Einstein in Time and Space, page 19
He was known to help schoolchildren with their homework, and one Christmas Eve he borrowed a violin from a group of carolers and accompanied them on their rounds. He is also supposed to have made a habit of pulling a random book off the shelves of the institute’s library, opening it at random, selecting a random paragraph, and then thinking about what he had read for three months, before returning to repeat the process.
In one story he is said to have tripped and fallen into a storm drain so deep that his head and arms protruded from the ground like a mushroom and he had to be helped out by a local photographer. Another tale involves somebody phoning the institute and asking to speak to one of the deans. The dean was not available, the caller was informed. In that case, came the tentative reply, would it be possible to have Dr. Einstein’s home address? Unfortunately, that information could not be given out.
“Please don’t tell anybody,” whispered the voice on the phone, “but I am Dr. Einstein. I’m on my way home and I’ve forgotten where my house is.”
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In 1935, Einstein hit on a problem that he did not think quantum mechanics could account for. If two particles collided with each other briefly and then continued on their way, then by measuring, say, the momentum of one particle, you would be able to figure out the momentum of the other, even after the two had flown apart. What this meant was that it was possible to know something about a particle without measuring it. Within the laws of quantum mechanics this was not allowed. Quantum scientists therefore had to interpret the situation to mean that the act of measuring the first particle had some effect on the second particle, even if it was no longer nearby. To say this, Einstein argued, was absurd. In a letter to his friend Max Born, Einstein explained his position with a now famous phrase: “Physics,” he wrote, “should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky action at a distance.”
Einstein’s contemporaries got around this problem by saying that the two particles are “entangled”—that is, paired with each other. In certain ways, a pair of entangled particles act as if they are one system. The paper Albert coauthored on the subject is known as the EPR paper, after the initials of Einstein and his colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen. In this paper they were concerned with a particle’s location and momentum, but the easiest way of explaining the effects of entanglement is to talk about a particle’s “spin.”
An electron’s spin can exist in two states, either “up” or “down.” One needn’t worry about what this means exactly, it is important just that a particle can exist in one of either two states. In an entangled pair of particles, one will have “spin up” and the other “spin down.” These properties are not built into the pairing. It is not that, as they go bumbling through the universe, one electron has the properties of an orange and the other an apple, but that they share the properties of both fluidly, in what is known as a “superposition.” This only changes when one of the electrons is measured, when it interacts with something. At that point, the measured electron will be wholly and only an apple. Instantaneously, the other, unmeasured electron will be wholly and only an orange.
The reason this is important is the instantaneousness: the information that an entangled particle has suddenly fixed its spin is seemingly conveyed to its sister faster than the speed of light, no matter what distance separates them—even if they are at opposite ends of the observable universe. To Einstein this “non-locality” was not acceptable. He believed that nothing should be able to exceed the speed of light, not even information, otherwise the theory of relativity could not hold true. Luckily for Einstein, it was soon argued that, as the two particles should be regarded as the same physical entity, in fact no information is exchanged—there is no signal faster than lightning that is sent between them. As they are the same entity, a signal is not needed. Relativity survives, albeit only just.
Entanglement continues to be something of a thorn in the paw of physics, however, and no mouse has yet been able to take it out. Differing explanations of the phenomenon exist, but none has been settled on absolutely. There have also been many efforts to try to prove that, as seems logical, the spins of entangled electrons are fixed from the start, that one electron is always an orange and one an apple, and there is no fruity mixing going on. But they have not succeeded. Quite the contrary: entanglement is a proven phenomenon of nature. Quantum computers work because of it, and a photograph has been taken of entanglement at work.
Einstein’s criticism was meant to show the bizarre consequences of following the logic of quantum mechanics, and to use this as evidence of the theory’s falsehood. He did not believe that entanglement could truly exist, that by prodding one particle you could instantaneously affect another. But as it turns out, the world is far more absurd than Einstein thought.
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Just as they had decided to stay in America, in May 1934 Einstein and Elsa received news that Ilse’s health was failing. Elsa’s daughter had been suffering from what was thought to be tuberculosis, but was in fact leukemia, and had moved in with her younger sister, Margot, in Paris.
Elsa set sail for Europe alone and arrived in Paris to find her emaciated daughter on the point of death. Ilse had for some time refused to receive proper medical care because she was convinced that her ailments were mainly psychosomatic, and she had instead submitted to a long course of psychotherapy. Elsa and Margot could do little for her except be with her as she died. Elsa was never quite the same. The experience devastated her spirit to the extent that she seemed to age by many years.
Margot moved to America to live with her mother and stepfather, leaving her husband behind, and in August 1935, Elsa and Albert bought a property in Princeton, across the road from their rented flat. Their simple white clapboard house at 112 Mercer Street was 120 years old. With four small square columns defending a diminutive porch, it was unostentatiously pretty, barely hidden behind a low garden hedge. They paid for it in cash and still had some money left over for renovations, which Elsa took charge of, even as her own health started to fail.
It became clear shortly after moving into their new home that Elsa would not be able to enjoy it for long. She developed a swelling of one of her eyes, something that tests in Manhattan revealed to be a symptom of heart and kidney problems. She was ordered to remain in bed, a treatment that worked in part, but she suspected she would never fully mend. When the summer of 1936 arrived, they rented a house next to Saranac Lake, three hundred miles north of New York, in the Adirondack Mountains. She felt sure that she would improve in such surroundings. “And if my Ilse walked into my room now, I would recover at once.” The vacation did bring limited relief, but it was not a cure.
Although he read to Elsa occasionally, during her illness Einstein worked manically, sometimes hardly sleeping. Elsa informed her friend Antonina Vallentin that Albert was affected by the situation more than she had expected. “He wanders around like a lost soul,” she wrote. “I never thought he loved me so much. And that comforts me.” By the winter, Elsa was again bedridden. She died on December 20, 1936. And with her death, her husband cried. “Oh,” he sighed, “I shall really miss her.”
After a few days, he was back in the office, looking sallow and pale. Even so, one of his collaborators could not bear to offer him inane expressions of sympathy. Instead, they discussed a particular work problem, as if nothing had happened. Einstein produced two small but important papers in the month after his wife’s death, but his early attempts to focus were sorry ones.
In a letter to Hans Albert, he wrote that he could not concentrate. Elsa’s passing had made life difficult. “But as long as I am able to work,” he went on, “I must not and will not complain, because work is the only thing that gives substance to life.”
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On one glowingly hot summer’s day in 1937, Leopold Infeld and C. P. Snow drove to visit Albert Einstein at his rented vacation house on Long Island. Infeld was a Polish physicist who was collaborating with Einstein at Princeton on an equation to describe star movements. Snow was a molecular physicist at the University of Cambridge, as well as a novelist.
Snow described the encounter: “At close quarters, Einstein’s head was as I had imagined it: magnificent, with a humanizing touch of the comic. Great furrowed forehead; aureole of white hair; enormous bulging chocolate eyes.” He recalled that someone had once said it had “the brightness of a good artisan’s countenance, that he looked like a reliable old-fashioned watchmaker in a small town who perhaps collected butterflies on a Sunday.
“What did surprise me was his physique. He had come in from sailing and was wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. It was a massive body, very heavily muscled: he was running to fat round the midriff and in the upper arms, rather like a footballer in middle age, but he was still an unusually strong man. He was cordial, simple, utterly unshy.”
The group settled into conversation. Einstein asked Snow if he was a pacifist. “Far from it, I explained. I was by that time certain that war was inevitable. I was not so much apprehensive about war as about the chance that we might lose it. Einstein nodded.”
The day was close, and very hot—it could be felt in the breath. There wasn’t much to eat, though Einstein smoked his pipe incessantly. “Trays of open sandwiches—various kinds of wurst, cheese, cucumber—came in every now and then. It was all casual and Central European. We drank nothing but soda water. What with the heat and the sandwiches, I got as thirsty as if I had been dehydrated, and drank more soda water in eight hours than I normally did in eight months.
“Mostly we talked of politics, the moral and practical choices in front of us, and what could be saved from the storm to come, not only for Europe but for the human race. All the time he was speaking with a weight of moral experience which was different, not only in quantity but in kind, from anything I had met… It was something like talking to the second Isaiah.”
Einstein spoke of the various countries he had lived in. As a rule, he preferred them in inverse proportion to their size. Did this mean he liked England? asked Snow. Yes, England—he liked England. It was a little like Holland, which he liked very much.
Why hadn’t he chosen to live in England after his exile from Germany?
“No, no!”
“Why not?”
“It is your style of life.” He laughed loudly. “It is a splendid style of life. But it is not for me.”
Snow asked what he meant, and Einstein replied by saying that on his first day in England he had been taken to an estate in the country. There was a butler. There was evening dress. Following that, he had spent most of his time in England at Christ Church, which was positively overflowing with butlers and evening dress. The English, Einstein seemed to think, spent all day putting on and taking off different outfits. Snow objected, but Einstein wouldn’t hear it. Had Snow heard of the German word Zwang? It meant, Albert explained, constraint, in the broadest possible way, constraint in any form, intellectual, emotional, societal. He wanted no Zwang.
They talked for many hours, until Snow saw the sky getting dark. “Einstein was talking about the conditions for a creative existence. He said that, in his experience, the best creative work is never done when one is unhappy. He could scarcely think of any physicist who had done fine work in such a state. Or any composer. Or any writer.
“It seemed a strange and unexpected remark.”
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Einstein had various pets in his household at 112 Mercer Street, all of which seemed to have their own problems with the world.
Bibo the parrot had many ailments. Einstein decided that poor Bibo was depressed and used to tell him jokes in an attempt to cheer him up.
And there was the fox terrier Chico, slightly chubby and quite disheveled, named after the Marx brother. “The dog is very smart. He feels sorry for me because I receive so much post. That’s why he tries to bite the postman.”
Einstein’s tomcat, Tiger, was a sensitive fellow. He was miserable when it rained, and Einstein used to say to him, “I know what’s wrong, my dear, but I really don’t know how to turn it off.”
Indeed, occasionally Einstein preferred animals to humans. When the cat of one of Einstein’s friends, Ernst Straus, had kittens, Einstein was so eager to see them that he walked Straus back to his home and on the way became slightly worried—all of Straus’s neighbors, it turned out, worked with Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study. “Let’s walk quickly,” he said. “There are so many people here whose invitations I’ve declined. I hope they don’t find out I came to visit your kittens.”
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Einstein wasn’t in the habit of personally accepting honorary degrees. He received so many of them. However, in May 1946, he made an exception for Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the first Black college to grant degrees in America. Trading one green and wooded campus for another, he made the short journey from Princeton so that he could teach a lesson about his relativity equations and also give a speech.
“My trip to this university was on behalf of a worthwhile cause,” he announced to the students and faculty. “There is a separation of colored people from white people in the United States. This separation is not a disease of colored people. It is a disease of white people. I do not intend to be quiet about it.”
And, true enough, he wasn’t quiet about it. In essays and in speeches, Einstein openly challenged the racism he found embedded in America. He threw his support behind prominent Black intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson, joined societies, and became the co-chair of the American Crusade to End Lynching. And it was not only in such public ways that he chose to stand against racial intolerance, but also with neighborliness and small private kindnesses.
On April 16, 1937, the famous contralto Marian Anderson arrived in Princeton to give a concert that evening. When she went to the Nassau Inn to book accommodations for the night, she was denied a room because she was Black. When Einstein heard of Anderson’s situation, he invited her to stay with him. The two had met several years before when they had talked briefly backstage at Carnegie Hall after one of her performances. Einstein had loved her version of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden,” while Anderson had admired his sensitive face and shock of white hair, and had felt humbled by him.
When Anderson arrived at Mercer Street, Einstein came downstairs to welcome her. Margot had prepared a room for her so that she could rest and change, and brought up a tray of food. Although Einstein did not go out as much as he used to, he attended the concert. She performed to a standing-room-only audience at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre and showed “complete artistic mastery of a magnificent voice,” according to the Daily Princetonian. “Miss Anderson had the audience at her feet from the first Handel aria to the last negro spiritual. It is hard to discuss such a performance without the excessive use of superlatives. Seldom is a voice like this combined with such a perfect intellectual and emotional understanding of the music.”
After the concert there was a reception. As a matter of course, Einstein, the local celebrity, was invited, although as Anderson put it, no one “would have been offended had he begged off.” But he came along for a while, and then waited up for Anderson to return home after him. From then on, whenever she sang in Princeton, she would stay with the Einsteins on Mercer Street.
On one occasion, Margot let Marian use her room for her to practice. Unknown to Anderson, the room was occupied by Bibo, the family parrot (who could say, “Beautiful, how beautiful” and “Give me a little kiss”). He was covered in his cage for the night, but as she began her exercises, as if out of nowhere, he began to sing along with her—“Truu, truu, truu…”—and Anderson burst out laughing.
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The FBI file on Albert Einstein is 1,400 pages long. For more than twenty years the Bureau kept tabs on the professor, resorting on some occasions to opening mail, tapping phone lines, and even breaking into private property. As his file also includes anecdotes that agents had heard in conversation, with surprising frequency it takes on the tone of gossipy slander, as in this entry:
EINSTEIN was alleged to be a personal courier from Communist Party Headquarters relaying messages orally to selected sources throughout the United States concerning important information being distributed by the Communist Party. These messages were of too great an importance to be trusted through the mails, telephone, telegraph or other means of communication and for this reason EINSTEIN being a trusted Communist was selected as the personal courier for the Party.
Another note suggests that Hans Albert was being kept as a hostage by the Soviets, and used as leverage to make Einstein an unwilling participant in Communist activities. This line of inquiry was dropped, however, when it was discovered that Hans Albert was not in Russia, as the Bureau had supposed, but working in Berkeley as a professor at the University of California.
Agents would consult an array of sources relating to the subject of their investigations. Einstein’s file has surprisingly little of his political writing, but does include, for example, this report, based on a newspaper article once read by an agent:
Einstein was one of many distinguished Germans who lent their influence and prestige to German Communists prior to the rise of Hitler… Einstein publicly declared, in 1947, that the only real party in France with a solid organization and a precise program was the Communist Party. In May, 1948, he and “10 former Nazi research brain trusters” held a secret meeting to observe a new beam of light secret weapon which could be operated from planes to destroy cities.
Action on the death ray was taken no further because, as the file notes, “The Intelligence Division of the Army subsequently advised the Bureau that this information could have no foundation in fact.”
