The wheels and whirligigs on the worldwide fame machine continued to spin out Albert Einstein’s name. Articles, books, and photographs spilled from the presses and people studied them with care. His strong features and free-spirited hair were shown around the world. It was as though somebody had given him another one of those ad hoc chits, like the one Ebert had handed him at the Reich Chancellery, only this one said he had authority for absolutely anything. The name “Einstein” or the word “relativity” were frequently overheard while strolling past Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, or while tasting ale in a London pub, or huddling on a seat in a crowded New York bus. Einstein found the transformation of his name and face into a public commodity both astonishing and distracting, but the change revealed something unexpected about Einstein. He was good at being a star. He did not hire a publicist nor did he make endorsements, but neither did he flee the spotlight when it lit on him. He presented himself as genius surprised by acclaim, and the world loved him for it.

Many of fame’s fruits resembled things he had known before, only now their creation had become industrialized. Before growing famous, he had received occasional invitations to speak in places where he was known, like Zürich and Leiden. Now requests to speak flooded him from places where he knew nobody. Before, he had received mail from strangers who knew his physics and had an idea to promote. Now

many people who knew no physics sent him letters that sought approval for every kind of idea, or asked his advice about a universe of unscientific things. For whom should I vote? Is there a God? And not only did they write, they came to his front door. Elsa became her husband’s butler and doorkeeper, letting a few through and sending many away. People recognized him on the street and said Hello. Before, he posed from time to time for a photograph with a friend; now strangers wanted to stand beside him while he smiled generously and a third person snapped a picture.

It was absurd and yet it was not quite ridiculous. Behind the frenzy and the comedy was a deep interest in science and its secrets. Every educated person in the world knew that Newton and Euclid had been reason’s prophets. Suddenly the papers reported that they were over-thrown; naturally people wanted to know what the new prophet had to say. During his obscurity a German publisher had commissioned Einstein to write a short book on his theory of relativity. Now that book was translated into many languages and a host of other writers produced books about relativity—more than 100 new ones in Einstein’s first year of fame. Einstein had been embraced as the public’s champion on a quest to make sense of the world.

Germany’s scientific community was startled by the acclaim given its most ingenious member. Popular uproars over science were not to be trusted and were often about nonsense like some charlatan’s claim to having invented a perpetual motion machine. Relativity was not nonsense and Einstein was no charlatan, but his ideas were expressed in terribly difficult equations. His ideas were becoming garbled and trivialized in this riot of fame. The mania’s superficiality was amply illustrated by its narrow focus on relativity. Einstein’s other work, most notably his work on quantum radiation, was ignored.

There were dissenters from the Einstein mania: scientists who did not like relativity, dogmatists who did not like science, and foreigners who did not like Germans. Among Germans there was a sudden pride that their ruins had yielded a world-honored thinker, but an especially strong anti-relativity, anti-Einstein movement also appeared in Germany. Einstein’s Jewish blood, his anti-militarist history, his democratic principles, and his popularity in enemy nations made him a hated target of German nationalists.

An engineer of no reputation named Paul Weyland burst onto Germany’s stage by denouncing Einstein’s theory as “scientific dada.” Part of the fame machine turned Weyland’s way and he did what he could to hold the spotlight. He organized anti-relativity talks all over Germany. Weyland himself was to be the star orator at the Berlin meeting, for which he hired the Philharmonic Hall where Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler once conducted. Bitter anti-Semites occupied the hall’s opulent interior, boxes, and balconies. Already some extremists wore the swastika as badges and lapel pins. There were also scientists in the crowd who had come anonymously for a peek.

Max von Laue, one of Einstein’s earliest admirers, was there. Fifteen years earlier Laue had been so startled by Einstein’s brilliance in the first theory of relativity that he traveled to Switzerland to meet the unknown theorist. Laue expected to find an academic and was surprised to find a low-level civil servant, a clerk in a patent office, a man who spent his working hours reading descriptions of electric machines and how they were supposed to work. Einstein needed only a quarter of his wits for that job and was happy to entertain the young emissary from Berlin with the other three-quarters. The two men became immediate friends. They began a regular correspondence that would last even after Hitler kidnapped the German soul and Laue persisted as a rare, loud voice of Berlin science insisting that Einstein was a glory of German history.

The blatant anti-Semitic leaflets and signs at the entrance to the philharmonic startled Laue and he was shocked still again by Weyland’s fiery speech. The master of ceremonies, Laue reported, could “compete with the most unscrupulous demagogue,” although Weyland’s speech could at least keep its audience awake. The evening also included more academically accredited speakers who served their purpose by giving shorter, boring speeches whose very tiresomeness gave them authority’s aura.

Einstein had his own talents when it came to holding the spotlight. Partway through Herr Weyland’s evening of hate, there was a sudden whispering and excitement in the hall. “Einstein, Einstein,” the words moved through the auditorium and people turned to see where everybody else was looking. The great man had taken a seat in one of

the boxes and showed himself confident as a king-bull walrus. Even the people who had come to scorn the Jew were eager to see the famous scientist in the flesh. Einstein had instinctively grasped the star’s greatest weapon—the people’s desire to look and report “I saw somebody famous.” Weyland came in second at his own show that night.

Most of Berlin’s scientific community had no respect or instinct for publicity and artificial fame. They voiced dismay that one of their own had dignified the musical-hall scandal with his showy presence. Einstein then expressed a thousand pardons to his colleagues, protesting that he had innocently thought it best to beard the lion in its den. Yet Einstein did not retreat into the academic monastery where his colleagues preferred to see him. Like Martin Luther, who shocked many clerics by writing in common German, Einstein then alarmed his friends again by defending his science in a newspaper, the Berliner Tageblatt. Science is not a democratic pursuit that progresses through majority opinion, and practical scientists could see no justification for arguing theoretical points in the popular press. Even more distressing to them was Einstein’s razor-swipe at the throat of fellow scientists.

The most distinguished physicist in the anti-relativity movement was Philipp Lenard. His presence in the anti-Einstein party was even more tragic than Stark’s. Lenard should have been Einstein’s anchor in the experimentalist’s party because light quanta rested on Lenard’s experiments. The two men had once been friendly correspondents, but the war, and especially defeat, had scarred Lenard’s brain. In Einstein’s newspaper reply to his critics, he hacked at his opponent’s public reputation, saying that Lenard “has so far achieved nothing in theoretical physics, and his objections to the general theory of relativity are of such superficiality that until now I had thought it unnecessary to answer them in detail.”

German physicists, bearded faces and all, gasped in dismay. Even Max Born’s wife sent Einstein a letter regretting that he had been “goaded into that rather unfortunate reply in the newspaper,” and a bit later Max himself had the effrontery to write Einstein, “In these matters you are a little child. We all love you, and you must obey judicious people (not your wife).”

Einstein had done more than set the soiled linen out for common display; he had slapped many faces. Most physicists—most scientists, even most Nobel Prize winners—contribute little or nothing to theory. They gather facts and hit upon techniques, but they do not alter the axioms that govern their work. Physicists like Einstein, Bohr, and Planck were unusual figures for having changed nature’s ground rules. Many proud scientists could ask themselves: if Einstein says that about Lenard, what might he say about me?

Despite their fatherly advice, Einstein defied his colleagues by making no public retraction. He even arranged for an open debate with Lenard at the annual meeting of the Society of German Scientists and Physicians. Einstein was going for a kill. He was right, of course. Lenard’s understanding of relativity theory was superficial and trivial. How much more fruitful a discussion about light quanta would have been. Einstein could have used an experimental partner just then. Lenard was among the few physicists whom Einstein had admired in his early days and Einstein’s first wife had studied under Lenard in Heidelberg. At about the time Mileva was there, a visiting Japanese physicist reported that Lenard’s lab was “perhaps the most active in Germany.” In 1901 Einstein wrote to Mileva, “I have just read a wonderful paper by Lenard on the generation of cathode rays by ultraviolet light. Under this beautiful piece I am filled with such happiness and joy that I absolutely must share some of it with you.” The “generation of cathode rays by ultraviolet light” was the old name for the photoelectric effect. Einstein’s letter refers to Lenard’s original publication proposing that electrons—what Lenard called cathode rays—are knocked from atoms by the light that strikes them. Almost two decades later, Einstein still could have used Lenard’s experimental vigor and imagination. He desperately needed to find some decisive experiment that would prove that quanta, not waves, caused the photoelectric effect.

Instead, Einstein scheduled a debate with Lenard that took place on September 23, 1920, in Bad Nauheim, a resort near Frankfurt in southwestern Germany. Before the Great War, Bad Nauheim had boasted an international clientele; aristocrats came from every European land and a few Americans were added for seasoning. The baths

there were considered beneficial to people with weak hearts. A “heart condition” sounds alarming and dangerous, but vague heart conditions are as standard a diagnosis in Germany as a liver crisis is for the French, or a 24-hour bug is for Americans. Thus, despite its reputation as a spa for people with weak hearts, the visitors—who frequently stayed for weeks or even months—were not so much the old and infirm as they were the rich and leisurely.

It was not Einstein’s kind of setting, not even in September 1920 when rich, leisurely foreigners were no more likely to visit Germany than they were to vacation across the Styx. Einstein stayed in Frankfurt with his friends the Borns for the meeting. Max Born had left Berlin to teach at the university in Frankfurt, so Einstein was spared the luxuries of the Nauheim hotels and their dining rooms where rolls were served in nickel-silver baskets. Each morning Einstein and Born rode the train 20 miles from Frankfurt to Nauheim.

The sessions revealed that besides the anti-Einstein movement, a more generalized anti-Berlin movement had gained strength in physics. Germany had many great cities besides its capital, and the provinces, which had been independent realms not so long before, were in a mood to assert themselves again. Leading the anti-Berlin struggle was Wilhelm Wien, winner of the 1911 Nobel Prize for work leading up to the quantum’s discovery. Along with Max Planck, he was considered the grand old man of German physics. But Planck was disgusted with Wien and told a colleague that “Wien was motivated not by considerations of substance or the effect on science but by his anti-Semitic, right-wing attitude.”

On the morning of the Einstein-Lenard debate, the police assembled in front of the Kursaal, the spa’s main building, to make sure that only the meeting’s registered participants entered. The armed guards no doubt disappointed the idly curious and any would-be troublemakers, but it was surely a blessing for them. It is difficult without grinning to picture nonscientists sitting through the Einstein session. Imagine some ill-educated nationalist who has come to boo the Jew, or a progressive come to cheer the democrat, having to sit still while Hermann Weyl, somebody they had never heard of, described his attempt—a completely mathematical attempt, reported with nei-

ther pictures nor flashy equipment—to unify Einstein’s gravity with electricity. Presumably the tedium would have grown so intense that the interlopers would have lapsed into comas.

“The world is a curious madhouse,” Einstein wrote his old schoolmate Marcel Grossman just before setting off to Bad Nauheim, “at present every coachman and every waiter argues about whether or not the relativity theory is correct. A person’s conviction on this point depends on the political party he belongs to.” When the coachman and the waiter disputed, they did not discuss the four- and even five-dimensional equations that theorists discussed on the floor of the Kursaal at Bad Nauheim.

At noon the main event, Einstein versus Lenard, began, with Max Planck in the referee’s corner. Lenard spoke first. Einstein took notes, inevitably with a pencil borrowed at the last minute. Lenard had a lean and angular face with an old-fashioned, thin beard. Photos sometimes show a wild look in his eye, but that might have been a transitory phenomenon. One of the things that attracted the world-fame machine to Einstein was his well-proportioned face that made for pleasing, interesting photographs. Lenard, like most of us, was not so blessed.

Lenard spoke calmly, but he did not shy from including racial cracks in his presentation. His main semiscientific argument was that Einstein’s theory defied common sense. Einstein pooh-poohed the objection. Common sense changed with the times. Newton’s ideas, which Lenard defended as pure clarity, had once seemed difficult because they challenged Aristotle’s common-sense positions. And Aristotle, too, had once seemed arcane and remote. Saint Augustine recalled Aristotle as the most difficult person he had studied when he was a schoolboy of the Roman Empire. Yet it was not so easy to refute Lenard because the importance of common sense comes down to personal taste. Whose authority do your instincts favor? Einstein and Lenard, as scientists, were supposedly agreed that observation trumped both logic and common sense. However, Lenard insisted that observations did not yet support Einstein, dismissing with banalities and a few anti-Jewish remarks, the successful observations of the eclipse that had hurled Einstein onto the world stage.

In their light-quanta dispute, stalemate had pestered Einstein and

Lenard for years. Lenard had said it was common sense that light waves were at work in the photoelectric effect. Light waves worked on electrons like ocean waves on beach balls. A wave crashes against the shore and sends balls rolling inland. The harder the wave hits the ball, the harder the ball goes rolling. If the wave frequency increases, the balls will bang around more. Lenard had done extensive work studying light’s effect on electrons and demonstrated that this beach ball analogy did not work. The electrons do not gain energy when the light grows more intense, nor do they bang around more when the frequency increases. Instead, light gets things backward. Increasing the light frequency—not its intensity—increases the electron’s energy. Increasing the light intensity, not the frequency, increases the number of electrons knocked free.

Aha, said Einstein, the ocean wave analogy does not hold. Light is not a wave. Lenard and every other established physicist looked toward the stick’s other end and said there must be something very peculiar about electrons for them to be reacting as they do. Perhaps the long frustration over this ambiguity finally caught up with Einstein. At Bad Nauheim he suddenly lost his temper and snapped at Lenard. Despite the meeting’s police barricade, some demonstrators had found seats and chanted slogans as Einstein spoke. Einstein kept talking. Planck turned white as marble. Finally Planck made a feeble joke, “Since the relativity theory unfortunately has not yet made it possible to extend the absolute time interval available for the meeting, our session must be adjourned.” And the debate ended.

Einstein’s triumph was not at once clear. Only one month spanned the time between his attendance at Weyland’s show, his newspaper article attacking Lenard, and his appearance at Bad Nauheim. Einstein’s willingness to go public robbed the anti-relativity movement of its scientific pretensions before it was well away. Weyland soon fell back into obscurity, not to be heard from again until 30 years later when he volunteered as an informer against Einstein for America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation. Einstein had held his ground. His enemies could not repudiate his science, although they continued hating him as a Jew, a traitor, and a dreamer.