Like the Magi of old whom a star drew irresistibly into a distant land, Stephan Pearson followed the brightest star on his horizon for the next two years. His professors had secured for him an appointment to a postgraduate position within the circle of aspiring young physicists that surrounded Dr. Albert Einstein in Germany. On the day after graduation, his last in St. Mark before setting sail for Europe, I happened to pass by the open door of his room while he was packing his suitcase. He saw me.
“Paul! Please come in for a minute.”
He stood there looking at me a little oddly, clasping a handful of clean socks which he was about to set into the opened suitcase on his bed.
“You know why I am going to Europe, don’t you?”
I nodded.
Steve swallowed hard.
“She didn’t die for nothing, Paul. There are moments when I feel so alone, even useless without her. But then I look at her portrait. See? There it is.”
It was lying on a bed of underwear in his suitcase.
“Then I remember that she is always right here with me, encouraging me to get back to work when I am discouraged, to accomplish something really good, and to find happiness in doing it. I just wanted you to know for sure. And I want Irv and Ellie to know. She didn’t die for nothing, by God! She didn’t die for nothing.”
“I know, Steve…. God is with you.”
Now I was the one having a hard time holding it together. We stood there looking at each other for a long moment. Then both of us instinctively stepped toward each other and ended up in a bear hug.
Nothing more was said.
And with that we parted for many years.
It is difficult to reconstruct Steve’s two years in Germany. While there he acquired considerable stature as a promising physicist and mathematician. His relationship with Dr. Einstein weaned him still further away from what some might call his “ulterior motives” for devoting himself to science. There was an extraordinary fascination for him in the mixture of mystery and certainty that composes theoretical physics. He found himself near the very center of that tiny circle of men who were intent on prying their way into the atom, first to be startled and then to be baffled by the things they were observing. This was the gathering place for those imaginative men whose minds had reached the frontiers of the unknown by crossing the known on the solid ground of the mathematical unity and consistency of all creation. The sheer thrill of observing even from afar what few men had hitherto considered observable, of building constructs on the basis of demonstrable fact in a domain that had previously been the subject solely of guesswork and conjecture, of working with phenomena whose very existence had been unknown until then, of playing daily with the grand oxymoron of undeniable fact and pure fantasy which is the essence of theoretical physics—this exerted an almost hypnotic power over Steve and his colleagues. Theirs was the challenge of deciphering the mathematical symmetry necessarily inherent in all phenomena, even the least understood. Living and working within the field of a magnet as strong as this one proved to be, precluded the possibility for many years to come that Steve would wander off in any other direction.
In a seminar one day, after Steve had deftly displayed his gift for correlating several concepts by means of their mathematical interdependence, a feat for which he had had to call upon several mathematical disciplines simultaneously and in German, Albert Einstein remarked to one of Steve’s fellow students: “Keep your eye on that young man.”
Apparently he did not travel around very much on the continent while he was there, although his infrequent letters home indicate that he made at least two trips to Paris. These letters, which I have seen, were respectful, if uninformative, but their arrival at wide intervals kept his mother’s hopes for him alive.
Returning to the United States somewhat reluctantly and for reasons that are not clear, he set about writing his doctoral thesis on matter and energy for an Eastern university. In 1926 at the age of twenty-five he received his PhD in theoretical physics and began a fourteen-year period of pure research under the auspices of the Eintvold Foundation near Boston, Massachusetts.