'THE SUDDENLY FAMOUS DOCTOR EINSTEIN.' 303
died in February and was buried in the Schoneberg Cemetery in Berlin. Soon
thereafter, Einstein wrote to Zangger, 'My mother has died.. .. We are all com-
pletely exhausted. ... One feels in one's bones the significance of blood ties' [E26].16b. Einstein Canonized
In the early fall of 1919, when Pauline Einstein was in the sanatorium, she
received a postcard from her son which began, 'Dear Mother, joyous news today.
H. A. Lorentz telegraphed that the English expeditions have actually demon-
strated the deflection of light from the sun' [E27]. The telegram that had
announced the news to Einstein a few days earlier read, 'Eddington found star
displacement at the sun's edge preliminary between nine-tenth second and double
that. Many greetings. Lorentz' [L2]. It was an informal communication. Nothing
was definitive. Yet Einstein sent almost at once a very brief note to Naturwissen-
schaften for the sole purpose of reporting the telegram he had received [E28]. He
was excited.
Let us briefly recapitulate Einstein's progress in understanding the bending of
light. 1907. The clerk at the patent office in Bern discovers the equivalence prin-
ciple, realizes that this principle by itself implies some bending of light, but
believes that the effect is too small to ever be observed. 1911. The professor at
Prague finds that the effect can be detected for starlight grazing the sun during
a total eclipse and finds that the amount of bending in that case is 0''87. He does
not yet know that space is curved and that, therefore, his answer is incorrect. He
is still too close to Newton, who believed that space is flat and who could have
himself computed the 0*87 (now called the Newton value) from his law of grav-
itation and his corpuscular theory of light. 1912. The professor at Zurich discovers
that space is curved. Several years pass before he understands that the curvature
of space modifies the bending of light. 1915. The member of the Prussian Acad-
emy discovers that general relativity implies a bending of light by the sun equal
to 1 "74, the Einstein value, twice the Newton value. This factor of 2 sets the stag
for a confrontation between Newton and Einstein.
In 1914, before Einstein had the right answer, he had written to Besso with
typical confidence. 'I do not doubt any more the correctness of the whole system,
whether the observation of the solar eclipse succeeds or not' [E29]. Several quirks
of history saved him from the embarrassment of banking on the wrong result. An
Argentinian eclipse expedition which had gone to Brazil in 1912 and which had
the deflection of light on its experimental program was rained out. In the summer
of 1914, a German expedition led by Erwin Freundlich and financed by Gustav
Krupp, in a less familiar role of benefactor of humanity, headed for the Crimea
to observe the eclipse of August 21. (Russian soldiers and peasants were told by
their government not to fear evil omens: the forthcoming eclipse was a natural
phenomenon [Nl].) When the war broke out, the party was warned in time to
return and some did so. Those who hesitated were arrested, eventually returned