The Man Who Stalked Einstein Page 3

  “Marriage is the unsuccessful attempt to make something lasting out of an incident,” Einstein once said. Although Elsa usually traveled with her husband and kept a stern eye on him, she soon experienced the same heartache as Mileva had. In 1923, four years into their marriage, Einstein fell in love with his twenty-three-year-old secretary, Betty Neumann. Elsa knew about it, but it was nearly two years before she convinced her husband to break it off. Even so, she could not banish the feelings Einstein had for Neumann. Einstein wrote Neumann, “I will have to look to the stars for what is denied me on earth.” Elsa didn’t doubt that there had been others. Locker-Lampson’s assistants were only a distraction. She would say nothing and focus on her preparations for their imminent departure.

  The steamship Westmoreland left Antwerp with Elsa aboard in early October 1933. It stopped in Southampton to pick up Einstein and his assistant, Walther Mayer, on October 7, before making its way across the Atlantic to New York. To avoid publicity, Flexner arranged for a tugboat to meet the ship when it cleared customs at Ellis Island. The tug transferred the Einstein party to a car for the short drive to Princeton. For the time being, Einstein was officially a man without a country. He was among the first of roughly two thousand Jewish scientists, mathematicians, and developers of technology—including fourteen Nobel Prize recipients—who would find themselves dismissed from their jobs, unable to support their families, and threatened with deportation to the Nazi death mills that would soon spring up across Europe.

  In recalling the many years of strife with his longtime foe, Philipp Lenard cited Einstein as “the most important example of the dangerous influence of the Jewish circles on the study of nature.” A month later, any remaining controversy over Einstein’s resignation from the Prussian Academy became moot. On the heels of the Third Reich barring Jews teaching in German universities, it also made any person of Jewish descent ineligible for membership in the Academy. Lenard saw his opportunity to further cement his status with the Nazi hierarchy. Noting, “We must recognize that it is unworthy of a German to be the intellectual follower of a Jew,” Lenard partnered with his like-minded colleague, Johannes Stark, to vigorously enforce a series of laws calling for the dismissal of Jewish academics from their university employment.

  Max Planck tried to head off the carnage by appealing directly to the Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler. It was to no avail. “Our national policies will not be revoked or modified, even for scientists,” Hitler told him in no uncertain terms. “If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of German science, then we shall do without science for a few years.”

  While, in hindsight, Hitler’s response to Planck seems maniacally self-destructive, at the time, it was everything that Lenard could have hoped for. In every respect, it must have seemed to Lenard that his victory was complete. Unrecognized at the time were the unintended consequences of Lenard’s successful vendetta against Einstein and the Jewish academics. He had unwittingly accomplished something of surpassing significance. Lenard’s actions had shifted the world’s balance of scientific intellect from Germany to its enemies, most prominently to the United States. Eventually, there would come a reckoning.

  Chapter 2

  The Heart of the Matter

  Near the end of his life, Einstein wrote to his good friend Niels Bohr, “Not often in life has a human being caused me such joy by his mere presence as you did.” This assertion was a testimony to their more than thirty years of friendly disagreement over the laws that govern particle physics. At times, their conversations grew so contentious that they became completely oblivious to what was going on around them. Famously, on one occasion, they became so engrossed in their conversation that they missed their streetcar stop on the way to a conference. Eventually realizing that they had gone too far, they got off the trolley, crossed the street, and got on the one going the other way. They missed their stop going back as well.

  Although they disagreed over specifics, Bohr and Einstein were both convinced that the laws of physics that work for everyday phenomena—those described by Newton and his successors—didn’t hold up in the world of atoms and subatomic particles, where things are very small and often move very fast. This was the purview of theoretical physics. The abstruse mathematics of theoretical physics was breaking down the certainties of traditional Newtonian physics, raising questions that the scientific orthodoxy of classically trained natural scientists like Philipp Lenard was ill prepared to address.

  Lenard bridled against the new science, refusing to let go of explanations of physical phenomena that were rooted in centuries-old discoveries and unwilling or unable to grasp mathematically derived theories. It was inevitable that Lenard and Einstein would clash over their scientific differences. However, unlike the sincerely inquiring argumentative relationship that Einstein shared with Niels Bohr, what Lenard and Einstein felt toward one another was the very opposite of respectful appreciation: a smoldering, personal cold war that occasionally combusted into a very public conflagration.

  Lenard’s intense hatred for Einstein went far beyond their disagreement over scientific principles. In the plodding, conservative world of physics, Einstein was a shooting star. The press had gone wild in 1919 with the first experimental proof of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Front-page news stories compared him to Newton, Copernicus, and Kepler, revered names in Lenard’s scientific pantheon. While the public adored the witty, unkempt, down-to-earth theorist, who was turning on its ear the long-accepted dictums by which classical physicists explained the functioning of the universe, Lenard was little known beyond the rarified halls of the academy.

  How unseemly for such acclaim to be accorded a scientist, Lenard thought. And on what grounds? Mathematical derivations that began in the abstract and were not held to any standard of experimental proof? Complicity with an all-too-willing and gullible press that welcomed Einstein’s self-promotion? The frivolous book—Einstein the Seeker—that the sycophantic writer Alexander Moszkowski had published with Einstein’s full participation? Yes! Yes, to all of these sins and to one more. Einstein was a Jew. He acted like a Jew. Most damning of all, he thought like a Jew. “It was so typical,” Lenard wrote, “the unquestionably pure-blooded Jew. . . . His relativity theories attempted to transform and dominate the whole of physics. . . . Apparently, they never were even intended to be true.”

  Lenard felt that Einstein had unjustly led a charmed life. Einstein had prospered while deserving true Aryans like himself had suffered greatly. The humiliating Treaty of Versailles and the Weimar government’s mindless adherence to the repressive terms of the armistice ending World War I had brought nothing but suffering to the German people.

  At the same time, Einstein had grown well-to-do on his renown. Since 1914, when Max Planck had recruited him away from Zurich to a professorship at Berlin’s Humboldt University and the directorship of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, Einstein had enjoyed special privileges. At Planck’s insistence, Einstein had been elected a member of the prestigious Prussian Academy of Sciences and granted German citizenship. Over Lenard’s protestations, Sweden’s Nobel Academy had awarded Einstein the 1921 Nobel Prize for work so derivative of Lenard’s own discoveries and so prosaic as to be better suited for schoolchildren. While Lenard’s son Werner had contracted kidney failure and died of wartime deprivation, Einstein’s Nobel Prize money was said to have secured the comfort of his two sons, who were living with their mother in Zurich. To top things off, Planck had acceded to Einstein’s demand that he have few teaching responsibilities, giving him the time to pursue well-paid opportunities to lecture abroad. It was rumored that Einstein’s Dutch friend, Paul Ehrenfest, banked Einstein’s honoraria in the Netherlands, safeguarding the moneys from the ravages of the rampant inflation wreaking ruin on the life savings of many German citizens, Lenard among them.

  The contrasts between the anti-Semitic, ultra-nationalistic Lenard and the tousled-hair, pacifistic Jew, Einstein, could hardly have been more stark.
They were antipodes, complete opposites in their early life experiences, scientific views, and personalities.

  Philipp Eduard Anton Lenard was the son of a wine merchant. He grew up in the small Austro-Hungarian city of Pressburg (now Bratislava in Slovakia). From childhood on, he evinced a deep disdain for any learning other than the natural sciences, a bias that only hardened in its intensity as he grew older. Lenard prepared for his career by studying at Europe’s major research centers with some of the greatest scientific minds of the 1880s and 1890s—men like Bunsen, Helmholtz, and Hertz. It was an era of discovery based on real-world experiments, and Lenard emerged a dedicated experimentalist. His research into the emanations of high-energy cathode ray tubes earned him the 1905 Nobel Prize for physics and eventually led to him being named professor at the University of Heidelberg. At the same time, however, his upbringing, orthodox training, and conventional life experiences imbued Lenard with a sense of privilege, a feeling of rectitude in his personal dealings that could be challenging for others.

  Lenard engaged in a succession of lifelong feuds. His envy of other scientists’ fame and his obsessing over “what might have been, if only . . .” led Lenard to make claims of primacy for either himself or his ideological forebears that bore little currency in reality. He squabbled with Marie Curie and the great British scientist, J. J. Thompson, whose pioneering work led to Thompson describing the electron. However, Lenard’s most egregious claims involved the discovery of the X-ray. Lenard was among a number of physicists studying the emanations of cathode ray tubes. Almost certainly, he had witnessed phenomena that could have led to his recognizing the existence of X-rays. That he failed to do so before Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen’s startling 1895 publication, “On a New Type of Ray,” detailing most of what we know today about X-rays, in no way stopped him from insisting that Roentgen was merely a technician who had advantaged himself of Lenard’s work and claiming for himself the title “Mother of the X-ray.”

  Ironically, 1905 was not only the year Lenard was awarded the Nobel Prize but also Einstein’s “miracle year.” In that year, the previously unknown and relatively untutored Swiss patent clerk published four major articles, including revolutionary dissertations on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, the equivalence of mass and energy, and one detailing his theory of special relativity. His mathematically derived insights came like a torrent, spontaneously and seemingly without precedent.

  In contrast to Lenard’s impressively varied educational pedigree, Einstein attended only Zurich’s Swiss Federal Polytechnic University. He floundered in arriving at an acceptable topic for his doctoral thesis, offering several that were rejected by the faculty before passing muster. He finally was granted his doctorate in that same annus mirabilis of 1905 for what turned out to be a miscalculation of Avogadro’s constant—the number of molecules in a mole of any substance. Off by a factor of almost three in underestimating the constant at 2.2×10 23, he later caught his own algebraic errors and published a correction.

  Their personalities also were polar opposites. Lenard could be snarky, harsh, and controlling in his dealings with others, and especially unpleasant in how he related to his subordinates. One such relationship involving Lenard and an assistant, Jakob Johann Laub, peripherally involved Einstein early in his career. Laub was an ardent believer in Einstein’s work, having written his doctoral thesis on the theory of special relativity. Beginning in 1909, Einstein and Laub conducted a correspondence.

  At first, Laub was grateful to be in Lenard’s employ, writing Einstein in May 1909, “As Lenard is concerned, he is indeed known everywhere as a satrap, who treats the assistants badly. In my opinion, these people deserve to fall on their bellies. I can only say to them that Lenard strikes an entirely different note with me, and that I have the utmost freedom.”

  However, by August 1910, it was quite a different story. Einstein’s theories contradicted an important aspect of Lenard’s scientific ethos, the presence of “ether.” Lenard relied on ether as necessary to the flow through space of electromagnetic radiation like light and X-rays. Despite the fact that Laub did not believe in the existence of ether, Lenard required his assistant to conduct extensive but unsuccessful experiments aimed at proving that ether really existed at the expense of his own research. Einstein wrote Laub, “Lenard must, however, in many things, be wound quite askew. His recent lecture on these fanciful ethers appears to me almost infantile. Further, the study he commanded of you . . . borders on the absurd. I am sorry that you must spend your time on such stupidity.”

  By November, things between Lenard and Laub had degenerated to such an extent that Einstein offered to help Laub find new work. However, even when Laub told Lenard he was seeking other employment and why, Lenard required Laub to continue the ether experiments until he had the promise of a new job. “This is really a twisted fellow, Lenard,” Einstein commented after hearing this. “So entirely composed of gall and intrigue. However, you are considerably better off than him. You can go away from him, however, he must do business with the monster until he bites the dust.”

  In contrast to Lenard, Einstein’s eccentric clothing, modest approachability, and gentle wit did nothing to discourage the public’s very positive impression. Einstein’s ability to laugh at himself and even his work endeared him to people of all castes and stations. He had an absent-minded air about him that generated innumerable anecdotes. Early in his career, his first wife, Mileva Marić, suggested that he dress more professionally at work. “Why should I?” he asked. “Everyone knows me there.” She mentioned it again when he was about to present a lecture at one of his first major conferences. He responded, “Why should I? No one knows me there.”

  Even Einstein’s often embattled theory of relativity was fodder for his humor. As one famous example, in the wake of experimental data supporting his theory of general relativity, he was asked to explain his theory in simple fashion. Einstein replied, “When you are courting a nice girl, an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder, a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.”

  On another occasion, when his longtime driver was taking Einstein to one of his lectures, the driver said to him, “I’ve heard that lecture so many times, I could deliver it myself.” Einstein took him up on the bet. The driver did Einstein proud, but afterward, someone in the audience asked a difficult question. Without missing a beat, the driver pointed to Einstein, sitting in chauffeur tucker in the back of the room, and said, “That’s such a simple question, I believe my driver could answer it.” So he did.

  In Lenard’s mind, this kind of grandstanding proved his point. Einstein was conducting a referendum on his science in the court of public opinion. Just because the man could get a laugh didn’t mean there was anything to his theories. In fact, just the opposite. What Einstein was doing wasn’t really science at all. His theories were so abstract. Really, nothing more than mathematical sophistry. An untrustworthy intellectual temple built from deduction as flimsy as playing cards. A hoax as cynical as a street corner game of three-card Monty. Einstein was shilling his ideas, prostituting himself for the sake of fame and money. Having made friends with complicit Jewish newspapers and others in the German press, he had duped a guileless citizenry. That was bad enough. Even worse, many of Lenard’s Aryan colleagues were abandoning their traditional views to line up behind Einstein and relativity. Fueled by a bitter stew of contempt, jealousy, and anti-Semitism, Lenard’s attacks became less about Einstein’s science than about Einstein himself.

  Lenard came to his anti-Semitism by both birth and experience. Though a subliminal hatred of Jews existed throughout eastern Europe in the early twentieth century, it was especially pronounced among the Hungarian nationalists where Lenard spent his childhood and adolescence. Despite being ethnically German, Lenard counted himself among them and was influenced by their zeal. In his adulthood, he shifted his allegiance to Germany, but his chauvinistic fervor never waned. Even so, the young Lenard revealed none of the a
nti-Semitic passion that so characterized his writings in later life.

  Very likely, it was during his educational pilgrimage that he first had negative interactions with Jews that helped lay the groundwork for his prejudice. One of Lenard’s professors, the estimable Heinrich Hertz, was, as Lenard described him in his book Great Men of Science, “partly of Jewish blood.” In fact, Hertz’s family had converted to Catholicism, and he had an Aryan mother to whom Lenard attributed Hertz’s scientific aptitude. While he and Hertz got along well for the most part, Lenard may have blamed Hertz’s frugality for Lenard missing out on an important discovery. Hertz hadn’t exactly rejected Lenard’s request to buy a better cathode ray tube like the one Wilhelm Roentgen may have been using when he discovered X-rays. Hertz had simply told him to use his best judgment as to whether the cost would be worth it. If only Hertz had given his enthusiastic approval for the new tube, Lenard believed, it would have been he who would have been hailed as the discoverer of X-rays.

  Following the armistice of World War I, Lenard incurred a series of financial reversals, which he attributed to Jewish control of international money markets. Already imbued with strongly nationalistic political views and confronted daily with prejudicial Nazi rhetoric, Lenard grew more radical. He fell prey to a popular Nazi shibboleth: the Jews were responsible for Germany’s ills. Unlike the masses of ordinary Germans who similarly bought into this lie, many of whom might never have associated with Jews, Lenard not only knew Jews, but also had worked closely with Jewish professors in universities. In fact, he had studied the behavior of one Jew very well. For Lenard, Einstein became “the Jew.” He personalized his anti-Semitic views, focusing his vitriol on Albert Einstein.