Princeton is a wonderful little spot, a quaint and ceremonious village of puny demigods on stilts. Yet, by ignoring certain special conventions, I have been able to create for myself an atmosphere conducive to study and free from distraction.
Letter from Einstein to Elisabeth, Queen of Belgium, November 1933
Einstein’s very last interview was focused on Sir Isaac Newton, as mentioned earlier. The interviewer was a historian of science from Harvard University, I. Bernard Cohen, with a burgeoning interest in Newton. Published in Scientific American in July 1955, even now Cohen’s lengthy article reads as a lively portrait of Einstein, both as a scientist and as a personality. As they sat together in Einstein’s Princeton study, observed by the portraits of Faraday and Maxwell (and Gandhi) on its walls, ‘His face was contemplatively tragic and deeply lined, and yet his sparkling eyes made him seem ageless. His eyes watered almost continually; even in moments of laughter he would wipe away a tear with the back of his hand. He spoke softly and clearly; his command of English was remarkable, though marked by a German accent,’ wrote Cohen. ‘The contrast between his soft speech and his ringing laughter was enormous. He enjoyed making jokes; every time he made a point that he liked, or heard something that appealed to him, he would burst into booming laughter that echoed from the walls.’
Just before Cohen left the house, Einstein delightedly showed off a brand-new gadget specially designed for his seventy-sixth birthday on 14 March by a Princeton physics professor, Eric Rogers. It consisted of a small upright plastic tube enclosing a spring, anchored at the bottom of the tube and attached near the top of the tube to a string, from the other end of which hung a little ball draped over the outer part of the tube. The spring was not forceful enough to pull the hanging ball into the tube against the force of gravity acting downwards on the ball. But when Einstein raised the gadget to the ceiling and let it freely accelerate downwards to the floor – like a man falling freely from a rooftop – no gravitational force acted on the ball, and so the spring was now forceful enough to pull the ball into the tube. Thus the gadget demonstrated the equivalence between acceleration and gravity in relativity: ‘the happiest thought’ of Einstein’s life back in the Patent Office in Bern in 1907, two centuries after Newton.
The interview was illuminating about Newton, mostly as a scientist and occasionally as a man. When Cohen brought into the discussion Newton’s notorious refusal to publish any acknowledgement of the ideas of Robert Hooke in the preface to his Principia Mathematica, Einstein responded: ‘That, alas, is vanity. You find it in so many scientists. You know, it has always hurt me to think that Galileo did not acknowledge the work of Kepler.’ Later in the discussion he pointed out that vanity may appear in many different forms. A man might often say that he had no vanity, but this too was a kind of vanity because he took such special pride in the fact. ‘It is like childishness,’ Einstein said. Then he turned to Cohen and let out a booming laugh that filled the room as he remarked, ‘Many of us are childish; some of us more childish than others. But if a man knows he is childish, then that knowledge can be a mitigating factor.’
Was Einstein perhaps including himself here? According to Russell, ‘I never saw in him any trace, however faint, of vanity or envy, which are vices to which even the greatest men, such as Newton and Leibniz, are prone.’ That said, Einstein had an increasing tendency with the passing of the years to write about his creation of relativity without much reference to others whom he had earlier acknowledged as providing important help, such as his close friends Besso, Ehrenfest and Grossmann. ‘As with many other major breakthroughs in the history of science, Einstein was standing on the shoulders of many scientists, not just the proverbial giants,’ according to a recent study in Nature. On the other hand, according to what Einstein told Cohen, his forgetfulness was most probably not due to vanity:
Einstein said most emphatically that he thought the worst person to document any ideas about how discoveries are made is the discoverer. Many people, he went on, had asked him how he had come to think of this or how he had come to think of that. He had always found himself a very poor source of information concerning the genesis of his own ideas. Einstein believed that the historian is likely to have a better insight into the thought processes of a scientist than the scientist himself.
For all its interest, the Einstein–Cohen conversation barely touched on two important aspects of its subject that are key to this book. It contained nothing significant about Einstein’s view of Newton’s relationship with English history and culture, and nothing at all about Einstein’s own relationship with English history and culture, other than his obvious admiration of Newton as a scientist. When Einstein and Cohen discussed Newton’s long-running, anti-Trinitarian, linguistic study of theology, Einstein said he regarded this as a ‘weakness’. If Newton did not accept the Trinitarian view of Scripture, why did he still believe that Scripture must be true?
Einstein apparently had little feeling for the way in which a man’s mind is imprisoned by his culture and the character of his thoughts is moulded by his intellectual environment. . . . I was struck by the fact that in physics Einstein could see Newton as a man of the seventeenth century, but that in the other realms of thought and action he viewed each man as a timeless, freely acting individual to be judged as if he were a contemporary of ours.
Einstein’s attitude here certainly clashes with the strong admiration for English tradition and continuity he had expressed on the bicentenary of Newton’s death in 1927, as quoted earlier, which surely motivated Newton’s intensive theological studies. It prompts the question: how much of an Anglophile was Einstein really – and why did he settle in America after 1933 rather than in England? Let us end by considering the evidence.
ANGLOPHILE, OR NOT?
There is a clue in Einstein’s conversation about England with C. P. Snow, a visitor in 1937 to Einstein’s summer house on Long Island invited by their mutual friend, Infeld, while he and Einstein were working closely together on The Evolution of Physics. Einstein talked to Snow of the countries he had lived in. He said he preferred them in inverse proportion to their size. How did he like England? asked Snow. ‘Yes, he liked England. It had some of the qualities of his beloved Holland. After all, by world standards, England was becoming a small country.’ They talked of the people Einstein had met in England, not only of the scientists, such as Eddington, but also the politicians, such as Churchill. ‘Einstein admired him. I said that progressives of my kind wanted him in the government as a token of resistance: this was being opposed, not so much by the Labour Party, but by Churchill’s own Tories. Einstein was brooding. To defeat Nazism, he said, we should need every kind of force, including nationalism, that we could bring together.’
Then Snow asked Einstein why, after he abandoned Nazi Germany in 1933, he had not come to live in England. ‘No, no!’ said Einstein. But why not? ‘It is your style of life,’ replied Einstein. Suddenly he began to laugh. ‘It is a splendid style of life. But it is not for me.’ Einstein struck Snow as enjoying some gigantic joke, but what was so funny? Snow was puzzled. What was this mysterious ‘style of life’?
When Snow pressed Einstein a little, it appeared that he was thinking of the formality of English life which he had experienced, willy-nilly, during his visits to England. Lord Haldane’s private reception at his London house in 1921 with the Archbishop of Canterbury, for example; and of course college dinners with Lindemann and the dons in Christ Church’s hall in 1931–33: ‘the holy brotherhood in tails’. In other words, butlers and the dreaded dinner-jacket. ‘Einstein chortled. He seemed to have a fixed idea that the English, or certainly the English professional classes, spent much of their time getting into and out of formal clothes. Any protests I made were swept aside,’ wrote Snow. ‘It was then that he introduced me to the word Zwang. No Zwang for him. No butlers. No evening dress.’ And of course no Nazis.
In Princeton, Einstein became well known for walking through the streets in summer dressed in a sweater without a coat and sandals without stockings, eating an ice-cream cone, to the amazement of the other professors, the delight of students, and the disapproval of the more conservative among them. ‘If Einstein dislikes his fame and would like to increase his privacy, why does he not do what ordinary people do? Why does he wear long hair, a funny leather jacket, no socks, no suspenders, no collars, no ties?’ a colleague of Infeld asked him. Because he wants to restrict his physical needs and thereby increase his freedom to live and to think, answered Infeld.
Privately, Einstein could be downright scathing about America, focusing on its shallowness, conformism and materialism. In 1932, on return to Europe from a stay at the California Institute of Technology, he advised Ehrenfest, who was thinking of leaving Holland to do physics in the United States: ‘I must tell you quite frankly that in the long term I would prefer to be in Holland rather than in America, and that I am convinced you would come to regret the change. Apart from the handful of really fine scholars, it is a boring and barren society that would make you shiver.’ And in 1950, he wrote from Princeton to Suzanne Markwalder, a woman he had known as a student in Zurich half a century before, that he had now lived in America for seventeen years without having adopted anything of the country’s mentality. ‘One has to guard against becoming superficial in thought and feeling; it lies in the air here. You have never changed your human surroundings and can hardly realise what it is to be an old gypsy: it is not so bad.’
Ironically, Princeton happened to be probably the most Anglicised town in the entire United States. ‘We might almost believe that we are in Oxford and when the bells ring – and they ring so often here – it makes us think of Westminster, of the heart of England,’ Elsa Einstein wrote to Vallentin. ‘I have never seen a place in America which looks so un-American.’ One of the university’s gates was an imitation of the Trinity College gate in Cambridge, but built in stone rather than brick. ‘The copy was supposed to be exact, but it looked grotesque whereas the original was beautiful and impressive,’ noted Infeld on first arrival in Princeton. Even the physics building, for which modern straight lines and large windows might have been expected, was mock-Gothic.
‘The atmosphere of Princeton is exemplary and decorous: Einstein’s laughter blew all that away,’ remarked an English visitor to his house, the writer and literary critic Sir V. S. Pritchett, who was teaching at the Princeton Graduate School in 1954. ‘No small, correct Princeton smile, but a laugh that had two thousand years of Europe in it.’ ‘What Englishman was it who said that sentence – you know?’ Einstein questioned Pritchett. ‘You remember? It goes, “When in doubt, act.” Now who was that? I like that. It is very good – and very brief. I like it because it is brief, to the point.’ He laughed ‘with naïve and total delight of mind and body at that, waving his hand, in which he held an empty pipe’. Then he added, speaking in ‘excellent English’, as Pritchett significantly noted:
It is nice to talk to Europeans. In Europe, the French, the Germans, and the English think they are so different, but when they meet here, in America, they see they are the same. They do not take themselves so seriously as the Americans. They are humble and modest about themselves. They laugh at themselves, but the Americans don’t. They take themselves au grand sérieux, like adolescents. They do not say they are unhappy; they say they have problems: that sounds more serious and important. In their scholarship there is a great deal of pedantry. In Europe one can talk. A European like Planck, who was a great friend of mine and a nationalist, the opposite of everything I believe in, could be convinced by argument. He was open to reason.
Clearly, Einstein’s Anglophilia, whatever it consisted of, was not the love of England that had inspired the quadrangles and high-table rituals of Christ Church or its colonial equivalent that had motivated the buildings and ceremonies of Princeton University. One would search in vain in Einstein’s life and writings for any reverence towards English royalty, aristocrats and clergymen; for any pleasure in English high society, formal social gatherings and grand country estates; for any taste for team sports such as cricket and football; or, for that matter, any passion to read and quote from English literature, such as the works of William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens or Rudyard Kipling (though Einstein certainly enjoyed reading George Bernard Shaw and also H. G. Wells), or any strong desire to play English music, whether it be Henry Purcell, George Frederick Handel (despite his German roots) or Sir Edward Elgar. On the whole, Einstein preferred a simple cup of coffee to the English ritual of taking tea.
At the same time, however, it is intrigu-ing that Einstein’s main contacts with politics in England, beyond the politics of science, tended to be among Conser-vatives more than among Liberals. Lord Haldane, it is true, was a Liberal, but Ein-stein’s relationship with Haldane in 1921 had more to do with Haldane’s character and his interest in relativity than with his politics. Lindemann and Locker-Lam-pson – Einstein’s two other hosts in England – were paid-up Conservatives, as were Chamberlain and of course Chur-chill, who Einstein described as ‘eminently wise’ after meeting him in the company of Lindemann and Locker-Lampson. By contrast, his brief contacts with Labour progressives such as Lloyd George and Beveridge in England in 1933, and also with Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald in Berlin in 1931, led no further; moreover Einstein strongly objected to the Palestinian policy of the Labour government post-1945 (as is clear from his exchange with Born about Bevin in 1948).
A portrait of Einstein in a stained-glass window of Christ Church Hall, Oxford, where he dined in 1931, 1932 and 1933 and was constantly amused by the college’s formal ceremonies.
Fluency in German may have been a facilitating factor in the case of Lindemann and Locker-Lampson, given Einstein’s discomfort with speaking English in 1933, before he moved to America. He could talk to and write to both the Oxford professor and the London politician in German, without effort or confusion of meaning. But surely more important was Einstein’s agreement with Lindemann and Locker-Lampson on certain values beyond their obvious shared detestation of the Nazi regime – however much the three of them may have differed as personalities.
The most important of these shared values for Einstein and Lindemann was their belief in academic elitism, nurtured by their joint background at the university in Berlin, dating back to their first meeting in 1911. ‘As a theoretical physicist Einstein stands alone in this century and perhaps in any century,’ Lindemann wrote in his obituary of Einstein in 1955. That was why Lindemann – ‘a thorough-going Englishman despite his German name’ (as Born noted) – was determined to ‘get’ Einstein for the physics department at Oxford. He took the same elitist view of the other German-Jewish refugee physicists in 1933: all were plainly at risk from the Nazis, but only the best of them should be found jobs in Oxford (provided that they had an experimental orientation). His campaign for the physicist refugees was an admirable opportunity to save livelihoods and even lives, certainly, but it was also an opportunity to boost Oxford’s – and Lindemann’s – international reputation.
Einstein, in advising Lindemann whom among his German-Jewish colleagues to invite to Oxford, essentially concurred with Lindemann’s elitism. Intellectual excellence always mattered more to him than a scientist’s other qualities, however valuable. Hence, at root, Einstein’s astonishing rejection of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in the 1930s. From its beginning, in the early 1920s, he saw the fledgling university as a research institution, which must aim to rival the world’s best research universities such as those in Berlin and Cambridge – not as a collegiate educational institution dedicated to building up the skills of poor Jewish settlers. Mainly because this elitist view failed to prevail in Jerusalem, Einstein resigned from the university’s governing body and severely criticised its leadership, including Weizmann. In 1933, while staying at Christ Church with Lindemann, he wrote to a newly jobless Born that he had heard of plans being under consideration to establish a good Institute of Physics in Jerusalem. ‘There has been a nasty mess there up to now, complete charlatanism.’ But, he added, if in the future he received definite indications that Jerusalem was likely to become serious about research, he would immediately advise Born of the details. ‘For it would be splendid if something good were to be created there; it could develop into an institute of international renown.’
However, nothing came of this plan and so Einstein repeatedly refused to accept a professorship from the Hebrew University, or even to revisit Palestine from Princeton. Although, when he turned down the presidency of Israel in 1952, he remarked that his relationship with the Jewish people had become his ‘strongest human bond’, he clearly valued the pleasures of solitary thinking more highly than human bonds, whether in Jerusalem, Oxford, Berlin or anywhere else in the world. ‘Remoteness, a relative absence of intimate personal relationships, is . . . a genuine ingredient of certain types of genius,’ noted Isaiah Berlin long after Einstein’s death. ‘It is certainly true of Einstein, who was himself aware of his absence of contact with human beings; although in his case this certainly did not take the form of a desire for power or glory.’
With Locker-Lampson, by contrast, Einstein’s shared understanding was clearly not fundamentally intellectual, but rather emotional. It goes without saying that Einstein appreciated Locker-Lampson’s sincere desire for England to show ‘fair play’ to Jews, especially because Locker-Lampson (unlike Lindemann) had nothing directly to gain from such support. But strange as it may seem, the commander’s can-do, gung-ho personality, too, plainly appealed to Einstein. ‘When in doubt, act’ appeared to be Locker-Lampson’s personal motto. (It was officially ‘Fear God! Fear Nought!’ in the days of the Blue Shirts.) How else can one explain Einstein’s willingness to be photographed peacefully disporting himself beside the athletic Locker-Lampson wielding a gun outside his hut in Norfolk – and then to be prominently displayed in British national newspapers? No doubt Einstein was genuinely grateful for the refuge, but surely he was also enjoying Locker-Lampson’s melodrama, which one of the newly arrived German-Jewish refugee physicists in Oxford, Kurt Mendelssohn, criticised as a case of ‘slight overacting’. (Lindemann must privately have agreed.)
Locker-Lampson’s extremism and impulsiveness, as expressed in his urge to cock a snook at Hitler, appealed to Einstein. They chimed with his childhood and adult aversion for authority, for Prussianism, for Zwang. And also, it would appear, with his own extreme swing from being an absolute pacifist in 1932 to being a proponent of European rearmament and military conscription in 1933. Einstein must have had some notion of Locker-Lampson’s recent affiliation with Fascism (though not, one assumes, his open admiration of Hitler in 1930) – whether from reading British and German newspapers in 1933 or from his friend Yahuda, who distrusted the commander. Even so, he was touched by Locker-Lampson’s powerful, and even courageous, declaration of support for the Jews in his House of Commons speech. Furthermore, he sensed that Locker-Lampson’s contacts with Churchill and other British politicians offered the best chance of rousing the British government against the Nazi menace. Finally, the success of the Albert Hall event in 1933 (whatever the absentee Lindemann’s reservations) – which owed a large debt to Locker-Lampson’s drive and organisational skills – was still more a cause for Einstein’s appreciation, not criticism, of this eccentric and swashbuckling Englishman. When the event was over, as we know, Einstein told a waiting journalist: ‘I shall leave England for America at the end of the week, but no matter how long I live I shall never forget the kindness which I have received from the people of England.’
So why did Einstein leave Europe, including England, forever in October 1933? His reservations about English formality, expressed in his Oxford diary, to Snow and to others, played some part. So did his insoluble family entanglements with his ex-wife and incurably ill younger son in Zurich. So, too, did his fear of further entrapment by the anti-Nazi cause, and his expectation of a brutal war with Germany. Most of all, though, he wanted to be in a place where he was absolutely free to think about theoretical physics, either on his own or in conjunction with other leading experts from all over the world, exactly as he chose. The new Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton offered this prospect, without any lecturing, committee or social obligations and with a sufficient salary – unlike established universities such as Oxford and Cambridge. Thus Einstein was ‘on the run’ not just from the Nazis but ultimately from unwanted human contact: the Zwang imposed on him, as he felt, by political meetings, by mass media demands, by conventional academic expectations and by painful family commitments – none of which helped his science. For Einstein, science always took precedence over nation – unlike for his almost equally distinguished physicist friends Planck and Bohr. ‘To Bohr one and only one place was home: Denmark. Einstein never fully identified himself with one country or nation; he would call himself a gypsy, or a bird of passage,’ wrote Einstein’s (and Bohr’s) biographer, Pais, who knew both physicists well. ‘If I had to characterise Einstein by one single word I would choose apartness.’
‘Albert Einstein lived here’. This famous cartoon by Herbert Lawrence Block (Herblock) appeared in the Washington Post just after Einstein’s death in Princeton in April 1955.
In De Profundis, a gaoled Oscar Wilde remarked: ‘Nothing really at any period of my life was ever of the smallest importance to me compared with Art.’ From all the available evidence, Einstein felt the same way about Physics.