In October, shortly after Louis de Broglie’s wondrous September, newspapers in Berlin began leaking Einstein’s plans to visit Russia. It was news that was bound to irritate the anti-communist middle class, and many of the intellectual elite, too. The universities were still drifting rightward. At the University of Berlin, the new rector had erected a war memorial to honor the students killed in combat. The Latin inscription read, Invictis victi victuri: to the undefeated and to the defeated who will emerge victorious. It was hardly the time for Einstein to boost his local popularity by going east.
Bolshevik Russia, in the autumn of 1923, was perhaps the only place in Europe where the mass of people suffered more than in Germany, although even Russia’s financial situation was more stable than Germany’s. Lenin had replaced confiscation with a “new economic policy” that returned Soviet living standards to Russia’s prewar levels; however, the country’s only strong institutions—the Communist Party and the Red Army—depended exclusively on force and fear. All previously known bases of political legitimacy—religion, family, democracy, and even money—had been replaced by fur-hatted commissars who studied the peasants for any sign of a stray opinion.
If the fur hats had any claim to authority, it came from Lenin’s prestige, but the sands of that boast were about to run out. During the
previous 12 months, Lenin had been felled by two strokes. Recently, on the 10th of October, he had astonished his bootlickers by climbing out of bed and insisting that he be taken to the Kremlin. The return proved his force of will, but his physical strength was only a memory; the next day he was back in bed, where he stayed. The strokes had deprived him even of the ability to shout “Revolution.” “Rev … rev … rev … vo … vo … vo … lu,” was the best he could do. Adding to the desperation of the moment was the absence of any clear successor. In the background, of course, Stalin was already moving his dependents into place, but that was behind the curtain. The Soviet Marxists boasted that their scientific history was as inevitable and preordained as a solar eclipse, but they had not yet found—and never would find—a way to manage their succession in a manner that suggested an inevitable historical process.
Why Einstein would pick that crisis hour to travel eastward to the Bolshevik state was impossible to say. He had been invited before but always refused. He tilted at different windmills from the ones Marxists favored. Immediately after the revolution, some enthusiastic socialists had gone to Moscow for a look, but Einstein was never that red and besides, those early days were far past. A tour in late 1923 by a celebrity of Einstein’s stature was a real coup for communism, or it would have been if the tour were real. The news of Einstein’s plans and visit, however, was a fabrication, an early illustration of German nationalism’s Big Lie tactic.
Several rightist Berlin papers carried reports of Einstein’s scheduled visit and, as happens with successful propaganda, the news spread to other outlets. Eventually, one bold liar even gave an account of Einstein’s arrival in Saint Petersburg and of his plans to stay there for three days of looking and admiring. Berliners were used to news of their hero-scientist traveling, but the papers that started these new reports of Russian travel were mostly nationalist, anti-Jew publications that normally shunned accounts of Einstein’s honors. They ran these travel tales to discredit a man they loathed. Meanwhile, the real Albert Einstein spent a quiet October in Berlin, doing nothing to deny the stories, not even after his own occasional outlet to the German public, the Berliner Tageblatt, reprinted the rumors. He had responded very
energetically and diligently to the first set of anti-relativity, anti-Semitic lies that followed the industrialization of his fame, but after four years of hearing his name beaten on the drums he had learned the impossibility of keeping a celebrity’s record straight. Fame had turned out to be as much slide show as spotlight, leaving people free to project whatever image they chose onto his form. Even before his celebrity, Einstein had a tendency to stand apart from the world and watch its follies with amusement; by 1923 he almost never spoke in his own defense.
Yet even autonomous Einstein could not live forever detached from all society. When October became November he traveled to Leiden to visit his friend Paul Ehrenfest. It was not a perfect escape. Whenever Einstein went outside, strangers approached to say Hello, to stand beside him while someone snapped a photograph, or even to interview him for some newspaper or magazine. Despite this hubbub, the change was good for the Berliner. Ehrenfest lived his homelife at the antipodes of Einstein’s style. It was filled with the kind of love that sets its own expectations. His wife, Tatiana, was a trained mathematician who worked alongside her husband as collaborator-in-chief. One of his sons, Vassik, had Down syndrome, or, as it was known in those days, mongolism. Vassik was being raised at home and brought constant worry to his parents, who wondered how he could survive without them. Einstein could never have stood to have a wife who was an equal, or children who rested so firmly at the center of need and attention, but he took pleasure in the Ehrenfest household. Host and guest sat across from one another, conversing energetically and enthusiastically about Compton’s discovery and the photon’s sudden status as fact. Of de Broglie’s ideas, naturally, they said nothing, for they remained in perfect ignorance of them.
Leiden had none of the Bohemian bustle that characterized Berlin during even its most wretched days. It was a quiet university town surrounded by canals, flatlands, and windmills. Einstein’s pleasure there foreshadowed the easy way, 10 years later, he would take to Princeton, New Jersey, another university town with quiet neighbors. Leiden was 1,000 years old, and mostly those years had gone unnoticed beyond the town’s borders. There had been a sudden spasm of involvement in history in the quarter-century before and after 1600, when rebels
opened the dykes and flooded Leiden’s countryside to drive out Spanish troops. Leiden then became a center, perhaps the center, of free thought with a free press. The Elsevir family settled there and published Galileo when his books were banned in Italy. English Puritans also published books there, before packing their presses and becoming the American “Pilgrims” of Plymouth, Massachusetts. Rembrandt was born in Leiden in 1606, enrolled in Leiden University at age 14, and began his life as a painter there, but in 1631 he moved on to Amsterdam, putting an end to Leiden’s half-century as a shooting star.
Three hundred years later, the Leiden that Einstein visited was still a center of free thought. The Ehrenfests had landed there because they were uncloseted atheists who could not find a job in most of Europe’s universities. It was hard enough being Jewish, but religious scoffers besides! Yet Leiden, and really all of the Netherlands, was proud of the Ehrenfest presence. Besides, most of physics was being done in backwaters that season. Yes, de Broglie was hard at work in cosmopolitan Paris turning his bloom of ideas into a doctoral thesis, but the rest of physics puttered along in less boisterous locales—St. Louis, Copenhagen, Göttingen.
Compton’s work had restored photons to the top of the agenda, but nobody knew how to seize the hour. Bohr still sought an argument that could explain away the Compton effect. Einstein was eager to move on, but a paper he produced that December showed he still did not yet know how to advance. Max Born summarized the general state of theorists when he wrote Einstein, “As always, I am thinking hopelessly about the quantum theory.” Yet Einstein remained as optimistic as ever, optimistic about both his own abilities and the likelihood of solution. “Optimistic” is indeed too tame a word for his confident faith that ultimately natural events have discoverable, natural explanations. Maybe he would find it, maybe somebody else would, but Einstein never questioned that nature had its reasons and that some fox would catch the reason’s scent.
Ehrenfest did not expect that he would ever be the fox. He even worried about his ability to follow the progress of his colleagues, though he shared Einstein’s assumption that quantum effects had their reasons. “He’s a skeptical fellow,” Einstein had said admiringly of
Ehrenfest, meaning that his companion liked to see plenty of evidence before embracing an explanation. He did not mean that Ehrenfest was moved by the deeper philosophical skepticism of a philosopher like David Hume, who doubted that we could derive truth from sensory experience. In 1923, there were not many westerners who believed in neither God nor scientific law.
The mystery about those two friends, sitting comfortably at the table in a Dutch kitchen, slicing a piece of cheese and chatting about Arthur Compton was the way they seemed so ordinary and yet something made them quite extraordinary. Artists, philosophers—crafters in every form of imagination—have always sat in cafes, inns, houses, and kitchens, to exchange words. A scene like Einstein conversing with Ehrenfest has been a staple of intellectual history since the time of the Babylonians. The scientific turn of mind that hopes to learn about nature has been part of every civilization, just as every civilization produces its poets and musicians. And yet something new must have been added, because in recent centuries, those following, say, 1600, this kind of conversational give-and-take had been rewarded to an extent previously unimaginable. That was the mystery of Einstein and Ehrenfest together. What was the extra ingredient in their discourse that led science to such success?
That same day, frustrated colonials in distant places like Dakar, Delhi, Peking, and Cairo spoke heatedly in kitchens and cafes and demanded to know how millions of intelligent, capable people stayed under the dominion of European power. The folly of the World War had shown that the Europeans were not gods, yet the victorious nations persisted in their blasphemous arrogance. It was difficult to rank traits and determine which ones gave these occupiers their power. Was it their Christianity, their derby hats, their science? Whatever it was, angry, ambitious youths wanted to find it, to make their way, and wipe that smirk off those arrogant white faces. It only rarely occurred to anyone in these disrupted societies that it was exactly their arrogant confidence that lay behind the newcomers’ power.
Many of the conquered peoples had scientific traditions that were older than the Europeans’. France and England had just carved up the Arab world, yet it was the Arabs who had once rekindled learning in
Europe. India’s millions were under the thumb of a few thousand British soldiers and civil servants, but India’s mathematical and engineering feats predated the Romans. The Chinese squirmed under a series of unequal treaties and lamented in vain that their traditions of scholarship were thousands of years older than their barbaric masters’. An eavesdropper in Leiden, hovering quietly over Einstein and Ehrenfest, might have eventually sniffed out the unspoken doctrine that distinguished them from the sages of Alexandria and Uxmal. Like the classical Greeks, they were masters of mathematical technique. Like the Chinese, they could cite close observations of fact. And like the Arabs they believed that something lay behind the facts. But while the Arabs believed the something behind nature was God’s inscrutable will, Einstein and Ehrenfest believed that nature was lawful and the law was ultimately knowable. The difference between the Einstein and Ehrenfest table-talk and that of the other scientific traditions was that those other traditions had been content to formulate laws of experience. Einstein’s tradition looked for something deeper, a law stamped on the universe that forces it to act as it does.
Where such a belief came from, how it was foreshadowed in the poetry of Dante and Chaucer—all that is another story, but by 1600 the writings of Francis Bacon and Galileo Galilei showed that the change in the minds of a few had taken hold. Looking back on that age, Einstein once mused about Galileo’s contemporary, Kepler: “How great must his faith in the existence of natural law have been to give him the strength to devote decades of hard patient work … entirely on his own, supported by no one and understood by few.” Originally this faith had been accompanied by traditional Christian beliefs, but over time faith in nature’s order had proven subversive of orthodox creeds; science had come to seem anti-religious. Boston’s Cardinal O’Connell would tell an audience that Einstein’s theories “cloaked the ghastly apparition of atheism … [and] befogged speculation, producing universal doubt about God and his Creation.” But modern science had emerged from Christianity, just as surely as Christianity had sprung from Judaism.
Ancient science had a different paternity. The first Greek philosopher was Thales of Miletus; he might just as well be remembered as
the first Greek scientist, for his ambition appears to have been discovering how nature really works. Even in those times, that sort of ambition always seemed to bring a little authority with it. The Nile priests knew what day of the year it was, and thus when it was time to plant in preparation for the river’s flood. So others depended on the priests. Dependence brought power. It did not, however, subvert religion.
Thales’s knowledge, too, brought power. Herodotus told the story of a battle in 585 B.C. between Greeks and two Asian tribes. Both sides had been stalemated for years; they often fought but never managed a decision. Once they even engaged in a night battle, very unusual in those days, but still the war persisted without promise of conclusion. Eventually, however, the Greeks entered a battle armed with a secret prophecy. Thales foretold that an eclipse of the sun would occur during the forthcoming engagement. The battle began. The sky went dark. The Greeks fought on. The Asian warriors were too startled by the sun’s disappearance to maintain their positions. At last the Greeks could press to a decision and settle the war in their favor.
It was a promising beginning for a people who would eventually conquer the eastern Mediterranean, but for all their learning the ancients had only what Einstein called “laws of experience.” Even Ptolemy’s astronomy, which was based on Euclid and remained consistently logical, did not dig down deeper for natural law; that is, it did not search for an order behind the surface behavior. The Alexandrian Greeks were a people who through genius and toil assembled bits and pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, but who never figured out that the snippets were parts of a whole. Without that extra idea, they had no reason to believe they could complete the picture.
Einstein’s conversations with Ehrenfest in the Leiden kitchen, however, were part of a common effort to explain quantum effects in terms of the rest of nature. Neither man would have considered for a moment that quanta did not obey some natural law, yet before modern science, opinion had been divided only between pious believers who saw God’s will determining outcomes according to some inscrutable plan and the cynical realists who agreed with La Rochefoucauld’s maxim that “Chance and caprice rule the world.” Neither side had any reason to expect that a general rule of natural behavior might
exist. Thus, when they saw some oddity in nature, they looked for fudges rather than for new generalizations. The planets usually travel around the earth from east to west, but every so often one of them moves west to east. Moderns, even those of us with no scientific training, immediately wonder why the change. What is going on in nature to make that reversal? To us it seems an inevitable question, but in other societies it was not so routine. The Roman and medieval astronomers looked for a mathematical workaround rather than a natural principle. By training and culture they sought an additional complexity in the mathematics of planetary motion, not a new simplification. Their breakthroughs tended to be mathematical rather than meaningful, as when the Alexandrian Eratosthenes suddenly conceived of a way to calculate the earth’s circumference. His insight was brilliant, marvelous and achieved through pure geometry. It added a fact to the world’s body of hard-won knowledge, but because it explained absolutely nothing about nature it was the kind of achievement that never interested Einstein. Before Copernicus, most scientific mile-stones consisted of that kind of nonexplanatory achievement.
The modern belief in the possibility of coherent, natural explanation had allowed science to transform the world and gave its disciples undreamt-of new powers. They held the authority of Thales and the Nile priests cubed, then squared again. The idea that nature was, as Galileo put it, “the observant executrix of God’s orders,” released a butterfly from a caterpillar’s cocoon. The old science had crawled; now it flew and gave believers a new project—understanding the world as God had made it. This idea that people could discover nature’s laws was the most profoundly revolutionary doctrine since the prophecies of Mohammed, and it changed the earth’s social face just as quickly. Lore and craft that had been stable for centuries, or even millennia, were suddenly transformed. Alchemy became chemistry. Astronomy divorced astrology and began learning new things. Geology blossomed from the rules of thumb that guided mining and quarrying. Biology and meteorology condensed from the void.
Einstein was the latest in the string of prophets who saw nature in the modern, Galilean way, and who had used his faith in nature’s lawfulness to expound a series of unexpected, profound revelations about
how the universe moved. Other believers were not as talented, but they still had an expectation of natural orderliness that gave their talk and their meetings a special quality, even when chatter or assembly came seemingly to naught. In the spring of 1924, for instance, the triennial Solvay Conference on physics took place without dropping any fruit. That was the meeting whose isolationism had prompted Einstein to tell Lorentz he was not coming and did not want to be invited to any future such conferences. Solvay 1924 showed plainly that physics had become stuck.
But even when stuck, modern science shows its strength. Classical astronomy was stuck for 1400 years between Ptolemy and Copernicus, but nobody at Solvay 1924 thought such prolonged idleness was possible again. When today’s scientists are lost, they cast about for ideas. They go over what they know. They try little changes; they test radical hunches. That’s what Einstein did when he was alone. It’s what Einstein and Ehrenfest did when they were together. And it is what went on at Solvay in 1924. Confident of nature’s lawful, discoverable behavior, they were like the Greeks armed with Thales’s prediction. They pressed on after others stopped struggling. The chatter that spring in Brussels seemed idle and limited, but much more damaging was its exclusion of nationally incorrect savants. Two-thirds of the Solvay 1924 attendees came from victorious countries, one-third from neutral lands, and zero-thirds from the defeated Central Powers. Nobody attended from institutions in Germany, Austria, Hungary, or Prague. Planck, Sommerfeld, Max Born, Wien, Heisenberg, and Pauli were barred from the door. Bohr could have attended but did not bother. So, when in the course of social events, Paul Langevin told of his student de Broglie’s ideas, there was nobody ready to seize the story. The hot quantum topic that season was Bohr’s BKS theory. And yet every reader knows that with modern science’s relentless push toward understanding, somebody like Einstein was bound eventually to take note of de Broglie’s ignored idea.