Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [25]
As it turned out, scientists in mid-career – as Robert Millikan was – are more likely to commit such sins. Those who feel aggrieved at the way the funding process works are also more likely to misbehave. To add to the issues, status matters in scientific misbehaviour. ‘Star scientists’ are more likely to commit scientific sins, but less likely to get caught, than the average scientist.
Albert Einstein’s name, which is synonymous with genius, crops up in a few chapters of this book. But it is perhaps most interesting to look more closely at him as a scientist behaving badly. If Einstein were forced to fill out Brian Martinson’s ‘Scientists Behaving Badly’ survey honestly, he would have to admit to committing five of the sixteen misdemeanours listed. When we allow for the fact that three of them cannot be applied to his particular field, that gives us a hit rate of just over one-third. Einstein provides a perfect example of the character that will produce great science and think nothing of the misdemeanours that such breakthroughs demand.
Einstein’s track record would set off alarm bells in university personnel departments today. The close attention such a genius receives has exposed him as a womaniser who made shameless passes at his mistress’s daughter. When confronted by both women, he shrugged and asked them to decide which of them he should marry once he had divorced his wife, Mileva. In his divorce settlement he arrogantly promised to give Mileva the money from an as yet unearned Nobel Prize. When the prize money did come in, he gave her only half. He let his alimony payments dwindle to intermittency. He made his university pay him a full-salary pension on retirement, threatening to use his fame against them should they refuse. He hid money from the taxman, and he cut off his schizophrenic son, leaving him to die a ‘third class’ patient in a mental institution.
None of this proves anything about Einstein’s scientific integrity, but it would be naive to think that a scientist’s humanity is neatly compartmentalised; personal and professional lives are unlikely to be so neatly separated that character traits obvious in one will have no bearing on conduct in the other.
Was Einstein fundamentally dishonest, a cheat in science as well as love? No. But there are plenty of shady moments in his professional life. Putting this heroic scientist into the best possible light, it is clear that he was an enthusiastic and gifted thinker who, in his determination to understand the universe and make it understood to others, considered the accepted practices of science as guidelines rather than laws carved in stone. He was well aware that convention demanded the game should be played a certain way, but sometimes it suited him to defy convention. He was certainly not above picking the data that worked best with his theories, for example.
In early 1915, a little cherry-picking must have seemed a very minor scientific misdemeanour. On the outskirts of Warsaw, the German army was busy putting the creations of German chemists to the test. Xylyl bromide – better known as tear gas – was a disappointment when it was first used: it was cold in Poland in January, and the gas froze instead of dispersing. When the army switched to using lethal gas shells, it was a different story. At Ypres, chlorine gas killed 6,000 Allied soldiers in just ten minutes.
Meanwhile, Einstein, who had bravely registered his objections to the war at considerable risk to his own status and safety, was conducting his own private battle.