As Cohen was leaving, a big grin came over Einstein’s face as he said he would explain the answer to the gadget. “Now the equivalence principle!” he announced. He poked the stick upward until it almost touched the ceiling. Then he let it drop straight down. The ball, while in free fall, behaved as if it was weightless. The spring inside the contraption instantly pulled it into the cup.21
Einstein was now entering the last week of his life, and it is fitting that he focused on the matters most important to him. On April 11, he signed the Einstein-Russell manifesto. As Russell later declared, “He remained sane in a mad world.”22 Out of that document grew the Pug-wash Conferences, in which scientists and thinkers gathered annually to discuss how to control nuclear weapons.
Later that same afternoon, Israeli Ambassador Abba Eban arrived at Mercer Street to discuss a radio address Einstein was scheduled to give to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the Jewish state. He would be heard, Eban told him, by as many as 60 million listeners. Einstein was amused. “So, I shall now have a chance to become world famous,” he smiled.
After rattling around in the kitchen to make Eban a cup of coffee, Einstein told him that he saw the birth of Israel as one of the few political acts in his lifetime that had a moral quality. But he was concerned that the Jews were having trouble learning to live with the Arabs. “The attitude we adopt toward the Arab minority will provide the real test of our moral standards as a people,” he had told a friend a few weeks earlier. He wanted to broaden his speech, which he was scribbling in German in a very tight and neat handwriting, to urge the creation of a world government to preserve peace.23
Einstein went in to work at the Institute the next day, but he had a pain in his groin and it showed on his face. Is everything all right? his assistant asked. Everything is all right, he replied, but I am not.
He stayed at home the following day, partly because the Israeli consul was coming and partly because he was still not feeling well. After the visitors left, he lay down for a nap. But Dukas heard him rush to the bathroom in the middle of the afternoon, where he collapsed. The doctors gave him morphine, which helped him sleep, and Dukas set up her bed right next to his so that she could put ice on his dehydrated lips throughout the night. His aneurysm had started to break.24
A group of doctors convened at his home the next day, and after some consultation they recommended a surgeon who might be able, though it was thought unlikely, to repair the aorta. Einstein refused. “It is tasteless to prolong life artificially,” he told Dukas. “I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.”
He did ask, however, whether he would suffer “a horrible death.” The answer, the doctors said, was unclear. The pain of an internal hemorrhage could be excruciating. But it may take only a minute, or maybe an hour. To Dukas, who became overwrought, he smiled and said, “You’re really hysterical—I have to pass on sometime, and it doesn’t really matter when.”25
Dukas found him the next morning in agony, unable to lift his head. She rushed to the telephone, and the doctor ordered him to the hospital. At first he refused, but he was told he was putting too much of a burden on Dukas, so he relented. The volunteer medic in the ambulance was a political economist at Princeton, and Einstein was able to carry on a lively conversation with him. Margot called Hans Albert, who caught a plane from San Francisco and was soon by his father’s bedside. The economist Otto Nathan, a fellow German refugee who had become his close friend, arrived from New York.
But Einstein was not quite ready to die. On Sunday, April 17, he woke up feeling better. He asked Dukas to get him his glasses, papers, and pencils, and he proceeded to jot down a few calculations. He talked to Hans Albert about some scientific ideas, then to Nathan about the dangers of allowing Germany to rearm. Pointing to his equations, he lamented, half jokingly, to his son, “If only I had more mathematics.”26 For a half century he had been bemoaning both German nationalism and the limits of his mathematical toolbox, so it was fitting that these should be among his final utterances.
He worked as long as he could, and when the pain got too great he went to sleep. Shortly after one a.m. on Monday, April 18, 1955, the nurse heard him blurt out a few words in German that she could not understand. The aneurysm, like a big blister, had burst, and Einstein died at age 76.
At his bedside lay the draft of his undelivered speech for Israel Independence Day. “I speak to you today not as an American citizen and not as a Jew, but as a human being,” it began.27
Also by his bed were twelve pages of tightly written equations, littered with cross-outs and corrections.28 To the very end, he struggled to find his elusive unified field theory. And the final thing he wrote, before he went to sleep for the last time, was one more line of symbols and numbers that he hoped might get him, and the rest of us, just a little step closer to the spirit manifest in the laws of the universe.
EPILOGUE
EINSTEIN’S BRAIN AND EINSTEIN’S MIND
Einstein’s study, as he left it
When Sir Isaac Newton died, his body lay in state in the Jerusalem chamber of Westminster Abbey, and his pallbearers included the lord high chancellor, two dukes, and three earls. Einstein could have had a similar funeral, glittering with dignitaries from around the world. Instead, in accordance with his wishes, he was cremated in Trenton on the afternoon that he died, before most of the world had heard the news. There were only twelve people at the crematorium, including Hans Albert Einstein, Helen Dukas, Otto Nathan, and four members of the Bucky family. Nathan recited a few lines from Goethe, and then took Einstein’s ashes to the nearby Delaware River, where they were scattered.1
“No other man contributed so much to the vast expansion of 20th century knowledge,” President Eisenhower declared. “Yet no other man was more modest in the possession of the power that is knowledge, more sure that power without wisdom is deadly.” The
Einstein had insisted that his ashes be scattered so that his final resting place would not become the subject of morbid veneration. But there was one part of his body that was not cremated. In a drama that would seem farcical were it not so macabre, Einstein’s brain ended up being, for more than four decades, a wandering relic.3
Hours after Einstein’s death, what was supposed to be a routine autopsy was performed by the pathologist at Princeton Hospital,Thomas Harvey, a small-town Quaker with a sweet disposition and rather dreamy approach to life and death. As a distraught Otto Nathan watched silently, Harvey removed and inspected each of Einstein’s major organs, ending by using an electric saw to cut through his skull and remove his brain. When he stitched the body back up, he decided, without asking permission, to embalm Einstein’s brain and keep it.
The next morning, in a fifth-grade class at a Princeton school, the teacher asked her students what news they had heard. “Einstein died,” said one girl, eager to be the first to come up with that piece of information. But she quickly found herself topped by a usually quiet boy who sat in the back of the class. “My dad’s got his brain,” he
