The culture of Einstein

Albert Einstein’s impact on the world was so immense that any assessment must range beyond the sciences to take in the multifarious ways he changed culture.

It is a task made complicated by the myths and misunderstandings that encrust his reputation — as Einstein himself once said, “Everyone likes me, yet nobody understands me.” It is not for a lack of trying. Library shelves and Web search engine servers groan under the sheer weight of the data, true and false, amassed about Einstein and his life.

Einstein as outsider
The common story tells of how the lowly patent clerk went off by himself and, by the sheer power of his mind, came out of nowhere to shock the scientific world with the results of his “thought experiments” — products of a pure intellect undistracted by the demands of the academic world or the need to test his theories in the lab.

“The standard imagery for Einstein is the genius who fell from the sky or who’s walking down the street and bam, all of a sudden, is overwhelmed by this brilliant insight,” said Robert Schulmann, former director of the Einstein Papers Project and co-editor of his collected papers.

It is true that Einstein was a government functionary in Switzerland, while the intellectual nexus of science in 1905 was Germany. But his work at the patent office in Bern was of much greater importance than he has been popularly given credit for, affording him the opportunity to engage in sophisticated experiments in reviewing advanced ideas.

He was also classically trained, having earned his Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School, and by 1909 he was well on his way to the top of the academic world, said Michel Janssen, a science and technology historian at the University of Minnesota and co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to Einstein.

Schulmann, who is working on a biography of Einstein, said: “Einstein worked for 10 years on what became, in 1905, the theory of special relativity. That is to say, he probably had the brilliant insight of simultaneity within six weeks of publishing it, as he says himself.

“But he has been mulling these problems and their connection with the question of corpuscular motion and Brownian motion and the light-quantum hypothesis — he’s been mulling these things for 10 years.”

Einstein as philosopher
The esteem Einstein earned in science meant that when he talked about the larger world, people listened.

Einstein began speaking out against war and violence before World War I, but after experiments during a solar eclipse proved general relativity in 1919 (“Einstein Theory Triumphs,” said a subheadline on the story in The New York Times), he became an overnight star.

As the “winner in this contest with Newton,” Schulmann said, Einstein was a media sensation. Front-page headlines followed him across America when he arrived for a tour in 1921, and his pronouncements on peace were already leading to his being seen as the “conscience of the world.”

Once he was compelled to abandon Germany during the rise of Hitler, Einstein emerged as a leading symbol of pacifism in the 20th century, held by some thinkers on a par with Mohandes K. Gandhi and Albert Schweitzer.

But Einstein’s commitment to pacifism was never absolute, as was publicly thought. In 1939, six months after the discovery of uranium fission, he began work on a letter urging President Franklin D. Roosevelt to build the atomic bomb, for fear that Germany would get there first.

“In view of this situation, you may think it desirable to have some permanent contact maintained between the Administration and the group of physicists working on chain reactions in America,” he wrote in August, going on to recommend specific sources of uranium ore in the former Czechoslovakia, Canada and the Belgian Congo.

Years later he called the entreaty the “one great mistake in my life” and said in a letter to President Harry S. Truman: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

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