Einstein and the Quantum Read Free

of natural things, a man with the greatest peace of mind and marvelous family virtue, never shrinking from civic duties, the powerful guide to those fabulous receptive molecules, infallible high priest of the poor in spirit.” Courtesy the Albert Einstein Archive.
    Solovine recalled that these gatherings brimmed over with merriment, although woe to him who would slight the gravity of the occasion. On one memorable night, Solovine, having skipped out on a meeting at the last minute to attend a concert, returned to his apartment to find his bed piled high with furniture and household items, his room enveloped in thick cigar smoke, and a scolding note in Latin pinned to his wall. Einstein remembered these get-togethers with the greatest fondness. In 1953 he wrote to Solovine:

    FIGURE 8.2. The principals of the Olympia Academy circa 1903; on the left is Conrad Habicht, center is Maurice Solovine, and on the right is Einstein. ETH-Bibliothek Zurich, Image Archive.
    To the immortal Olympia Academy !
    In your short active life dear Academy, you took delight, with childlike joy, in all that was clear and intelligent. Your members created you to make fun of the long-established sister academies. How well your mockery hit the mark I have learned to appreciate through long years of careful observation…. Even if we have become somewhat decrepit, a glimmer of your bright, vivifying radiance still lights our lonely pilgrimage…. To you our fidelity and devotion until the last learned gasp!
    A. E.—now corresponding member
    Besides Habicht and Solovine, Einstein had another intellectual confidant in Michele Besso. He had met Besso, who was six years older and already a graduate of the Poly, while he was a student in Zurich. Besso, of middle-class Jewish origin, was an engineer, whohad applied for and obtained a position in the patent office in Bern at Einstein’s suggestion. Einstein had also introduced him to his eventual wife, Anna Winteler, who was a daughter of Einstein’s host family in Aarau. Besso and Einstein became lifelong and intimate friends. If Einstein occasionally exhibited the absentmindedness of a starry-eyed dreamer, he was an absolute model of Swiss efficiency compared with the impractical Besso, whose boss had once pronounced him “ completely useless and almost unbalanced.” Einstein, while granting that in many respects Michele was “an awful schlemiel,” nonetheless enjoyed and profited from their exchanges: “[Besso] has an extraordinarily fine mind whose working, though disorderly, I watch with great delight.” Later, when reflecting upon his achievements of 1905, he said that he “ could not have found a better sounding-board in the whole of Europe.” Besso and Einstein walked home together daily during that period, and Einstein shared with him his developing ideas about physics. Although Besso is often mentioned as the first to hear about relativity theory, apparently the main subject of their conversations was something else: Einstein’s new hypothesis about the nature of light.
    This hypothesis surely would have been presented to the Olympia Academy; however, by the end of 1904, Habicht had obtained a post as a mathematics and physics teacher in Schiers, quite a distance from Bern, and in 1905 Solovine moved from Bern to Paris, where he worked on a journal, the Revue Philosophique . Hence the academy was out of session as Einstein was producing his string of hits. In May of 1905 he sent a typical jocular missive to Habicht, whose absence he had felt:
    Dear Habicht, such a solemn air of silence has descended between us that I almost feel as if I am committing a sacrilege when I break it now with some inconsequential babble….
    So what are you up to you frozen whale, you smoked, dried, canned piece of soul…? Why have you still not sent me your dissertation? Don’t you know that I am one of the 1½ fellows that would read it with interest