einstein
einstein
einstein
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
Einstein drew packed crowds wherever he went in New York.“Every seat in the Metropolitan Opera House, from the pit to the last row under the<br />
roof, was filled, and hundreds stood,” reported the Times one day. About another lecture that week it likewise reported, “He spoke in German, but<br />
those anxious to see and hear the man who has contributed a new theory of space and time and motion to scientific conceptions of the universe<br />
filled every seat and stood in the aisles.” 42<br />
After three weeks of lectures and receptions in New York, Einstein paid a visit to Washington. For reasons fathomable only by those who live in<br />
that capital, the Senate decided to debate the theory of relativity. Among the leaders asserting that it was incomprehensible were Pennsylvania<br />
Republican Boies Penrose, famous for once uttering that “public office is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” and Mississippi Democrat John Sharp<br />
Williams, who retired a year later, saying, “I’d rather be a dog and bay at the moon than stay in the Senate another six years.”<br />
On the House side of the Capitol, Representative J. J. Kindred of New York proposed placing an explanation of Einstein’s theories in the<br />
Congressional Record. David Walsh of Massachusetts rose to object. Did Kindred understand the theory? “I have been earnestly busy with this<br />
theory for three weeks,” he replied, “and am beginning to see some light.” But what relevance, he was asked, did it have to the business of<br />
Congress? “It may bear upon the legislation of the future as to general relations with the cosmos.”<br />
Such discourse made it inevitable that, when Einstein went with a group to the White House on April 25, President Warren G. Harding would be<br />
faced with the question of whether he understood relativity. As the group posed for cameras, President Harding smiled and confessed that he did<br />
not comprehend the theory at all. The Washington Post carried a cartoon showing him puzzling over a paper titled “Theory of Relativity” while<br />
Einstein puzzled over one on the “Theory of Normalcy,” which was the name Harding gave to his governing philosophy . The New York Times ran a<br />
page 1 headline: “Einstein Idea Puzzles Harding, He Admits.”<br />
At a reception in the National Academy of Sciences on Constitution Avenue (which now boasts the world’s most interesting statue of Einstein, a<br />
twelve-foot-high full-length bronze figure of him reclining), 43 he listened to long speeches from various honorees, including Prince Albert I of<br />
Monaco, who was an avid oceanographer, a North Carolina scholar of hookworms, and a man who had invented a solar stove. As the evening<br />
droned on, Einstein turned to a Dutch diplomat seated next to him and said, “I’ve just developed a new theory of eternity.” 44<br />
By the time Einstein reached Chicago, where he gave three lectures and played violin at a dinner party, he had become more adept at<br />
answering irksome questions, particularly the most frequent one, which was sparked by the fanciful New York Times headline after the 1919<br />
eclipse that only twelve people could understand his theory.<br />
“Is it true only twelve great minds can understand your theory?” the reporter from the Chicago Herald and Examiner asked.<br />
“No, no,” Einstein replied with a smile. “I think the majority of scientists who have studied it can understand it.”<br />
He then proceeded to try to explain it to the reporter by using his metaphor about how the universe would look to a two-dimensional creature who<br />
spent its life moving on a surface of what turned out to be a globe. “It could travel for millions of years and would always return to its starting point,”<br />
said Einstein. “It would never be conscious of what was above it or beneath it.”<br />
The reporter, being a good Chicago newspaperman, was able to spin a glorious tale, written in the third person, about the depths of his own<br />
confusion. “When the reporter came to he was vainly trying to light a three-dimensional cigarette with a three-dimensional match,” the story<br />
concluded. “It began to trickle into his brain that the two-dimensional organism referred to was himself, and far from being the 13th Great Mind to<br />
comprehend the theory he was condemned henceforth to be one of the Vast Majority who live on Main Street and ride in Fords.” 45<br />
When a reporter from the rival Tribune asked him the same question about only twelve people being able to understand his theory, Einstein<br />
again denied it. “Everywhere I go, someone asks me that question,” he said. “It’s absurd. Anyone who has had sufficient training in science can<br />
readily understand the theory.” But this time Einstein made no attempt to explain it, nor did the reporter. “The Tribune regrets to inform its readers<br />
that it will be unable to present to them Einstein’s theory of relativity,” the article began. “After the professor explained that the most incidental<br />
discussion of the question would take from three to four hours, it was decided to confine the interview to other things.” 46<br />
Einstein went on to Princeton, where he delivered a weeklong series of scientific lectures and received an honorary degree “for voyaging through<br />
strange seas of thought.” Not only did he get a nice fee for the lectures (though apparently not the $15,000 he had originally sought), he also<br />
negotiated a deal while there that Princeton could publish his lectures as a book from which he would get a 15 percent royalty. 47<br />
At the behest of Princeton’s president, all of Einstein’s lectures were very technical. They included more than 125 complex equations that he<br />
scribbled on the blackboard while speaking in German. As one student admitted to a reporter, “I sat in the balcony, but he talked right over my head<br />
anyway.” 48<br />
At a party following one of these lectures, Einstein uttered one of his most memorable and self-revealing quotes. Someone excitedly informed<br />
him that word had just arrived of a new set of experiments improving on the Michelson-Morley technique that seemed to show that the ether existed<br />
and the speed of light was variable. Einstein simply refused to accept it. He knew that his theory was correct. And so he calmly responded, “Subtle<br />
is the Lord, but malicious he is not.”*<br />
The mathematics professor Oswald Veblen, who was standing there, heard the remark and, when a new math building was built a decade later,<br />
asked Einstein for the right to carve the words on the stone mantel of the fireplace in the common room. Einstein happily sent back his approval<br />
and further explained to Veblen what he had meant: “Nature hides her secret because of her essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse.” 49<br />
The building, neatly enough, later became the temporary home of the Institute for Advanced Study, and Einstein would have an office there when<br />
he immigrated to Princeton in 1933. Near the end of his life, he was in front of the fireplace at a retirement party for the mathematician Hermann<br />
Weyl, a friend who had followed him from Germany to Princeton when the Nazis took power. Alluding to his frustration with the uncertainties of<br />
quantum mechanics, Einstein nodded to the quote and lamented to Weyl, “Who knows, perhaps He is a little malicious.” 50<br />
Einstein seemed to like Princeton. “Young and fresh,” he called it. “A pipe as yet unsmoked.” 51 For a man who was invariably fondling new briar<br />
pipes, this was a compliment. It would not be a surprise, a dozen years hence, that he would decide to move there permanently.<br />
Harvard, where Einstein went next, did not endear itself quite as well. Perhaps it was because Princeton President John Hibben had introduced<br />
him in German, whereas Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell spoke to him in French. In addition, Harvard had invited Einstein to visit, but it did<br />
not invite him to give lectures.<br />
Some charged that this slight was due to the influence of a rival Zionist group in America led by Louis Brandeis, a graduate of Harvard Law<br />
School, who had become the first Jewish Supreme Court justice. The allegation was so widespread that Brandeis’s protégé Felix Frankfurter had<br />
to issue a public denial. That prompted an amused letter about the perils of assimilationism from Einstein to Frankfurter. It was “a Jewish<br />
weakness,” he wrote, “always and eagerly to try to keep the Gentiles in good humor.” 52<br />
The very assimilated Brandeis, who had been born in Kentucky and had turned himself into a proper Bostonian, was an example of the Jews<br />
from Germany whose families had arrived in the nineteenth century and tended to look down on the more recent immigrants from eastern Europe<br />
and Russia. For both political and personal reasons, Brandeis had clashed with Weizmann, a Russian Jew who had a more assertive and political