The Einstein Factor

The Einstein Factor
The curiosity of the greatest thinker of our time.
By Walter Isaacson

Not Always an EinsteinWhen Albert Einstein arrived in America at age 54, pulling into New York Harbor on the ocean liner Westernland on October 17, 1933, an official greeting committee was waiting for him. Einstein and his entourage, however, were nowhere to be found.

Abraham Flexner, director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, was obsessed with shielding his celebrity professor from publicity. So he'd sent a tugboat to spirit the great man away from the Westernland as soon as it cleared quarantine. His hair poking out from a wide-brimmed black hat, Einstein surreptitiously disembarked onto the tug, which ferried him and his party to lower Manhattan, where a car would whisk them to Princeton. "All Dr. Einstein wants is to be left in peace and quiet," Flexner told reporters.

Actually, Einstein also wanted a newspaper and an ice cream cone. As soon as he checked into Princeton's Peacock Inn, he walked over to a newsstand, bought a newspaper and chuckled at the headlines about his mysterious whereabouts. Then he entered a local ice cream parlor and ordered a cone. The waitress making change for him declared, "This one goes in my memory book"

Winner of the Nobel Prize in 1921 for his contribution to theoretical physics, Einstein was given an office at the institute. He was asked what equipment he needed. "A desk or table, a chair, paper and pencils," he replied. "Oh, and a large wastebasket, so I can throw away all my mistakes."

He and Elsa, his wife, rented a house and settled into life in Princeton. He liked the fact that America, despite its inequalities of wealth and racial injustices, was more of a meritocracy than Europe. "What makes the new arrival devoted to this country is the democratic trait among the people," he would later marvel. "No one humbles himself before another person."

The lack of stifling traditions, he noted, encouraged more of the sort of creativity he'd relished as a student in Europe, where his constant questioning of established wisdom led to the special theory of relativity, as well as the best-known equation in all of physics: E=mc2. Einstein, however, was no Einstein when he was a child.

Growing up in Munich, Germany, the first of two children of Hermann and Pauline Einstein, he was slow in learning how to talk. "My parents were so worried," he recalled, "that they consulted a doctor."

Even when he began using words after age two, he developed a quirk that prompted his nursemaid to dub him the dopey one. "Every sentence he uttered, no matter how routine," recalled his younger sister, Maja, "he repeated to himself softly, moving his lips." His slow development was combined with a cheeky rebelliousness toward authority, which led one German schoolmaster to send him packing. Another declared that Einstein would never amount to much.

"When I ask myself how it happened that I discovered the relativity theory, it seemed to lie in the following circumstance," Einstein later explained. "The ordinary adult never bothers his head about the problems of space and time. These are things he has thought of as a child. But I developed so slowly that I began to wonder about space and time only when I was already grown up. I probed more deeply into the problem than an ordinary child would have."

Encouraged by his genial father, who ran a family business, and his music-loving mother, Einstein spent hours working on puzzles and building towers with toys. "Persistence and tenacity were part of his character," his sister remarked.

Once, when Einstein was sick in bed as a preschooler, his father brought him a compass. Einstein later remembered being so excited as he examined its mysterious powers that he trembled and grew cold. The magnetic needle behaved as if influenced by a hidden force field, rather than through a mechanical method of touch or contact. "Something deeply hidden had to be behind things," he said.

He marveled at magnetic fields, gravity, inertia and light beams. He retained the ability to hold two thoughts in his mind simultaneously, to be puzzled when they conflicted and to delight when he saw an underlying unity. "People like you and me never grow old," he wrote a friend years later. "We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born."

Contrary to widespread belief, Einstein excelled at math. By the age of 13, "he already had a predilection for solving complicated problems in applied arithmetic," his sister recalled. An uncle, Jakob Einstein, an engineer, introduced him to the joys of algebra, calling it a "merry science," and whenever Einstein triumphed, he "was overcome with happiness."

From his reading of popular science books, which showed him that "much in the Bible could not be true," Einstein developed a resistance to all forms of dogma. As he wrote in 1901, "A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth."

At age 15, Einstein left Germany for northern Italy, where his parents relocated their business, and at 16, he wrote his first essay on theoretical physics. By then, he was a head-turning teenager who possessed "masculine good looks of the type that played havoc at the turn of the century," according to a woman who knew him. He was sensuous and sassy, with many romantic relationships over the years.

Einstein's discovery of special relativity, after he graduated from the Zurich Polytechnic in 1900, involved an intuition based on intellectual as well as personal experience. He developed the theory starting in 1905, after taking a job at the Swiss patent office. But his theory was not fully accepted until 1919, when observations made during a solar eclipse confirmed his prediction of how much the gravity of the sun would bend light beams.

"Lights All Askew in the Heavens," The New York Times headlined. "Men of Science More or Less Agog Over Results of Eclipse Observations. Einstein Theory Triumphs."

At age 40, in 1919, Einstein was suddenly world famous. He was also married to Elsa, his second wife, and was the father of two sons from his first marriage. By spring 1921, his exploding global fame led to a grand two-month procession through parts of the United States, evoking mass frenzy. The world had never seen such a scientific celebrity superstar.

Dozens of reporters and cameramen rushed aboard his ship. "I can't do that," Einstein protested when told he should lead a press conference. "It's like undressing in public." But he could, and he did. After posing for pictures, he held a press briefing with all the wit and charm of a big-city mayor. When a reporter asked for a one-sentence description of the theory of relativity, Einstein replied, "All my life I have been trying to get it into one book. And he wants me to state it in one sentence!" But he gave a simple overview: "It's a theory of space and time as far as physics is concerned, which leads to a theory of gravitation."

A reporter asked Elsa if she understood relativity. "Oh, no," she replied. "It is not necessary to my happiness." Later that week, some 10,000 spectators gathered outside city hall to hear speeches. Einstein got a "tumultuous greeting." As he left, "he was lifted to the shoulders of his colleagues in the automobile," the New York Evening Post reported, "which passed through a roar of cheering voices."

On April 25, Einstein paid a visit to the White House to meet with President Warren G. Harding. Afterward he attended a reception at the National Academy of Sciences, where he listened to long, boring speeches. As the evening droned on, he turned to a Dutch diplomat and said, "I've just developed a new theory of eternity."

In Hartford, Connecticut, 15,000 spectators lined his parade route. In Cleveland, several thousand thronged the Union train depot, and a cadre of Jewish war veterans in uniform led a parade of 200 honking horns.

Einstein loved America, appreciating that its bursts of exuberance were the result of freedom and individualism. In March 1933, with Hitler in power in Germany, Einstein realized he could no longer live in Europe. By that fall, he'd settled in Princeton, and by 1940, he was a naturalized citizen, proud to call himself an American.

The Harmony of Nature and Math
His first Halloween living in this country, Einstein disarmed some astonished trick-or-treaters by serenading them at the door with his violin. At Christmas, when members of a local church came by to sing carols, he stepped outside, borrowed a violin and merrily accompanied them.
Einstein soon acquired an image, which grew into a near legend, of being a kindly professor, distracted at times but unfailingly sweet, who rarely combed his hair or wore socks. "I've reached an age when, if somebody tells me to wear socks, I don't have to," he told some local children.

He had also adapted to the role Elsa played, that of a wife who could be both doting and demanding. He gave in to her nagging that he smoked too much, and on Thanksgiving bet her that he would be able to abstain from his pipe until the New Year.

When she boasted of this to friends, Einstein grumbled, "I am no longer a slave to my pipe, but I am a slave to that woman." He kept his word, but "he got up at daylight on New Year's morning, and he hasn't had his pipe out of his mouth except to eat and sleep," Elsa reported.

The greatest source of friction for him came from Flexner's desire to protect him from publicity. Einstein once sent a letter with his return address as "Concentration Camp, Princeton." He proposed ending his relationship with the institute if the meddling continued. Finally Einstein won his battle. Every day he'd shuffle freely from his house on Mercer Street to his office.

He once helped a 15-year-old student, Henry Rosso, with a journalism class. Rosso's teacher had offered a top grade to anyone scoring an interview with the scientist, so Rosso showed up at the Einstein home, only to be rebuffed at the door. The milkman gave him a tip: Einstein walked a certain route each morning at 9:30. Rosso snuck out of school and accosted him.

But the student, flummoxed, didn't know what to ask. So Einstein suggested questions about math. "I discovered that nature was constructed in a wonderful way, and our task is to find out [its] mathematical structure," Einstein explained about his own education. "It is a kind of faith that helped me through my whole life."
The interview earned Henry Rosso an A.