Once it was settled that Berlin would remain his home and that the Swiss would welcome his free lectures, Einstein grew eager to visit the city where he had gone to school. Accompanied by his cousin-mistress Elsa, he boarded the train at Berlin’s Anhalt Station, a giant train shed that had been built on “artistic” lines to evoke power and civilization. Its salmon-pink walls, Roman archways, and circular windows sought to evoke the grandeur that was Caesar’s, although perhaps it also expressed the unspoken insecurities behind Prussian ambition.
Once through the station’s double porticos, however, the quick-time sounds and oily smells of mechanized travel overwhelmed any nostalgia for the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius. The porters had plenty of luggage to tend. Einstein traveled with a violin, books, paper, and more clothes than gossip might have predicted. His suit material looked cheap, but, perhaps thanks to Elsa, he was a presentable dresser in those days. Photographs show him with various colleagues and always it is the colleague who is the cliché dowdy savant while Einstein looks better. In those days, too, he had a fine, broad-brimmed hat that suggested there might even be a dandy hidden somewhere in that rich soul. Beside him aboard the train, Elsa—short, past 40, older than Einstein—was a lively, good-humored woman who knew many things,
including how to leave her cousin alone when he slipped into one of his trances. In their compartment Einstein was free to think deeply and wildly. Many of his examples of relativity were set on trains: Imagine a train dashing along the tracks at the speed of light when a bolt of lightning strikes the locomotive….
Even fidgety souls can sink into themselves aboard a train, so you can appreciate how deep Einstein could dive. The critical point to remember, of course, is that Einstein on a train, transfixed by his own daydreaming, is Einstein doing his most important work. “The essential in the being of a man of my type,” Einstein said about himself, slipping so naturally into generalization that he replaced even “I” with an abstraction, “lies precisely in what he thinks and how he thinks, not in what he does or suffers.” Reporters and magicians might suspect the old man was trying to force a card on his audience. What he thought was often so much nobler than what he did, but there is no denying that Einstein succeeded in his science because he had a nearly perfect scientific imagination. The most fascinating question about him was always how that imagination worked. The frustration with Einstein is that while we can easily picture him seated on a train—hugging himself slightly for warmth with Elsa seated beside him enjoying a magazine—it is impossible to reverse the view and get inside that large head to see and feel what it was making.
Earlier that year, however, Einstein gave us a peek into what he hoped to achieve from his trances. At a gathering of the Physical Society held in honor of Planck’s sixtieth birthday Einstein was supposedly celebrating the way Planck thought, but he generalized from Planck to himself and to all creatures of imagination. He said, “Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world.” Whoa! Einstein knew he was overgeneralizing there; knew that many people ignore the world altogether and think exclusively about themselves, or they think not at all and simply act. He knew, too, that dreamers are so much more varied than doers. There are mathematical and scientific imaginations, literary imaginations and visual ones, moral and legal imaginations, criminal and philosophical ones. But while he knew all that, he did not care. He, Planck, Lorentz—the people he most esteemed—were all lost in
thought about a simplified, intelligible world. Traveling to Zürich, Einstein was rapt in the presence and search for that simpler, more intelligible picture.
When it came to practical tasks, however, men of his type were as absurd as tigers in tuxedos. They would have done better had they stayed in bed. Indeed, when Einstein did not have lawyers with pressing engagements, he enjoyed his bed’s full benefits. He was one of those lucky ones who could sleep until he awoke naturally. Without the daily pressure to be up and out somewhere, he had the creative person’s freedom of lying under the covers and playing with the ideas that greeted him when he awoke. The champion lie-abed of those years, of course, was Marcel Proust who passed most of the Great War propped on his pillows, working in a soundproofed room that kept the life of Paris from intruding on his thoughts.
The images Einstein liked to conjure were not scenes from the house where he grew up or the faces of friends, but elegant geometric shapes. In his head he saw an imaginary light that cast shadows while a disk moved across a crystal sphere’s invisible surface. Einstein could watch the shadow change its size and shape, and he could recognize what these changes implied about the rules of physics. Playing with images, Einstein had pictured his way to atoms, to relativity, and to light quanta. But even the freest thinker suffers from reality’s demands. As 1919 began, both archetypal dreamers, Proust and Einstein, each of whom had passed the Great War imagining a different world, found themselves snagged by the flypaper of circumstance. In Paris, Proust received the galleys to his work’s second volume and discovered that, besides thousands of typos, the whole thing had been printed in an unreadably tiny font. Meanwhile, Einstein was due in the Zürich courts, completing his divorce from Mileva.
A few hours out of Berlin, Zürich-bound trains passed through Göttingen, a university town with so illustrious a history in mathematics that even Napoleon spared it from the torch. Einstein had become familiar with Göttingen’s quiet glories because, when he was struggling to create his general theory, its mathematicians provided invaluable help. Yet even there Einstein’s abstractions were too much for some. Before the war Einstein had given a lecture at Göttingen
and, as he explained space-time, many grew restless and one professor had stormed out, muttering “This is absolute nonsense.”
That was the challenge the late risers posed for the up-and-at-’ems of the world. New ideas can be grasped only when other people follow along in the creator’s imaginative effort. People who really want to experience Einstein’s imagination must quit trying to crawl into Einstein’s skull and go into their own. Einstein had based his general theory of relativity on a novel geometry that was unknown even to most physicists, and the few people who did know the math still had to work to discover what Einstein saw. It took Lorentz several months to work through the math before he understood the achievement well enough to congratulate Einstein on a brilliant success. Meanwhile Ehrenfest confessed wretchedly to Lorentz that he was still baffled.
Beyond Göttingen the train route to Zürich went west-south-west, diving into territory devastated by actions that had been loosed without imagination. No battles had been fought here. No invaders had arrived, but many of the countryside’s young men had been replaced by a rich crop of widows. Those men who did survive were liable to be armed and angry. Germany was teetering over possible civil war. Its people had been exposed to lessons many bright souls had thought the masses of humanity could never learn. When, before the war, Thomas Mann began writing The Magic Mountain, he thought he had a funny idea, a twist on his Death in Venice story about a great and mature artist confronting love and death. Suppose, Mann asked himself, the protagonist was not a sensitive aesthete, but an ordinary fellow, a mediocrity, a not very gifted engineering student who had to come to terms with the basics of human existence. In 1913 this thought led Mann to private laughter, but well before the war’s end, the conflict had drained away all notion of how such a theme could be funny.
At the war’s start every person of action in Europe signed up for the great experience. More, for it was not just Europe that responded. Even in British Kenya and German East Africa the Masai herders were excited to learn that their two overlords were going to war. Only the people most fervently committed to dreaming found something else to do, but by 1918 action alone had been exposed as emptiness. The
generals were tired, the people exhausted, the colonized millions, including East Africa’s Masai, were disgusted. The generals had begun with plans aplenty but when none succeeded, they could only propose trying the same schemes again and again, hoping each time that events would end differently.
Now that the battles had been lost and won, the world was splitting in two. On one side were those who knew it was time to think again and shape a replacement world. Dreamers, Einstein had said at Planck’s sixtieth birthday celebration, try to “substitute” their “simplified and intelligible … cosmos … for the world of experience and thus overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientist do, each in his own fashion. Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way the peace and security which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.” Opposite these creators were the destroyers. They were the ones who preferred to nurse the hatreds bred by four violent years. Already, anonymous veterans, like Corporal Hitler, and glamorous heroes of combat, like Hermann Göring, were furious. They blamed the pacifists and the thinkers for all the sacrificing that had gone for naught. They would have loved to tear down any undefeated survivor of the past.
A few hours beyond Göttingen, the train tracks carried Einstein and Elsa to Switzerland. At the border they showed their passports and were out of Germany. The Swiss were fat, free, and undogged by history. “Brilliant landscape and satisfied citizens, who have nothing to fear. This is how it looks,” Einstein reported to his friend Max Born. Zürich was a tidy city along a lakeshore, with the Alps to the far, hazy east. It was as busy and orderly as Berlin was desperate and confused. Then Einstein added this comment for Born, “But God knows, I prefer people with anxieties, whose tomorrow is threatened by uncertainty. How will it all end? One cannot tear one’s thoughts away from Berlin; so changed and still changing.”
In mid-January, revolution, or really counterrevolution, broke out in Berlin. The revolutionaries, called Sparticists, never had a chance. They were crushed after a few days’ fighting. Meanwhile, during those dangerous days, Switzerland’s only intrigue came from foreigners, who were caught by the alert police. Germans and Russians were seized as
they made their way to Paris to murder the French prime minister, Clemenceau. Then Trotsky’s two brothers escaped from a French jail and were seized in Switzerland. Still more Russians and Germans were captured near Lake Geneva, on their way to murder the American president, Woodrow Wilson, at the Paris peace talks.
Some of Einstein’s closest friends were in Zürich, waiting for his return. Michele Besso had known Einstein since before his marriage, and, when nobody in the world wished to hire Einstein, Besso had found him a spot in the patent office. Besso was a member of Einstein’s “Olympians,” young men who got together to laugh and talk about science. Besso became famous as the only person whom Einstein acknowledged in his relativity paper. He loved and admired Einstein, yet he had been appalled by the way his friend treated Mileva, and he served as her intermediary and defender.
Einstein was the sort who is better served by bordellos than by marriage. He occasionally patronized brothels and, years later, grumbled, “Marriage is the unsuccessful attempt to make something lasting out of an incident.” His emotions were tied to his dreams, not to his experiences. He could find no lasting satisfaction in being loved, and he did not aim for it. Nor was he in any way concerned about social appearances, so there were no forces pushing him toward domestic stability. When he had first arrived in Berlin its physics community had been delighted at the prospect of working with so eminent a thinker, one who was still in his prime. To their dismay, the city’s chemists and physicists were promptly drawn into mediating a matrimonial separation. In Berlin Einstein had immediately resumed a very public affair with his cousin. He began to leave Mileva and the children alone for days at a time. Within months of their arrival in the German capital, Mileva returned to Zürich. Their two boys went with her.
When Einstein reached Zürich he passed January amid a strangle of lawyers who were needed to legalize the death of his marriage. Even then he had science to cheer him. He gave a month-long series of two-hour lectures. Innovative thinkers do not always make great teachers. Planck recalled how he had taken classes from Hermann Helmholtz, Germany’s greatest physicist before Einstein. To Planck’s dismay, Helmholtz was uninterested in his subject, unable to speak
much above a mumble, and unlikely even to get through a calculation at the blackboard without making serious errors. Einstein was different. He liked talking to nonspecialists about physics, and nonspecialists liked listening. He kept his points clear and Einstein kneaded humor in with his numbers and theory.
Einstein’s secret was that for him physics was not just a collection of facts, but something transformative that got behind a familiar experience and gave people a way to see the reality behind the show. Many important scientists disagreed with Einstein. They held that the facts of appearance are all there are to truth, and facts-only science did exist. The biological classification system credited to Linnaeus had provided facts without any deeper truth. With the Linnean system naturalists could organize their discoveries according to an efficient, easy-to-remember method based on anatomical similarities. The system served as an excellent device for organizing an ever-expanding body of information, but the categories and relations within them were meaningless and expressed nothing real. Under the Linnean system lobsters and grasshoppers shared a common blueprint while caterpillars and spiders did not. Why? The question was empty and should not be asked. That meaninglessness is why ordinary people find that scientific names inspire the very essence of tedium: Carcharhinus plumbeus, Galeocerdo cuvier, Carcharias taurus, Squalus acanthias, Lamna nasus. Such technical blather can make people want to scream, and not in the I’m-having-fun sort of scream that comes while watching a scary shark movie, but an I-can’t-take-it-any-more sort of scream. Einstein omitted all that pointless information from his lectures. Facts were nothing to him until they were meaningful.
As passionately as Monet believed in color, Einstein believed in the power of theories to tell us something about the reality behind the surface. He loved taking his audiences that extra step where technical systems become meaningful realities. Einstein preached that the universe is lawful; it works the same way everywhere so that any intelligent creature, no matter where or when in the universe, can find the same laws. For him, abstractions like matter and energy were not just words; they were as real as turnips. Acting on that conviction he had shown that ultimately even matter and energy are forms of one real thing. Did he leap from his bath when he saw the single equation that
linked matter and energy? That little equation said there is one thing sometimes seen as energy (E), sometimes mass (m). The one form—mass, say—is equivalent to the other if you factor in the speed of light squared (c2). Einstein loved this discovery because it dug so deeply. It united so much. It explained so many odd facts.
It is a fact, for example, that the sun shines forever, rising and setting more faithfully than the truest Penelope. It seems like a great fire in the sky except that it never burns out. It is more like a divine fire, like the burning bush that Moses saw. The sun is encased in flames and yet it never consumes itself. Einstein’s simple-looking E=mc2, however, got behind the sun’s appearance to see its real face. The sun burns eternally because it does not burn the way worldly things do. Somehow it is slowly transforming its enormous bulk (its m of the equation) into an even more enormous (mc2) ocean of energy. And what do you know? It turns out that the sun will not shine forever. Some day the m will be used up. Stars everywhere are slowly shrinking like melting glaciers, and everywhere they are melting according to the same law. For lay audiences, Einstein’s confidence and message was as electrifying as when Charles Darwin took his great stride and showed that the Linnaean classification was not merely an abstract, meaningless tool; it revealed the historical relations between life forms. Lobsters really are close to grasshoppers, and that closeness tells us something of how nature works. By combining surface fact with deeper meaning, scientists had created a powerful tool for exposing the law behind the random play of experience.
Between lectures Einstein finished up with the courts. By coincidence another famous expatriate in Zürich, James Joyce, had a court case at the same time. It would be amusing to pretend a scene where the modern novel’s creator and the creator of modern physics pass one another on the court steps without knowing anything of either the other’s genius, or pettiness. Perhaps it happened. For sure, on February 14, St. Valentine’s Day, 1919, Einstein was officially declared an adulterer and Mileva was granted the divorce that Albert demanded. She retained custody of the children. In the settlement, Einstein agreed that, if he ever won the Nobel Prize, he would give the money to Mileva. Einstein, as the guilty party, was forbidden to remarry for two years; however, Swiss law could not reach into Germany and Einstein
expected to defy it soon by marrying Elsa. Yet his passion for his cousin had already cooled and he was not moving on to marry at last his life’s great love. Perhaps if he had not been taken ill late in the war and seen how important it was to have somebody ready to minister to him, he would never have bothered with a divorce.
Einstein’s lectures continued after the divorce. He faithfully climbed up Zürich University’s hillside to tell anyone interested enough to listen about how the cosmos held together. Some students asked him to speak about quantum theory, but he told them No. “However hard I tried,” he explained, “I never fully understood it.” The answer must have struck some as ridiculous, like Galileo refusing to lecture on motion because he did not understand the very revolution he had wrought. Yet Einstein was serious. Neither he nor anybody else had yet cried “Eureka” after taking the imaginative stride that would transform the quantum hυ from a surface fact into a meaningful statement about reality’s hidden face. How does an atom seem spontaneously to emit a chunk of wave? Why does the light quantum go in one direction rather than another? Nobody yet knew. Einstein, whether he was in Berlin or Zürich, was never far from his quest to find out what quanta really were; then he would indeed have a great lecture to give. His women were not happy; his children were distant, but the emotional pivot of his life turned on finding how quanta fit into nature. The puzzle occupied his thoughts when he sat at his desk and again when he lingered in bed. He was sure that, in time, quanta’s meaning would become apparent. He, or somebody, would get there. For now, however, Einstein limited himself to lecturing on the realities that he understood.
Meanwhile, in chilly Copenhagen, Niels Bohr was struggling with the same puzzle. He had shown that hυ could be used to describe atomic structure, although how the structure worked also remained mysterious. In Munich, one of physics’ best teachers, Arnold Sommerfeld, was studying the same problem. Sommerfeld boasted that he had been the first to teach a class in relativity and first again to teach about Bohr’s atom. He had improved on Bohr’s quantum work by linking it to Einstein’s relativity theory, and he, too, hoped eventually to understand quantum physics.