Albert Einstein

From Philosopedia.org

Einstein, Albert (14 March 1879 - 18 April 1955)

An internationally eminent theoretical physicist, who formulated the relativity theory, Einstein is a symbol of genius in the 20th century.

The son of a salesman, Hermann Einstein (1847 - 1902), and a housewife,Pauline Koch (1858 - 1920), Albert as a boy lived in Munich and Milan. He studied at a cantonal school in Switzerland, graduated from Zürich‘s Federal Institute of Technology, and later became a Swiss citizen.

In 1910 he became full professor at the German University in Prague, then returned to Zürich, resuming his German citizenship. In 1921 he won the Nobel Prize in physics, notably for his work on the photoelectric effect. He taught at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, from 1933 to 1940. His property, however, was confiscated in 1934 by the Nazi government and he was deprived of his German citizenship. In 1940 he became an American citizen, although Joseph McCabe reports that the Catholic hierarchy denounced him as an atheist when he was invited to America.

Contents 1 On Relativity and Pacifism 2 Anecdotes 3 Religion 4 The $404,000 Letter on Religion 5 His Will 6 Einstein's Brain 7 Family 8 Books 9 Impact

On Relativity and Pacifism

In addition to being known for his relativity theory, and for being a vegetarian and a socialist, he is known for his contributions to the development of the quantum theory and for the unified field theory. He alerted Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt to the possible use of atomic energy in bombs, but Einstein remained a pacifist throughout his life. His formulation of a general theory of relativity that included gravitation as a determiner of the curvature of a space-time continuum revolutionized almost all fields of study. David Hume and Ernst Mach, he once stated, were the philosophers who impressed him the most favorably. The “general” theory suggested that space itself is not just a stage for the material world to act on, but is an active participant in the play. For example, space gets bent out of shape by any matter that is hanging about in it. His “special” theory of relativity showed that an object can be two different sizes for two different people, and that they can perceive the time between two events to have different durations.

So he came up with the relativity principle (a person’s speed in a car can be relative to the ground, the moon, the farthest galaxy) and the absolute value of the speed of light. He also came up with the equation, E = m·c² which changed physics as well as nuclear fission and the history of mankind.

He disagreed with Kant that particular concepts of time and space are necessary premises for thought, concepts that are innate in the human mind. Rather, he held, all concepts including physical ones are “free inventions of the human intellect” which can be modified in the event they do not compare with one’s experiences. Our intuition about the physical world, he held, is based on sensory experiences and can be fundamentally in error.

Anecdotes

When Franz Kafka was in the same room with Einstein in 1911 or 1912, Kafka - although one of the most creative thinkers of the time - sat “tongue-tied in a corner.”

Norman Cousins told the story that when he took his young daughter to see the distinguished Princeton professor, she had ingenuously informed Einstein that he was the smartest man in the world and she marveled at all the little objects that graced his desk. He described several of them to her.

“And why do you have this rock?” he was asked, for it appeared to be a rock like all other rocks anywhere. “To remind myself,” he responded, “that it is something I do not thoroughly understand.”

In their Private Lives of Albert Einstein, biographers Roger Highfield and Paul Carter cite Einstein’s acquaintance with Marie Curie but state he had little regard for women’s intellectual potential in the sciences. “I’m not much with people,” he stated, “and I’m not a family man. I want my peace. I want to know how God created the world.”

Religion

Einstein was on the board of advisors of Charles Francis Potter’s First Humanist Society of New York and was an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association, of which Bertrand Russell was then president. Also, he was a member of the American Humanist Association.

Einstein once wrote,

• I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusive human concern with no superhuman authority behind it. . . . Teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God, that is, give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast power in the hands of priests.

In 1950, Einstein wrote Essays in Humanism. The Helen Dukas (who was his secretary) and Banesh Hoffman editing of Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979) quotes him as writing in German to a Colorado banker in 1927:

• My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality. Morality is of the highest importance - but for us, not for God.”

In 1941, Einstein delivered a paper on “Science and Religion” at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, pointing out,

• Nobody, certainly, will deny that the idea of the existence of an omnipotent, just, and omnibeneficent personal God is able to accord men solace, help, and guidance; also by virtue of its simplicity the concept is accessible to the most undeveloped mind.

Students of Einstein’s thought have remarked that if Einstein had a God, it was the God of Spinoza, not the God of the organized religions. But they are amused that, as Abraham Pais’s Subtle Is the Lord (1982) reports, “Of Bergson’s philosophy he [Einstein] used to say, ‘God forgive him.’”

However, Einstein once wrote,

• It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God, and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious, then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

Joseph McCabe noted that “Catholic prelates in the United States denounced him, with their usual crudeness, to the public as an atheist, and he replied that he believes in a "great Power, the source of order and beauty.” McCabe adds, “Agnostic is the accurate description of his opinion, but Einstein has never made any serious study of religious issues.” When Einstein declared that “God does not play dice with the universe,” speaking about quantum explanations of what goes on within atoms, many clergymen jumped to the erroneous conclusion that Einstein was a believer. But Einstein’s “cosmic religion” was his way of expressing an awe of our universe, an entity too profound to be adequately understood. Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, disagreeing, quipped, “Who ever wanted to die for the Milky Way!”

James A. Haught quoted The Private Albert Einstein (1992) by Peter Bucky, a young confidant of the genius:

• Einstein told me many times that he did not believe in a single God. He said he could not imagine how God could manifest himself in a human countenance. Rather, he believed that there was a cosmic force that could develop things that mortal men could not even begin to understand. . . . I recall his telling me that, during his earlier years, when he would apply for various positions and come to a column asking for details about his religion, he would mark down “dissident,” thus demonstrating his disinterest in any one faith. . . . During an interview with Professor William Hermanns, Einstein once said that he could never accept any conceptualization of God that was based on fear, either fear of life or fear of death, or one that required a blind belief, totally removed from logic. Nor did he envision God in any personal sense. In that respect, he said that if he were to talk about a personal God, he would consider himself to be a liar.

In 1994, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope confirmed Einstein’s theory about black holes. The Ultimate Einstein, a CD-ROM, attempts to explain the scientist’s various theories and makes possible a study of Einstein’s skepticism. It shows how at one time he considered nationalism as “ugly,” for he lived through the horrors of World War I, but he came to hold that nationalism can help create human dignity. The work shows how he rejected conservatively defined religion, tells of his advocacy of the values of the Enlightenment, and speaks of his love of classical literature. He took pride in knowing about Jewish culture but when asked later in life if he cared to succeed a Jewish scientist (Chaim Weizmann) as president of Israel, he declined. “What really interests me,” Einstein remarked, “is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.” Such a comment, said Dennis Overbye, deputy science editor of The Times, was not a reference to a “white-bearded man sitting up in Heaven toting up sins and dispensing favors to prayerful supplicants.” Rather it was Einstein’s way of asking (a) could the universe be any other way than it appears to be? or (b) if not, how much room remains in that universe for things like chance and miracles? Overbye reasons that “A God with no choice, of course, might seem to be a cold comfort or even no God at all, at least in the traditional sense.” To Einstein, then, God

• was a code word for the mystery and grandeur of the universe, the wellspring of awe, a reminder that there was something at the core of existence that all his equations could only graze, as he said once, “something we cannot penetrate.”

He accepted the fact, Overbye added, that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible, that humans will never know the answer to some questions, but that science is nothing if not the search for reasons, “for the smoking gene in our coiled cells, the atom of consciousness, the quantum butterfly flapping its wings at the heart of the world.”

Einstein’s last book was entitled Essays in Humanism (1950).

The $404,000 Letter on Religion

In May 2008, a letter Einstein wrote in 1954 to Eric Gutkind, a German philosophy, was sold for $404,000 at an auction in London. The letter writes of religion that

• He lost his religion at the age of 12 and never looked back. He gained an interest in the apparent order of the universe, which he savored.

• Those who characterize a personal god as something that answers prayers are naive. Life after death is wishful thinking.

• But atheists "are creatures who - in their grudge against the traditional 'opium for the people' - cannot bear the music of the spheres." The problem of God "is too vast for our limited minds."

According to the Associated Press account,

• "the word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish." The Jewish religion, like all others, is "an incarnation of the most childish superstitions." As for Jews, "As far as my experience goes they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."

His Will

His final will left his manuscripts and royalties to Hebrew University. Raised as he was by non-religious parents, Einstein was not involved in religious activities, but he did identify with his Jewish heritage and became an outspoken Zionist. In Living Philosophies (1930), Einstein wrote,

• I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own—a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism. It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we can dimly perceive, and to try humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature.

Eight years later, in 1938, he revised those sentiments:

• Things [have grown] even worse than a pessimist of the deepest dye would have dared prophesy. In Europe to the east of the Rhine free exercise of the intellect exists no longer, the population is terrorized by gangsters who have seized power, and youth is poisoned by systematic lies. The pseudo-success of political adventurers has dazzled the rest of the world; it becomes apparent everywhere that this generation lacks the strength and force which enabled previous generations to win, in painful struggle and at great sacrifice, the political and individual freedom of man. Awareness of this state of affairs overshadows every hour of my present existence, while ten years ago it did not yet occupy my thoughts. It is this that I feel so strongly in re-reading the words written in the past. And yet I know that, all in all, man changes but little, even though prevailing notions make him appear in a very different light at different times, and even though current trends like the present bring him unimaginable sorrow. Nothing of all that will remain but a few pitiful pages in the history books, briefly picturing to the youth of future generations the follies of its ancestors.

Einstein's Brain

Although the will contained no provisions for his funeral or burial, Einstein’s vital organs, including his brain, were removed for scientific study. He then was cremated. According to one unidentified researcher,

After his death in 1955, Einstein’s brain was removed - without permission from his family - by Thomas Stoltz Harvey, the Princeton Hospital pathologist who conducted the autopsy. Harvey took the brain home and kept it in a jar. He was later fired from his job for refusing to relinquish the organ.

Many years later, Harvey, who by then had gotten permission from Hans Albert to study Einstein’s brain, sent slices of Einstein’s brain to various scientists throughout the world. One of these scientists was Marian Diamond of University of California, Berkeley, who discovered that compared to a normal person, Einstein had significantly more glial cells in the region of the brain that is responsible for synthesizing information.

In another study, Sandra Witelson of McMaster University found that Einstein’s brain lacked a particular “wrinkle” in the brain called the Sylvian fissure. Witelson speculated that this unusual anatomy allowed neurons in Einstein’s brain to communicate better with each other. Other studies had suggested that Einstein’s brain was denser, and that the inferior parietal lobe, which is often associated with mathematical ability, was larger than normal brains.

The saga of Einstein's brain can be quite strange at times: in the early 1990s, Harvey went with freelance writer Michael Paterniti on a cross-country trip to California to meet Einstein’s granddaughter. They drove off from New Jersey in Harvey’s Buick Skylark with Einstein’s brain sloshing inside a jar in the trunk! Paterniti later wrote his experience in the book Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein’s Brain.

In 1998, the 85-year-old Harvey delivered Einstein’s brain to Dr. Elliot Krauss, the staff pathologist at Princeton University, the position Harvey once held:

… after safeguarding the brain for decades like it was a holy relic - and, to many, it was - he simply, quietly, gave it away to the pathology department at the nearby University Medical Center at Princeton, the university and town where Einstein spent his last two decades.

“Eventually, you get tired of the responsibility of having it… I did about a year ago,” Harvey said, slowly. “I turned the whole thing over last year [in 1998].”

Family

Einstein had an illegitimate child shortly before his marriage in 1903 with a Swiss student, Mileva Maric, a marriage that ended in divorce and involved trying to put their daughter Liserl up for adoption and sending their mentally disturbed son, Eduard, to a Swiss psychiatric home, where he was not visited by his father - Eduard died wretchedly. Michelle Zackheim’s Einstein’s Daughter: The Search for Lieserl (1999) claims - Jeremy Bernstein thinks Zackheim has no real evidence, calling most of the study “a wild goose chase”—that the daughter was born severely retarded, possibly with Down syndrome, and died at twenty-one months after a bout with scarlet fever. The daughter was never adopted and, instead, was left with her parents in the Vojovodina region of Serbia. The Einsteins had two other sons - Albert Jr. and Eduard.

In 1919 Einstein married his second cousin, Elsa Einstein (2 June 1919 - 20 December 1936), a widow who had two daughters, and upon her death he spent his last two decades unmarried. He died of an abdominal aneurysm. Although his brain was preserved, his ashes were scattered in an undisclosed location.

His will reveals that Helena Dukas, his “secretary-housekeeper,” received more than his own relatives, that she was to receive from a special trust “all of my manuscripts, copyrights, publication rights, royalties and royalty agreements, and all other literary property and rights, of any and every kind or nature whatsoever.” Upon her death, his stepdaughter Margot Einstein was to receive such moneys, and upon her death the property was to be delivered to the Hebrew University in Israel. His violin was willed to his grandson, Bernhard Caesar Einstein.

in 2007, Walter Isaacson's Einstein, His Life and Universe and Jürgen Neffe's Einstein, A Biography are just two of many books that have dished the dirt about his love life - his multiple love affairs included one with a reputed Soviet spy, Margarita Konenkova.

In 1996, 53 love letters between Einstein and his first wife, Milea Maric, were sold at an auction at Christie's in New York for $442,500.

Books

Relativity: The Special and General Theory (1920)

The Meaning of Relativity (1922)

Sidelights on Relativity (1922)

Investigations on the Theory of the Brownian Movement (1926)

About Zionism: Speeches and Letters (1930)

Cosmic Religion: With other Opinions and Aphorisms (1931)

Builders of the Universe: From the Bible to the Theory of Relativity (1932)

Essays in Science (1934)

Out of My Later Years (1950)

Impact

(Einstein, whose parents were Hebrews, was not a Jew - Hebrew refers to someone as being a descendant from one of a group of northern Semitic peoples including the Israelites. Jew refers to a person regardless of his mother’s religion who - like Sammy Davis, an African American - chooses the Jewish religion and its basic theology. See the John Holmes entry concerning a comment about a poem by Einstein, and see the entry for Edwin Powell Hubble.)

{Jeremy Bernstein, in The New York Times Book Review, 19 Dec 99, claims Zackheim’s book is erroneous in claiming Einstein had syphilis—Zackheim countered that he had written, “I merely posed the medically sound possibility that if he had syphilis, as his friend and physician Janos Pleasch posited, it could have had an impact on the health of his first- and third-born children”; CE; CL; HNS2; JM; RE; The Economist, 8 November 1997; TRI; TYD}