On Saturday evening, October 25, 1919, Albert Einstein walked alongside a small canal toward a palace called the Trippenhuis. He was in Amsterdam, which styles itself as the Venice of the North, but he found no Venetian palazzo. Instead of being light and graceful, the Trippenhuis is as heavy as a prison. If Einstein paused to study its weighty facade, he saw olive branches surrounding cannon and other weapons. The palace’s builders had grown rich supplying arms for the Thirty Years War. Once through the Trippenhuis doors Einstein found a more ordinary interior with large rooms and painted ceilings. The palace had been taken over by the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences. Einstein had come not to a ball, but to a science gathering.
The bright lights that greeted him shone on a room filled with physicists. The Netherlands, despite its small size, was home to many theoretical physicists and most had turned out for the opportunity to view the great Einstein on his triumphal night. He saw that Lorentz was there and Ehrenfest had come up from Leiden. Lorentz and Ehrenfest together made a Dutch Mutt and Jeff team. Lorentz was tall, lean, always photographed wearing a black bow tie. Ehrenfest was short, square-shaped, less formal in appearance. Besides meeting the star pair, Einstein was also greeted by less-remembered figures like 1913’s Nobel Prize winner, Helke Kamerlingh-Onnes, the discoverer
of superconductivity at very low temperatures. The scientists buzzed about the meeting room, talking of serious and temporary things. Einstein was not yet a figure of myth, and as he greeted smiling faces there were no representatives of the Dutch press on hand. They were not invited, probably because the evening was not entirely in line with scientific etiquette. Lorentz, the grand old man of Dutch physics, the man Einstein admired most in the world, was going to report some data (the data of the century, as it turned out) before it was announced by the team that had gathered it.
Ehrenfest was as proud as a happy brother. He admired Einstein so much he had once considered moving his family to Zürich, even with no job promise, just to be close to his hero. Einstein moved among these thinkers with an alert confidence. In autumn 1919 he looked better, less worn, than he had a year earlier, and when a man is the hero of the hour, meeting in a 250-year-old setting, he looks still better. The evening’s conversations went unrecorded, but presumably Einstein was greeted enthusiastically and given many anticipatory congratulations.
Ehrenfest was excited by a visit that Niels Bohr had paid recently to Leiden. He had been deeply impressed by Bohr’s lecture. Presumably, as Einstein and Ehrenfest chatted, friends and bold strangers came up to note that it was a grand night. Ehrenfest and his wife, Tatiana, were experts in the statistics of thermodynamics. Together they had written a book that made the field intelligible to their fellow physicists. Einstein much admired them and their brains. Paul was a complicated man who combined his many talents with hero worship and bouts of depression. He doubted his own abilities and would write mournful letters to the hero-in-chief. Late in the war, Einstein had scolded him, “Stupid you certainly are not, except insofar as you keep thinking about whether or not you are stupid. So away with the hypochondria! Rejoice with your family in the beautiful land of life.”
As for Ehrenfest’s enthusiasm for Bohr, Einstein did not yet share it. He had never met the Dane and did not quite catch what it was that made him so well admired. Bohr’s work sprang from none of physics’ usual techniques. Instead of deducing ideas from known laws, Bohr argued from blatant assertion and did not show the math that supported his conclusion. It was hard for mortals to know just where
Bohr found his insights, but he was rich in them. Ehrenfest spoke so insistently that Einstein reported back to Planck, “[Bohr’s] must be a first rate mind, extremely critical and farseeing, which never loses track of the grand design.”
Einstein had some Berlin gossip of his own. Planck’s life had become a terrible heartache. First his son lost in the war, then his daughter in childbirth, but now a second daughter, the twin sister of the first, was pregnant, so there might be some happiness soon.
Surely, as the evening persisted, the air filled with tobacco’s sweet taste and surely, too, there were still more preliminary congratulations for Einstein. The Dutch physicists had assembled to hear the result of the British expedition’s test of Einstein’s theory. Once, Einstein probably would have gone to London and joined the expedition’s leaders in announcing their results; however, the war had transformed the Netherlands into a neutral corner for exchanging information between enemy powers. When the war was at its height, news of Einstein’s general theory of relativity had skirted the western front and reached Britain via Holland. In London, ideas from Germany were viewed as greetings from Lucifer, but the astronomer Arthur Eddington was a Quaker and a pacifist, so he peeked. The theory piqued back. Eddington went to the trouble of mastering Einstein’s difficult ideas. When the war ended he organized an expedition to see if a coming solar eclipse matched Einstein’s theory. The team’s photographic analysis took much longer than anticipated. The silence persisted for weeks beyond expectations. At first Einstein waited patiently, showing no concern until, unable to sit still, he asked Lorentz if he had heard anything. Lorentz contacted England and eventually sent Einstein a wonderfully ambiguous telegram: “Eddington found star displacement at rim of sun, preliminary measurements between nine-tenths of a second and twice that value.” This confirmed, as Einstein had expected, that light bends when it passes through a gravitational field, just as it bends when it passes through a lens. But “nine-tenths of a second” was the bend that Newton’s old measure for gravity would have supported while “twice that” was the prediction made by Einstein’s measure. Now Lorentz had newer, more decisive information to announce.
The Dutch setting that night could have been Einstein’s to keep—
learned minds, a sophisticated city, a neutral country sure to be spared the many agonies that were obviously Germany’s immediate destiny, but with his usual No-Yes Einstein had turned down Ehrenfest’s and Leiden’s offer to settle there. No, he would not move to Leiden; yes, he would come to give regular lectures. He had tied his fate to German democracy’s, and so, instead of appearing that night as Holland’s latest star, he held his more accustomed role of honored outsider, a triple outsider.
Einstein’s friend Walther Rathenau told an acquaintance what it was like those days to be such an outsider. Foreigners, the acquaintance remembered, “are unanimous in their attitude of condolence that he should belong to [the German] nation which they regard with a mixture of loathing and contempt unique in history. Their behavior is the same as Christians adopt towards outstanding Jews whom they accept but pity because of their awful Jewish connections. As a Jew, he is perfectly familiar with such politely disdainful turns of phrase and the accompanying looks. What seems harsh to him is that, having had to put up with this all his life, he is called on to endure it a second time as a German.”
Einstein, however, loved the freedom that came from being such a universal outsider. Yet he was shrewd enough to know that the outsider’s success depends on the insider’s recognition of special merit. He was in because he was so often right. If he were ever wrong, he could not count on the old boys’ club to look out for him. So he had more than abstract theory riding on the data from the Eddington expedition. He had bet his fate on the proposition that nature is, in its roots, profoundly simple, that the why of it can be fully grasped in accordance with a few basic natural laws.
In future years Einstein would be famous for being difficult to understand, but his difficulty arose from his simplicity. Others would find it hard to throw away complicating ideas, just as would-be suitors find it hard to shed the extra weights that keep them from floating easily on a sea of love. Years before, when Einstein was an unknown patent officer, there were several insiders who almost hit on relativity. Lorentz had worked out the mathematics, but he kept in a complicating idea—ether, the mysterious substance said to fill the cosmos and
provide an absolute reference point for any event in the universe. France’s star mathematician, Henri Poincaré, also came close to relativity, but he was never able to whittle his system down, as Einstein did, to two basic axioms. Poincaré’s too-complicated theory left him like a bloodhound who is subtle enough to sniff the right ground, but not quite good enough to find the prize.
Under the chandeliers, amid the tobacco cloud, the physicists took their seats. Lorentz stood before them, handsome and alert in old age. Moments like these always begin with preliminaries and asides, but he came to the point. He read aloud Eddington’s measurements and explained their meaning. Starlight passing the sun had bent 1.8 seconds from its normal course. The number was exactly the one general relativity had predicted. Einstein had won; the age of Newton was over.
“It is a mercy of fate that I was allowed to live to see this,” Einstein wrote Planck as soon as he knew Eddington’s results.
The next day the Dutch newspapers were silent.
Einstein did not expect publicity or much public interest, although it was evident that there would be some stir when the news broke officially. Rewriting the law of gravity is no small thing, even for café chatter, but ultimately people want to know So what? In relativity’s case, Einstein had no answer. In September, he had sent a letter to Max Born’s wife discussing the limits of science, “the causal way of looking at things … always answers only the question ‘Why?’ but never the question ‘To what end?’ No utility principle and no natural selection will make us get over that.” Relativity had nothing to say about life’s purposes, so Einstein was unprepared for the way his world tipped over on November 7 and stayed tipped over. The London Times that morning published a report on the preceding afternoon’s joint meeting of the Royal Society and Royal Astronomical Society, where, beneath a portrait of Isaac Newton, Eddington reported and discussed his expedition’s results. The Times story attracted notice and throughout the day reporters were calling and visiting Einstein’s apartment. There had been other physicist celebrities like Roentgen and Curie, but even so there was something unprecedented about the depth and persistence of the Einstein fascination. In a morning he became a symbol of science, modernity, and genius under a shag of crazy hair.
Eight days later the Nobel committee announced its physics prize. Max Planck was awarded, a year late, the prize for 1918. The 1919 prize went to Einstein’s old disciple, Johannes Stark. Normally a physicist winning the Nobel gets to be, for a day at least, the world’s most esteemed scientist, but with all the world shouting and writing about Einstein, very few crumbs were left for the Nobelists. What crumbs there were went more for Planck. With Stark ignored even at the promised pinnacle, Einstein’s fame had produced a jealous, relentless enemy.