FOR ALL HIS SEEMING EASE WITH THE WORLD, Einstein was intensely private. Outwardly friendly, he disclosed almost nothing of himself to the world. Little wonder, perhaps, that biographers have seized on his bohemian clothing and disheveled appearance, as if they could be keys to his inner being. In his Berlin years, when he reached home, he took off the professor's obligatory wing collar and frock coat and walked around in bare feet and an old sweater. In Princeton, with a sigh of relief at American informality, he wore sweatshirts and baggy pants in public and, in winter, a seaman's woolen cap pulled down over his ears. Like his forebear Newton, Einstein was utterly indifferent to fashion.
Privacy was not easily attained. In Princeton, his wife, Elsa, and secretary, Helen Dukas, guarded the front door of 112 Mercer Street. Princeton was as self-contained and self-assured as Einstein himself, so his daily walk to his office attracted little attention. On one occasion, however, his morning walk was interrupted by a high school student sufficiently guileless to have inveigled a rare interview for his school newspaper. “My life is a simple thing that would interest no one. It is a known fact that I was born, and that is all that is necessary.” Thus did Einstein steer the young journalist away from personal questions.1
No one who met Einstein seems to have harbored suspicions that his reticence was a pose. Indeed, he led a very active social life. Yet he seems to have avoided revelation—even self-revelation, having remained, as he remarked in an appreciation of Freud, among those “not-having-been-analyzed.” One activity that tends to reveal is teaching. But Einstein preferred not to teach. His appointments at the Prussian Academy in Berlin and at the Institute for Advanced Study relieved him of all teaching duties. “I couldn't resist the temptation of a post in which I would be free from all obligations and be able to indulge wholly in my musings,”2 he wrote of his appointment in Berlin. No one took a Ph.D. under his direction. He did not cultivate protégés or disciples among students. As he said, he was always a loner.
In his later years, Einstein alluded to the price he paid for his single-minded devotion to science. When his close friend Michele Besso died in 1955, shortly before Einstein himself, he wrote admiringly to Besso's widow of Michele's ability to lead a “harmonious life”:
[W]hat I most admired in Michele as a man was his ability to live many years with his wife, not only in peace but in constant accord, an endeavor in which I have lamentably failed twice.3
Einstein had chosen the perfection of work, Besso the perfection of life. Besso's sister, visiting Princeton in 1947, told Einstein that she said she had long wondered why her brother had not made some great discovery in mathematics. Einstein laughed and said, “Michele is a humanist, a universal spirit, too interested in many things to become a monomaniac. Only a monomaniac gets what we commonly refer to as results.” Then, according to Besso's sister, “Einstein giggled to himself.”4
It is thought that scientific genius is best nurtured in households rich in learning and culture. If so, Einstein's family was ideal. His father, Hermann Einstein, was an easygoing and good-natured man, not particularly suited to the business world. After several false starts, he opened an electrochemical works in Munich with his brother Jakob. Einstein's mother, Pauline, was the more cultured and widely read parent. She also played the piano.
Einstein was born in Ulm, a vibrant, highly industrialized city in southern Germany. The Einstein family history is typical of German Jewry. In the sixteenth century, a small Jewish community grew in the small town of Buchau, about forty miles from Ulm, where an abbey afforded protection. To that small town, in 1665, came Baruch Moises Ainstein. Like other Jews, Ainstein became a tradesman (in cloth and horses) and enjoyed relative freedom to practice his faith. For two centuries, the Jews of Buchau lived nestled against the Alps in peace. During the mid-nineteenth century, however, Einstein's family began a slow migration to Ulm, where prosperity born of industry beckoned. Hermann was born in Ulm and to Ulm he returned with Pauline, whom he met in Stuttgart, where he had been sent to school.
In 1880, a year after Albert's birth, the family moved to Munich, convinced by Hermann's brother Jakob that riches were to be made from the generation of electricity. Jakob, a graduate of Stuttgart Polytechnic, persuaded the more cautious Hermann to join him in partnership. Jakob would serve as inventor and technician; Hermann would tend to the business side.
Despite Jakob's talent, or perhaps because of it, the ensuing years were lean. Munich and the surrounding Bavaria, conservative and steeped in tradition, had resisted industrialization. Not so the rest of Germany. Although the Einstein brothers seemed to have gotten in on the ground floor, they faced fierce competition from well-established companies outside Bavaria. Time and again, Jakob's innovations proved too ambitious and Hermann's caution too inhibiting. Later, Maja, Albert's sister, described their father's method: He “had a particularly pronounced way of trying to get to the bottom of something, by examining it from every side, before he could reach a decision.”5 It was a mode better suited to a physicist than to a businessman. Albert's formative years were spent watching his father and uncle struggle through several incorporations and dissolutions. Capital borrowed from family and friends was lost time and again, and, in the end, the brothers went their own ways.
In many ways, it was an ordinary childhood. Yet the young Einstein was anything but ordinary. Even the moment of his birth provided a shock. Pauline, glimpsing her firstborn, saw only his “large and angular” head, flattened at the back. In a few weeks, time, his skull rounded out; still, he was overly plump, to his grandmother's horror: “Much too fat! Much too fat!” Slow to speak, he nevertheless appeared quite self-possessed as an infant, able to amuse himself. His sister's arrival on the scene may have upended his universe. She was clearly useless as a toy. “Where are its wheels?” he asked.6
For all that the Einstein family struggled, it remained solidly middle class. The loving parents, culturally Jewish but not observant, seem to have indulged Einstein and his sister, Maja, nurturing their inquisitiveness and encouraging their musical talents. Despite protests (including hurling a chair at a prospective music teacher), Albert took violin lessons and became so proficient that he and his mother played piano duets. He was free to wander about his neighborhood at the tender age of four. He was also free to let loose his temper on Maja. She narrowly missed being hit by a bowling ball and was not so lucky when Albert came after her with a hoe. More than anything, he was free to explore intellectually, especially in the realm of mechanics. With an extended family steeped in technical and business know-how, Einstein found ready answers to his precocious questions. He was always eager to observe: At age five, during an illness, he was given a magnetic compass by his father. The device, meant only as a distraction, fascinated and excited the budding physicist.
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.”7
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.8 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.”9 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.”10 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.11 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.12
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=mc2.
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.”13 In 1903, he had faced down his family's angry disapproval of his marriage to Mileva by being “stubborn as a mule.”14 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.
Mileva had barely settled into a Berlin apartment with the children when Einstein sent her a “memorandum” setting harsh conditions: She must not expect him to see her while at home, nor expect affection of any kind; she could speak to him only when he asked and must answer at once when spoken to. To add to Mileva's misery, Berlin was now the home of Einstein's mother, Pauline. Even Einstein sympathized with Mileva's fears of Pauline: “She feels persecuted,” he wrote to Elsa. “Well, there's some truth in it.”15 Not surprisingly, Mileva very soon returned to Zurich. Michele Besso and other friends tried to calm the waters, but to no avail. Then began long negotiations for a divorce.
Einstein always possessed a sharply realistic sense of what was necessary. Thus, even during World War I, when all around him were diverted by the tragedy of war and when his family life was disintegrating, he was still able to concentrate. After eight years of work on the general theory of relativity, he made one last great dash in the second half of 1915. Without question, he juggled the distractions by compartmentalizing himself. He brought his full attention to his work, while somehow coping with (or evading) his tumultuous life. He waged battles on different fronts, each of which clamored for his presence. But he remained inwardly centered.
His ability to focus, to the exclusion of all distractions, was legendary. In 1911, when Einstein was in Prague, he spent evenings at the salon of Bertha Fanta along with a group of young Jews interested in philosophy and literature. There he met the young Franz Kafka and Kafka's close friend Max Brod, also a novelist. (Brod later secured his place in literary history by refusing Kafka's dying request to destroy the latter's unpublished manuscripts, among them The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika.) Brod was then at work on a novel about the great Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, later published as Tycho Brahes Weg zu Gott (The Redemption of Tycho Brahe). It was an allegory of scientific genius, based loosely on historical fact. Brahe's careful measurements of planetary movement in the two decades before 1600 made it possible for his assistant Johannes Kepler to find the true laws of planetary motion by 1610—measurements Newton later used in his epochal theory of gravitation. Kepler dared to assert that planets move around the sun in ellipses.
Brod took Einstein as his model for Kepler. In the novel, Kepler's genius relies on his gift of “retaining the essential and rejecting everything else or perfecting it.”
His patience never failed; he held all in readiness for the one mysterious moment, in which from near and far his “laws” should rise up before his eyes. Until then… he accepted everything as purely provisional…. He had given his allegiance to no theory, trembled for nothing, and longed for nothing; he readily rejected his own earlier convictions, for any new discovery might overturn all previous result.16
Certainly Brod studied Einstein closely during those Prague evenings. In Einstein he must have seen the “certain rigor and ruthlessness” he ascribed to Kepler.17 When the novel was published in 1915, Einstein read it “with great interest,” though with no certain memory of Brod himself. Others noticed the likeness: The German chemist Walther Nernst told Einstein: “This Kepler… that's you.”18
In counterbalance to Einstein's “rigor and ruthlessness” was his sense of humor. Sometimes it came across as kindly, as when he wrote a child: “Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics; I can assure you that mine are still greater.”19 But his humor was often darker, more biting. To the World Disarmament Conference of 1932, he offered this caustic message: “As it is, the hardly bought achievements of the machine age in the hands of our generation are as dangerous as a razor in the hands of a 3-year-old child.”20 Yet he remained cheerful. In 1915, he met the French pacifist and writer Romain Rolland in the safety of neutral Switzerland. The Kaiser was ruled by industrialists and mad generals, Einstein reported, and everyone in Germany looked forward to victory. Still, Einstein seemed “vivacious and serene” to Rolland:
[H]e cannot help giving his most serious thoughts a jocular form…. Einstein is incredibly free in his judgments on Germany…. No German enjoys that freedom. Anyone else but he would have suffered from a sense of isolation in his thinking during this frightful year. Not he. He laughs….21
In the face of isolation and hopelessness, Einstein mustered not only humor but fortitude, just as he would later through his long, lonely quest for a unified theory. Indeed, isolation seemed to suit him, on many levels. Most exiles regret having to leave their homeland. But Einstein considered his stateless state a blessing rather than a curse. When he became world famous, various nations tried to claim his allegiance. In 1919, he observed, wryly, in the London Times:
By an application of the theory of relativity to the tastes of readers, today in Germany I am called a German man of science and in England I am represented as a Swiss Jew. If I come to be regarded as a bête noire, the descriptions will be reversed and I shall become a Swiss Jew for the Germans and a German man of science for the English!22
Einstein moved to Berlin just six months before the outbreak of World War I. Max Planck, whom Einstein revered, and Walther Nernst had come to Zurich in the summer of 1913 to discuss terms—or, as Einstein put it, they came looking for a “prize laying hen.”23 For a young man of thirty-four, the offer was generous: a triple appointment to the Prussian Academy of Science, the University of Berlin, and, as director, of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics. The Kaiser Wilhelm Society was founded in 1911 with the goal of developing German science. Its research institutes in chemistry, physics, biology, and medicine were financed partly by the government, partly by wealthy businessmen. Inevitably, science became handmaiden to industrial and military aims, even before the Nazi takeover. Funding was plentiful and expectations ran high. By the time Einstein accepted his appointment, Berlin was arguably the center of the scientific world, though no match for the glamor and culture of Paris, Vienna, or London.24 The Prussian Academy, by contrast, hearkens back to 1700, when Gottleib Liebnitz became its first president under Frederick, King of Prussia. Only two positions were fully salaried, and Einstein was offered one of them. Despite his childhood memories of rigid, militaristic German schools, he accepted. As his first public duty, he delivered an inaugural address on “Leibniz Day,” July 2, 1914. One month later, war was declared.
Einstein was unusual in his revulsion toward the war. Even the respected and sober Max Planck took up the cause, encouraging students to enlist (the nearsighted Planck was exempt). As a Swiss citizen, Einstein was tacitly excused from rabble-rousing German nationalism. Nor did his reputation suffer particularly when he signed on to a petition by Georg Friedrich Nicolai, a renowned physician, protesting the war. Nicolai's reputation was ruined; Einstein was deemed eccentric. Having returned to Berlin as an outsider, he remained so politically. His professional and collegial relationships did not suffer. He was on friendly terms with the warmongers who surrounded him. He would not let the war and politics distract him.
In fact, he had no preparation for political activism. His adult life had been spent almost entirely on the sidelines in neutral Switzerland. His political education, such as it was, had consisted of listening to his socialist friends in heated conversation in Prague cafés. He was casually sympathetic. Nor had he been he an avowed pacifist before the war, though his contempt for German authoritarianism and exaltation of martial glory ran deep. He did not even like to play chess: too much naked competitiveness.25
To his surprise, his Berlin colleagues had suddenly transformed into superpatriots. Nor were they content to sit on the sidelines. On October 4, what became known as the “paper war” (Krieg der Geister) was launched with the infamous “Appeal to the Cultured World,” drafted in October 1914 by the writer Ludwig Fulda.26 The appeal was signed by ninety-three of Germany's most prominent scholars and artists; fifteen were scientists, including Planck, Fritz Haber, and Emil Fischer. The appeal condemned “enemies trying to befoul Germany's pure cause” in a struggle “forced” on it. It denied that Germany's invasion of Belgium was illegal and insisted that no violence had been visited on Belgian citizens. In a dramatic flourish worthy of Fulda's profession, it invoked the “legacy of Goethe, Beethoven, and Kant.”27
As a Swiss national, Einstein was not asked to sign. But a growing sense of dismay led him to action. A few days later, he signed Nicolai's countermanifesto, “An Appeal to Europeans.” Its premise was the international and transnational nature of science. It urged an end to the war without assigning blame. Nothing came of their international appeal. Only Einstein, Nicolai, an astronomer, Wilhelm Forster, and a Dr. Otto Beck could be persuaded to sign. Rather than publish immediately, Nicolai incorporated it into a study of war, which he published in Zurich in 1916.
In late 1914, Einstein joined the New Fatherland League (Bund Neues Vaterland), a liberal group trying to bridge war differences in Europe. They had connections in the German foreign office, but trouble arose when a statement of their peace views—signed among others by Einstein—was published in foreign newspapers in 1915. That same year, the League started distributing illegal writings by English pacifists—Bertrand Russell among them—and smuggling letters to pacifists in jail. The government finally shut down the League's offices, interrogated its officials, sent two female secretaries to jail, and forbade all other members to communicate with each other.28
In October 1915, the Berlin Goethe Society asked Einstein to write something for a “patriotic commemorative album.” He submitted a three-page essay, “My Opinion of the War.” The original essay spoke of the “sad circumstances of the present” and his hope that a European federation would rule out future wars. But it also denounced patriotism as a shrine to “bestial hatred and mass murder” and mockingly described a citizen's “affliction with a state to be a business affair, somewhat akin to one's relationship to life insurance.”29 The editors refused to print remarks so openly offensive to the Fatherland, and several paragraphs were excised. It says much about muzzled speech in Germany that Einstein's short essay was heavily censored by an organization bearing the name of Goethe.
Einstein was probably on the government's watch list of pacifists from the start of the war.30 In 1915, he was elected to the council of the Central Organization for a Durable Peace and attended its closed-door session, the scholarly purpose of which was to make recommendations to diplomats about postwar matters.31
The organization was hardly inflammatory or dangerous. Still, the German police investigated with pedantic thoroughness. Their reports included the name of the Berlin newspaper he subscribed to and a complaint that he had not always filled out the proper forms required to travel around Germany.32
Even though he was a Swiss citizen and a neutral, Einstein's antiwar stand might have led to his expulsion from Germany and from membership in the Prussian Academy. Dr. Nicolai, who drafted and signed the “Appeal to Europeans,” was a German citizen, a professor at the University of Berlin, and on active duty as an office physician with the Army. But his outspoken pacifism played havoc with his life. He was “degraded to private and made a hospital orderly.”33 Einstein was far more prominent, yet he was never rebuked or even warned. The German authorities must have considered him annoying but relatively harmless.
Yet for a pacifist, Einstein's record was decidedly wayward. His criticism of Germany was most strident during the first year of the war. From mid-1915 to the Armistice, he said little publicly. His salary was partly paid by the industrialist Leopold Koppel; the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, which he nominally directed, did military research. Einstein did not protest. (In England, Russell solved a similar problem of conscience by giving away his stock in a munitions firm to a financially strapped and decidedly not pacifist
T. S. Eliot.) Einstein remained friendly with colleagues like Fritz Haber, who introduced poison gas into the war, and with the industrialist Walther Rathenau. Nor did Einstein refuse to serve in May 1916, when he was elected president of the German Physical Society, a loudly patriotic group.34
Surprisingly, Einstein even helped the German war effort by improving wing design for aircraft and gyrocompasses for U-boats. Of course, Germany in the First World War was not Nazi Germany; the Kaiser was a moral universe away from Hitler. Einstein, sooner than Russell, had also come to see the peace cause as a futile gesture against the prevailing “herd” mentality. The martial delusions of his fellow professors—bloodthirsty about the war but tender altruists at home—left him in mixed despair and amusement. As for the war itself, Einstein thought Germany and England both wrong, infected by an epidemic of lunacy.
Einstein was inconsistent, but neither obtuse nor hypocritical. He did not delude himself. In 1916, he confessed to a friend:
Admittedly, things are fine for me here and I float on the very “top,” but on my own and rather like a drop of oil on water, isolated by my attitude and concept of life.35
“On my own” and “isolated”: What mattered to him was his work in physics. The rest—family, friends, love, worthy causes—could be attended to only if there were time and energy. He was, after all, a young man in the grip of a discovery as great as any in scientific history. In November 1915, after more than eight years of torturous work, he was able to present to the Prussian Academy the definitive general theory of relativity.
By late 1918, with the war in its final throes, German sailors mutinied, refusing to fight and seizing ships from their officers. Revolution spread through port cities inland, eventually reaching Berlin. Soldiers and laborers rioted in the streets. A general strike was called. On November, the Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann declared Germany a republic. Within hours, the Kaiser abdicated. Einstein, recovering from a debilitating ulcer, was elated by the prospect of a socialist and democratic government. Though he did not know it then, the most politically active part of his life had just begun.
Ironically, his entrance into the political fray followed on the heels of an extraordinary scientific event. On November 6, 1919, the Royal Astronomical Society in London reported that Einstein's prediction of light “bending” as it passed the sun had been proven. Arthur Stanley Eddington's photographs of an eclipse, taken in Sobral, Brazil, confirmed Einstein's calculations. The theory of general relativity was heralded around the world. On November 7, headlines touted the new sage: “Revolution In Science. New Theory of Universe. Newtonian Ideas Overthrown.”36 Einstein was thrust into the public spotlight and into a career forever dictated by notoriety.
The political value of his fame was obvious. The new German republic welcomed the left-liberal Einstein as a spokesman on its behalf. German scientists were typically conservative, yet the most illustrious scientist of all was ready to defend the shaky republic at home and abroad. He became the spokesman not only of the fledgling Weimar Republic, but of a passionate vision of internationalism.37 In the first months after the Armistice, he was optimistic about both. In a 1919 letter to Max Born's wife, Hedwig, he wrote: “I believe in the growth potential of the League of Nations…. I don't believe that human beings as such can really change, but I am convinced that it is possible, and indeed necessary, to put an end to anarchy in international relations, even if it were to mean sacrificing the independence of various countries.”38
One other cause beckoned him: Zionism. Ironically, given his abhorrence of nationalism, Einstein embraced Zionism passionately, though not without reservation. Zionism soon mattered more to him than anything outside of science. It was a surprising turn of mind. Until he moved to Berlin in 1914, he had little interest in being Jewish. The Jews he met in Prague in 1911—Brod, Kafka, Hugo Bergmann—were committed Zionists, but they seem to have made little impression on him, at least in the short run: “I read the book [Brod's The Redemption of Tycho Brahe] with great interest,” he wrote to Hedwig Born in 1916. “Incidentally, I believe that I met him [Brod] in Prague. I think he belongs to a small circle there of philosophical and Zionist enthusiasts, which was loosely grouped around the university philosophers, a medieval-like band of unworldly people….”39 Einstein's Jewish colleagues in Berlin were another matter: Many had converted to Christianity to become as German as possible, often with an eye to career advancement. The proudly independent Einstein called this servile “mimicry.”
After the war, Zionism must have seemed a logical alternative to assimilation: “Judaism owes a great debt of gratitude to Zionism,” he later said. “The Zionist movement has revived among Jews the sense of community.”40 He began to realize the utility of his fame as a scientist and as a Jew. Towards the end of the war, poor Jews fled Eastern Europe and poured into Berlin, crowding into an impoverished shantytown. To the dismay of assimilated, middle-class Jews, Einstein welcomed the refugees, but also urged them to look towards Palestine as the natural homeland of “free sons of the Jewish people.” He further riled assimilated Berlin Jews in 1920, when he castigated the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith for the underlying message of its name, so suggestive of a “servile attitude” and so resistant to ethnic identity. “Not until we have the courage to see ourselves as a nation, not until we respect ourselves, can we acquire the respect of others.”41
In 1920, Chaim Weizmann, the driving force behind the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and its guarantee of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, became president of the World Zionist Organization. The following year, he set off on a trip to the United States to raise funds for a Hebrew University in Palestine. Einstein agreed to come along. “Naturally, I am needed not for my abilities but solely for my name, from whose publicity value a substantial effect is expected among the rich tribal companions in Dollaria.”42 For all his arch deprecation, he was proud to lend his name to the cause. Howls of outrage were hurled at him for taking such a public stand in favor of Zionism, and especially for setting foot on the soil of Germany's enemies (he stopped in England on the way home from the United States). Before setting out, Einstein heard from his colleague Fritz Haber: “If at this moment you demonstratively fraternize with the British and their friends, people in this country will see this as evidence of the disloyalty of the Jews.”43 Still, Einstein made the trip. He was greeted in the United States with such enthusiasm as would gratify a movie star. This was Einstein's first visit to the country, an exhausting, sometimes preposterous experience. The endless interviewing, hand-shaking, and touring, the crowds gaping to catch sight of him, reporters asking inane or sensationalizing questions, and he answering with “cheap jokes” taken seriously—Einstein said he felt like a “prize ox” being exhibited. In a spare moment, he made his first trip to Princeton as well, receiving an honorary degree from Princeton University and giving four lectures there on relativity (published as The Meaning of Relativity).
Meanwhile, he dutifully worked for the Weimar Republic. He served on a committee to evaluate German war atrocities; he joined the League of Nations’ Commission on Intellectual Cooperation. He traveled widely, representing (despite his Swiss citizenship) German science and the democratic German government, in sometimes controversial efforts to overcome the animosities of the war. In the spring of 1922, the Collège de France asked him to lecture in Paris. After some hesitation, he accepted. He was the first German scientist to be invited, though many French scholars disapproved, and Einstein's German colleagues were equally unhappy.44 Increasingly certain of his commitment to internationalism, Einstein turned his fame into a pan-national passport.
Then politics turned dangerous. His friend Walther Rathenau, a Jewish industrialist with philosophic inclinations who became foreign minister in early 1922, was assassinated in June. Political murders in postwar Germany were common. One estimate reported that in 1922, left-wing death squads were responsible for twenty-two such killings; right-wing death squads were responsible for more than three hundred.45 As a Jew, a liberal, and an internationalist, Rathenau was anathema to the conservatives, diehard militarists, anti-Semites, and nascent Nazis making up the political right.
Einstein knew that he was in danger. His defiant Jewishness, his antiwar activities, his “Red” sympathies during the German revolution in 1918, and especially his world fame—everything pointed to his becoming a target of the right. He canceled his lectures and political work, and even considered resigning from the Prussian Academy for the first time since 1920, when an antirelativity rally left him wondering whether to leave Germany altogether.46
It was time for him to lower his too-familiar profile. He and Elsa sailed to Japan, where he had been invited to give lectures. Oddly enough, Bertrand Russell had made this trip possible, perhaps unwittingly. During his own trip to Japan in 1921, Russell had been asked by a publisher to name the most “significant” people alive. His answer: Lenin and Einstein. The Japanese publisher decided on Einstein (Lenin having his hands full with the Russian Revolution). Not only did the lecture series allow Einstein to absent himself from the dangers of Berlin; it also contributed handily—a whopping £2,000 in British currency—to his constantly depleted bank account. He spent six weeks in Japan, lecturing to crowded rooms while his words were painstakingly translated into Japanese.
As he sailed back, en route to a planned stop in Palestine, he learned that he had won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Despite the news, Einstein continued his trip to Jerusalem. He was the honored guest of the British High Commissioner of Palestine, Sir Herbert Samuel, a fellow Jew.47
The Nobel Prize had long been a certainty, with only one question in the air: Why had it taken so long? The quandary faced by the Nobel committee had much to do with Einstein's eminent qualifications for the award. He had been repeatedly nominated for his major works: the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and relativity. The latter, perhaps the most logical choice for the award, evidently ran up against a seeming technicality: The Nobel Prize is awarded for a discovery, not a theory. More to the point, despite definitive proof by Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, relativity stirred controversy. In Germany, promulgators of the nascent “German Physics” (including the rabidly anti-Semitic Paul Weyland and Ernst Gehrcke) denounced the theory. In Sweden, the committee members had difficulty understanding it. In the end, it was decided to give the award to Einstein not for relativity, but for his discovery of the photoelectric effect. Thus, the paper he called “revolutionary,” the first published paper of his “miracle year,” was the feat for which Einstein won his Nobel.
By the terms of their divorce agreement, the prize money went to Mileva. (She continued to care for their two sons, and especially for Eduard, whose mental health was increasingly fragile.) Ironically, the awarding of the prize led to a small international quarrel. Germany wanted to claim this latest laureate as its own, insisting that members of the Prussian Academy were automatically German citizens—thus, Einstein was deemed to be German, despite his Swiss citizenship. Einstein objected vehemently. Since protocol required that the winner's national representatives take part in festivities, the quarrel was more than academic. Who would deliver the medal to Einstein? Finessing the problem, Nobel Foundation officials dispatched a Swedish minister to Einstein's apartment, where he handed over the honorific medal and scroll.
Though adamant about his Swiss citizenship, Einstein had always claimed to be a man without a homeland—a member not of a nation, but of the international community. But during the 1920s, he began to identify strongly with Zionism and Jewish causes. It was the closest he ever came to nationalism. Though passionate in his feelings, Einstein never hesitated to criticize the nascent Jewish state. Hebrew University in Jerusalem enjoyed his early support, but by 1928, despairing of its quality, he resigned from its board.48 He repeatedly encouraged “peaceful cooperation” with Arabs, blaming British policy for the deepening and dangerous animosity. Yet his love for Israel and his identification with Jewish causes never wavered. His feelings were enthusiastically returned: From his sudden fame in 1919 to his death, Einstein was seen by most of the world's Jews as their greatest living figure. When Chaim Weizmann died in 1952, David Ben-Gurion, then prime minister of Israel, decided to offer the presidency to Einstein:
There is only one man whom we should ask to become President of the State of Israel. He is the greatest Jew on earth. Maybe the greatest human being on earth.49
Quite sensibly, Einstein refused. Still, he was deeply moved by the offer from “our state Israel”:
All my life I have dealt with objective matters, hence I lack both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people and to exercise official functions…. I am the more distressed over these circumstances because my relationship to the Jewish people had become my strongest human bond, ever since I became aware of our precarious situation among the nations of the world.50
It now requires an effort of historical imagination to recall how much dignity Einstein lent to Jews. Supreme in science, manifestly decent, he was a living refutation of racial and religious slurs. That such a great mind saw himself as a Jew like all the rest; that he said so at a time when millions of poor Jews still lived in Eastern Europe or congregated as immigrants in the slums of New York or Berlin, often resented by their more fortunate brethren; that he spoke out tirelessly to defend them or attack their enemies—these efforts made him not only admired but beloved by his fellow Jews. When Hitler took power in 1933, Einstein's immediate denunciation of the Nazi regime carried powerful weight around the world. His early support of Zionism was of incalculable value, and Weizmann knew it, though he was often annoyed by Einstein's naïveté or obstinacy. In 1918, when Einstein became a Zionist, that cause was largely ignored or unpopular among the mass of Jews; a few thousand emigrated to Palestine, many millions to America and other Western countries. He was the “Jewish saint,” Einstein said ironically, but he never shirked the responsibilities involved. Russell was born into the ruling class of the most powerful empire on earth—Einstein the Zionist was an early patriot of a nation that did not even exist until 1948.
For Einstein, the years between the wars saw the diminution of his scientific genius. They saw, as well, a new focus on the atom. Relativity had resolved macrophysics—the realm of gravity, time, and space. What remained was the invisible realm of what makes matter.
In some ways, Einstein remained at the center of physics purely by dint of his reputation. Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, he reestablished his status as an outsider for his stubborn rejection of quantum mechanics. A younger generation, located in the “quantum triangle” of Munich, Göttingen, and Copenhagen, succeeded in changing our worldview, as he had in relativity.51 It was, in many ways, a more startling revolution than Einstein's. Quantum mechanics gave us the structure of the atom, but it robbed us of the certainty of causation. Einstein was never reconciled to a physics in which God appeared to “throw dice.” When, in 1932, he finally accepted the usefulness and (for him, limited) success of quantum mechanics, he turned irrevocably away from mainstream physics. His search for a “theory of everything” based on relativity, a unified theory that would subsume quantum theory, was relentless and, ultimately, unsuccessful.
Fame assured Einstein of the means to carry on his work. As Germany descended into the hell of Nazism, he found himself afloat in requests for lectures and job offers. He lectured at the new California Institute of Technology in 1930 and again in 1932. He was invited to deliver the Rhodes lecture at Oxford in 1931. In 1932, while at Caltech, he met Abraham Flexner, an academic reformer and inveterate organizer, who was recruiting faculty for his newly endowed Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Flexner, determined to entice the greatest name in science, offered Einstein a six-month contract scheduled around his Berlin duties. But Einstein was as yet unwilling to abandon his home in Berlin.
Almost immediately after Hitler took power, Einstein was targeted. That the most famous scientist in the world was a Jew—not to mention a pacifist and internationalist—outraged the Nazis. In the years leading up to Hitler's election, Einstein had attended rallies, signed manifestos, and lent his name to appeals in the anti-Fascist cause. Once in power, the Nazis wasted no time in retaliating. Among the photographs in a book listing “traitors to Germany,” Einstein's picture was captioned: “Not Yet Hanged.”52 Soon to come were book burnings, mass dismissals of Jews from academia, and concentration camps.
Einstein did not hesitate. Only three months after the Nazis took over, he cut all ties with Germany, resigning from the Prussian Academy of Sciences and turning in his passport.53 The Nazi chieftains and German newspapers spat at him, calling him a turncoat. As Einstein wrote to Max Born, “I've been promoted to an ‘evil monster.’”54 The Prussian Academy—with a very few honorable exceptions—rejected Einstein's resignation. They wanted the satisfaction of expelling him, and did so a few months later. Flexner's offer of a half-year stay was extended indefinitely. As it turned out, Einstein remained at the Institute for the rest of his life. He never set foot in Europe again.
For almost its first decade, the Institute for Advanced Study was an institution on paper only, with no buildings of its own. Offices were rented for its members from Princeton University. Its purpose was to free its scholars from teaching. Lavish salaries also made it attractive: Einstein asked for a salary of $3,000, but was given $15,000 per year—this during the early Depression, when most American professors earned about $2,000. That salary was possible because the Institute was handsomely funded by Louis Bamberger and his sister, Caroline Bamberger Fuld, who had sold their department store in 1929 a few scant weeks before Wall Street crashed.
Einstein was the second professor named; the first was the American mathematician Oswald Veblen. Until 1935, six mathematicians comprised the entire fulltime Institute—but they were a choice group: Besides Einstein and Veblen, they included the renowned mathematician Hermann Weyl, self-exiled from Göttingen, and the young John von Neumann. As a bonus, one of the visiting scholars in 1933 was the twenty-seven-year old Gödel.
If not for his fame, Einstein would very probably not have been hired. Mathematicians were the first appointees because there was consensus about the best. Einstein was never a mathematician in the sense of a Gödel or a von Neumann; he was a physicist who used whatever abstruse mathematics he needed, but beyond that his interest and expertise dropped off. Still, general relativity had spurred new mathematical research, and he was in any case too valuable a catch to lose.
On his way to Princeton in October 1933, Einstein sailed to New York, to be met there by the mayor, a band, speeches, and the usual journalistic hoopla. But Institute officials, worried about conservative protests against Einstein as a Bolshevik, hurried him off to Princeton.55
So, at age fifty-four, Einstein settled in a most unlikely place: a small American college town nestled amid genteel wealth. Nothing could have been more different from Berlin, where art, decadence, and scientific eminence jostled with Nazis and Communists bloodying the streets, and where Hitler now reigned. The leafy Princeton streets quietly shaded an inbred little community, affluent and above all decorous. Princeton University embodied these qualities in its neo-Gothic architecture reminiscent of Oxford. From about 1920, the university's mathematics department had suddenly blossomed into one of the greatest centers of mathematics in the world, doing new research in every direction. But Fine Hall, which housed it, looked backward, at least architecturally, to old Europe and the Gilded Age of nineteenth-century America: its long corridors punctuated by stained-glass windows, its offices carpeted and lavishly furnished.56 Oswald Veblen, said to have planned the building, was the nephew of Thorstein Veblen, the famous American social thinker who satirized “conspicuous consumption”—spending lavishly to excite the envy of others—which might describe the Fine Hall of Mathematics. The corrosively ironic Thorstein Veblen was one of Einstein's favorite authors, along with Russell.
Einstein's last letter, written within days of his death in 1955, was addressed to his friend, Bertrand Russell:
Thank you for your letter of April 5. I am gladly willing to sign your excellent statement. I also agree with your choice of the prospective signers.
With kind regards, A. Einstein57
This short note was a fitting last word to a lifelong friend. It added Einstein's name to what became known as the Einstein-Russell Manifesto. The manifesto was signed by nine other scientists, among them Max Born, Linus Pauling, and Frédéric Joliot-Curie. Conceived by Russell, it called upon the American Congress, and the public, to repudiate war in the face of nuclear weapons. It met with a surprising degree of support, despite the Cold War. Certainly Einstein's signature, offered on his deathbed, lent prestige and credibility. Only days after its publication, an industrialist named Cyrus Eaton offered to fund the conference proposed by the manifesto, providing that it take place in Pugwash, Eaton's birthplace in Nova Scotia. Thus were the Pugwash Conferences and other anti-nuclear movements born.
Among public intellectuals with international stature, few were more visible in their antipathy for nuclear arms than Einstein and Russell. The two had been comrades in pacifism since World War I, when Russell in England and Einstein in Germany were the most prominent figures on either side to speak out against the slaughter. Though the two men saw little of each other throughout their lives, they lived and thought along similar lines—outspoken defenders of peace, social justice, and intellectual freedom.
As it had done for so many, World War I changed both their lives. Russell plunged into political action, gathering signatures from Cambridge dons, writing an antiwar letter to The Nation, and joining the Union of Democratic Control and the No-Conscription Fellowship.58 In Germany, Einstein, who had just moved to Berlin, was appalled by the rabid nationalism of leading German intellectuals. He signed the antinationalist “Appeal to Europeans” and, for the first time, joined a political association, the Bund Neues Vater-land (New Fatherland League).
If their scientific energies had relatively short half-lives, their political energies, once unleashed by the two World Wars and their interregnum, knew no boundaries.
The two men first met sometime in the early 1930s, possibly when Russell stopped in Princeton during an American tour. Their first known correspondence seems to have been in 1931, when Einstein wrote, expressing his “highest admiration” for the mathematician turned philosopher.59 (Russell returned the compliment, calling Einstein “the leading intellect of the age.”60) Had Plutarch lived today, he might have chosen Einstein and Russell as subjects of a modern Parallel Lives. By education and outlook, they were Victorians; by dint of genius, they helped define modernity. They shared the high optimism of purpose and confidence bequeathed by the European empire and the skepticism bequeathed by its inexorable demise. Both worked energetically throughout their lives. They carried on the Victorian practice of reading aloud to family. Einstein, for one, read to his invalid sister each evening from Herodotus or Xenophon—or Bertrand Russell. After his first marriage in 1894, the twenty-two-year-old Russell and his bride happily entertained each other in the evenings by reading aloud from Shakespeare, Gibbon, Plutarch, and Shelley's Epipsychidion.
The two men also shared an intellectual heritage. Each had discovered Kant early in life (Einstein in his early teens; Russell at Cambridge).61 John Stuart Mill and David Hume were foundational, especially Mill for Russell. In later years, Einstein remembered Hume's works as having had “considerable effect on my development.”62 (Einstein's admiration of Russell's wit, logical precision, and skepticism may have its roots in the resemblance to Hume.) Although canonized, along with Nietzsche, Hegel, and Freud, as arch-shapers of the modern spirit, Einstein and Russell both preferred the cool rationalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Russell paid scant attention to such twentieth-century fevers as nihilism, existentialism, or the unconscious psyche. Einstein bothered with them even less and had no more to do with moral or historical relativism than the accident of the word “relativity.” His theory sought to rid physics of subjective relativity; indeed, the term “relativity theory” was coined by Planck, who nevertheless marveled over the “absolute, the universally valid, the invariant” uncovered by the theory. “Invariance theory” was proposed at one point as an alternative name, but “relativity” stuck.
Above all, they were committed leftists, whose politics were tempered by inconsistencies. Einstein, a lifelong enemy of nationalism, supported Zionism and the creation of Israel—“I am against nationalism but for the Jewish cause” seemed to be a compromise he could live with. He championed freedom and equality but also declared that “the creative sentient individual… alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd remains dull in thought and feeling.”63 Russell was a political radical who remained an aristocratic with an aristocrat's sense of privilege. Ever at odds with the spirit of his times, he found himself drawn to and ultimately abandoned by young turks (Wittgenstein and D. H. Lawrence, especially) because he could not or would not subscribe to their views. The First World War moved Einstein and Russell into collision with politics and changed their lives. By the 1920s, they were activists and global celebrities, Einstein the Sage of the Universe and Russell the nonconformist founder of analytical philosophy.
And yet, few men were so different, above all, in their heritage. Einstein was born into a middle-class family, but as a Jew and, for most of his life, a man without a country, he was very much the outsider. The aristocratic Russell was by birth an insider. Their given names reflect social class. Einstein's parents straddled the awkward, tentative path of assimilation, giving Albert a nonbiblical name, but not the more assimilated “Albrecht.” “Bertrand” had the opposite purpose—to emphasize distinction. The Russell family gained prominence when Henry VIII replaced the troublesome Catholic aristocracy with loyal Protestants. He ennobled John Russell and gave him splendid estates and abbeys. Bertrand's grandfather was an earl, a title Bertrand inherited in 1931.
In character and demeanor, too, the differences were stark. One has only to think of the famous photograph of the elderly Einstein sticking his tongue out at the camera—childlike impudence mixed with self-mockery, the celebrity scoffing at anyone foolish enough to take celebrity seriously. Earthy and droll, Einstein also tended to be gentle with friends. More often than not, he was the target of his own sarcasm: “So now I too am an official member of the guild of whores,” he said upon taking the Patent Office position.64
Such antics were never Russell's style. If Einstein was the benign clown, Russell was the witty satyr. T. S. Eliot, who had been Russell's student at Harvard in 1914, caricatured Russell in “Mr. Apollinax” as an interloper at a tedious faculty party, “laugh[ing] like an irresponsible foetus” and “grinning over a screen / With seaweed in his hair.” He did not fancy the Harvard dullards, and he let them know it. His wit was often used to flay. Of the Bloomsbury set, he snarled:
They put up with me because they know I can make anyone look ridiculous—if I had less brains and less satire, they would be all down on me—as it is they whisper against me in corners, and flatter me to my face. They are a rotten crew.65
One hardly knows whether to be awed more by the ruthless candor or by the ruthless turn of language. The power to sting never deserted Russell. Throughout his life, he discharged his quick brains and combative wit against the enemy, whoever it might be. When the target was public injustice or folly, Russell could be a refreshing gadfly—witness his early courageous attack on Soviet oppression in 1920, which earned the wrath of many intellectuals. Of his travels in Russia, he wrote, “I felt that everything I valued in human life was being destroyed in the interests of a glib and narrow philosophy, and that in the process untold misery was being inflicted upon many millions of people.”66 In private company, his acuity could make him chilling and feared: “He has the tongue of a witty, acidulous and far from benignant adder,” wrote Leonard Woolf in 1968, noting not only Russell's tendency to flay, but his prejudices as well—his “dislike and hatred of Americans, Jews, and even his personal friends.”67 He seemed to fascinate and repel in equal measure. D. H. Lawrence lampooned him in Women in Love (1920) as a “learned dry baronet” with frozen feelings and a “harsh horse-laugh.” Aldous Huxley cast Russell as Mr. Scogan in Crome Yellow (1921), harping on his “rather fiendish laugh”:
Mr. Scogan was like one of those extinct bird-lizards of the Tertiary. His nose was beaked, his dark eye had the shining quickness of a robin's. But… his hands were the hands of a crocodile. His movement was marked by the lizard's disconcertingly abrupt clockwork speed… an extinct saurian.68
Russell often struck observers this way: beak-nosed, small and bony, quick as a bird in response—and in his ability to peck. Einstein's sad eyes and wild hair seemed those of a simple saintly genius, a poetic dreamer. These familiar images distort both men. The “icy” Russell was as often stirred and generous; Einstein was neither simple nor saintly.
Admiration and praise of another expresses one's own inner self. Einstein's heroes and heroines were many. Foremost was Hendrik Lorentz, the great Dutch physicist, whose “quite unusual lack of human frailties never had a depressing effect on others.”69 Max Planck was another father figure with whom Einstein remained friendly, despite their political disagreements. Of Marie Curie, Einstein recounted “twenty years of unclouded and sublime friendship”:
Her strength, her purity of will, her austerity toward herself, her objectivity, her incorruptible judgment…. [O]nce she had recognized a certain way as the right one, she pursued it without compromise and with extreme tenacity.70
Einstein had the same tough qualities, though unlike Curie, he was constitutionally cheerful. Madame Curie, he once lamented, could not shake off sadness: “She had the soul of a herring.”71 Not Einstein.
Russell often saw himself reflected in those he admired, as if their genius might shore up his self-confidence. He felt a special kinship with the novelist Joseph Conrad. “In the out-works of our lives, we were almost strangers, but we shared a certain outlook on human life and human destiny, which, from the very first, made a bond of extreme strength.” Conrad's pessimistic “philosophy of life” led him to “a profound belief in the importance of discipline… by subduing wayward impulse to a dominant purpose.”72 Russell, too, gazed into the abyss, and his life was a ceaseless struggle to subdue that “passionate madness” to which he, like Conrad's characters, tended. Russell never gave way to madness, but he was tormented by it, and by the passions to which he confessed in the first sentences of his Autobiography:
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.73
Such buffeting by warring passions is nowhere visible in Einstein. In his soul there was no abyss. He remained grandly, classically optimistic: “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”74 In 1949, he composed some “Autobiographical Notes” for a volume in his honor. In sharp contrast to Russell's “ocean of anguish” (although Russell, too, indulged in gallows humor), Einstein's reminiscences begin with a humorous and jaunty bit of self-deprecation: “Here I sit in order to write, at the age of sixty-seven, something like my own obituary.”
Bertrand Russell never seemed to lack social confidence. Rupert Crawshay-Williams, a young friend, describes a trip with Russell to Wales to check on a house that was being renovated, in Russell's view, too slowly. As they drove, Russell calmly discoursed on philosophy with Williams and his wife, Elizabeth. At the house, they found both builder and architect. Without more than a perfunctory greeting, Russell began to rant:
“What do you mean by this intolerable and quite inexcusable delay?” he roared. The builder and the architect were so taken aback by this eruption that they were speechless for the first few minutes. They went pale with astonishment and their lips trembled….75
Russell railed on and on. The workers were left “gasping and floundering.” Then he strode out to the car and calmly resumed the conversation as if nothing had happened. His companions were astonished. Might the workers now think badly of Russell, ventured Crawshay-Williams, having heard so much thunderous criticism? “No, I wasn't worried about that. Why should I be?” Russell the aristocrat knew his place in the social strata and did not hesitate to trade on it.
But the inner Russell was not quite so confident. Much of his insecurity was fostered by a difficult childhood. Born into an aristocratic, unconventional family of stalwart Whigs, Russell inherited his liberal politics and, for better or worse, his Victorian sensibilities. His mother and father died before he was three, after which he and his older brother Frank were sent to live with their paternal grandparents at Pembroke Lodge. Lord John, the boys’ grandfather, once a monument of nineteenth-century English history (having launched the great Reform Bill of 1832 and served two terms as prime minister), died in 1878, when Russell was just six. Lord John's widow, Lady Russell, though twenty years younger than her husband, was formidable and utterly unsuited to parenting.
Lady Russell was widely read, perfectly fluent in German, French, and Italian, and fearlessly unconventional. She was also immensely puritanical. For the good of her soul, she eschewed wine, meat, even the luxury of a “comfortable chair” for most of the day.76 Her self-abnegation extended beyond herself to her grandsons. The young Bertrand was forbidden even modest pleasures: No fruit, only the rare piece of candy, cold baths, and a rigid schedule were the order of each day.77 At Pembroke Lodge, Lady Russell's great house, a succession of eccentric relatives and eminent personages came and went.
So, too, at the more vibrant household of the sharp-tongued Lady Stanley, his maternal grandmother. Russell remembered the “hawk's eye” of Prime Minister Gladstone and, at a time when the Irish nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell was under suspicion of murder, a succession of Irish MPs.78 Bertrand's godfather was John Stuart Mill, long a family friend. All around the boy, the talk was of high politics and Whiggish history. It was Lady Russell's great hope that Bertrand would enter politics, as his father and grandfather had before him.
The boy had no real friends and few companions his own age. Frank escaped the dreary house early by waging a campaign of misbehavior until he was finally sent away to Winchester. Not Bertrand, who was tutored at home. He sometimes played games with the servants when their chores allowed. A solitary, brilliant child, he grew prematurely intellectual, analyzing others and himself. At eleven, he fell in love with Euclid. In his teens, introspective, precocious, and shy, he naturally kept a diary, but wrote his thoughts in secret Greek characters.
Trinity College at Cambridge was his salvation. When he entered at eighteen, he was astonished to find other people like himself. He was not as odd as he had feared. A. N. Whitehead, Crompton Llewelyn Davies, Ellis McTaggart, Robert and Charles Trevelyan, Roger Fry, Lowes Dickinson—these young men were friends and colleagues with whom he could share the “whole world of mental adventure.”79 The shy, priggish, slight adolescent was, by the time he left Cambridge, self-confident and, if not worldly, at least part of a world.
Russell's “first” in mathematics from Trinity was followed by a “first” in philosophy (Moral Sciences) in 1894. Immediately upon graduating, while working at the British embassy in Paris, Russell traveled to Germany, where he attended party meetings of the Social Democrats, who had just been outlawed. The trajectory recapitulates his life—one devoted first to mathematics, then to philosophy, and finally to left-leaning political action.
In 1893, Russell began a romantic correspondence with Alys Pearsall Smith, the daughter of American Quakers living in Surrey. Alys was a serious, pious social reformer four years older than Russell. He fell in love immediately, but prudently waited until he was twenty-one, at which time he came into his inheritance and felt sufficiently independent to brave his family's inevitable disapproval. His formidable grandmother seems to have rejoiced when, momentarily, the marriage was delayed by fears that insanity in both families might be passed on to their children.80 The crisis was resolved when they assured each other (falsely, as it turned out, on Russell's side) that children were not necessary. The specter of birth control, which the Russell family doctor deemed “injurious to health,” was another impediment. At last, a second opinion laid to rest Russell's qualms. They married in 1894. Their marriage lasted until 1911, when Russell fell in love with Lady Ottoline Morrell. He and Alys were finally divorced in 1921.
His academic life began when he was appointed a lecturer at the London School of Economics in 1896. By then, he had published German Social Democracy, his first book. Thereafter, of course, he evolved into the familiar Russell of the modern landscape: The archrationalist brushing away logical cobwebs, metaphysical confusion, and the shackles of religion, and the champion of social progress. He was the new Voltaire. Yet within, he always felt different and apart. His puritan impulses were at constant war with his desire for sexual liberation, and his yearning for certainty never seemed to square with the rationalism to which he aspired. Above all, his long experience with solitude in childhood haunted him, as did fears of insanity. Russell championed mathematical logic and analytic philosophy. He was, said Ottoline, “so quick and clear-sighted, and supremely intellectual—cutting false and real asunder. Somebody called him the Day of Judgment.”81 Yet he tangled incessantly with the vagaries of passion: “[M]y nature is hopelessly complicated; a mass of contradictory impulses.”82 These impulses, so beyond his control, led to a lifelong passion for self-analysis.
From boyhood on, Russell recorded his inner self in letters, memoirs, journals, essays, and books. No other important philosopher has recorded his own life in such detail. Much of this detail is self-deprecating, all of it extremely revelatory, nowhere more so than in his Autobiography, the final volume of which was published just before his death. Writing one's own life, observes Michael Foot in his introduction to the Autobiography, “ is the most risky and arduous of all the writer's arts.”83 It is courageous in great part because whatever it reveals can be taken at face value or deemed disingenuous—either way, in the effort to set history “right,” the autobiographer inevitably provides more ammunition.
Russell's Autobiography alternates narration with contemporary letters to and from him. He scrutinizes his sexual maturation and its vicissitudes: his awkward masturbation as a youth; the enduring “comic” difficulties of coitus with his first wife, Alys; learning from his lover Lady Ottoline Morrell of his pyorrhea, finally cured by an American dentist. He records humiliation and anguish at the hands of his onetime pupil Wittgenstein and his onetime acolyte, the writer D. H. Lawrence.
His relationship with Ottoline, the first truly uncontrollable love affair of his life, set off equally uncontrollable behaviors. Angry with her once, he walked twenty miles in the rain, “in a fit of madness.”84 Sexual passion left him haunted by the fear of insanity: “It doesn't do for me to relax too much—the forces inside are too wild—some of them must be kept chained up.”85
Insanity must have seemed a threat. He was plagued by nightmares “in which I dream that I am being murdered, usually by a lunatic.” One night, he awoke from a nightmare with his hands around Alys's throat.86 He was no stranger to rage: At eighteen, he nearly choked his best friend to death; he attempted to smother his third wife, Patricia, with a pillow; he felt, in his own words, “murderous impulses” toward Paul Gillard, an acquaintance whom he called a “drunken homosexual spy.” He wasn't afraid of “peccadilloes,” he said, but he was terrified of “big violent crimes—murder and suicide and such things.”87
Self-dramatizing was a mode of operation for Russell, especially with women. To them he would reveal these impulses: “[M]ost people would despise my inner turmoil.” Yet his tone was clinical. “Only intellect keeps me sane: perhaps this makes me overvalue intellect as against feeling.”88 Ray Monk argues that Russell sought to control his frightening impulses by dint of cold reason.89 Although Russell records no “murderous” episodes or feelings after his fifties, his wish to douse feelings with intellect never deserted him, to the extent that, as Crawshay-Williams argues, his public persona of “materialist temperament and unfeeling intellect” obscured his “sympathetic emotions.”90
Russell also had uncontrollable impulses of a more benign sort. He called them “conversions,”91 since they struck him with the force of a mystical experience, bringing him an understanding that his intellect could not achieve.
His relationship with Ludwig Wittgenstein was one such “conversion.” Wittgenstein was a wealthy but unknown young Austrian who came to study logic with Russell in 1911. Driven by his search for truth, caring nothing for feelings or consequences as he pursued his own vision, the twenty-two-year-old Wittgenstein began to consume the thirty-nine-year-old Russell. He often appeared in Russell's rooms at midnight, pacing the floor as if caged, silently. He harangued Russell hour after hour with philosophic discourse. He raged at those who claimed not to understand him. He threatened suicide. He was impervious to any ideas except his own.
Russell, always generous when he saw intellectual fire and interest, put up with and even encouraged his strangely irrational and brilliant disciple. In only a few months, Russell came to see himself as the disciple. “[Wittgenstein] has more passion about philosophy than I have; his avalanches make mine seem mere snowballs.” The conversion was complete. “Wittgenstein has been a great event in my life… I think he has genius…. I love him & feel he will solve the problems I am too old to solve.”92 Yet two years later, Wittgenstein pronounced the manuscript of Russell's new book, Theory of Knowledge, “all wrong,” demolishing the thesis in a series of devastating exchanges. Now it was Russell's turn to think of suicide.93
This episode is often viewed by Wittgenstein's adherents as a clash between youth and aging genius. In many ways, Russell agreed. By the end of their relationship, Wittgenstein had convinced the older man that he “could not ever hope again to do fundamental work in philosophy.”94 Still, what overwhelmed Russell more than Wittgenstein's intellectual agility was his imperially romantic personality. The self-absorbed young Austrian either dominated those around him or banished them from his sight—a “tyrant,” Russell called him.95 Yet Russell felt that Wittgenstein had “a kind of purity…. [H]is personal force was extraordinary.” By force of personality, the youthful Wittgenstein swept Russell away: “He was perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating.”96 Russell had other philosophic opponents during his life: Henri Bergson, William James, G. E. Moore, F. H. Bradley, John Dewey, the later Whitehead, and Henri Poincaré. But he never allowed their criticism to affect him as did Wittgenstein's.
The same intensity characterized his brief friendship with the novelist D. H. Lawrence. They met in 1915, when Lawrence was twenty-six and Russell forty-three. Lawrence was convinced that a wholly new social order was necessary to prevent more wars. Russell, tired of “Sunday-schooly” pacifists, welcomed Lawrence's iconoclasm. Having taken up the cause of pacifism with a vengeance, Russell hoped that the fiery Lawrence “could give me a vivifying dose of unreason.”97 He was looking for a prophet, and he found one in Lawrence. After their first talk, Russell was enthralled. He described his new friend to Ottoline Morrell:
“[Lawrence] is amazing; he sees through and through one.” “Yes. But do you think he really sees correctly?” I asked. “Absolutely. He is infallible,” was Bertie's reply. “He is like Ezekiel or some other Old Testament prophet… he sees everything and is always right.”98
Russell took Lawrence to meet his cabal of Cambridge friends: the economist Maynard Keynes, the classicist Lowes Dickinson, and G. E. Moore. A few years earlier, Wittgenstein had denounced Russell's Cambridge circle as utter fools and derided Russell for being polite to them. Lawrence, likewise, “hated them all with passionate hatred and said they are ‘dead, dead, dead.’” At first, Russell did not disagree, thinking that such an imaginative genius had “an insight into human nature deeper than mine.” But he was increasingly repelled by Lawrence's mystical philosophy of “blood consciousness”—which, as opposed to intellect, was that aspect of “consciousness… belonging to darkness.”99
The two men fell out when Russell argued the unexceptionable view that people were capable of kindly feelings towards one another. Lawrence responded by letter, furiously accusing Russell of hypocrisy and cowardice. Like everyone else, Lawrence argued, Russell only wanted to satisfy his “lust to jab and strike.” He scornfully advised Russell to give up peace work and stick to sterile mathematics. As he had been after the quarrel with Wittgenstein, Russell was devastated.
I was inclined to believe he had some insight denied to me, and when he said that my pacifism was rooted in blood-lust I supposed he must be right. For twenty-four hours I thought I was not fit to live and contemplated suicide.100
Then he came to his senses. “One must be an outlaw these days, not a teacher or preacher,” Lawrence had earlier written him. But Russell quite rightly reflected that “I was becoming more of an outlaw than he ever was.”101 His infatuation with yet another dominating romantic genius ended; their friendship had lasted a year.
Russell did not stick to “sterile mathematics,” and his contributions to original philosophical thinking virtually ceased by the early twenties. He returned, briefly, to so-called “technical” work only once, in 1924, when he revised the Principia Mathematica for a second edition. But the bulk of his postwar work lay in politics and popular writings. To a lay audience hungry for knowledge, he wrote highly accessible books on relativity, the atom, and twentieth-century philosophy.
Russell's wide-ranging interests and radical political activities were tame in comparison with the tumult of his emotional life. He was married four times, first to Alys Pearsall Smith, whom he married in 1894, then to Dora Black, who was pregnant with Russell's first child when they married in 1921. Russell and Black divorced in 1935. They had two children together—John and Katherine. After enduring their parents’ messy divorce, the two children found themselves with a difficult stepmother, Marjorie (Peter) Spence, whom Russell married in 1936. Conrad, their only child, was born the following year. After years of acrimony and anger, with children caught in the middle, Peter and Russell divorced in 1952. Russell's fourth and final marriage, to Edith Finch, lasted serenely and congenially until Russell's death in 1970.
Yet Russell's marriages tell only part of tale. Having grown up in utter repression, Russell entered married life sexually and emotionally ignorant. His great awakening came in 1911, when he met Lady Ottoline Morrell, wife of Philip Morrell, a successful antiques dealer and member of Parliament. Their affair was marked by great passion on Russell's side and inevitable rancor when the relationship cooled. By then, Russell had taken up with Lady Constance Malleson, an actress whose stage name was Colette O'Neil. Russell befriended and may have had romantic relationships with several other women, including Evelyn Whitehead (the wife of his colleague Alfred North Whitehead), the writer Katherine Mans-field, and Vivienne Eliot (wife of the poet T. S. Eliot).
Russell and Dora Black began their relationship in 1919, two years before their marriage. In Dora, Russell found an intellectual partner. She was an activist and scholar, well traveled and independent. When Russell went to Russia in 1920, she followed, though their paths never crossed and they both returned home singly. Not so for Russell's next trip abroad. He and Dora spent the academic year 1920–21 in China (which he loved), during which time Russell lectured at the National University—and nearly died of pneumonia. Russell had traveled twice to the United States before the war; in 1924, he returned to lecture at universities, institutes, and clubs across the country. Subsequent tours from 1927 through 1934 helped Russell afford upkeep for his children.
Swept up by various radical philosophies of education, Russell and Dora began a school for children (including his own) in 1927. Russell and Dora tried to chart a middle ground between conventional schooling and the relative anarchy of “new schools.” The experience left the Russells not only in debt, but disillusioned by the cruelty of the children. Their progressive pedagogy failed to stem bullying. One of the most vulnerable was their son John, who, like his sister Katherine, survived by retreating into a “shell.”102 Meanwhile, Russell's marriage to Dora was deteriorating; they separated in 1931. At the time, Dora was pregnant by her lover Griffin Barry, and Russell was cohabiting with “Peter” Spence. The school became Dora's, and she ran it until the war.
Russell had cast his lot far from the security (and orthodoxy) of academia for most of his life. In 1937, with the birth of his third child, Conrad, with Peter, he looked about for a permanent university position that would solve his financial problems. But none was forthcoming. With war on the horizon, Russell, Peter, and Conrad set sail for the United States in 1938 on the promise of a visiting professorship at the University of Chicago. For the next six years, Russell and his family moved from one position to another—or, in the notorious case of the City College of New York, which rescinded an offer when a mother complained that Russell was too radical to teach at her son's college, from one position to no position at all. With the declaration of war, Russell was stuck in the United States. His prolific writing did not cease, and he was a popular lecturer. But his reputation as a libertine and a sexual radical preceded him at every moment. In the end, his years in the United States did not solve his financial difficulties; they only served to intensify his longing to return to England. He did so, finally, in 1944, as the war waned, and he was finally able to secure transport for himself, Peter, and Conrad.103
Far from having been forgotten in England, Russell was received warmly. In early 1944, his old Cambridge college, Trinity, offered him a fellowship starting in the fall—healing the breach caused by his expulsion during World War I. Back in London, he became a popular lecturer on the BBC and soon a member of the highbrow quiz show, The Brains Trust. Then, in 1945, his History of Western Philosophy became a runaway best seller, at last ending his financial troubles at the ripe old age of seventy-three. In 1948, he became a folk hero of sorts. Flying from Norway to Sweden in a storm, his plane crashed and nineteen people drowned. But the seventy-six-year-old Russell swam through icy waters to a rescue boat, none the worse for wear. In 1949, he became truly respectable. He was made a member of the Order of Merit, Britain's highest honor to its intellectual and artistic elite. In 1950, while visiting Princeton again, he learned that he had won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Russell certainly did not think of himself as having slowed down in his later years—nor did others. Hearing of Russell's financial straits in 1937, George Santayana immediately and generously sent the sixty-five-year-old Russell a yearly stipend. “Old and penniless” Russell might have been, but in Santayana's view, he was “still brimming with undimmed genius and suppressed immortal works.”104 Still, for all his energy, Russell's most important philosophic work had stopped in 1927, at about the same time as Einstein's most important scientic work. Russell's mathematical work lay in the distant past.
Russell's philosophical career can be divided into two parts: first logic, then philosophy of science. The split came in 1910. In that year, he and Whitehead completed the Principia Mathematica. It would be hard to overestimate the lasting importance of this work. It grew out of the profound conflict Russell felt as a young philosopher schooled, along with other Cambridge Apostles, in the idealism that was in vogue. Gone were the empiricists, including Russell's revered John Stuart Mill. Instead, he read Kant and Hegel and Berkeley. However beguiling, idealism was something thrust on Russell, a version of metaphysics that could not satisfy his longing for “truth.” Absolute idealism locates reality within the mind. Only mental conditions and constructions are real. For Plato, the universal “ideals” constitute reality. Hegel distinguished between finite nature and infinite ideas, finding only the latter to be “real”—thus, his “absolute idealism,” as opposed to Kantian “subjective idealism,” which limits our knowledge to our mental impressions of the external world, which can (if it exists) be perceived only indirectly, through organizing “categories” inherent in the mind.
Russell, for all his exposure to idealism at Trinity, came away unconvinced. With G. E. Moore, for whom “common sense” was the rule, Russell abandoned absolute idealism, arguing that an objective world susceptible to analysis did, indeed, exist. When Russell taught Leibniz for a semester, he was thunderstruck by the latter's method of analysis. If language could be broken down to reveal its basic structure, so then could logical analysis become a tool for discovering the truth. And what better foundation for logic than mathematics?
The new century intervened with the First International Congress of Philosophy and the Second International Congress of Mathematics, held one after the other in Paris in the summer of 1900. The backdrop was the great Exposition Universelle. Whereas all of Paris was transformed by new architecture—the Grand and Petit Palais, the Eiffel Tower—Russell was transformed by the work of one man: Giuseppe Peano, the great mathematician of Turin. For months afterward, Russell read Peano's works and corresponded feverishly with him. Peano's system of symbolic notation was, Russell believed, extendable to the logic of relations. Fellow Apostle A. N. Whitehead joined Russell at his house in Fernhurst, and soon the two men committed to a collaboration on what would become the Principia.
In three volumes, written jointly over the course of ten years, Russell and Whitehead, following Gottlob Frege, laid down the principles and elements of logicism. In short, logicism asserts that all mathematical truths can be stated in the form of logical truths and that mathematical proofs can be derived from logical proofs.
For the young Russell (he was thirty), mathematics was a haven from his increasingly unhappy and complicated private life. He had fallen out of love with Alys and was embroiled, romantically though probably not sexually, with Whitehead's wife, Evelyn, who suffered terrible pain from angina. Some forty years later, Russell was to remark caustically that Gödel was mired in Platonism. Yet he, too, felt drawn towards the “enchanted region” of mathematics, where “in thinking about it we become Gods.”105 In a letter to his friend Gilbert Murray, he pronounced mathematics and philosophy to be concerned with “ideal and eternal objects.”106
As he and Whitehead worked through the intensely technical matters of the Principia, Russell must have found those “ideal and eternal objects” increasingly remote. By its nature, the Principia led Russell face-to-face with paradox, the inevitable spanner in the mechanics of logic. In answer to his own famous paradox (To what class does the class of all things which do not belong to themselves belong?), Russell wrote “On Denoting,” delivered in 1905. He was able, paradoxically, to construct a “no-class theory,” taking both classes and numbers out of the realm of the ideal.107 What was left—propositions—still carried weight as Platonic “truths,” but soon, this “haven of peace” disappeared, to be replaced by the doubt more suited to his empiricist roots.
It took seven years of extraordinarily intense and exhausting work to complete Principia Mathematica. After that, Russell ceased, for all practical purposes, to do highly technical and demanding work on logic. He was thirty-eight years old. He had come to hate the shuttered concentration that logic demanded. Writing the Principia was like juggling several dozen balls at once for years on end. In a logical system, he said, writing to his longtime friend Lucy Donnelly, “one mistake will vitiate everything.” The toll, he acknowledged, was tremendous. He described at length, and in dramatic fashion, the “sheer effort of will” necessary for such work:
Abstract work, if one wishes to do it well, must be allowed to destroy one's humanity; one raises a monument which is at the same time a tomb, in which, involuntarily, one slowly inters oneself.108
And, indeed, these words were written in 1902, when Russell had finished his precursor work, The Principles of Mathematics. In 1910, having finished the much longer and grander Principia, he was “somewhat at loose ends. The feeling was delightful, but bewildering, like coming out of prison.”109 He never went back in.
In My Philosophical Development, written half a century later, Russell thinks back upon his devotion to a nonhuman, idealist mathematics. As the contradictions mounted, Russell lost that devotion. He came to accept Wittgenstein's dismissal of mathematics as “tautologies.” In the face of “young men embarking in troop trains to be slaughtered on the Somme because generals were stupid,” mathematics and the “world of abstraction” were for all intents and purposes lost. Perhaps his disappointment lay in his character. As one critic has it, “as one reflects on Russell's philosophical career, it appears that behind this thirst for certainty there lurked an even deeper craving for disillusionment.”110 Still, once the godson of John Stuart Mill had completed the monumental Principia, his world changed.
From mathematics, he turned to philosophy. Although (perhaps because) Russell wrote some seventy books and hundreds of essays on philosophy and philosophical topics, his own philosophy is difficult to summarize. Like Einstein, he hated disarray in the foundations of knowledge. His major philosophical work examines the premises and beliefs undergirding logic and science. The titles of his important works illuminate his grand scope: The Analysis of Matter, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. But his was truly an experimental and question-driven philosophy. He was always ready to try a new approach to find solutions. He often revised his views, but never thought this a failing. In a way, he modeled his philosophic approach on the piecemeal and provisional approach of physics. He never built a grand system. Instead, he inspired the modern movement known as “analytic philosophy.” Like Russell, his philosophical heirs, Wittgenstein and the logical positivists, were better at dissecting than building.
Once Russell turned away from logic, where he had made his true mark, he looked toward physics as the sole arbiter of certain knowledge. Modern physics, he thought, had the best chance of being true about the external world. What was left over, the empirical world that we know through our senses, yields information quite different from the truths of physics. Most of Russell's philosophical career was spent pondering these two paths towards truth. Logic, his first passion, was no longer the high-road, only a tool.
Still, Russell was drawn back into his early world of mathematical logic from time to time. In The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, a collection of essays in Russell's honor, several contributors revisited the Principia and Russell's place in the history of mathematical logic. Russell dutifully commented on all contributions, save one, written by the agonizingly exacting Kurt Gödel and submitted months late.111
Russell was forty-two when war was declared in August 1914. He was already seen as one of the world's important logicians and philosophers, having been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1908 at only thirty-six and offered a teaching position at Harvard in early 1914. Up to then, his life had been that of a scholar and teacher. But he was restless and uncertain. His love affair with Otto-line Morrell began that year. It was as if, once he left mathematical logic behind, his sexual passions exploded. Yet his intellectual engine never stopped. As always, he turned out a prodigious number of books, articles, reviews, lectures, and letters. As for the war, it so changed Russell that he later thought of himself as a Faust figure who, on that fateful August day, met his Mephistopheles.112
The war swept him into new roles. He became a pacifist, a war resister, and a man of action. None of this could have been predicted. Up to then, he had supported Britain's colonial wars—the Boer War, for instance, had been a necessary adjunct to the spreading of “civilized government.”113 But he could see no sane purpose in the European war, and said so with increasing bite and fury. Once he was committed, his courage and defiance never wavered, though he was berated as a traitor to his country and class. He was, after all, the Honorable Bertrand Russell, grandson of a prime minister, son of a lord, and brother of an earl. He lost close friends. The otherwise cherubic Alfred North Whitehead, his collaborator on the Principia, caught war fever and could not abide Russell's lack of patriotism. His old friend, the Greek scholar Gilbert Murray, denounced Russell as “pro-German” in print. Russell understandably took to decrying the “bloodthirstiness of professors.”114
For almost four years, his life became a marathon of political maneuvering, writing, and speaking. At the start of the conflict, he helped found the Union of Democratic Control, an antiwar movement. Russell suddenly blossomed as a mover and shaker. The UDC boasted such influential figures as the future prime minister Ramsay MacDonald; the peace activist and future Nobelist Norman Angell; the journalist and tireless campaigner against King Leopold's Congo, E. D. Morel; the writers Leonard Woolf and Lytton Strachey; and Russell's old Cambridge friends Lowes Dickinson and Charles Trevelyan. Russell soon dominated the movement. As an observer noted, “No resisting the force of his ruthless dissection of motive; no reply possible to the caustic comments he would emit in his high squeaky voice.”115
By the summer of 1915, after only one year of war, over a quarter million English soldiers had been killed or wounded, all of them volunteers. Britain had never contemplated a conscription law. In the face of this mass slaughter, it did so, and in January 1916 a law was passed requiring all males between eighteen and forty-one to register for military service. The UDC voted not to oppose conscription, and Russell quit. He had consistently reproved the UDC for having “no intensity of will.”116 He promptly joined the more radical No-Conscription Fellowship (NCF), which had supported conscientious objectors since the war's outset.117
These new experiences and emotions liberated Russell as never before. In 1916, he gave lectures on a new theory of society based on “creative” and “instinctual” alternatives to the destructiveness of war (published as The Principles of Social Reconstruction in 1916). It was the first of many briskly rational, quasi-utopian proposals that he launched periodically throughout his long life. He gave stump speeches and orated at rallies. He visited conscientious objectors in prison and lobbied tirelessly on their behalf, salvaging their mental health and perhaps even their lives in the face of ferocious governmental hostility.118
At times, his antiwar fervor bordered on the obsessive. “It is a real ferment,” he wrote of the no-conscription movement, “like the beginning of a new religion.” Religion indeed: “I rather envy the men they persecute. It is maddening not to be liable.”119 His young comrades, admirable as they were, lacked “the thirst after perfection—they see the way out of Hell but not the way into Heaven.” Yet “they will joyfully become martyrs.”120 In upswing moods, he declared that “I want actually to change people's thoughts. Power over people's minds is the main personal desire of my life.”121 As one UDC member shrewdly noted, Russell
had a dynamo within that was too powerful for his own comfort and far too powerful for that of others: inevitably, he first swallowed admirers and then, with what they felt a heartless cruelty, spewed them out.122
Russell quickly arrived on the government's list of troublemakers. Fearful that he might travel to the United States and foment opposition to the British effort, the authorities sought a reason to refuse him a passport. In 1916, his wish for martyrdom nearly came true. A No-Conscription member was sentenced to two years at hard labor, and six others were then sent to prison for circulating an anonymous leaflet protesting the case. Russell publicly admitted writing the leaflet and was arrested and fined £100. When Russell refused to pay, the authorities impounded his books and furniture from Trinity.123 The conviction allowed the government to revoke his passport, forestalling a showdown. Trinity College, his alma mater, quickly used the conviction as an excuse to remove him from his lectureship. Whitehead and others protested. But Russell was (at least outwardly) euphoric at the news. “I no longer have the feeling of powers unrealised within me, which used to be a perpetual torture…. I have no inward discords anymore.”124
By now the government spied on Russell, absurdly, as an “enemy agent.”125 He was banned from restricted areas, lest he signal enemy ships—an absurd idea, though a convenient cover for stopping Russell from lecturing to and encouraging conscientious objectors.126 Russell tried another tack, writing a letter to President Wilson urging him to force Europe to the peace table. The letter managed to slip by the censors of the Foreign Office. Wilson ignored it, but the letter (and details of its secret journey) was printed in full by The New York Times.
Russell continued his antiwar efforts. When the Russian Provisional Government put forth a peace offer, he was ecstatic. With great fervor, he threw his support behind the revolution and its British admirers. In July 1917, however, a meeting of revolutionary sympathizers at Hackney disintegrated into violence, leaving Russell shocked and disheartened. He returned to his philosophical work, spending the fall and winter writing and lecturing on logical atomism.
Ironically, just as Russell had become disillusioned with the efficacy of protest, he was arrested in 1918 for “insulting an ally”—the United States, which had entered the war. The alleged crime—he had written a short article advocating peace with Germany—was the pretext for a harsh sentence: six months at hard labor in the so-called “second division.” The sentence was not to be taken lightly. Long stretches in the second division had left his colleagues Clifford Allen and E. D. Morel physically devastated, and men could be crippled during such a sentence. Friends, including Gilbert Murray, brought pressure on the government to shift Russell to the “first division.”127 At his appeal, the magistrate, citing Russell's contributions in logic and philosophy, acceded. Russell served his six months in the relative comfort of the “first division.” Because he could pay, he had a large separate room, with meals brought in from outside, a servant to clean the “cell,” daily delivery of the Times, and a well-stocked library of chosen books. Russell compared it to “life on an Ocean Liner.”128 Visitors came three times a week. In such enforced but tolerable isolation, the exhausted Russell revived and soon wrote two books, an Introduction to Mathematical Logic and a draft of The Analysis of Mind.129
Even with this seriocomic finale, Russell's career as a war protester makes Einstein's antiwar efforts pale by comparison. The anti-war movement energized Russell and propelled him forward. He saw in the future “infinite possibilities.” It would be hard to guess from this excited language that he meant teaching philosophy to “working-men who are hungry for intellectual food…. Think of building up a new free education not under the State!… I could give heart & brain & life to that.”130
The day World War I ended, Russell in victorious London was depressed: Millions had been pointlessly slaughtered, but people were wildly celebrating in the streets. Russell had spent the war years in feverish political activity. Almost fifty years would pass before he plunged again into antiwar protests, against the nuclear bomb and the Vietnam War.
During the last half of his life—from 1920 on—Russell's affection for his country grew in tandem with his popularity. He became the plain-speaking oracle, the dauntless opponent of injustice and folly, the philosopher with a gift for connecting to the common people. Russell the philosophical popularizer blossomed after the First World War. Had he not been radicalized by that war, he would likely have returned to teaching philosophy and logic, his works known only to an inner circle of specialists. The oracle and gadfly would have been stillborn. As it was, he never returned to a full-time academic career. He became, instead, a freelance writer, an educational innovator, and a prophet of social change.
In crucial part, Russell's popularity stemmed from his passionate belief in the usefulness of philosophy. Unlike many of his fellow academics, Russell had taken up philosophy to find consolation and meaning in life. For him it was no academic exercise. “I wish to understand the hearts of men,” he wrote in his Autobiography. This desire may have led him to abstruse mathematics, but it was nonetheless ordinary and human. On his journey, he experienced a “failure” that was yet a “victory…. I may have conceived theoretical truth wrongly, but I was not wrong in thinking that there is such a thing, and that it deserves our allegiance.”131 Russell has been consigned to history, rather than philosophy, by a modern tradition that prefers the technical to the metaphysical. Yet, notes Frank McLynn,
Russell was that rare bird, a professional philosopher who actually tried to answer the questions that ordinary people naively imagine can be answered by philosophy. He was in fact a “philosopher” in a sense that would be recognised by the man in the pub. This was why he, alone of his breed, could move between the worlds of Whitehead and Wittgenstein and those of Conrad and Lawrence.132
And, as Michael Foot writes, “[a] particular, persistent reason” for his “appeal, throughout his ninety-odd years, especially to the young, was the trouble he took to write plain English.”133 In recent years, it had become not only fashionable but occupationally imperative for academic philosophers to write for other academic philosophers rather than for a general reader. Despite his ability to write (with the more mathematically adept Whitehead) the Principia Mathematica, Russell was no technician. Alan Wood has described him as “a philosopher without a philosophy. The same point might be made by saying that he is a philosopher of all the philosophies.”134 In later years, he came to believe in philosophy writ large—in other words, philosophy that is concerned with “matters of interest to the general educated public, and loses much of its value if only a few professionals can understand what is said.”135
The aristocratic Russell had one thing in common with the populace for whom he wrote: He was perennially short of money. He was fifty when John, his first son, was born. Delighted as he was with the novel sensations of parenthood, he faced the “inescapable responsibility” of providing financial support. To that end, he churned out potboilers on sex, marriage, and divorce; on conquering happiness and praising idleness; on atoms and relativity. He became a regular columnist for the American Hearst newspapers. He lectured across the United States several times in the 1920s and 1930s, and in his seventies was a popular voice on the BBC.
In 1938, badly needing a steady income, he did try to return to teaching, but not in England. He moved his family to the United States to find a suitable university position. A series of small fiascos ended in two big ones. He taught at Chicago (they wouldn't keep him) and Los Angeles (where he quarreled with the chancellor), and then was appointed in 1940 to teach philosophy at the City College of New York. There, the political and religious establishments blocked the appointment, accusing him of immorality, incompetence, degeneracy, godlessness, anti-Americanism. His works were damned (in the words of one lawyer) as “lecherous, venerous, lustful, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, irreverent, narrow-minded, untruthful and bereft of moral fiber.”136 Einstein, Whitehead, John Dewey, and even Charlie Chaplin rose to his defense, but in vain. After months of fighting, with hate mail pouring in, Russell's position was simply eliminated. He lectured at Harvard (an engagement that predated the City College debacle), but thereafter American universities shunned him. Compounding his dire financial straits was his escalating disdain for America. He was homesick for England, which had survived the Battle of Britain but still faced great danger.
Russell was rescued by an eccentric millionaire in Philadelphia. Dr. Albert Barnes, a chemist, had spent his fortune (made on the drug Argyrol) amassing French Post-Impressionist paintings. His private museum housed hundreds of Picassos, Cézannes, Matisses, and Van Goghs. It was open only to a select few, those whose taste suited him. In late 1940, on the recommendation of John Dewey, Barnes offered Russell a handsome salary to give popular lectures on philosophy at the museum. Russell began what was to be a five-year term in January 1941. At first, Barnes was enthusiastic. Within a few months, however, he began meddling in Russell's classes. There were quarrels. Barnes's ego was further bruised by Russell's wife, Peter, whom he deemed “imperious” and banned from the museum. Barnes fired Russell a few days after Christmas 1942. Russell sued for breach of contract and won, but was forced to wait months for payment. Beginning in 1943, he tried to find transport back to England, but it was the spring of 1944 before he, his wife, and their young son Conrad finally embarked. Meanwhile, he kept busy writing his History of Western Philosophy.
As always, he planned ahead. What would become his last work of philosophy, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, was in its planning stages. Throughout October 1943, Russell delivered a series of five lectures on successive Fridays at Bryn Mawr College. The lectures were received by an enthusiastic audience who braved “torrential rain.” Their titles are notable to us, for they suggest what was on Russell's mind at the time: (1) “Limitations of Deductive Logic,” (2) “Probable Inference in Practice,” (3) “Physics and Knowledge,” (4) “Perception and Causality,” and (5) “Induction and Analogy.”137
Human Knowledge was to be, in the words of Ray Monk, Russell's “last major philosophical work.”138 His purpose was “to examine the relation between individual experience and the general body of scientific knowledge”—in sum, the age-old dialectic between the concrete and the abstract, applied in particular to the world of science. Philosophy flourishes as an adjunct of science, especially physics. The problem is to find the link between what we see and what is there (always the problem in epistemology), or, in other words, the common world around us and the world described by science. It is telling that “individual experience” comes first in his thesis. For, again, Russell held always to the world of experience, however desirous he was of an overarching certainty. Yet, as the philosopher A. C. Grayling remarks, “he was… critical of certain forms of empiricism” because a focus on “sensory experience,”139 the very definition of empiricism, cannot account for scientific knowledge. Thus, Human Knowledge takes up the problem of “non-demonstrative inference,” the primary method by which science works, and the difficulty of finding structures to ensure truth-finding in science.
Pondering these questions, in late 1943 or early 1944, Russell rented a lakeside house near Princeton. There, once a week, he walked in the bitter cold to 112 Mercer Street and chatted with Einstein, Gödel, and Pauli.
Einstein's closest friend at Princeton was Kurt Gödel. The wonder is that they were friends at all, so different were they in temperament and style. Einstein was twice Gödel's age. He loved jokes and laughter. He was generous, down-to-earth, and the epitome of sanity. Gödel was distrustful of people's motives, a hypochondriac, often depressed and paranoid. In the end, he starved himself to death, convinced that his doctors were trying to poison him. One cannot imagine Gödel enduring what Einstein took in stride—wearing an Indian war bonnet for photographers, chatting with Charlie Chaplin or Winston Churchill, trading cookies with a neighbor's child. Einstein loved Bach and Mozart. Gödel said that Bach made him “nervous” (his taste ran to “O Mein Papa” and “The Wheel of Fortune”).140 Einstein played the bohemian. When he lived alone in Berlin, he cooked soup and eggs all together in the same pan to save time. Gödel was a thorough and contented bourgeois, living snugly with his wife in a Princeton bungalow full of kitsch. When his wife set a pink flamingo on the lawn, Gödel thought it “terribly cute.”141 Einstein felt compelled to fight injustice, though it cost time and energy away from physics. Gödel, though he had fled Nazi Vienna, never so much as glanced up from his equations.
How could their friendship thrive? Clearly, it did. Late in his life, Einstein told a friend that when he felt old and his own work no longer meant much, he came to the Institute mostly for the privilege of walking home with Gödel.142
The word “privilege” salutes the younger man with Einstein's typical generosity. It also hints at Einstein's isolation from the greater scientific community. Gödel helped fill that void in Einstein later years. Gödel believed that Einstein liked him because he was willing to argue. But intellectual stimulation is hardly the sole basis for a close friendship. The intriguing question is: Why did Einstein enjoy Gödel's company?
Some light is shed by Ernst Straus, Einstein's mathematical assistant in 1944. He wrote that although the two men differed “in almost every personal way,” Gödel “in some ways strangely resembled [Einstein] most…. They shared a fundamental quality: both went directly and wholeheartedly to the questions at the very center of things.”143 They were also, as Palle Yourgrau notes, equally “unapproachable” because of the “sheer size of their reputations.”144 They shared a common language, German, and common interest in each other's fields—Einstein had finally awakened to the importance of mathematics, and Gödel had once dabbled in physics. They were strangers together, philosopher-kings in the brave new world of technophysics. When it came to understanding intellectual questions—indeed, to tackling them in the first place—Gödel had the requisite audacity and inner freedom.
Gödel's towering reputation was built on two theorems, collectively known as “incompleteness.” The audacity of incompleteness is best illustrated by a story about John von Neumann, a mathematician of prodigious output, far exceeding Gödel's in number and range. In 1930, von Neumann—only three years older than Gödel—was pondering the same questions as Gödel. But he failed where Gödel succeeded. For in proving his theorems, Gödel disproved David Hilbert's mathematical formalism. Hilbert was not only the greatest mathematician of the time, but von Neumann's mentor as well. Had von Neumann ventured to conceive of incompleteness, he would have had to imagine the towering Hilbert capable of error.144 Gödel—like Einstein—was never awed by eminence, and never had nor wanted a mentor. In such intellectual matters, Gödel was as self-contained and self-confident as Einstein.
Outside mathematics and philosophy, Gödel was helpless, even infantile. He needed care and attentiveness and, at times, nursing. His wife, Adele, mothered him from the beginning. During their engagement, he was terrified of being poisoned. She loyally tasted all his food to reassure him and patiently fed him “spoonful by spoonful” to build up his weight.146 He found in Einstein another protector. Gödel's frailty evoked in Einstein both sympathy and tenderness. Perhaps Einstein, nearly twice Gödel's age, saw in Gödel something resembling a son, brilliant and troubled. Einstein's youngest boy, Eduard, was schizophrenic and confined to a Swiss sanatorium.
Few would mistake either Einstein or Russell for a mere professor: Einstein looked like a wild-haired sage; Russell might have stepped out of the House of Lords. But Gödel looked the part, un-worldly and abstracted. Nothing in his life corresponds to Einstein's commitment to Israel or Russell's antiwar crusades. Great minds are not necessarily great men. Einstein and Russell lived their greatness in the public eye. Gödel, their intellectual peer, was otherwise fragile and somewhat diminished.
He was born in 1906 in Brunn (“Brno” in Czech), a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and attended schools there. Then he moved to the University of Vienna and took his doctorate in mathematics in 1930, at age twenty-four. That same year he found the breakthrough to the epochal proof that any system that is logical and consistent must be incomplete, which was published the next year. His life seemed ordinary in many respects. He took classes, went on vacations with his family, spent time in Vienna cafés, and had an eye for the girls. His father died in 1929, and his mother moved in with Gödel and his brother in Vienna. He had severe rheumatism at age eight, a nervous attack of some kind at five, and several depressive or psychotic episodes in his late twenties.
Yet it is hard to bring the young (or later) Gödel into focus. He never showed much of himself to anyone. Contemporaries described him as quite interested in what others said but saying little himself, speaking precisely but very briefly when he did, and rarely on topics outside mathematics.147 Alert but withdrawn—he never changed; his watchful photographs suggest this. Even his publishing record can be described as withdrawn: He wrote much but published very little, because he disliked exposing himself to controversy or criticism. Cautious about every word destined for public scrutiny, he could delay promised material for years. His greatest work, the first incompleteness theorem, was announced at a mathematics conference with such modesty that it almost escaped unheard.
Still, glimpses of the unexpected emerge. Gödel's marriage was such a case. He met his future wife, Adele, in 1927, when he was twenty-one. She was a nightclub dancer, married at the time to a Viennese photographer, and eight years his senior. Marrying Adele was a gamble. If Gödel were to have a chance at an academic life, he would be expected to uphold high social standards. The title “Professor” carried with it civil service status, and thus much scrutiny. (As the hapless Herr Professor Rath discovers in the 1928 film Blue Angel, marrying a dancer invites merciless scorn and degradation.) Gödel's mother and brother were opposed to the marriage. The Gödel family was well-to-do, solidly middle class, well educated; Adele would not fit in. She was distinctly lower-class. She was uneducated and Catholic, with a port-wine stain on her face, and later developed a habit of bullying Gödel.148
The otherwise devoted son and sober academic Gödel defied family and propriety when, after several years of secret engagement, he married Adele. Both families were represented at the private ceremony, but Gödel's brother had never met Adele before, and none of Gödel's friends were notified of the wedding date.149 Man and mouse at once: He seems to have wanted a wife who would protect and mother him, yet he acted boldly and cunningly enough in making sure he married her.
Adele was hardly a typical Princeton wife. Gödel's closest friend apart from Einstein, the Princeton economist Oscar Morgenstern, minced no words: She was a “Viennese washerwoman type: garrulous, uncultured, strong-willed” whose “astonishing bad taste” in décor he deplored. His wife Dorothy was “roused to indignation” by Adele's treatment of the frail and retiring Gödel, noting, among other trespasses, that Adele smoked.150
Still, Adele was a good choice for Gödel. She had the outgoing toughness and directness that he lacked. (After Germany annexed Austria, Nazi gangs roamed the streets attacking those who seemed to belong to the wrong side. In 1939, walking with Adele near the university, Gödel was assaulted and his glasses knocked off. Adele counterattacked with her umbrella and saved him.) His great discoveries in logic came before the marriage, but Adele very likely kept his later career going, especially as he became more hypochondriac and fearful. She was adaptable as few wives might be. In Princeton, Gödel believed that gases from the furnace might poison him, so the heat was turned off—even during winter.151
Their home life otherwise revolved around the quiet middle-class pleasures of “house and garden, food and digestion, household helpers, weekly accounts, summer vacations… families and relatives, anniversaries, birthdays,” and the like.152 Gödel arranged his life to avoid disturbing his concentration.
The marriage was probably happier on Gödel's side than Adele's. She spoke English badly, had little interest in intellectual pursuits, and found Princeton stifling. When Gödel refused to move to a livelier city, she escaped by traveling frequently to Europe. Gödel was a recluse at best. He was uncomfortable in social situations. If she could be a shrew—at times, Gödel said, hysterical—they suited each other. Despite all their differences, Gödel and Adele remained married until his death.
Gödel came of age in turbulent Vienna, center of a world in chaos. After its defeat in World War I, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dismantled. Economic pressures mounted. Fascists, socialists, and Nazis fought in the streets. In early 1933, civil war broke out. Chancellor Dollfuss abolished the parliament, set up a dictatorship, and suppressed socialists and Nazis alike by force. In July 1934, Dollfuss himself was assassinated by the Nazis. Weak governments followed. Hitler invaded in 1938 and turned Austria into a province of Greater Germany.
Gödel, meanwhile, graduated from the University of Vienna in 1930 and began the difficult task of finding work among the rigid and closed hierarchies of Austrian and German universities. His incompleteness theorems of 1931—though as epochal as relativity—seemed to many mathematicians to be off in the remote margins where logic and mathematics met. So, highly esteemed by a few but otherwise undistinguished and unconnected, Gödel searched for a position as a Dozent, the lowest rung on the academic ladder. Professors had tenure and received their salaries regardless of whether many or none took their courses; a Dozent had no tenure and no salary, and collected fees only according to how many students enrolled. In summer 1933, Gödel taught his first course at the University of Vienna. It would be twenty years, perhaps, before he could expect to be named professor.
However, his prospects improved drastically even before he began his summer course. The young mathematician John von Neumann had been present when Gödel presented his incompleteness theorems. Unlike many others, von Neumann immediately grasped the significance, and he began spreading the word in Princeton, where he had taught since 1930. Oswald Veblen, the senior mathematician at the newly formed Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), invited Gödel to visit the Institute, starting in the fall of 1933. His year went well and included a trip to Cambridge to lecture at the Mathematical Association of America. He returned to Europe in May and was in Vienna by early June. The summer brought more political chaos and a subtle escalation of Nazi influence. Although scheduled to return to the IAS in the fall of 1934, Gödel had a nervous breakdown, which he hid from Veblen (claiming an infected tooth) and spent several weeks in a sanatorium. One year later, he returned to Princeton. The voyage must have been stimulating, for he sailed with Wolfgang Pauli and the mathematician Paul Bernays, also en route to the IAS. But within two months, Gödel suffered a recurrence of depression and returned to Vienna, with Veblen's assurance that he could return at any time. Gödel's lifelong mental instability seemed to have taken shape. He spent much of the remaining year reading up on toxicology and psychiatry. His marriage in 1937 calmed him, and he was able to return to Princeton in the fall of 1938.
Meanwhile, his constant leaves of absence from the University of Vienna and his inattention to bureaucratic requirements came back to haunt Gödel. He had neglected to request a leave in 1938 until well after he was ensconced in Princeton. Having caught the attention of the Ministry of Education, he returned in 1939 to a Vienna dramatically changed under the Nazi takeover. His Dozent appointment was on the verge of expiring.153 Only a “New Order Dozent” position—bestowed at the pleasure of the Nazi regime—was available. Gödel filled out an application. A Nazi bureaucrat with the inimitable title of Dozentenbundführer (Leader of the Association of Dozents)154 reported that Gödel's doctorate had been directed by a Jewish professor (Hans Hahn) and that Gödel “always traveled in Jewish-liberal circles.”155 However, there was no record of Gödel's having disparaged Nazism. The application lingered in officialdom. Meanwhile, Gödel was examined for military duty and, astonishingly, found fit to serve. Facing the unthinkable, Gödel acted quickly, negotiating quietly for a visa to the United States. Despite bureaucratic tangles, Flexner at the IAS was able to wangle a special visa for him. Only after the incident with the Nazi thugs, however, did Gödel decide to leave Austria. To obtain transit visas, he and Adele were forced to take a circuitous route through the USSR (then a Nazi ally) to Japan, where they set sail for California. Within days of landing, the Gödels arrived safely in Princeton.
In retrospect, Gödel's behavior in 1938 and 1939 is puzzling and disturbing. He was in Vienna on March 12, 1938, when Germany invaded Austria. The next day, Hitler spoke to a hundred thousand people in the Heldenplatz and decreed Anschluss, annexing Austria to Germany. Almost immediately, Austrian anti-Semitism burst out violently. Persecution of the Jews was savage. Crowds watched gleefully as Jewish doctors, businessmen, and well-dressed women were forced to scrub the sidewalks of Vienna with toothbrushes until they were clean of anti-Nazi slogans. The third largest Jewish community in the world—and the most sophisticated—was suddenly stripped of dignity, position, and employment. Stores, homes, and synagogues were broken into and looted; many thousands of Jews were imprisoned or shipped to concentration camps.
Even though he had been in the United States during some of the worst atrocities, the reclusive Gödel could not have been unaware of what was happening. Jewish (and liberal non-Jewish) academics were among the first targets. Colleagues, friends, and neighbors disappeared overnight to exile, prison, or death. He was surrounded in America by refugees and well-informed opponents of Nazism.
The answer lies not in his political inclinations, but in his psyche. He was neither anti-Semitic nor pro-Nazi. Rather, he was excessively detached. When he had lunch with the newly arrived Austrian-Jewish mathematician Gustav Bergmann, driven into exile in 1938, Gödel stunned Bergmann by asking, “And what brings you to America, Herr Bergmann?”156 The mathematician Karl Menger, an old friend from Vienna, recalled that he never uttered a word to Gödel about the horrors unfolding in Europe simply because Gödel seemed unconcerned—except for the threat to his Dozent position.157
One can only wonder how Gödel's friendship with Einstein survived such a striking difference in temperament and outlook. Nothing was further from Gödel's self-absorption than Einstein's engagement with the world. Einstein never hesitated to break a rule or disregard legalities to do right. Gödel's obsession with legalities struck everyone who knew him. To be legalistic is to cleave to the letter of the law—the rules—rather than to the spirit, and thus to a narrowed view of what is at stake. Adhering to the letter was hardly appropriate in a world ruled by Nazis.
Gödel's obsessive legalism, the consequence of an extreme rationalism, was famous. Whereas a reasonable person accepts the muddle of life's confusion, imperfection, and accidents, the extreme rationalist seeks to banish dilemmas by so precisely defining problems that the solution seems simple. (The paranoid is perhaps the only perfect rationalist: Every seemingly random act, gesture, look, or word is part of a logical pattern; no stray threads, accidents, coincidences, luck, or flukes can exist.158 Gödel, in the grip of such a view, finally starved himself to death, convinced he was saving himself from untrustworthy doctors.159) Sometimes, Gödel's attempts to rationalize the world were comic. In 1947, he had to travel to Trenton for an interview regarding his application for citizenship. Einstein and the economist Oscar Morgenstern went along. On the way, Gödel remarked that he had studied the Constitution very closely, expecting to be drilled on its contents, and had discovered a fatal flaw in its logic. Alarmed, Einstein and Morgenstern cast about for ways to distract Gödel, lest he bungle his interview by lecturing on the Constitution's shortcomings. Einstein told joke after joke about whatever came to mind. When at last Gödel's turn came, the justice asked an innocuous question: “Do you think a dictatorship like that in Germany could ever arise in the United States?” Gödel saw his opening. “I know how that could happen,” he said, and began to explain that fatal flaw. The judge, who knew Einstein, quickly changed the subject—and approved Gödel's citizenship.
When Gödel returned to Princeton in 1940, he was given only temporary appointments, to be renewed each year—this despite his renown. Only in 1946 was he given a permanent appointment—still as a visitor, not as one of the permanent faculty. In 1953, at age forty-seven, he was finally made a professor—and even that came after he had been awarded honorary degrees by Yale and Harvard and shared the first Einstein Medal in 1951.
Why had it taken so long for a professorship? For his part, von Neumann thought it absurd: “How can any of us be called professor when Gödel is not?”160 Doubtless the delay was due to considerable apprehension on the part of several faculty members worried about Gödel's mental health. Others were irritated by his legalistic and interminable arguments during committee meetings and his habit of phoning at all hours of the night to talk about trivial matters. Eventually, of course, he was promoted. Gödel himself seemed indifferent and was never heard to complain about his treatment.
Gödel can scarcely be summed up by his private aberrations. Mathematics is the most highly rationalized form of thought, and Gödel was one of the great mathematicians. What is most intriguing is that he discovered contradiction and finitude in the heart of mathematics. The incompleteness theorems for which he is famous prove that no mathematical system can be both consistent and complete. His proofs are elegant and irrefutable.
Within this hyperrationalist mathematician lived a seemingly obverse personality.161 He believed in ghosts, for instance. Our instinct is to ascribe such a belief to psychological problems. Except for frightened children, who takes ghosts seriously? Yet Gödel's university mentor, Hans Hahn, and the philosopher Rudolf Carnap frequented mediums. How do we reconcile their beliefs with a rational world view? Gödel never explained how he came to think that ghosts exist. Did he himself see them? Or read about them in fairytales? Or dream them? Yet are ghosts so different, for instance, from the Platonic idea of numbers? Such numbers are as puzzling as ghosts—they exist only as mental entities, but they are nonetheless real, not invented but discovered, in the same sense that astronomers discover stars and zoologists discover different species of life. Hence, reason is not mere finger play in the void; the objects of reason are inscribed in the eternal order of things.
Now, consider a “fact” about ghosts: They linger. If they didn't, would we ever speak of them? But why do they linger? Because (tradition says) they must abide until some higher task is completed: Their sins must be exorcised or their earthly longings abated. Not surprisingly, Gödel also believed in reincarnation, and he thought through some of the implications with philosophic rigor. In 1961, Gödel's mother asked whether he believed in a next world. Gödel said he did. Since the universe and life seemed regularly ordered, there might well be another life in another world:
What would be the point of bringing forth an essence (the human being) that has so wide a range of possible (individual) developments and changes in their relations, but is never allowed to realize one thousandth of them? That would be like laying the foundations of a house with the greatest trouble and expenditure, and then letting the whole thing perish again.162
Thus, the soul (or human essence) proceeds from this world to the next and is reincarnated or reembodied so that it may continue its improvement.
If reincarnation is possible, “time” with its familiar panoply of past, present, and future becomes more mysterious than ever. In 1949, in a volume honoring Einstein, Gödel offered a new twist on Einstein's relativity: rotating universes whose effect is not only time travel, but the disappearance of time itself. Gödel's work on time is the subject of Palle Yourgrau's A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein.163 Yourgrau is the first scholar to examine Gödel's philosophizing on time in the depth it deserves.
Gödel's famous incompleteness theorem is ultimately a limiting case for mathematics, demonstrating that mathematics cannot complete its proofs. As we shall see, the confidence that mathematics is a complete system was one of the high water marks of optimistic rationalism in the twentieth century. Incompleteness proved this confidence misplaced: No enterprise of human thought can escape limitation, not even the crystalline structure of mathematics. It might have seemed to Russell that Gödel was mired in Platonism, but on some very fundamental level, it was a Platonism tempered by reasonable doubt.164
On the evening of May 26, 1955, Wolfgang Pauli arrived at the Zurich Physical Society ready to lecture on Einstein. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the special theory of relativity. He expected to see among the many invited guests his two assistants, David Speiser and Armin Thellung. Both were missing.
So, too, were Ralph de Laer Kronig, in town on his annual trek back to Zurich, and Res Jost, an old friend and associate professor at ETH (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, the former Zurich Polytechnic School), Pauli's home university.
Kronig and Pauli were old friends, despite their inauspicious first meeting. In 1924, Kronig, a freshly minted Columbia Ph.D., had gone to the ever-skeptical Pauli, known as the “scourge of God,” with an idea about electron spin. Pauli pronounced the idea “amusing” (“Das is ja ein ganz witziger Einfall”) but unrealistic. He later regretted his words. Discouraged, Kronig gave up. In the months to come, two students of Paul Ehrenfest published very similar ideas on spin, and finally Pauli took notice. Building on these ideas, Pauli proposed a fourth quantum number with two values, one each for clockwise and for counterclockwise spin. Ehrenfest's students were ultimately awarded the Max Planck medal for their discovery. Kronig, quick to forgive, went on to a distinguished career, first at Zurich, where he was hired by Pauli, then at the Dutch University of Groningen. Years afterwards, Pauli, ever the critic even of himself, wrote to Kronig, “I was so stupid when I was young.”165
Res Jost had started out at ETH as Pauli's assistant in 1946, the year Pauli returned from the United States. By 1955, he had risen to the rank of associate professor of theoretical physics. He and Pauli were very close. They spoke to each other in the familiar “du.”
So it was odd that the four had not yet arrived.
Years later, Armin Thellung recollected the incident. The four men had met for dinner at what Thellung remembers as a “teetotal” restaurant. Afterwards, they set off for Pauli's talk. Here is Thellung:
Speiser, discovering that the gasoline tank of his Lambretta [scooter] was empty, went to a filling station. There the Lambretta suddenly caught fire! It was extinguished with the water from a ewer but was not usable any more, so that Speiser had to walk. I found my bike with flat tires and, hence, also had to walk. Kronig, finally, went by tram—a stretch he had traveled many times already—but he forgot to get out at Gloriastrasse, and noticed it only many stops later.166
They all managed to find their way just in time, despite the instrumental mishaps.
When the tale was recounted, Pauli was quite amused, perhaps even gratified. The notorious “Pauli effect”—his peculiar and negative influence on all things instrumental—had struck again.
As a theorist, Pauli was on the other side of the divide from experimental physics. Rarely did theorists venture into the laboratory, certainly in the early days of quantum theory. Pauli, though, represented an extreme case, especially among the highly superstitious experimental physicists. It was said that no instrument or laboratory apparatus was safe when Pauli was near. Mechanisms ground to a halt, experimental data disintegrated, glass beakers tumbled to the floor. Thus, “the Pauli effect.” The great Otto Stern, who developed the molecular beam for use in studying molecules, forbade Pauli to enter his lab when the two worked in Hamburg. If Pauli came by for a chat or on the way to lunch, he was obliged to knock on the door, to make sure he never set foot within.
By 1940, when Pauli came to Princeton, he had established his name in quantum theory. He remained active, but, as with Einstein, his great discoveries lay in the past. He, too, fit the definition of protégé. At nineteen, at Arnold Sommerfeld's request, he wrote the relativity article for the Encyclopädie der Mathematischen Wissenschaften, a project that ultimately turned from an article into a book and garnered praise from Einstein himself. At twenty-two, as an assistant to Max Born, Pauli was invited to the Bohr Festival, his initiation into the vibrant international society of nuclear physics. At twenty-four, he discovered how electrons gather energy levels in the atom—the exclusion principle. Nine years later, he published his paper on what would later be called the neutrino. For his exclusion principle, Pauli was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1945. The neutrino was another matter. It remained in the realm of theory until 1956, when its existence was confirmed by experiment.
But Pauli's genius, however creative, was circumscribed by his critical acumen. From the mid-1930s to the end of his life, he functioned as the “conscience of physics”—a critic whose often acerbic tongue was widely respected for its impartiality and clarity. He stayed abreast of all the advances and developments; he knew everyone, wrote to everyone, and traveled widely. But after 1933, he made no singular discovery. His contributions to meson theory (the interaction of subatomic particles that “glue” protons and neutrons) and spin (the angular momentum of subatomic particles) were numerous and valuable. Yet Pauli himself seemed unsuited to revolutionary advancement. While he labored over the exclusion principle, his close friend Werner Heisenberg published in 1925 an early formulation of quantum mechanics without fully understanding his own theory. Heisenberg published his “uncertainty principle” in 1927, against the advice of Niels Bohr. Pauli was too cautious and too much of a perfectionist to leap at speculative theories. As collaborators, Pauli and Heisenberg may have combined into the yin and yang of quantum physics. “Pauli's whole character was different from mine,” wrote Heisenberg in 1968.
He was much more critical, and he tried to do two things at once. I, on the other hand, generally thought that this is really too difficult, even for the best physicist. He tried, first of all, to find inspiration in the experiments and to see, in a kind of intuitive way, how things are connected. At the same time, he tried to rationalize his intuitions and to find a rigorous mathematical scheme, so that he really could prove everything he asserted. Now that is, I think, just too much. Therefore Pauli has, through his whole life, published much less than he could have done if he had abandoned one of these two postulates. Bohr had dared to publish ideas that later turned out to be right, even though he couldn't prove them at the time. Others have done a lot by rational methods and good mathematics. But the two things together, I think, are too much for one man.167
A year before his death, Pauli, diffident and critical as ever, quarreled with Heisenberg over a paper on the theory of elemental particles. Heisenberg wanted to publish, despite many doubts; Pauli refused, cautious to the end. The paper remained unpublished.
With his cherubic face and high-spirited demeanor, Pauli stood out among his peers. In a photograph of the 1927 Solvay Conference (a highly selective physics conference held in Brussels), three rows of eminent figures including Einstein, Marie Curie, Bohr, and Max Planck all face dutifully front toward the photographer—all except Pauli, who is looking down and to our left, staring inquisitively elsewhere as the camera clicked.
It was Pauli's first Solvay Conference. At twenty-seven, already famous, he stands in the last row. Front row center was Einstein, then only forty-eight years old, but with white hair, winged collar, and a solemn look. Positioned as they are, one in front and the other at the rear, they embody in that image the course of their working lives. Pauli's entire career coincided with the last half of Einstein's life. Like others of his generation, Pauli moved in the wake of Einstein's epochal discoveries. In spite of their profound disagreement over quantum physics, Pauli and Einstein remained friends. During thirty years of affectionate exchanges, neither wavered, and the great man and the brash youngster never hesitated to voice disagreement.
Certainly, Pauli would have been most welcome in Einstein's living room during that winter of 1943–44. Theirs was something of a transfigured father-son relationship. It was Einstein who nominated Pauli for the 1945 Nobel Prize. At the celebration party, held in Princeton, Einstein declared Pauli his scientific heir apparent.
The usually acerbic Pauli was immeasurably touched. At Einstein's death, he wrote to Max Born:
Now, that affectionate, fatherly friend is gone. Never will I forget the speech that [Einstein] gave about me and for me in Princeton in 1945, after I had received the Nobel Prize. It was like a king who abdicates and installs me, as a kind of chosen son, a successor.168
Still, Pauli was famous for his sharp tongue and combative presence. Even Einstein was not immune to Pauli's verbal assaults. At one lecture, Einstein had just finished making a point when the very young Pauli remarked to the assembly, “What Professor Einstein said is not entirely stupid.” One theory, advanced unwisely in Pauli's presence, was so poorly conceived that it was, said Pauli, “Not even wrong!” For the most part, colleagues and students seemed to accept his sledgehammer approach as a reflection of his passion for truth and clarity, at whatever personal cost. Others felt vulnerable. Hans Bethe, for one, gave Pauli a wide, respectful berth after their first meeting at a 1929 conference, when Pauli introduced himself by saying, “Bethe, I was quite disappointed by your thesis.” No wonder Pauli earned the nickname “the scourge of God.”
Yet he was also a self-effacing colleague and supportive teacher. He fed insights to others, but never thought to claim credit. His letters to colleagues were brilliant small monographs that helped clarify and extend their ideas.
Pauli was born in 1900 in Vienna. But his familial roots—both maternal and paternal—lay in Prague. His maternal grandfather, Friedrich Schütz, was born in Prague, but moved to Vienna, where, as a journalist and playwright, he was active in Jewish political and cultural life. His maternal grandmother, Bertha Schütz-Dillner, was a famed mezzo-soprano, born in Vienna, who sang at the Cologne and Prague opera houses before moving back to Vienna, where she met and married Friedrich. Pauli's own mother, also Bertha, was born in Vienna in 1878. Intelligent and well educated, she was a feminist and a pacifist. She was actively involved in socialist politics. Her writings included theater reviews, essays, and a book on the French Revolution. (Her suicide, in 1927, was one of the precipitating events of Pauli's breakdown in 1931.) Her daughter, Hertha, Pauli's sister, took part in the French Resistance and later became a professional writer.
Pauli's father, Wolf, was descended from Jewish intellectuals who had lived in and around Prague since their expulsion from Spain. At Prague's Carl Ferdinand University, Wolf worked with Ernst Mach, the physicist and philosopher (“Mach” speed was named in his honor), whose works would later directly influence Einstein. After receiving his degree in 1893, Wolf was appointed to the medical staff of Rudolf Hospital in Vienna. There he remained until 1898, when, only months after his father's death in 1897, he changed his name from Pascheles, converted to Catholicism, and married Bertha Schütz, Pauli's mother. He took the name “Pauli” probably in honor of Saint Paul, that earlier convert. The conversion was a prudent and fairly typical step for a professional amid the growing anti-Semitism of Europe. It meant that Wolf, whose specialty was colloid chemistry, would be able to rise to the rank of director of the Biological Experimental Institute and, eventually, full professor and director of the Institute for Medical Colloid Chemistry at the University of Vienna.169
Contradictions presided over Pauli's cradle. His father was a Jew who converted to Catholicism to advance his academic career. Young Wolfgang was not a Jew, according to Jewish tradition, since his mother was not (Bertha's mother was Christian, though her father was Jewish). Still, the Nazis would later deem him Jewish (in a 1940 letter to Frank Aydelotte, director of the Institute for Advanced Study, Pauli noted that he was “75 percent Jewish”170), and thus his exile to Princeton in 1940.
Even Pauli's baptism was fraught with contradiction. His father Wolf remained friends with Ernst Mach, who had moved to Vienna in 1895. A fierce positivist, dismissing all things metaphysical and spiritual, Mach nevertheless agreed to be the godfather of the newborn Pauli. (Mach seems to have haunted Einstein's living room in 1944. Not only did his positivism lay the foundations for the theory of relativity, it also underlay Russell's view of “neutral monism.”171 Gödel spent his formative years listening to and silently disagreeing with the Machian positivism of the Vienna Circle.) Later, Pauli joked that he grew up a positivist because Mach's power was stronger than that of the baptizing priest. In fact, Pauli was never a simple positivist, though he never ceased to believe that theory must be supported by experiment. His later devotion to Jung and metaphysics would have driven his godfather to distraction.
Like so many other sons and daughter of Vienna, Pauli grew up amid the strange psychic energies, ambivalences, and decadence that created Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Arnold Schönberg, Gustav Klimt, Arthur Schnitzler, and, yes, the young Hitler, who dabbled in art and nursed his monstrous dreams. Perhaps it is not surprising that Pauli later became—at the same time—the disciple of Niels Bohr's crystalline rationality and of Carl Jung's mythifying depth psychology.
Young Pauli attended a “classical” Gymnasium, which emphasized not science but literature and history. He learned Greek and Latin—useful later in his life when he began a lengthy project on Kepler and the alchemists, although his language grades were less than stellar. As for mathematics and physics, Pauli needed little formal training at school to do well. He was a prodigy who had mastered calculus by fourteen and was easily advised in his reading by godfather Mach. His tutor, Hans Adolf Bauer, kept Pauli abreast of the latest theories. At eighteen, just out of high school, Pauli published his first paper, on Einstein's general relativity—a theory published only two years earlier. Whereas many senior physicists were still puzzled by its mathematical difficulties and conceptual innovations, Pauli was unfazed. Even at eighteen, his self-confidence was unshakable. The physicist Victor Weisskopf, Pauli's assistant in the early 1930s, once pointed out to him a mistake in calculation made by another physicist. Pauli said, “Others make mistakes; but I, never.” And so it was.
Thus, when he entered the University of Munich, Pauli at eighteen was so far ahead of his peers that his mentor, the eminent theorist Arnold Sommerfeld, put him to work writing the article on the new general relativity theory for the Encyclopädie Mathematicschen Wissenschaften. Pauli obliged with a book-length article, 237 pages long, with almost four hundred footnotes (still in print, with supplementary notes added by Pauli just before his death). Upon reading the article, published in 1921, Einstein was all admiration:
No one studying this mature, grandly conceived work would believe that the author is a man of twenty-one. One wonders what to admire most, the psychological understanding for the development of ideas, the sureness of mathematical deduction, the profound physical insight, the capacity for lucid, systematic presentation, the knowledge of the literature, the complete treatment of the subject matter, or the sureness of critical appraisal.172
Such praise from the Master might be the capstone of a career, rather than the starting point. Yet Pauli, now under Sommerfeld's tutelage, blossomed. Munich was, as Sommerfeld wished it to be, a “nursery of theoretical physics.”173 In the early 1920s, it would produce not only Pauli, but Werner Heisenberg and Hans Bethe, each of whom was to win the Nobel Prize in Physics. Still, the city was rocked by political and economic strife as the war ended and the Central Powers disintegrated. Prince Ludwig III, the Bavarian prince regent, fled for his life in 1918 as revolution threatened. In early 1919, Kurt Eisner, a socialist who had been elected premier just a few months earlier, was assassinated. The Communist-inspired Bavarian Soviet Republic lasted only until May, when it was toppled by the Freikorps, many of whom later swelled the ranks of the National Socialists. Munich was, for all practical purposes, the birthplace of Nazism. In 1923, Hitler and his supporters staged the failed Beer Hall Putsch in an attempt to overthrow the fragile Weimar Republic.
Yet Pauli seems to have been oblivious to the turmoil. At nineteen, he was the resident expert on general relativity. He lectured on it in Sommerfeld's class, wrote his second paper on it in June 1919, and tended to sleep late, enjoying the nightlife and clearly untroubled by missing a few morning lectures. He later recalled the “cheerful mood” of those on their way to and from physics and mathematics conferences. Only rarely did the real world intrude on Sommerfeld's institute, as when extremist students threatened to disrupt a lecture by Einstein, scheduled in late 1921. Einstein wisely decided not to attend.
Pauli had already met Einstein at a 1920 conference in Nauheim. It must have been a heady moment for the young student, at work on the relativity article. The conference was one of several during 1920 at which Einstein was expected to defend general relativity. His name recognition not only among physicists, but among the general populace had increased exponentially when in 1919 Arthur Stanley Eddington was able to measure the bending of light during a solar eclipse, thus confirming Einstein's postulate on gravitational magnetism. Still, with fame came controversy, some of it stirred not by science but by blatant anti-Semitism. The Nauheim conference witnessed a “dramatic… duel between Einstein and Philipp Lenard,” in the words of the mathematician Hermann Weyl. Lenard's anti-Semitism was so virulent that it colored his view of relativity and embittered him against “Jewish physics.” Ironically, it was Einstein, the “Jewish fraud” of relativity, who had been able in 1905 to explain anomalies Lenard observed in his own work on cathode rays.
In Sommerfeld's institute, consisting of not much more than a library, a laboratory, a seminar room, the director's own office, and, of course, a lecture hall, Pauli and his fellow students (Werner Heisenberg among them) learned how to theorize not only on relativity, but on quantum theory as well. It was, of course, the “old” quantum theory first postulated by Bohr in 1913. Bohr's now obsolete atomic model resembled a solar system; its electrons, however, did not follow the rules of classical physics. Sommerfeld was active in the attempt to “manage” Bohr's unwieldy model, suggesting, for instance, elliptical orbits. In the years to follow, Sommerfeld's students, Pauli and Werner Heisenberg among them, rode the wave of quantum theory thoroughly grounded in the rudiments of research. Throughout both of their lives, the very mention of Sommerfeld transformed the usually sardonic Pauli into a deferential and respectful pupil.
In only six semesters, Pauli finished all required coursework. He began his thesis on ionized molecular hydrogen—a little-remembered excursion into quantum theory (Enz remarks that Pauli's ego might have led him to tackle a too-difficult problem). Pauli had distinguished himself sufficiently to be offered an assistantship with Max Born, the physicist whose “probability interpretation” reconciled wave and particle, introduced the notion of probability as a state of knowledge rather than a state of ignorance, and won Born a Nobel Prize in 1954. During the winter of 1921, while completing the thesis, Pauli assisted Born at the University of Göttingen. Until 1933, the university, founded in 1737 by the Hanoverian King George II of England, boasted first-rate mathematics and physics departments: Among other illustrious former faculty was Bernhard Riemann, the nineteenth-century mathematician, whose geometry made Einstein's general relativity theory possible, as we shall see.
Born was fond of Pauli, despite the latter's tendency to sleep late and miss lectures. Much later, Born wrote,
[E]ver since the time he had been my assistant in Göttingen, I had been aware that he was a genius comparable only to Einstein himself. Indeed, from the point of view of pure science he was possibly even greater than Einstein even if as an entirely different type of person he never, in my opinion, attained Einstein's greatness.174
Genius Pauli may have been; still, his somewhat erratic comportment hinted at a psychological imbalance, which surfaced in the early 1930s.
In Göttingen, Pauli and Born collaborated on an important series of calculations that would, in theory, test Niels Bohr's idea of the harmony of atomic motions. The “Göttingen calculations,” based on the celestial mechanics of perturbation (i.e., the effect planets have on each other as opposed to the much greater effect of the sun's gravitation), seemed to contradict Bohr's description of the helium atom. This was one of an increasing number of difficulties facing the Bohr atomic model and his early formulation of quantum theory.
In 1922, Niels Bohr was invited to lecture at Göttingen University. Bohr was at the pinnacle of his career. He had just founded an institute for theoretical physics in Copenhagen, where he taught. He was six months away from being awarded the Nobel Prize for his atomic model. Everyone who was anyone came to the lectures, dubbed the “Bohr Festspiele.” Among those attending were Werner Heisenberg and, of course, Wolfgang Pauli. Bohr was to become the greatest mentor of young physicists in the century. Pauli was thereafter a disciple, colleague, and friend of the Danish scientist. The young Heisenberg and Paul Dirac were also drawn into Bohr's orbit.
Bohr's lectures were exciting but not particularly accessible (one student described Bohr's style as “neither acoustically nor otherwise completely understandable”175). Still, most of the attendees knew Bohr's theories. The lectures were an occasion to discuss, argue, and augment. Pauli must have been active at the conference, since he wrote Bohr immediately after its close, thanking him for answering “the most diverse questions.”176
Those questions, together with Pauli's reputation, led Bohr to invite the twenty-two-year-old prodigy to his new Copenhagen institute for a year. Pauli quickly accepted. In addition to his own work, Pauli spent the year translating Bohr's papers and lectures (including Bohr's Nobel Prize lecture) into German. During his year in Copenhagen, Pauli gained lifelong friends, colleagues, and collaborators. Above all, he became one-third of the trio who would forge a new, more successful quantum theory. Though Pauli and Heisenberg left Copenhagen—Heisenberg went to Leipzig in 1927, Pauli to Hamburg in 1923 and then to Zurich in 1928—the three men met regularly at conferences and corresponded prolifically.
Through it all, Pauli was a “nuclear” force, as it were—not only an incisive theorist, but a critical sounding board, a mediator, an adviser. As a collaborator, he supported and inspired, argued fearlessly, worried the details, and spared no weak postulate his sarcasm and scorn. Silvan Schweber, reviewing a comprehensive history of quantum theory, remarks on
Pauli's staggering contributions to the technical developments (Pauli exclusion principle, solution of the hydrogen atom in matrix mechanics, spin, paramagnetism, quantum electrodynamics,…) and to the resolution of the philosophical problems engendered by the new mechanics of the micro domain. Pauli was the critic par excellence who was at the center of the vast network of correspondents and became the ultimate arbiter of the Kopenhagener Geist der Quantentheorie. 177
Little wonder, then, that Pauli was chosen to write the two volumes on quantum theory for the Handbuch der Physik. The first volume, published in 1926, summarized old quantum theory—the state of quantum physics from Bohr's 1913 atomic model up to 1925. The second volume, published in 1933, summarized the new quantum mechanics and laying out what became known as the “Copenhagen interpretation.” These volumes are bookends to the heady years during which quantum theory revolutionized physics.
As with all scientific theory, the Copenhagen interpretation was the product of many hands and minds—among them, Erwin Schrödinger, who postulated wave mechanics, Paul Dirac, who devised quantum algebra, and Max Born, who “measured” quantum probability. Still, when the Copenhagen interpretation was explained at the Fifth Solvay Conference of 1927, it was primarily the work of Bohr, the “father” of the new quantum theory, and his two “offspring,” Heisenberg and Pauli. Each played his typecast role—Bohr the quixotic and intuitive muse, Heisenberg, the excitable boy wonder, Pauli the indefatigable critic.
It was Heisenberg who devised the linchpins of modern quantum mechanics: matrix mechanics and the uncertainty principle. We will revisit these notions in a subsequent chapter; here, we will simplify dramatically. Matrix mechanics involves measurements of quantum states with a twist: They are not observational measurements. Heisenberg fretted over a simple, undeniable fact: We cannot see into an atom to measure it. If we cannot see the atom, he reasoned, efforts to model it were fruitless (rebuking, as sons do, the father—Bohr was an inveterate visualizer). Instead, Heisenberg set out to quantify the only evidence we can observe: the frequencies and intensities of light spectra. To predict the numerical values of atomic energy, he created a system of equations that, with help from Pauli and Max Born, were extended into a “matrix” language. The pretty atomic model of a nucleus and orbiting electrons had been erased and converted into a numerical table.
While Heisenberg was thinking up matrix mechanics, Pauli was in the grip of the “anomalous Zeeman effect.” Named after Pieter Zeeman, a Dutch physicist, the Zeeman effect (as distinguished from its anomalous counterpart) is the splitting of a spectral frequency into three symmetrical lines of very slightly differing energy when placed near a magnetic field. This effect can be explained by classical physics, as it was by Zeeman's teacher, Hendrik Lorentz. Zeeman and Lorentz shared the 1902 Nobel Prize for their work.
The Zeeman effect held true for some atoms—for instance, hydrogen. In other cases, the splitting resulted not in three symmetrical lines, but in four or more lines that formed complicated patterns: thus, anomalous—and bedeviling. Pauli later recalled:
A colleague who met me strolling rather aimlessly in the beautiful streets of Copenhagen said to me in a friendly manner, “You look very unhappy”; whereupon I answered fiercely, “How can one look happy when he is thinking about the anomalous Zeeman effect?”178
Not until the concept of electron spin would the anomalies be fully explained. Pauli groped on for several years, identifying the valence electron as the culprit in an article first proposing a “classically not describable kind of two-valuedness” of the electron.179 But what was this “two-valuedness” of the electron? Pauli resisted suggestions of an electron “spin” (thus his deprecation of young Konig) until finally he was convinced, writing to Bohr that he would “capitulate completely.”180
Bohr's now obsolete 1913 atomic model had, in many ways, done its job: It failed the test of “quantization.” Indeed, its visual imprint, based on the solar system, seemed so misleading as to drive physicists away from any proposal that suggested an image. Pauli, a true believer in the quantum, benefited enormously from the swirl of conversation about electrons. In 1924, he read a paper by an English physicist named Edmund Stoner suggesting a distribution of electrons around the nucleus. Pauli was inspired. He set to work formulating the description of electron states that would eventually win him the Nobel Prize.
Known generally as the “exclusion principle,” it was dubbed “exclusion” because it describes what cannot happen: No two electrons can occupy a single quantum state at the same time. The exclusion principle solved a simple but enormously important question: Why do electrons not fall into the nucleus? The answer is that electrons cannot “fall” into another, less-energized state or “orbital” if it is already occupied. More precisely, no two electrons can have the same quantum states within an atomic structure. These states are expressed as the four quantum numbers: (n) the size or level of the orbit, (l) the orbit's shape, (ml) the orbit's orientation, and (ms) the electron's spin direction. Were electrons not excluded from other states, matter would collapse into itself—as, for instance, in black holes, where the exclusion principle does not hold!
The exclusion principle and electron spin answered a number of questions beyond the anomalous Zeeman effect. Most wonderfully, especially for chemists, the exclusion principle gave the periodic table and its arrangement of elements new meaning. Working empirically, from experimental observations, Dmitry Mendeleyev, the Russian chemist who laid out the table in 1869, had arranged the elements in order of atomic mass. He also grouped them vertically by similar properties. When the exclusion principle clarified the energy value (and position) of the valence shell electron (that is, the outer shell, where bonding takes place), the hidden logic of Mendeleyev's table was revealed. His organization seemed amazingly on target. Those elements with the same valence electrons in a shell are similar—lithium and francium, for instance, each have one valence electron and are both alkali metals, though lithium is light, with an atomic number of 3, whereas francium is quite heavy, with an atomic number of 87.
Pauli's exclusion principle was one of the first in a series of interconnected discoveries that grew out of the “new quantum theory.” From 1924 through 1927, Heisenberg, Bohr, Max Born and his assistant Pascual Jordan, Enrico Fermi, Paul Dirac, Erwin Schrödinger, and Pauli, in collaboration or singly, contributed postulates, equations, and theorems to the Copenhagen interpretation. In his role as supercritic, Pauli was Heisenberg's sounding board. Although Heisenberg is credited with creating matrix mechanics, the first complete description of quantum mechanics, Pauli provided the dialectic from which emerged both matrix mechanics and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle of 1927. Indeed, Heisenberg's great insight—that theories must be based on what can be observed—is very Paulian in temperament. While Heisenberg was pondering the “strangely beautiful interior” of atomic phenomena,181 Pauli obsessed over the anomalous Zeeman effect, determined to explain rather than theorize away experimental observations.
Still, Pauli had time for Heisenberg. Pauli was “generally my severest critic,” said Heisenberg. Pauli's feelings toward Heisenberg were more complex. “When I think about his ideas,” wrote Pauli in a 1924 letter to Bohr, “then I find them dreadful, and I swear about them internally. For he is very unphilosophical, he does not pay attention to clear elaboration of the fundamental assumptions and their relation with the existing theories. However, when I talk with him he pleases me very much….”182 Most of Pauli's letters to Heisenberg seem to have vanished during wartime, a particularly sad loss given Pauli's careful, expansive epistolary style.183 Heisenberg's contribution to the dialogue consisted of thirty-four letters and more than twenty postcards.
Pauli's “staggering contributions” to quantum mechanics continued apace. Yet another oddity reared its head, and Pauli took up the case of the missing momentum. It was a mystery. Experimental data showed that during radioactive processes, the atomic nucleus emits an electron. This is called “beta decay.” It occurs because a neutron transforms into a proton. The atom consequently emits an electron. The energy and momentum of all the particles were measured, but the before and after did not match. A tiny amount of energy had gone missing with the beta decay and could not be accounted for. Some physicists, Bohr among them, seemed willing to give up the sacred principle of the conservation of energy. Demonstrably, they argued, energy was lost, and conservation of energy, like much of classical physics, simply did not work for individual subatomic processes.
Not so, said Pauli. He sought the advice of Lise Meitner, a leading authority on nuclear physics. Her work helped him refute Bohr's contention that beta decay did not follow the conservation of energy except statistically—an idea that offended Pauli's austere scientific sensibility. After battling through the possibilities, he came up with a solution—what he called a “desperate remedy.” He announced his idea in a letter addressed to the Meeting of the Regional Society in Tübingen: “Dear Radioactive Ladies and Gentlemen,” he began. Pauli's wit was famous. The salutation may not have surprised the conferees, but the remedy must have done so:
[T]here might exist in the nuclei electrically neutral particles, which I shall call neutrons, which have spin 1/2, obey the exclusion principle and moreover differ from light quanta in not traveling with the velocity of light. The mass of the neutrons would have to be of the same order as the electronic mass and in any case not greater than 0.01 proton masses.184
Pauli's terminology was soon amended by Enrico Fermi to “neutrino”—in 1932, Sir James Chadwick discovered what he named the neutron, the neutral element equal in mass to the proton. Fermi, unlike the “radioactive” conferees, found the neutrino plausible, since it fit into his theory of weak force and the resulting instability in the atomic nucleus.
Not until 1956, two years before Pauli's death, was the neutrino's existence proven experimentally. It was, said Frederick Reines, its codiscoverer, “the most tiny quality of reality ever imagined by a human being.”185 Today, the neutrino is an invaluable tool in astrophysics. So small in mass and so weak in energy, it passes through the densest material as no other entity can, without collision or effect. Even supernovae, which collapse into unimaginable density, release almost all their energy in the form of neutrinos. Whatever information they carry comes from the very core of the explosion. Pauli celebrated the confirmation of the neutrino with champagne and wrote to Reines and Clyde Cowan in Los Alamos, “Everything comes to him who knows how to wait.”
If Pauli's professional work ever suffered from his personal crises, it rarely if ever showed. But crises there were. In 1927, Pauli's father had an affair. His mother's suicide followed soon after. Pauli was stricken, but his anguish remained hidden. The following year, he settled in Zurich, where, despite his reputation as a poor lecturer (his style resembled “a soliloquy… often scarcely… intelligible” to Markus Fierz, then a student186), ETH hired Pauli at the rank of full professor of theoretical physics. In turn, Pauli hired Ralph Kronig to be his assistant for the summer term. They spent the summer as much at play as at work. They were joined by Paul Scherrer, Pauli's nominal department head. Eating, drinking, and concert-going were the usual fare. A favorite haunt was the Kronenhalle, where the famous and infamous among artists (Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Braque, Picasso, Stravinsky) had imbibed.
By the end of 1929, Pauli was married. He had met his bride-to-be, Kate Deppner, at a friend's house in Zurich. She was not, as tradition has it, a cabaret dancer. Rather, she danced at the Max Reinhardt School of Dramatic Arts in Berlin. Pauli probably saw her in Berlin when he visited. In Zurich, Deppner danced at a school run by Trudi Schoop, who later became famous for her work in dance therapy.187 Schoop later befriended Pauli, heralding his entry into psychology and therapy.
The marriage proved to be a disaster. Kate had been in love with a chemist from Berlin before the marriage, and their relationship did not seem to end with the wedding. As soon as she left Pauli, in 1930, she married her old lover. Pauli's letters during the scant year of their marriage were rueful and self-deprecating. “My wife presumably doesn't join me; even if I am married it is at least in a loose way!” he wrote Oskar Klein.188 Within two months of the wedding, he promised his friends a printed notice if his wife should run away. Later, according to Enz, Pauli proclaimed himself more distraught at Kate's choice of a “mediocre chemist” as his rival than with the dissolution itself.
With the end of his marriage, Pauli became irritable and subject to mood swings. He drank heavily, spent time in cabarets, picked fights, and was once beaten. During a trip to the United States, in the summer of 1931, he broke his shoulder, having fallen “in a slightly tipsy state,”189 and had to lecture in Ann Arbor with his left arm uncomfortably elevated in a cast. When depression overcame Pauli in the winter of 1931, his father suggested a visit to the eminent psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. Pauli dived into Jung's works, attended conferences, and made an appointment to see the great man. In February 1932, as Jung proposed, Pauli began therapy with Erna Rosenbaum, a young, inexperienced student whom Jung trusted not to “tamper” with Pauli. Indeed, Jung seems immediately to have recognized in Pauli the makings not only of an interesting patient, but of an inspired collaborator as well. In addition, Jung recommended Pauli to a female analyst—significantly, given Pauli's failed marriage and his mother's suicide.
During Pauli's analysis with Rosenbaum, which lasted about five months, he recounted hundreds of vivid dreams. Some of these dreams he noted in letters to her. In October 1932, Jung took over Pauli's case. For two years, often in letters, Pauli described his dreams to Jung and provided sophisticated analyses of them. “I did not have to explain much of the symbolism to him,” said Jung.190 So rich were the dreams that Jung incorporated many of them into a chapter of Psychology and Alchemy (1944).
Pauli and Jung corresponded for decades. Their letters, from 1932 to 1958, are now collected in a book entitled Atom and Archetype. Their complex intertwining of ideas and theories is laid out in their joint publication, The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, published in 1952. Their relationship seems to have grown not so much from Pauli's need for analysis as from their shared intellectual eclecticism.191 Eventually, the Jungian ideas of synchronicity let Pauli to speculate on a “unified theory” that would not only join the physical forces, but bridge the dualism of physical and psychic that was the hallmark of the modern era. Still, outwardly, Pauli's life ran in separate paths—his colleagues in physics did not know about his immersion in Jungian symbols and archetypes, and his Jungian associates had little contact with ongoing physics.
Analysis seems to have given Pauli a measure of psychological peace and social ease. In 1933, he proposed to Franca Bertram, the woman with whom he would live the rest of his life. “Proposal” might be to grand a word for what Pauli said: “[N]ow we marry.”192 Before their wedding, the couple visited family and friends in Vienna and Hamburg and stayed with Bohr and his family in Copenhagen. Evidently, Franca Pauli enjoyed socializing as much as her husband. Throughout their life together, they entertained and visited friends, many of them Pauli's academic colleagues, throughout the world.
Pauli's professional life in Zurich was happy, but as Hitler's power increased, the Paulis became increasingly vulnerable. Pauli held an Austrian passport. When Austria was annexed to Germany in 1938, Austrian passports were nullified, and Pauli was forced to take a German passport. Given his Jewish heritage, he was subject to Nazi persecution. Switzerland, neutral but geographically vulnerable, began mobilizing its tiny army in 1939. In 1940, however, Germany turned its armies to the west, and Pauli, rather belatedly, began to act. He had applied for Swiss citizenship in 1939. Prudently, in 1940, he also applied for a visa to the United States, on the strength of an invitation to the Institute for Advanced Study. When he was turned down for Swiss citizenship, he arranged for leave for the winter semester from ETH (Eidgenössiche Technische Hochschule). On June 11, with visas to America, Spain, and Portugal in hand, the Paulis tried to board a plane to Barcelona, via Rome. But Italy had just declared war. The plane was cancelled, and the Paulis were forced to wait in Zurich. Finally, on July 31, the couple left by train through France to Barcelona and then Lisbon. It was a harrowing journey, recapitulated later in the summer by Pauli's sister, Hertha, who wrote about the experience in her fictionalized autobiography, Break of Time. Once in Lisbon, the Paulis boarded a ship to New York, where they were met by John von Neumann.
Pauli had visited Princeton once before, during a tour of the United States in 1935–36 (and had met Gödel briefly on the Atlantic crossing). Now, he was to join the Institute for Advanced Study for an indefinite period. In small-town Princeton, during the five lonely war years, he became very close to Einstein. They were wonderfully matched, personally as well as intellectually. The irrepressible Pauli was not intimidated by Einstein's stature. Pauli was sardonic, earthy, tactless, rough-edged—which is to say, a sort of rude version of Einstein. The elder man felt completely at home with his caustic younger colleague, and he gave as good as he got. “You were right after all,” he wrote to Pauli in 1931, conceding a point on quantum theory—and added: “you rascal [Sie Spitz-bube].”193 In Princeton, they prospered together.