The Man Who Stalked Einstein (2 page)

Kepler’s law is one example where Einstein’s theoretical physics provided a plausible
explanation of an exception to a law of classical physics. One part of Kepler’s law
states that planets orbit the sun in a regular and reproducible ellipse with the sun
residing at one of the focal points of the ellipse. However, by Einstein’s time, it
became evident that there was a small but definite irregularity in the orbit of Mercury
that conflicted with Kepler’s law. The point of Mercury’s orbit when the planet is
nearest the sun—known as its “perihelion”—actually changes from orbit to orbit. Calculations
based on Einstein’s theory of general relativity explained the shifting perihelion.
As we detail in this book, Einstein’s explanation of the shifting perihelion of Mercury
was an important factor in validating the utility of his theory of general relativity.

Another example of how theoretical physics gained acceptance was Einstein’s use of
the concept of a curved universe to predict that light emitted by stars directionally
adjacent to our sun bends under the influence of the sun’s gravity. Arthur Eddington’s
much-ballyhooed experiment, which was conducted during an expedition to Africa and
South America to witness the 1919 solar eclipse and is also described in our book,
proved Einstein correct. The publicity surrounding the occasion shot Einstein to international
celebrity and produced converts to his theories.

An important point of disagreement between experimentalists and theorists was Einstein’s
unified construct of space and time. First proposed by the eighteenth-century philosopher
Immanuel Kant, and fundamental to Einstein’s theory of relativity, Einstein held that
space and time do not exist in isolation but are dependent on the observer’s frame
of reference. This idea was alien to the experimentalists who held that space and
time were distinct, absolute entities. To help bring home the theorists’ point of
view, consider the following “thought experiment”:

A train travels along a track. A man inside the train measures the amount of time
it takes for a beam of light to travel from the ceiling to the floor of the train
and back again. Another man, standing stationary alongside the track as the train
passes, makes the same measurement. To the man inside the train, the light beam appears
as a vertical shaft. Because the train is moving, the man standing beside the tracks
sees the light as a diagonal beam of greater length than the perpendicular. Because
the speed of light is invariable, the longer diagonal requires more time to complete
its path. Both frames of reference are valid, yet the two yield different results.
Hence, the amount of time for the light beam to travel its course is
relative
, depending on the perspective of the observer.

As we describe later in this book, Lenard mocked this critical aspect of the principle
of relativity during his 1920 public debate with Einstein, unsuccessfully attempting
to egg Einstein into a statement he might regret.

The experimentalists also disputed the theorists’ penchant for expressing their deductions
in the shorthand of advanced mathematics. Experimental physics required only that
a scientist be accomplished at basic mathematical skills and have familiarity with
classical Euclidean geometry. In general, the experimental physicists of the early
twentieth century relied more on describing observations than expressing mathematical
formulae. The experimentalists were deeply suspicious that the theorists’ frequent
use of advanced mathematics was, at best, to obscure what they’d done, if not to disseminate
outright falsehoods. The experimentalists, unable or unwilling to shift to the new
paradigm, were ill prepared to participate in the new physics or even to effectively
critique the theorists’ mathematically derived constructs. Lenard, in particular,
grew resentful as Einstein attracted young adherents, who were intrigued by the capabilities
of the theoretical approach and more facile than their elders with advanced mathematics.

Finally, Einstein and Lenard clashed over the existence of “ether.” Lenard was particularly
attached to the notion that the transmission through space of electromagnetic radiation,
like light and X-rays, as well as gravitation, depended on a so-called ether. This
is ironic because Lenard was an arch-experimentalist. Despite extensive experimentation,
neither he nor anyone else had been able to demonstrate the existence of ether since
Christiaan Huygens proposed the idea in the seventeenth century. Einstein’s theoretical
universe disdained ether as requiring a special frame of reference apart from all
others with respect to electromagnetism in contradiction of his theory of special
relativity. Einstein proposed that quanta of light and other radiant energies were
self-sustaining as they moved through space. During the two decades when Lenard stalked
Einstein, he repeatedly brought up Einstein’s disbelief in ether as though it were
a moral failing of religious proportions.

Lenard and Einstein’s scientific differences sparked their heated interpersonal dispute
that highlighted an era of intellectual tumult and led to the dismantling of the natural
sciences in Germany. The resultant international diaspora of German natural scientists,
the most accomplished scientific community of its era, still influences the science
of today.

Sieg heil!

The man’s cry found an echo in a thousand others. On the clear, cool evening of May
11, 1933, the crowd repeated the familiar Nazi greeting as ranks of university students
marched past encouraging throngs of spectators into the vast expanse of Berlin’s Opera
Square. The students arranged themselves around an enormous blaze that the brown shirts
of the Nazi SA had set and stoked into an inferno earlier in the evening. Sparks shot
into the late spring night, their explosive barks all but drowned out by the cheers
of more than forty thousand onlookers.

Young faces reflected the heat of the bonfire and their excitement at having all
eyes upon them for this historic moment. At a signal, the front rows of students moved
forward, stooped to gather armfuls of books, and tossed them into the flames. They
gave way to the students behind them, reciting as they did the prescribed verses each
had committed to memory:

Against class warfare and materialism; for the community of the people and an idealistic
way of life!

Against decadence and moral degeneracy; for decency and custom in family and government!

The ritual was repeated until the flames had consumed twenty-five thousand books.
Among the dozens of authors whose writings had been trucked from libraries to Opera
Square earlier in the day were socialists like Karl Marx, social activists like Helen
Keller, and humanists like Ernest Hemingway. Organizers also had removed from the
library stacks every copy they could find of the works of a number of Jewish scientists.
Their revolutionary discoveries had helped elevate German science to the apotheosis
of world recognition. Under the new Nazi regime, they had fallen out of favor.

As the flames snapped and flexed in the wind, and the logs fueling the blaze settled
into embers, a lone figure limped up several steps to a roughly constructed platform
fronting the square. The chief of Nazi propaganda, Reichsminister Joseph Goebbels,
surveyed his audience. His sweating, lupine face gleamed in the shifting light. When
he sensed the crowd’s anticipation had grown as taut as it could bear, he began to
speak.

The age of an overly refined Jewish intellectualism has come to an end, and the German
revolution has made the road clear again for the German character. In the past fourteen
years, comrades, as you have been forced in silent shame to suffer the humiliations
of the November Republic, the libraries became filled with trash and filth from Jewish
asphalt litterateurs.

He paused to give the crowd space to roar its disapproval.

You do well, in these midnight hours, to consign the unclean spirit of the past to
the flames. . . . The old lies in the flames, but the new will arise from the flame
of our own hearts. . . . Let it be an oath to many flames!
Heil
to the Reich and the nation and our leader Adolf Hitler!

Goebbels shot the Nazi straight-arm salute, fingers extended, palm forward, into the
cool night air. As the deafening applause settled down, a group of students began
to sing the Horst-Wessel song, the anthem of the Nazi Party. The tune was picked up
by other students and soon the surrounding thousands. The celebration was just beginning.
It would continue long into the night.

One man who did not join in the singing, but who was nonetheless elated with the
evening’s events, was Philipp Lenard. The 1905 Nobel Prize recipient for physics,
director of the Institute of Physics at the University of Heidelberg, and powerful
scientific advisor to Adolf Hitler risked a rare smile. It had taken a very long time,
but he could finally gloat about his victory over Albert Einstein. For nearly fifteen
years, he had led the opposition that finally forced the relativity Jew to flee his
native Germany. The burning of Einstein’s foolish scribblings that evening in Berlin—and
numerous other locations throughout the Fatherland—was the beginning of the end of
memory for Einstein’s outlandish ideas about relativity, of which Lenard had written
“. . . even now, were falling apart.”

Driven by professional disagreement, intense envy over the public’s adoration of Einstein,
and virulent anti-Semitism, Lenard had unrelentingly harassed Einstein and publicly
denigrated his theory of relativity. Beginning with two dramatic confrontations with
Einstein in 1920, Lenard and his minions publicly assailed Einstein as the living
personification of an ignoble Jewish spirit in science and a threat to Aryan German
culture. He had been the mastermind behind the 1920 anti-Einstein lectures at the
auditorium of the Berlin Philharmonic. A month later, he had famously debated Einstein
about the theory of relativity at Bad Nauheim. He had too often been forced to stand
alone, but he had persevered, was persevering even now that Einstein and his wife
Elsa had fled to America. It had not been easy, but that night’s triumphant burning
of Einstein’s work had made it all worthwhile.

It was Lenard and the few who had stood with him who had persistently antagonized
Einstein and reversed Einstein’s popular standing. By the early 1930s, Einstein had
been made to feel like a pariah in the country of his birth. He absented himself from
Germany for longer periods than he had in the past, traveling, lecturing on the theory
of relativity, and speaking out about German militarism to pacifist groups. Predictably,
the end of Einstein’s tenure in Germany arrived as Hitler was on the verge of consolidating
his power.

In the fall of 1932, as Elsa packed their things for a two-month trip to America,
Einstein bravely told friends that they would return to Berlin after he had completed
what would be his third professorship in residence at Cal Tech, in Pasadena, California.
But he probably knew this was wishful thinking. He found himself increasingly at odds
with the rising tide of National Socialism. While Einstein, a nonpracticing Jew who
once described his ethnicity as “the son of Jewish parents,” still felt most at home
in Europe and especially among his friends in the German scientific community, he
had no illusions about who Hitler was and what drove his intentions. A few years after
leaving Germany, from his safe perch in New Jersey, Einstein wrote about his impressions
of Hitler during his run to power:

Then Hitler appeared, a man with limited intellectual capabilities and unfit for any
useful work, full of envy and bitterness, against all whom circumstances had favored
over him. . . . In his desperate ambition for power, he discovered that his speeches,
confused and pervaded with hate as they were, received wild acclaim from those whose
situation and orientation resembled his own. . . . But what really qualified him for
leadership was his bitter hatred of everything foreign and, in particular, his loathing
of a defenseless minority, the German Jews. Their intellectual sensitivity left him
uneasy, and he considered it, with some justification, as un-German. . . . [He propagated]
the fraud about the alleged superiority of the “Aryan” or “Nordic” race, a myth invented
by the anti-Semites to further their sinister purposes.

In early 1931, Einstein had written a letter of resignation to Max Planck, the elder
statesman among German physicists and the man who had recruited him to Berlin. After
much consideration, he decided not to send it. Later, in December the same year, he
wrote in his diary, “Today I decided to give up my position in Berlin,” but once more
he did not act on his intention. Just before they left their holiday cottage in Caputh
for their December 1932 voyage to America, Einstein said to his wife, “Look at the
house very closely. You will never see it again.” Elsa took what her husband had said
very seriously. She packed thirty pieces of luggage for the brief sabbatical. They
would be prepared if the political circumstances worsened.

Einstein’s premonitions proved to be well founded. Any hope that he would be able
to resume his academic life in Berlin turned to dust as, three months later, the couple
prepared for their return from California. On March 10, 1933, the day before they
were to depart Pasadena, Elsa’s daughter, Margot, was twice cornered in the Einsteins’
Berlin apartment by marauding, brown-shirted storm troopers seeking to intimidate
her stepfather. The apartment was raided three more times during the next several
days. The intruders made off with a number of Einstein’s personal items, including
a prized violin. Einstein telegraphed Margot that she should make every effort to
safely remove his extensive books and papers from the apartment to the French embassy,
then leave Germany as soon as she could. She managed to do so and met her husband
in Paris. At about the same time, Elsa’s other daughter, Ilse, and her husband escaped
to the Netherlands. Months later, after he decided to immigrate to the United States,
a significant portion of Einstein’s papers accompanied him on board ship.