Quantum_ Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality - Manjit Kumar [64]
While Einstein felt 'only a mixture of pity and disgust', Nernst at 50 volunteered as an ambulance driver.17 Planck, unable to contain his patriotism, declared: 'It is a great feeling to be able to call oneself a German.'18 Believing that it was a glorious time to be alive, as rector of Berlin University, Planck sent his students to the trenches in the name of a 'just war'. Einstein could hardly believe it when he discovered that Planck, Nernst, Röntgen and Wien were among the 93 luminaries who signed the Appeal to the Cultured World.
This manifesto was published on 4 October 1914 in leading German newspapers and in others abroad, its signatories protesting against 'the lies and defamations with which our enemies are trying to besmirch Germany's pure cause in the hard life-and-death struggle forced upon it'.19 They asserted that Germany bore no responsibility for the war, had not violated Belgian neutrality, and had committed no atrocities. Germany was 'a cultured nation to whom the legacy of Goethe, Beethoven and Kant is fully as sacred as its hearths and plots of land'.20
Planck quickly regretted having signed, and in private began apologising to his friends among foreign scientists. Of all those that lent their names to the falsehoods and half-truths of the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three, as it became known, Einstein had expected better from Planck. Even the German chancellor had publicly admitted that Belgium's neutral status had been violated: 'The wrong that we are committing, we will endeavour to make good as soon as our military goal is reached.'21
As a Swiss citizen, Einstein was not asked to add his signature. However, he was deeply concerned at the long-term effect of the unbridled national chauvinism of the manifesto and was involved in producing a counter-manifesto entitled an Appeal to Europeans. It called on 'educated men of all states' to ensure that 'the conditions of peace did not become the source of future wars'.22 It challenged the attitude expressed by the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three as 'unworthy of what until now the whole world has understood by the term culture, and it would be a disaster if it were to become the common property of educated people'.23 It castigated German intellectuals for behaving 'almost to a man, as though they had relinquished any further desire for the continuance of international relations'.24 However, including Einstein, there were only four signatories.
By the spring of 1915 the attitudes of his colleagues at home and abroad had left Einstein feeling deeply disheartened: 'Even scholars of the various nations behave as if their cerebrums had been amputated eight months ago.'25 Soon all hope that the war would be short-lived evaporated, leaving him by 1917 'constantly very depressed about the endless tragedy we must witness'.26 'Even the habitual flight into physics does not always help', he confessed to Lorentz.27 Yet the four years of war proved to be among his most productive and creative, as Einstein published a book and some 50 scientific papers, and in 1915 completed his masterpiece – general relativity.
Even before Newton, it had been assumed that time and space were fixed and distinct, the stage on which the never-ending drama of the cosmos was played out. It was an arena where mass, length and time were absolute and unvarying. It was a theatre in which spatial distances and time intervals between events were identical for all observers. Einstein, however, discovered that mass,