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Andrew Robinson, Author and Journalist, reveals why Albert Einstein travelled to Britain on three occasions in the early 1930s – and how he shocked his audience in Oxford with his new thinking about how science work.
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| Historic moment: On 23 May 1931 Einstein received an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford. Photo: courtesy - ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy Stock Photo |
The History of Science Museum
in Oxford contains 18,000 objects, ranging from an ancient Roman
vertical disc sundial to an X-ray spectrometer built by the physicist
Henry Moseley in 1913. Its most famous object, however, is a humble
Oxford blackboard – chalked by Albert Einstein on 16 May 1931 with
calculations about the size, density and age of the universe. The
museum’s website describes it as “a relic of a secular saint”,
adding that some visitors “treat it almost as an object of veneration,
anxiously requesting its location on arrival and eager to experience
some connection with this near-mythical figure of science”.
The blackboard is perhaps the most lasting legacy of a
visit that Einstein paid to Oxford in the spring of 1931. He had been to
the city once before, having dropped by briefly in 1921 during his
first visit to Britain. That was shortly after British astronomers had
observed the 1919 solar eclipse, confirming Einstein’s general theory of
relativity and propelling him to fame. On that occasion, he and his
second wife, Elsa, were in Oxford for just a few hours, having a guided
tour of the city and university provided by Einstein’s admirer Frederick
Lindemann. A fellow German-born physicist, Lindemann was at the time
head of the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford and later rose to fame as
Winston Churchill’s science adviser.
Einstein’s return in 1931 was also due to Lindemann, who had been courting the great man on behalf of the Oxford-based Rhodes Trust,
which wished to launch a series of lectures in memory of the
businessman and South African politician Cecil Rhodes. Einstein, who
hardly spoke English, had already declined a previous invitation in July
1927, in part because he felt that his poor health – triggered by
overwork and an inadequate diet in Berlin during the rigours of the
First World War – would make “a long stay in foreign and unfamiliar
surroundings…too great a burden for me, particularly bearing in mind the
language difficulty”.
But shortly afterwards he changed his mind, telling Lindemann in August 1927: “It is very important to me that in England, where my work has received greater recognition than anywhere else in the world, I should not give the impression of ingratitude.” Other difficulties intervened, but at long last, after Lindemann saw Einstein personally in Berlin in 1930, he agreed to lecture, and to stay at Lindemann’s Oxford college, Christ Church...
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| Photo: courtesy - CC BY-SA 3.0/Museum of the History of Science, Oxford |
The idea of preserving Einstein’s blackboards during his visit to Oxford in 1931 seems to have come from dons who had attended his three public lectures, notably Robert Gunther, who had founded the History of Science Museum in Oxford a few years earlier. They rescued the two blackboards from Einstein’s 16 May lecture about the expansion of the universe. Although one board was later accidentally wiped in the museum’s storeroom, the other survives.
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Recommended Reading
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| Einstein on the Run How Britain Saved the World’s Greatest Scientist Publication date: 24 Sep 2019 |
