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A review by absolutive
Einstein on the Run: How Britain Saved the World's Greatest Scientist by Andrew Robinson
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
3.5
This book is the life of Einstein, framed by his several short visits to Britain, particularly to Oxford and Roughton Heath. Robinson argues that Britain was Einstein's haven while "on the run" from the Nazis. He quotes Einstein's positive comments on Britain's most prestigious scientists: Newton, Faraday, and Maxwell. He quotes Einstein's polite letters of thanks to his British hosts. But I think a clear-eyed reading of the book cannot support the claim that Einstein's half a dozen brief sojourns to the UK between 1921 and 1933, never to return in the last 22 years of his life, even including a season living under armed guard in a Norwich cottage, really represent a profound influence on his life. Nor is it clear the extent to which England was really a haven for Einstein while on the run.
However, the structure of this book provides a new and welcome opportunity to reconsider his remarkable life and in what feels like a fresh way. Since the book cannot stand on its own in Britain, it expands into something not quite as comprehensive as a biography, but traces out many themes that go beyond Britain. We have the usual history of Einstein's lack of success in school, but added to this story his renunciation of Prussian citizenship to avoid military service and continue his education in Zurich, where despite failing its entrance exam, he was offered a deferred place because of his outstanding promise in physics and mathematics. We have the potted history of his extraordinary output in theoretical physics from about 1905 to 1920, but also just how important laboratory work and astronomy were to the creation, spread, and acceptance of his theories. We also see the importance of Einstein's collaborators at this time. One reads with wonder and a wee bit of sadness as the man who worked with others and thought about experimental results refashioned himself as solitary thinker whose philosophy explicitly elevated theory, to the extent that his later obsession, the Grand Unified Theory, completely ignored contemporary experimental results.
Einstein's humanitarianism and commitment to truth and People with a capital P, even if not to individuals, is another well-connected theme that emerges in this book. Einstein risked his own career, finances, assets and home, and later even his life for speaking out against German militarism during the First World War, for pushing back heroically when the nation tried to use him for propaganda, and later his potential deportation for confronting Senator McCarthy in America. (Apparently the FBI attempted to revoke his American citizenship in order to deport him because he spoke out against nuclear weapons and the hydrogen bomb in 1950.) Between the Great War and McCarthyism, Einstein fought for the rights of Jews, intellectuals, refugees, scientists and thinkers, and bravely against the Nazis, who were assassinating other prominent Jews abroad and who referred to him as "Not yet hanged." He was outspoken in favour of pacifism during and after the First World War before renouncing pacifism to warn the world about Hitler and later to suggest the building of the atomic bomb, which he came to disavow after it was used not against the Nazis, but Japanese civilians, and after learning that the Nazis had not made much progress on their own bomb.
I never realised it, but it's clear in this book that Einstein never really learned English. In England he was always surrounded by German speakers. Up until 1933, he gave all of his lectures in German. In 1933, he wrote his lectures and speeches--at Oxford, University of Glasgow, and the Royal Albert Hall--in German and had them translated into English, which he then read, haltingly. Even in Princeton, where he spent the rest of his life after leaving England--from 1933 to 1955--Einstein spoke and wrote in German. Any interviews or publications of his in English were collaborative affairs and not broadcast live. Einstein must have been profoundly lonely: He left Germany for Holland, Holland for England, England for America; he left his first wife and left his child in an institution; he did not always have a great relationship with his second wife; and he could not communicate with most of the people around him in England and America. In addition, by the time Einstein was an annual visitor to Oxford in the early '30s, his physics had become estranged from the community of physicists. His pursuit of the Grand Unified Theory when the influence of his early work was exploding into the flourishing of Quantum Mechanics left him aloof from his colleagues.
One of those colleagues was Max Born, also a German Jewish refugee who won the Nobel Prize. Einstein's relationship with Max Born, mostly carried out by letter in their later years, when Born was in Edinburgh and Einstein in Princeton, is another important feature of this book, though tacked on at the end. They fundamentally disagreed about quantum mechanics, and the German people's responsibility for Nazi atrocities. They were united in their wary support of Zionism. Born returned to Germany in 1954, maintaining that collective responsibility does not exist; only individual responsibility. Einstein disagreed: he would never return to "the land of the mass-murderers" and saw Germany as the most dangerous, after the Second World War, of "the so-called civilised nations." Born responded with Dresden and Hiroshima. The two physicists were lifelong Zionists but were sympathetic to the Arabs living in Palestine and under no illusions about Britain's role in arming one group while giving land to the other and creating countries by drawing lines on the map, stepping back, and turning away from the conflicts they created. Born wrote that Einstein's inability to jettison "physical reality and determinism" was not only wrong for physics, but for people: "The relaxation of the rules of thinking seems to me," Born wrote, "the greatest blessing which modern science has given us. For the belief that there is only one truth and that oneself is in possession of it, seems to me the deepest root of all that is evil in the world."
Robinson does not convince me of his truth about Einstein and Britain, but in failing to do so he has produced a book about Einstein in which we see that truth and science and the fight against evil were lifelong passions and ways of living.
However, the structure of this book provides a new and welcome opportunity to reconsider his remarkable life and in what feels like a fresh way. Since the book cannot stand on its own in Britain, it expands into something not quite as comprehensive as a biography, but traces out many themes that go beyond Britain. We have the usual history of Einstein's lack of success in school, but added to this story his renunciation of Prussian citizenship to avoid military service and continue his education in Zurich, where despite failing its entrance exam, he was offered a deferred place because of his outstanding promise in physics and mathematics. We have the potted history of his extraordinary output in theoretical physics from about 1905 to 1920, but also just how important laboratory work and astronomy were to the creation, spread, and acceptance of his theories. We also see the importance of Einstein's collaborators at this time. One reads with wonder and a wee bit of sadness as the man who worked with others and thought about experimental results refashioned himself as solitary thinker whose philosophy explicitly elevated theory, to the extent that his later obsession, the Grand Unified Theory, completely ignored contemporary experimental results.
Einstein's humanitarianism and commitment to truth and People with a capital P, even if not to individuals, is another well-connected theme that emerges in this book. Einstein risked his own career, finances, assets and home, and later even his life for speaking out against German militarism during the First World War, for pushing back heroically when the nation tried to use him for propaganda, and later his potential deportation for confronting Senator McCarthy in America. (Apparently the FBI attempted to revoke his American citizenship in order to deport him because he spoke out against nuclear weapons and the hydrogen bomb in 1950.) Between the Great War and McCarthyism, Einstein fought for the rights of Jews, intellectuals, refugees, scientists and thinkers, and bravely against the Nazis, who were assassinating other prominent Jews abroad and who referred to him as "Not yet hanged." He was outspoken in favour of pacifism during and after the First World War before renouncing pacifism to warn the world about Hitler and later to suggest the building of the atomic bomb, which he came to disavow after it was used not against the Nazis, but Japanese civilians, and after learning that the Nazis had not made much progress on their own bomb.
I never realised it, but it's clear in this book that Einstein never really learned English. In England he was always surrounded by German speakers. Up until 1933, he gave all of his lectures in German. In 1933, he wrote his lectures and speeches--at Oxford, University of Glasgow, and the Royal Albert Hall--in German and had them translated into English, which he then read, haltingly. Even in Princeton, where he spent the rest of his life after leaving England--from 1933 to 1955--Einstein spoke and wrote in German. Any interviews or publications of his in English were collaborative affairs and not broadcast live. Einstein must have been profoundly lonely: He left Germany for Holland, Holland for England, England for America; he left his first wife and left his child in an institution; he did not always have a great relationship with his second wife; and he could not communicate with most of the people around him in England and America. In addition, by the time Einstein was an annual visitor to Oxford in the early '30s, his physics had become estranged from the community of physicists. His pursuit of the Grand Unified Theory when the influence of his early work was exploding into the flourishing of Quantum Mechanics left him aloof from his colleagues.
One of those colleagues was Max Born, also a German Jewish refugee who won the Nobel Prize. Einstein's relationship with Max Born, mostly carried out by letter in their later years, when Born was in Edinburgh and Einstein in Princeton, is another important feature of this book, though tacked on at the end. They fundamentally disagreed about quantum mechanics, and the German people's responsibility for Nazi atrocities. They were united in their wary support of Zionism. Born returned to Germany in 1954, maintaining that collective responsibility does not exist; only individual responsibility. Einstein disagreed: he would never return to "the land of the mass-murderers" and saw Germany as the most dangerous, after the Second World War, of "the so-called civilised nations." Born responded with Dresden and Hiroshima. The two physicists were lifelong Zionists but were sympathetic to the Arabs living in Palestine and under no illusions about Britain's role in arming one group while giving land to the other and creating countries by drawing lines on the map, stepping back, and turning away from the conflicts they created. Born wrote that Einstein's inability to jettison "physical reality and determinism" was not only wrong for physics, but for people: "The relaxation of the rules of thinking seems to me," Born wrote, "the greatest blessing which modern science has given us. For the belief that there is only one truth and that oneself is in possession of it, seems to me the deepest root of all that is evil in the world."
Robinson does not convince me of his truth about Einstein and Britain, but in failing to do so he has produced a book about Einstein in which we see that truth and science and the fight against evil were lifelong passions and ways of living.