Historians of science have a guilty secret: we don’t particularly enjoy writing about those deemed singular geniuses. The public – or at least publishers – want stories of revolutionaries who stood entirely apart from their peers and predecessors, or, failing that, to see them ‘exposed’ as plagiarists (ideally stealing the work of the oppressed). But science rarely works in such simplistic ways. A century of historical scholarship has shown that the figure of the lone genius is largely mythical.
Still, it remains tempting to think that Albert Einstein is the exception to the rule. Everything about him savours of the preternatural: his discovery, aged just twenty-six, of special relativity while working as a clerk at the Swiss Patent Office; his appearance in later life as a wild-haired guru uttering sage pronouncements about the universe; the sheer weirdness of the general theory of relativity and quantum physics.
Diana Buchwald and Michael Gordin’s marvellous and concise new biography shows that for all his unquestionable brilliance, Einstein almost always worked as part of a broader community rather than delivering vatic pronouncements from on high. Likewise, it shows that his non-scientific commitments, such as pacifism and Zionism, were responses to specific circumstances rather than abstract idealisms.
Hackneyed stories about Einstein’s youthful scientific incompetence are apocryphal. He excelled in mathematics, and his scientific interests were stimulated by his father’s and uncle’s work in electrical engineering. At seventeen, he enrolled at the ETH, a specialist scientific institute in Zurich founded in 1854. There he met his first wife, Mileva Marić, the only woman on the course. Although their love was fuelled by a shared passion for physics, there is no evidence to support the claim that Einstein stole his early discoveries from her.
Those discoveries were announced during the ‘annus mirabilis’ of 1905, when Einstein was working at the Patent Office, a job he took after avoiding conscription into the Swiss army (partly on the grounds of ‘excessive foot perspiration’) and failing to secure a teaching post. But this was no intellectual exile. Einstein was evaluating cutting-edge electrical technologies and continued to interact with scientific counterparts. His two most famous achievements in 1905 were his explanation of the photoelectric effect (the emission of electrons from an object when struck by light) and his development of the special theory of relativity. It had been known for some time that the former was incompatible with standard electromagnetic theory. Einstein’s solution, built upon recent work by Max Planck, posited the existence of particles or ‘quanta’ of light, placing it at odds with the prevailing wave theory.
As for relativity, the fact that the laws of physics are invariant within one’s reference frame had been rendered famous by Galileo almost three hundred years earlier (inside a moving ship, a falling ball appears to move straight down no less than on shore). But 19th-century physics had established that the speed of light in a vacuum is unchanging for all observers, irrespective of whether the light source or observer is in motion. Again, building on the research of others, especially Hendrik Lorentz and Henri Poincaré, Einstein reconciled these two postulates by abandoning the idea of absolute time, according to which one can always say when two events are simultaneous. ‘Two events which are simultaneous with respect to one observer are, in general, not simultaneous with respect to a second observer who is moving relative to the first one,’ he explained. Much science fiction – from Joe Haldeman’s Forever War (1974) to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) – has played with the potential consequences of this for humans if we could find a way to travel fast enough for the time differences to become appreciable.
Einstein’s findings were not immediately accepted by everyone. But they stimulated much activity, precisely because they addressed questions already central to the broader scientific community. By 1909, Einstein had assumed a position back at the ETH; in 1914, he took up a research post in Berlin, while also remarrying after an affair (one of several). In 1915, he announced the theory of general relativity, which posits that gravity isn’t a force but a consequence of the curvature of spacetime; it was spectacularly confirmed by the detection of gravitational waves in 2015. Buchwald and Gordin don’t linger on the process by which Einstein arrived at his most famous theory. Such a discussion would have further confirmed his embeddedness in wider networks: Einstein drew on the ideas of mathematicians such as Tullio Levi-Civita, an Italian Jew who was later deprived of his professorship by the Mussolini regime.
In May 1919, an expedition to the island of Príncipe led by the Quaker astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington to observe a solar eclipse confirmed that the sun’s gravitation curved light rays from distant stars. A headline in The Times announced a ‘Revolution in Science’; Einstein became a celebrity. Buchwald and Gordin note that vindication for Einstein had an ‘internationalist aura’. Like Einstein, Eddington was a pacifist; less than a year after the conclusion of the First World War, a British scientist was confirming the ideas of a German scientist. Both Einstein and Eddington worked hard on re-establishing international scientific relations after the war. One of the book’s lessons is just how much pioneering science appeared in German in the first half of the 20th century.
Although he had many identities, the authors write that ‘in almost every context, one encounters Einstein’s relationship to the Jewish community’. He was a product of that peculiar 19th-century cultural phenomenon: non-religious Judaism grounded in a perception of shared suffering across generations. When Einstein reports that he ‘first discovered’ that he was a Jew from anti-Semites, not least children possessed of a ‘remarkable awareness of racial characteristics’, one cannot help but think trans-historically – my experience was eerily similar.
But early 20th-century Germany was not late 20th-century Britain. Buchwald and Gordin chart with nuance Einstein’s activism on behalf of the Jewish community in Germany in the wake of the refugee crises after the First World War and the Nazi takeover of 1933, at which point he moved permanently to Princeton. Despite his campaigning for a Jewish state, he could be sharply critical of Zionists: ‘our Jews have revealed themselves as chauvinistic nationalists without psychological instinct and sense for equity in the matter of Palestine-Arabs,’ he wrote to his sister in 1930.
Einstein’s work in the 1920s focused on the unsettling consequences of quantum theory. Here, the traditional story is one of binary conflict between two titans, Einstein and Niels Bohr, in which Bohr emerges victorious over Einstein and his outdated reluctance to embrace quantum mechanics. But Buchwald and Gordin show that this is the winner’s version of history, crafted by Bohr’s acolytes and overdramatic journalists. To be sure, Einstein was unhappy with the seeming paradox that distant particles can be ‘entangled’ and that measurements performed on one can affect the others, regardless of the distance between them – not least because this implied that physics was probabilistic. But the experimental work and discussions involved many people and were not characterised by fundamental philosophical incommensurability. Rather, they were part of a multidimensional conversation about various aspects of quantum theory.
This finding simultaneously encapsulates the great achievement of Free Creations of the Human Mind and the tribulations of writing about any important scientist. To facilitate understanding, it is tempting to reduce scientists to a fundamental philosophical stance. But scientists are not philosophers. The awesomeness of Einstein, Bohr and others lay not in their apriorist speculations but in the experimental and mathematical work they undertook to develop and test ideas. Einstein himself put it best when he said that ‘the external conditions, which are set for [the scientist] by the facts of experience, do not permit him to be too much restricted … by the adherence to an epistemological system’. Ultimately, the scientist was more an ‘unscrupulous opportunist’ than a philosophical system-builder.
It is a testament to Buchwald and Gordin’s historiographical talents that they can convey so clearly the messiness of scientific life, where the devil always lies in the detail. This is not easy to grasp for non-scientists, but it is our duty to try. Early 20th-century science was far more historically significant than the work of any philosopher or political theorist. Reading about such intellectuals may make us feel smart. But it is books like Free Creations of the Human Mind, which might make us feel rather stupid, that truly teach us about the intellectual foundations of the modern world.