Einstein: His Life and Universe

they could “devote themselves undisturbed” to thinking.⁷⁷

It was a revealing remark. For Einstein, science was a solitary pursuit, and he seemed not to realize that for others it could be far more fruitful when pursued collaboratively. In Copenhagen and elsewhere, the quantum mechanics team had been building on one another’s ideas with a frenzy. But Einstein’s great breakthroughs had been those that could be done, with perhaps just an occasional sounding board and mathematical assistant, by someone in a Bern patent office, the garret of a Berlin apartment, or a lighthouse.

The ocean liner Westmoreland, which had sailed from Antwerp with Elsa and Helen Dukas aboard, picked up Einstein and Walther Mayer in Southampton on October 7, 1933. He did not think he would be away for long. In fact, he planned to spend another term at Christ Church, Oxford, the next spring. But although he would live for another twenty-two years, Einstein would never see Europe again.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

AMERICA

1933– 1939

112 Mercer Street

Princeton

The ocean liner Westmoreland, which carried Einstein, at age 54, to what would become his new home country, arrived in New York Harbor on October 17, 1933. Waiting to meet him in the rain at the Twenty-third Street pier was an official committee led by his friend Samuel Untermyer, a prominent attorney, who carried some orchids he had grown, plus a group of cheerleaders that was scheduled to parade with him to a welcoming pageant.

Einstein and his entourage, however, were nowhere to be found. Abraham Flexner, the director of the Institute for Advanced Study, was obsessed with shielding him from publicity, whatever Einstein’s quirky preferences might be. So he had sent a tugboat, with two Institute trustees, to spirit Einstein away from the Westmoreland as soon as it cleared quarantine. “Make no statement and give no interviews on any subject,” he had cabled. To reiterate the message, he sent a letter with one of the trustees who greeted Einstein’s ship. “Your safety in America depends upon silence and refraining from attendance at public functions,” it said.¹

Carrying his violin case, with a profusion of hair poking out from a wide-brimmed black hat, Einstein surreptitiously disembarked onto the tug, which then ferried him and his party to the Battery, where a car was waiting to whisk them to Princeton. “All Dr. Einstein wants is to be left in peace and quiet,” Flexner told reporters.²

Actually, he also wanted a newspaper and an ice cream cone. So as soon as he had checked into Princeton’s Peacock Inn, he changed into casual clothes and, smoking his pipe, went walking to a newsstand, where he bought an afternoon paper and chuckled over the headlines about the mystery of his whereabouts. Then he walked into an ice cream parlor, the Baltimore, pointed his thumb at the cone a young divinity student had just bought, and then pointed at himself. As the waitress made change for him, she announced, “This one goes in my memory book.”³

Einstein was given a corner office in a university hall that served as the temporary headquarters of the Institute. There were eighteen scholars in residence then, including the mathematicians Oswald Veblen (nephew of the social theorist Thorstein Veblen) and John von Neumann, a pioneer of computer theory. When shown his office, he was asked what equipment he might need. “A desk or table, a chair, paper and pencils,” he replied. “Oh yes, and a large wastebasket, so I can throw away all my mistakes.”⁴

He and Elsa soon found a house to rent, which they celebrated by hosting a small musical recital featuring the works of Haydn and Mozart. The noted Russian violinist Toscha Seidel played lead, with Einstein as second fiddle. In return for some violin tips, Einstein tried to explain relativity theory to Seidel and made him some drawings of moving rods contracting in length.⁵

Thus began a proliferation of popular tales in town about Einstein’s love for music. One involved Einstein playing in a quartet with violin virtuoso Fritz Kreisler. At a certain point they got out of sync. Kreisler stopped playing and turned to Einstein in mock exasperation. “What’s the matter, professor, can’t you count?”⁶ More poignantly, there was an evening where a Christian prayer group gathered to make intercessions for persecuted Jews. Einstein surprised them by asking if he could come. He brought his violin and, as if offering a prayer, played a solo.⁷

Many of his performances were purely impromptu. That first Halloween, he disarmed some astonished trick-or- treaters, a group of 12-year-old girls who had come with the intent of playing a prank, by appearing at the door and serenading them with his violin. And at Christmastime, when members of the First Presbyterian Church came by to sing carols, he stepped out into the snow, borrowed a violin from one of the women, and accompanied them. “He was just a lovely person,” one of them recalled.⁸

Einstein soon acquired an image, which grew into a near legend but was nevertheless based on reality, of being a kindly and gentle professor, distracted at times but unfailingly sweet, who wandered about lost in thought, helped children with their homework, and rarely combed his hair or wore socks. With his amused sense of self-awareness, he catered to such perceptions. “I’m a kind of ancient figure known primarily for his non-use of socks and wheeled out on special occasions as a curiosity,” he joked. His slightly disheveled appearance was partly an assertion of his simplicity and partly a mild act of rebellion. “I have reached an age when, if someone tells me to wear socks, I don’t have to,” he told a neighbor.⁹

His baggy, comfortable clothes became a symbol of his lack of pretense. He had a leather jacket that he tended to wear to events both formal and informal. When a friend found out that he had a mild allergy to wool sweaters, she went to a surplus store and bought him some cotton sweatshirts, which he wore all the time. And his dismissive attitude toward haircuts and grooming was so infectious that Elsa, Margot, and his sister, Maja, all sported the same disheveled gray profusion.

He was able to make his rumpled-genius image as famous as Chaplin did the little tramp. He was kindly yet aloof, brilliant yet baffled. He floated around with a distracted air and a wry sensibility. He exuded honesty to a fault, was sometimes but not always as naive as he seemed, cared passionately about humanity and sometimes about people. He would fix his gaze on cosmic truths and global issues, which allowed him to seem detached from the here and now. This role he played was not far from the truth, but he enjoyed playing it to the hilt, knowing that it was such a great role.

He had also, by then, adapted willingly to the role Elsa played, that of a wife who could be both doting and demanding, protective yet afflicted with occasional social aspirations. They had grown comfortable together, after some rough patches. “I manage him,” she said proudly, “but I never let him know that I manage him.”¹⁰

Actually, he knew, and he found it mildly amusing. He surrendered, for example, to Elsa’s nagging that he smoked too much and on Thanksgiving bet her that he would be able to abstain from his pipe until the new year. When Elsa boasted of this at a dinner party, Einstein grumbled, “You see, I am no longer a slave to my pipe, but I am a slave to that woman.” Einstein kept his word, but “he got up at daylight on New Year’s morning, and he hasn’t had his pipe out of his mouth since except to eat and sleep,” Elsa told neighbors a few days after the deal was over.¹¹