Albert Einstein Speaking , livre ebook

Canongate Books - R.J. Gadney

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

145 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

Princeton. New Jersey. 14th March 1954 'Albert Einstein speaking.' 'Who?' asks the girl on the telephone. 'I'm sorry,' she says. 'I have the wrong number.' 'You have the right number,' Albert says. From a wrong number to a friendship that would impact both their lives, Albert Einstein Speaking begins with two unlikely friends - the world's most respected scientist and a schoolgirl from New Jersey. From their first conversation Mimi Beaufort had a profound effect on Einstein and brought him, in his final years, back to life. In turn he let her into his world. Albert Einstein Speaking is the story of an incredible friendship, and of a remarkable life. The son of an electrician in nineteenth-century Germany, Albert Einstein went on to become one of the twentieth century's most influential scientists and the most famous face in the world. This riotous, charming and moving novel spans almost a century of European history and shines a light on the real man behind the myth.

Informations

Publié par	Canongate Books
Date de parution	03 mai 2018
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781786890481
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0400€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

R.J. Gadney was a writer, artist and academic. He was born in Cross Hills, Yorkshire in 1941. He studied English, Fine Art and Architecture at St. Catharine's College, Cambridge. In 1970 he became a part-time Tutor at the Royal College of Art and later became the youngest Pro-Rector in the history of the College. He lectured both at Oxford and Cambridge universities, Harvard, MIT, at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and at the Academy of Arts and Sciences in Moscow. He wrote several screenplays for television, wrote for the Spectator , the London Magazine and the Evening Standard and authored several crime and thriller novels. He died in May 2018.

Published in Great Britain in 2018 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books
Copyright © R.J. Gadney, 2018
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All quotations from the works and correspondence of Albert Einstein © The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The author and publisher would like to thank The Albert Einstein Archives and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem for their help and support of this publication
Further information on copyright material within the text is given here
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 049 8 eISBN 978 1 78689 048 1
Typeset in Utopia by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire
Nell, Jago, Toby, Elliot & Tom
‘If everybody lived a life like mine there would be no need for novels.’
Albert Einstein, aged twenty, to his sister, Maja, 1899
CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Image Credits
Text Credits
ONE
Princeton, New Jersey,
14 March 1954
‘Albert Einstein speaking.’
‘Who?’ asks the girl on the telephone.
It’s the morning of Albert’s seventy-fifth birthday. He’s seated at his study table on the second floor of his small house on Mercer Street in Princeton turning the pages of his scrapbook embossed in silver:
A LBERT E INSTEIN S AMMELALBUM
He presses the black plastic Western Electric telephone closer against his ear.
‘I’m sorry,’ the girl says. ‘I have the wrong number.’ Her accent is Boston Brahmin.
‘You have the right number,’ Albert says.
‘I do? May I ask, sir, please – what is your number?’
‘I don’t know—’
‘You don’t know your own phone number? You are Albert Einstein. How come the world’s most famous scientist doesn’t know his own phone number?’
‘Never memorise something that you can look up,’ Albert says. ‘Or, even better, have someone else look up for you.’
Tobacco sparks from his briar pipe spew across a letter from the German physicist Max Born. Albert extinguishes them with a slap.
‘OK, sir,’ the girl says. ‘I’m sorry I bothered you.’
‘You haven’t bothered me in the least. How old are you?’
‘Seventeen.’
‘I’m seventy-five today.’
‘You are? Seventy-five – that’s something. Happy birthday.’
‘Thank you. You have given me a fine birthday present.’
‘I have?’
‘You have raised an interesting philosophical problem. You dialled a wrong number. The wrong number for you. The right number for me. It is a most intriguing conundrum. What is your name?’
‘Mimi Beaufort—’
‘Where are you calling from?’
‘From my lodgings, outside Princeton.’
‘Your lodgings, you say – where’s your real home?’
‘Greenwich in Fairfield County, Connecticut.’
‘That’s a nice place. Will you call me again?’
‘If you really are Albert Einstein, I’ll call again. Sure I will.’
Albert toys with his copious white moustache. ‘Check me out in the directory.’
His right leg is jiggling and bouncing. The ball of his foot rises and lowers rapidly. He flexes his calf muscles. He’s quite unaware his leg is making such rapid movements.
*
Puffing at his pipe, filled with Revelation, a tobacco blended by Philip Morris and House of Windsor, Albert gazes at the birthday cards and cables piled up on the desk and tables, even on his wooden music stand. He hasn’t the foggiest idea who’s sent them.
There are congratulatory cables from people he does know: Jawaharlal Nehru, Thomas Mann, Bertrand Russell and Linus Pauling.
He shifts uneasily in his chair, troubled by the pain in his liver.
He opens The New York Times to find that its editorial page has quoted George Bernard Shaw’s view that history would remember Albert’s name as the equal of Pythagoras, Aristotle, Galileo and Newton.
On chairs, mahogany commodes and occasional tables are mimeographed academic papers from Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study marked for his personal attention: papers from mathematicians, physicists, archaeologists, astronomers and economists. A rack of briar pipes stands next to jars of pencils in front of a gramophone and vinyl records, mostly of violin and piano music by Bach and Mozart.
There are four portraits on the wall. One of Isaac Newton. A second of James Maxwell whose work Albert has described as the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton. A third of Michael Faraday. The fourth of Mahatma Gandhi. Beneath the portraits is the framed emblem of the Jain religion, symbol of the doctrine of non-violence. He looks at the letter from Born.
‘I believe,’ Born declares, ‘that ideas such as absolute certitude, absolute exactness, final truth, etc. are figments of the imagination which should not be admissible in any field of science.’
‘I agree,’ says Albert to himself.
‘On the other hand,’ Born continues, ‘any assertion of probability is either right or wrong from the standpoint of the theory on which it is based. This loosening of thinking [ Lockerung des Denkens ] seems to me to be the greatest blessing which modern science has given to us.’
‘Very good,’ Albert mutters.
‘For the belief in a single truth and in being the possessor thereof is the root cause of all evil in the world.’
‘So says Born,’ says Albert. ‘Quite right.’
Albert’s treasured Biedermeier-style grandfather clock chimes ten. When the chimes end, he smiles to himself. F = L + S . Frieden entspricht Liebe und Stille . Or: P = L + S . Peace equals Love plus Silence.

EINSTEIN ATTENDS A CONCERT WITH HELEN DUKAS AT THE GREAT SYNAGOGUE IN BERLIN, 1930
Outside Albert’s study, his live-in secretary and housekeeper, Frau Helen Dukas, has been waiting until the clock chimes the hour. She doesn’t like what she’s just heard Albert saying on the telephone. ‘You will call me again?’
You = another time-wasting female admirer.
She comes into the study bringing with her the aroma of camphor. Albert has long meant to tell her: ‘The organic chemical C ₁₀ H ₁₆ O is unpleasant.’ He’s never quite summoned up the courage to do so.
Frau Dukas opens the green shutters of the study’s main window with a flourish, the clatter intended as a reprimand. The window looks out onto the weeping willows, maples and elms of the leafy suburban street.
The sunlight increases the wateriness in Albert’s eyes. He rubs them with the back of his hand and blinks.
Frau Dukas, austere, tall and slender, is originally from southwest Germany, the daughter of a German-Jewish merchant. Her mother was from Hechingen, the same town as Albert’s second wife. As Albert’s secretary and gatekeeper for some twenty-five years she’s dedicated herself to providing him with a quiet life.
Her bedroom in the house on Mercer Street, separated by a bathroom, is next to Albert’s. There’s also a small studio and bedroom set aside for Albert’s stepdaughter, Margot, when she visits. And another that had been Albert’s sister, Maja’s. Maja died four years ago.
‘Who was that you were speaking to?’ Frau Dukas asks.
‘A young lady called Mimi Beaufort. I like her voice. From good old Boston. The home of the bean and the cod, where the Lowells talk only to Cabots and presumably the Beauforts. Families that talk only to God. D’you think you can find out who she is?’
‘She calls you by mistake and you want me to find out who she is?’
‘I do. Anyone who’s never made a mistake has never tried anything new.’
‘Do you mind me saying you mustn’t waste your time?’
‘Helen. Kreativität ist das Resultat Verschwendeter Zeit. Creativity is the residue of time wasted. Find out who this Mimi Beaufort is. Check out the name in the Greenwich, Connecticut, telephone directory. And please bring me a cup of hot chocolate.’
Albert wears scuffed leather slippers, no socks. His frayed shirt, open at the neck, reveals a worn blue sweatshirt.
Frau Dukas arranges a blanket around his feet. ‘I have never seen so many birthday cards,’ she marvels.
‘What is there to celebrate? Birthdays are automatic things. Anyway, birthdays are for children.’ Once again he wipes away the wateriness from his eyes. Their sparkle contrasts with the lines and furrows of his brow. ‘I am seventy-five. None of us is getting any younger.’
He fills his pipe from the tin of Revelation tobacco and lights up. A cloud of smoke billows upwards. ‘Please, Helen, bring me my hot chocolate.’
‘All in good time.’
‘What are you holding, Helen?’
Frau Dukas hands him a newspaper photograph of the mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima on 6 August 1945.
‘Some schoolchildren from Lincoln, Nebraska, have asked you to sign this. Are you prepared to sign it for them?’
Shrouded in the cloud of pipe smoke, Albert stares forlornly at the image. ‘If I must.’
‘I will get your cup of chocolate,’ Frau Dukas says, as if promising a reward.
She leaves him alone to sign the photograph A. Einstein 14 March 1954 .
Then he takes out a sheet of paper and writes:

140,000 souls perished at Hiroshima. 100,000 were terribly injured. 74,000 perished at Nagasaki. Another 75,000 suffered fatal injuries from burns, injuries, and gamma radiation. At Pearl Harbor – how many died? They tell me 2,500. The British poet Donne tells us: ‘any man’s death diminishes me, bec