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 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 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 before.” August 25: “Einstein’s equations are looking good—maybe something will come of them—but it’s damned hard work.” September 21: “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 setback.” October 24: “He calculated like crazy today but accomplished nothing.” 11 That year Wolfgang Pauli, the quantum mechanics pioneer, came to visit. Again the old debate over whether God would play dice was 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 quantum mechanics that a system can be defined only by specifying the experimental method of observing it. There was a reality, he insisted, that was independent of how we observed it. “Einstein has the philosophical prejudice that a state, termed ‘real,’ can be defined objectively under any circumstances, that is, without specification of the experimental arrangement used to examine the system,” Pauli marveled in a letter to Max Born. 12 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.” 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 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 case nothing remains of my entire castle in the air, gravitation theory included.” 13 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 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 gravitational theories by trusting an underlying principle, and that made him a “fanatic believer” that comparable methods would eventually lead to a unified field theory. “This should explain the ostrich policy,” he wryly told de Broglie. 14 He expressed this more formally in the concluding paragraph of his final updated appendix to his popular book, Relativity: The Special and General Theory. “The conviction prevails that the experimentally assured duality (corpuscular and wave structure) can be realized only by such a 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 knowledge, and that one should not desist from pursuing to the end the path of the relativistic field theory.” 15 Bertrand Russell encouraged him to continue, in addition, the search for a structure that would ensure peace in the atomic age. They had both 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 science ought to do something dramatic to bring home to the governments the disasters that may occur,” Russell wrote. Einstein replied by proposing a “public declaration” that they and perhaps a few other eminent scientists and thinkers could sign. 16 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 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 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 a black sheep (and not merely in scientific matters).” 17 Alas, Bohr declined, but nine other scientists, including Max Born, agreed to join the effort. Russell concluded the proposed document with a 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 continued existence of mankind, we urge the governments of the world to realize, and to acknowledge publicly, that their purpose cannot be 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 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 in front of 112 Mercer Street. The mailman delivered presents, Oppenheimer came by with papers, the Bucky family brought some puzzles, and Johanna Fantova was there to record the events. 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 him and thought he could use one. “Neckties exist for me only as remote memories,” he admitted politely in his letter of thanks. 19 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 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 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 physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn illusion.” Einstein had introduced Besso to his wife, Anna Winteler, and he marveled as his friend made the marriage survive despite some difficult 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 miserably.” 20 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 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 would burst into booming laughter.” Einstein was particularly amused by a scientific gadget, designed to show the equivalence principle, that he had recently been given. It was a 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 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 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 ball in the cup every time? 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 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, behaved as if it was weightless. The spring inside the contraption instantly pulled it into the cup. 21 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 the Einstein-Russell manifesto. As Russell later declared, “He remained sane in a mad world.” 22 Out of that document grew the Pug-wash Conferences, in which scientists and thinkers gathered annually to discuss how to control nuclear weapons. Later that same afternoon, Israeli Ambassador Abba Eban arrived at Mercer Street to discuss a radio address Einstein was scheduled to give 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 amused. “So, I shall now have a chance to become world famous,” he smiled. 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 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 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 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
peace. 23 Einstein went in to work at the Institute the next day, but he had a pain in his groin and it showed on his face. Is everything all right? his assistant asked. Everything is all right, he replied, but I am not. He stayed at home the following day, partly because the Israeli consul was coming and partly because he was still not feeling well. After the visitors left, he lay down for a nap. But Dukas heard him rush to the bathroom in the middle of the afternoon, where he collapsed. The doctors gave him morphine, which helped him sleep, and Dukas set up her bed right next to his so that she could put ice on his dehydrated lips throughout the night. His aneurysm had started to break. 24 A group of doctors convened at his home the next day, and after some consultation they recommended a surgeon who might be able, though it was thought unlikely, to repair the aorta. Einstein refused. “It is tasteless to prolong life artificially,” he told Dukas. “I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.” He did ask, however, whether he would suffer “a horrible death.” The answer, the doctors said, was unclear. The pain of an internal hemorrhage could be excruciating. But it may take only a minute, or maybe an hour. To Dukas, who became overwrought, he smiled and said, “You’re really hysterical—I have to pass on sometime, and it doesn’t really matter when.” 25 Dukas found him the next morning in agony, unable to lift his head. She rushed to the telephone, and the doctor ordered him to the hospital. At first he refused, but he was told he was putting too much of a burden on Dukas, so he relented. The volunteer medic in the ambulance was a political economist at Princeton, and Einstein was able to carry on a lively conversation with him. Margot called Hans Albert, who caught a plane from San Francisco and was soon by his father’s bedside. The economist Otto Nathan, a fellow German refugee who had become his close friend, arrived from New York. But Einstein was not quite ready to die. On Sunday, April 17, he woke up feeling better. He asked Dukas to get him his glasses, papers, and pencils, and he proceeded to jot down a few calculations. He talked to Hans Albert about some scientific ideas, then to Nathan about the dangers of allowing Germany to rearm. Pointing to his equations, he lamented, half jokingly, to his son, “If only I had more mathematics.” 26 For a half century he had been bemoaning both German nationalism and the limits of his mathematical toolbox, so it was fitting that these should be among his final utterances. He worked as long as he could, and when the pain got too great he went to sleep. Shortly after one a.m. on Monday, April 18, 1955, the nurse heard him blurt out a few words in German that she could not understand. The aneurysm, like a big blister, had burst, and Einstein died at age 76. At his bedside lay the draft of his undelivered speech for Israel Independence Day. “I speak to you today not as an American citizen and not as a Jew, but as a human being,” it began. 27 Also by his bed were twelve pages of tightly written equations, littered with cross-outs and corrections. 28 To the very end, he struggled to find his elusive unified field theory. And the final thing he wrote, before he went to sleep for the last time, was one more line of symbols and numbers that he hoped might get him, and the rest of us, just a little step closer to the spirit manifest in the laws of the universe.
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ALSO BY WALTER ISAACSON A Benjamin
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SIMON & SCHUSTER Rockefeller Center
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In Santa Barbara, 1933 Life is like
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CHAPTER FOURTEEN Nobel Laureate, 19
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their countless acts of support ove
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ABRAHAM FLEXNER (1866-1959). Americ
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CHAPTER ONE THE LIGHT-BEAM RIDER
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The Swabian CHAPTER TWO CHILDHOOD 1
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during the years he lived alone in
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elementary school seemed to me like
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fulfill my wishes and expectations,
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taken out of the black case. It pro
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one of her female friends in Zurich
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Summer Vacation, 1900 CHAPTER FOUR
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The first of these papers was on a
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Lake Como, May 1901 “You absolute
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molecular forces, which used calcul
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His office in Bern’s new Postal a
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affection, and it concluded on that
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Turn of the Century CHAPTER FIVE TH
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These packets or bundles of energy
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though it did not help him get an a
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elative to the medium (the water or
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finally he added, “I guess I just
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Suppose that at the exact instant (
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With all this talk of distance and
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his one-sentence drunken postcard t
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was better suited to theorizing. Fo
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Adler made sure that the Zurich aut
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Zurich, 1909 CHAPTER EIGHT THE WAND
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invitation to stay with Lorentz and
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As Einstein wandered around Europe
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The visitors made their case during
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Mari accepted the terms. When Haber
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When Einstein moved back to Zurich
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indistinguishable from a case where
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Haber’s son in math. 45 But when
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Part of Einstein’s genius was his
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the Annalen der Physik, “The gene
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e a heavy blow for my boys. Therefo
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“The Nobel Prize—in the event o
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Germany’s new left-wing governmen
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Cosmology and Black Holes, 1917 CHA
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quanta involved probability rather
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“Lights All Askew” CHAPTER TWEL
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celebrity, were thrilled that the n
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a “single-minded and single-hande
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Kinship CHAPTER THIRTEEN THE WANDER
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(There was one odd coda to this eve
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Einstein drew packed crowds whereve
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1920s was not a good place or time
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The 1921 Prize CHAPTER FOURTEEN NOB
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photoelectrical effect has been ext
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Atoms emit radiation in a spontaneo
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An additional step was taken by ano
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The Quest CHAPTER FIFTEEN UNIFIED F
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even now. He also gave an interview
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Its shortcoming was that it “make
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Caputh CHAPTER SIXTEEN TURNING FIFT
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later declared. Although she could
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Einstein said, “encases the mind
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His fears were realized. The confer
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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN EINSTEIN’S GOD
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with, his scientific work. “The c
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Edison, Thomas, 6, 299 Edison test,
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nervous strain of, 184, 217-18, 255
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as cosmologist, 223-24, 248, 249-62
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Feynman, Richard, 515, 584n “Fiel
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Hertz, Paul, 208 Hibben, John, 298
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Konenkov, Sergei, 436, 503 Konenkov
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Matthau, Walter, 13 Maxwell, James
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nuclear weapons, 482-84, 487-95, 53
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entanglement in, 454, 455, 458-59
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Remembrance of Things Past (Proust)
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superposition, 456-60 surface tensi
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Whitehead, Alfred North, 261 “Why
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ILLUSTRATION CREDITS Numbers in rom
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5 With Mileva and Hans Albert, 1905
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12 Hiking in Switzerland with Madam
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18 The 1927 Solvay Conference 19 Re
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23 Werner Heisenberg 24 Erwin Schr
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29 With Elsa and her daughter Margo
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34 Welcoming Hans Albert to America
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* The official name of the institut
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* The letters were discovered by Jo
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* A person “at rest” on the equ
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* If the source of sound is rushing
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* The German phrase he used was “
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* She was born Elsa Einstein, becam
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* See chapter 7. For purposes of th
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* Here’s how it works. If you are
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* Einstein’s salary after tax was
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* See chapter 14 for Einstein’s d
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* I have used the translation prefe
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* Robert Andrews Millikan would win
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* The de Broglie wavelength of a ba
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* From his 1905 special relativity
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* As Eddington showed, the cosmolog
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* There are two related concepts th