A relatively sane outlook
By Mahir Ali

[January 20, 2005]

A familiar face - with its shock of indifferently combed white hair, outsized moustache and an expressive pair of eyes - is likely to become even more familiar as the year progresses.

Guest Column
by Mahir Ali

Apart from scores of seminars and exhibitions, there are plans for large-scale merchandizing, with the aforementioned visage turning up on everything from T-shirts and mugs to mouse-pads and screensavers.

Why try to make an icon out of someone who could already be considered one and someone whose name is a byword for genius and whose popular image is an epitome of the absent-minded professor?

Well, there is certainly a good excuse: a centenary. In 1905, a seemingly unexceptional 26-year-old clerk at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern published three papers in Annalen der Physik, a German physics journal.

Those three papers - on the photoelectric effect, which refuted the theory that light travels in waves; on Brownian motion, which proved that atoms exist; and on special relativity, which proved wrong Newton's and Galileo's theories about the way the universe works by unravelling some of the mysteries of time and space - changed the way scientists look at the world.

Small wonder, then, that in the annals of physics, 1905 is looked upon as a particularly hallowed year - or that, in commemoration, 2005 has been designated as the Year of Physics. As well as Einstein Year.

Soon after Albert Einstein published his groundbreaking papers, he progressed to academic posts that had earlier been denied to him. Within a couple of decades, he had expounded his general theory of relativity and been awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. He, thereafter, became the best-known scientist on the planet.

His fame has, by and large, endured - even though people familiar with the equation most closely associated with Einstein are unlikely, unless they are scientists, to be aware of its implications.

The equally iconic Charlie Chaplin wasn't being facetious when he remarked to Einstein: "The people applaud me because everyone understands me, and they applaud you because no one understands you."

However, although his scientific achievements were the dominant aspect of Einstein's personality, they were by no means the only one. He was also a committed humanist who devoted considerable time and energy to the pursuit of peace and social justice.

It would be most unfortunate if his hopes and fears for humankind were to be overlooked this year. Einstein understood the danger posed by militarism back in 1914, when he was a signatory, alongside other German intellectuals, to the Manifesto for Europeans.

During the First World War, he joined an organization that not only sought peace in the short term but also called for the formation of a supranational organization that would preserve it in the future.

This became an enduring theme in Einstein's political interventions. He recognized the risks involved in establishing a world government, but felt that without it competing nation-states would inevitably seek to settle disputes militarily. "Do I fear the tyranny of a world government?" he asked in a 1945 article. "Of course I do. But I fear still more the coming of another war."

Until the early 1930s, Einstein advocated the "violent" path of conscientious objection as a means of depleting military machines. Later in the decade, with the Nazis clearly preparing for war, he changed his mind about the efficacy of this approach, realizing that conscientious objectors in Germany would be shot, whereas elsewhere in Europe they would only weaken the forces that could be expected to resist the Nazi onslaught.

In 1939, he wrote to US president Franklin D. Roosevelt, pointing out that experiments being conducted by E. Fermi and L. Szilard suggested "the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future" and that this could lead to the possible construction of "extremely powerful bombs of a new type".

"A single bomb of this type," he added, "carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove too heavy for transportation by air."

He was wrong about that. But those who imply his letter led directly to the Manhattan Project are also wrong. And he wasn't allowed anywhere near the project because the American government did not trust him.

Einstein was justifiably concerned at the time that the Germans would unlock the atomic key before anyone else. Six years later, he was as appalled as anyone else about the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In 1946, he noted in a telegram to prominent Americans: "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift towards unparalleled catastrophe."

He knew the genie could not be returned to the bottle. "The secret of the bomb should be committed to a world government," he proposed, "and the United States should immediately announce its readiness" to do so. He did not believe any good would come from sharing it with other powerful nations, such as the Soviet Union.

Suspicious as he had become of Anglo-American intentions, Einstein couldn't possibly have known the leadership's mindset. According to Winston Churchill's personal physician, Baron Charles McMoran Wilson, the former (and future) British prime minister confided to him that very year: "We should not wait until Russia is ready ... America knows that 52 per cent of Russia's machine-building is located in Moscow and can be destroyed with one bomb. It would probably cost three million human lives, but they couldn't care less, those Americans."

Among the matters on which Einstein remained resolute throughout his life was what he described in 1931 as "the worst outcrop of herd life, the military system". Anyone who revels in soldiering, he said, "has only been given his big brain by mistake; unprotected spinal marrow was all he needed".

"This plague-spot of civilization," he went on, "ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them! How vile and despicable war seems to me! I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable business."

Later in his life he described nationalism as "an infantile disease ... the measles of mankind", and the armaments industry as "the hidden evil power behind the nationalism which is rampant everywhere".

Had Einstein lived longer, one of the things that would arguably have hurt him most was Israel's evolution into a militarist state. Like many other socialists and idealists in the aftermath of the Holocaust, he supported the emigration of European Jews to Palestine, envisaging a single state in which they would live side by side with Palestinians.

In 1952, he turned down an offer to become president of Israel - but even at that juncture he would have been horrified to learn that Israelis would make it a national duty to replicate so much of the oppression so many of them had suffered in the 1930s and 1940s.

He would also have been disappointed by the UN's failure to heed the advice he had directed towards the General Assembly in 1947, asking it to strengthen its authority relative to a Security Council "paralysed by the shortcomings of the veto provisions" and recommending that national representatives should be democratically elected rather than picked by governments. Nearly 60 years on, many of the same debates continue to rage.

Earlier in his life, in order to escape conscription, Einstein had renounced his German citizenship and taken up that of Switzerland. After Adolf Hitler came to power, he settled in the United States, got a job at Princeton and became an American citizen.

Einstein's initially favourable disposition towards the US changed, however, in the face of reality - he abhorred the racism, the anticommunist witch-hunts, the militarism.

The authorities, particularly Edgar J. Hoover's FBI, viewed him as a potential subversive; they spied on him, kept voluminous files on his political activities and sought to link him to Soviet espionage; only his renown as a scientist kept him out of their clutches.

Undeterred by all intimidation, Einstein joined Paul Robeson in co-chairing a crusade against lynching, sought clemency for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and waged a vigorous battle against McCarthyism. Not bad for someone who, dividing his "time between politics and equations", found that "our equations are much more important to me".

One doesn't have to be an Einstein to grasp the significance of peace and understand that the scourge of war can be banished only through international agreement and enforceable guarantees of security; or to appreciate that the progress of humankind will necessarily be piecemeal and uneven under a system that concentrates wealth and disperses poverty.

It is nonetheless reassuring to know that one of the finest minds of the past 100 years devoted his intellect not just to understanding the world but also to changing it for the better.

And, 50 years after his death, it is encouraging to remember that the 20th century's foremost genius was also, in the best sense of the word, an incorrigible troublemaker.

Mahir Ali is a columnist for Dawn, the newspaper. Reprinted with author's permission.

Comments on this Article