It is not any personal attitude of the German scientists that presents a difficulty, but the feeling that we are involved in a general condemnation of their nation. But the indictment of a nation takes an entirely different aspect when applied to the individuals composing it. Fortunately, most of us know fairly intimately some of the men with whom, it is suggested, we can no longer associate. Think, not of a symbolic German, but of your former friend Prof. X, for instance—call him Hun, pirate, baby-killer, and try to work up a little fury. The attempt breaks down ludicrously… [T]he worship of force, love of empire, a narrow patriotism, and the perversion of science have brought the world to disaster.
—Arthur Eddington, letter to the Observatory, 1916
THE MODUS VIVENDI that the European scientists had sailed away from in the summer of 1914 was changed by the time they returned. The luxuriant steamers that had carried some of the world’s wealthiest people and boasted elegant dining rooms, libraries rich with books, full orchestras, palm courts on deck, swimming pools, and crystal chandeliers disappeared as if overnight. Now, instead of stocking 30,000 pounds of prime beef, 16 tons of potatoes, 15,000 eggs, 10,000 clams and oysters, 3,000 pounds of moist sugar, 500 quarts of ice cream, dozens of cheeses, fresh fish, fruits, and vegetables—and this was just until the ships reached the next port of call—the libraries and ballrooms were packed with ready troops, ammunition, artillery, medicines, and tins of corned beef, sardines, and hardtack.
It was the end, at least for a time, of pomp and circumstance. There would be no more astronomers “rolling down to Rio” on those “great steamers white and gold,” as Rudyard Kipling’s poem had boasted. In due time, Kipling would be overwhelmed with the loss of his only son, John, a seventeen-year-old for whom he had pulled strings to get commissioned and who went missing in action after being wounded in the Battle of Loos in 1915. The Kiplings, riddled with grief, would begin a pilgrimage from hospital to hospital, asking, as did the poem the author would write, “Have you news of my boy Jack?” No one ever did.
It was during this period of world turmoil and personal sorrow that Albert Einstein was still at the drawing board when it came to general relativity. Now was not a good time to be a German physicist with a provocative idea to present in its final draft to the world of science. Indeed, it may have been the worst time in history to write a paper that carried so much consequence in redefining our cosmos. Its acceptance came with a scientific price. What had been for two hundred years an English-defined universe would become a German-defined universe. By the turn of the twentieth century, tension had already been brewing between the two countries. With Germany’s growing economy, Great Britain was losing its foothold as Europe’s leading power.
Just as he was pulling strings to get son John into the military, Kipling would be one of the literary names recruited to assist in the war effort by signing an “Author’s Declaration,” published on September 14. Fifty-three British writers, including Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, declared it was a matter of honor that England go to war once Germany had invaded Belgium. Hardy would be accused by his detractors of hoping to revamp his career. But still feeling the loss of his son, Kipling was eager to oblige by writing pamphlets and stories that glorified the heroics of British soldiers standing firmly against the brutality of “the Huns.” The hatred between countries was snowballing.
Frank Dyson and Arthur Eddington were still on ships sailing back from Australia when Harvard College Observatory bulletin 563 published an announcement dated September 23, 1914. It was received by astronomers in the Western Hemisphere and allied countries in Europe: “Owing to the war in Europe the usual interchange of astronomical announcements between this Observatory and the Astronomische Centralstelle at Kiel, Germany, is necessarily suspended.” From then on, the announcement continued, all messages about astronomical discoveries should go to director Edward C. Pickering, who would distribute them in the United States “and to foreign countries as far as practicable.” The umbrella of scientific friendship was closing, aided by a groundswell of atrocity propaganda.
The German intelligentsia of the day didn’t help matters. On October 4, 1914, as Dyson was on a train back to Greenwich from the dock at Plymouth and as Eddington was admiring the flying foxes in Sri Lanka, an astonishing document was published that would further separate members of the scientific community whose countries were at war. It was written and signed by ninety-three of Germany’s leading scientists, artists, and scholars. Titled “Manifesto to the Civilized World,” it defended Germany’s actions early in the war and denied reports of assault on Belgian citizens. “It is not true that we trespassed in neutral Belgium. It has been proved that France and England had resolved on such a trespass, and it has likewise been proved that Belgium had agreed to their doing so. It would have been suicide on our part not to have preempted this.” Among the signers, ten had already won a Nobel Prize, and four more would win one in the years immediately following.
Max Planck, who had been so influential in Einstein’s career, was one of the signers, although he would later rescind parts of the document. Fritz Haber, who had taken Mileva Einstein and her sons into his home, had also signed it. “Have faith in us!” the statement ended. “Believe, that we shall carry on this war to the end as a civilized nation, for whom the legacy of a Goethe, a Beethoven, and a Kant is just as sacred as its own hearths and homes.” The manifesto would become known as the go-to essay on how German intellectuals felt about the war, and it infuriated their foreign colleagues. Three German scientists, however, did not sign the manifesto but drafted their own instead. In “A Manifesto to Europeans,” Einstein, Willem Forster, and G. F. Nicolai all protested that “never has any previous war caused so complete an interruption of that cooperation that exists between civilized nations.” Their document was sent out privately. It was unknown outside Germany and received very little attention inside Germany. But Einstein had announced his pacifistic nature.
Finally back at Flamsteed House, where the previous eight astronomers royal had also lived, Frank Dyson found things greatly changed.1 At forty-six years old, he would not be called into service by the military, and his sons, at thirteen and nine, were too young. But his employees, fellow astronomers, and friends would walk away to join the fight or would watch their loved ones go. He was relieved to find Charles Davidson safely back home and to learn that he and Harold Spencer Jones had been successful at the eclipse. But he was dismayed to hear that they had returned from Russia without the valued instruments.
Gone, also, were most of the observatory’s assistants and computers of military age. They had volunteered to fight, being caught up in the wave of heroic patriotism that was engulfing the country. Dyson was determined to keep their positions open until and if they returned and to continue their salaries. This plan put a strain on how to pay new computers, if he could find any not gone to the war. In all, he lost thirty-six members of his staff. A few retirees, women, and local boys too young to fight were hired. And Dyson found more workers among the Belgian refugees who had just begun arriving in England by the thousands. His permanent staff, however, soon dwindled and he lost Jones to the arsenal at Woolwich, in southeast London, where he was attached to the optical department. Jones’s job was in cleaning and adjusting the mountains of binoculars sent to the arsenal by the military. Because they had been manufactured hurriedly in the United States when the war broke out, the optical lenses were often unstable. Unable to service the great bulk of these field glasses, the arsenal sent many pairs on to Dyson and his staff at the observatory.2
Dyson had hired John Jackson, a Scottish astronomer, as his chief assistant before leaving that summer for Australia. Jackson was still there. Yet without a full workforce and proper equipment, work at the observatory was restricted. Solar photography and observations of the sun, moon, and planets were maintained, and the time ball still went up every day, religiously.3 But with no astronomer left to operate the twenty-eight-inch refracting telescope, Dyson was forced to discontinue an important study of double star systems—a study that had begun in 1893, when this telescope was installed. Chronometers had always been tested at the observatory, but now this work became an important part of the war effort. Dozens of them were sent to Dyson after sea battles to be repaired and readjusted. Amazingly, arriving at his door one day from Australia was the chronometer from the notorious Emden that had been sinking ships in the same patch of the Indian Ocean that Dyson and Eddington had crossed days earlier. All in all, the observatory’s work was crippled by the war, as if the study of the universe also had to be rationed.
When Dyson sponsored and hired a French refugee named Robert Jonckerhèere, an astronomer who owned a private observatory back in France, the Englishman finally had an assistant to oversee the twenty-eight-inch telescope. The study of double stars could begin again. But with money short and the need to support his English wife and two children, Jonckerhèere had to find additional work adjusting binoculars at the optical arsenal with Jones. Dyson and his wife also helped in the war effort by hosting garden parties at the observatory to raise money. When he was knighted in 1915 for his important astronomical work, the Dysons’ invitations were more eagerly accepted. At first reluctant with their new titles, Sir Frank Dyson became president of a local Red Cross chapter and Lady Dyson, for her part, was a volunteer police officer who walked the heath at nights. One of her duties soon became ordering the giddy girls hanging around the military camp near Greenwich to go home to their mothers.
The Kipling-esque propaganda of glory in combat began to wane as the causality lists of dead soldiers grew longer each day, demanding more and more space in the local newspapers. By 1915, zeppelins loaded with incendiary bombs were soaring in the skies above England. They followed the Thames River upstream, flying over the arsenal at Woolwich and then Greenwich, on their way to London. Once, when Dyson was away and the large dome of the observatory was open, a zeppelin dropped two bombs close by. No one was injured, although Jackson was inside the dome at the time. The only damage was some burned fence rails and the piercing of the papier-mâché domes by splinters of shrapnel.4 These were the original domes that for over two hundred years British sailors sailing up the Thames had looked for and found comfort in seeing. From then on, when the air raid alarms sounded and searchlights swept the dark skies over the domes, Dyson ushered his family, staff, and any visiting guests into the stone cellars below.5
In November, Arthur Eddington arrived home from Australia, three months after the outbreak of war. Waiting for him in the east wing at the Cambridge Observatory where the director’s residence was located, just off the library, were his mother, his sister, an Aberdeen terrier, and a cat. He had enjoyed the comfort of this new home for just a few weeks before sailing to Australia. Now he was back to settle in, not just in his position as Plumian Professor, but also as the observatory’s new director. He soon faced the same situation that Dyson had found at the Royal Observatory, a debilitated staff and limited finances. With no plans to join the war effort, he went to work. A zodiacal catalog had been begun at Cambridge in 1900 but was left unfinished. Eddington took it on as a special project while the war intensified, single-handedly completing the transit observations. With England still relying on volunteers to meet its military needs, he could continue his work at the observatory, despite the restrictions and without reproach.
Eddington was still just thirty-one years old, which was certainly not too old for the military at a time when elderly officers, some of them over the age of sixty, were being called out of retirement to train soldiers. Physical fitness was not a great issue. Many working-class men were not properly nourished to begin with. One medical grading would accept men who were “Unfit, but could be fit within 6 months.” Given these lax physical requirements, Eddington would have been a prize. He was not married and had no children. While in Greenwich, he had been a member of the field hockey team, hardly a sport for the timid. He played golf and tennis poorly but, as with hockey, was known more for his vigor than skill. However, he excelled at cycling, an almost daily routine and for many long miles at a stretch.6 And he was a hiker. He and his close friend C. J. A. Trimble would walk twenty or thirty miles a day on holidays with no effort, sometimes climbing three thousand feet up steep hills and glissading down them, once while being pelted by a snowstorm.
If anyone was physically fit for the military, it would be Eddington. But he was not just a scientist doing important work; he was a Quaker whose religious beliefs prohibited him from the taking of a human life. With England still not conscripting men to fight, he would be left to his work. But his later refusal to serve on religious grounds would cause disapproval among some of his fellow scientists. It didn’t help that two of Eddington’s own computers at the observatory were finally called off to war. Neither man would return.
The optimism that the war would be “over by Christmas” was over by Christmas. But at least a truce, which appeared to be more spontaneous than official, took place as soldiers from both sides along the Western Front fraternized during Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, 1914. This gesture of hopefulness on the part of already-wearied soldiers, in the form of a holiday truce, would also disappear by the next yuletide.7
While Charles Perrine might have been a long way from the lines of battle, in Argentina, the economic crunch of war was felt there, too. With German U-boats patrolling the northern waters, all shipping commerce between South America and Europe was now suffering from blockades. European investments in those countries seemed to vanish overnight. What Perrine was experiencing more directly, however, was the money he personally lost during the Russian expedition. Once war had been declared, the rubles that he had brought with him to Crimea were immediately devalued. He was forced to use his own money to finance the weeks he and Mulvey would be in Theodosia, as well as their journey home. The expense would amount to one and a half times his yearly salary as director at Córdoba. Perrine had tried unsuccessfully to turn the rubles into gold. When leaving Russia, he had given them to Backlund, at the Pulkovo Observatory. Backlund promised to safeguard the money until the country’s currency would again appreciate. When Backlund died in August 1916, chances became bleak for Perrine to recoup those funds.8
Perrine was soon faced with a loss more personal than money. A few months after his and Mulvey’s return from Crimea, over the Christmas holidays, Mulvey had fallen seriously ill from an attack of what was most likely typhoid. The illness was so severe that he had to be hospitalized for two months. Hoping to recuperate, Mulvey traveled to the Sierras Chicas, the hills northwest of Córdoba beloved by tourists for their beauty. As he was recovering there, he was suddenly stricken with food poisoning and had to be hospitalized a second time. On the night before he was to be released, he began hemorrhaging and died almost immediately. His body was brought back to Córdoba for burial, whose details Perrine oversaw himself.
Perrine’s last actions speak loudly of the affection he felt for his mechanical engineer and friend. Loyalty was not a trait to be taken lightly. As Perrine had once been William Campbell’s right-hand man, so had James Mulvey been his. Sending Mulvey’s body home to the United States for burial wasn’t possible in those days, unless one was cremated. Perrine buried him in the plot he had purchased for himself, in El Cementerio de Disidentes. This was the Cemetery of Dissidents, where Protestants and anyone else who had died outside the Catholic faith, including Muslims, Jews, and atheists, were buried. He paid for a large, pyramid-shaped stone to be placed on the grave. Then he sold what possessions Mulvey had and mailed the money to his aging father, who was by now in a nursing home in Arkansas, where the family had moved twenty years earlier. One of the first men to test for light deflection was now not even a footnote in history.
Perrine wrote a glowing tribute to Mulvey for the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, detailing his genius in the design of astronomical instruments and his strong work ethic. Then he concentrated on what lay ahead: the February 1916 total eclipse. Two annular eclipses had occurred in 1915, mostly over ocean water. With Europe deep into the war and the United States teetering, Perrine intended to take advantage of the fact that this 1916 path would at least clip the upper part of South America. It would cut across northern Colombia, Venezuela, and most of Guadeloupe, with a totality duration of over 2½ minutes. It was not exactly in his backyard, but it was close enough to send a limited expedition to Tucacas, Venezuela. The expedition was so limited, in fact, that it would only consist of Enrique Chaudet, the third astronomer who had gone with him to Brazil in 1912. Perrine would not make the trip. Chaudet would find his volunteers and workers once he arrived. What must have been most disappointing for Perrine was that the forty-foot telescope was still in Russia, his expenses had not been recovered from the Crimean trip, and his indispensable mechanic was dead. Therefore, testing for light deflection regarding Einstein’s theory would not be on the program.
The spontaneous comradeship that had arisen briefly between opposing soldiers during that first Christmas of the war would soon be impossible to revisit in a theater of aerial bombings, trench warfare, armored tanks, and, the most heinous of all, the introduction of poison gas as a weapon. None other than Albert’s and Mileva’s old friend Fritz Haber, now a captain in charge of the Chemistry Section in the Ministry of War, was there in person to witness the release of nearly two hundred tons of chlorine gas by the Germans at the Second Battle of Ypres, on April 22, 1915. Haber relied on Mother Nature by waiting for a day of perfect wind that would carry the massive yellow cloud of gas, released from six thousand canisters, over to French troops lying in the trenches. Several thousand would perish from the gas, which destroys tissue, such as eye tissue, and lungs when inhaled.
Haber and his unit of three future Nobel Prize winners continued to perfect the deadly gases used during the war.9 There was phosgene in 1916, which was said to smell like moldy hay, and sulfur mustard gas in 1917, ultimately earning for Haber the moniker “father of chemical warfare.” His wife, also a chemist, committed suicide in their garden eight days after the gas release at Ypres, and on the night before Fritz would leave to oversee the second attack. This act might be considered a symbol of the widening gap not just between men and women of science, but also between science and humanity. Clara Haber used her husband’s service revolver to shoot herself in the heart.10
If Kipling and others were enraged when the Lusitania was sunk by the Germans on May 7, 1915, they were also blessed by the perfect timing of that event when it came to atrocity propaganda. Scheduled for print just a week later, on May 12, 1915, was the Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages, a sixty-one-page document published in London. The committee that prepared the document included some of England’s best-known names in politics, education, and the law. The document was supposedly based on twelve hundred firsthand accounts by unnamed victims of body mutilations, gang rapes, deaths by clubbing, and unimaginable tortures carried out by German soldiers on Belgian civilians, including women, children, and the elderly. Bayonetting babies was a particular horror and gave rise to illustrated poster drawings sometimes showing several at a time impaled on a German soldier’s spear. Pillaging, plundering, and destroying fine works of art now appeared to be the nice crimes.
Germany’s denials only brought more attention to the awful charges, so the country retaliated with its own booklet of atrocities perpetrated on them by Belgians. It attracted little notice. Within two weeks, however, the United States had grabbed up the British report, and the document was reprinted in almost all national newspapers, including the New York Times. The British War Propaganda Bureau would immediately ship forty-one thousand copies of the booklet to the United States. When American critics saw the effort as propaganda designed to enlist the United States into the war and asked for hard evidence, it was apparent that the committee had never even read those first-person accounts, which had somehow disappeared. This was the state of world affairs as the general theory of relativity was taking final shape.
Back at work after his failed expedition to Crimea, Erwin Freundlich still felt like a prisoner when it came to his duties at the observatory. He kept up a steady correspondence with Einstein, in Berlin, both men discussing ways to test the general theory in the future. They were back to courting Jupiter as an option. But Freundlich felt that his steadfast interest in relativity was stymied by the duties that his director, the strict Hermann Struve, was imposing on him. Struve came from a family chock-full of astronomers and was a no-nonsense scientist who had offered no financial or moral support to Freundlich’s expedition to Russia.
Freundlich and his former math teacher, Karl Schwarzschild, seemed to be the only Germans who were showing the general theory any support. Added to that, Freundlich was the one with the connections to other astronomers. And Einstein needed astronomers if his light deflection prediction was to be verified by observation in nature. He would try twice again to emancipate Freundlich from his job at the observatory, with salary intact, so that he could concentrate more fully on the general theory. The physicist failed each time. For now, Freundlich would stay put.
Freundlich was apparently casting a wider net than perhaps Einstein and others in Germany realized. On May 31, 1915, Perrine wrote from Argentina to George Hale, at Mount Wilson, informing him about the failed expeditions to Russia and noting Freundlich’s good luck in being able to return to Berlin. The German astronomer had recently sent Perrine a letter stating that he wished to continue his work, which was then focused on Jupiter, but outside Germany. Because the large telescope at Córdoba would not be installed for a few more years, Perrine wondered if Hale might have a place for Freundlich at Mount Wilson. He was quick to mention that Freundlich would prefer life in Germany, although his mother was English and his wife, Käte, was Jewish. But the astronomer wanted to prioritize his work, which he couldn’t do at the Berlin Observatory under Struve’s watchful eye. Hale answered briefly on June 20. He couldn’t employ Freundlich, because of strict orders by President Woodrow Wilson preventing Americans from hiring Europeans who were directly or indirectly related to the war.11
As the war waged on, Einstein again realized that he had made a mistake. In Newton’s theory, all three masses (the inertial mass, and the active and passive gravitational masses) are equal. Einstein wanted to know why they couldn’t be different. Earlier in his life, before he published the special theory, he had said that he felt inner turmoil as he conceptualized a universe whose laws were not coming together as he knew they should. “At the very beginning, when the special theory of relativity began to germinate in me, I was visited by all sorts of nervous conflicts.… When young, I used to go away for weeks in a state of confusion.” But he was a decade older now, with different responsibilities in that external world beyond his mind, with two young sons and a bitter marriage that was headed for divorce. He had published papers. His reputation was growing. But geniuses aren’t equipped with all-powerful searchlights that can magically find answers in the dark.
He dusted himself off and went back to work. His intuition since 1911 was that light should be bent by gravity, as his early papers predicted, but he needed a rigorous mathematical proof, which he still lacked. Finding this proof would mean that his mind had to unlock the problem with no assistance from prior human knowledge. The poet William Wordsworth, in writing about Newton’s memorial statue that stands at Trinity College Chapel, perhaps best described this kind of intellect as “a mind for ever Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.”12
In late 1915, Einstein began writing equations that would support his theory. A breakthrough came when he correctly calculated results that would explain the shift in Mercury’s orbit. Developing what became known as the Einstein field equations, he wrote on one side of the equations the terms that describe how the complex system of space and time can be defined by a mathematical field. In doing this, Einstein remembered that James Clerk Maxwell had shown that the influence of electricity and magnets could be understood in terms of an electric field and a magnetic field. Maxwell demonstrated this relationship between electricity and magnetism in mathematical equations (so-called Maxwell’s equations) he developed more than fifty years earlier.13 Einstein came to the conclusion that the properties of time and space must be described by a gravitational field. This gravitational field would become known as the metric tensor, or just metric. On the other side of Einstein’s field equations is a description of how the matter and energy of everything else in the universe is related to the curvature associated with the metric. Just as a magnet, if surrounded by iron filings, will have an influence on them, so do Einstein’s field equations imply that the structure of space and time is influenced by all matter and energy in the cosmos.
Einstein had arrived at what would be his final calculations on the theory of general relativity. His astronomical predictions now revealed an answer to the universe, one far more dramatic than he had anticipated. This discovery, this oracle, this prophecy, made him almost giddy with joy, as he would later relate to colleagues. If correct, the pedestal that had been firmly built beneath Newtonian physics, and the pillars that had held it aloft for two centuries, would need remodeling. During his many long hours of work, he had come up with his own third-eye answer. What was woven into those handwritten pages that lay on the table before him, what was embedded in those mystifying equations, was a universe built from a magic carpet known as space-time. Sir Isaac Newton was no longer voyaging on those strange seas alone.
In a series of lectures to the Prussian Academy in the autumn of 1915, he presented these new results. They explained that Mercury’s wobble—the planet’s stubborn refusal to conform to Newtonian calculations at its perihelion, the point at which Mercury was closest to the sun—was due to the warped space-time it was traveling through near the sun. On November 25, he delivered his final lecture, “The Field Equations of Gravitation,” which revealed the full theory of general relativity: light would actually bend 1.7 arc seconds, a result twice as large as Newton’s 0.87 arc seconds. Now, with an even better chance at observing and measuring starlight, given the larger calculations—a single arc second is comparable to the size of a dime at a distance of 1.3 miles—he was ready for astronomers to test again for light bending. That meant waiting for the next total solar eclipse. He wrote to his oldest boy, Hans Albert, then eleven years old. “In the last few days I completed one of the finest papers of my life. When you are older, I will tell you about it.”14
What may have been more difficult to explain to Hans Albert at the time was that three months later he would entice Mileva to give him a divorce by offering more money than he was already sending her. He also promised to set up funds for the two boys. He was now being pressured not just by Elsa, but also by her parents. He no longer tried to conceal his relationship with his cousin from his wife. Rumors were circulating, he wrote to Mileva. It wouldn’t look right to the public since Elsa had two daughters with reputations of their own to consider. He then added a directive on how she might shield their boys from a calcium deficiency. Mileva wavered on the divorce but declined his offer. When he refused to visit her in person, even though Hans Albert begged him, it marked the beginning of Mileva’s emotional and physical decline.15
In the late summer of 1915, William Campbell had written to encourage Charles Perrine to take advantage of the upcoming eclipse on February 3, 1916. It would be another opportunity to test for light deflection, and Perrine “would probably be the only man of experience on the line of totality.” Perrine knew that this observation was correct. But there was no way he could go on this expedition. Not only was Bell expecting a child in January, their third, but he was also facing some disheartening obstacles: pressing finances, the skepticism of many who were now overseeing observatory funding, and the loss of his skilled mechanic, James Mulvey, who was lying beneath a pyramid headstone in the Cemetery of Dissidents. He wrote in his notes, “It was impossible for the observatory to send anything but a small expedition to Venezuela which, along with the unfavorable conditions, prevented including the relativity problem on our program for that eclipse.” Among those “unfavorable conditions” was the fact that he was still waiting on the return of his forty-foot telescope.
On February 9, 1916, the Harvard College Observatory bulletin 598, from director Pickering, had this to say: “The following cablegram has been received from Professor C. D. Perrine, Director of the Argentine Observatory at Cordoba:—‘Argentine Expedition Venezuela announces observation total solar eclipse through thin clouds.’”
But Perrine wasn’t ready to give up yet, not with two future total eclipses waiting in the wings. He would unwaveringly petition the government to finance expeditions from Córdoba. The first eclipse, in the summer of 1918, was near his old stomping grounds in California. The second, in 1919, was back in Brazil. Like his friend and mentor William Campbell, Perrine was not a man to quit easily. He had moved to Argentina, a country in which his wife would never feel at home, not just because the salary was enticing. As he would write years later, there was an even greater temptation in that hemisphere, “the untouched southern sky in so many fields.”
The Argentinian government would refuse both his petitions. Having chased Vulcan, Charles Dillon Perrine was now out of the race to test for light deflection. The 1914 eclipse expedition to Crimea would be his last.
With Europe now caught in the downward spiral of a war so catastrophic it would obliterate a generation of young men, the world of science began a bitter battle within its own ranks. Something else besides financial strain and political bickering would further hamper the relationships both collegiate and friendly among scientists in the various countries now at war. It was more personal and human than any poster created from the inkwells of propaganda or from manifestos quickly written and signed. It was the deaths of their sons, brothers, fathers, colleagues, friends, and employees. No observatory or classroom, no laboratory or office, is so insulated or isolated that it can shut out the carnage of war, especially when there are empty spaces where young chemists, astronomers, physicists, and mathematicians had once pondered the unknown. Unfilled were the university desks where scholars had mused over philosophy, geography, medicine, and history. Many class barriers put firmly in place during the Edwardian period began to dissolve in the wake of this swift mortality. Gone along with those aristocratic sons were millworkers and bank tellers, farmers and shop owners, fishermen and dock workers, tailors and shoemakers. English anger and hatred toward Germany and all things German grew daily.
The older scientists left behind to manage the home front were now met with this loss. By the time conscription was introduced in England in the summer of 1916—Arthur Stanley Eddington would be expected to serve—the roll call of the dead was an endless banner being unfurled with no seeming end in sight. In the beginning, the notion of honor in war was so poignant that young men dashed off willingly to the battlefronts. This patriotism was still evident in the words that J. J. Atkinson had to say about the death of his own son, who was killed in action a few months into the war. At a memorial service held at Atkinson’s estate, the heartbroken father offered this sentiment: “My son was killed in battle with a smile on his face, so his brother said.… There is not a real man here who will not wish for such an end as his.”
Many other tributes to fallen soldiers would mention that farewell “smile,” as if it were proof that a young life had not been given in vain. This was not the affable “Atky” who had gone on eclipse expeditions around the world with his famous astronomer friends and kept them entertained with his comical antics. Atkinson and his wife became devoted fund-raisers for the troops. They attended every funeral and memorial service for the war dead in their village. Thus, Brazil in 1912 was amateur astronomer John Jepson Atkinson’s last eclipse expedition.
What Sir Oliver Lodge didn’t know the evening he gave his brotherhood of science speech in Australia was that his beloved and youngest son, Raymond, would be killed a year later in France, in the autumn of 1915. Or that he would relentlessly seek to contact his son via spiritualists and mediums. These talks with his dead boy would result in a book published soon after his loss: Raymond or Life and Death. In sending messages from beyond the veil, Raymond assured the living that the world of the afterlife was much the same as it was on earth—at least in England—but without illness and disease. People still lived in houses surrounded by flowers and trees. As for all those soldiers who had died and were still dying on the battlefields of the war? Raymond sent good news. They were greeted on the other side with fine cigars and whiskey. Having long believed in a spiritual afterlife, Sir Oliver and his grieving wife found a measure of peace from these “visits” with Raymond. Since Lodge firmly believed that both the universe and the afterlife were filled with ether—Raymond’s otherworldly existence now depended on it—he would perpetually dismiss Einstein’s 1905 special theory of relativity, which invalidated its existence.16
The loss most talked of and written about among scientists, however, was the death of the brilliant physicist Henry Moseley. He had voyaged to Australia with his mother on the same steamer that Lodge was on, that momentous summer of 1914. Moseley would give lectures at the BAAS meeting and then travel with his friend, British chemist Henry Tizard, to the United States before returning to England and a job offer at Oxford University. When the war broke out, everything changed, including his Oxford plans. The BAAS meeting over, he and Tizard left Australia for San Francisco as they had planned. In what would seem a college road trip before military service, they traveled across the United States by train to New York City and then sailed from Pier 54 on the Lusitania.17
If Moseley had accepted the offer from Oxford, he would have been allowed to continue his impressive body of work. At the age of twenty-six, he was already known for Moseley’s law and the atomic number. Back in England, there was no amount of pleading on behalf of family and friends that could dissuade “Harry,” as they called him, from the military. He convinced the Royal Engineers to accept him as a communications officer. On August 10, 1915, as he was telephoning an order during the failed Battle of Gallipoli, in Turkey—this was Churchill’s chance to show the world he was a brilliant military strategist—a Turkish sniper fired a bullet into Moseley’s brain.
The loss of Moseley was felt deeply by the scientific community, the men and women who could understand the pure genius of his gifts.18
On the other side of the war were the imprisonments and deaths of soldiers fighting for the Central Powers, losses that were exacting the same kind of pain and anger. Freundlich’s former teacher Karl Schwarzschild had died at Potsdam in early 1916 from a painful autoimmune disease he had contracted at the Russian front. The brilliant astronomer and physicist had been instrumental in helping Einstein with his field equations, remarkably developing the so-called Schwarzschild solution while serving in the German army. When news arrived in England that Schwarzschild had passed away, Eddington wrote an obituary for his German colleague. “The war exacts its heavy toll of human life, and science is not spared. On our side we have not forgotten the loss of the physicist Moseley, at the threshold of a great career; now, from the enemy, comes news of the death of Schwarzschild in the prime of his powers… The world loses an astronomer of exceptional genius.”
Other notable scientists were feeling these losses. Early in the war, Max Planck’s youngest son, Erwin, had been taken prisoner by the French, and his older son, Karl, was killed in action at Verdun, in 1916.19 Walter Zurhellen, the astronomer who had traveled to Crimea with Erwin Freundlich, had been released a year after the Russians took him prisoner. As a soldier in the German army, he died in the autumn of 1916 at the Battle of the Somme, in France, one of the bloodiest battles in human history. And Albert Einstein’s brother-in-law, Milos Marić, who studied medicine in France, had been called by the Austro-Hungarian army to serve as a battalion doctor. When he was taken prisoner by the Russians in 1915, his family had assumed that he was dead or a prisoner of war. His French wife went to live with the Marić family in Novi Sad, Serbia. They wouldn’t know for years that he was still alive and that his medical skills were being put to good use in Russian hospitals.20
On March 20, 1916, the Annalen der Physik received Albert Einstein’s final submission of “The Foundations of the General Theory of Relativity.” It was published in May. So there it was in cement. Light would bend at 1.7 arc seconds. But what if things had gone differently and the astronomers had had better luck on their expeditions? What if the sun had shone down brilliantly over Brazil on October 10, 1912? What if Perrine, with Mulvey’s help, had captured magnificent photographs of the sun in the center of the plates, with longer exposures and all stars in the vicinity perfectly visible? In 1912, Einstein was calculating that the deflection of light would be 0.85 arc seconds.
What if clouds hadn’t covered the sky over Campbell’s rented dacha near Kiev during the eclipse of 1914? What if, after young Kenneth Campbell shouted, “Go!” the Lick Observatory plates had caught perfect images of the stars and would finally reveal an answer to Isaac Newton’s question? Do not bodies act upon light at a distance, and by their action bend its rays? Yes, they do.
What if Freundlich had not been abruptly detained in Crimea? What if he and Perrine had risen to bright sun and cloudless skies over the hillside vineyard?
Better yet, what if Frank Dyson had answered Freundlich’s letter of February 1913 with a different response? Instead of no, what if the astronomer royal had agreed to have Charles Davidson test for light deflection at Minsk, in 1914? Davidson had clear skies and perfect images. The observation would have been successful.
Because nature never makes errors in its calculations, human beings would have been held accountable. If measured and read correctly, the universe would have gladly given up the right answer: 1.7 arc seconds. Newton, the genius of classical physics, would have been mistaken. Einstein, the genius of modern physics, would have botched his calculations. But should either man be considered wrong? After all, both of them had played a major role in opening up a door to the cosmos. It was as if for two hundred years, physicists had watched a man wearing a hat walk into a room and then saw the hat blown from his head. Over and over again. What was causing that to happen? Newton couldn’t tell us; he just knew that it happened. And then Einstein figured out that a fan was blowing away the man’s hat. That the fan was turned on high instead of low had been his early mistake.
But Einstein’s contribution would have seemed less dramatic had the 1912 or 1914 eclipse expeditions been successful. If Perrine and Campbell had not been undone by inclement weather, Einstein’s introduction to the global stage of science would have simply been as an important actor among other actors and not as the superstar of the show. Now he had corrected himself in the last draft of his paper. There may never be another man whose impressive reputation, although deserved, owes its place in history to bad weather, to precipitation and clouds, and to the ironic fact that it’s gravity that causes water droplets in clouds to fall to earth in the first place. Einstein was as lucky with weather conditions on the days of the eclipses as Perrine and Campbell were unlucky.
Not long after the publication of his paper in 1916, his book, Foundations of the General Theory of Relativity, was also printed. In it, Einstein again challenged astronomers to take up the gauntlet: “As seen from the earth, certain fixed stars appear to be in the neighborhood of the sun, and are thus capable of observation during a total eclipse. At such times, these stars ought to appear to be displaced outwards from the sun by 1.7 seconds of arc, as compared with their apparent position in the sky when the sun is situated at another part of the heavens. The examination of the correctness or otherwise of this deduction is a problem of the greatest importance, the early solution of which is to be expected of astronomers.”
Freundlich had studied mathematics with no less than renowned mathematician Felix Klein. But astronomers like Perrine and Campbell didn’t need the brilliance of a Klein to correctly test for light deflection. And it wasn’t as if an eclipse had to wait for a mathematical mind like Arthur Eddington’s. Everything an astronomer really needed to know was contained in one handwritten letter penned on tan stationery, the first letter that Freundlich wrote to Perrine, in the autumn of 1911. “Dear Sir,” it began. “Although I am not acquainted with you… The known physicist Prof Einstein has derived in a paper he intends to publish in the course of the next month an effect, that any field of gravitation produces upon electro-magnetic phenomena for instance an effect of the gravitation of the sun upon the light of a star passing near to the sun.” Reading a few more details in Freundlich’s letter, and the astronomers could take it from there.
Perrine, Campbell, Curtis, and others had read the previous versions of Einstein’s papers and articles as he moved from 0.83 arc seconds to 0.85. Dyson, Davidson, Newall, and others in England were at least familiar with the theory. Eddington had published an article titled “Gravitation” in the RAS’s journal, Observatory, in February 1915. In it, he referred to Einstein and his 1911 paper, which was predicting 0.83 arc seconds. He noted that it would be difficult, even impossible, during a total eclipse to make such a minute measurement, although “the astronomer has a deep interest in the attempts now being made to complete the law of gravitation whereas Newton has left it ambiguous.” He was probably remembering his 1912 meeting in Brazil with Perrine, who was there for that purpose. Or he had read Campbell’s paper on his attempt near Brovary in 1914. Eddington then laid out the general theory’s consequence to science: “A positive result would mean that gravitation has been pulled down from its pedestal, and ceases to stand aloof from the other interrelated forces of nature.”
But then war had broken out before Einstein applied his final brush strokes to the canvas. Much of Europe was fighting. Communications had been broken between Germany and scientific types in the Allied countries. Now that the polished paper had finally been published, in Berlin, in March 1916, channels to receive it were mostly blocked. It was as if Einstein had finally obtained his magic carpet, but there were now few places to watch it fly. In Germany, he had far more cynics than disciples. Since the Netherlands was still neutral, he had kept in touch with Dutch colleagues Paul Ehrenfest and Hendrik Lorentz, who shared his papers with Willem de Sitter, director of the Leiden Observatory. De Sitter mailed a copy of the final paper across the North Sea to Eddington, who was still secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society and who had been outspoken in maintaining an academic relationship with German scientists. Now Einstein was predicting 1.7 arc seconds for light deflection. Any deflection would have groundbreaking consequences if proven, but twice Newton’s calculation was even more monumental. De Sitter had hoped that Einstein’s final paper could be read in England, but he was aware of the wartime restrictions on printing a German’s work. He offered to write an article himself for the RAS journal. Eddington eagerly agreed.
Eddington’s decision was courageous, given astronomer Herbert Hall Turner’s strong criticism of scientific cooperation with the Germans. Turner, who had been Dyson’s friend since their early years at the Royal Observatory, had been teaching at Oxford since 1904. He had been known as an internationalist before the war, working mostly with German astronomers. But earlier that May, in his monthly Observatory column, “From an Oxford Note-book,” he had begun a bitter attack. The journal had been founded in 1877 by the astronomer royal Sir William Christie. It was widely read by many scientific groups, and thus Turner spoke to a large audience of his peers. He denounced the Germans as untrustworthy and reminded his British colleagues that Lodge’s “science above politics” toast they had raised their glasses to in Australia, in the summer of 1914, should now be disregarded. Eddington, who was then editor of the Observatory, had been one of the few scientists to respond and disagree: “Think, not of a symbolic German, but of your former friend Prof. X, for instance… and try to work up a little fury. The attempt breaks down ludicrously.”
As Eddington became more familiar with the calculations, he understood the magnitude of what Einstein’s brain had conceived and the revolutionary journey it had taken. He saw the theory as a stunning example of the power of mathematical reasoning. For those few who understood it then, and those who understand it now, the general theory of relativity is an elegant work so pure in shape and meaning that adjectives to describe it are often the same used to describe fine works of art. Into a world beleaguered by an unchivalrous war, with its newly introduced atrocities of trench warfare, poisonous gases, air bombings, and large-scale civilian massacres, had been born this graceful new idea.
The next total eclipse was coming in the summer of 1918. This time, the path of totality lay almost in William Campbell’s backyard. He would not have to face the limitations of wartime travel that the English would have. With Charles Perrine unable to get funding down at Córdoba, Campbell would likely stand alone in testing for light deflection. Now all he needed was to get his instruments home from Russia.
De Sitter’s paper appeared in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society that October. On November 1, 1916, he wrote to Einstein. “I am sending you today a separate offprint of a little popular exposition of the general theory of relativity which I have published in an English astronomical journal.” In his second paper a month later, he reminded the reader that “Newton in his Principia gave only formal laws for gravitation and inertia. He made no attempt at explanation: ‘Hypotheses non fingo.’” I feign no hypotheses. De Sitter’s report ended with the view that Einstein’s theory “represents an enormous progress over the physics of yesterday.” And added that “not only has he entirely explained the exceptional and universal nature of gravitation by the principle of the identity of gravitation and inertia, but he has laid bare intimate connections between branches of science which up to now were considered as entirely independent from each other, and has thus made an important step towards the unity of nature.” The theory proved to be, de Sitter concluded, “a powerful instrument of discovery.”