Einstein (90 page)

Because he was a mental patient, Eduard was not allowed to immigrate to America. As his illness progressed, his face became bloated, his speech slow. Mari
increasingly had trouble allowing him back home, so his stays in the institution became more prolonged. Her sister Zorka, who had come to help care for them, descended into her own hell. After their mother died, she became an alcoholic, accidentally burned all the family money, which had been hidden in an old stove, and died a recluse in 1938 on a straw-covered floor surrounded only by her cats.
⁵⁹
Mari
lived on, through it all, in increasing despair.

In retrospect, the rise of the Nazis created a fundamental moral challenge for America. At the time, however, this was not so clear. That was especially true in Princeton, which was a conservative town, and at its university, which harbored a surprising number of students who
shared the amorphous anti-Semitic attitude found among some in their social class. A survey of incoming freshmen in 1938 produced a result that is now astonishing, and should have been back then as well: Adolf Hitler polled highest as the “greatest living person.” Albert Einstein was second.
⁶⁰

“Why do They Hate the Jews?” Einstein wrote in an article for the popular weekly
Collier’s
that year. He used the article not just to explore anti-Semitism but also to explain how the social creed inbred in most Jews, which he personally tried to live by, was part of a long and proud tradition. “The bond that has united the Jews for thousands of years and that unites them today is, above all, the democratic ideal of social justice coupled with the ideal of mutual aid and tolerance among all men.”
⁶¹

His kinship with his fellow Jews, and his horror at the plight that was befalling them, plunged him into the effort for refugee relief. It was both a public and a private endeavor. He gave dozens of speeches for the cause, was feted at even more dinners, and even gave occasional violin recitals for the American Friends Service Committee or the United Jewish Appeal. One gimmick that organizers used was to have people write their checks to Einstein himself. He would then endorse them to the charity. The donor would thus have as a keepsake a cancelled check with Einstein’s autograph.
⁶²
He also quietly backed scores of individuals who needed financial guarantees in order to emigrate, especially as the United States made it harder to get visas.

Einstein also became a supporter of racial tolerance. When Marian Anderson, the black contralto, came to Princeton for a concert in 1937, the Nassau Inn refused her a room. So Einstein invited her to stay at his house on Mercer Street, in what was a deeply personal as well as a publicly symbolic gesture. Two years later, when she was barred from performing in Washington’s Constitution Hall, she gave what became a historic free concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Whenever she returned to Princeton, she stayed with Einstein, her last visit coming just two months before he died.
⁶³

One problem with Einstein’s willingness to sign on to various and sundry movements, appeals, and honorary chairmanships was that, as before, it opened him to charges that he was a dupe for those that were
fronts for communists or other subversives. This purported sin was compounded, in the eyes of those who were suspicious about his loyalty, when he declined to sign on to some crusades that attacked Stalin or the Soviets.

For example, when his friend Isaac Don Levine, whose anticommunist writings Einstein had previously endorsed, asked him to sign a petition in 1934 condemning Stalin’s murder of political prisoners, this time Einstein balked. “I, too, regret immensely that the Russian political leaders let themselves be carried away,” Einstein wrote. “In spite of this, I cannot associate myself with your action. It will have no impact in Russia. The Russians have proved that their only aim is really the improvement of the lot of the Russian people.”
⁶⁴

It was a gauzy view of the Russians and of Stalin’s murderous regime, one that history would prove wrong. Einstein was so intent on fighting the Nazis, and so annoyed that Levine had shifted so radically from left to right, that he reacted strongly against those who would equate the Russian purges with the Nazi holocaust.

An even larger set of trials in Moscow began in 1936, involving supporters of the exiled Leon Trotsky, and again Einstein rebuffed some of his former friends from the left who had now swung to become ardently anticommunist. The philosopher Sidney Hook, a recovering Marxist, wrote Einstein, asking him to speak out in favor of the creation of an international public commission to assure that Trotsky and his supporters would get a fair hearing rather than merely a show trial. “There is no doubt that every accused person should be given an opportunity to establish his innocence,” Einstein replied. “This certainly holds true for Trotsky.” But how should this be accomplished? Einstein suggested it would best be done privately, without a public commission.
⁶⁵

In a very long letter, Hook tried to rebut each of Einstein’s concerns, but Einstein lost interest in arguing with Hook and did not respond. So Hook phoned him in Princeton. He reached Helen Dukas, and somehow was able to make it through her defensive shield to set up an appointment.

Einstein received Hook cordially, brought him up to his study lair, smoked his pipe, and spoke in English. After listening to Hook again
make his case, Einstein expressed sympathy but said he thought the whole enterprise was unlikely to succeed. “From my point of view,” he proclaimed, “both Stalin and Trotsky are political gangsters.” Hook later said that even though he disagreed with Einstein, “I could appreciate his reasons,” especially because Einstein emphasized that he was “aware of what communists were capable of doing.”

Wearing an old sweatshirt and no socks, Einstein walked Hook back to the train station. Along the way, he explained his anger at the Germans. They had raided his house in Caputh searching for communist weapons, he said, and found only a bread knife to confiscate. One remark he made turned out to be very prescient. “If and when war comes,” he said, “Hitler will realize the harm he has done Germany by driving out the Jewish scientists.”
⁶⁶

The thought experiments that Einstein had lobbed like grenades into the temple of quantum mechanics had done little damage to the edifice. In fact, they helped test it and permit a better understanding of its implications. But Einstein remained a resister, and he continued to conjure up new ways to show that the uncertainties inherent in the interpretations formulated by Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and others meant that something was missing in their explanation of “reality.”

Just before he left Europe in 1933, Einstein attended a lecture by Léon Rosenfeld, a Belgian physicist with a philosophical bent. When it was over, Einstein rose from the audience to ask a question. “Suppose two particles are set in motion towards each other with the same, very large, momentum, and they interact with each other for a very short time when they pass at known positions,” he posited. When the particles have bounced far apart, an observer measures the momentum of one of them. “Then, from the conditions of the experiment, he will obviously be able to deduce the momentum of the other particle,” Einstein said. “If, however, he chooses to measure the position of the first particle, he will be able to tell where the other particle is.”

Because the two particles were far apart, Einstein was able to assert, or at least to
assume,
that “all physical interaction has ceased between them.” So his challenge to the Copenhagen interpreters of quantum mechanics, posed as a question to Rosenfeld, was simple: “How can the final state of the second particle be influenced by a measurement performed on the first?”
¹

Over the years, Einstein had increasingly come to embrace the concept of realism, the belief that there is, as he put it, “a real factual situation” that exists “independent of our observations.”
²
This belief was one aspect of his discomfort with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and other tenets of quantum mechanics that assert that observations determine realities. With his question to Rosenfeld, Einstein was deploying another concept: locality.
*
In other words, if two particles are spatially distant from each other, anything that happens to one is independent from what happens to the other, and no signal or force or influence can move between them faster than the speed of light.

Observing or poking one particle, Einstein posited, could not
instantaneously
jostle or jangle another one far away. The only way an action on one system can affect a distant one is if some wave or signal or information traveled between them—a process that would have to obey the speed limit of light. That was even true of gravity. If the sun suddenly disappeared, it would not affect the earth’s orbit for about eight minutes, the amount of time it would take the change in the gravitational field to ripple to the earth at the speed of light.

As Einstein said, “There is one supposition we should, in my opinion, absolutely hold fast: the
real factual situation
of the system S
₂
is independent of what is done with the system S
₁
, which is spatially separated from the former.”
³
It was so intuitive that it seemed obvious. But as Einstein noted, it was a “supposition.” It had never been proven.

To Einstein, realism and localism were related underpinnings of physics. As he declared to his friend Max Born, coining a memorable phrase, “Physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky action at a distance.”
⁴

Once he had settled in Princeton, Einstein began to refine this thought experiment. His sidekick, Walther Mayer, less loyal to Einstein than Einstein was to him, had drifted away from the front lines of fighting quantum mechanics, so Einstein enlisted the help of Nathan Rosen, a 26-year-old new fellow at the Institute, and Boris Podolsky, a 49-year-old physicist Einstein had met at Caltech who had since moved to the Institute.

The resulting four-page paper, published in May 1935 and known by the initials of its authors as the EPR paper, was the most important paper Einstein would write after moving to America. “Can the Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Regarded as Complete?” they asked in their title.

Rosen did a lot of the math, and Podolsky wrote the published English version. Even though they had discussed the content at length, Einstein was displeased that Podolsky had buried the clear conceptual issue under a lot of mathematical formalism. “It did not come out as well as I had originally wanted,” Einstein complained to Schrödinger right after it was published. “Rather, the essential thing was, so to speak, smothered by the formalism.”
⁵

Einstein was also annoyed at Podolsky for leaking the contents to the
New York Times
before it was published. The headline read: “Einstein Attacks Quantum Theory / Scientist and Two Colleagues Find It Not ‘Complete’ Even though ‘Correct.’ ” Einstein, of course, had occasionally succumbed to giving interviews about upcoming articles, but this time he declared himself dismayed by the practice. “It is my invariable practice to discuss scientific matters only in the appropriate forum,” he wrote in a statement to the
Times,
“and I deprecate advance publication of any announcement in regard to such matters in the secular press.”
⁶

Einstein and his two coauthors began by defining their realist premise: “If without in any way disturbing a system we can predict with certainty the value of a physical quantity, then there exists an element
of physical
reality
corresponding to this physical quantity.”
⁷
In other words, if by some process we could learn with absolute certainty the position of a particle, and we have not disturbed the particle by observing it, then we can say the particle’s position is real, that it exists in reality totally independent of our observations.