Albert Einstien was a genius

Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

Albert Einstein hung this sign in his office at Princeton.

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Torn between two continents, Einstein championed co-operation

Whatever the state of relations between London and Washington, Europe and the US should remember their long history of shared intellectual activity, championed chiefly by Albert Einstein, writes Lisa Jardine. Read original article

The campus of the California Institute of Technology, Caltech, in Pasadena, where I spent this week, looks more like a Latin-American hacienda than a top-flight university dedicated to teaching and research in fundamental science.

Practically all the giants of modern science have been associated with Caltech during the hundred years since its foundation. The best known of these by far is Albert Einstein, perhaps science's only folk hero - Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist, forever associated with the evocative formula E = mc2 .

Caltech is where Linus Pauling pursued his research on the formation of chemical bonds between atoms in molecules and crystals, paving the way for Crick and Watson's discovery of the structure of DNA. This is also where Edwin Hubble's discoveries with the Mount Wilson telescope challenged Einstein's cosmological picture of the universe, and brought him here himself to discuss the implications of his general theory of Relativity with Caltech physicists and astronomers.

He loved Hollywood, and Hollywood loved him ...on Albert Einstein Hear Radio 4's A Point of View

The institute sits at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, in a lush landscape. Graceful jacaranda trees smothered in a purple haze of blossom, and soaring emerald-leaved palms, shade beds of bird-of-paradise flowers and headily-scented star jasmine. A long avenue of mature olive trees runs through the sunlit campus, to a pool on whose edge dozens of ebony-coloured turtles sun themselves among the reeds. Arched colonnades covered in bougainvillea border and connect the cool stuccoed buildings.

Walk up close, though, and these buildings have unexpectedly futuristic names: the Keith Spalding Building, home of the Space Infrared Telescope Facility; the Lauritsen Laboratory for high energy physics; and, a few short miles away, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and its current project LISA - the laser interferometer space antenna.

In this highly-charged intellectual environment, 2,000 undergraduate and graduate students, and 300 faculty work at the cutting edge of modern science.

Einstein visited Caltech for the first time in December 1930, returning in 1931-2 and 1932-3. It was while he was on his third research visit that the Nazis came to power in Germany. Einstein never returned to Europe, although he would spend the last 20 years of his life at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton rather than Caltech.

The other half of the Russell-Einstein manifesto

And it is here at Caltech that the formidable project of transcribing and publishing the entire Einstein archive is currently being carried out. Tucked into a corner of the Caltech campus is a modest building which contains the Einstein Papers Project. Housed deep in its basement, in a row of locked black filing cabinets running the full length of one wall, are copies of more than 70,000 items - half a million pages of documentation - relating to Einstein's life and career (most originals are kept at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to which Einstein bequeathed them at his death in 1955).

Einstein's devoted assistant Helen Dukas began collecting and ordering Einstein's papers in Berlin, even before he left for America. The collection includes Einstein's letters, scientific manuscripts (published and unpublished), as well as lectures, speeches and articles on a wide range of topics from philosophy of science to education, Zionism, pacifism, and civil liberties. At Caltech a small team of dedicated researchers are editing the entire contents of the archive, transcribing them, annotating them, and publishing them volume by volume. On Monday I was given a guided tour, and shown some of the fascinating items the collection contains.

Among the papers are personal travel diaries Einstein kept whenever he was abroad. The diaries for the Caltech years give a wonderfully vivid picture of the elan with which he embraced his new California lifestyle. By the 30s Einstein was an international celebrity - the Los Angeles Times and the Pasadena Star newspapers produced over 1200 articles about him, which are also carefully filed in the Einstein archive. From the day he arrived he was feted and honoured.

Einstein dined with Charlie Chaplin and Randolph Hearst

He loved Hollywood, and Hollywood loved him. On his first trip a motion picture tycoon made arrangements for Einstein and his wife Elsa to see his new film at the Universal studios. In his diary Einstein wrote: "We drove to Hollywood to visit the film giant Laemmle. They showed us All Quiet on the Western Front, a nice piece, which the Nazis have banned successfully in Germany".

That ban, he also noted, was "a diplomatic defeat for [the German] government". Hearing that Einstein admired the films of Charlie Chaplin, Chaplin himself invited the couple to dinner, together with the newspaper magnate Randolph Hearst. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks entertained the Einsteins at their mansion, "Pickfair", in Beverley Hills. It was, Einstein tells us, like a three-ringed circus, but he loved it nonetheless.

Of course, the Einstein papers for the Caltech years are full of important science too. But the very human Einstein who emerges from the pages of the California travel diaries is for me a kind of symbol for the way in which the United States took up the torch of fundamental scientific research and kept its flame alight, giving great original thinkers like Einstein a home and public recognition, when National Socialism in Germany was turning its back on the future.

Beneath the surface differences in attitudes and beliefs, there runs a historically strong set of values connecting us ...on Europe-US relations

It is also, for me, a reminder that the ties that bind European intellectuals to our fellow human beings in the United States are far stronger than the agendas of particular political administrations on either side of the Atlantic. If we take the long view - back to the founding years of Caltech, and forward, beyond the disaster of the Iraq war, and what some like myself regard as the damagingly anti-science ethos of the Bush administration - the common intellectual understanding between our two countries has to continue to be nurtured and cherished.

Because beneath the surface differences in attitudes and beliefs, there runs a historically strong set of values connecting us. It was out of the debris of World War II, and the team-work and collaboration between leading scientists in America and Europe that one of the lastingly important statements about war and weapons of mass destruction was issued by a group of distinguished scientists which included a number of Caltech illuminati -the "Russell-Einstein manifesto".

Together, Einstein in America and Bertrand Russell in England produced what still stands as one of the most important statements of the need for cooperation between nations. It was the last letter Einstein signed, shortly before he died on 18 April 1955, having drafted and redrafted the text with Russell in the weeks before his death.

The Russell-Einstein manifesto was addressed to the leaders of the western world. It urged them to recognise that weapons of war (specifically the atomic bomb) were now too deadly for war between opposed factions any longer to be an option:

"In the tragic situation which confronts humanity [they wrote], we feel that scientists should assemble in conference to appraise the perils that have arisen as a result of the development of weapons of mass destruction?

"We have to learn to think in a new way [they went on]. We have to learn to ask ourselves, not what steps can be taken to give military victory to whatever group we prefer, for there no longer are such steps; the question we have to ask ourselves is: what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must be disastrous to all parties?"

The current clamour of anti-American sentiment in Europe runs entirely counter to Einstein and Russell's fervent hopes for the future. Just as they feared, it drives the world towards shrill factionalism and petty nationalistic posturing. But our response cannot be to deny the bonds of history and common aspiration which underpin decades of shared intellectual activities in Europe and America. We should not treat the Anglo-American accord as a doctrine to be imposed elsewhere in the world by military might, but rather redouble our efforts to build on our remarkable shared history of scientific advance.

As I wandered the campus at Caltech, and as I talked to faculty and students, the culture of serious reflection on the big issues in science and in human values filled me with a sense that together they and we could achieve a great deal for the future of the human race. As my plane touched down back at Heathrow on Wednesday, it struck me forcibly that we must hold on to that strong sense I had at Caltech of future purpose and possibility. We must not squander science's dream of an increasingly open world of discovery and opportunity.