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