Richard Rhodes - The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Physically Einstein was not yet the amused, grandfatherly notable of his later American years. His mustache was still dark and his thick black hair had only begun to gray. C. P. Snow would observe “a massive body, very heavily muscled.” 612The Swabian-born physicist’s friends thought his loud laugh boyish; his enemies thought it rude. “A powerful sensuality,” Snow suspected, suspecting also that Einstein took his sensuality to be “one of the chains of personality that ought to be slipped off.” 613Nor had he yet learned, in the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson’s words, “to look into cameras as if he were meeting the eyes of the future beholders of his image.” 614In the past year Einstein had endured a stomach ulcer, jaundice and a painful divorce; he had lost and partly regained fifty-six pounds; his mother was dying of cancer: fatigue stained his expressive face. Leopold Infeld, a young Polish physicist who knocked at his door in postwar Berlin seeking a letter of recommendation, found him “dressed in a morning coat and striped trousers with one important button missing.” Infeld knew Einstein’s face from magazines and newsreels. “But no picture could reproduce the shining glow of his eyes.” 615They were large and dark brown, and the diffident young visitor was one of many—Leo Szilard was another—who found comfort in those cold days in their honest warmth.

The immediate occasion for world notice was an eclipse of the sun. Einstein had presented a paper to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin on November 25, 1915, “The field equations of gravitation,” in which, he reported happily, “finally the general theory of relativity is closed as a logical structure.” 616The paper stands as his first finished statement of the general theory. It was susceptible of proof. It explained mysterious anomalies in the orbit of Mercury—that confirmed prediction was the one which left Einstein feeling something had snapped in him. The general theory also predicted that starlight would be deflected, when it passed a massive body like the sun, through an angle equal to twice the value Newtonian theory predicts. The Great War delayed measurement of the Einstein value. A total eclipse of the sun (which would block the sun’s glare and make the stars beyond it visible) due on May 29, 1919, offered the first postwar occasion. The British, not the Germans, followed through. Cambridge astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington led an expedition to Principe Island, off the West African coast; the Greenwich Observatory sent another expedition to Sobral, inland from the coast of northern Brazil. A joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society at Burlington House in London on November 6, under a portrait of Newton, confirmed the stunning results: the Einstein value, not the Newton value, held good. “One of the greatest achievements in the history of human thought,” J. J. Thomson told the assembled worthies. “It is not the discovery of an outlying island but of a whole continent of new scientific ideas.” 617

That was news. The Times headlined it REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE and the word spread. From that day forward Einstein was a marked man.

It rankled German chauvinists, including rightist students and some physicists, that the eyes of the world should turn to a Jew who had declared himself a pacifist during the bloodiest of nationalistic wars and who spoke out for internationalism now. When Einstein prepared to offer a series of popular lectures in the University of Berlin’s largest hall—everyone was lecturing on relativity that winter—students complained of the expense for coal and electricity. 618The student body president challenged Einstein to hire his own hall. He ignored the insult and spoke in the university hall as scheduled, but at least one of his lectures, in February, was disrupted. 619

He was challenged more seriously the following August by an organization assembled under obscure leadership and extravagant but clandestine financing that called itself the Committee of German Scientists for the Preservation of Pure Scholarship. The 1905 Nobel laureate Philipp Lenard, seeing relativity hailed and Einstein come to fame, retreated into a vindictive anti-Semitism and lent his respectability to the Committee, which attacked relativity theory as a Jewish corruption and Einstein as a tasteless self-promoter. The organization held a well-attended public meeting in Berlin’s Philharmonic Hall on August 20. Einstein went to listen—one speaker, as Leopold Infeld recalled, “said that uproar about the theory of relativity was hostile to the German spirit”—and stayed to scorn the crackpot talk with laughter and satiric applause. 620

The criticism nevertheless stung. Einstein mistakenly thought the majority of his German colleagues subscribed to it. 621Rashly he struck off an uncharacteristically defensive statement. It appeared in the Berliner Tageblatt three days after the Philharmonic Hall meeting. “My Answer to the Antirelativity Theory Company Ltd.” 622shocked his friends, but it presciently identified the deeper issues of the Committee attack. “I have good reason to believe that motives other than a desire to search for truth are at the bottom of their enterprise,” Einstein wrote. And parenthetically, leaving his implications unstated in elision: “(Were I a German national, with or without swastika, instead of a Jew of liberal, international disposition, then…).” A month later his sense of humor had returned; he asked Max Born not to be too hard on him: “Everyone has to sacrifice at the altar of stupidity from time to time… and this I have done with my article.” 623But before then he had seriously considered leaving Germany.

It would not be the first time. Einstein had renounced German citizenship and departed the country once before, at the extraordinary age of sixteen. That earlier rejection, which he reversed two decades later, prepared him for the final one, after the Weimar interlude, when Adolf Hitler came to power.

Germany had been united in empire for only eight years when Einstein was born in Ulm on March 14, 1879. He grew up in Munich. He was slow to speak, but he was not, as legend has it, slow in his studies; he consistently earned the highest or next-highest marks in mathematics and Latin in school and Gymnasium. At four or five the “miracle” of a compass his father showed him excited him so much, he remembered, that he “trembled and grew cold.” It seemed to him then that “there had to be something behind objects that lay deeply hidden.” 624He would look for the something which objects hid, though his particular genius was to discover that there was nothing behind them to hide; that objects, as matter and as energy, were all; that even space and time were not the invisible matrices of the material world but its attributes. “If you will not take the answer too seriously,” he told a clamorous crowd of reporters in New York in 1921 who asked him for a short explanation of relativity, “and consider it only as a kind of joke, then I can explain it as follows. It was formerly believed that if all material things disappeared out of the universe, time and space would be left. According to the relativity theory, however, time and space disappear together with the things.” 625

The quiet child became a rebellious adolescent. He was working his own way through Kant and Darwin and mathematics while the Gymnasium pounded him with rote. He veered off into religion—Judaism—and came back bitterly disillusioned: “Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much of the stories in the Bible could not be true…. The consequence was a positively fanatic free-thinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression. Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a sceptical attitude towards the convictions which were alive in any specific social environment.” 626