einstein

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
roof, was filled, and hundreds stood,” reported the Times one day. About another lecture that week it likewise reported, “He spoke in German, but
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
filled every seat and stood in the aisles.” 42
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
that capital, the Senate decided to debate the theory of relativity. Among the leaders asserting that it was incomprehensible were Pennsylvania
Republican Boies Penrose, famous for once uttering that “public office is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” and Mississippi Democrat John Sharp
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.”
On the House side of the Capitol, Representative J. J. Kindred of New York proposed placing an explanation of Einstein’s theories in the
Congressional Record. David Walsh of Massachusetts rose to object. Did Kindred understand the theory? “I have been earnestly busy with this
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
Congress? “It may bear upon the legislation of the future as to general relations with the cosmos.”
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
faced with the question of whether he understood relativity. As the group posed for cameras, President Harding smiled and confessed that he did
not comprehend the theory at all. The Washington Post carried a cartoon showing him puzzling over a paper titled “Theory of Relativity” while
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
page 1 headline: “Einstein Idea Puzzles Harding, He Admits.”
At a reception in the National Academy of Sciences on Constitution Avenue (which now boasts the world’s most interesting statue of Einstein, a
twelve-foot-high full-length bronze figure of him reclining), 43 he listened to long speeches from various honorees, including Prince Albert I of
Monaco, who was an avid oceanographer, a North Carolina scholar of hookworms, and a man who had invented a solar stove. As the evening
droned on, Einstein turned to a Dutch diplomat seated next to him and said, “I’ve just developed a new theory of eternity.” 44
By the time Einstein reached Chicago, where he gave three lectures and played violin at a dinner party, he had become more adept at
answering irksome questions, particularly the most frequent one, which was sparked by the fanciful New York Times headline after the 1919
eclipse that only twelve people could understand his theory.
“Is it true only twelve great minds can understand your theory?” the reporter from the Chicago Herald and Examiner asked.
“No, no,” Einstein replied with a smile. “I think the majority of scientists who have studied it can understand it.”
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
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,”
said Einstein. “It would never be conscious of what was above it or beneath it.”
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
confusion. “When the reporter came to he was vainly trying to light a three-dimensional cigarette with a three-dimensional match,” the story
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
comprehend the theory he was condemned henceforth to be one of the Vast Majority who live on Main Street and ride in Fords.” 45
When a reporter from the rival Tribune asked him the same question about only twelve people being able to understand his theory, Einstein
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
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
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
discussion of the question would take from three to four hours, it was decided to confine the interview to other things.” 46
Einstein went on to Princeton, where he delivered a weeklong series of scientific lectures and received an honorary degree “for voyaging through
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
negotiated a deal while there that Princeton could publish his lectures as a book from which he would get a 15 percent royalty. 47
At the behest of Princeton’s president, all of Einstein’s lectures were very technical. They included more than 125 complex equations that he
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
anyway.” 48
At a party following one of these lectures, Einstein uttered one of his most memorable and self-revealing quotes. Someone excitedly informed
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
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
is the Lord, but malicious he is not.”*
The mathematics professor Oswald Veblen, who was standing there, heard the remark and, when a new math building was built a decade later,
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
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
The building, neatly enough, later became the temporary home of the Institute for Advanced Study, and Einstein would have an office there when
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
Weyl, a friend who had followed him from Germany to Princeton when the Nazis took power. Alluding to his frustration with the uncertainties of
quantum mechanics, Einstein nodded to the quote and lamented to Weyl, “Who knows, perhaps He is a little malicious.” 50
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
pipes, this was a compliment. It would not be a surprise, a dozen years hence, that he would decide to move there permanently.
Harvard, where Einstein went next, did not endear itself quite as well. Perhaps it was because Princeton President John Hibben had introduced
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
not invite him to give lectures.
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
School, who had become the first Jewish Supreme Court justice. The allegation was so widespread that Brandeis’s protégé Felix Frankfurter had
to issue a public denial. That prompted an amused letter about the perils of assimilationism from Einstein to Frankfurter. It was “a Jewish
weakness,” he wrote, “always and eagerly to try to keep the Gentiles in good humor.” 52
The very assimilated Brandeis, who had been born in Kentucky and had turned himself into a proper Bostonian, was an example of the Jews
from Germany whose families had arrived in the nineteenth century and tended to look down on the more recent immigrants from eastern Europe
and Russia. For both political and personal reasons, Brandeis had clashed with Weizmann, a Russian Jew who had a more assertive and political