Einstein: His Life and Universe

  The essence of Mach’s philosophy was this, in Einstein’s words: “Concepts have meaning only if we can point to objects to which they refer and to the rules by which they are assigned to these objects.”85 In other words, for a concept to make sense you need an operational definition of it, one that describes how you would observe the concept in operation. This would bear fruit for Einstein when, a few years later, he and Besso would talk about what observation would give meaning to the apparently simple concept that two events happened “simultaneously.”

  The most influential thing that Mach did for Einstein was to apply this approach to Newton’s concepts of “absolute time” and “absolute space.” It was impossible to define these concepts, Mach asserted, in terms of observations you could make. Therefore they were meaningless. Mach ridiculed Newton’s “conceptual monstrosity of absolute space”; he called it “purely a thought-thing which cannot be pointed to in experience.”86

  The final intellectual hero of the Olympia Academy was Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), the Jewish philosopher from Amsterdam. His influence was primarily religious: Einstein embraced his concept of an amorphous God reflected in the awe-inspiring beauty, rationality, and unity of nature’s laws. But like Spinoza, Einstein did not believe in a personal God who rewarded and punished and intervened in our daily lives.

  In addition, Einstein drew from Spinoza a faith in determinism: a sense that the laws of nature, once we could fathom them, decreed immutable causes and effects, and that God did not play dice by allowing any events to be random or undetermined. “All things are determined by the necessity of divine nature,” Spinoza declared, and even when quantum mechanics seemed to show that was wrong, Einstein steadfastly believed it was right.87

  Marrying Mileva

  Hermann Einstein was not destined to see his son become anything more successful than a third-class patent examiner. In October 1902, when Hermann’s health began to decline, Einstein traveled to Milan to be with him at the end. Their relationship had long been a mix of alienation and affection, and it concluded on that note as well. “When the end came,” Einstein’s assistant Helen Dukas later said, “Hermann asked all of them to leave the room, so he could die on his own.”

  Einstein felt, for the rest of his life, a sense of guilt about that moment, which encapsulated his inability to forge a true bond with his father. For the first time, he was thrown into a daze, “overwhelmed by a feeling of desolation.” He later called his father’s death the deepest shock he had ever experienced. The event did, however, solve one important issue. On his deathbed, Hermann Einstein gave his permission, finally, for his son to marry Mileva Mari.88

  Einstein’s Olympia Academy colleagues, Maurice Solovine and Conrad Habicht, convened in special session on January 6, 1903, to serve as witnesses at the tiny civil ceremony in the Bern registrar’s office where Albert Einstein married Mileva Mari. No family members—not Einstein’s mother or sister, nor Mari’s parents—came to Bern. The tight group of intellectual comrades celebrated together at a restaurant that evening, and then Einstein and Mari went back to his apartment together. Not surprisingly, he had forgotten his key and had to wake his landlady.89

  “Well, now I am a married man and I am living a very pleasant cozy life with my wife,” he reported to Michele Besso two weeks later. “She takes excellent care of everything, cooks well, and is always cheerful.” For her part, Mari* reported to her own best friend, “I am even closer to my sweetheart, if it is at all possible, than I was in our Zurich days.” Occasionally she would attend sessions of the Olympia Academy, but mainly as an observer. “Mileva, intelligent and reserved, listened intently but never intervened in our discussions,” Solovine recalled.

  Nevertheless, clouds began to form. “My new duties are taking their toll,” Mari said of her housekeeping chores and role as a mere onlooker when science was discussed. Einstein’s friends felt that she was becoming even more gloomy. At times she seemed laconic, and distrustful as well. And Einstein, at least so he claimed in retrospect, had already become wary. He had felt an “inner resistance” to marrying Mari, he later claimed, but had overcome it out of a “sense of duty.”

  Mari soon began to look for ways to restore the magic to their relationship. She hoped that they would escape the bourgeois drudgery that seemed inherent in the household of a Swiss civil servant and, instead, find some opportunity to recapture their old bohemian academic life. They decided—or at least so Mari hoped—that Einstein would find a teaching job somewhere far away, perhaps near their forsaken daughter. “We will try anywhere,” she wrote to her friend in Serbia. “Do you think, for example, that in Belgrade people of our kind could find something?” Mari said they would do anything academic, even teaching German in a high school. “You see, we still have that old enterprising spirit.”90

  As far as we know, Einstein never went to Serbia to seek a job or to see his baby. A few months into their marriage, in August 1903, the secret cloud hovering over their lives suddenly cast a new pall. Mari received word that Lieserl, then 19 months old, had come down with scarlet fever. She boarded a train for Novi Sad. When it stopped in Salzburg, she bought a postcard of a local castle and jotted a note, which she mailed from the stop in Budapest: “It is going quickly, but it is hard. I don’t feel at all well. What are you doing, little Jonzile, write me soon, will you? Your poor Dollie.”91

  Apparently, the child was given up for adoption. The only clue we have is a cryptic letter Einstein wrote Mari in September, after she had been in Novi Sad for a month: “I am very sorry about what happened with Lieserl. Scarlet fever often leaves some lasting trace behind. If only everything passes well. How is Lieserl registered? We must take great care, lest difficulties arise for the child in the future.”92

  Whatever the motivation Einstein may have had for asking the question, neither Lieserl’s registration documents nor any other paper trace of her existence is known to have survived. Various researchers, Serbian and American, including Robert Schulmann of the Einstein Papers Project and Michele Zackheim, who wrote a book about searching for Lieserl, have fruitlessly scoured churches, registries, synagogues, and cemeteries.

  All evidence about Einstein’s daughter was carefully erased. Almost every one of the letters between Einstein and Mari in the summer and fall of 1902, many of which presumably dealt with Lieserl, were destroyed. Those between Mari and her friend Helene Savi during that period were intentionally burned by Savi’s family. For the rest of their lives, even after they divorced, Einstein and his wife did all they could, with surprising success, to cover up not only the fate of their first child but her very existence.

  One of the few facts that have escaped this black hole of history is that Lieserl was still alive in September 1903. Einstein’s expression of worry, in his letter to Mari that month, about potential difficulties “for the child in the future,” makes this clear. The letter also indicates that she had been given up for adoption by then, because in it Einstein spoke of the desirability of having a “replacement” child.

  There are two plausible explanations about the fate of Lieserl. The first is that she survived her bout of scarlet fever and was raised by an adoptive family. On a couple of occasions later in his life, when women came forward claiming (falsely, it turned out) to be illegitimate children of his, Einstein did not dismiss the possibility out of hand, although given the number of affairs he had, this is no indication that he thought they might be Lieserl.

  One possibility, favored by Schulmann, is that Mari’s friend Helene Savi adopted Lieserl. She did in fact raise a daughter Zorka, who was blind from early childhood (perhaps a result of scarlet fever), was never married, and was shielded by her nephew from people who sought to interview her. Zorka died in the 1990s.

  The nephew who protected Zorka, Milan Popovi, rejects this possibility. In a book he wrote on the friendship and correspondence between Mari and his grandmother Helene Savi, In Albert’s Shadow, Popovi asserted, “A theory has been advanced that
my grandmother adopted Lieserl, but an examination of my family’s history renders this groundless.” He did not, however, produce any documentary evidence, such as his aunt’s birth certificate, to back up this contention. His mother burned most of Helene Savi’s letters, including any that had dealt with Lieserl. Popovi’s own theory, based partly on the family stories recalled by a Serbian writer named Mira Alekovi, is that Lieserl died of scarlet fever in September 1903, after Einstein’s letter of that month. Michele Zackheim, in her book describing her hunt for Lieserl, comes to a similar conclusion.93

  Whatever happened added to Mari’s gloom. Shortly after Einstein died, a writer named Peter Michelmore, who knew nothing of Lieserl, published a book that was based in part on conversations with Einstein’s son Hans Albert Einstein. Referring to the year right after their marriage, Michelmore noted, “Something had happened between the two, but Mileva would say only that it was ‘intensely personal.’ Whatever it was, she brooded about it, and Albert seemed to be in some ways responsible. Friends encouraged Mileva to talk about her problem and get it out in the open. She insisted that it was too personal and kept it a secret all her life—a vital detail in the story of Albert Einstein that still remains shrouded in mystery.”94

  The illness that Mari complained about in her postcard from Budapest was likely because she was pregnant again. When she found out that indeed she was, she worried that this would anger her husband. But Einstein expressed happiness on hearing the news that there would soon be a replacement for their daughter. “I’m not the least bit angry that poor Dollie is hatching a new chick,” he wrote. “In fact, I’m happy about it and had already given some thought to whether I shouldn’t see to it that you get a new Lieserl. After all, you shouldn’t be denied that which is the right of all women.”95

  Hans Albert Einstein was born on May 14, 1904. The new child lifted Mari’s spirits and restored some joy to her marriage, or so at least she told her friend Helene Savi: “Hop over to Bern so I can see you again and I can show you my dear little sweetheart, who is also named Albert. I cannot tell you how much joy he gives me when he laughs so cheerfully on waking up or when he kicks his legs while taking a bath.”

  Einstein was “behaving with fatherly dignity,” Mari noted, and he spent time making little toys for his baby son, such as a cable car he constructed from matchboxes and string. “That was one of the nicest toys I had at the time and it worked,” Hans Albert could still recall when he was an adult. “Out of little string and matchboxes and so on, he could make the most beautiful things.”96

  Milos Mari was so overjoyed with the birth of a grandson that he came to visit and offered a sizable dowry, reported in family lore (likely with some exaggeration) to be 100,000 Swiss francs. But Einstein declined it, saying he had not married his daughter for money, Milos Mari later recounted with tears in his eyes. In fact, Einstein was beginning to do well enough on his own. After more than a year at the patent office, he had been taken off probationary status.97

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE MIRACLE YEAR: Quanta and Molecules, 1905

  At the Patent Office, 1905

  Turn of the Century

  “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now,” the revered Lord Kelvin reportedly told the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1900. “All that remains is more and more precise measurement.”1 He was wrong.

  The foundations of classical physics had been laid by Isaac Newton (1642–1727) in the late seventeenth century. Building on the discoveries of Galileo and others, he developed laws that described a very comprehensible mechanical universe: a falling apple and an orbiting moon were governed by the same rules of gravity, mass, force, and motion. Causes produced effects, forces acted upon objects, and in theory everything could be explained, determined, and predicted. As the mathematician and astronomer Laplace exulted about Newton’s universe, “An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world; to him nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to his eyes.”2

  Einstein admired this strict causality, calling it “the profoundest characteristic of Newton’s teaching.”3 He wryly summarized the history of physics: “In the beginning (if there was such a thing) God created Newton’s laws of motion together with the necessary masses and forces.” What especially impressed Einstein were “the achievements of mechanics in areas that apparently had nothing to do with mechanics,” such as the kinetic theory he had been exploring, which explained the behavior of gases as being caused by the actions of billions of molecules bumping around.4

  In the mid-1800s, Newtonian mechanics was joined by another great advance. The English experimenter Michael Faraday (1791– 1867), the self-taught son of a blacksmith, discovered the properties of electrical and magnetic fields. He showed that an electric current produced magnetism, and then he showed that a changing magnetic field could produce an electric current. When a magnet is moved near a wire loop, or vice versa, an electric current is produced.5

  Faraday’s work on electromagnetic induction permitted inventive entrepreneurs like Einstein’s father and uncle to create new ways of combining spinning wire coils and moving magnets to build electricity generators. As a result, young Albert Einstein had a profound physical feel for Faraday’s fields and not just a theoretical understanding of them.

  The bushy-bearded Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) subsequently devised wonderful equations that specified, among other things, how changing electric fields create magnetic fields and how changing magnetic fields create electrical ones. A changing electric field could, in fact, produce a changing magnetic field that could, in turn, produce a changing electric field, and so on. The result of this coupling was an electromagnetic wave.

  Just as Newton had been born the year that Galileo died, so Einstein was born the year that Maxwell died, and he saw it as part of his mission to extend the work of the Scotsman. Here was a theorist who had shed prevailing biases, let mathematical melodies lead him into unknown territories, and found a harmony that was based on the beauty and simplicity of a field theory.

  All of his life, Einstein was fascinated by field theories, and he described the development of the concept in a textbook he wrote with a colleague:

  A new concept appeared in physics, the most important invention since Newton’s time: the field. It needed great scientific imagination to realize that it is not the charges nor the particles but the field in the space between the charges and the particles that is essential for the description of physical phenomena. The field concept proved successful when it led to the formulation of Maxwell’s equations describing the structure of the electromagnetic field.6

  At first, the electromagnetic field theory developed by Maxwell seemed compatible with the mechanics of Newton. For example, Maxwell believed that electromagnetic waves, which include visible light, could be explained by classical mechanics—if we assume that the universe is suffused with some unseen, gossamer “light-bearing ether” that serves as the physical substance that undulates and oscillates to propagate the electromagnetic waves, comparable to the role water plays for ocean waves and air plays for sound waves.

  By the end of the nineteenth century, however, fissures had begun to develop in the foundations of classical physics. One problem was that scientists, as hard as they tried, could not find any evidence of our motion through this supposed light-propagating ether. The study of radiation—how light and other electromagnetic waves emanate from physical bodies—exposed another problem: strange things were happening at the borderline where Newtonian theories, which described the mechanics of discrete particles, interacted with field theory, which described all electromagnetic phenomena.

  Up until then, Einstein had published five little-noted papers. They had earned him neith
er a doctorate nor a teaching job, even at a high school. Had he given up theoretical physics at that point, the scientific community would not have noticed, and he might have moved up the ladder to become the head of the Swiss Patent Office, a job in which he would likely have been very good indeed.

  There was no sign that he was about to unleash an annus mirabilis the like of which science had not seen since 1666, when Isaac Newton, holed up at his mother’s home in rural Woolsthorpe to escape the plague that was devastating Cambridge, developed calculus, an analysis of the light spectrum, and the laws of gravity.

  But physics was poised to be upended again, and Einstein was poised to be the one to do it. He had the brashness needed to scrub away the layers of conventional wisdom that were obscuring the cracks in the foundation of physics, and his visual imagination allowed him to make conceptual leaps that eluded more traditional thinkers.

  The breakthroughs that he wrought during a four-month frenzy from March to June 1905 were heralded in what would become one of the most famous personal letters in the history of science. Conrad Habicht, his fellow philosophical frolicker in the Olympia Academy, had just moved away from Bern, which, happily for historians, gave a reason for Einstein to write to him in late May.

  Dear Habicht,

  Such a solemn air of silence has descended between us that I almost feel as if I am committing a sacrilege when I break it now with some inconsequential babble . . .

  So, what are you up to, you frozen whale, you smoked, dried, canned piece of soul ...? Why have you still not sent me your dissertation? Don’t you know that I am one of the 1½ fellows who would read it with interest and pleasure, you wretched man? I promise you four papers in return. The first deals with radiation and the energy properties of light and is very revolutionary, as you will see if you send me your work first. The second paper is a determination of the true sizes of atoms ... The third proves that bodies on the order of magnitude 1/1000 mm, suspended in liquids, must already perform an observable random motion that is produced by thermal motion. Such movement of suspended bodies has actually been observed by physiologists who call it Brownian molecular motion. The fourth paper is only a rough draft at this point, and is an electrodynamics of moving bodies which employs a modification of the theory of space and time.7