Titans of History

In this and numerous other ways, the theory of relativity continues to confound our common-sense ways of looking at and understanding the world around us. Nevertheless, it is today firmly established as the fundamental conceptual platform on which the physical sciences are built.

Few people noticed Einstein’s revolutionary theories until Max Planck, the German scientist and father of quantum theory, helped to publicize them. By 1913 Einstein had risen in the academic world to become director of the Institute of Physics at the University of Berlin.

While Einstein’s fame rocketed during this period, his personal life was in turmoil. After a lengthy separation he finally divorced Mileva in 1919 and promptly married his cousin Elsa Löwenthal. Einstein was now the most famous scientist in the world. He met and corresponded with many of the world’s leading scientists and artists, including Sigmund Freud, the Indian mystic Rabindranath Tagore and Charlie Chaplin. “The people applaud me,” Chaplin once told Einstein, “because everybody understands me; they applaud you because no one understands you.”

Though he was far from religiously orthodox and his theories seemed to cast doubt on religions, Einstein always believed in some form of higher principle or spirit. “The scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation,” he wrote. “His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.” He maintained a belief in what he called der Alte—the Old Man.

In 1931 the rising Nazi Party attacked Einstein and his “Jewish physics.” He left Germany forever the following year, realizing his life was in danger. He settled in the USA at the University of Princeton. His pacifism—which had led to his open opposition to the First World War—weakened in the face of Nazi tyranny. He supported rearmament against Hitler, and in 1939 he co-wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in which the dangers of the development of nuclear weapons by the Nazis were pointed out. This prompted the Allied powers to collaborate in the Manhattan Project in order to produce the first atomic bomb themselves.

When the Second World War ended in 1945 with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Einstein turned sharply and publicly against further nuclear development and favored international restrictions. He was even monitored by the FBI for his pacifist views. In 1952 he was offered the presidency of Israel; though he was a lifelong Zionist, he respectfully declined. When he died in 1955, Einstein had not achieved his long-term goal of finding a unified theory that would provide a comprehensive explanation of the fundamental forces governing the universe and so offer (as he figuratively put it) an insight into the mind of God. Such a goal has continued to elude succeeding generations of scientists, whose work has nevertheless been revolutionized by Einstein—a colossus of science and the most humane of men.

ENVER, TALAT & JEMAL: THE THREE PASHAS

1881–1922 & 1881–1922 & 1872–1922

What on earth do you want? The question is settled. There are no more Armenians.

Talat Pasha responding to questioning about the Armenians from the German ambassador, 1918

The Three Pashas were the aggressive Turkish nationalists who emerged from the Young Turk movement and seized power in the Ottoman empire in 1913, led it into a disastrous war and ordered the massacre of a million Armenians during World War One.