Einstein: His Life and Universe

On the House side of the Capitol, Representative J. J. Kindred of New York proposed placing an explanation of Einstein’s theories in the Congressional Record. David Walsh of Massachusetts rose to object. Did Kindred understand the theory? “I have been earnestly busy with this theory for three weeks,” he replied, “and am beginning to see some light.” But what relevance, he was asked, did it have to the business of Congress? “It may bear upon the legislation of the future as to general relations with the cosmos.”

Such discourse made it inevitable that, when Einstein went with a group to the White House on April 25, President Warren G. Harding would be faced with the question of whether he understood relativity. As the group posed for cameras, President Harding smiled and confessed that he did not comprehend the theory at all. The Washington Post carried a cartoon showing him puzzling over a paper titled “Theory of Relativity” while Einstein puzzled over one on the “Theory of Normalcy,” which was the name Harding gave to his governing philosophy . The New York Times ran a page 1 headline: “Einstein Idea Puzzles Harding, He Admits.”

At a reception in the National Academy of Sciences on Constitution Avenue (which now boasts the world’s most interesting statue of Einstein, a twelve-foot-high full-length bronze figure of him reclining),⁴³ he listened to long speeches from various honorees, including Prince Albert I of Monaco, who was an avid oceanographer, a North Carolina scholar of hookworms, and a man who had invented a solar stove. As the evening droned on, Einstein turned to a Dutch diplomat seated next to him and said, “I’ve just developed a new theory of eternity.”⁴⁴

By the time Einstein reached Chicago, where he gave three lectures and played violin at a dinner party, he had become more adept at answering irksome questions, particularly the most frequent one, which was sparked by the fanciful New York Times headline after the 1919 eclipse that only twelve people could understand his theory.

“Is it true only twelve great minds can understand your theory?” the reporter from the Chicago Herald and Examiner asked.

“No, no,” Einstein replied with a smile. “I think the majority of scientists who have studied it can understand it.”

He then proceeded to try to explain it to the reporter by using his metaphor about how the universe would look to a two-dimensional creature who spent its life moving on a surface of what turned out to be a globe. “It could travel for millions of years and would always return to its starting point,” said Einstein. “It would never be conscious of what was above it or beneath it.”

The reporter, being a good Chicago newspaperman, was able to spin a glorious tale, written in the third person, about the depths of his own confusion. “When the reporter came to he was vainly trying to light a three-dimensional cigarette with a three-dimensional match,” the story concluded. “It began to trickle into his brain that the two- dimensional organism referred to was himself, and far from being the 13th Great Mind to comprehend the theory he was condemned henceforth to be one of the Vast Majority who live on Main Street and ride in Fords.”⁴⁵

When a reporter from the rival Tribune asked him the same question about only twelve people being able to understand his theory, Einstein again denied it. “Everywhere I go, someone asks me that question,” he said. “It’s absurd. Anyone who has had sufficient training in science can readily understand the theory.” But this time Einstein made no attempt to explain it, nor did the reporter. “The Tribune regrets to inform its readers that it will be unable to present to them Einstein’s theory of relativity,” the article began. “After the professor explained that the most incidental discussion of the question would take from three to four hours, it was decided to confine the interview to other things.”⁴⁶

Einstein went on to Princeton, where he delivered a weeklong series of scientific lectures and received an honorary degree “for voyaging through strange seas of thought.” Not only did he get a nice fee for the lectures (though apparently not the $15,000 he had originally sought), he also negotiated a deal while there that Princeton could publish his lectures as a book from which he would get a 15 percent royalty.⁴⁷

At the behest of Princeton’s president, all of Einstein’s lectures were very technical. They included more than 125 complex equations that he scribbled on the blackboard while speaking in German. As one student admitted to a reporter, “I sat in the balcony, but he talked right over my head anyway.”⁴⁸

At a party following one of these lectures, Einstein uttered one of his most memorable and self-revealing quotes. Someone excitedly informed him that word had just arrived of a new set of experiments improving on the Michelson-Morley technique that seemed to show that the ether existed and the speed of light was variable. Einstein simply refused to accept it. He knew that his theory was correct. And so he calmly responded, “Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not.”*

The mathematics professor Oswald Veblen, who was standing there, heard the remark and, when a new math building was built a decade later, asked Einstein for the right to carve the words on the stone mantel of the fireplace in the common room. Einstein happily sent back his approval and further explained to Veblen what he had meant: “Nature hides her secret because of her essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse.”⁴⁹

The building, neatly enough, later became the temporary home of the Institute for Advanced Study, and Einstein would have an office there when he immigrated to Princeton in 1933. Near the end of his life, he was in front of the fireplace at a retirement party for the mathematician Hermann Weyl, a friend who had followed him from Germany to Princeton when the Nazis took power. Alluding to his frustration with the uncertainties of quantum mechanics, Einstein nodded to the quote and lamented to Weyl, “Who knows, perhaps He is a little malicious.”⁵⁰

Einstein seemed to like Princeton. “Young and fresh,” he called it. “A pipe as yet unsmoked.”⁵¹ For a man who was invariably fondling new briar pipes, this was a compliment. It would not be a surprise, a dozen years hence, that he would decide to move there permanently.

Harvard, where Einstein went next, did not endear itself quite as well. Perhaps it was because Princeton President John Hibben had introduced him in German, whereas Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell spoke to him in French. In addition, Harvard had invited Einstein to visit, but it did not invite him to give lectures.

Some charged that this slight was due to the influence of a rival Zionist group in America led by Louis Brandeis, a graduate of Harvard Law School, who had become the first Jewish Supreme Court justice. The allegation was so widespread that Brandeis’s protege Felix Frankfurter had to issue a public denial. That prompted an amused letter about the perils of assimilationism from Einstein to Frankfurter. It was “a Jewish weakness,” he wrote, “always and eagerly to try to keep the Gentiles in good humor.”⁵²

The very assimilated Brandeis, who had been born in Kentucky and had turned himself into a proper Bostonian, was an example of the Jews from Germany whose families had arrived in the nineteenth century and tended to look down on the more recent immigrants from eastern Europe and Russia. For both political and personal reasons,