3.8 A Very Beautiful Day

In 1894 Einstein's parents and younger sister Maja moved to Italy, where his father hoped to start a new business. It was arranged for Albert, then 15, to remain in Munich to complete his studies at the Gymnasium (high school). However, the young lad soon either dropped out or was invited to leave (recollections differ). He then crossed the Alps to reunite with his family in Italy. Lacking a high school diploma, his options for further education were limited, but his father still hoped for him to become an electrical engineer, which required a university degree. It so happens that the Zurich Polytechnic Institute had an unusual admissions policy which did not require a high school diploma, provided the applicant could pass the entrance examination, so after a year off in Italy, the 16 year old Albert was dispatched to Zurich to take the exam. He failed, having made (as he later admitted) "no attempt whatsoever to prepare myself". In fairness, it should be noted that the usual age for taking the exam was 18, but it seems he wasn't particularly eager to (as his father advised) "forget his philosophical nonsense and apply himself to a sensible trade like electrical engineering".

Fortunately, the principal of the Polytechnic noted the young applicant's unusual strength in mathematics, and helped make arrangements for Einstein to attend a catonal school in the picturesque town of Aarau, twenty miles west of Zurich. The headmaster of the school was Professor Jost Winteler, an ornithologist. During his time in Aarau Einstein stayed with the Winteler family, and always had fond memories of the time he spent there, in contrast with what he regarded as the coercive atmosphere at the Munich Gymnasium. He became romantically involved with Marie Winteler (Jost's daughter), but the relationship ended badly when Einstein took up with Mileva Maric. He also formed life-long relationships with two of the other Winteler children, Paul and Anna. Paul Winteler married Einstein's sister Maja, and Anna Winteler married Michelangelo Besso, one of Einstein's closest friends. Besso, six years older than Einstein, was a Swiss-Italian studying to be an electrical engineer. Like Einstein, he played the violin, and the two of them first met at a musical gathering in 1896.

It was at about this same time that the 16 year old Einstein first wondered how the world would appear to someone travelling at the speed of light. He realized that to such an observer a co-moving lightwave in a vacuum would appear as a spatially fluctuating standing wave, i.e., a stationary wave of light, but it doesn't take an expert in Maxwell's equations to be skeptical that any such configuration is possible. Indeed, Einstein later recalled that "from the beginning it appeared to me intuitively clear" that light must propagate in the same way with respect to any system of inertial coordinates. However, this invariance directly contradicts the Galilean addition rule for the composition of velocities. This problem stayed with Einstein for the next ten years, during which time he finally gained entrance to the Polytechnic, and, to the disappointment of his family, switched majors from electrical engineering to physics. His friend Besso continued with his studies and became an electrical engineer.

Despite his love of physics, Einstein did not perform very impressively as an under-graduate in an academic setting, and this continued to be true in graduate school. Hermann Minkowski referred to his one-time pupil as a "lazy dog". As the biographer Clark wrote, "Einstein became, as far as the professorial staff of the ETH was concerned, one of the awkward scholars who might or might not graduate but who in either case was a great deal of trouble". Professor Pernet at one point suggested to Einstein that he switch to medicine or law rather than physics, saying "You can do what you like, I only wish to warn you in your own interest". Clearly Einstein "pushed along with his formal work just as much as he had to, and found his real education elsewhere". Often he didn't even attend the lectures, relying on Marcel Grossman's notes to cram for exams, making no secret of the fact that he wasn't interested in what men like Weber had to teach him. His main focus during the four years while enrolled at the ETH was independently studying the works of Kirchhoff, Helmholtz, Hertz, Maxwell, Poincare, etc., flagrantly outside the course of study prescribed by the ETH faculty.

Einstein later recalled that after graduating in 1900 the "coercion" of being forced to take the final exams "had such a detrimental effect that... I found the consideration of any scientific problem distasteful to me for an entire year". He achieved an overall mark of 4.91 out of 6, which is rather marginal. Academic positions were found for all members of the graduating class in the physics department of the ETH with the exception of Einstein, who seems to have been written off as virtually unemployable, "a pariah, discounted and little loved", as he later said.

Toward the end of 1901 he had still found no permanent position. As he wrote to Grossman in December of that year, "I am sure I would have found a position [by now] were it not for Weber's intrigues against me". It was only because Grossman's father happened to be good friends with Haller, the chief of the Swiss Patent Office, that Einstein was finally given a job, despite the fact that Haller judged him to be "lacking in technical training". Einstein wrote gratefully to the Grossman's that he "was deeply moved by your devotion and compassion which do not let you forget an old, unlucky friend", and that he would spare no effort to live up to their recommendation. He had applied for Technical Expert 2nd class, but was given the rank of 3rd class (in June 1902).

As soon as he'd been away from the coercive environment of academia long enough that he could stand once again to think about science, he resumed his self-directed studies, which he pursued during whatever free time a slightly lazy patent examiner can make for himself. His circumstances were fairly unusual for someone working on a doctorate, especially since he'd already been rejected for academic positions by both the ETH and the University of Zurich. He was undeniably regarded by the academic community (and others) as "an awkward, slightly lazy, and certainly intractable young man who thought he knew more than his elders and betters".

In early 1905, while employed as a patent examiner in Bern, Einstein was striving to complete his doctoral thesis, focusing on black-body radiation, and at the same time writing a paper on light-quanta (later cited by the Nobel committee) and another on Brownian motion. Each of these was a tremendous contribution to 20th century physics, but one has the impression that Einstein was, in a sense, getting these duties out of the way, so that he could concentrate on the "philosophical nonsense" of the velocity addition problem, which he realized was "a puzzle not easy to solve at all". In other words, he realized that he couldn't count on being able to produce anything useful on this question, even though his attention was inexorably drawn to it. One imagines that he forced himself to complete the papers on statistical physics - in which he knew he had something to say - before allowing himself the luxury of focusing on the fascinating but possibly insoluble philosophical problem of motion.

After completing the statistical papers on March 17, April 30, and May 10, 1905, he allowed himself to concentrate fully on the problem of motion, which apparently had never been far from his mind. As he later recalled, he "felt a great difficulty to resolve the question... I had wasted time almost a year in fruitless considerations..." Then came the great turning point, both for Einstein's own personal life and for modern physics: "Unexpectedly, a friend of mine in Bern then helped me." The friend was Michelangelo Besso, who had also taken a job at the Swiss patent office. In his Kyoto lecture of 1922 Einstein later remembered the circumstances of the unexpected help he received from Besso:

It had suddenly become clear to Einstein during his discussion with Besso that the correlation of time at different spatial locations is not absolutely defined, since it depends fundamentally on some form of communication between those locations. Thus, the concept of simultaneity at separate locations is relative. A mere five weeks after this recognition, Einstein completed "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", in which he presented the special theory of relativity. This monumental paper contains not a single reference to the literature, and only one acknowledgement:

We don't know precisely what those suggestions were, but we have Einstein's later statement that he "could not have found a better sounding board for his ideas in all of Europe." It was Besso also introduced Einstein to the writings of Ernst Mach, which were to have such a profound influence on the development of the general theory (although subsequently Einstein emphasized the influence of Hume over Mach). Besso self-deprecatingly described their intellectual relationship by saying "Einstein the eagle took Besso the sparrow under his wing, and the sparrow flew a little higher". The two men carried on a regular correspondence that lasted over half a century, through two world wars, and Einstein's incredible rise to world fame.

The friendship with Besso was, in some ways, the most meaningful of Einstein's life. Michael and his wife sometimes took care of Einstein's children, tried to reconcile Einstein with Mileva when their marriage was foundering, and so on. Another of the few close personal ties that Einstein was able to maintain over the years was with Max von Laue, who Einstein believed was the only one of the Berlin physicists who behaved decently during the Nazi era. Following the war, a friend of Einstein's was preparing to visit Germany and asked if Einstein would like him to convey any messages to his old friends and collegues. After a moment of thought, Einstein said "Greet Laue for me". The friend, trying to be helpful, then asked specifically about several other individuals among Einstein's former associates in his homeland. Einstein thought for another moment, and said "Greet Laue for me".

The stubborn, aloof, and uncooperative aspect of Einstein's personality that he had shown as a student continued to some extent throughout his life. For example, in 1937 he collaborated with Nathan Rosen on a paper purporting to show, contrary to his own prediction of 1916, that gravitational waves cannot exist - at least not without unphysical singularities. He submitted this paper to Physical Review, and it was returned to him with a lengthy and somewhat critical referee report asking for clarifications. Apparently Einstein was unfamiliar with the refereeing of papers, routinely practiced by American academic journals. He wrote back to the editor

Was the postscript about Mr. Rosen's departure to the Soviet Union (in the politically charged atmosphere of the late 1930's) an oblique jibe at American mores, or just a bland informational statement? In any case, Einstein submitted the paper, unaltered, to another journal (The Journal of the Franklin Institute). However, before it appeared he came to realize that its argument was faulty, causing him to re-write the paper and its conclusions.

Interestingly, what Einstein had realized is precisely what the anonymous referee had pointed out, namely, that by a change of coordinates the construction given by Einstein and Rosen was simply a description of cylindrical waves, with a singularity only along the axis (thus considered to be an acceptable singularity). The referee report still exists among Einstein's private papers, although it isn't clear if the correction was prompted by the Physical Review's referee report. (The correction may also have been prompted by private comments from Howard Percy Robertson (via Infeld) who had just returned to Princeton from sabbatical. On the other hand, these two possibilities may amount to the same thing, since Kennefick speculates that Robertson was the anonymous referee!)

Another aspect of Einstein's personality that seems incongruous with scholarly success was his remarkable willingness to make mistakes in public and change his mind about things, with seemingly no concern for the effect this might have on his academic credibility. Regarding the long succession of "unified field theories" that Einstein produced in the 1920's and 30's, Pauli commented wryly "It is psychologically interesting that for some time the current theory is usually considered by its author to be the 'definitive solution'". Eventually Einstein gave up on the particular approach to unification that he had been pursuing in those theories, and cheerfully wrote to Pauli "You were right after all, you rascal". Lest we think that this willingness to make and admit mistakes was a characteristic only of the aged Einstein, past his prime, recall Einstein's wry self-description in a letter to Ehrenfest in December 1915: "That fellow Einstein suits his convenience. Every year he retracts what he wrote the year before."

In 1939 Einstein's sister Maja Winteler, was forced by Mussolini's racial policies to leave Florence. She went to Princeton to join her brother while Paul moved in with his sister Anna and Michel Besso's family in Geneva. Maja and Paul never saw each other again. In 1946, after the war, they began making plans to reunite in Geneva, but Maja suffered a stroke, and thereafter remained bedridden until her death in 1951. To Besso in 1954, nearly 50 years after their discussion in the patent office, Einstein wrote:

In March of the following year, Michelangelo Besso died at his home in Geneva. Einstein wrote to the Besso family "Now he has gone a little ahead of me in departing from this curious world". Einstein died three weeks later, on April 18, 1955.

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