Albert's Aortal Aneurysm; and Evelyn, R.I.P.

Well, if he hadn't died on a Monday, I probably wouldn't bother with this. But he did, and it's again a Monday so here it is, from the penultimate chapter of Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson, published in 2007.  Albert died at Princeton Hospital, yep, in good old New Jersey.  We zoom into his hospital room late on Sunday night: 

He worked as long as he could, and when the pain got too great, he went to sleep. Shortly after one a.m. on Monday, April 18, 1955, the nurse heard him blurt out a few words in German that she could not understand. The aneurysm, like a big blister, had burst, and Einstein died at age 76.

I can't highly recommend Isaacson's book, except for the factual information it contains.  You can get an idea of the problem from the quote above.  Definitely skip the first chapter, read the second chapter, and then just for fun, read the last chapter, "Einstein's Brain and Einstein's Mind," about the  removal of Einstein's brain without permission of his relatives by Thomas Harvey, the pathologist on duty lo those many years ago.  Fifty six, to be exact.

Also, which I didn't know before reading the footnote about it in Isaacson's book, Einstein's eyes were removed by (or given to) his ophthalmologist, Henry Abrams:  "...Abrams happened to wander into the autopsy room, and he ended up taking with him his former patient's eyeballs, which he subsequently kept in a New Jersey safe deposit box."  I would surely like to know what then happened to those soulful looking eyes, but mainly it's not pleasant to think they were even removed.  Unlike Einstein's extracted brain, which has a bizarre and much-written-about history (see the book Driving Mr. Albert, for instance), his eyes receive no further mention that I have yet found in the historical record (okay, what I mean is, I just now did a search and didn't see anything relevant).  Albert's body was cremated as he'd requested and, according to Isaacson, his ashes were scattered in the Delaware River.

The oddest thing of all I learned from reading the last chapter of Isaacson's book is that Einstein may have a still-living daughter.  Einstein was 57 in 1936 when his second wife Elsa died.  He never remarried, but as Isaacson says, "was spending time with a variety of women."  (Uh, well, yeh, he did that also when he was married to Elsa, but not as much maybe.)  Sometime in the early 1940s, Einstein's oldest son, Hans Albert, a hydraulics engineering professor at Berkeley, adopted a baby girl, who then of course became the step-granddaughter of Albert, an addition to the several actual, bloodline grandchildren, some of whom I guess are still around.  The question of that moment of adoption, 1941, would be, why the heck would H.A. and wife adopt another kid, especially one born in Chicago?  Hmmm.  Anyway, the adopted one's name is Evelyn Einstein. (How many Evelyn's have you known?  Not many I bet--there's another mystery: the choice of her name.)  In 1998, she was "divorced, marginally employed, and struggling with poverty," Isaacson says.  Whether that's changed, I don't know.

Well, just now googling her name, I find she just died at age 70!  Whew, how bizarre is that? The obituary being in today's New York Times online! (I wrote this part and the remainder on the 19th of April, actually.)  Anyway, Evelyn could not have a DNA test done to determine Einstein's paternity or lack of it, Isaacson says, because the way Thomas Harvey embalmed Einstein's brain "made it impossible to extract usable DNA."

The oddness of this very likely possibility of Einstein having had a post-marital daughter is only made stranger by the fact that he and his first wife, before they were married, had a daughter who was given up for adoption or left with her mother's relatives in Serbia. Quoting Isaacson from the list of "main characters" in his book:  "Lieserl Einstein (1902-?). Premarital daughter of Einstein and Mileva Maric.  Einstein probably never saw her.  Likely left in her Serbian mother's hometown of Novi Sad for adoption and may have died of scarlet fever in late 1903." 

Albert and Mileva, once they were married, had two sons.  Besides Hans Albert (1904-1973) there was, again quoting Isaacson: "Eduard Einstein (1910-1965).  Second son of Mileva Maric and Einstein. Smart and artistic, he obsessed about Freud and hoped to become a psychiatrist, but he succumbed to his own schizophrenic demons in his twenties and was institutionalized in Switzerland for much of the rest of his life."  Eduard, whose nickname was Tete, never married or had any kids.

(I would say "schizophrenia demons" instead of "schizophrenic demons."  Could be a typo in the book. Have you noticed typos are more common these days, appearing in even the best of publications?  What's up with that?)

Evelyn does, in the 1960 photo in the NYTimes obit, seem to have Einstein's eyes.

The Image in the Aperture

I was going to post more excerpts from Hiroshima, but like the blurb on the cover of my paperback copy of the book says (quoting a review from the Saturday Review of Literature), "Everyone able to read should read it."  And if you read it a good while ago, I suggest re-reading it.  I have dog-eared so many pages I'd be posting quotes from here to next week--okay that's beginning in a few hours, technically, so let's say from here to next month, at my current rate--if I excerpted passages from all the pages I marked.  It's a slim book, even with the added 1985 chapter.

Another slim book, slim for a textbook at 200 pages, is one I bought recently through the auspices of Edward R. Hamilton bookseller, called Introduction to the Theory of Coherence and Polarization of Light.  It's written by Emil Wolfe, and contains this as an epigraph for the first chapter:  "...the image that will be formed in a photographic camera--i.e. the distribution of intensity on the sensitive layer--is present in an invisible, mysterious way in the aperture of the lens, where the intensity is equal at all points."  The quote is from Frits Zernike's discussion of the concept of optical coherence in a lecture published in Proceedings of the Physical Society (London), Vol. 61, No. 158, 1948.

Wolf is rather well-known, partly for his research publications in optics and partly due to coauthoring two classic upper level physics textbooks:  Principles of Optics (with Max Born) , and Optical Coherence and Quantum Optics (with Leonard Mandel).  He is on the faculty at The Institute of Optics, U of Rochester. Here's what interests me mainly about the Intro book.  In the preface, and also included in the info about the book in the ERH bookseller catalogue, there's a statement saying it has recently been discovered that coherence and polarization of light "are two aspects of statistical optics which are intimately related and can be treated in a unified manner."  Recently means not long before the book was published in 2007.  Exciting stuff!

Next, or at least sometime soon, we must discuss the idea of superposition in quantum mechanics, before getting back to the cat, the strangeness of which is due to the unavoidability of superposition of states in quantum theory. 

Excerpts from first chapter of Hiroshima

The four chapters of Hiroshima as it was originally published in 1946 are:  A Noiseless Flash, The Fire, Details Are Being Investigated, Panic Grass and Feverfew; the new 1985 chapter is The Aftermath.  The experiences documented in the book are those of Miss Toshinki Sasaki, Dr. Masakazu Fujii, Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, Dr. Terufumi Sasaki (no relation to Toshinki), and Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto.  Some excerpts from Chapter One:

            As Mrs. Nakamura stood watching her neighbor, everything flashed whiter than any white she had ever seen.  She did not notice what happened to the man next door; the reflex of a mother set her in motion toward her children.  She had taken a single step (the house was 1,350 yards, or three quarters of a mile, from the center of the explosion) when something picked her up and she seemed to fly into the next room over the raised sleeping platform, pursued by parts of her house.

            Timbers fell around her as she landed, and a shower of tiles pommelled her; everything became dark, for she was buried.  The debris did not cover her deeply. She rose up and freed herself.  She heard a child cry, “Mother, help me!,” and saw her youngest—Myeko, the five-year-old—buried up to her breast and unable to move.  As Mrs. Nakamura started frantically to claw her way toward the baby, she could see or hear nothing of her other children.

                                                                  _________________

            Dr.Fujii was the proprietor of a peculiarly Japanese institution: a private, single-doctor hospital.  This building, perched beside and over the water of the Kyo River, and next to the bridge of the same name, contained thirty rooms for thirty patients and their kinfolk—for, according to Japanese custom, when a person falls sick and goes to a hospital, one or more members of his family go and live there with him, to cook for him, bathe, massage, and read to him, and to offer incessant familial sympathy, without which a Japanese patient would be miserable indeed.

                                                                ___________________

            After the terrible flash—which, Father Kleinsorge later realized, reminded him of something he had read as a boy about a large meteor colliding with the earth—he had time (since he was about 1,400 yards from the center) for one thought:  A bomb has fallen directly on us.  Then for a few seconds or minutes, he went out of his mind.

            Father Kleinsorge never knew how he got out of the house.  The next things he was conscious of were that he was wandering around the mission’s vegetable garden in his underwear, bleeding slightly from small cuts along his left flank; that all the buildings round about had fallen down except the Jesuits’ mission house, which had long before been braced and double-braced by a priest named Gropper, who was terrified of earthquakes; that the day had turned dark; and that Murata-san, the housekeeper, was nearby, crying over and over, “Shu Jesusu, awaremi tamai! Our Lord Jesus, have pity on us!”

                                                                  _________________ 

           Dr. Sasaki shouted the name of the chief surgeon and rushed around to the man’s office and found him terribly cut by glass.  The hospital was in horrible confusion:  heavy partitions and ceilings had fallen on patients, beds had overturned, windows had blown in and cut people, blood was spattered on the walls and floors, instruments were everywhere, many of the patients were running about screaming, many more lay dead.  (A colleague working in the laboratory to which Dr. Sasaki had been walking was dead; Dr. Sasaki’s patient, whom he had just left and who a few moments before had been dreadfully afraid of syphilis, was also dead.)  Dr. Sasaki found himself the only doctor in the hospital who was unhurt.

            Dr. Sasaki, who believed that the enemy had hit only the building he was in, got bandages and began to bind the wounds of those inside the hospital; while outside, all over Hiroshima, maimed and dying citizens turned their unsteady steps toward the Red Cross Hospital to begin an invasion that was to make Dr. Sasaki forget his private nightmare for a long, long time.

                                                              ____________________

            Then a tremendous flash of light cut across the sky.  Mr. Tanimoto has a distinct recollection that it traveled from east to west, from the city toward the hills.  It seemed a sheet of sun.  Both he and Mr. Matsuo reacted in terror—and both had time to react (for they were 3,500 yards, or two miles, from the center of the explosion). Mr. Matsuo dashed up the front steps into the house and dived among the bedrolls and buried himself there.  Mr. Tanimoto took four or five steps and threw himself between two big rocks in the garden.  He bellied up very hard against one of them.  As his face was against the stone, he did not see what happened.  He felt a sudden pressure, and then splinters and pieces of board and fragments of tile fell on him.  He heard no roar.

                                                                    ____________________

            … She thought that before she began to make entries in her lists of new employees, discharges, and departures for the Army, she would chat for a moment with the girl on her right.  Just as she turned her head away from the windows, the room was filled with a blinding light.  She was paralyzed by fear, fixed still in her chair for a long moment (the plant was 1,600 yards from the center).

            Everything fell, and Miss Sasaki lost consciousness. The ceiling dropped suddenly and the wooden floor above collapsed in splinters and the people up there came down and the roof above them gave way; but principally and first of all, the bookcases right behind her swooped forward and the contents threw her down, with her left leg horribly twisted and breaking underneath her.  There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.

A Japanese Doctor's Comments

It's remarkable reading Hiroshima to be reminded of how much the effect of the atomic bomb was like an earthquake:  Buildings are knocked down.  In the case of Hiroshima, after the houses and other buildings were flattened by the bomb's shock wave (or blast effect), various small fires started and resulted in the total conflagration that consumed the city and killed most of the people who died in the bombing.  Others were killed immediately by being hit by flying debris, especially glass, and near the center of the blast by the heat of the bomb.  Others died later from the acute exposure to high levels of gamma rays and from the horrible flash burns that were seen then for the first time.

But in reading the book, there are many descriptions of people being trapped in rubble, of people digging their way out of rubble.  I will post some excerpts from the book later, including excerpts from letters written by the two doctors who are among about the six people John Hersey documents in the book.  First, a letter from a Japanese doctor that was posted as a comment in March on Yahoo's news site, concerning the recent earthquake and tsunami:

Dear friends all over the world

Thank you for your encouraging comments

I am in very neighbor of outrageous disaster of the quake.

And under tremendous fear of spreading nuclear substance from damaged nuclear power plants in Fukushima in Japan.

First thing which I want to say is that this quake and Tunami is unexpected things, besides we surveyed last 300 hundreds years. One can argue it is not enough periods for setting effective countermeasures, but in some town very close to coast set up breakwater over than 10 meters. However, the Tunami very overcame it and swallowed so many people with over than 10.000 casualties. Nightmere.

I must admit that we should have much more careful about managing nuclear plant about huge quake. I am very sorry, but I think that unexpected thing may be happened and, in general, very positive attitude is that help each other and look into real and effective resolution of serious problem. Please give us your talented knowledge and technique to manage deadly consequence of the quale for the appropriate Japanese staff.

We, Japanese, for sure will hang on this problem and would like to welcome all of you to Japan with traditional hospitality as it went before the accident.

With warm regards

Yoshihiko Tomita MD