Recently a coterie of distinguished scientists, including Murray Gell-Mann, Brian Greene, and Sir Martin Rees, were featured speakers at “Einstein: A Celebration,” a conference hosted by the Aspen Institute and sponsored in part by Discover. After three days of discussion about Albert Einstein’s impact on science, society, and culture, the task of defining the nature of his creative genius fell to a great American novelist: E. L. Doctorow. “Perhaps the organizers of this conference understood all too well that any report on the genius of a mind like Einstein’s would have to be a matter of fiction,” he joked. Yet it was fitting that Doctorow be given the last word on the subject. His novel City of God begins with a meditation on the Big Bang and includes several memorable passages in which a fictional writer peers inside Einstein’s mind and channels his thoughts. This is an adapted version of Doctorow’s remarks at the Aspen Institute on August 11.
When I was a student at the Bronx High School of Science in New York City, our principal, Dr. Morris Meister, had an image for scientific endeavor and the enlightenment it brings: “Think of science as a powerful searchlight continuously widening its beam and bringing more of the universe into the light,” he said. “But as the beam of light expands, so does the circumference of darkness.”
That image would certainly have appealed to Albert Einstein, whose lifelong effort to find the few laws that would explain all physical phenomena ran into immense difficulties as the revolutionary light of his theory of relativity discerned a widening darkness.
Of course, to a public celebrating its own mystification, that hardly mattered. The incomprehensibility of his space-time physics, and the fulfillment of an early prophecy of the theory of relativity when Sir Arthur Eddington’s experiments confirmed the bending of starlight as it passed by the sun, was enough for Einstein to be exalted as the iconic genius of the 20th century.
This was a role he could never seriously accept; he would come to enjoy its perks and use it as he grew older on behalf of his various political and social causes, but his fame was an irrelevancy at best and did not accord with the reality of a life lived most of the time in a state of intellectual perplexity. To be a genius to someone else was not to be a genius to oneself. Acts of mind always come to us without a rating.
Einstein would say by way of calming his worldwide admirers: “In science . . . the work of the individual is so bound up with that of his scientific predecessors and contemporaries that it appears almost as an impersonal product of his generation.”
Could this statement have been something more than an expression of modesty on his part?
Einstein came of age in a culture that was in hot pursuit of physical laws. In Europe some of his scientific elders—Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, Hermann Helmholtz, Heinrich Hertz, and Ernst Mach, to name a few—determined that electromagnetic waves move through space at the speed of light; their work called into question the concepts of absolute motion and absolute rest, everything in the universe moving only in relation to something else. So the science leading up to Einstein’s breakthrough was in a sense premonitory—it gave him the tools with which to think.
If we look outside the scientific enterprise of his time to the culture in general, we discover that this same turn-of-the-century period in which Einstein conceived his theory of relativity put him in the national German-speaking Jewish company of such contemporaries as Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, the revolutionary atonalist composer Arnold Schoenberg, the critic Walter Benjamin, the great anthropologist Franz Boas, and the philosopher of symbolic forms Ernst Cassirer. They joined the still-living precedent generation of Friedrich Nietzsche, who had proclaimed that God is dead, and Gustav Mahler, whose freewheeling First Symphony was written while Einstein was still a child. Mahler’s First, a big kitchen sink of a symphony, with its openness to idea, its structural relaxations, its excesses of voice and extravagance of mood, all coming after the unified and majestic sonorities of Brahms, for example, was in effect a kind of news broadcast: “This just in: The 19th-century world is coming apart.”
Frederic V. Grunfeld’s book Prophets Without Honor is the definitive account of this cultural florescence of German-speaking Jews. A multibiographical study of some of the artists and intellectuals of the period, it finds as their common characteristic not only an intense work ethic but also a passion that would drive them to take on the deepest and most intransigent questions. As Freud would plumb the unconscious in his effort to “understand the origin and nature of human behavior,” so Einstein would set off on his lifelong quest for a unified field theory that would encompass all physical phenomena.
Of course, outside Germany some world-shattering things were going on as well: in Paris, Braque’s and Picasso’s cubist paintings and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which brought on a riot at its premiere; in Bologna, Marconi’s experiments with radio waves; at Kitty Hawk, the Wright brothers’ first flight. So Einstein came of age at a moment not only in German culture but in world history—those early years of the 20th century—that if I were a transcendentalist I might consider as manifesting the activity of some sort of stirred-up world oversoul.
The English poet and essayist Matthew Arnold speaks about such historic moments of creative arousal in literature in his 1865 essay “The Function of Criticism at the Pres-ent Time”: “The grand work of literary genius,” says Arnold, “is a work of synthesis and exposition, . . . its gift lies in the faculty of being happily inspired by a certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere, by a certain order of ideas, when it finds itself in them; of dealing divinely with these ideas. . . . But it must have the atmosphere, it must find itself amidst the order of ideas, in order to work freely; and these it is not so easy to command. This is why great creative epochs in literature are so rare; this is why there is so much that is unsatisfactory in the productions of many men of real genius; because for the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.”
Arnold’s thesis puts me in mind of the debate among historians of science as to whether science at its most glorious (for example, the work of Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, or Einstein) is a revolution or whether it emerges incrementally as evolution. Perhaps it is both evolutionary and revolutionary. Perhaps there is an evolving communal intellect, and its role is periodically to be stunned and possibly outraged by the revolutionary ideas that it had not realized it was itself fomenting.
Thus, to speak of the power of the moment does not gainsay the power of the man. Opinions vary as to when, if ever, the theory of relativity might have been articulated if Einstein had not lived. Some scholars have said it would have taken generations. The eminent English astrophysicist Sir Martin Rees believes that it would have been conceived by now, but not by just one theorist working alone.
So what are we to make of Einstein’s own reference to the communal context of creativity, whereby the scientific work of an individual “appears almost as an impersonal product of his generation”? As always, he was being totally honest. Yet we must ask to whom the work appears as an impersonal product—certainly not to the world that applauds it and names its producer a genius. Rather it appears impersonal to the producer himself, the revelation of such work coming to his mind always as a deliverance, at a moment in his thought when his personality, his psyche, is released from itself in the transcendent freedom of a revelation.
The creative act doesn’t fulfill the ego but rather changes its nature. You are less than the person you usually are.
Einstein’s theory of relativity was an arduous work of self-expression no less than that of a great writer or painter. It was not accomplished without enormous mental struggle. It was created not merely from an intellectual capacity but also from an internal demand of his character that must have defined itself in his nightmares as Atlas holding up the sky with his shoulders. It was a matter of urgency to figure things out lest the universe be so irrational that it would come down around his and everyone else’s head. The term “obsession” is woefully insufficient to describe a mind so cosmologically burdened.
We have to assume also that there was the occasion of lightning clarity when that formula E = mc2 wrote itself in his brain, the moment of creative crisis, the eureka moment let’s call it. And here a writer can only scrub about in his own field to find a writer’s equivalent moment, as described by a giant of his profession: Henry James.
In his essay “The Art of Fiction,” James speaks of the “immense sensibility . . . that takes to itself the faintest hints of life . . . and converts the very pulses of the air into revelations.” He celebrates the novelist’s intuitive faculty “to guess the unseen from the seen,” but the word guess may be inadequate, for it is a power, I think, generated by the very discipline to which the writer is committed. The discipline itself is empowering, so that a sentence spun from the imagination confers on the writer a degree of perception or acuity or heightened awareness that a sentence composed with the strictest attention to fact does not.
