A Brill Calendar: May 29

Friendship: and E=mc²

Few relations between people generate so many panegyrics throughout the ages as friendship: the first epic, Gilgamesh, written four thousand years ago, is already an ode to it.

The history of mankind and scholarship couldn’t be written without considering the blessing of ‘amicitia’. However (coins being coins), the Moses of research and philosophy of science, Sir Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam (1561 – 1626), connoisseur of power politics, wrote in his ‘Essayes’: ‘there is little friendship in the world and least of all amongst equals’.

By the same token however, it is seldom that friendship amongst scientists and scholars blossomed as abundantly as at Leyden, during the first third of the 20th century. With Professor Emeritus Lorentz (1853 – 1928) cast as amiable Patriarch within the Faculty of Physics, Leyden witnessed a unique ‘va-et-vient’ in the history of learning, featuring mutual friends like the Viennese Paul Ehrenfest (1880 – 1933), Leyden Professor since 1912, and regularly visiting comrades like their ‘Great Dane’, Niels Bohr (1885 – 1962), senior mathematician Hermann Minkowski (1864 – 1909) and rising mega-star Albert Einstein (Ulm, Germany, March 14 1879 – Princeton, New Jersey, April 18, 1955), the Visiting Professor who thought of Leyden as a ‘delightful haven in a barren world’.

A climax of communal achievement started on May 29 1919. The British Royal Society had equipped an expedition under Arthur Eddington to Príncipe Island, Gulf of Guinea, in order to use the total solar eclipse there on that calendar day for confirming – or refuting – Einstein’s theory of relativity formulated in 1905, in which Lorentz’s ‘transformations’ - formulated earlier - played a significant role. A confirmation and a sensation resulted.

Einstein heard the news directly from Lorentz in early September, while the formal announcement of November 6 1919 made E = mc2 the world’s best known and least understood mathematical expression of a crucial truth in theoretical physics.