einstein

with the plump chemist Fritz Haber at his side. Einstein brought the group to a nearby town where he was giving a lecture, after which he took them
to lunch. Not surprisingly, he had forgotten to bring any money, and an assistant who had come along slipped him a 100 franc note under the table.
For most of the day, Freundlich discussed gravity and the bending of light with Einstein, even when the group went on a nature hike, leaving his new
wife to admire the scenery in peace. 35
At his speech that day, which was on general relativity, Einstein pointed out Freundlich to the audience and called him “the man who will be
testing the theory next year.”The problem, however, was raising the money. At the time, Planck and others were trying to lure Einstein from Zurich to
Berlin to become a member of the Prussian Academy, and Einstein used the courtship to write Planck and urge him to provide Freundlich the
money to undertake the task.
In fact, on the very day that Einstein formally accepted the Berlin post and election to the Academy—December 7, 1913—he wrote Freundlich
with the offer to reach into his own pocket. “If the Academy shies away from it, then we will get that little bit of mammon from private individuals,”
said Einstein. “Should everything fail, then I will pay for the thing myself out of the little bit that I have saved, at least the first 2,000 marks.” The main
thing, Einstein stressed, was that Freundlich should proceed with his preparations. “Just go ahead and order the photographic plates, and do not
let the time be squandered because of the money problem.” 36
As it turned out, there were enough private donations, mainly from the Krupp Foundation, to make the expedition possible. “You can imagine how
happy I am that the external difficulties of your undertaking have now more or less been overcome,” Einstein wrote. He added a note of confidence
about what would be found: “I have considered the theory from every angle, and I have every confidence in the thing.” 37
Freundlich and two colleagues left Berlin on July 19 for the Crimea, where they were joined by a group from the Córdoba observatory in
Argentina. If all went well, they would have two minutes to make photographs that could be used to analyze whether the starlight was deflected by
the sun’s gravity.
All did not go well. Twenty days before the eclipse, Europe tumbled into World War I and Germany declared war on Russia. Freundlich and his
German colleagues were captured by the Russian army, and their equipment was confiscated. Not surprisingly, they were unable to convince the
Russian soldiers that, with all of their powerful cameras and location devices, they were mere astronomers planning to gaze at the stars in order to
better understand the secrets of the universe.
Even if they had been granted safe passage, it is likely that the observations would have failed. The skies were cloudy during the minutes of the
eclipse, and an American group that was also in the region was unable to get any usable photographs. 38
Yet the termination of the eclipse mission had a silver lining. Einstein’s Entwurf equations were not correct. The degree to which gravity would
deflect light, according to Einstein’s theory at the time, was the same as that predicted by Newton’s emission theory of light. But, as Einstein would
discover a year later, the correct prediction would end up being twice that. If Freundlich had succeeded in 1914, Einstein might have been publicly
proven wrong.
“My good old astronomer Freundlich, instead of experiencing a solar eclipse in Russia, will now be experiencing captivity there,” Einstein wrote
to his friend Ehrenfest. “I am concerned about him.” 39 There was no need to worry. The young astronomer was released in a prisoner exchange
within weeks.
Einstein, however, had other reasons to worry in August 1914. His marriage had just exploded. His masterpiece theory still needed work. And
now his native country’s nationalism and militarism, traits that he had abhorred since childhood, had plunged it into a war that would cast him as a
stranger in a strange land. In Germany, it would turn out, that was a dangerous position to be in.
World War I
The chain reaction that pushed Europe into war in August 1914 inflamed the patriotic pride of the Prussians and, in an equal and opposite
reaction, the visceral pacifism of Einstein, a man so gentle and averse to conflict that he even disliked playing chess. “Europe in its madness has
now embarked on something incredibly preposterous,” he wrote Ehrenfest that month. “At such times one sees to what deplorable breed of brutes
we belong.” 40
Ever since he ran away from Germany as a schoolboy and was exposed to the gauzy internationalism of Jost Winteler in Aarau, Einstein had
harbored sentiments that disposed him toward pacifism, one-world federalism, and socialism. But he had generally shunned public activism.
World War I changed that. Einstein would never forsake physics, but he would henceforth be unabashedly public, for most of his life, in pushing
his political and social ideals.
The irrationality of the war made Einstein believe that scientists in fact had a special duty to engage in public affairs. “We scientists in particular
must foster internationalism,” he said. “Unfortunately, we have had to suffer serious disappointments even among scientists in this regard.” 41 He
was especially appalled by the lockstep pro-war mentality of his three closest colleagues, the scientists who had lured him to Berlin: Fritz Haber,
Walther Nernst, and Max Planck. 42
Haber was a short, bald, and dapper chemist who was born Jewish but tried mightily to assimilate by converting, getting baptized, and adopting
the dress, manner, and even pince-nez glasses of a proper Prussian. The director of the chemistry institute where Einstein had his office, he had
been mediating the war between Einstein and Mari just as the larger war in Europe was breaking out. Although he hoped for a commission as an
officer in the army, because he was an academic of Jewish heritage he had to settle for being made a sergeant. 43
Haber reorganized his institute to develop chemical weapons for Germany. He had already found a way to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen,
which permitted the Germans to mass-produce explosives. He then turned his attention to making deadly chlorine gas, which, heavier than air,
would flow down into the trenches and painfully asphyxiate soldiers by burning through their throats and lungs. In April 1915, modern chemical
warfare was inaugurated when some five thousand French and Belgians met that deadly fate at Ypres, with Haber personally supervising the
attack. (In an irony that may have been lost on the inventor of dynamite, who endowed the prize, Haber won the 1918 Nobel in chemistry for his
process of synthesizing ammonia.)
His colleague and occasional academic rival Nernst, bespectacled and 50, had his wife inspect his style as he practiced marching and saluting
in front of their house. Then he took his private car and showed up at the western front to be a volunteer driver. Upon his return to Berlin, he
experimented with tear gas and other irritants that could be used as a humane way to flush the enemy out of the trenches, but the generals decided
they preferred the lethal approach that Haber was taking, so Nernst became part of that effort.
Even the revered Planck supported what he called Germany’s “just war.” As he told his students when they went off to battle, “Germany has drawn
its sword against the breeding ground of insidious perfidy.” 44
Einstein was able to avoid letting the war cause a personal rift between him and his three colleagues, and he spent the spring of 1915 tutoring