A preserved blackboard

Today Albert Einstein is, literally speaking, nowhere. Almost all of him (setting aside the unfortunate story of his purloined brain) was cremated and the ashes were distributed on the waters of the Delaware River. Of course, Einstein is also, literally speaking, everywhere: his visage can be encountered in almost every conceivable context, from poster to plushy. In geographical terms, there are three canonical Einsteinian places – Bern, Berlin, and Princeton – and the first two of them have more than one book dedicated to explicating his relationship to these surroundings. There are books about many other cities where he spent sizable periods of time, even volumes about more glancing visits. In a bookshop in Austria this spring, I came across a recent offering, Salvatore Matteo Giacomuzzi’s Einstein in Innsbruck, which celebrates the few days that Einstein passed in the Alpine town in the autumn of 1924. And now we have Andrew Robinson’s Einstein in Oxford.

This slim, lively volume won’t take long to read, and I doubt you will regret it. It is less about Einstein than about Oxford, seen through the lens of the physicist’s limited interactions with the institution. Those interactions were few, clustered in the dozen years between 1921 and 1933, but some were arguably significant, such as his lecture, “On the Method of Theoretical Physics”, given at Rhodes House in June 1933.

Given what was soon to transpire in British, German, and Einsteinian history, there is a curious lack of urgency to this text, distinguishing it from Robinson’s Einstein on the Run (2019), which records the role Britons played in protecting the physicist from Nazi death threats. Instead, the book’s charm lies in the ephemera of his daily life in the city: a cocktail party, playing violin with the musicologist Margaret Deneke and others, a self-satirical poem Einstein wrote to the absent scholar whose rooms he occupied on one visit, a hilarious dumbshow encounter with the future novelist William Golding. Einstein enjoyed his time in Oxford, and seriously considered making it his home, had the United States not offered safer harbour.

Indicative of his persistence in Oxonian lore is a blackboard he had used to derive some cosmological equations during a different lecture at Rhodes House, in May 1931, lovingly preserved at the History of Science Museum in Oxford. This was retained against his wishes, much like his brain was upon his death: a relic in the cult of a secular saint.

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