by John Updike
The other giants of physics in the first half of the twentieth century applauded. Paul Dirac called general relativity “probably the greatest scientific discovery ever made,” and Max Born termed it “the greatest feat of human thinking about nature, the most amazing combination of philosophical penetration, physical intuition and mathematical skill.” In 1919, the discovery was given empirical proof when Arthur Eddington, the director of the Cambridge Observatory, led an expedition to equatorial realms to observe a solar eclipse and see if, as Einstein’s field equations predicted, stars near the sun’s rim would be apparently displaced 1.7 arc seconds. With a little massaging from Eddington, they were. Einstein, asked what his reaction would have been if the experiment had shown his theory to be wrong, serenely replied, “Then I would have been sorry for the dear Lord; the theory is correct.”
Though Einstein was to reap many honors (including the 1921 Nobel, belatedly, for his early work on the photoelectrical effect) and was to serve humanity as a genial icon and fount of humanist wisdom for three more decades, he never again made a significant contribution to the ongoing life of the physical sciences. Beginning around 1918, he devoted himself to a quest even more solitary and visionary than his relativity triumphs. “We seek,” he said in his Nobel Prize lecture, “a mathematically unified field theory in which the gravitational field and the electromagnetic field are interpreted only as different components or manifestations of the same uniform field.” Quantum theory, with its built-in uncertainties and paradoxes, struck him as a spooky violation of physical realism. “The more successes the quantum theory enjoys,” he lamented to a friend in 1912, “the sillier it looks.” In an autobiographical sketch published in 1949,2 he described his frustrated attempts “to adapt the theoretical foundation of physics” to quantum science: “It was as if the ground had been pulled out from under us, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere,” leaving “an intermediate state of physics without a uniform basis for the whole, a state that—although unsatisfactory—is far from having been overcome.”
His faith that a unified theory of all the fields exists went back to his childhood sense that “something deeply hidden had to be behind things,” a something that would evince itself in an encompassing theory of elegant simplicity. Isaacson tells us: “On one of the many occasions when Einstein declared that God would not play dice, it was Bohr”—the physicist Niels Bohr—“who countered with the famous rejoinder: Einstein, stop telling God what to do!” God, sometimes identified as “the Almighty” or “the Old One” (der Alte), frequently cropped up in Einstein’s utterances, although, after a brief period of “deep religiousness” at the age of twelve, he firmly distanced himself from organized religion. In a collection of statements published in English as The World As I See It,3 he wrote:
The scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation.… His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire.
The apparition of a superior intelligence behind the impassive arrangements of nature was more than a playful metaphor for Einstein, and the escape from selfishness through scientific thought was a principle he lived. In composing, at the request of an editor, his “Autobiographical Notes,” he concentrated almost exclusively on his thought processes, complete with equations.
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Yet things happened to him; he had a life. In 1909, the University of Zurich upped an initial offer, and Einstein, “four years after he had revolutionized physics,” resigned from the patent office and accepted his first professorship. “So, now I too am an official member of the guild of whores,” he told a colleague. In 1910, Mileva gave birth to a second son, Eduard, who as he grew older developed mental illness and was to end up in a Swiss asylum. In 1911, the Einsteins moved to Prague, where Einstein accepted a full professorship at the German part of the University of Prague. Offers kept coming; in 1912, he returned to the Zurich Polytechnic, which had become a full university, the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule. Mileva should have been happy back in Zurich, among old friends, but her health was uncertain, carrying with it depression, and continued to decline. In 1913, an invitation was personally delivered by two pillars of Berlin’s academic establishment, Max Planck and Walther Hermann Nernst, to come to Berlin as a university professor and the director of a new physics institute, and to become, at the age of thirty-four, the youngest member of the Prussian Academy. Einstein stayed in Berlin until 1932, when the combination of rising Nazism and tempting offers from America impelled him to leave Germany, never to return.
In America, Robert A. Millikan, a physicist whose experiments had verified Einstein’s photoelectrical equation, was now the president of Caltech, and he aggressively courted Einstein to come to Pasadena. However, the educator Abraham Flexner, a former officer of the Rockefeller Foundation, was in the process of establishing, with funds from the Bamberger department-store fortune, a haven for scholars named the Institute for Advanced Study, to be situated in New Jersey, next to but not affiliated with Princeton University. Einstein, intending to split his time between Europe and America, accepted the Princeton proposal. He and Elsa moved there, and in 1935, after renting for a few years, they bought a modest frame house at 112 Mercer Street, where Einstein lived until his death, in 1955.
He and Mileva had divorced, after many difficulties, in March 1919. One of the attractions of Berlin in 1913 had been the presence of his divorced cousin Elsa Einstein. During the First World War, while Mileva stayed in Zurich with the two boys, Elsa and Einstein shared a life in Berlin—in his divorce deposition he gave the period of “intimate relations” as “about four and a half years.” After some friction (Einstein wasn’t sure that he wanted to be married at all, after the mental exertions of general relativity, but Elsa’s respectable family wanted her reputation salvaged), he and Elsa married, in June 1919. In their “spacious and somberly furnished apartment near the center of Berlin,” with her two daughters, he seemed, a colleague remarked, “a Bohemian as a guest in a bourgeois home.” Elsa was shrewd but, unlike Mileva Maric´, not scientific, which at his stage of life and eminence may have been a blessing. Einstein and women are a complicated story, and Isaacson doesn’t attempt to tell it all. There were a number of extramarital relationships; how many of them tipped from companionship into sex is, like the electron, difficult to measure. (One startling fact, according to Isaacson: beginning in 1941, Einstein was sleeping with an alleged Soviet spy, the multilingual Margarita Konenkova, though the FBI, which was keeping close tabs on him, never twigged.)
Isaacson, a former managing editor of Time, whose previous biographies dealt with Benjamin Franklin and Henry Kissinger, writes in short paragraphs; taking up in rotation science and politics and personal developments, he has much material to compress. He notes that, at Elsa’s untimely death, in 1936, “Einstein was hit harder than he might have expected,” and pronounces on their marriage:
Beneath the surface of many romances that evolve into partnerships, there is a depth not visible to outside observers. Elsa and Albert Einstein liked each other, understood each other, and perhaps most important (for she, too, was actually quite clever in her own way) were amused by each other. So even if it was not the stuff of poetry, the bond between them was a solid one.
Yet when Michele Besso, an old friend from his youth in Zurich, died, not long before Einstein’s own death, he wrote to Besso’s family that the deceased’s most admirable trait had been to live harmoniously with a woman, “an undertaking in which I twice failed rather miserably.” He was married to the universe, and gave back to people less love than he attracted. Max Born said, “For all his kindness, sociability and love of humanity, he was nevertheless totally detached
from his environment and the human beings in it.”
But he loved America, and America reciprocated. Its informality, optimism, and emphasis on free speech delighted him: “From what I have seen of Americans, I think that life would not be worth living to them without this freedom of self-expression.” Except for a brief trip to Bermuda as part of his application for citizenship, he never left; he never returned to Europe, let alone to Germany, whose crimes, he wrote the chemist Otto Hahn, “are really the most abominable ever to be recorded in the history of the so-called civilized nations.” To America, Isaacson says, he projected a “rumpled-genius image as famous as Chaplin[’s] little tramp.” As famous as Chaplin, he appeared, to Americans of my age, as saintly as Gandhi. Einstein’s public political life—his initially reluctant but eventually committed Zionism, his initially militant but eventually modified pacifism, his wartime patriotism (including a sponsoring role in the creation of the atomic bomb), his scorn of McCarthyism, and his good humor and amiable wit in shouldering all the causes and interviews he was asked to shoulder—contributed to American morale in the challenging years between 1933 and 1955. Having the greatest mind in the world on the premises lifted American spirits. In his own freedom of thought, the valiant Swabian demonstrated how to be free.
Visions of Mars
Written for National Geographic, December 2008.
MARS has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: the Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet. Even after Copernicus proposed, in 1543, that the sun and not the earth was the center of the local cosmos, the eccentricity of Mars’s celestial motions continued as a puzzle until, in 1609, Johannes Kepler analyzed all the planetary orbits as ellipses, with the sun at one focus.
In that same year, Galileo first observed Mars through a telescope. By the mid-seventeenth century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea. The Italian astronomer Giovanni Cassini was able to observe certain features accurately enough to calculate the planet’s rotation. The Martian day, he concluded, was forty minutes longer than our twenty-four hours; he was only three minutes off. While Venus, a closer and larger planetary neighbor, presented an impenetrable cloud cover, Mars showed a surface enough like Earth’s to invite speculation about its habitation by life forms.
Increasingly refined telescopes, challenged by the blurring effect of our own planet’s thick and dynamic atmosphere, made possible ever more detailed maps of Mars, specifying seas and even marshes where seasonal variations in presumed vegetation came and went with the fluctuating ice caps. One of the keenest-eyed cartographers of the planet was Giovanni Schiaparelli, who employed the Italian word canali for perceived linear connections between presumed bodies of water. The word could have been translated as “channels,” but “canals” caught the imagination of the public and in particular that of Percival Lowell, a rich Boston Brahmin who in 1893 took up the cause of the canals as artifacts of a Martian civilization. As an astronomer, Lowell was an amateur and an enthusiast but not a crank. He built his own observatory on a mesa near Flagstaff, Arizona, more than seven thousand feet high and, in his own words, “far from the smoke of men”; his drawings of Mars were regarded as superior to Schiaparelli’s even by astronomers hostile to the Bostonian’s theories. Lowell proposed that Mars was a dying planet whose highly intelligent inhabitants were combating the increasing desiccation of their globe with a system of irrigation canals that distributed and conserved the dwindling water stored in the polar caps.
This vision, along with Lowell’s stern Darwinism, was dramatized by H. G. Wells in one of science fiction’s classics, The War of the Worlds (1898). The Earth-invading Martians, though hideous to behold and merciless in action, are allowed a dollop of dispassionate human sympathy. Employing advanced instruments and intelligences honed by “the immediate pressure of necessity,” they enviously gaze across space at “our own warmer planet, green with vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad stretches of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas.”
In the coming half-century of Martian fancy, our neighboring planet served as a shadowy twin onto which earthly concerns, anxieties, and debates were projected. Such burning contemporary issues as colonialism, collectivism, and industrial depletion of natural resources found ample room for exposition in various Martian utopias. A minor vein of science fiction showed Mars as the site, more or less, of a Christian afterlife; C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet (1938) invented an unfallen world, Malacandra. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s wildly popular series of Martian romances presented the dying planet as a rugged, racially diverse frontier where, in the words of its Earthling superhero John Carter, life is “a hard and pitiless struggle for existence.” Following Burroughs, pulp science fiction, brushing aside possible anatomical differences, frequently mated Earthlings and Martians, the Martian usually the maiden in the match, and the male a virile Aryan aggressor from our own tough planet. The etiolated, brown-skinned, yellow-eyed Martians of Ray Bradbury’s poetic and despairing The Martian Chronicles (1950) vanish under the coarse despoilment that human invasion has brought.
But all the fanciful Martian megafauna—Wells’s leathery amalgams of tentacles and hugely evolved heads; American journalist Garrett P. Serviss’s fifteen-foot-tall quasi–red men; Burroughs’s ten-foot, four-armed, olive-skinned Tharks; Lewis’s beaverlike hrossa and technically skilled pfifltriggi; and the “polar bear–sized creatures” that Carl Sagan imagined to be possibly roaming the brutally cold Martian surface—were swept into oblivion by the flyby photographs taken by Mariner 4 on July 14, 1965, from six thousand miles away. The portion of Mars caught on an early digital camera showed no canals, no cities, no water, and no erosion or weathering. Mars more resembled the moon than the earth. The pristine craters suggested that surface conditions had not changed in more than three billion years. The dying planet had been long dead.
Two more Mariner flybys, both launched in 1969, sent back fifty-seven images that, in the words of the NASA release, “revealed Mars to be heavily cratered, bleak, cold, dry, nearly airless and generally hostile to any Earth-style life-forms.” But Mariner 9, an orbiter launched in 1971, dispatched, over 146 days, seven thousand photographs of surprisingly varied and violent topography: volcanoes, of which the greatest, Olympus Mons, is thirteen miles high, and a system of canyons, Valles Marineris, that on Earth would stretch from New York City to Los Angeles. Great arroyos and tear-shaped islands testified to massive floods in the Martian past, presumably of water, the sine qua non of life as Earth knows it. In 1976, the two Viking landers safely arrived on the Martian surface; the ingenious chemical experiments aboard yielded, on the question of life on Mars, ambiguous results whose conclusions are still being debated into the twenty-first century.
In the meantime, our geographical and geological intimacy with Mars grows. The triumphant deployment of the little Sojourner rover in 1997 was followed in 2004 by the even more spectacular success of two more durable rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. In four years of solar-powered travels on the red planet, the twin robots have relayed unprecedentedly detailed images, including many clearly of sedimentary rocks, suggesting the existence of ancient seas. The stark, russet-tinged photographs plant the viewer right on the surface; the ladderlike tracks of Spirit and Opportunity snake and gouge their way across rocks and dust that for eons have rested scarcely disturbed under salmon-pink skies and a pearlescent sun. In this tranquil desolation, the irruption of our live curiosity and systematic purpose feels heroic.
Now the Phoenix Mission, with its surpassingly intricate arm, scoop, imagers, and analyzers, takes us inches below th
e surface of dust, sand, and ice in Mars’s north polar region. Spoonfuls of another planet’s substance, their chemical ingredients volatilized, sorted, and identified, become indexes to cosmic history. Meanwhile, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the newest of three operational spacecraft circling the planet, feeds computers at the University of Arizona with astoundingly vivid and precise photographs of surface features. Some of these false-color images appear totally abstract, yet they yield to knowledgeable eyes riches of scientific information.
The dead planet is not so dead after all: avalanches and dust storms are caught on camera, and at the poles a seasonal sublimation of dry ice produces erosion and movement. Dunes shift; dust devils trace dark scribbles on the delicate surface. Whether or not evidence of microbial or lichenous life emerges amid this far-off flux, Mars has become an ever-nearer neighbor, a province of human knowledge. Dim and fanciful visions of the twinkling fire planet have led to panoramic close-ups beautiful beyond imagining.
Extreme Dinosaurs
Written for National Geographic, December 2007. Adam Gopnik chose this for Best American Essays 2008.
BEFORE THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, when dinosaur bones turned up they were taken as evidence of dragons, ogres, or giant victims of Noah’s Flood. After two centuries of paleontological harvest, the evidence seems stranger than any fable, and continues to get stranger. Dozens of new species emerge each year; China and Argentina are hot spots lately for startling new finds. Contemplating the bizarre specimens recently come to light, one cannot but wonder what on earth Nature was thinking of. What advantage was conferred, say, by the ungainly eight-foot-long arms and huge triple claws of Deinocheirus? Or, speaking of arms, by Mononykus’s smug dependence on a single, stoutly clawed digit at the end of each minimal forearm? Guesses can be hazarded: the latter found a single stubby claw just the thing for probing after insects; the former stripped the leaves and bark from trees in awesome bulk. A carnivorous cousin, Deinonychus, about the size of a man, leapt on its prey, wrapped its long arms and three-fingered hands around it, and kicked it to death with sickle-shaped toenails.
