Oxford Sparks

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Emily Elias: The History of Science Museum in Oxford has some pretty cool stuff, but there’s one item that is particularly interesting. It is a blackboard used by Albert Einstein. So how did it get there? What’s the story behind it? On this episode of the Oxford Sparks Big Questions podcast, we’re asking what was Einstein doing in Oxford?

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Hello, I’m Emily Elias, and this is the show where we seek out the brightest minds at the University of Oxford. And we ask them the big questions. And for this one, we have found a researcher who has studied up for this very specific lesson.

Dr JC Niala: I’m Dr JC Niala, and I’m the Deputy Director and Head of Research, Teaching and Collections at the History of Science Museum, which is a University of Oxford museum.

Emily: And you have a lot of stuff in the collection, but today we’re going to focus in on one particular item, a blackboard that Einstein used. Now, can you just kind of take me back in time? What was this historical context that would have brought Einstein to Oxford to use this blackboard?

JC: Well, the very first thing to remember is that Einstein was already a bit of a superstar, especially in Britain. He had a great thing for British natural philosophers, people like Newton, you know, who we now call physicists or scientists. And, you know, he was really popular. This was after the end of the First World War. So the political context was that there was quite a bit of work being done to try and improve Anglo-German relations. The other thing that was going on is that Oxford actually was not the centre of the universe that it is now. Oxford was a little bit isolated and was trying to make a comeback and put itself back on the world stage. So there were a series of lectures called the Rhodes Lectures that were happening, and they were inviting incredibly well-known people of arts and letters and science to come and give lectures. So actually, Oxford started to pursue Einstein in order to get Einstein to come and deliver one of these Rhodes Lectures.

Emily: And so this was in the 1930s?

JC: So the pursuing Einstein actually started in the 1920s. It took him quite a while to get here, and he wasn’t very well. And there was a professor by the name of Frederick Lindemann who was really the one kind of writing to Einstein saying, please come over. And then in 1931 was his very first visit, in the spring of 1931. These were really important years, because between 1930 and 1933 was when Germany was starting to get into some really awful political times. By 1933, Hitler’s in power and Einstein had found himself as a refugee. But we’ll just go back to 1931 for a moment. And that spring, Einstein turns up. He’s not unwell as he had been, which is why he couldn’t come before. But he had been also nervous about giving the lecture in English. So, you know, he was going to give it in German. They’d managed to convince him that this is great, not just for the Rhodes Lectures, but also for himself. And here he arrives. And while he’s giving these lectures, he starts writing on these blackboards. There were a couple of blackboards. And what’s amazing about what Einstein was writing is that he was thinking out loud. These weren’t perfect theories. These were thoughts that he was having at the time about physics. And that’s what’s captured.

Emily: Is it written in German or is it in English? How did he sort of translate himself?

JC: One of the things that is wonderful about these blackboards is if you were to come and see them at the History of Science Museum, one of the things you’ll see right at the end of an equation is a J for Jahre, which is German for year. So Einstein was still thinking in German and still writing in German, which says a lot, you know, speaks to the fact that Einstein was a refugee. German was his mother tongue, and he had to flee when Hitler came into power.

Emily: So Einstein is already the superstar status. What was the sort of like wooing going on to try and get him to say, hey, you should stay in Oxford?

JC: So they offered him a five-year fellowship. Frederick Lindemann, who I mentioned, was like, you know, come to Christ Church where he was based. Come and stay in these incredible surroundings. Einstein actually ended up staying in the same rooms Lewis Carroll, who wrote Alice in Wonderland, stayed in. And of course, you know, from Oxford’s perspective, they felt like they were offering him this incredible experience, you know, the college dining, absolutely lush places to stay. But Einstein was really down to earth. And he wrote, you know, he joked about Oxford dons. He said they’re the holy brotherhood in tails. He wasn’t into dressing up in dinner jackets and smartly. He found it all a little bit stuffy. Einstein was much more down to earth. And actually he played the violin, and that was the way he was able to engage with the people of Oxford rather than being in a stuffy college.

Emily: Who is he playing with? What was he doing musically?

JC: Well, I think one of the things that I think is quite special about Einstein is how humble he was. He didn’t travel with his own violin. He borrowed instruments whenever he came. He played in people’s homes, particularly in homes in Gunfield in North Oxford. And there’s a lady by the name of Margaret Deneke who actually writes about this experience of Einstein playing. You know, it speaks a lot to somebody that can pick up a violin where they are and play with the people of the town. I think it says a lot about who he was as a person.

Emily: Imagine listening to Einstein playing violin in your sitting room. That would be incredible.

JC: It would be. I mean, apparently, he wasn’t the world’s best musician, but I mean, hey, not like he wasn’t exactly the world’s best something. But he was, you know, he was a really competent, really good to listen to musician.

Emily: So he wasn’t a fan of what Oxford had to offer him.

JC: This is the really strange thing. He was really happy to connect with the minds of Oxford. He was happy to connect with fellow musicians in Oxford when he was playing the violin and, you know, often in people’s homes. But the actual kind of ritual, the grandeur, many of the things that you would think a superstar might be attracted to, that wasn’t Einstein’s gig.

Emily: And so where did he end up after giving his final lecture in ‘33?

JC: So after giving his final lecture, he was actually already what we would describe nowadays as a displaced person. He couldn’t return back to Germany, because by this point Jewish scientists, Jewish intellectuals are being expelled. They’re also being avoided by people in Germany. So he was incredibly isolated. He was in Belgium and he started writing to Lindemann again, going, can I come back to the UK? But the response was kind of like, well, things are not great. Communications are being monitored. It’s a bit of a difficult time. And so actually, Einstein didn’t then end up making Britain his home. He ended up moving to Princeton in the US, and many of the memories that we have about Einstein are really from that time. But what was critical about Einstein’s time in Oxford is it was, in some ways, a bridge between his life in Germany, where he started off his life and his career, and then going on to the US. Oxford was kind of that pivotal moment in between his past and what turned out to be his future.

Emily: And you have a really neat memento of that with those blackboards. Can you tell me about how they’ve been preserved all of these years?

JC: Well, the very first thing to say is that Einstein was not happy that they were preserved. So as a museum, with, I suppose, in some ways being a little bit naughty, after the lectures a couple of the dons realised that these blackboards were really important historically. And because, as I said, he was already well known. And so they took them down and they got in touch with the curator of the History of Science Museum, Gunther. And they said, you know, we’ve got a couple of these blackboards. Would you take them? And of course, Gunther, when he saw what they were, was like, ‘of course, I’ll take them immediately.’ And they received the blackboards and they went into storage. And as I said, there were two blackboards. And unfortunately, and I hasten to say this was before my time at the museum, one of those blackboards got wiped in storage. We still have the chalk dust. We still have the blackboard. But we also have a perfectly preserved blackboard that you can come and see with Einstein’s equations written on them.

Emily: Oh, that must be such a horrible feeling to have been the person that accidentally wiped that. How do you make sure that this incident does not happen again?

JC: Well, it’s an interesting one. I think about it a lot because on the one hand it’s, you know, it’s oh my goodness, I can’t believe we lost that material cultural heritage. But on the other hand, Einstein would have been happy. He was really upset about the fact that those blackboards were being kept. So, I don’t know, maybe it was the ghost of Einstein wiping it off.

Emily: Can I ask you a final cheeky question coming out of Einstein’s ghost, which is, I guess, our fan fiction after this podcast? You’ve also been working on a podcast about milk, so not Einstein related at all. You’re a woman of many layers. Can you tell me a bit about this podcast that you’ve been working on?

JC: Yes. So I and my colleague Johanna Zetterström-Sharp, and the Einstein link actually is her family potentially live in a house that might have been one of the houses that Einstein played in. We have a podcast called Milk on the Move, and it talks about the social, cultural and political history of milk – because people think about it as an innocent drink, but it’s so much more.

Emily: What is the most surprising thing that you learned in the course of the podcast?

JC: That milk is alive. We tend to think about milk as, you know, just something that we drink, but actually it’s full of bacteria, a lot of which is actually beneficial for our health, but also what can make milk quite dangerous. And this is why there’s, you know, things like pasteurisation and all sorts of scientific technologies were used to develop to make milk safe, to be able to be consumed at scale and to be able to travel. So we think of milk as something that, you know, you just take out of the fridge and pour into a glass, but actually it’s a living substance and needs to be dealt with in that way.

Emily: And how can people find your podcast?

JC: They can find it on Apple, on Spotify, and also on our website, which is MilkingIt.org.

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Emily: This podcast was brought to you by Oxford Sparks from the University of Oxford, with music by John Lyons, and a special thanks to Dr JC Niala.

And if you want to listen to an episode of her podcast, Milk on the Move, it is in our feed right now, so go click on that, take a listen, and we’ll also have a link to it in our show notes.

Tell us what you think about this podcast. We are on the internet at Oxford Sparks or go to our website, oxfordsparks.ox.ac.uk.

I’m Emily Elias. Bye for now.

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