Einstein in Time and Space, page 22
“Now, Mr Gödel,” he asked after the three professors had settled themselves before him, “where do you come from?”
“Austria.”
“And what kind of government did you have in Austria?”
“It was a republic, but the constitution was such that it was finally changed into a dictatorship.”
Einstein and Morgenstern began to worry.
“Oh! This is very bad,” the judge replied. “This couldn’t happen in this country.”
They braced themselves for disaster.
“Oh, yes, I can prove it.”
Gödel launched into an explanation, but the judge, responding to the look on Einstein’s face, quieted poor Kurt and let him know that he really needn’t go into all that. He was finally made an American citizen, and took his oath, on April 2, 1948.
No one ever thought to make a note of the flaw he had spotted in the Constitution.
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Chaim Weizmann—the Zionist leader who had been responsible for Einstein’s tour of America in 1921 and had gone on to become the first president of Israel—died in November 1952. The Jerusalem evening newspaper Maariv recommended as Weizmann’s successor “the greatest Jew alive: Einstein.”
It was a powerful suggestion, and at the time it sounded more than fine to David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister of Israel, who publicly endorsed the idea as quickly as he could.
He sent an urgent telegram to Israel’s US ambassador, Abba Eban. Eban wired Einstein, inquiring if he would allow someone from the embassy to visit him in Princeton to convey an important message.
Einstein was aware of what this meant. The American newspapers had reported Weizmann’s death and had recommended Einstein as his successor. At first he had thought it was a joke. Einstein did not want the position. As he said to Margot, “If I were to be president, sometimes I would have to say to the Israeli people things they would not like to hear.”
Seeing little point in some poor official having to drive all the way to Princeton, he rang Eban expressly to ask the ambassador not to offer him the job.
“I am not the person for that and I can’t possibly do it.”
“But I can’t tell my government that you phoned me and said no,” Eban said. “I have to go through the motions and present the offer officially.”
Eventually Einstein relented, realizing that it would be insulting to refuse the invitation before he had even received it. Someone from the embassy was soon dispatched.
“Acceptance,” the formal letter informed him, “would entail moving to Israel and taking its citizenship. The Prime Minister assures me that in such circumstances complete facility and freedom to pursue your great scientific work would be afforded by a government and people who are fully conscious of the supreme significance of your labors.”
Eban was anxious to express that the offer embodied “the deepest respect which the Jewish people can repose in any of its sons… I hope that you will think generously of those who have asked it, and will commend the high purposes and motives which prompted them to think of you at this solemn hour in our people’s history.”
Einstein’s reply, which he handed to the minister as soon as he arrived, read:
I am deeply moved by the offer from our State of Israel, and at once saddened and ashamed that I cannot accept it. All my life I have dealt with objective matters, hence I lack both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people and to exercise official functions. For these reasons alone I should be unsuited to fulfill the duties of that high office, even if advancing age was not making increasing inroads on my strength. I am the more distressed over these circumstances because my relationship to the Jewish people has become my strongest human bond, ever since I became fully aware of our precarious situation among the nations of the world.
In the end, Ben-Gurion was more than thankful for the refusal. While waiting for Einstein’s answer, he had begun to harbor doubts.
“Tell me what to do if he says yes!” he jokingly asked his assistant. “If he accepts we’re in for trouble.”
Had Einstein accepted, the State of Israel would have had a president who was ill-disposed to authority, formality, and paperwork, who was outspoken, who did not speak Hebrew, had not had a bar mitzvah ceremony, whose views on God were notoriously unorthodox, and who had been a vocal opponent of the creation of a Jewish state. “I would much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state,” he had once said, in succinct summary of his view of Zionism. “Apart from practical consideration, my awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain.” Trouble indeed.
Einstein met Eban at a black-tie reception in New York two days after the business had been concluded. As Eban noted, Einstein was not wearing socks.
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Albert’s closest friend, Michele Angelo Besso, whom he had known for over fifty years, died on March 15, 1955, the day after Einstein’s seventy-sixth birthday. Besso’s son and sister wrote to Einstein to give him the news. He sent them a letter in return, thanking them and reflecting on who his friend had been. He died less than a month later.
Princeton, March 21, 1955
Dear Vero and dear Mrs. Bice,
It was truly very kind of you to give me, in these difficult days, so many details about Michele’s death. His end was in harmony with his whole life, and with the circle of his loved ones. This gift of a harmonious life is seldom paired with such a sharp intelligence, especially to the degree in which it was found in him. But what I most admired in Michele, as a man, was the fact that he managed to live for many years not only in peace but in lasting consonance with a wife—an undertaking at which I twice rather shamefully failed.
Our friendship began when I was a student in Zurich; we met regularly at music events. He, the elder and a scientist, was there to stimulate us. The circle of his interests seemed simply boundless. However, it was critico-philosophical concerns that seemed to win him over.
Later, we were reunited by the patent office. Our conversations on our way home were of an incomparable charm—it was as if the contingencies of daily life simply didn’t exist. In contrast, we later had more difficulty understanding each other in writing. His pen could not keep up with his versatile spirit, such that it was, in most cases, impossible for his correspondent to guess what he had failed to write down.
Now he has again preceded me a little in parting from this strange world. This has no importance. For people like us who believe in physics, the separation between past, present and future has only the importance of an admittedly tenacious illusion.
I am sending you my sincere thanks and my best thoughts.
Yours,
A. Einstein
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Einstein, a few days before his seventy-fifth birthday, 1954.
In 1948, Einstein was diagnosed with an aneurysm of the abdominal aorta. He was told that this would likely be the death of him. “The strange thing about growing old is that the intimate identification with the here and now is slowly lost,” he wrote to one of his friends. “One feels transposed into infinity, more or less alone.”
On the afternoon of April 13, 1955, Einstein collapsed. The day before, his assistant, noticing him grimace, had asked if everything was all right. Yes, he had replied, everything except himself. Helen Dukas called the doctor and he was given morphine so he could sleep. More doctors came the following day. The aneurysm had started to break, but Einstein refused surgery. “It is tasteless to prolong life artificially,” he explained to Dukas. “I have done my share. It is time to go. I will do it elegantly.”
He was taken to the hospital the next day, after Dukas had found him in bed, in agony, unable to lift his head. His condition improved to such an extent that he asked for paper, pencils, and his glasses so that he could do some work in his hospital bed. He talked with Hans Albert, who had flown from San Francisco to see him, about physics, and his friend Otto Nathan about politics. He looked over a draft of a speech he was to give for Israel’s Independence Day, and he wrote twelve pages of equations, complete with crossings-out and amendments, still hoping to find his unified field theory.
His recovery, however, was fleeting. Shortly after one in the morning on Monday, April 18, the night nurse on duty, Alberta Roszel, noticed a difference in Einstein’s breathing and heard him muttering very quietly. The aneurysm had burst and death would claim him soon. But Roszel did not speak German, and so his last words were lost.
The funeral took place the same day as his death. There were twelve guests, including Hans Albert, Helen Dukas, Otto Nathan, and Einstein’s girlfriend, Johanna Fantova. Few of them wore black. In the sharp brightness and chill of spring, under incongruous sunlight, Nathan read from Goethe’s memorial poem for the playwright Friedrich Schiller. Goethe describes his friend’s almost unearthly talents, his courage, his “unchanging ever-youthful glow”; and he mentions his dedication to fighting against the injustices of society. It was an appropriate choice of text. Einstein was—to friends and strangers, at least—the most generous and gentle of people, but that did not detract from the hardness in him. He was convicted, near immovable, in his belief that the evils of society should be spoken out against and fought to the best of one’s ability.
“He gleams like some departing meteor bright,” Nathan ended. “Combining, with his own, eternal light.”
And that was effectively all the ceremony Einstein was given, much as he had wished. He had wanted as little public veneration as could be achieved. He had been careful not to leave behind places tied to the idea of him. His office at the institute was to be used by others; the house on Mercer Street was to be sold and lived in. And he made it clear that he wanted no marker of his body, no piece of ground for the mighty man to lie beneath. His ashes were scattered in an undisclosed place.
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Einstein’s brain, dissected, segmented, and preserved in celloidin, ca.1980.
At the time of Albert Einstein’s death, Thomas Harvey was a pathologist at Princeton Hospital. He was a Quaker. With his short haircut and high hairline, he looked convincingly ordinary. More unkindly, one might call him forgettable. It was Harvey’s job to perform the routine autopsy on Einstein’s body. While an understandably upset Otto Nathan looked on, Harvey removed and examined each of Einstein’s major organs. He then replaced them before sewing up the body—or rather, he replaced almost all of them. In the autopsy room, Harvey decided, entirely without permission, to keep Einstein’s brain.
When this was discovered a few days later, Einstein’s friends and family were outraged. Hans Albert tried to complain, but Harvey argued that Einstein would have wanted to serve a scientific use. Hans Albert, unsure what he could practically do about the situation, begrudgingly accepted the state of affairs. With this retroactive approval in place, Harvey was soon approached by the US Army’s pathology unit, but he refused their various requests to meet with them, instead choosing to cut up the brain, embalm it, and store it in some glass cookie jars.
He left his job at Princeton, taking the brain to the University of Pennsylvania, where it was carved into 240 pieces and preserved in celloidin, a hard, rubbery substance. After driving the pieces home in the back of his Ford, he then put them away, floating in their jars, in his basement. He divorced his wife, remarried twice, and moved about the country, always taking the brain with him and often leaving no forwarding address. In Wichita, Kansas, he worked as a medical supervisor in a biological testing lab and kept the brain in a box meant for apple juice cartons, near a beer cooler, buried under old newspapers.
In Weston, Missouri, he practiced medicine and attempted to study the brain, but in 1998 he lost his medical license after failing a competency exam. In Lawrence, Kansas, he worked in a plastic-extrusion factory, on the assembly line, and moved into an apartment next door to a gas station. Here he befriended his neighbor, who turned out to be the beat novelist and poet William S. Burroughs. The two would meet regularly for drinks on Burroughs’s porch and swap stories. Burroughs proudly told his other friends that he could have a piece of Einstein’s brain any time he asked.
All the while, Harvey had been periodically sending off portions of the brain—some slivers mounted on slides, some larger chunks—to a smattering of researchers across the country. His choices of who received these cerebral gifts were pretty random, mostly based on whoever’s work appealed to him at the time, although sometimes he did answer requests for samples. He sent a mayonnaise jar full of various bits to a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, for instance. But Harvey rarely asked that the recipients do anything with his present.
Einstein’s brain has not ended up as a scientific marvel, but rather as something akin to a religious relic. It is the tongue of St. Anthony, the heart of St. Camillus, preserved so that we may observe and venerate it as a tangible reminder of someone more than human. Contrary to Hans Albert’s wishes, it has become an object of popularism and tourism. There’s an app of the brain available, should one want it, consisting of a “brain atlas” constructed from slides and photographs. And some of Harvey’s slices have found their way to the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, where they nestle, very comfortably, in the company of a malignant tumor removed from President Grover Cleveland’s mouth and a piece of tissue from the neck of John Wilkes Booth.
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At Europe’s Spaceport, in the jungle outside Kourou, French Guiana, on June 5, 2013, the European Space Agency’s Automated Transfer Vehicle-4 was blasted skyward. The unmanned cargo freighter was named Albert Einstein. About the size of a double-decker bus, with four solar array wings sticking out of a tubular body, its purpose was to resupply the International Space Station.
When it docked, ten days after liftoff, Albert Einstein delivered food, water, oxygen, and propellant to the astronauts of the ISS. It also carried a 3D-printed toolbox, gas masks, and a new water pump and recycling unit, as well as equipment for science experiments. All in all, the delivery weighed seven tons and amounted to more than 1,400 items, including a space food treat—tiramisu.
Among this bounty was a copy of the first page of the manuscript for general relativity. This was signed aboard the station, some 250 miles from the surface of Earth, by the astronaut Luca Parmitano, in a symbolic gesture of respect and debt. Because, of course, without the equations of general relativity to refer to, space exploration would be markedly more difficult. It is essential, for example, to take into account the effects of relativity when determining the correct orbits of heavenly bodies or spacecraft as they explore the solar system, or keeping track of interplanetary probes via the radio signals they send out.
Indeed, where accuracy in space is concerned, Einstein’s theory has to be allowed for. We see the practical upshot of this most obviously in the Global Positioning System. The satnav in your car or on your phone receives signals from a system of satellites orbiting Earth around twelve thousand miles away, each broadcasting its location and the exact time. Your car then uses the differences in the time it takes to receive those signals to work out its respective distance from each of the satellites. This then reveals its own location on Earth. Time is crucial to the whole operation. But because the satellites are so far away from the planet, they experience a weaker gravitational effect, which is to say that, by a tiny fraction, the satellites experience time moving slightly faster than on Earth. If GPS didn’t have general relativity built into it, to adjust for the satellites’ clocks being always slightly faster than their counterparts on Earth, your phone could easily send you miles in the wrong direction.
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The first test of a hydrogen bomb took place in 1952, at Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, and the operation was code-named Ivy Mike. The bomb itself was given a nickname: “the sausage.” The explosion contained the power of more than 10 million tons of TNT. The fireball created was approximately two miles wide, and within seconds a mushroom cloud had spread out to a diameter of one hundred miles, covering the blue sea. The blast caused waves up to twenty feet high. The nearby islands were stripped of vegetation, and radioactive coral debris fell on ships thirty-five miles away.
At the time, Edward Teller, who had been perhaps the greatest supporter of the hydrogen bomb, was nearly five thousand miles away, in Berkeley, California, home to most of America’s atomic research, but he watched the shock of the explosion register on a seismometer. He quickly telegrammed a colleague in Los Alamos, the message reading only “It’s a boy.”
Drones carrying filter paper were flown through the radioactive clouds. The material these collected, as well as tons of coral from the atoll, were all sent to Berkeley. Analysis confirmed that in the intensity of the explosion, a new element had been created. Among the mass of debris studied in the lab, around a hundred atoms of element 99 were detected.
The element is silvery, soft, and metallic, and glows blue in the dark. One gram contains one thousand watts of energy. Like all the actinides—those exotic elements right at the end of the periodic table—it is heavy, and very reactive. Its various isotopes have half-lives ranging from mere seconds to more than a year, so even in the best of circumstances it is short-lived. It also holds the distinction of having no practical use at all.
Ivy Mike was, of course, a close secret, and the results weren’t declassified for three years. In the Physical Review of August 1, 1955—three and a half months after Einstein’s death—the discovery of element 99 was finally published. In the article, the discoverer, Albert Ghiorso, and his colleagues proposed that the new element be named after Einstein. At the time it was rare to name an element after a scientist, although not unprecedented: in 1944, curium (atomic number 96) had been named after Einstein’s old friend Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre.
