By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – Our cousins, Harry and Sherry Jacobson-Beyer of Louisville, Kentucky, paid us a visit, bringing along their 14-year-old grandson, Ethan Jacobson, of Fairhope, Alabama. Together, with Nancy’s and my grandson, Sky, 12, we visited the Reuben E. Fleet Science Center in Balboa Park.
The boys went off in one direction and the adults went off in another, occasionally rendezvousing at exhibits of mutual interest. Harry, for example, was as interested as the boys were in experiencing virtual reality rides that took them to a prehistoric sea, in one instance, and to a space roller coaster in another. The boys also spent time enjoying the sight of marbles rolling in descending circles down into a gravity well.
I browsed some of my favorite exhibits, including a picture of Albert Einstein that is made from holes cut into a board. Up close, you cannot discern the pattern, but if you stand far enough away from it, the great physicist’s portrait is clearly visible.
Perhaps it was that experience that inspired me during our subsequent visit to the gift shop when Sky asked if I would buy for him a freeze-dried ice cream bar so he could experience what astronauts had for treats on their various missions into space.
I agreed, with a proviso. I’d buy that for him if he also would read the booklet Who Was Albert Einstein? by Jess Brallier. It also was on sale in the gift shop. Plus, I said, I wanted a taste of the freeze dried ice cream.
Sky agreed to what he promptly termed a “bribe,” so I purchased the ice cream bar and the 105-page, large print book which was well illustrated by Robert Andrew Parker. The initial taste of the ice cream bar was kind of sawdusty, but its after taste was reminiscent of an ice cream sandwich.
We rode the free Balboa Park tram from the big statue of El Cid to Inspiration Point, adjacent to the Veterans Museum and across Park Boulevard from the central portion of Balboa Park. Sky started reading the book while we waited for the tram, then continued it on the tram, and stayed with the book during the car ride home. Once we got home, he continued to read it, until he triumphantly announced, “Finished!” The debt was paid, in other words.
Frankly, I was delighted that he found Brallier’s book so interesting that he read it right there and then to its completion. Written for young adults, the book outlines Einstein’s life and his discoveries. It told how he was unhappy in the rigid German schools of his youth, when students were expected to listen and absorb, not to ask questions. Eventually the questions he asked his teachers got him expelled.
From Germany, young Albert moved to northern Italy where his parents and sister had since relocated. Schools were very different there. Questions were welcomed, and, free to think, Albert wrote his first theoretical paper, in which he postulated that space was not filled with “ether” as scientists at the time believed, but in fact was empty. As he was just a teenager, his paper didn’t attract all that much attention, but years later he was proven right. Albert continued his studies in Switzerland, where he went to work for the Swiss patent office, and married his first wife, Mileva Maric. They had two sons together, Hans Albert and Eduard.
In 1905, Einstein published his famous theory of relativity, suggesting that the speed of an object depends on the perspective of one viewing it. Four years later, he left the patent office to become a professor at the University of Zurich.
Albert’s most famous formula was E=MC2 meaning Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. From this formula, it was understood that changing mass into energy (such as by “splitting the atom”) could result in a destructive release of energy, as the atom bomb would later prove at the end of World War II.
In 1914, Albert moved to Berlin to teach at a university there. In 1922, he was honored with a Nobel prize for a paper in which he described the “photoelectrical effect,” which led to the development of television. Mileva, who was herself a brilliant scientist, had refused to accompany Albert to Germany, and they were divorced. In 1919, Albert married his cousin, Elsa.
In other papers,Albert postulated that the sun and its planets are constantly moving, but remain fairly constant relative to each other. He also said that light bends, rather than traveling in a straight line. After he was able to prove this during a solar eclipse in 1914, he became an international celebrity – aided no doubt by his eccentric appearance, “wild hair, mismatched socks, wrinkled shorts and pants that were too short,” author Brallier wrote. “Albert was not just a brilliant physics professor. He was a personality. His mysterious smile beamed from the front pages of newspapers around the world – a genius who had unlocked the secrets of God’s own mind.”
With the onset of the world wide economic depression in 1929, Germany was particularly hard-hit, and the Nazi party, headed by Adolf Hitler, blamed Jews like Albert both for Germany’s economic straits and its defeat during World War I. After he was denounced as a spy and his home in Caputh, Germany, was ransacked by Nazi thugs in 1933, Albert decided it was time to leave Germany. Initially, he and Elsa went to Belgium, which was unwelcoming because of the powerful German government’s animus toward him. So, to Europe’s loss, and to America’s benefit, Albert accepted a position as a mathematics professor at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Studies.
Learning during World War II that European scientists were attempting to find a way to build an atomic bomb, Albert wrote to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, urging the United States to develop such a weapon before the Nazi Germans could. This was a matter of great regret for Albert, who essentially was a pacifist, because the atom bomb ultimately killed many tens of thousands of people in a single blast at Hiroshima, Japan (and again at Nagasaki), but it helped to bring World War II to an end. Thereafter, Albert campaigned to limit further development of the bomb.
After Israel was created in 1948, Albert was approached to serve as its second president, but he declined saying that he was a man of science, not of politics. Predeceased by Elsa and his sister Maja, who had come to live with him after Elsa’s death, Albert grew weaker and weaker. He died in 1955, willing that many of his material goods should be donated to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and his brain made available for study by scientists.
I don’t know how much of this story Sky will retain, but I have a feeling that a seed has been planted, thanks to author Brallier’s cogent story-telling abilities. We’ll see if Albert Einstein proves to be a passing interest of Sky’s or perhaps an inspiration!
Either way, I think it was the best deal for a freeze-dried ice cream I ever could have made!
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com