Einstein's Greatest Mistake Read online

  Einstein dropped out of school when he was sixteen. If he had been forced out, he might have considered it a failure, but since it was his own choice, he actually felt proud, seeing it as an act of rebellion. He traveled on his own to join his family in Italy, worked for a while at his father and uncle’s factory, and then reassured his worried parents that he had discovered a German-language university that didn’t require a high school diploma and had no minimum age requirement. This was the Swiss Polytechnic in Zurich, and he applied right away. Although his math and physics grades were excellent—those family conversations hadn’t been wasted—he should have paid more attention to Degenhart, for Einstein later remembered that he’d made no attempt to prepare, and his scores in French and chemistry let him down. The Swiss Polytechnic turned him away.

  His parents weren’t too surprised. “I got used a long time ago,” his father wrote, “to receiving not-so-good grades along with very good ones.” Einstein accepted that it had been a mistake to apply so early. He found a family to lodge with in the valleys of northern Switzerland near Zurich over the next year, as he took remedial classes to prepare for a second try.

  Einstein’s hosts in Switzerland, the Winteler family, assumed as a matter of course that he would sit around the table with them to share in reading aloud or discussion. They shared musical evenings—Einstein was a gifted violinist, whom school assessors had ranked highly back in Germany—and even better there was a daughter, Marie, who was just a bit older than him. Einstein seems to have thought it a token of affection to suggest that Marie do his laundry for him, as his mother had always done. He soon learned more sophisticated methods of courtship, however, and so began his first romance. This relationship triggered his mother’s first bout of nosiness. When he was home with his family over the holidays and wrote to Marie, “Beloved sweetheart . . . you mean more to my soul than the whole world did before,” his mother inked on the envelope the unpersuasive assertion that she hadn’t read what was inside.

  EINSTEIN MANAGED TO GET into the Polytechnic on his next try at age seventeen in 1896, on a course designed for the training of future high school teachers. He had just enough education to follow the lessons, yet enough of a cautious attitude from his already well-traveled life to judge them critically. It was the perfect background to cause him to take an independent view of what his teachers offered.

  Although the Zurich Polytechnic was generally first-rate, a few professors were out-of-date, and Einstein managed to irritate them. Professor Heinrich Weber, for instance, who taught physics, had been helpful to Einstein at the beginning, but he turned out to have no interest in contemporary theory and refused to incorporate the Scotsman James Clerk Maxwell’s groundbreaking work on the links between electrical and magnetic fields into his physics lectures. This irked Einstein, who recognized how important Maxwell’s work could be. Weber, like many physicists of the 1890s, didn’t feel there was anything fundamentally new to learn and believed that his job was simply to fill in remaining details. All the main work of figuring out the laws of the universe was complete, the thinking went, and although future generations of physicists might need to improve their measuring equipment so as to more accurately describe the known principles, there were no major insights left to be made.

  Weber was also immensely pedantic, once making Einstein write out an entire research report for a second time, on the grounds that the first submission was not written on paper of exactly the proper size. Einstein mocked the professor by pointedly calling him Herr Weber instead of Professor Weber and harbored a grudge against him about his teaching style for years to come. “It is nothing short of a miracle that [our] modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry,” Einstein wrote about his university education a half century later.

  Since there was little point in going to Weber’s lectures, Einstein spent a lot of time getting to know the cafés and pubs of Zurich: sipping iced coffee, smoking his pipe, reading, and gossiping as the hours went by. He also found time to study, on his own, works of von Helmholtz, Boltzmann, and other masters of current physics. But his reading was unsystematic, and when the annual examinations came around, he realized he would need help catching up with Herr Weber’s lesson plan.

  What Einstein really needed was a fellow student to whom he could turn. His best friend was Michele Angelo Besso, a Jewish Italian who was a recent graduate of the Polytechnic, a few years older than Einstein. Besso was friendly and cultivated—he and Einstein had met at a musical evening where they were both playing the violin—but he had been almost as dreamy in class as Einstein had been. This meant Einstein needed to find someone else to borrow lecture notes from if he was to have any chance of passing, not least because one of his academic reports at the Polytechnic contained the ominous inked remark “director’s reprimand for nondiligence in physics practicum.”

  Einstein’s best friend, Michele Besso, 1898. “Einstein the eagle took Besso the sparrow under his wing,” Besso once said in describing their intellectual partnership, “and the sparrow flew a little higher.”

  Luckily, another of Einstein’s acquaintances, Marcel Grossmann, was just the sort of individual every undisciplined undergraduate dreams of having as a friend. Like Einstein and Besso, Grossmann was Jewish and also only recently arrived in the country. Switzerland had a semiofficial policy of anti-Semitism at its universities that channeled Jews and other outsiders into what were then considered lower-status departments such as theoretical physics rather than fields such as engineering or applied physics, in which salaries were likely to be higher. (This wasn’t too bad for Einstein, for it was only through theoretical physics that he was able to get a grip on concepts such as energy and matter that so intrigued him.) Knowing they were being treated in the same biased way probably helped Einstein and Grossmann bond.

  When final exams came around, Grossmann’s lecture notes—with all the important diagrams neatly drawn—did wonders for Einstein (“I would rather not speculate how I might have fared without them,” Einstein wrote Grossmann’s wife much later), enabling him to pass geometry, for example, with a respectable 4.25 out of 6. His score wasn’t as good as Grossmann’s, of course, which as everyone expected was a perfect 6.0. But none of his friends were surprised, for Einstein had yet another distraction.

  Grossmann and Einstein, several years after university, early 1910s

  Besides Besso and Grossmann, Einstein was spending time with another student, someone who was even more of an outsider than him: an Orthodox Christian Serbian, and the only woman in the course. With Mileva Marić’s mix of high intelligence and darkly sensual looks, more than one student at the Polytechnic was interested in her. She was a few years older than the other students, was a skilled musician and painter, excellent at languages, and had studied medicine before switching to physics. Einstein had long since broken up with Marie Winteler from his lodging days and was ready to move on.

  Einstein was surprisingly handsome as a young man, with black curly hair and a confident, easy smile. His close relationship with his sister, Maja, had given him an ease with women and worked to his advantage when he began courting Marić. Over their undergraduate years, their romance advanced deeply. “Without you,” he wrote to her in 1900, “I lack self confidence, pleasure in work, pleasure in living.” But if they lived together, he promised her, “we shall be the happiest people on earth together, that’s for sure.” Throwing caution to the wind, at one point he had even sent her a letter with a drawing of his foot so that she could knit him some socks.

  Mileva Marić, late 1890s. In 1900, Einstein wrote to her, “We shall be the happiest people on earth together, that’s for sure.”

  Einstein and Marić had held back for a while before telling their friends how close their romance had become, but they had been fooling no one. When Einstein was visiting his parents in Italy in 1900, he wrote to her, “Michele has already noticed that I like you, because . . . when I told him that I must no
w go to Zurich again, he asked: ‘What else would draw him [back]?’” What else, indeed, but Marić?

  There’s something momentous about the years just before a new century begins, and Einstein’s circle likely felt that sense of excitement. The four friends—Besso, Grossmann, Einstein, and Marić—had an attitude many students shared: the majority of their professors were relics from another age and not to be taken seriously, but the dawning twentieth century would bring forth wonders, and it would be the younger generation who would see them through to fruition. Of that, none of them seemed to have any doubt.

  Each had their own source of confidence. Besso’s family had a prosperous engineering business waiting for him in Italy, and he had already been spending time there as well as in Zurich. He was good with people, and confident that when he did eventually settle down he would be able to continue his family’s success in industry. Grossmann had a stand-out mathematical talent that everyone at the Polytechnic recognized. Marić had been a superb student at her technical secondary school in Budapest and in fact had been one of the first women in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to attend a scientific high school at all. She was also one of the few female university students in Switzerland. In a country where woman suffrage was still seven decades away, this was even more of a distinction for her.

  The four friends were hungry to advance the world’s knowledge—Einstein perhaps most of all. Although he struggled with his schoolwork, his private intellectual pursuits were picking up steam. Along with those long hours reading newspapers and playing the joker in Zurich’s cafés, he had continued to study Europe’s greatest physicists, teaching himself everything the out-of-date Professor Weber ignored.

  Einstein was fascinated by the ideas of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell that there could be invisible fields of mixed electricity and magnetism stretching through space, influencing everything within their reach. He was fascinated by more recent findings as well: J. J. Thomson at Cambridge measuring details of the electron, a tiny particle that seemed to exist inside the atoms within every substance; Wilhelm Röntgen discovering X-rays that could see through living flesh; Guglielmo Marconi sending radio signals across the English Channel. How did these phenomena occur, Einstein wondered, and why? He had been mulling this over since the year he’d spent in Italy with his family before going to Switzerland, but he had been unable to take his inquiries any further then.

  Now he was eager to advance not just his own knowledge but also that of the entire field of physics. Einstein owed part of his newfound drive to his desire to help out his father, whose companies in Pavia and Milan, despite the relative lack of anti-Semitism there, were no more successful than his previous partnership in Munich. The money his parents sent him to live on was a great drain on them, and he knew it. Einstein also owed part of his drive to what he had drawn from his religious heritage. Although he had dropped the formalities of religion at the age of twelve, he did believe there were truths waiting to be found in the universe, only some of which mankind had glimpsed. That would be his quest, he vowed in an 1897 letter to Marie Winteler’s mother.

  “Strenuous intellectual work,” he wrote, “and looking at God’s Nature are the . . . angels that shall lead me through all of life’s troubles . . . And yet what a peculiar way this is . . . One creates a small little world for oneself, and as lamentably insignificant as it may be in comparison with the perpetually changing size of real existence, one feels miraculously great and important.”

  For most of Einstein’s friends, those feelings of general grandeur to come were as far as they went. He, however, was thinking about the great Victorian synthesis a lot now and beginning to question the grand vision that had been handed down to him. The universe was divided into two great realms. There was energy, as carried in the gusting winds that blew down the Zurich streets he knew so well, and there was matter, such as the glass windows of his beloved cafés and the beer or mocha he sipped as he thought about all these things. But did the unity have to stop there?

  At this stage, young Einstein couldn’t do anything more with such a thought. He was intelligent, but the questions he was asking himself seemed impossible to answer. And he was young enough to simply make do with the dominant vision of the universe as having two unlinked parts—albeit with the confidence that he could come back to it later.

  TWO

  Coming of Age

  UNIVERSITY FRIENDS LIKE to imagine they’ll stay together forever, but it rarely turns out that way. In 1900, Einstein’s, Grossmann’s, and Marić’s four years at the Zurich Polytechnic were up. Besso, a few years older, had already moved back to Italy to work in electrical engineering. Although Einstein tried to argue him out of it (“What a waste of his truly outstanding intelligence,” he wrote Marić that year), he respected Besso’s decision, which would prevent him from becoming a financial burden to his family. Grossmann was going to teach high school, though he had his eye on research and eventually registered for graduate study in realms of pure mathematics that perplexed the more practical Einstein. Marić was caught between staying in Switzerland for more studies (and her boyfriend) and going back to her family near Belgrade, whom she now had to visit.

  Einstein also was stuck. He badly wanted to pursue a career as a research scientist, but he had so upset his main physics lecturer, Professor Weber, through his insubordination and skipping classes that Weber now refused to write letters of recommendation to other professors or school heads, which was the usual way for students to procure such jobs after graduation. With remarkable aplomb, Einstein himself tried writing to one of his former mathematics instructors, Professor Hurwitz, explaining that although he had, in fact, not bothered to attend most of Hurwitz’s classes, he was writing “with the humble inquiry” as to whether he might be granted a job working as Hurwitz’s assistant. For some reason, Hurwitz was not impressed, and there was no job there either. Einstein kept on writing letters ​—“I will soon have graced every physicist from the North Sea to the southern tip of Italy with my offer,” he wrote Marić—but all he got were rejections.

  These especially hurt because he knew his family needed more income. A little earlier, he’d told Maja, “What oppresses me most, of course, is the [financial] misfortune of our poor parents. It grieves me deeply that I, a grown man, have to stand idly by, unable to do the least thing to help.”

  After a stint as a high school teacher, and even for a while working as a tutor to a young Englishman in Switzerland, Einstein was back living with his parents in Italy in 1901. His father, Hermann, recognized that his son was depressed and resolved to help. He decided to write to Wilhelm Ostwald, one of Germany’s greatest scientists, explaining that “my son Albert is 22 years old [and] . . . feels profoundly unhappy . . . His idea that he has gone off the tracks with his career & is now out of touch gets more and more entrenched each day.” Hermann asked the professor to write Albert “a few words of encouragement, so that he might recover his joy. If, in addition, you could secure him an Assistant’s position for now or the next autumn, my gratitude would know no bounds.” Naturally, this had to remain between the two of them, for “my son does not know anything about my unusual step.” The appeal was heartfelt, but it rambled and was as ineffectual as most of Hermann’s business ventures. Ostwald never replied.

  As for Einstein’s relationship with Marić, although his mother hadn’t met her, she couldn’t bear this girl he spoke of so much—for what woman, if one thought about it, was ever going to be good enough for her son? Pauline used Einstein’s failure to earn a good living as a further reason to insist that he stop writing to this non-Jewish woman. After three weeks of this moral torture, Einstein wrote to Grossmann in desperation, asking if there was any way Grossmann could help him escape having to live at home. When Grossmann called on family connections, securing Einstein an interview at the Patent Office in Bern, Einstein immediately wrote back, “When I found your letter I was deeply moved [that] you did not forget your old luckless friend.�
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  It wasn’t exactly the profession Einstein had envisioned for himself, but the Patent Office job—if he could get it—would be a useful way to make a living, and just maybe protect his relationship with Marić from his mother as well. It helped that earlier in 1901, Einstein had taken out Swiss citizenship, having passed an application process that involved being shadowed by a private detective, who noted that Herr Einstein kept regular hours, scarcely drank, and so deserved to be approved. But even so, the position seemed a letdown, merely a way to earn a steady paycheck while he tried to get back into the academic system. He had to pretend to his parents that this was fine and no stumbling block at all.

  At least everything was continuing to go well with Marić, for while he was still with his parents in northern Italy, she was back in Switzerland, not too terribly far away. They could write to each other about science and love—and they could arrange to meet.

  May, 1901

  My dear dolly! . . . This evening I sat 2 hours at the window and thought about how the law of interaction of molecular forces could be determined. I’ve got a very good idea. I’ll tell you about it on Sunday . . .

  Ah, writing is stupid. Sunday I am going to kiss you in person. To a happy reunion! Greeting and hugs from your,

  Albert

  PS: Love!

  And kiss they did, finally meeting in the Swiss Alps, high above Lake Como. Marić wrote to her best friend describing how she and her boyfriend had to cross a pass in twenty feet of snow.