Louis Roney: The savviest guy

Relatively speaking, we all have some relatives somewhere. But the relatives that Albert Einstein was concerned with were not his kin-folk.

In my salad days, one guy was consistently referred to as “the smartest person in the world.” When I was lunching in a Princeton, N.J., restaurant prior to a Harvard/Princeton football game, I looked out the window, and saw an elderly white-maned man licking a vanilla ice cream cone as he sauntered slowly down the sidewalk. For specific reasons I wondered what the old guy might be thinking at that moment, for I recognized him as “the world’s savviest guy,” Albert Einstein.

Einstein was a guy who cogitated about the universe and all that is in it. While he held an ice cream cone in his hand, in his mind he was holding the infinite!

Adolf Hitler made lots of decisions, a great many of them unspeakably horrible. But Hitler’s making of Germany a land impossible for a large Jewish population to live in any longer, was certainly one of Hitler’s stupidest “Dummheiten!” In particular Hitler forced the emigration of many of the worlds top Jewish intellectuals who fled Nazi persecution and ended up in places like Princeton, N.J., where Albert Einstein lived and thought — as an honored citizen and professor at Princeton University. What great luck it was when Hitler “exported ” this atomic genius to the U.S., a felicitous misstep which prevented Germany from developing the Atomic Bomb.

Einstein was born in 1879 in Ulm, Germany, and lived primarily in Munich, Germany. He soon became the world’s premier theoretical physicist who developed the General Theory of Relativity, a pillar of modern physics along with quantum mechanics. While best known for his mass “energy equivalence formula E = MC2 (which was dubbed “the world's most famous equation),” Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his service to theoretical physics, and especially for discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.” The latter was pivotal in establishing Quantum theory.

Near the beginning of his career, Einstein already thought that Newtonian mechanics were no longer enough to reconcile the laws of classical mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. This led to the development of his “special theory of relativity.” He realized, however, that the principle of relativity could also be extended to gravitational fields, and with his subsequent theory of gravitation, he published a paper on the general theory of relativity. He continued to deal with problems of statistical mechanics and quantum theory, which led to his explanations of particle theory and the motion within molecules. He also investigated the thermal properties of light, which laid the foundation of the Photon Theory of Light. Einstein applied the general theory of relativity to model the structure of the universe as a whole.

He was visiting the United States when Hitler came to power in 1933, and did not go back to Germany, where he had been a professor at the Berlin Academy of Sciences. He settled in the U.S., becoming a citizen in 1940. On the eve of World War II, he alerted President Franklin D.

Roosevelt that Germany might be developing an atomic weapon, and recommended that the U.S. begin similar research: this eventually led to what would become the Manhattan Project and the American atomic bomb. Einstein was in support of defending the Allied forces, but strongly denounced using the new discovery of nuclear fission as a weapon. Later, with the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, Einstein signed the “Russell/Einstein Manifesto,” which highlighted the danger of nuclear weapons. Einstein was affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton until his death in April 1955.

And since then, any physicist who dotes on ice cream cones is a winner by me!