Einstein (18 page)

Einstein’s conversation was often a combination of inoffensive jokes and penetrating ridicule, so that some people could not decide whether to laugh or to feel hurt. Often the joke was that he presented complicated relationships as they might appear to an intelligent child. Such an attitude often appeared to be an incisive criticism and sometimes even created an impression of cynicism. Thus the impression Einstein made on his environment vacillated between the two poles of childish cheerfulness and cynicism. Between these two poles lay the impression of a very entertaining and vital person whose company left one feeling richer for the experience. A second gamut of impression varied from that of a person who sympathized deeply and passionately with the fate of every stranger, to that of a person who, upon closer contact, immediately withdrew into his shell.

In the fall of 1910 there occurred a vacancy in the chair of theoretical physics at the German University in Prague. Such appointments were made at the recommendation of the faculty by the Emperor of Austria, who exercised his right through the Ministry of Education. The decisive man in the selection of the candidate was the physicist Anton Lampa, a man of very progressive tendencies as far as education was concerned. All his life he fought for the introduction of modern pedagogical methods, for the freedom of teaching from reactionary influences, and for the extension of scientific and artistic education to the largest possible number of the population. There was a considerable gap between his high aspirations and his scientific capacities, however, and as a result he was animated by an ambition he could not satisfy. Since he was a man of high ethical ideals, he consciously sought to suppress this ambition, but the result was that it played an even greater role in his subconscious life. His
philosophical
Weltanschauung
was for the most part determined by the positivistic philosophy of the physicist Ernst Mach, whose student he had been. It was Lampa’s life goal to propagate Mach’s views and to win adherents for them.

When the question of filling the chair of theoretical physics came up, Lampa thought that here was an opportunity to appoint someone who would teach physics in the spirit of Mach. In addition, it had always been his dream to enter the realm of the extraordinary and of the genius, and he wanted an outstanding scientist, not an average professor. Even though he realized that he himself was not so gifted, he was just enough to accept the presence of an outstanding man.

Lampa had in mind two physicists who he thought would teach in the spirit of Mach and were acknowledged to have extraordinary capacities. The first was Gustav Jaumann, a professor at the Technical Institute in Brno, and the second was Einstein. Jaumann followed Mach in some peculiarities, chief among which was his aversion to the introduction of atoms and molecules in physics. Even when the atomic constitution of matter had been generally accepted as giving the best and simplest presentation of physical phenomena, Jaumann retained Mach’s predilection and tried to build up a theory of continuously distributed matter. Since he had a great natural talent and imagination, he considered himself a neglected genius and developed an excessive vanity and sensitivity. Einstein, on the other hand, was influenced more by the spirit than by the letter of Mach’s teachings. We have already seen in his work on Brownian motion that Einstein did not follow Mach’s rejection of the atom.

Since the regulations provided that the names of the proposed candidates be listed on the basis of their achievements, Einstein, whose writings in the years from 1905 to 1910 had already made a strong impression on the scientific world, was placed first and Jaumann second. Nevertheless, the Ministry of Education first offered the position to Jaumann. The Austrian government did not like to appoint foreigners and preferred Austrians. But the ministry had not taken Jaumann’s vanity and touchiness into account. He said: “If Einstein has been proposed as first choice because of the belief that he has greater achievements to his credit, then I will have nothing to do with a university that chases after modernity and does not appreciate true merit.” Upon Jaumann’s rejection of the offer, the government overcame its aversion to foreigners and offered the position to Einstein. He
had some qualms about going to a foreign country, and his wife did not want to leave Zurich, but eventually he accepted it. One deciding factor was the circumstance that for the first time in his life he was to have a full professorship with adequate salary.

There was one peculiar difficulty to be overcome, however, in taking up the position. The octogenarian Emperor Franz Josef was of the opinion that only a man who belonged to a recognized church should be a teacher at a university, and he refused to confirm the appointment of anyone who did not conform to this rule. Einstein’s friends at the university who had proposed his appointment informed him of this circumstance. Since leaving the gymnasium in Munich, Einstein had not been an official member of any religious community, but in order to avoid this difficulty, he indicated that he was an adherent of the Jewish religion, to which he had belonged as a child. He did not go through any formal ceremony, but in the questionnaire that he had to fill out he simply wrote his religion was “Mosaic,” as the Jewish creed was then called in Austria.

When Einstein arrived in Prague he looked more like an Italian virtuoso than a German professor, and he had, moreover, a Slav wife. He was certainly unlike the average professor at the German University. Since he had been preceded by the reputation of being not an ordinary physicist but an extraordinary genius, everyone was curious to meet him.

In Prague it was the custom for a newly arrived member of the faculty to pay a call on all his colleagues. In his good-natured way Einstein was ready to accept the advice of his friends and make the necessary calls, which numbered some forty. He also decided to take advantage of this opportunity to see various sections of the romantic old city of Prague, and so he began to make his visits according to the location of the houses. All who made his personal acquaintance were immediately pleased by his naturalness, his hearty laughter, and the friendly and at the same time dreamy look in his eyes. But Einstein soon began to find the calls rather a nuisance. He felt that it was a waste of time to carry on conversations about trivialities and suddenly he stopped his visits. The professors upon whom he had not called were puzzled and offended at this neglect. Some people began to regard him as either proud or capricious, when the true explanation was that these colleagues lived in sections of the city that did not interest Einstein, or their names were too far back in the faculty directory.

This aversion to all formality and ceremonial was a very important
trait in Einstein’s character. It was particularly marked for ceremonies that were in any way depressing. Thus Einstein had an intense aversion to attending funerals, and on one occasion when he was in a funeral procession he remarked to his assistant, walking at his side: “Attending funerals is something one does to please the people around us. In itself it is meaningless. It seems to me not unlike the zeal we polish our shoes with every day just so that no one will say we are wearing dirty shoes.” Throughout his life Einstein had maintained this attitude of revolt against the customs of bourgeois life.

The University of Prague is the oldest university in central Europe. During the second half of the nineteenth century there had been German and Czech professors lecturing in their respective languages, but with political quarrels creating more and more difficulties, the Austrian government had in 1888 decided to divide the university into two parts, thus creating a German and a Czech university. It is perhaps an interesting historical accident that the first rector of the German University, where Einstein was appointed, had been Ernst Mach.

At the time of Einstein’s arrival the two universities were completely separated and there were no relations between the professors of the two institutions. Even professors of the same subject had no personal contact and it frequently happened that two chemistry professors from Prague would meet for the first time at an international congress in Chicago. There was already a group among the Germans who propagated the idea of the “master race” and frowned upon any intercourse with “inferior races.” The majority of the German professors had too little interest in politics or were too timid to oppose the powerful will of this group by entering into contact with the Czechs.

Nevertheless, the general attitude of superiority and hostility against the Czechs was quite evident in the conversations among the German professors and their families. Comical stories were told of how Czechs behaved in society for which, in the Germans’ opinion, they were not suited. The situation may be described by the following instances:

During a population census undertaken by the government, a professor of political science sent a circular letter to the members
of the university faculty urging them to list all their servants as German even if they were Czech. He reasoned as follows: Servants should only speak to their masters; since the latter are German, the language of all the servants must be German.

Another professor, while walking with a colleague one day, saw a house sign that seemed about to fall down on the sidewalk. “It doesn’t matter much,” he said, “since it is extremely probable that when it falls it will strike a Czech.”

One of the remarkable and frequently comical aspects of this hostility was that there was not even the slightest difference between the Germans and the Czechs in Prague so far as race and origin were concerned. The question of which nationality one belonged to was often a question of personal taste and which offered opportunities for earning a living.

Anton Lampa, Einstein’s closest colleague, was the son of a Czech janitor. But, as frequently happened among the Czechs, the son had worked his way up, driven by his ambition and a great desire for knowledge and learning. Though his father was a Czech, he worked in a building belonging to Germans, so young Lampa attended German schools. He spoke Czech and German with equal facility, and upon graduating from the gymnasium he was faced with the problem of deciding whether to attend the German or the Czech university. He chose the former and later became a student of Ernst Mach. Yet despite his past Lampa was just as hostile to the Czechs as the other Germans. He was one of those who, for instance, refused to buy a postcard if the word “postcard” was printed on it in both languages, and demanded a card having only the German word on it. If the post-office clerk was a Czech, he would frequently say that such cards had all been sold out. The professor would then argue that it was the clerk’s duty to keep cards with purely German text, and so a quarrel would begin.

Under these circumstances it was difficult even for a German who disapproved of this hostile attitude to come into contact with the Czechs. The latter were very suspicious and sensitive and felt insulted by every thoughtless word. They suspected everyone of wishing to humiliate and disparage them, and as a result it was not easy for a well-meaning German to maintain friendly relations with the Cechs. It is not surprising, therefore, that Einstein hardly came in contact with them. He disapproved the standpoint of his colleagues and did not join in their disparaging anecdotes, but he did not become intimately acquainted with any Czechs. But Czech students did attend his lectures and
carry on scientific research under his direction, in itself a rare occurrence at the German University.

Among his closest colleagues Einstein was attracted most strongly by a mathematician named Georg Pick. He was some twenty years older than Einstein and was an extraordinary personality, both as a man and as a scientist. Pick was above all a creative mind in mathematical research. In very concise papers he published many precisely formulated ideas, which were later developed by others as independent branches of mathematics. Nevertheless, he never received much of the scientific recognition he deserved, since he was of Jewish ancestry and had rather an uncompromising nature. He held firmly to what he considered was right and did not make concessions of any kind. After his retirement at an age of over 80, he died in a Nazi extermination camp.

As a young man Pick had been an assistant of Ernst Mach’s when Mach was professor of experimental physics at Prague. Einstein liked to hear Pick reminisce about Mach, and Pick was particularly fond of repeating statements by Mach that could be interpreted as anticipating Einstein’s theories. Pick was also a good violinist, and through him Einstein became acquainted with a group of music-lovers and was urged to participate in chamber music. After that, Einstein had his regular quartet evenings.

Einstein and Pick met almost daily and they discussed many problems together. In the course of long walks Einstein confided to Pick the mathematical difficulties that confronted him in his attempts to generalize his theory of relativity. Already at that time Pick made the suggestion that the appropriate mathematical instrument for the further development of Einstein’s idea was the “absolute differential calculus” of the Italian mathematicians Ricci and Levi-Civita.

Einstein’s immediate assistant at this time was a young man named Nohel. He was the son of a small Jewish farmer in a Bohemian village, and as a boy he had walked behind the plow. He had the quiet poise of a peasant rather than the nervous personality so often found among the Jews. He told Einstein a good deal about the condition of the Jews in Bohemia, and their conversations began to arouse Einstein’s interest in the relation between the Jews and the world around them. Nohel told him about the Jewish peasants and tradesmen who in their daily activities used the Czech language. On the Sabbath, however, they spoke only German. For them this language, so close to Yiddish, was a substitute for Hebrew, which had long since been given up as the language of daily life.