Einstein on the Run: How Britain Saved the World's Greatest Scientist

EINSTEIN ON THE RUN

Copyright © 2019 Andrew Robinson

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10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

For my wife, Dipli,

moromere, as ever

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgements

Prologue A Wanderer on the Face of the Earth

1 The Happiest Thought of My Life

2 Hats Off to the Fellows! From a Swiss Jew

3 A Stinking Flower in a German Buttonhole

4 God Does Not Play Dice with the Universe

5 A Barbarian among the Holy Brotherhood in Tails

6 The Reality of Nature and the Nature of Reality

7 On the Run

8 I Vill a Little T’ink

Epilogue An Old Gypsy in a Quaint and Ceremonious Village

Notes and References

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Einstein under guard in Norfolk, 1933. Archant Library, Norwich.

Solvay Congress in Brussels, 1911.

Einstein with Arthur Eddington, 1930. Winifred Eddington /from The Life of Arthur Stanley Eddington by A. Vibert Douglas.

Manuscript of an article on relativity by Einstein, 1919. Albert Einstein Archives, Jerusalem.

Einstein on his first visit to England, 1921. Ullstein Bild / Granger.

Drawing of Einstein by William Rothenstein, 1927. From Twelve Portraits by William Rothenstein.

Einstein and group at Government House, Jerusalem, 1923. Courtesy of École Biblique, Jerusalem.

Einstein and George Bernard Shaw at a dinner in London, 1930. Topical Press Agency / Hulton Archives / Getty Images.

Solvay Congress in Brussels, 1927.

Einstein during his doctoral ceremony in Oxford, 1931. Zuma Press, Inc. / Alamy Stock Photo.

Einstein’s blackboard in Oxford, 1931.

Letter to the Rhodes trustees from Robert Gunther, 1931. Courtesy of Rhodes Trustees, Oxford.

Drawing of Einstein by F. Rizzi, 1933. Courtesy of Senior Common Room, Christ Church, Oxford.

Einstein and two men in Oxford, probably 1931. Albert Einstein Archives, Jerusalem.

Einstein seated in Oxford, 1931–33. Private collection.

Cartoon of Einstein by an unknown German artist, 1933. From Einstein on Politics, edited by David E. Rowe and Robert Schulmann.

Einstein in Christ Church quadrangle, Oxford, 1933. Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock Photo.

Einstein’s landing card at Dover, 1933.

Einstein at the Oxford Union, 1933. Gillman & Soame, Oxford.

Einstein with Winston Churchill, Chartwell, 1933. Leo Baeck Institute, New York.

Einstein with Oliver Locker-Lampson, London, 1933. Keystone Pictures USA / Alamy Stock Photo.

Cartoon of Einstein by Charles Raymond Macauley, 1933. From Einstein on Politics, edited by David E. Rowe and Robert Schulmann.

Einstein and wife with a Belgian police officer, 1933. Everett Collection Historical / Alamy Stock Photo.

Einstein on the front page of the Daily Express, 1933. Courtesy of Daily Express / Express Syndication.

Einstein alone in Norfolk, 1933. Leo Baeck Institute, New York.

Cartoon of Einstein by David Low, 1933. Courtesy of Caltech Archives, Pasadena.

Einstein with his bronze bust and Jacob Epstein, 1933. Bettmann / Getty Images.

Einstein speaks at the Albert Hall, London, 1933. Keystone Pictures USA / Alamy Stock Photo.

Cartoon of Einstein by Sidney ‘George’ Strube, 1933. Courtesy of Daily Express / Express Syndication.

Einstein in his study at Princeton, 1951. Ernst Haas / Getty Images.

Russell–Einstein Manifesto: cover of a recording by Bertrand Russell, 1955. Private collection.

Einstein in a stained-glass window of Christ Church Hall, Oxford. Courtesy of Christ Church, Oxford.

Cartoon by Herbert Lawrence Block, 1955. Herb Block Foundation, Washington DC.

Preface

Whenever we think of the world’s best-known scientist, we generally picture him in relation to Germany, where Albert Einstein was born, or Switzerland, where he first became a physicist, or the United States, where he settled during his last two decades, or Israel, to which he willed his massive archives because of his Jewish sympathies.

Less often considered is Britain. Yet, it would be no exaggeration to say that Britain is the country that made Einstein into the worldwide phenomenon he is today. Profound and creative, Einstein’s entanglement with Britain was both intellectual and emotional. In 1927, while he was living in Germany, he wrote to a British physicist in Oxford: ‘in England . . . my work has received greater recognition than anywhere else in the world’. In 1933, while revisiting Britain, he remarked with uncharacteristic fervour to a London journalist: ‘I love this country.’ In 1937, having relocated from Europe to the United States, he told a refugee German physicist in Edinburgh that Britain was ‘the most civilised country of the day’.

Einstein’s relationship with Britain flourished for over half a century. In the 1890s, British theoretical and experimental physics, as epitomised by Isaac Newton, sparked his scientific development during his school and college education in Switzerland. In 1919, British astronomers confirmed his general theory of relativity, which made Einstein internationally famous. In 1933, Britain saved him from likely assassination by Nazi extremists by offering him refuge. And in 1955, Britain gave rise to his most enduring political statement: the Russell–Einstein Manifesto against the spread of nuclear weapons during the Cold War, initiated by the philosopher, mathematician and political activist Bertrand Russell – the last document signed by Einstein before his death.

All this was despite Einstein’s never fluent, indeed at times comical, grasp of English, which he had not formally learned. ‘It just won’t stick to my ancient skull,’ he confessed to his diary in 1931 (of course in German), after trying to study English on a long ocean voyage while going to lecture in the United States. ‘Einstein’s English was very simple, containing about 300 words pronounced in a very peculiar way,’ noted his English-speaking physicist friend Leopold Infeld, a Polish refugee from Nazism who collaborated closely with Einstein at Princeton in the 1930s in the writing of their joint popular success, The Evolution of Physics. ‘I cannot write in English, because of the treacherous spelling,’ Einstein confessed in 1944 to another physicist, Max Born, an old friend from Germany who had studied in Cambridge as a young man and was comfortable with speaking and writing the language. ‘When I am reading it, I only hear it and am unable to remember what the written word looks like.’

Even so, ‘Einstein was an Anglophile,’ declared three American scholars of Einstein – Alice Calaprice, Daniel Kennefick and Robert Schulmann – without hesitation or qualification in their study, An Einstein Encyclopedia, published by Princeton University Press in 2015. Nonetheless, Einstein specialists, including his many biographers, have tended to downplay his relationship with Britain because of its diversity and subtlety. I myself underrated it in my book, Einstein: A Hundred Years of Relativity – as did the book’s nine expert contributors.

This book, Einstein on the Run, is the first to focus on Einstein and Britain. It brings together material that is both familiar and unfamiliar – some of it hitherto unpublished – from disparate parts of the Einstein archives. These archives at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem contain a total of around 30,000 documents, making them similar in size to the archives of Napoleon Bonaparte and several times the size of those of Newton and Galileo, according to the unique Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology. Since the 1980s, the project has overseen the publication of fifteen large volumes of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein (CPAE ), the latest of which concludes in 1927 – leaving nearly three decades of his life still to be published. No wonder that Einstein still has the power to surprise and fascinate the world. As George Bernard Shaw said of him in a speech in London in 1930, at a dinner to honour Einstein: ‘I rejoice at the new universe to which he has introduced us. I rejoice in the fact that he has destroyed all the old sermons, all the old absolutes, all the old cut and dried conceptions, even of time and space, which were so discouraging . . .’.

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the cooperation of the Albert Einstein Archives in Jerusalem, which made available to me Einstein’s articles, lectures and letters, some of which are unpublished, plus related material and letters to Einstein. Its archivists, Barbara Wolff and Chaya Becker, were consistently helpful while I was researching both this book and Einstein: A Hundred Years of Relativity . My deepest gratitude goes to their colleague Or Orith Burla, who not only retrieved much archival material at my request but also suggested material I was not aware of and on occasion helped me to translate it from German into English. Her assistance with my research was generous, invaluable and particularly welcome to a freelance author.

I am also grateful to the fellows of Christ Church, Lady Margaret Hall and Nuffield College in Oxford, to the Rhodes House Trustees and to the English-Speaking Union, for permission to quote correspondence relating to Einstein’s visits to Oxford, notably the Oxford diary of Margaret Deneke and the letters of Frederick Lindemann (Lord Cherwell).

Sebastian Born, on behalf of the Born family, generously granted permission to quote passages from the letters written by his grandfather Max Born to Einstein, originally published in English translation as The Born–Einstein Letters. ‘I’m sure he would have been, and we are, happy that your work continues to reveal his thought and insight in these conversations with his great friend Einstein.’

Many archivists, based mainly in Britain, have been unusually helpful with my research. It is a pleasure to thank: Nicolas Bell (Trinity College, Cambridge), Judith Curthoys (Christ Church, Oxford), Gavin Fuller (Telegraph Media Group, London), Emma Huber (Taylor Institution Library, Oxford), Michael Hughes (Bodleian Library, Oxford), Clare Kavanagh (Nuffield College, Oxford), Suzanne Keyte (Royal Albert Hall, London), Oliver Mahony (Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford), Charlotte Oxendale (Rhodes House, Oxford), Niels Sampath (Oxford Union Library), Michael Simonson (Leo Baeck Institute, New York) and Anna Towlson (London School of Economics). Others include: Frank Baker (John Rylands Library, Manchester), Jessica Borge (King’s College, London), Rosemary Dixon (Archant Library, Norwich), Melissa Downing (Rhodes House, Oxford), Heidi Egginton (Churchill Archives, Cambridge), Robyn Haggard (Museum of the History of Science, Oxford), Stephen Hebron (Bodleian Library, Oxford), Laura Hilton-Smith (Leeds University Library), Loma Karklins (Caltech Archives, Pasadena), Lee Macdonald (Museum of the History of Science, Oxford), Wilma Minty (Bodleian Library, Oxford), Alistair Murphy (Cromer Museum), Laura Outterside (Royal Society, London), Emma Quinlan (Nuffield College, Oxford), Ed Smithson (Nuffield College, Oxford), Jean-Michel de Tarragon (École Biblique, Jerusalem), Bridget Whittle (McMaster University, Hamilton) and Harry Wright (Friends House, London).

In the world of Einstein scholarship, it was a delight to discuss a range of issues with someone as well informed, open-minded and amusing as Robert Schulmann, former director of the Einstein Papers Project, author of influential books on Einstein and contributor to Einstein: A Hundred Years of Relativity, who shares my curiosity about Einstein’s attitude to Britain. I also enjoyed interacting with Robert’s former colleagues at the Einstein Papers Project: Alice Calaprice, editor of The Ultimate Quotable Einstein, who, despite her retirement from Princeton University Press, was always willing to answer my questions about Einstein quotations (genuine, probable and invented); and David Rowe, co-editor with Robert Schulmann of Einstein on Politics, who drew my attention to Antonina Vallentin’s arresting account of Einstein in 1933, plus other sources. Among the current members of the Einstein Papers Project I am grateful to its director, Diana Kormos Buchwald, another contributor to Einstein: A Hundred Years of Relativity, for her general support, and to its assistant director, Ze’ev Rosenkranz, who took trouble to advise me on Einstein’s travel diaries, his relationship to Palestine and other matters. In Oxford, Robert Fox was a generous source of information while he was researching an article on Einstein in Oxford for the Royal Society’s journal, Notes and Records.

In the wider academic world, beyond Einstein studies, I owe a special debt to the physicist and historian of science Graham Farmelo, fellow author, biographer and journalist, who wrote excellent book reviews for me when I was literary editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement. Graham introduced me to Yale University Press.

Other friends and contacts inside and outside academe who deserve thanks for their advice on Einstein and/or Einstein-related matters are: Joanna Ashbourn, Jonathan Bowen (Edmund Bowen), Paul Cartledge, Jodie Collins (Oliver Locker-Lampson), David Dunmur (Frederick Lindemann), David Dutton (Austen Chamberlain), Josef Eisinger (Einstein’s travel diaries), Mordechai Feingold (Isaac Newton), Nancy Greenspan (Max Born), Hanoch Gutfreund (The Hebrew University), Richard Hawkins (Samuel Untermyer), Gordon Johnson (Isaiah Berlin), David Levey, Jonathan Locker-Lampson, Alex May (entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography), Michael Musgrave (Marie Soldat), Cormac O’Raifeartaigh (Einstein’s cosmology), David Robinson (Einstein’s lecture at King’s College, London), Tom Wakeford and Thomas Weber (Adolf Hitler).

At Christ Church, Oxford, my old friend James Lawrie organised a talk for me at the college on Einstein in Oxford in 2015, the centenary of general relativity, followed by an article in the college magazine, Christ Church Matters, commissioned by his colleague Simon Offen.

Among writers and journalists, various individuals in Norfolk kindly helped me in researching Einstein’s stay near Cromer in September–October 1933, in particular Glenys Hitchings, Stuart McLaren, Steve Snelling and Del Styan. Stuart kindly supplied me with a copy of the rare souvenir booklet published (presumably by Oliver Locker-Lampson) to commemorate Einstein’s speech at the Albert Hall meeting in October 1933. The BBC journalists David Edmonds and John Eidinow provided further information about this meeting regarding the role of Locker-Lampson. Thanks, too, to various editors who have recently published articles of mine about Einstein and related subjects, in particular: Sara Abdulla (Nature), Marina Benjamin (Aeon), Tushna Commissariat (Physics World), Barb Kiser (Nature), James McConnachie (The Author) and Valerie Thompson (Science).

It has been a distinct pleasure to work with the editorial staff of Yale University Press for the first time. My editor, Julian Loose – evidently fascinated by Einstein’s personality and British adventures – was imaginatively involved with the book from its commissioning to its completion. Marika Lysandrou did sterling work on the illustrations. Rachael Lonsdale and Clarissa Sutherland were remarkably careful and efficient editors.

See him as he squats on Cromer beach doing sums, Charlie Chaplin with the brow of Shakespeare. . . . So it is not an accident that the Nazi lads vent a particular fury against him. He does truly stand for what they most dislike, the opposite of the blond beast – intellectualist, individualist, supernationalist, pacifist, inky, plump.

‘Einstein’ by John Maynard Keynes, New Statesman and Nation, October 1933

In September 1933 – a few months after exiling himself forever from his German home in Berlin where he had lived since 1914 – Einstein found himself unexpectedly dwelling alone in a thatched wooden holiday hut located in a wild rural area of Norfolk in eastern England, close to the sea near the coastal town of Cromer. He was far from being on holiday, however. The hut was a secret refuge to avoid a rumoured attempt at assassination by agents acting for the Nazi regime in Germany; Einstein was guarded with guns by a small group of local English people, led by a Conservative member of parliament who was also a decorated veteran of the First World War.

During March–April, shortly after Adolf Hitler came to power, Einstein had publicly criticised the repressive policies of the new National Socialist government; resigned from the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin; applied for release from his Prussian (German) citizenship; and found a temporary home for himself and his wife on the coast of nearby Belgium. In response, he had been relentlessly attacked in the German press, and his scientific works had been publicly burned in Berlin. The government had confiscated his and his wife’s bank accounts. Their summer villa near Berlin had reportedly been searched for arms – on the grounds that Einstein was treasonously spreading Communist-influenced ‘atrocity propaganda’ against Germany from abroad. One especially prominent anti-Semitic German publication about Jews, approved by the government’s propaganda chief Josef Goebbels, showed a photograph of Einstein with the sinister caption in capital letters: ‘BIS JETZT UNGEHAENGT’, that is, ‘not yet hanged’.

Soon Einstein was widely thought to be public enemy number one of the Nazis. He was given round-the-clock police protection by the Belgian royal family. However, he tried to evade the policemen’s watchful eyes and did not take rumours of an attack on him too seriously, despite his awareness of the disturbing history of political assassination in post-war Germany, which had claimed several lives including, most notoriously, that of Germany’s foreign minister, Walther Rathenau, a friend of Einstein and a prominent Jew, who was murdered in Berlin in broad daylight in 1922. (Rathenau’s photo was captioned ‘executed’.) As a long-standing devotee of sailing, Einstein was indifferent to danger or death, to the extent that he refused to carry life-jackets or life-belts on board his sailing-boat – even though he had never learned to swim.

Einstein under guard in rural England, September 1933. On the left is his English host, Commander Oliver Locker-Lampson MP, a veteran of the First World War; directly behind Einstein stands Marjory Howard, a secretary of Locker-Lampson; further away hovers Herbert Eastoe, a local gamekeeper. The world’s press had recently announced that Nazi extremists had put a price on Einstein’s head.

Then, on 30 August 1933, Nazi extremists shot an associate of Einstein in Czechoslovakia, the controversial German-Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing, whose photo had also been captioned ‘not yet hanged’ – for which the assassins were immediately honoured in Germany. Within days, press reports appeared suggesting that Einstein was next in line, and mentioning a hefty financial reward placed on his head. Even so, Einstein shrugged his shoulders. He told a Paris-based correspondent: ‘I really had no idea my head was worth all that.’ As for the threat, ‘I have no doubt it is really true, but in any case I await the issue with serenity.’ To his hugely anxious wife, Elsa, he argued: ‘When a bandit is going to commit a crime he keeps it secret’ – according to a local press statement she made in early September, reported in the New York Times. Nonetheless, shortly after this, Elsa Einstein successfully insisted that her husband immediately go ‘on the run’ from possible Nazi retribution.

He discreetly departed from Belgium, took a boat across the English Channel and headed for London. But instead of going from London to his familiar berth in a historic Oxford college, he was soon settled in the depths of the English countryside.

There, in the holiday hut on Roughton Heath near Cromer, Einstein lived and toiled peacefully at mathematics – the unified field theory, based on his general theory of relativity, which would occupy him until his dying day – while occasionally stepping out for local walks or to play his violin. He had no library, of course, but this mattered relatively little to Einstein, who had long relied chiefly on his own thoughts and calculations; all he really missed was his faithful calculating assistant, who had stayed behind in Belgium. For about three weeks, Einstein was largely undisturbed by outsiders, except for a visit from the sculptor Jacob Epstein, who modelled a remarkable bronze bust of the hermit Einstein, today on permanent display at London’s Tate Gallery.

From this undisclosed location, Einstein informed a British newspaper reporter in mid-September: ‘I shall become a naturalised Englishman as soon as it is possible for my papers to go through.’ However, ‘I cannot tell you yet whether I shall make England my home.’

In early October, he emerged from hiding to speak at a meeting in London intended to raise funds for desperate academic refugees from Germany. Without our long fought-for western European freedom of mind, stated Einstein in front of a gripped audience overflowing the massive Albert Hall, ‘there would have been no Shakespeare, no Goethe, no Newton, no Faraday, no Pasteur and no Lister’. Afterwards, on the steps of the hall, he told another newspaper reporter:

I could not believe that it was possible that such spontaneous affection could be extended to one who is a wanderer on the face of the earth. The kindness of your people has touched my heart so deeply that I cannot find words to express in English what I feel. I shall leave England for America at the end of the week, but no matter how long I live I shall never forget the kindness which I have received from the people of England.

Einstein’s flight from Nazi terror is easily understandable. But how was it that he came to take refuge in an obscure English hut? What was it about England, in particular, that appealed to Einstein as a sanctuary? And why – given his long and enriching relationship with Britain, dating back to his teenage encounters with British physics in Switzerland – would he leave the country for America, never to return to Europe?

[B]efore Maxwell, people conceived of physical reality . . . as material points, whose changes consist exclusively of motions. . . . After Maxwell, they conceived of physical reality as represented by continuous fields, not mechanically explicable. . . . This change in the conception of reality is the most profound and fruitful one that has come to physics since Newton; but it has at the same time to be admitted that the programme has by no means been completely carried out yet.

Essay written by Einstein for the centennial celebration of the

birth of James Clerk Maxwell, published by

Cambridge University Press, 1931

On the walls of his apartment in 1920s Berlin, and later in his Princeton house, Einstein hung portraits of three British natural philosophers: the physicists Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell – and no other scientists. Each of this trio he unquestionably revered. ‘England has always produced the best physicists,’ Einstein said in 1925 to a young Ukrainian-Jewish woman, Esther Salaman, attending his lectures on relativity in Berlin. He advised her to study physics at the University of Cambridge: the home of Newton in the second half of the seventeenth century and later the scientific base of Maxwell, founder of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory in the 1870s. As Einstein explained to Salaman: ‘I’m not thinking only of Newton. There would be no modern physics without Maxwell’s electromagnetic equations: I owe more to Maxwell than to anyone. But remember,’ he warned her, ‘in England everything is judged by achievement.’

While visiting England in 1930, immediately after stopping at Newton’s birthplace in Woolsthorpe to pay tribute, Einstein remarked simply, before giving a lecture at the University of Nottingham: ‘It is a pleasure and an honour to speak in the country in which my science, theoretical physics, was born.’ In his last ever interview, two weeks before his death in Princeton, much of his conversation revolved around Newton’s fascinating writings, scientific and theological, published and unpublished, without overlooking Newton’s misanthropic personality – so different from Einstein’s own. (‘Newton is the Old Testament god; it is Einstein who is the New Testament figure . . . full of humanity, pity, a sense of enormous sympathy,’ the Polish-born British mathematician Jacob Bronowski remarked in his 1970s BBC television series The Ascent of Man.)

EARLY YEARS IN GERMANY

Although England played little role in Einstein’s childhood and adolescence in 1880s–90s Germany, some understanding of his early years is essential to appreciate his first receptive encounters with English physics, which he studied as a teenage autodidact in Germany from the early 1890s and then, more attentively, as a university student in Switzerland. Einstein’s unconventional upbringing was what set him on the path not only to his theory of relativity and his quantum theory but also to his later, ultimately unfulfilled, pursuit of a unified field theory of gravity and electromagnetism.

There was no hint of any intellectual distinction in Einstein’s family tree. His father, Hermann, was an easy-going businessman who was not very successful in electrical engineering and his paternal grandfather a merchant, while his mother, Pauline, a fine piano player but otherwise not gifted, also came from a business family which ran a profitable grain concern and was wealthy. Though both sides of the family were Jewish, neither was orthodox. Hermann and Pauline Einstein were thoroughly assimilated and non-observant Jews (‘entirely irreligious’, according to their son), who conversed in German, not Yiddish/Hebrew.

Nor was there much sign of distinction in Einstein as a child. Albert Abraham – the first name a common one among the ruling Hohenzollern dynasty, the second from Einstein’s paternal grandfather – was born on 14 March 1879 in Ulm, in southern Germany, in the semi-rural province of the Swabians. Their ‘speculative brooding’, ‘often roguish and occasionally coarse humour’ and ‘pronounced, individualistic obstinacy’ Einstein would share, according to his biographer Albrecht Fölsing. He was a quiet baby, so quiet that his parents became seriously concerned and consulted a doctor about his not learning to talk. But when a daughter, Maja, was born in November 1881, Albert apparently asked promptly: Where are the wheels of my new toy? It turned out that his ambition was to speak in complete sentences: first he would try out a sentence in his head, while moving his lips, and only then repeat it aloud. The habit lasted until his seventh year or even later. The family maidservant dubbed him ‘stupid’.

His first school was a Catholic one in Munich, where the Einstein family had relocated in 1880. Albert was the only Jew in a class of about seventy students. But he seems to have felt anti-Semitism among the teachers only in the religious education classes, not in the rest of the school curriculum. Among the students, however, anti-Semitism was commonplace, and though it was not vicious, it encouraged Einstein’s early sense of being an outsider, a feeling that would intensify throughout adulthood.

Academically he was good yet by no means a prodigy, both at this school and at his high school, the Luitpold Gymnasium. However, Einstein showed hardly any affection for his schooling and in later life excoriated the system of formal education current in Germany. He referred to his teachers as ‘sergeants’ and ‘lieutenants’, disliked physical training and competitive games – even intellectual games such as chess – and detested anything that smacked of the military discipline typical of the Prussian ethos of northern Germany. ‘Constraint has always been his personal enemy. His whole youth was a battle against it,’ wrote a friend and Einstein biographer, Antonina Vallentin, in 1954. ‘When he uttered the German word for it, an abrupt word, with a particular sinister sound, Zwang, everything tolerant, humorous or resigned in his expression vanished.’ In 1920, he even told a Berlin interviewer that the school matriculation exam should be abolished. ‘Let us return to Nature, which upholds the principle of getting the maximum amount of effect from the minimum of effort, whereas the matriculation test does exactly the opposite.’ As he astutely remarked in 1930 after he had become world famous: ‘To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself.’

Part of Einstein’s problem lay in the heavy emphasis in the German Gymnasiums – as in British public schools of the period – on the humanities; that is, on classical studies and, to a lesser extent, German history and literature, to the detriment of modern foreign languages, such as French and English. Science and mathematics were regarded as the subjects with the lowest status.

But the main problem with school was probably that Albert was a confirmed autodidact, who preferred his own company to that of his teachers and fellow students. ‘Private study’ is a phrase frequent in his early letters and adult writings on education. It was clearly his chief means of becoming educated. His sister Maja recalled that even in noisy company her brother could ‘withdraw to the sofa, take pen and paper in hand, set the inkstand precariously on the armrest, and lose himself so completely in a problem that the conversation of many voices stimulated rather than disturbed him’.

At a relatively early age, he began reading mathematics and science books simply out of curiosity; at college in Zurich he ranged very widely in his reading, including the latest scientific journals; and as an adult