Einstein (36 page)

The Jewish population of America itself regarded Einstein’s
visit as the visit of a spiritual leader, which filled them with pride and joy. The Jews felt that their prestige among their fellow citizens was raised by the fact that a man of Einstein’s generally recognized intellectual greatness publicly acknowledged his membership in the Jewish community and made their interests his own. When Einstein arrived with Weizmann in Cleveland, all the Jewish businessmen closed their establishments so as to be able to march in the parade that accompanied Einstein from the Station to the City Hall. When Einstein and Weizmann addressed Zionist meetings, it seemed almost as if the political and spiritual heads of the Jewish people were appearing together.

These appearances in the service of the organization that represented some of his political and cultural aims were interspersed with lectures on his scientific theories. Sometimes he appeared in a most informal manner. Thus he visited Professor Kasner’s class at Columbia University just as he was explaining the theory of relativity to his students. Einstein congratulated Kasner on the comprehensible manner in which he did this, and then spoke to the students himself for about twenty minutes.

Later he addressed the students and faculty of Columbia University and was greeted by the outstanding physicist Professor Michael Pupin. This remarkable man, once a Serbian shepherd, had become one of the leading inventors and scientists in the world, and through his understanding of electrical phenomena the first transatlantic telephone cable had been made possible. He regarded all theories with the dispassionateness of a laboratory worker, but, unlike so many others, greeted Einstein not as a person who invented absurd and sensational things but as the “discoverer of a theory which is an evolution and not a revolution of the science of dynamics.”

At this time Einstein always lectured in German, because he did not yet have full mastery of English. On May 9 he received an honorary degree from Princeton University. President Hibben of the university lauded him in a German address: “We salute the new Columbus of science voyaging through the strange seas of thought alone.” Later Einstein gave several lectures at Princeton, in which he presented a comprehensive survey of the theory of relativity.

Einstein was regarded, however, not only as a representative of the Jewish people. Since he had left his work at the Berlin Academy to come to America, and because he spoke German
everywhere, he was also considered a representative of German science. In view of the fact that it was not long after the war, this aroused hostile reactions in some quarters.

Sometimes semi-comical occurrences took place when political attacks were directed against him and no one knew whether he was attacked as a Jew or as a German. An episode of this kind occurred when Fiorello H. La Guardia, then president of the Board of Aldermen of New York City, proposed that Einstein be given the “freedom of the City of New York.” All the aldermen were in favor of this resolution but one, who declared “that until yesterday he had never heard of Einstein.” He asked to be enlightened, but nobody offered to explain the theory of relativity. But the Jews and the Germans did not believe in the naïveté of Einstein’s opponent. He was accused of partly anti-Semitic, partly anti-German opinions. He defended his action on patriotic grounds: he wanted to spare his beloved native city from the possibility of becoming a scientific and national laughing stock. He said at the session: “In 1909 the key of the city was unfortunately given to Dr. Cook, who pretended to have discovered the North Pole.” Perhaps, he suggested, Einstein had not really discovered the theory of relativity. Besides, he continued, “I have been assured that Professor Einstein was born in Germany and was taken to Switzerland but returned to Germany prior to the war. He is consequently a citizen of Germany, of an enemy country, and might be regarded as an enemy alien.”

Everyone was so interested in Einstein’s theory and its meaning that Congressman J. J. Kindred of New York requested the Speaker of the House of Representatives for permission to publish a popular presentation of the relativity theory in the
Congressional Record
. Representative David Walsh of Massachusetts had his doubts about permitting anything to appear in the
Record
that had nothing to do with the activities of Congress and that in addition seemed to be incomprehensible.

“Well, Mr. Speaker,” said Representative Walsh, “ordinarily we confine matters that care to appear in the
Congressional Record
to things that one of average intelligence can understand. Does the gentleman from New York expect to get the subject in such shape that we can understand the theory?” Kindred answered: “I have been earnestly busy with this theory for three weeks and am beginning to see some light.” But then Representative Walsh asked him: “What legislation will it bear upon?” To this Representative Kindred could only reply: “It
may bear upon the legislation of the future as to general relations with the cosmos.”

At the time when Einstein was in the United States, a statement by the great inventor Thomas Edison created quite a furore throughout the country. He denied the value of college education and asserted that education should be directed toward learning relevant facts. He worked out a questionnaire containing questions that he thought were relevant for practical people, and suggested that tests be made, which would show that most college graduates were unable to answer these questions.

While Einstein was in Boston, staying at the Hotel Copley Plaza, he was given a copy of Edison’s questionnaire to see whether he could answer the questions. As soon as he read the question: “What is the speed of sound?” he said: “I don’t know. I don’t burden my memory with such facts that I can easily find in any textbook.” Nor did he agree with Edison’s opinion on the uselessness of college education. He remarked: “It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.” For this reason, according to Einstein, there can be no doubt of the value of a general college education even in our time.

Einstein was often mentioned together with Edison, both being honored as the outstanding representatives of physical science. Edison was to the technical application of physics what Einstein was to its theoretical foundation.

Einstein also visited the physics laboratories of the oldest university in the United States, Harvard University. Professor Theodore Lyman, famous for his optical investigations, informed him about the work that was being done there. Lyman had the feeling that after the many meetings at which Einstein had been used as an instrument of political propaganda, even though for a purpose with which he was entirely in sympathy, he now could breathe freely, being again in the atmosphere of a physics laboratory and able to immerse himself in the problems of nature. Most visitors to a laboratory rapidly pass by the experimental arrangements and listen only half-heartedly to the explanations of the students. Einstein, however, did not remain satisfied with a superficial “That is very interesting,” or some similar polite remark; instead, he allowed several students to give him detailed explanations of the problems on which they were working. Furthermore,
he actually thought about these problems, and some students received advice from him that was helpful in their research. Such absorption during a strenuous journey is only possible for a man possessing two qualities that are rarely found together: first, an unusual ability to familiarize himself rapidly with an unfamiliar problem; and secondly, the capacity to enjoy helping someone who is doing scientific research.

There is no doubt that Einstein made his first trip to America not only in the service of science and of the future university in Jerusalem, but also because he was particularly interested in becoming acquainted with life on this continent, which was new to him. This first trip, however, was not very favorable for the achievement of this purpose. The entire journey proceeded at a whirlwind pace, leaving him no time for any quiet reflection. As a result the impressions that Einstein received on his first visit to the United States could only be very superficial ones that struck one at first glance. In the first place he was impressed by American youth, with its fresh energetic urge to acquire knowledge and to do research. He once said: “Much is to be expected from American youth: a pipe as yet unsmoked, young and fresh.” Then there was the impression of the many peoples that had settled America, which despite their different origins lived together in peace under a tolerant democratic regime. He remarked in particular about New York City: “I like the restaurants with the color of the nations in the air. Each has its own atmosphere. It is like a zoological garden of nationalities, where you go from one to another.” He was also struck by the role of women in American life, observing that it was much greater than the part played by women in European life.

Efforts were made to enlist Einstein’s interest in campaigns to restrict the use of tobacco and Sunday amusements. In such matters, however, Einstein did not favor any excessive restrictions on individual liberty. He was much too natural a person not to have recognized the importance of the innocent pleasures of daily life. He did not have any faith in cut and dried schemes for making people happy by dictating to them what they are to regard as work and what as play. Replying to a man who had requested his opinion on the matter of Sunday rest, he said: “Men must have rest, yes. But what is rest? You cannot make a law and tell people how to do it. Some people have rest when they lie down and go to sleep. Others have rest when they are wide awake and are stimulated. Some must work or write or go to amusements to find rest. If you pass a law to show
all people how to rest, that means you make everybody alike. But everybody is not alike.”

Einstein, who devoted his entire life to the discovery of physical laws that could be derived from a few general principles, was not of the opinion that life could be regulated according to a few abstract principles. He was always more inclined to rely on the natural instincts. As a passionate smoker he also remarked on that occasion: “If you take tobacco and everything else away, what have you left? I’ll stick to my pipe.”

He often had experiences that made it difficult for him to maintain his equanimity. His naïve joy in simple pleasures such as smoking certainly helped him in these situations. Ascetic instincts were foreign to him.

The report of the English astronomers to the Royal Society in London in 1919 had laid the foundation for Einstein’s world fame. But Einstein himself had not yet been in London. In 1919, in the postwar atmosphere of hostility to Germany, it had indeed been possible to recognize the theory of a German, but not to honor a German personally. Lord Haldane, who had always worked for the improvement of Anglo-German relations, had been in Berlin shortly before Einstein’s arrival there, but had received a cool reception from the Kaiser. Immediately after the war and Germany’s defeat, however, Haldane again began to build up new cultural relations with Germany. Einstein seemed to him to be a person who could serve as the thin end of a wedge with which one could penetrate the mass of hostility and prejudice. Many favorable factors seemed to be present: the great acclaim that Einstein’s prediction of the result of the solar eclipse expeditions had produced; the opportunity for a great achievement that had thus been presented to English science; and finally, also, the favorable circumstance that Einstein did not belong to the hated kind of German; indeed, if one so desired, he could be regarded as a non-German. It thus seemed almost as if Einstein had been specially created to act as an intermediary. In addition, for Lord Haldane there was a very important personal factor. He was one of those English statesmen whose hobby was science combined with philosophical speculation. Haldane had set himself the problem of how, despite
the skepticism that had become prevalent in religion, morals, politics, and even science as a result of the disappointments of the postwar period, one could still retain an objective conception of truth. In his book The Reign of Relativity, published in 1921, he pointed out that the views that skeptics regard as different are actually only different aspects of the same truth and that therefore a single objective truth exists. Or, in Haldane’s own words:

“The test of truth may have to be adequacy in a fuller form, a form which is concerned not only with the result of measurement with the balance or rule, but with value, that cannot be so measured and that depends on other orders of thinking. What is truth from one standpoint may not of necessity stand for truth from another. Relativity, depending on the standard used, may intrude itself in varying forms.… It may, therefore, be stated generally that an idea is true when it is adequate, and only completely adequate when it is from every point of view true. Each form of test that is applicable must be satisfied in the conception of perfect adequacy; for otherwise we can have only truth that is relative to particular standpoints.”

This philosophy found its practical application in a training for tolerance toward one’s fellow man and in the struggle against the overestimation of political doctrines. In Einstein’s theory Haldane saw a special example of his own philosophy. He believed that the physical theory of relativity would invest his philosophy of relativity with greater certainty and an increased brilliance. Consequently Haldane endeavored to induce Einstein to stop over in England for several days on his return from America, to give several lectures there, and personally to meet scientists and people in public life.

Not only were there political difficulties in the way of such personal contacts, but the entire mental attitude of the English physicists was not such as to make them very enthusiastic about a theory like that of relativity. English science was always much more intent upon the direct connection between experiment and theory. A connection that consisted in such long chains of thought as in Einstein’s theory often appeared to the English physicist to be a philosophical phantasm — too much theory for so few facts. In England philosophers, astronomers, mathematicians, even theologians and politicians were passionately interested in the theory, but the physicists themselves were still rather cool to “Relativity” as a basic concept.