Albert Einstein: Inside the Mind of Quirky Genius

to have with me today? Michael Gordon Professor of Modern and contemporary history, particularly the history of science, at Princeton University, and he is also the author of the new book Einstein in Bohemia. Einstein was born on March fourteenth, eighteen seventy nine, who was born in the South German town of Woom and his father, Hermann Einstein, was an entrepreneur in an electrical engineering firm, which he did with his brother, so it was a family business working in this kind

of electrical technology. And Einstein's early work, especially work on special relativity, is also linked to electrical technology in a bunch of ways. And Einstein worked in a patent office, largely as a specialist evaluating electromagnetic technologies. It's also the hottest area of physics and physics and inspired engineering at

the times. It's interesting that it did carry through although his father really wanted him essentially to go study engineering and join the family business, and that is not what Albert wanted to do. So in that sense they departed from one another. I mean, his father essentially let him depart, if you will. It's important to frame it as though it's some sort of break between the two of them, because the relations don't seem to have suffered terrible because

of this. I would say they're in the solid middle class bourgeoisie, but they're not at the top of that. They're kind of in the middle, but there's always a bit of a struggle going on. Einstein seems to be mostly shielded from that, and when you look at childhood pictures, he has all the classic bourgeois child pictures of like

boy in school uniform against the backdrop. And his relationship with his mother, it sounds as though she is the more strict, tough, if you will, presence in the family between the two parents, though it's not like many people's relationships with their mothers it's close, but it's not unfraught. So his parents are very typical of Jews in the bourgeoisie in that period. In living in urban Germany, they were largely assimilated. They did some of the very surface traditions,

but didn't observe in any way. They were completely irreligious in that regard. When Einstein was about eleven twelve, he became substantially interested in the Jewish tradition and started studying the stuff and even preparing and thinking about apart Mitzpah, and then around page twelve he abandons all of it. Was it scientific readings, material or his his commitment to

science that made him give it up? Yeah, So what we have We actually have very few sources about Einstein's youth, but one of the sources we have is from a medical student in Munich who would visit the household. So one of the traditions that the Einstein did, which is sort of classic Jewish tradition for the Sabbath, meal have a talmud student over at your house religious students and

feed them as a way of supporting their studies. Max toalmwould later emigrates to the United States, changes his last name to Tommy tell Me writes a book on special relativity, explaining it to a popular audience, and at the back of it he put his memories of what Albert Einstein was like as a child. So it's one of the few sources we have of that period. So Max talmwould really hit it off with the boy Einstein. So there's about there's over a decade of difference in their ages

that they spent a lot of time talking. He works through the proofs of Euclid with him from a textbook his uncle had given him, and they read other kinds of popular science books together. He gives the boy popular science books, and it's though that engagement with a scientific explanation of how things go that alienate him from religion. One of the things that makes Einstein so interesting to think about is he's a mixture of radically unconventional things

and enormously conventional choices. He does both of those in a weird mix. He kicks an unusual first spouse, but then he expects her to behave in exactly the way a conventional spouse would. I think in some ways that he was a mixture, just as we're talking about in terms of the type of student that he was so. On the one hand, he clearly excelled in math and sciences in certain way and that was where his interests lie.

In other areas not so much. There's a very common myth that Einstein was a terrible students, and that's just not true. He was a very good student in the math and sciences, and he was a decent mediocre to decent students in other areas. Some of that is lack of interest, some of that is also lack of talent. He clearly had a hard time with languages. Some people learn them more easily, other people learn them with a

greater difficulty. His lack of facility with French is one of the things that holds him up and enrolling in the university, and he needs to take a year of schooling to get his French up to snuff. He started learning English when he was thirty one and always learned it kind of imperfectly, and his his German is enormously expressive, almost poetic in places. He had a real facility with the language, but not of facility with any other language.

Even though he was eventually competent in French and English and could read some Italian this collection of attending to only things that really really interested him and clearly appearing to not attend and be able to have the same facility therefore with things that did not interest him, and then going on to not only attend to the things

that interested him, but like what you might call hyper focus. Uh, you know, like a deep dive that few other people could maintain for the lengths of time that he did, at the depth that he did. And that's why there are some groups that look at that collection of behaviors and say, could this be a person who has attention

deficit disorder? In the sense that attention deficit disorder is not the lack of ability to pay attention, It is actually the faulty switch in one's ability to attend when one wants to attend, so that even, for example, if you're not going to do well in Greek or in French and you have to pay attention, you're able to get yourself to pay attention. But if you had a d D, you would just not be able to do it.

You just could not make yourself do it. But if the math fascinated you, you could do that better and more deeply and for a longer period of time than somebody who did not have a d D. And in addition, many people with a d D, because of this faulty switch, their ability to harness innovative ideas and to have a greater number literally of out of the box thoughts that are related to daydreaming and fantasy and so on, is

often superior. As an adult, he was perfectly capable of spending many hours paying attention to things he thought were boring and useless if they satisfied some greater goals. So he did a lot of fundraising for the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He found these events idiotic and pointless, but

he would do it. He engaged in extensive correspondence concerning the League of Nation, and lots of other efforts, such as writing affidavits for refugees in the nineties and trying to get them positions either in the UK or in the US. He would complain about how much time it was taking, but he would do it with focus. So it's not just the maths stuff that he can do this with. He can do this with a lot of things. I think it's just when he chooses to apply himself.

He clearly did cultivate this image of the absent minded professor to some degree, I don't know, perhaps as a way of checking out when he preferred to check out, but the whole I don't tie my shoelaces, I don't wear socks. My hair looks like I've just stuck my finger in a socket. You know, he he clearly cultivated this image, that vision of mine, thing which I know everybody listening to this has in their mind right now. He did look like that, But he looked like that

kind of the late thirties onward earlier. If you look at him in the twenties, he's dressed in a suit, he's got shoes, they're tied, and some of that is his wife died in thirty six and she stopped dressing him. But when he needed to look respectable, he looked perfectly respectable. It's only as he gets older that um either maybe he doesn't mean to, maybe he cares less. So it's it's not clear to me whether he always wanted to be kind of a shlub and then finally got the chance,

or if the propensity to shlubbiness grew over time. This is a good spot to take a break, be back in a moment, Einstein rebelled against the authoritarian behavior of some of his teachers and dropped out of school at age sixteen. Later he was admitted to Swiss Polytechnic and five years later he graduated with his diploma to teach physics and mathematics. But Einstein couldn't find a teaching position, so he took a job in the patent office because he had to make money. He wanted to get married.

There was already a first baby out of wedlock that was given up for adoption. He wanted to get married to start a family. He needed money, so he took the job. He liked the patent office in part because he was really good at it. So he did very

well at this job. His superiors liked him. And when you think about what a patent officer has to do when they get a new invention, as they first of all, they have to figure out if it's new, and they have to figure out what the basic principle is the idea behind a patent application is there's a key idea

that his novel and has some utility. So he got very good at reading these applications and seeing what are the fundamental principles By which this invention is supposed to work, and are they distinct from the fundamental principles of these other inventions that I looked at yesterday. That kind of thinking is not dissimilar to what he does with relativity theory, where he's like, what are the fundamental principles by which

we measure time? We need a clock and we need to have mark an event happening at a certain place. The thought that he came in with the style of thinking, and that was what made him good the patent office, or did the work at the patent office inform his style of thinking that he would go on to use in terms of, you know, coming to special relativity and then general relativity. I think it's got to be a

bit of both. He was certainly exposed to patent earlier because his father's business involved that kind of work, but even later when he was a professor, Einstein filed a ton of patents. Later on he had an idea for a refrigerator, he filed a patent, and Einstein continued to consult for people on their patent applications as a way of earning extra money and also because he was interested in it. So he liked the thinking in patents, and

even after he didn't need the money anymore. So I think it's probably a bit that his style of thought mapped onto this, so it was congenial to him. But I think it's also it's the practice of doing it day in and day out created certain patterns of thinking. So he is newly married here. She became pregnant before they got married. He didn't marry her then, which is something that he could have done and sort of legitimized

her and the whole thing. But because he didn't do that, she was sort of sent home, if you will, to have this baby. And sadly, it does seem from the few records that exist that that there may have been something wrong with the baby. Um. But we basically we don't even know what happened to the baby. It might have been adopted, it might have died, um, it might have been her family took the baby, but basically they have nothing further to do with this baby when she returns.

She may have survived, you may not have survived. We just don't know at present what happened to her. People have looked, they're still looking, and that's the only daughter. So Einstein then marries her and they have two children. Hans Albert later on becomes the professor of engineering in the United States and has his own children. And then Eduard or as they called him, Teddy, and sadly, we know that Teddy ultimately developed schizophrenia and is serious slee

psychiatrically ill marriage. The first wife also later on had very severe bouts of depression. There maybe some inherited mental illness that is going on in this case, but it's clear that Malva had her own struggles going on. But Teddy, Teddy really suffered quite badly as a girlder in a pained I'm fine to see it. His wife becomes more and more miserable, partially because she is a PhD physics student who would like to be doing work herself and really is sort of relegated to taking care of the

house and taking care of the boys. Clearly, being relegated to, you know, housewife is not a happy circumstance for her. And and yet there is very little evidence that Einstein in any way tries to help or ameliorate her difficulties. His marriage falls apart, he doesn't have a close relationship

with his children. He remarried to this distant cousin, but he similarly like an oddly unrelated sort of set up with her where you know, the deal was, you know, she would take care of him and be the wife, and he would be able to have relationships outside the marriage as long as they were just one at a time, you know, sort of serial infidelity and this odd way you know, even later of relating where he had this room in the house, you know, a private room where

people could come in and meet with him, but his wife was to never come in there unless invited, because young women came in there who were invited. For many people who admire Einstein, the relationships with women is the picking point. It's unpleasant. He does not have the characteristics we now consider admirable. There's a lot of infidelity. He was immensely appealing to women, and he knew it, but it's almost like he was sort of unaware of who

got hurt in the process. You know, you hear about serial philanderers that know exactly what they're doing and they're

very savvy about it. They're very well aware of who it's hurting, and they have sort of almost a sociopathic you know, I don't care, but there are also people who do things in their relationships where it's almost like socially they're just not so aware, they're not aware that they're angry, that they're making others, you know, distressed or angry, or in the case of you know, his anti authoritarian

reaction with professors. And I guess I just bring all this up because there are almost no names to put with Albert Einstein in terms of scientific discoveries and the magnitude of them, and the genius of him and such that. You know, you think of words like savant, and when you think of people who have savant like abilities, at the same time that socially they do so many maladaptive things, you do wonder about you know what today we used to call Asperger's now we call a very mild autism.

But people who are incredibly intelligent in this skewed way, but socially emotionally have difficulty reading what's going on and therefore do a lot of things that make it hard for them to stay connected to important people. This grows

over time. His relationship with Elsa, the cousin who becomes the second Mrs Einstein, began as an affair an extramarital affair where Malva would get hurt, and that begins in on a visit to Berlin from Prague, where they're living at the time, and then when they return to Zurich. There's actually a correspondence between them between Elsa and Albert where he says, you know, I destroyed your letters as you asked. You should probably send your letters to me

in my office. So he's covering up the tracks. As he gets older, he cares less to cover up the tracks. Whether that's a cultural development or a psychological development, or just mediosyncrasy, it's hard to know. While the divorce is ongoing,

he's basically living with his second wife. You can't really call Einstein a narcissist because narcissism is a grandiose view of oneself that's not consistent necessarily with reality, and in his case, well, his confident view of himself was very consistent with reality, so it makes it hard to call him a narcissist. But he did believe that he was

going to he was doing these things. He was going to do these things such that he told Malva, when I win the Nobel Prize, I will give the prize money to you and the boys to take care of you. In Einstein wins the Nobel Prize in Physics for his services to theoretical physics and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect, and he does indeed

put the money in a trust for his children. The Nobel Prize when he says that is fifteen years old, it doesn't have the same status it now has, and looking at the kinds of people who have won Nobel Prizes up until that point, Einstein was quite reasonable to think that he would be in their number. Also, the scientific community is much smaller before World War Two than it is after World War two and much less global, so his chances of winning are higher that so it's

not crazy. It still is a little bit galling to see that. And then when it happens and he gives the money, he wants to control how they spend the money. It's also complicated by the fact that rightland divorce begins, a war breaks out, which makes it hard to travel,

even though Switzerland is neutral. And then after the war, when the Nobel Prize money does come in, Germany has the brunt of hyper inflation Switzerland doesn't, which is where the kids live, and it's very hard for Einstein actually financially meet the terms of the agreement because the currencies don't match. While the divorce is happening, he and Elsa have this relationship going. It is clear that Elsa really wants to regularize this. She wants to get married, and

she's quite insistent on it. She has two fairly grown up daughters, Elsa and Margot and desn. Einstein proposed to one of the daughters as well, so he has a debate. He's like, should I propose to Elsa or should I propose to Ilsa, the older daughter, who's actually I kind of like better, And then he proposes to Elsa, and Elsa says, no, I really think you should marry my mother. And that's what he does. In this period, he has an affair with his secretary. There's lots of messiness in

his life. In nineteen eleven, there's a big scandal breaks out in Paris with Marie Curie, who is having an affair with Paul Longevan, who is an important French physicist who's married. Madame Lingevan knows this, and they've kind of been having this kind of three way thing where they all know what's going on, but then it breaks into

the newspapers and is used as a way to smear Curie. Einstein, who usually doesn't pay attention to stuff like this, pays attention to this, and he writes her a supportive letter, and he says, I don't understand what what people are doing, why people are smearing you this way? You're a very nice person. He also writes about it to his friend Einstein and says, like, why is everybody so upset about

this infidelity? It's clear that nobody's getting hurt, and they all live in the same city, so it's not like he has to like travel really far to have an affair with her, Like like they all they're all there, they all know each other, Like it's not a problem, So why is everybody so sad about that? In his anti authoritarian ness, feels that the rules, the cultural rules, you know, aren't really sensical and shouldn't really apply, as opposed to his inability to see a record that these

rules have to do with human feelings and people being hurt. No, he doesn't register the damage it does in the process of psycholanalizing Einstein, and it would have to psycholanalize Elsa as well to Elsa knew what she was getting into. Listen. I could just tell you from the work I do today that there are plenty of people who get involved with someone in an affair and still believe somehow that they will be the one and when they marry this person there will be no more cheating, and they are

usually disappointed. It's unusual to be as academically and theoretically intelligent as Einstein is and to be as in some ways, let's say, lacking in emotional intelligence um in the way that he seems to be. And to make it even more complicated, Einstein was really good with children. Repeatedly. You see this in Princeton, but you also see this William Prague. On Sundays, he hangs out with a very large family of Mard's internets, who's a sanskritistin who teaches there um

and the kids loved him. He would spend all day Sunday with them. Now he has his own family who aren't there like, so he's leaving his own family at home and going to hang out with somebody else's family. Adults with autism may have an easier time socializing with children, essentially because the pleasure in perseverating on something you know, to do something over and over again is something at would be more comfortable is actually a symptom of autism um.

But you know it can work for you, let's say, in terms of engaging with children who might enjoy doing the same thing over and over again. And in your work, if you your attention to detail and your ability to you know, obsess on one thing, perseverate on one thing, something that might bore the heck out of somebody else can be a real asset um in terms of your thinking style, if you're trying to do rigorous, very specific scientific thinking. It's an interesting idea. I still resist in

principle the sort of the idea. I think there's too much evidence about other aspects of mindstein. But it's very interesting that that patterns consistent. I think part of it may also just be him providing like so Tommy slash Talmud's impact on him as a child, that connection, I think is something that perhaps is live for him. It's something that he thinks, well. Another reason to be engage with these children's like you never know how you can shape their lives. This seems like a good place to

take a break will be right back. Clearly, Albert Einstein was unusually intelligent. He himself spoke of his intense curiosity as an all important asset, and I quote, I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious. The important thing is to not stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. His fame thought experiments like imagining riding on a beam of light were actually the use of

daydreaming and fantasy thinking driven by curiosity. But great discoveries are sometimes made not only by great minds, but by the influence and interaction of the current culture that mine resides in. In the days before it was possible to know what a scientific competitor was working on in a different part of the world, scientists were often surprised to discover that another person or group was proceeding towards the

same discovery. Had they not arrived there first, the discovery would still have been made, because information bubbling in the current environment was leading toward a breakthrough. Was this also a factor in Einstein's discoveries. There's an example which illustrates this really well, an example which drinks it not at all. So I'll give you both of those. First is special relativity,

which is the theory of space and time. It's fundamentally a theory of electromagnetism about what happens when you go very close to the speed of light, but at a constant speed. He developed that at the patent office and he's talking about it with his friends. But there's a mathematician in France on ri plant Cares, one of the great mathematicians of the day, who's developing something very similar at basically the same time. And the reason for that

is there's many reasons. You're the two basic once. The first is if you're working with Maxwell's equations and pay attention to them closely, there is a problem with how you measure the speed of light with respect to an ether that pervades everything, perhaps, but the equations don't require that. So you have these equations that don't seem to fit with the assumptions of the science at the time, and if you think really hard about it, special relativity can

pop out of that. The second is electrical technologies everywhere, so the problems of coordinating time and how do you measure time at the same time in different places that can communicate with each other, which is important for railroads and for um surveying and mapping. Those are real problems that lots of people are thinking about, and in different ways. Einstein i Plunker were both engaged with that problem, one in the patent office and the other for the Bureau

of Longitude in France trying to coordinate time measurements. So it's clear that that science emerges out of a culture. The counter example is general relativity. When Einstein expands not just a constant speed but to accelerated speed, and when you try to expand the theory of that way, gravity pops out of it. I say pops out like it's easy.

It took many, many years to work out this theory, but it's weird that a fundamental extension of this theory of space and time would produce gravitational attraction as a

consequence of the shape space time. Einstein starts working, he has the idea in nineteen o seven, and then he can't work on it for a few years because he's distracted by quantum theory, just something else he's innovating in this whole period, and then in leven when he moves to product he starts to work on general relativity almost exclusively, and all of his colleagues think this is crazy. They're like, why do you care about gravity? It's not an interesting area.

There's a couple of tiny problems about measuring this or measuring that, and we don't need to have a general theory of relativity at presence. And while you're doing this, the quantum revolution, like, the most exciting thing to happen in the physics of the micro world, which you helped build, is bursting everywhere. Why are you abandoning that and working

on this tiny thing about gravity. His competitors in the gravity area are an underemployed physicist from Finland, which is then part of the Russian Empire, and a guy who as student of mox Plunks who can't get a job anywhere and ends up teaching at a place in Italy.

And they're they're totally marginal people. So he moved from like being with the types of mox Plunk too um competing with people who are not at all of the same prominence because gravity wasn't that exciting a topic, and I Einstein kind of makes gravity an exciting topic because the scale and the ingenuity of the result. He comes up with is so striking. But that is a case where it's not like if he hadn't done it, somebody

else would have. And now, with so much excitement about cosmology and gravitational waves, extansion and the universe, all these topics, it seems obvious that people would care about gravity black hole. Gravity was considered mostly a solved problem at the time. That's one thing that's hard to convey. The other thing it's hard to convey, or maybe not so hard, is

how exciting quantum here you. I mean, it's it's born in Einstein's radical reinterpretation of it with the photon is in five, and then in n eleven he's like, okay, six years after kind of busting the field, that I'm just gonna step aside when all the great minds in Europe are doing this is really surprising. I think it's also important for people to understand much of this initial

thought and initial work this was happening. He was in his twenties, which today sounds, you know, you're kind of incredulous that someone in their twenties could be making these

kinds of completely science changing understandings come to life. But the reality is that the brain is in a certain kind of peak in terms of plasticity and new neurons growing, and the juxtaposition I guess of acquired knowledge with the plasticity of the brain and change being able to happen in the brain is really a certain kind of peak in the twenties, such that you find often that people who make their greatest discoveries have actually had those initial

thoughts at that time in their twenties. So amongst theoretical physicist and mathematicians, the idea that someone in their twenties would make the great discoveries is not surprising because they expect that you'll do your best work before your twenty five and then you're basically done. I think Einstein is actually at the root of that idea, that cultural assumption, because he did those things when he was young. If you look into the nineteenth century, there are very few

cases of the great mathematicians being young. The stuff that Pavlov did that we all think of now with the buzzers and the dogs, he started that project when he was sixty. Neuroscientists, of course, are fascinated by and what you know, have wondered, you know, was there something different

about Einstein's brain? Someone has looked at some point, I guess shortly after his death, and made note of increased number of saulsi, which are basically the folds of the outer shell of the cortex of the brain, which is where you know, higher order thinking occurs, and noted that he had many more sulsi than the average brain. Beyond that, sadly, it seems like whatever tissue was available is no longer available. Things seem to have disappeared. It's really kind of tragic.

And then, of course, even if there are more sulsai, were there more salsai from the get go, there's no way to know that, or did all of his thinking and all of his science and all of his work caused the plastic brain to develop these more souls i. You know, obviously that's something that you can't answer because of course we didn't have m r I and there was you know, we weren't scanning his brain as we went.

But it's an interesting question. Yeah. I don't follow the brain stuff, but let me tell you why, because I have a sort of moral revulsion for the story about the brain. So thanks Sin insisted that he be cremated. He wanted to ashes dispersed. He didn't want a shrine. He didn't want to see that people would valerize later. No one had ever been as famous as Einstein. It's not clear whether anybody actually has since been as famous as Einstein was. He was more famous than Charley Chaplain.

Everybody knew his visage, everything he said got into the newspapers, and to some degree, this was a burden day. Sometimes he liked it, but a lot of times this was a burden head as I imagine it would be to most of us. He didn't want to become some kind of secular saint. He didn't think that that's appropriate. So he didn't want to be to be a grave people could visit. There's now a statue in Princeton, but it

was erected in two thousand and five. He didn't want any of that, and so he went to the Princeton hospital. He dies there and the pathologist steals his brain, cuts out the brain, puts it in the cooler, takes it and then drives across the country with it, keeps it for years in formaldehyd and so it's stolen. It's a violation of informed consent to be working with this brand. This man cut it out and stole the brain and

kept it. There are people who track him down later and he gives them a little bits of the brain. He cuts out parts of the brain like as a gift. It strikes me so deeply as something that's disrespectful. Well it is, it's it's morally reprehensible. Right now, you can buy an app for your phone which will show you scans of cross sections of einstein brain. I don't have

that on my phone for this reason. Were people aware that he was the one who stole or they just didn't know where the brain went, or they didn't even know the brain was missing. That the brain was missing and being analyzed by people was known at a certain point. The Einstein estate wasn't happy about that, but it was a little they could do to get it back. But it wasn't immediately known that he had done this. That's a tragic end um which which I didn't even know about.

Tragic end for Einstein, you know, just in terms of what was important his belief system. I mean, he'd already suffered. He obviously was suffering mightily towards the end of his life in terms of his feeling about his role in the development and use of nuclear weapons and the ending of World War Two. He definitely had some moral dilemmas that did bother him. Nonetheless, this was something I didn't know done to him that postmortem. That's really really quite tragic.

Einstein holds a unique place and how we understand the universe and the physical properties of our world. But he struggled more so was understanding important people in his life. His passion for endless inquiry drove him to always ask why out yonder there was this huge world, he said, which exists independently of us human beings, and which stands before us like a great eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this

world beckoned like a liberation. This is Personalogy. Follow me on Twitter at Dr Gayl Saltz or Personlogy m D. Thank you to my guest, Michael Gordon, Professor at Princeton University, and if you'd like to learn more about our subject today pick up his book, Einstein in Bohemia, A fascinating read. Personology is a production of I Heart Radio. The executive producers are doctor Gayl Saltz and Tyler Klang. The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. The associate producer is Lowell Berlanti.

Editing music and mixing by Lowell Berlante. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.