einstein

argument of Ernst Gehrcke, one of the anti-Semitic antirelativists who led the notorious 1920 rally against Einstein that summer in Berlin, that the
shift in Mercury’s orbit could be explained by other theories.
Behind the scenes, Einstein’s other leading anti-Semitic critic, Philipp Lenard, was waging a crusade against him. (The following year, Lenard
would propose Gehrcke for the prize!) Sven Hedin, a Swedish explorer who was a prominent member of the Academy, later recalled that Lenard
worked hard to persuade him and others that “relativity was really not a discovery” and that it had not been proven. 5
Arrhenius’s report cited Lenard’s “strong critique of the oddities in Einstein’s generalized theory of relativity.” Lenard’s views were couched as a
criticism of physics that was not grounded in experiments and concrete discoveries. But there was a strong undercurrent in the report of Lenard’s
animosity to the type of “philosophical conjecturing” that he often dismissed as being a feature of “Jewish science.” 6
So the 1920 prize instead went to another Zurich Polytechnic graduate who was Einstein’s scientific opposite: Charles-Edouard Guillaume, the
director of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, who had made his modest mark on science by assuring that standard measures
were more precise and discovering metal alloys that had practical uses, including making good measuring rods. “When the world of physics had
entered upon an intellectual adventure of extraordinary proportions, it was remarkable to find Guillaume’s accomplishment, based on routine study
and modest theoretical finesse, recognized as a beacon of achievement,” says Friedman. “Even those who opposed relativity theory found
Guillaume a bizarre choice.” 7
By 1921, the public’s Einstein mania was in full force, for better or worse, and there was a groundswell of support for him from both theoreticians
and experimentalists, Germans such as Planck and non-Germans such as Eddington. He garnered fourteen official nominations, far more than any
other contender. “Einstein stands above his contemporaries even as Newton did,” wrote Eddington, offering the highest praise a member of the
Royal Society could muster. 8
This time the prize committee assigned the task of doing a report on relativity to Allvar Gullstrand, a professor of ophthalmology at the University
of Uppsala, who had won the prize for medicine in 1911. With little expertise in either the math or the physics of relativity, he criticized Einstein’s
theory in a sharp but unknowing manner. Clearly determined to undermine Einstein by any means, Gullstrand’s fifty-page report declared, for
example, that the bending of light was not a true test of Einstein’s theory, that the results were not experimentally valid, and that even if they were
there were still other ways to explain the phenomenon using classical mechanics. As for Mercury’s orbit, he declared, “It remains unknown until
further notice whether the Einstein theory can at all be brought into agreement with the perihelion experiment.” And the effects of special relativity,
he said, “lay below the limits of experimental error.” As one who had made his name by devising precision optical measuring instruments,
Gullstrand seemed particularly appalled by Einstein’s theory that the length of rigid measuring rods could vary relative to moving observers. 9
Even though some members of the full Academy realized that Gullstrand’s opposition was unsophisticated, it was hard to overcome. He was a
respected and popular Swedish professor, and he insisted both publicly and privately that the great honor of a Nobel should not be given to a highly
speculative theory that was the subject of an inexplicable mass hysteria that would soon deflate. Instead of choosing someone else, the Academy
did something that was less (or more?) of a public slap at Einstein: it voted to choose nobody and tentatively bank the 1921 award for another year.
The great impasse threatened to become embarrassing. His lack of a prize had begun to reflect more negatively on the Nobel than on Einstein.
“Imagine for a moment what the general opinion will be fifty years from now if the name Einstein does not appear on the list of Nobel laureates,”
wrote the French physicist Marcel Brillouin in his 1922 nominating letter. 10
To the rescue rode a theoretical physicist from the University of Uppsala, Carl Wilhelm Oseen, who joined the committee in 1922. He was a
colleague and friend of Gullstrand, which helped him gently overcome some of the ophthalmologist’s ill-conceived but stubborn objections. And he
realized that the whole issue of relativity theory was so encrusted with controversy that it would be better to try a different tack. So Oseen pushed
hard to give the prize to Einstein for “the discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.”
Each part of that phrase was carefully calculated. It was not a nomination for relativity, of course. In fact, despite the way it has been phrased by
some historians, it was not for Einstein’s theory of light quanta, even though that was the primary focus of the relevant 1905 paper. Nor was it for
any theory at all. Instead, it was for the discovery of a law.
A report from the previous year had discussed Einstein’s “theory of the photoelectric effect,” but Oseen made clear his different approach with
the title of his report: “Einstein’s Law of the Photoelectric Effect” (emphasis added). In it, Oseen did not focus on the theoretical aspects of
Einstein’s work. He specified instead what he called a fundamental natural law, fully proven by experiment, that Einstein propounded: the
mathematical description of how the photoelectric effect was explained by assuming that light was absorbed and emitted in discrete quanta, and
the way this related to the frequency of the light.
Oseen also proposed that giving Einstein the prize delayed from 1921 would allow the Academy to use that as a basis for simultaneously giving
Niels Bohr the 1922 prize, because his model of the atom built on the laws that explained the photoelectric effect. It was a clever coupled-entry
ticket for making sure that the two greatest theoretical physicists of the time became Nobel laureates without offending the Academy’s old-line
establishment. Gullstrand went along. Arrhenius, who had met Einstein in Berlin and been charmed, was now also willing to accept the inevitable.
On September 6, 1922, the Academy voted accordingly, and Einstein and Bohr were awarded the 1921 and 1922 prizes, respectively.
Thus it was that Einstein became the recipient of the 1921 Nobel Prize, in the words of the official citation, “for his services to theoretical physics,
and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.” In both the citation and the letter from the Academy’s secretary officially
informing Einstein, an unusual caveat was explicitly inserted. Both documents specified that the award was given “without taking into account the
value that will be accorded your relativity and gravitation theories after these are confirmed in the future.” 11 Einstein would not, as it turned out, ever
win a Nobel for his work on relativity and gravitation, nor for anything other than the photoelectric effect.
There was a dark irony in using the photoelectric effect as a path to get Einstein the prize. His “law” was based primarily on observations made
by Philipp Lenard, who had been the most fervent campaigner to have him blackballed. In his 1905 paper, Einstein had credited Lenard’s
“pioneering” work. But after the 1920 anti-Semitic rally in Berlin, they had become bitter enemies. So Lenard was doubly outraged that, despite his
opposition, Einstein had won the prize and, worse yet, done so in a field that Lenard pioneered. He wrote an angry letter to the Academy, the only
official protest it received, in which he said that Einstein misunderstood the true nature of light and was, in addition, a publicity-seeking Jew whose
approach was alien to the true spirit of German physics. 12
Einstein was traveling by train through Japan and missed the official award ceremony on December 10. After much controversy over whether he
should be considered German or Swiss, the prize was accepted by the German ambassador, but he was listed as both nationalities in the official
record.
The formal presentation speech by Arrhenius, the committee chair, was carefully crafted. “There is probably no physicist living today whose name
has become so widely known as that of Albert Einstein,” he began. “Most discussion centers on his theory of relativity.” He then went on to say,
almost dismissively, that “this pertains essentially to epistemology and has therefore been the subject of lively debate in philosophical circles.”
After touching briefly on Einstein’s other work, Arrhenius explained the Academy’s position on why he had won. “Einstein’s law of the