The Man Who Stalked Einstein (4 page)

The steamship
Westmoreland
left Antwerp with Elsa aboard in early October 1933. It stopped in Southampton to
pick up Einstein and his assistant, Walther Mayer, on October 7, before making its
way across the Atlantic to New York. To avoid publicity, Flexner arranged for a tugboat
to meet the ship when it cleared customs at Ellis Island. The tug transferred the
Einstein party to a car for the short drive to Princeton. For the time being, Einstein
was officially a man without a country. He was among the first of roughly two thousand
Jewish scientists, mathematicians, and developers of technology—including fourteen
Nobel Prize recipients—who would find themselves dismissed from their jobs, unable
to support their families, and threatened with deportation to the Nazi death mills
that would soon spring up across Europe.

In recalling the many years of strife with his longtime foe, Philipp Lenard cited
Einstein as “the most important example of the dangerous influence of the Jewish circles
on the study of nature.” A month later, any remaining controversy over Einstein’s
resignation from the Prussian Academy became moot. On the heels of the Third Reich
barring Jews teaching in German universities, it also made any person of Jewish descent
ineligible for membership in the Academy. Lenard saw his opportunity to further cement
his status with the Nazi hierarchy. Noting, “We must recognize that it is unworthy
of a German to be the intellectual follower of a Jew,” Lenard partnered with his like-minded
colleague, Johannes Stark, to vigorously enforce a series of laws calling for the
dismissal of Jewish academics from their university employment.

Max Planck tried to head off the carnage by appealing directly to the Fuehrer, Adolf
Hitler. It was to no avail. “Our national policies will not be revoked or modified,
even for scientists,” Hitler told him in no uncertain terms. “If the dismissal of
Jewish scientists means the annihilation of German science, then we shall do without
science for a few years.”

While, in hindsight, Hitler’s response to Planck seems maniacally self-destructive,
at the time, it was everything that Lenard could have hoped for. In every respect,
it must have seemed to Lenard that his victory was complete. Unrecognized at the time
were the unintended consequences of Lenard’s successful vendetta against Einstein
and the Jewish academics. He had unwittingly accomplished something of surpassing
significance. Lenard’s actions had shifted the world’s balance of scientific intellect
from Germany to its enemies, most prominently to the United States. Eventually, there
would come a reckoning.

Near the end of his life, Einstein wrote to his good friend Niels Bohr, “Not often
in life has a human being caused me such joy by his mere presence as you did.” This
assertion was a testimony to their more than thirty years of friendly disagreement
over the laws that govern particle physics. At times, their conversations grew so
contentious that they became completely oblivious to what was going on around them.
Famously, on one occasion, they became so engrossed in their conversation that they
missed their streetcar stop on the way to a conference. Eventually realizing that
they had gone too far, they got off the trolley, crossed the street, and got on the
one going the other way. They missed their stop going back as well.

Although they disagreed over specifics, Bohr and Einstein were both convinced that
the laws of physics that work for everyday phenomena—those described by Newton and
his successors—didn’t hold up in the world of atoms and subatomic particles, where
things are very small and often move very fast. This was the purview of theoretical
physics. The abstruse mathematics of theoretical physics was breaking down the certainties
of traditional Newtonian physics, raising questions that the scientific orthodoxy
of classically trained natural scientists like Philipp Lenard was ill prepared to
address.

Lenard bridled against the new science, refusing to let go of explanations of physical
phenomena that were rooted in centuries-old discoveries and unwilling or unable to
grasp mathematically derived theories. It was inevitable that Lenard and Einstein
would clash over their scientific differences. However, unlike the sincerely inquiring
argumentative relationship that Einstein shared with Niels Bohr, what Lenard and Einstein
felt toward one another was the very opposite of respectful appreciation: a smoldering,
personal cold war that occasionally combusted into a very public conflagration.

Lenard’s intense hatred for Einstein went far beyond their disagreement over scientific
principles. In the plodding, conservative world of physics, Einstein was a shooting
star. The press had gone wild in 1919 with the first experimental proof of Einstein’s
theory of general relativity. Front-page news stories compared him to Newton, Copernicus,
and Kepler, revered names in Lenard’s scientific pantheon. While the public adored
the witty, unkempt, down-to-earth theorist, who was turning on its ear the long-accepted
dictums by which classical physicists explained the functioning of the universe, Lenard
was little known beyond the rarified halls of the academy.

How unseemly for such acclaim to be accorded a scientist, Lenard thought. And on
what grounds? Mathematical derivations that began in the abstract and were not held
to any standard of experimental proof? Complicity with an all-too-willing and gullible
press that welcomed Einstein’s self-promotion? The frivolous book—
Einstein the Seeker
—that the sycophantic writer Alexander Moszkowski had published with Einstein’s full
participation? Yes! Yes, to all of these sins and to one more. Einstein was a Jew.
He acted like a Jew. Most damning of all, he thought like a Jew. “It was so typical,”
Lenard wrote, “the unquestionably pure-blooded Jew. . . . His relativity theories
attempted to transform and dominate the whole of physics. . . . Apparently, they never
were even intended to be true.”

Lenard felt that Einstein had unjustly led a charmed life. Einstein had prospered
while deserving true Aryans like himself had suffered greatly. The humiliating Treaty
of Versailles and the Weimar government’s mindless adherence to the repressive terms
of the armistice ending World War I had brought nothing but suffering to the German
people.

At the same time, Einstein had grown well-to-do on his renown. Since 1914, when Max
Planck had recruited him away from Zurich to a professorship at Berlin’s Humboldt
University and the directorship of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, Einstein
had enjoyed special privileges. At Planck’s insistence, Einstein had been elected
a member of the prestigious Prussian Academy of Sciences and granted German citizenship.
Over Lenard’s protestations, Sweden’s Nobel Academy had awarded Einstein the 1921
Nobel Prize for work so derivative of Lenard’s own discoveries and so prosaic as to
be better suited for schoolchildren. While Lenard’s son Werner had contracted kidney
failure and died of wartime deprivation, Einstein’s Nobel Prize money was said to
have secured the comfort of his two sons, who were living with their mother in Zurich.
To top things off, Planck had acceded to Einstein’s demand that he have few teaching
responsibilities, giving him the time to pursue well-paid opportunities to lecture
abroad. It was rumored that Einstein’s Dutch friend, Paul Ehrenfest, banked Einstein’s
honoraria in the Netherlands, safeguarding the moneys from the ravages of the rampant
inflation wreaking ruin on the life savings of many German citizens, Lenard among
them.

The contrasts between the anti-Semitic, ultra-nationalistic Lenard and the tousled-hair,
pacifistic Jew, Einstein, could hardly have been more stark. They were antipodes,
complete opposites in their early life experiences, scientific views, and personalities.

Philipp Eduard Anton Lenard was the son of a wine merchant. He grew up in the small
Austro-Hungarian city of Pressburg (now Bratislava in Slovakia). From childhood on,
he evinced a deep disdain for any learning other than the natural sciences, a bias
that only hardened in its intensity as he grew older. Lenard prepared for his career
by studying at Europe’s major research centers with some of the greatest scientific
minds of the 1880s and 1890s—men like Bunsen, Helmholtz, and Hertz. It was an era
of discovery based on real-world experiments, and Lenard emerged a dedicated experimentalist.
His research into the emanations of high-energy cathode ray tubes earned him the 1905
Nobel Prize for physics and eventually led to him being named professor at the University
of Heidelberg. At the same time, however, his upbringing, orthodox training, and conventional
life experiences imbued Lenard with a sense of privilege, a feeling of rectitude in
his personal dealings that could be challenging for others.

Lenard engaged in a succession of lifelong feuds. His envy of other scientists’ fame
and his obsessing over “what might have been, if only . . .” led Lenard to make claims
of primacy for either himself or his ideological forebears that bore little currency
in reality. He squabbled with Marie Curie and the great British scientist, J. J. Thompson,
whose pioneering work led to Thompson describing the electron. However, Lenard’s most
egregious claims involved the discovery of the X-ray. Lenard was among a number of
physicists studying the emanations of cathode ray tubes. Almost certainly, he had
witnessed phenomena that could have led to his recognizing the existence of X-rays.
That he failed to do so before Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen’s startling 1895 publication,
“On a New Type of Ray,” detailing most of what we know today about X-rays, in no way
stopped him from insisting that Roentgen was merely a technician who had advantaged
himself of Lenard’s work and claiming for himself the title “Mother of the X-ray.”

Ironically, 1905 was not only the year Lenard was awarded the Nobel Prize but also
Einstein’s “miracle year.” In that year, the previously unknown and relatively untutored
Swiss patent clerk published four major articles, including revolutionary dissertations
on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, the equivalence of mass and energy,
and one detailing his theory of special relativity. His mathematically derived insights
came like a torrent, spontaneously and seemingly without precedent.

In contrast to Lenard’s impressively varied educational pedigree, Einstein attended
only Zurich’s Swiss Federal Polytechnic University. He floundered in arriving at an
acceptable topic for his doctoral thesis, offering several that were rejected by the
faculty before passing muster. He finally was granted his doctorate in that same
annus mirabilis
of 1905 for what turned out to be a miscalculation of Avogadro’s constant—the number
of molecules in a mole of any substance. Off by a factor of almost three in underestimating
the constant at 2.2×10
²³
, he later caught his own algebraic errors and published a correction.

Their personalities also were polar opposites. Lenard could be snarky, harsh, and
controlling in his dealings with others, and especially unpleasant in how he related
to his subordinates. One such relationship involving Lenard and an assistant, Jakob
Johann Laub, peripherally involved Einstein early in his career. Laub was an ardent
believer in Einstein’s work, having written his doctoral thesis on the theory of special
relativity. Beginning in 1909, Einstein and Laub conducted a correspondence.

At first, Laub was grateful to be in Lenard’s employ, writing Einstein in May 1909,
“As Lenard is concerned, he is indeed known everywhere as a satrap, who treats the
assistants badly. In my opinion, these people deserve to fall on their bellies. I
can only say to them that Lenard strikes an entirely different note with me, and that
I have the utmost freedom.”

However, by August 1910, it was quite a different story. Einstein’s theories contradicted
an important aspect of Lenard’s scientific ethos, the presence of “ether.” Lenard
relied on ether as necessary to the flow through space of electromagnetic radiation
like light and X-rays. Despite the fact that Laub did not believe in the existence
of ether, Lenard required his assistant to conduct extensive but unsuccessful experiments
aimed at proving that ether really existed at the expense of his own research. Einstein
wrote Laub, “Lenard must, however, in many things, be wound quite askew. His recent
lecture on these fanciful ethers appears to me almost infantile. Further, the study
he commanded of you . . . borders on the absurd. I am sorry that you must spend your
time on such stupidity.”

By November, things between Lenard and Laub had degenerated to such an extent that
Einstein offered to help Laub find new work. However, even when Laub told Lenard he
was seeking other employment and why, Lenard required Laub to continue the ether experiments
until he had the promise of a new job. “This is really a twisted fellow, Lenard,”
Einstein commented after hearing this. “So entirely composed of gall and intrigue.
However, you are considerably better off than him. You can go away from him, however,
he must do business with the monster until he bites the dust.”

In contrast to Lenard, Einstein’s eccentric clothing, modest approachability, and
gentle wit did nothing to discourage the public’s very positive impression. Einstein’s
ability to laugh at himself and even his work endeared him to people of all castes
and stations. He had an absent-minded air about him that generated innumerable anecdotes.
Early in his career, his first wife, Mileva Marić, suggested that he dress more professionally
at work. “Why should I?” he asked. “Everyone knows me there.” She mentioned it again
when he was about to present a lecture at one of his first major conferences. He responded,
“Why should I? No one knows me there.”

Even Einstein’s often embattled theory of relativity was fodder for his humor. As
one famous example, in the wake of experimental data supporting his theory of general
relativity, he was asked to explain his theory in simple fashion. Einstein replied,
“When you are courting a nice girl, an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a
red-hot cinder, a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.”