Physics as a Calling, Science for Society
Studies in Honour of A.J. Kox
Edited by
Ad Maas and Henriëtte Schatz
LEIDEN Publications
The publication of this book has been made possible by grants from the Institute for Theoretical Physics of the University of Amsterdam, Stichting Pieter Zeeman- fonds, Stichting Physica and the Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology.
Leiden University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press.
Cover illustration: Albert Einstein and Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, photographed by Paul Ehrenfest in front of his home in Leiden in 1921. Source: Museum Boerhaave, Leiden.
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Contents
Preface 7
Kareljan Schoutens
Introduction 9
1 Astronomers and the making of modern physics 15 Frans van Lunteren
2 The drag coefficient from Fresnel to Laue 47
Michel Janssen
3 The origins of the Korteweg-De Vries equation:
Collaboration between Korteweg and De Vries 61 Bastiaan Willink
4 A note on Einstein’s Scratch Notebook of 1910-1913 81 Diana K. Buchwald, Jürgen Renn and Robert Schlögl
5 The reception of relativity in the Netherlands 89 Jip van Besouw and Jeroen van Dongen
6 ‘Our stomachs can’t wait that long’:
E.C. van Leersum and the rise of applied nutrition research in
the Netherlands 111
Pim Huijnen
7 Ernst Laqueur (1880-1947):
The career of an outsider 131
Peter Jan Knegtmans 8 Much ado about cold:
Leiden’s resistance to the International Temperature Scale of 1927 141 Dirk van Delft
9 The magnet and the cold:
Wander de Haas and the burden of being Kamerlingh Onnes’
successor 163
Ad Maas
10. ‘The search for a black cat in an unlit room, where there is no cat at all’:
Investigation by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences into
dowsing and earth rays 179
Jan Guichelaar
11 Amsterdam memories 199
Roger H. Stuewer
About the authors 207
Index 211
Colour insert: Material heritage of Dutch science between 1850 and 1950:
Ten highlights from Museum Boerhaave
4 A note on Einstein’s Scratch Notebook of 1910-1913
Diana K. Buchwald, Jürgen Renn and Robert Schlögl
Starting at a young age and continuing into the last decade of his life, Einstein often worked simultaneously on myriad topics. Over the past years, systematic examination of his previously unpublished manuscripts has yielded deep insights into his work. Yet, portions of text in Einstein’s Scratch Notebook, published in 1993 in facsimile in Volume 3 of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, have remained un- explained.1Here, we show that the notebook provides information on his hitherto unremarked upon interest in oscillating chemical reactions. It also contains a glimpse into the much-disputed fate of his daughter Lieserl.
Albert Einstein graduated in 1900, at age 21, from the polytechnic in Zurich.
Unable to find academic employment, he worked as substitute teacher and private tutor and, in 1902, became a technical expert at the Swiss Federal Office for In- tellectual Property in Bern. He spent seven productive years in this‘secular clois- ter,’ publishing more than sixty scientific papers before becoming an Extraordin- ary Professor of Physics at the University of Zurich in late 1909.2By then, Einstein was married to his university classmate Mileva Marić, with whom he had fath- ered, first, an illegitimate daughter, and, in 1904, his first son Hans-Albert.
During the first half of his life, Einstein was not a careful preserver of his manuscripts and correspondence. Thus, for example, there are no known manu- scripts or drafts of his most important papers of 1905 on the determination of molecular dimensions, Brownian motion, the special theory of relativity, or the photoelectric effect. Neither do we know of manuscripts for his other numerous papers published before 1909, including his important expansion of the quantum theory to the solid state, or his work on capillarity, molecular forces, and thermo- dynamics.
The Einstein Archives preserve a very few notebooks, address books and diaries that Einstein kept during his lifetime, among them the small, bound Scratch Note- book, most likely purchased in the fall of 1909, that is thought to have served as an intermittent aide-mémoire from 1909 to 1914. It appears that the time frame for its use can be narrowed to the span between the Spring of 1910 and early 1913.
While not every entry on the 33 pages of the Notebook can be dated or interpreted
with certainty, we can now provide a more precise chronology and explanation for several developments in its first pages.
On the first right-hand page of the Notebook there appear two enigmatic entries.
In the middle of the page appears the name‘A. Ellermann, Institutsmechaniker,’
followed by an address. We know that, in the first week of March 1910, the che- mist Walther Nernst and the physicist Heinrich Rubens, both interested in Ein- stein’s work on the emerging quantum theory, travelled from Berlin and visited him in Zurich. Having just completed an article to be published in the new Journal de Chimie Physique, Nernst had visited with its founder Philippe-Auguste Guye in Geneva.3Only a few weeks earlier, Nernst had presented the first experimental results on the behaviour of specific heats at low temperatures to the Prussian Academy of Sciences, together with a demonstration of his new platinum and copper calorimeters.4This work was the first empirical confirmation of Einstein’s theoretical predictions, published in 1907, for this temperature domain. Nernst recorded his strong impressions of his meeting Einstein, writing to Arthur Schus- ter about the‘original young thinker’ whose work was of ‘great boldness.’5Dur- ing their conversations, Einstein or Rubens likely mentioned the name of Albert Ellermann, the mechanic of the Physics Institute at the University of Berlin, known for designing important electrotechnical equipment.6It seems that Ein- stein intended to visit or write to Ellermann in regard to his own teaching and research, since other notes nearby testify to his interest in electrochemistry and electromechanics at the time.
Just below Ellermann’s address, there is a mention of a young girl, to which we shall return.
The immediately following entries on the same page read, in German:‘taxes community.’ These most likely refer to September 1910. We know that in late Summer 1910 Einstein began negotiations for an appointment to the chair of physics at the German University in Prague. To this end, he travelled in Septem- ber to Vienna, where the offices of the Ministry of Education of the Austro-Hun- garian Empire were located. There, he was confronted with the requirement im- posed on all civil servants that he officially declare and enter his religious affiliation when filling out the forms for his professorial appointment. Affiliation with a religious community was required and may explain why Einstein noted that he would have to pay taxes to the Kultusgemeinde (the Jewish community).
Two notes on the next pages refer to ponderomotive forces and magnetism, a subject on which Einstein delivered public lectures that same fall in Basel, and that he discussed with Nernst and Rubens in Spring 1910. We also found notes in Nernst’s own handwriting (on p. 6), recapitulating formulae contained in a paper he had published in the Spring of 1910.
Later notes refer to Einstein’s teaching activities, including laboratory work, in the Summer and Winter semesters of 1910. His own research at the time also figures prominently, including capillarity, the foundations of statistical me-
chanics, critical opalescence, the elastic behaviour of matter, radiation theory, and relativity.
Fig. 1– In his notebook (pp. 23-24) Einstein describes an experiment dealing with periodic processes in heterogeneous reactions. The correct explanation is still being debated today.
More surprising is Einstein’s interest in oscillating chemical reactions, their pos- sible explanations, and their relation to life. The notes on p. 23 deal with periodic processes in heterogeneous reactions. After mentioning the dissolution of iron in nitric acid at various concentrations, Einstein is fascinated with the pulsations of mercury under certain conditions. This phenomenon had been known since 1825, and in the years around 1910 a novel, non-chemical explanation was put forward under the designation electrocapillary action.7 In short, the phenomenon de- scribes the pulsating action of a mercury droplet immersed in a mixed solution of oxidizing chemical potential (H2O2, nitric acid, permanganate, perchlorate) in point contact with a non-noble metal (such as iron) that dissolves in the oxidizing solution but does not form an amalgam with the mercury (such as zinc would).
The correct explanation is still enigmatic today, as multiple electrochemical pro- cesses occur simultaneously and the relevant detailed kinetics strongly depend on the experimental details.
Einstein carefully, and correctly, noted two observed effects. First, that tem- perature variations occur that are not connected to putative pressure changes, but rather to the oxidation of the initiating dissolution of the non-noble metal. Sec- ond, he also correctly noted that trace impurities in the system lead to catalytic decomposition of H2O2as an unwanted side reaction. Einstein additionally specu- lated that the drop’s pulsations could be due to fluctuations in pressure that might be generated as the oxidant H2O2decomposed.
Einstein explicitly recognized the analogy of the inorganic, heterogeneous sys- tem with its pulsating droplet to the process of muscular contraction in living systems. He argued, in particular, that the mercury droplet constituted a ‘ma- chine’ that converts chemical energy (of H2O2) into mechanical energy, in full analogy to muscles converting the chemical energy of sugars into mechanical en- ergy.
He was apparently led to this conclusion on learning that H2O2is also decom- posed in living systems by the enzyme‘catalase,’ which he mentions. He noted further that other inorganic catalysts can perform the same reaction and that cat- alytic poisons can inhibit this ability. His final remark concerns additives such as alkali ions that can first accelerate and then inhibit both the catalytic action of inorganic compounds and their respective poisons.
The fragmentary notes represent a tour d’horizon through periodic processes in heterogeneous systems with coverage as complete as it could have been at the time. Einstein clearly noted that the richly detailed processes involved were at best partially understood, indicating that both physical and chemical factors had to be invoked in reaching a proper explanation.
This first half of the notebook concludes with entries related to Berlin and Vienna. Einstein wrote down the address of the Berlin physical chemist Fritz Wei- gert, who was at the time working on the chemical effects of light, a theme on which Einstein himself published in January 1912.8Together with the entry on Ellermann, who died suddenly on 1 September 1910,9 this raises the puzzling question of whether Einstein might have visited Berlin for the first time in his life as early as mid-1910. We know that he went to Berlin in 1912, yet some of the addresses jotted down in this first part of the notebook hint at an earlier trip.
Such an early visit might be of significance in our understanding of his subse- quent career and his scientific contacts. Notes on his visit to Vienna in September 1910 appear on the same double page, including the address of the physicist- philosopher Ernst Mach, whom we know Einstein visited on this occasion.
In subsequent months, Einstein continued to travel, giving talks, visiting fellow scientists, and doing research while travelling. Traces of these activities are docu- mented in the notebook. Thus, Einstein’s first notes on general relativity occur in this second part of the notebook. They recapitulate the content of his first papers on the static gravitational field, which he had just submitted for publication, most likely intending to discuss them with colleagues in Berlin in April 1912. It is likely
that these discussions resulted in a note added in proof to the second of these papers, which appeared in May 1912.10The note is important because it provides the first concrete hint at the role of a variable four-dimensional line element as representing the gravitational potential. This probably constitutes the most con- sequential of Einstein’s triumphs documented in the notebook, which also contains his first calculations on gravitational lensing, made during the same trip to Berlin in the context of discussions with the astronomer Erwin Finlay- Freundlich,11The fact that these insights emerged from discussions with collea- gues confirms that Einstein’s enormous scientific productivity in this period was also rooted in the intellectual network to which he then belonged.
We return now to the first double page and the puzzling entry mentioned above. It comprises two lines, separated by a dash. When read together, the two lines reveal a surprising commentary on Einstein’s personal life:
J. Mäd. [Ölgm?] gekr. H.
meines tot.
When expanded and translated, the note could be rendered as follows:
Young girl. [Oil painting?] c[urly] h[air]; mine [is] dead.
Even if we focus just on the part that is unambiguously readable, the note sug- gests that Einstein refers to‘his girl’ being dead.12
He may have been thinking of his own daughter Lieserl, born in 1902, and probably given up for adoption in the same year. Her fate is unknown; specula- tions have ranged from death shortly after birth due to scarlet fever to her having survived the Second World War. Yet, this note suggests that she died no later than 1912, and most likely around age two, as the CPAE editors had concluded almost two decades ago.13
During his travels between Spring 1910 and Spring 1912, Einstein was probably led to recall his own lost daughter when viewing an oil painting of a girl with curly hair or a crowned head. Some European museum galleries hosted paintings of girls to which his description may roughly fit. Among them are Velasquez’s portraits of the Infanta Margarita Teresa located at the Kunsthistorisches Mu- seum in Vienna. But a more likely candidate is the remarkable portrait by Titian of Clarissa Strozzi, a milestone in the artistic depiction of children.14The latter painting was on display in Berlin’s then still young Bode Gallery, not far from the scientific sites that Einstein visited either on his trip to Berlin in early 1912, or perhaps an earlier trip that he might have undertaken in 1910. The gallery was within walking distance of the Physics Institute where the mechanic Ellermann worked; it was also very close to Nernst’s Second Chemical Institute, and within steps of the building where Berlin’s Physical Society met.
Fig. 2– Portrait of Clarissa Strozzi, painting by Titian, 1542.
Source: Gemäldegalerie Berlin
The period 1910-1912 in Einstein’s work is best known for his preoccupation with either quantum theory or with relativity theory. But the notes show him engaged in experiment, as he had been in earlier years, and continuing his interest in physical chemistry. In a different vein, they perhaps reveal a glimpse into the disputed fate of his first child, his daughter Lieserl. In their brevity and starkness, the jottings suggest a moment of intense sorrow over the loss of his first child, who was born a decade earlier. Also, in contrast to the still widely held image of Einstein as an isolated thinker, the notebook illuminates his creative engagement with a wide-ranging network of fellow scientists.
Acknowledgement
This paper goes back to the work of Anne J. Kox in the early years of the Einstein Papers Project. It is a pleasure for the authors to acknowledge how much they have benefitted from Anne’s contributions to this project, as well as from many stimulating discussions over the years. We are grateful to Urs Schoepflin for dis- cussing with us candidates for the painting Einstein may have seen, and to Lindy Divarci for editorial support.
Notes
1. See CPAE, Vol. 3, Appendix A,‘Einstein’s scratch notebook’, 1910–1914?, pp. 563-597.
All references to events and dates are documented in the Collected papers of Albert Einstein (CPAE), Volumes 2-5. The notebook is available online at http://alberteinstein.info/
vufind1/Digital/EAR000034432#page/1/mode/2up.
2. For a complete list of his writings until 1920, both published and unpublished, see CPAE,Vol. 11.
3. Nernst (1910), pp. 288-67.
4. Nernst, Koref & Lindemann (1910), pp. 247-61, presented to the Prussian Academy of Sciences on 17 February 1910.
5. See Kormos Barkan (1999), p. 182, and Einstein to Jakob Laub, 16 March 1920, CPAE, Vol. 5.
6. Ellermann built and sold various electrical instruments to scientists; for example, electric contact breakers and carbon rheostats. His instruments were purchased by foreign academic laboratories as well, such as a quadrant electrometer for the physics department at the University of Lund in 1905 (see Lunds universitet, Lunds universitets årsberättelse (1908), p. 51).
7. For an historical survey, see Möllencamp, Flintjer & Jansen (1994), doi: 10.1002/
ckon.19940010303.
8. Thermodynamic proof of the law of photochemical equivalence. Annalen der Physik 37 (1912), pp. 832-838. See CPAE, Vol. 4, Doc. 2, pp. 114-121, and the editorial note
‘Einstein on the law of photochemical equivalence’, pp. 109-113.
9. Zeitschrift der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Mechanik und Optik, 15 September 1910. Springer, p. 180.
10. ‘On the theory of the static gravitational field’ and ‘Note added in proof’. Annalen der Physik 38 (1912), pp. 443-458, CPAE, Vol. 4, Doc. 4, pp. 146-164. For historical discussion, see Renn (2007) and Blum et al. (2012).
11. See Renn, Sauer & Stachel (1997); Renn & Sauer (2003); Sauer (2008).
12. The abbreviation‘gekr. H.’ can plausibly be expanded as ‘gekräuseltes’ or ‘gekraustes’
‘Haar’ (‘curled, curly, hair’) or as ‘gekröntes Haupt’ (‘crowned head’). The part that is most difficult to read may stand for some abbreviation of‘Ölgemälde’ (‘oil painting’).
13. See CPAE, Vols. 2 and 5; Renn & Schulmann (1992).
14. For an analysis of its significance, see Freedman (1989).
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