Einstein, in particular, was distracted by other matters. On the same day he replied to Schwarzschild he finally penned his dreaded letter to Mileva: a proposal of formal divorce. He had been hoping to put this moment off as long as possible, to avoid any further painful personal communications with her. But he knew that marriage to Elsa was on the horizon, and that could not happen without a divorce from Mileva. Their war, at least, would soon come to a resolution.
* * *
IN BRITAIN THE nation began to resign itself to a long war. A peculiar symbol of this resignation hung in the Cambridge Observatory. It was a poster about fifteen inches high. It read: “Defence of the Realm (Consolidation) Regulations: List of Male Employees between the Ages of 18 and 41. NB—this List must be posted in some conspicuous place on the premises in or about which the persons are employed.” Eddington’s name and address were listed, along with a short statement explaining why he was not fighting at the front. He would have walked by it every day as he crossed under the building’s Greek columns. Indeed, he would have been the only one who saw it—every other member of the observatory staff was already serving with the army. Eddington’s solitary presence in the observatory was a reminder of both the difficulty of reconciling mass conscription with a free state and the strained position of science in a country at war.
The failure of the semivoluntary Derby Scheme had made mass conscription inevitable. By the end of January 1916, the Military Service Act became law. All unmarried men between eighteen and forty-one were drafted into the armed forces. In an attempt to keep unrest from flaring up, Ireland—then still part of the United Kingdom—was exempt. The political left was furious over the entire act. Two Quaker Members of Parliament, Arnold S. Rowntree and T. Edmund Harvey, ensured that the final bill contained a “conscience clause.” This was a provision that allowed men with principled opposition to military service to claim “conscientious objector” status and thus be exempted. This was built on the long tradition of Quakers and similar religious groups being excused from military service (William Pitt released them from the militia during the Napoleonic Wars). The conscience clause was widely condemned and was commonly called the “Slackers’ Charter.”
Quakers like Eddington had been preparing for this moment since the beginning of the war. There was no question that they would refuse to fight on the front lines. There was still a serious debate, though, on the question of alternative service. Would it be acceptable for Quakers to take noncombatant jobs within the military? What about agricultural work, since that might free up another man to go fight? John William Graham, a respected Quaker leader and Eddington’s mentor from Manchester, pointed out that in a sense it was impossible not to help the war in some way simply by being a British citizen. The national Quaker organization stated their position clearly: “We regard the central conception of the Act as imperiling the liberty of the individual conscience—which is the main hope of human progress—and entrenching more deeply that Militarism from which we all desire the world to be freed.”
Now that conscription was law, the government had to formalize some of the poorly planned institutions that had developed in the recruiting process. Most important of these was an expansion of the tribunal system that had been part of the Derby Scheme. By the end of the war there were about 2,000 tribunals, most often with five members. They were formed on a county or city basis, and usually were composed of upstanding local citizens or low-level government officers asked to volunteer (there was a Central Tribunal in Westminster to deal with difficult cases).
The tribunals formerly had to deal with a small trickle of exemption requests—the cobbler who wanted to stay with his business—now it was a flood. Some 1.2 million men were immediately conscripted. Of those, 750,000 applied for exemption. The Military Service Act allowed exemptions for work of national importance, serious hardship (say, taking care of an infirm relative), ill health, and conscientious objection. The government gave the local tribunals almost no guidance on how to apply these rules. The general assumption was that every man was most valuable as a soldier; beyond that, no one really knew. Chaos reigned and decisions were often made based on local concerns rather than national ones. It is interesting to note that most of the tribunal records were destroyed after the war—it was generally felt that the process had been poorly planned and embarrassing for the government.
Tribunals could dismiss an application and send the man directly into the military. An applicant could be granted complete or absolute exemption and never be bothered by anyone again (this rarely happened). They could be granted conditional or partial exemption, say, for a certain period of time to close a business. A common outcome for Quakers and other religious objectors was to be assigned alternative service that would support the war, such as working in agriculture or the ambulance corps. Refusal to accept alternative service meant being treated as a soldier disobeying orders, which could mean prison or corporal punishment. Without clear instructions, the tribunals had almost complete power to decide someone’s fate. If a tribunal did grant some kind of exemption, that decision could be challenged by the military representative in attendance, starting the whole process again.
Most men simply filed for exemption as a default response, so the tribunals were clogged with work. The Banbury Local Tribunal had 40 percent of applicants asking for exemption on domestic grounds (who will take care of my children?); 40 percent on employment (my haberdashery will close without me); 10 percent on both; and 10 percent on grounds of conscience. Most were dismissed quickly—no, making black pudding is not work of national importance. Those who claimed exemption for more than one category were quite suspicious. They were surely just looking for an excuse.
That particular issue loomed over Eddington. His university had filed Form R.41 for him, arguing that his scientific work was of national importance. It was no surprise that he was granted an exemption on those grounds—the university had enormous influence on the local tribunal. Eddington would not have to serve in the army, at least for the moment. But this was not enough for him. His refusal to fight was not based on the idea that his work was of national importance. His refusal to fight was based on his deeply held religious objection to war and violence. He filed his own Form R.41, checking the box for conscientious objection. Because the records are fragmentary, we do not know exactly what happened next. We do know that the local tribunal never processed that second form, and that there was no official record of Eddington’s conscientious objection to the war. As far as the government was concerned, his astronomy was part of the war effort. He had to carry his exemption papers at all times. The poster was hung outside his office.
It seems likely that the university intervened to prevent Eddington’s conscientious objection from being processed. They were very concerned about any appearance that their faculty and students were not fully in support of the war. And the university had good reason to worry about pacifist professors. In April 1916 (soon after the conscription system was expanded to include married men), an anonymous anticonscription pamphlet titled Two years’ hard labour for not disobeying the dictates of conscience began circulating. The pamphlet presented the case of a Quaker who had been sent to prison for refusing conscription. Under Section 27 of the Defence of the Realm Act, which prohibited interference with recruiting or discipline, this pamphlet was illegal. It soon came to light that the author was Bertrand Russell, the famous Cambridge mathematician and socialist. The chisel-faced Russell, whose area of expertise would drift into philosophy as the decades wore on, had soured on the war quickly. The son of his longtime collaborator Alfred North Whitehead was killed in action with the Royal Flying Corps, and his apprentice Ludwig Wittgenstein was sent to the front (on the enemy side). Russell decided to freely admit that he wrote the document once it became clear that the state would arrest someone for it. A precise and influential speaker, at his trial he elegantly argued for the unjustness of both the act and conscription itself
. He was found guilty and given a £100 fine, which he refused to pay, hoping that he would then be imprisoned. Instead, his library was confiscated and the books sold to cover the fine. He was stripped of his fellowship and even denied access to his rooms. Later in the war he was sentenced to six months in prison for further pacifist activity.
The affair was enormously frustrating for the University of Cambridge in particular and British intellectuals in general, who were generally still working hard to justify their usefulness to the war. Cambridge was seen as a hotbed of pacifism (it had more peace societies than any other university). To combat this perception the university banned some student peace groups and actively helped in recruiting. Even beyond official support for recruiting, many students and scholars felt called to fight as guardians of civilization after Louvain. One Cambridge don praised any student who enlisted: “He will carry with him into the field the memory of that martyred city, whose ashes cry aloud for the vindication of true culture against the barbarity made possible and said to be sanctioned by a false Kultur.” There were fewer and fewer students attending classes every day. Enrollment plummeted from 3,263 in 1913 to 398 in 1917.
The legendary Cavendish Laboratory—the home of James Clerk Maxwell and J. J. Thomson—was partially converted into a barracks. The rest of the lab worked on signaling, acoustics, wireless transmission, high explosives, and other projects of (hopeful) military importance. Soldiers marched on the not-to-be-trod lawns. Russell described it sadly: “The melancholy of this place now-a-days is beyond endurance—the Colleges are dead, except for a few Indians and a few pale pacifists and bloodthirsty old men hobbling along victorious in the absence of youth. Soldiers are billeted in the courts and drill on the grass; bellicose parsons preach to them in stentorian tones from the steps of the Hall.”
“Pacifist” became a term of abuse, and Eddington’s life was tense. Other Fellows of Trinity began to avoid him. Other physicists pressured him to do war work. He found refuge in the silence at the Friends Meeting House on Jesus Lane even as other members there were hauled before tribunals and sent to work camps or prison. The tribunals saw their job as determining whether a conscientious objector was sincere. This often meant presenting increasingly outrageous scenarios—what if a German attacked your mother? What if a German “refused to sheathe his sword until he should have imbrued it with the blood of your deceased wife’s sister”? The Quakers were increasingly seen less as principled moralists and more as simple shirkers.
Eddington was run ragged trying to do all the work of the observatory by himself while also conducting his own research. As secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society he also had significant administrative duties. It was in this capacity that he received a curious letter from the director of the Leiden Observatory, Willem de Sitter. In late May or early June 1916 (we do not have the original letter) de Sitter decided to try to spread word of Einstein’s work across the English Channel. In mid-May, Einstein had produced a new summary of general relativity that emphasized the theory’s astronomical consequences, which probably spurred the Dutch astronomer’s attempt to find new converts. Interestingly, he did not include any of Einstein’s actual papers, just his own summary of the theory and its implications. Since the letter is lost we do not know exactly what he said. But we do know that this was the first appearance of general relativity in an enemy country. The theory had leaped the trenches.
* * *
EINSTEIN WAS VERY, very lucky that it was Eddington who opened that envelope. At this point in the war few British scientists would have been willing to even think about a German theory. Eddington, the pacifist and internationalist, was. And even further, he was one of the handful of people equipped to understand even the rudiments of general relativity. Its daunting mathematical framework was quite familiar to Eddington. While an undergraduate, he had been coached for his exams (the famous Mathematics Tripos) by Robert Alfred Herman, a mathematician fascinated by differential geometry. He made sure all his students were skilled in this exotic subfield, which seemed to have few practical applications at the time. De Sitter had chosen as a correspondent perhaps the one Briton both willing and able to think about Einstein.
Eddington’s June 11 reply to de Sitter noted that “Hitherto I had only heard vague rumours of Einstein’s new work. I do not think anyone in England knows the details of his paper.” The embargo on scientific communication between the warring countries meant none of Einstein’s work on general relativity had been seen. Frankly, though, no one would have likely been reading his papers anyway. The topic and the author were both rather obscure. Eddington’s vague previous knowledge of Einstein was about as good as it got. De Sitter offered to write a paper summing up general relativity for one of the Royal Astronomical Society’s publications. Eddington steered him toward the Monthly Notices, which had a simpler editorial process, so that de Sitter’s paper would appear much more quickly. Eddington wanted more on relativity, as soon as possible: “I am immensely interested in what you tell me about Einstein’s theory.”
Over the summer of 1916 a handful of letters made their way back and forth between de Sitter and Eddington, with the former agreeing to write an additional short piece for the non-technical journal The Observatory. The annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science was coming up in September in Newcastle, and Eddington tried to get de Sitter invited as a speaker in a session dedicated to gravitation. Unfortunately he discovered that Newcastle was considered a “restricted area” and non-British citizens were not allowed. Instead, Eddington would present his own meager understanding of relativity: “So far as I can make out, no one in England has yet been able to see Einstein’s paper and many are very curious to know the new theory. So I propose to give some account of it at the Meeting.”
During that summer and fall Eddington struggled to make sense of relativity. He had to put aside the new research he had been doing on the internal structure of stars so he could focus on this strange new theory. When de Sitter first learned the theory, he had the advantage of personal contact with Einstein and others who already understood it. Eddington, on the other hand, had to rely on infrequent and often delayed correspondence. There was no one else on his island who knew anything about general relativity; there were no textbooks, no tutorial from Einstein. Eddington persevered, asking de Sitter for clarifications of fundamentals and interpretation. He constantly stumbled through the thicket of a secondhand theory, occasionally becoming stranded by a particularly difficult mathematical pit or philosophical obstacle. Eddington reassured his Dutch correspondent that these worries did not at all sour him on the theory as a whole: “I need scarcely say that this philosophical difficulty does not to my mind detract in the least from the remarkable practical implications of the paper.”
The final sentence of this letter reveals that Eddington was concerned not only with Einstein’s equations but also his role in the war: “I was interested to hear that so fine a thinker as Einstein is anti-Prussian.” “Prussian” was common shorthand for the militarist German nationalism on which the British had blamed the war. Eddington saw a crucial opportunity. Einstein was not only a brilliant physicist but also opposed his own nation’s worst excesses. As a peaceful German, he could be just what a Quaker scientist needed to convince his colleagues of the error of their own jingoistic ways. Relativity could show what was lost when science became consumed by wartime hatred.
De Sitter wrote to Einstein to tell him of relativity’s spread. “Your theory still seems to be almost entirely unknown in England.” Einstein was delighted with de Sitter’s efforts to overcome the rifts within science: “It is a fine thing that you are throwing this bridge over the abyss of delusion.” He liked what he heard about Eddington and was impressed with that astronomer’s insights into relativity (Eddington caught a few mistakes in one of Einstein’s early papers on general relativity from 1914). It seemed that Eddington might join the group with whom Einstein felt
he could talk freely: “When peace has returned, I shall write to him.”
* * *
TO ENSURE DOMESTIC tranquility in Berlin, Einstein had to make a trip to Switzerland. In order to marry Elsa as she so fervently wanted, he needed to secure a divorce from Mileva, still living in Zurich with their children. He planned a trip for Easter 1916, assuming he could persuade both the central bureaucracy and the border guards to let him through (the former was no guarantee of the latter). His general absentmindedness did not help with the intensely ritualized crossing procedure, such as when a guard asked his name and he had to hesitate before he remembered it. At the border crossing in Lindau he underwent an inspection that was “very thorough . . . but entirely decent and polite. Jacket & vest off, shirt opened; even trousers down, collar off. Every single piece was searched through.” He appreciated that the inspector was graceful, at least.
Einstein’s plan to secure a divorce agreement was complicated by his resolution to never see Mileva again—even while he was in the same city he continued to converse with her only by letters. She was also increasingly ill, a state that their mutual friends blamed on Einstein’s clumsy communications. Those friends acted as intermediaries and finally convinced Einstein to put off his demands for a formal divorce. While dealing with Mileva, he hoped to repair relations with his twelve-year-old son, Hans Albert, who would no longer even answer his letters. Despite all these family matters, Einstein’s first order of business upon arrival was to contact Michele Besso so they could talk relativity. They went boating together. Even as the pair’s lives continued to push them apart, Besso remained an important sounding board for all things relativistic—appropriate for the friend whom Einstein credited with the original inspiration for special relativity.
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