The Einstein Mystique

Scientific Paper
Title	The Einstein Mystique
Read in full	Link to paper
Author(s)	Ian McCausland
Keywords	Einstein, Special Relativity, history of science, celebrity, 1919 eclipse
Published	2003
Journal	Journal of Scientific Exploration
Volume	17
Number	4
No. of pages	18
Pages	715-732

Read the full paper here

Abstract

Albert Einstein's scientific career is studied, with the purpose of trying to explain why he became such a universally famous and revered person. Various events of the past century are considered, and their effects on his scientific and personal reputation. Some of the events studied are: the publication of the special and general theories of relativity, the 1919 solar eclipse and the famous meeting at which the results of the eclipse observations were announced, and Einstein's visit to the United States in 1921. After his death, many biographies of Einstein were written, both before and after the availability of further information that became available about his personal life after the deaths of Helen Dukas and Otto Nathan; some of these are discussed, including the strange story of what happened to Einstein's brain after his death. Celebrations of the centenary of his birth, the centenary of special relativity, and the centenary of the solar eclipse are also discussed. In spite of all the information that is available, the reasons for Einstein's great and enduring fame remain mysterious.

Overview

The Einstein Mystique is not a physics paper. It is a study in the sociology and historiography of science, written by a control-systems engineer at the University of Toronto who had already published a critical examination of the historical record of relativity in the same journal (Anomalies in the History of Relativity, 1999). Its subject is a question that McCausland regards as genuinely unanswered: why is Albert Einstein not merely respected among physicists but revered by the general public as no other scientist has ever been? He opens with a 1970 remark by H. Le R. Finch, who predicted that future historians "may find themselves wondering how it happened that an abstract scientist, whose work could be understood only by a handful of people, should nevertheless have become an idol of millions."

The paper's departure from the standard account is not a denial of Einstein's achievements but a refusal to treat his fame as their natural consequence. McCausland's contention is that the fame is disproportionate to the accomplishment — and, more pointedly, that the single event which created it, the announcement of the 1919 eclipse results, rested on measurements too crude to decide the question they were said to have decided. He assembles the evidence in the manner of a documentary case: contemporary press assessments, the recollections of Rutherford and Chandrasekhar, the later admissions of historians, the publishing record, and the posthumous handling of Einstein's remains. The conclusion is deliberately unresolved. Having marshalled every explanation on offer, he reports that none of them is sufficient, and commends the problem to the reader.

The argument

The slow start and the 1919 turning point

McCausland notes that the immediate impact of the 1905 paper on Special Relativity is hard to gauge from the present day, and that the theory was much less renowned outside Europe than is now assumed. He quotes an editorial in Scientific American from January 1921 which dismissed the special theory as having "never been elevated to a position of any great importance in mathematical theory" and called it "merely an interesting bit of abstract speculation." Max Planck, he observes following Fölsing, was largely responsible for the acceptance of Einstein's first relativity paper and "the most important figure in establishing relativity theory after 1905" — the first of what McCausland later calls Einstein's instances of luck.

Even the publication of General Relativity in 1916 did not by itself produce fame. What did was the Joint Meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society of 6 November 1919, at which Dyson and Eddington announced that the May eclipse observations supported the general theory — an event Abraham Pais described as "the canonization of Albert Einstein."

The accuracy of the eclipse observations

The paper's central factual claim, carried over from McCausland's 1999 study, is that the accuracy of the 1919 observations was not sufficient for a conclusive verification. His evidence is not his own but Stephen Hawking's. In A Brief History of Time (1988) Hawking wrote that "later examination of the photographs taken on that expedition showed the errors were as great as the effect they were trying to measure," and that the result "had been sheer luck, or a case of knowing the result they wanted to get, not an uncommon occurrence in science." McCausland sets this beside Hawking's own account eleven years later in Time magazine's "Person of the Century" issue, where the same expedition is described as confirming the theory "in spectacular fashion" and providing "direct evidence that space and time are warped."

He anticipates the obvious rejoinder — that the deflection has since been measured accurately — and answers that later confirmation is irrelevant to the historical question. The fame was created in November 1919 by an announcement whose evidential basis was, on Hawking's own description, sheer luck.

Why the announcement carried

Several amplifying circumstances are documented. The armistice was a year old and the Treaty of Versailles six months old: a German theory confirmed by British astronomers read as an act of reconciliation. Chandrasekhar records Rutherford, asked why Einstein was more acclaimed than he, turning to Eddington and saying "You are responsible for Einstein's fame," then explaining that astronomy "had always appealed to public imagination" and that "the typhoon of publicity crossed the Atlantic."

To this McCausland adds incomprehensibility as an asset — the legend that only twelve men in the world could understand the theory — illustrated by a passage from Galbraith's novel A Tenured Professor: "Economists value most the colleague whom they most struggle to understand… And anyone who cannot be understood at all will be especially admired." The 1921 American visit, undertaken as part of a Zionist fund-raising delegation, is treated as the second amplification; Missner's finding is that the press mistook a welcome for Chaim Weizmann as a hero's welcome for Einstein, and that "the American press was the instrument that made Einstein into a celebrity."

The literature and the estate

A long section tracks the biographies. Ronald Clark's 1971 life is praised, but McCausland shows that Clark was denied key permissions, threatened with legal action and forced partially to rewrite the work by Otto Nathan. Nathan and Helen Dukas, joint controllers of the literary estate, guarded Einstein's reputation closely; Pais's 1982 book marks the transition between hagiography and more objective treatment, and the later biographies of Brian, Fölsing and Overbye rest on material that became available only after Dukas's death. McCausland's irritation is with the industry rather than the man: a photograph of Einstein on a cover or his name in a subtitle, and preferably the deity in the title as well, is treated by publishers as a guarantee of sales.

The brain

The most caustic pages concern the removal and forty-year private retention of Einstein's brain by the pathologist Thomas Harvey, against Einstein's expressed wish that his body be cremated and the ashes scattered to avoid the creation of a shrine. McCausland reviews Carolyn Abraham's Possessing Genius and Michael Paterniti's Driving Mr. Albert, notes that Einstein's eyes are kept in a bank safety-deposit box, and concludes that the remains "are being treated like relics of a saint instead of ordinary physical objects." He urges that they be cremated and scattered as Einstein wished. In passing he catches Paterniti confusing the two chief tests of general relativity, describing Eddington as having confirmed "the exact shift of sunlight as it passes Mercury — approximately forty-three seconds of arc per century": the perihelion advance of Mercury and the deflection of starlight at the limb of the sun are different phenomena measured by different means.

Greatness versus celebrity

The analytical frame arrives late, from Daniel Boorstin's Hidden History: "The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness… The hero was distinguished by his achievement, the celebrity by his image or trademark. The hero created himself; the celebrity is created by the media." Pais had independently applied the same definition to Einstein. Boorstin's worked example is Charles Lindbergh, world-famous overnight for a single feat, sustained by subsequent events, and eventually "uncelebrated" when his public pronouncements offended. McCausland maps the parallel: Einstein's celebrity was sustained by his flight from the Nazis, the letter to Roosevelt and the bomb, and society was not content that he be only a clever scientist but made him an oracle on all subjects.

He collects dissenting valuations that are rarely quoted. W. H. McCrea, a defender of relativity against its critics, nevertheless judged that Einstein was "certainly not in the class of Newton" and questioned "whether he was as great a scientist as Faraday or Maxwell or Rutherford or Bohr" — yet none of those men became famous in this way. Missner makes the same point with Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Against these McCausland sets Cornelius Lanczos's claim that the answer to "who is the greatest modern physicist after Einstein?" is "Einstein again," a formulation he finds remarkable for demoting every other modern scientist to third place behind Einstein and "Zweistein."

Assessment

The paper's real strength is evidential discipline. Almost nothing in it is McCausland's own assertion; the case is built from admissions by people with no dissident motive — Hawking on the quality of the eclipse plates, McCrea on Einstein's rank among physicists, Pais on the celebrity definition, Highfield and Carter on the estate's suppression of documents. That construction makes the historical claims hard to dismiss as special pleading, and it is the correct method for a paper whose thesis concerns what the scientific community is willing to say about itself. The distinction he borrows from Boorstin does genuine work, and the Lindbergh comparison is apt: both men became world-famous within days for a single event, and in both cases the fame subsequently detached from the achievement and fed on itself.

The difficulties are of two kinds. The first is that the paper never quite settles what it is claiming. McCausland argues that the mystique exceeds the accomplishment and is therefore anomalous, but he also declines to offer an explanation, and the two positions sit awkwardly: an anomaly is normally a discrepancy against an expected value, and no expected value for scientific fame is ever specified. The journal's own editors made exactly this objection in an appended Editorial Comment, observing that the disagreement runs along disciplinary lines — engineers and scientists presume fame should track objective achievement, while sociologists of popular culture "would find nothing remarkable about mystique exceeding objective measures." They then supply, in a page and a half, a perfectly ordinary social explanation: the media require celebrities, physics is the obvious place to look, a photogenic patent clerk who superseded Newton is the natural candidate, and the Nobel Prize, the flight from Nazi persecution and the bomb each reinforced the pedestal. That the editors could assemble this from McCausland's own materials weakens his closing claim that "no explanation seems completely satisfactory."

The second is that the eclipse argument, which carries most of the paper's weight, is asserted here rather than demonstrated — it rests on the 1999 paper and on Hawking's remark, and a reader who wants the plate-scale analysis must go elsewhere. It is also fair to note what the argument does not establish. That the 1919 measurement was too coarse to decide the matter is a claim about 1919; the deflection has since been measured to high precision by very-long-baseline interferometry of radio sources near the solar limb, and McCausland does not dispute this. His point is strictly historical, and readers sympathetic to his general position should be careful not to enlarge it into a physical one. Within its own terms — a documented argument that Einstein's public standing was manufactured by a particular announcement at a particular moment, and has since been sustained by the press and a licensing industry rather than by continuing scientific accomplishment — the paper is sound, and unusually well sourced.

See also

• Ian McCausland
• Anomalies in the History of Relativity
• Albert Einstein
• Relativity
• Special Relativity
• General Relativity