Einstein The Life and Times

As remembered by Einstein in later years, this backwardness had its compensations, since it indirectly helped guide him towards the field he was to make his own.

"I sometimes asked myself," he once said, "how did it come that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity.

Such treatment destroys the healthy feelings, the integrity, and self-confidence of the pupils. All that it produces is a servile helot."

And years later, replying to a young girl who had sent him a manuscript, he wrote. "Keep your manuscript to your sons and daughters, in order that they may derive consolation from it and —not give a damn for what their teachers tell them or think of them."

And in later life Einstein was to repeat more than once that the fact of his Jewishness was only brought home when he arrived in Berlin a few months before the start of the First World War.

Before he left his Catholic elementary school for the very different Luitpold Gymnasium he received what appears to have been the first genuine shock to his intellectual system.

It is true that it put as great a premium on a thick skin as any British public school but there is no reason to suppose that it was particularly ogreish.

Behind what might be regarded as no more than normal discipline it held, in reserve, the ultimate weapon of appeal to the unquestionable Prussian god of authority.

"I myself think so, and I believe that these outside influences had a considerable influence on my development," he replied with some caution.

"But a man has little insight into what goes on within him.

The admission, which is substantiated by Einstein's son, was made in old age after Dr. János Plesch, who had known Einstein at least since 1919 when he attended Pauline Einstein on her deathbed sent him for comment the material he was incorporating in his own autobiography.

"It has always struck me as singular," he wrote, "that the marvelous memory of Einstein for scientific matters does not extend to other fields.

His parents feared that he might be subnormal, and it has even been suggested that in his infancy he may have suffered from a form of dyslexia.

"Leonardo da Vinci, Hans Christian Andersen, Einstein, and Niels Bohr" it is claimed by the Dyslexic Society—with understandable special pleading—"are supermen who survived the handicap of dyslexia ."

This was Cäser Koch, Pauline Koch's brother, who lived in Stuttgart and whose visits to the Einstein family were long remembered.

"You have always been my best-loved uncle," Einstein wrote to him as a man of forty-five.

written by the man who introduced Einstein to science at the age of thirteen, virtually all of it comes from Einstein himself in middle or old age when he could remember not only

"with advantages" but with the hindsight of history to guide him.

9.) that shook the windows; together with decent moral purpose, it combined to make him a character rich in his own nonscientific right.

10.) German by nationality, Jewish by origin, dissenting in spirit.

11.) Einstein reacted ambivalently against these three birthday gifts.

12.) He threw his German nationality overboard at the age of fifteen but twenty years later, after becoming Swiss, settled in Berlin where he remained throughout the First World War; after Germany's defeat in 1918

13.) he took up German civic rights again, "one of the follies of my life," as he later wrote of it, only to renounce his country a second time when Hitler came to power.

14.) His position as a Jew was buttressed by his support of Zionism, yet he offended more than once by insistence that Jews were, more importantly, members of the human species.

15.) Moreover his Zionism conflicted at times with his pacifism, and to his old friend,Lord Samuel, he commented that he was, despite ant-Semitic attacks "pas très Juif."

16.) The freethinking ideals of his youth continued into old age; yet these included a belief in the ordered and orderly nature of the universe

17.) which was by no means in conflict with the idea of God—even though what Einstein meant by the word was peculiar to himself and a small number of others.

18.) In these and other ways, in his private and his professional life, Einstein became the great contradiction: the German who detested the Germans; the pacifist who encouraged men to arms and played a significant part in the birth

1.) Chapter 1 German Boy

2.) The life of Albert Einstein has a dramatic quality that does not rest exclusively on his theory of relativity.

19.) of nuclear weapons; the Zionist who wished to placate the Arabs; the physicist who with his "heuristic viewpoint" of 1905 suggested that light could be both wave and particle, and who was ultimately to agree that even matter presented the same enigma.

20.) Yet Einstein himself supplied part of the answer to his own riddle.

21.) In ordinary life, as well as in the splendid mysteries of physics, absolutes were to be distrusted; events were often relative to circumstance.

22.) He was born in Ulm, an old city on the Danube with narrow winding streets and the great cathedral on which workmen were then building the tallest spire in Europe.

23.) Lying in the foothills of the Swabian Alps, where the Blau and the Iller join the Danube, the city had in 1805 been the scene of the Austrians' defeat by Napoleon.

24.) Four years later it was ceded to Württemberg under the Treaty of Vienna.

25.) In 1842 the old fortifications were restored by German engineers, and with the creation of the new German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors in 1870,

26.) Prussian discipline began to reach down from the north German plains towards the free.and.easy Swabians of whom the Einstein's were commonplace examples.

27.) They came from Buchau, a small town between Lake Constance and Ulm, comfortable and complacent on the Federnsee, a minor

28.) marsh of prehistoric interest whose story is admirably told in the fine new Federnsee Museum and whose shores are today thronged with weekend tourists.

29.) Since 1577 the Jews had formed a distinguished and respectable community in the area.

30.) They prospered down the centuries; they hung on, despite the burning of the synagogue in 1938 and all that followed it, until 1968.

31.) Only then could the local papers report: "Death of the Last Jew in Buchau."

32.) His name was Siegbert Einstein, a relative, many times removed, of the most famous Jew in modern history.

33.) Industrious and mildly prosperous, the Einsteins had lived in Buchau at least since the 1750s according to the six family registers kept by the Jewish authorities.

34.) By the middle of the nineteenth century, they were numerous, and eleven of that name are shown on the roll of those who subscribed to the ne synagogue in 1839.

35.) Albert Einstein's great-grandfather had been born in the town in 1759, and the Jewish registers record his marriage to Rebekka Obernauer, the birth of their sonAbraham in 1808, and Abraham's marriage to Helene Moos.

36.) Their son Hermann, the father of Einstein, was born in Buchau on August 30, 1847.

37.) Nineteen years later Abraham and his family moved to zulm, thirty miles to the north, and in 1876 Herman married Pauline Koch, born in Cannstadt, only a few miles away, and eleven years his junior.

38.) Like the Einsteins, the Kochs had been part of the Württemberg Jewish community for more than a century, a family with roots rather more to the north—in Goppingen, Jebenhausen, and Cannstadt.

3.) For the extravagant timing of history linked him with three shattering developments of the twentieth century: the rise of modern Germany, the birth of nuclear weapons, and the growth of Zionism.

4.) Their impact on his simple genius combined to drive him into a contact with the affairs of the world for which he had little taste.

39.) Like her husband, Pauline spoke the soft Swabian dialect, hallmark of an ancient duchy that had once spread from Franconia to Switzerland, from Burgundy to Bavaria, and whose inhabitants lacked both the discipline of Prussia and the coarseness of Bavaria.

40.) Although Einstein was not of peasant stock, he came from people almost as close to the earth, and his reactions were often those of the men tied to the hard facts of life by the seasons.

41.) His second wife's scathing "My husband mystical!" may not be literally justified, but it illustrates the difference which has grown through the years between the unreservedly philosophical Einstein whom many of his admirers would like him to have been and the more practical man he very often was.

42.) Absent-minded scientist, of course; that was real and not sham.

43.) Einstein never played to the gallery, although more aware of its existence than is sometimes imagined; but, more than most men, he was absent-minded only about things that didn't matter: or when he knew there was someone to remember for him.

44.) The differences between his parents, a devoted, cheerful couple's home faced the results of the husband's happy-go-lucky character with resignation, were largely those of emphasis.

45.) The picture of the father that comes through, secondhand, from a grandson he never knew, is of a jovial, hopeful man.

46.) This fits the description which Einstein himself presented to his friend Philipp Frank, who wrote of Herman: "His mode of life and his Weltanschauung offered in no respect from those of the average citizen in that locality.

47.) When his work was done, he liked to go on outings with his family into the beautiful country round Munich, to the romantic lakes and and mountains, and he was fond of stopping at the pleasant , comfortable Bavarian taverns, with their good beer, radishes, and sausages."

48.) More than half a century later Albert Einstein remembered those Sunday excursions with enjoyment, the discussions between his father and his mother as to which way they should go, and the husband's careful selection of a route which would end up where his wife wanted.

49.) "Exceedingly friendly, mild, and wise," was how he spoke of his father as he approached the age of seventy.

50.) Easygoing and unruffleable, a large optimist man with a thick mustache who looks out from his portraits through a rimmed pince-nez with all the quiet certitude of the nineteenth century, Herman.Einstein would have thought it slightly presumptuous to have fathered a genius.

51.) Pauline Koch, with even features and a mass of dark hair piled high above a broad forehead, brought to the union more than the comparative affluence of a woman whose father was a Stuttgart grain merchant and court purveyor.

52.) She brought also a breathe of genuine culture, a love of music which was to be inextricably entwined with her son's work and, in the pursuit of her ambition for him, a touch of the ruthlessness with which he followed his star.

53.) She appears to have had a wider grasp than her husband of German literature, and while for him Schiller and Heine were an end in themselves, for her they were only a beginning.

54.) To Pauline Koch, it might well be thought, Einstein would attribute the imaginative genius which was to make him so much more than a mere scientist.

55.) He took a different view. "I have no particular talent, I am merely extremely inquisitive,," he replied in later life when asked from whom he had inherited his talents. "So I think we can dispense with this question of heritage."

56.) For a year the young Einstein's live in Buchau. Then in 1877 they moved back to Ulm where Hermann set up, in a building on the south side of Cathedral Square which later became the "Englander" wine tavern tavern, a small electrical and engineering workshop financed by his more prosperous in-laws.

57.) He and his wife lived a few hundred yards away in an apartment at No. 135, city division B, an undistinguished four-story building renumbered 20 Bahnhofstrasse in 1880 and destroyed in an Allied air raid 64 years later.

58.) Below it, one of the tributaries of the river Blau flowed in a cutting beside the street, past the overjutting windows of houses that had not changed much since the fifteenth century, turning before it reached the cathedral and entered the Danube.

5.) The result would have made him a unique historical figure even had he not radically altered man's ideas of the physical world.

6.) Yet Einstein was also something more, something very different from the Delphic, hair-haloed oracle of his later years.

59.) Here, in the town whose inhabitants proudly claimed that "Ulmense sunt mathematici " [the people of Ulm are mathematicians], Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879.

60.) Within a year of the birth, Herman's small business had collapsed, a victim of his own perpetual good nature and high hopes.

61.) He now moved to Munich and with his brother Jacob opened a small electrochemical works.

62.) Thus for Einstein Ulm was just a vestigial memory, a town from whose winding medieval streets the open country could be seen, a town where the Jews retained their own identity yet lived at ease with the rest of the community; a smallish place through whose squares the cows with their great clanging bells were driven, and into which there drifted, on summer evenings, the scent of the forests and the surrounding hills.

63.) The move to Munich brought the Einstein family from an almost rural environment into the capital of Bavaria, already more than a quarter of a million strong, still fresh from the architectural adornments added to it the mad King Ludwig I at a cost of 7,000,000 Thales.

64.) Overwhelmingly Catholic, its air was heavy with the sound of bells from numerous churches: the cathedral of the archbishopric of Munish-Freising, with its unfinished towers; the Jesuit St. Michael's; the Louis, with Cornelius' fresco of the Last Judgment and St. Mariahilf with its gorgeous glass and fine woodwork.

65.) The city was rich in art galleries, proud of its seven bridges across the Isar, and of the Königsbau built in the style of the Pitti Palace in Florence; a city still epitomizing the baroquerie of southern Germany before it bowed knee to the Prussians from the north.

66.) From its narrow alleyways and fine arcades there was carried on one of the great art trades of Europe; from its breweries there came, each year, no less than 49,000,000 gallons of which 37,000,000 were drunk in the city itself.

67.) In the University of Munich there had begun to work in 1880 a man whose influence on Einstein was to be continuous, critical, and, in the final assessment, enigmatic.

68.) This was Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, then aged twenty-two, the latest in a long line of "excellent, reliable, incorruptible, idealistic, and generous men, devoted to the service of Church and State."

69.) Born in Kiel while the port was still part of Danish Schleswig-Holstein, aged eight at the time of Prussia's conquest of the province, Max Planck was born into a professional German family which moved south to Munich the following year.

70.) Later he studied at the university before going north to Berlin.

71.) Then, dedicated to the task of discovering how nature worked.

72.) Planck returned to Munich where he served as a privatdozent for five years; as he walked duly to the university the young private tutor may have brushed shoulders with a boy whose life was to be intimately linked with his own.

73.) For two decades later Einstein was tp provide a revolutionary development to Planck's own quantum theory.

74.) Another decade on, and Planck was to attract Einstein from the Switzerland he loved to the Germany which he detested.

75.) Planck was to encourage him into becoming a German citizen for the second time and, more than once during the 1920s, to dissuade him from leaving the Fatherland.

76.) In these, and in other ways, the two men's lives were to be ironically linked in a way which reads like nature aping art.

77.) In these, and in other ways, the two men's lives were to be ironically linked in a way which reads like nature aping art.

78.) The first Einstein home in Munich was a small rented house.

7.) To the end he retained a touch of clowning humor as well as a resigned and understanding amusement at the follies of the human race.

8.) Behind the great man there lurked a perpetual glint in the eye, a fundamental irreverence for authority, and an unexpected sense of the ridiculous that could unlatch a deep belly laugh

79.) After five years the family business had prospered sufficiently for a move to be made to a larger home in the suburb of Sendling.

80.) This was surrounded by large trees and a rambling garden, usually unkempt, which separated it from the main road.

81.) Only a short distance away were buildings some converted into a small factory for manufacture of electrical equipment.

82.) Here Hermann attended to the business while brother Jakob, with more technical knowledge, ran the works.

83.) A year after the family's arrival in Munich, Albert's sister Maja was born.

84.) Only two years younger, she was to become constant companion and unfailing confidant.

85.):Himself unconcerned with death, he faced the loss of two wives with equanimity: but the death of his sister, at age seventy, dented the hard defensive shell he had built round round his personal feelings.

86.) In one way the Einstein's failed to fit any of the convenient slots of their history and environment.

87.) In a predominantly Catholic community—eighty-four percent in Munich—they were not merely Jews, but Jews who had fallen away.

88.) Many deep-grained Jewish characteristics remained, it is true.

89.) The tradition of the close-knit intermarrying community is well brought out in the family trees, and Einstein himself was to add to it, when after divorce, he married a double cousin.

90.) The deep respect for learning which the Jews share with the Celt ran in the very marrow of the family.

91.) And Einstein was to become but one more witness to the prominent part that Jews have played in the revolutionary developments of science-from Jacques Loeb n physiology to Levi-Citiiva and Minkowsky in mathematics...

92.) Paul Ehrenfest in quantum theory, Haber in chemistry, and Lise Meitner, Leo Szilard, and many others in nuclear physics.

93.) Thus he belonged to a group whose loyalties crossed frontiers and oceans, known by its members to be steadfastly self-succoring and and claimed by its enemies to operate an international conspiracy.

94.) Despite this, the essential Jewish root of the matter was lacking: the family did not attend the local synagogue.

Almost sixty years later Einstein gave his seal to the tale: "A true story."

But Frank, to whom he appears to have told it, comments that the teacher "did not add, as sometimes happens, that the Crucifixion was the work of the Jews.

A well-to-do grain merchant, Cäsar Koch appears to have had few intellectual pretensions.

But some confidence was sparked up between uncle and nephew and it was to Cäsar that Einstein was to send, as a boy of sixteen, an outline of the imaginative ideas later developed into the Special Theory of Relativity.

Einstein himself, answering questions in 1953 at the time of his seventy-fourth birthday, gave it perspective by is assessment of how it had—or might have—affected him.

Did the compass, and the book on Euclidean geometry which he read a few years later, really influence him, he was asked.

I don't believe that Einstein could forget anything that interested him scientifically, but matters relating to his childhood, his scientific beginnings, and his development are in a different category and he rarely talks about them—not because they don't interest him but simply because he doesn't remember them well enough."

Einstein agreed, commenting: "You're quite right about my bad memory for personal things. It's really quite astounding.

The choice of Catholic school was not as curious as it seems.

Elementary education in Bavaria was run on a denominational basis.

The one feature of his childhood about which there appears no doubt in is the lateness with which he learned to speak.

Even at the age of nine he was not yet fluent , while reminiscences of his youth stress heritages and the fact that he would reply to questions only after consideration and reflection.

According to some sources he was here confronted for the first time with hid Jewishness.

For as an object lesson a teacher one day produced a large nail with the words: "The nails with which Christ was nailed to the cross looked like this."

The "appears" is necessary.

For this was the famous incident of the pocket compass and while he confirmed that it actually happened he was also to put a gloss on its significance.

His boyhood was straightforward enough.

From the age of five until the age of ten he attended a Catholic school near his home, and at ten was transferred to the Luitpold Gymnasium, where the children f the middle classes had drummed into them the rudiments of Latin and Greek, of history and geography, as well as of simple mathematics.

The enthusiasm this evoked did not come quickly.

He was taught by rote rather than inspiration, and seven years passed before he was aroused by Mozart into an awareness of the mathematical structure of music.

Amateur, gifted or not, remained amateur.

Hermann Einstein with his compass and Pauline Einstein with her insistence on music lessons brought two influences to bear on their sn.

A third was provided by his uncle Jakob, the sound engineer without whom Hermann would have foundered even faster in the sea of good intentions.

Jakob Einstein is a relatively shadowy figure, and his memorial is a single anecdote, remembered over more than thirty years and recalled by Einstein to his early biographers, "Algebra is a merry science," Uncle Jakob would say.

recourse to something not so very different; to analogies with elevators, trains, and ships that suggest a memory of of the stone house at Sendling and uncle Jakob's "little animal whose name we don't know."

However, the Einstein family included and in-law more important than Father, Mother, or uncle Jakob.

"You have always been one of the few who have warmed my heart whenever I thought of you, and when I was young your visit was always a great occasion."

In January, 1885, Cäsar Koch returned to Germany from Russia, where part of his family was living.

Yet his delight in the instrument grew steadily and became a psychological safety valve: it was never quite matched by performance.

In later years the violin became the hallmark of the world's most famous scientist; but Einstein's supreme and obvious enjoyment in performance was the thing.

Uncle Jakob may or may not have played a significant part in making mathematics appear attractive, but his influence seems to have been long-lasting.

In many of Einstein's later attempts to present the theory of relativity to nonmathematicians, there is

95.) did not deny itself bacon nor ham, nor certain sea foods.

It did not demand that animals must be slaughtered according to ritual and did not forbid the eating of meat and dairy products together.

It taught him the virtues of skepticism.

It encouraged him to question and to doubt, always valuable qualities in a scientist and particularly so at this period in the history of physics.

Nor did the idea enter the minds of the students that because of this they must change their relations with their classmate Albert."

It seems likely, despite the highlight sometimes given to the incident, that none of the boys took much notice of the nail from the Crucifixion.

Something for psychoanalysts-if there really are such people."

Many of the reported details of Einstein's early years must therefore be believed in more as an act of faith than as the result of reliable evidence-a situation true to a lesser extent of his later life when there grew up round his activities a thick jungle of distortions, misconceptions, inventions, and simple lies.

"The teachers in the elementary school appeared to me like sergeants and in the Gymnasium the teachers were like lieutenants." He remembered.

More than forty years later, speaking to the seventy-second Convocation of the State University of New York, he noted that to him, "the worst thing seems to be for a school principally to work with methods of fear, force, and artificial authority.

But my intellectual development was retarded as a result of which began to wonder about space and time only when had already grown up.

Naturally, I could go deeper into the problem than a child with normal abilities."

The bare facts of his early years are well enough known, but an aura of mythology surrounds most of the detail.

Neither his sister nor either of his wives contributed significantly to the raw material of biography and with the exception of one chapter in a little-known book

A biography with frontispiece drawing drawing showing "Einstein at the first test of the atomic bomb" — a test of which he knew nothing at the time—is illustration rather tha exception.

Nothing in Einstein's early history suggests dormant genius . Quite the contrary.

With him he brought as present for Albert a model steam engine, handed over during a visit to Munich that year, and drawn from memory by his nephew thirty years later.

Soon afterwards Cäsar married and moved to Antwerp—where the young Albert was subsequently taken on a conducted tour of the Bourse.

One can postulate more or less plausible theories on this subject, but one never really finds the answer."

Soon afterwards another influence entered Einstein's life. From the age of six he began to learn the violin.

However, nothing so precocious appeared likely when Einstein in 1889 made his first appearance at the Luitpold Gymnasium.

Still slightly backward , introspective, keeping to himself the vague stirrings of interest which he felt for.the world about him, he had so far given no indication that he was in any way different from the common run of children.

Yet boys, and even sensitive boys, have survived as much; some have even survived Eton.

The Gymnasium was to have a critical effect on Einstein in separate ways.

Sent first to a Catholic elementary school apparently on the grounds that it was convenient, he was there a Jew among Christians; among Jews he was, like the members of his family, an outsider.

The pattern was to repeat itself through much of his life.

Not giving a damn about accepted beliefs was an attitude which certainly developed at the Gymnasium.

The teaching may or may not have justified the principle, but the outcome was singularly fortunate as far as Einstein was concerned.

He would always describe with relish how he had surprised him one day in full formal dress preparing to go to the synagogue.

The uncle had responded to the nephew's with the warning:"Ah, but you never know."

All this was to Hermann Einstein nut "an ancient superstition" and equally so were the other customs and traditions of the Jewish faith.

There was also in the family one particularly hard-bitten agnostic uncle, and Einstein used him as peg for the old Jewish joke.

The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time.

These are things which he thought of as a child.

As he himself written, "Every reminiscence is colored by today's being what it is, and therefore by a deceptive point of view."

This alone would suggest caution; but there is also Einstein's own admission that his evidence could be faulty.

Thus Einstein was nourished on a family tradition which had broken authority; which disagreed, sought independence, deliberately trodden out of line.

This also, as surely as the humanitarian tradition of Jewish self-help, was to pull him the way he went, so that at times he closely resembled J. B. S. Haldane who came to believe that authority and government itself must be bad—any government and any authority.

The first was that it's discipline created in him a deep suspicion of authority in general and of educational authority in particular.

This feeling lasted all his life, without qualification.

Far more plausible is the simpler situation suggested by Einstein's son Hans Albert who says that his father was withdrawn from the world even as a boy—a pupil for whom teachers held out only poor prospects.

This is in line with the family legend that when Hermann Einstein asked his son's headmaster what professional his son should adopt, the answer was simply: "It doesn't matter; he'll never make a success of anything.

The nearest Jewish school was some distance from the Einstein home and it's fees were high.

To a family with little religious feeling the dangers of Catholic orientation were overweight by the sound general instruction which the school gave.

When a young puppy sees a compass for the first time it may have no similar influence, nor on many a child.

What does, in fact, determine the particular reaction of an individual.

The story is simply that when the boy was five, Ill in bed, his father showed him a pocket compass.

What impressed the child that since the iron needle always pointed in the same direction whichever way the case was turned, it must be acted upon by something that existed in space—the space that had always been considered empty.

"We go hunting for a little animal whose name we don't know, so we call it x.

When we bag our game we pounce on it and give it its right name."

The incident, so redolent of famous of "famous childhoods," is reported persistently in the accounts of Einstein's youth that began to be printed after he achieved popular fame at the end of the First World War.

Whether it always had its later significance is another matter.

The next six years at the Gymnasium were to alter that, although hardly in the way his parents can have hoped.

Within the climate of the time, the Luitpold Gymnasium seems to have been no better and no worse than most establishments of its hind.

Here the advance of technology was bringing to light curious new phenomena which, however hard men might try, could not be fitted into the existing order of things.

Yet innate conservatism presented a formidable barrier to discussion, let alone acceptance, of new ideas.