She had known, for instance, to let J. Robert Oppenheimer past the gates, and to make him comfortable in the guest room for a couple of days so that the two men could discuss and unravel the impediments to the atomic bomb research being done in Los Alamos. In a way, it was a vindication for the professor — he had felt marginalized for years by the younger establishment, Oppenheimer included, and to know that they would turn to him now, under the utmost secrecy, on a project of such unparalleled national importance, was invigorating, to say the least.
“To what depth is the lake?” Gödel asked, for the third time that morning. He had buckled his life preserver up to his chin.
“Ach, it is no more than twenty feet,” Einstein replied. “Twenty feet.”
That was plainly not the answer Gödel, hardly an accomplished swimmer, wanted to hear. Anything above six or seven feet would do the job, if it came to that.
The autumn wind was blowing the gray tendrils of Einstein’s hair about his head and the cobwebs out of his mind. The yellow sail of the little boat — a craft so battered that Einstein had jokingly christened it the Tinef, or, translated from the Yiddish, “piece of junk”—swelled and snapped with the breeze as he manned the tiller with a practiced hand.
“And how is your work going?” he asked, simply to distract Gödel from the slight heeling of the boat as the wind picked up.
“To which do you refer? My paper on the continuum hypothesis is almost done, and if you would be so kind, I may ask you to read it very soon and give me your opinion before I send it out for publication.”
“I would be happy to,” Einstein said sincerely. Gödel’s mathematical works — for which he had become famous — were always stimulating, and in their logic, irrefutable. His incompleteness theorems, which posited that in any given system there are claims which are true but which that same system cannot prove to be so, were enough to secure his place in the pantheon forever.
It was his other pet project — his ontological proof of a divine plan and an afterlife — that was, though just as well-grounded, unconvincing. For all of Einstein’s own belief in a unified field theory, a complete and elegant and unassailably integrated scheme for the organization of the cosmos — a goal he had been pursuing in vain for decades — he was not a believer in a God, at least insofar as any religion claimed to know Him. As for Heaven and Hell, they were nothing but fantasies. He could see no evidence for any of it. And if even a genius like Gödel couldn’t prove it to his satisfaction, then who could?
“As for my other work, the ontological proof—”
Here it comes, Einstein thought. It was his own fault for opening the door.
“—I have paid close attention to your objections to the juncture of axioms four and five, and I believe I have been able to resolve them in a way that does not in any fashion diminish or alter the validity of those that follow.”
It had taken him only about fourteen axioms and theorems in a row to build his case, and because of his brilliance, it was not easy to find the chinks in the argument. But Einstein knew that its central thesis was wrong. Why? Because he knew in his very bones that there could be no reason, nor any special purpose, for a Divinity. Mankind had made it all up out of whole cloth because, at bottom, everyone was afraid of the dark, afraid of ultimate extinction, afraid to face the fact that individual lives meant nothing in the grand scheme of a vast and utterly indifferent cosmos.
“But you must not say that a proof of God is all merely a matter of wish fulfillment,” Gödel said, “as your late friend Dr. Freud would have said. For him, it was all in the mind, but that mind, I think, was too often only his own.”
As for himself, Einstein had no such fears or apprehension of death. He was sixty-five now, and he had already done good work — there was no denying that. Love and work, those were the two essential things, as Sigmund had said. But Einstein had always admired Freud as a philosopher more than as a scientist, and had found his essays more thought-provoking than they were definitive.
No, the reason he didn’t fear death was because he had accepted his place — minuscule as an atom, insignificant as a mayfly — in a mystery and a miracle beyond full comprehension. It was enough to have participated in it and to have achieved as much as one could while here.
“I promise that I will keep an open mind,” he replied, “even if you tell me that I will wear wings and play on a harp and sit at the foot of the heavenly throne.” What he didn’t want to get into, especially at this moment, was an earnest debate about the merits of Gödel’s proof. Gazing off at the profusion of red and gold leaves clustered along the banks of the lake, he wanted only to take in the natural beauty of the scene, to revel in the puffy white clouds drifting in the blue sky like the clumps of whipped cream with which he used to sweeten his hot chocolate in the Alps, and in the rhythmic lapping of the clear, cold water against the sides of the sailboat. Closing his eyes, he tried to imagine himself back in Switzerland as a young man, sailing on a little boat much like the Tinef, only with his sweetheart, pretty blonde Marie Winteler, nestled under his arm. Time was relative — he had certainly proved that much — but even he could not account for how rapidly it seemed to pass, especially as he grew older. He feared that he would not live long enough to complete his unified field theory.
Or to prove that he was right about it at all.
Oppenheimer, he knew, had always scoffed at the idea. All the quantum mechanics fellows did. Bohr. Teller. How ironic, he often thought, that his papers, published at the turn of the century, had laid the groundwork for their own theories and research, but that these men had then turned around and used his work to create a universe that operated by random rules he could not accept. There had to be a pattern — the simpler, the better — to everything, but quantum physics, he felt sure, was not the way to find it.
“This has been a very pleasant excursion, and I thank you for it,” Gödel said, “but do you not think that we should return to shore?”
Shaking off his reverie, Einstein opened his eyes, and saw, on the distant horizon, what his friend Kurt had already observed. Above the treetops, he could discern a thin line of storm clouds. The weather in New Jersey was as unpredictable as in the Bernese Alps.
Their little sailboat would be a veritable sitting duck.
He sheeted in on the mainsail and tacked to starboard, then used the tiller to redirect their course toward the university boathouse. The lake water sloshed over the side of the boat, and Gödel lifted his wet feet as swiftly as if they’d been touched by lava, and then wrapped his arms around his knees. Einstein might have laughed, if it were not that he felt so guilty about subjecting his friend to such terror.
Looking back over his shoulder, he saw that the storm clouds were indeed approaching, and fast. It was the very metaphor Oppenheimer had used before returning to Los Alamos. “The storm to end all storms is coming,” he had said, “and the only question is going to be who wields the lightning and the thunder.” Oppenheimer had always been prone to such melodramatic language. “It has to be us.”
Of course, Einstein had heard this argument before, and yielded to it before, too. A committed pacifist, a tireless promoter of an organized world body to ensure peace, he had inevitably been forced to ameliorate his views. The war dragged on, the atrocities mounted. First, he had been asked by the navy to help them with the design of mines that could be used to block the Japanese harbors, and he had done so. And now, now he was being asked to help with the creation of a weapon that could wreak havoc on a scale never before seen, or even contemplated. If, as Oppenheimer said, the Germans were well along in their efforts to make such a bomb, then there was no choice.