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Transcription: [00:00:00]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
First of all, I just wanna thank you all for coming. I wanna remind you all this is a museum of history, biography, and portraiture; it's not a natural history museum.
[00:00:08]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}

And I was really bad at science, so if there are any untenured physics professors here who want to score points, you can feel free later.
[00:00:15]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
I also want to thank you for coming to the National Portrait Gallery to celebrate the end of summer.
[00:00:20]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And to start off with an Einsteinian analogy about time and velocity: that summer goes by in about two days and February takes 6 months.
[00:00:30]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
So whereas we start off after Labor Day with Albert Einstein, that may be appropriate.

[00:00:35]
This is Albert Einstein looking slightly mournful in a picture of 1944, end of World War II.
[00:00:40]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Uhm. Einstein sort of pioneered the modern view of a dotty, slightly eccentric scientist.
[00:00:46]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Although his hair is pretty well tamed here, we know him from the familiar photographs where it's kind of wild.
[00:00:53]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
He never wore socks. And he cultivated a kind of "out of it" persona which belied the fact that he was incredibly shrewd.
[00:01:01]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And as with most portraits, as with most public portrayals, there's a good amount of a pose involved that is protective camouflage.
[00:01:09]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Now Einstein is one of the most self-sufficient people that I have ever read about as an historian of biography,
[00:01:15]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
uhm, and a really fascinating case study in how you analyze genius.
[00:01:21]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Born in 1879, in Ulm, Germany, his father and his uncle were electricians. They ran an electrical firm which was just big enough to be almost successful.
[00:01:34]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
They were always on the cusp of making it big, but unfortunately as a family firm, they got wiped out by the large conglomerates in Germany
[00:01:44]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
that were coming along. Siemens and, and, uhm, and the spark plug company in ... spark, German spark plugs ... splot ... Bosch.
[00:01:55]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Um, and-- %hank you.
[00:01:57]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"
And so the family situation was upper middle class, but under threat, and Einstein led this kind of powerless existence.
[00:02:07]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
He demonstrated a really early aptitude for science. He was given at about age 5; recollections vary; it was either a magnet or a compass.
[00:02:17]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
They are of course the same thing.
[00:02:19]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And he wrote later about becoming fascinated with the notion of the magnetic field, a concept that would fascinate him throughout his entire life,
[00:02:30]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
and of course not only the magnetic field, but also the whole concept of the field; the unified field as it were.
,[00:02:37]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Unfortunately, it's not true that he was a bad student, it's not true that he failed math. He was in fact brilliant.
[00:02:44]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
But what he was, he was idiosyncratic and almost mulish in his stubbornness, his refusal to take authority
[00:02:53]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
and what his teachers were continually angry at him because he was, to be blunt, superior, distant, and teachers don't like that.
[00:03:03]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"
One of them called him into their-- his class and said, "You know, Einstein, I have to talk to you about your behavior," and he says "Well, I don't. I'm not doing anything," and he goes, "I know, but you're sitting in the back of the class, and I know what you're thinking."
[00:03:14]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And so there was this element of distance with Einstein, which is almost preternatural,
[00:03:21]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
and you can read backwards and see that as the fount of his genius.
[00:03:26]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
One of the interesting things about him was that he learned to speak relatively late.
[00:03:30]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
He, and I don't know whether there's any linkage here, but he learned to talk much further along than children usually do.
[00:03:39]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And he developed this habit of sounding words out, sounding out the conception of what he wanted to do.
[00:03:45]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And, I'm perfectly willing to draw the leap here that Einstein was almost an intuitive scientist.
[00:03:52]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Although he was good at math he was never as strong as he was supposed to be.
[00:03:56]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
He never had the mathematical ability because he was conceptually so strong in imagining both everything from the atom to the cosmos.
[00:04:04]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
He renounced his German citizenship really early to avoid military service.
[00:04:11]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
In part he detested regimentation, he didn't like the notion of being in the army, not really because it was anything having to do with the military but it was regimentation.
[00:04:19]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
His par-- His family had moved to Italy; he was left behind. He found a way to go to Italy to get out of school. He'd led this kind of peripatetic existence of self-teaching.
[00:04:30]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
He got himself-- He passed his exams, he gets himself into the Zurich Technical Institute, and starts to do pretty well.
[00:04:39]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
He also at that point meets a young woman named Mileva Maric,
[00:04:43]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
who is a kindred spirit in terms of: a) being independent -she's Serbian, living in Switzerland; and also very interested in Physics.
[00:04:52]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And the romance between the two of them blossoms. They have an illegitimate child who is put up for adoption and disappears.
[00:05:00]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
It may have died, it may have, may have, been moved on; there's a kind of a mystery about it. And Einstein curiously enough never speaks about her, which is one of the other sides of his autonomy;
[00:05:11]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
he's so self-contained that it's very difficult-- He, he is very reticent about revealing emotions.
[00:05:17]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
He, because he has no family money, because they are scrimping, because the two of them are together, he gets himself, he gets a diploma.
[00:05:24]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
He has no job because he's alienated a lot of the other physicists and the other scientists.
[00:05:30]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
One of the things that he did was, in order to get patronage, he would write physicists and tell them what they were doing wrong,
[00:05:35]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
and that he-- They should-- Nonetheless, they should appoint him as the lab assistant.
[00:05:40]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
This, doesn't work, and he spends two really bad years in Switzerland, just getting by until finally a family friend gets him the famous job
[00:05:49]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
at the Zurich Patent Office, which he takes in the early 20th Century.
[00:05:54]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And the Patent Office was great for Einstein because having worked with electrical machinery for his family firm, he was perfectly at home with it.
[00:06:04]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And so he's examining this stuff, and it's really kind of classic. He's looking at all this practical application of electromagnetic technology,
[00:06:10]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
and at the same time he's also working with his other hand on physics problems.
[00:06:15]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
He wants to get a PhD at the University of Zurich, which you could do just by submitting a PhD, and you didn't have to do anything else.
[00:06:22]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And he does it. And 1905 is Einstein's "annus mirabilis"; the year that he comes to public and worldwide attention.
[00:06:33]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And it's interesting it's called Einstein's "annus mirabilis", miraculous year, which is an interesting literary reference,
[00:06:39]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
because John Dryden's great poem "Annus Mirabilis" refers 1666, which is the year that Newton's sitting in a garden in Cambridge, saw the apple fall and invented or discovered gravity;
[00:06:52]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
a theme that would preoccupy Einstein not only in 1905, but for the rest of his life.
[00:06:56]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
So you have this weird connection across time with the two of them.
[00:07:02]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Einstein gets his PhD in 1905, he's fascinated with the notion of proving the existence of atoms, which is still up for contestation.
[00:07:12]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
There's still these holdovers from old Newtonian physics; the classical empiricism -that if you couldn't see it, it didn't exist; if you couldn't demonstrate it existed, it didn't exist.
[00:07:24]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Einstein is fascinated with that; his dissertation is a way of proving, using a sugar solution, using the existence of atoms, that way.
[00:07:34]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
He publishes a very important paper on what's called "Brownian motion," which proves the activity of molecools-- molecules in moving very small parts, very small microscopic pieces of pollen.
[00:07:45]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
He publishes a very important - we'll come back to it - essay on the photoelectric effect and the light quanta,
[00:07:54]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
and of course 1905, there's also the special Theory of Relativity, which gives birth,
[00:08:00]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
almost as an afterthought to the most famous equation of all time, the one that everybody knows; E = mc squared (energy equals mass times the speed of light squared),
[00:08:10]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
based out of Einstein's attempt, and successful attempt, to prove that the speed of light was constant, and the relative positions would um, would give you different results, but that that-- but--
[00:08:23]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
that the speed of light remained at roughly three hundred thousand kilometers a second.
[00:08:28]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And it is the perception of the viewer that would change, and that time literally would run slow as you approach the speed of light.
[00:08:36]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
These things crash out onto a more or less unsuspecting scientific world, and Einstein becomes instantly succ-- a success, something that he yearned for since his, since early days.
[00:08:48]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
He, he makes the round of the universities; he's appointed, he has basically has the opportunity to pick or choose, and ends up after some shorter stints, he ends up in Berlin.
[00:08:58]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And this begins 1905; he had published before; but 1905 to roughly 1922ish, are the heyday of Albert Einstein's.
[00:09:07]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Overall in his career he publishes over 400 books or articles, on science alone.
[00:09:13]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Um, so, so he's in Berlin, he he he's publishing on a series of topics which is just too infinite even, too infinite even to being to approach in this format.
[00:09:24]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
The one that I like is in around 1910. He wrote a paper about why the sky is blue,
[00:09:29]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
which is, because blue, the blue end of the spectrum is reflected and diffused in the molecules in the air in a way that the orange and the red spectrum isn't,
[00:09:38]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
so we see the sun is a disc but the rest of the sky is blue.
[00:09:41]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
and I think that that's kind of nice and charming. And he's working on, again, going back to the Notion of Gravity and the Theory of Special Relativity. Special relativity is called "Special Relativity" because it's constant. It's the speed of light.
[00:09:56]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
What he begins to get-- he, he becomes interested again, going back to Newton with the idea of gravity and how, going, how space-time, um, how the cosmos works.
[00:10:06]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
So you have Einstein acting, in 1905, as a fulcrum really between the classic world of Newtonian physics,
[00:10:14]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
the calculus, Euclidean geometry, and then setting the stage for what came after,
[00:10:21]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
which is the Special Theory of Relativity, theories of the universe and quantum mechanics.
[00:10:27]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Between about 1910, he's fascinated with the idea of of of gravity. Between 1910 and 1915, he works on
[00:10:36]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
the Theory of-- the General Theory of Relativity, which goes from the finite atom-- it takes him now into cosmology,
[00:10:44]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
where through the innovation of realizing that time equals speed, time equals velocity,
[00:10:50]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
he adds another construct to the notion of space, which is space time. And he discovers that, or he has the intuition again that acceleration and gravity are essentially the same thing.
[00:11:01]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And that gravity is not caused by mass, but instead, as Newton had it, but instead by the interaction of space time.
[00:11:07]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And as the analogy has it - Spacetime tells mass how to move, mass tells spacetime how to curve, so there's this great movement through space.
[00:11:16]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Einstein, of course, was working, and before we know--
[00:11:20]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
If you saw that story last week about - they released a new map of the number of universes in the universes
[00:11:25]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
- Einstein was-- was confined by the notion that there was only one universe, it was as, it was fairly finite, it was constant.
[00:11:33]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And he introduced a notion to explain why we weren't collapsing as we fell through space.
[00:11:39]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
The-- With the cosmological constant, which he later, as we learned more about the extent of space, he later said that was the biggest mistake he ever made,
[00:11:50]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
except the cosmological constant always seems to be coming back in terms of finding ways and why the universe, why space holds together.
[00:11:58]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
So Einstein, at that point, it's 1915. He and Maleva had-- had, divorced about a decade earlier.
[00:12:08]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
There's some speculation, and this gets into gender politics, that she had, in fact, been his co-worker, especially on Special Relativity.
[00:12:18]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Um, there's not really any evidence for that, and I suspect, and I'm agnostic about it, there's no documentary evidence.
[00:12:26]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
what I think happened was that Maleva provided him with the bridge as a help mate, who was incredibly interested in physics and getting himself out of a--
[00:12:35]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
a kind of fraught, domestic situation with bourgeois parents, who wanted him to go into the family business.
[00:12:41]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And Einstein, and this is the other side of being self-contained; it can lead to coldness; that at a certain point, he didn't want to have to deal with those,
[00:12:50]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
having a real co-partnership, a certainly-- an intellectual co-partnership with his wife. And they divorced.
[00:12:56]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
In terms of when they separated at first, until finally Einstein realized he needed to remarry because he, again, this is not a particularly lovely trait,
[00:13:04]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
but it's an early 19th century trait, which I hear still persists,
[00:13:07]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
he needed somebody to take care of him. So he decides to get divorced in around 1910.
[00:13:11]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And one of the things, when they're getting divorced, because he still doesn't have much money, he tells her, "Well, look, I'm bound to win the Nobel Prize, so when I win the Nobel Prize, you get all the prize money."
[00:13:21]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Which then, as now, is a huge amount of money. And I think it's nice that she recognized what a genius he was and says, OK.
[00:13:29]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And sure enough, in 1922, Albert Einstein wins the Nobel Prize in physics for a prize held over from 1921.
[00:13:38]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And it's interesting because, he was not awarded the Nobel Prize for either of the Theories of Relativity;
[00:13:43]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
he was awarded it for the Photoelectric Effect of 1905, which is the joker in the pack, because everybody knows e=mc squared.
[00:13:51]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And the notion of space time, if you watch Star Trek movies, it enters into that.
[00:13:56]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
But it's the Photoelectric Effect that that Einstein wins the Nobel for, and it's, this is again the next divide.
[00:14:03]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Einstein was the divide with old classical physics and cla-- Euclidean geometry.
[00:14:09]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
He breaks the mold; moves us to the next stage; continues doing valuable work.
[00:14:13]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
But by opening up the whole notion of the quantum, is what the atom was doing inside its shell
[00:14:22]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
whether the behavior was from the nucleus, the electron, and all the other little things, and believe me they were little, um,
[00:14:29]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
that were going on inside the atom in terms of the dispersion of energy, Einstein now concentrates on that.
[00:14:38]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And, the photoelectric effect is the the ... that light can act both as a wave and as a particle of energy is the thing that Einstein discovers.
[00:14:45]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And that opens up an entire new can of worms, if you will, um, that we're still dealing with today because
[00:14:55]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
you're dealing almost with the realm of pure of statistics, or not almost, you are dealing with a realm of pure statistics,
[00:15:00]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
you're dealing with probabilities, and you're dealing with, up until relatively recently, with large teams of scientists,
[00:15:05]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
uh, a very difficult analytical conjectures about what's going on in terms of atomic and sub-atomic particles.
[00:15:14]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And this is where Einstein-- This is the big split in Einstein's career.
[00:15:18]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
He wins the Nobel Prize in 1822 [sic], long overdue by the way, anybody who thinks there's not politics in science is wrong.
[00:15:26]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Einstein made enemie; there's more than a tinge of anti-Semitism in the way in which he's received.
[00:15:33]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
The German scientific establishment was allied to state power and under the, in the Nazi era, there was a great deal of unlovely behavior.
[00:15:41]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Einstein's Nobel is delayed long after it should have been granted, but he wins it in 1922.
[00:15:49]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Um, let me just say something briefly about celebrity here. I don't, can't think of a single scientist today or anybody else
[00:15:59]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
who would receive the worldwide impact that Einstein's imperfectly understood, imperfectly explained theories had.
[00:16:06]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
That there's a, there's a receptivity, the appetite of the public for Einstein was equal that of other great celebrities like
[00:16:16]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Babe Ruth, or Charles Lindbergh. The front page behavior; the breathless journalistic interview. It's the beginning of the age of celebrity,
[00:16:23]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
and Einstein is the scientist who captures the imagination. It's hard to conceive of who those would be today.
[00:16:31]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
In part, because I don't think in terms of science we have the lone genius anymore, we had Lindbergh, the lone aviator, you can still have the lone adventurer,
[00:16:37]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
but the lone scientist is likely to be a conglomerated Berkley or the Cavendish Library or laboratory or somewhere else.
[00:16:47]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
But Einstein captures the imagination precisely because what he seems to be saying is so Earth-shaking, but what he's also saying is also incredibly misunderstood.
[00:16:55]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
They're going back to this Special Theory of Relativity and this is even battened on by a variety of political commentators.
[00:17:01]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
The notion that the Theory of Relativity, in both cases, means, that nothing matters,
[00:17:08]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
that it's where you stand; it's your perspective, so there's this element. It's not relativity, it's relativism, that my opinion, is as good as yours; go to hell with you.
[00:17:17]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And that leads to a lot of problems in politics, among other things. Particularly, when you use-- you're grounded in the misunderstanding of a scientific theory.
[00:17:26]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
The point with the Special Theory of Relativity is that Einstein was determined to prove that the speed of light was a constant, and he did that.
[00:17:32]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
So there's nothing relative about it; it's a constant; it's your relationship to something that's going on at the speed of light that counts.
[00:17:41]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And that actually does change, so the kind of-- this is upside down. The same thing happens when Einstein's Quantum Effect goes--
[00:17:49]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
is received by the next series of scientists, particularly Heisenberg and the well-known Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
[00:17:57]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
What Heisenberg discovered, and this is the big-- this is where Einstein splits. Having invented quantum mechanics, Einstein then splits with everybody who comes after him, whose work is enabled by him.
[00:18:08]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Because he doesn't believe Heisenberg says the theory is widely understood to mean that if you observe something, that changes the nature of the experiment.
[00:18:16]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Well that's not what Heisenberg said. What Heisenberg said was, at subatomic levels, that you cannot see the familiar pattern of the atom as electrons and
[00:18:26]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
as planets moving around the Sun, that we take from our solar system, is inaccurate.
[00:18:30]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
There's this cloud of energy, the quantum. And electrons will move from state to state, but you can't predict them.
[00:18:37]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
You can't tell how they're gonna be. It's only when you observe them that they're in one particular state, and that's all you can say. You can't say how they got there.
[00:18:44]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And this is where Einstein goes back to his almost conservative roots, his desire to save-- to save the structure of rational science that began with Newton.
[00:18:55]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Which Einstein doesn't believe, and this is how he started, of course, his own career in dealing with the atom. He doesn't believe that you can't show cause and effect. As he put it famously, "God does not play dice".
[00:19:06]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And that if you had an electron that was suddenly positively charged and moved to another--
[00:19:11]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
another layer or another sphere, in the atom-- atomic structure, you should be able to show it.
[00:19:18]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And the fact that Heisenberg and Pauli and the other physicists, the quantum-- were willing to take a gamble, take the jump
[00:19:26]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
that Einstein couldn't. And what he did was, he spent the rest of his career, roughly 25 years, working for what-- toward what he, what's called the unified field theory.
[00:19:36]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
A way of unifying gravitation, electrodynamics, thermodynamics, and all the rest at subatomic levels.
[00:19:43]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And there's, essentially, there's an interpretation of Einstein that after around 1825 [[1925]], he failed as a scientist.
[00:19:50]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
But what I like to emphasize is he kept looking for something which may or not be there.
[00:19:56]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Whether that means he failed or not, I don't know. But what is clear, is that the dialogue with Bohr and the other physicists was incredibly fruitful in pushing them
[00:20:05]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
towards what we now know as the discipline of quantum physics.
[00:20:09]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
But if you-- and this is artificial, but I'm gonna now sort of shift towards Einstein's public life,
[00:20:15]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
because going back to the notion of his celebrity, you get Einstein as becoming a really important public-- public figure in the, in the kind of institutionalization of science.
[00:20:27]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
There's a tremendous bidding war going on for his services. And it's becoming impossible for him to live in Germany.
[00:20:33]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
He was born a Jew, um, his family was secular. He never really attended synagogue.
[00:20:40]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
He had a kind of ethical-- cultural identification with being Jewish.
[00:20:45]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
He was a pacifist, but he was only a pacifist until Hitler came along.
[00:20:51]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
He espoused a kind of one-world government, which again is interesting if you think about his desire for a unified field. Something that would tie together all of nature.
[00:21:02]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
He had these kind of slightly wooly-headed intellectualized views that everybody could live together,
[00:21:07]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
and would allow Albert Einstein the living space in which he could continue to work unmolested.
[00:21:13]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
But it's untenable for him to remain in Germany. They leave in 1935. He's remarried to his cousin who's a widow who took care of him.
[00:21:22]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
She was quite the pistol. She used to charge people autograph-- a dollar or two for an autograph for him.
[00:21:28]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
But she was kind of the stage manager that he really needed. She protected his space.
[00:21:33]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And there's this bidding war in America for-- worldwide for his services. And he ends up at the brand new Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, which was perfect for him because it left him alone.
[00:21:42]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Again, Einstein was not as the British say, "clubbable", he was never interested in associating with other physicists. He was very friendly, he got on well with everybody.
[00:21:52]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
One of the great moments in his life to my mind was, he became an American citizen and the judge in Trenton, New Jersey who had swore him about 5 or 7 years later had a big party,
[00:22:02]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
he had passed-- the judge had sworn in like 10,000 new citizens.
[00:22:06]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
So to mark that milestone, he invited everybody to come to Trenton for a big party.
[00:22:10]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And Einstein showed up with his family. And one of the most famous men in the world shows up at this public park, and Einstein, the mayor, everybody at else is agog. Of course, he becomes the center of attention.
[00:22:20]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
He has a great time, he eats ice cream, has a great time and goes back to the little house on Mercer Street and the Center for Advanced Study to do his work.
[00:22:28]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Einstein, during the 30s, becomes a kind of ethical figure. He, as I say, was not religious in a conventional sense, but as the statement, "God does not play dice".
[00:22:39]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
He had a strong almost-- I guess you could almost go back to the deus and say that God set things in motion, there must be a purpose and an order to them.
[00:22:46]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And he becomes a force for kind of humanitarian good in a kind of general way.
[00:22:51]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And a lot of people have made fun of him for this. It's easy to make fun of intellectuals and their political views because they tend to completely idealistic, and completely unrealistic.
[00:23:01]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
This draws the attention of a variety of people who think that if, if you believe in one-world government and pacifism, you must be a communist.
[00:23:10]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And his FBI file, which is rather horrendous to read because of the unsupported and unexamined material that's dumped into it starts to grow and grow.
[00:23:21]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Einstein, of course, his great public act for good or for ill, is that, towards the beginning of World War II, he and Leo Szilard,
[00:23:29]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
another physicist, write Franklin Delano Roosevelt and say that e=mc squared, essentially, means that you can make an atomic bomb,
[00:23:36]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
that you can split matter, you can split the atom and that will release a tremendous amount of energy. And Roosevelt immediately acts on that and sets up the Manhattan Project.
[00:23:46]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Einstein did no work. People sometimes think he worked on the Manhattan Project. He didn't work on any of the, any of the governmental projects because, temperamentally, he wasn't suited to it.
[00:23:56]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And, at that point, he also was seen somehow as a security risk.
[00:24:00]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Although, what "security risk" meant at that time, given, given the virulence of the security apparatus, is very hard to know.
[00:24:08]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
He continues living in Princeton, New Jersey, a nice bucolic existence.
[00:24:12]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
It is true, apparently, that he did help out little-- there was a little girl who stopped at his house and asked for help with math problems, and he did help her out.
[00:24:20]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
There's a couple of other instances where the reporter for the high school paper just stopped in and got, like; scooped the world for an interview for Einstein in the late 1940s.
[00:24:31]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And, you know, this 13 year old high school sophomore managed to get himself a byline in all the major European and American papers with an interview with Einstein.
[00:24:40]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
He had, again, this kind of avuncular feeling that you look at when you see him now.
[00:24:46]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Again, this slightly dotty, absent-minded professor who, nonetheless, was sharp as a tack and was more than happy to pose as a slightly dotty professor
[00:24:56]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
because it again gave him a space in which he could work.
[00:24:59]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
He dies of an aneurysm in 1955 and when the nurse, when they found him,
[00:25:08]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
there was a pad of paper on the bedside where his last act, really, was to write down another series of equations, again,
[00:25:16]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
attempting to statistically prove the existence of the unified field;
[00:25:20]
{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}

The unified field that he struggled with 20, 25, 30 years to reach; to bring in a fulfillment.
[00:25:28]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And I just like that notion that he's working to the end. And I'd also just like to conclude by going back to this notion that gravity and falling, that Einstein's theory of the universe means that we're perpetually falling,
[00:25:39]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
that we're perpetually moving.
[00:25:40]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And going back to the Newton and the apple. But if we're always falling, we're never falling.
[00:25:47]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
We never reach that state of sin that we see in the Bible. The apple never falls; we don't eat the apple and are corrupted by it.
[00:25:54]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Instead, the pursuit of the unified field becomes a way in which we combine our intellect and our humanity to reach what we've never really wanted, but which we lost.
[00:26:03]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
The garden, the garden of the unified field, the garden of equal and harmonic relations between nature and people.
[00:26:11]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Thank you.
[00:26:12]

[[applause]]
[00:26:18]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Yes.
[00:26:19]

Transcription Notes:
Need speaker name and spaces inserted. "Annus mirabilis" means:a remarkable or auspicious year.