Einstein's Genius Club (6 page)

He acquitted himself honorably enough in his schoolwork. But he was the odd boy out in elementary school and, later, the Gymnasium, where rote learning and sports-worship ruled. Happily, he could turn to his uncle Jakob about algebra. Later, a young medical student, Max Talmey, became a boarder in the Einstein house. With Talmey, Einstein found an equal with whom to converse about physical science and higher mathematics. Geometry opened up the “sacred… book” of Euclidian geometry for Einstein: Its “clarity and certainty made an indescribable impression on me.”
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Very early on, he demonstrated the stubborn independence so evident throughout his life. He scorned organized sports and such youthful pastimes as playing soldier: “Poor people,” he once said as a uniformed parade passed.
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He resented the “mindless and mechanical method of teaching” favored by German elementary and secondary schools. Compulsory examinations seemed to him appropriate for “a penal institution.”
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Again and again, he turned to his mathematical pursuits, a world apart from school and the society of children.

At age twelve, Einstein, whose upbringing was secular, got religion. His overwhelmingly Catholic public school was required by law to ensure that he received training in his own religion. A distant relative was unearthed to do the honors, his nonobservant parents being unequal to the task. At first fiercely reluctant, he succumbed to the lure of Judaism with all the fervor of a convert. He was swept up by religious zeal, forgoing pork and composing religious songs. But as the time neared for his bar mitzvah, his high-spirited belief vanished. “[W]ith breathless attention,” he began
reading “popular scientific books” that thoroughly contradicted, in his view, much of the Bible. Later, he remembered his subsequent “orgy of free thinking, coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies.”
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He never had a bar mitzvah.

Had his father's business not turned sour, Einstein would probably have endured the hated Gymnasium and graduated with his peers. Military service would then have swallowed him up, all the more agonizing for his antipathy toward authority. But at age fifteen, he was able to escape. His parents were now living in Milan, where Hermann and Jakob, with the backing of Pauline's family, had reconstituted their failed electrical lighting company. Albert stayed in Munich to finish Gymnasium. It was not a happy year. He was lonely and missed his family. He spent Christmas alone for the first time. As ill luck would have it, his “home room” teacher, or primary Gymnasium instructor, was the Greek professor. Although Einstein excelled at mathematics and the sciences, Greek eluded him. Some of the blame must surely rest with adolescent arrogance: Of what use to him that florid language with its dual voice and impenetrable verb system? At any rate, in the spring, the Greek professor exploded: “Your mere presence here undermines the class's respect for me,” he shouted.
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On the verge of dismissal from school, already far beyond the Gymnasium mathematics curriculum, and miserable without his family, Albert begged a family friend and doctor for an official letter allowing him to leave school and join his parents.

The conundrum of what to do now that Albert was in Milan occupied the Einsteins for months. Back in the family fold, Albert regained his spirits. But family finances were at low ebb. In Munich, Albert had been eligible for state-funded schooling. Now, he would have to earn his keep at a practical job (a solution he instantly rejected) or find a way to continue his schooling. Albert resisted both, perhaps because he relished the freedom of days without lessons. He fell in with a congenial group of youths with
whom he explored Milan. He also helped with the family business. Finally, it was decided that he would apply to the renowned Zurich Polytechnic School (later renamed Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule—the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology—or ETH) to pursue a degree in electrical engineering. Lacking a high school diploma, he boned up for the college entrance exam. Unfortunately, for all his efforts, he failed three parts of the exam: French, chemistry, and biology. As always, he did poorly in subjects other than his passions—math and physics.

Calamity was averted when physics professor Heinrich Weber saw those scores. He invited Einstein to sit in on his lectures. From there, entrance by special fiat was almost inevitable. All that was required was a high school diploma. A year in Aarau, a small town outside Zurich, gave Einstein much more than his high school diploma. Boarding with a high school professor and his family, Einstein fell in love for the first time, played his violin incessantly, and haunted the beautiful countryside. Marie Winteler, the object of his affection, was destined to be supplanted, the victim of Einstein's great charms and also his tendency to withdraw his emotions without warning.

The following year, Einstein entered Zurich Polytechnic School (ETH). There, he met Mileva Marić, the sole female student in the physics class. Marić, an ethnic Serb, was, like Einstein, an outsider. Highly intelligent and resolute—attributes necessary for her to have penetrated such a male domain as ETH—she knew that in Zagreb her chances of pursuing a technical degree were nonexistent. Switzerland, with its tradition of liberal thinking, gave her the chance. Although well matched in their intelligence, temperamentally Marić and Einstein seemed poles apart. Increasingly at ease with himself and the world, Einstein was as outgoing as Mileva was somber. On the surface, at least, he exuded charm and nonchalance in social settings. Still, in later years Einstein described himself as a “loner.” Solitude afforded him the space to think. Nor did solitude necessarily mean physical isolation. As a boy he could shut
out the noise surrounding him in a crowded room and lose himself in a problem. Scientists would do well to live in lighthouses, he once said (perhaps thinking of Spinoza, who took up lens grinding), alone and apart for the sake of thought.
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At ETH, Einstein studied with several physicists who would become lifelong friends: Marcel Grossmann, whose lecture notes helped Einstein pass math exams; Friedrich Adler, a socialist and, like Einstein, devoted admirer of the philosopher Ernst Mach; and Michele Besso, who would later work with Einstein at the Patent Office. Besso was a particularly cherished friend. At ETH, they devoured material not generally taught in classes, including James Maxwell's theories on electromagnetism and Ernst Mach's critique of Newton. It was Besso to whom Einstein turned in May 1905 with his “difficult problem.” Out of that conversation came the final step toward the special theory of relativity.

Not alone among ETH students, Einstein rebelled against the ordinary demands of the professors—attending lectures and taking exams were bothersome distractions. He devoted most of his time and energies to extracurricular studies: Mach, Maxwell, Hermann von Helmholtz, Heinrich Hertz, Hendrik Lorentz, Henri Poincaré. His love affair with Mileva blossomed. In their fourth year at ETH, they both took a required final exam. Einstein passed, coming in third among five. Mileva failed one crucial part. Distraught, she nevertheless allowed herself to be encouraged by Einstein and hoped to retake the exam the following year. Their marriage was planned. It would remain so for three long years, all the while actively opposed by Einstein's mother.

Having graduated, Einstein struggled to make a living. He and Mileva tried their hand at tutoring, but existence was meager. Einstein failed to gain a teaching post, alone among his ETH friends to be shut out. Just as he had antagonized his Gymnasium professors, Einstein had managed to alienate almost everyone in authority at ETH. Broke and discouraged, he and Mileva returned to their respective homes. In the meantime, he gained Swiss citizenship and
landed two successive temporary teaching jobs. Mileva, at her home in Novi Sad, was pregnant. She would later give birth to a daughter, to be named Lieserl. The infant was probably given up for adoption some months after her birth.

In 1902, Einstein moved to Bern, where at last he landed a solid job at the Patent Office. He and Mileva had been apart for a year. At the end of 1902, Hermann Einstein died of heart failure, having finally given his approval for the marriage. Einstein and Mileva married in January 1903. Too impoverished for a honeymoon, they returned to their apartment in Bern. Little Lieserl remained in Novi Sad, kept secret from their life in Bern. Einstein never set eyes on her.

Like a general marshaling troops, Einstein pursued his goals single-mindedly and relentlessly. His behavior with his family was an example. Newlywed though he was, he wrote paper after paper, all the while toiling six days a week at the Patent Office. Mileva, meanwhile, having failed her exams again, settled into the job of housewife, scribe, adviser, colleague, and, in 1904, mother to Hans Albert, the first of their two sons.

It had been a dream of his early youth, to fly along a ray of life as if surfing. That image became a thought experiment and led to the fourth of his five “annus mirabilis” papers of 1905. That paper, famously titled “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” demolishes Newton's absolute time and space. They become relative to the speed of light. What became known as the special theory of relativity remains today one of Einstein's two most celebrated contributions to physics. The second appeared in a paper written soon after: “Is the Inertia of a Body Dependent on Its Energy Content?” The answer to this question emerged in a simple and elegant formula: e=mc
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Yet of his five “miraculous” papers, Einstein reserved the word
“revolutionary” for the first: “On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Generation and Transformation of Light.” It was revolutionary—the more so for its contribution to quantum mechanics, a worldview he never ceased to oppose. It was also Einstein's most profound contribution to atomic structure—apart from the equation that culminated in Hiroshima.

Einstein's “light” article postulates that the wave theory of light, while useful and commonsensical, since it accords with our view of light as continuous, nevertheless does not accord with experimental data. Rather, light is particle, “distributed discontinuously in space.” The paper attempts to resolve a contradiction between the two phenomena: gas and electromagnetism. Gas, it had been shown, was made up of discontinuous particulate matter—atoms. Light or electromagnetic processes were supposed to be waves that traveled through a medium called the ether. Eventually, thanks to Einstein, the problem of “ether,” and, indeed, the need to conceive of it, disappear. But in the “light” paper, Einstein is more concerned with solving the disconnect between experimental data and the idea of light as a wave. What he demonstrates, though for years physicists resist his conclusions, is that light is particulate. It is “quantum” in nature, discontinuous and finite, just as are the atoms of helium in a balloon.

The second “miracle year” paper, “A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions,” was not published until 1906. However, as soon as Einstein completed it, he sent it to the University of Zurich as his doctoral dissertation. That paper and the third, “On the Motion of Small Particles Suspended in Liquids at Rest Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat,” take up the molecular realm. The aptly titled dissertation reveals Einstein's early interest in fixing the size, and indeed the reality, of atoms. The third paper dealt with Brownian motion—the movement of particles suspended in liquid—and thermodynamics. These three papers alone would have assured Einstein's fame as a physicist. Indeed, so radical
were the concepts of light quanta and relativity that only very slowly did the world of physics begin to take note.

For six long years, Einstein toiled at the Patent Office by day and revolutionized physics by night. He clarified his “relativity principle” and extended his work on Brownian motion, publishing paper after paper. Yet when he applied to the University of Bern, he was rebuffed—he had not submitted a proper thesis. Finally, having resisted the demeaning requirement (he had sent a collection of papers, to no avail), he buckled down and cranked out the requisite work. He was hired immediately, and in the spring of 1908 he began to teach. A full-time appointment at the University of Zurich followed in 1909. By this time, his fame had spread. He began to lecture widely and was invited to speak at the first Solvay Conference in Brussels. In 1911, he accepted an appointment at the University of Prague. He and Mileva now had two sons, Albert and Eduard. The move to Prague was financially rewarding. The family could now afford a maid. But Mileva was increasingly isolated and depressed. Einstein's science came first, and now his science had catapulted him into the world's eye. In 1913, Einstein was offered a prestigious position, requiring no teaching, as a member of the Prussian Academy in Berlin. It was an offer he could not refuse. To Mileva's dismay, the family moved again.

Once they arrived in Berlin, Einstein wished only to work. Mileva protested, but to no avail. Indeed, he had fallen out of love with her years before. Einstein later said that “she was cool and suspicious toward anyone who, in some way or other, came close to me.”
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In 1903, he had faced down his family's angry disapproval of his marriage to Mileva by being “stubborn as a mule.”
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Now, just as stubbornly, he meant to be free.

In truth, Einstein had motives beyond his career when he accepted the Berlin position. On a visit to Berlin in 1912, he had met his cousin Elsa for the first time since childhood, and their acquaintance intensified during a visit the following year. Elsa, who
would become his second wife, took to the task of protecting Einstein and, with some limited success, grooming him. The move to Berlin, so distasteful for Mileva, made Einstein's new life with Elsa possible.