einstein
einstein
einstein
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The visitors made their case during a long visit to Einstein’s sunny office at the Polytechnic. He said he needed a few hours to think it over,<br />
though it is likely he knew he would accept. So Planck and Nernst took their wives on an excursion by funicular railway up one of the nearby<br />
mountains. With puckish amusement, Einstein told them he would be awaiting their return to the station with a signal. If he had decided to decline,<br />
he would be carrying a white rose, and if he was going to accept, a red rose (some accounts have the signal being a white handkerchief). When<br />
they stepped off the train, they happily discovered that he had accepted. 58<br />
That meant that Einstein would become, at 34, the youngest member of the Prussian Academy. But first Planck had to get him elected. The letter<br />
he wrote, which was also signed by Nernst and others, had the memorable but incorrect concession, quoted earlier, that “he might sometimes have<br />
overshot the target in his speculations, as for example in his light quantum hypothesis.” But the rest of the letter was suffused with extravagant<br />
praise for each of his many scientific contributions. “Among the great problems abundant in modern physics, there is hardly one to which Einstein<br />
has not made a remarkable contribution.” 59<br />
The Berliners were taking a risk, Einstein realized. He was being recruited not for his teaching skills (as he would not be teaching), nor for his<br />
administrative ones. And even though he had been publishing outlines and papers describing his ongoing efforts to generalize relativity, it was<br />
unclear whether he would succeed in that quest. “The Germans are gambling on me as they would on a prize-winning hen,” he told a friend as they<br />
were leaving a party, “but I don’t know if I can still lay eggs.” 60<br />
Einstein, likewise, was taking a risk. He had a secure and lucrative post in a city and society that he, his wife, and his family loved. The Swiss<br />
personality agreed with him. His wife had a Slav’s revulsion for all things Teutonic, and he had a similar distaste that had been in-grained in<br />
childhood. As a boy he had run away from Prussian-accented parades and Germanic rigidity. Only the opportunity to be gloriously coddled in the<br />
world capital of science could have compelled him to make such a move.<br />
Einstein found the prospect thrilling and a bit amusing. “I am going to Berlin as an Academy-man without any obligations, rather like a living<br />
mummy,” he wrote fellow physicist Jakob Laub. “I’m already looking forward to this difficult career!” 61 To Ehrenfest he admitted, “I accepted this<br />
odd sinecure because giving lectures gets on my nerves.” 62 However, to the venerable Hendrik Lorentz in Holland Einstein displayed more<br />
gravitas: “I could not resist the temptation to accept a position in which I am relieved of all responsibilities so that I can give myself over completely<br />
to rumination.” 63<br />
There was, of course, another factor that made the new job enticing: the chance to be with his cousin and new love, Elsa. As he would later admit<br />
to his friend Zangger, “She was the main reason for my going to Berlin, you know.” 64<br />
The same evening that Planck and Nernst left Zurich, Einstein wrote Elsa an excited letter describing the “colossal honor” they had offered. “Next<br />
spring at the latest, I’ll come to Berlin for good,” he exulted. “I already rejoice at the wonderful times we will spend together!”<br />
During the ensuing week, he sent two more such notes. “I rejoice at the thought that I will soon be coming to you,” he wrote in the first. And a few<br />
days later: “Now we will be together and rejoice in each other!” It is impossible to know for sure what relative weight to assign to each of the factors<br />
enticing him to Berlin: the unsurpassed scientific community there, the glories and perks of the post he was offered, or the chance to be with Elsa.<br />
But at least to her he claimed it was primarily the latter. “I look forward keenly to Berlin, mainly because I look forward to you.” 65<br />
Elsa had actually tried to help him get the offer. Earlier in the year, on her own initiative, she had dropped in on Fritz Haber, who ran the Kaiser<br />
Wilhelm Institute of Chemistry in Berlin, and let him know that her cousin might be open to a position that would bring him to Berlin. When he learned<br />
of Elsa’s intervention, Einstein was amused. “Haber knows who he is dealing with. He knows how to appreciate the influence of a friendly female<br />
cousin . . . The nonchalance with which you dropped in on Haber is pure Elsa. Did you tell anyone about it, or did you consult only with your wicked<br />
heart? If only I could have looked on!” 66<br />
Even before Einstein moved to Berlin, he and Elsa began to correspond as if they were a couple. She worried about his exhaustion and sent him<br />
a long letter prescribing more exercise, rest, and a healthier diet. He responded by saying that he planned to “smoke like a chimney, work like a<br />
horse, eat without thinking, go for a walk only in really pleasant company.”<br />
He made clear, however, that she should not expect him to abandon his wife: “You and I can very well be happy with each other without her having<br />
to be hurt.” 67<br />
Indeed, even amid his flurry of love letters with Elsa, Einstein was still trying to be a suitable family man. For his August 1913 vacation, he<br />
decided to take his wife and two sons hiking with Marie Curie and her two daughters. The plan was to go through the mountains of southeastern<br />
Switzerland down to Lake Como, where he and Mari had spent their most passionate and romantic moments twelve years earlier.<br />
As it turned out, the sickly Eduard was unable to make the trip, and Mari stayed behind for a few days to get him settled with friends. Then she<br />
joined them as they neared Lake Como. During the hikes, Curie challenged Einstein to name all the peaks. They also talked science, especially<br />
when the children ran ahead. At one point Einstein stopped suddenly and grabbed Curie’s arm. “You understand, what I need to know is exactly<br />
what happens to the passengers in an elevator when it falls into emptiness,” he said, referring to his ideas about the equivalence of gravity and<br />
acceleration. As Curie’s daughter noted later, “Such a touching preoccupation made the younger generation roar with laughter.” 68<br />
Einstein then accompanied Mari and their children to visit her family in Novi Sad and at their summer house in Ka . On their final Sunday in<br />
Serbia, Mari took the children, without her husband, to be baptized. Hans Albert remembered later the beautiful singing; his brother, Eduard, only<br />
3, was disruptive. As for their father, he seemed sanguine and bemused afterward. “Do you know what the result is?” he told Hurwitz.“They’ve<br />
turned Catholic. Well, it’s all the same to me.” 69<br />
The façade of familial harmony, however, masked the deterioration of the marriage. After his visit to Serbia and a stop in Vienna for his annual<br />
appearance at the conference of German-speaking physicists, Einstein continued on to Berlin, alone. There he was reunited with Elsa. “I now have<br />
someone I can think about with pure delight and I can live for,” he told her. 70<br />
Elsa’s home cooking, a hearty pleasure she lavished on him like a mother, became a theme in their letters. Their correspondence, like their<br />
relationship, was a stark contrast to that between Einstein and Mari a dozen years earlier. He and Elsa tended to write to each other about<br />
domestic comforts—food, tranquillity, hygiene, fondness—rather than about romantic bliss and planted kisses, or intimacies of the soul and insights<br />
of the intellect.<br />
Despite such conventional concerns, Einstein still fancied their relationship could avoid sinking into a mundane pattern. “How nice it would be if<br />
one of these days we could share in managing a small bohemian household,” he wrote. “You have no idea how charming such a life with very small<br />
needs and without grandeur can be!” 71 When Elsa gave him a hairbrush, he initially prided himself on his progress in personal grooming, but then<br />
he reverted to more slovenly ways and told her, only half jokingly, that it was to guard against the philistines and the bourgeoisie. Those were words<br />
he had used with Mari as well, but more earnestly.<br />
Elsa wanted not only to domesticate Einstein but to marry him. Even before he moved to Berlin, she wrote to urge him to divorce Mari . It would<br />
become a running battle for years, until she finally won her way. But for the moment, Einstein was resistant. “Do you think,” he asked her, “it is so<br />
easy to get a divorce if one does not have any proof of the other party’s guilt?” She should accept that he had virtually separated from Mari even if