Albert Einstein
The man whose name is synonymous with "genius," but whose real
interest was the unknowable.
By Matthue Roth
In 1921, Albert Einstein presented
a paper on his then-infant Theory of Relativity at the Sorbonne, the
prestigious French university. "If I am proved correct," he said,
"the Germans will call me a German, the Swiss will call me a Swiss
citizen, and the French will call me a great scientist. If relativity is proved
wrong, the French will call me a Swiss, the Swiss will call me a German and the
Germans will call me a Jew."
At the time, Einstein was not yet
40, but he had already spent most of his life forging revolutionary new ways of
looking at the world.
An Interest in the Impossible
Albert Einstein was born in Ulm,
Germany to assimilated Jewish parents in 1879. When Einstein was ten,
his father's business failed, and his family moved to Italy. Albert, who was
already somewhat of a loner, became even more absorbed in his work.
In 1905, at the age of 26, Einstein had what he would later
refer to as his annus mirabilis, or miracle year. While working as a
patent clerk, he submitted four papers to a leading German physics journal, all
of which were accepted for publication. One of them, "On the
Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," argued against Newton's ideas of an
absolute space and time. It suggested that time and space are perceived
differently by subjects in different states of motion. These papers contained
the seeds of the formula that would one day be his
trademark, appearing everywhere from T-shirts to hip-hop videos: E=mc2.
Amazingly, Einstein continued working as a patent clerk for
several years before finally receiving a professorship at the German University
in Prague in 1911. It wasn't until 1919, the year that a solar eclipse proved
Einstein's theory right, that he devoted himself to his research fulltime. It
was also the year that he divorced his first wife, the mother of his children,
and married his second wife, his cousin Elsa.
In 1920, Einstein received the
Nobel Prize. Interestingly, it wasn't awarded for the Theory of Relativity, but
for his work on the photoelectric effect, which is a way of measuring the
electrons that bounce off a surface when light shines on it.
The Bigger Things
Few if any scientists have
captured the public imagination as profoundly as Albert Einstein. Part of
Einstein's appeal is his grandfatherly image and part is the genteel tone of
his public writings as well as the ubiquity of his clever quotes. But it also might
be the fact that he knew something about the inner workings of the universe,
yet spoke openly about life's mysteries--including God.
In 1927, a casual debate between
Einstein and physicist Niels Bohr about determinism--the theory that everything
that happens in the universe is determined by a prior chain of actions (and
that, effectively, free will does not exist)--brought his religious opinions
into the public sphere. While the debate centered more on quantum theory than
the existence of a "higher power," Einstein also articulated his
belief that the universe possesses a fundamental order. His proof statement in the
determinism arguments--"I, at any rate, am convinced that He [God] does not throw dice"--is
often quoted in this context.
Still, Einstein vehemently shouted
down people who attempted to read his ruminations on God into conventional religion.
Yet he also said that conflicts between science and religion "have all
sprung from fatal errors," and that "science without religion is lame, religion without science is
blind." In 1930, Einstein wrote an
article for the New York Times called
"Religion and Science," which called for a more all-encompassing idea
of God's existence and argued that a fear or moral-based understanding of God
ran contrary to modern science.
Einstein served as a board member
of the First Humanist Society of New York. He was a supporter of ethical
culture, but angered his fellow humanists with some of his ideas about God--a
God, he said, who designs the universe with utmost precision and harmony, but
not a God concerned with the fate of individuals. "A knowledge of the existence
of something we cannot penetrate…which are only accessible to our reason in
their most elementary forms--it is this knowledge and this emotion that
constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am
a deeply religious man."
Physicist, Philosopher…President?
As a secular and scientifically
inclined young man, Einstein renounced his Jewish identity. Later, while living
in a Germany that was increasingly receptive to Nazi ideas, Einstein was motivated
to take a stand against anti-Semitism and became a cultural Zionist. He had
mixed feelings about the State of Israel but supported the idea of an
institution dedicated to Jewish continuity and called himself a "strong
devotee of the Zionist idea."
In 1952, after the death of Einstein's
friend, then-president Chaim Weizmann, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz printed an editorial nominating Einstein
as his successor. Eventually, Abba Eban contacted Einstein on behalf of Prime
Minister David Ben Gurion. Addressing Einstein, Eban offered "complete
facility and freedom to pursue your great scientific work would be afforded by
a government and people who are fully conscious of the supreme significance of
your labors," though cautioning that "acceptance would entail moving
to Israel and taking its citizenship."
One Israeli government
statistician was quoted in Time,
saying, "He might even be able to work out the mathematics of our
economy and make sense out of it."Ultimately, Einstein
declined, saying, "I am deeply moved by the offer from our State of
Israel, and at once saddened and ashamed that I cannot accept it."
Before his death, Einstein bequeathed his literary estate
and all personal papers to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Despite his discomfort
with the idea of a single "chosen people," and his onetime renouncement
of Jewish identity, Einstein believed that his work would find a stable, secure,
and permanent home in Israel--the same hope that, perhaps, he had for his people.
Matthue Roth is the author, most recently, of Losers,
as well as the Orthodox punk road-trip novel Never Mind the Goldbergs, Yom Kippur a Go-Go and Candy in Action. He is an Associate Editor at
MyJewishLearning.com.
