In Search of Klingsor. Jorge Volpi

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ in Pasadena to deliver a lecture at the California Institute of Technology, Abraham Flexner first approached him to join the Institute for Advanced Study, which was soon to be inaugurated at Princeton University. Flexner would make the same proposal to Einstein once again, when the two men found themselves at Oxford University in 1932.

      “Professor Einstein,” he said as they walked through the gardens of Christ Church College, “it is not my intention to dare to offer you a position at our institute, but if you think about it and feel that it might meet your needs, we would be more than disposed to accommodate whatever requirements you might have.” Einstein replied that he would think about it, and in early 1933 the political climate in Germany forced him to accept the offer.

      By the early 1930s, members of Hitler’s party were winning more and more seats in the Reichstag. In the 1932 elections, for example, more than two hundred Nazi deputies joined the ranks of the Reichstag, which was now under the control of the artful, cagey Hermann Goering. Around that time, Einstein and his second wife, Elsa, realized that sooner or later they would have to flee Germany. A third telephone call from Abraham Flexner, this time to Einstein’s home in Caputh, in the outskirts of Berlin, convinced the couple to cross the Atlantic. Taking advantage of the new season of conferences and lectures in the United States, Einstein promised Flexner that he would pay a visit to the institute, which would allow him to finally make a decision regarding the offer. Upon leaving their home, Einstein looked at his wife’s careworn face and in the admonishing tone he reserved for truly tragic moments, he said to her: “Dreh’ dich um. Du sieht’s nie wieder.” That is, “Don’t turn around. You’ll never see it again.” In January of 1933, Einstein was at the conference in Pasadena when Hitler was named chancellor of the Reich by President Von Hindenburg. In one interview, Einstein confirmed the prediction he had recently made to his wife: “I won’t be going home.”

      Taking care not to go anywhere near Germany, Albert and Elsa returned to Europe, where Einstein still had several academic commitments to fulfill. Goering, in the meantime, wasted no time in denouncing the communist conspiracy behind “Jewish science” during one of his incendiary speeches in the Reichstag, disavowing Albert Einstein as well as his life’s work. Several Nazi assault units broke into the physicist’s home in Caputh, in search of the armaments that they were certain the communists had stored there.

      Einstein then paid a brief visit to the Belgian coast, and upon ensuring that Flexner was indeed prepared to agree to his conditions—an annual salary of $15,000 and a position for one of his assistants—he accepted the appointment at Princeton. On the seventeenth of October 1933, he disembarked from the steamship Westmoreland on Quarantine Island, New York, and from there he took a motorboat that whisked him away, incognito, to the New Jersey shore and then straight to the Peacock Inn, in the town of Princeton.

      The new institute seemed to have been created exclusively for Einstein. In Flexner’s own words, it was a haven that would allow scholars and scientists to work “without being carried off in the maelstrom of the immediate.” Contrary to the current trend at universities all over the world, the study of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study was to be purely theoretical; no classes at all would be offered. At the institute, Einstein would have no other obligation than to think. A new koan would come to epitomize his life in the United States. The same—or maybe it was another—reporter asked the wise man:

      “Professor, you have developed theories that have changed the way we see the world, a giant step forward for science. So tell us, where is your laboratory?”

      “Here,” replied Einstein, pointing to the fountain pen that peeked out from his jacket pocket.

      Einstein had a method, a practice he resorted to frequently which enabled him to contemplate certain scientific issues that otherwise would have been impossible to envision. This technique was known as Gedankenexperiment, or “mental experiment,” and despite its contradictory-sounding name, it was common practice in the days of ancient Greece. All modern science, especially physics, was based upon the use of practical experiments to prove hypotheses. A theory was considered valid if and only if reality did not betray it, if its predictions could be fulfilled rigorously and without exception. Nevertheless, since the close of the previous century, very few pure physicists were amused by the idea of locking themselves in laboratories to battle against increasingly sophisticated machinery that, in the end, only proved things they already knew. The gulf between the theorists and the experimental physicists grew wider and wider, fiercer even than the rift between mathematicians and engineers. Due to this mutual animosity, the two camps only made contact when the circumstances absolutely required it. Though they were, in fact, mutually dependent, they did all they could to avoid one another, inventing the most far-fetched excuses to get out of attending one another’s seminars and conferences.

      One of the most important—and controversial—of Einstein’s mental experiments was the EPR Paradox of 1935, which took its name from the initials of the three scientists who worked together on the experiment: Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen. Based entirely on a mental experiment (since the instruments to prove it didn’t exist), the EPR Paradox was an attempt to refute, once again, the quantum physics that so irked Einstein—the same quantum physics he himself had helped bring about. As defended by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr in the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation, quantum mechanics posited, among other things, the notion that chance was no accident at all, but rather a perfectly integral feature of the laws of physics. Einstein, of course, could not accept this idea. “God does not play dice with the universe,” he said to the physicist Max Born, and the EPR Paradox was a way of demonstrating certain aspects of quantum mechanics that he felt were scientifically unacceptable. Bohr and his followers, in turn, insinuated that Einstein had lost his mind.

      Bacon belonged, as did Einstein, to the theoretical camp. Ever since the awakening of his youthful passion for theoretical mathematics, he had done everything possible to distance himself from concrete problems, focusing instead on formulas and equations that were increasingly more abstract, and in most cases exceedingly difficult to explain in real-world terms. Rather than struggle with particle accelerators and spectroscopic methods, Bacon chose instead to hide himself away in the far more pleasant realm of the imagination. There, he never ran the risk of dirtying his hands with things like radioactive waste, or exposing himself to dangerous X rays. To carry out his research, all that was required of him were perseverance and ingenuity. It was an approach to physics that, in a way, was a lot like chess.

      Princeton, despite being one of the country’s great centers of academia, was an insipid place: too small, too American, too clean-cut, and too hypocritical. And contrary to the supposed “university tradition,” or perhaps because of it, a kind of stiff formality, a sameness, an uncomfortable kind of morality seemed to infect all the relationships one might cultivate there. The university itself was known for having a history of racism and anti-Semitism. To make matters worse, people felt even less able to express any kind of natural, day-to-day happiness, what with the war raging in Europe.

      In order to escape these inconveniences, Bacon convinced himself very early on that the one area in which the theoretical world was useless and perhaps even perverse was sex. Theory, when you came down to it, was just fantasy. The tragedy was that almost nobody in the town of Princeton seemed able or willing to accept this basic idea—not the dean, the ministers, the mayor, the professors’ wives, the policemen, the doctors, not even the students themselves. No, they all insisted on performing endless mental experiments on the topic, and in the most unthinkable of places: in church, in lecture halls, in the eating clubs, at family gatherings, while taking their children to nursery school, as they walked their little dogs at sunset. And just like the men at the Institute for Advanced Study, the opaline community of Princeton limited itself to thinking about the pleasures no one dared consummate. For this very reason, Bacon detested his neighbors; they were insincere, provincial, and prudish. In this matter, Bacon could not be pacified with abstraction and fantasy: no intellect—not even that of Einstein—could come close СКАЧАТЬ