Celebrating Great Minds with Walter Isaacson & David Rubenstein | Institute for Advanced Study

I'm I'm the director of neon Levy Professor David Nuremberg um and I'm really I'm delighted to introduce you to today's program celebrating great minds a discussion between two formidable intellects themselves David Rubinstein and Walter Isaacson is of course a bit of a problem to introduce either of these people I'm not going to try to describe David rubinstein's achievements which are Monumental in fact one of those is the reason for our presence here today but I will just mention in brief that he was the co-founder and co-chairman of the Carlisle Group the host of the David Rubinstein show author of many books and also a philanthropist who has supported I can't think of any important cultural institution he hasn't supported I think if there's any human being who has served on more University boards than David Rubinstein well I don't know who it is including chairing at least two that I know of Duke and the University of Chicago which which he currently chairs as well as dedicating his wisdom as a trustee of the institute for the past 18 years Walter has an equally impressive resume that extends across many domains he's a professor of history at Tulane he's been distinguished fellow and past CEO of the Aspen Institute the former chairman of CNN the editor of time and he's probably also the most famous biographer of the 21st Century besides their own I'm going to call it genius what makes them the perfect interlocutors for this subject is on the one hand the fact that Walter has written about so many Innovative and Brilliant Minds including Einstein who will I think be the focus of some of their comments today and then another David's prescient support of much of what's most important in education research and yes genius in both the sciences and the humanities at The Institute and Far Far Beyond so this program is really the most appropriate conceivable celebration and dedication of the opening of our new and and already beloved Rubenstein Commons a place that is designed to invigorate to challenge and transform every intellect that enters it I I think many of us have already had this experience and thereby to carry forward the mission of The Institute to which we've been dedicated for almost a century now so please join me in welcoming David Rubinstein and Walter Isaacson thank you very much for coming up from New Orleans to do this and I think just a day or so ago you turned in the manuscript about somebody who's well known it's publicly known that you're writing a book about uh a very smart person what's his name I can't remember uh Elon Musk it's a memorable name and he's a memorable person so we'll talk about him in a moment two memorable by half sometimes so I will get into that in a moment but I appreciate your finishing that on time to come up here so um we want to talk about Einstein a bit but before we get into that I'd like to ask about how you actually came to specialize in people that some people would say are geniuses so let's go through the list of some of them that you've talked you've written about the first one I think you wrote about was Henry Kissinger and some people would say he's a genius Henry would say he would say that he would say that right so um what led you to write a book about him and is it easier to write a book about a genius who's alive or one who's not alive well I keep forgetting that the not alive is the correct answer indeed after I did Dr Kissinger I said okay next time I'm doing somebody who's been dead for 200 years and moved to Franklin because it's difficult if they're Geniuses they tend to have a strong personality so Henry Kissinger was a immigrant from Germany he was in The Faculty of Harvard and there are a lot of smart people at Harvard you're a graduate Harvard a Rhodes scholar as well so you're you know pretty well credentialed and Harvard was he anything special at Harvard at the time that he was a faculty member or he was just another well he was very very good at playing the game and it was wonderful to watch him and Matt Bundy who would like oil and water and back Monday as you know was the dean of the faculty and uh they clashed quite a bit but then Matt Bundy brings them in as a consultant to the Kennedy administration during the Berlin crisis while he was a professor at Harvard and was Kissinger a Democrat or Republican then you know those of you know Einstein well know that light can be both wave and particle and there was a Quantum uncertainty about Dr Kissinger so to go through Kissinger he became famous for the job he had as uh as National Security advisor and then later Secretary of State and one time he had both jobs at the same time he said that was the only time in American history that the National Security advisor and the Secretary of State got along so is it now he had a Teutonic accent and I think I read yeah why by the way his brother did not have a Teutonic accent yeah Walter Kissinger so how did Walter Kissinger have a you know a normal American accent and yeah they came over together when I asked Walter that he said because I am the Kissinger who listens so Kissinger because of his accent I think I I got it right the White House staff did not want him to make any public speeches or go to the uh the white house uh press room because they thought it would sound like Dr Strangelove right and that movie had come out and it was a question of whether it was sort of based on Kissinger which it wasn't it was yeah right so actually he came out for the first time the public heard him was when he made his famous speech about peace being at hand is that right yeah I guess I mean I that was a famous one that he does in December of 72 right no right before the election November of 72. um it turned out peace was not at hand but right right and partly because of him saying that so uh okay so he um what is the secret to this attribute of his life he left government service on January uh 20th 1977. he's been out of power for more or less 45 plus years how can somebody be out of power for 45 plus years and still be such a powerful person in the world of foreign policy you know the half-life of celebrity is kind of interesting because why is it that you know he doesn't decline I'll say something you know that'll seem Earnest and nice but I really believe that even though I've had you know mixed feelings about some of what he did which is he is extraordinarily brilliant and even now uh just uh I'm not sure it was with Maryland and gem or is it some dinner in Kissinger was there and it was what's your biggest worry he said that this Administration will push China into the arms of Russia and vice versa because Bismarck teaches us never and it was the most incisive understanding of how to play Russia and China off against each other so it was said of April Harriman in the Kennedy administration he was the only ambitious 70 year old man right Henry Kissinger seems that 99 to be still ambitious he shows up in meetings he's he's still um he's about to be a hundred um his 100th birthday will be a phenomenon it'll be that's right and I asked him once what the secret to his long longevity was was it exercising they didn't think that was it was it eating well no no he actually said it was his parents had lived to be in their 90s I think although definitely did right mother yeah so anyway in in Kissinger's case what was the attribute that you think he had that no other Nash security advisor or secretary of state had that has made him still a prominent force in geopolitics well you know in a place like the institute around here in fact we were talking at lunch today uh Rick and uh Anton single about is somebody smart and that's such a weird word because there's so many attributes that go into intelligence but there's a particular type of intelligence I don't mean this in a pejorative way saying a spider but a spider in a web can feel the vibrations just from people and from events around the world and understand how they fit into a pattern now I think Kissinger's ability whether it was watch watching Rockefeller playing off against Nixon or China playing off against Russia is just understanding how a movement in this part of the web is going to Ripple here now in your book about Kissinger you point out that he had been an advisor to Nelson Rockefeller and Rockefeller did not turn out to be the nominee of the of the party in 68 and obviously Nixon got elected and then Nixon uh asked Kissinger to be the National Security advisor eventually um and Kissinger asked Nelson Rockefeller it was okay for him to do that what did he what would he have done if Rockefeller said no he was smart enough to know that Rockefeller couldn't possibly say no because he knew he was going to do that job and he knew that Rockefeller would have to say yes okay so uh when you're it's another example of so when Kissinger when your book on Kissinger came out uh was he happy with it there was somebody his famous Oscar de la Renta once gave a big birthday party for kessinger and for some reason I guess Oscar de la Renta wasn't that gave my book on Kissinger as the gift to everybody at the dinner thing and Kissinger at that point was I mean it was not that fond of all of the book I think if he re-read his own Nobel Peace Prize citation he'd be outraged that it understated his accomplishments and so somebody did ask him well what did you think of the book and he said I like the title so did he ever tell you later on that he was willing to forgive you oh yeah you know uh once again I'll pick on Rick as we were Time Magazine together we decided to do a big party on the 75th Anniversary for everybody who'd been on the cover of Time Magazine and it was a radio City and all these invites go out and Kissinger at that point still wasn't truly speaking to me much and um the phone rings and my assistant says it's Dr Kissinger on the phone for you so I said pick up the phone go hello he goes well Walter and my first reaction as yours would have been is this is either Henry Kissinger or it's Graydon Carter who does a wonderful Kissinger accent is trying to trick me and he'll dine out for cycle uh-huh it doesn't he says even the 30 Years War had to end at some point I will come to your dinner I said well that's great and I said in Nancy and she said well you know Nancy she's partial to the Hundred Years War we're going to have to work on her but since then like a moth to Flame he's one of those people who's attracted to his critics and so he's often asked me to introduce him to get some George Marshall award or things like that so I think we've made up made up okay so let's talk about your next person it was a genius Benjamin Franklin Now Benjamin Franklin didn't go to Harvard you know why because he was a 10th son of a Puritan immigrant he was going to be his father's tithe to the Lord and so he was going to be sent to Harvard to study to be a man this is a long time ago when Harvard trained ministers unlike you know today but um not private Equity yeah and um so uh but Franklin wasn't exactly cut for the cloth and at one point he said to his father they were saying grace and they were salting the way the provisions for the winter he said let me say grace over them right now we get it done with once and for all for the entire year and so his father thought that was so sad ended up not sending them to Harvard uh and there's a wonderful parody of Harvard that that Franklin does at like age 15 under the pseudonym of Silence do good about how it only knows how to turn out Dunces and Blockheads who can enter a room Gentilly something they could have learned less expensively at a dancing school so he he leaves his native Boston goes away he goes to Philadelphia and works for Israel was his brother there no no his brother he was apprenticed to his brother in Boston and then he went and he broke he ran away that's why he had to run away he had no money when he get to Philadelphia three coins in his pocket so what did he do well first of all he tipped The Boatman okay secondly he buys the three puffy rolls that are some of the most famous scene in autobiographical literature and then gives one to a poor woman on the street and he said and this is not directed at you he said you're always much more generous when you're poor than when you're wealthy because you don't want people to think you're poor okay so he gives away he has no money actually I don't know why that I didn't mean so he has no money left right he has no money left and walks by the home of Deborah Reed and gets a apprenticeship at a print shop and he builds a big printing company and then he becomes he becomes the wealthiest person in the colonies depending on how you count it meaning land lots of people had lots of land and he built the postal service because uh he had a print shop and he realized that if you have a print shop you should have the content so he starts creating a newspaper and then Poor Richard's Almanac other printers were printing Bibles but he said that didn't make sense because people buy a Bible once in a lifetime if you put in an almanac they have to buy it every year and then he becomes so successful that he realizes he's going to franchise print shops up and down the coast all the way down to Charleston South Carolina and then he says if I own the distribution system he's like a cable Mogul at this point and so he creates what then becomes a colonial postal system with the U.S Post Road one so that he can control the distribution but so he creates this but then he has a common law wife that he says to her you run it and I'm going to England for a while yeah did he ever come back to see her he did one I mean he when he was in England for quite a few years uh he takes a break comes back but when she's dying it's right as we're about to have a revolution and he's still trying to do the hold it together and it was a strange they were common law because she had been married before and her husband had disappeared and they had a great partnership but she hated to travel as far as I can tell I did a lot of research she sees them the first time straggling up Market Street with those three puffy rolls they end up marrying later that she lived every single night of her life on Market Street or within two blocks she never not only left Philadelphia but never left Market on the other hand he's up and down the coast creating the postal system back and forth to England back and forth to France he loved to travel so it was at one point I thought he stayed in Europe for 10 years at a time I mean I don't remember exactly but 1750s he goes over and stays celibate there he creates he recreated not just a mystery he recreates a household Mrs Stevenson who's very much like Deborah with a daughter and they set up a household there after Deborah died he did have two famous messages in Paris in fact um Madame Brianne Madame helvetia said to play chess in the bathtub this is in the old days when you get away with that and he was friends with kirodon you remember the great philosopher and Franklin at that point is in his late 70s and canadons in his late 80s and Madame helicius comes in and she's in the state of deja bil which I think means underdressed let's say and kinadon turns to uh Franklin says Ah to be 70 again so so John Adams is over there oh yeah and he's not quite as uh adventuresome what what Franklin said of Adams and they had to work together they were co-envoys for a while until Adams gets persona non grata in Paris uh he said that John Adams learned French by reading funeral orations in French and he said I learned French by writing bag of tells to my two mistresses what about Jefferson was he okay with the lifestyle that Franklin had oh he loved Franklin and he and Franklin Bond and get rid of John Adams despite uh McCullough's wonderful treatment of Adams uh he was a bit of a priggish individual so what inventions did the genius Benjamin Franklin develop that we still have that we still live with uh well the lightning rod was by far the most important scientific invention of that era and believe it or not up until then they thought you know lightning was Thunderbolts from God they used to sanctify the Steeples of churches to try to and they would put gunpowder in the church Sanctuary to keep it from being and it kept blowing up it was just like like 250 a year and Franklin said maybe we ought to try a different Theory and he was very much a believer in the scientific method which by the way was rather new then In America which is uh he would list the attributes say of a spark of electricity and the attributes of lightning and he'd line them up and say Well they're very comparable let the experiment be made now we think of him as a daughtering old dude flying a kite in the rain but those electricity experiences with the kite are huge and so he creates the lightning rod and doesn't patent it and does he really discover electricity in the sense of he discovers that electricity is a flow from negative to positive he comes up with the phrase the words negative and positive plus and minus battery he invinced that we still use those yeah and the single fluid theory of electricity uh is uh probably the most important of that decade I mean he didn't discover electricity I mean he was there but it was there all right what about uh bifocals if that's his idea too yeah because he was always traveling up and down on the Postal Road that he had helped create and reading and looking and so he had a maid in the Franklin stove and so he was the most famous American at the time is that right especially in France where they first proved his electricity experiments and they first proved the lightning rod I mean he was other than Jerry Lewis we've never had somebody who was so Sanctified in France Over America so um I love being in the crowd of people who actually know who Jerry Lewis is so of all the uh Geniuses we'll talk about the couple more in a moment I thought you once told me if you could have dinner with any one person that you've written about it would be Franklin is that right well he's the most Pleasant Geniuses as people at the Institute may know are not often Pleasant dinner companions really I didn't know that okay so let's go to another person that people say is uh a genius in the business World Steve Jobs absolutely so um how did that book come about uh because did he call you and say you should write about me I'm a genius like Franklin or a Kissinger or how did that come about well he actually did we took a walk I had just joined the Aspen Institute and he had um he said let's go for a walk I didn't realize taking a walk which is and he said well do me do me next and I did say to myself uh well actually I may have said it to him I said yeah Franklin Einstein you you arrogant little um but in and I said I'll do you in 30 40 years when you retire and then somebody who you know um called and said well if you're going to do them you're going to have to do them now and I said yeah and I said well I didn't no he said well he was diagnosed the day before he called you he called you the dance with bankrupt that's why I didn't know he said well he hasn't even told his board but that's why and then I realized this is a person who transformed Our Lives totally I mean every industry from the personal computer one you could just take out a box and plug in to retail stores the music to movies to phones and so very rarely do we try to get at the roots of Genius in business and in Innovation and I thought this would be uh an enormous opportunity to spend time with them so he didn't graduate from college I think he spent one semester at Reed basically did he ever tell you why he didn't want to get a college degree didn't think he needed it or he wanted to go invent the computer what did he win I mean he was just a pure wandalous the big difference and we may get to it in a minute I don't mean to jump ahead but you know Bill Gates when he goes to college studies only applied math Harvard didn't have a computer science department then but it does apply whereas jobs who was somewhat interested in Tech technology only took calligraphy dance music poetry whatever and he said that that was by standing at the intersection of the humanities and technology that was the special thing he brought to the party so people forget that he was thrown out of the company he started and was out of the company I think for was it 12 years or 14 years something like thrown out in 1985 famously after the 1984 introduction of the Mac gets brought back in 1998 or nine I think so he's out for a long time and actually he sold all of his stock except for one share so when he got back to the company and built it up he actually wasn't the biggest shareholder had he held on to the stock he would have been by 10 times the richest man in the world but he actually didn't own that much stock compared to what he would have owned no you know Larry Ellison probably so he's he's saying I want to go back to Apple and I want to you know find a way back in because they had screwed up Apple and Allison says fine and we should buy up a whole lot of stock and do it and Steve said I don't want to do that I don't want to buy a lot of stock and try to do it for that reason and Allison says well Steve if you don't buy up stock and then do it how are you going to make a lot of money and he said I looked at Allison and put both hands on my shoulders and said Larry you already have enough money you don't need to do things only motivated that way where'd the name Apple come from well you know he worked on a Apple commune he and was Steve Wozniak that's what they did on weekends and when they were first building this computer uh he tells Wozniak you've got to code it by the weekend because we have to get back to the apple orchard where they were working and while I said well I can't finish the coding they were working at Atari at the time and the night shift because Steve didn't shower and so they put him on the night shift um well you mentioned that in the book well he never showered so people didn't want to work with him so they made him work at night when no one else was there is that right he went to India and found a guru the maharaji who had been John Lennon's Guru who told him if he ate only vegetables and fruit I mean a pure vegan diet he didn't have to shower and use deodorant and he was working at Atari so I went to Al Alcorn who was then and he said that was a mistake in theory that's why I put him on the night shift he didn't wear shoes either correct Einstein doesn't wear socks he doesn't wear shoes okay but uh do real quickly on getting back to was they what he tells was you've got to code it and he does a trick that his Guru used to do on him which is he stared it was without blinking and said don't be afraid you can do it don't be afraid so was finally codes the game and when they form the company uh they decide to call it Apple after the apple orchard and because they wanted to get ahead of Atari in the phone book so if there had been no Wozniak who actually had some technical skills could Steve Jobs have created the apple or you needed Wozniak does he have the technical skills in life we who are biographers have a dirty little secret we distort history some we make it seem like a guy or a gal goes to a garage and has a light bulb moment and it's always about teams whether it's Lennon and McCartney or you can pick it on you know whether it's whatever basketball team you want or for that matter Balmer and Gates or right or sometimes a team like noise and um Andy Grove and Gordon Moore and it was a perfect Synergy of a team which is a very reclusive was who can do the engineering and Steve who knew how to make it in your book you keep talking about the fact that he was so focused on design that he would give the designers criticisms of the design he was more focused on the design of the product and how it would work than actually some of the uh I'd say complication and technology part of it yeah well first of all his father his adoptive father who was a Dropout told him one thing which is beauty matters and when they built a fence around the backyard of his house near Cupertino a little tracked home where he grew up he said we have to make the back of the fence just as beautiful as the front and Steve said why nobody's going to see it nobody's ever going to know he said yes but you will know so when they do the original Macintosh not only does he get the chamfers and curves of the case beautiful goes to Macy's to look at Cuisine Art machines but when they're about to finish it he looks at the circuit board inside and tells the engineers this sucks and they said what do you mean he said it's ugly they said but it's in inside a case nobody will see it nobody will know and he told them the story of his father saying you have to make it even beautiful the parts unseen so one of the most interesting parts of that book was Steve was interested in finding out who his biological father was he had a chance to meet him for the only time in his life really and he chose not to do so can you go back and explain how he came to realize who his biological father was and why he didn't want to meet him yes he um first of all finds out that Mona Simpson the great novelist is his biological sister uh because the mother had raised Mona but put Steve up for adoption and so Mona and Steve get together the biological mother and father were not married at the time right the biological fathers the guy named John din Dolly who was a from hum Syria and then uh from uh yeah Lebanon but mainly from Syria and was a graduate student in the University of Wisconsin and gets uh Mrs Simpson pregnant or whatever and so Mona is born they reunite and they decide they're going to find the lost Father which is the name of one of Mona's novels and they go to California they're able to track them down eventually that he's running a coffee shop in Sacramento and when they get near there Steve says I don't want to go inside I don't want to meet him Mona goes in introduces herself because he had remembered Mona because Mona had been raised by his ex-wife and so I was crying and saying and says you have a brother too and he said I just wish you could have seen me in better circumstances because this is a bad little roadside coffee shop he said I used to own a great middle eastern restaurant in San Jose and it was everybody used to come there even Steve Jobs used to come there and Mona catches herself and doesn't say Steve is your son she goes back to see Steve who's waiting saying I'm not going to go meet this guy but goes back to see him in Sacramento you know and um tells him this he says that guy was my father and refused ever to see him so Steve is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer but he chooses to use homeopathic kind of medicine I guess you're not a doctor I know but do you think that had he gone to the conventional medical Western medical treatment process with pancreatic cancer was complicated but you think he might have lived longer or yeah he definitely might have lived longer obviously we don't know it took nine months but and before he even had the half Whipple procedure or whatever and he tried to do it with you know as uh art Levin's in the chair of his board said excuse my language here horseshit and horseshit Roots meaning you just ate all this organic stuff and it didn't help and Steve had a reality Distortion field he felt that if something was there that he didn't like he could just will it away and he often used that to get apple to do things everybody thought was impossible and he would do that trick I mentioned about the guru and stale without blinking one of the things you can't will away that way is cancer and he regretted it that he didn't get treated so you wrote a book about Leonardo yeah so um why'd they consider to be one of the great Geniuses of all time or what attracted you to Leonardo and you had to go back and deal with something hundreds of years old was that complicated to go back well also it was one of those things after Kissinger's like man I'm gonna go back 200 years after dealing with this guy then I I've forgotten how bad it was so then I do it with Steve oh man I'm going to go back 500 years this time but it was actually jobs who helped convince me because he said you got to do Leonardo next and I said what do you mean they said well the I did not know this but he pointed out to me the theme of all of your books is people who stand at the intersection of the Arts and Sciences whether it's Ben Franklin or Steve Jobs or whatever Einstein as well and he said the ultimate of that is Leonardo and the ultimate um symbol of it is Vitruvian man it's the icon of the intersection of the Arts and Sciences and I realized it was true that most of us think of Leonardo as an artist but if you look at the way he identifies himself all the time it's as the engineer and artist of the Duke of Milan and I wanted to treat him not as an artist but as somebody who did not make a distinction between engineering and art so in your book you point out that we only have like a limited number of paintings that he completed that are still around well you would know it better than anybody because Geneva Da Vinci as you know there's only one Da Vinci in the United States right and you've helped make sure that it stays at the National Gallery of Art but why did he not finish more paintings he seemed to start these paintings and carry them around he never seemed to finish them well he was definitely a perfectionist and he really finishes I'd say 12 paintings you can argue you know the Saint Jerome in the wilderness is it finished or nothing and it was because he was always believing there was something more something of a brush stroke and it was he was a procrastinator too and he also did not feel any have he had to leave Florence because he had so many uncommissioned that's why he goes to Milan so the famous most famous painting in the world is the Mona Lisa why is it so famous well because it's actually the greatest piece of art ever done on can I mean on wood I should say not canvas and it's done because it's a great intersection of Art and Science for example um in order to understand how light comes off things he dissected the human eye and he spent a lot of time it's easy to get bodies to dissect her not easy but in in fact and also a little bit contrary to the teaching to the church so he gets in trouble but he's at the mortuaries doing the dissection and he understands how light hits the retina of the eye and that the light I'm going to give just one example of the monthly I'll give it 100 of them but that Delight coming directly to the center of your retina shows color and uh I mean sorry it shows detail very very well but as it comes in separately you kind of see the shadows and colors better and so if you look at the lips of the Mona Lisa the most famous smile ever and you look very carefully the details on each end actually go down slightly she's not smiling and if you look directly at her lips you don't think she's smiling but if your head turns slightly the colors and the Shadows are moving upward and so as your head moves ever so slightly you watch that smile interacting with you and coming on and off that was an example one of probably 20 I could give you of his science and forming his eyes so he was a rival of someone named Michelangelo did they get along or not at all Florence wasn't big enough for both of them and uh they were incredibly different I mean Leonardo is a proud Misfit he's come from the village of Vinci as a person born out of wedlock left-handed gay distracted flamboyant has many many friends has a posse oh dresses in purple and magenta and Michelangelo also gay but if you've read The Agony and the Ecstasy or anything it's totally tortured by it you know with only these black coats never socialize with anybody and Florence is a very small town and they were great Rivals so let's talk about Albert Einstein so to do his spiritual home here man He Loved These sacred grounds so Albert Einstein to um he's the when you say Albert Einstein it's almost equivalent in the Rocher's thesaurus for genius right when did that actually happen during the 1920s the 30s the 40s when did the name Einstein become almost synonymous with genius well it certainly happened a little bit late one of the great things is he goes to the Zurich Polytech and when he applies the first time he gets rejected uh and I thought God I've really got to find the name of the person of the Zurich Polytech who uh rejected Alberta it was einrich Weber who is a great physicist he's like okay this guy isn't good but finally Einstein comes Weber never ends up liking him Einstein even after the miracle year of 1905 with the papers that give you the two post holes of 20th century physics relativity and quantum in 1905 he's a third class examiner in the patent office in barn because he can't get his Doctorate because the dissertation he submitted is too confusing for people in 1906 after his transferred he's still a third class he does not until 1909 get an assistant professorship so um who were his parents were they geniuses they were engineers and every biography of a great man or complex man rule one is it's all about Dad whether it's Ben Franklin Einstein Steve Jobs and Einstein's father and was an engineer who went bankrupt twice trying to create electricity in both the city of Pavia and then in Milan creating generators in which the coils back then before people fully groked Maxwell's equations if the magnet moves through the coil it generates electricity and if the coil moves related to the magnet it makes an electromagnetic field uh if you believe in relativity those have to be the same thing but they didn't know it at the time I'm getting too detailed here but his father tries to create these generating machines and goes bankrupt and in Einstein himself is like always trying to make up the conventional wisdom often is that Einstein wasn't too good in kindergarten in fact he barely talked until he was low in learning how to speak as a child uh so slow that they consulted a doctor they called him the Dopey one deportay in the family because he would have trouble speaking he said though that that was part of his strength was two things he didn't speak very well so he always thought visually like when his Dad gives him that Compass famously his father gave a compass and he was he loved that Compass yeah because the needle is twitching and pointing North but nothing's touching it and he becomes mesmerized no pun intended by the concept of a force field something that's a field that has no substance but it touches something and moves it and for the rest of his life until his deathbed a few blocks away he's still trying to feel figure out a field Theory that'll and he said his palms would sweat but trying to figure this out as a kid now I remember what was causing my you know we remember getting a compass right like oh look it's and then a minute or two later a dead squirrel and we're on to something else his whole life he's still worrying about this so was he considered by his classmates in high school or college a brilliant person or just reasonably intelligent reasonably intelligent the Zurich Polytech even um as I say he's the only person in his class with the exception of maleva the only woman who then becomes his wife not to get a job offer at any University and those of you who live near Prince and can understand what that would mean you know getting a degree but not being offered any job and do you think that was because he was Jewish uh not exactly then but it's a very good question because we're talking here in 1901 1902 in the anti-Semitism but you have to remember he does get made a member of the Prussian Academy when they finally uh improve the theory of relativity and uh so he does ascend the greatest of all Heights in the epicenter of anti-Semitism and some people say that his first wife uh helped him with some of his scientific work yeah you know he always said that believe it or not he never had enough math and he did not realize he said his greatest mistake was not realizing at first that math is the language that explains physics or nature to you and maleva was a very good mathematician so she helped us check the math and was he a very good husband not great um and they have a very complicated life of my favorite story of that is when they finally decide to get a divorce and by the way this is after 1905 he's written these miracle year papers including evils MC squared and by 1907 1908 they decided they wanted divorce but he has no money he's still a second class patent Clerk and he says to her one of these days one of those papers will win the Nobel Prize if you give me a divorce instead of me giving you money or whatever of it I will give you all the money from the Nobel Prize when that happens and she's very smart and she had you know and she consults with three or four people including Heinrich Weber and how big and others to figure out what are the chances that he will win the Nobel Prize she takes the bet is not until 1919 I think or 1923 1919's eclip that he or 21. he wins the Nobel Prize she gets all the money and she buys two apartment building 23 000 I know is that how much I thought it was about twenty five thousand dollars well in today's thing I'm not a banker yes let's go on what happened in 1905 you mean with the miracle-year papers are him just doing these visual thought experiments one of the interesting things about him being trapped as a patent clerk let me just take one in particular which is the Swiss had just gone on Standard time zones and those of you know Swiss people they tend to be quite Swiss you know they really care that if it strikes the hour in Basel at the exact same instant is going to strike it and burn and so they have to have a device that will synchronize clocks and 28 of his patent applications from 1903 to 1905. involves synchronizing Clocks by sending a signal and the signal travels at the speed of light and ever since he was a young kid trying to figure out Maxwell's equations he kept Imagining the thought experiment of catching up with a light beam and how it should look stationary but Maxwell's equations don't allow for that so he's trying to figure out why is it that the speed of light is always constant no matter what your state of motion and he's looking at these devices as synchronize clocks and he comes up with this brilliant leap that what's looks synchronized in terms of two clocks is the train goes right beneath this window with the clock tower burn he said if you're moving really fast in one direction which looks synchronized is different than somebody's moving fast in another Direction and that if you can't have absolute sync synchronimity is that the word you know you can't say something's absolutely synchronous then time is also not absolute it's relative depending on your state of motion so that's the typical leap of the imagination he did in o5 and then he does quantity but he writes how many four papers or five papers yeah he writes four papers in this famous letter to his friend why did he not get The Nobel Prize right away for this incredible work that he came up with the theories of Relativity well first of all he couldn't even get a job for four years after that because nobody believes wait a minute time is I mean because Newton tells us first paragraph of the brink Time Marches along second by second irrespective how we observe it and he's trying to say no so they don't quite get it nobody he generalizes the theory I won't get into that in 1915-16 and still nobody's absolutely sure and they're calling a Jewish science by this point because it's relativity and it's not until the eclipse of 1919 when they can see the bending of light as it goes through the gravitation it's proven then he becomes famous that's when you to answer your question in the very beginning which I forgot to answer it's that when that Eclipse operation observation happens he becomes world famous and wins a Nobel for Quantum though not for relative he didn't win it for relativity for something else and they okay so well quantum theory it's not just something else but yeah but it wasn't it wasn't what he thought he was going to win it for but let's say uh so what was the story with the hair why did he never uh why couldn't he comb his hair a little bit you know the thought experiment is if he didn't have that wild Halo of hair you know if he had looked just like Niels Bohr or somebody uh would he still be considered such a genius was it a great marketing thing I think at a certain point he just told some school children he said you know I'm just very very busy there's no reason for me to waste time combing my hair what about uh from the violin he loved to play the violin was he any good at it controversy I mean people he you know everybody loved to hear him play he'd love to play Mozart and he said whenever he was having trouble with the math in particular on general relativity he was quite a loner all the more so because he's by this point at the Prussian Academy and in Berlin where right he's having trouble as an outsider and he said whenever I'm having trouble figuring out the tensor calculus he was trying to do he said I pick up my violin and play Mozart because it connects me to the harmonies of the Spheres so how did he actually come to the the uh The Institute I mean The Institute was just starting he presumed he didn't know it that well yeah Abraham flexner is it just yeah as you all know founded the Institute and uh flexner is just really intent on collecting the greatest Geniuses and he goes out to see Robert Milliken who is then running Caltech and that's where Einstein was this is 1932. so Einstein thinks he's going to go back to Germany but as 1932 progresses he becomes clear and clearer that he might never get back to his beloved uh house on the lake near Berlin and flexner goes there and Milliken is furious because he's trying to recruit Einstein and flexner in a gesture of pulley test stops trying to recruit him for a while and waits until Einstein has gone to Oxford for one semester Christchurch Oxford and goes and takes a walk in Tom quad and offers him the job at Princeton which was only going to be one of four jobs Einstein was going to try to juggle them how much was he offered he was offered first of all flexer says to him how much do you think you should get and Einstein who didn't have a head for finance said I don't know I could live off three thousand dollars a year so flexner says well that's ridiculous and offers him ten thousand yeah upset you know negotiating him upward and then who is a there was a great mathematician here somebody can shout out huh babylonos I guess Oswald Evans um who was making fifteen thousand and that's when flexer finally raises I thought uh Elsa is his second wife negotiation she's a tougher negotiator and who was his second wife was she related to him first cousin cousin twice and mother's side and from his first wife he had a shout out of wedlock before and nobody knows what happened to that great mystery just like uh Ben Franklin a lot of these and um we don't quite ever know what happened to Lee's Earl but he has when he's married to his first wife he has two children what happened to those two children and then there's Hans Albert who is I think still with us say he was an engineer no okay engineering professor at Caltech for a long time and had to keep walking by the Einstein bust and the Atheneum which I think gave him some problems and then unfortunately a beautiful kid named Edward who ends up with schizophrenia and an asylum in Germany which is not a good place to be and did Einstein like his time at the Institute or did he oh he loved it in fact he was supposed to as I say be it three other places offered him think it of course milk into Caltech and he was going to juggle it and once he gets here and then Elsa finds 112 Mercer Street he just thinks it's Heaven he does have a wonderful line something uh a lot of semi-dwarfs on stilts prancing around which is what he said what about the apocryphal story that he couldn't remember how to get to his house he does at one point called the dean of The Institute uh who's not in so he gets an assistant and says can you tell me where Albert Einstein lives and this I you know you think it's apocryphal but enough people have told me this and the person says I'm sorry we're not allowed to give out that address and there's a long pause and he says well I am Dr Einstein and I've forgotten my address at which point he says 112. so um after let's say 1920 or so was he really at The Cutting Edge of physics or was he no he was not at that point a major figure in the future well he was a major figure but it was it was so into interesting he he strange was his contempt for Authority like I'll read the first paragraph of Newton's principia and I'll say no I disagree and he said God punished me for my contempt of Authority for make by making me an authority myself and so what he does is he becomes resistant to the new physics the most important advances in theoretical physics of the 20th century come out of that Quantum paper he does in 1905 and the other Quantum thing and yet by 1915 he's resisting the implications of quantum theory which basically say that there's an inherent Randomness at the subatomic level and he keeps famously saying I cannot believe that God plays dice with the universe at one point he says it and he says here at Princeton at the old fine Hall if somebody remembers I think it was a math building right he says arguing against it subtle is the Lord but malicious he is not meaning God wouldn't play dice which is carved still somebody tell me if I might tell me is it still carved on the mantle right still there so so he's resisting the implications of quantum so he dies in 1955 I think and it is said that at the time that he died he didn't want to be kept artificially alive he said my time well he had an aorta and they offered him surgery because it was starting to rupture and he said now my time has come it is said that an unauthorized effort was undertaken by a uh I guess a doctor to remove his brain Thomas Harvey at the Princeton hospital takes his brain out even though they he wanted to be cremated but keeps the brain and the brain was later examined by brain Specialists and what did they conclude not much I mean I I went through all sorts of literature of people something like the synapses I'm not even sure that that account I don't think we can brain map and say this guy is a Jew so um I do want to say though when he's at Princeton hospital he refuses the thing and he knows he's dying he asked Helen ducas to go by the office here and bring him his papers and there's that last night that last night where after the visitors had left he does 12 more pages it's there at Hebrew University I wish they were here because I went to Hebrew University 12 more pages of equations with math mistakes Crossing about doing line after line still trying to get the unified field theory that would overcome uncertainty he was trying to prove that every there's a theory that makes everything he's trying to figure out what is the compass needle twitch and Point North and you see the last line when his art burst it just dribbles down so you've now finished a couple years spending time with Elon Musk I I won't ask you to talk about the book that's going to be coming out but when will it come out uh probably this fall we're still dealing I mean it's a Movable Feast and you put him in the category of Genius as well yeah I mean all Geniuses have you know all Geniuses are different as Jane Austen would have said but um his genius is understanding the intersection of physics and engineering and the physics of properties and we were talking about it at lunch today because he's totally mad and totally crazy and totally you know problematic at times and yet over and over again whether it comes to deciding to start Tesla and figuring out the Lithium-ion batteries the year GM decides to get out of the EV business and being successful and I think his company is now worth all night the next nine car companies combined or being the only person only entity that can get astronauts into orbit from the United States even NASA and Boeing can't do that anymore so he keeps succeeding and the book is about if he's this crazy what accounts for this success uh there's a line that Steve Jobs wrote at the end of the ad that he writes when he finally gets back to Apple in 99 it's a beautiful ad it says here's to The Crazy Ones The Misfits the Rebels the round pegs in the square hole and I remember Steve Jobs in his backyard reciting that to me my heart started to cry I thought he had something his eye but he was crying by the end and it ends with um because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do and in some ways that's a bit of the theme of the musk book so do you get people calling you all the time saying well Walter maybe you could write a book about me because and so I ought to give you the names you'd be amused by but I won't say them publicly I mean it does and they you know they're offering and they think you know if they just get the price right I said no no I actually don't write these so anybody in the private Equity world called you and said they should have a book that hasn't happened yet yeah two people you know okay well the Widow of one and uh one you know Walter I want to thank you for a great conversation thank you sir [Applause]

Channel: Institute for Advanced Study

Views: 47,283

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Id: CT4RBTKlRTU

Length: 56min 33sec (3393 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 28 2023