einstein

(There was one odd coda to this event. In 1953, according to declassified documents in Einstein’s FBI file, a well-dressed German walked into
the FBI field office in Miami and told the receptionist he had information that Einstein had admitted to being a communist in an article in Berliner
Tageblatt in August 1920. The aspiring informer was none other than Paul Weyland, who had landed in Miami and was trying to emigrate after
years of being a con man and swindler all over the world. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was eagerly trying to prove, with no success, that Einstein was a
communist, and took up the cause. After three months, the Bureau finally found the article and translated it. There was nothing about being a
communist in it. Weyland was, nevertheless, granted American citizenship.) 22
The public crossfire coming out of the antirelativity rally heightened interest in the upcoming annual meeting of German scientists, scheduled for
late September in the spa town of Bad Nauheim. Both Einstein and Lenard were to attend, and Einstein had ended his newspaper response by
proclaiming that, at his suggestion, a public discussion of relativity would occur there. “Anyone who can dare face a scientific forum can present his
objections there,” he said, tossing a gauntlet in Lenard’s direction.
During the weeklong gathering in Bad Nauheim, Einstein stayed with Max Born in Frankfurt, twenty miles away, and the two men commuted to
the resort town by train each day. The big showdown over relativity, at which both Einstein and Lenard were expected to participate, was on the
afternoon of September 23. Einstein had forgotten to bring anything to write with, so he borrowed the pencil of the person next to him in order to
take notes while Lenard talked.
Planck was in the chair, and by both his commanding presence and soothing words he was able to prevent any personal attacks. Lenard’s
objections to relativity were similar to those of many nontheorists. The theory was built on equations rather than observations, he said, and it
“offends against the simple common sense of a scientist.” Einstein replied that what “seems obvious” changes over time. That was true even of
Galileo’s mechanics.
It was the first time that Einstein and Lenard had met, but they did not shake hands or speak to each other. And though the official minutes of the
meeting do not record it, Einstein apparently lost his equanimity at one point. “Einstein was provoked into making a caustic reply,” Born recalled.
And a few weeks later, Einstein wrote Born to assure him that he would “not allow myself to get excited again as in Nauheim.” 23
Finally, Planck was able to end the session, before any blood was drawn, with a limp joke. “Since the theory of relativity unfortunately has not so
far been able to extend the absolute time available for this meeting,” he said, “ it must now be adjourned.”The papers the next day were left without
headlines, and the antirelativity movement subsided for the time being. 24
As for Lenard, he distanced himself from the weird group of original antirelativists. “Unfortunately Weyland turned out to be a crook,” he later said.
But he did not let go of his own antipathy toward Einstein. After the Bad Nauheim meeting he became increasingly vitriolic and anti-Semitic in his
attacks on Einstein and “Jewish science.” He became a proponent of creating a “Deutsche Physik” that purged German physics of Jewish
influences, which to him was exemplified by Einstein’s relativity theory with its abstract, theoretical, and nonexperimental approach and its odor (at
least to him) of a relativism that rejected absolutes, order, and certainties.
A few months later, at the beginning of January 1921, an obscure Munich party functionary picked up the theme. “Science, once our greatest
pride, is today being taught by Hebrews,” Adolf Hitler wrote in a newspaper polemic. 25 There were even ripples that made it across the Atlantic.
That April, the Dearborn Independent, a weekly owned by automaker Henry Ford, a strong anti-Semite, blared a banner headline across the top of
its front page. “Is Einstein a Plagiarist?” it accusingly asked. 26
Einstein in America, 1921
Albert Einstein’s exploding global fame and budding Zionism came together in the spring of 1921 for an event that was unique in the history of
science, and indeed remarkable for any realm: a grand two-month processional through the eastern and midwestern United States that evoked the
sort of mass frenzy and press adulation that would thrill a touring rock star. The world had never before seen, and perhaps never will again, such a
scientific celebrity superstar, one who also happened to be a gentle icon of humanist values and a living patron saint for Jews.
Einstein had initially thought that his first visit to America might be a way to make some money in a stable currency in order to provide for his
family in Switzerland. “I have demanded $15,000 from Princeton and Wisconsin,” he told Ehrenfest.“It will probably scare them off. But if they do
bite, I will be buying economic independence for myself—and that’s not a thing to sniff at.”
The American universities did not bite. “My demands were too high,” he reported back to Ehrenfest. 27 So by February 1921, he had made other
plans for the spring: he would present a paper at the third Solvay Conference in Brussels and give some lectures in Leiden at the behest of
Ehrenfest.
It was then that Kurt Blumenfeld, leader of the Zionist movement in Germany, came by Einstein’s apartment once again. Exactly two years earlier,
Blumenfeld had visited Einstein and enlisted his support for the cause of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Now he was coming with an
invitation—or perhaps an instruction—in the form of a telegram from the president of the World Zionist Organization, Chaim Weizmann.
Weizmann was a brilliant biochemist who had emigrated from Russia to England, where he helped his adopted nation in the First World War by
coming up with a bacterial method for more efficiently manufacturing the explosive cordite. During that war he worked under former prime minister
Arthur Balfour, who was then first lord of the Admiralty. He subsequently helped to persuade Balfour, after he became foreign secretary, to issue the
famous 1917 declaration in which Britain pledged to support “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”
Weizmann’s telegram invited Einstein to accompany him on a trip to America to raise funds to help settle Palestine and, in particular, to create
Hebrew University in Jerusalem. When Blumenfeld read it to him, Einstein initially balked. He was not an orator, he said, and the role of simply
using his celebrity to draw crowds to the cause was “an unworthy one.”
Blumenfeld did not argue. Instead, he simply read Weizmann’s telegram aloud again. “He is the president of our organization,” Blumenfeld said,
“and if you take your conversion to Zionism seriously, then I have the right to ask you, in Dr. Weizmann’s name, to go with him to the United States.”
“What you say is right and convincing,” Einstein replied, to the “boundless astonishment” of Blumenfeld. “I realize that I myself am now part of the
situation and that I must accept the invitation.” 28
Einstein’s reply was indeed a cause for astonishment. He was already committed to the Solvay Conference and other lectures in Europe, he
professed to dislike the public spotlight, and his fragile stomach had made him reluctant to travel. He was not a faithful Jew, and his allergy to
nationalism kept him from being a pure and unalloyed Zionist.
Yet now he was doing something that went against his nature: accepting an implied command from a figure of authority, one that was based on
his perceived bonds and commitments to other people. Why?
Einstein’s decision reflected a major transformation in his life. Until the completion and confirmation of his general theory of relativity, he had
dedicated himself almost totally to science, to the exclusion even of his personal, familial, and societal relationships. But his time in Berlin had