einstein

called Tete. She was ill for weeks afterward. Her doctor, contending that she was overworked, suggested that Einstein find a way to make more
money and pay for a maid. Mari was annoyed and protective. “Isn’t it clear to anyone that my husband works himself half dead?” she said. Instead,
her mother came down from Novi Sad to help. 7
Throughout his life, Einstein would sometimes appear aloof toward his two sons, especially Eduard, who suffered from increasingly severe
mental illness as he grew older. But when they were young, he tended to be a good father. “When my mother was busy around the house, father
would put aside his work and watch over us for hours, bouncing us on his knee,” Hans Albert later recalled. “I remember he would tell us stories—
and he often played the violin in an effort to keep us quiet.”
One of his strengths as a thinker, if not as a parent, was that he had the ability, and the inclination, to tune out all distractions, a category that to
him sometimes included his children and family. “Even the loudest baby-crying didn’t seem to disturb Father,” Hans Albert said. “He could go on
with his work completely impervious to noise.”
One day his student Tanner came for a visit and found Einstein in his study poring over a pile of papers. He was writing with his right hand and
holding Eduard with his left. Hans Albert was playing with toy bricks and trying to get his attention. “Wait a minute, I’ve nearly finished,” Einstein
said, as he handed Eduard to Tanner and kept scribbling his equations. “It gave me,” said Tanner, “a glimpse into his immense powers of
concentration.” 8
Prague, 1911
Einstein had been in Zurich less than six months when he received, in March 1910, a solicitation to consider a more prestigious job: a full
professorship at the German part of the University of Prague. Both the university and the academic position were a step up; however, moving from
the familiar and friendly Zurich to the less congenial Prague would be disruptive for his family. For Einstein, the professional considerations
outweighed the personal ones.
He was again going through difficult periods at home. “The bad mood that you noticed in me had nothing to do with you,” he wrote to his mother,
who was now living in Berlin. “To dwell on the things that depress or anger us does not help in overcoming them. One must knock them down
alone.”
His scientific work, on the other hand, was giving him great pleasure, and he expressed excitement about his possible new opportunity. “It is
most probable that I will be offered the position of full professor at a large university with a significantly better salary than I now have.” 9
When word of Einstein’s possible move spread in Zurich, fifteen of his students, led by Hans Tanner, signed a petition urging officials there “to do
your utmost to keep this outstanding researcher and teacher at our university.” They stressed the importance of having a professor in “this newly
created discipline” of theoretical physics, and they extolled him personally in effusive terms. “Professor Einstein has an amazing talent for
presenting the most difficult problems of theoretical physics so clearly and so comprehensibly that it is a great delight for us to follow his lectures,
and he is so good at establishing a perfect rapport with his audience.” 10
The Zurich authorities were so eager to keep him that they raised his salary from its current 4,500 francs, which was the same as he made as a
patent examiner, to 5,500 francs. Those attempting to lure him to Prague, on the other hand, were having a more difficult time.
The faculty department at Prague had settled on Einstein as its first choice and forwarded the recommendation to the education ministry in
Vienna. (Prague was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and such an appointment had to be approved by Emperor Franz Joseph and his
ministers.) The report was accompanied by the highest possible recommendation from the best possible authority, Max Planck. Einstein’s theory of
relativity “probably exceeds in audacity everything that has been achieved so far in speculative science,” Planck proclaimed. “This principle has
brought about a revolution in our physical picture of the world that can be compared only to that produced by Copernicus.” In a comment that might
later have seemed prescient to Einstein, Planck added, “Non-Euclidean geometry is child’s play by comparison.” 11
Planck’s imprimatur should have been enough. But it wasn’t. The ministry decided that it preferred the second-place candidate, Gustav Jaumann,
who had two advantages: he was Austrian, and he was not Jewish. “I did not get the call to Prague,” Einstein lamented to a friend in August. “I was
proposed by the faculty, but because of my Semitic origin the ministry did not approve.”
Jaumann, however, soon discovered that he was the faculty’s second choice, and he erupted. “If Einstein has been proposed as the first choice
because of the belief that he has greater achievements to his credit,” he declared, “then I will have nothing to do with a university that chases after
modernity and does not appreciate merit.” So by October 1910, Einstein could confidently declare that his own appointment was “almost certain.”
There was one final hurdle, also dealing with religion. Being a Jew was a disadvantage; being a nonbeliever who claimed no religion was a
disqualifier. The empire required that all of its servants, including professors, be a member of some religion. On his official forms, Einstein had
written that he had none. “Einstein is as unpractical as a child in cases like this,” Friedrich Adler’s wife noted.
As it turned out, Einstein’s desire for the job was greater than his ornery impracticality. He agreed to write “Mosaic” as his faith, and he also
accepted Austro-Hungarian citizenship, with the proviso that he was allowed to remain a Swiss citizen as well. Along with the German citizenship
that he had forsaken but that would soon be foisted back on him, that meant he had held, off and on, three citizenships by the age of 32. In January
1911, he was officially appointed to the post, with a pay twice what he had been making before his recent raise. He agreed to move to Prague that
March. 12
Einstein had two scientific heroes he had never met—Ernst Mach and Hendrik Lorentz—and he was able to visit them both before his move to
Prague. When he went to Vienna for his formal presentation to the ministers there, he called on Mach, who lived in a suburb of that city. The aging
physicist and preacher of empiricism, who so deeply influenced the Olympia Academy and instilled in Einstein a skepticism about unobservable
concepts such as absolute time, had a gnarly beard and gnarlier personality. “Please speak loudly to me,” he barked when Einstein entered his
room. “In addition to my other unpleasant characteristics I am also almost stone deaf.”
Einstein wanted to convince Mach of the reality of atoms, which the old man had long rejected as being imaginary constructs of the human mind.
“Let us suppose that by assuming the existence of atoms in a gas we were able to predict an observable property of this gas that could not be
predicted on the basis of non-atomistic theory,” Einstein asked. “Would you then accept such a hypothesis?”
“If with the help of the atomic hypothesis one could actually establish a connection between several observable properties which without it would
remain isolated, then I should say that this hypothesis was an ‘economical’ one,” Mach grudgingly replied.
It was not a full acceptance, but it was enough for Einstein. “For the moment Einstein was satisfied,” his friend Philipp Frank noted. Nevertheless,
Einstein began edging away from Mach’s skepticism about any theories of reality not built on directly observable data. He developed, said Frank,
“a certain aversion to the Machist philosophy.” 13 It was the beginning of an important conversion.
Just before moving to Prague, Einstein went to the Dutch town of Leiden to meet Lorentz. Mari accompanied him, and they accepted an