My Friend Albert Einstein

My Friend, Albert EinsteinBanesh HoffmannHe was one of the greatest scientists the world has ever known, yet if I had to convey the essence of Albert Einstein in a single word, I would choose simplicity. Perhaps an anecdote will help. Once, caught in a downpour, he took off his hat and held it under his coat. Asked why, he explained, with admirable logic, that the rain would damage the hat, but his hair would be none the worse for its wetting. This knack for going instinctively to the heart of a matter was the secret of his major scientific discoveries---this and his extraordinary feeling for beauty.I first met Alert Einstein in 1935, at the famous Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. He had been among the first to be invited to the Institute, and was offered carte blanche as to salary. To the director’s dismay, Einstein asked for an impossible sum: it was far too small. The director had to plead with him to accept a larger salary.I was in awe of Einstein, and hesitated before approaching him about some ideas I had been working on. When I finally knocked on his door, a gentle voice said, ―Come‖---with a rising inflection that made the single word both a welcome and a question. I entered his office and found him seated at a table, calculating and smoking his pipe. Dressed in ill-fitting clothes, his hair characteristically awry, he smiled a warm welcome. His utter naturalness at once set me at ease.As I began to explain my ideas, he asked me to write the equations on the blackboard so he could see how they developed. Then came the staggering ---and altogether endearing---request: ―Please go slowly. I do not understand things quickly.‖ This from Einstein! He said it gently, and I laughed. From then on, all vestiges of fear were gone.Einstein was born in 1879 in the German city of Ulm. He had been no infant prodigy; indeed, he was so late in learning to speak that his parents feared he was dullard. In school, though his teachers saw no special talent in him, the signs were already there. He taught himself calculus, for example, and his teachers seemed a little afraid of him because he asked questions they could not answer. At the age of 16, he asked himself whether a light wave would seem stationary if one ran abreast of it. From that innocent question would arise, ten years later, his theory of relativity.Einstein failed his entrance examinations at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School, in Aurich, but was admitted a year later. There he went beyond his regular work to study the masterworks of physics on his own. Rejected when he applied for academic positions, he ultimately found work, in 1902, as a patent examiner in Berne, and there in 1905 his genius burst into fabulous flower.Among the extraordinary thins he produced in that memorable year were his theory of relativity, with its famous offshoot, E=mc² (energy equals mass times the speed of light squared), and his quantum theory of light. These two theories were not only revolutionary, but seemingly contradictory: the former was intimately linked to the theory that light consists of waves, while the latter said it consists somehow of particles. Yet this unknown young man boldly proposed both at once ---and he was right in both cases, though how he could have been is far too complex a story to tell here.Collaborating with Einstein was an unforgettable experience. In 1937, the Polish physicist Leopold Infeld and I asked if we could work with him. He was pleased with the proposal, since he had an idea about gravitation waiting to be worked out in detail. Thus we got to know not merely the man and the friend, but also the professional.The intensity and depth of his concentration were fantastic. When battling a recalcitrantproblem, he worried it as an animal worries its prey. Often, when we found ourselves up against a seemingly insuperable difficulty, he would stand up, put his pipe on the table, and say in his quaint English, ―I will a little tink‖ (he could not pronounce ―th‖). Then he would pace up and down, twirling a lock of his long, graying hair around his forefinger.A dreamy, faraway and yet inward look would come over his face. There was no appearance of concentration, no furrowing of the brow---only a placid inner communion. The minutes would pass, and then suddenly Einstein would stop pacing as his face relaxed into a gentle smile. He had found the solution to the problem. Sometimes it was so simple that Infeld and I could have kicked ourselves for not having thought of it. But the magic had been performed invisibly in the depths of Ei nstein’s mind, by a process we could not fathom.When his wife died he was deeply shaken, but insisted that now more than ever was the time to be working hard. I remember going to his house to work with him during that sad time. His face was haggard and grief-lined, but he put forth a great effort to concentrate. To help him, I steered the discussion away from routine matters into more difficult theoretical problem, and Einstein gradually became absorbed in the discussion. We kept at it for some tow hours, and at the end his eyes were no longer sad. As I left, he thanked me with moving sincerity. ―It was a fun,‖ he said. He had had a moment of surcease from grief, and then groping words expressed a deep emotion.Einstein was an accomplished amateur musician. We used to play duets, he on the violin, I at the piano. One day he surprised me by saying Mozart was the greatest composer of all. Beethoven ―created‖ his music, but the music of Mozart was of such purity and beauty one felt he had merely ―found‖ it --- that it had always existed as part of the inner beauty of the Universe, waiting to be revealed.It was this very Mozartean simplicity that most characterized Einstein’s methods. His 1905 theory of relativity, for example, was built on just tow simple assumptions. One is the so-called principle of relativity, which means, roughly speaking, that we cannot tell whether we are at rest or moving smoothly. The other assumption is that the speed of light is the same no matter what the speed of the object that produces it. You can see how reasonable this is if you think of agitating a stick in a lake to create waves. Whether you wiggle the stick from a stationary pier, or from a rushing speedboat, the waves, once generated, are on their own, and their speed has nothing to do with that of the stick.Each of these assumptions, by itself, was so plausible as to seem primitively obvious. But together they were in such violent conflict that a lesser man would have dropped one or the other and fled in panic. Einstein daringly kept both ---and by so doing he revolutionized physics. For he demonstrated they could, after all, exist peacefully side by side, provided we gave up cherished beliefs about the nature of time.Science is like a house of cards, with concepts like time and space at the lowest level. Tampering with time brought most of the house tumbling down, and it was this that made Einstein’s work so important --- and controversial. At a conference in Pinceton in honor of his 70th birthday, one of the speakers, a Nobel Prize winner, tried to convey the magical quality of Einstein’s achievement. Words failed him, and with a shrug of helplessness he pointed to his wristwatch, and said in tones of awed amazement, ―It all came from this.‖ His very ineloquence made this the most eloquent tribute I have heard to Einstein’s genius …Einstein’s work, performed quietly with pencil and paper, seemed remote from the turmoil of everyday life: But his ideas were so revolutionary they caused violent controversy and irrationalanger. Indeed, in order to be able to award him a belated Nobel Prize, the selection committee had to avoid mentioning relativity, and pretend the prize was awarded primarily for his work on the quantum theory.Political events upset the serenity of his life even more. When the Nazis came to power in Germany, his theories were officially declared false because they had been formulated by a Jew. His property was confiscated, and it is said a price was put on his head.When scientists in the United States, fearful that the Nazis might develop an atomic bomb, sought to alert American authorities to the danger, they were scarcely heeded. In desperation, they drafted a letter which Einstein signed and sent directly to President Roosevelt. It was this act that led to the fateful decision to go all-out on the production of an atomic bomb ---and endeavor in which Einstein took no active part. When he heard of the agony and destruction that his E=mc²had wrought, he was dismayed beyond measure, and from then on there was a look of ineffable sadness in his eyes.There was something elusively whimsical about Einstein. It is illustrated by my favorite anecdote about him. In his first year in Princeton, on Christmas Eve, so the story goes, some children sang carols outside his house. Having finished, they knocked on his door and explained they were collecting money to buy Christmas presents. Einstein listened, then said, ―Wait a moment.‖ He put on his scarf and overcoat, and took his violin from its case. Then, joining the children as they went from door to door, he accompanied their singing of ―Silent Night‖ on his violin.How shall I sum up what it meant to have known Einstein and his works? Like the Nobel Prize winner who pointed helplessly at his watch, I can find no adequate words. It was akin to the revelation of great art that lets one see what was formerly hidden. And when, for example, I walk on the sand of a lonely beach, I am reminded of his ceaseless search for cosmic simplicity --- and the scene takes on a deeper, sadder beauty.The Invisible PoorMichael HarringtonThe millions who are poor in the United States tend to become increasingly invisible. Here is a great mass of people, yet it takes an effort of the intellect and will even to see them.I discovered this personally in a curious way. After I wrote my first article on poverty in America, I had all the statistics down on paper. I had proved to my satisfaction that there were around 50,000,000 poor in this country. Yet, I realized I did not believe my own figures. The poor existed in the Government reports; they were percentages and numbers in long, close columns, but they were not part of my experience. I could prove that the other America existed, but I had never been there.There are perennial reasons that make the other America an invisible land.Poverty is often off the beaten track. It always has been. The ordinary tourist never left the main highway, and today he rides interstate turnpikes. He does not go into the valleys of Pennsylvania where the towns look like movie sets of Wales in the thirties. He does not see the company houses in rows, the rutted roads (the poor always have bad roads whether they live in the city, in towns, or on farms), and everything is black and dirty. And even if he were to pass through such a place by accident, the tourist would not meet the unemployed men in the bar or the women coming home from a runaway sweatshop.Then, too, beauty and myths are perennial masks of poverty. The traveler comes to the Appalachians in the lovely season. He sees the hill, the streams, the foliage --- but not the poor. Or perhaps he looks at a run-down mountain house and, remembering Rousseau rather than seeing with his eyes, decides that ―those people‖ are truly fortunate to be living the way they are and that they are lucky to be exempt from the strains and tensions of the middle class. The only problem is that ―those people,‖ the quaint inhabitants of those hills, are undereducated, underprivileged, lack medical care, and are in the process of being forced from the land into a life in the cities, where they are misfits.These are normal and obvious cause of the invisibility of the poor. They operated a generation ago; they will be functioning a generation hence. It is more important to understand that the very development of American society is creating a new kind of blindness about poverty. The poor are increasingly slipping out the very experience and consciousness of the nation.If the middle class never did like ugliness and poverty, it was at least aware of them. ―Across the tracks‖ was not a very long way to go. There were forays into the slums at Christmas time; there were charitable organizations that brought contact with the poor. Occasionally, almost everyone passed through the Negro ghetto or the blocks of tenements, if only to get downtown to work or to entertainment.Now the American city has been transformed. The poor still inhabit the miserable housing in the central area, but they are increasingly isolated from contact with, or sight of, anybody else. Middle-class women coming in from Suburbia on a rare trip may catch the merest glimpse of the other America on the way to an evening at the theater, but their children are segregated in suburban schools. The business or professional man may drive along the fringes of slums in a car or bus, but it is not an important experience to him. The failures, the unskilled, the disabled, the aged, and the minorities are right there, across the tracks, where they have always been. But hardly anyone else is.In short, the very development of the American city has removed poverty from the living, emotional experience of millions upon millions of middle-class Americans. Living out in the suburbs, it is easy to assume that ours is, indeed, and affluent society.This new segregation of poverty is compounded by a well-meaning ignorance. A good many concerned and sympathetic Americans are aware that there is much discussion of urban renewal. Suddenly, driving through the city, they notice that a familiar slum has been torn down and that there are towering, modern buildings where once there had been tenements or hovels. There is a warm feeling of satisfaction, of pride in the way things are working out: the poor, it is obvious, are being taken care of.The irony in this… is that the truth is nearly the exact opposite to the impression. The total impact of the various housing programs in postwar America has been to squeeze more and more people into existing slums… Clothes make the poor invisible too: America has the best-dressed poverty the world has ever known. For a variety of reasons, the benefits of mass production have been spread much more evenly in this area than in many others. It is much easier in the United States to be decently dressed than it is to be decently housed, fed, or doctored. Even people with terribly depressed incomes can look prosperous.This is an extremely important factor in defining our emotional and existential ignorance of poverty. In Detroit the existence of social classes became much more difficult to discern the day the companies put lockers in the plants. From that moment on, one did not see men in work clothes on the way to the factory, but citizens in slacks and white shirts. This process has been magnified with the poor throughout the country. There are tens of thousands of Americans in the big cities who are wearing shoes, perhaps even a stylishly cut suit or dress, and yet are hungry. It is not a matter of planning, though it almost seems as if the affluent society had given out costumes to the poor so that they would not offend the rest of society with the sight of rags.Then, many of the poor are the wrong age to be seen. A good number of them (over 8,000,000) are sixty-five years of age or better; an even larger number are under eighteen. The aged members of the other America are often sick, and they cannot move. Another group of them live out their lives in loneliness and frustration: they sit in rented rooms, or else they stay close to a house in a neighborhood that has completely changed from the old days. Indeed, one of the worst aspects of poverty among the aged is that these people are out of sight and out mind, and alone.The young are somewhat more visible, yet they too stay close to their neighborhoods. Sometimes they advertise their poverty through a lurid tabloid story about a gang killing. But generally they do not disturb the quiet streets of the middle class.And finally, the poor are politically invisible. It is one of the cruelest ironies of social life in advanced countries that the dispossessed at the bottom of society are unable to speak for themselves. The people of the other America do not, by far and large, belong to unions to fraternal organizations, or to political parties. They are without lobbies of their own; they put forward no legislative program. As a group, they are atomized. They have no face; they have no voice.Thus, there is not even a cynical political motive for caring about the poor, as in the old days. Because the slums are no longer centers of powerful political organizations, the politicians need not really care about their inhabitants. The sums are no longer visible to the middle class, so much of the idealistic urge to fight for those who need help is gone. Only the social agencies have a really direct involvement with the other America, and they are without any great political power.To the extent that the poor have a spokesman in American life, that role is played by the labormovement. The unions have their own particular idealism, and ideology of concern. More than that, they realize that the existence of a reservoir of cheap, unorganized labor is a menace to wages and working conditions throughout the entire economy. Thus, many union legislative proposals --- to extend the coverage of minimum wage and social security, to organize migrant farm laborers --- articulate the needs of the poor.That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them. They are not simply neglected and forgotten as in the old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, they are not seen.Group the Gifted: ProKenneth MottI regard gifted children as those who possess some quality or innate ability which has been recognized and identified by any number of testing and observation devices and who manifest interest and success in either physical, intellectual, or artistic pursuits.These might be children who are gifted athletes but who have real trouble mastering academic subject matter, or students who are poor athletes bu t are highly intellectual ―quiz kids‖ who knock the top off all measuring devices. ―Gifted‖ may describe pupils of average intelligence who have exceptional ability in art or music, or it may refer to the child with an IQ of 135 who excels in everything.How can we deal with these gifted? I firmly believe that we should group them as nearly as possible according to interest and ability (giftedness) and challenge them with a type of program that will help them to grow to the fullest extent of their abilities and capacities.This grouping could take the form of special subject arrangements in the elementary grades, a situation in which a class is heterogeneously grouped most of the day but is divided at times into special interest or ability class groups for special instruction. In high school, it may take the form of grouping students in regular classes according to any number of criteria but basically those of interest and proficiency (or lack of proficiency) in various subject areas.One of the basic arguments against grouping the gifted is the fear of creating a caste of intellectual snobs. Similarly, some educators fear that the average and slow students would come to regard themselves as inferior.If my definition of the gifted is accepted, then these fears are groundless. After all, the schools have grouped gifted athletes for years. Yet how many athletes regard themselves as part of an elite? Do varsity athletes look down upon other pupils as inferior? The vast majority apparently do not.Consider also th e amount of ―gifted grouping‖ in speech, music, art, and journalism. Schools have readily grouped the gifted in these areas without any apparent ill effect. To the extent of myobservation, encouraging gifted debaters, musicians, artists, and writers to develop their special talents does not create envy or feelings of inferiority among less talented students.If educators sincerely desire to promote individual growth and self-respect, they have no grounds, as far as I can see, to fear any kind of grouping. The teacher, not the manner in which a class is organized, determines students' attitudes toward individual differences. Before he can hope to instill the proper attitude, however, the teacher needs to make a critical analysis of his own attitudes toward such differences.If a group of gifted or nongifted students form the wrong concept about themselves, the fault probably lies with the teachers, parents, or administrators. I have confidence that if teachers accept and respect individual worth, that if they challenge and spark interests in young people, the individual student will mature and grow successfully along the lines of his interests and abilities. I say, let those with similar ―gifts‖ associate, plan, and enjoy being together.Many educators disagree with the idea of gifted grouping because they believe that it does not affect achievement significantly. They cite pilot studies which indicate that no significant change in achievement results when children are separated into slow and accelerated classes.The fact is, however, that in a vast majority of pilot studies the children have been grouped only according to IQ scores, which are far from reliable, and the conclusions have been based on achievement scores which measure only mastery of factual detail.Unfortunately, there are no reliable devices for measuring growth in such areas as creativity, attitudes, personal adjustment, latent interest and talent, and innate capacity.My opinion, which is based on more than a decade in the classroom, is that learning skyrockets when individuals are grouped according to interest and ability and are motivated, challenged, and inspired by a type of schoolwork that will yield some measure of success to them.Heterogeneous classrooms frequently produce frustration in children who are persistently unable to do the same work that most of the other children do. Frustration is also produced when bright children are not properly challenged by their school work, as is too often the case in heterogeneous classrooms.I have little fear of gifted students being pushed beyond their endurance, for I have faith in the ability of most teachers to recognize the limits to which any student should be pushed. On the other hand, I don't believe giftedness should be wasted away simply because a bright or talented student is content to proceed at what is --- for him --- a snail's pace or to stand at the top of a class of students with less ability.Several schools with which I am familiar have experimented with grouping the gifted in a reading program. (Their regular procedure had been to have three or four reading groups in one classroom under one teacher. The teacher's time was divided among several small groups.) The experiment involved putting slow readers from different classrooms in one classroom, average readers from different classrooms in another class, and fast readers in still another class. Each classroom still had one teacher, but he no longer had to divide his time among several different groups. The control group consisted of a class organized and taught under the regular procedure mentioned above.After two years, the researchers found greater overall progress at all reading levels in the experimental group. In fact, some slow readers joined the average ones and some average ones moved up to the fast group. In this case, special ability grouping paid dividends all around.I believe the same results could have been achieved in science, social studies, mathematics, or English. By decreasing the range of interest and/or ability levels, the teacher is able to do more toward helping individual growth.While I do not believe that children should be regarded as resources to be molded to the needs of society, I do believe that as individuals they are endowed with certain characteristics and attributes --- ―gifts‖ of nature --- which represent their potential success in life. Where children have certain ―gifts‖ in common, they should be allowed to work and study together.Grouping the Gifted: ConBruno BettelheimAn argument often advanced on behalf of special classes for gifted children is that in regular classrooms these children are held back and possibly thwarted in their intellectual growth by learning situations that are designed for the average child. There can be little doubt that special classes for the gifted can help them to graduate earlier and take their place in life sooner. On the other hand, to take these students out of the regular classroom may create serious problems for them and for society.For example, in regular classrooms, we are told, the gifted child becomes bored and loses interest in learning. This complaint, incidentally, is heard more often from adults, parents, or educators than from students. Nevertheless, on the strength of these complaints, some parents and educators conclude that special classes should be set up for the gifted.Although some children at the top of their class do complain of being bored in school, the issue of why they are bored goes far beyond the work they have in school. If the findings of psychoanalytic investigation of feelings have any validity, feelings of boredom arise as a defense against deep feelings of anxiety. To be bored, therefore, is to be anxious.The student who is bored by his studies is the student who can take few constructive measures of his own to manage his anxieties. Consequently, he represses or denies them; he must ask others, specifically his teachers, to keep him frantically busy, studying and competing intellectually so that he will not feel anxiety.The gifted child who is bored is an anxious child. To feed neurotic defense mechanisms may serve some needs of society, but to nourish his neurosis certainly does not help him as a human being.Psychology, like nature, does not permit a vacuum. If study material does not hold the student's attention because of his easy mastery of it, the result is not necessarily boredom. Other intellectual interests can fill the unscheduled time. Is it reasonable to assume that gifted children learn only when pressed by the curriculum?Several years ago I observed what happened to a number of gifted children who were taken out of a highly accelerated, highly competitive, private school and placed in a public high school of good academic standing where, by comparison, the work was so easy as to be ―boring‖.Close inspection revealed an interesting and worthwhile development in most of the transplanted youngsters. In the special school for the gifted these children had shown little ability to use their own critical judgment. Instead, they had relied heavily on their teacher's direction. In the slower-paced school, no longer having to worry about keeping up, these students began to reflect spontaneously on many problems, some of which were not in the school program.The students acquired on their own a much deeper appreciation of life, art, literature, and other human beings. No longer exhausted by meeting assigned learning tasks, these youngsters had energy to branch out, broaden their interests, and understand far more deeply.Prolonged, rarely assailed security may be the best preparation for tackling difficult intellectual problems. Because the gifted child learns easily, he acquires a feeling of security in a regular class. On the other hand, if such a child is put into a special class where learning is not easy for him, where he is only average among a group of extremely gifted youngsters, he may, as often happens, come to feel that he has only average abilities which are not up to coping with difficult challenges.Another argument advanced for special classes for the gifted is that removing highly capable students from the regular classroom lessens anxiety among the slower learners. Possibly so. But how do anxieties become manageable except through a friendly working relationship with someone felt to be superior --- in this case, the faster learners in the classroom?In many of our big cities today, the students left behind in the non-collegiate programs are marked as a lower breed. Indeed, most of them come from poor, lower-class homes. Surrounded by students who have little interest in acquiring an education, lacking companionship with students who want to learn, and receiving no encouragement at home, these children apply themselves even less than they would if there were good students in class with whom to identify.In order to achieve educationally, many children from economically impoverished homes need to be challenged and motivated by example. Grouping deprives these children of such stimulation. They are left behind as second-class students, a situation which is more likely to create hopelessness than to lessen anxiety. Should some of them display outstanding leadership or ability, they are sent away to join their intellectual peers, leaving the nongifted group even more impoverished.Grouping children intelligently has much in common with mountain climbing. In mountain climbing, the guides usually distribute themselves ahead of and behind beginners or less skilled climbers. Placed in the center of the group with people who have learned both the skill and the teamwork required in mountain climbing, the beginner is likely to learn quickly and well.If, however, all of the good climbers are put into one party, and all of the poor ones in another, the second group is likely to fail miserably or perish altogether.When the debate over what is the ―best ― education for the child reaches an impasse, the argument is frequently switched to what is best for society. Today we are told that we need more scientists and more engineers to ―survive.‖ Therefore, we must speed the growth of young people who have the necessary talent.Does anyone really know what the needs of society will be thirty years hence? Can science guarantee survival? Might society not have a greater need for fresh, imaginative ideas on how to。