M ichael D. G ordin . Einstein in Bohemia

A new “trolley problem.” A trolley in the middle of Berlin in the winter of 1923. You get on a car at the rear, and there are five men already there: Kafka, Nabokov, Einstein, Agnon, Planck. Three Jews, three foreigners, three Nobel Prize winners. Yet, as Michael D. Gordin notes in his deeply pleasing account of Einstein in Bohemia, you can mix and match, depending on how you define each category and the inflection of their self-identification. But whom would you recognize in 1923? Albert Einstein—hair and all, of course. In 1911, Einstein followed a call from the German University in Prague, the third city in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but unlike Vienna and Budapest, a linguistic and cultural orphan. He made a conventional choice and followed the money. He had been an “assistant professor” in Zurich; Prague offered him a chair and substantially more money. The downside: he had to...

Art · Einstein · Physics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Mathematical Physics · Philosophy