Einstein the Great

By R.W. Johnson

In 1666 – the year of the Great Fire of London – Isaac Newton left Cambridge which was stricken by the plague and went to his mother’s house in the tiny village of Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire. There he developed the calculus, analysed the light spectrum and originated the laws of motion and gravity. In a single year he revolutionised the entire world of science.

In 1905, Albert Einstein, a 26 year old junior clerk in the Zurich patent office – for he had utterly failed to get any academic job – produced a series of papers, the first being an analysis of the photoelectric effect and a new analysis of light, showing that it was propagated both by waves and by particles (photons). This work ultimately won him a Nobel Prize – though any of his other four papers were also potential Nobel Prize winners, let alone his later and greatest work on general relativity.

A second paper proved the existence and also the size of atoms and molecules.

A third paper explained Brownian motion, confirmed the existence of atoms and molecules and had major implications for the theory of heat.

A fourth paper produced Einstein’s theory of special relativity, showing that time and space were both relative, not absolutes. This had huge implications for our entire understanding of the cosmos.

Finally, Einstein showed that mass could be converted into energy, indeed prodigious amounts of energy (as nuclear fission was to prove). This produced the most famous equation of all, the beautifully simple E = mc² (energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light).

Einstein too, had revolutionised the entire world of science, profoundly modifying Newton’s laws. He admitted that he had not produced any of these results by practical laboratory work but by “thought experiments” i.e. pure theory and that at key junctures he had been guided by inspired intuition for, as he always said, imagination was more important than intelligence. As for his bursts of intuition, he wisely pointed out that “intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience”.

So both Newton and Einstein had their annus mirabilis – in very unlikely situations. But it is Einstein’s world that we live in, a world where we accept that gravity can bend light and space, a world where everything is made of atoms and atoms can be split, where enormous energy can thus be released, a world in which black holes exist at the centre of every galaxy in an expanding universe.

At first almost no one noticed what Einstein had done and he, for his part, decided to become a high school teacher – but he was quickly labelled as not being a good teacher. By 30 he had finally become a junior professor. Slowly his fame grew. Meanwhile he had begun to work – in complete isolation – on the huge problem of general relativity. For years he worked with great intensity on it. Although his outspoken pacifist brought Einstein into conflict both with authority and popular opinion during the First World War, he seemed most of the time not to relate that much to people and his face often wore a dreamy look while his mind was preoccupied with problems of the cosmos. His wife Elsa looked after all his needs but did not share his intellectual world. When asked whether she understood relativity she said, “No, but that is not necessary to my happiness”. A friend described Einstein as “a Bohemian, living as a guest in a bourgeois home”.

One of the results of the gravitational field equations which Einstein devised as part of his work on general relativity was to predict the possibility of black holes where gravitational forces would be so strong that they would suck in not only all light but also time, so that inside the black hole all time would stop. Einstein suggested that such a thing could not happen in reality but a young American physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer, did further work and insisted – rightly – that stars could indeed undergo a gravitational collapse and become black holes.

Inevitably, as Einstein’s ideas re-shaped conceptions of the universe, he was asked “but what lies beyond the universe ?” By this stage Einstein was convinced that gravity could and did bend light and could create the curvature of space, so he argued that the universe had no borders or limits. Because of the immense gravitational forces it contained, its space was bent back on itself so that any traveller who set off across the universe would in the end return to where he had started. Just as the early explorers had set off on what they took to be a flat journey but in fact circumscribed the Earth and returned to their starting place, so space travellers would have much the same experience though on a very much larger scale.

Many still thought the universe was in a steady state but Einstein doubted this. If it was not expanding then the sheer force of gravity would cause it to contract. So it was more likely to be expanding (as indeed was the case), which meant that the universe was like a steadily inflating balloon, though still without borders or limits.

Some physicists had come to accept Einstein’s claim that gravity could bend space and light but most men in the street still found it difficult to consider this as more than one more wacky theory. Until 1919 when a Cambridge don, Arthur Eddington, voyaged to the isle of Principe to observe the eclipse and was able to measure exactly how far the rays of light passing the sun had been deflected. The result was to confirm Einstein absolutely, right down to the angle of deflection that he had predicted.

This had an enormous effect: Einstein became world famous and newspapers everywhere covered his every movement and new idea, particularly since he now unveiled his theory of general relativity. They were excited by the thought of such unparallelled genius. He was nothing less than a modern Merlin. In fact he continued on his own humble, Bohemian way, his clothes and hair unkempt. He never bothered with ties or wore socks.

Ominously, in Germany many associated relativity with moral relativism – which Einstein profoundly disagreed with – and tried to condemn his theories as “Jewish thinking”. All his life Einstein had to deal with antisemitism. This grew in intensity in the wake of the First World War, where pacifist Jews like Einstein were accused of having “stabbed Germany in the back”. Einstein reacted by becoming an enthusiastic Zionist and said that “my relationship to the Jewish people has become my strongest human tie”.

Thus in 1921 Kurt Blumenfeld, the leader of the Zionists in Germany, asked Einstein to accompany him and the world Zionist leader, Chaim Weizmann, on a trip to America to raise funds for Israel’s Hebrew University. Einstein, now the world’s most famous Jew, happily went along. When they arrived in the US Weizmann was asked if he understood the theory of relativity. “During the crossing”, he replied, “Einstein explained his theory to me every day, and by the time we arrived I was fully convinced that he really understands it.” On his return to Europe Einstein visited England and laid a wreath on the tomb of Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey.

On his next visit to the US in 1931 Einstein met with the astronomer, Edwin Hubble, and was delighted to hear that Hubble had shown that the universe was indeed expanding. Elsa asked what all the astronomical equipment was for. To determine the shape and scope of the universe, she was told. “My husband does that on the back of an envelope” she said proudly.

Einstein was in Pasadena when Hitler came to power. Hitler spoke vehemently against Einstein and the press reported that Einstein was an assassination target. It became clear that he could never return to Germany. His pacifist comrades expected him to respond with redoubled pacifism but Einstein had talked with Churchill and was in no doubt that pacifism had to be put aside until Hitler was beaten. From 1933 on he was settled at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton.

When Marian Andersen, the famous black singer, visited Princeton in 1937 she was refused a room at the local hotel on segregation grounds, so Einstein asked her to stay at his house. Thereafter whenever she visited Princeton she always stayed with him for the rest of his life. For Einstein was completely committed to human equality and regarded segregation as barbaric. He was also just a very kindly man.

Einstein spent his time at Princeton working endlessly on a unified field theory, attempting a theory which would explain both gravity and electro-magnetism. It was a hopeless attempt to explain everything in a single theory. In fact as physics advanced there was less and less room for a unified theory: both a weak and a strong nuclear force were discovered as were all manner of fundamental particles – bosuns, photons, gluons, fermions, up quarks and down quarks, positrons etc.

The famous Swedish scientist, Niels Bohr, visited Princeton in 1939 and told Einstein that he had learned that German scientists had perhaps managed to split the atom by bombarding heavy uranium with neutrons. Two Hungarian refugee scientists, Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner, then came to see Einstein and warn that this research might well lead to the production of an atom bomb. And they wanted Einstein to write to President Roosevelt to warn him that it was essential that Nazi Germany was not the first country to develop such a technology. This produced little reaction from the American government although the situation became more serious in 1940 when the Nazis over-ran Belgium: for the Belgian Congo was the major source of uranium.

So Einstein was mobilised again to petition Roosevelt and explain what a chain reaction might produce. This time it worked and Roosevelt hurriedly set up the Manhattan Project with J. Robert Oppenheimer in charge. Einstein never worked on that Project or had anything to do with the production of the atom bomb but of course when the bomb was finally dropped it created an immense sensation and the press learned of Einstein’s early role in initiating the research. The result was a TIME cover with Einstein in the foreground against a backdrop of a huge nuclear mushroom cloud. The image stuck and in the popular mind Einstein was indelibly associated with the Bomb. It was not altogether unjust: his work had proved the existence of atoms and had shown the immense energy which could be released from a very small mass.

When J. Robert Oppenheimer first visited the IAS in 1935 he reported that it was “a madhouse” and that Einstein was “completely cuckoo” – doubtless a reference to his endless quest for a unified field theory and Einstein’s equally hopeless passion for world government. But the two men got on well and when the Manhattan Project was over Oppenheimer became the new Director of the IAS. When Oppenheimer was stripped of his security clearance in nuclear matters during the McCarthyite era Einstein could not see why Oppenheimer bothered to contest the decision and counselled his friend to simply ignore the witch-hunt, an other-worldly attitude which only illustrated the gap between the two men.

For Einstein was perfectly happy sitting at Princeton, pondering the cosmos and writing new equations to try to advance his unified field theory. (By this time most of his family had joined him in the US, with his son, Hans Albert, a professor of engineering at the University of California.) Einstein had never had ambitions for money or position. When he had been offered the Presidency of Israel he had politely turned it down – much to the relief of David Ben Gurion, who had made the offer and then glimpsed how impractical Einstein would be in such a role.

So whereas Isaac Newton became an MP and Master of the Mint, renewing the entire British currency, accumulating great wealth and hunting down currency forgers and hanging them, Einstein lived a purely intellectual life to the end. His assistants would help him cover the blackboard with equations until Einstein reached a point where he needed to stop for some reflection, explaining to them “I will now a little tink”. For thinking was what he mainly did. He always seemed slightly abstracted from personal relationships and was an instinctive loner in everything. One of the reasons for the endless media fascination with Einstein was that he so perfectly lived their conception of genius, wrapt entirely in the life of the mind.