einstein
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einstein
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y me personally.” In various letters over the next few months, Einstein described his different ideas and fantasies for home-schooling his sons,<br />
what he would teach, and even the type of walks they would take. He wrote Hans Albert to assure him that he was “constantly thinking of you both.” 18<br />
But Hans Albert was so angry, or hurt, that he had stopped answering his father’s letters. “I believe that his attitude toward me has fallen below<br />
the freezing point,” Einstein lamented to Besso. “Under the given circumstances, I would have reacted in the same way.” After three letters to his<br />
son went unanswered in three months, Einstein plaintively wrote him: “Don’t you remember your father anymore? Are we never going to see each<br />
other again?” 19<br />
Finally, the boy replied by sending a picture of a boat he was constructing out of wood carvings. He also described his mother’s return from the<br />
sanatorium. “When Mama came home, we had a celebration. I had practiced a sonata by Mozart, and Tete had learned a song.” 20<br />
Einstein did make one concession to the sad situation: he decided to give up asking Mari for a divorce, at least for the time being. That seemed<br />
to aid her recovery. “I’ll take care that she doesn’t get any more disturbance from me,” he told Besso. “I have abandoned proceeding with the<br />
divorce. Now on to scientific matters!” 21<br />
Indeed, whenever personal issues began to weigh on him, he took refuge in his work. It shielded him, allowed him to escape. As he told Helene<br />
Savi , likely with the intent that it get back to her friend Mari , he planned to retreat into scientific reflection. “I resemble a farsighted man who is<br />
charmed by the vast horizon and whom the foreground bothers only when an opaque object prevents him from taking in the long view.” 22<br />
So even as the personal battle was raging, his science provided solace. In 1916, he began writing again about the quantum. He also wrote a<br />
formal exposition of his general theory of relativity, which was far more comprehensive, and slightly more comprehensible, than what had poured<br />
forth in the weekly lectures during his race with Hilbert the previous November. 23<br />
In addition, he produced an even more understandable version: a book for the lay reader, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, that<br />
remains popular to this day. To make sure that the average person would fathom it, he read every page out loud to Elsa’s daughter Margot, pausing<br />
frequently to ask whether she indeed got it. “Yes, Albert,” she invariably replied, even though (as she confided to others) she found the whole thing<br />
totally baffling. 24<br />
This ability of science to be used as a refuge from painful personal emotions was a theme of a talk he gave at a celebration of Max Planck’s<br />
sixtieth birthday. Putatively about Planck, it seemed to convey more about Einstein himself. “One of the strongest motives that leads men to art and<br />
science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness,” Einstein said. “Such men make this cosmos and its<br />
construction the pivot of their emotional life, in order to find the peace and security which they cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal<br />
experience.” 25<br />
The Treaty<br />
In early 1917, it was Einstein’s turn to fall ill. He came down with stomach pains that he initially thought were caused by cancer. Now that his<br />
mission was complete, death did not frighten him. He told the astronomer Freundlich that he was not worried about dying because now he had<br />
completed his theory of relativity.<br />
Freundlich, on the other hand, did worry about his friend, who was still only 38. He sent Einstein to a doctor, who diagnosed the problem as a<br />
chronic stomach malady, one that was exacerbated by wartime food shortages. He put him on a four-week diet of rice, macaroni, and zwieback<br />
bread.<br />
These stomach ailments would lay him low for the next four years, then linger for the rest of his life. He was living alone and having trouble getting<br />
proper meals. From Zurich, Zangger sent packages to help satisfy the prescribed diet, but within two months Einstein had lost close to fifty pounds.<br />
Finally, by the summer of 1917, Elsa was able to rent a second apartment in her building, and she moved him in there to be her neighbor, charge,<br />
and companion. 26<br />
Elsa took great joy in foraging for the food he found comforting. She was resourceful and wealthy enough to commandeer the eggs and butter<br />
and bread he liked, even though the war made such staples hard to come by. Every day she cooked for him, doted on him, even found him cigars.<br />
Her parents helped as well by having them both over for comforting meals. 27<br />
The health of his younger son, Eduard, also was precarious. Once again he had fevers, and in early 1917 his lungs became inflamed. After<br />
receiving a pessimistic medical prognosis, Einstein lamented to Besso, “My little boy’s condition depresses me greatly. It is impossible that he will<br />
become a fully developed person. Who knows if it wouldn’t be better for him if he could depart before coming to know life properly.”<br />
To Zangger, he ruminated about the “Spartan’s method”—leaving sickly children out on a mountain to die—but then said he could not accept that<br />
approach. Instead, he promised to pay whatever it took to get Eduard care, and he told Zangger to send him to whatever treatment facility he<br />
thought best. “Even if you silently say to yourself that every effort is futile, send him anyway, so that my wife and my Albert think that something is<br />
being done.” 28<br />
That summer, Einstein traveled back to Switzerland to take Eduard to a sanatorium in the Swiss village of Arosa. His ability to use science to<br />
rise above personal travails was illustrated in a letter he sent to his physicist friend Paul Ehrenfest: “The little one is very sickly and must go to Arosa<br />
for a year. My wife is also ailing. Worries and more worries. Nevertheless, I have found a nice generalization of the Sommerfeld-Epstein quantum<br />
law.” 29<br />
Hans Albert joined his father on the journey to take Eduard to Arosa, and he then visited when Einstein was staying with his sister, Maja, and her<br />
husband, Paul Winteler, in Lucerne. There he found his father bedridden with stomach pains, but his uncle Paul took him hiking. Gradually, with a<br />
few rough patches, Einstein’s relationship with his older son was being restored. “The letter from my Albert was the greatest joy I’ve had for the past<br />
year,” he told Zangger. “I sense with bliss the intimate tie between us.” Financial worries were also easing. “I received a prize of 1,500 crowns from<br />
the Viennese Academy, which we can use for Tete’s cure.” 30<br />
Now that he had moved into the same building as Elsa and she was nursing him back to health, it was inevitable that the issue of a divorce from<br />
Mari would arise again. In early 1918, it did. “My desire to put my private affairs in some state of order prompts me to suggest a divorce to you for<br />
a second time,” he wrote. “I am resolved to do everything to make this step possible.” This time his financial offer was even more generous. He<br />
would pay her 9,000 marks rather than what had now become a 6,000 annual stipend, with the provision that 2,000 would go into a fund for their<br />
children.*<br />
Then he added an amazing new inducement. He was convinced, with good reason, that he would someday win the Nobel Prize. Even though the<br />
scientific community had not yet fully come to grips with special relativity, much less his new and unproven theory of general relativity, eventually it<br />
would. Or his groundbreaking insights into light quanta and the photoelectric effect would be recognized. And so he made a striking offer to Mari :