Einstein

From Marfa to Mauritania in Forty Years

Four hundred and fifty miles west of the University of Texas at Austin, thirty-seven miles (as the car drives) north of the town of Marfa, Texas, and almost 6,800 feet above sea level sit the white and silver domes of the McDonald Observatory. Each dome shelters an enormous, yet delicate, tool: a combination of mirrors, metal, and electronics capable of gathering light from long ago and far, far away. Decades are a relatively tiny unit of temporal measurement on an astronomical scale, and the distances between terrestrial points are vanishingly small compared to the distances between celestial bodies. In historical terms, however, the transformation of the McDonald Observatory from a peripheral startup into an internationally recognized hub of scientific research was no small step. The forty-year interval between 1934 when the observatory came into existence and 1973 when McDonald personnel and UT faculty traveled to Mauritania to study the longest solar eclipse of the twentieth century was a period of truly giant leaps for science in America and in the southwest in particular. It was during these years that the National Science Foundation (NSF) was born and grew into an institution of enormous financial importance for researchers. The McDonald Observatory, like many other science facilities, owes a great deal of its success to the Foundation and to the political environment that prompted the Foundation’s creation.

Image of the McDonald Observatory sitting faraway on a shrub covered hill overlooking surrounding grasslands

The land and money for the observatory came from the estate of one William Johnson McDonald, born in the Republic of Texas in 1844. McDonald served in the Confederate army during the Civil War and later became a wealthy banker. When he died in 1926, his will bequeathed nearly one million dollars to The University of Texas to build an Astronomical Observatory. By 1934, UT had an astronomical observatory in the mountains of west Texas but no astronomers to staff it. The school’s lack of trained astronomers reflected a gap in the scientific capabilities of western and eastern universities prior to the Second World War. Historian George Webb describes the southwest in the early twentieth century as a “colony” of American science: the region was valuable to eastern-based researchers as a source of exotic flora and fauna, and to astronomers for its dark, clear skies, but it lacked top-tier research institutions of its own. New facilities like UT’s McDonald Observatory began to narrow the gap, but it had to fill positions with scientists from the University of Chicago.

World War II brought about a major restructuring of federal financial support for academic science research. Scientists’ contributions to the war effort proved invaluable and the sparsely populated southwest had offered an ideal testing ground for dangerous and highly classified projects. McDonald Observatory staff, for example, took part in military rocket propulsion studies in the New Mexico badlands near the secret atomic research complex at Los Alamos. Toward the end of the war Vannevar Bush, head of the military’s Office of Scientific Research and Development and a former MIT administrator, drafted a proposal for a new federal agency devoted to science funding. Bush’s vision was realized in 1950 with the creation of the National Science Foundation, whose mission was to support the development of academic science programs and research facilities throughout the nation. Prior to the establishment of the NSF, university science departments had received the bulk of their funds from state governments, private donors, and student tuition. Over the course of the 1950s the NSF’s purse grew to surpass anything these sources could have matched. The Foundation’s first annual budget was a modest $3.5 million, but when the Soviet Union launched the satellite known as Sputnik in 1957 Congress raised the figure to $130 million. By 1970, the NSF commanded half a billion dollars each year and had distributed a grand total of $4.72 billion to science departments around the country.

Black and white image of Vannevar Bush sitting at a desk covered in papers

Universities turned NSF grants into state-of-the-art facilities and cutting-edge equipment. The McDonald Observatory was one of many university-affiliated institutions that received new equipment and made significant discoveries in the postwar decades. At the close of the 1940s Gerard Kuiper, a University of Chicago astronomer, used McDonald Observatory equipment to discover new moons around Uranus and Neptune. Between 1963 and 1967 NASA granted five million dollars to the McDonald Observatory to help build a new reflector telescope with a 107-inch lens, a substantial upgrade from its original 82-inch device. It was also during the 1960s that the University of Texas severed the McDonald Observatory’s ties with Chicago and created its own Department of Astronomy.

Interior view of the McDonald Observatory featuring the observatory's giant telescope

Texas recruited Harlan J. Smith, a Yale astronomer, to chair the new department and head up the observatory. To the Harvard-educated Smith, leaving Yale for Texas was like entering an “astronomical wilderness.” But Harlan Smith dreamed big, and saw opportunities where others saw obstacles. For example, he spoke publicly and often of his desire to see humans colonize the moon and Mars. He imagined setting up an observatory on the far side of the moon, and eventually made sketches of such a hypothetical extraterrestrial installation. He also directed his energies toward more immediate projects. In addition to overseeing the construction of the new, NASA-funded reflector, Smith won a NASA grant to refurbish the observatory’s two original telescopes. He also reached out to the general public by helping to create a syndicated radio program devoted to astronomy news and facts, Stardate, which still airs on public radio stations nationwide.

By the early 1970s the McDonald Observatory was ready to embark on its most ambitious project to date: an expedition to the deserts of northwest Africa to conduct delicate observations of a solar eclipse that would take place on the morning of June 30, 1973. By photographing stars that become visible near a fully eclipsed sun and comparing those images to photographs of the same stars at night when the sun is not present, slight differences in the apparent positions of the stars should become visible. The disparity is the result of the sun’s gravity bending the path of starlight that passes near it. Ever since Albert Einstein predicted this gravitational deflection of light as part of his theory of relativity, scientists realized the importance of measuring the exact amount of bend. Among its most familiar applications today, the calculations are used to acquire more precise GPS satellite measurements. The 1973 eclipse, however, would not be visible over McDonald or any other such structure in North America. Scientists would have to journey to a part of the globe few outsiders knew well, where sandstorms and 110-degree heat threatened to wreak havoc on their delicate instruments. The eager scientists of the McDonald Observatory hoped the NSF would agree to finance the high-risk, high-cost, high-reward expedition to a site in the newly-independent Islamic republic of Mauritania.

In May 1972 the observatory’s planning team drafted a NSF grant application for the amount of $302,848. Several factors made approval of the grant unlikely. First, the UT team was not the only group requesting NSF money to travel to Africa for the eclipse. Second, the amount the team requested was unrealistic in the political and economic climate of 1972. The NSF requested $622 million in 1972, a record high, but the funding it received still didn’t compensate for inflation. Using 1972 dollars as a baseline, federal funding for academic research grew by an average of thirteen percent each year between 1953 and 1968, but zero percent for the period 1968 to 1974. Economic problems, social turmoil, and the ongoing war in Vietnam drove policymakers in Washington toward greater fiscal austerity. In 1971 scientists feared that the NSF was becoming more sensitive to federal politics than to their research needs. From June 1970 to March 1971 the NSF received 20,000 grant requests for a total amount of 2 million dollars. Of these, the Foundation approved fewer than 7000 grants and distributed only $320,000 to support new projects. In September 1972 Smith received a form letter from the NSF bearing the worst possible news: the Foundation had rejected the team’s grant application. Yet hope was not lost. The team scrambled to find other sources of funding and eventually received sizable grants from NATO and the National Geographic Society. They slashed their budget by trimming the expedition to its bare essentials, and submitted a new proposal to the NSF for $65,000. The University of Texas received notification of NSF approval on December 19, 1972. The McDonald expedition was officially a go.

The story of the team’s travels in Mauritania is fascinating from cultural, political, and scientific perspectives. Interested readers should consult team member David Winget’s memoir of the experience, Harlan’s Globetrotters: The Story of an Eclipse. The team faced persistent heat and a sandstorm on the morning of the eclipse that only cleared ten minutes before the long-awaited event. Despite these obstacles they successfully captured high-resolution images of a starfield near the eclipsed sun and used those photographs to calculate a value of light deflection consistent with Einstein’s predictions. Though this was not the final experiment to put Einstein’s theory to the test, it was perhaps the last of its kind. Later efforts would employ new technologies such as space-based telescopes and radio astronomy rather than risking ground-based visual observations under challenging field conditions.

Yet it is precisely the difficult and costly nature of the 1973 McDonald expedition that makes it a significant event in the history of American scientific research. The ambitious project was possible only because of the revolution that had taken place in science funding during World War II and the early Cold War, a development that breathed new life into once-marginal facilities like the McDonald Observatory. The Mauritania mission was a demonstration of how far the observatory—and American and southwestern science writ large—had come, and how far each party to the process was willing to go to uncover the universe’s secrets.

Photo credits:

Dan Pancamo, “McDonald Observatory 107″ Telescope,” 20 May 2009

Dan Pancamo via Flickr Creative Commons

Photographer unknown, “Mr. Vannevar Bush. Chief of Scientific Research and Development, Office of Production Management (OPM)”

Unknown photographer via The Library of Congress

Michael Cummings, “McDonald Observatory,” 10 June 2011

Michael Cummings via Flickr Creative Commons

Artist unknown, Mauritanian Stamp, 4 February 2012

John C. McConnell via Flickr Creative Commons

Was Einstein Really Religious?

by Alberto A. Martínez

When he was a boy, yes. He lovingly studied the Bible, he sensed no contradiction between Catholicism and Judaism, he stopped eating pork, he wrote little songs to God and sang them as he walked home from school. But at the age of twelve, by reading science books, he abruptly abandoned all of his religious beliefs. He kept a “holy curiosity” for the mysteries and wonders of nature.

It is well-known that decades later he made witty statements about God: that He does not play dice; that God is crafty but not malicious. Einstein famously wrote: “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” And the year he died, in 1955, a student quoted him as having once said that “I want to know how God created this world. I’m not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know his thoughts, the rest are details.”

Yet Einstein’s statements on God were notoriously ambiguous. Therefore, many Jews, Christians, atheists, and others have embraced Einstein as one of their own—by picking his most appealing quotations. Atheists such as Richard Dawkins are glad that sometimes Einstein clarified that by “God” he actually meant to say “nature.” Yet sometimes he remarked “I am not an atheist.” Other times Einstein said that he believed in the God of Spinoza. In the 1670s, that Dutch philosopher expressed great reverence for the lawful harmony of nature, arguing that God has no personality, consciousness, emotions, or will. In 1929 Einstein praised Spinoza’s outlook as a “deep feeling in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience.” Yet at the same time he expressed doubts as to whether he could fairly describe himself as a pantheist like Spinoza.

In his #1 New York Times bestselling biography of Einstein, Walter Isaacson argues that Einstein did not use the word God as just another name for nature. Isaacson insists that Einstein was not secretly an atheist but instead, that Einstein believed in an impersonal Creator who does not meddle in our daily lives. Likewise, many other writers also think that since Einstein did not believe in a personal God, a fatherly Creator who cares about us, and not being an atheist, that therefore he believed in an impersonal God.

In 1936, Einstein wrote a letter to a little girl, in which he explained: “everyone seriously engaged in science becomes convinced that the laws of nature manifest a spirit which is vastly superior to man, and before which we, with our modest strength, must humbly bow.” This certainly sounds religious, but what did he mean by “a spirit”? Einstein’s replies to inquisitive strangers, children, reporters, or close friends sometimes were markedly different. In some cases, he used colloquial expressions that he preferred to rephrase in more exacting contexts. He voiced regrets that many of his casual expressions later became subject to public dissection.

In contrast to the famous quotations that portray the old Einstein as a religious man, it is less well known that he privately described himself as agnostic. In 1869, “Darwin’s bulldog,” Thomas Henry Huxley coined the word “Agnostic” as an attitude of temporary reasoned ignorance, to not pretend to know conclusions that have yet to be demonstrated scientifically. Twenty years later, Huxley commented: “I invented the word ‘Agnostic’ to denote people who, like myself, confess themselves to be hopelessly ignorant concerning a variety of maters, about which metaphysicians and theologians, both orthodox and heterodox, dogmatise with the utmost confidence…” Popularly, agnosticism became known simply as the position of admitting that one does not know whether God exists.

In 1949 Einstein wrote a letter to a curious sailor in the US Navy, explaining that “You may call me agnostic.” In 1950 he replied to another correspondent: “My position concerning God is that of an agnostic. I am convinced that vivid consciousness of the primary importance of moral principles for the betterment and ennoblement of life does not need the idea of a law-giver, especially a law-giver who works on the basis of reward and punishment.” Then in 1952, in a letter to a philosopher, Einstein frankly expressed his unsweetened opinions: “The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends aplenty. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can change this (for me).” Einstein added that the Jewish people were no better that any other groups of people: “I can ascertain nothing Chosen about them.” He said that all religions are “primitive superstitions.”

He wrote such stark comments in private letters, in contradistinction to his published pronouncements about God and religion. So, was Einstein really religious? Or was he politically correct in public? In 1930, at the age of fifty-one, an article was published in which he described himself as “deeply religious.” But by then he was a world-wide celebrity. He knew that every word he said might be analyzed and interpreted. Over the years, he explained that he was religious only inasmuch as he felt a deep sense of wonder and reverence for the laws and mysteries of nature.

But what do we usually mean when we say that someone is religious? Most of the beliefs and practices that we distinctively associate with religious people were absent in Einstein. He denied the existence of a God that cares for humans, he argued that there is nothing divine about morality, he did not believe in any holy Scriptures, he had no faith in religious teachings, he rejected the authority of all churches and temples, he belonged to no congregation, he denied the existence of souls, life after death, divine rewards or punishments. He denied the existence of miracles that suspend the laws of nature. He rejected all mysticism, he did not believe in free will, he did not believe in any prophets or saviors. He denied that there is any goal in life or in the order of the universe, he practiced no religious rituals, and he did not pray.

Having rejected most aspects of religion, the young Einstein had some options: either say that he was not a religious person, or instead, find an alternative way to define religiosity. He chose the latter path. In science, Einstein had great success by redefining traditional concepts: he redefined concepts of time, energy, mass, gravity, and more. So he tried to do the same thing with religion. In 1950, he explained to his close friend from youth, Maurice Solovine: “I have found no better expression than ‘religious’ for confidence in the rational nature of reality as it is accessible to human reason.”

Instead of accepting Scriptures, rituals, or traditions, Einstein focused on the wonders of nature. By redefining religion to include at its core the emotions and attitudes that Einstein did cultivate, then and only then could Einstein describe himself as a deeply religious man. For example, he called himself deeply religious, but he did not pray. Therefore, in his new definitions, not praying became an act of a deeply religious man, one who fully trusts the laws of nature. He once wrote to Leo Szilard: “as long as you pray to God and ask him for some benefit, you are not a religious man.”

Summing up, good old Einstein was agnostic, I don’t think that he was very religious. Forgive me for making an unscientific analogy. Suppose someone tells us that he really loves pizza, but then he says that he prefers no sauce, dislikes dough, is allergic to cheese, and believes that anyone who asks for toppings does not really like pizza. Then we ask: but how can you say that you really love pizza? He answers: “because I have a deep appreciation for its essence.”

In 2008, the letter from Einstein on the subject of religion that is pictured above stunned the public and was sold at auction for a staggering £207,000 ($404,000) instead of the £6000-8000 estimated by Bloomsbury Auctions. Alberto Martínez translates part of the letter here:

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends aplenty. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can change this (for me). Such refined interpretations are naturally highly varied and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the unmodified Jewish religion, like all other religions, is an incarnation of primitive superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mindset I have a deep affinity, have no different quality for me than other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better at anything than other human groups, though at least a lack of power keeps them from the worst excesses. Thus I can ascertain nothing “Chosen” about them.

Overall, I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and seek to defend it with two walls of pride: an outer one as a man, and an inner one as a Jew. As a man you claim a certain exemption from otherwise valid causality; as a Jew, a privilege for monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer causality, as our wonderful Spinoza had first said in the strongest terms. And the animistic interpretations of natural religions are also through monopolization not invalid. With such walls we fall essentially into self-deception, but they do not help us in our search for a higher morality. On the contrary.

Now, though I have in all honesty expressed our different beliefs, I still have the certainty that we largely agree on important matters, e.g. in our assessment of human conduct. What separates us, in Freud’s terms, are intellectual “supports” and “rationalizations.” I therefore believe that we would understand each other well if we were to talk about concrete things.

With friendly thanks and best wishes,

your

A. Einstein.

Source: Albert Einstein to philosopher Eric B. Gutkind, 3 January 1954, Einstein Archives, item 33-337

More Einstein on Not Even Past:

Michael Stoff, “The Einstein Letter-A Tipping Point in History”

Bruce Hunt on Technology & Science in the 19th Century

Albert Einstein is perhaps the most recognizable figure of modern times. In 1999 Time magazine picked him as its “Person of the Century,” and in the public mind he certainly stands as the iconic scientist. He is generally pictured as an otherworldly genius, inhabiting a cosmic realm far above the mundane affairs of ordinary life, and in some ways he was. Yet when Einstein hit on his most famous and revolutionary idea, his Theory of Relativity, in 1905, he was working as a patent examiner at the Swiss Federal Patent Office in Bern, spending his days scrutinizing the designs of electrical machinery. How are we to reconcile our image of Einstein as the pure thinker, advancing scientific knowledge of the universe simply through the unfettered exercise of his mind, with the fact that he came up with revolutionary ideas while working in the thoroughly practical and technological setting of a patent office?

In Pursuing Power and Light: Technology and Physics from James Watt to Albert Einstein, I’ve tried to show that Einstein’s situation was really not so anomalous and that physics and technology had been tightly intertwined for more than a century before he went to work in the Swiss patent office. In fact, many of the most important advances in physics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — including aspects of Einstein’s own relativity theory — had deep roots in the technologies that, in the same period, had so profoundly transformed material life. When the nineteenth century began, everyday life in even the most prosperous and technologically developed parts of the world hardly differed, in many basic ways, from that of the ancients. People still relied on their own muscles, or those of their horses and oxen, to carry their loads and pull their plows; on the wind to drive the sails of their ships; and on falling water to turn their mill wheels and grind their grain. By the end of the eighteenth century, there had been some first efforts to harness the power of steam, but at first it was used for little more than pumping water out of some mines in England. Transportation and communications remained, by later standards, woefully slow; a message could travel no faster than the person who carried it, and it typically took weeks or months for a traveler to cross an ocean or a continent.

By 1905, when Einstein first began to formulate his new conceptions of time and space, the world was very different. Steam engines and turbines were driving giant factories and power plants, and networks of electrical lines were spreading power and light through cities around the globe. Railroads and steamships had reduced travel times from weeks or months to a few days; the first automobiles had begun to appear on the roads and the first airplanes in the skies. Communication had not just been sped up, but had become almost instantaneous; a vast network of telegraph cables circled the globe, and telephone lines now carried distant voices right into one’s home. Wireless telegraphy had begun to appear, and the advent of radio broadcasting was just around the corner.

Along with these technological changes came equally sweeping transformations in the scientific understanding of matter, heat, energy, and electromagnetism. But the relationship between this new scientific knowledge and these new technologies was not always quite what one might expect. Today technology is often seen, or even defined, as simply “applied science,” as abstract knowledge cast into the form of concrete and useful devices. When we look more closely at some of the most important technologies of the nineteenth century, however, we find that the arrow of influence ran in the opposite direction, from technology to science. Historians of science and technology have often remarked that the steam engine did far more for science than science ever did for the steam engine. When Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen built the first practical steam engines in the years around 1700, they were guided in part by ideas of their own about heat and pressure, but they didn’t draw on any store of solid scientific knowledge about work and energy, for no such body of knowledge yet existed. Even James Watt’s famous improvements in the efficiency of steam engines were based more on inspired tinkering and careful experimentation than on a knowledge of anything resembling the modern laws of thermodynamics. The first steam engines did not emerge from an understanding of the fundamental laws of heat and energy; rather, those laws themselves emerged from the efforts of Sadi Carnot and others in the nineteenth century to analyze the workings of the steam engines they already saw around them.

Much of my own research concerns the history of electrical science in the nineteenth century, and here we find a very similar story. Beginning in the 1820s, electrical inventors took up a few basic scientific discoveries, particularly Alessandro Volta’s electric battery, and began to make them into practical devices, guided more by trial and error than by any deep scientific understanding. By the 1830s, they were building working telegraphs, and within a decade entrepreneurs in both Europe and America were spreading their networks of wires across the countryside. Soon they began to run into puzzling phenomena that scientists had never encountered in their laboratories, and a rich new field of scientific research began to open up. This was especially true after British telegraphers took to laying insulated cables beneath the sea, first across the English Channel in 1851 and then, in an especially bold attempt, across the Atlantic in 1858. The “retardation” and distortion that electrical signals suffered in passing along a cable pointed toward an influence coming from outside the wire itself — from what British physicists began to think of as the electromagnetic “field” that, they said, filled the space around charges, currents, and magnets. Field theory cast all of electromagnetism into a new and clearer light and proved immensely useful not only in telegraphy, the technological ground from which it had grown, but also in the design of motors, dynamos, and the rest of what became the electric power system.

When Albert Einstein was hired by the Swiss patent office, it was largely for his expertise in field theory, which was important in evaluating designs for electrical machinery. When he formulated his Theory of Relativity, he drew on field theory and on puzzles that had come up with the design of motors and dynamos. Of course, Einstein’s ideas would carry him into much wider realms, but it is worth bearing in mind how deeply his work, like that of his nineteenth-century predecessors, was rooted in the technological context of the time.

The “Einstein Letter” — A Tipping Point in History

by Michael B. Stoff

On a mid-July day in 1939, Albert Einstein, still in his slippers, opened the door of his summer cottage in Peconic on the fishtail end of Long Island. There stood his former student and onetime partner in an electromagnetic refrigerator pump, the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, and next to him a fellow Hungarian (and fellow physicist), Eugene Wigner. The two had not come to Long Island for a day at the beach with the most famous scientist in the world but on an urgent mission. Germany had stopped the sale of uranium from mines in Czechoslovakia it now controlled. To Szilard, this could mean only one thing: Germany was developing an atomic bomb.

Szilard wanted Einstein to write a letter to his friend, Queen Mother Elisabeth of Belgium. The Belgian Congo was rich in uranium, and Szilard worried that if the Germans got their hands on the ore, they might have all the material they needed to make a weapon of unprecedented power. First, however, he had to explain to Einstein the theory upon which the weapon rested, a chain reaction. “I never thought of that,” an astonished Einstein said. Nor was he willing to write the Queen Mother. Instead, Wigner convinced him to write a note to one of the Belgian cabinet ministers.

Pen in hand, Wigner recorded what Einstein dictated in German while Szilard listened. The Hungarians returned to New York with the draft, but within days, Szilard received a striking proposal from Alexander Sachs, an advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt. Might Szilard transmit such a letter to Roosevelt? A series of drafts followed, one composed by Szilard as he sat soaking in his bathtub, another after a second visit to Einstein, and two more following discussions with Sachs. Einstein approved the longer version of the last two, dated “August 2, 1939,” and signed it as “A. Einstein” in his tiny scrawl.

The result was the “Einstein Letter,” which historians know as the product not of a single hand but of many hands. Regardless of how it was concocted, the letter remains among the most famous documents in the history of atomic weaponry. It is a model of compression, barely two typewritten, double-spaced pages in length. Its language is so simple even a president could understand it. Its tone is deferential, its assertions authoritative but tentative in the manner of scientists who have yet to prove their hypotheses. Its effect was persuasive enough to initiate the steps that led finally to the Manhattan Project and the development of atomic bombs.

Stripped of all jargon, the letter cited the work of an international array of scientists (“Fermi,” “Joliot,” “Szilard” himself), pointed to a novel generator of power (“the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy”), urged vigilance and more (“aspects of the situation call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action”), sounded a warning (“extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed”), made a prediction (“a single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with the surrounding territory”), and mapped out a plan (“permanent contact between the Administration and the group of physicists working on chain reactions in America . . . and perhaps obtaining the co-operation of industrial laboratories”). A simple conclusion, no less ominous for its understatement, noted what worried the Hungarians in the first place: “Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over.”

Looking back at the letter, aware of how things actually turned out, we can appreciate its richness. For one thing, it shows us a world about to pass from existence. Where once scientific information flowed freely across national borders through professional journals, personal letters, and the “manuscripts” to which the letter refers in its first sentence, national governments would now impose a clamp of secrecy on any research that might advance weapons technology. The letter also tells us how little even the most renowned scientists knew at the time. No “chain reaction” had yet been achieved and no reaction-sustaining isotope of uranium had been identified. Thus the assumption was that “a large mass of uranium” would be required to set one in motion. No aircraft had been built that could carry what these scientists expected to be a ponderous nuclear core necessary to make up a bomb, so the letter predicts that a “boat” would be needed to transport it.

More than the past, the letter points to the shape of things to come. Most immediately, it shows us that the race for atomic arms would be conducted in competition with Germany, soon to become a hostile foreign power. And in the longer term, of course, the postwar arms race would duplicate that deadly competition as hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union led them to amass more and more nuclear weapons. The letter also presents us with nothing less than a master plan for what became the Manhattan Project, the first “crash program” in the history of science. After the war, other crash programs in science—to develop the hydrogen bomb; to conquer polio; to reach the moon; to cure cancer—would follow. Finally, by stressing the entwining of government, science, and industry in service of the state, the letter foreshadows what Dwight Eisenhower later called “the military-industrial complex.”

In the end, the “Einstein Letter” is a document deservedly famous, but not merely for launching the new atomic age. If we read it closely enough, it gives us a fascinating, Janus-faced look at a tipping point in history, a window on a world just passing and one yet to come, all in two pages.

You can read the letter in its entirety here.

Photo Credits:
Albert Einstein, 1947, by Oren Jack Turner, The Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons
Dr. Norman Hilberry and Dr. Leo Szilard (right) stand beside the site where the world’s first nuclear reactor was built during World War II. Both worked with the late Dr. Enrico Fermi in achieving the first self-sustaining chain reaction in nuclear energy on December 2, 1942, at Stagg Field, University of Chicago. U.S. Department of Energy via Wikimedia Commons

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