Albert Einstein by Kathleen Krull

Author:Kathleen Krull [Krull, Kathleen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101659908
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2009-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Too Beautiful to Be False

THE ACADEMIC TIDE had turned in favor of Einstein.

A tempting triple-offer came from the University of Berlin, thanks to Planck and others. Besides a professorship, the German offer promised his election to the Prussian Academy of Sciences (whose fifty members—all men—pompously addressed one another as “Your Excellency”). He’d be its youngest member at age thirty-four. He would also become the director of a new research center, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics … and the salary was hefty, with no teaching required—too good to be true.

To accept meant leaving Switzerland again and hiding his contempt for all things German. But he would be in the same city as Cousin Elsa and her home cooking. Einstein teased Planck by delaying his response, saying if he waved a red rose from the train station, it meant he accepted. A white rose meant no go.

A red rose it was. It was 1913 and he was poised at the height of his academic career.

As his new life began in Berlin, his marriage was in its death throes. “I treat my wife as an employee whom I cannot fire,” he wrote to a friend. A bizarre and cruel letter to Mileva proposed a contract in which she was to make sure “that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order, that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room.” He went on, “You will not expect any intimacy from me … you will stop talking to me if I request it.” In return he offered only to continue living with her and act with the politeness “such as I would exercise to any woman as a stranger.”

Oddly enough, she accepted the deal. But shortly afterward, she reneged. Mileva took custody of the boys and got on the train back to Zürich.

After seeing them off, Einstein did something very surprising, something he hardly ever did: He cried, mourning the loss of his sons. He planned to keep up a relationship with them, but swore he’d never marry again—it was just too “confining.”

Living alone, he decided, was “an indescribable blessing.” (Not entirely alone, as Elsa and her two daughters, Margot and Ilse, lived conveniently nearby.) He worked as many hours as he liked, slept when he pleased, and if he remembered to eat at all, would heat whatever was around in a saucepan.

He avoided the work he’d been hired to do—staffing his new Institute for Physics, which was created to do further research on quantum theory.

Instead, he kept to himself, obsessing over how to generalize his special theory of relativity. Two steps forward, one step back—he made progress, found mistakes and corrected them, and continued to wage war with math, consulting with Grossmann long-distance. “I have gained enormous respect for mathematics,” he said at one point.

Previously, Einstein had thrown out the well-entrenched Newtonian concept of absolute time. Time is relative, Einstein had theorized.

Now he looked at Newton’s concept of space, in which “absolute space, in its own nature, without relation to anything external, remains always similar and immovable.

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