The physicist found inspiration in the composer

Last year, the centenary of E=mc2 inspired a wave of symposiums, concerts, essays and products referred to Albert Einstein. This year, the same dealing is received by another genius, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born on January 27, two hundred fifty years behind. But there are between these two anniversaries more coincidences than we might think.

In an opportunity, Einstein said that, while Beethoven created his music, that of Mozart "it was so pure, that seemed to have existed in the universe for ages, waiting to be discovered by his proprietor". Einstein believed the same with regard to the physics, which beyond the remarks and the theory was finding the music of the spheres... that, as he wrote, was revealing "a pre-established harmony", since it was expressing amazing symmetries.

The laws of the nature, as those of the theory of the relativity, were hoping that someone with an attentive ear should gather them from the cosmos. This way, Einstein did not attribute so much his theories to laborious calculations, but rather to the "pure thought". Einstein was fascinated by Mozart and was perceiving an affinity between the creative processes of both, as well as between his life histories. Being a child, Einstein was a low achiever in the school.

A leakage valve

The music was a valve of leakage of his emotions. At the age of 5 it began taking violin lessons, but very quickly the practices turned out to be so hard to him that a chair threw his teacher, who went out fleeing of the made house a tears sea. To the 13, the physicist discovered the sonatas of Mozart. The result was an almost mystical connection, said Hans Byland, Einstein's friend from the secondary one. "When his violin began singing - said Byland to the biographer Carl Seelig - the walls of the room seemed to move away... For the first time Mozart appeared before me in all his purity, illuminated with the pure lines of the Hellenic beauty, crafty and naughtily, powerfully sublimate."

From 1902 until 1909, Einstein was employed six days per week at a Swiss patents office, dedicating his free time to the investigation in the field of the physics, his own "escapade". But the music also was his food, particularly the music of Mozart, who was in the nucleus of his creative life. And as well as the escapades of Mozart scandalized his contemporaries, Einstein took in his youth a life significantly Bohemian. His studied indifference to the clothes and to his dishevelled dark long hair, together with his love for the music and the philosophy, they were making it more similar to a poet than to a scientist.

It was touching the violin hotly and often it was doing it in musical parties. The public was loving, particularly to the women, one of which went so far as to sign: "It had this class of masculine beauty capable of causing ravages". Einstein also was coinciding with the aptitude of Mozart to compose magnificent music, even in conditions of big difficulty and poverty.

In 1905, the year in which it discovered the relativity, Einstein was living in a tiny department and had to face a difficult marriage and difficulties of money. This spring wrote four works that were destined to change the course of the science and of the nations. His ideas on the space and the time they emerged, partly, of the esthetic dissatisfaction: it seemed to him that the asymmetries of the field of the physics were concealing essential beauties of the nature; the existing theories were lacking the "architecture" and the "internal unit" that he was finding in the music of Bach and of Mozart.

Against the complexity

In his struggles with enormous grades of mathematical complexity, which led it to the enunciation of the general theory of the relativity, in 1915, Einstein was resorting often, in search of inspiration, to the simple beauty of the music of Mozart.

"Whenever it was in a deadlock or in a difficult moment in his work, he was looking for refuge in the music - remembered his elder son Hans Albert-. That usually solved all his difficulties."
In the end, Einstein felt that in his own field it had managed, Mozart, to unravel like the complexity of the universe. The scientists usually describe the theory of the relativity like more beautiful that has never been formulated. The same Einstein always indicated the beauty of the theory: "It is difficult that someone that the haya understood truly is capable of spending for high the delight of this theory", said in an opportunity. The theory is essentially the vision of a man of how it must be the universe. And, surprisingly, the universe turned out to be very similar to as Eisntein imagined it.

His bold man mathematics revealed spectacular and unexpected phenomena as the black holes.
Although he was a classic giant, Mozart helped to sit the essentials of the romantic ones with his least precise structures. In a similar way, the theories of Einstein's relativity completed the age of the classic physics and opened the way for the atomic physics and his ambiguities. As the music of Mozart, Einstein's work is a milestone and a starting point.

In a concert realized in 1979 to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Einstein, Julliard Qartet remembered to have touched for Einstein in his Princeton house, in New Jersey (USA).
They had taken quartets of Beethoven and of Bartók and two quintets of Mozart, as remembered the first violinist Robert Mann, whose comments were recorded by the academician Harry Woolf.
After interpreting Bartók, Mann spoke to Einstein: "We would like very much doing music with you". In 1952, Einstein already had no violin, but the musicians had taken the extra one and Einstein chose the worrying quintet in the minor Sun of Mozart.

"The doctor Einstein almost was not looking at the notes of the score - remembered Mann-. Although his hands, out of practice, were fragile, it had a coordination, an ear and a concentration extraodrinarios." Nothing seemed, according to his history, to extract of the melodies of Mozart.

For Arthur I. Miller
Of The New York Times
The author is a teacher of History and Science philosophy in the University of London, and he wrote the book "Empire of the Stars".
Translation: Mirta Rosenberg