The inner Einstein

Cover Story 12/9/02
The inner Einstein

BY THOMAS HAYDEN
[www.usnews.com]


Sharp guy, that Einstein. Kinda funny looking, what with the big hair and all, but real smart. Relativity, that was his thing. That and E=mc2, right? Interesting stuff. Really nice guy too, or was there something about Mrs. Einstein getting a raw deal? Still, he was a genius, definitely a genius. You don't need to be an Einstein to know that.


Nearly 50 years after his death and a century after the then unknown physicist started challenging doctrine and stretching brains with his ideas, Albert Einstein remains not just scientifically relevant but a multipurpose icon as well. If anything, his stature has grown over the decades, fed by a steady stream of books, pop-culture references, and posthumous appearances in commercials and on T-shirts, coffee mugs, and most anything else that will sit still long enough to be stamped with a photo and a quote. The lionized Einstein cuts a comforting figure: a gentle genius, as benevolent as he was intelligent . . . almost a scientific Santa. But the more we see that image, the less we seem to know about the real Einstein and the work that made him famous.

Thanks in large measure to an ambitious publishing effort, a much more nuanced view of the greatest scientist of the 20th century is taking shape. The Einstein Papers Project, now in its eighth volume, will ultimately publish some 14,000 original documents in a planned 25 volumes. Already, early drafts of famous papers are allowing historians to track the development of his ideas?he didn't pluck them fully formed from the cosmos after all?and his voluminous correspondence reveals (surprise!) a real human being. There's plenty of wit and charm here, along with courage and a deep sense of social justice. But far from being a saint, he could also be acerbic, rebellious, even something of a rake. As a powerful new exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in New York shows, the Einstein that emerges is at once darker, richer, and infinitely more fascinating than the friendly icon we thought we knew.

"Lights All Askew in the Heavens. Men of Science More or Less Agog Over Results of Eclipse Observations."
-New York Times headline, Nov. 10, 1919

As you walk into the darkened exhibition hall at the AMNH, the dissonant strains of Gustav Holst's 1918 composition The Planets provide ample orchestral warning: Things are different here in Einstein's world. Take a step forward, and your image splashes up in front of you. Move forward again, and it starts to warp, bending around a black bull's-eye; thrust your hand into its center, and your arm spirals around before every last pixel is pulled into a simulated black hole. Welcome to the relativistic fun house, where time speeds up and slows down, mass warps space, and beams of light bend and twist along the rumpled surfaces of the space-time continuum. You can check your intuition at the door; it'll only get in the way.

"All physical theories ... ought to lend themselves to so simple a description that even a child could understand them."
-Einstein, attributed

Yeah, right. Einstein's theories are mostly so far removed from daily experience that similes fall flat and new meanings have to be squeezed out of old words. "Einstein said that he thought in images and even muscular sensations," says John Stachel, a physicist and the founding editor of the Papers Project. "The hardest part for him was to translate his findings back into language that others could understand." But in 1915, Einstein counseled a former student that "one should not pursue goals that are easily achieved," so we'd better give it a shot.

Einstein published some 300 scientific papers, but ideas from four of them?three in 1905 and one in 1916?stand out.

* Light comes in discrete bits or "quanta" called photons; their speed is exactly the same for any person who cares to measure it, no matter how fast that person is moving.

* Mass and energy are interchangeable, as expressed by the famous equation E=mc2. A tiny amount of matter can be converted into an enormous amount of energy.

* Space and time, lumped together as the four dimensions of space-time, actually depend on who's measuring them. The laws of physics are unchanging for any single observer, but two observers whipping past each other at near the speed of light see time slow down and length shorten in the other's world. This is the essence of the 1905 special theory of relativity.

* Gravity and acceleration are intimately related, according to the 1916 general theory of relativity. Gravity is basically a warping of space-time, so a falling apple is actually tumbling into the "dent" in the fabric of space-time made by the Earth's mass. Same thing with planets orbiting around the sun or light vanishing into a black hole.

In other words, he was nuts. Except he wasn't. In 1919, astronomers observed the sun's powerful gravity bending the light from far-off stars during a solar eclipse. The discovery confirmed a key aspect of general relativity and launched Einstein's worldwide fame. Many more proofs of Einstein's theories have followed. In 1971, physicists confirmed "time dilation" when they put four supremely accurate atomic clocks on board jetliners and sent them around the world. Sure enough, the speeding clocks were just slightly out of step?by about 150 billionths of a second?with identical clocks that stayed put. But no confirmation was as spectacular, and tragic, as the one that came on Aug. 6, 1945, when the destruction of Hiroshima testified to E=mc2, nature's profligate exchange of mass for energy.

"I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious."
-Einstein, to his biographer Carl Seelig, 1952

So who was this guy, and how did he manage to see what no one else did? Einstein himself attributed his success to a slow start. "A normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time," he once wrote. "But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had grown up."

Gerald Holton, a Harvard physicist and historian of science, was the first scholar admitted to Einstein's archives after his death in 1955, at the age of 76. Holton says he was "quite overwhelmed" by the unique brilliance he found there. "Unlike the textbook idea of working from experiments, to theory, to testing that theory, he worked in grand leaps from thought experiments," says Holton. "It was beyond anything I had seen."

According to family tradition, recorded by Albert's sister Maja in an unpublished biography, her brother was unusual from the start. Though he showed a remarkable ability to focus on difficult tasks like building houses of cards, he was slow to develop and didn't start speaking until at least the age of 21/2. (She also noted that when her brother was born, "his mother was shocked at the sight of the back of his head, which was extremely large and angular." Sisters can be such a pain.)

Many tall tales of supernatural intelligence have attached themselves to Einstein. (The best one: His first words were an eloquent complaint that his milk was too hot. His stunned parents asked why he hadn't spoken earlier. "Because," the little genius supposedly replied, "previously everything was in order.") But his brilliance doesn't need embellishment. Ask the usually loquacious Stachel whether Einstein was really as smart as all that, and here's the reply you'll get: "Yes."

"There is no doubt that the special theory of relativity ... was ripe for discovery in 1905."
-Einstein, letter to Seelig, Feb. 19, 1955

Contrary to the popular image of Einstein as a lone genius, he was actually immersed in the physics of his day. "It's not like he suddenly popped out of the ground one day and published special relativity," says Michael Shara, an astrophysicist and curator of the New York exhibit. True, Einstein was a patent clerk when he published many of his greatest papers (he failed to land an academic job mostly because his casual approach to lecture attendance annoyed his professors), but he had attended the Federal Polytechnical Institute in Switzerland, one of the top science universities in Europe. He later worked with assistants and collaborators and, even in the earliest days, bounced developing ideas off friends and colleagues, including his first wife and fellow physics student, Mileva Maric.

By 1905, physicists had been struggling for years to come up with a theory that would combine new discoveries about electricity, magnetism, and light with earlier physics. Galileo had introduced the idea of relativity?that how we perceive the world depends on our particular frame of reference?for everyday objects three centuries before. By questioning assumptions about how it should move through the universe, Einstein showed that light is the exception. Its speed is the same no matter what your frame of reference. That deceptively simple idea was enough to undermine the constancy of time and space, changing the way physicists see the world.

"How happy and proud I will be when the two of us together have brought our work on relative motion to a triumphant end!"
-Einstein, to Mileva, March 27, 1901

After his death, Einstein's longtime secretary, Helen Dukas, helped to organize his scientific papers. But, notes Holton, she resisted efforts to make his personal letters available. When his correspondence with Mileva was published in 1992 as Albert Einstein/Mileva Maric: The Love Letters, it became abundantly clear why. Wisdom comes at a price, it seems, even for a genius. Letters from his university days are filled with his parents' misgivings about Mileva, and while Albert and Mileva did marry in 1903, it was not until after Mileva gave birth to a girl, Lieserl, in her native Serbia. Albert never saw his illegitimate daughter, who may have been given up for adoption if she did not die in infancy.

There are many moments of tenderness in the letters. But the exuberance of "How was I ever able to live alone, my little everything?" from 1900 fades over the years, as Einstein's fame grows, two sons are born, and Mileva begins showing what may have been the symptoms of schizophrenia. What remains is scorn, and deceit. "[Mileva] is an unfriendly, humorless creature . . . who, by her mere presence, extinguishes other people's joy of living," Albert wrote in 1913 to his cousin Elsa L?wenthal. She was already his lover and would become his second wife in 1919 (although not until after he had contemplated proposing to one of her two daughters instead). He had lovers throughout his life, leading some critics to label him a misogynist. Perhaps longtime Papers Project editor Alice Calaprice, echoing an affection common among Einstein scholars, says it best. "I wouldn't have wanted to be married to him, but we still like him despite his faults."

The most controversial "revelation" may be the line from the 1901 letter to Mileva in which Albert refers to "our work on relative motion." Did Einstein steal his theory from his first wife, as some critics have speculated? "The quote is real, and he did end up being a bastard to her," says Einstein scholar Robert Schulmann, "but there's absolutely no evidence that she made critical contributions to the 1905 paper." Mileva responded to everything in Albert's letters except for the physics, Stachel notes, and while some authors have claimed that she worked out the math in special relativity, Stachel says that's far-fetched. "Mileva failed her [university] exams two times, especially because of her math marks."

"To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself."
-Einstein, Sept. 18, 1930

Often distant in his personal life, Einstein could be gregarious in public. He was a natural celebrity, eminently photogenic and always ready with a charming sound bite. In a film clip on display in the Einstein exhibit, he engages a crowd of reporters. "Professor Einstein, are you glad to be in America?" one asks. "Now that I see you are here, sure," he quips. A Dec. 11, 1930, excerpt from his travel diaries, however, gives a franker assessment of journalists. "A horde of reporters boarded our ship near Long Island," he complains. "[They] asked me extremely stupid questions which I answered with cheap retorts, which they accepted with enthusiasm."

Despite Einstein's ambivalence about his high profile, he famously used it to further social and political causes. He worked tirelessly to help refugees flee Nazi Germany and to establish Hebrew University in Jerusalem as a haven for his fellow Jewish academics. Einstein also supported the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine but warned in 1955, "The most important aspect of our policy must be our ever-present, manifest desire to institute complete equality for the Arab citizens living in our midst." A committed socialist, he distrusted capitalism and communism in equal measure and believed that "world government" was the only way to control nuclear weapons and eventually abolish war entirely.

Famous for treating everyone with the same respect, from his duet partner Queen Elisabeth of Belgium (she played piano, he the violin) to beginning students, Einstein was also an early and vocal advocate of civil rights. "This is the least-known aspect of his activism," says Fred Jerome, whose book The Einstein File traces a secret vendetta against Einstein led by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Einstein not only lent his prestige to anti-lynching campaigns, notes Jerome, "he attended NAACP meetings and spent a lot of time in the black community" in Princeton, N.J. When the opera singer Marian Anderson was refused a room at a Princeton hotel because of her race, Einstein invited her to stay with him.

Einstein's iconoclasm in both science and politics made enemies. His name appeared on a Nazi "hit list" as early as 1922, and a group of otherwise respectable German physicists denounced his work as "Jewish physics"?a dangerous lie and a threat to Aryan supremacy. Sadly, this sort of mindless harassment didn't stop when Einstein fled Germany for Princeton in 1933. Under Hoover, the FBI amassed a 1,800-page dossier on Einstein, with the eventual aim of having him denaturalized and deported. Hoover's main obsession was proving that Einstein had worked as a Communist spy. While he did succeed in getting Einstein barred from the wartime Manhattan Project, notes Jerome, "The FBI and seven other agencies participated in a secret anti-Einstein effort for 22 years, and they never found any evidence. It simply isn't there."

"Humanity needs a few romantic idols as spots of light in the drab field of earthly existence. ... The particular choice of person is inexplicable and unimportant."
-Einstein, at the age of 70

On the basis of his scientific work alone, Einstein's legacy is secure. "Someone else would have figured out special relativity eventually," says Shara. "But general relativity? I don't think so. We'd still be stumbling around in the dark had it not been for Einstein." Physicists are now struggling toward a theory that would go beyond general relativity?a "theory of everything" that would unite gravity with the other forces of nature. Yet the quest is more of a homage to Einstein than a challenge, since Einstein himself worked?unsuccessfully, in the end?toward the same goal.

Nor has Einstein's personal appeal been diminished by revelations about his private life. "There is a feeling that he had somehow a direct line to the powers above, much the same feeling people have about Mozart or Gandhi," says Holton. "His life projects high achievement and a hope for a sane future for humanity." Perhaps that life is even more remarkable when one must accept that it was lived by a man rather than a superhero.