Matthew Stanley - Einstein’s War: How Relativity Triumphed Amid the Vicious Nationalism of World War I

The Devil howling, Ho!...

T HEY HAD BEEN allies for five years but were meeting for the first time. On a Friday afternoon in June 1921 a shabby scientist, wearing shoes without socks, shuffled down a hallway in London. He described himself as having a pale face and long hair, and a tiny start of a paunch. Someone watching would notice an awkward gait, and a cigar in the mouth... and a pen in pocket or hand. But crooked legs and warts he does not have, and so is quite handsome. No one on the planet would have needed an introduction to him: his lively mane and bushy mustache marked him unmistakably as Albert Einstein, the most famous thinker in the world.

Waiting for him was a neatly dressed, square-jawed Englishman. He had a lean, athletic build and a thoughtful, penetrating gaze. Arthur Stanley Eddington had just been elected president of the Royal Astronomical Society (colloquially known as the RAS), but it was not his expertise about the hearts of stars and movements of galaxies that bonded him to Einstein. He had literally journeyed across the world, suffered condemnation and the threat of prison, and battled against centuries of scientific tradition to help make this unruly visitor from Berlin into an icon of science. He was the one who had showed Einsteins relativity to be true, and who had spread that gospel around the world.

They shook hands in Burlington House, a grand Palladian structure that sat at the inner ring of British science. Not long before, it would have been unthinkable for someone who answered to Herr Professor to set foot there. The building had seen ferocious arguments about whether German research even counted as real science, and whether Germans could ever be allowed back into the scientific community after the horrors of the Great War. But now the main room filled to bursting with British scientists eagerly waiting to hear Einsteins every word.

T HIS IS THE story of a theory, general relativity, hailed at its birth as one of the greatestperhaps the greatestof achievements in the history of human thought. It remains, a century later, one of the essential pillars upholding our understanding of the universe. Relativity not only explained the movements of galaxies through space, predicted black holes, and defined the grand scales of the cosmos, it forced us to question the most basic ways we experience the world around us. Einstein warned that time and space were not what they seemed, that the most fundamental tools we use to make sense of reality were warped. Gravity bent light, twins aged at different rates, stars were askew in the heavens, matter and energy were strange shadows of each other. We saw only a distorted, partial view of the true four-dimensional universe. The truth of things was accessible only to those who could grapple with complicated mathematics and philosophical paradoxes.

Einsteins extraordinary claims, and Einstein himself, burst into public view in 1919. His theory had been complete for four years and he had been hard at work on it for almost a decade before that. But his work was still little known outside a small group of theoretical physicists. Why? This is also a story of sciences journey from peace to war and back again.

The First World War, the industrialized murder that racked Europe from 1914 to 1918, coincided with Einsteins most productive years (fifty-nine publications). His struggle with his own theory was inextricably tied to the course of the World War, as it was known at the time. Scientists seeking to confirm his ideas were arrested as spies. Technical journals were banned as enemy propaganda. Colleagues died in the trenches. And most frustratingly, Einstein was separated from his most crucial ally by barbed wire and U-boats. This ally was Eddington, who would go on to convince the world of the truth of relativity.

Eddington took up the cause of that German physicistwhom he had never metto show how science could triumph over nationalism and hatred. The international institutions of science had been shattered by the war and had left Einstein isolated, but Eddington realized that relativity could be the key to restoring exactly those networks. In 1919, when Europe was still in chaos from the war, Eddington led a globe-spanning expedition to catch a fleeting solar eclipse. It was a rare opportunity to confirm Einsteins bold prediction that light has weight. It was the results of this expeditionthe proof of relativity, as many saw itthat put Einstein on front pages around the world. The pandemonium of the Great War was the background against which this new sage appeared. His scientific revolution depended on battles both intellectual and political, fought from Berlin to London to the very edge of the universe.

The story of Einsteins relativity was a deeply human one. Far from being an abstract development of ideas through pure rationality or a spark of inspiration from one persons mind, this was a messy adventure that combined friendship, hatred, and politics. While Einstein never held a rifle or fired a shot, the war shaped his life and work for years. Falling ill from wartime starvation, unable to send simple letters to his most important colleagues, Einstein was constantly reminded he was living in a state under siege. The war hobbled him but also created the conditions under which his theory came to fruition. The pressures of that shattering conflict pushed together specific people and ideas at just the right moments of serendipity to create the relativity revolution. Einsteins emergence as a history-making figure could have been quite different: the practice of science, and what it even meant to