FOREWORD IX
the Patent Office in Bern, and producing several epoch-making papers? What
about Einstein's relation to quantum mechanics? Can we understand why he had
set off on his lonely route, at first so much ahead of his contemporaries and then
very much to one side of them, so that eventually they seemed convincingly to
have passed him by? Do we find clues to his science in his early years, such as when
as a child of about five he was enchanted by the seemingly miraculous behaviour
of a pocket compass, or when at twelve he was enthralled by Euclid? Or may we
learn as much from a remark from his teacher in the Munich Gymnasium asserting
that he would have been much happier if young Albert had not been in his class:
"you sit there in the back row and smile, and that violates the feeling of respect
which a teacher needs from his class"? Einstein's early ability to find authority
funny was a trait which stayed with him until the end.
And we find that Einstein was certainly no saint, though he was an admirable
man in many ways. It is perhaps not surprising that he had a remarkable faculty
for detaching himself from his surroundings, no doubt both a necessary factor
for him and a cause of strain in his two marriages. But he certainly did not lack
personal feelings, as is made particularly clear in his highly sensitive obituary
notices and appreciations of fellow scientists and friends. And he clearly had a
sense of humour. He was a humanitarian, a pacifist, and an internationalist. His
feelings would, perhaps as often as not, be more directed at humanity as a whole
than at particular individuals.
He could sometimes be petulant, however, such as after learning that a paper
that he submitted to Physical Review had actually been sent to a referee(!), whose
lengthy report requested clarifications. Einstein angrily withdrew his paper and
never submitted another to that journal. And he could feel an understandable
human annoyance in matters of priority concerning his own scientific work.
Usually he would later check his over-reaction, and in these cases we might have
on record only the very gracious subsequent letters of reconciliation to suggest
any earlier friction. His correspondence with the renowned mathematician David
Hilbert was a case in point, concerning the issue of who had first correctly
formulated the full field equations of general relativity. But in the case of another
great mathematician, Henri Poincare, in relation to the origins of special relativity,
it took until towards the end of Einstein's life for him even to acknowledge the
existence of Poincare's contributions. There is little doubt that Einstein had been
influenced by Poincare, perhaps indirectly through Lorentz, or through Poincare's
popular writings. Poincare himself seems to have been less generous, as he never
even mentioned Einstein's contributions at all in his own later papers on the
subject!
It is interesting also to follow the developments in Einstein's approach to physics
as he grew older. It is a common view that Einstein slowed down dramatically as
he reached his 40s, or that he perhaps lost his earlier extraordinary instincts for
divining physical truth. What Pais's account makes clear, however, is that he found
himself driven more and more into areas where his own technical judgements were