Einstein: His Space and Times by Steven Gimbel, review: 'a complex nut'
From fathering a secret daughter to declining the presidency of Israel, Albert Einstein lived a life of mystery, argues Nicholas Shakespeare
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11:00AM BST 26 Jul 2015
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In 1905, a young patent clerk in his office in Bern wrote a paper that overturned the study of physics. Working one day, Albert Einstein – a scientific nobody – had what he would later call his “happiest thought”. If a person fell off a ladder, he would not feel his weight during his fall. This led Einstein to the idea that gravity and acceleration were merely different ways of looking at the same thing. His idea would take another 10 years to develop, and would reshape our view of material reality, writes Steven Gimbel in this short, accessible biography, “and he would be celebrated for it across the entire scientific community”.
Never one to lack confidence, the 26-year-old Einstein expected instant acclaim and a professorship. Instead, there was “an icy silence”, according to his sister. One of his former professors recalled him as a “lazy dog”. Another mathematician quipped that “every boy in the streets of Göttingen knows more about four-dimensional geometry than Einstein”. Gradually, though, the idea was considered worthy of discussion by the German physicist Max Von Laue, who travelled specially to Bern to meet him. “When Laue stepped off the train he let Einstein walk past him, certain that the young man on the platform could not be the eminent scientific mind who created the theories he came to discuss.”
Who was Einstein? This is the complex nut that Gimbel, who holds the philosophy chair at Gettysburg College, sets out if not to crack, then to rattle. The unknown civil servant with unkempt hair and rumpled clothes who suddenly overhauled Newton’s concepts of space, time, motion and mass – judged for 300 years “the highest expression of the human mind in all recorded history” – was a darkish horse. Letters hidden until 1986 tell of a daughter called Lieserl whom Einstein had had by his first wife. Yet Einstein never mentioned her existence to his family or friends. In some stories, she died of scarlet fever; in others, she lived on into adulthood, blinded by the disease.
Chillingly, Gimbel writes: “We do not know exactly what happened to Lieserl… but we do know that Einstein never met his daughter.”
Gimbel records a life shot through with similar black holes. Einstein, he argues folksily, was “a product of both his space and his times”. Born in Swabia to a failed mattress-maker and a domineering mother, Einstein was a late talker, finally breaking into speech one dinner with the words: “The soup is too hot.” Asked by his relieved parents why he had not uttered until now, he replied: “Until now everything was in order.”
Once able to speak, he revealed himself as a sarcastic pessimist who knew better than everyone. He grew up detesting authority, assuming exemption from the same rules that he demanded should apply to all observers in the universe.
He was so confident of winning the Nobel Prize that when the award was given to him in 1922 he didn’t bother to collect it.
The fact that few people understood Einstein’s theories only enhanced his cachet. In Los Angeles with Charlie Chaplin, he attended the premier of City Lights. Stunned to be mobbed by cheering fans, Einstein turned to Chaplin, who remarked: “They cheer me because they all understand me, and they cheer you because no one understands you.” When Einstein asked him, “What does all this mean?” Chaplin replied: “Nothing.”
The Nazis tried to belittle Einstein’s achievements in his native Germany. His work was condemned as “Jewish science” and “scientific Dadaism”. Gimbel describes a meeting in Bad Nauheim where anti-Semitic German nationalists attacked Einstein’s theory of relativity at a public forum, repeatedly interrupting him with jeers and chants. Largely for this reason, he had renounced his German citizenship at the age of 15, allergic to Germany’s nationalism and militarism.
Though he “relished being the outsider” and abhorred national boundaries, Einstein did find a kinship of sorts in Judaism. He remembered his parents as “entirely irreligious”; he himself opened and closed the doors to his Jewishness at regular intervals. But a visit to Tel Aviv in 1923 intoxicated him: here was a city of the Jews that represented what the Jewish presence in Palestine could be. That he never quite shared the Zionist aspiration for a Jewish country in Palestine put him beyond the pale for some. In his opinion, turning Palestine into a Jewish state threatened the heart of Judaism. In 1952, he learnt that he was about to be offered the presidency of Israel and hastened to decline: “All my life I have dealt with objective matters, hence I lack both the natural aptitude and experience to deal properly with people.”
It’s a nice coincidence that the centenary of Einstein’s theory of general relativity falls at the same time as the discovery of a new pentaquark particle. What he might have made of the Large Hadron Collider’s achievement is anyone’s guess. In Gimbel’s capable hands, he died as mysteriously as he had lived, uttering a single sentence aloud in his native tongue. “Einstein’s dying words were heard by one person, a night nurse who spoke no German.”
Nicholas Shakespeare is the author, most recently, of Priscilla: the Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime France (Vintage)
216pp, Yale, £14.99, ebook £11.39. To order this book from the Telegraph for £12.99 plus £1.99 p&p, call 0844 871 1515 or seebooks.telegraph.co.uk
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