Einstein's Genius Club (5 page)

As Einstein, Russell, Pauli, and Gödel sat talking in Princeton, Robert Oppenheimer and his fellow physicists in Los Alamos were trying to build an atom bomb that could decide the course of World War II. They believed—and it is certainly argued—that Werner Heisenberg and his fellow physicists were doing the same in Germany.

Physics was a small world. Einstein and Pauli had direct links to these projects, both personal and professional. Fearful of a German bomb, Einstein had written to President Roosevelt in 1939, urging him to begin an atomic project. Pauli had been Oppenheimer's teacher in the early 1930s and had been Heisenberg's close friend and collaborator in the 1920s when, together with Niels Bohr, they had built the foundations of quantum mechanics. In this tightly knit world, Einstein and Pauli were aware of what was at stake, if not in detail.

When the Bomb exploded over Hiroshima, science lost its innocence, irrevocably. In return for the ultimate weapon, physicists tasted dizzying political power. Yet that power was poisoned fruit. Indispensable to their government's survival in the atomic age, physicists were enlisted as guardians of the state—guardians who were kept under strictest guard. Their knowledge was dangerous, and their loyalty was constantly questioned. Oppenheimer's security hearing of 1954 is often thought to have inaugurated the era of atomic suspicion. In fact, distrust and surveillance followed almost
immediately from Einstein's letter to Roosevelt. By the time Oppenheimer was staking out Los Alamos, spying on physicists was widespread—even obsessive. Most scrutinized of all, perhaps, was Einstein, whose FBI file eventually numbered some fifteen hundred pages. A new age of suspicion was emerging.

The four men came to Princeton from a continent wracked by war. Each made his way to Princeton as much by luck as by any clear design. There they waited as the world changed. And change it did. In 1945, after the Bomb was dropped, Pauli, critical and prescient as always, lamented:

The Atom Bomb is a very evil thing, also for physics, I think. The politicians, of course, are at a complete loss and talk in a demagogic way of a
secret
which, evidently, does not exist (the true secret is the nature of the nuclear forces). Although most people say that I see ghosts, I am afraid that physics gets more or less subdued by military censorship and that free research, in principle, is gone.
¹⁰

If Einstein and his friends spent the war sidelined and isolated, they were not idle. Of the four, Einstein and Russell were the most outwardly political. Both had abandoned their early pacifism in the face of Hitler and the threat of Fascism. Of the four, only Einstein made any direct contribution to the war effort, working in a minor capacity for the Navy, despite his status as a security risk. Pauli offered his services, only to be told by Oppenheimer to “keep those principles of science alive which do not seem immediately relevant to the war.”
¹¹
Pauli was too acerbic and independent to fit into regulated teamwork and had no taste for the applied science useful in military research. Gödel was unfit physically and mentally. Russell was trapped in the United States, unable to secure sea passage to England, where he hoped to contribute to the war effort.

Thus it was Princeton, for better or worse. Einstein described the town “as a wonderful bit of earth, and a most amusing ceremonial backwater of tiny demigods on stilts.”
¹²
As for its intellectual life, “[a]part from the handful of really fine scholars, it is a boring and barren society that would soon make you shiver.”
¹³
Einstein shunned the public spotlight as much as possible. Yet he could never escape the notice of town and gown alike. He was besieged by requests for appearances, statements, appeals, signatures, speeches, and interviews. But he avoided making political statements and reserved his energy for Jewish causes.

Generally, he kept his distance from Princeton's colony of German and European exiles. He was always in the public eye, yet he remained apart, even from the nexus of intellectual life: “I live like a bear in my den.”
¹⁴
From 1938 to 1941, the great German novelist Thomas Mann taught at Princeton and lived only a few blocks away. But the two men saw little of each other. Mann's wife, Katia, thought Einstein an “enormously specialized talent” but “not particularly stimulating” and “not a very impressive person.”
¹⁵
A certain cultural snobbery seemed to have migrated to the American shores. Then again, the Manns' grand style of living—in a mansion with a staff of servants—did not appeal to Einstein, who lived simply, without fuss. One can scarcely imagine the dandyish Thomas Mann in Einstein's trademark sweatshirt. Einstein's few close friends in Princeton were outsiders and mavericks, like Gödel and Pauli.

Of the four men who met in Einstein's living room, Gödel, Pauli, and Einstein held appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study. Established by Abraham Flexner in 1930, the Institute offered fellowships (without teaching requirements) to eminent scholars in the natural and social sciences and in physics and mathematics. Einstein was Flexner's first recruit—and his fame fortified the Institute's prestige. Gödel joined in 1933, though only as an assistant; Pauli, after a visit in the mid-1930s, arrived in 1940 to take up residence until the end of the war.

Gödel and Pauli were not only Einstein's intellectual peers, but also, thankfully, spoke German. Einstein's spoken English was never strong; he was really at home only in German. In Princeton, his old friendship with Pauli deepened, and a new one with Gödel flowered. Pauli was superbly knowledgeable about relativity theory, and, when they were not arguing about quantum theory, he and Einstein collaborated on a paper. Gödel and Einstein saw each other daily for years; their walks to the Institute gave Einstein an intellectual equal with whom to discuss his unfashionable unified theory, though Gödel remained skeptical. Russell, whom Einstein had met years before, showed up in Princeton at the end of 1943, at loose ends, scheduled for periodic lectures in New York, desperate for a ship to take him back to wartime England.

Four more varied—and difficult—people would be hard to find.

F
OR ALL HIS SEEMING EASE WITH THE WORLD
, Einstein was intensely private. Outwardly friendly, he disclosed almost nothing of himself to the world. Little wonder, perhaps, that biographers have seized on his bohemian clothing and disheveled appearance, as if they could be keys to his inner being. In his Berlin years, when he reached home, he took off the professor's obligatory wing collar and frock coat and walked around in bare feet and an old sweater. In Princeton, with a sigh of relief at American informality, he wore sweatshirts and baggy pants in public and, in winter, a seaman's woolen cap pulled down over his ears. Like his forebear Newton, Einstein was utterly indifferent to fashion.

Privacy was not easily attained. In Princeton, his wife, Elsa, and secretary, Helen Dukas, guarded the front door of 112 Mercer Street. Princeton was as self-contained and self-assured as Einstein himself, so his daily walk to his office attracted little attention. On one occasion, however, his morning walk was interrupted by a high school student sufficiently guileless to have inveigled a rare
interview for his school newspaper. “My life is a simple thing that would interest no one. It is a known fact that I was born, and that is all that is necessary.” Thus did Einstein steer the young journalist away from personal questions.
¹

No one who met Einstein seems to have harbored suspicions that his reticence was a pose. Indeed, he led a very active social life. Yet he seems to have avoided revelation—even self-revelation, having remained, as he remarked in an appreciation of Freud, among those “not-having-been-analyzed.” One activity that tends to reveal is teaching. But Einstein preferred not to teach. His appointments at the Prussian Academy in Berlin and at the Institute for Advanced Study relieved him of all teaching duties. “I couldn't resist the temptation of a post in which I would be free from all obligations and be able to indulge wholly in my musings,”
²
he wrote of his appointment in Berlin. No one took a Ph.D. under his direction. He did not cultivate protégés or disciples among students. As he said, he was always a loner.

In his later years, Einstein alluded to the price he paid for his single-minded devotion to science. When his close friend Michele Besso died in 1955, shortly before Einstein himself, he wrote admiringly to Besso's widow of Michele's ability to lead a “harmonious life”:

[W]hat I most admired in Michele as a man was his ability to live many years with his wife, not only in peace but in constant accord, an endeavor in which I have lamentably failed twice.
³

Einstein had chosen the perfection of work, Besso the perfection of life. Besso's sister, visiting Princeton in 1947, told Einstein that she said she had long wondered why her brother had not made some great discovery in mathematics. Einstein laughed and said, “Michele is a humanist, a universal spirit, too interested in many things to become a monomaniac. Only a monomaniac gets
what we commonly refer to as results.” Then, according to Besso's sister, “Einstein giggled to himself.”
⁴

It is thought that scientific genius is best nurtured in households rich in learning and culture. If so, Einstein's family was ideal. His father, Hermann Einstein, was an easygoing and good-natured man, not particularly suited to the business world. After several false starts, he opened an electrochemical works in Munich with his brother Jakob. Einstein's mother, Pauline, was the more cultured and widely read parent. She also played the piano.

Einstein was born in Ulm, a vibrant, highly industrialized city in southern Germany. The Einstein family history is typical of German Jewry. In the sixteenth century, a small Jewish community grew in the small town of Buchau, about forty miles from Ulm, where an abbey afforded protection. To that small town, in 1665, came Baruch Moises Ainstein. Like other Jews, Ainstein became a tradesman (in cloth and horses) and enjoyed relative freedom to practice his faith. For two centuries, the Jews of Buchau lived nestled against the Alps in peace. During the mid-nineteenth century, however, Einstein's family began a slow migration to Ulm, where prosperity born of industry beckoned. Hermann was born in Ulm and to Ulm he returned with Pauline, whom he met in Stuttgart, where he had been sent to school.

In 1880, a year after Albert's birth, the family moved to Munich, convinced by Hermann's brother Jakob that riches were to be made from the generation of electricity. Jakob, a graduate of Stuttgart Polytechnic, persuaded the more cautious Hermann to join him in partnership. Jakob would serve as inventor and technician; Hermann would tend to the business side.

Despite Jakob's talent, or perhaps because of it, the ensuing years were lean. Munich and the surrounding Bavaria, conservative and steeped in tradition, had resisted industrialization. Not so
the rest of Germany. Although the Einstein brothers seemed to have gotten in on the ground floor, they faced fierce competition from well-established companies outside Bavaria. Time and again, Jakob's innovations proved too ambitious and Hermann's caution too inhibiting. Later, Maja, Albert's sister, described their father's method: He “had a particularly pronounced way of trying to get to the bottom of something, by examining it from every side, before he could reach a decision.”
⁵
It was a mode better suited to a physicist than to a businessman. Albert's formative years were spent watching his father and uncle struggle through several incorporations and dissolutions. Capital borrowed from family and friends was lost time and again, and, in the end, the brothers went their own ways.

In many ways, it was an ordinary childhood. Yet the young Einstein was anything but ordinary. Even the moment of his birth provided a shock. Pauline, glimpsing her firstborn, saw only his “large and angular” head, flattened at the back. In a few weeks, time, his skull rounded out; still, he was overly plump, to his grandmother's horror: “Much too fat! Much too fat!” Slow to speak, he nevertheless appeared quite self-possessed as an infant, able to amuse himself. His sister's arrival on the scene may have upended his universe. She was clearly useless as a toy. “Where are its wheels?” he asked.
⁶

For all that the Einstein family struggled, it remained solidly middle class. The loving parents, culturally Jewish but not observant, seem to have indulged Einstein and his sister, Maja, nurturing their inquisitiveness and encouraging their musical talents. Despite protests (including hurling a chair at a prospective music teacher), Albert took violin lessons and became so proficient that he and his mother played piano duets. He was free to wander about his neighborhood at the tender age of four. He was also free to let loose his temper on Maja. She narrowly missed being hit by a bowling ball and was not so lucky when Albert came after her with a hoe. More than anything, he was free to explore intellectually, especially
in the realm of mechanics. With an extended family steeped in technical and business know-how, Einstein found ready answers to his precocious questions. He was always eager to observe: At age five, during an illness, he was given a magnetic compass by his father. The device, meant only as a distraction, fascinated and excited the budding physicist.