# Albert Einstein Theoretical physicist (1879–1955) whose 1905 papers on The Photoelectric Effect, Brownian motion and special relativity remade physics, and whose 1915 general theory of relativity remains the standing description of gravity. The 1921 Nobel Prize was for the photoelectric work, not relativity. He was a founder of [[Quantum Mechanics]] and its most persistent critic, holding the theory correct but incomplete — the position behind The Bohr-Einstein Debates and the 1935 EPR paper, which set out to show [[Entanglement]] absurd and became the founding document of quantum information science; Bell's Theorem and the experiments confirming it settled the substance against him a decade after his death. The science lives on its own pages. This one is for the political life, which is the reason a physics page sits in a vault about the right. ## The refugee Einstein was in Pasadena when Hitler took power in January 1933; he never went back. The Nazi press had already made him its emblem of "Jewish physics" — the Deutsche Physik movement of Lenard and Stark, both Nobel laureates, held that relativity was a fraud of the Jewish mind — and his books were among those burned in May. His property was seized, a bounty reported on his head, and he took up the Institute for Advanced Study post in Princeton that autumn, becoming a citizen in 1940. He spent the rest of the decade getting other refugees out, which is the practical side of the story: the world's most famous scientist as a case worker for visa affidavits. The [[Nazi Party]] page has the regime; the [[Science and Empire]] page has what happens to a science that decides some of its practitioners are the wrong kind. ## The letter and the bomb In August 1939 Leo Szilard drafted and Einstein signed the letter to Roosevelt warning that a uranium bomb was possible and that Germany might build one — the document that started the American program. Einstein was never cleared to work on it; the Army considered him a security risk. After Hiroshima he called the letter the "one great mistake" of his life, chaired the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, and spent his last decade arguing for world government and against the arms race, ending with the Russell–Einstein Manifesto he signed days before he died. ## The file [[J. Edgar Hoover]]'s [[FBI]] kept a file on him that ran to some 1,400 pages, opened in the 1930s on the theory that a pacifist and socialist with his fame was a subversive and grown through the McCarthy years, when he advised witnesses called before the committees to refuse to testify and was denounced on the Senate floor. He was a socialist by conviction (*Why Socialism?*, 1949), a Zionist of the cultural rather than statist kind who declined the presidency of Israel in 1952, and an American civil-rights supporter who called racism the country's "worst disease" and befriended Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois when doing so had a cost. The reason the right's history keeps returning to him is that he is the counterexample to its account of the scientist as apolitical technician: the century's best physicist was also its most public dissenter, and the state that sheltered him also surveilled him. [[McCarthyism]] and the [[History of Science Hub]] carry the surrounding record. ## See Also - The Photoelectric Effect · [[Quantum Mechanics]] · The Bohr-Einstein Debates · [[Entanglement]] · Bell's Theorem · [[History of Science Hub]] - [[Nazi Party]] · [[The Manhattan Project]] · [[J. Edgar Hoover]] · [[FBI]] · [[McCarthyism]] · [[Zionism]] · [[Science and Empire]]