einstein
einstein
einstein
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Recognition<br />
CHAPTER SEVEN<br />
THE HAPPIEST THOUGHT<br />
1906–1909<br />
Einstein’s 1905 burst of creativity was astonishing. He had devised a revolutionary quantum theory of light, helped prove the existence of atoms,<br />
explained Brownian motion, upended the concept of space and time, and produced what would become science’s best known equation. But not<br />
many people seemed to notice at first. According to his sister, Einstein had hoped that his flurry of essays in a preeminent journal would lift him<br />
from the obscurity of a third-class patent examiner and provide some academic recognition, perhaps even an academic job. “But he was bitterly<br />
disappointed,” she noted. “Icy silence followed the publication.” 1<br />
That was not exactly true. A small but respectable handful of physicists soon took note of Einstein’s papers, and one of these turned out to be, as<br />
good fortune would have it, the most important possible admirer he could attract: Max Planck, Europe’s revered monarch of theoretical physics,<br />
whose mysterious mathematical constant explaining black-body radiation Einstein had transformed into a radical new reality of nature. As the<br />
editorial board member of Annalen der Physik responsible for theoretical submissions, Planck had vetted Einstein’s papers, and the one on<br />
relativity had “immediately aroused my lively attention,” he later recalled. As soon as it was published, Planck gave a lecture on relativity at the<br />
University of Berlin. 2<br />
Planck became the first physicist to build on Einstein’s theory. In an article published in the spring of 1906, he argued that relativity conformed to<br />
the principle of least action, a foundation of physics that holds that light or any object moving between two points should follow the easiest path. 3<br />
Planck’s paper not only contributed to the development of relativity theory; it also helped to legitimize it among other physicists. Whatever<br />
disappointment Maja Einstein had detected in her brother dissipated. “My papers are much appreciated and are giving rise to further<br />
investigations,” he exulted to Solovine. “Professor Planck has recently written to me about that.” 4<br />
The proud patent examiner was soon exchanging letters with the eminent professor. When another theorist challenged Planck’s contention that<br />
relativity theory conformed to the principle of least action, Einstein took Planck’s side and sent him a card saying so. Planck was pleased. “As long<br />
as the proponents of the principle of relativity constitute such a modest little band as is now the case,” he replied to Einstein, “it is doubly important<br />
that they agree among themselves.” He added that he hoped to visit Bern the following year and meet Einstein personally. 5<br />
Planck did not end up coming to Bern, but he did send his earnest assistant, Max Laue.* He and Einstein had already been corresponding about<br />
Einstein’s light quanta paper, with Laue saying that he agreed with “your heuristic view that radiation can be absorbed and emitted only in specific<br />
finite quanta.”<br />
However, Laue insisted, just as Planck had, that Einstein was wrong to assume that these quanta were a characteristic of the radiation itself.<br />
Instead, Laue contended that the quanta were merely a description of the way that radiation was emitted or absorbed by a piece of matter. “This is<br />
not a characteristic of electromagnetic processes in a vacuum but rather of the emitting or absorbing matter,” Laue wrote, “and hence radiation<br />
does not consist of light quanta as it says in section six of your first paper.” 6 (In that section, Einstein had said that the radiation “behaves<br />
thermodynamically as if it consisted of mutually independent energy quanta.”)<br />
When Laue was preparing to visit in the summer of 1907, he was surprised to discover that Einstein was not at the University of Bern but was<br />
working at the patent office on the third floor of the Post and Telegraph Building. Meeting Einstein there did not lessen his wonder. “The young man<br />
who came to meet me made so unexpected an impression on me that I did not believe he could possibly be the father of the relativity theory,” Laue<br />
said, “so I let him pass.” After a while, Einstein came wandering through the reception area again, and Laue finally realized who he was.<br />
They walked and talked for hours, with Einstein at one point offering a cigar that, Laue recalled, “was so unpleasant that I ‘accidentally’ dropped it<br />
into the river.” Einstein’s theories, on the other hand, made a pleasing impression. “During the first two hours of our conversation he overthrew the<br />
entire mechanics and electrodynamics,” Laue noted. Indeed, he was so enthralled that over the next four years he would publish eight papers on<br />
Einstein’s relativity theory and become a close friend. 7<br />
Some theorists found the amazing flurry of papers from the patent office to be uncomfortably abstract. Arnold Sommerfeld, later a friend, was<br />
among the first to suggest there was something Jewish about Einstein’s theoretical approach, a theme later picked up by anti-Semites. It lacked<br />
due respect for the notion of order and absolutes, and it did not seem solidly grounded. “As remarkable as Einstein’s papers are,” he wrote Lorentz<br />
in 1907, “it still seems to me that something almost unhealthy lies in this unconstruable and impossible to visualize dogma. An Englishman would<br />
hardly have given us this theory. It might be here too, as in the case of Cohn, the abstract conceptual character of the Semite expresses itself.” 8<br />
None of this interest made Einstein famous, nor did it get him any job offers. “I was surprised to read that you must sit in an office for eight hours<br />
a day,” wrote yet another young physicist who was planning to visit. “History is full of bad jokes.” 9 But because he had finally earned his doctorate,<br />
he had at least gotten promoted from a third-class to a second-class technical expert at the patent office, which came with a hefty 1,000-franc raise<br />
to an annual salary of 4,500 francs. 10<br />
His productivity was startling. In addition to working six days a week at the patent office, he continued his torrent of papers and reviews: six in<br />
1906 and ten more in 1907. At least once a week he played in a string quartet. And he was a good father to the 3-year-old son he proudly labeled<br />
“impertinent.” As Mari wrote to her friend Helene Savi , “My husband often spends his free time at home just playing with the boy.” 11<br />
Beginning in the summer of 1907, Einstein also found time to dabble in what might have become, if the fates had been more impish, a new<br />
career path: as an inventor and salesman of electrical devices like his uncle and father. Working with Olympia Academy member Conrad Habicht<br />
and his brother Paul, Einstein developed a machine to amplify tiny electrical charges so they could be measured and studied. It had more<br />
academic than practical purpose; the idea was to create a lab device that would permit the study of small electrical fluctuations.<br />
The concept was simple. When two strips of metal move close to each other, an electric charge on one will induce an opposite charge on the<br />
other. Einstein’s idea was to use a series of strips that would induce the charge ten times and then transfer that to another disc. The process would<br />
be repeated until the original minuscule charge would be multiplied by a large number and thus be easily measurable. The trick was making the<br />
contraption actually work. 12<br />
Given his heritage, breeding, and years in the patent office, Einstein had the background to be an engineering genius. But as it turned out, he