einstein

The Endless Quest
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
LANDMARK
1948–1953
With Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in Princeton, 1951
The problems of the world were important to Einstein, but the problems of the cosmos helped him to keep earthly matters in perspective. Even
though he was producing little of scientific significance, physics rather than politics would remain his defining endeavor until the day he died. One
morning when walking to work with his scientific assistant and fellow arms control advocate Ernst Straus, Einstein mused at their ability to divide
their time between the two realms. “But our equations are much more important to me,” Einstein added. “Politics is for the present, while our
equations are for eternity.” 1
Einstein had officially retired from the Institute for Advanced Study at the end of the war, when he turned 66. But he continued to work in a small
office there every day, and he was still able to enlist the aid of loyal assistants willing to pursue what had come to be considered his quaint quest for
a unified field theory.
Each weekday, he would wake at a civilized hour, eat breakfast and read the papers, and then around ten walk slowly up Mercer Street to the
Institute, trailing stories both real and apocryphal. His colleague Abraham Pais recalled “one occasion when a car hit a tree after the driver
suddenly recognized the face of the beautiful old man walking along the street, the black woolen knit cap firmly planted on his long white hair.” 2
Soon after the war ended, J. Robert Oppenheimer came from Los Alamos to take over as director of the Institute. A brilliant, chain-smoking
theoretical physicist, he proved charismatic and competent enough to be an inspiring leader for the scientists who built the atomic bomb. With his
charm and biting wit, he tended to produce either acolytes or enemies, but Einstein fell into neither category. He and Oppenheimer viewed each
other with a mixture of amusement and respect, which allowed them to develop a cordial though not close relationship. 3
When Oppenheimer first visited the Institute in 1935, he called it a “madhouse” with “solipsistic luminaries shining in separate and hapless
desolation.” As for the greatest of these luminaries, Oppenheimer declared, “Einstein is completely cuckoo,” though he seemed to mean it in an
affectionate way. 4
Once they became colleagues, Oppenheimer became more adroit at dealing with his luminous charges and his jabs became more subtle.
Einstein, he declared, was “a landmark but not a beacon,” meaning he was admired for his great triumphs but attracted few apostles in his current
endeavors, which was true. Years later, he provided another telling description of Einstein: “There was always in him a powerful purity at once
childlike and profoundly stubborn.” 5
Einstein became a closer friend, and a walking partner, of another iconic figure at the Institute, the intensely introverted Kurt Gödel, a Germanspeaking
mathematical logician from Brno and Vienna. Gödel was famous for his “incompleteness theory,” a pair of logical proofs that purport to
show that any useful mathematical system will have some propositions that cannot be proven true or false based on the postulates of that system.
Out of the supercharged German-speaking intellectual world, in which physics and mathematics and philosophy intertwined, three jarring theories
of the twentieth century emerged: Einstein’s relativity, Heisenberg’s uncertainty, and Gödel’s incompleteness. The surface similarity of the three
words, all of which conjure up a cosmos that is tentative and subjective, oversimplifies the theories and the connections between them.
Nevertheless, they all seemed to have philosophical resonance, and this became the topic of discussion when Gödel and Einstein walked to work
together. 6
They were very different personalities. Einstein was filled with good humor and sagacity, both qualities lacking in Gödel, whose intense logic
sometimes overwhelmed common sense. This was on glorious display when Gödel decided to become a U.S. citizen in 1947. He took his
preparation for the exam very seriously, studied the Constitution carefully, and (as might be expected by the formulator of the incompleteness
theory) found what he believed was a logical flaw. There was an internal inconsistency, he insisted, that could allow the entire government to
degenerate into tyranny.
Concerned, Einstein decided to accompany—or chaperone—Gödel on his visit to Trenton to take the citizenship test, which was to be
administered by the same judge who had done so for Einstein. On the drive, he and a third friend tried to distract Gödel and dissuade him from
mentioning this perceived flaw, but to no avail. When the judge asked him about the Constitution, Gödel launched into his proof that its internal
inconsistency made a dictatorship possible. Fortunately, the judge, who by now cherished his connection to Einstein, cut Gödel off. “You needn’t go
into all that,” he said, and Gödel’s citizenship was saved. 7
During their walks, Gödel explored some of the implications of relativity theory, and he came up with an analysis that called into question whether
time, rather than merely being relative, could be said to exist at all. Einstein’s equations, he figured, could describe a universe that was rotating