Physics & Math / Einstein

Albert Einstein has been dead for 49 years, but Ralph Gardner can still see the great physicist’s dark eyes across the chessboard.

“Dr. Einstein taught me how to play chess,” says Gardner, a former New York Times editor. In 1934 Gardner was 11 years old. He had learned to speak German from his grandparents, so a friend invited him to a Manhattan tea party honoring Einstein (who spoke at least four languages but preferred German). “First, he asked me if I played an instrument,” says Gardner. “I told him no. He said he played the violin. Then he asked me if I played chess. I said no. I was getting worried that he would think I couldn’t do anything. He said he would teach me chess, and he did.” Einstein returned for several successive Saturdays and taught his new student until tea was served. Gardner learned later that the tea party recurred weekly because Einstein, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, was arranging passage out of Germany for Jewish college professors.

Memories of Einstein are just as strong for Gillett Griffin. In 1954, after eating dinner at Einstein’s house at the invitation of a mutual friend, Griffin watched curiously as Einstein wound up a plastic toy bird with suction cups for feet. “He stuck it on the mirror,” recalls Griffin, 76, a Princeton art curator for more than 50 years. “It ran up the mirror, then fell back into his hand. He said, ‘Do you like it?’ I said I loved it.” The next day, Einstein’s stepdaughter and secretary both called and told Griffin, “The professor says come back whenever you like. You are part of the family.”

Teacher and toy aficionado are just two of the endless descriptions applied to the most famous scientist who ever lived, the man Time magazine dubbed the person of the 20th century. Almost every adjective ever applied to a human being has been pasted across Einstein’s iconic visage with its towering forehead, tangled white mane, and sometimes goofy smile: genius, secular saint, pacifist, humanitarian, indifferent parent, jokester, poet, dreamer, musician, world saver, father of the bomb, loyal friend, flirt, even fraud.

For those who are drawn to science, Einstein is most profitably seen as a superposition. Quantum physics tells us that an object can be in all possible states simultaneously—superposition—until it is observed. Einstein is like that. To observe and describe him is to limit him. “I found him more complex than I even thought I would,” says Michael Shara, curator of the American Museum of Natural History’s seminal Einstein exhibit created to mark the centenary of the 1905 publication of the theory of special relativity. “For a man who was so great a scientist, he was more human than one could believe.”

The possibilities that would be expressed by Albert Einstein began to manifest on March 14, 1879, in Ulm, Württemberg, Germany, when the swollen, misshapen head of their newborn son alarmed Hermann Einstein, a feather-bed salesman, and his wife, Pauline. The attending physician assured the worried parents that time would rectify the problem, and it did, though the back of Albert’s head remained oddly angular for the rest of his life.

Popular mythology holds that young Einstein seemed slow, even mentally challenged. But a more comprehensive view of his early life—such as that provided by Denis Brian in his 1996 book, Einstein: A Life, jostles the superposition. Young Albert excelled at math. From the age of 10 he conversed as an equal with Max Talmey, a Polish medical student and weekly lunch guest of the Einsteins. Talmey fed Albert’s voracious curiosity with books, especially works by Aaron Bernstein, a popularizer of science whose writings discussed the idea that a unified force underlay all natural phenomena.

Still, the popular view has some merit too. Disgusted by young Albert’s inability to learn Greek, his professor at Munich’s Luitpold Gymnasium reportedly told him in front of the entire class that he would never amount to anything.

Regarding one aspect of his developing character, however, no one has doubts: Einstein was inflamed by great passions. “As a young man, he was so eager,” says biographer Brian. “Once, he was walking down the street carrying his violin and he heard a woman playing the piano. He rushes into her house, stomps up the stairs, startles her, and shouts, ‘Don’t stop! Don’t stop!’ He pulls out his violin and accompanies her. He had a wonderful spontaneity.”

Unsurprisingly, as Einstein reached his late teens the passionate young man soon found himself gripped by forces of attraction beyond the scope of particle physics. Around 1898 he fell in love with Mileva Maric´, a Serbian classmate at Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zürich. His exuberant personality opened up the reserved young woman, and soon he was composing fevered doggerel for her about Johnnie and Dollie, their pet names for each other:

Oh my! that Johnnie boy!

So crazy with desire,

While thinking of his Dollie,

His pillow catches fire.

In 1902 they had a daughter out of wedlock, Lieserl, whom Einstein never mentioned in public and whose fate remains a mystery. In that same year Einstein took a job as an examiner at the Swiss Patent Office. In 1903 he and Mileva married, and a year later she gave birth to their first son, Hans Albert. Then came the miracles.

In the golden year of 1905, 26-year-old Einstein wrote four major articles that forever altered physics. The most famous is “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” which introduced the special theory of relativity. It plumbed the nature and interrelationships of time, distance, mass, and energy and smashed the Newtonian view of the universe that had held sway for two centuries. The paper “was strangely free of footnotes or references, as if the inspiration had indeed come, if not from God, from some otherworldly source,” wrote Brian. Some biographers credit a more down-to-earth font of inspiration, arguing that Mileva contributed to the papers and Einstein unfairly denied her credit.

In any case, as the groundbreaking papers circulated among physicists and his stature and obligations increased, Einstein’s marriage became strained. “I am very starved for love,” Mileva wrote to a friend in 1909. Divorce loomed, and Einstein sent Mileva a list of conditions that she would need to meet to remain married to him, such as, “You make sure . . . that I receive my three meals regularly in my room” and “You are neither to expect intimacy nor reproach me in any way.”