Getting Inside the ‘Brain’

This has to be a mistake. There, on the Borders shelf, packed with weighty physics volumes, lies a slick little book titled “Driving Mr. Albert.” Its cover shows the rear end of a Buick with the license plate “E=MC2.” Its plot is bizarre: Young man drives cross-country with old doctor who stole Einstein’s brain 45 years ago and never gave it back. They roll westward with the sliced-and-diced brain in a Tupperware bowl in a gray duffel bag in the Buick’s trunk. The doc shows it off every now and then to strangers he meets in coffee shops. This is fiction, accidentally placed on the wrong shelf, you might think. Wrong. It’s fact.

Journalist Michael Paterniti drove the car and wrote the book, published by Dial nine months ago. The doctor is Thomas Harvey, 84, who performed the Einstein autopsy in 1955, and walked away with the world’s smartest brain.

Happy birthday, Albert Einstein.

The planet’s greatest scientist--the man who figured out the nature of the universe--was born March 14, 1879. No big bashes have been slated to honor the mental maestro--a situation that would suit him just fine. He never celebrated his own, or even those of the ones he loved. He couldn’t remember them.

Even at age 22, in lust with the woman he would marry, he missed his mark: “My dear little sweetheart,” he wrote to Mileva Maric, “my belated cordial congratulations on your birthday yesterday, which I have forgotten once again . . .”

Years later in 1954, to his son Hans Albert, he wrote: “I have to admit I didn’t think about your birthday, but your wife reminded me . . .”

These little tidbits come courtesy of the extraordinary undertaking that has arrived at Caltech in Pasadena, which is a place Einstein respected and enjoyed.

Called the Einstein Papers Project, it is an archive of almost everything the scientist ever received or wrote. Equations, notations, physics theories, learned dialogues, love letters, postcards, every rhyme and scribble Einstein made--and his assistants saved. An example:

Oh my! That Johnnie boy!

So crazy with desire

While thinking of his Dollie

His pillow catches fire.

Einstein sent the poem to Maric in 1900. She married him anyway.

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The Einstein Papers Project is probably the most important, comprehensive--and juiciest--publishing venture ever undertaken in the history of science. It is also the most complex. So far, it represents a 20-year effort to research, cross-reference, catalog and publish, in the original German and in English, Einstein’s entire written remains.

From the books he liked as a child, to his writings on religion, physics and philosophy, and new information on his love affairs, researchers are compiling an unprecedented analysis of the great man’s intellectual and spiritual growth.

Einstein did nothing less than turn space, time, energy and matter on their heads--showing that what the world once thought were separate phenomena are really different aspects of the same thing.

The Einstein Papers Project, which began in Boston in the early 1980s, moved West when Diana Barkan, 44, was named its director and editor in chief last year. Barkan, who was trained as a chemist in Israel and received a doctorate in the history of science at Harvard, has taught history of science at Caltech since 1989. With seven of the planned 29 volumes already published by Princeton University Press under previous editors, Barkan will be in charge of the volumes to come.

Seven oversize black file cabinets containing more than 40,000 documents in Einstein’s possession when he died, and an additional 15,000 discovered by editors since the project began (they still track down new material every year) are now parked in the basement of an old red brick former faculty residence, where Barkan and her group work.

“There has never been a work of comparable structure and detail,” Barkan says. “We are publishing everything Einstein wrote or received, chronologically, day by day,” cross-referencing it to everything going on in his life, and to what was relevant in the world at large.

“For example, his correspondence with mathematicians on the theory of relativity is cross-referenced with all the drafts of papers he wrote, with all the papers he published on the subject, and with all the the popular articles of the day,” she says. Added to the mix is anything to do with Einstein’s leisure reading and hobbies, personal relationships, and his involvements in political and ethical issues at the time.

The first volume begins with his birth in Ulm, Germany, on March 14, 1879, and goes through 1902, when he started his first full-time job in the Swiss patent office. The second covers 1905--what scientists call “the miracle year”--during which Einstein, at 26, did his most important work. It includes his papers on the generation and conversion of light, Brownian motion, and his theory of relativity.

A large number of the documents reproduced in these books were discovered by the project’s editors, who searched for them in obscure German scientific journals from the time, in private homes and collections of Europeans and Americans who knew (or whose relatives knew) Einstein. One volume has 50 pages of handwritten calculations made by Einstein, unearthed by the editors, and never published before.

The series so far goes up to 1918. Barkan says the 29 volumes will be crucial to understanding Einstein’s development; beyond that, she believes, they will become a valuable asset for scholars of American and European history and philosophy, because Einstein’s work reflected on so many intellectual areas and world events.

A Homecoming at Caltech

The arrival of the project on the leafy Caltech campus is being touted as a kind of homecoming for Einstein. He visited three times in the early 1930s, and considered moving there.

“Here in Pasadena, it is like Paradise. Always sunshine and clear air, gardens with palms and pepper trees and friendly people . . . Scientifically it is very interesting, and my colleagues are wonderful to me,” he wrote home to friends in Germany in 1931.

War clouds and anti-Semitism were swirling through Europe, and he needed a safe haven in which to continue his work. By then, he was middle-age and a global icon. Grade-school children knew his name and could spout his most famous formula, E=mc2, although even most adults did not know what it meant.

Einstein’s image--the sad eyes, bushy brows and electrified-looking mane (he achieved his hairstyle “through negligence,” he liked to say) was imprinted in people’s minds via a media just as rabid for celebrity then as it is today. Einstein was what Barkan calls the first “star” scientist. His name became synonymous with “brain.”

What made his popularity so remarkable was that the man on the street (almost any street in the world) hailed him as a hero even without understanding an iota of what he had done. At first, even some physicists didn’t comprehend. British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington was asked if it was true that only three people understood the theory of relativity. “I am trying to think who the third person is,” he reportedly replied.

The Nobel committee delayed giving Einstein its prize in physics until 1921 because the members were afraid his more radical theories would be disproved. Only Isaac Newton, who formulated laws of gravity in the 17th century, is mentioned in the same breath as an equally great scientist, Barkan says.

Einstein’s fame didn’t arrive until 1919, when, during a solar eclipse, Eddington was able to measure the bending of light and confirm what Einstein had theorized. Einstein became an instant celebrity worldwide. Through all the resulting hoopla, he reportedly remained humble, even naive. He once arrived at the queen of Belgium’s palace on foot, toting his own luggage. He never imagined, he said, that the royal carriage he saw at the station had been sent to meet him.

He enjoyed the luxury of a good pipe, a sailboat, a violin. But he rebelled at what he considered excessively high payments for speeches and articles, and reportedly sometimes asked for a reduction in his fee. He refused the huge sums offered to endorse commercial products or do anything else unrelated to his convictions or his work. “What do they think I am, a prizefighter?” he would scowl, as the unseemly offers poured in.

So he might easily have said yes when Caltech’s then-president, Robert Millikan, offered a paltry amount to lure Einstein out West--with no provisions for his research assistant and secretary to come along.

Meanwhile, wealthy Einstein aficionados back East had dreamed up a better plan. They would build an Institute for Advanced Study in bucolic Princeton, N.J. They would give the great man a place where he and his assistants could live and work undisturbed, free to do nothing but think. When asked what salary he would like for his work at the institute, Einstein reportedly asked for $3,000 per year. His wife is alleged to have stepped in, and renegotiated it to $15,000.

Einstein moved to Princeton in 1933. All further pleadings from Millikan at Caltech were too little and too late. In the current issue of the school’s “Engineering and Science” quarterly, Editor Jane Dietrich writes: “Now, 70 years later and 45 years after Einstein’s death, Caltech has gotten another chance to do the right thing.”

The school is providing space and financial support for the Einstein Papers Project, which employs Barkan and a group of half a dozen editors and researchers, as well as contributing experts from around the world who concentrate on documents that relate to their own areas of expertise.

The years of research and the publication of the books have been made possible by fund-raising and donations.

At the same time, Caltech is expanding its history of science department. Among others, it has brought in Jed Buchwald, who headed MIT’s institute for the history of science for 10 years. Buchwald is Barkan’s husband--they were married last New Year’s Eve.

The study of the history of science is only about 50 years old, Barkan says. That’s because scientists, unlike doctors or many other professionals, are mainly interested in today and tomorrow. They have never ached to reinterpret yesterday.

Even if the project were to move, Barkan says, a complete copy of the archives will remain on campus, as a permanent resource for scholars. Less complete archives will be available at Princeton and Boston universities and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. All are copies. The originals are in a bomb-proof bunker at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, as stipulated in Einstein’s will.

Scientists Still in Awe

“Immortality awaits the man who can overthrow Einstein,” wrote Alva Johnston in a 1933 New Yorker magazine. Nearly 70 years later, no one has overthrown him.

Since his death in 1955, Einstein’s luster has not dimmed in the scientific community, Barkan says. In a recent issue of Caltech’s magazine, for example, Andrew E. Lange writes about “a theory Einstein devised 80 years ago and then discarded, calling it ‘the greatest blunder of my life.’ ” Now scientists are finding that his theory of a cosmological constant may well exist, that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. “The current thinking is, darn that Einstein, he was right after all,” Lange writes.

Barkan adds that Caltech and MIT have just spent years building a huge wave-detection facility in Hanford, Wash., which Barkan calls “one of the most exciting experimental projects that exists.” Within a year, she says, scientists hope to confirm what Einstein predicted almost 100 years ago.

A deeply spiritual man, Einstein felt that a force “vastly superior to that of man is manifest in the laws of the universe.” He often said he was inspired and humbled by the magnificence of nature.

The fact that he could visualize the structure of a flower, or the quanta of light emanating from the sun, did not diminish his belief in what he called “a superior being.”

“The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible,” he said.

Einstein used nothing but a pencil, paper and his brain to come up with his theoretical explanations of the universe. It sometimes took years before others could perform the experiments that would prove him right or wrong.

Bookstore shelves continue to swell with scholarly new volumes on the scientist’s work and life, along with numerous laymen’s guides explaining Einstein to ‘idiots” and “beginners.” Among the new books, a biography, “Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance,” (Penguin, 2000) by Dennis Overbye.

A Magnet for Women

Barkan says the layman’s image of Einstein is based on his later years--a frail, little professor who shuffled sockless around Princeton in moth-eaten sweaters, puffing his pipe. “Think of him as young,” she says. “Think of him as a a powerful, athletic, muscular young man who loved to sail and bike, and who had an amazing way with women.”

One biographer said “women were drawn to Einstein like iron filings to a magnet.” He was not the most considerate lover, it turns out.

His first serious affair, with science student Mileva Maric, produced an illegitimate daughter. Einstein’s letters to Maric indicate no true concern for her tribulations as a pregnant, unmarried woman trying to finish school in a prudish society. The baby was put up for adoption, biographers believe. She has never been traced--although researchers have tried.

Einstein married Maric in 1903, and they had two sons. But by 1912 they were at odds.

Einstein had already begun a romance with his divorced double cousin, Elsa Lowenthal. She was related to him on both his parents’ sides. And she had two attractive daughters, one of whom Einstein had an affair with at the same time he was dallying with her mother.

In February 1919, he and Maric were divorced.

Einstein quickly proposed to Ilse, 22, who declined to marry him. He then proposed to her mother, Elsa, who said yes. They were married the same year he got his divorce.

In 1928, a pretty young woman named Helen Dukas applied for the job as Einstein’s secretary. She got it, and remained with him for the rest of her life. After Elsa died in 1936, Dukas assumed the role of what biographers politely call “housekeeper,” a function that Elsa had previously filled.

At his death, 20 years later, Dukas was named a trustee of his estate, and it was she who collected and copied every scrap of his writing and annotated it all. Dukas lived in Einstein’s house and worked on his papers for 27 years after he died, until her own death in 1982.

Alice Calaprice, a senior editor at Princeton University Press, has worked on the Einstein publishing project for 23 years. She jokingly calls herself “yet another woman who’s hooked on him.” She has written a book, “The Expanded Quotable Einstein,” and it was she who recently discovered another one of his love affairs--with a Russian spy, Margarita Konenkova. (Experts do not believe he knew her secret occupation.)

Responding to All His Mail

By many accounts, Einstein had a sweet disposition. Barkan reports that he answered almost everyone who wrote to him. No one was considered too lowly or unimportant to rate a response. “He spent an hour and a half every day responding to his mail. He even answered the silly letters from kids,” she says.

Einstein, who was treated with the reverence of a religious leader by the end of his life, requested cremation because he said he didn’t want anyone to “worship at my bones.”

In a final extraordinary twist, Thomas Harvey, the pathologist on duty at Princeton Hospital the day Einstein died of an abdominal aortic aneurysm, removed the scientist’s brain. Apparently, no one pressed charges or tried to get it back. Harvey reportedly kept it in an old cider jar, gave a few pieces to researchers, and then packed it in Tupperware for the cross-country trip.

Barkan says that historians of science prefer to focus on Einstein’s distinguished work, rather than on the sensational aspects of his life and death--even if for most people the personal details are far easier to understand than his science.

“You would be able to understand it if Einstein were here to explain it to you,” Barkan says. “He was extraordinarily gifted, talented, eloquent at explaining very difficult science in very simple terms. He was a genius at that.”