Einstein×Baldwin

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Radio Ether. Up next on TITANS: Albert Einstein and James Baldwin, on On a rival they secretly respected.
2. 00:08
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   You know, I have been thinking about Niels Bohr all morning. We fought for thirty years about quantum mechanics, and I never convinced him of anything. Not one thing.
3. 00:18
   James Baldwinshare moment

   Fought how?
4. 00:19
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   With thought experiments. With mathematics. I would say, look, God does not play dice with the universe. He would smile and say, Albert, stop telling God what to do. This went on and on. Copenhagen, Solvay conferences, letters. I think maybe he enjoyed it more than I did.
5. 00:40
   James Baldwinshare moment

   Did you hate him for it?
6. 00:41
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   Hate? No, no. I respected him enormously. He had this... this clarity. When he spoke, you felt the ground shift under your arguments. Even when I was certain he was wrong, I knew I was fighting someone who saw something real.
7. 00:57
   James Baldwinshare moment

   That's the terrible gift of a real rival. They make you better by refusing to let you be comfortable.
8. 01:03
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   Yes! Exactly this. And you? You have had such a person?
9. 01:10
   James Baldwinshare moment

   Richard Wright.
10. 01:11
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    The novelist. Native Son, yes?
11. 01:14
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Yes. He was the first Negro writer to make white America look at what it had done. Really look. He helped me when I was young, when I had nothing. Gave me money. Introduced me to people. And then I wrote about him.
12. 01:26
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Wrote... critically?
13. 01:28
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I wrote that his protest novels accepted the categories white America had created. That Bigger Thomas, his protagonist, was still trapped inside white definitions of what a Negro could be. I said he'd written rage, but not humanity.
14. 01:43
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    And he was angry with you.
15. 01:44
    James Baldwinshare moment

    He never spoke to me again. Died in 1960 and we never reconciled. But the thing is... I meant what I wrote. And I learned from what he wrote. Both things are true.
16. 01:55
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Bohr used to say that the opposite of a correct statement is a false statement, but the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. I never liked this idea. It seemed too clever. But with people, maybe it is necessary.
17. 02:10
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Wright taught me that a Black writer could demand to be heard in this country. That was profound. But he also showed me the limits of rage without love. That was profound too.
18. 02:21
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Did you love him?
19. 02:22
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I did. That's why it hurt. That's why it mattered. You don't betray someone you don't love.
20. 02:27
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    You think you betrayed him?
21. 02:29
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I think I told the truth as I saw it. But yes. He saw it as betrayal. And I understood why. When you're fighting for your life, you want your brothers to stand beside you, not behind you pointing out your technique.
22. 02:41
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Mmm. This is the difficulty. With Bohr, we were fighting about the nature of reality itself, but we both had positions, security. We could afford to be wrong because we were both already safe. Your fight with Wright was different.
23. 02:58
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Our fight was about survival. About how to be a Negro in America and stay alive and stay human. That's not a seminar topic. That's blood.
24. 03:08
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Yes. I see this. When I disagreed with Bohr, the worst that happened is some physicists thought I was old-fashioned. When you disagreed with Wright, you were disagreeing about... what, the path to freedom?
25. 03:22
    James Baldwinshare moment

    About whether freedom meant being seen as human, or being feared. Wright wanted white America to fear what it had created. I wanted white America to see what it had destroyed. And you can't do both at once.
26. 03:34
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    But you still respected his work.
27. 03:36
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I did. I do. Native Son is a monument. It's also a cage. Both things.
28. 03:41
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    There is something similar with Bohr's complementarity principle. He said that light is both particle and wave, depending on how you measure it. I hated this. I thought it was giving up on finding the real answer. But maybe he was right that sometimes the real answer contains the contradiction.
29. 03:59
    James Baldwinshare moment

    You never accepted that?
30. 04:01
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Not fully. I spent the last thirty years of my life trying to find a unified theory that would resolve these contradictions. I failed. But I had to try. To accept Bohr's position felt like... like saying the universe is fundamentally unknowable. And I could not accept this.
31. 04:20
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Maybe that's what rivals give us. The thing we can't accept. The truth we need to reject so we can find our own truth.
32. 04:27
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    You think Wright needed you to reject him?
33. 04:30
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I don't know. I think maybe I needed to reject him to become myself. And I think he knew that, somewhere. Didn't make it hurt less.
34. 04:37
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    When Bohr died in 1962, I had been arguing with him for decades. I wept. I thought, now who will tell me I am wrong? Who will make me think this hard?
35. 04:47
    James Baldwinshare moment

    That's it exactly. When Wright died, I felt orphaned. Even though we weren't speaking. Especially because we weren't speaking.
36. 04:54
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    You knew you had lost the person who understood what you were trying to do.
37. 04:58
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Yes. Nobody else was in that fight with me. Nobody else knew what it cost to walk away from the father who made you possible.
38. 05:05
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    This is the strange mathematics of rivalry. They oppose you, but they also hold you up. Without them, you have no one to push against. You lose your shape.
39. 05:16
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Did you ever tell Bohr what he meant to you?
40. 05:18
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I think he knew. We had a kind of... shorthand. We could argue for hours and then have dinner like nothing had happened. There was affection in it. Even in the disagreement, affection.
41. 05:30
    James Baldwinshare moment

    That's different from me and Wright. We couldn't separate the disagreement from the wound.
42. 05:35
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Because the disagreement was about identity, not just ideas.
43. 05:39
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Yes. And because we were both fighting to exist in a country that wanted us silent. When you turn on each other in those circumstances, it feels like suicide. Even if it's necessary.
44. 05:50
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Do you think it was necessary?
45. 05:51
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I do. I wrote three novels trying to show Black life as complex, interior, human. Not just reactive. Not just angry. If I hadn't walked away from Wright's path, I would have been his echo. And the world didn't need another echo.
46. 06:07
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    No. The world needed Baldwin. This I understand. I could not be Bohr's echo either, even though I admired him. I had to follow my own intuition, even if it led nowhere.
47. 06:20
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Did it lead nowhere?
48. 06:21
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I did not find the unified theory. But I learned what to look for. And maybe that is not nowhere. Maybe that is the best we can do—to learn what questions to ask, and to teach others to ask them better.
49. 06:33
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Wright taught me what questions to ask. Even if I answered them differently.
50. 06:37
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Then he succeeded. A good rival makes you possible, even when you reject them. Especially when you reject them.
51. 06:45
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I wish I could have told him that.
52. 06:47
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Perhaps he knew. Just as Bohr knew that I would keep fighting him until one of us died. It was a kind of love letter, all those arguments. A way of saying: you matter enough to be wrong about.
53. 07:00
    James Baldwinshare moment

    You matter enough to be wrong about. Yes. That's exactly what it was.