The incredibly strange story of Einstein’s Nobel prize

On 25th October 2021, I got a frenetic email. It was from an ex-student of mine, who is now a professor at an undergraduate college. From the message, I learned that she is also the Head of the Physics Deparment at the moment, and she had sent the message in her capacity as the Head. After these bits of information, the important part of the message was contained in the next paragraph:

We are planning to organize a Webinar on the occasion of “Centenary year of the Nobel Prize to Einstein”. … We want to arrange the webinar in the year 2021, date will be finalized according to your convenience.

To be sure, it is not clear how to detect freneticity in an email. When one talks, the emotions come out through the pitch and the speed of the words delivered. Written words have no representation of either of those qualities. However, in this case, the signature was unmistakable. It was in the sentence “We want to arrange the webinar in the year 2021”. Although it was not said explicitly, it would not be unreasonable to guess that the reason for the hurry is the occasion, as mentioned in the message itself: “Centenary year of the Nobel Prize to Einstein”. Of course she was referring to the fact that Einstein received the 1921 Nobel prize for Physics.

But there was no cause for hurry. It can be debated whether 2021 should be the centenary year for the event of Einstein’s Nobel prize, or even whether there was an event at all. In case you are wondering what I mean by that statement, let me say, without beating around the bush, that although Einstein got the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics, he did not get in 1921.

Nobel Prize for Physics is usually announced in October. The preparation for the choice starts the year before that. In other words, for the 2015 Nobel Prize, say, the first step was taken in September 2014. At that time, letters and messages were sent by a five- or six-member Nobel Committee to a lot of luminaries, asking for their suggestions for the next year’s prize. The deadline for submitting suggestions is the end of the month of January, of the year of the award. A few months then go by while the Committee deliberates, and also consults with experts outside the Committee. In June or July, the Committee prepares a report. It includes the names of the persons considered for the prize, some account of the proceedings, and a recommendation for the recipient(s) based on everything. This report is submitted to the Royal Swedish Academy. The Academy makes the final decision. It may or may not uphold the recommendation of the Committee. The would-be recipient is announced in October, and the prize is awarded in a ceremony at the Royal Swedish Academy held on the 10th of December.

Based on this timeline, one would conclude that Einstein, the recipient of the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics, came to know about the decision in October 1921, and received the prize in December of the same year. No, that did not happen at all. But we must go back a few years before coming back to that part of the story.

Some of Einstein’s phenomenal work appeared in 1905. That year, in fact, is often called the “Annum mirabilis”, or the miracle year, for Einstein. He submitted at least five papers in that year, all of which have become classic. And, wonder of wonder, he did all the work at a time when he did not have an academic position. He applied for quite a few positions earlier, and was denied. Then, in 1902, he accepted a job as technical expert third class at the patent office in Bern. During the Annum Mirabilis, he was still working there.

I will not get into a history of how his work was received in the scientific community. I will only mention that the recognition was not instantaneous. Even in 1907, when he applied for a position at the University of Bern, his application was rejected. He did not get an academic position until 1908, and did not attend an academic conference until 1909. The position he obtained in 1908 was not a permanent one. His first permanent position was at the University of Prague, where he moved in 1911. Then, in 1912, he was offered a professorship at ETH Zürich, which he accepted and moved back to Switzerland. Soon after, he was approached by people from Berlin, with the idea of a membership at the Prussian Academy of Sciences. He accepted the position in December 1913, and moved to Berlin on the 6th of April, 1914.

During all these turbulent years, his name started appearing in the Nobel nominations. In fact, with the exceptions of the years 1911 and 1915, he was nominated for the Nobel Physics prize every year from 1910 to 1922. In 1910, there was just one person who proposed Einstein’s name. The person was Wilhelm Ostwald, winner of the 1909 Chemistry Nobel, who, earlier in 1901, turned down Einstein’s application for an assistantship in his research group. He was joined by several others in 1912 and 1913, including some other Nobel laureates. All these nominations were for his theory of Special Relativity. Although some experimental confirmation of Einstein’s now-famous mass-energy relation started appearing in 1908, even in 1913 it was argued that the evidences were not compelling enough to merit a prize for the theory. Some other confirmation of the theory appeared later, 1916 onward. But by then, Einstein had published his General Theory of Relativity (GTR), and the tables had turned. In fact, in 1916, he was nominated for his GTR, and also for his work on Brownian motion which demonstrated the existence of molecules. There was only one nomination in that year.

Let’s jump cut to 1921. By then, Einstein had become a household name. This is not an exaggeration. Indeed his fame spread much beyond the circle of physicists, even to lay people not directly involved with science, because of the experiments performed by Arthur Eddington in 1919, which proved that the path of light is bent by gravitation, in agreement with the prediction made in Einstein’s GTR. In 1920, his nominations talked mainly about the GTR, as expected.

For the 1921 prize, there was a strong note from Max Planck, who had won the prize for 1918, nominating Einstein for GTR. It was a repeat of the request he had made the earlier year. Carl Oseen, a theoretical physicist from the University of Uppsala, proposed Einstein’s name for the photoelectric effect. The committee requested its member Allvar Gullstrand to prepare a report on the theory of relativity, and another member, Svante Arrhenius, a report of the photoelectric effect. They were both celebrated sceintists. Gullstrand was a professor of opthalmology who had worked on geometrical optics and won the 1911 prize for Physiology and Medicine for his contributions to the functioning of the human eye. His report on relativity was highly critical of the theory. He surmised that the effects of relativity would be unmeasurable, “so small that in general they lie below the limits of experimental error”. On the other side, Arrhenius, the 1903 Nobel laureate for Chemistry who is sometimes called the “father of Physical Chemistry”, said that since Planck had been awarded the Nobel for quantum theory as recently as in 1918, another prize should not go in the same direction so soon. So, near the end of the year 1921, the Nobel Prize committee decided that they could not find anyone suitable for the prize for that year. The year of this writing, 2021, marks the centenary of that decision.

In 1922, Einstein’s name was proposed again. Meanwhile, the campaign for him had increased in strength. Maurice Brillouin (not the person who is responsible for the idea of “Brillouin zone”) wrote, “Imagine for a moment what the general opinion will be fifty years from now if the name Einstein does not appear on the list of Nobel laureates.” Oseen repeated his nomination for the photoelectric effect. Planck proposed to give the overdue 1921 prize to Einstein and the 1922 prize to Niels Bohr. This was indeed possible, because according to the Nobel Foundation’s statutes, when no acceptable candidate can be found, the Nobel Prize can be reserved until the following year.

The Committee again asked Gullstrand for a report on relativity, and Gullstrand reiterated what he had written the year before. Oseen was asked as well, to produce a report on photoelectric effect, and he gave an excellent account of Einstein’s revolutionary contribution to its theory. The Committee recommended Einstein for the 1921 prize, and Bohr for the 1922 prize, just as Planck had suggested. The Swedish Academy upheld the decision. Accordingly, a telegram was delivered to Einstein’s address in Berlin on the 10th of November 1922, informing him of the good news.

Now you might have started to think that the rest of the story would be obvious: that Einstein went to Stockholm in the December of 1922 and received his prize, the Nobel Physics prize for the year 1921. Wrong. That’s not what had happened.

Einstein was not home when the telegram arrived. He and his wife Elsa were on board a ship to Japan. He would not be back until March 1923. So, obviously he did not go to Stockholm to receive his prize in December 1922.

Certainly Einstein would not have looked at it as a lost opportunity. In fact, during the last few years, he was really quite sure that he would receive the Nobel Prize at some point. When he got divorced from his first wife Mileva Marič in January 1919, he promised her that he would give her the entire Nobel Prize money, whenever he would get it. So, clearly, the news of the Nobel Prize did not come as a surprise to Einstein.

Indeed, in September of 1922, the 1914 Nobel Physics winner Max von Laue wrote a letter to Einstein, telling him that it would be “desirable for you to be present in Europe in December.” Laue knew about Einstein’s plan for visiting Japan, and he advised Einstein not to go. Of course he did not mention the Nobel Prize, but the hint was rather obvious. Einstein ignored Laue’s suggestion. It may also be true that he wanted badly to get out of Germany at that time. On 24th June 1922, Walter Rathenau, a politician and Einstein’s friend, was assassinated. There were attempts at the lives of several other people, which were clear signs of rising anti-semitism in Germany.

Anyway, the news must have reached Einstein during his journey. It is not clear when that happened. There was no mention of the arrival of the news in his diary.

It was clear, much before December, that Einstein would not be around to accept his prize. The question then arose: who would receive it on his behalf? Usually, when a recipient is absent for some reason, the person who represents him or her at the ceremony is the Ambassador of the recipient’s native country to Sweden, residing in Stockholm. So now a battle of sorts ensued: the bone of contention being, what was Einstein’s native country?

Einstein was born in Germany in 1879 in the southern town of Ulm, so he must have been a German citizen by birth. But he moved with his family: first to Italy in 1894, and then to Switzerland in 1895. In 1896, he paid 3 marks to obtain a document that proclaimed that he was not a German citizen anymore. He remained stateless for the next five years, until he got the Swiss citizenship in 1901. At the time when the Nobel prize was announced for him, he was traveling with his Swiss passport. Clearly, then, it should have been the Swiss Ambassador to Stockholm who should accept the prize for him!

But this is a story where nothing goes according to the expectation. The information about Einstein’s passport was known to the German Foreign Office, who passed it on to the German Ambassador in Sweden, Rudolph Nadolny. Nadolny refused to believe it. He cannot be blamed for that. In 1922, Einstein was in Berlin, a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. That position was available only to German citizens. When Nadolny telegraphed to the Academy, inquiring about the citizenship, the Academy replied what it knew and believed: that Einstein was indeed a German. Nadolny showed the reply to the Swiss Ambassador. He was surprised, probably unhappy, but he accepted the situation. He thought that probably, since Einstein had been living in Berlin for a while, he considered himself to be a German again. Nadolny graciously stated that Einstein’s Swiss connection be duly mentioned in public statements of any kind, and that the Swiss Ambassador be also invited to the ceremony and to the banquet afterwards. In any case, it was Nadolny who accepted the prize on behalf on Einstein in December 1922, and in the Nobel records he appeared as a German.

The matter did not end there. The German Ministry of Science asked the Berlin Academy to clear up the citizenship issue. The Academy sent its report on 23rd January 1923. They said that, since the job at the Academy required a German citizenship and Einstein had accepted the job, it could be concluded that he was a German. Remember that Einstein was away in Japan when all these things were going on. When he returned in March 1923, he was asked to give his view on the matter. His letter, dated 24th March 1923, contained the following lines:

When my appointment to the Academy was being considered, my colleague Haber informed me that my appointment would result in my becoming a Prussian citizen. As I attached importance to retaining my nationality, I made acceptance of a possible appointment dependent on this, a stipulation which was agreed to.

It was clear that Einstein remained a Swiss citizen at heart. So, when it came to the issue of handing over the Nobel prize to him, he preferred that it be done by the Swiss Ambassador to Germany. In fact, on 6th April 1923, Einstein’s stepdaughter Ilse wrote a letter to the Nobel Foundation, informing that Professor Einstein would appreciate if the medal and diploma could be sent to him in Berlin, and added that it is preferred that this is done through diplomatic channels, and the “Swiss Embassy should be considered, since Professor Einstein is a Swiss citizen.” Finally, the Swedish Ambassordor to Germany, Baron Ramel, handed the prize over to Einstein in Berlin.

To summarize, if we were to celebrate the centenary of the Nobel prize announcement or the formal presentation of the award, that would be in 2022. If we want to celebrate the centenary of Einstein actually receiving the prize, that should happen in 2023.

There are a few things about the prize which have not been discussed yet. First, what happened to the money? As I have already mentioned, Einstein promised his first wife Mileva, at the time of their divorce in January 1919, that she would receive the entire Nobel prize money. Einstein kept up to his promise. Soon after he got the money, in 1923, he transferred the entire amount to the bank account of Mileva. Mileva bought a house in Zürich. Albert Einstein himself did not enjoy a penny of his Nobel prize.

The other pending thing is about the Nobel lecture. A Nobel prize winner is supposed to give a Nobel lecture at the time when the prize is conferred, on the work cited in the award. In Einstein’s case, the winner was absent at the ceremony in December of 1922. After he came back to Europe in March 1923, he received a letter from Svante Arrhenius, Director of the Nobel Institute and an esteemed member of the Nobel Committee, requesting him to visit Sweden at a time of his conveience, and telling him that he need not wait till the next Nobel ceremony which would be held in December 1923. So Einstein organized a trip to Sweden. On 11th July 1923, he gave a lecture: not in Stockholm in front of the Royal Swedish Academy, but to the Nordic Assembly of Naturalists at Göteborg. The audience consisted of about 2000 people, including the King of Sweden. Because of the lack of anything better, this lecture is considered to be his Nobel lecture ever since, not only unofficially but even by the Nobel Prize Foundation, and can be obtained on their website, and printed in authorized collections of Nobel Prize lectures.

But, unlike usual Nobel lectures, this was not a lecture of the work that was cited in the award. The citation said that Einstein was receiving his prize “for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.” There was no mention of relativity. There are good reasons to believe that the subject was deliberately omitted, since in his nomination history the reports on relativity were not favorable. However, by an irony of fate, when Arrhenius invited him to Sweden, he left the choice of the topic to the speaker, but added that something on his relativity theory would be a good choice. So Einstein gave his Göteborg lecture on “Fundamental ideas and problems of the theory of relativity”. There was absolutely no reference to his own work on photoelectric effect: not even once. The Nobel Foundation had to accept it as the overdue Nobel lecture. All they could do is to add a comment: “The Lecture was not delivered on the occasion of the Nobel Prize award, and did not, therefore, concern the discovery of the photoelectric effect.” This comment appears as a footnote in the Foundation’s website.

Was relativity totally overlooked in Einstein’s Nobel prize? Certainly the prize was not given for relativity. Even if one accepts the argument, however lame it might be, that there was not enough experimental evidence to support the theory in 1921 or 1922, the Swedish Academy could have considered him for a second Nobel for the Theory of relativity at some later time. They did not. It is a pity that there was no member in the Committee who could evaluate relativity at that time. The reports submitted on relativity were negative, and certainly the prize could not be given on the basis of them. The Nobel Committe probably began feeling that it would be an embarrassment if Einstein hadn’t received the Nobel prize. So, to quote Einstein’s biographer Abraham Pais, “Oseen’s proposal to give the award for photoelectricity must have come as a relief of conflicting pressures.”

However, it has to be said that relativity was not completely omitted in the entire event. The presentation speech for the 1921 Nobel Physics prize was made by Svante Arrhenius. He started his speech like this:

There is probably no physicist living today whose name has become so widely known as that of Albert Einstein. Most discussion centres on his theory of relativity. This pertains essentially to epistemology and has therefore been the subject of lively debate in philosophical circles. It will be no secret that the famous philosopher Bergson in Paris has challenged this theory, while other philosophers have acclaimed it wholeheartedly. The theory in question also has astrophysical implications which are being rigorously examined at the present time.

So, Arrhenius admired relativity and recognized its importance. But he thought that it was essentially “epistemology”. The word, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, means “the study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity”.

Maybe it was not possible to anticipate what role the theory would play in the coming decades, in the discovery of new elementary particles, in the understanding the behavior of heavy atoms, and in the birth and development of the theory of the universe as a whole. But from the presentation speech, it seems that the people in Nobel Foundation did not even realize that relativity was a theory of Physics. They brought up Bergson’s philosophical arguments in the context. Einstein liked and respected Bergson as a person. About his philosophy, he apparently commented, “Gott verzeih ihm” (God forgive him).

Was Einstein hurt, for no mention of relativity, then or ever again, in the circle of Nobel awards? Probably he did not care. The fame came to him anyway. The money did not come to him. As for the prize itself, or in general about prizes, he was probably not a big enthusiast. A few incidents might throw light on his attitude.

The Planck medal is the highest award of the German Physical Society. It was instituted in 1929, and Einstein was the recipient of the inaugural year. The day of the award, he did some work in the morning and went to the house of his doctor friend, Janos Plesch, for lunch. After lunch, he fell asleep on a couch. He got up at four. The ceremony was supposed to begin at five. Suddenly he realized that he might be asked to speak at the occasion. So he sat down at Plesch’s table, and grabbed the nearest piece of paper, which happened to be a bootmaker’s bill. He scribbled on it for twenty minutes. Half an hour later, when Planck awarded the medal to him, he said, in his acceptance speech, that he knew that he would be overwhelmed after receiving the prize and would be at a loss for words, so he had written down his speech, and would read it out. He pulled the shoe bill from his waistcoat pocket and started reading. After the speech, Plesch told him that he needed the bill back. Einstein reached in his pocket, pulled the bill and the medal that was wrapped in it, and gave the whole thing to Plesch. Plesch wrote, “He never took it out, and never looked at it again.”

In 1932, he was invited to become a member of a science academy. A form was sent to him, to be filled out. It contained nine questions, including birth details, education, publications and major scientific contributions. Einstein completed the form the submitted it. There was no mention of his Nobel prize. Certainly he considered it to be irrelevant to the answers of the questions asked.

Probably there is nothing to be surprised about, at least in the light of the other things that we summarized here. It is said that truth is stranger than fiction. Certainly the entire story appears almost unreal, or maybe magic-real. That is why I could not help using a Marquezian title to this article, mimicking “The incredible and sad tale of innocent Erendira and her cruel grandmother”.