Speaker 1: Personology is a production of I Heart Radio. The name
Speaker 1: Albert Einstein is virtually synonymous with the word genius. A
Speaker 1: theoretical physicist, he developed the theory of relativity and brought
Speaker 1: us the most famous of all equations, E equals MC squared.
Speaker 1: He changed our understanding of the universe entirely creative, original,
Speaker 1: brilliant and quirky. How can we understand what made him tick? Hi?
Speaker 1: I'm Dr Gail Saltz and you're listening to Personology. Thrilled
Speaker 1: to have with me today? Michael Gordon Professor of Modern
Speaker 1: and contemporary history, particularly the history of science, at Princeton University,
Speaker 1: and he is also the author of the new book
Speaker 1: Einstein in Bohemia. Einstein was born on March fourteenth, eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy nine, who was born in the South German town
Speaker 1: of Woom and his father, Hermann Einstein, was an entrepreneur
Speaker 1: in an electrical engineering firm, which he did with his brother,
Speaker 1: so it was a family business working in this kind
Speaker 1: of electrical technology. And Einstein's early work, especially work on
Speaker 1: special relativity, is also linked to electrical technology in a
Speaker 1: bunch of ways. And Einstein worked in a patent office,
Speaker 1: largely as a specialist evaluating electromagnetic technologies. It's also the
Speaker 1: hottest area of physics and physics and inspired engineering at
Speaker 1: the times. It's interesting that it did carry through although
Speaker 1: his father really wanted him essentially to go study engineering
Speaker 1: and join the family business, and that is not what
Speaker 1: Albert wanted to do. So in that sense they departed
Speaker 1: from one another. I mean, his father essentially let him depart,
Speaker 1: if you will. It's important to frame it as though
Speaker 1: it's some sort of break between the two of them,
Speaker 1: because the relations don't seem to have suffered terrible because
Speaker 1: of this. I would say they're in the solid middle
Speaker 1: class bourgeoisie, but they're not at the top of that.
Speaker 1: They're kind of in the middle, but there's always a
Speaker 1: bit of a struggle going on. Einstein seems to be
Speaker 1: mostly shielded from that, and when you look at childhood pictures,
Speaker 1: he has all the classic bourgeois child pictures of like
Speaker 1: boy in school uniform against the backdrop. And his relationship
Speaker 1: with his mother, it sounds as though she is the
Speaker 1: more strict, tough, if you will, presence in the family
Speaker 1: between the two parents, though it's not like many people's
Speaker 1: relationships with their mothers it's close, but it's not unfraught.
Speaker 1: So his parents are very typical of Jews in the
Speaker 1: bourgeoisie in that period. In living in urban Germany, they
Speaker 1: were largely assimilated. They did some of the very surface traditions,
Speaker 1: but didn't observe in any way. They were completely irreligious
Speaker 1: in that regard. When Einstein was about eleven twelve, he
Speaker 1: became substantially interested in the Jewish tradition and started studying
Speaker 1: the stuff and even preparing and thinking about apart Mitzpah,
Speaker 1: and then around page twelve he abandons all of it.
Speaker 1: Was it scientific readings, material or his his commitment to
Speaker 1: science that made him give it up? Yeah, So what
Speaker 1: we have We actually have very few sources about Einstein's youth,
Speaker 1: but one of the sources we have is from a
Speaker 1: medical student in Munich who would visit the household. So
Speaker 1: one of the traditions that the Einstein did, which is
Speaker 1: sort of classic Jewish tradition for the Sabbath, meal have
Speaker 1: a talmud student over at your house religious students and
Speaker 1: feed them as a way of supporting their studies. Max
Speaker 1: toalmwould later emigrates to the United States, changes his last
Speaker 1: name to Tommy tell Me writes a book on special relativity,
Speaker 1: explaining it to a popular audience, and at the back
Speaker 1: of it he put his memories of what Albert Einstein
Speaker 1: was like as a child. So it's one of the
Speaker 1: few sources we have of that period. So Max talmwould
Speaker 1: really hit it off with the boy Einstein. So there's
Speaker 1: about there's over a decade of difference in their ages
Speaker 1: that they spent a lot of time talking. He works
Speaker 1: through the proofs of Euclid with him from a textbook
Speaker 1: his uncle had given him, and they read other kinds
Speaker 1: of popular science books together. He gives the boy popular
Speaker 1: science books, and it's though that engagement with a scientific
Speaker 1: explanation of how things go that alienate him from religion.
Speaker 1: One of the things that makes Einstein so interesting to
Speaker 1: think about is he's a mixture of radically unconventional things
Speaker 1: and enormously conventional choices. He does both of those in
Speaker 1: a weird mix. He kicks an unusual first spouse, but
Speaker 1: then he expects her to behave in exactly the way
Speaker 1: a conventional spouse would. I think in some ways that
Speaker 1: he was a mixture, just as we're talking about in
Speaker 1: terms of the type of student that he was so.
Speaker 1: On the one hand, he clearly excelled in math and
Speaker 1: sciences in certain way and that was where his interests lie.
Speaker 1: In other areas not so much. There's a very common
Speaker 1: myth that Einstein was a terrible students, and that's just
Speaker 1: not true. He was a very good student in the
Speaker 1: math and sciences, and he was a decent mediocre to
Speaker 1: decent students in other areas. Some of that is lack
Speaker 1: of interest, some of that is also lack of talent.
Speaker 1: He clearly had a hard time with languages. Some people
Speaker 1: learn them more easily, other people learn them with a
Speaker 1: greater difficulty. His lack of facility with French is one
Speaker 1: of the things that holds him up and enrolling in
Speaker 1: the university, and he needs to take a year of
Speaker 1: schooling to get his French up to snuff. He started
Speaker 1: learning English when he was thirty one and always learned
Speaker 1: it kind of imperfectly, and his his German is enormously expressive,
Speaker 1: almost poetic in places. He had a real facility with
Speaker 1: the language, but not of facility with any other language.
Speaker 1: Even though he was eventually competent in French and English
Speaker 1: and could read some Italian this collection of attending to
Speaker 1: only things that really really interested him and clearly appearing
Speaker 1: to not attend and be able to have the same
Speaker 1: facility therefore with things that did not interest him, and
Speaker 1: then going on to not only attend to the things
Speaker 1: that interested him, but like what you might call hyper focus. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, like a deep dive that few other people
Speaker 1: could maintain for the lengths of time that he did,
Speaker 1: at the depth that he did. And that's why there
Speaker 1: are some groups that look at that collection of behaviors
Speaker 1: and say, could this be a person who has attention
Speaker 1: deficit disorder? In the sense that attention deficit disorder is
Speaker 1: not the lack of ability to pay attention, It is
Speaker 1: actually the faulty switch in one's ability to attend when
Speaker 1: one wants to attend, so that even, for example, if
Speaker 1: you're not going to do well in Greek or in
Speaker 1: French and you have to pay attention, you're able to
Speaker 1: get yourself to pay attention. But if you had a
Speaker 1: d D, you would just not be able to do it.
Speaker 1: You just could not make yourself do it. But if
Speaker 1: the math fascinated you, you could do that better and
Speaker 1: more deeply and for a longer period of time than
Speaker 1: somebody who did not have a d D. And in addition,
Speaker 1: many people with a d D, because of this faulty switch,
Speaker 1: their ability to harness innovative ideas and to have a
Speaker 1: greater number literally of out of the box thoughts that
Speaker 1: are related to daydreaming and fantasy and so on, is
Speaker 1: often superior. As an adult, he was perfectly capable of
Speaker 1: spending many hours paying attention to things he thought were
Speaker 1: boring and useless if they satisfied some greater goals. So
Speaker 1: he did a lot of fundraising for the Hebrew University
Speaker 1: in Jerusalem. He found these events idiotic and pointless, but
Speaker 1: he would do it. He engaged in extensive correspondence concerning
Speaker 1: the League of Nation, and lots of other efforts, such
Speaker 1: as writing affidavits for refugees in the nineties and trying
Speaker 1: to get them positions either in the UK or in
Speaker 1: the US. He would complain about how much time it
Speaker 1: was taking, but he would do it with focus. So
Speaker 1: it's not just the maths stuff that he can do
Speaker 1: this with. He can do this with a lot of things.
Speaker 1: I think it's just when he chooses to apply himself.
Speaker 1: He clearly did cultivate this image of the absent minded
Speaker 1: professor to some degree, I don't know, perhaps as a
Speaker 1: way of checking out when he preferred to check out,
Speaker 1: but the whole I don't tie my shoelaces, I don't
Speaker 1: wear socks. My hair looks like I've just stuck my
Speaker 1: finger in a socket. You know, he he clearly cultivated
Speaker 1: this image, that vision of mine, thing which I know
Speaker 1: everybody listening to this has in their mind right now.
Speaker 1: He did look like that, But he looked like that
Speaker 1: kind of the late thirties onward earlier. If you look
Speaker 1: at him in the twenties, he's dressed in a suit,
Speaker 1: he's got shoes, they're tied, and some of that is
Speaker 1: his wife died in thirty six and she stopped dressing him.
Speaker 1: But when he needed to look respectable, he looked perfectly respectable.
Speaker 1: It's only as he gets older that um either maybe
Speaker 1: he doesn't mean to, maybe he cares less. So it's
Speaker 1: it's not clear to me whether he always wanted to
Speaker 1: be kind of a shlub and then finally got the chance,
Speaker 1: or if the propensity to shlubbiness grew over time. This
Speaker 1: is a good spot to take a break, be back
Speaker 1: in a moment, Einstein rebelled against the authoritarian behavior of
Speaker 1: some of his teachers and dropped out of school at
Speaker 1: age sixteen. Later he was admitted to Swiss Polytechnic and
Speaker 1: five years later he graduated with his diploma to teach
Speaker 1: physics and mathematics. But Einstein couldn't find a teaching position,
Speaker 1: so he took a job in the patent office because
Speaker 1: he had to make money. He wanted to get married.
Speaker 1: There was already a first baby out of wedlock that
Speaker 1: was given up for adoption. He wanted to get married
Speaker 1: to start a family. He needed money, so he took
Speaker 1: the job. He liked the patent office in part because
Speaker 1: he was really good at it. So he did very
Speaker 1: well at this job. His superiors liked him. And when
Speaker 1: you think about what a patent officer has to do
Speaker 1: when they get a new invention, as they first of all,
Speaker 1: they have to figure out if it's new, and they
Speaker 1: have to figure out what the basic principle is the
Speaker 1: idea behind a patent application is there's a key idea
Speaker 1: that his novel and has some utility. So he got
Speaker 1: very good at reading these applications and seeing what are
Speaker 1: the fundamental principles By which this invention is supposed to work,
Speaker 1: and are they distinct from the fundamental principles of these
Speaker 1: other inventions that I looked at yesterday. That kind of
Speaker 1: thinking is not dissimilar to what he does with relativity theory,
Speaker 1: where he's like, what are the fundamental principles by which
Speaker 1: we measure time? We need a clock and we need
Speaker 1: to have mark an event happening at a certain place.
Speaker 1: The thought that he came in with the style of thinking,
Speaker 1: and that was what made him good the patent office,
Speaker 1: or did the work at the patent office inform his
Speaker 1: style of thinking that he would go on to use
Speaker 1: in terms of, you know, coming to special relativity and
Speaker 1: then general relativity. I think it's got to be a
Speaker 1: bit of both. He was certainly exposed to patent earlier
Speaker 1: because his father's business involved that kind of work, but
Speaker 1: even later when he was a professor, Einstein filed a
Speaker 1: ton of patents. Later on he had an idea for
Speaker 1: a refrigerator, he filed a patent, and Einstein continued to
Speaker 1: consult for people on their patent applications as a way
Speaker 1: of earning extra money and also because he was interested
Speaker 1: in it. So he liked the thinking in patents, and
Speaker 1: even after he didn't need the money anymore. So I
Speaker 1: think it's probably a bit that his style of thought
Speaker 1: mapped onto this, so it was congenial to him. But
Speaker 1: I think it's also it's the practice of doing it
Speaker 1: day in and day out created certain patterns of thinking.
Speaker 1: So he is newly married here. She became pregnant before
Speaker 1: they got married. He didn't marry her then, which is
Speaker 1: something that he could have done and sort of legitimized
Speaker 1: her and the whole thing. But because he didn't do that,
Speaker 1: she was sort of sent home, if you will, to
Speaker 1: have this baby. And sadly, it does seem from the
Speaker 1: few records that exist that that there may have been
Speaker 1: something wrong with the baby. Um. But we basically we
Speaker 1: don't even know what happened to the baby. It might
Speaker 1: have been adopted, it might have died, um, it might
Speaker 1: have been her family took the baby, but basically they
Speaker 1: have nothing further to do with this baby when she returns.
Speaker 1: She may have survived, you may not have survived. We
Speaker 1: just don't know at present what happened to her. People
Speaker 1: have looked, they're still looking, and that's the only daughter.
Speaker 1: So Einstein then marries her and they have two children.
Speaker 1: Hans Albert later on becomes the professor of engineering in
Speaker 1: the United States and has his own children. And then
Speaker 1: Eduard or as they called him, Teddy, and sadly, we
Speaker 1: know that Teddy ultimately developed schizophrenia and is serious slee
Speaker 1: psychiatrically ill marriage. The first wife also later on had
Speaker 1: very severe bouts of depression. There maybe some inherited mental
Speaker 1: illness that is going on in this case, but it's
Speaker 1: clear that Malva had her own struggles going on. But Teddy,
Speaker 1: Teddy really suffered quite badly as a girlder in a
Speaker 1: pained I'm fine to see it. His wife becomes more
Speaker 1: and more miserable, partially because she is a PhD physics
Speaker 1: student who would like to be doing work herself and
Speaker 1: really is sort of relegated to taking care of the
Speaker 1: house and taking care of the boys. Clearly, being relegated to,
Speaker 1: you know, housewife is not a happy circumstance for her.
Speaker 1: And and yet there is very little evidence that Einstein
Speaker 1: in any way tries to help or ameliorate her difficulties.
Speaker 1: His marriage falls apart, he doesn't have a close relationship
Speaker 1: with his children. He remarried to this distant cousin, but
Speaker 1: he similarly like an oddly unrelated sort of set up
Speaker 1: with her where you know, the deal was, you know,
Speaker 1: she would take care of him and be the wife,
Speaker 1: and he would be able to have relationships outside the
Speaker 1: marriage as long as they were just one at a time,
Speaker 1: you know, sort of serial infidelity and this odd way
Speaker 1: you know, even later of relating where he had this
Speaker 1: room in the house, you know, a private room where
Speaker 1: people could come in and meet with him, but his
Speaker 1: wife was to never come in there unless invited, because
Speaker 1: young women came in there who were invited. For many
Speaker 1: people who admire Einstein, the relationships with women is the
Speaker 1: picking point. It's unpleasant. He does not have the characteristics
Speaker 1: we now consider admirable. There's a lot of infidelity. He
Speaker 1: was immensely appealing to women, and he knew it, but
Speaker 1: it's almost like he was sort of unaware of who
Speaker 1: got hurt in the process. You know, you hear about
Speaker 1: serial philanderers that know exactly what they're doing and they're
Speaker 1: very savvy about it. They're very well aware of who
Speaker 1: it's hurting, and they have sort of almost a sociopathic
Speaker 1: you know, I don't care, but there are also people
Speaker 1: who do things in their relationships where it's almost like
Speaker 1: socially they're just not so aware, they're not aware that
Speaker 1: they're angry, that they're making others, you know, distressed or angry,
Speaker 1: or in the case of you know, his anti authoritarian
Speaker 1: reaction with professors. And I guess I just bring all
Speaker 1: this up because there are almost no names to put
Speaker 1: with Albert Einstein in terms of scientific discoveries and the
Speaker 1: magnitude of them, and the genius of him and such that.
Speaker 1: You know, you think of words like savant, and when
Speaker 1: you think of people who have savant like abilities, at
Speaker 1: the same time that socially they do so many maladaptive things,
Speaker 1: you do wonder about you know what today we used
Speaker 1: to call Asperger's now we call a very mild autism.
Speaker 1: But people who are incredibly intelligent in this skewed way,
Speaker 1: but socially emotionally have difficulty reading what's going on and
Speaker 1: therefore do a lot of things that make it hard
Speaker 1: for them to stay connected to important people. This grows
Speaker 1: over time. His relationship with Elsa, the cousin who becomes
Speaker 1: the second Mrs Einstein, began as an affair an extramarital
Speaker 1: affair where Malva would get hurt, and that begins in
Speaker 1: on a visit to Berlin from Prague, where they're living
Speaker 1: at the time, and then when they return to Zurich.
Speaker 1: There's actually a correspondence between them between Elsa and Albert
Speaker 1: where he says, you know, I destroyed your letters as
Speaker 1: you asked. You should probably send your letters to me
Speaker 1: in my office. So he's covering up the tracks. As
Speaker 1: he gets older, he cares less to cover up the tracks.
Speaker 1: Whether that's a cultural development or a psychological development, or
Speaker 1: just mediosyncrasy, it's hard to know. While the divorce is ongoing,
Speaker 1: he's basically living with his second wife. You can't really
Speaker 1: call Einstein a narcissist because narcissism is a grandiose view
Speaker 1: of oneself that's not consistent necessarily with reality, and in
Speaker 1: his case, well, his confident view of himself was very
Speaker 1: consistent with reality, so it makes it hard to call
Speaker 1: him a narcissist. But he did believe that he was
Speaker 1: going to he was doing these things. He was going
Speaker 1: to do these things such that he told Malva, when
Speaker 1: I win the Nobel Prize, I will give the prize
Speaker 1: money to you and the boys to take care of you.
Speaker 1: In Einstein wins the Nobel Prize in Physics for his
Speaker 1: services to theoretical physics and especially for his discovery of
Speaker 1: the law of the photoelectric effect, and he does indeed
Speaker 1: put the money in a trust for his children. The
Speaker 1: Nobel Prize when he says that is fifteen years old,
Speaker 1: it doesn't have the same status it now has, and
Speaker 1: looking at the kinds of people who have won Nobel
Speaker 1: Prizes up until that point, Einstein was quite reasonable to
Speaker 1: think that he would be in their number. Also, the
Speaker 1: scientific community is much smaller before World War Two than
Speaker 1: it is after World War two and much less global,
Speaker 1: so his chances of winning are higher that so it's
Speaker 1: not crazy. It still is a little bit galling to
Speaker 1: see that. And then when it happens and he gives
Speaker 1: the money, he wants to control how they spend the money.
Speaker 1: It's also complicated by the fact that rightland divorce begins,
Speaker 1: a war breaks out, which makes it hard to travel,
Speaker 1: even though Switzerland is neutral. And then after the war,
Speaker 1: when the Nobel Prize money does come in, Germany has
Speaker 1: the brunt of hyper inflation Switzerland doesn't, which is where
Speaker 1: the kids live, and it's very hard for Einstein actually
Speaker 1: financially meet the terms of the agreement because the currencies
Speaker 1: don't match. While the divorce is happening, he and Elsa
Speaker 1: have this relationship going. It is clear that Elsa really
Speaker 1: wants to regularize this. She wants to get married, and
Speaker 1: she's quite insistent on it. She has two fairly grown
Speaker 1: up daughters, Elsa and Margot and desn. Einstein proposed to
Speaker 1: one of the daughters as well, so he has a debate.
Speaker 1: He's like, should I propose to Elsa or should I
Speaker 1: propose to Ilsa, the older daughter, who's actually I kind
Speaker 1: of like better, And then he proposes to Elsa, and
Speaker 1: Elsa says, no, I really think you should marry my mother.
Speaker 1: And that's what he does. In this period, he has
Speaker 1: an affair with his secretary. There's lots of messiness in
Speaker 1: his life. In nineteen eleven, there's a big scandal breaks
Speaker 1: out in Paris with Marie Curie, who is having an
Speaker 1: affair with Paul Longevan, who is an important French physicist
Speaker 1: who's married. Madame Lingevan knows this, and they've kind of
Speaker 1: been having this kind of three way thing where they
Speaker 1: all know what's going on, but then it breaks into
Speaker 1: the newspapers and is used as a way to smear Curie. Einstein,
Speaker 1: who usually doesn't pay attention to stuff like this, pays
Speaker 1: attention to this, and he writes her a supportive letter,
Speaker 1: and he says, I don't understand what what people are doing,
Speaker 1: why people are smearing you this way? You're a very
Speaker 1: nice person. He also writes about it to his friend
Speaker 1: Einstein and says, like, why is everybody so upset about
Speaker 1: this infidelity? It's clear that nobody's getting hurt, and they
Speaker 1: all live in the same city, so it's not like
Speaker 1: he has to like travel really far to have an
Speaker 1: affair with her, Like like they all they're all there,
Speaker 1: they all know each other, Like it's not a problem,
Speaker 1: So why is everybody so sad about that? In his
Speaker 1: anti authoritarian ness, feels that the rules, the cultural rules,
Speaker 1: you know, aren't really sensical and shouldn't really apply, as
Speaker 1: opposed to his inability to see a record that these
Speaker 1: rules have to do with human feelings and people being hurt. No,
Speaker 1: he doesn't register the damage it does in the process
Speaker 1: of psycholanalizing Einstein, and it would have to psycholanalize Elsa
Speaker 1: as well to Elsa knew what she was getting into. Listen.
Speaker 1: I could just tell you from the work I do
Speaker 1: today that there are plenty of people who get involved
Speaker 1: with someone in an affair and still believe somehow that
Speaker 1: they will be the one and when they marry this
Speaker 1: person there will be no more cheating, and they are
Speaker 1: usually disappointed. It's unusual to be as academically and theoretically
Speaker 1: intelligent as Einstein is and to be as in some ways,
Speaker 1: let's say, lacking in emotional intelligence um in the way
Speaker 1: that he seems to be. And to make it even
Speaker 1: more complicated, Einstein was really good with children. Repeatedly. You
Speaker 1: see this in Princeton, but you also see this William Prague.
Speaker 1: On Sundays, he hangs out with a very large family
Speaker 1: of Mard's internets, who's a sanskritistin who teaches there um
Speaker 1: and the kids loved him. He would spend all day
Speaker 1: Sunday with them. Now he has his own family who
Speaker 1: aren't there like, so he's leaving his own family at
Speaker 1: home and going to hang out with somebody else's family.
Speaker 1: Adults with autism may have an easier time socializing with children,
Speaker 1: essentially because the pleasure in perseverating on something you know,
Speaker 1: to do something over and over again is something at
Speaker 1: would be more comfortable is actually a symptom of autism um.
Speaker 1: But you know it can work for you, let's say,
Speaker 1: in terms of engaging with children who might enjoy doing
Speaker 1: the same thing over and over again. And in your work,
Speaker 1: if you your attention to detail and your ability to
Speaker 1: you know, obsess on one thing, perseverate on one thing,
Speaker 1: something that might bore the heck out of somebody else
Speaker 1: can be a real asset um in terms of your
Speaker 1: thinking style, if you're trying to do rigorous, very specific
Speaker 1: scientific thinking. It's an interesting idea. I still resist in
Speaker 1: principle the sort of the idea. I think there's too
Speaker 1: much evidence about other aspects of mindstein. But it's very
Speaker 1: interesting that that patterns consistent. I think part of it
Speaker 1: may also just be him providing like so Tommy slash
Speaker 1: Talmud's impact on him as a child, that connection, I
Speaker 1: think is something that perhaps is live for him. It's
Speaker 1: something that he thinks, well. Another reason to be engage
Speaker 1: with these children's like you never know how you can
Speaker 1: shape their lives. This seems like a good place to
Speaker 1: take a break will be right back. Clearly, Albert Einstein
Speaker 1: was unusually intelligent. He himself spoke of his intense curiosity
Speaker 1: as an all important asset, and I quote, I have
Speaker 1: no special talent. I am only passionately curious. The important
Speaker 1: thing is to not stop questioning. Curiosity has its own
Speaker 1: reason for existing. His fame thought experiments like imagining riding
Speaker 1: on a beam of light were actually the use of
Speaker 1: daydreaming and fantasy thinking driven by curiosity. But great discoveries
Speaker 1: are sometimes made not only by great minds, but by
Speaker 1: the influence and interaction of the current culture that mine
Speaker 1: resides in. In the days before it was possible to
Speaker 1: know what a scientific competitor was working on in a
Speaker 1: different part of the world, scientists were often surprised to
Speaker 1: discover that another person or group was proceeding towards the
Speaker 1: same discovery. Had they not arrived there first, the discovery
Speaker 1: would still have been made, because information bubbling in the
Speaker 1: current environment was leading toward a breakthrough. Was this also
Speaker 1: a factor in Einstein's discoveries. There's an example which illustrates
Speaker 1: this really well, an example which drinks it not at all.
Speaker 1: So I'll give you both of those. First is special relativity,
Speaker 1: which is the theory of space and time. It's fundamentally
Speaker 1: a theory of electromagnetism about what happens when you go
Speaker 1: very close to the speed of light, but at a
Speaker 1: constant speed. He developed that at the patent office and
Speaker 1: he's talking about it with his friends. But there's a
Speaker 1: mathematician in France on ri plant Cares, one of the
Speaker 1: great mathematicians of the day, who's developing something very similar
Speaker 1: at basically the same time. And the reason for that
Speaker 1: is there's many reasons. You're the two basic once. The
Speaker 1: first is if you're working with Maxwell's equations and pay
Speaker 1: attention to them closely, there is a problem with how
Speaker 1: you measure the speed of light with respect to an
Speaker 1: ether that pervades everything, perhaps, but the equations don't require that.
Speaker 1: So you have these equations that don't seem to fit
Speaker 1: with the assumptions of the science at the time, and
Speaker 1: if you think really hard about it, special relativity can
Speaker 1: pop out of that. The second is electrical technologies everywhere,
Speaker 1: so the problems of coordinating time and how do you
Speaker 1: measure time at the same time in different places that
Speaker 1: can communicate with each other, which is important for railroads
Speaker 1: and for um surveying and mapping. Those are real problems
Speaker 1: that lots of people are thinking about, and in different ways.
Speaker 1: Einstein i Plunker were both engaged with that problem, one
Speaker 1: in the patent office and the other for the Bureau
Speaker 1: of Longitude in France trying to coordinate time measurements. So
Speaker 1: it's clear that that science emerges out of a culture.
Speaker 1: The counter example is general relativity. When Einstein expands not
Speaker 1: just a constant speed but to accelerated speed, and when
Speaker 1: you try to expand the theory of that way, gravity
Speaker 1: pops out of it. I say pops out like it's easy.
Speaker 1: It took many, many years to work out this theory,
Speaker 1: but it's weird that a fundamental extension of this theory
Speaker 1: of space and time would produce gravitational attraction as a
Speaker 1: consequence of the shape space time. Einstein starts working, he
Speaker 1: has the idea in nineteen o seven, and then he
Speaker 1: can't work on it for a few years because he's
Speaker 1: distracted by quantum theory, just something else he's innovating in
Speaker 1: this whole period, and then in leven when he moves
Speaker 1: to product he starts to work on general relativity almost exclusively,
Speaker 1: and all of his colleagues think this is crazy. They're like,
Speaker 1: why do you care about gravity? It's not an interesting area.
Speaker 1: There's a couple of tiny problems about measuring this or
Speaker 1: measuring that, and we don't need to have a general
Speaker 1: theory of relativity at presence. And while you're doing this,
Speaker 1: the quantum revolution, like, the most exciting thing to happen
Speaker 1: in the physics of the micro world, which you helped build,
Speaker 1: is bursting everywhere. Why are you abandoning that and working
Speaker 1: on this tiny thing about gravity. His competitors in the
Speaker 1: gravity area are an underemployed physicist from Finland, which is
Speaker 1: then part of the Russian Empire, and a guy who
Speaker 1: as student of mox Plunks who can't get a job
Speaker 1: anywhere and ends up teaching at a place in Italy.
Speaker 1: And they're they're totally marginal people. So he moved from
Speaker 1: like being with the types of mox Plunk too um
Speaker 1: competing with people who are not at all of the
Speaker 1: same prominence because gravity wasn't that exciting a topic, and
Speaker 1: I Einstein kind of makes gravity an exciting topic because
Speaker 1: the scale and the ingenuity of the result. He comes
Speaker 1: up with is so striking. But that is a case
Speaker 1: where it's not like if he hadn't done it, somebody
Speaker 1: else would have. And now, with so much excitement about
Speaker 1: cosmology and gravitational waves, extansion and the universe, all these topics,
Speaker 1: it seems obvious that people would care about gravity black hole.
Speaker 1: Gravity was considered mostly a solved problem at the time.
Speaker 1: That's one thing that's hard to convey. The other thing
Speaker 1: it's hard to convey, or maybe not so hard, is
Speaker 1: how exciting quantum here you. I mean, it's it's born
Speaker 1: in Einstein's radical reinterpretation of it with the photon is
Speaker 1: in five, and then in n eleven he's like, okay,
Speaker 1: six years after kind of busting the field, that I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna step aside when all the great minds in
Speaker 1: Europe are doing this is really surprising. I think it's
Speaker 1: also important for people to understand much of this initial
Speaker 1: thought and initial work this was happening. He was in
Speaker 1: his twenties, which today sounds, you know, you're kind of
Speaker 1: incredulous that someone in their twenties could be making these
Speaker 1: kinds of completely science changing understandings come to life. But
Speaker 1: the reality is that the brain is in a certain
Speaker 1: kind of peak in terms of plasticity and new neurons growing,
Speaker 1: and the juxtaposition I guess of acquired knowledge with the
Speaker 1: plasticity of the brain and change being able to happen
Speaker 1: in the brain is really a certain kind of peak
Speaker 1: in the twenties, such that you find often that people
Speaker 1: who make their greatest discoveries have actually had those initial
Speaker 1: thoughts at that time in their twenties. So amongst theoretical
Speaker 1: physicist and mathematicians, the idea that someone in their twenties
Speaker 1: would make the great discoveries is not surprising because they
Speaker 1: expect that you'll do your best work before your twenty
Speaker 1: five and then you're basically done. I think Einstein is
Speaker 1: actually at the root of that idea, that cultural assumption,
Speaker 1: because he did those things when he was young. If
Speaker 1: you look into the nineteenth century, there are very few
Speaker 1: cases of the great mathematicians being young. The stuff that
Speaker 1: Pavlov did that we all think of now with the
Speaker 1: buzzers and the dogs, he started that project when he
Speaker 1: was sixty. Neuroscientists, of course, are fascinated by and what
Speaker 1: you know, have wondered, you know, was there something different
Speaker 1: about Einstein's brain? Someone has looked at some point, I
Speaker 1: guess shortly after his death, and made note of increased
Speaker 1: number of saulsi, which are basically the folds of the
Speaker 1: outer shell of the cortex of the brain, which is
Speaker 1: where you know, higher order thinking occurs, and noted that
Speaker 1: he had many more sulsi than the average brain. Beyond that, sadly,
Speaker 1: it seems like whatever tissue was available is no longer available.
Speaker 1: Things seem to have disappeared. It's really kind of tragic.
Speaker 1: And then, of course, even if there are more sulsai,
Speaker 1: were there more salsai from the get go, there's no
Speaker 1: way to know that, or did all of his thinking
Speaker 1: and all of his science and all of his work
Speaker 1: caused the plastic brain to develop these more souls i.
Speaker 1: You know, obviously that's something that you can't answer because
Speaker 1: of course we didn't have m r I and there
Speaker 1: was you know, we weren't scanning his brain as we went.
Speaker 1: But it's an interesting question. Yeah. I don't follow the
Speaker 1: brain stuff, but let me tell you why, because I
Speaker 1: have a sort of moral revulsion for the story about
Speaker 1: the brain. So thanks Sin insisted that he be cremated.
Speaker 1: He wanted to ashes dispersed. He didn't want a shrine.
Speaker 1: He didn't want to see that people would valerize later.
Speaker 1: No one had ever been as famous as Einstein. It's
Speaker 1: not clear whether anybody actually has since been as famous
Speaker 1: as Einstein was. He was more famous than Charley Chaplain.
Speaker 1: Everybody knew his visage, everything he said got into the newspapers,
Speaker 1: and to some degree, this was a burden day. Sometimes
Speaker 1: he liked it, but a lot of times this was
Speaker 1: a burden head as I imagine it would be to
Speaker 1: most of us. He didn't want to become some kind
Speaker 1: of secular saint. He didn't think that that's appropriate. So
Speaker 1: he didn't want to be to be a grave people
Speaker 1: could visit. There's now a statue in Princeton, but it
Speaker 1: was erected in two thousand and five. He didn't want
Speaker 1: any of that, and so he went to the Princeton hospital.
Speaker 1: He dies there and the pathologist steals his brain, cuts
Speaker 1: out the brain, puts it in the cooler, takes it
Speaker 1: and then drives across the country with it, keeps it
Speaker 1: for years in formaldehyd and so it's stolen. It's a
Speaker 1: violation of informed consent to be working with this brand.
Speaker 1: This man cut it out and stole the brain and
Speaker 1: kept it. There are people who track him down later
Speaker 1: and he gives them a little bits of the brain.
Speaker 1: He cuts out parts of the brain like as a gift.
Speaker 1: It strikes me so deeply as something that's disrespectful. Well
Speaker 1: it is, it's it's morally reprehensible. Right now, you can
Speaker 1: buy an app for your phone which will show you
Speaker 1: scans of cross sections of einstein brain. I don't have
Speaker 1: that on my phone for this reason. Were people aware
Speaker 1: that he was the one who stole or they just
Speaker 1: didn't know where the brain went, or they didn't even
Speaker 1: know the brain was missing. That the brain was missing
Speaker 1: and being analyzed by people was known at a certain point.
Speaker 1: The Einstein estate wasn't happy about that, but it was
Speaker 1: a little they could do to get it back. But
Speaker 1: it wasn't immediately known that he had done this. That's
Speaker 1: a tragic end um which which I didn't even know about.
Speaker 1: Tragic end for Einstein, you know, just in terms of
Speaker 1: what was important his belief system. I mean, he'd already suffered.
Speaker 1: He obviously was suffering mightily towards the end of his
Speaker 1: life in terms of his feeling about his role in
Speaker 1: the development and use of nuclear weapons and the ending
Speaker 1: of World War Two. He definitely had some moral dilemmas
Speaker 1: that did bother him. Nonetheless, this was something I didn't
Speaker 1: know done to him that postmortem. That's really really quite tragic.
Speaker 1: Einstein holds a unique place and how we understand the
Speaker 1: universe and the physical properties of our world. But he
Speaker 1: struggled more so was understanding important people in his life.
Speaker 1: His passion for endless inquiry drove him to always ask
Speaker 1: why out yonder there was this huge world, he said,
Speaker 1: which exists independently of us human beings, and which stands
Speaker 1: before us like a great eternal riddle, at least partially
Speaker 1: accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this
Speaker 1: world beckoned like a liberation. This is Personalogy. Follow me
Speaker 1: on Twitter at Dr Gayl Saltz or Personlogy m D.
Speaker 1: Thank you to my guest, Michael Gordon, Professor at Princeton University,
Speaker 1: and if you'd like to learn more about our subject
Speaker 1: today pick up his book, Einstein in Bohemia, A fascinating read.
Speaker 1: Personology is a production of I Heart Radio. The executive
Speaker 1: producers are doctor Gayl Saltz and Tyler Klang. The supervising
Speaker 1: producer is Dylan Fagan. The associate producer is Lowell Berlanti.
Speaker 1: Editing music and mixing by Lowell Berlante. For more podcasts
Speaker 1: from My Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.