Welcome back to part two of Albert Einstein. In the last episode, he told us the story about his father, giving him the compass when he was younger. And how it inspired him he talked about leaving Germany to avoid conscription and how, at one point in his life, he was a man without a country. And he told us about his wild hair and his offer to be the president of Israel. In this episode, he's going to share the terms of his divorce decree.
You're not going to believe what his wife received per the terms of that agreement. He's also going to talk about his thoughts on God, as well as explain some of his scientific theories and why they matter so much Okay, that makes sense. You have a history of being known as a pacifist. And I read once that you had said that war was, I don't know if you'd said this or not, it might not be true, that war was a disease.
And yet I guess I, I question I've debated this in my head and I think a lot of people have throughout their lives that I don't know if there's any way with pacifism to stop somebody that's determined that has an army then without an army. Sometimes people just can't find common ground. How do you reconcile being a pacifist with the fact that sometimes only an army can beat another army? I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that. Well, let me think about that.
It's a very profound question Throughout the First World War, and in the immediate decade following, I was a convinced pacifist, and I provided funding for those people, no matter what country they live in, who were conscientious objectors, and some of them were sent to prison. And so I would provide whatever I could in the way of support. Perhaps it would be a letter to the government.
In support of this or that person, or perhaps it would be a little money that would support them even while they are in prison. And I would give speeches in favor of pacifism and against the war. But certainly in the First World War. One time I was giving a lecture in New York, in the city, and I said to the audience, I said and I believe this was 1930. I said, if only 2% of the young people, the young men in the world would refuse military service that would.
put like sand in the veils of . Militarism. It would just stop the military from functioning. That is what it would only take. How, 2 percent is a huge number of people. How could you arrest all of them? 2 percent of the people. And so shortly after I gave this speech I was informed that many young people were seen on the streets of New York City with little buttons and the word 2%. They were in favor, they accepted, they believed what I said, but then I got into a little trouble.
Then the Second World War began, and that, then I am living on the coast of Belgium. Thanks to the Queen of Belgium who gave my wife and I a place to live where I am trying to decide where to go next. And I see that Hitler has invaded Poland and it is clear to me that there will be a cataclysmic war coming. I wrote and I said, I believe I said it in a radio interview, that if I were a young person. I would become a soldier. I would carry a rifle.
I would do what was necessary to protect Western civilization. Now, this caused a great deal of problems for me. On both the right and the left. On the right, they were accusing me again. of being a traitor, that I would fight the German army. On the left, they were saying, It's wrong with Einstein. He has rejected his pacifism. Now he wishes to be a soldier. And you see, you can't please everybody. Or anybody. I could, no. I could see at that time that it was necessary to pick up arms.
And defend what that which we most deeply value, otherwise, what is the point? Everything would have been destroyed without opposition to the German military machine. I completely agree with everything you're saying, and what I find interesting about this is I think that, , this strong position that you had as a pacifist is honorable. , nobody really wants to fight, but the reality is, aren't we all pacifists until we don't agree with something? Because that is really what happened.
It's just your level of understanding what is happening is more profound than others. But at the end of the day, none of us really want to punch the other guy until we feel like we have to. And that's, that's the place where, you know, that you got to. Because if somebody doesn't stand up against Hitler, Then we all have blonde hair and blue eyes, you know, I mean, except Hitler, of course. That, you know, I understand the position. I still consider myself a pacifist.
Yeah, I do not approve of violence and of militarism, of aggression, of war. So I do not renounce my pacifism. But as you said, there are times when it is necessary that we have to oppose fascism, military aggression, yeah, but of course there are people who will argue with me and say, no, if you are truly a pacifist, Einstein, you would never pick up a gun. You would never shoot another person.
You cannot be opposed to violence on the one hand and resort to violence on the other and call yourself a pacifist. No, we called you a hypocrite, Einstein. Well, that is their opinion. I do not share that opinion, but that does not mean that I am absolutely right. It is only where I have come to in my life. But I remain on principle opposed to violence in any form.
Whether it is war, whether it is interpersonal violence, domestic violence, yeah, no, I think, as I have been reading and studying still, it seems that people by nature. You have to be trained to kill, to overcome humanity in order to lift a gun, point it at another human, and pull the trigger. That has got to be learned. It is not instinctual, I believe. Well, you can argue with me, but you know, that is what military training is all about.
It is to overcome the natural human instinct . not hurt the other person, do not kill them. We don't want to kill our fellow human beings. But we have to overcome that inherent reluctance to violence. . I've never thought about it that way. That is exactly what military training is, from a soldier's point of view, is how to overcome the desire not to kill somebody else.
. But you know, there is the famous story of the, in World War, I believe it was in the first World War, in the first year of the war, during the Christmas, when the soldiers On the German side, and on the British side, they decided to declare a truce. And it was Christmas Eve, they put down their weapons, they emerged from the trenches, they met on no man's land between the trenches, they had a game of soccer, they showed pictures of their families with one another.
Perhaps they shared a little food, a little drink. They learned the names of their enemies. And then when they had to go back to the trenches, and they had to lift up their guns, and sight the person in the opposite trench, that was no longer a nameless human being. That was Fritz. Or that was Robert. Robert has a wife who's pregnant. Or what not. It's a human being. A total human being. How can I shoot him? Yeah. Jeez. That really is amazing.
Let me let me talk a little bit about the end of World War II. And the the bomb that was dropped. The atomic bomb. So anybody that spends the time to read about this knows that you're not responsible for making that bomb, but there are people that, , get little tidbits of history that think that you played a big role in that. And I know for a fact you were not involved with the Manhattan Project and you were not making the bomb.
In fact, I saw the letter that you wrote to Roosevelt saying The Germans are going to get to this before you do. I saw that original letter that you wrote when I was in Washington, D. C. Yeah yeah. But you weren't the person that made the bomb, right? , what is your role in all of that? Yeah, well, , I was prevented from any involvement because I was considered a security risk after all. The FBI was investigating me I'm assuming over the bread knife incident, right?
Over the, my political views, my outspoken political views, it was clear that I was not sympathetic to To those who wish to make war and whatnot, and that is why the FBI was investigating me. daughters of the American Revolution, D. A. R., they tried to prevent me. From coming to America because they said no, no, we can't have this person. He is an atheist. He will corrupt our religion. He will corrupt our schools. And so we must prevent, we cannot issue him a passport.
And I said to the person at the embassy, I said, well, if you refuse me and my wife a passport, I will inform the world. And you will be a laughing stock. I got the passport, I came to America, but I was still under investigation because of my political views by the FBI. But when you get to the question of the end of the war and my involvement, well, you know, Yeah.
It was my theory of energy is equal to mass times the square of the speed of light that gave birth, one might say, to the atomic age, or the atomic bomb. It was scientists who understood what that equation was saying. That tiny bit of matter contained an enormous amount of force, of energy. And if you could break the bonds between the atoms, you would release that force that would be incredibly destructive, and that is the essence of the atomic bomb.
Did I have any role in that application of my theory? No. Not at all. But others did.
The letter that you are speaking of, I confess, my colleague Leo Szilard, a physicist and a refugee like myself, he wrote the first draft, I made some corrections, some editorial changes, and that is what was submitted to Roosevelt, that we had, in fact, it was Szilard who informed me of the progress the Germans were making for the development of this weapon, and also that they were putting a ban on shipments of uranium out of Czechoslovakia, for instance.
So, it was clear to me that yeah, the Germans were close to developing this weapon, and I put my signature. On that letter. And that is what led to the Manhattan Project and the development of that weapon. Yeah. But beyond your original revelation of the theory E equals mc squared that you were talking about. Energy equals mass , times the square of speed of light. E equals mc squared. Very famous in our time. People walk around with it on the front of their t shirt.
You weren't in the room making the bomb. Did you think it was that they were going to be able to pull it off? ? There was evidence that the Germans were close to developing this, and yeah, so I thought, now perhaps you can criticize me in hindsight, but I thought that the Americans would have the facility, and the scientific ability To do this, to develop this, and I also believe that it had to be in the possession of the Americans.
Well, and you might say, the Allies during the war, and have this, not to use it, but to have it we did not want the Germans to have it, because I believe that if they had it, they would use it, and that would be the end, perhaps, of humanity, of all civilization. Yeah, but that is why I signed the letter, and I wanted Roosevelt to see it, and I approved the development, but I had no part in the development itself. Did I want the United States to actually use the weapon? No. No, not at all.
What I believed was that the Germans, if they knew, , , ah, they would say, well, you know the United States, it has developed this extraordinary weapon, so we are going to have to make concessions. Because we do not want them to drop such a weapon on Dresden or Hamburg or other cities in Germany. The end of our country. Yeah, that is what I believed. And that is why I thought it was necessary.
And I thought of all the countries in the Allied side, the United States was the one with the greatest military, financial, And scientific resources to do this. Let's go back to the moment that you finalized that equation, e equals mc square, and you understood the amount of power that , could come out of releasing that energy in that moment. Can you just, I mean, I'm guessing that moment was very different than the moment where you realized it was gonna be used from a weapon.
What was the moment like when you finished that theory, and you were sure that it was correct? What was that like for you? Well, it was almost an afterthought. You know, at the time I was 26 years old. I was working as a third class patent clerk. In in Switzerland, in Bern, Switzerland, and when I am not examining applications for patents, I am doing my own work, my own pursuit of my own scientific work during the office hours and also at home.
And at that time, I published four papers, or five papers, I forget which, four or five, Almost as an afterthought, it occurred to me that on the basis of what I had already written and developed in other theories that I published at that time, that it came to me of the connection between energy and mass. And that is when I developed this equation, energy is mass times the square of the speed of light. It was like necessary, that is what I understood.
, it followed from my work on the theory of special relativity. On the work of the photoelectric effect, on the work that proved the existence of atoms, and on the paper that explained how you can measure the size of molecules. This was the paper I published in that year, which some people have called Miracle Year. And the fifth paper was on the relationship between energy and matter. It was very satisfying.
But I never for a moment I never imagined that this theory, this equation, would be put to use in developing a weapon of mass destruction. No. In fact, I thought that, I did not see it until it was brought to my attention by Professor Szilard. When he came to visit me in Long Island, yeah, in the 1930s that was when I understood, oh my goodness now I am a much older person, but at the time, no, I did not envision this.
It was simply a continuation of my own work into understanding deeper matter and energy and the relationship between the two. So at that moment, there wasn't this big revelation that you had that, Oh my gosh, I just did this. , it was just like one of the stepping stones. It's like, oh, this makes sense. Oh, well now then that makes sense. It was just one of the pieces of, one of the creations along the line. Is that right? Yeah I don't wish to give any more weight to that equation.
I would give more importance to the special theory of relativity that preceded it in the same time period. That was, for me, much more revolutionary. Because , it challenged our conceptions of space and time. The equation of which we are speaking, that was also revolutionary, because it said that a certain level, energy and mass are indistinguishable. Or did one can be converted into the other. Yeah, I was excited.
Of course, this was a, for me and for the world, obviously, a very stunning insight into reality. That energy, they were not separate entities or realities, but they were convertible. Was I excited? Yeah, of course, I was excited, but I did not foresee how this would be put to Well, I would normally would say demonic use. Yeah, so later on, once they start building these bombs, and then they're dropped, do you feel regret? Do you feel guilt? Yeah it is hard for me to remember this.
To remember my reactions when I first read What had happened, that atomic bomb had been dropped on, , well, there were two different bombs, one on Hiroshima, one on Nagasaki. I had spent with my wife, Elsa, we had spent six weeks in Japan. We had met many people. We had been celebrated He had been greeted by little children. I had a deep fondness for the Japanese people and their culture. When I learned of the bombing, I was beyond myself in shock and disbelief.
It was for me a horrible, horrible, event. That I could not, at first, I could not equip myself to understand, to comprehend, to take into my, my, my mind the fact that instantaneously thousands of people were incinerated alive, burned to death or having to suffer terrible burns. Yeah, this was, and I felt, yeah, all right, I felt guilty. that my own work had been used as the basis of the bombs that were dropped. Yeah. And I have never overcome this sense of guilt. I wish it had never happened.
And that but perhaps as a way to compensate, I have argued in the last years that scientists must assume responsibilities for the consequences of their work. They cannot simply say that, well, we don't care what is, what the general public , will make use of our work. No. I said no. You have to be responsible. You have to consider the effects of your work on the welfare of humanity. These are dark thoughts. Let's let's move for a second.
And you had said that when I was asking you about the formula E equals MC squared, that the special theory of relativity you thought, you feel is more significant than that. And I'd like to know why you say that. Well, there are perhaps people who will dispute that. And they will say, well, you see, your equation has completely transformed the world. Now we are creating weapons that are even many times more powerful than the first bombs that were dropped in 1945.
But, , for centuries, People believed that time and space were absolute, they had nothing to do with one another, and that they existed apart from whatever we are doing. They were abstract realities that we cannot influence. That was given. Well I was not the first person to question the the absoluteness of space and time, but I was the person, and I say this with some degree of modesty to go a little bit further and to pass it, that space and time far from be absolute.
They can be stretched and they are profoundly involved in each of us, where we are, how fast we are moving. And so that I had to challenge what was centuries old prejudices or thoughts or concepts of space and time. Um, Even the great Isaac Newton, I could be wrong, but he believed that space is absolute, and therefore he can make measurements of movement in relation to absolute space, which is unchanging. It cannot be influenced by anything, it exists.
As as a reality, as an abstraction and it is always perfect. Time flows like a river, and it can be measured. It is always, time will flow at the same rate everywhere in the universe. That is what people believed. People once believed that the Earth does not move. It is flat, but Copernicus challenged these notions and said, no, the earth is moving around the sun, and it is circular, and , this created a great deal of resentment toward him, toward Galileo, who said pretty much the same thing.
So, that is why I give myself a certain amount of credit for being willing to come up against these long, centuries old beliefs. So I said in my paper on the theory of electrodynamism, otherwise known as the theory or the special theory of relativity, that the faster you go, the slower you will be. time elapses. And at the same time, as you approach incredibly fast speeds at the speed of light, that spaces will contract. They will shrink. And this, I thought was revolutionary.
And I still maintain that It upsets the centuries old conception of time and space and the way we measure space and time. We can no longer consider space as something that is always there, permanent, unchanging. We can no longer conceive of time as independent from us. No. Time is elastic. It stretches, it contracts. Is the universe growing, then?
Well, yeah, that is an interesting question, because at one time I believed that the universe is unchanging, that it was created, and what we observe with our instruments, there'll always be But it was only when I finally, I went to California and I met the great American astronomer who had been observing through a telescope in California, through his own work and calculations proved to be, I was wrong, that in fact the universe is indeed expanding, yeah.
So it is not unchanging, oh no, it is quite volatile and always changing and expanding. Yeah. We don't know if there is an end point, or if the universe will continue expanding infinitely. And what does that mean? Infinite expansion to the point where there are no longer we can no longer observe galaxies.
or planets that that the expansion of space will render them no longer observable through telescopes, that it will in a sense be so completely thinned out that they will no longer exist, it will be essentially a dead universe. I can't, , I'm seeing , this visual in my brain right now, the universe expanding. I can't help but wonder, where's it expanding to? Is it expanding to something that doesn't exist? And if it is expanding into that place, like, how is nothing there?
It has to be very challenging to be in your brain sometimes. You know, I have to say that sometimes it people would come to my apartment in Berlin or to our little home in Kapa, near the lake and they would want to ask me questions, profound questions. They would treat me as if I was a disciple or a founder of a new religion. One person wanted to wash my feet. When he came to the apartment. Too sweaty though? Yes, I think it was too sweaty for him.
Yeah. They would line up outside of the building in which Elsa and I lived in Berlin to meet me, to see me, to to ask me questions. I would have to sneak out the back part of the building to avoid the people waiting. But then I would say I am an ordinary person. You know, I like to eat yogurt with berries, or cream, fresh cream with the strawberries, and I love to drink black tea, and yeah. But please, do not consider me some kind of a god, no, I'm just a human being like you.
But we cannot, our brains are not equipped, including my own brain, to imagine what came before the universe. What comes after the universe, we can conjecture, we can work out theorems and equations, but we cannot imagine this thing. These are realities beyond the human , capacity. Though did the universe come from nothing? What does that mean, nothing? Could there be other universes besides this one? What does it mean that it expands forever, infinitely?
Into what was there nothing outta which came the universe or was it perhaps that it was not such a unique phenomenon that, that it is occurring all the time that universes are born when they die? Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about the. This experiment about whether or not space can bend light. I may not be saying that correctly, but where in 19 in 1919, there was the eclipse, where you had the astronomers measuring the stars, and if it looked like they moved after this eclipse.
Can you tell me a little bit about all that, and how that was used to prove a theory of yours, and, the problems and the successes with that? Yeah my theory, special theory of relativity, which was published in when I was 26 years old, 1906 yeah, that that brought me, in fact, those papers that I published in when I was 26 they brought me a certain notoriety, brought me to the attention of other physicists, but there was a conflict.
That was obsessing me for the next let us say, the next decade or so, and that my attempt to resolve that conflict resulted in what is called the General Theory of Relativity. And that is when I posited that that Newton was wrong when he said gravity is a force that acts at a distance. I said no, it is not a force that acts at a distance. It is due to the very structure of the universe, the structure of space and time.
And I imagined that, well, here, let us imagine you have a ball, let us say a basketball, and you put it in a container of water. What happens to the water? It displaced. The same in if we look into the space, we see objects, large objects like the moon, the earth, the planets. They are also in a substance we call space time. And a certain amount of space time will be displaced. It will be affected by the presence of this large object, such as the moon or the planets.
And it will cause ripples in the structure of space time. You cannot separate, just as you cannot separate energy from matter, you cannot separate space from time. They are interlinked. And it was my professor of physics in Zurich who, Actually took my conceptions, and he was the one who said we can no longer separate space and time, and this is a new understanding of its fourth dimension called space time.
So, if it is in fact true that energy and mass are at a basic subatomic level equal, , and that space and time are connected, then a beam of light, which is energy, therefore , it is mass. Mass and energy are equivalent. A beam of light coming from a distant star, as it passes by the sun, must be affected by the the contouring of space around the sun is a huge object, it will it will affect the structure of space time, yeah? Just as , the balls that displace the water around it.
So, here comes the beam of light, it has to bend to a certain degree as it comes close to the sun. We can observe this during a total eclipse, that we can take photographs and then analyze the photographs. My student, one of my students said to me once Professor Einstein. But if it turns out you are wrong, and that the light does not bend, I said to him, well, I will feel very sorry for God, because the theory is correct.
It must bend, , and I worked out exactly how much it would bend, and So, the photographs were taken in 1919, after the end of the First World War. And they were analyzed. It took several months to complete the analysis. And it turned out that I was correct. Yeah. And therefore my theory was validated. , that objects in space will cause ripples in space time. And we have proof of this in the way the beam of light has bent , as it passed by the sun. And overnight, I became a worldwide sensation.
That I had given the world a new way of understanding the cosmos itself because of the implications of the theory of general relativity, that large objects will cause differences in space time and so forth. Yeah. So, I forget the question. No, you answered it perfectly. Actually I wanna follow up , so you definitely didn't forget it. You answered it. So, if a layman like myself, if I were to look at space, would it be.
incorrect to visualize space more like an ocean, like just a like a container filled with water. And that's why the balls and the water are reacting together instead of seeing it as just this empty place where it's really cold. Well, in one sense it is empty, but in another place it is a fabric.
Think of it as a fabric, and that objects in space will tell space time how to bend, and the bending of space time will tell objects how to move, matter, like, objects in space, such as the moon and the stars, the planets, they will tell space time how to curve, and the curvature of space time will tell matter how to move, and that movement is what Newton called gravity. He was wrong. There is no mysterious, instantaneous force that, that causes the attraction between bodies in space time.
so then you look in the night sky, for instance and you can think of it as a great emptiness, but you know it is not empty. There are billions and billions of stars and galaxies, and space itself is expanding, and so it is far from being empty. continues to fill me. With awe as I regard the sky, particularly the night sky in some places the stars are so visible, and it is far from empty. But We have had to change our way of understanding space.
It is not this unchanging abstraction no. I hesitate to use the word living fabric, but you can perhaps imagine it as water, as the ocean, in which the objects are moving, are gravitating toward one another, are responding to space time, and space time , in turn, is affecting the movements of these objects. It's my understanding that when you were trying to measure this during the eclipse, whether or not it looked like the stars would move, which would prove that.
The light was bending, that you had astronomers running all around the world trying to get in like different spots to where, they would be able to measure this. And some of them got cloudy days and all that. , , can you tell me about that? Well, I , when the war the First World War began, German scientists wanted to test my theory that light would bend. But the war started, and they were captured by the Russians. And they were eventually released, they were not hurt, so they had to postpone.
When the war was over, Arthur Eddington, the great astronomer, cosmologist in England he had my paper on general relativity, And , he was tasked with disproving my theory, because after all, during the war, we were enemies. But he read my paper, and he said as a scientist, a principled scientist, he was concerned with the truth, and not with disproving my theory. So-called Enemy scientists. So he got funding from the British government.
And he at the appropriate time when they knew there would be an eclipse, you had to have a complete solar eclipse. And he sent two ships. One they went to off the coast of West Africa and another to Brazil. So if there was bad weather in one place, maybe there would be good weather in the other. So there was two ships. And each place they had the equipment they needed to take the photographs during the eclipse. And then those photographs, of course, had to be analyzed.
And it showed, when you look at the starlight from a , distant star, you As it came close to the sun, which is an eclipse, this is in darkness because of the eclipse. Now you can make your measurements and the starlight , it bent according to my calculations and they were correct. Magnificent. I have really enjoyed this time and I have such a clearer picture of what you stand for and, , what you were trying to do and I just have a few more questions that I'd like to ask.
, your first wife, Melva? , I have heard that . She partially is due some credit for some of your theories. Is any of that true? . I have been criticized for. Not giving credit to my first wife, Mileva. It is believed that she was the person who developed the theories of special relativity. And my other work while we were married and living in Bern, Switzerland, and I'm working at the patent office. I will say this much. Mineva was brilliant. She wanted to be a scientist.
She wanted to be a physicist. We had studied and read the same books. We were interested in the same scientists theories, the advanced physics that was not being taught very much at the institute, at the Zurich Institute. But unfortunately, she failed her exams, her final exams, twice she failed. And so she was unable to get degree, and then they get married. And we have children, we have two little boys, Edward and Albert.
And now she has to take care of the children, the apartment, she has to make the meals, she has to go to shopping, and so she could not pursue. For scientific interests. And thus, from her point of view, I had developed close friendships with two young men at their home. Approximately my age, we called ourselves the Olympia Academy as if to kind of make mock of academic associations.
But we get together, we talk about literature and art and science, we have many cups of tea and hot chocolate and so she felt isolated from me. from the relationship we had in the past, but, , because of her brilliance, I would often share with her my thoughts. I would ask her to help me with the mathematics, and she was perhaps better at mathematics than me.
But I must say that the theories the core of the theory It was me, it was my work, and not me alone, of course, but I derived much of my work from people in the past, from Newton, Galileo, Copernicus, James Clerk Maxwell, yeah, but I would run my ideas across with Mileva, and she would help me work out difficulties, kinks and my own reasoning. Yeah, but did she write this special theory? No. I have to say that I take responsibility for that. Should I have credited her?
Yes. Should I have given thanks to her for her mathematical wizardry? Yes. And I regret that I didn't give her more credit. But I did say on my own behalf that should I ever win the Nobel Prize, I will give my earnings, my winnings to her. So that she will be able to take care of herself and our children. Those were your terms for the divorce? If I win the Nobel Prize, you can have the money? Yeah. It was, well, it was, there were other terms. She wanted us to stay together as a family.
Yeah. And my first set of terms were, okay, well, you come to Berlin, we will live together, but you must not bother me. You must prepare my meals. You must not expect any form of intimacy with me. If you can abide by those terms, we will live together. But she lasted two or three months and she returned to Zurich.
And it wasn't, it was not too long after that we get a divorce, but I think in the proceedings, as we are working out the terms, I expected I would get the Nobel Prize, and I did, and I gave her the money. I didn't give it to her, like, over the table. I put it in what you call a trust fund that she could draw from. I see. . So she did get your Nobel Prize money. That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah, she did.
Was there a chance throughout your life, I mean, you have this brilliant mind for science, but it seems like you're also an accomplished violinist. Could you have gone that direction into music instead? Well, I think at a young age, if I had not become a scientist, I would have become a musician. Yeah, my, my mother taught me to play the piano, and then she wanted me to learn the violin. But when I am only six or seven, , I did not particularly enjoy playing the violin.
It wasn't until I heard the sonatas of Mozart when I am 12 that I understood. Ah this music, I wish to know how to play these sonatas and comparable music. And that is when I began to take learning the violin seriously. Before that, you know, we had a tutor. She came to the house to give me lessons in the violin, but I had a very bad temper. And one day she upset me and I threw the chair at her. And she ran out of the house, shouting and screaming, and she never came back.
But I did learn the violin and the piano. Now some people will say, yeah, I have heard Einstein playing and it sounds like the chickens pecking in the yard or it's, it sounds like crows in the backyard. It is awful. You don't want to hear it, but it's better to go with science. Yeah. But I don't think that is the complete truth. I was able to take part in recitals.
And I love to play the violin and I would often take it with me wherever I went and if I learned that there was somebody , giving a concert or recital, I would perhaps sometimes I would join with them. I couldn't have been that bad if they'd let me join them. People in our time, the word is that you played well. I'm curious, when you threw the chair at your teacher and she was running out and you were, Trying to get her to come back.
Were you yelling wait, I'm a pacifist after you threw the chair? No, I don't think so. No, I don't think I was speaking of myself. I was only a child, you know, and it wasn't until that I read several volumes on the history of science when I was 10, 11 years old. And that is when I began to question my beliefs. My, my religious beliefs, I had been quite a devout person unlike my parents who did not keep the traditions, the Jewish traditions.
I did, but then my mind was broadened by the exposure to the history of science, but I don't think I would have considered myself a pacifist. Well certainly my friends would, because I didn't like to roughhouse with the other boys at all. Who would come over to, to play with me. I, that, I was that was not for me at all. I would rather be alone by myself into a rough house with the boys. What, you had said religion there. What is your, what are your opinions on religion? Do you believe in God?
Once I received a letter from a little girl, I forget in what school , she was 11th, , 6th grade or something, and her teacher was encouraging the students to send letters to people to ask them about their religious beliefs. So I received this little girl's letter. She asked me, as you had asked me, about God, and I said, well, I don't believe in God in the traditional sense.
Of this wise white bearded person who is watching over us and who listens to our petitions and grants them in his own way and at his own time, and intervenes in the affairs of humans. Now, that is not my conception. What I believe is that there is an intelligence that is so much greater than we can possibly conceive of.
That one can only be in awe, and perhaps even a little afraid that there's something this superior, this ultra rational intelligence that is one could say responsible for the universe, for life itself, is that God? Well, I leave it for you to say, but it is not God in the traditional sense, because I believe , that kind of intelligence that is not here, interfering, influencing human life.
I reject the traditional conceptions that I consider many of the stories in the Bible and the Talmud, they are superstitious. They are not based on evidence, upon fact, upon truth. They are people, they are simply what people wish to believe, but they are not true. Alright, I have two last questions. I understand that at this point in your life you're actually working on , this theory that everything is connected. I don't know if that's called unified theory.
I may be mixing that up with something else. Do you believe that before the end that you're going to be able to put down how the universe works as a whole in one mathematical equation? Well, way to characterize what you are saying is a unified field theory. And that is a theory that would connect gravity which is the essence of general relativity, and quantum mechanics, that is the study of subatomic particles.
And my search for a theory that would connect the two realms the small and the grandiose the cosmic level and the microscopic subatomic level. Several times I felt I had come close, but each time there was a holes in my theory and I had to recognize that it was incomplete. And incorrect, but I maintain a belief.
That it will be possible, if not in my lifetime, then perhaps in a future lifetime, that we will see that there is a connection, as there was between energy with matter, time with space, the very small and the very large. Now my colleague at the Institute in Princeton Oppenheimer. He has called me cuckoo. He feels that my thinking is behind the times, that physics has passed me by, and that I am wasting my time trying to unify these two realms. But I don't accept this.
And I do not reject quantum theory. No. What I object to is to think that probabilities are all that there is to reality. I believe that one day scientists will discover a deeper, more fundamental reality that underlies even the quantum world. , that is what I have come to in my old age. Wow. Amazing. Just fantastic. Alright, my final question, the most important one of them all, the one that everybody's been waiting to hear the answer to.
As we hear about you and your life, we hear the stories of how you would play the violin sometimes to clear your mind and think, and you would spend a lot of time, maybe even on the water in your boat, as you mentioned, sometimes you would just sit in a room quietly and smoke your pipe and just think. And it seems like this is the time where maybe a lot of your ideas came to you.
But that, That raises the question, is this true or not, that occasionally in the middle of those deep thinking sessions, that you would occasionally walk out of the house without your pants on. Is that true? I don't recall any time when I walked out without my pants on. No I walked into the wrong house once at Princeton. Yeah I mistook one door for another.
And so we had to paint my door red, front door, so that I would We always walk into my own house and not somebody else's, and sometimes I would walk out of the building at Princeton, and I wouldn't remember if I had eaten or not am I going into the building or am I walking out of the building? I didn't know. But, I don't remember. Because you were thinking about other things. I was, yeah, I was thinking, I, yeah, I would get disoriented sometimes.
Thinking about, one time I'm pushing a little baby carriage with our first child Hans Albert, and I'm pushing him in the baby carriage in the streets of , Bern, Switzerland, and I stopped in the middle of the road When the traffic is going by. Because I had to write something down so I would not forget it. And both sides, cars going by, and I'm writing on , my notebook something. I forgot that I was out there with my little child in the middle of the road. Yeah. Oh my gosh.
It's a challenging life to be a genius, I suppose. Mr. Einstein, I am so thankful for all of your time. Is there anything that you'd like to add as we wrap this up? Well, I would love to have this kind of mechanism that you call I forget what you call the phone. That we are using. Perhaps I would have two of them, so I could have communication with somebody else. That would be very nice. Yeah. And I am wondering if What will happen to the radio?
I listen to the radio, and I wonder if there will still be radio years ahead from now. Perhaps perhaps there will be advances in how we communicate and how we project our movies and whatnot. I don't know. I don't, I can't imagine, but it will be like far in the future. I have not put a television in my house yet because it is too distracting. I prefer the radio.
I think that if you were to live to be old enough to where you were in my time right now, I think you would look at all of these advancements and all you'd want to do is just work on it to see how much further you could take it and what you could create next because it is all as interesting as you would expect that it would be. Ah, and there's one thing I also, I would like a copy of the New York Times. I want to see what is going on in the world in your time.
Well, if I can get one through one of those wormholes, and I can find a way to bend space, and they figure out how to get that through, one day you're going to wake up and one will be sitting on your desk. How does that sound? That would be wonderful. Thank you so much. Sir, I thank you so much for your time, and I wish you the best. It is a wonderful pleasure to be able to talk with you across these many miles of space and time. Thank you again.
There's nobody like Albert Einstein, he had talent, he had genius and he had work ethic after his miracle year, his theories needed to be proven, but it could only be done during a solar eclipse. Astronomers were traveling across the globe, trying to get pictures of this complete solar eclipse, which required lots of travel, expensive equipment and lots of manpower.
Some of these astronomers in their equipment were captured because they were in places that they shouldn't have been during a world war. Others would take huge amounts of equipment across the world. They'd set up and be ready to go only to find that it would be a cloudy day or it was raining. And then they'd have to wait a few years until there was another eclipse.
But eventually after many failed attempts, one astronomer was able to take pictures before, during and after a complete solar eclipse and Einstein was right. The light was bending. Later in life, it was agonizing for him to know that the formula that he had created during his miracle year would ultimately be responsible for killing so many people because of the creation of the atomic bomb. While my wife and I were in Washington, DC.
We saw the letter, the original letter that he sent to Roosevelt. In a nutshell, the letter said that the Germans were making serious and dangerous progress on the atomic bomb and that the Americans should step it up and create this weapon before the Germans did. But the reality was very different. The Germans were not far along at all.
In fact, after realizing this was the case, Einstein wished that he had never sent that letter at all, because in essence, it lit a fire under the Americans that ultimately started an arms race that still exists to this day. In his later years, Einstein continued to work on his theories in search of a connection between everything, but those theories are still incomplete. Thank you for listening. And if you enjoyed this podcast, subscribe now I'm Tony Dean. And until next time, um, history.