Albert Einstein and chess. Chess is the fastest game in the world, because in chess you have to think through every second thousands of thoughts. Albert Einstein on chess Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was born at Ulm in Wurttemberg, Germany, on March 14, 1879. The family moved to Munich in 1880. He may have first played chess in Munich. In 1936, he did tell a reporter that he played chess as a boy. He grew up in Munich, but left at age 15 when his parents moved to Italy in 1894. His parents then sent him to Switzerland to finish secondary school, which he completed in 1896. In 1896 he renounced his German citizenship and enrolled in a Swiss technical school. He graduated with a teaching diploma in 1900 and became a Swiss citizen in 1901. In 1905, at the age of 25, he received his doctorate after submitting his dissertation On a new determination of molecular dimensions. That same year he wrote articles on Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect, special relativity, and energy equivalency. The paper on the photoelectric effect later won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. In 1908, Dr. Einstein was licensed in Berne, Switzerland as a teacher and lecturer. In 1913, Einstein supposedly played this game. Einstein - Sell, Zurich 1913 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Bc5 4.c3 Nf6 5.d4 exd4 6.cxd4 Bb4 + 7.Nc3 OO 8.e5 Ne4 9.Bd3 Nxc3 10.bxc3 Bxc3 + 11.Kf1 Bxa1 12.Bxh7 + Kh8 13. Ng5 g6 14.h4 Kg7 15.h5 Rh8 16.hxg6 fxg6 17.Qf3 Qf8 18.Ne6 + dxe6 19.Bh6 + 1-0 (White announced mate in 6 moves, Black resigned.) In 1914 he moved to Berlin as a professor at the local university and became a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. He also served as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics. In 1915 he presented a series of lectures on the theory of general relativity. In the fall of 1918, Emanuel Lasker and Albert Einstein first met at the home of Einsteins friend and first biographer, Alexander Moszkowski (1851-1934), also a chess player. Einstein wrote to his mother, Recently I made the acquaintance of the chess master Lasker, a small, fine gentleman with a sharply cut profile and a Polish-Jew, yet genteel manner. In 1921 he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the photoelectric effect. In 1927 Einstein and Emanuel Lasker were living in Berlin and they became good friends. In December 1928 Einstein wrote to Dr. Emanuel Lasker, congratulating him on his 60th birthday. Einstein wrote, Emanuel Lasker is one of the strongest minds I ever met in my life. A Renaissance man, gifted with an untamable urge for liberty; averse to any social bonds .... As a genuine individualist and self-willed soul, he loves deduction; and inductive research leaves him cold .... I love his writings, irrespective of their content of truth, as the fruits of a great original and free mind. In 1931 a pamphlet was written called One Hundred Authors Against Einstein. One of the authors was Emanuel Lasker because Lasker did not believe the theory of relativity. Adolf Hitler came into power in 1933 and there was a nationalist hatred of Einstein, accusing him of creating Jewish physics. Einstein then fled Germany and was given permanent residence in the United States. He accepted a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He was 54 years old when he first arrived in the USA. The director of the Institute was Dr. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967). Emanuel Lasker also fled Berlin about the same time that Einstein left. On March 28, 1936, an article appeared in the New York Times called New Chess Theory Not for Einstein. In an interview, he said, I do not play any games. There is no time for it. When I get through work I do not want anything which requires the working of the mind. Einstein preferred playing the violin and sailing. Einstein did say he played chess as a boy. In 1939 Einstein met Dr. Edward Teller (1908-2003). Teller was an avid chess player, but there is no indication they played chess. Einstein became an American citizen in 1940 at the age of 61. He also maintained his Swiss citizenship. In 1947, a movie was made called The Beginning or the End. There is a scene in which a group of scientists go to the home of Albert Einstein (played by Ludwig Stossel). Einstein is seated by the fireplace with a chessboard and men on the coffee table. Einstein died on April 18, 1955 at the age of 76. Einstein was a good friend of Dr. Emanuel Lasker (1868-1941). Lasker thought Einsteins theory of relativity was wrong and that the speed of light was limited due to particles in space. Lasker did not think there was a perfect vacuum. Einstein knew Edward Lasker (1885-1981). On one occasion, Edward Lasker visited Einstein at Princeton and gave him an autographed copy of his book Go and Gomoku, written in 1934. Einstein, in return, gave Edward Lasker an autographed copy of one of his papers on relativity. The book given to Einstein later showed up in a Baltimore used bookstore. When someone told Edward Lasker about this, Lasker replied, Thats all right. I left his relativity paper on the subway. Einstein thanked Edward Lasker for his book, but then asked, You are obviously an intelligent man; clearly a great deal of work went into this book. But why for such a trivial and unimportant topic? Edward Lasker replied, A friend of mine recently said the following, and I must say I agree with it: We are born and we die, and in between these two events of a lifetime, there is a lot of time that must be wasted. Now, whether it is wasted by doing mathematics, practicing law, or playing games, it is really quite insignificant. Ed Lasker was quoting Clarence Darrow. In 1951 Einstein met a Go grandmaster from Japan and told the interpreter that he (Einstein) did not know much about Go. Einstein is quoted as saying that chess grips its exponent, shaking the mind and brain so that the inner freedom and independence of even the strongest character can not remain unaffected. Einstein also said, I always dislike the fierce competitive spirit embodied in [chess]. Einstein said he disliked chess in particular because he found it a far too aggressive game, and I do not like that kind of fighting. But the main reason why I do not like chess is ethical: because the main goal of the game consists in beating the opponent through employing various tricks and strategems. Einstein wrote a preface to a posthumous biography of Emanuel Lasker, Emanuel Lasker, The Life of a Chess Master, published by Dr. Jacques Hannak in 1952 (written in German in 1942). Emanuel Lasker was undoubtedly one of the most interesting people I came to know in my later years. We must be thankful to those who have penned the story of his life for this and succeeding generations. For there are few men who have had a warm interest in all the great human problems and at the same time kept their personality so uniquely independent. I am not a chess expert and therefore not in a position to marvel at the force of mind revealed in his greatest intellectual achievement - in the field of chess. I must even confess that the struggle for power and the competitive spirit expressed in the form of an ingenious game have always been repugnant to me. I met Emanuel Lasker at the house of my old friend, Alexander Moszkowski, and came to know him well in the course of many walks in which we exchanged opinions about the most varied questions. It was a somewhat one-sided exchange, in which I received more that I gave. For it was usually more natural for this eminently productive man to shape his own thoughts than to busy himself with those of another. To my mind, there was a tragic note in his personality, despite his fundamentally affirmative attitude towards life. The enormous psychological tension, without which nobody can be a chess master, was so deeply interwoven with chess that he could never entirely rid himself of the spirit of the game, even when he was occupied with philosophic and human problems. At the same time, it seemed to me that chess was more a profession for him than the real goal of his life. His real yearning seems to be directed towards scientific understanding and the beauty inherent only in logical creation, a beauty so enchanting that nobody who has once caught a glimpse of it can ever escape it. Spinozas material existence and independence were base on the grinding of lenses; chess had an analogous role in Laskers life. But Spinoza was granted a better fate, because his occupation left his mind free and untroubled, while, on the other hand, the chess playing of a master ties him to the game, fetters his mind and shapes it to a certain extent so that his internal freedom and ease, no matter how strong he is, must inevitably be affected. In our conversations and in the reading of his philosophical books, I always had that feeling. Of these books, The Philosophy of the Unattainable interested me the most; the book is not only very original, but it also affords a deep insight into Laskers entire personality. Now I must justify myself because I never considered in detail, either in writing or in our conversations, Emanuel Laskers critical essay on the theory of relativity. It is indeed necessary for me to say something about it here because even in his biography, which is focused on the purely human aspects, the passage which discusses the essay contains something resembling a slight reproach. Laskers keen analytical mind had immediately clearly recognized that the central point of the whole question is that the velocity of light (in a vacuum) is a constant. It was evident to him that, if this constancy were admitted, the relative of time could not be avoided. So what was there to do? He tried to do what Alexnder, whom historians have dubbed the Great, did when he cut the Gordian knot. Laskers attempted solution was based on the following idea: Nobody has any immediate knowledge of how quickly light is transmitted in a complete vacuum, for even in interstellar space there is always a minimal quantity of matter present under all circimstances and what holds there is even more applicable to the most complete vacuum created by man to the best of his ability. Therefore, who has the right to deny that its velocity in a really complete vacuum is infinite? To answer this argument can be expressed as follows: It is, to be sure, true that nobody has experimental knowledge of how light is transmitted in a complete vacuum. But it is as good as impossible to formulate a reasonable theory of light according to which the velocity of light is affected by minimal traces of matter which is very significant but at the same time virtuallt independent of ther density. Before such a theory, which moreover, must harmonize with the known phenomena of optics in an almost complete vacuum, can be set up, it seems that evey physicist must wait for the solution of the above-mentioned Gordian knot - if he is not satisified with the present solution. Moral: a strong mind can not take place of delicate fingers. But I liked Laskers immovable independence, a rare human attribute, in which respect almost all, including intelligent people, are mediocrities. And so I let matteers stand that way. I am glad that the reader will be able to get to know this strong and, at the same time, find and lovable personality from his sympathetic biography, but I am thankful for the hours of conversation which this ever striving, independent, simple man granted me. 1. Albert Einstein at age 14 1893 2. School-leaving certificate, issued by Albert Einstein in 1896, at age 17, after studying at the cantonal secondary school in Aarau, Switzerland. 3. Albert Einstein during a lecture in Vienna in 1921 4. Excursion to station Marconi in New Brunswick, New Jersey. In the photograph there are well-known scholars, including Tesla, 1921 5. Albert Einstein. Official photograph of the Nobel Prize in Physics 1921 6. Solvay Congress in 1927 on quantum mechanics. 7. From December 1930 to March 1931, during his second voyage to America, Einstein joined the expedition of the California Institute of Technology. During this trip, Einstein and his wife visited the Indians who lived in the north of Arizona near the Grand Canyon. It is interesting that in the photo headdress Einstein and tube do not belong to the Hopi Indians, and the Indians of the plains. 8. Albert Einstein, Albert Abraham Michelson, Robert Andrews Millikan. Pasadena. 1931 9. Violin Concerto Albert Einstein. 1941 10. Physicist Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein talk at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. 1940
Posted on: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 15:11:26 +0000
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