Albert Einstein, a Biographical Portrait

Front matter

ALBERT EINSTEIN

A BIOGRAPHICAL PORTRAIT

THE MAN WHO HAS DISCOVERED AN IDEA WHICH ALLOWS US TO PENETRATE, TO WHATEVER SLIGHT DEGREE, A LITTLE MORE DEEPLY THE ETERNAL ARCANUM OF NATURE, HAS BEEN GRANTED A GREAT FAVOR. IF, IN ADDITION, HE EXPERIENCES THE BEST HELP, SYMPATHY, AND RECOGNITION OF HIS TIME, HE ATTAINS ALMOST MORE HAPPINESS THAN ONE MAN CAN BEAR.

INTRODUCTION

I

Certain periods in history are, as by a miracle, suddenly made rich by new and profound ideas. Clear intellectual light falls on a world previously dark. New problems arise on which the scholars and thinkers of the time thrive and become great personalities. Thus the Renaissance was the age of invention and discovery, but also the age of great men of the stature of Galileo and Leonardo. It is through men of this type that the happy miracle of a new spirit prospers, manifesting its significance in creative personalities and fixing itself in works which, as eternal laws, explain nature. Most scientific efforts, however, are carried on in a different, and less heroic, manner. They show only to a limited extent the direction of the times and the creative personality. Scientific progress is attained step by step and only by slow, methodical means, till finally the great investigator through profound experience or a happy thought reaches his final inductions. He is at once father to a great effort and son of an industrious past. Deeds of this kind are neither magical nor heroic.

The Renaissance was an age of miracles, of heroic creators. They attained new, fruitful perspectives in science; they were the builders of a new world-view which the next centuries replaced by another: that of particular methods, specific measurements, and small, concrete experiments. Since the time when Kant with his transcendental philosophy transformed scientific thought into critical thought and made skepticism the guard over imagination, exact methods have become firm, strong tracks over which advancing science has glided almost without great names. The spirit of technique has become also the technique of spirit, and a technical age has demanded a technical science—one which improves scientific method, refines the apparatus, and, if possible, transfers the result to practical life. The investigator whose genius and imagination derive from a technique of this order, must, however, first of all free himself of traditional methods and scientific prejudices. Indeed, such revolutionary action implies chiefly the awakening of an individual personality. It is in this manner that each great discoverer repeats on his own account the work of the Renaissance and frees himself from the ideas and forms of tradition. In any case, this means a threat to inherited scientific technique and is the beginning of a heroism which combats such opposition and disturbs many a dogmatic slumber.

Kant’s critical philosophy despite its skeptical character contained one inviolable dogma: the absolute accuracy of mathematics and of its allied study, natural science. Mathematics had, since the days of ancient Greece, made its royal way and had reached a point “beyond which the course man had to take was unmistakably the certain progress of a science for all time, outlined and directed to include endless vistas.” Newton’s system of mechanics and Euclidean geometry were therefore, to Kant, indisputable truth influencing the relation of philosophy to exact science. In the course of the nineteenth century, however, it became evident that Euclidean geometry was not the only one conceivable, but that there were other geometries. Furthermore, the magnificent structure of mechanist philosophy had been disturbed by the electrodynamic system, so that gradually a mathematical scientific conception of the world had been established, basically different from the world in whose dogmatic truth Kant had believed. This change manifested itself only slowly and against great opposition. The old forms persisted behind the growth of new meanings which continually threatened to break the brittle shell of the past. In the sphere of physics the important contribution was made by Albert Einstein, who finally not only invalidated Newton’s absolutes of space and time, but first introduced non-Euclidean geometry into the structure of the new physical philosophy.

II

The magnificence of this achievement bespeaks the personality of Einstein. In an era apparently characterized entirely by technique, mechanics and uniform routine, his personality and its world reputation seem almost a miracle; they make the alleged impersonality of the time seem a very doubtful matter. In Einstein may be recognized the growth of a lonely man, who, entirely out of his own experience and knowledge, with incomparable acuteness, has come upon the most fundamental and radical problems of his science and mastered them through long and intensive labor. In him may be found that great scientific intuition which relates pole and pole: the given problem and the suspected solution, the traditional enigma and the current postulate. All of these extremes together must contribute to a single work. This is the great truth which has raised Einstein, since early youth, above the scientific commonplace into the rarer atmosphere of investigation and discovery. The story of his life is also the history of the great investigator in our times, and to be able to observe it at close range is a gain for every one to whom the progress and achievement of a new theory appears a special and wonderful stroke of good fortune.

The relation of such a man to science is other than mere love for an intellectual handicraft. It is a passion which possesses him, almost a kind of religion. Just as with the biblical prophet the divine summons is the fundamental characteristic, so with the creative thinker; and each summons is at once a matter of humility and of pride. Humble, the thinker knows that he is in the service of an idea, the divine idea of scientific truth. But in the service of the idea he himself has become the creator requiring the joyful pride of his creation. This kind of chemical synthesis of humility and pride limns the countenance of the investigator.

In Einstein, almost nothing but humility appears. He considers his work a great blessing which fortune has bestowed on him. Generally, this is his idea of the purpose of science and of the motives of research. With Schopenhauer he believes that escape—escape from a painful commonplace and the chains of one’s own desires—is one of the most essential aims of artistic and scientific creation. “It drives the sensitive disposition out of his personal life into the world of objective vision and understanding; it is a motive similar to the townsman’s desire which irresistibly draws him away from noisy, confused surroundings to the high mountain landscape where the far glance glides on the quiet, clear air and fixes upon restful lines which seem created for infinity.”

In still another sense is Albert Einstein’s scientific labor the fulfillment of a desire. His work not only frees him of his ego, inasmuch as it carries over all energies and experiences into an objective world, but also simplifies and clarifies the picture of this world. This too means the fulfillment of a human desire, since only a simplified world of forms discloses a spiritual life of rest and harmony.

The investigation of the theoretical physicist results in a world-view, just as does the work of the artist and the philosopher. It is perhaps not so comprehensive and not so anchored in personal experience as these other worlds. It results only in a familiarity with a small part of nature which is, however, so finely constructed and illuminated by all the gifts of the human spirit, that it, too, means a view of the world. This temper of theoretical physics, this metaphysical temper, if it may be called that, is especially convincing if, as in the case of Einstein, the physical world-view revealed is a spirited and creative innovation.

III

The decline of the mechanist philosophy and (the extension of mathematical principles in the form of non-Euclidean geometry are among the greatest setbacks that the old physical worldview could suffer. Out of this upheaval the great masters of the new physics built the new structure of their science, which fulfilled in solid proportions the fundamental desire for a simplified, observable scheme of nature. Einstein feels throughout his entire being this desire for completion. The progress of his scientific work shows the continuous extension of his ideas, in order to embrace as much as possible the totality of physical forces. There is here actually an æsthetic need for a unified, natural, scientific world-view. It corresponded to Einstein’s longing for the universally human, for an inclusive humanity.

Einstein is certainly the complete human being, and as such a rarity in contemporary intellectual life. His completeness does not lie in his ability or in his learning, but in his interests and in his inclinations. A genuine creative power always sees beyond its province of specialization, and finds it necessary to attach itself to the col- lective human mind, that is to humanity itself. One must be aware that each work is organized in the time and space of creative reason, and that everything created belongs to the great fellowship of creations.

This form of universalism is a decisive factor in Einstein’s spiritual deportment. There is no human and intellectual sphere which does not interest him. He is interested in all values and occurrences that touch the intellect; no other than a social existence is conceivable to him, for in practical life every man lives with and by other men.

Leonardo possessed this universality, also Goethe. Its practical efficacy lies in the fact that the individual effort is always completed by new contents of experience. Music, to Einstein, is this kind of redintegration, as, contrarily, science was to the art of Leonardo. But Einstein is also interested in technical processes, and likes to invent mechanical improvements which are of value in practice. Here again is evident the ardent desire to include the great and the minute; the will to an inclusive view of the world and to exact mathematical measurement. Thus, too, one may perhaps explain psychologically the fact that Einstein represents the great system of natural forces in the form of a mathematical equation.

Hostinato rigore, obstinate precision: this was the device of Leonardo. With its help he sought to overcome all obscurities and to attain an inclusive vision of the world. The same maxim is equally valid to Einstein, and enlists him in a similar work of the spirit. A vision of the world of this kind is the vision of the artist. It brings all the particulars of thought and feeling into a great ruling unity and secures it through a responsible devotion to each detail whether it be a number, an equation, a line, a diagram or an event.

For all that, Einstein is not a “modern” man. Nothing is further from him than a trivial selfishness and particularism of life and interests. No other phenomena are stranger to him than the pursuit of success, the brutality of gain, of lovelessness and of cruelty. The creator’s joy in his scientific labor passes on to society. One is at once creator and creation, and it is particularly the creative human being who feels he is a product resembling, constantly bound up with, and always responsible to, all true humanity. What we are and what we create has its meaning only in the light of this common human interest, which is at once the common interest of all science, art and religion.

This is Albert Einstein’s philosophy of life.

Chapter 1

Munich had entered the new German empire as a southern capital, Catholic by tradition. During the decades before the establishment of the Empire, the center of political and economic life had already been shifted to the north. Prussia had become the principal German power, and Berlin the center of all efforts towards German unity and German expansion in Europe. But it had been known for a long time that even if the political unity of the German race were attained solely under the militant, cool, imperialistic kingdom of the north, the old opposition between northern and southern Germany would not be terminated by this political union. On the contrary, this opposition could only become more sharp, just as the differences and friction between individual members of a family are greater in one home than in separate dwellings. The vast roof, reaching from the Alps to the North and Baltic Seas, looked down on a south which could only become more southern, a north which could only become more Prussian.

Yet Munich had hardly ever appeared so Southern as in the first decades following the establishment of the Empire. To the economically ambitious city of Berlin, the plodding, petty-trading Bavarian capital did not seem a likely competitor. Its residents lived comfortably in the past, in sight of the beautiful structures of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Baroque and the Rococo, and in the holy tradition of the Catholic Church. Munich society, despite its feudal aristocracy, always had a small-bourgeois character.

In Munich of the eighties, therefore, there were to be observed few social and religious contrasts. Descent and religious denomination were not much questioned. But the Jews, though united in common interests with the Christians, lived, as everywhere and at all times, in a certain seclusion. The childhood of Albert Einstein was thus passed in a characteristically Jewish environment.

He was born on the 14th of March, 1879, at Ulm. A year later, his parents moved to Munich. In a rented house, situated in a district appropriately removed from the brilliance and renown of the center of the city, the boy spent the next few years. From the windows of his parents’ home over a lot between tall stone houses, he looked out on a scanty stretch of romantic country. During even these early years the boy felt alone. The world in which he lived was sober. One could not dream in it, and miracles never happened.

When Albert Einstein was about four years old, he saw for the first time a small object, in his father’s eyes a sort of toy, which seemed to come from another world. His father showed him a small compass, and tried to explain the secret of the dancing magnetic needle, without, however, producing any great results by his explanations. The miracle which excited the boy so that he trembled and grew cold, was different. There, in his father’s hand, lay a small receptacle; in it trembled a delicate needle guided by a far, intangible, divine power. For the first time, the child had a presentiment of the mysterious web of nature, of its prodigious power, to which all being is subject. He would gladly have learned more about it, but calm explanations on the use of the compass did not greatly help him.

He sought his bearings from his father, even more than from his mother. The father was unruffled, easy, kind, loved by all acquaintances, and particularly by women. His approach to the world was optimistic, perhaps even careless, but it helped him to put up with many troubles, chiefly economic. His salutary nature conveyed its influence to his wife and children.

Though Einstein family was a merchant, he possessed a particular inclination for technical matters. He conducted an electrical business. He enjoyed technical problems and mathematics as it was taught in the lower forms of the German secondary schools. Music meant little to him, was a distant and not very necessary pleasure. But he loved literature and in the lamplight, evenings, read aloud Schiller and Heine. He was not concerned about politics, yet the rising power of the new Empire and Otto von Bismark’s mighty form impressed him.

When the peal of trumpets and the roll of drums, the clatter of cavalry and marching columns, rose from the street and reverberated against the windows, young and old looked out. The eyes of children, fascinated by the display of this military power, shone large and round. Young Albert, however, seeing these gay-colored armies, hated and feared them. They were tools with no will of their own, forced to obey, machines. The boy, told that he, too, would become a soldier, was terrified. He would never be that! He would rather go away, far away, where this necessity did not exist! His parents had to promise him that.

The mother, Pauline (née Koch) was, in many respects, more serious than the father, and did not always see the world through his optimistic eyes. She enjoyed her life, loved people and her house- hold, and possessed a genuine and hearty humor. She was a devoted mother. For herself, she asked no more than a simple, secure existence. Of small Albert, however, she often prophesied: “Some day he will be a great professor.” Both parents had come from Swabia, the father from Bad Buchau, the mother from Bad Cannstatt; they spoke a South-German dialect and in imagination lived amid the remembered loveliness of their native landscape. With their son and their daughter Maja, two years his junior, they went on frequent outings to a neighboring inn to eat Weisswurst, or up to the mountains and the upper Bavarian lakes. To the children, these Sunday outings with their parents were but an indifferent pleasure. Often, the children’s little cousin, Elsa, later Albert Einstein’s wife, went along with them. The children teased one another and played together. For the greater part of the time, however, the boy was quiet and retired.

Slowly, and only after much difficulty, he learned to talk. His parents thought he was abnormal. The hired governess called the still, backward, slow-speaking Albert, “Pater Langweil” (Father Bore).

But tiresomeness was more characteristic of the well-to-do philistine atmosphere in which the child was raised. After about five years the father moved to the suburb of Sendling, where he estab- lished an electrical engineering plant and bought a private house with a large, handsome garden. On the same premises lived the uncle who also had a share in the business. In this house, the child grew to boyhood. Here, dreams and play were the early expression of a growing spiritual life. Here occurred Albert’s first contacts with the spiritual world and his intimations of a larger life. Sophisticated small cousins came from Genoa, told of Italy and its people, of harbors, ships and sailors. With old factory chests they played “going to sea.” The boy’s world grew larger.

He experienced it particularly as nature. Each moment brought him nearer to the wonder of it. With religious awe he felt its presence and perceived it the whole of God’s majesty, which compelled adoration. Thus the boy revealed a religious frame of mind which, like so much that happened within him, was not properly understood by his parents.

Albert longed for a religious life and for religious instruction. But he heard only ironic and unfriendly talk about dogmatic ritual. His father prided himself on the fact that he was a freethinker. His belief harmonized with the thought of his time, which was controlled by the philosophy of materialism. Albert’s father was proud that Jewish rites were not practiced in his house. The boy, however, grieved over the fact that the Jewish dietary laws were neglected. For him they were holy commandments which must not be despised or ridiculed.

In his own way, he sought to give his religious temper expression. He wrote and set to music brief songs in praise of God and sang them in his home and on the street. He identified God with nature. He was carried away by a Spinozistic pantheism. Like the young Goethe, he felt nature an all-embracing, all ful-filling power: “She has no speech nor voice, but she creates tongues and hearts through which she feels and speaks.”

With this religious feeling, Albert Einstein, shy and slow, entered school at the age of six; first, primary school, since the Prussian system of combined elementary and secondary schools was unknown in Bavaria. From the lowest to the highest grade, school was ever to him a burdensome duty.

The methods of instruction in the primary school were far removed from any educational ideal. Rules were enforced mechanically with the ample support of thrashings and harsh words. The reigning atmosphere was hard and brutal.

In the large, overflowing classes the difference between the children of rich and poor parents was marked. In contrast to the poor, the rich children seemed strangely to show a greater power of hold- ing out against the brutality of the school. For them after a few hours everything was over; the small pupils were again the spoiled darlings of rich citizens in Munich. For the poor children, however, there was no escape; they returned from school to the gloom and lovelessness of poverty.

Young Albert Einstein thus experienced the social problem for the first time. He never forgot his first glimpse of the injustice which prevails in human society.

At school, his religious instruction was Catholic; at home, Jewish. But he did not feel religious differences. On the contrary, he perceived the sameness of all religions. The stories of the Old Testament and Jesus’ Way of Sorrow impressed him with equal power.

The Catholic teacher of religion liked him. But one day the same teacher brought a large nail to class and told the pupils that it was the nail with which the Jews had nailed Jesus to the cross. The incident stimulated in the pupils anti-Semitic feeling which was turned against their Jewish fellow-student Einstein. For the first time Albert experienced the frightful venom of anti-Semitism.

But his religious sentiments were only more and more strengthened. From nature they slowly carried over to art. Music filled him most, became a spiritual revelation. His mother, accompanied fi by engineers who worked in his father’s factory, played duets on the piano, for the most part classical music, chiefly Beethoven. At the age of six, Albert was already taking lessons on the violin, but till he was twelve these lessons gave him no pleasure, remained only a duty as burdensome as school. His musical experience grew out of listening, and pleasure in his own playing came but slowly.

Albert continued to be a timid, mentally awkward boy. Rather than being with boys of his own age or with older people, he preferred being alone. He was strongly built, but he was frequently ill. The glimpses of the world which he saw at school and on the street made him sad. At home there was no wealth, but solid bourgeois comfort. When Albert saw the lives of the poor, he felt that he himself had been too fortunate, and his conscience was troubled. The idea of drawing unearned gain from an unjust world was insufferable.

The secondary school also did not satisfy his intellectual curiosity. Fundamentally, the secondary school was controlled by the same educational principles as the primary school, although these principles were less brutal and somewhat more cultivated. Here too, however, the greater part of learning was rote. Educating the student for productive work, to a deeper understanding of science and in the experience of spiritual things, was still not understood Education in the German secondary schools then arranged, as it does to an extent now, for an upbringing emphasizing only dead concepts and formulas and not a living point of view. The effect of such education is often evident in the character of the student Life cannot always catch up with the omissions of education.

Albert attended the Luitpold Gymnasium at Munich. The most important study of the curriculum was the Ancient world, the Greek and Latin languages. The German secondary school had been founded on the ideal of new humanism. The instructors, however, failed to grasp its spirit. They did not wish to be intelligent guides to youth, but stood for mere authority, through office, education, and age. It was only in the higher classes that Albert met teachers possessing a true love of the spirit, capable also of transmitting this love to the student. But these teachers were exceptions. The impression of school which the six-year-old boy had already formed in the primary grades remained: school was servitude, nothing but fulfillment of duty, and very seldom real spiritual enrichment and education.

This inability to identify himself with the school, with teachers and pupils,—Albert pos- sessed only one real friend at the school—added only to his feeling of isolation. But this feeling in him was altogether of a productive nature. He was concerned not only with himself, but also, in a real and independent way, with things of the spirit, with science and with art. He had a natural antipathy for excessive physical activity, gymnastics and sports. He did not feel himself physically equal to such exertions. He easily became dizzy and tired. Violent activity imposed by the authority of the instructor offended him. Activity should be the result of a personal decision, of free creative emotions, making demands on itself, not compulsion, not submission before authority! Through the contrast to the mechanical carrying on of the secondary school and the conventional city life, the boy’s love of nature continued to grow. It was identified with a love of the wonderful.

Albert was about thirteen or fourteen when, for the first and last time, he came in contact with an instructor whose friendship was a spiritual experience. The instructor’s name was Ruess. He taught Latin, Greek and German. He had a talent for inspiring his pupils with an enthusiasm for the beauties of the classical world. In his German lessons, he introduced them to classical German poetry and so to the fundamentals of art. He was able to bring near, even to his greatest pupil, the classical spirit and mighty creative form of Goethe and Schiller.

From that time on, Albert Einstein’s love for the classical spirit in art never failed him. Shakespeare’s intense, dramatic gesture, Schiller’s great architecture, Goethe’s universality, always remained, for him, profoundly involved in the substance of poetry. Liveliest of all remembrances was that of a lecture on Goethe’s “Hermann and Dorothea.” This lecture was to him the revelation of a new world, which for loveliness and wonder could be compared only to nature. The boy’s love for this teacher, who alone knew how to satisfy the pupil’s spiritual hunger, was so great that the punishment of staying in after school with him was a pleasure. The boy’s gratitude remained after he was a man. At about the age of thirty Einstein revisited his old teacher. But he was deeply disappointed when the teacher did not recognize him. Was it possible that the young professor had formerly been his pupil? Ruess did not comprehend the matter, and to no purpose racked his brains to remember. Moreover, what did this former pupil want with him? It is not customary for former students to revisit their teachers when the latter are not going to be of service. Did this Professor Einstein intend borrowing money from him? Perhaps this was it. Both experienced a painful sensation, and Ein- stein hurried to end this visit to which he had so eagerly looked forward.

A strong, indelible, and creative impression not to be overlooked was produced on the twelve-year-old boy by the first small geometry book held in his tender hands. Geometry was not yet an assigned study in the secondary school. That did not begin until shortly after. But Albert already possessed the textbook, which caused him a tremendous excitement. Here at last was a way which led to knowledge, to the mysteries of truth, to clear and honest thought. But the boy also experienced great æsthetic pleasure at the thought that the world could be built up by conceptions—products of human understanding. All these theorems and constructions seemed indescribably beautiful.

Previous to this he had learned several elementary mathematical facts from his uncle, his father’s partner in the factory. In a very amusing manner he explained to the boy the essentials of algebra: “Algebra? It’s a lazy kind of arithmetic. What you don’t know, you simply call x and then look for it.” This uncle also told him of the Pythagorean theorem, but he gave only the statement, not the proof. The boy’s ambition was to discover the proof himself, unaided by the least knowledge of geometry. And the miracle happened: racking his brains over his small desk, the child-head supported by the hands, Albert independently succeeded in proving the central proposition of Euclidean geometry. He busied himself more and more with geometric problems. Soon the small textbook was his favorite reading. It brought him the classical experience of perfect harmony, and his preoccupation with mathematics became the most beautiful adventure of his youth. When he secured Spieker’s geometry, he at once succeeded in solving all the exercises, including the most difficult, with the exception of two or three.

Each Thursday his parents invited a poor Russian-Jewish student to dinner. This practice was a form of customary beneficence silently exercised in Jewish circles. To this student Albert was indebted for a knowledge of the popular books on natural science by Aaron Bernstein.

These very popular little books, twenty-one of which were published, had at that time an extraordinarily large circulation. They were a gay-colored, beautiful atlas of nature within the limits of a child’s comprehension. To Albert, these books were veritable revelations. He consumed them with the same passion with which other boys devour Indian stories. At that time, he already had the ability to comprehend the essence of all great and beautiful things. Nature is great not only through the enormous dimen- sions of time and space but through the overwhelming experience of the wonderful. Thus there arose in him the deep veneration for nature, its mysteries as well as its laws. This experience was a determining factor in his future research.

At fourteen the boy was already master of the higher mathematics which the secondary school, based on humanistic principles, did not teach. Integral and differential calculus, analytical geometry—he mastered them all by himself. His mathematical knowledge was already so great that he amazed both teachers and fellow-students. The talent manifested was that of genius. To the teachers, it was not always pleasing. Many questions the boy asked embarrassed them to the point of silence.