Quantum_ Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality - Manjit Kumar [67]
Real food was scarce, but still available to those who could afford to pay. Einstein was luckier than most, as he received food parcels from relatives in the south and from friends in Switzerland. Amid all the suffering, Einstein felt 'like a drop of oil on water, isolated by mentality and outlook on life'.40 Yet he could not look after himself and reluctantly moved into a vacant apartment next door to Elsa's. With Mileva still unwilling to grant a divorce, Elsa finally had Einstein as near to her as propriety would allow. Nursing Albert slowly back to health gave Elsa the perfect opportunity to pressurise him into doing whatever it took to get a divorce. Einstein initially had no intention of rushing into marriage a second time, as the first felt like 'ten years of prison', but eventually he relented.41 Mileva agreed after Einstein proposed to increase his existing payments, make her the recipient of his widow's pension, and offer her the money when he won the Nobel Prize. By 1918, having been nominated in six of the previous eight years, he was a dead certainty to be awarded the prize some time soon.
Einstein and Elsa married in June 1919. He was 40, she three years older. What happened next was beyond anything that Elsa could have imagined. Before the end of the year, the lives of the newlyweds were transformed as Einstein became world-famous. He was hailed as the 'new Copernicus' by some, derided by others.
In February 1919, just as Einstein and Mileva were finally divorced, two expeditions set off from Britain. One headed to the island of Principe off the coast of West Africa, the other to Sobral in the north-west of Brazil. Each destination had been carefully chosen by astronomers as a perfect site from which to observe the solar eclipse on 29 May. Their aim was to test a central prediction of Einstein's general theory of relativity, the bending of light by gravity. The plan was to photograph stars in close proximity to the sun that would be visible only during the few minutes of blackout of a total solar eclipse. In reality, of course, these stars were nowhere near the sun, but their light passed very close to it before reaching the earth.
The photographs would be compared with those taken at night six months earlier when the earth's position in relation to the sun ensured that the light from these same stars passed nowhere near the neighbourhood of the sun. The bending of light due to the presence of the sun warping the space-time in its vicinity would be revealed by small changes in the position of the stars in the two sets of photographs. Einstein's theory predicted the exact amount of displacement due to the bending or deflection of light that should be observed. At a rare joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society on 6 November in London, the cream of British science gathered to hear whether Einstein was right or not.42
REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE
NEW THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE
Newtonian Ideas Overthrown
… were the headlines on page twelve of the London Times the following morning. Three days later, on 10 November, the New York Times carried an article with six headings: 'Lights all askew in the heavens/Men of science more or less agog over results of eclipse observation/Einstein theory triumphs/Stars not where they seem or were calculated to be, but nobody need worry/A book for 12 wise men/ No more in all world could comprehend it, said Einstein, when his daring publishers accepted it.'43 Einstein had never said any such thing, but it made good copy as the press latched onto the mathematical sophistication