He's Relatively Familiar: Albert Einstein in Contemporary American Fiction

Perhaps one of the truest gauges of a person's impact on culture is the limerick. With that in mind, we should check on the state of Einstein's There was a young lady named Bright, Who traveled much faster than light. She started one day In the relative way, And returned on the previous night. Clifton Fadiman attributed that to Arthur Buller in his 1962 The Mathematical Magpie (Friedman & Donley 11). But certainly, well before the 1960s Einstein's Theory of Relativity had already made enormous changes in our culture, even though as most experts on both culture and science agree, it is virtually always grossly misunderstood and distorted except in the halls of science. When one speaks of what a culture adopts as its icons, however, accuracy hardly matters. Icons serve a completely different purpose altogether. Having established this disclaimer, we can turn to more recent events. Within a matter of months in 1992 and 1993, two very different types of novels were released with Albert Einstein as a central character: Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams purports to take place in Einstein's mind in 1905 as he developed his Special Theory of Relativity. The other, Todd Gitlin's The Murder of Albert Einstein takes place in 1992 with plot involvements that hark back to the 1950s and Einstein's last year as he worked-ultimately unsuccessfully-to develop a Unified Field Theory. Theoretical physics does not seem the stuff of rousing novels; nevertheless, Lightman's novel became a best seller, and Gitlin's collected a smaller but enthusiastic audience. Both authors rely on documented, factual events, as well as accurate science, for their clearly fictional stories, but they use both those events and science in what appears at first glance very different ways. Lightman, a distinguished physicist himself, wants more than to tell a good story about an important scientist; he wants to illuminate the scientific process itself. His definition of scientific thinking, the kind involved in the "first-rate science" that leads to redefinitions of reality, depends on more than analytical thinking or the scientific process. He points to a very necessary intuitive component, the epiphany perhaps, or in his words, "planing": "that lifting feeling when everything suddenly falls into place" ("Science on the Right Side of the Brain" 43). While by his own admission Lightman has planed briefly and sporadically for no more than seconds at a time, he speculates that Einstein could probably plane for minutes at a time-minutes in which he came to know what no one else had even imagined before. Independent evidence indicates that even Einstein himself valued this kind of thinking and, according to Einstein scholar Gerald Holton, he "was on record, more than once, that a means of writing must be found that conveys the thought processes that lead to discoveries-showing how scientists thought and wrestled with their problems" ("Einstein's Scientific Program..." 49). Holton also discusses the unconventional way Einstein structured his own scientific papers, noting their "heuristic character" (55), a quality more often associated with humanities scholarship than with scientific thinking. According to William Eamon, "Above all, for Einstein the mind must be free to think any thought: only in this way can scientific progress be guaranteed.... The creative process is not only the most difficult part of science, it is also indescribable, for the creation of scientific concepts is fundamentally an intuitive, almost poetic experience" (349). And so, as the first-rate scientist whose work embodies the qualities Lightman values, Einstein becomes his ideal protagonist. But Lightman's task gets more complicated. If, as Aristotle proclaimed in his Poetics, plot requires action, the contemplative life of a remote scientist poses particular problems for the would-be novelist in search of a story. Abraham Pais, Einstein's biographer and personal friend, tells us that for Einstein as a scientist at work, "every scientific triumph was preceded by a long period of quiet gestation" (38). …