A group of photographs documenting Einstein’s visit to the California Institute of Technology in the first quarter of 1931, and featuring his wife, Elsa, his ‘calculator’ Walther Mayer, and other scientists including Robert Millikan and Albert Michelson.
[: 1930-1931]. An important group of photographs documenting Einstein’s second visit to America, and his first to the California Institute of Technology, which began at the end of December 1930. The main purpose of the visit was to discuss Edwin Hubble’s observations, made in 1929 with the 100-inch telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory (then the largest telescope in the world), which showed that light from distant nebulae (galaxies) was red-shifted, indicating that the universe was expanding. Einstein had believed that the universe is static, and had introduced his ‘cosmological constant’ into his equations of general relativity to allow for a static solution. When Einstein met Hubble at the Mount Wilson Observatory in January and February 1931, he was visibly moved with Hubble’s discovery and reportedly said, with tears in his eyes that “It was the most beautiful and satisfying interpretation of astronomical science.” In light of the new evidence, Einstein published a paper two months later renouncing the concept of a cosmological constant, whose invention Einstein denounced as “the greatest blunder of my life.” Einstein was accompanied on his visit by Walther Mayer (1887-1948), who had been appointed as his mathematical assistant in 1929. Mayer and Einstein worked together on several approaches towards a unified field theory. “On the way over, [Einstein] and his mathematical calculator, Walther Mayer, holed up, working on revisions to his unified field theory, in an upper-deck suite with a sailor guarding the door” (Isaacson, p. 368). Two of the photographs are of Einstein at Mount Wilson, one with Mayer and the observatory’s director Walter Adams (1876-1956), who had confirmed Einstein’s prediction of the gravitational red-shift (although his observations were later shown to be faulty); the other with Mayer and solar physicist Charles St. John (1857-1935) who had assisted Hubble with his red-shift observations. Another photograph shows Einstein between fellow Nobel Laureates Albert Michelson (1852-1931) and Robert Millikan (1868-1953), Caltech's “chairman of the executive council” (effectively its president). Together with Edward Morley, Michelson had in 1887 carried out the famous Michelson–Morley experiment which failed to detect evidence of the existence of the luminiferous ether; this provided crucial evidence for the early acceptance of special relativity. On this trip, Einstein “paid tribute to the aging Michelson, carefully praising his famous experiments that detected no ether drift, without explicitly saying that they were a basis for his special theory of relativity” (Isaacson, p. 372). “In the early 1930s [Einstein] came to California specifically to consult with scientists at the California Institute of Technology. Few members of the general public understood the nature of his visits, but they idolized him all the same. From the moment his boat docked in San Diego on December 31 1930, the reception accorded him by Californians was one part show business, one part hero worship, and one part genuine affection. Groups of children dressed in blue and white middies serenaded him and thrust wreaths of flowers into his hands, two bands struck up tunes, and in Los Angeles a theatrical group, the Yale Puppeteers, opened a play called Mr. Noah in which the ark landed on Mt. Wilson instead of on Mt. Ararat … “As early as 1913, Einstein was looking for experimental verification for the correctness of his theory of general relativity, and he had been in correspondence with Caltech's George Ellery Hale, asking him to make an astronomical measurement. He was anxious to know if Hale could detect the influence of the sun's gravitation field upon a light ray. Hale replied that in order to try he needed a solar eclipse. The experiment was finally carried out in 1919 by two British expedition teams and again in 1922 by an American team of astronomers – and it did confirm the theory of general relativity. “There were cosmological implications in this theory, and they attracted a lot of attention in the 1920s and 1930s – nowhere more than at Caltech. Millikan had been urging Einstein to visit the campus for some time, and, in the fall of 1930, he agreed to spend the winter quarter in Pasadena. Not only would he be able to discuss his theory and its interpretation with distinguished scientists; he would also be meeting old friends again – Richard Tolman, the cosmologist; Paul Epstein, the theoretical physicist; and Theodore von Karman, the aerodynamicist … “The new Athenaeum at Caltech was the setting for many dinners to honor Einstein. At the first, on January 15, 1931, the guests included the physicist and Nobel Laureate A. A. Michelson and 200 members of the California Institute Associates. Several weeks later, a second dinner was held at which all the astronomers from the Institute and the Mt. Wilson Observatory were present. Edwin Hubble was there, as was Charles E. St. John, who verified the third prediction of the theory of general relativity [the gravitational red-shift]. Colleagues came from Berkeley, including Tolman’s close friend and co-author G. N. Lewis, who wrote to say he was coming with a friend – though not without some mildly humorous trepidation. As he put it in his letter to Tolman: ‘I have just accepted an invitation from Oppenheimer to drive me down. Do you think I should take out accident insurance?’ “Einstein was not without a sense of humor himself. At a farewell luncheon in his honor on February 24, 1931, which was sponsored by the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce, he said: “I want to thank the extraordinary group of scholars in the fields of physics and astronomy who have afforded me glimpses of their work. They have conducted me not only into the world of atoms and crystals, but also to the surface of the sun and into the outermost depths of space. There I saw worlds which are flying away from us with incomprehensible rapidity, in spite of the fact that their inhabitants do not know us well enough to justify any such action’” (Goodstein). “Millikan was a physicist who had won the Nobel Prize in 1923 for having ‘verified experimentally Einstein’s all-important photoelectric equation.’ He likewise verified Einstein’s interpretation of Brownian motion. So it was understandable that, as he was building Caltech into one of the world’s pre-eminent scientific institutions, he worked diligently to bring Einstein there. “Despite al they had in common, Millikan and Einstein were different enough in their personal outlooks that they were destined to have an awkward relationship. Millikan was so conservative scientifically that he resisted Einstein’s interpretation of the photoelectric effect and his dismissal of the ether even after they were apparently verified by his own experiments. And he was even more conservative politically. A robust and athletic son of an Iowa preacher, he had a penchant for patriotic militarism that was as pronounced as Einstein’s aversion to it” (Isaacson, p. 373). “To physics posterity, Viennese mathematician Walther Mayer is mostly known as ‘Einstein’s calculator’. He had apparently been called that at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, which Einstein and Mayer visited together in the winter of 1930/31. It is true that in order to advance in his studies to construct a unified field theory, Einstein relied on the expertise of mathematicians. With his unified field theory, Einstein attempted to formally join his own theory of general relativity with Maxwell’s electromagnetism. “When Einstein was looking for a new mathematics assistant in 1929, Mayer was hired on the recommendation of eminent mathematician Richard von Mises. Like Einstein, von Mises at that time held a professorship in Berlin. Walther Mayer then served as private lecturer at the University of Vienna, finishing the second volume of a very well received textbook series on differential geometry which he co-authored with fellow Viennese mathematician Adalbert Duschek. Subsequently, Mayer and Einstein worked together on several approaches towards a unified field theory consisting of 1) the analysis of solutions to Einstein’s so-called distant teleparallelism approach, 2) the invention of a variant of the Kaluza-Klein theory (in which not space-time, but attached vector spaces are 5-dimensional) and finally 3) the construction of a formalism they referred to as “semi-vectors” for interpreting Dirac-spinors in simpler, classical field-theoretical, terms and reformulating the Dirac equation accordingly. Their joint work was published in 7 papers over a period of roughly four years, 1930-1934 … “While being humbly appreciative of the vital improvement that Einstein brought to his career, Mayer was at the same time also quite unhappy about his role as Einstein’s ‘appendage’. Einstein, however, was aware of and respected this sentiment of Mayer’s: When he bargained his Princeton position with Abraham Flexner, a founding director of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, he insisted on an independent professorship for Mayer as well. After some back and forth, this was indeed granted at the last minute. However, the question of Mayer’s legitimacy as an independent professor at Princeton surfaced again after their arrival. Feeling unwelcomed and not sufficiently supported by Einstein, Mayer finally ended their collaboration after just one further joint paper in 1934. He felt that his career would be advanced best if from now on he would focus entirely on his own studies in pure mathematics. In the end, Mayer was able to retain his tenure at Princeton for the rest of his life, but he subsequently appeared to have wished to no longer be associated with work on unified field theory. On the outside, Einstein and Mayer remained in friendly contact while Einstein found new collaborators. The ones immediately succeeding Walther Mayer at Princeton were Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen” (Lessel). The photographs are accompanied by a number of letters from Mayer to his brother Arthur in Austria, discussing Einstein’s work, Hitler and the Nazis. Mayer was Jewish, and it was only through Einstein’s intervention that he was given the title of professor at the University of Vienna. Mayer immediately took a leave of absence from this position to continue his collaboration with Einstein when he had returned to Berlin. At a press conference on his arrival in New York, Einstein was asked “‘What do you think of Adolf Hitler?’ Einstein replied, ‘He is living on the empty stomach of Germany. As soon as economic conditions improve, he will no longer be important’” (Isaacson, p. 369). “On the day he left New York, Einstein revised slightly one of the statements he had made on his arrival. Asked again about Hitler, he declared that if the Nazis were ever able to gain control, he would consider leaving Germany” (ibid., p. 371). In April 1933, Einstein discovered that the new German government had passed laws barring Jews from holding any official positions, including teaching at universities. He left Germany in summer 1933 and took up a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, despite Millikan’s efforts to lure him to Caltech. He remained at the Institute until his death in 1955. Goodstein, ‘Albert Einstein in California,’ Engineering and Science, May-June 1979, pp. 17-19 – https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3237/1/einstein.pdf. Isaacson, Einstein. His Life and Universe, 2007. Lessel, ‘Walther Mayer – more than ‘Einstein’s calculator’’ – https://www.iqoqi-vienna.at/de/blogs/blog/walther-mayer-more-than-einsteins-calculator.
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Item #6005
Price: $35,000.00
