Nonconformity in chess and physics: Emanuel Lasker and Albert Einstein

Two of the greatest Jewish intellectuals, Lasker (1868-1941) and Einstein (1879-1955) were contemporaries and friends. Emanuel Lasker, son of a Jewish cantor, and world chess champion from 1894 to 1921, shared many concerns with that genius of Relativity, Albert Einstein.  

Not least was his preoccupation with the future of European Jews. Towards the end of his career, Lasker published The Community of the Future, a political tract in which he demonstrated many of his ideas to create an ideal society. Two problems were especially prominent in his lucubrations: the fate of European Jews, highlighted of course by the irresistible rise of the Nazis in Germany, and the spectre of widespread unemployment. 

To resolve the first problem, Lasker even proposed the near geographical homonym, Alaska, as a possible refuge for Jewish immigration, a proposal that at that time of intractable emergency did not sound as outlandish as it might today. Lasker also pondered deeply on the origins of anti-Semitism and identified unemployment as a major cause of resentment against the Jews. His remedy to cure the evil of unemployment was to establish communities modelled on the Kibbutz system, then popular in Israel, in order to prepare and train people for the job market. Lasker comprehended that work did set free and empower populations, a stance in complete opposition to the Satanic Nazi parody, erected over the gates of Dachau, Theresienstadt and Auschwitz: Arbeit macht frei.  

While winning and holding the World Chess Championship for 27 years, Lasker had earned a PhD in Mathematics, with his 100-page 1905 thesis Zur Theorie der Moduln und Ideale. This work is regarded as one of the foundations of modern algebra. A confirmed polymath, he published several philosophical works, wrote one verse drama and regularly commented upon political events. In his prime Lasker was one of the most dominant champions, only losing the title to Capablanca in 1921. In addition, he was a first-class contract bridge player, writing about this and other games, including Draughts, Go and his own invention, the equally homonymic  Lasca . 

At the age of eleven Lasker was sent to Berlin to study mathematics, where he lived with his brother Berthold, eight years his senior, who, around 1879, the year of Einstein’s birth, taught him how to play chess. To supplement their income Emanuel Lasker played chess and card games for modest stakes, principally at the Cafe Kaiserhof. His rise was rapid and by 1893 Lasker was beginning to look like a convincing aspirant to world honours.

The incumbent champion, Wilhelm Steinitz, had already twice despatched the Russian Titan, Mikhail Tchigorin, and with the next natural challenger, Dr Siegbert Tarrasch, puzzlingly reluctant to enter the lists, Lasker traveled to the new world, where his challenge to Steinitz was played out in 1894, at venues in New York, Philadelphia, and Montreal. Steinitz had previously announced that he would win easily against his relatively inexperienced opponent, so it came as a something of a shock to the chess world, when it was Lasker who won the first game. Thus, on the transatlantic field of honour, two German-speaking Jews battled it out for the supreme chess title, while a third, Tarrasch, watched helplessly from the sidelines, as his dream of chess imperium vanished before his eyes. 

Lasker won convincingly with ten wins, five losses and four draws, thus becoming the second universally recognised World Chess Champion, and confirmed his title by beating Steinitz even more convincingly in their re-match in 1896-1897 (ten wins, five draws, and a mere two losses).

Einstein was , of course, a serious candidate for the supreme genius of all time. Yet, like Lasker, he was deeply concerned by the plight of European Jewry, and at one point, as we shall see, he even declined the presidency of the newly formed state of Israel. In just a few years, his brilliant insights entirely changed the way the universe is perceived, while his mighty equation, E=MC 2 , was to make available both for creative and destructive purposes, an energy source of hitherto unimagined intensity — atomic power. Indeed, Einstein’s investigations ushered in the atomic age. For the very first time, human beings were actually placed in the position of understanding how the universe works, while simultaneously being given the terrifying capacity to annihilate their own world.

Einstein  has the reputation of having been a  relative  dunce at his school in Munich, but this is a misapprehension. Although precocious, he did not excel in those subjects taught by the  Luitpold  Gymnasium, where he was a  pupil.   Einstein was  later to denounce their  lessons  as “lies”, and he was in fact  expelled  from the school on the grounds that he was a “disruptive  influence ” on his fellow students. He had an  enquiring mind  and often used to daydream. When  he applied  himself to something that he really enjoyed doing, he would excel. Two games of chess won by Einstein do survive, and I give links to them both at the close of this column. My heart likes to believe that these are as genuine, like well attested games by Tolstoy, Randolph Churchill and Prokofiev, though my head warns that they might belong in the apocryphal category, inhabited by games attributed to Napoleon and Pope John Paul II. 

Einstein studied  music as a boy and eventually became an accomplished violinist, playing for  relaxation.  While playing a  duet  with a professional violinist, Einstein missed a few notes and beats. This prompted his exasperated companion to ask “What’s the  matter  with you, Einstein? Can’t you count?”

It is clear, though, that early in his life (he was fascinated by a compass at the age of five),  Einstein was determined  to probe the secrets and solve the riddle of the physical world. He was inspired by a boo k  of Euclid’s geometry and he made a particular point of studying Michelangelo’s  pictures. By  the age of 16,  Einstein had  already written a  scientific  paper on the relationship between electricity, magnetism and the ether. He reported at the time that he came up with his theories by encouraging himself to play mind games, in which he allowed his  imagination  to run riot. 

Einstein  also reported that in one daydreaming session he had imagined riding on a sunbeam to the end of the universe. To his amazement, when he got to “the end of the universe”, he found he was bac k  where he had started his “ journey ”, and thus concluded that the universe must be both finite and curved. In his  paper,   Einstein  explored the  question  “what would happen if one could follow a beam of light at the  speed   of light?” As a  result, he discovered a paradox which, in  scientific   jargon,  is “a spatially oscillating electromagnetic field at rest”. In other  words,  in spite of moving at  a vast speed, one  would appear to have not moved at all. 

In 1895, Einstein joined the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School at  Zurich, at  an age two years below the standard age of  enrolment. There Einstein   studied   under Professor  Hermann Minkowski, the Russo-German mathematician, whose special interests were the theory of numbers, space and time.  Einstein  could not have found a teacher more in tune with his own predilections.  Einstein took   Swiss  nationality in 1901, and in 1902 he was appointed  Examiner  at the Swiss Patent Office. From this point on, his achievements  begin to  ta k e on the aspect of  an intellectual   roller  coaster.

Einstein published a steady stream of  scientific  papers on a number of problems in the field of physics. One concerned the quantum theory of Germany’s greatest physicist, Max Planck (1858-1947), which held that energy changes or emissions occur in violent, abrupt instalments, packages or quanta. Planc k himself was to become a Nobel Prize winner, President of the Berlin Science Academy and a member of the Royal  Society.  

In 1905, Einstein  applied  Planck’s quantum  theory to light and published his revolutionary paper on Special  Relativity. From  1909 onwards, the scientific world realised that a new Galileo or Newton was upon them, and showered  Einstein  with Professorships – for example, in  Zurich,  Prague and Berlin.  In 1916, Einstein  published his theory of General Relativity. Three years later, two British  expeditions confirmed,  through their  observation  of  eclipses,  that  Einstein’s  theories were correct.

The world of science was now in  ferment,  but  excitement  also gripped the world at large. As the Times of  London  wrote: “The scientific conception of the fabric of the universe must be changed. It is confidently believed by the greatest experts that enough has been done to overthrow the certainty of ages, and to require a new philosophy of the universe. A philosophy that will sweep away nearly all that has hitherto been accepted as the axiomatic basis of physical thought. The ideals of Aristotle and Euclid and Newton, which are the basis of all  our present conceptions,  prove in fact not to correspond with what can be observed in the fabric of the universe. Space is merely a relation between two sets of data and  an infinite  number of times may coexist. Here and there, past and present, are relative not absolute and change according to the ordinates and  coordinates  selected.  Observational   science  has in fact led back to the purest  subjective  idealism.”

Lasker disagreed with Einstein’s theories and wrote forcefully in opposition to them. This, however, did not deter the great physicist from contributing a magnificently insightful foreword to Dr J Hannak’s standard biography of the great chess master. Einstein wrote: “Emanuel Lasker was undoubtedly one of the most interesting people I came to know in my later life. Few indeed can have combined such a unique independence of personality with so eager an interest in all the great problems of mankind.” One of these, of course, was Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which Lasker hated.

Einstein again: “Lasker’s keen analytical brain had immediately and clearly recognised that the entire problem hinged on the constancy of the velocity of light in empty space. He clearly saw that, once such constancy was admitted, the relativisation of space was unanswerable, whether one liked it or not, and he did not like it at all… I rather liked Lasker’s stubborn intellectual independence, a most rare quality in a generation whose intellectuals are almost invariably mere camp followers. And so I let the matter rest.” “Stubborn” here is Einsteinspeak for “wrong”. Nevertheless, one wonder s how Einstein and Lasker would have fared within the groupthink corral of our modern woking classes.

Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s, and the particularly pernicious version of Nazi inspired groupthink which infected Germany in the 1930s, led to Einstein leaving Europe and establishing himself at Princeton in the United States, where he lived for 20 years. In September 1939 he wrote to President Roosevelt, advising him to start wor k on an  atomic  bomb project and warning of the dangers of a  possible German initiative  in this field. This was to lead directly to the  Manhattan Project.  

The  equation, E=MC 2 , where energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light  squared,  demonstrates that a very small amount of mass is the equivalent of a vast amount of energy.  By utilising  this theory, two German scientists,  Otto Hahn  and  Fritz Strassman, were  already engaged in 1938 in splitting the uranium  atom.  They were thus on the brink of unleashing untold energy for Germany. Fortunately though, Werner Heisenberg, Germany’s top physicist during the 1940s, succeeded in leading the  Nazi  authorities down a blind alley, as befits the originator of the Uncertainty Principle, and thus helped to deflect Nazi science from  concentrating  on the creation of an atomic weapon.

After  the detonation of atomic bombs on  Hiroshima  and Nagasaki, and the  subsequent   cessation  of global hostilities,  Einstein  (who had earlier written an anti-war book with Sigmund Freud, Why  War?   1933), urged international control of all atomic devices.  Then,  in common with  Charlie  Chaplin,  Einstein  also protested against the  communist  witch-hunt of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s  un-American  Activities Committee in the early  1950s. In 1952,   Einstein  was offered the presidency of the newly created state of  Israel,  but declined to  accept  the  honour,  saying: “ Equations  are more important to me, because politics are for the present, but an equation is something for eternity!”

Examination of Einstein’s brain after his death revealed that it contained 400 per cent  more glial cells   per neurone  than usual, which would have had the effect of boosting his power of association between seemingly  disparate  items way beyond the average. But whether this was the cause or effect of his genius, it is impossible to tell. 

Two games attributed to Albert Einstein can be seen here.

Einstein’s great predecessor, Sir Isaac Newton, wrote of his three inspirational friends, Amicus Platonis, Amicus Aristoteles and Amicus Veritas. Plato and Aristotle knew nothing of chess, but in my heart of hearts I yearn to believe that those two games are, indeed, a true indication of the chess ability of possibly the greatest genius humankind has ever known.  

Raymond Keene ’ s latest book “ Fifty Shades of Ray: Chess in the year of the Coronavirus”, containing some of his best pieces from TheArticle, is now available from  Blackwell’s.