Authors: Walter Isaacson
Although he enjoyed the school in Aarau, Einstein turned out to be an uneven student. His admission report noted that he needed to do remedial work in chemistry and had “great gaps” in his knowledge of
French. By midyear, he still was required to “continue with private lessons in French & chemistry,” and “the protest in French remains in effect.” His father was sanguine when Jost Winteler sent him the midyear report. “Not all its parts fulfill my wishes and expectations,” he wrote, “but with Albert I got used to finding mediocre grades along with very good ones, and I am therefore not disconsolate about them.”
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Music continued to be a passion. There were nine violinists in his class, and their teacher noted that they suffered from “some stiffness in bowing technique here and there.” But Einstein was singled out for praise: “One student, by the name of Einstein, even sparkled by rendering an adagio from a Beethoven sonata with deep understanding.” At a concert in the local church, Einstein was chosen to play first violin in a piece by Bach. His “enchanting tone and incomparable rhythm” awed the second violinist, who asked, “Do you count the beats?” Einstein replied, “Heavens no, it’s in my blood.”
His classmate Byland recalled Einstein playing a Mozart sonata with such passion—“What fire there was in his playing!”—that it seemed like hearing the composer for the first time. Listening to him, Byland realized that Einstein’s wisecracking, sarcastic exterior was a shell around a softer inner soul. “He was one of those split personalities who know how to protect, with a prickly exterior, the delicate realm of their intense personal life.”
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Einstein’s contempt for Germany’s authoritarian schools and militarist atmosphere made him want to renounce his citizenship in that country. This was reinforced by Jost Winteler, who disdained all forms of nationalism and instilled in Einstein the belief that people should consider themselves citizens of the world. So he asked his father to help him drop his German citizenship. The release came through in January 1896, and for the time being he was stateless.
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He also that year became a person without a religious affiliation. In the application to renounce his German citizenship, his father had written, presumably at Albert’s request, “no religious denomination.” It was a statement Albert would also make when applying for Zurich residency a few years later, and on various occasions over the ensuing two decades.
His rebellion from his childhood fling with ardent Judaism, coupled with his feelings of detachment from Munich’s Jews, had alienated him from his heritage. “The religion of the fathers, as I encountered it in Munich during religious instruction and in the synagogue, repelled rather than attracted me,” he later explained to a Jewish historian. “The Jewish bourgeois circles that I came to know in my younger years, with their affluence and lack of a sense of community, offered me nothing that seemed to be of value.”
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Later in life, beginning with his exposure to virulent anti-Semitism in the 1920s, Einstein would begin to reconnect with his Jewish identity. “There is nothing in me that can be described as a ‘Jewish faith,’ ” he said, “however I am happy to be a member of the Jewish people.” Later he would make the same point in more colorful ways. “The Jew who abandons his faith,” he once said, “is in a similar position to a snail that abandons his shell. He is still a snail.”
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His renunciation of Judaism in 1896 should, therefore, be seen not as a clean break but as part of a lifelong evolution of his feelings about his cultural identity. “At that time I would not even have understood what leaving Judaism could possibly mean,” he wrote a friend the year before he died. “But I was fully aware of my Jewish origin, even though the full significance of belonging to Jewry was not realized by me until later.”
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Einstein ended his year at the Aarau school in a manner that would have seemed impressive for anyone except one of history’s great geniuses, scoring the second highest grades in his class. (Alas, the name of the boy who bested Einstein is lost to history.) On a 1 to 6 scale, with 6 being the highest, he scored a 5 or 6 in all of his science and math courses as well as in history and Italian. His lowest grade was a 3, in French.
That qualified him to take a series of exams, written and oral, that would permit him, if he passed, to enter the Zurich Polytechnic. On his German exam, he did a perfunctory outline of a Goethe play and scored a 5. In math, he made a careless mistake, calling a number “imaginary” when he meant “irrational,” but still got a top grade. In physics, he arrived late and left early, completing the two-hour test in an hour and fifteen minutes; he got the top grade. Altogether, he ended
up with a 5.5, the best grade among the nine students taking the exams.
The one section on which he did poorly was French. But his three-paragraph essay was, to those of us today, the most interesting part of all of his exams. The topic was “Mes Projets d’avenir,” my plans for the future. Although the French was not memorable, the personal insights were:
If I am lucky and pass my exams, I will enroll in the Zurich Polytechnic. I will stay there four years to study mathematics and physics. I suppose I will become a teacher in these fields of science, opting for the theoretical part of these sciences.
Here are the reasons that have led me to this plan. They are, most of all, my personal talent for abstract and mathematical thinking ... My desires have also led me to the same decision. That is quite natural; everybody desires to do that for which he has a talent. Besides, I am attracted by the independence offered by the profession of science.
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In the summer of 1896, the Einstein brothers’ electrical business again failed, this time because they bungled getting the necessary water rights to build a hydroelectric system in Pavia. The partnership was dissolved in a friendly fashion, and Jakob joined a large firm as an engineer. But Hermann, whose optimism and pride tended to overwhelm any prudence, insisted on opening yet another new dynamo business, this time in Milan. Albert was so dubious of his father’s prospects that he went to his relatives and suggested that they not finance him again, but they did.
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Hermann hoped that Albert would someday join him in the business, but engineering held little appeal for him. “I was originally supposed to become an engineer,” he later wrote a friend, “but the thought of having to expend my creative energy on things that make practical everyday life even more refined, with a bleak capital gain as the goal, was unbearable to me. Thinking for its own sake, like music!”
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And thus he headed off to the Zurich Polytechnic.
The Zurich Polytechnic, with 841 students, was mainly a teachers’ and technical college when 17-year-old Albert Einstein enrolled in October 1896. It was less prestigious than the neighboring University of Zurich and the universities in Geneva and Basel, all of which could grant doctoral degrees (a status that the Polytechnic, officially named the Eidgenössische Polytechnische Schule, would attain in 1911 when it became the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, or ETH). Nevertheless, the Polytechnic had a solid reputation in engineering and science. The head of the physics department, Heinrich Weber, had recently procured a grand new building, funded by the electronics magnate (and Einstein Brothers competitor) Werner von Siemens. It housed showcase labs famed for their precision measurements.
Einstein was one of eleven freshmen enrolled in the section that provided training “for specialized teachers in mathematics and physics.” He lived in student lodgings on a monthly stipend of 100 Swiss francs from his Koch family relatives. Each month he put aside 20 of those francs toward the fee he would eventually have to pay to become a Swiss citizen.
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Theoretical physics was just coming into its own as an academic discipline in the 1890s, with professorships in the field sprouting up across Europe. Its pioneer practitioners—such as Max Planck in Berlin,
Hendrik Lorentz in Holland, and Ludwig Boltzmann in Vienna—combined physics with math to suggest paths where experimentalists had yet to tread. Because of this, math was supposed to be a major part of Einstein’s required studies at the Polytechnic.
Einstein, however, had a better intuition for physics than for math, and he did not yet appreciate how integrally the two subjects would be related in the pursuit of new theories. During his four years at the Polytechnic, he got marks of 5 or 6 (on a 6-point scale) in all of his theoretical physics courses, but got only 4s in most of his math courses, especially those in geometry. “It was not clear to me as a student,” he admitted, “that a more profound knowledge of the basic principles of physics was tied up with the most intricate mathematical methods.”
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That realization would sink in a decade later, when he was wrestling with the geometry of his theory of gravity and found himself forced to rely on the help of a math professor who had once called him a lazy dog. “I have become imbued with great respect for mathematics,” he wrote to a colleague in 1912, “the subtler part of which I had in my simple-mindedness regarded as pure luxury until now.” Near the end of his life, he expressed a similar lament in a conversation with a younger friend. “At a very early age, I made an assumption that a successful physicist only needs to know elementary mathematics,” he said. “At a later time, with great regret, I realized that the assumption of mine was completely wrong.”
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His primary physics professor was Heinrich Weber, the one who a year earlier had been so impressed with Einstein that, even after he had failed his entrance exam to the Polytechnic, he urged him to stay in Zurich and audit his lectures. During Einstein’s first two years at the Polytechnic, their mutual admiration endured. Weber’s lectures were among the few that impressed him. “Weber lectured on heat with great mastery,” he wrote during their second year. “One lecture after another of his pleases me.” He worked in Weber’s laboratory “with fervor and passion,” took fifteen courses (five lab and ten classroom) with him, and scored well in them all.
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Einstein, however, gradually became disenchanted with Weber. He felt that the professor focused too much on the historical foundations of physics, and he did not deal much with contemporary frontiers.
“Anything that came after Helmholtz was simply ignored,” one contemporary of Einstein complained. “At the close of our studies, we knew all the past of physics but nothing of the present and future.”
Notably absent from Weber’s lectures was any exploration of the great breakthroughs of James Clerk Maxwell, who, beginning in 1855, developed profound theories and elegant mathematical equations that described how electromagnetic waves such as light propagated. “We waited in vain for a presentation of Maxwell’s theory,” wrote another fellow student. “Einstein above all was disappointed.”
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Given his brash attitude, Einstein didn’t hide his feelings. And given his dignified sense of himself, Weber bristled at Einstein’s ill-concealed disdain. By the end of their four years together they were antagonists.
Weber’s irritation was yet another example of how Einstein’s scientific as well as personal life was affected by the traits deeply bred into his Swabian soul: his casual willingness to question authority, his sassy attitude in the face of regimentation, and his lack of reverence for received wisdom. He tended to address Weber, for example, in a rather informal manner, calling him “Herr Weber” instead of “Herr Professor.”
When his frustration finally overwhelmed his admiration, Professor Weber’s pronouncement on Einstein echoed that of the irritated teacher at the Munich gymnasium a few years earlier. “You’re a very clever boy, Einstein,” Weber told him. “An extremely clever boy. But you have one great fault: you’ll never let yourself be told anything.”
There was some truth to that assessment. But Einstein was to show that, in the jangled world of physics at the turn of the century, this insouciant ability to tune out the conventional wisdom was not the worst fault to have.
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Einstein’s impertinence also got him into trouble with the Polytechnic’s other physics professor, Jean Pernet, who was in charge of experimental and lab exercises. In his course Physical Experiments for Beginners, Pernet gave Einstein a 1, the lowest possible grade, thus earning himself the historic distinction of having flunked Einstein in a physics course. Partly it was because Einstein seldom showed up for the course. At Pernet’s written request, in March 1899 Einstein was
given an official “director’s reprimand due to lack of diligence in physics practicum.”
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Why are you specializing in physics, Pernet asked Einstein one day, instead of a field like medicine or even law? “Because,” Einstein replied, “I have even less talent for those subjects. Why shouldn’t I at least try my luck with physics?”
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On those occasions when Einstein did deign to show up in Pernet’s lab, his independent streak sometimes got him in trouble, such as the day he was given an instruction sheet for a particular experiment. “With his usual independence,” his friend and early biographer Carl Seelig reports, “Einstein naturally flung the paper in the waste paper basket.” He proceeded to pursue the experiment in his own way. “What do you make of Einstein?” Pernet asked an assistant. “He always does something different from what I have ordered.”
“He does indeed, Herr Professor,” the assistant replied, “but his solutions are right and the methods he uses are of great interest.”
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Eventually, these methods caught up with him. In July 1899, he caused an explosion in Pernet’s lab that “severely damaged” his right hand and required him to go to the clinic for stitches. The injury made it difficult for him to write for at least two weeks, and it forced him to give up playing the violin for even longer. “My fiddle had to be laid aside,” he wrote to a woman he had performed with in Aarau. “I’m sure it wonders why it is never taken out of the black case. It probably thinks it has gotten a stepfather.”
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He soon resumed playing the violin, but the accident seemed to make him even more wedded to the role of theorist rather than experimentalist.