The Other Einstein

A Review by Lee Smolin
The New York Review of Books
Volume 54, Number 10
June 14, 2007

Edited by Andrew Ross

Einstein: His Life and Universe
by Walter Isaacson
Simon and Schuster, 675 pages

Einstein: A Biography
by Jürgen Neffe, translated from the German by Shelley Frisch
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 461 pages

'Subtle Is the Lord': The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein
by Abraham Pais
Oxford University Press, 552 pages

The Private Lives of Albert Einstein
by Roger Highfield andPaul Carter
St. Martin's, 376 pages

Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance
by Dennis Overbye
Penguin, 416 pages

Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time
by Peter Galison
Norton, 389 pages

Einstein on Politics
edited by David Rowe and Robert Schulmann
Princeton University Press, 560 pages

Einstein on Race and Racism
by Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor
Rutgers University Press, 206 pages

The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein
by Albert Einstein
Princeton University Press, ten volumes, 4,252 pages
 

In his new book ... Walter Isaacson explains that "studying Einstein can be worthwhile [because] it helps us remain in touch with that childlike capacity for wonder ... as the sagas of [science's] heroes reminds us." ...

Noble sentiments, and certainly sufficient justification for continuing to promulgate uplifting myths about science and its heroes. But what does this have to do with the actual character and life of the real person who happened to be the most important physicist of the last two hundred years? ...

The myth of Einstein presents us with an elderly sage, a clownish proto-hippy with long hair, no socks, and a bumbling, otherworldly manner. As Isaacson writes it: "Adding to his aura was his simple humanity. His inner security was tempered by the humility that comes from being awed by nature." ...

Of the new books, Jürgen Neffe's Einstein: A Biography is the liveliest. It was a big success in Germany ... Neffe also tells the heroic story of the scholars hired by the Einstein Papers Project to catalog and publish Einstein's collected papers ... The project was launched in 1986 under the joint sponsorship of Princeton University Press and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. As Neffe explains, the executors ... "made life difficult for anyone who tried to gain access to the approximately 42,000 items in the archives." ...

Anyone who really wants to get to know Einstein can do no better than immerse themselves in the books and papers coming out of the Einstein Papers Project, which has so far published ten volumes of correspondence and writings spanning the period from Einstein's youth up to 1920.

Less ambitious readers who want an introduction to Einstein's story, taking into account all the latest discoveries of letters and organized in a conventional chronological format, will find Isaacson's workmanlike biography well worth reading. ...

The problem any biographer faces is that Einstein scholarship is still digging itself out of decades of mythmaking. While it is possible to extract a picture of a real person from the recent books, it takes some work, as the writers themselves still seem too much in awe and accept too easily the sanitized and domesticated version of the fierce and unruly spirit who was the greatest scientist in living memory. ...

First the young Einstein, the one who actually made the great discoveries we associate with his name, is nothing like the mellow sage described during his Princeton years. He was seen by his contemporaries as arrogant, intolerant of authority, charismatic, good-looking, manipulative, and avidly engaged in his relationships with women, his children, his friendships, his music. ...

The question that needs to be answered, although none of the biographers do so, is how this arrogant, charismatic revolutionary turned into the otherworldly sage who was said to be an "emblem...of the mature and reflective human being." ...

Einstein's letters show that in fact he was capable of considerable sensitivity to the feelings of other people. Here, in a letter quoted by Isaacson, is how he resolved a difficult conflict with the great mathematician David Hilbert over who should get credit for the equations of general relativity in December 1915: "There has been a certain ill-feeling between us, the cause of which I do not want to analyze. I have struggled against the feeling of bitterness attached to it, with complete success. I think of you again with unmixed geniality and ask you to try to do the same with me." ...

A possible clue to Einstein's character is an evident gulf between how women saw him and how men saw him. The men in his life, his friends and his sons, complained of his detachment. ... Reading about his relations with [women], we can ask whether there is an erotic component to some kinds of scientific and mathematical creativity. ...

The discrepancies in the myth of Einstein are important, not so much for their own sake but because they point to contradictions in the perception of his scientific legacy held by laypeople and scientists alike. ... The early Einstein, according to legend, was brash and revolutionary. His thinking was closely tied to experimental science and engineering practice. It was intuitive ...

Einstein's later work, beginning in the early 1920s, was very different. ... According to Banesh Hoffman, one of his assistants, "The search was not so much a search as a groping in the gloom of a mathematical jungle inadequately lit by physical intuition." ...

The key issue in the assessment of Einstein's later years is his conviction that quantum mechanics could not be correct. Although in 1905 he had been the first to identify the need for a new quantum physics, he dissented strongly from the view that our understanding of quantum phenomena was put in final form by the invention of quantum mechanics ...

By the time Einstein moved to Princeton in 1933, he had already parted ways with most of his colleagues. As a result, although all the subsequent developments of twentieth-century physics were entirely based on Einstein's early work, it can also be said that Einstein left very little legacy from his work at Princeton within the scientific community. ...

The big question that any assessment of Einstein's later period then hinges on is whether Einstein's later views were correct or not. The least that can be said is that there is an entire field now devoted to questions raised by the counterintuitive aspects of quantum mechanics called the foundations of quantum mechanics. ... The simple truth is that Einstein ceded nothing because he had well-thought-out and principled objections to the quantum theory.

Paradoxically, it appears that the myth of Einstein may have diminished the influence he might have had. To understand how and why this happened, we should ask who benefited by the diminishment of Einstein's legacy from that of the greatest scientist of the last two centuries to the gentle and wise clown of popular imagination.

First of all, his executors stood to benefit. They saw their role as establishing the legacy of one of history's greatest scientists. But the man himself was an embarrassment. Politically he had supported causes such as socialism, pacifism, and racial justice ... Einstein's political engagements were an embarrassment even for the director of the Institute for Advanced Study ...

Einstein's unruly Bohemian personal life was also an embarrassment ... The executors even went to court to block Einstein's son from publishing letters between his parents ... In fact, what is in these letters is ... banal; his two marriages were not very different from those of many creative people today. ...

Einstein's scientific colleagues had even more to gain by the establishment of a myth that left him honored but unheeded. During his years as a professor and director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute at the University of Berlin up to 1933, Einstein was a formidable obstacle to those who sought to establish quantum mechanics ...

But once Einstein moved to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton he was no longer seen as a leading figure among scientists. His dissent from quantum mechanics and his entire philosophical approach to scientific research was an embarrassment to his younger American colleagues. ... The solution was to elevate Einstein to the status of a sage, a Yoda of Princeton, after which it would not be necessary to take him seriously. ...

Indeed, Einstein also had something to gain by the propagation of a myth. Knowing that he had done the greatest science of the last two centuries, ... can we imagine him descending into the pit of American academic politics and contending for a legacy measured in chairs held by students and collaborators? ...

But Einstein was famous, as no scientist has been before or since, so his every move was under scrutiny. And, in view of the tragedies that had driven him to give up his European home and move to America, we can imagine he felt compelled to continue to use his fame to speak out for principles and causes he believed in. ...

For science, the question to be answered is the paradox of Einstein's failed last years. I would suggest that the resolution of the paradox is that Einstein's dissent from quantum mechanics and immersion in the search for a unified field theory were not failures but anticipations. After all, even if many string theorists would disagree with Einstein about the incompleteness of quantum mechanics, much of what goes on in string theory these days looks a lot like what Einstein was doing in his Princeton years ...

It is also disappointing that none of the biographers mention the writings [that] look beyond his struggles with the unified field theory to "the other possibility [which] leads in my opinion to a renunciation of the space-time continuum, and to a purely algebraic physics." What Einstein is saying is that the smoothness of space is an illusion and the fundamental description of space will be in terms of algebra and not geometry. ...

Remarkably, this is precisely where most current work on unifying quantum mechanics with general relativity, apart from string theory, has led. Non-commutative geometry, spin foam models, loop quantum gravity, quantum causal histories, and others are each based on such an algebraic framework for spacetime. Between string theory and such approaches, the later Einstein appears to have anticipated much of contemporary research aiming to bring together and close the great revolutions he began. ...

As for Einstein's dissent from quantum mechanics, there remains the stubborn fact that a significant proportion of those who have thought the matter through find themselves in agreement with Einstein ...