Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book TV Encore Booknotes 20130302

Scientists and explores his private life. Cspan denis brian, author of einstein a life, why did you devote a chapter to einsteins brain . Guest it was such shocking news when i found out that somebody had got his brain. And it was exactly what he didnt want to happen. He told everyone that he didnt want any physical part of him to remain. He didnt want any memorials made to him. He didnt want his home made into a memorial. So that when i heard somebody had his brain, and they were slicing it up to find out clues to his genius, i thought this is perhaps the worst thing that could have ever happened to this man. Cspan where is his brain . Guest several scientists have it. The man who took the brain has most of it. And a japanese scientist has some, and theres a doctor in philadelphia has other parts of it. And the conclusion is that its absolutely ridiculous to search for genius in the brain, and that all they can say about it is its remarkably healthy for a man his age. Cspan who took the brain originally, and where is most of it now stored . Guest the man who did the autopsy took most of the brain, and its in kansas. Its in bottles, and its still in a very healthy state and still can be examined. Cspan how did he get it originally . Guest he was doing the autopsy, and he purportedly asked hans albert, einsteins son, if he could have the brain for medical reasons, for research. And he was given permission as long as there was no publicity about it. And immediately there was publicity in the new york times, saying the brain was available. And the man was at princeton at the time, and he stored it in his basement. And when he divorced his wife, he left the brain for a time with his wife, who was very angry about it, saying things like, i wish theyd get this damn thing out of here. Cspan Thomas Harvey was his name, of wichita, kansas. Guest thats right. Cspan and did you talk to him . Guest i did several times. Hes now working parttime at a plastic factory. He failed his medical exams when he took them again, so he cant act as a doctor. And he says that he may give this brain to the Hebrew University if they ask for it. Cspan and you also found that someone has his eyes . Guest that was even more extraordinary. The man who had been his eye doctor in princeton somehow appeared at the autopsy, asked permission if he could take the eyes, and was given permission, and has stored them in a bank vault ever since, and he says hes done it for his veneration for einstein, not for any scientific purposes. Cspan and where are they stored, what city . Guest they are somewhere in new jersey in a bank vault. Cspan who was Albert Einstein . Guest he was an extraordinary young man who had a tremendously hard life as a young man. When he finished college, he almost starved because he couldnt get a job. He had antagonized his professors at the zurich polytechnic, and he was the only one of his colleagues who didnt get a job directly at that college. And the problem was he didnt know how to handle authority. He treated the professors in the same pleasant, easygoing way that he treated the cleaning women. And the professors in those days in germany expected to be treated like minor royalty. And they said he knew it all, he wouldnt listen to them. And he missed all the lectures that didnt interest him, such as math, and the math professor said he was a lazy dog his summing up of einstein. But to his friends, he was intriguing, dynamic, spontaneous. And to one, a man called Marcel Grossmann, who knew him at college only in these early days, grossmann went home to his parents and said, ive met a man who one day is going to be a very great man, which was an incredible prophecy when everybody else was saying, hes a lazy dog. Hes not going to make it. Cspan what have you done in your life as a profession . Guest lets think now. At 16, world war ii broke out. I had just graduated from bromley grammar school. Bromley, incidentally, was where h. G. Wells spent his boyhood. Cspan in great britain. Guest in great britain. And for two years, i worked in fleet street as a reporter on the irish news service. We were reporting news of irish people in britain and irish people what they were doing in ireland, for british papers. I was really waiting to join the royal air force. You couldnt do that till you were 18. I took a short course at Southampton University to join the royal air force, became a bomber pilot. After the war, i did freelance writing. I wrote some plays. They were done in what you would call repertory companies and offbroadway, the equivalent. And i emigrated to america in 1957, two years after einstein had died. Cspan and what have you done since youve been in the states . Guest i started by doing freelance writing. I worked for scholastic magazines as an editor. I worked with a Literary Agency called writers Literary Agency. And in the early 60s, i started writing. I wrote the science of crime detection for doubleday. I then wrote a novel called the loveminded, which got very good quotes from people like p. G. Wodehouse and evan thomas, quite different sort of writers and always ive been intrigued with biography. When i was 17 in fleet street, i wrote an article about lawrence of arabia. Now he was, the cliche, a legend in his own time. And thats whats always appealed to me, to find the truth about the socalled legends in their own time. I wanted to say, what i think scientists and biographers have in common is the search for mysteries, to try to solve mysteries. Cspan where do you live today . Guest i live in west palm beach, florida. Cspan how long have you lived there . Guest about 20 years. Cspan are you an american citizen . Guest no. Cspan kept your british passport . Guest kept my british passport. I have an american wife who helped me tremendously on the book, an american daughter, and an american grandson and an american granddaughter. Cspan when was the first time you thought you would be interested in doing a biography on Albert Einstein . Guest 1972. I telephoned his secretary, helen dukas, about something entirely differently, and she began to talk about a seance that einstein had attended in california in 1931 with his friend upton sinclair, who was very interested in psychic phenomena. And at this seance, she was scared out of her wits. She was sitting in an adjoining room where the seance was taking place, and there was suddenly a ring at the door. And she thought it was a spirit appearing. It was actually somebody with a letter. And Nothing Happened at the seance. And the people organizing it, including upton sinclair, gave the usual answer, there are unfriendly spirits in the circle. And one of the unfriendliest would have been einstein, who was a complete rationalist, and said, even if i saw a ghost, i wouldnt believe it. But strangely enough, he believed that telepathy might be possible. Cspan you have a number of pictures in the book, and i want to try to show this small one right here, because helen dukas is in that picture. Can you tell us where she is in there . Guest shes on my left, where your fingers touching. Cspan right there. Guest shes thats right next to her is einsteins stepdaughter, margot. Theres, unmistakably, einstein, in what we british call bracers theres his very good friend next to him, dr. Bucky; dr. Buckys wife. And the tallest man behind margot, is thomas bucky, who was also a very close friend, and gave me a great deal of information about einstein, personal information knew him very well. Cspan is helen dukas still alive . Guest no, she died in 1986. Cspan what role did she play in einsteins life . Guest she became his secretary in 1928. She was scared out of her wits when it was suggested she should be his secretary, because, like me, she knew nothing about physics. But she was persuaded to go and see him, and he was very ill at the time. He was in bed. Hed had a very badly strained heart. And she was taken up by his wife and the wife then, his second wife, elsa, who was also his cousin. And einstein immediately put her completely at ease with a few soft jokes. Cspan what was she like . Guest very pleasant, very easy to talk with, but absolutely tough in defending him, a real watchdog. She scared people off strangers who tried to see him and badger him. And she devoted her life absolutely to him, as secretary and after his wife elsa died in 1936, she was the housekeeper. Cspan i think i read in your book that you said that on eight occasions over 11 years, he was nominated for a nobel prize. Why did it take so long for him to get one . Guest fascinating. One, the judges didnt understand relativity. It had not been experimentally proved until after world war i, when eddington did an experiment proving it to be accurate. And also there was a definite antisemitic tinge in the people who voted for him. One man was a very close friend of hermann goerings, and his being jewish and very projewish was, of course so it was a mixture of they didnt understand relativity and in fact, when they gave him the prize in 1922, it was for the photoelectric effect, another of his discoveries, which today we make use of it in automatic Opening Doors the electric eye, we call it, you know. Cspan all right, can you tell us what the theory of relativity is . Guest you know, there are many aspects to it, and i was afraid you were going to ask me that. I took notes. Was there any part of it you read it that puzzled you . Cspan well, just what is it . Guest well. Cspan i mean, e mc2. Guest yeah, well, thats the most dramatic part of it, which means that in everything physical in the world, there is Tremendous Energy that can be released. Everything can be transformed into energy. Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. And the result of that is the atomic bomb when the atom was split and the Chain Reaction took place. Einstein didnt know it could be done at the time. But the equation proved what was there. And let me think now. Its also a lot to do with the movement of planets and speed of planets in space. Up till then let me think now. Newton and everyone else believed there was an invisible ether that pervaded the entire universe, and that everything in it, all planets, the speed of them, should be judged against that ether. Its as if you imagine the ocean. Under the ocean there are submarines and swimmers and everything, and their movements and speed is judged against the ocean. Einstein said, lets forget about the ether, and it doesnt exist in fact lets forget about the ether. Everything should be judged relatively to each other, one planet against another. Its all relative. Cspan you have a picture in here, and then im going to read a joke in a moment that you put in the book from heres a picture of Ashley Montagu and Albert Einstein. What year was this taken, and what was their relationship . Guest thats, i think, in the 30s. And the relationship was very interesting. Ashley montagu, who was an anthropologist hes famous for the elephant man. He wrote the elephant man, which inspired a movie and a play. And hes also your women viewers might like to know hes famous for a book called the natural superiority of women. He used to be on tv programs or radio programs, and he was asked questions. And he would telephone einstein for his advice. And the joke you may be referring to was when Ashley Montagu was asked the number of hours most people slept at night, and napoleon apparently was said to have slept very few and when einstein was told that, he said, well, thats because napoleons a big boaster. That was his joke. But one other thing about the special theory of relativity thats very important is that no two events can be described as simultaneous or happening at the same time except in your own environment. And now the extension of that is that events happening stars moving, for example theyre millions of miles away from us, millions of light years away from us. So if you want to calculate whats happening there, youve got to take into account the space thats traveled in the time it takes. Cspan how old was he when this theory was propounded by Albert Einstein . Guest twentysix. Twentysix. Four or five tremendous theories came out all in the same year, all almost in the same month, when he was 26 years old. Cspan what has happened since he was 26 and revealed this theory that would not have happened had he not invented this . Guest what has happened . Cspan in other words, in the world, the bomb, for instance. Guest oh, well thats the most dramatic thing thats happened. Cspan his formula led to the creation of the atomic bomb . Guest his formula showed it was possible. But it would only have been possible if the atom could be split, which it wasnt for another maybe until about 1930, Something Like that till another 1940 another 25 years. Cspan where was he born . Guest he was born in a little town called, or city, called ulm, ulm, in southern germany. Cspan how long did he live there . Guest just as an infant. Then he moved with his family to munich. His father was an electrical engineer, and he didnt do very well in ulm, so he moved to munich, which was an upandcoming city. Cspan how long did he live there, and where did he go after that . Guest he lived there till he was 15, when his family all moved to a place near milan where there was more opportunity for the electrical engineering. Einstein was left in school at 15, hated it hated being left by his family, and wasnt doing well at school, wasnt getting on well with the teachers or the students. And he persuaded a doctor to say that hed have a nervous breakdown if he wasnt allowed to leave and join his family, and. Cspan he was faced with, at one point when he went to switzerland, with military service. Guest he was faced with military service in germany, if he had stayed. When he went to switzerland, which he did to go to college, he was also faced with military service, but the medical exam failed him on the grounds that he had flat feet and varicose veins, both of which his doctor friend, thomas, denies thomas bucky denies whos seen him in bathing trunks, that he had neither flat feet nor varicose veins. Cspan who said he had it then . Guest the swiss medical authorities. Cspan why . Guest because he had to have a medical exam to see if he was fit for the swiss. Cspan but, i mean, why did they lie about his condition . Guest i dont think youd call it a lie. I think youd call it ineptitude, or maybe he had weaknesses then, which i dont know if flat feet can be cured. Maybe they can. Cspan how long was he in switzerland . Guest quite a long time. He took an exam for zurich polytechnic and failed it, to his relatives amazement, because by that time he was considered a potential genius. He was brilliant at mathematics but hed taken it a year or so younger than the average age. But he had done so well at mathematics, they said, if you graduate from high school, hed left a year before high school if you graduate, you can come straight in without retaking the exam. And he went to a high school in switzerland where he absolutely had a marvelous time. He fell in love for the first time with his teachers daughter. He lived in the house with a teacher and the teachers children. And he did very well. He became a terribly enthusiastic violin player. And then he went from there to zurich went to the polytechnic for four years, graduated, fell in love again with the woman he married, mileva maric, and then they moved to bern. He lived in bern for a while. Cspan let me jot back, though mileva maric was pregnant before they got married . Guest mileva maric was pregnant before they got married with a little girl who was born in serbia. She went home to have the baby born. The whereabouts of this baby now is absolute mystery. She disappeared at the age of three. Its assumed that friends of the einsteins had her adopted, but the fate of this girl is a complete mystery. Various people have tried to find out; and, in fact, theres a young woman from the new yorker magazine, i think, now in serbia trying to find out what happened to her. Cspan how. Guest she may be alive today. Shed be in her nineties. Cspan are there any other einstein direct descendants living . Guest direct descendants, yes. Grandson, bernard, living in switzerland, and several grandchildren. Bernard is the son of einsteins eldest son, hans albert. Einsteins youngest son, eduard, was in a mental asylum for the last years of his life with schizophrenia. Cspan was there an illegitimate child . Guest the illegitimate child is the first one born. I dont know if they call them illegitimate today, but born before and the extraordinary thing is einstein was looking forward to the birth of this child very much, talking about seeing it and when it came back but there are all sorts of reasons why it would have been terribly difficult for them to have had the child with them then. Cspan ok. Where else did he move to . What was next . Guest when they moved to bern, after he almost starved and couldnt get a job, he started a Little Academy of his own teaching two friends. He made lifelong friends teaching, as a tutor. He and mileva did a little tutoring. He then did some parttime teaching in schools. And then, through this friend, Marcel Grossmann, who had predicted hed be a great man one day, he got a job in the Patent Office in bern. And what he had to do was look at the patents that people had sent in and their description of the patents and clarify them, simplify them, see if they worked, and recommend whether they should be considered. And it was a great help to him, because it focused him very much on being succinct about describing things and looking immediately for the flaws and that sort of thing. Cspan go over two or three of the next moves he made, just so we can get some sense of what he did. Guest he went to the Patent Office, and after about seven years in the Patent Office in which he was doing fairly well, he was promoted, and they thought very highly of him. He got a chance to be a lecturer in a bern university. A professor had taken a great interest in him. And he lectured there, and he was a very poor lecturer to start with. And then he got his phd at the university of zurich. And from the university of zurich, where he taught, too, he went to prague university, and from prague, he. Cspan we have a picture from 1922. Was this a good likeness of what he was you point out here that he always buttoned the top button of his coat . Guest thats right. Thats him in berlin. And it really what its a point of he didnt bother to button his coat. He just bothered with the first one. His interest in dress was absolutely nil, and partly what it was, including his long hair, he tried to simplify everything theres a story that bucky told me, that einstein used to shave only with water, and it was very painful. And bucky gave him some shaving soap at one time introduced him to it and einstein used it, said it was marvelous, and then went back to just water again because it was just simpler. Cspan how smart was he . Guest he was absolutely brilliant. I mean, all of the people i spoke with before i did this book, because my knowledge of physics was practically none, as a preparation, i read up on physics and i interviewed nobel prizewinning physicists. And that made another book of mine called genius talk conversations with nobel scientists and other luminaries. And every one of them said there was really nobody that could match einstein for brain power, and the only person they would even consider in the same sphere as him was niels bohr. Cspan and who was niels bohr . Guest niels bohr was a danish scientist who started a school in copenhagen. And almost all the great scientists contemporary scientists went there and studied there. Cspan where was he at age 26 . Guest einstein at age 26 . Cspan when the theory of relativity was discovered . Guest he was at the Patent Office. Cspan in bern. Guest in bern, yes. Cspan in switzerland. When did he first come to the United States . Guest he first came to the United States in 1921. He came with Chaim Weizmann to do a tour to raise funds for a Hebrew University, and they did a lightning tour of all the major cities. And then his next visit to america was in 1931, when he went to california. Cspan where did he go in california . Guest he went to los angeles. He went to the university of california, to cal tech. And it was from cal tech, where he went a few years running in the 30s, somebody wanted him for what was to be the institute of advanced study in princeton, a new organization. Cspan when did he go to princeton . Guest he went to princeton in 1933, when hitler and the nazis had declared him public enemy number one, and there was a price on his head. Cspan along the way, what citizenship did he hold . Guest he was born in germany, so he was naturally a german citizen. He renounced his german citizenship, and for a time was a citizen of no nationality. Then he eventually got swiss nationality. And eventually, in 1940, he became an american citizen. Cspan you have a book on biography. Guest yes. Cspan and let me see. You, im sure, remember the title of it. Its fair game what biographers dont tell you. Guest i decided that biographers should be put to the same scrutiny as they put their subjects. So i as well as a survey of biography through the ages, i interviewed quite a few contemporary biographers, including bob woodward, whos quite interesting. And one of the things i got out of him is he told me the secret of how he, in confidence, the secret of how he interviewed casey, the head of the cia, when casey was almost on his deathbed in washington, and i believed him. Cspan did you print it . Guest it was in confidence. Cspan he told you in confidence . Guest in the book yes, he told me. He wont tell people how he did it. You see, he says its a secret, so they say, well, obviously, like deep throat, hes covering up; either it doesnt exist or its not as he describes it. So i said to him, you know, some people have told me, fellow reporters and biographers, theyre very disappointed in you because you could confide in them, you could tell them how you did it, and they could then say, i believe bob woodward, and that would at least give you more credibility. So he did tell me in confidence, and i believe him, and its almost like a conan doyle story of the dog not barking or whatever. Its very simple. Cspan and you never can tell this story . Guest i dont know about never. I could tell if bob woodward tells it or gave me permission to tell it. Rather, as he said, he wont tell who deep throat is until deep throat dies or gives him permission. Cspan well, why do you think he trusted you not to tell the story . Guest i think the same reason people trust him, and that was the thrust of my book on biographers. Youve got to know about them, their integrity or lack of it, to know if you can trust their biographies. Because one of the people in that book, a contemporary biographer, faked an fbi document to follow his thesis. Cspan who was that . Guest id rather not tell you, but its in the book. Cspan its in the book . Guest its in its in. Cspan what year did you publish the book . Guest quite recently. I think its about two or three years ago. Cspan and what publisher . Guest as a matter of fact, i cant remember because its a very prometheus. Prometheus. Do you know the prometheus press . Cspan yes. But this is a wiley book that youve got here . Guest this is a wiley book, yes. They mostly do scientific and business books. But theyre branching into trade books very much in the last few years. Cspan how long did you work on your biography book . Guest its really a lifetime. You mean literally worked on it . Cspan yes, but. Guest about a year or two years, but this is a 25year effort, this. Cspan the einstein book . Guest yes. Over the years, i wrote a biography of Ernest Hemingway as well, in the meantime. But i started this in 72 with that original phone call to helen dukas. And then every library id go to, every biography that came out, id look in the index to see if there was any mention of einstein for the new information. Cspan did you change the way you wrote this book based on your discoveries of writing the book about biographers . Guest well, another book of mine is called murderers and other friendly people the public and private worlds of interviewers. This again was to try to find out, you know, its so important, the interviewer in a biography, getting information, to find out the secrets of people like Truman Capote and the man who wrote roots and how they go about it. So, one, it helped me in interviewing technique in a sense. But what i developed over the years in einstein, was a tremendous admiration for him. Ive never come across, in life or in any book, anyone who went out of his way to help strangers in distress. And theres a recent account of Raoul Wallenberg it was in the us news and world report. Apparently, you know he rescued tens of thousands of hungarian jews from the nazis a swedish diplomat. Apparently, he was working for the american intelligence and funded by the american intelligence to rescue these jews, and einstein in 1948 had written to stalin, saying, would you please release Raoul Wallenberg from prison . And an assistant of stalins wrote back to einstein, ive looked for Raoul Wallenberg, and i cant find him anywhere. But he went out of his way so much to help other people. Cspan go back to the art of biography. When you interview someone, what kind of a technique do you use to get information . Guest one, i think its very important to know a great deal about the subject so that you can appear to know as much or more than they do about it. And, in fact, when you write a biography like this, you know more about the man than practically anybody in the world, including his wife or his best friends, because you knew it from so many different sources. So that i think when you know so much about a person and you can talk to somebody who also knows them, you can give them information that interests them and one of the things that Truman Capote said which is in a sense deceitful was to empathize with the subject. He, for example, did an interview with Marlon Brando for the new yorker, and they were talking about both having alcoholic mothers, or rather brando was talking about having an alcoholic mother, so capote would say, well, you know, i know exactly how you feel, i had a. and with this sort of empathy, he thought he got much more out of the person than he did. Cspan who was carl seelig . Guest carl seelig was a very wealthy swiss man who was interested in the mentally retarded people very much. He wanted to write a biography of einstein because he was intrigued with him. And he wrote to einstein suggesting that he should do it and he had taken an interest in einsteins son, who was in the mental asylum, and befriended him. And on account of that and rather an amusing he used to send packages of swiss soup to einstein. Maybe this is the way to get information and help from people, too. Einstein heard about him more and trusted him and believed he was a man of integrity, and gave him a lot of information, told his friends to be frank with him, and even helped him get to know more from the son in the mental asylum. Cspan what did you think of the biography written by carl seelig . Guest very good. Very good, except that it was a einstein and helen dukasinspired book, and the information came almost always from friends. Cspan so if i picked up that book and read it and then read yours, what kind of information do you bring to the table that wasnt in that book . Guest well, many people wouldnt speak frankly about einstein until almost everyone close to him died. Now his stepdaughter margot didnt die till 1982, and his secretary dukas till 86, so people were cautious. When they were all dead, there were quite a lot of people who were willing to speak very frankly. Cspan who did you talk to . Did you talk much to helen dukas . Guest not a lot, no, not after that first conversation, but who i spoke with, for example, were a presbyterian ministers son who were neighbors of the einsteins, who knew them very personally, and who helped, in fact, smuggle the archives out from france and germany to america, and knew them very personally, meeting them and that sort of thing. To bucky, the doctors son, who in princeton used to be a chauffeur, and who went on almost every vacation with him for several years and was a very close friend. And also i spoke with his biographers. I spoke with his colleagues. Banesh hoffmann, for example, was both a colleague and biographer. Cspan you paint a picture, at some point, of an office at princeton that somebody i mean, i dont remember the story where somebody was hanging down to look in the office. Guest this is how einstein intrigues people. One 70yearold man went to the institute to see einsteins study, and. Cspan its still there . Guest its still there, yes and somebody else occupies it. And it was closed, so he climbed up and i think its two stories and he was hanging from the windowsill, this 70yearold man, to just take a glimpse inside. And theres a japanese scientist, too, who was so enthralled with anything about einstein, that he asked for a sliver of the brain from this man out in kansas, and got it and took it back to japan. And he has a museum of einstein memorabilia. Cspan whos jane swing . Do you remember . Guest jane swing is a thats a marvelous story a young woman who, with a girlfriend, the younger daughter of this girlfriend, had been to einstein to ask him to help her with his math. And einstein helped her with the math. And when the two girls came to call for the younger sister, einstein invited them up to his very untidy study and asked if theyd like to have lunch with him. And they said yes, and the lunch consisted of Something Like baked beans, which he opened cans of baked beans, which he heated under a bunsen burner, and gave them to the girls for their lunch with him. Cspan did you hear him did you hear his voice . Guest ive heard his voice on radio and also in documentary films of him. Its a very quiet, gentle, slow, musical voice, which is an incredible contrast from this dynamic young man. As a young boy, he had a terrible temper, and he hit his sister maja, over the head with a garden hoe in one of his tempers, so that she said, to be the sister of a thinker, you must have a very thick skull. But he always seemed to have this rather mellow, soft, highpitched i dont know, mellow and highpitched may be contradictory voice. Cspan accent . Guest a german accent always, but with rather things like, i tink i will a little study and she is a very good theory. Cspan where are they either the recordings or the films of Albert Einstein kept . Guest oh, various different places. Like thered be cbs and that sort of thing. The archives have some. Film companies have some. And im sure Hebrew University. Hebrew university have the master the original archives princeton have a copy, and Boston University have a copy. Cspan he was offered the presidency of israel. Guest he was offered the presidency of israel, and he was very ill. It was shortly before he died. He died in 55 at 76. He was offered it, obviously, in 48, when israel became israel. But he said that it was not a job he could do, really dealing with people. And despite the fact that he claimed to be a man who loved to be alone and that sort of thing, he had more Close Friends than anyone i know about and communicated with more people and wrote to them and. Cspan who were his closest friends . Guest i think his closest friends were, in his young days, Marcel Grossmann and michelangelo besso, who worked with him on his science was like a sounding board for him; and another man called max born, who was a scientist, and max borns wife, hedi born. And in america, in later life, bucky was one of his closest friends, this man thomas bucky, the. Cspan and who was he . Guest thomas bucky was a medical doctor. Cspan where . Guest living in connecticut. Cspan how did they get. Guest he was living in new york city at the time. Cspan how did they get to be friends . Guest well, the father, gustav bucky, was the medical doctor to einsteins stepdaughters, elsa and margot. And he met them through that. And he was also an inventor, bucky. Hed invented a kind of camera for medical purposes, which is still in use. And he and einstein became very friendly, and bucky could discuss science with him and medicine. Strangely enough, einstein had many medical doctors as friends, though he was very skeptical about the medical profession and their ability to cure. Cspan how tall was he . Guest about 56. Cspan how heavy was he . Guest in later years, he was a bit heavy, but he had quite a good physique. With that little liaison or flirtation with luise rainer, the movie star, you can see he looks quite in good shape, quite muscular. He loved rowing. He is in white there, and hes rowing there with luise rainer and her husband, the famous playwright. Cspan was there some suspicion on the part of her husband that there was something going on between the two of them . Guest he was a very jealous man. Have you got his name there . Hes quite a famous. Cspan yes, i can get it. Clifford clifford odets. Guest clifford odets. Clifford odets. He was a very jealous man. He had many affairs himself. Thats perhaps why he suspected his wife, luise rainer. And einstein was quite flirtatious with her, and she obviously was attracted to him. And odets was so jealous that photographs that were taken, every one he could get hold of, he cut out the photograph of einsteins head, and thats one of the few photos that escaped that jealous attack. Cspan how long was he married to mileva . Guest he was married to mileva from about 1900 to 1918, about 17 years. Cspan and weve got a picture here of the two boys. Guest thats right. Cspan and what was his relationship to hans albert . Guest hans albert, his eldest son. Well, in their young days, he was an adorable father. They adored him. He was very playful with them, and they found him fascinating, and he was very interested in their upbringing. But when the divorce happened, when there was the breakdown, he remained in berlin, and she went back to switzerland. And she felt that he was getting the boys to dislike him, the trouble with the divorce. And they remained with her pretty well for the rest of their lives until they grew up. The youngest boy went into the mental asylum as a schizophrenic. The eldest boy came over to america and became quite a prominent engineer, and he worked in california. And he quite occasionally saw his father, but einstein was rather a remote father, although he was very fond of children and often very helpful of other peoples children. Cspan when did he begin to have the affair with his second wife . Guest during world war i, he was very unhappy with mileva. I think partly the disappearance or whatever happened to this young, first baby girl they had caused the first wife to be terribly miserable and depressed. And she had a sister who was very badly mentally retarded. And then he became interested in his cousin, elsa. Interestingly enough, as she became his wife, his cousins mother and his mother were sisters, and his father and his wifes father were brothers were cousins, rather. Cspan and then his second wife was his cousin. Guest thats right. Cspan how close . Guest well, so close, because elsas mother, his second wife, and his mother were sisters. Cspan so second cousins. Guest yes, and elsas father and his father were cousins. So there were sisters and cousins of their so it was very close. Cspan how long was he with his second wife before he divorced his first . Guest seventeen years with his first wife. Cspan but i mean, how long were they having an affair before they. Guest oh. Well, its hard to tell, but he met he was very ill in world war i because of the diet they had to go through in germany, very ill, and she helped almost save his life. And then they became very close and friendly, and then they married. I think the affair maybe was for a few years. And then that marriage lasted until she died in 1936. She came across to princeton with him. Cspan did he ever remarry after that . Guest he never remarried, no. He had many offers of marriage. Cspan offers of marriage. Guest yes, and mostly in the mail. Cspan what would you say his relationship was, overall, with women and vice versa . Guest i think he was very fond of women. He had the almost typical view of men in those days that women were not as bright as men. In one rather embarrassing interview he had, he said that in women, god may have created a sex without brains. But when marie curie was brought up to him, the nobel prize winner, he said, well, she may be an exception. Now he must have found out quite differently when he met his first wife, mileva, who was studying physics at zurich polytechnic with him. So over the years he had a greater, higher view of women than that. But he was very fond of women, and they adored him. Any woman i spoke to who knew him, particularly his Close Friends, speak of him in terms of adoration. Cspan if you were sitting in the room with him, what would you see . What would you. Guest i. F. Stone, the gadfly journalist, went to tea with einstein and said it was like having tea with god. And i. F. Stones son, who also i interview for the book, said that the difference in their conversation was fascinating. His father. Cspan let me just interrupt to make sure to the audience this is not i. F. Stone. This is a picture of fiorello la guardia and do you know who the gentlemen is in the middle . Guest yes, thats a rabbi. Rabbi. Cspan stephen wise. Guest stephen wise, a famous american rabbi, laughing, and there thats einstein was a great laugher. He laughed at almost any joke anyone told him, even if hed heard it several times, people said because he was so kind and didnt want to hurt people. Cspan didnt mean to interrupt, but you mentioned i. F stone. Guest yes. Cspan . And you have a lot in here about i. F. Stone. Guest yes. Cspan who was he . Guest thats new information, too. He was a liberal, leftwing journalist who attacked all the authority figures, and had his own journal he was based in washington, dc called i. F. Stones weekly. And einstein was one of his subscribers, and interestingly enough, Marilyn Monroe was another subscriber, and she bought a copy for every member of congress and sent it to them. Cspan you said that its inaugural issue of the newsletter was only 5,300 copies . Three 5,300 subscribers . Guest 5,300, i think thats right, yeah. I mean, it had a small but very influential readership, and they thought along the same lines. They were both liberal. They were both great liberals. They both were very sympathetic towards the plight of israel, but also very sympathetic to the being fair to the arabs. And through their correspondence, einstein invited him and his family to lunch, and they had this great conversation together, which i. F. Stone told me about, and the son, which do you find it quite delightful . Cspan and what was the conversation . Guest well, theyre mostly discussing about peace, and they were also discussing about mccarthy. It was during the mccarthy years, and i. F. Stone had a very low opinion of mccarthy, and so did einstein. Cspan was it christopher stone, the son . Where is he living . Guest christophers son the other son, you mean . Cspan no, i. F. Stones son. Guest oh, the son who i interviewed is in california, and hes a prominent lawyer and very interested in music, and the other son i think is editor of the federation for american scientists editor of their journal. Cspan i wrote down in the early part of this, words like pacifist, leftwinger, an accused communist, communist sympathizer, all kinds of words that you used to define Albert Einstein. Guest he was a tremendous pacifist until the nazis came to power, and also during the spanish civil war, when he realized that the democracy was completely at stake. And then he was a realist, and he disappointed pacifists by saying, the democracies have to rearm to survive, and when israel was threatened, saying, obviously, a small country has a right to defend itself. He was a tremendous liberal. He belonged to the social democratic party, which in germany, the strongest platform they had was social justice for all, and that the Major Industries should be either owned by the government or controlled by the government. And because he was a liberal during the mccarthy era and the cold war, and because he saw the soviet side of things as against the american side of things, almost like a devils advocate, people thought he was a communist, but he was the farthest thing from a communist he hated tyrannies of any kind. He hated the stalin regime. But he would argue that the americans were making mistakes, too. And so when sidney hook, who was a philosopher and a wellknown philosopher, argued with him in person and by letter defending america, einstein would put the russian or soviet point of view, although he was definitely not for dictatorships, just to even the Playing Field sort of thing cspan the rosenbergs. Guest the rosenbergs were accused of being atom bomb spies, which they almost inevitably were and were sentenced to death and were executed. Einstein appealed that they should not be executed, saying that it was possible they were spies, but we were at peace, nobody else in such circumstances would be executed, it was obviously a political thing for their execution, and appealing for their lives. Of course, he wasnt successful. Cspan you say that he was loved and hated, and go back to the time when he was hated the most. How would we have seen that if we were alive when he was. Guest he was hated by the germans, of course, the nazis, because he was almost regarded as the representative of jews in germany, the representative of jewish intellectuals. And he spoke out against the nazis. And, in fact, when they put a price on his head and people threatened to kill him and he was in belgium and being protected by the queen of belgium, who was a friend of his, strangely enough, and who secretly she had detectives guard him, when his wife begged him to stop talking out against the nazis, to keep quiet, his life was in danger, he refused to keep quiet. He said, i wouldnt be einstein if i kept quiet. He was a very, physically, a very courageous man, as well as morally. Cspan what do you think his reaction would be if he came back today and saw that a lot of the papers coming out of the soviet union show that some of the people he was defending were actually communists . Guest who, for example . Cspan the rosenbergs or the Whittaker Chambers story of alger hiss and some of those. Guest he wasnt defending alger hiss; i dont think he got involved with alger hiss. And he didnt deny that the rosenbergs may have been spies, and he wouldnt have approved of their being spies, but he just said that to kill them, particularly the parents of two young boys, for spying in wartime with, theoretically, an ally, the Death Penalty was not fair and not just. Social justice was a tremendously strong. Cspan what was his relationship to j. Robert oppenheimer . Guest ostensibly, oppenheimer was his boss when oppenheimer was in charge of the institute for advanced study, and it was a mutual admiration of scientists. And when oppenheimer was accused of being a communist and, or rather, a security risk, einstein defended him because he knew, and others knew, that everything about oppenheimer that was being revealed then was known before he was cleared to head the project to produce the atom bomb. Again, he felt it was a political witchhunt because of the mccarthy era. Cspan what was the 61 vote . He tried to intervene. I remember writing it down that mr. Oppenheimer lost that vote on whether or not, i think he was. Guest that must have been security clearance. Cspan it was yeah, its the members voted 6to1 not to reinstate his clearance. Guest thats right. Eventually, apparently, he was exonerated by president lbj, l. B. Johnson in the white house. Cspan so what would you say in the end was Albert Einsteins direct relationship to the building of the atom bomb . Guest no relationship at all to the building of it well, no, let me start again. He wrote the formula e mc2. The splitting of the atom was discovered by accident by a man called otto hahn in the 30s, but he didnt know what hed done. And a jewish colleague of his, lise meitner and her cousin discovered he had found out that the atom could be split. Wherein the extension of that, the Chain Reaction could take place, they knew that it was possible to create an atom bomb einstein, when he heard through secret information through switzerland that the germans were probably working to create an atom bomb, realized they could win the war and destroy civilization. So he was persuaded by leo szilard, a former student of his, also a brilliant physicist, and eugene wigner, another physicist, to write a letter to president roosevelt, warning him that the germans were not allowing uranium to be sent out of czechoslovakia, and there was very good information an atom bomb was in the works; he should get onto it for the americans. Cspan do you think you would have liked him . Guest i think i would have loved him. And i think this is a motive, too, for writing biographies people you would like to have known very much. Cspan do you happen to know where this picture on the cover is from . Guest i dont. I dont think its a very good one of him. He looks far more gloomy than he does in many photographs. Its intriguing cover, i think, particularly putting his head above the i. Maybe theres some symbolism. I but. Cspan did you have anything to say about how this cover looked . Guest absolutely not. Cspan and why did you do business with john wiley . Guest i had a relative who worked for them in england, and he told me that they were now doing trade books, and were interested in biographies. They were interested in a man called martin gilbert, who had done all the official biographies of winston churchill, and theyve recently done a biography of de gaulle. So knowing they were a scientific publisher and were now doing trade books, it seemed ideal for me. So i contacted them without mentioning my relative at all it was no influence at all in this and they were interested. Cspan is it an American Company . Guest oh, yes. Yes, and i think its from the 19th century. Cspan and then you have your dedication. And who are these folks . Guest my wife, martine, who came to every archive. We worked together. Every word of the book, she went over and often criticized, and i rewrote frequently from her point of view. Danielle, my daughter who lives in leesburg and works in washington, dc. Shes the president of pogo, the project on government oversight its a Watchdog Group that investigates fraud and abuse in government and in big corporations. My grandson and my granddaughter, alex and emma. Cspan and where are they . Guest my daughter and my grandchildren live in leesburg. My wife is in an adjoining room. Cspan where did you meet your wife . Guest i met my wife in england. She was in ormskirk, near liverpool she was my sister rosemarys best friend. Cspan how long have you been married . Guest weve been married since the 60s, the early 60s 35 years. Cspan this book, you say, took 25 years. It was over . Did you like it . Guest i read it again, because i find him so fascinating. Look at that incident, for example, where hes having his portrait painted, and a letter comes in saying a woman is in despair. Her son believes hes jesus christ and has isolated himself on a mountaintop, and he wont come down for anyone except Albert Einstein, if Albert Einstein would talk to him. Now heres a man who may be dangerous. He may be mad. Einstein agrees to see him. The women in einsteins household are really frightened of whats going to happen. The man comes, and he looks rather frightening. Einstein goes walking in the woods with him and talks with him, and this man thinks hes jesus christ, and einstein says to him, well, you know, jesus christ was a fisher of men. He wouldnt be stuck up a mountain. Apparently, this worked. Apparently the man then came down. But the interesting part is, einstein says, it seems so peaceful, the sort of life this man talked about, that i wonder if hes the sane one, and were the lunatics. Cspan somebody knocked on his door at midnight demanding to see him . Guest a woman who was mentally disturbed. He had a lot of these strange people come. There was a man who was, again, on this communist thing under the mccarthy he was being called up in the mccarthy hearings and was very worried. He knocked on the door. Helen dukas answered, and to protect einstein, which she always did. But she knew einstein would want to help this man, and he gave him advice, and helped him in a way. Cspan never drove a car . Guest never drove a car, but loved driving his little, simple boat with just a with no outboard or inboard motor, and no i dont think he had any protection, any floating device, and would drive it daringly at other boats, and just swerve aside at the last moment. He loved sailing. He loved playing his violin. Theres this spontaneity of him as a young man. Hes told somebody in an attic is playing a mozart on a piano, and he doesnt know who it is. He breaks into the house, runs up, says, keep playing hes got his violin with him, and he finishes this piece with this old woman, and then. Cspan have you been down to the einstein statue in washington, right across from the Vietnam Memorial . Guest ive been previously, and id tried to see it driving in, but i didnt see it. Cspan and you say youve never seen it. Guest i have seen it. Yes, ive seen it previously, yes. Cspan what do you think of it . Guest its not good of him, i dont think. Cspan why not . Guest how do you think any statues are good . I dont think the statue of churchill in london is good of him. I dont know, having seen him on film and seeing these photos and him playing ludo with this game with this little boy there he is for us. I think thats quite a good bust of him in that photograph. I dont know how clear it will come out. I think living people, its very hard to get the lifeblood seen in the statues of them. Cspan i want to go back to the story you i was talking about another story earlier. I didnt read it then, but this is the one that Ashley Montagu told einstein a joke with a jewish inflection which became one of his favorites. Quote, its about two jewish tailors in the bronx, said montagu. one of them happens to mention the name of einstein, and the other one says to him, whos einstein . he says, you schlemiel whos einstein . Hes only the biggest scientist in the world. what is he the biggest scientist in the world for . relativity. whats relativity . he says, schlemiel, this is relativity. Supposing an old lady sits in your lap for a minute. A minute seems like an hour. But if a beautiful girl sits in your lap for an hour, an hour seems like a minute. and this is relativity . his companion asked. yes, he replies, thats relativity. and from this he earns a living . einstein laughed heartily and said it was one of the best explanations of relativity he had ever heard. Guest well, its very funny, but, of course, it isnt a good explanation of relativity, which isnt what seems, but what, in fact, is. Cspan what is the quantum theory . Guest the quantum theory. Now this is fascinating, because it started off with a man called max planck, who was a german scientist who discovered that in electromagnetic phenomena, things didnt come in a solid stream, but were broken up into little pieces, like bullet pieces, called quanta, little parts. And this absolutely was so new and almost frightening to the scientific community. It developed from there, and the essence of it is that in the subatomic world no Single Particle you cannot predict the behavior of any Single Particle. Prediction is impossible. So that this brought forth from einstein the very famous saying he was opposed to it his saying was, god does not play dice. I cant believe god plays dice. Because he thought you would be able in time to predict what these particles did. Now an interesting story about this is that john wheeler of princeton, who was a colleague of the great niels bohr and is a very highly reputed scientist, i was discussing quantum theory with him for this book, genius talk, and i said as he was discussing it, i said, i see. And he said, you do . I said, well, i mean, i see im following what youre saying. He said, im glad you say that, because if anyone tells you they understand quantum theory, theyre lying. Its a very difficult and complicated field. Cspan you say that the fbi had a 1,600page file on Albert Einstein. Guest yes, thats right. Cspan what was in it . Did you look at it . Guest oh, absolutely, absolutely, pretty well the whole 1,600 pages. Almost all garbage. They would take anything that came, often from lunatics or anonymous people writing from anywhere, accusing him of working on a death ray, of a plan to take over hollywood and make it the movie capital for communists. And they themselves seemed scared to interview him. Hoover himself seemed scared all his life to interview einstein, because of influential friends. And when they couldnt get to einstein or find about him, because they suspected him and his secretary dukas of maybe being helping communists spy nazi communist spies, rather, or being communist spies themselves. So when they couldnt get to einstein, they started investigating helen dukas and looking at all her outgoing mail and incoming mail and doing tests on all the letters and all this sort of thing they did, and absolute nonsense because they were the most innocent people in the world, the most Democratic People in the world. Cspan where is the most material located . If somebody wants to go see a museum or a home or something einstein, where would they go . Guest well, the most material is in the archives, which were in these places Hebrew University, Princeton University and Boston University. Theyre coming out in separate volumes over, probably, the next quarter of a century. About five volumes have already come out, giving you the scientific work, as well as the letters to and from einstein. And if anybody wants a really good scientific book on einstein, in absolute detail scientists its by abraham pais, called subtle is the lord. Its a great book. Cspan and were out of time. Heres the cover of the book. Einstein a life, by denis brian. We thank you very much. Guest thank you very much