The Man Who Stalked Einstein Read online

  The Man Who

  Stalked Einstein

  The Man Who

  Stalked Einstein

  How Nazi Scientist Philipp Lenard Changed the Course of History

  Bruce J. Hillman, Birgit Ertl-Wagner,

  and Bernd C. Wagner

  Guilford, Connecticut

  An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield

  Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

  Copyright © 2015 by Bruce J. Hillman, Birgit Ertl-Wagner, and Bernd C. Wagner

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

  Hillman, Bruce J.

  The man who stalked Einstein : how Nazi scientist Philipp Lenard changed the course of history / Bruce J. Hillman, Birgit Ertl-Wagner, and Bernd C. Wagner.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-4930-1001-1 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4930-1569-6 (ebook)

  1. Lenard, Philipp, 1862–1947. 2. Einstein, Albert, 1879–1955. 3. Relativity (Physics) 4. National socialism and science. 5. Jewish scientists—Germany. I. Ertl-Wagner, Birgit, 1970– II. Wagner, Bernd C., 1968– III. Title.

  QC16.L4H55 2015

  530.092—dc23

  2014043486

  TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  For my wife Pam, who gives me love, encouragement,

  and much to think about

  —Bruce Hillman

  For Sophie, Hannah, and Clara—we love you

  —Birgit Ertl-Wagner and Bernd Wagner

  Introduction

  The Man Who Stalked Einstein is the product of a partnership among three individuals—an American Jew born immediately after World War II and a German couple two decades younger, whose generation still lives with the moral opprobrium of Nazi abuses. Friends for over a decade, we approached writing our book from different but complementary perspectives to achieve common goals: We wished to write a history on an important topic. We also wanted to write a good story in an entertaining, creative style that would read like a novel and appeal to a broad audience. Although we narrate when necessary, we had a strong preference for our characters to express themselves in their own words. To the extent the historical record allows, we give vent to their unique voices.

  We believe the result is a compelling story that weaves together engaging characters, their dramatic actions, and the tumultuous times in which they lived. In addition, we explain in plain English the research and scientific philosophies of Philipp Lenard, Albert Einstein, and their contemporaries so as to make them approachable to all readers.

  There are several reasons why we decided to write this book. Foremost among these is that the antagonistic relationship between Albert Einstein and Philipp Lenard makes for a memorable, character-driven story. Einstein and Lenard were opposites in virtually every way. That both men were brilliant scientists and Nobel laureates with opposing views about what constituted important, believable science made some degree of conflict inevitable. However, the enmity that each felt for the other was based on much more than their science. It was personal. Lenard was so consumed by his own narcissism, his envy of Einstein’s fame, and his hatred for Jews that he sacrificed the integrity of his science and his personal reputation among the community of scientists on the altar of his personal prejudices.

  We follow the convergence of influences and events that turned Lenard from a productive and highly respected scientist to a man consumed by racial hatred and an early supporter of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party. We detail the environment that fostered the flowering of Deutsche Physik, Lenard’s irrational and unsupportable philosophy of Aryan scientific supremacy. The acceptance of Deutsche Physik by the highest level of Nazi leadership, underpinned by anti-Semitic laws enacted under the Third Reich, enabled Lenard and his like-minded colleague Johannes Stark to purge Germany’s institutes and universities of many of the greatest scientists of the era and force them to immigrate to countries with which Germany would soon be at war.

  Oddly enough, the idea for this book had its origins on the lunarlike landscape of the Cruden Bay golf links just north of Aberdeen, Scotland. There, fate paired me for a round of golf with two brothers. Their father had been a Canadian army officer attached to the U.S. military to observe early nuclear weapons testing. Our conversation about what he had told them of his experiences carried us through eighteen holes and a long and bibulous dinner at a nearby pub right up until “last call.” Having just completed writing a book on medical imaging for lay audiences, I was looking to do something different. Some aspect of the race to develop an atomic weapon seemed like just the ticket. After a number of false starts, my research led me to the curled yellowed pages of a 1946 medical journal detailing Colonel Lewis E. Etter’s postwar interviews of Philipp Lenard. Doctor Etter had recently been discharged from the U.S. Army Medical Corps and would soon return to the United States to complete his training in radiology. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Lenard claimed that he, not Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, was responsible for discovering X-rays. Researching further, I found that Lenard’s conflicts over the delegation of credit for scientific discoveries extended to the British physicist J. J. Thompson, as well as Marie Curie and Albert Einstein. In Lenard’s brilliantly self-centered and paranoid character, I saw the makings of a powerful story.

  The problem for me, of course, was that many of the letters, writings, and secondary sources that would be essential to writing The Man Who Stalked Einstein existed only in German. Translations of Lenard’s writings, in particular, would be especially hard to come by. Unable to translate German, I approached Birgit and Bernd with a proposal.

  I had known Birgit since 2001, when she had successfully applied for a medical research fellowship in the United States, under my tutelage. I met her husband Bernd just a few months later when they traveled to the United States for a medical meeting. In 2012, over cocktails one evening during a conference in Vienna, Birgit and I worked out the parameters of our partnership: I would research, write, and relate to our agent, editor, and publisher—should we be fortunate enough to find one. Birgit and Bernd would research, translate, edit, and suggest the inclusion of material I had overlooked. Together, we shared a common vision that made writing The Man Who Stalked Einstein interesting and fun. We hope you will agree that this book fulfills our hopes for our collaboration.

  Bruce Hillman, Birgit Ertl-Wagner, and Bernd Wagner

  October 2014

  A Note on the Differences between Lenard’s and Einstein’s Science

  The natural sciences took a great leap forward during the period covered by our book, from the late 1800s until the end of World War II, an era in which scientists modeled the atom and began to develop new theories about the workings of the cosmos.

  Lenard’s experimental physics and Einstein’s theoretical physics represent two opposing schools of thought that came into conflict throughout Europe (but most notably in Germany) during the first decades of the twentieth century. Basing their work on classical mechanics derived from the discoveries of such greats as Isaac Newton, Nicolaus Copernicus, and Johannes Kepler, the experimentalists be
lieved that valid new knowledge was the product of “induction.” Induction calls for a scientist to express a hypothesis; design experiments to test the correctness of the hypothesis; observe whether the results support or reject the hypothesis; and, in the end, employ proven hypotheses to construct laws describing the behavior of natural phenomena.

  In contrast, theoretical physics is primarily based on “deduction,” wherein scientists express new understandings of how the universe works based on established knowledge and their assumptions concerning unknown principles. To show the plausibility of his theories, Einstein famously designed “thought experiments” using familiar, everyday phenomena to make his theories relevant and understandable. Even so, his theories awaited experimental observations to ultimately determine their accuracy and utility.

  Newton’s universal law of gravity provides a classic example of induction. The law states that the gravitational force exerted by an object is proportional to the square of its mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the two masses. In other words, larger objects exert more gravitational pull than smaller objects, and the impact of gravity lessens as the distance between objects grows farther apart. Newton’s work on gravity began with observation. Based on his observations, Newton formed a hypothesis about how gravity worked. He then designed a series of experiments that allowed Newton to accept or reject the hypothesis based on his results. By repeating this process for a series of hypotheses, he ultimately arrived at his law of gravitation.

  The problem is that while the laws of classical physics hold up well for many applications, they do not quite work for all applications, especially when miniscule masses like atoms and subatomic particles and high velocities are involved. As a generalization, phenomena that do not fall into the realm of human perception are often difficult to interpret using the laws of classical physics. With advances in instrumentation improving the accuracy of quantitation of natural occurrences, breaches in the applicability of Newtonian physics became more evident.

  Kepler’s law is one example where Einstein’s theoretical physics provided a plausible explanation of an exception to a law of classical physics. One part of Kepler’s law states that planets orbit the sun in a regular and reproducible ellipse with the sun residing at one of the focal points of the ellipse. However, by Einstein’s time, it became evident that there was a small but definite irregularity in the orbit of Mercury that conflicted with Kepler’s law. The point of Mercury’s orbit when the planet is nearest the sun—known as its “perihelion”—actually changes from orbit to orbit. Calculations based on Einstein’s theory of general relativity explained the shifting perihelion. As we detail in this book, Einstein’s explanation of the shifting perihelion of Mercury was an important factor in validating the utility of his theory of general relativity.

  Another example of how theoretical physics gained acceptance was Einstein’s use of the concept of a curved universe to predict that light emitted by stars directionally adjacent to our sun bends under the influence of the sun’s gravity. Arthur Eddington’s much-ballyhooed experiment, which was conducted during an expedition to Africa and South America to witness the 1919 solar eclipse and is also described in our book, proved Einstein correct. The publicity surrounding the occasion shot Einstein to international celebrity and produced converts to his theories.

  An important point of disagreement between experimentalists and theorists was Einstein’s unified construct of space and time. First proposed by the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, and fundamental to Einstein’s theory of relativity, Einstein held that space and time do not exist in isolation but are dependent on the observer’s frame of reference. This idea was alien to the experimentalists who held that space and time were distinct, absolute entities. To help bring home the theorists’ point of view, consider the following “thought experiment”:

  A train travels along a track. A man inside the train measures the amount of time it takes for a beam of light to travel from the ceiling to the floor of the train and back again. Another man, standing stationary alongside the track as the train passes, makes the same measurement. To the man inside the train, the light beam appears as a vertical shaft. Because the train is moving, the man standing beside the tracks sees the light as a diagonal beam of greater length than the perpendicular. Because the speed of light is invariable, the longer diagonal requires more time to complete its path. Both frames of reference are valid, yet the two yield different results. Hence, the amount of time for the light beam to travel its course is relative, depending on the perspective of the observer.

  As we describe later in this book, Lenard mocked this critical aspect of the principle of relativity during his 1920 public debate with Einstein, unsuccessfully attempting to egg Einstein into a statement he might regret.

  The experimentalists also disputed the theorists’ penchant for expressing their deductions in the shorthand of advanced mathematics. Experimental physics required only that a scientist be accomplished at basic mathematical skills and have familiarity with classical Euclidean geometry. In general, the experimental physicists of the early twentieth century relied more on describing observations than expressing mathematical formulae. The experimentalists were deeply suspicious that the theorists’ frequent use of advanced mathematics was, at best, to obscure what they’d done, if not to disseminate outright falsehoods. The experimentalists, unable or unwilling to shift to the new paradigm, were ill prepared to participate in the new physics or even to effectively critique the theorists’ mathematically derived constructs. Lenard, in particular, grew resentful as Einstein attracted young adherents, who were intrigued by the capabilities of the theoretical approach and more facile than their elders with advanced mathematics.

  Finally, Einstein and Lenard clashed over the existence of “ether.” Lenard was particularly attached to the notion that the transmission through space of electromagnetic radiation, like light and X-rays, as well as gravitation, depended on a so-called ether. This is ironic because Lenard was an arch-experimentalist. Despite extensive experimentation, neither he nor anyone else had been able to demonstrate the existence of ether since Christiaan Huygens proposed the idea in the seventeenth century. Einstein’s theoretical universe disdained ether as requiring a special frame of reference apart from all others with respect to electromagnetism in contradiction of his theory of special relativity. Einstein proposed that quanta of light and other radiant energies were self-sustaining as they moved through space. During the two decades when Lenard stalked Einstein, he repeatedly brought up Einstein’s disbelief in ether as though it were a moral failing of religious proportions.

  Lenard and Einstein’s scientific differences sparked their heated interpersonal dispute that highlighted an era of intellectual tumult and led to the dismantling of the natural sciences in Germany. The resultant international diaspora of German natural scientists, the most accomplished scientific community of its era, still influences the science of today.

  Chapter 1

  Pyrrhic Victory

  Sieg heil!

  The man’s cry found an echo in a thousand others. On the clear, cool evening of May 11, 1933, the crowd repeated the familiar Nazi greeting as ranks of university students marched past encouraging throngs of spectators into the vast expanse of Berlin’s Opera Square. The students arranged themselves around an enormous blaze that the brown shirts of the Nazi SA had set and stoked into an inferno earlier in the evening. Sparks shot into the late spring night, their explosive barks all but drowned out by the cheers of more than forty thousand onlookers.

  Young faces reflected the heat of the bonfire and their excitement at having all eyes upon them for this historic moment. At a signal, the front rows of students moved forward, stooped to gather armfuls of books, and tossed them into the flames. They gave way to the students behind them, reciting as they did the prescribed verses each had committed to memory:

  Against class warfare and materialism; for the commun
ity of the people and an idealistic way of life!

  Against decadence and moral degeneracy; for decency and custom in family and government!

  The ritual was repeated until the flames had consumed twenty-five thousand books. Among the dozens of authors whose writings had been trucked from libraries to Opera Square earlier in the day were socialists like Karl Marx, social activists like Helen Keller, and humanists like Ernest Hemingway. Organizers also had removed from the library stacks every copy they could find of the works of a number of Jewish scientists. Their revolutionary discoveries had helped elevate German science to the apotheosis of world recognition. Under the new Nazi regime, they had fallen out of favor.

  As the flames snapped and flexed in the wind, and the logs fueling the blaze settled into embers, a lone figure limped up several steps to a roughly constructed platform fronting the square. The chief of Nazi propaganda, Reichsminister Joseph Goebbels, surveyed his audience. His sweating, lupine face gleamed in the shifting light. When he sensed the crowd’s anticipation had grown as taut as it could bear, he began to speak.

  The age of an overly refined Jewish intellectualism has come to an end, and the German revolution has made the road clear again for the German character. In the past fourteen years, comrades, as you have been forced in silent shame to suffer the humiliations of the November Republic, the libraries became filled with trash and filth from Jewish asphalt litterateurs.

  He paused to give the crowd space to roar its disapproval.

  You do well, in these midnight hours, to consign the unclean spirit of the past to the flames. . . . The old lies in the flames, but the new will arise from the flame of our own hearts. . . . Let it be an oath to many flames! Heil to the Reich and the nation and our leader Adolf Hitler!