einstein

sounds that we experience every minute—fit into patterns, follow rules, and make sense. We take it for granted when these perceptions piece
together to represent what seem to be external objects, and it does not amaze us when laws seem to govern the behavior of these objects.
But just as he felt awe when first pondering a compass as a child, Einstein was able to feel awe that there are rules ordering our perceptions,
rather than pure randomness. Reverence for this astonishing and unexpected comprehensibility of the universe was the foundation for his realism
as well as the defining character of what he called his religious faith.
He expressed this in a 1936 essay, “Physics and Reality,” written on the heels of his defense of realism in the debates over quantum mechanics.
“The very fact that the totality of our sense experiences is such that, by means of thinking, it can be put in order, this fact is one that leaves us in
awe,” he wrote. “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility . . . The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.” 46
His friend Maurice Solovine, with whom he had read Hume and Mach in the days of the Olympia Academy, told Einstein that he found it “strange”
that he considered the comprehensibility of the world to be “a miracle or an eternal mystery.” Einstein countered that it would be logical to assume
that the opposite was the case. “Well, a priori, one should expect a chaotic world which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way,” he wrote.
“There lies the weakness of positivists and professional atheists.” 47 Einstein was neither.
To Einstein, this belief in the existence of an underlying reality had a religious aura to it. That dismayed Solovine, who wrote to say that he had an
“aversion” to such language. Einstein disagreed. “I have no better expression than ‘religious’ for this confidence in the rational nature of reality and
in its being accessible, to some degree, to human reason. When this feeling is missing, science degenerates into mindless empiricism.” 48
Einstein knew that the new generation viewed him as an out-of-touch conservative clinging to the old certainties of classical physics, and that
amused him. “Even the great initial success of the quantum theory does not make me believe in a fundamental dice-game,” he told his friend Max
Born, “although I am well aware that our younger colleagues interpret this as a consequence of senility.” 49
Born, who loved Einstein dearly, agreed with the Young Turks that Einstein had become as “conservative” as the physicists of a generation
earlier who had balked at his relativity theory. “He could no longer take in certain new ideas in physics which contradicted his own firmly held
philosophical convictions.” 50
But Einstein preferred to think of himself not as a conservative but as (again) a rebel, a nonconformist, one with the curiosity and stubbornness to
buck prevailing fads. “The necessity of conceiving of nature as an objective reality is said to be obsolete prejudice while the quantum theoreticians
are vaunted,” he told Solovine in 1938. “Each period is dominated by a mood, with the result that most men fail to see the tyrant who rules over
them.” 51
Einstein pushed his realist approach in a textbook on the history of physics that he coauthored in 1938, The Evolution of Physics. Belief in an
“objective reality,” the book argued, had led to great scientific advances throughout the ages, thus proving that it was a useful concept even if not
provable. “Without the belief that it is possible to grasp reality with our theoretical constructions, without the belief in the inner harmony of our world,
there could be no science,” the book declared. “This belief is and always will remain the fundamental motive for all scientific creation.” 52
In addition, Einstein used the text to defend the utility of field theories amid the advances of quantum mechanics. The best way to do that was to
view particles not as independent objects but as a special manifestation of the field itself:
There is no sense in regarding matter and field as two qualities quite different from each other ... Could we not reject the concept of matter and
build a pure field physics? We could regard matter as the regions in space where the field is extremely strong. A thrown stone is, from this
point of view, a changing field in which the states of the greatest field intensity travel through space with the velocity of the stone. 53
There was a third reason that Einstein helped to write this textbook, a more personal one. He wanted to help Leopold Infeld, a Jew who had fled
Poland, collaborated briefly in Cambridge with Max Born, and then moved to Princeton. 54 Infeld began working on relativity with Banesh Hoffmann,
and he proposed that they offer themselves to Einstein. “Let’s see if he’d like us to work with him,” Infeld suggested.
Einstein was delighted. “We did all the dirty work of calculating the equations and so on,” Hoffmann recalled. “We reported the results to Einstein
and then it was like having a headquarters conference. Sometimes his ideas seemed to come from left field, to be quite extraordinary.” 55 Working
with Infeld and Hoffmann, Einstein in 1937 came up with elegant ways to explain more simply the motion of planets and other massive objects that
produced their own curvatures of space.
But their work on unified field theory never quite gelled. At times, the situation seemed so hopeless that Infeld and Hoffmann became
despondent. “But Einstein’s courage never faltered, nor did his inventiveness fail him,” Hoffmann recalled. “When excited discussion failed to break
the deadlock, Einstein would quietly say in his quaint English, ‘I will a little tink.’ ” The room would become silent, and Einstein would pace slowly up
and down or walk around in circles, twirling a lock of his hair around his forefinger. “There was a dreamy, far-away, yet inward look on his face. No
sign of stress. No outward indication of intense concentration.” After a few minutes, he would suddenly return to the world, “a smile on his face and
an answer to the problem on his lips.” 56
Einstein was so pleased with Infeld’s help that he tried to get Flexner to give him a post at the Institute. But Flexner, who was annoyed that the
Institute had already been forced to hire Walther Mayer, balked. Einstein even went to a fellows meeting in person, which he rarely did, to argue for
a mere $600 stipend for Infeld, but to no avail. 57
So Infeld came up with a plan to write a history of physics with Einstein, which was sure to be successful, and split the royalties. When he went to
Einstein to pitch the idea, Infeld became incredibly tongue-tied, but he was finally able to stammer out his proposal. “This is not at all a stupid idea,”
Einstein said. “Not stupid at all. We shall do it.” 58
In April 1937, Richard Simon and Max Schuster, founders of the house that published this biography, drove out to Einstein’s home in Princeton to
secure the rights. The gregarious Schuster tried to win Einstein over with jokes. He had discovered something faster than the speed of light, he
said: “The speed with which a woman arriving in Paris goes shopping.” 59 Einstein was amused, or at least so Schuster recalled. In any event, the
trip was successful, and the Evolution of Physics, which is in its forty-fourth printing, not only propagandized for the role of field theories and a faith
in objective reality, it also made Infeld (and Einstein) more secure financially.
No one could accuse Infeld of being ungrateful. He later called Einstein “perhaps the greatest scientist and kindest man who ever lived.” He also
wrote a flattering biography of Einstein, while his mentor was still alive, that praised him for his willingness to defy conventional thinking in his quest
for a unified theory. “His tenacity in sticking to a problem for years, in returning to the problem again and again—this is the characteristic feature of
Einstein’s genius,” he wrote. 60
Against the Current