The Man Who Stalked Einstein (16 page)

• New discoveries that help further understand or apply existing knowledge;
  

• New explanations of phenomena that help the evolution of theories;
  

• New methods or instruments that have the potential to improve quantitation;
  

• New measurements that helped to determine the accuracy of theories;
  

• New theories
  

Einstein’s nominations most often fell within the last of these categories, which
was
terra incognita
for the committee members. Like Lenard, the committee members saw relativity as alien
to the world of sensory experience and, therefore, more of an intellectual exercise
than meaningful science with practical applications. Because Alfred Nobel’s will explicitly
stated that the prize should be given for tangible benefits, Einstein had an uphill
climb from the outset. In fact, by the end of the committee’s deliberations for 1914,
it was clear that it would be some time before Einstein would be seriously considered,
if he would be at all. That year, they had dismissed his accomplishments with a single
frigid sentence: “For the time being, there is no reason to take into account his
candidacy.”

The war years of 1914–1918 did little to improve Einstein’s chances for a Nobel Prize.
In addition to the prejudices of the physics committee, he now had to fight the Allies’
perceptions of German scientists. He might be an atypical German, but in many eyes,
he still was a German.

Einstein kept busy, putting the finishing touches on his theory of general relativity
and extending his considerations to gravitation. In 1915, he conceived a series of
lectures on relativity that he presented before the Prussian Academy of Sciences during
November. The lectures provided a framework for him to organize his work and publish
his new theory of general relativity comprehensively in an extensive article in the
March 1916 issue of
Annalen der Physik
. He quickly followed up that publication with a short book entitled
Relativity—the Special and General Theory
, designed to explain his ideas to an educated general audience in plain language,
with little math. Between 1915 and 1919, Einstein received fifteen nominations. Given
the strong anti-German bias of most Europeans, these mostly originated from German
scientists and physicists living in neutral countries. Among those nominating Einstein
in 1919, surprisingly, was physics committee member Svante Arrhenius, the winner of
the 1903 Prize.

Following his completion and publication of the theory of general relativity, Einstein
published several articles intimating the cosmological ramifications of his theories
that included the predictions that eventually secured his fame. There were three main
cosmological events that Einstein addressed. The first was a relativity-based explanation
of the shifting of the perihelion, or the closest point of Mercury’s orbit relative
to the sun. The Nobel committee acknowledged the workability of Einstein’s solution
but, in once again denying Einstein the Nobel Prize, their report noted that, so far,
there had been no validation of the correctness of the other two proofs: Einstein’s
prediction that the sun’s gravity would bend the light of closely aligned stars, and
his assertion that the sun’s gravity would cause a small shift in the red spectrum
of the sun relative to the same part of the light spectrum on earth. The committee
concluded, “There are also hitherto unobserved phenomena that have been derived from
the theory [meaning the two predictions], and it seems obvious that it must be of
fundamental significance when ascribing a value to it [the theory of relativity] whether
or not the derived consequences agree with reality.”

Thus, a prize for relativity was rejected in 1918, and again in 1919, at least in
part on the grounds of insufficient empirical data in support of his theories. Ironically,
when nominators proposed a prize for one or another of his accomplishments other than
relativity, the committee found a new argument for why an award for anything other
than relativity simply wouldn’t do:

[It] would appear peculiar to the learned world if Einstein were to receive the Prize
precisely for the work just reviewed [meaning his contributions to science other than
relativity], regardless of its obvious great value and utility for the development
of science, and not for his other major papers which much more than the ones at hand
have attracted the attention of those who have proposed him.

Even as scientific investigation chipped away at the objections to his candidacy,
like a celestial body in Einstein’s expanding universe, it seemed that the Nobel Prize
was receding ever farther from his grasp.

Soon, however, events in warmer locales would change the Nobel equation. Early in
November 1919, preliminary results of the British solar eclipse expedition leaked
to Einstein’s friends in Zurich. Another of Einstein’s three key predictions was confirmed
as accurate. The gravitational field of the sun did indeed bend starlight as it passed
closely by its considerable mass. His friend, Edgar Meyer, sent Einstein a congratulatory
poem on the back of a postcard:

All doubt removed

Finally, it is found

That light bends naturally

To Einstein’s greater glory

In the event that the British results were upheld through their final analysis, Einstein
would have ticked off yet another necessary criterion of what was proving to be a
very demanding Nobel committee.

How things had arrived at this state was as much due to good fortune as detailed
planning. Einstein’s Dutch friend Willem de Sitter had passed to Arthur Eddington
at Cambridge the cosmological articles published by Einstein during the war. Even
before he was aware of Einstein’s celestial predictions, Eddington had been considering
an expedition to conduct experiments during the May 29, 1919, total solar eclipse.
The Einstein papers increased his enthusiasm for the venture.

To improve his chances of success, Eddington planned on conducting his work at two
sites. Along with his assistant, E. T. Cottingham, he traveled to Principe Island
in the Bay of Guinea, off the coast of West Africa. The other party was led by Andrew
Crommelin and Charles Davidson, who set up shop near Fortaleza, Brazil. Both locations
would have a few minutes when the eclipse was complete to photograph the position
of nearby stars in the darkened sky.

On November 6, 1919, in a joint meeting of the Royal Society of London and the Royal
Astronomical Society, the retired Cambridge professor and Nobel laureate, J. J. Thompson,
announced the salient result. The photographic data obtained during the eclipse showed
a deflection of 1.7 degrees in the position of relevant stars relative to where they
were positioned in the night sky when the sun was not adjacent to them. It was exactly
what Einstein had predicted and double the deflection expected on the basis of classical
Newtonian physics. The positive outcome was run in the
Times of London
and then throughout the world. Einstein was the new Newton! The new Copernicus! Surely,
the press speculated, the Nobel physics committee would see a way to vote Einstein
a Nobel Prize.

Einstein’s new celebrity put him in something of a bind. One outcome of World War
I was the isolation of German scientists, who were not welcome at meetings held elsewhere
in Europe, a situation that did not begin to officially change until 1926. Einstein,
however, was treated differently. Perhaps because he had spurned German nationalism,
he became a favored nominee for the physics prize even for scientists from such countries
as France, England, and the United States. In Germany, however, he became a lightning
rod for right-wing extremists, who regarded his wartime behavior as un-German. This
was the period that gave rise to Weyland’s Working Group for the Preservation of Pure
Science and its anti-relativity lecture series, the attacks of Ernst Gehrcke, and
Lenard’s radicalization. Communist factions, on the other hand, viewed Einstein’s
ideas of non-absolute time and relativistic motion as degenerate Western idealism,
inappropriate for the reigning Soviet dialectic.

Einstein’s international fame translated into more travel and more lectures, which
he undertook not only as a scientist but also as an emissary of pacifism. During 1921,
Einstein made his first trip to the United States in the company of Chaim Weitzmann,
who had arranged a lecture tour to raise money for a Jewish university in Palestine.
In New York, Einstein was feted with a ticker tape parade. He received the Barnard
Medal for Meritorious Service to Science from the National Academy of Sciences and
Columbia University. Americans loved the quirky European, and he lectured before huge
crowds. At one particularly overcrowded event at Princeton University, Einstein is
said to have turned to his host and marveled, “I never realized that so many Americans
were interested in tensor analysis.”

Einstein’s participation in the Zionist-sponsored lecture tour conflicted with his
ethos of anti-nationalism. However, Einstein was convinced of the rightness of his
participation by Europe’s increasingly virulent anti-Semitism and his burgeoning consciousness
of his own ethnic heritage. Einstein, who, to this point in time had described himself
as “the child of Jewish parents” and shown little affinity for any form of religion—he
who had vocally eschewed nationalism—became a Zionist. All of this made him much more
a man of the world than a man of Germany. A beleaguered postwar Germany took notice.
He became a prominent target for reactionary critics, who referred to Einstein as
“un-German” or “internationalist,” a code word meant to brand Einstein with communist
leanings.

Einstein received eight Nobel nominations in 1920, fourteen in 1921. Despite continuing
hard feelings over the war, many of the nominations came from countries that had been
Germany’s enemies. The large number of nominations reflected the general excitement
over Eddington’s findings. In his 1921 nomination, Eddington called Einstein’s theory
of general relativity “one of the greatest landmarks in the history of scientific
thought.” His theory provided the first fresh insights on gravitation since Newton,
conjoined into a single theory an explanation for the workings of numerous important
natural phenomena, reconciled science and philosophy, and enabled further development
by other scientists.

In light of the Eddington results, the Nobel physics committee charged Svante Arrhenius
with drafting a special report on Einstein and relativity in 1920 and Allvar Gullstrand
with drafting one in 1921. Neither man had the background or worldview to understand
the mathematics of Einstein’s theories and the ramifications of his vision. As a result,
both reports clearly favored the views of the experimentalists in expressing skepticism
about particulars of Einstein’s theories. Arrhenius swallowed whole Gehrcke’s charges
of plagiarism regarding Einstein’s explanation of the shift in the perihelion of Mercury.
He seized upon uncertainties in Eddington’s measurements.

If possible, Gullstrand was even harder on Einstein than Arrhenius. His evaluation
determined that relativity theory “has the character of an article of faith rather
than a scientific hypothesis. . . . The effects [predicted by relativity theory] are
so small that they lay under the margin of observational error.” He dismissed Einstein’s
explanation of the perihelion of Mercury as circular reasoning. He leapt upon irregularities
in Eddington’s processes and data, declaring the work completely unreliable.

Chief among the Small Popes, Gullstrand was the individual who most firmly stood between
Einstein and a Nobel Prize, though other committee members were also resistant. Hasselberg,
who had taken ill during the 1921 proceedings, concurred with Gullstrand in saying,
“It is highly improbable that Nobel considered speculations such as these [meaning
the theory of relativity] to be the object of his prizes.”

If not for the deaths of two of the Small Popes, it is unlikely that anything would
have changed. The demise of Hasselberg and Granqvist paved the way for the appointment
of Carl Wilhelm Oseen, first as a temporary consulting committee member and later
as a permanent member. Oseen was a mathematician and theoretical physicist whose principle
interest was hydrodynamics. A member of the faculty at Uppsala, his worldview was
nonetheless contrary to the pre-relativistic experimentalism of the other Uppsala
professors on the committee. Gullstrand had frequently sought Oseen’s advice while
working on his 1921 evaluation of Einstein, but each time Oseen allayed one of Gullstrand’s
concerns, the elder scientist seized upon another. In the end, Gullstrand’s report
echoed the chief concern expressed by Philipp Lenard: Einstein’s theories were abstractions,
ungrounded in reality. On that basis, the theory of relativity was belief, not science.

Oseen’s election to the Swedish Academy of Sciences and his subsequent appointment
to the Nobel physics committee changed everything. He was a new and demanding force.
Oseen had nominated Einstein for the prize in 1920 and 1921. Seeing that a prize for
relativity was impossible, he struck upon the idea of proposing an award for Einstein’s
discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect. Now a member of the physics committee,
Oseen managed in the November 1921 committee meeting to fight off a comment in the
Arrhenius evaluation that it would seem odd to ignore Einstein’s theory of relativity
by awarding him a prize for lesser known work. Oseen forced a stalemate in the discussion;
the committee recommended that the 1921 prize be reserved for future determination.
Although the full Nobel assembly upheld this result, a number of voices raised the
issue of Einstein. When would the committee get around to nominating the most popular
scientist of this, or perhaps any, era?

Seventeen nominators supported Einstein in the committee’s November 1922 deliberations.
Although most of the nominations were for relativity theory, there was a fair sampling
of letters backing Einstein’s work on Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect.
Oseen wrote an in-depth report citing why he felt Einstein’s law of the photoelectric
effect was a significant enough contribution to warrant a Nobel Prize. In his report,
he linked Einstein’s law to Niels Bohr’s atomic model. Oseen was a close friend of
the young Dane. He admired Bohr’s model of electrons whizzing at different energy
levels around a central nucleus, calling it “the most beautiful of all the beautiful”
concepts in contemporary theoretical physics. Oseen showed how Einstein’s law underpinned
understanding of Bohr’s model and how drawing both together sustained Planck’s quantum
theory, which previously had stood apart in physics. Toward the end of his report,
Oseen summarized his argument for Einstein: