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Albert Einstein in Leiden During World War I, This University Town in Neutral Holland Opted for Zürich

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Albert Einstein in Leiden During World War I, This University Town in Neutral Holland Opted for Zürich Albert Einstein in Leiden During World War I, this university town in neutral Holland opted for Zürich. Ehrenfest, who got was, for Einstein, a respite from the abhorrent chauvinism his PhD in Vienna under Ludwig Boltzmann, had been working at the of German academia. Leiden was also the home of his University of St. Petersburg in Russia father figure Hendrik Lorentz and of his dear and tragic since 1907. In Leiden, the Ehrenfests friend Paul Ehrenfest. moved into a Russian-style villa de- signed by Ehrenfest’s Russian wife Ta- tiana Afanashewa, a mathematician. Dirk van Delft They brought with them from St. Pe- tersburg the tradition of a weekly col- lbert Einstein liked coming to Leiden, the Dutch city loquium, with frank and open discussion of the latest de- Aparticularly known for its venerable university. Vi- velopments in physics. At first the colloquia met at the enna-born theoretical physicist Paul Ehrenfest, professor Ehrenfest home, but later they were held at the institute at Leiden University since 1912, was one of his closest for theoretical physics. friends.1 The formal Lorentz would keep silent until he had his Last July Rowdy Boeyink, a history-of-science student, thoughts in order, but the high-spirited Ehrenfest viewed stumbled across a long-lost, handwritten Einstein manu- boisterous debate as absolutely essential. He was informal script in the Ehrenfest Library of Leiden University’s with students, his lectures and presentations were lively Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics. The manuscript and lucid, and his German was peppered with colorful ex- was part two of a paper entitled “Quantum Theory of pressions like Das ist wo der Frosch ins Wasser springt Monatomic Ideal Gases,” which Einstein presented at a (that’s where the frog jumps into the water). 1925 meeting of the Prussian Academy of Sciences.2 According to his student Hendrik Casimir, Ehrenfest That paper has a special significance. It contained was “a passionate admirer of the beautiful and the pro- Einstein’s last great discovery—Bose–Einstein condensa- found.”5 Yet he was increasingly weighed down over the tion, as the effect came to be called. Unearthed amid the years by doubts about his ability to keep pace with devel- celebrations of the Word Year of Physics, the centenary of opments in the new physics, particularly quantum Einstein’s 1905 annus mirabilis, the 16 handwritten pages physics. Those doubts contributed to the deep depression attracted international media attention.3 That same that tragically led him to take his own life in 1933, at age month, Boeyink also found among Ehrenfest’s papers type- 53. Boltzmann, his great teacher, had set him a sad ex- scripts of two more Einstein papers—one from 1914, the ample by committing suicide in 1906. other from 1920. Both manuscripts contain interesting dif- Nonetheless, Einstein and Ehrenfest were soul mates. ferences from the version that eventually appeared in They first met in February 1912 in Prague, where Einstein print (see box 1 on page 59). was a professor until he moved to Zürich later that year. Last October I came across reprints of 22 articles by The friendship clicked from the very beginning. They in- Einstein from the period 1902–15 in the archive of the terrupted their intense discussions on subjects like the er- Huygens Laboratory, home to experimental physics at the godic principle or gravitation to play Brahms sonatas, with university. In some cases, including the famous 1905 arti- Einstein on the violin and Ehrenfest at the piano (see the cle on the special theory of relativity, the reprints feature cover of this issue). handwritten “improvements” by Einstein himself (see box After spending a week at Einstein’s home, Ehrenfest 2 on page 60). confided to his diary that he “was terribly happy.... Yes, we will be friends.” The affection was mutual. In a 1934 Einstein and Ehrenfest eulogy Einstein wrote: “Within a few hours we were true How did the Einstein manuscripts and the hand- friends—as though our dreams and aspirations were annotated reprints end up in Ehrenfest’s library? They re- meant for each other.” flect the intimate bond between Einstein and Ehrenfest. Einstein first visited Leiden in February 1911. He had How did that bond develop? What was Einstein’s connec- accepted a student invitation to give a lecture there be- tion with Leiden and with two other leading scientists at cause he was keen to meet Lorentz, a father figure whose the university, astronomer Willem de Sitter and Heike work he valued highly. He also wanted to meet Kamerlingh Kamerlingh Onnes, the discoverer of superconductivity? Onnes and see his celebrated cryogenics laboratory. Inter- In 1912 Ehrenfest succeeded Hendrik Antoon Lorentz estingly, Kamerlingh Onnes had failed to respond to a 1901 (1853–1928) as professor of theoretical physics at Leiden.4 letter from Einstein applying for a graduate assistantship. Einstein, who had just graduated from the Zürich Poly- Lorentz would have preferred to get Einstein, but Einstein technic, enclosed a stamped, self-addressed postcard and his recently published paper on intermolecular forces. The Dirk van Delft is an associate professor of history of science at the Leiden University Observatory in the Netherlands. He is also postcard disappeared into a folder in Onnes’s home. a senior science editor of the NRC Handelsblad, a daily newspa- By 1910, Einstein was no longer an obscure suppli- per published in Rotterdam. cant. The research reports on critical opalescence that Kamerlingh Onnes sent to Prague that year with an eye © 2006 American Institute of Physics, S-0031-9228-0604-030-0 April 2006 Physics Today 57 Albert Einstein, painted in 1920 by Harm Kamerlingh Onnes, nephew of the discoverer of superconductivity. to Einstein’s arrival were of common interest to both men. They elicited from Einstein a consignment of reprints of his own work. Einstein and his wife Mileva stayed with Lorentz during that week in February 1911. Back home again in Prague, Einstein wrote to say how much he had enjoyed the hospitality and the scientific discussions. He ex- pressed great interest in Onnes’s re- search into the temperature depen- dence of the electrical resistance of metals. At the time, Kamerlingh Onnes was on the brink of observing superconductivity in mercury, a dis- covery he would present at the first Solvay conference in Brussels in the autumn of 1911. Einstein was a par- ticipant in that historic meeting. During the next 20 years Ein- stein visited Leiden often. He enjoyed the scientific give and take. In Berlin, where he was based from 1914 to 1932, the theoretical physicists were generally unreceptive to wide-ranging discussions about fundamentals. But in Leiden he could talk in a relaxed fashion with Ehrenfest about his work on general relativity. In March 1914, shortly before his move to Berlin, Einstein spent a week at Ehrenfest’s home. The two friends spoke at length about problems with quantum theory and incomparably closer to these people [than I was before].” statistical mechanics. Afterwards, Ehrenfest received a During his stay at Ehrenfest’s home, Einstein had opened warm letter from Berlin in which, as a sign of close friend- his host’s eyes to the music of Bach. For several months ship, Einstein no longer addressed him with the formal Sie thereafter, Ehrenfest seemed to be more taken up with but rather with du. choral music than with physics. Because there was no free exchange of scientific ideas A neutral respite in wartime Europe, it was the Dutchman de Sitter who After World War I began with the German invasion of Lux- passed on the new general theory of relativity to England. embourg and Belgium in August 1914, Einstein gratefully At Arthur Eddington’s request, de Sitter wrote a three- seized upon an invitation from Ehrenfest to visit the neu- part paper entitled “On Einstein’s Theory of Gravitation, tral Netherlands. Einstein abhorred the wave of national- and Its Astronomical Consequences” for the Monthly No- ism that was sweeping the German academic community. tices of the Royal Astronomical Society. As one of the few prominent academics who refused to sign Einstein first met de Sitter during his 1916 Leiden the “Manifesto to the Civilized World,” a pompous justifi- visit. The two spoke at length about general relativity and cation of the invasions that invoked Beethoven and the residual elements of absolute space and time that it Goethe, Einstein was desperate for a respite from all the still preserved.6 There ensued a detailed correspondence patriotic hysteria. “Every fiber of my being itches to get about cosmological solutions of the theory’s field equa- away from here,” he wrote his friend. tions. That was the beginning of relativistic cosmology. Re- But traveling in wartime was not easy; it was many sponding to Einstein’s closed, static universe and its cos- months before Einstein could arrange the necessary docu- mological constant, de Sitter in March 1917 introduced his ments. He finally arrived in Leiden in September 1916 for eponymous empty-universe solution. a two-week visit. In Haarlem, he and Ehrenfest looked up Eddington, who was “immensely interested” in the the semi-retired Lorentz, with whom he had been corre- new ideas, led the expedition that observed the deflection sponding intensively about general relativity, which had of starlight passing by the Sun during the solar eclipse of been published in its completed form the previous No- May 1919, thus confirming an important prediction of gen- vember. Back again in Berlin, Einstein wrote to his old eral relativity. Einstein learned of the happy news from friend Michele Besso that he had “spent unforgettable Lorentz in September.
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