The Born-Einstein Letters,1916-1955

"It was a long friendship. It began with physics but developed into a relationship with many other overtones to do with politics, ethics, and the state of Germany during those years. Both of them won Nobel Prizes, so when we read them we’re exposed to a couple of very intelligent people writing about science. Throughout the letters, you get these human asides: It’s a very unique mixture of science and humanities. They disagreed frequently and they disagreed most famously about quantum theory. In one letter from Einstein to Born he says, ‘The old one does not play dice. I can’t accept the possibility of chance ruling the universe.’ And Born never agreed with that. Right to the end of the correspondence, they’re arguing about the role of probability in physics. They’re also talking about the First World War and how they react to that and about Jewishness. They’re both Jewish but they have different attitudes to Jewishness. And they’re talking about the Nazi period, of course. During that time, Born escaped from Germany and went to Edinburgh and became a professor. Einstein had gone to the United States — so they didn’t meet. After 1933, they corresponded but they didn’t have any personal contact — which is good, as it means that their ideas are on paper rather than just spoken to each other. We learn a lot. Born edits the letters and has a lot of commentary where he responds after Einstein’s death. Einstein’s step-daughter wrote to him about his last few days in hospital and she said, ‘He left this world without sentimentality or regret.’ Born says, ‘we lost our dearest friend when he died.’ But ‘without sentimentality or regret’ is the keynote of the letters. Einstein can be quite inhuman. He doesn’t have normal human reactions to some things including, for instance, the death of his second wife. His family life was not particularly happy. He divorced his first wife and had a rather difficult relationship with his children. This comes into the book quite a lot because Born is a warmer personality than Einstein. The contrast is interesting. Physics dominated his life. The second aspect that dominated his life was humanity. He had a great passion to support what he regarded as just political causes. He said himself that that was not associated with a love of individuals. He always said, ‘I know I’m quite aloof from the world in relationship to individuals’ — even to Born and some of his other close friends. He didn’t want to rest himself or his life on the ‘merely personal.’ That comes up in an essay when he’s 50 . He was very strongly in favour of the idea of world government. After the Second World War, he thought that was the only hope for world peace and to avoid another war. There should be a military-style organisation with the great powers all taking a role in it and preventing war. It didn’t catch on, but he supported that strongly for a while."

"Absolutely. The Born-Einstein Letters is a collection of the correspondence of these two men over decades and decades. You know – ‘Dear Albert…’ ‘Dear Max…’ There’s no commentary at all, just the letters. Max Born is one of the unsung heroes of the quantum revolution. He was at least as influential as Bohr, Schrödinger and Heisenberg. It’s a mixture of two old friends and colleagues keeping in touch, but also highlights the ongoing debate, in particular about some of the ideas of quantum theory, in the first half of the 20th century. Quantum mechanics’ revolutionary way of looking at the structure of the subatomic world changed our view and overthrew a lot of old notions. But Einstein—probably the greatest physicist who ever lived (bar maybe Newton)—had issues with it. He was unhappy with some of its implications and famously had debates with many of the founders of quantum mechanics. He was almost like an outsider on this. The Born-Einstein Letters is a correspondence over many years highlighting the toing and froing in these arguments about the nature of reality between two of the giants of the field. The book gives us a window into what their problems were and how they tried to persuade each other their view was right. But it’s done in a way that is reasonably accessible to people. You don’t have to be an insider or an expert to follow their arguments. The letters map out the whole of the theory of 20th century physics but include all the conflict and personal life, the head-scratching. I think we’re all having to re-examine and revise how we feel about some of the great scientists and thinkers. There’s no doubt that without their contribution the world wouldn’t be the way it is now. The advances in science have led to advances in technology, which have made our lives better and richer. They have changed the world and we can’t take the contribution they’ve made to science away from them. But people like Erwin Schrödinger, Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman were, in many ways, misogynists. They were sexist. They had some views that today would be utterly unacceptable. And we do have to temper our enthusiasm and admiration for their work with how we feel about them as people. We shouldn’t just unquestioningly say, ‘these were great people, they made great contributions to science and knowledge.’ We also have to acknowledge that as human beings, in their private lives, they weren’t as pleasant as they could have been. It’s not enough just to say, ‘It was a different time then.’ With some of these things you have to draw a moral line. Today we live in a different world and when we look back we have to judge them differently as well."