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In the evening, he would often explain his last-ditch efforts to his companion, Johanna Fantova, and she would record them in her journal. The<br />
entries for 1954 were littered with hopes raised and dashed. February 20: “Thinks he found a new angle to his theory, something very important that<br />
would simplify it. Hopes he won’t find any errors.” February 21: “Didn’t find any errors, but the new work isn’t as exciting as he had thought the day<br />
before.” August 25: “Einstein’s equations are looking good—maybe something will come of them—but it’s damned hard work.” September 21:<br />
“He’s making some progress with what was at first only a theory but is now looking good.” October 14: “Found an error in his work today, which is a<br />
setback.” October 24: “He calculated like crazy today but accomplished nothing.” 11<br />
That year Wolfgang Pauli, the quantum mechanics pioneer, came to visit. Again the old debate over whether God would play dice was<br />
reengaged, as it had been a quarter-century earlier at the Solvay Conferences. Einstein told Pauli that he still objected to the fundamental tenet in<br />
quantum mechanics that a system can be defined only by specifying the experimental method of observing it. There was a reality, he insisted, that<br />
was independent of how we observed it. “Einstein has the philosophical prejudice that a state, termed ‘real,’ can be defined objectively under any<br />
circumstances, that is, without specification of the experimental arrangement used to examine the system,” Pauli marveled in a letter to Max Born. 12<br />
He also clung to his belief that physics should be based, as he told his old friend Besso, “on the field concept, i.e., on continuous structures.”<br />
Seventy years earlier, his awe at contemplating a compass caused him to marvel at the concept of fields, and they had guided his theories ever<br />
since. But what would happen, he worried to Besso, if field theory turned out to be unable to account for particles and quantum mechanics? “In that<br />
case nothing remains of my entire castle in the air, gravitation theory included.” 13<br />
So even as Einstein apologized for his stubbornness, he proudly refused to abandon it. “I must seem like an ostrich who forever buries its head in<br />
the relativistic sand in order not to face the evil quanta,” he wrote Louis de Broglie, another of his colleagues in the long struggle. He had found his<br />
gravitational theories by trusting an underlying principle, and that made him a “fanatic believer” that comparable methods would eventually lead to a<br />
unified field theory. “This should explain the ostrich policy,” he wryly told de Broglie. 14<br />
He expressed this more formally in the concluding paragraph of his final updated appendix to his popular book, Relativity: The Special and<br />
General Theory. “The conviction prevails that the experimentally assured duality (corpuscular and wave structure) can be realized only by such a<br />
weakening of the concept of reality,” he wrote. “I think that such a far-reaching theoretical renunciation is not for the present justified by our actual<br />
knowledge, and that one should not desist from pursuing to the end the path of the relativistic field theory.” 15<br />
Bertrand Russell encouraged him to continue, in addition, the search for a structure that would ensure peace in the atomic age. They had both<br />
opposed the First World War, Russell recalled, and supported the Second. Now it was imperative to prevent a third. “I think that eminent men of<br />
science ought to do something dramatic to bring home to the governments the disasters that may occur,” Russell wrote. Einstein replied by<br />
proposing a “public declaration” that they and perhaps a few other eminent scientists and thinkers could sign. 16<br />
Einstein set to work enlisting his old friend and sparring partner, Niels Bohr. “Don’t frown like that!” Einstein joked, as if he were face-to-face with<br />
Bohr rather than writing to him in Copenhagen. “This has nothing to do with our old controversy on physics, but rather concerns a matter on which<br />
we are in complete agreement.” Einstein admitted that his own name might carry some influence abroad, but not in America,“where I am known as<br />
a black sheep (and not merely in scientific matters).” 17<br />
Alas, Bohr declined, but nine other scientists, including Max Born, agreed to join the effort. Russell concluded the proposed document with a<br />
simple plea: “In view of the fact that in any future world war nuclear weapons will certainly be employed, and that such weapons threaten the<br />
continued existence of mankind, we urge the governments of the world to realize, and to acknowledge publicly, that their purpose cannot be<br />
furthered by a world war, and we urge them, consequently, to find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of dispute between them.” 18<br />
Einstein made it to his seventy-sixth birthday, but he was not well enough to come outside to wave to the reporters and photographers gathered<br />
in front of 112 Mercer Street. The mailman delivered presents, Oppenheimer came by with papers, the Bucky family brought some puzzles, and<br />
Johanna Fantova was there to record the events.<br />
Among the presents was a tie sent by the fifth grade of the Farmingdale Elementary School in New York, which presumably had seen pictures of<br />
him and thought he could use one. “Neckties exist for me only as remote memories,” he admitted politely in his letter of thanks. 19<br />
A few days later, he learned of the death of Michele Besso, the personal confessor and scientific sounding board he had met six decades earlier<br />
upon arriving as a student in Zurich. As if he knew that he had only a few more weeks, Einstein ruminated on the nature of death and time in the<br />
condolence letter he wrote to Besso’s family. “He has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For us believing<br />
physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn illusion.”<br />
Einstein had introduced Besso to his wife, Anna Winteler, and he marveled as his friend made the marriage survive despite some difficult<br />
patches. Besso’s most admirable personal trait, Einstein said, was to live in harmony with a woman, “an undertaking in which I twice failed rather<br />
miserably.” 20<br />
One Sunday in April, the Harvard historian of science I. Bernard Cohen went to see Einstein. His face, deeply lined, struck Cohen as tragic, yet<br />
his sparkling eyes made him seem ageless. He spoke softly yet laughed loudly. “Every time he made a point that he liked,” Cohen recalled, “he<br />
would burst into booming laughter.”<br />
Einstein was particularly amused by a scientific gadget, designed to show the equivalence principle, that he had recently been given. It was a<br />
version of the old-fashioned toy in which a ball that hangs by a string from the end of a stick has to be swung up so that it lands in a cup atop the<br />
stick. This one was more complex; the string tied to the ball went through the bottom of the cup and was attached to a loose spring inside the<br />
handle of the contraption. Random shaking would get the ball in the cup every now and then. The challenge: Was there a method that would get the<br />
ball in the cup every time?<br />
As Cohen was leaving, a big grin came over Einstein’s face as he said he would explain the answer to the gadget. “Now the equivalence<br />
principle!” he announced. He poked the stick upward until it almost touched the ceiling. Then he let it drop straight down. The ball, while in free fall,<br />
behaved as if it was weightless. The spring inside the contraption instantly pulled it into the cup. 21<br />
Einstein was now entering the last week of his life, and it is fitting that he focused on the matters most important to him. On April 11, he signed<br />
the Einstein-Russell manifesto. As Russell later declared, “He remained sane in a mad world.” 22 Out of that document grew the Pug-wash<br />
Conferences, in which scientists and thinkers gathered annually to discuss how to control nuclear weapons.<br />
Later that same afternoon, Israeli Ambassador Abba Eban arrived at Mercer Street to discuss a radio address Einstein was scheduled to give<br />
to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the Jewish state. He would be heard, Eban told him, by as many as 60 million listeners. Einstein was<br />
amused. “So, I shall now have a chance to become world famous,” he smiled.<br />
After rattling around in the kitchen to make Eban a cup of coffee, Einstein told him that he saw the birth of Israel as one of the few political acts in<br />
his lifetime that had a moral quality. But he was concerned that the Jews were having trouble learning to live with the Arabs. “The attitude we adopt<br />
toward the Arab minority will provide the real test of our moral standards as a people,” he had told a friend a few weeks earlier. He wanted to<br />
broaden his speech, which he was scribbling in German in a very tight and neat handwriting, to urge the creation of a world government to preserve