernstein dealt with the speed of light, a topic that obviously fascinated him. Indeed, he returned to it repeatedly in his subsequent volumes, including eleven essays on the topic in volume 8. Judging from the thought experiments that Einstein later used in creating his theory of relativity, Bernstein’s books appear to have been influential.

For example, Bernstein asked readers to imagine being on a speeding train. If a bullet is shot through the window, it would seem that it was shot at an angle, because the train would have moved between the time the bullet entered one window and exited the window on the other side. Likewise, because of the speed of the earth through space, the same must be true of light going through a telescope. What was amazing, said Bernstein, was that experiments showed the same effect no matter how fast the source of the light was moving. In a sentence that, because of its relation to what Einstein would later famously conclude, seems to have made an impression, Bernstein declared, “Since each kind of light proves to be of exactly the same speed, the law of the speed of light can well be called the most general of all of nature’s laws.”

In another volume, Bernstein took his young readers on an imaginary trip through space. The mode of transport was the wave of an electric signal. His books celebrated the joyful wonders of scientific investigation and included such exuberant passages as this one written about the successful prediction of the location of the new planet Uranus: “Praised be this science! Praised be the men who do it! And praised be the human mind, which sees more sharply than does the human eye.” 36

Bernstein was, as Einstein would later be, eager to tie together all of nature’s forces. For example, after discussing how all electromagnetic phenomena, such as light, could be considered waves, he speculated that the same may be true for gravity. A unity and simplicity, Bernstein wrote, lay beneath all the concepts applied by our perceptions. Truth in science consisted in discovering theories that described this underlying reality. Einstein later recalled the revelation, and the realist attitude, that this instilled in him as a young boy: “Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle.” 37

Years later, when they met in New York during Einstein’s first visit there, Talmud asked what he thought, in retrospect, of Bernstein’s work. “A very good book,” he said. “It has exerted a great influence on my whole development.” 38

Talmud also helped Einstein continue to explore the wonders of mathematics by giving him a textbook on geometry two years before he was scheduled to learn that subject in school. Later, Einstein would refer to it as “the sacred little geometry book” and speak of it with awe: “Here were assertions, as for example the intersection of the three altitudes of a triangle in one point, which—though by no means evident—could nevertheless be proved with such certainty that any doubt appeared to be out of the question. This lucidity and certainty made an indescribable impression upon me.” Years later, in a lecture at Oxford, Einstein noted, “If Euclid failed to kindle your youthful enthusiasm, then you were not born to be a scientific thinker.” 39

When Talmud arrived each Thursday, Einstein delighted in showing him the problems he had solved that week. Initially, Talmud was able to help him, but he was soon surpassed by his pupil. “After a short time, a few months, he had worked through the whole book,” Talmud recalled. “He thereupon devoted himself to higher mathematics . . . Soon the flight of his mathematical genius was so high that I could no longer follow.” 40

So the awed medical student moved on to introducing Einstein to philosophy. “I recommended Kant to him,” he recalled. “At that time he was still a child, only thirteen years old, yet Kant’s works, incomprehensible to ordinary mortals, seemed to be clear to him.” Kant became, for a while, Einstein’s favorite philosopher, and his Critique of Pure Reason eventually led him to delve also into David Hume, Ernst Mach, and the issue of what can be known about reality.

Einstein’s exposure to science produced a sudden reaction against religion at age 12, just as he would have been readying for a bar mitzvah. Bernstein, in his popular science volumes, had reconciled science with religious inclination. As he put it, “The religious inclination lies in the dim consciousness that dwells in humans that all nature, including the humans in it, is in no way an accidental game, but a work of lawfulness, that there is a fundamental cause of all existence.”

Einstein would later come close to these sentiments. But at the time, his leap away from faith was a radical one. “Through the reading of popular scientific books, I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression.” 41

As a result, Einstein avoided religious rituals for the rest of his life. “There arose in Einstein an aversion to the orthodox practice of the Jewish or any traditional religion, as well as to attendance at religious services, and this he has never lost,” his friend Philipp Frank later noted. He did, however, retain from his childhood religious phase a profound reverence for the harmony and beauty of what he called the mind of God as it was expressed in the creation of the universe and its laws. 42

Einstein’s rebellion against religious dogma had a profound effect on his general outlook toward received wisdom. It inculcated an allergic reaction against all forms of dogma and authority, which was to affect both his politics and his science. “Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience, an attitude which has never again left me,” he later said. Indeed, it was this comfort with being a nonconformist that would define both his science and his social thinking for the rest of his life.

He would later be able to pull off this contrariness with a grace that was generally endearing, once he was accepted as a genius. But it did not play so well when he was merely a sassy student at a Munich gymnasium. “He was very uncomfortable in school,” according to his sister. He found the style of teaching—rote drills, impatience with questioning—to be repugnant. “The military tone of the school, the systematic training in the worship of authority that was supposed to accustom pupils at an early age to military discipline, was particularly unpleasant.” 43

Even in Munich, where the Bavarian spirit engendered a less regimented approach to life, this Prussian glorification of the military had taken hold, and many of the children loved to play at being soldiers. When troops would come by, accompanied by fifes and drums, kids would pour into the streets to join the parade and march in lockstep. But not Einstein. Watching such a display once, he began to cry. “When I grow up, I don’t want to be one of those poor people,” he told his parents. As Einstein later explained, “When a person can take pleasure in marching in step to a piece of music it is enough to make me despise him. He has been given his big brain only by mistake.” 44

The opposition he felt to all types of regimentation made his education at the Munich gymnasium increasingly irksome and contentious. The mechanical learning there, he complained, “seemed very much akin to the methods of the Prussian army, where a mechanical discipline was achieved by repeated execution of meaningless orders.” In later years, he would liken his teachers to members of the military. “The teachers at the elementary school seemed to me like drill sergeants,” he said, “and the teachers at the gymnasium like lieutenants.”