Albert Einstein is an icon of the twentieth century. Born in Ulm, Germany, in 1879, he is most famous for his theory of relativity. He also made enormous contributions to quantum mechanics and cosmology, and for his work he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921. A self-pronounced pacifist, humanist, and, late in his life, democratic socialist, Einstein was also deeply concerned with the social impact of his discoveries.
Much of Einstein’s life is shrouded in legend. From popular images and advertisements to various works of theater and fiction, he has come to signify so many things. In Einstein: A Biography, Jürgen Neffe presents a clear and probing portrait of the man behind the myth. Unearthing new documents, including a series of previously unknown letters from Einstein to his sons, which shed new light on his role as a father, Neffe paints a rich portrait of the tumultuous years in which Einstein lived and worked. And with a background in the sciences, he describes and contextualizes Einstein’s enormous contributions to our scientific legacy.
Einstein, a breakout bestseller in Germany, is sure to be a classic biography of the man and proverbial genius who has been called “the brain of the [twentieth] century.”
"You would never know you were reading a translation. Converted into evocative, idiomatic English by Shelley Frisch, the book abandons the traditional chronological framework to make oblique swipes across Einstein's timeline—like those bullets flying through a train. One chapter is on his psychological makeup, another on the scientists who influenced him, another on The Physicist and the Women. Occasionally leaping to the present, Neffe tells the story behind the story, the literary forensics by which modern-day Einstein sleuths piece together what he knew when . . . If you already know the story, Neffe’s book might tell you something new." —Los Angeles Times Book Review
"One closes this rigorously reseached and finely written biography full of admiration for the scientist..." —The New York Observer
"Jurgen Neffe, a German journalist and biochemist, embarks on a more probing, if somewhat dour, exploration in an expanded version of a biography originally published in Germany in 2005, here crisply translated by Shelley Frisch." —New York Times Book Review
"A comprehensive, sympathetic and very readable portrait of the man, the celebrity, the scientist and the theories that transformed physics and the modern world...Stellar research and prose combine in a splendid biogrpahy of physics' most luminous persona." —Kirkus Reviews
"In the wonderland realm described by Einstein's theory of special relativity, simultaneity generally proves to be an illusion, but in the world of publishing, two good studies of the same subject will often appear at roughly the same time. Then, alas, a variant of another scientific doctrine -- Gresham's law -- typically goes into effect: One book tends to drive out the other.
Walter Isaacson's hefty biography of Albert Einstein (1879-1955) appears with lots of panoply -- including 11 blurbs by noted scientists and biographers -- and the author provides a thorough and patient account of a great thinker's life and achievements. The tone is rightly admiring, though fully aware of the saintly scientist's darker side -- at least one illegitimate child, several mistresses, a coldness to his family that verged on heartlessness and cruelty. The prose is straightforward and clear, essential when explaining complex ideas, though sometimes feeling airless or straitjacketed, as if Isaacson were afraid of making a mistake or showing any personal feeling. Like other popularizers before him, he works hard to explain Einstein's conceptual breakthroughs and to lay out his decades-long arguments with Niels Bohr and the progenitors of quantum mechanics. For, sad to say, after the age of 40, this once-revolutionary thinker grew increasingly conservative and stuck in his ways, never bringing himself to fully accept indeterminacy, uncertainty and chance as the secret governors of the universe. In a famous catchphrase, Einstein couldn't believe that God played with dice, and for decades he kept up the search for a "unified field theory" that would make sense of everything. Einstein: His Life and Universe covers all this and much else in a painstaking and reliable biography. You won't go wrong in reading and learning from it.
But Jurgen Neffe's exhilarating Einstein: A Biography is a lot more fun. At first, Neffe might sound like a German counterpart to Isaacson. Both are distinguished journalists, Neffe having won the Egon Erwin Kisch Award, "the most prestigious award for print journalism in Germany." While Isaacson is currently the CEO of the Aspen Institute, the German writer is affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. The Neffe biography was even a bestseller in Germany, as Isaacson's earlier life of Benjamin Franklin was in the United States. Yet the two authors approach Albert Einstein quite differently, the American having written a rather stolid, even "Teutonic" study, while the German has produced a much jazzier one.
Neffe's zingy, dramatic style -- for which we must offer congratulations to his translator, Shelley Frisch -- sometimes calls to mind the New Yorker's John McPhee: His pages are rich in odd facts, take us deep into what one might call the Einstein industry and display both reverence for the genius and lèse-majesté before the man. While Isaacson diligently marches us through Einstein's life, thought and career, Neffe tends to be more freewheeling and thematic -- one of his chapters is titled "How Albert Became Einstein: The Psychological Makeup of a Genius"; another is called "The Burden of Inheritance: Einstein Detectives in Action." Yet Neffe's swagger and ease don't hide the fact that he's mastered a vast amount of material: He knows 20th-century German history, the development of physics since Galileo, the work of contemporary psychologists and philosophers on the nature of genius and media celebrity. Virtually all of Isaacson's references are to publications in English, and his book sometimes feels like a reporter's distillation of what others have discovered. By contrast, Neffe appears to have worked a bit harder and thought more for himself. For example, Isaacson tells us that Mozart was Einstein's favorite composer, but Neffe adds that the "Sonata for Piano and Violin in E Minor" was his favorite piece. He also discusses Einstein's cultural tastes, which were so deeply old-fashioned that the physicist found nearly all 20th-century art and music utterly incomprehensible or repellent, especially the works influenced by his own ideas. Furthermore, Neffe offers detailed information about the Einstein family's engineering business, which specialized in installing electric lighting, and shows how a boyhood spent around technical equipment influenced his later thought-experiments.
While discussing the crucial impact on the young Einstein's imagination of Aaron Bernstein's 20-volume Popular Books on Natural Science, Isaacson naturally draws on the major study in English of this formative reference work. But Neffe seems to have actually gone and read the books themselves, citing Bernstein more than 15 times, by volume and page number. He reveals through exact quotation how much Einstein's later formulations about gravity, light and space-time echo actual sentences from a child's introduction to the wonders of science. While the German's biography tends to focus on the youthful Einstein and on his cultural as well as scientific afterlife, Isaacson tells us more about the great man's years in America (from 1932 till his death), carefully narrates his involvement with the atomic bomb and movingly elucidates both his mature thinking about religion (God, he believed, could be found in the laws that ordered the universe) and his growing activism on behalf of world government. Isaacson's is, in this respect, the fuller life. But it would be a pity if his account completely overshadowed Neffe's, which is more personal, original and exciting. The latter, for instance, underscores that Einstein's English vocabulary was probably no more than a few hundred words and that the great man was often largely incomprehensible in our language. All his assistants at Princeton had to speak German.
For most of us, Albert Einstein remains the emblematic genius-holy man of modern science -- part Gandhi, part absent-minded professor, part wide-eyed child. (Neffe notes that Steven Spielberg modeled E.T.'s kindly and sorrowful eyes after those of Einstein.) In his later years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the physicist probably did become something close to a "Jewish saint" and sage, as he's often been described, but both biographies portray the younger Einstein as a man of unexpected, and sometimes unlikable, contradictions and polarities. As a student, he got a classmate pregnant, sent her away to have the baby (which he refused to see) and then apparently made the young woman give up the child for adoption. He regarded both of his wives as essentially caretakers, their main obligation being to see to his domestic needs. In the case of his first wife, he compelled her to forgo a promising scientific career and then treated her shabbily. He hardly ever saw their mentally ill younger son, whom he dismissed as degenerate.
After claiming for years to despise all forms of nationalism, Einstein nonetheless became an enthusiastic Zionist. He spoke up strongly for pacifism throughout the 1920s, but once Hitler rose to power, he grew full of martial anti-Nazi ardor. This isn't to say that he was wrong to embrace his Jewish identity or to fear Hitler's evil, but his ideological flip-flops are nonetheless disconcerting. Similarly, he initiated the development of the atomic bomb as a weapon against the hated Third Reich, yet deplored its use on Japan. He was largely indifferent to the victims of Stalin's show trials and purges but strongly supported the Pugwash conferences for world peace. What's more, this childlike genius absolutely required full-time assistants, housekeepers and support staff to live his simple, Spartan life. He also clearly loved publicity, women and sleep (Neffe tells us he generally slept at least 10 hours a night and often took naps). Though Einstein's may be the very face of scientific genius, he never really advanced much in his thought after winning the Nobel Prize in 1921 and, despite being widely revered, gradually lost touch with the cutting edge of physics.
After finishing some biographies, readers often feel an increased admiration for the subject. This isn't true for Einstein. More and more, he seems almost as flawed a human being as Pablo Picasso, John F. Kennedy and so many other icons of the 20th century. Read either of these two books and that well-known face will never look quite the same again. Still, it probably doesn't matter very much. Einstein provides one case when we might surely say: It's the thought that counts." —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
"Surprisingly, Neffe's biography reads more like an American novel. The language is fresh and lively--a nod to Neffe's English translator, Shelley Frisch." —San Diego Union-Tribune
Dr. Jürgen Neffe is a recipient of the Egon Erwin Kisch Award, the most prestigious award for print journalism in Germany. He lives in Berlin, where he is affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Science History.
PROLOGUE
THE IMMORTAL
EINSTEIN’S SECRET
Princeton, New Jersey, April 18, 1955. A sunny Monday morning. Pathologist Thomas Harvey’s shift begins at the hospital in this university town. The dissection table in the autopsy room holds a dead man whose presence offers Harvey the opportunity of a lifetime. The forty-two-year-old starts in as he would on any other workday, picking
up a hospital form and entering the requisite data in the spaces
provided. Name: Albert . . . Family Name: Einstein . . . Gender:
Male . . . Age: 76 . . . Year: 55 . . . Postmortem Serial Number for the Year 1955: 33. Then the medical examiner begins the autopsy.
He places his scalpel behind one of the dead man’s ears and pulls it hard over the neck and thorax through the cold, pale skin down to the abdomen. Then he repeats this cut beginning with the other ear. The result is the Y incision that Rudolf Virchow, a Berlin doctor, had introduced to pathology 150 years earlier.
Blood trickles out of the abdominal cavity. Harvey suspects that a ruptured aorta is the cause of death. It soon becomes apparent that his hypothesis is correct. Einstein had been suffering from an aneurysm for years, a blood-filled protrusion of his abdominal artery, and it had burst during the night, evidently owing to a weakness in the vascular wall. The inevitable result was internal bleeding and death. The doctor announces these findings to the journalists eagerly assembled in front of the clinic to report every detail to the world.
The pathologist has run into the physicist now lying on the autopsy table several times in the past, which is nothing out of the ordinary in a small town like Princeton, where Einstein spent the final twenty-two years of his life. The only time the doctor came into direct contact with his prominent fellow Princetonian, however, was during a house call, when he was standing in for a female colleague.
“I see you’ve switched genders,” Einstein quipped when the doctor entered his room for that visit. Evidently he preferred the female variety of medical care. He was lying in his bed, which took up nearly half of his room. A feather quilt covered his stocky body, and his famous shock of hair was spread out on the pillow. The patient was again suffering from an upset stomach, as he had off and on since his childhood.
Harvey asked him to hold out one of his arms. He looked for a suitable vein, stuck a needle into the skin, and drew blood into a syringe. While doing so, he told Einstein how he had bicycled through Europe with friends for a few weeks before the war and had seen something of Germany along the way. The emigrant listened attentively. Finally the doctor gave him a glass and asked him for a urine sample. When Einstein returned from the bathroom and handed him the warm container, Harvey kept thinking, This is from the greatest genius of all time.
And now Einstein’s cold corpse is lying cut open before him. It is Harvey’s last chance to take something from the body before it goes to the crematorium. Suddenly the pathologist sees, and seizes, his once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Case 55-33 will change his life.
Removing and examining the brain of a dead person does not go beyond the purview of standard autopsy procedure. Harvey, however, has been neither asked nor authorized to do what he does next to Einstein’s body, nor does the Hippocratic oath endorse his actions. He saws off the head of the dead man and scoops out its contents. He holds the brain in his hand the way Hamlet held Yorick’s skull. In these two and a half pounds of nerve tissue, he is certain, lies the key to understanding the greatest intellectual creative power. If it were possible to elicit the trade secret from this organ, he, the pathologist, would gain fame and honor. He decides to walk off with it and never give it back.
Princeton Hospital, half a century later. Like a criminal returning to the scene of the crime, Harvey heads straight to the former autopsy room. A windowless, fluorescent-lit back room, part office, part laboratory, full of beakers, retorts, refrigerators, bins, files, and discarded furnishings. The table, made of shiny high-grade steel, still dominates the center of the room. Harvey, now white-haired and ninety, his back bent by the trials and tribulations of his life, waits in front of it. He is wearing a sleeveless vest over his sport shirt.
A young doctor in a white coat enters the room and places a cardboard box on the steel table. Harvey opens the box like someone who has performed this movement a thousand times. He pulls out crumpled rags, then heaves two heavy glass containers in the shape of big cookie jars onto the table. Both are filled to the top with a yellowish, translucent, somewhat cloudy liquid. In this liquid is a stack of rosy gray chunks, wrapped in fine gauze and marked with tiny numbers—Einstein’s brain, sectioned and stored in an alcohol solution.
“Is everything all right, Dr. Harvey?” the young doctor inquires. “Thanks, Elliott, everything’s fine. Let’s have a look, shall we?” Harvey carefully holds one of the jars up to the light and rotates it with both hands. “My treasure,” he exults. Eyes fixed on the shimmering pallid cubes, he describes his venturesome life starting with that fateful Monday morning when he took the gem into his possession.
How he meticulously prepared the brain, sectioned it into about two hundred cubes, and divided them between the two jars. How he lost his job in the aftermath of walking off with the brain. How the jars, packed away in rags in the carton, accompanied him on his travels all over the country. How he had to keep hiding the brain in unlikely locations, underneath a beer cooler or in a closet of a student apartment, when his impoverishment after having lost his medical privileges drove him to seek employment in a factory in Kansas. And how, after more than forty years, he ruefully returned the infamous stolen goods to the safekeeping of his former workplace.
Elliott Krauss, the successor to his successor in pathology, knows the story by heart. “It all happened right here in this room, didn’t it?” “Yes, it did, Elliott.” The aged doctor continues to regard his actions as a kind of peccadillo.
Einstein would certainly have condemned what Harvey had done under the white-draped guise of medicine—even though in principle he was not against having his brain examined. However, Harvey was unaware of that. In his will, Einstein had stipulated precisely what was to happen with his body after his death. His mortal remains were to be burned on the day of his death and the ashes scattered in a secret location; these wishes were respected. He did not want to leave behind
anything that could be used as a place of pilgrimage or worship. He himself was the monument. Gods have no graves.
But who could blame Harvey? After all, when Einstein’s ophthalmologist and longtime friend Henry Abrams heard that the autopsy had just been completed, he too seized his chance, rushing off to the morgue in time to pluck both of Einstein’s eyes from their sockets, preserve them in formaldehyde, and place them in a safe deposit box, where they remain to this day. Harvey’s actions may have been reprehensible, but his alleged intention was noble: to serve the interest of science. Over the years, he repeatedly made samples from his tissue collections available to researchers. He hoped right to the end that they would capture the essence of genius under their microscopes.
Since studies of Einstein’s brain were virtually guaranteed to get publicity, it is no wonder that the experts jumped at the opportunity to report anything they found. The resultant studies claimed that the number of so-called glial cells was elevated, the inferior parietal lobe was larger than normal, and the Sylvian fissure was unusually shaped.
Were these findings the first steps toward understanding extraordinary creative power? Certainly not. Virtually all neuroanatomists have discounted these studies, calling them shoddy, unconvincing, and based on false assumptions. Of course, this brain did accomplish something colossal—but only in its interaction with many other brains. The world in which he lived was a crucial component of his brain’s achievement. The researchers do not even know whether the deviations they measured in Einstein’s nerve tissue—if they are of any significance whatsoever—are due to the fact that he continued to engage in intense intellectual activity to a ripe old age. How can they hope, then, to classify the unusual qualities they observed, which moreover apply equally to thousands and maybe even millions of other people?
In any case, they fail to shed light on Einstein’s distinctiveness. What they do provide is further evidence that even after the close of a century defined by science, the misguided belief that qualities of the mind are reflected in the body has lost nothing of its power. And they demonstrate a longing for simple formulas that encapsulate the life and work of a mental giant of Einstein’s stature. Ironically, the immortal Einstein’s genius lay in generating simple formulas to explain the workings of the universe—but living beings cannot be reduced to such
formulas.
Einstein was one of the most renowned people ever to walk the planet. Certainly no other scientist has come close to his degree of fame and mythic transfiguration. His seemingly paradoxical nature—bourgeois and bohemian, superman and scalawag—lent him an air of mystery. He could reconcile discrepant views of the world, but he was a walking contradiction. Einstein polarized his fellow man like no other. He was a friend to some, an enemy to others, narcissistic and slovenly, easygoing and rebellious, philanthropic and autistic, citizen of the world and hermit, a pacifist whose research was used for military ends.
On the one hand, he upheld the ideals of the French Revolution, advocating freedom and fraternity; on the other, he had a blind spot when it came to the female half of humanity. He carried moral authority, but he was rumored to have illegitimate children and syphilis. With his marked sense of justice, he had as much in common with a queen as with a vagrant, but the equality of the sexes was of no concern to him. Quite the opposite: he valued and used women as lovers, but never really accepted them as companions on an equal level (except perhaps as musicians), and could not tolerate displays of femininity. He failed miserably at marriage—twice.
Rarely has a single individual been so farsighted and myopic at the same time. He was one of the first to recognize the danger posed by
the Nazis, the degree to which the Jews were being persecuted, and the threat to democracy in the United States by the American militarization after World War II, yet he never failed to startle his friends and
colleagues with the extent of his political naïveté.
Discoveries that shook the world on the one hand, errors and miscalculations on the other. With his theory of relativity and his groundbreaking writings on quantum theory, he enhanced and transcended classical physics. But no sooner was he famous than he wielded his authority to impede further advances, and the younger generation regarded him as a stubborn mule who steered clear of progress.
Thanks to the power of his imagination, he could project his way into the essence of electrons just as well as into the destiny of distant stars. When it came to people who were close to him, however, especially his sons and the problems that bedeviled them, he had not a trace of empathy. He could be downright brutal, but he could show deep compassion for the poor, weak, and persecuted. He alternated between kind sage and incorrigible mule—an egocentric loner with a sense of responsibility for all of mankind.
Neither his brain tissue nor any other physical remains, such as his genes, reveal a thing about his extreme creative powers. The key to understanding Einstein lies not in biology, but in biography.
Excerpted from Einstein: A Biography by Jurgen Neffe. Copyright © 2007 by Rowohlt Verlag. Published in May 2007 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
Imprint: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Distributor: MPS
Publication Date: 04-17-2007
Pages: 480
Measurements: 9.00in X 6.00in
