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Little Peconic Bay and E = mc²

Albert Einstein spent summers on LI, sailing and pondering world-shaking issues

By George DeWan | Staff Writer

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The most famous summer vacationer in Southold history was the German-born genius who created the world's most famous equation. His name was Albert Einstein.

After theoretical physics, Einstein's second love was sailing, and Little Peconic Bay enchanted him. In the summer of 1939, Robert Rothman, the present owner of Rothman's Department Store in Southold, was 12. His father, David, then owned the store.

``Einstein came in and asked, did we sell sundials,'' Rothman said recently. ``My father took him out to the back yard and showed him sundials. ```No,' he said. `No, no. Sundials,' and pointed to his feet''

The 60-year-old Einstein got his sandals, and he liked them so much that Rothman's father sent him a new pair for the next two years when the scientist was summering at upstate Saranac Lake. ``It was very kind of you to send me again this year a pair of my favorite sandals,'' Einstein wrote to Rothman. ``I cannot wear them yet because those you have given me last year are still of kingly elegance. I wear them always in the sailboat and out.''

An avid sailor, if not always an artistic one, Einstein once called Little Peconic Bay ``the most beautiful sailing ground I ever experienced ... '' In the summers of 1938 and 1939 he rented a cottage on Old Cove Road, now called West Cove Road, on Nassau Point, on the bay. Einstein spent many hours alone in the little sailboat he called Tineff (Yiddish for ``worthless''), occasionally running aground, sometimes capsizing, often just drifting, and always doing what he did best, which was thinking.

On Aug. 2 of that summer, Einstein, at the request of fellow physicists, signed the famous letter to President Roosevelt, alerting him to new developments in nuclear physics that could lead to powerful weapons, and hinting that the Germans might be working on an atomic bomb. It was a letter that Einstein would later regret sending.

Since 1933, Einstein had lived in Princeton, N.J., where he was a professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies. In the summer of 1934, he shared a rented house with a friend in Watch Hill, R.I. In later summers, he spent time in Old Lyme, Conn., and Saranac Lake. In 1937, the summer after his second wife, Elsa, died, he rented a home on the water in Huntington. Also that summer, he occasionally visited friends at Nassau Point, near what was then called Peconic -- now Cutchogue. Einstein had little contact with most of the other residents in and around Nassau Point. But in 1939 he became a close friend of Rothman's father, who, like Einstein, played the violin. ``He suggested they might like to play,'' Robert Rothman said. ``My father knew a few others who were reasonably accomplished musicians. They came down, went into the living room and started playing together. They might have played every week, frequently, the whole summer.''

Well out of the mainstream of physics by this time, Einstein had not given up what would ultimately be a failed quest for his own holy grail, a unified field theory. This would, in Einstein's words, ``reduce to one formula the explanation of the field of gravity and of the field of electromagnetism.'' Other scientists, meanwhile, were getting closer and closer to unlocking the secrets of the atom.

But it was Einstein who, unfairly, was to get the unwanted label, ``father of the atomic bomb.'' This judgment was based primarily on the theoretical work, including the Special Theory of Relativity, which he had published in 1905 while employed as a low-grade technical officer in the Swiss Patent Office. Out of this theory came the most famous equation ever written, the equation that defines the equivalence of mass and energy: E = mc². Because ``c'' represents the speed of light (186,282 miles per second), this meant that huge amounts of energy were locked up in minute particles of mass.

But that was only in theory. Practically, he did not believe that it was possible to release this enormous energy by bombarding the nucleus of the atom. Some experimental physicists thought otherwise, however. One of them was the Hungarian refugee Leo Szilard, who had produced a nuclear chain reaction in a laboratory at Columbia University. He and others feared that Germany might be working on an atomic bomb.

When Szilard and fellow physicist Eugene Wigner journeyed to Nassau Point in mid-July of 1939, they knew what Einstein did not know -- that recent developments in nuclear fission made an atomic bomb possible. They wanted to get the ear of the U.S. government, and they knew that Einstein would not be ignored. They brought him up to date, and the great scientist was surprised.

``Daran habe ich gar nicht gedacht!'' Einstein said -- ``I never thought of that!''

After a second visit, a letter to the president was drafted by Szilard. Einstein's final version, dated Aug. 2, 1939, said, in part: ``[I]t may become possible to set up nuclear chain reactions in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power ... would be generated. This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs ... ''

The letter is widely credited with setting in motion the Manhattan Project, the government effort to build an atomic bomb. The bureaucratic process was a long one, and the project did not begin until December, 1941. World War II effectively ended in August, 1945, with atomic mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Later, Einstein had second thoughts about the famous letter.

``I made one great mistake in my life -- when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atomic bombs be made,'' Einstein told chemist Linus Pauling in 1954. ``But there was some justification -- the danger that the Germans would make them.''