Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are we're
looking at a stack of research that is frankly
it's intimidating. Just a little bit. It is the
entire biographical and scientific record of
Albert Einstein. And the first thing that jumps
out at me from these sources isn't the physics.
It's the the massive gap between the symbol and
the man. Right. We have this. Cultural shorthand
for Einstein, you know, the crazy white hair,
the no socks, the tongue out on the postcard.
He is the benevolent grandfather of the universe.
He's the mascot for genius. He's the guy on the
baby Einstein DVDs. He's a caricature. But when
you actually read his letters, especially the
early ones to his first wife, Molly of America,
his colleagues, you don't find a saint. Not at
all. You find a guy who is arrogant, obsessed,
politically radical and often. deeply messy in
his personal life. That is exactly what we need
to parse today. We aren't just doing a biography.
We're trying to map the specific, I guess, cognitive
architecture of his brain. How did he see the
universe so differently? And the sources are
pretty clear that this starts way before the
patent office. Way before. So we're going to
dismantle the caricature. We aren't just talking
about E equals MC squared. We are talking about
a refugee. A civil rights activist, a musician,
a man involved in some very intricate romantic
scandals, and ironically, a scientist who actually
hated the randomness of the quantum mechanics
that he helped invent. That is the part that
always fascinates me. The idea that the man who
blew up Newtonian physics eventually became the
conservative old guard. The one trying to stop
the next revolution. It's the classic cycle of
scientific life, isn't it? It really is. Our
mission today is to find the real Albert Einstein.
And to do that we have to start at the very beginning.
And I want to immediately address the poster
boy for bad students everywhere. Ah, yes. You're
referring to the Einstein failed math myth. I
am. It is the most comforting myth in all of
history. I'm failing algebra the second, but
it's okay. You know, Einstein failed math too.
Please tell me there is some truth to this. I
hate to be the one to take that comfort away
from you, but it is completely 100 % false. Oh,
come on. The records are crystal clear on this.
He excelled at physics and math from a very,
very young age. By the time he was 12, he was
teaching himself algebra and Euclidean geometry.
Teaching himself. On his own. There's a quote
from a family tutor, a guy named Max Talmud,
who gave the 12 -year -old Einstein a geometry
textbook. And he said Einstein worked through
the entire book in just a short time and then,
quote, devoted himself to higher mathematics.
Soon the flight of his mathematical genius was
so high I could not follow. So he wasn't just
good at it. He was a prodigy, a genuine prodigy.
Where on earth does the failure myth come from
then? It seems to come from a conflation of two
different things. One, he did fail an entrance
exam later in his teens, which I'm sure we'll
get to. But primarily it comes from his time
at the Leutpold Gymnasium in Munich. Okay. He
didn't fail the subjects. He failed the system.
And we have to remember the context here, right?
We're talking about late 19th century Germany.
The education system was incredibly militaristic.
Oh, absolutely. It was all about rote memorization.
You stand up when the teacher enters the room.
You recite facts on command. You do not, under
any circumstances, ask why. And that would have
been poison to a mind like Einstein's. Total
poison. He hated it. He felt that that kind of,
you know, military style regimen just killed
creativity. He was what they called a fractious
pupil. He clashed with his teachers constantly.
I can imagine. There's a story that one teacher
actually told him he would never amount to anything,
not because he was stupid, but because his rebellious
attitude was destroying the discipline of the
entire class. So he wasn't struggling with the
content at all. He was struggling with authority.
Precisely. And that is a theme that runs through
his entire life. He had a sort of pathological,
allergic reaction to authority figures. But before
he drops out, because he does eventually drop
out, there is one specific moment from his childhood
that the sources point to as being even more
important than all the school trouble. It's the
story of the compass. It's a famous story, but
I think... People often miss the true significance
of it. He's five years old, sick in bed, and
his father, Herman, hands him a standard pocket
compass to play with. And most kids would just
treat it like a toy, right? You spin it around,
the needle wobbles back and forth. It's fun for
five minutes, maybe. Exactly. But Einstein freezes.
He sees that the needle is behaving in a very
determined way. It always, always seeks north.
No matter how he turns the case, the needle corrects
itself and he realized in that moment that the
needle was interacting with something he couldn't
see something he couldn't touch couldn't hear
he later described this experience as a trembling
he realized that something deeply hidden had
to be behind things and that phrase something
deeply hidden that is the key to his entire scientific
career You have to understand, Newtonian physics,
which was the absolute law of the land at the
time, was very much about contact forces. Billiard
balls hitting billiard balls. Right. Gears turning
gears. You push something, it moves. But the
compass suggested something else entirely. It
suggested a field, an invisible structure to
reality that permeates empty space. So at five
years old, he's already intuiting field theory.
He's already looking for the invisible geometry
of the universe rather than just the objects
moving within it. He is. And that absolute refusal
to accept surface level reality is what eventually
leads him to tear down Newton's entire universe.
Yeah. But let's get back to the timeline. He's
a teenager. He hates his German school with a
passion. What does he do? He pulls a pretty radical
move. His family had moved to Italy for business.
His father was in the electrical equipment industry.
But Albert had stayed behind in Munich to finish
his schooling. Right. But eventually he just
quits. He gets a doctor's nose saying he's suffering
from nervous exhaustion, drops out of the gymnasium
and crosses the Alps to join his family in Italy.
And then he tries to get into the Swiss Federal
Polytechnic School in Zurich, the ETH. And this
is where the failure actually happens. But again,
context is everything here. He was only 16 years
old. Exactly. The exam was intended for 18 -year
-olds. Yeah. And you have to be clear, he didn't
fail the math or physics sections of the exam.
He obliterated them. He did. The principal was
reportedly stunned by his math scores. But he
failed the general subjects like Watney, zoology.
and French language. Which makes perfect sense,
doesn't it? He hadn't attended high school for
those subjects. He essentially walked in off
the street as a high school dropout and tried
to pass a general university entrance exam in
a foreign language. It's an incredible story.
So the principal, being very impressed, advised
him to go and finish secondary school in a little
town called Aral and then come back. Which he
did. But there is another detail from this period
that I found really surprising. At 16, he made
a pretty drastic legal decision. He renounced
his German citizenship. At 16, I mean, who does
that? It's hard to overstate how big a deal that
is, especially back then. He wanted to avoid
the military draft in Germany because he absolutely
hated that militaristic culture we were talking
about. So for five years, from 1896 to 1901,
Albert Einstein was stateless. No passport, no
country. He belonged to no country until he was
finally granted Swiss citizenship. It just paints
this picture of someone who is fiercely, almost
pathologically independent. He doesn't want to
belong to a school system that tells him how
to think, and he doesn't want to belong to a
country that tells him who to fight. He is stripping
away all the labels so he can just be a thinking
mind. But that independence definitely came with
a cost. He graduates from the Polytechnic in
1900, fully certified to teach mathematics and
physics, but... He can't get a job. Most famous
physicist in history couldn't get a job. For
almost two full years. It's actually kind of
sad reading the letters from this period. He
applied for teaching positions and got rejected
one after the other. He was passed over for university
assistant jobs because his professors at the
Polytechnic found him arrogant. One professor,
Heinrich Weber, actually told him, you're a smart
boy, Einstein, a very smart boy, but you have
one great fault. You do not let yourself be told
anything. The classic double edged sword. The
same trait that makes him a genius makes him
completely unemployable. Exactly. So he was essentially
unemployed and broke. He was tutoring students
on the side for, you know, pennies. Eventually,
the father of his good friend, Marcel Grossman,
pulled some strings and got him a job interview.
At the Swiss patent office in Bern. The famous
patent office job, assistant examiner, level
three. Just sounds so bureaucratic and boring.
Like. The place where scientific dreams go to
die. Just a guy in a stiff collar stamping forms
all day. You would think so. But if we really
unpack this, the research strongly suggests this
job was actually the perfect incubator for relativity.
We have to look at what he was examining every
day. It wasn't just mousetraps and gravel sorters
then? Not at all. Bern, Switzerland, in 1902,
was a hub for the new electromechanical revolution.
He was looking at patent applications for the
synchronization of clocks over long distances.
This was a massive... practical problem at the
time, right? Because of the trains. It was all
about the trains. The trains were the internet
of the 19th century. If you want a train to travel
from Zurich to Bern on a single track, you need
to know exactly what time it is in both cities
to avoid a head -on collision. Okay, so how do
you synchronize a clock in Bern with a clock
in Zurich? You send a signal, a telegraph signal.
Right, and that signal travels at the speed of
light. So Einstein is sitting at his desk day
after day looking at these technical diagrams
of Sender A and Receiver B exchanging signals
to set their clocks. And he starts asking a question
that the inventors themselves weren't asking.
A much deeper question. He asks, what does it
actually mean to say two things happen at the
same time? Simultaneity. That is the breakthrough.
Isaac Newton said, time is like a master clock
ticking universally for everyone in the cosmos.
If it's 12 .0 for me, it's 12 .0 for you, no
matter where you are or how fast you're moving.
It's absolute. But Einstein realizes that if
the speed of light is finite, which Maxwell's
equations for electromagnetism said it was, then
the time it takes for a signal to reach you depends
on how you are moving relative to that signal.
Exactly. And if the speed of light must remain
constant for all observers, which was the one
postulate he refused to budge on, then something
else has to give. If I'm on a train moving near
the speed of light and I measure a light beam
and you're standing on the platform measuring
that same beam, we must get the exact same speed.
But we're moving differently, so how is that
possible? For the math to work, the distance
and the time have to change for the moving observer.
Space shrinks and time slows down. He realized
that the concept of now... is not universal.
It's a local illusion. Your now and my now are
relative to our motion. And he's actually figured
this out because he was obsessed with how to
coordinate train clocks at the patent office.
It's just incredible. He's taking a boring bureaucratic
problem and turning it into a complete metaphysical
revolution. And he wasn't doing this entirely
in a vacuum. We have to mention the Olympia Academy.
Right, which sounds incredibly prestigious and
formal. It sounds like it should be in a marble
hall somewhere. But it was basically just Einstein
and two of his friends, Maurice Solovine and
Conrad Habicht, drinking cheap wine and eating
sausage in his tiny burn apartment. But they
were reading some really heavy stuff. David Hume,
Henri Poincaré, Ernst Ma. And this is crucial.
They weren't just reading physics textbooks.
They were reading philosophy that questioned
the very nature of absolute truths. Hugh and
Mach in particular taught Einstein to be deeply
skeptical of concepts that you couldn't actually
observe. So Newton said absolute space and time
existed. But Mach basically said if you can't
measure it, it doesn't exist. That philosophical
priming allowed Einstein to look at the luminiferous
ether the invisible substance light was supposed
to travel through and just say, we don't need
it. It's a supercilious concept. So you have
the technical puzzle of the clocks from the patent
office, the philosophical skepticism from the
Olympia Academy, and the sheer stubbornness of
his personality. And it all culminates in the
year 1905. The Annus Mirabilis. The miracle year.
I honestly don't think Miracle Year is an exaggeration.
He is 26 years old. He is a patent clerk, level
three. He is not a professor at a major university.
And in a single year, he publishes four papers
in the Annalen der Physik that completely change
our understanding of the universe. It is unparalleled
in the history of science. I mean... Newton had
a similar productive run during the plague years,
but Einstein did this while working six days
a week at a full -time day job. Let's walk through
these papers, because I think most people know
the last one, but the others are just as huge,
if not bigger in some ways. Let's start with
the first one, the photoelectric effect. Right,
and this is actually the paper that won him the
Nobel Prize in 1921. It wasn't for relativity.
Which is so ironic. It is, because this paper
planted the seeds for quantum mechanics, the
very theory he would later fight against so vehemently.
so what was the central idea here what was the
problem he was solving at the time the prevailing
theory was that light was a wave like a ripple
in a pond but there was a persistent experimental
problem when you shine light on a piece of metal
it can knock electrons off okay now if light
is a wave simply making the light brighter increasing
its intensity or amplitude, should knock off
more electrons with more energy. But experiments
showed that wasn't happening at all. Right. It
depended on the color of the light, the frequency,
not just how bright it was. Precisely. A dim
blue light could knock electrons off. But a super
bright red light did nothing. It made no sense.
So Einstein proposed a radical solution. He said,
let's stop thinking of light as just a continuous
wave. And think of it as what? As being made
of discrete packets of energy. Little bullets
of light. He called them light quanta, or what
we now call photons. He treated light as a particle.
Which was complete heresy at the time. Absolute
heresy. A scientist named Max Planck had used
the idea of quanta as a kind of mathematical
trick to solve a different problem, but he didn't
think it was physically real. Einstein was the
first to say, no, this is physically real. Light
itself is granular. It fundamentally changed
how we see reality. It's not smooth and continuous.
It's chunky. It's quantized. That's the word.
Okay, so paper one invents the concept of the
photon and starts quantum mechanics. Not a bad
spring break. What's paper number two? Brownian
motion. This one is less famous to the public,
but arguably just as important, especially for
the world of chemistry. In this paper, he proved
that atoms exist. Wait, hold on a second. People
didn't know for sure that atoms existed in 1905.
It was still a huge debate. Major respected scientists
like Ernst Mach and Wilhelm Ostwald thought atoms
were just a convenient mathematical fiction,
not a physical reality. Just a useful idea for
calculations. Exactly. They believed matter was
ultimately continuous. So how did Einstein go
about proving them wrong? He looked at a phenomenon
that had been observed for decades called Brownian
motion. If you suspend tiny particles like pollen
grains in water and look under a microscope,
the pollen grains dance around erratically. They
just jiggle. Einstein used statistical analysis
to show that this jittery motion could only be
explained if the pollen was being constantly
bombarded by millions of invisible tiny particles,
the water molecules themselves, hitting them
from random directions. He made the invisible
visible through statistics. Perfectly put. He
even calculated the approximate size of atoms
based on how much the pollen moved. It was the
nail in the coffin. It ended the debate. Matter
is made of atoms. So two papers down, two revolutions
started. Let's go to paper three, special relativity.
We touched on this with the trains and the clocks.
This is the paper that reconciles electricity
and magnetism with classical mechanics. And in
doing so, it completely destroys the concept
of absolute time and absolute space. This is
where he lays down his two postulates. One, that
the laws of physics are the same for all non
-accelerating observers. And two, that the speed
of light in a vacuum is the same for all observers.
those two simple ideas, everything else falls
out. Time dilation, length contraction. And as
a sort of addendum, a few months later, E equals
mc squared falls out of the math as well. Which
is actually the fourth paper, right? It's almost
like a postscript. Yes, there's a tiny three
-page paper titled, Does the Inertia of a Body
Depend Upon Its Energy Content? And the answer,
famously, was yes. The equation E equals mc squared
means that mass and energy are just two different
sides of the same coin. Mass is just congealed
energy. And because C, the speed of light, is
a gigantic number, squaring it gives you a gargantuan
number. Which means a tiny amount of mass contains
a massive, almost unimaginable amount of energy.
This is the secret of the stars. It's the reason
the sun shines. It's converting a tiny bit of
its mass into a huge amount of energy every second.
And tragically, it's the secret of the atomic
bomb. The very same principle. So in one year,
he redefines the nature of light. proves atoms
exist, changes our concept of space and time,
and unifies mass and energy, it is truly staggering.
But while he is having this unprecedented intellectual
explosion, his personal life is, well, let's
just say complex is a very polite word for it.
We absolutely have to talk about Mileva Maric.
Mileva was a fellow student at the Polytechnic
in Zurich, and in fact, she was the only woman
in his physics program. Which tells you right
away that she must have been incredibly brilliant
just to be there in the 1890s. A force to be
reckoned with. Absolutely. She was a formidable
intellect. And they fell deeply in love. They
were true intellectual partners. In his letters
to her from this period, before and during 1905,
Einstein constantly refers to our work, our investigation,
and our theory of relative motion. This is a
huge hot -button issue among historians, isn't
it? Did maleva marriage co -author relativity?
It is a significant and very passionate debate.
Some historians argue she was a full collaborator
who did the heavy mathematical lifting, especially
since Einstein himself sometimes admitted to
struggling with the higher level math. And what's
the other side of the argument? Others argue
she was more of an essential sounding board,
someone brilliant he could trust to bounce ideas
off of, who understood the concepts intimately
and could check his work, but didn't originate
the core theories herself. Where does the consensus
seem to land on this? I think the consensus for
now seems to be that while she is an absolutely
essential intellectual support and a partner
who helped him develop and check his work, there
isn't concrete documentary proof like notebooks
or drafts in her handwriting that she co -authored
the central concepts. But it's fair to say that
without her, he might not have had the stability
or the intellectual sounding board to produce
those 1905 papers. I think that's very fair to
say. Yeah. But their relationship had a. very
dark and tragic chapter early on their daughter
Yes. In 1902, before they were married, Mileva
went back to her family in Serbia and gave birth
to a daughter named Lyser. Einstein was in Switzerland,
working. He never saw the child. Never. Never
once. The correspondence is heartbreaking. It
shows she either died of scarlet fever as an
infant or was quietly given up for adoption.
She just vanishes from the historical record.
Einstein asks about her in his letters. Is she
healthy? Does she cry properly? But he never
went to see her. It's a tragic, hidden part of
his life that suggests a certain emotional detachment.
And the marriage itself didn't last. They married
in 1903, had two sons, Hans Albert and Edward,
but by 1914, the relationship had completely
imploded. It had. And Einstein could be incredibly
cruel when the love faded. He actually wrote
a manifesto of rules for Mileva if they were
to continue living together in the same apartment
for the sake of the children. What kind of rules?
It's shocking to read. It included things like,
you will not expect any intimacy from me, you
will stop talking to me if I request it, and
you will keep my study and bedroom neat and you
will not use my desk. Yikes. That is, that's
brutal. A contract for a roommate. Not a wife.
It is. They separated soon after, in 1914. Einstein
moved to Berlin for a prestigious professorship,
and Mileva took the boys back to Zurich. But
here's a fascinating detail about their divorce.
When they finally divorced in 1919, Einstein
didn't have much money to his name, so he made
a bet. The Nobel Prize bet. He told her, in essence,
I'm going to win the Nobel Prize one day. If
you grant me a divorce now, I will give you all
the prize money when I win it. That is supreme.
Almost breathtaking confidence. And Mileva, being
a physicist herself, knew he was good enough
to win. She took the bet. And he did pay it,
right, when he won in 1921. He did. He paid her
the full amount. But by then, he had already
moved on and married his cousin, Elsa Lowenthal.
His cousin. We have to say it out loud. First
cousin on his mother's side, second cousin on
his father's side. Different times, I suppose.
Very different times. And Elsa was a very different
kind of partner for him. She wasn't a physicist.
She was more of a manager, a caretaker. She organized
his chaotic life, handled his growing fame, cooked
his meals, and basically treated him like a brilliant
child who needed protection from the world. She
created the environment where he could just think.
But Einstein wasn't exactly faithful to her either.
No. The sources mention a string of affairs.
Betty Newman, his secretary. A woman named Margarita
Konnikova. The alleged Russian spy. That's a
whole other story. It is. Einstein was a very
complex romantic figure. He once described his
own love life as misguided. He was definitely
not the chaste, grandfatherly figure people imagine.
He seemed to need constant female companionship,
but he also deeply resented the obligations and
constraints of marriage. It's just interesting
how we compartmentalize the work from the man,
because while his personal life is getting this
messy in Berlin, his professional life is hitting
another crisis point. We've talked about 1905,
but that was special relativity. He then spent
the next 10 years banging his head against the
wall trying to figure out general relativity.
This is such a crucial distinction to make. Special
relativity only applies to special cases uniform
motion in a straight line. It didn't explain
gravity, and it didn't explain acceleration.
If you speed up, slow down, or turn a corner,
special relativity breaks down. And Einstein
knew the theory was incomplete. He knew it was
just one piece of the puzzle. And this struggle
took a full decade, from 1905 to 1915. And this
is where we see the sheer grit. He wasn't just
struck by a single bolt of lightning. He worked
for this. He called his key realization the equivalence
principle, the happiest thought of his life.
Let's break that down for a second. What is the
equivalence principle? Okay, so imagine a man
is in an elevator and the cable snaps. The elevator
is now in free fall, plummeting toward the ground.
Right. Inside that falling box, the man would
float. He would feel his own weight. If he took
a coin out of his pocket and let go, it would
just float there next to him. So falling freely
is the same as being weightless. It cancels out
gravity. Exactly. Now imagine that same elevator
is out in deep space, far away from any planet
or star. It's just floating. The man inside floats.
From his perspective, the two situations are
indistinguishable. He can't tell the difference
between being in free fall and being in zero
gravity. Right. So Einstein realized that gravity
and acceleration... are equivalent if you are
in a closed box in space that is accelerating
upwards it feels exactly like you're standing
still on the surface of the earth this is what
led him to the radical idea that gravity isn't
a force pulling you down it's not a force at
all it's a curvature of space -time itself the
famous analogy is a bowling ball on a trampoline
the heavy ball creates a dip and a marble rolling
nearby will circle around that dip. Matter tells
space -time how to curve, and space -time tells
matter how to move. That's John Wheeler's summary.
It's all geometry, not force. But describing
that geometry required math that Einstein didn't
actually know at the time. He didn't. He needed
something called Riemannian geometry, which deals
with curved surfaces in multiple dimensions.
He actually had to go back to his old friend,
Marcel Grossman. The same guy who got on the
patent office job and say, Grossman, you must
help me or I'll go crazy. So the math genius
needed a math tutor. He absolutely did. Yeah.
And he was in a frantic race against David Hilbert,
who was probably the greatest living mathematician
at the time. And it was also trying to solve
the final equations. He was a real nail biter.
In November 1915, Einstein finally cracked it.
He presented the field equations of general relativity.
But a theory on paper isn't enough in science,
is it? You need proof. You need a testable prediction.
And the prediction he made was audacious. He
said that because gravity curves space, a beam
of light from a distant star passing near the
sun should bend. But you can't see stars near
the sun during the day because the sun is too
bright. Unless the sun's light is blocked out.
A total solar eclipse. Exactly. And this brings
us to the British astronomer Arthur Eddington.
Now, you have to remember the year. It's 1919.
World War I has just ended. Germany and Britain
have been slaughtering each other for four years.
German science is being boycotted across the
allied world. And here is a prominent British
scientist leading an expedition to try and prove
the theory of a German -born Jewish scientist.
It was a beautiful moment of post -war internationalism.
Eddington led an expedition to the island of
Principe off the coast of Africa to photograph
the eclipse. He needed to measure the position
of the Hyades star cluster, which would be right
behind the sun. So if Newton was right, the light
would travel in a straight line or bend just
a tiny bit. But if Einstein was right, the light
would bend by a specific, much larger amount
that he had calculated. I can just imagine the
tension, developing those fragile photographic
plates in the jungle heat, not knowing if the
clouds ruined everything. And when they finally
analyzed the data back in England, it was a perfect
match for Einstein's prediction. What was the
reaction in the world? An absolute explosion.
On November 7, 1919, the London Times ran the
now -famous headline, Revolution in Science,
New Theory of the Universe, Newtonian Ideas Overthrown.
And just like that, overnight, he's a global
celebrity. Instantaneously. He becomes the first
celebrity scientist. He's mobbed by crowds in
America, Japan, England. People who had no idea
what a tensor was just wanted to be near him.
He was like a movie star. Charlie Chaplin invited
him to a movie premiere. And there's that famous
exchange with Chaplin, right? Yes. Chaplin reportedly
said to him, the people applaud me because everybody
understands me and they applaud you because nobody
understands you. That sums it up perfectly. He
became the symbol of a higher, almost mystical
intelligence. But here is where the story takes
such a fascinating and ironic turn. He is now
the undisputed king of physics. He has revolutionized
our understanding of the universe. And yet, the
next big revolution in physics quantum mechanics
is something he spends the rest of his life fighting
against. It is the great tragedy, or irony, depending
on how you look at it, of his later scientific
life. Remember, his 1905 paper on the photoelectric
effect helped start quantum theory. He was one
of its fathers. Right. He gave us the photon.
But in the 1920s, a new generation of physicists
like Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg developed
the theory further, and they found that at the
subatomic level, nature is fundamentally probabilistic.
You can't know exactly where an electron is and
how fast it's going at the same time. You can
only know the probability of where it might be.
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. And Einstein
detested this. He was a classical realist. He
believed that an electron has a definitive position
and speed, whether we are looking at it or not.
This is where he famously wrote in a letter to
Max Born, God does not play dice with the universe.
He believed in a deterministic universe, clockwork,
cause and effect, no randomness. So he gets into
these legendary public debates with Niels Bohr,
mostly at the Solvay conferences. Einstein would
come up with these brilliant, elaborate thought
experiments designed to break quantum mechanics
to find a logical inconsistency. And Bohr would
stay up all night muttering to himself and come
back the next morning with a solution that proved
Einstein wrong again. But Einstein didn't give
up. In 1935, he published the famous EPR paper.
The Einstein -Podolsky -Rosen paper. And this
is where he weaponized the weirdest part of quantum
theory against itself. Entanglement. Okay, explain
entanglement for us. The math of quantum mechanics
suggested that two particles could become linked
or entangled in a special way. If you then separate
them by a billion miles and measure a property
of one, say, its spin, the other one instantly
snaps into the opposite state. Instantly. Faster
than the speed of light. Faster than the speed
of light, which seemed to violate his own theory
of relativity. Einstein derisively called this
spooky action at a distance. He thought it was
absurd. Completely. He used it as what he thought
was definitive proof that quantum mechanics must
be incomplete. He thought there must be hidden
variables we aren't seeing, local information
that the particles carry with them. He was wrong,
wasn't he? He was. Decades after his death, experiments
by John Bell and others proved that this spooky
action is real. The universe really is that weird.
Entanglement is a fundamental fact of nature.
We use it as a basis for quantum computing and
quantum cryptography today. So he was wrong about
the physics in the end, but his constant rigorous
challenging of the theory forced the quantum
physicists to sharpen their arguments and understand
their own creation better. Exactly. He was the
greatest and most important critic that theory
ever had. He strengthened it by trying to tear
it down. Let's shift gears a bit to politics,
because you can't talk about Einstein in the
20th century without talking about the world
he lived in. He was a German Jew during the rise
of the Nazis. And he was, from a very early age,
an outspoken pacifist. During World War I, while
other prominent German intellectuals were signing
manifestos supporting the Kaiser's war, Einstein
signed a countermanifesto calling for peace in
the United States of Europe. He was decades ahead
of his time on that. But by 1933, his brand of
pacifism wasn't really an option anymore. No.
Hitler comes to power in January 1933. Einstein
and Elso were actually in the U .S. at the time,
visiting Caltech. And he realized immediately...
I can never go back to Germany. And the Nazis
went after him hard. They knew he was the most
famous Jew in the world, a symbol of everything
they hated. They raided his summer cottage in
Cape Uth. They turned it into a Hitler youth
camp. They burned his books in the massive bonfires
in Berlin. They seized his bank accounts, his
property, his beloved sailboat. There was a Nazi
magazine that published a list of enemies of
the regime with his picture on the front and
the caption. Not yet hanged. Not yet hanged.
It's chilling. There was essentially a $5 ,000
bounty on his head. He renounced his German citizenship
for the second time, this time permanently, and
became a refugee. He eventually settled in Princeton,
New Jersey at the New Institute for Advanced
Study. And this leads to one of the most consequential
letters ever written in human history, the letter
to FDR. It's August 1939. The war hasn't officially
started, but everyone knows it's coming. The
physicist Leo Szilard an old friend of Einstein's
from Berlin, realized that the recent discovery
of nuclear fission meant that an atomic bomb
was now theoretically possible. And he knew the
Germans had the scientists and the industrial
capacity to build it. He was terrified the Nazis
would get it first, so he knew he needed someone
with real clout to warn the president. He went
to Einstein. And Einstein signed the letter to
President Roosevelt warning that extremely powerful
bombs of a new type may thus be constructed.
He urged the U .S. government to speed up its
own nuclear research. That letter basically kickstarted
the Manhattan Project. It did. And for a lifelong
committed pacifist, this was a heavy, heavy burden
to carry. He later said, had I known that the
Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic
bomb, I would not have lifted a finger. He called
signing that letter his one great mistake. Did
he work on the bomb himself? No. This is a surprise
to many people. The U .S. military actually considered
him a security risk. The guy who warned them
about the bomb was a security risk. How? Because
of his well -known pacifist history and his socialist
political leanings, the FBI had already started
a file on him. So he was excluded from the Manhattan
Project. He was stuck in Princeton working on
his own theories while the bomb was being designed
and built in Los Alamos. He didn't even know
it was ready until the news of Hiroshima broke
on the radio. That must have been a devastating
moment for him. It was. He spent the rest of
his life campaigning tirelessly against nuclear
proliferation. He wanted a world government to
control these weapons. That's when he made his
famous statement, I do not know with what weapons
World War III will be fought, but World War II
will be fought with sticks and stones. He also
used his considerable fame and moral platform
for something else in his adopted country, civil
rights. This is a huge and often overlooked part
of his legacy. He arrived in America and saw
how black people were treated, the segregation,
the daily indignities. And coming directly from
Nazi Germany, he recognized the smell of it.
He called racism America's worst disease. He
lived in Princeton, which was at the time a pretty
segregated town. Very much so. And Einstein didn't
just talk the talk. He acted. He joined the NAACP.
He corresponded with and campaigned for W .E
.B. Dubois. And there is a beautiful story about
the great opera singer Marian Anderson. I read
this in the source material. She came to Princeton
for a concert. Yes, this was in 1937. She gave
a stunning performance at the university. But
the Nassau and the Fancy Historic Hotel in town
refused to give her a room because she was black.
Unbelievable. Einstein heard about this and was
apparently furious. He immediately walked over
and invited her to stay at his home as his guest.
Just come stay with me. And she did. And from
then on... Whenever she visited Princeton for
the rest of his life, she stayed with the Einsteins.
It's so consistent with his character. He hated
arbitrary authority and prejudice, whether it
was against Jews in Germany or black people in
America. He famously said. Being a Jew myself,
perhaps I can understand and empathize with how
black people feel as victims of discrimination.
A powerful statement. Speaking of his Jewish
identity, let's touch on his relationship with
Zionism and the new state of Israel. It was complicated.
It was very complicated. He supported the idea
of a Jewish homeland, specifically as a cultural
and intellectual center. He was a huge fundraiser
for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. But he
was culturally Jewish, not religiously observant.
He famously believed in Spinoza's God, the God
revealed in the lawful harmony and order of the
world, not a personal God who answers prayers
or intervenes in human affairs. And he was very
wary of nationalism, wasn't he? Very wary. He
worried about the militarization of Israel. He
advocated for cooperation and a binational state
with the Arab population. He didn't want the
Jewish state to become just another nationalistic
power acting like the old European nations he
had fled. But the state of Israel clearly revered
him. So much so that in 1952, after their first
president, Chaim Weizmann, died, they actually
offered the presidency of Israel to Albert Einstein.
Can you even imagine that? A theoretical physicist
as president. So why did he turn it down? He
was very self -aware about his own limitations.
He wrote a beautiful, humble refusal letter saying
he lacked the natural aptitude and the experience
to deal properly with people. He knew he was
a man of abstract equations, not practical diplomacy.
And honestly, the prime minister at the time,
David Ben -Gurion, was kind of relieved, wasn't
he? There is a widely reported story that Ben
-Gurion asked his secretary. Tell me what to
do if he says yes. I've had to offer the post
to him because it's impossible not to. But if
he accepts, we are in for trouble. Einstein was
just too independent to ever follow a party line.
Let's talk about those final years in Princeton.
Because there is a sense of scientific isolation
that sets in. He became known as the great old
man of physics. He would walk to the institute
every day in his sweatshirt and sneakers. But
scientifically, he was very much isolated from
the mainstream. This is the era of his search
for unified field theory. What was he trying
to do with that? He wanted to combine the two
known forces of his time -gravity and electromagnetism
into one single elegant mathematical framework.
He wanted one equation to rule them all. He wanted
to, as he put it, read the mind of God. But he
ignored the new discoveries that were coming
out of particle physics, right? The nuclear forces.
Exactly. Physics had moved on. They were discovering
the strong nuclear force that holds atoms together
and the weak nuclear force that governs radioactive
decay. Einstein largely ignored them. He kept
trying to unify just gravity and electricity.
And he failed. He failed. He filled notebooks
with complex equations that led to dead ends.
He was seen as a bit of a tragic figure, a dinosaur,
by the younger generation of physicists like
Richard Feynman and Robert Oppenheimer. It's
a bit sad, the great revolutionary becoming the
relic. It is, but the sheer ambition is still
inspiring. He never, ever stopped trying to solve
the ultimate puzzle of the universe. Let's talk
about some of his quirks in those later years.
The violin, for instance. He loved Mozart. He
carried his violin, which he affectionately named
Lena, everywhere with him. He once said, I often
think in music. I live my daydreams in music.
So it wasn't just a hobby. No, it was a cognitive
tool for him. When he was stuck in a particularly
difficult physics problem, he would play the
violin to clear his mind. And he said that often
the solution would just appear to him in the
silence afterwards. And he was an inventor. I
did not know about the Einstein refrigerator.
The Einstein -Zillard refrigerator. In the 1920s,
early refrigerators used toxic gases like ammonia.
Einstein read a news story about an entire family
in Berlin who were killed in their sleep by leaking
fumes from their fridge. He was horrified. So
he decided to build a better one. He and Leo
Vallelard invented a fridge with no moving parts
that used a heat source to pressurize a gas mixture.
is much much safer did it ever get built commercially
they got a patent And the company Electrolux
bought it, but then Freon was invented, which
was cheaper to produce, though we later found
out it was terrible for the ozone layer. So the
Einstein fridge never really took off. But it
just shows his practical humanitarian side. So
we have the violin, the fridge, and the massive
FBI file. J. Edgar Hoover was completely obsessed
with Einstein. By the time Einstein died in 1955,
his FBI file was 1 ,427 pages long. What were
they looking for? They viewed him as a radical,
a subversive. a suspected communist sympathizer
because of his pacifism and his advocacy for
world government. They bugged his phone, they
opened his mail, they interviewed his associates.
It's wild to think that the lovable genius on
the poster was being surveilled by the U .S.
government as a potential enemy of the state.
It brings us to the end of his life. It's April
1955. He is 76 years old. He suffered an abdominal
aortic aneurysm, a rupture in the main artery
from the heart. Which is extremely painful. He
was taken to the hospital in Princeton. The doctors
told him they could operate, try to reinforce
the artery. It was a risky procedure. And he
refused. Completely refused. He said, and this
is a direct quote, I want to go when I want.
It is tasteless to prolong life artificially.
I have done my share. It is time to go. I will
do it elegantly. I will do it elegantly. Even
in death, he had this incredible dignity and
sense of control. He actually died working. He
had taken a draft of a speech he was writing
for Israel's anniversary to the hospital with
him, along with a pad of his latest calculations
for his unified field theory. He was calculating
until the very end. But the story doesn't quite
end there, does it? And this is the part that
is both fascinating and incredibly macabre. The
theft of his brain. It is a bizarre and unsettling
postscript. The pathologist who performed the
autopsy, a man named Thomas Stoltz Harvey, removed
Einstein's brain during the procedure. Without
the family's permission. Without permission.
He later claimed he had a kind of retroactive
blessing from Einstein's son, Hans Albert. But
essentially, he stole it. He put it in two jars
of formaldehyde. He kept it in a cider box hidden
under a beer cooler in his office for decades.
Why on earth would he do that? He was obsessed.
He was convinced that if he could just get the
brain studied by the right neurologist, he could
find the physical source of Einstein's genius.
He thought he would find a genius neuron or some
unique structure. And did he, after all that?
Not really. He did send little slices of the
brain to scientists all over the world. Over
the years, there have been a few papers published
claiming his parietal lobe was 15 % wider than
average or that he had a higher than normal ratio
of glial cells. But nothing definitive, nothing
that screams, this is the source of relativity.
So the secret wasn't just in the meat of the
brain. It seems the genius was in the software,
not just the hardware. It was in the curiosity
that started with that compass. So we've gone
from the little boy with the compass to the patent
clerk, the global celebrity, the refugee, the
activist, and finally the brain in a jar. When
you look at this whole complicated picture, what
is the final synthesis for you? For me, it's
the contradictions. He was a profound loner.
who loved humanity as a concept, but often struggled
to connect with the individuals closest to him.
He was a pacifist who urged the building of the
deadliest weapon in history. He was the father
of quantum mechanics who then tried to kill his
own child, intellectual speaking. Exactly. He
wasn't a perfect, smooth seer of genius. He was
rough, complex, difficult, and... deeply, deeply
human. And stubborn. Incredibly stubborn. But
that stubbornness is what allowed him to look
at Isaac Newton, who was a god in physics for
200 years, and say very respectfully, I think
you're wrong. It really does all go back to that
quote from the beginning, something deeply hidden.
He never stopped looking for it. He never stopped
being that five -year -old boy, trembling with
wonder at the mystery of the compass. Here's
a final thought for you, our listener, to chew
on. In 1917, Einstein introduced something into
his equations called the cosmological constant.
He put it in there because he, like everyone
else, assumed the universe was static. And he
needed this little fudge factor to stop his equations
from predicting a collapse. Right. And then a
decade later, the astronomer Edwin Hubble proved
that the universe was, in fact, expanding. Which
meant the fudge factor wasn't needed. Einstein
immediately took it out and called the cosmological
constant his biggest blunder. He felt so stupid
for having put it in. But here is the kicker.
Decades later, in the late 1990s, astronomers
discovered that the expansion of the universe
is not only happening, it's actually accelerating.
It's being pushed apart by a mysterious force
we now call dark energy. And the best mathematical
way we have to describe that dark energy is Einstein's
cosmological constant. His biggest blunder turned
out to be one of his most prescient predictions.
He was right, even when he was absolutely certain
he was wrong. If that's not genius, I don't know
what is. Thanks for diving deep with us today.
Always a pleasure. Go look up the cosmological
constant, stare at a compass for a while, and
stay curious. We'll see you on the next deep
dive.