Einstein

by Isaacson, Walter

  A few days after Einstein arrived in Bern, Mileva Mari, staying at her parents’ home in Novi Sad, gave birth to their baby, a girl whom they called Lieserl. Because the childbirth was so difficult, Mari was unable to write to him. Her father sent Einstein the news.

  “Is she healthy, and does she cry properly?” Einstein wrote Mari. “What are her eyes like? Which one of us does she more resemble? Who is giving her milk? Is she hungry? She must be completely bald. I love her so much and don’t even know her yet!” Yet his love for their new baby seemed to exist mainly in the abstract, for it was not quite enough to induce him to make the train trip to Novi Sad.62

  Einstein did not tell his mother, sister, or any of his friends about the birth of Lieserl. In fact, there is no indication that he ever told them about her. Never once did he publicly speak of her or acknowledge that she even existed. No mention of her survives in any correspondence, except for a few letters between Einstein and Mari, and these were suppressed and hidden until 1986, when scholars and the editors of his papers were completely surprised to learn of Lieserl’s existence.*

  But in his letter to Mari right after Lieserl’s birth, the baby brought out Einstein’s wry side. “She’s certainly able to cry already, but won’t know how to laugh until much later,” he said. “Therein lies a profound truth.”

  Fatherhood also focused him on the need to make some money while he waited to get the patent-office job. So the next day an ad appeared in the newspaper: “Private lessons in Mathematics and Physics . . . given most thoroughly by Albert Einstein, holder of the federal Polytechnic teacher’s diploma ... Trial lessons free.”

  Lieserl’s birth even caused Einstein to display a domestic, nesting instinct not previously apparent. He found a large room in Bern and drew for Mari a sketch of it, complete with diagrams showing the bed, six chairs, three cabinets, himself (“Johnnie”), and a couch marked “look at that!”63 However, Mari was not going to be moving into it with him. They were not married, and an aspiring Swiss civil servant could not be seen cohabitating in such a way. Instead, after a few months, Mari moved back to Zurich to wait for him to get a job and, as promised, marry her. She did not bring Lieserl with her.

  Einstein and his daughter apparently never laid eyes on each other. She would merit, as we shall see, just one brief mention in their surviving correspondence less than two years later, in September 1903, and then not be referred to again. In the meantime, she was left back in Novi Sad with her mother’s relatives or friends so that Einstein could maintain both his unencumbered lifestyle and the bourgeois respectability he needed to become a Swiss official.

  There is a cryptic hint that the person who took custody of Lieserl may have been Mari’s close friend, Helene Kaufler Savi, whom she had met in 1899 when they lived in the same rooming house in Zurich. Savi was from a Viennese Jewish family and had married an engineer from Serbia in 1900. During her pregnancy, Mari had written her a letter pouring out all of her woes, but she tore it up before mailing it. She was glad she had done so, she explained to Einstein two months before Lieserl’s birth, because “I don’t think we should say anything about Lieserl yet.” Mari added that Einstein should write Savi a few words now and then. “We must now treat her very nicely. She’ll have to help us in something important, after all.”64

  The Patent Office

  As he was waiting to be offered the job at the patent office, Einstein ran into an acquaintance who was working there. The job was boring, the person complained, and he noted that the position Einstein was waiting to get was “the lowest rank,” so at least he didn’t have to worry that anyone else would apply for it. Einstein was unfazed. “Certain people find everything boring,” Einstein told Mari. As for the disdain about being on the lowest rung, Einstein told her that they should feel just the opposite: “We couldn’t care less about being on top!”65

  The job finally came through on June 16, 1902, when a session of the Swiss Council officially elected him “provisionally as a Technical Expert Class 3 of the Federal Office for Intellectual Property with an annual salary of 3,500 francs,” which was actually more than what a junior professor would make.66

  His office in Bern’s new Postal and Telegraph Building was near the world-famous clock tower over the old city gate (see p. 107). As he turned left out of his apartment on his way to work, Einstein walked past it every day. The clock was originally built shortly after the city was founded in 1191, and an astronomical contraption featuring the positions of the planets was added in 1530. Every hour, the clock would put on its show: out would come a dancing jester ringing bells, then a parade of bears, a crowing rooster, and an armored knight, followed by Father Time with his scepter and hourglass.

  The clock was the official timekeeper for the nearby train station, the one from which all of the other clocks that lined the platform were synchronized. The moving trains arriving from other cities, where the local time was not always standardized, would reset their own clocks by looking up at the Bern clock tower as they sped into town.67

  So it was that Albert Einstein would end up spending the most creative seven years of his life—even after he had written the papers that reoriented physics—arriving at work at 8 a.m., six days a week, and examining patent applications. “I am frightfully busy,” he wrote a friend a few months later. “Every day I spend eight hours at the office and at least one hour of private lessons, and then, in addition, I do some scientific work.” Yet it would be wrong to think that poring over applications for patents was drudgery. “I enjoy my work at the office very much, because it is uncommonly diversified.”68

  He soon learned that he could work on the patent applications so quickly that it left time for him to sneak in his own scientific thinking during the day. “I was able to do a full day’s work in only two or three hours,” he recalled. “The remaining part of the day, I would work out my own ideas.” His boss, Friedrich Haller, was a man of good-natured, growling skepticism and genial humor who graciously ignored the sheets of paper that cluttered Einstein’s desk and vanished into his drawer when people came to see him. “Whenever anybody would come by, I would cram my notes into my desk drawer and pretend to work on my office work.”69

  Indeed, we should not feel sorry for Einstein that he found himself exiled from the cloisters of academe. He came to believe that it was a benefit to his science, rather than a burden, to work instead in “that worldly cloister where I hatched my most beautiful ideas.”70

  Every day, he would do thought experiments based on theoretical premises, sniffing out the underlying realities. Focusing on real-life questions, he later said,“stimulated me to see the physical ramifications of theoretical concepts.”71 Among the ideas that he had to consider for patents were dozens of new methods for synchronizing clocks and coordinating time through signals sent at the speed of light.72

  In addition, his boss Haller had a credo that was as useful for a creative and rebellious theorist as it was for a patent examiner: “You have to remain critically vigilant.” Question every premise, challenge conventional wisdom, and never accept the truth of something merely because everyone else views it as obvious. Resist being credulous. “When you pick up an application,” Haller instructed, “think that everything the inventor says is wrong.”73

  Einstein had grown up in a family that created patents and tried to apply them in business, and he found the process to be fulfilling. It reinforced one of his ingenious talents: the ability to conduct thought experiments in which he could visualize how a theory would play out in practice. It also helped him peel off the irrelevant facts that surrounded a problem.74

  Had he been consigned instead to the job of an assistant to a professor, he might have felt compelled to churn out safe publications and be overly cautious in challenging accepted notions. As he later noted, originality and creativity were not prime assets for climbing academic ladders, especially in the German-speaking world, and he would have felt pressure to conform to the prejudices or prevailing wisd
om of his patrons. “An academic career in which a person is forced to produce scientific writings in great amounts creates a danger of intellectual superficiality,” he said.75

  As a result, the happenstance that landed him on a stool at the Swiss Patent Office, rather than as an acolyte in academia, likely reinforced some of the traits destined to make him successful: a merry skepticism about what appeared on the pages in front of him and an independence of judgment that allowed him to challenge basic assumptions. There were no pressures or incentives among the patent examiners to behave otherwise.

  The Olympia Academy

  Maurice Solovine, a Romanian studying philosophy at the University of Bern, bought a newspaper while on a stroll one day during Easter vacation of 1902 and noticed Einstein’s advertisement offering tutorials in physics (“trial lessons free”). A dapper dilettante with close-cropped hair and a raffish goatee, Solovine was four years older than Einstein, but he had yet to decide whether he wanted to be a philosopher, a physicist, or something else. So he went to the address, rang the bell, and a moment later a loud voice thundered “In here!” Einstein made an immediate impression. “I was struck by the extraordinary brilliance of his large eyes,” Solovine recalled.76

  Their first discussion lasted almost two hours, after which Einstein followed Solovine into the street, where they talked for a half-hour more. They agreed to meet the next day. At the third session, Einstein announced that conversing freely was more fun than tutoring for pay. “You don’t have to be tutored in physics,” he said. “Just come see me when you want and I will be glad to talk with you.” They decided to read the great thinkers together and then discuss their ideas.

  Their sessions were joined by Conrad Habicht, a banker’s son and former student of mathematics at the Zurich Polytechnic. Poking a little fun at pompous scholarly societies, they dubbed themselves the Olympia Academy. Einstein, even though he was the youngest, was designated the president, and Solovine prepared a certificate with a drawing of an Einstein bust in profile beneath a string of sausages. “A man perfectly and clearly erudite, imbued with exquisite, subtle and elegant knowledge, steeped in the revolutionary science of the cosmos,” the dedication declared.77

  Generally their dinners were frugal repasts of sausage, Gruyère cheese, fruit, and tea. But for Einstein’s birthday, Solovine and Habicht decided to surprise him by putting three plates of caviar on the table. Einstein was engrossed in analyzing Galileo’s principle of inertia, and as he talked he took mouthful after mouthful of his caviar without seeming to notice. Habicht and Solovine exchanged furtive glances. “Do you realize what you’ve been eating?” Solovine finally asked.

  “For goodness’ sake,” Einstein exclaimed. “So that was the famous caviar!” He paused for a moment, then added, “Well, if you offer gourmet food to peasants like me, you know they won’t appreciate it.”

  After their discussions, which could last all night, Einstein would sometimes play the violin and, in the summertime, they occasionally climbed a mountain on the outskirts of Bern to watch the sunrise. “The sight of the twinkling stars made a strong impression on us and led to discussions of astronomy,” Solovine recalled. “We would marvel at the sun as it came slowly toward the horizon and finally appeared in all of its splendor to bathe the Alps in a mystic rose.” Then they would wait for the mountain café to open so they could drink dark coffee before hiking down to start work.

  Solovine once skipped a session scheduled for his apartment because he was enticed instead to a concert by a Czech quartet. As a peace offering he left behind, as his note written in Latin proclaimed, “hard boiled eggs and a salutation.” Einstein and Habicht, knowing how much Solovine hated tobacco, took revenge by smoking pipes and cigars in Solovine’s room and piling his furniture and dishes on the bed. “Thick smoke and a salutation,” they wrote in Latin. Solovine says he was “almost overwhelmed” by the fumes when he returned.“I thought I would suffocate. I opened the window wide and began to remove from the bed the mound of things that reached almost to the ceiling.”78

  Solovine and Habicht would become Einstein’s lifelong friends, and he would later reminisce with them about “our cheerful ‘Academy,’ which was less childish than those respectable ones which I later got to know at close quarters.” In response to a joint postcard sent from Paris by his two colleagues on his seventy-fourth birthday, he paid tribute to it: “Your members created you to make fun of your long-established sister Academies. How well their mockery hit the mark I have learned to appreciate fully through long years of careful observation.”79

  The Academy’s reading list included some classics with themes that Einstein could appreciate, such as Sophocles’ searing play about the defiance of authority, Antigone, and Cervantes’ epic about stubbornly tilting at windmills, Don Quixote. But mostly the three academicians read books that explored the intersection of science and philosophy: David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, Ernst Mach’s Analysis of the Sensations and Mechanics and Its Development, Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics, and Henri Poincaré’s Science and Hypothesis.80 It was from reading these authors that the young patent examiner began to develop his own philosophy of science.

  The most influential of these, Einstein later said, was the Scottish empiricist David Hume (1711–1776). In the tradition of Locke and Berkeley, Hume was skeptical about any knowledge other than what could be directly perceived by the senses. Even the apparent laws of causality were suspect to him, mere habits of the mind; a ball hitting another may behave the way that Newton’s laws predict time after time after time, yet that was not, strictly speaking, a reason to believe that it would happen that way the next time. “Hume saw clearly that certain concepts, for example that of causality, cannot be deduced from our perceptions of experience by logical methods,” Einstein noted.

  A version of this philosophy, sometimes called positivism, denied the validity of any concepts that went beyond descriptions of phenomena that we directly experience. It appealed to Einstein, at least initially. “The theory of relativity suggests itself in positivism,” he said. “This line of thought had a great influence on my efforts, most specifically Mach and even more so Hume, whose Treatise of Human Nature I studied avidly and with admiration shortly before discovering the theory of relativity.”81

  Hume applied his skeptical rigor to the concept of time. It made no sense, he said, to speak of time as having an absolute existence that was independent of observable objects whose movements permitted us to define time.“From the succession of ideas and impressions we form the idea of time,” Hume wrote. “It is not possible for time alone ever to make its appearance.” This idea that there is no such thing as absolute time would later echo in Einstein’s theory of relativity. Hume’s specific thoughts about time, however, had less influence on Einstein than his more general insight that it is dangerous to talk about concepts that are not definable by perceptions and observations.82

  Einstein’s views on Hume were tempered by his appreciation for Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), the German metaphysician he had been introduced to, back when he was a schoolboy, by Max Talmud. “Kant took the stage with an idea that signified a step towards the solution of Hume’s dilemma,” Einstein said. Some truths fit into a category of “definitely assured knowledge” that was “grounded in reason itself.”

  In other words, Kant distinguished between two types of truths: (1) analytic propositions, which derive from logic and “reason itself ” rather than from observing the world; for example, all bachelors are unmarried, two plus two equals four, and the angles of a triangle always add up to 180 degrees; and (2) synthetic propositions, which are based on experience and observations; for example, Munich is bigger than Bern, all swans are white. Synthetic propositions could be revised by new empirical evidence, but not analytic ones. We may discover a black swan but not a married bachelor or (at least so Kant thought) a triangle with 181 degrees. As Einstein said of Kant’s first category of truths: “This is held to be the case, for example,
in the propositions of geometry and in the principle of causality. These and certain other types of knowledge . . . do not previously have to be gained from sense data, in other words they are a priori knowledge.”

  Einstein initially found it wondrous that certain truths could be discovered by reason alone. But he soon began to question Kant’s rigid distinction between analytic and synthetic truths. “The objects with which geometry deals seemed to be of no different type than the objects of sensory perception,” he recalled. And later he would reject outright this Kantian distinction. “I am convinced that this differentiation is erroneous,” he wrote. A proposition that seems purely analytic—such as the angles of a triangle adding up to 180 degrees—could turn out to be false in a non-Euclidean geometry or in a curved space (such as would be the case in the general theory of relativity). As he later said of the concepts of geometry and causality, “Today everyone knows, of course, that the mentioned concepts contain nothing of the certainty, of the inherent necessity, which Kant had attributed to them.”83

  Hume’s empiricism was carried a step further by Ernst Mach (1838–1916), the Austrian physicist and philosopher whose writings Einstein read at the urging of Michele Besso. He became one of the favorite authors of the Olympia Academy, and he helped to instill in Einstein the skepticism about received wisdom and accepted conventions that would become a hallmark of his creativity. Einstein would later proclaim, in words that could be used to describe himself as well, that Mach’s genius was partly due to his “incorruptible skepticism and independence.”84