In a diary entry from his second Caltech visit, in early 1932, Albert Einstein noted that he had spent an evening with the Robinsons, then walked to a Black Methodist church in Pasadena to listen to spiritual songs, “to the dismay of everybody,” he wrote. The occasion was a memorial for Julius Rosenwald, the Sears chairman who had given millions for the education of Black children in the United States and had died on January 6. The entry also notes the displeasure of Einstein’s hosts.
This is the kind of detail that surfaces when someone reads the primary sources patiently and chronologically. About 20 people on Caltech’s campus do exactly that for a living, at the Einstein Papers Project. The director and general editor is Diana Kormos-Buchwald, the Robert M. Abbey Professor of History. She sat down with Patt Morrison, the Los Angeles Times columnist, at the Project to record Techer Live: Einstein: Beyond the Myth. What followed was an unwinding of the figure most filtered through invention in modern science: a man who became a celebrity before he wanted to be, in a city that knew exactly what to do with one.
The 1931 context, as Kormos-Buchwald laid it out, was stark. Germany was unraveling. Caltech was short on money. Mount Wilson astronomers had been confirming predictions of general relativity for years, and Einstein was grateful. He had wanted to see the country whose science was overtaking Germany’s, and he had wanted to see a kind of university he had heard about from American postdocs and graduate students who had studied in Berlin. Einstein had been a German professor: a position with limited teaching, few collaborators, no large lab. Caltech offered him something he had never had: a working campus that was more collaborative and less hierarchical by his standards.
“The people are internally democratic,” he wrote his sister in 1931. “There’s neither envy nor stubbornness of any kind among the scholars.”
Einstein was, by 1931, very famous. The keys to Los Angeles were handed to him in front of a crowd Kormos-Buchwald estimates at 80,000. Wealthy patrons in Pasadena, Santa Barbara, Montecito, and Palm Springs used him as a trophy at dinner parties and a draw at fundraisers. The Depression had cut the number of Pasadena businesses in half. Einstein’s presence at a table was leverage. “California’s the place that makes celebrities,” Morrison said.
The Pasadena church visit was one piece of a larger pattern. From Berlin, after his first Caltech visit, Einstein wrote to California Governor James Rolph asking him to intervene in the case of Tom Mooney — the labor leader Morrison identified from her own years reporting on California history, imprisoned on falsified police evidence after a 1916 bombing in San Francisco. He signed the petition, then went past it. He did things he wasn’t supposed to do.
What he wanted, he wrote, was for people to be interested in how a man like him thinks. “But we are mostly interested in what he does and what he suffers,” Kormos-Buchwald said.
The Einstein Papers Project is a working laboratory of about 20 people. Kormos-Buchwald described one of the harder editorial tasks of her career: separating the legitimate scientific objections to relativity from the political ones. In Berlin in the early 1920s, swastika pins were handed out at meetings about Einstein’s work.
Pamphlets circulated under the name “Anti-Relativity Company, LLC.” Some of the people raising scientific questions had real questions. Some did not. The Project has spent decades sorting which was which.
The misreadings did not stay academic. American newspapers Photoshopped his hair more disheveled and more white. Quotes attached themselves to him over the decades. Morrison and Kormos-Buchwald ran a quick audit.
“God doesn’t play dice with the universe.” Real.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Not his.
“Why do these things get attached to him?” Morrison asked.
“There is this underground quotations culture that proliferates,” Kormos-Buchwald said.
“But it sounds so credible,” Morrison said. “If Einstein said it, it has to be real.”
This is the editorial work the Project exists for. The most quoted scientist of the twentieth century is also the one most filtered through invention, and the gap between what he said and what he is said to have said keeps widening on its own. A story still circulates in Pasadena that a tunnel ran from Caltech to the Cheesewright Studios building during the war, used by Einstein for privacy. There is no tunnel. And Einstein did not work at Caltech during the war.
When Pons and Fleischmann announced cold fusion in 1989, Morrison was sent to cover their Los Angeles presentation. “It was a flash in the pan,” she said.
Einstein has not been. Kormos-Buchwald put him in a different category: part of “a long chain of scientists, experimentalists and theoreticians, where things are confirmed or disconfirmed.” Einstein himself was unusually candid about belonging to it. Told he’d made a calculation error in a published paper, he would publish the correction. That’s rare in any era.
The chain runs through Caltech in unusually direct ways. Einstein predicted gravitational waves a century ago and believed they would be too weak to detect. Joe Weber tried to detect them in the 1960s and could not. LIGO directly detected gravitational waves on September 14, 2015, and the discovery was announced on February 11, 2016; Kip Thorne and Barry Barish were among the key figures later recognized with the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics, alongside Rainer Weiss. The Einstein Papers Project held a conference shortly after the announcement.
Morrison, who has spent a fair amount of time at Mount Wilson, mentioned that she had once sat in Einstein’s chair there. “His rump and my rump shared the same space divided by time,” she said, “which we know is inconsequential.”
The most reproduced photograph of Einstein was taken on his 72nd birthday. He had handed out the first Einstein Award that evening. There was a dinner. The press was there. Einstein didn’t want his picture taken. He stuck his tongue out at the photographer, Arthur Sasse. The image that circled the world is not the bushy-haired sage of the dorm-room poster. It is a man at his own birthday, declining to perform the part assigned to him.