Quote of the Day (Albert Einstein, on Weak Character and ‘The Destruction of Our Intellectual Life’)

“Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character; it becomes lack of power to act with courage proportionate to danger. All this must lead to the destruction of our intellectual life unless the danger summons up strong personalities able to fill the lukewarm and discouraged with new strength and resolution.”— Nobel Prize-winning physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955), speech in honor of Thomas Mann, January 1939, quoted by Abraham Pais, Einstein Lived Here (1994)

Quote of the Day (Hart Pomerantz, on Einstein’s Math and Marriage)

“[Albert] Einstein married Mileva Maric, a brilliant physicist and the only woman in his university class. The couple had two sons, and Einstein wanted to name them Positive and Negative, so they would stick together. The principle of quantum superposition says that a particle can be in two places at the same time. When Einstein started cheating on Mileva, he used that theory as an alibi.”— Canadian lawyer and TV personality Hart Pomerantz, “Shouts and Murmurs: Einstein—The Untold Story,” The New Yorker, Jan. 6, 2020

Quote of the Day (Paul Johnson, on How the ‘Modern World’ Began With Einstein’s Relativity Theory)

“The modern world began on 29 May 1919 when photographs of a solar eclipse, taken on the island of Principe off West Africa and at Sobral in Brazil, confirmed the truth of a new theory of the universe….

“In 1905, a 26-year-old German Jew, Albert Einstein, had published a paper which became known as the Special Theory of Relativity…. 

“Einstein's theory, and [Cambridge Professor Arthur] Eddington's much publicized expedition to test it [during the eclipse], aroused enormous interest throughout the world in 1919. No exercise in scientific verification, before or since, has ever attracted so many headlines or become a topic of universal conversation.”—English historian and journalist Paul Johnson, Modern Times, Revised Edition: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (2001)

Quote of the Day (Albert Einstein, on an Early Discovery of His)

“When I was young, I found out that the big toe always ends up making a hole in a sock. So I stopped wearing socks."—Nobel Prize-winning scientist Albert Einstein (1879-1955), to portrait photographer Philippe Halsman, quoted in A.P. French, Einstein: A Centenary Volume (1979)

On this date in 1933, Albert Einstein arrived in Princeton as a refugee from Nazi Germany. Those who came in contact with him here in the United States discovered a man who, in addition to being a genius, was—well, quirky.

See this prior post of mine for an account of his not-always-happy life in the United States.

Quote of the Day (Albert Einstein, on Whom We Exist For)

“Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people— first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy.”—Nobel Prize-winning scientist Albert Einstein (1879-1955), “The World As I See It,” in Living Philosophies (1931)

(Thanks to my friend Holly for the inspiration for this quote.)

Quotes of the Day (Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, Demonstrating That Finance Stumps Even Geniuses)

"I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people."—Sir Isaac Newton, after losing a fortune in Great Britain’s South Sea Bubble of 1720, quoted in Christopher Reed, “The Damn’d South Sea,” Harvard Magazine, May-June 1999

“The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.”—Popularly attributed to Albert Einstein

Flashback: Einstein Comes to America, October 1933

October 17, 1933—Albert Einstein and his wife arrived in New York Harbor on the ocean liner Westernland, then were whisked away from a crowd of reporters by tugboat to New Jersey, where he would take a position with Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study. 

His move, as newsworthy as it was, was just one part of what might have been the greatest brain drain in history—the vast exodus of scientists, writers, directors, artists, architects, and other intellectuals who first fled Hitler’s Germany, then the other European powers that fell under the Nazi shadow.

As a Jew, the German scientist had already been marginalized in his own country. 

A Nazi edict on April 7 dismissing politically suspect academics would undoubtedly have caught him in its web anyway, since by the start of the 1933-34 school year that fall fully 15 percent of the nation’s established university teachers had already been cashiered, according to Richard J. Evans’ The Coming of the Third Reich.

Einstein had taken the extraordinarily brave step earlier in the year of denouncing the thuggish crackdown by the regime after the Reichstag fire. He resigned from the Prussian Academy of Science before that organization could accede to the Nazi demand that he be expelled. 

But, since he was visiting America at the time of his denunciation of Hitler’s terror, there was nothing he could do to prevent the seizure of his property.

Joining Einstein among the refugee tide were the following past or future Nobel laureates: Gustav Hertz, Erin Schoringer, Max Born, Fritz Haber and Hans Krebs. Who knows how much of a military advantage Hitler would have gained during World War II if he had not evicted so many?

Staying in America –even a beautiful campus such as Princeton’s—did not prove to be the happiest period in Einstein’s life, however, and for more than the obvious reason that he was now cut off from longtime friends and family. There were also these issues:

* Just like a great forebear in applying the laws of mathematics to the physical universe, Isaac Newton, Einstein devoted himself to an endeavor that consumed his energy with little to show for it. Newton had become sidetracked by alchemy, while Einstein’s unfulfilled passion was for a unified field theory.

* Einstein’s prestige was considerable enough that his letter to FDR warning that Germany could design an atomic bomb would lead to the Manhattan Project. But his socialism and pacifism rendered him so politically suspect that he could not serve on the project.

* The scientist’s political views led him to run afoul of Senator Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. His public statement that all intellectuals called before McCarthy’s committee should refuse to testify led at least one witness to take his advice. Hoover’s paranoia was so wide-ranging concerning Einstein—as attested to by the 1,800 pages in the FBI file—that the agency head even suspected the scientist might be a Communist spy.

For a treatment of the Princeton sojourn of this genius, I recommend renting a DVD of a highly fanciful—but equally delightful—romantic comedy, I.Q., with Meg Ryan and Tim Robbins as the young lovers brought together by Walter Matthau, playing the bushy-haired refugee who in this movie—if not in real life—had a sly twinkle in his eyes during these years.