The Books: “Driving Mr. Albert: A trip across America with Einstein’s brain” (Michael Paterniti)

Next book in my science and philosophy books section:

DrivingAlbert.jpgAnother book about Einstein – this one is called Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein’s Brain, by Michael Paterniti. This is a fun book. It’s a bit of a travelogue – it’s a cross-country trip across America, and that is a huge part of the book: describing America, the different states, and what it’s like to drive cross-country. It’s also a history/biography of the disappearance of Einstein’s brain – Thomas Harvey did the autopsy in 1955 and removed the brain and took it home with him. Where it then stayed for over 40 years. Sounds stranger than real-life, but it’s true – Einstein’s brain disappeared. I can’t remember the details of how it was discovered again, and why it needs to be moved to California, but Michael Paterniti has a great idea. He’s kind of at a crossroads in his life (the book is also part memoir) – and he needs something new, he needs an adventure. So he proposes to the now 86 year old Dr. Harvey: “Let’s drive cross-country with the brain – let’s escort it, you and I, to its final destination.” The book tells that story. Of what goes through your mind when you have Einstein’s BRAIN in the back seat.


EXCERPT FROM Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein’s Brain, by Michael Paterniti

A confession: I want Harvey to sleep. I want him to fall into a deep, blurry, Rip Van Winkle daze, and I want to park the Skylark mother-ship and walk around to the trunk and open it. I want Harvey snoring loudly as I unzip the duffel bag and reach my hands inside, and I want to — what? — touch Einstein’s brain. I want to touch the brain. Yes, I’ve admitted it. I want to hold it, coddle it, measure its weight in my palm, handle some of its one hundred billion now-dormant neurons. Does it feel like tofu, sea urchin, bologna? What, exactly? And what does such a desire make me? One of the legion of relic freaks? Or something worse?

The more the idea persists in my head, the more towns slip past outside the window as Harvey gazes into the distant living rooms of happy families, the more I wonder what, in fact, I’d be holding if I held the brain. I mean, it’s not really Einstein and it’s not really a brain, but disconnected pieces of a brain, just as the passing farms are not really America but parts of a whole, symbols of the thing itself, which is everything and nothing at once.

Still, I’d be touching Einstein the Superstar, immediately recognizable by the electrocuted hair and those mournful mirthful eyes. The man whose American apotheosis is so complete that he’s now a coffee mug, a postcard, a T-shirt. A figure of speech, an ad pitchman, a bumper sticker (“I’m hung like Einstein,” reads one that I spy on the back of some ironic VW Jetta, “and I’m smart as a horse.”) Despite the fact that he was a sixty-one-year-old man when he was naturalized as an American citizen, it’s amazing how fully he’s been appropriated by this country.

But why? I think the answer is that, more so than anyone else in the last one hundred years, Einstein was not exactly one of us. Even now, he comes back again as both Lear’s fool and Tiresias, comically offering his uncanny vision of the future while warning us about the lurking violence of humankind. “I do not know how the third world war will be fought,” he is said to have cautioned, “but I do know how the fourth will: with sticks and stones.” Because he glimpsed into the workings of the universe and saw an impersonal God — what he called an “invisible piper” — and because he greeted the twentieth century by rocketing into the twenty-first with his breakthrough tehories, he assumed a mien of invincibility. And because his sloppy demeanor stood in such stark contrast to what we expect from a white-winged prophet, he seemed both innocent and trustworthy, and thus that much more supernatural.

If we’ve incorporated the theory of relativity into our scientific view of the universe, as well as our literature, art, music, and culture at large, it’s the great scientist’s attempt to devise a kind of personal religion — an intimate spiritual and political manifesto — that still stands in stark, almost sacred contrast to the Pecksniffian systems of salvation offered by modern society. Einstein’s blending of twentieth-century skepticism with nineteenth-century romanticism offers a different kind of hope.

“I am a deeply religious nonbeliever,” he said. “This is a somewhat new kind of religion.” Pushing further, he sought to marry science and religion by redefining their terms. “I am of the opinion that all the finer speculations in the realm of science spring from a deep religious feeling,” he said. “I also believe that this kind of religiousness … is the only creative religious activity of our time.”

To touch Einstein’s brain, then, would be to ride a ray of light, as Einstein once dreamed it as a child. To clasp time itself. To feel the warp and wobble of the universe. Einstein claimed that the happiest thought of his life came to him in 1907, during his seven-year tenure at the Patent Office in Bern, when he was twenty-eight and still couldn’t find a teaching job. Up to his ears in a worsted-wool suit and patent applications, a voice in his mind whispered, “If a person falls freely, he won’t feel his own weight.” That became the general theory of relativity. His life and ideas continue to fill thousands of books; even today, scientists are still verifying his work. Recently, a NASA satellite took millions of measurements in space that proved a uniform distribution of primordial temperatures just above absolute zero; that is, the data proved that the universe was in a kind of postcoital afterglow from the big bang, further confirming Einstein’s explanation for how the universe began.

It would be good to touch that.

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