From Albert Einstein to a nuclear Iran

How strange. On April 18, 1955, he was alive. He had mass. He lay in a bed, frantically plotting equations with pencil and paper in neat handwriting, attempting to piece together a unified theory to explain the connections between all forms of matter in the universe.

And then he was dead, killed by an aneurysm that had festered for years. He was cremated, his ashes scattered over the Delaware River south of Princeton, N.J. But one part of his body remained. His brain — his magnificent brain.

I’m referring, of course, to Albert Einstein.

Upon Einstein’s death, the Princeton Hospital pathologist who performed the autopsy on the 20th century’s greatest theoretical physicist cut open his skull, removed his brain and embalmed it. Over the ensuing decades, Thomas Harvey passed out slivers of the brain tissue on glass slides to scientists so they might try to figure out what made Einstein tick. Why was he so much smarter than the rest of us? How could he so deeply peer into the inner workings of the space-time continuum?

I spent the past two years reading Walter Isaacson’s “Einstein: His Life and Universe.” I read fast, but this 551-page tome was a dense text. I kept putting it back on the shelf, only to return to it weeks, sometimes months, later. Along the way, I read any number of other books, some longer than this one. But “Einstein” was special. It required time. I read and re-read and re-read passages in an attempt to fully understand the science behind the man.

I can’t say that I fully understood Einstein’s theories. Relatively few (no pun intended) ever have. I was heartened to read how the original New York Times reporters on the Einstein beat struggled to comprehend his science.

What I found morbidly fascinating about Einstein was that his life was a case study in the law of unintended consequences. In 1900 he was a recent graduate of the Zurich Polytechnic Institute looking to forge a career in theoretical physics, a field that had come into its own only a decade earlier.

He wanted to understand the laws that govern the universe. His first published paper that year argued that molecules (and their constituent atoms) do actually exist and that numerous natural phenomena can be explained by studying the interactions between molecules. (Previously, scientists had doubted the very existence of molecules and atoms.)

Less than a half century later, scientists had figured out how to split the atom and unleash the apocalyptic forces of the universe upon the Earth. The U.S. dropped atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, ending World War II.

From there the U.S. and the USSR engaged in a Cold War arms race that, in many ways, persists today. Both America and the Soviet Union engaged in a policy known as MAD, or mutually assured destruction. So long as one side had enough armaments to obliterate the other, neither would fire first.

In the final 10 years of his life, Einstein was more involved in politics than science (though science was always there), focusing his intellect and his concern for humanity on ending the arms race and creating one world government that would at last bring peace on Earth.

Many of the government officials who crafted the MAD policy, both in the U.S. and the USSR, thought of Einstein as a fool. Imagine that: One world united, with lasting peace as the sole objective. Nonsense, they said.

Those very wise men never foresaw their atomic secrets’ being stolen by rogue states bent on destruction. They never foresaw a nuclear Iran or North Korea. In 1955, either would have been thought of as a naïve or far-fetched proposition.
The U.S., superpower that it had become, seemingly had nothing to fear but fear itself in the middle of the 20th century. No one would have imagined the possibility of a “dirty” little radiological bomb carried in a suitcase and unleashed on a city by a ragtag terrorist group.

Yet here we are, a little more than a century after scientists like Einstein proved the existence of the atom, and we live in a hyper-tense world that so often plays by no rules, one in which the hellish forces of the universe can be unleashed seemingly anywhere, anytime.

The U.S. is no longer battling the big, bad Soviet Union with espionage and bombast. We’re extinguishing fires in far-off, little-understood lands like Afghanistan and Iraq, often going it alone, hoping and praying that the terrorists never go nuclear. Somehow, one world government that would set the rules of law and of democracy for all — with the teeth to enforce those rules — doesn’t seem so naïve after all.

It is a strange world indeed, one that even Einstein could not fully comprehend.

Scott Brinton is senior editor of the Bellmore and Merrick Heralds and an adjunct professor at the Hofstra University Graduate Journalism Program. Comments? SBrinton@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 203.