In 1924 Lanczos found an exact solution to Einstein's gravitational field equation for a cylindrically symmetrical collection of dust particles.

Lanczos worked as an assistant to Einstein (who had relatively few assistants and co-authors, preferring to work alone) in Berlin during the 1928-29 academic year.

In his last year of life Lanczos completed an insightful biography of Einstein, The Einstein Decade (1905-1915), that captured his estranged relationship to the "founders" of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and others, who little appreciated the early work of Einstein on many puzzling quantum properties.

Between 1905 and 1915, Einstein was the undisputed leader of all physics. His unprecedented new ways of seeing things set an example which will never disappear from our physical world picture. Whether it was the increasing impact of atomism, or the radioactive phenomena, or Planck's radiation law, or the entrance of the quanta — in all these realms of physical theory Einstein's fundamental investigations opened new and exciting vistas.

But in 1915 something happened which in its consequences alienated Einstein with increasing certainty from the contemporary generation of physicists. He was still completely at the peak of his intellectual prowess. His discussion remarks in the regular Wednesday meetings of the Berlin Colloquium were just as brilliant as ever. It was not his aim to isolate himself from his colleagues and start out on a lonely pilgrimage towards self imposed dreams. Yet the impact of the tremendous speculative victory, which became known under the name of general relativity, surreptitiously began to take hold of his subconscious. For the physicists of his generation the phenomenon of gravitation was of little consequence. Since Bohr's atomic model, the physicists had concentrated with ever increasing intensity on the structure of the atom and the nature of elementary particles. Einstein, however, could not forget how the weak and apparently isolated force of gravitation had led him to a discovery, compared with which all the spectacular results of atomic physics paled into insignificance: the unification of the three basic categories of all existence — space, time and matter. This was obtained by incredibly subtle and bold imagination which combined the most advanced ideas of physics, mathematics and geometry, on the slender empirical basis of the double role of every mass as the source of gravitation and inertia. Where are the technologically most advanced atom smashers in comparison to such a discovery? Yes, we can learn more and more empirical facts by the use of these advanced instruments, but do we understand what we are doing? Can we hope to come nearer to the real mysteries of nature by such empirical methods? Perhaps the majority of physicists still belive in the positivistic adage: first of all the experiment, then the description of the experimental result by some equations. And if the experiments become more refined and new facts emerge, then modify the previous equations until they fit — if only temporarily — the newly discovered empirical facts. For Einstein this naive viewpoint held no attraction, after a discovery in which the experimental evidence was the least important link. With this great discovery at hand there was only one conclusion possible: why should it work for gravitation and leave out all the other forces of nature?

The physicists, on the other hand, cared little for gravitation and the concomitant mathematical paraphernalia. Here was Bohr's atomic model, which worked so marvellously. A set of rules, admittedly, whose inner meaning we do not understand, but who cares? The model worked wonders in unravelling the chemical properties of the elements and the structure of the periodic system. Then, in 1925, came the great discovery of the Schrödinger equation which seemed to give a wonderfully simple escape in the form of the eigenvalues of a linear partial differential equation. All the inherently incomprehensible rules of Bohr's theory could now be simplified by bringing them down to a common denominator: 'Start with the Hamiltonian, write down the Hamilton—Jacobi partial differential equation, but now interpreted as an operational equation in Hilbert space.' This was a great improvement in comparison to the quantum rules of the Bohr model, but — although in a much more refined form — it was once more a rule. For a person who went through the tremendous experience of discovering nature's laws through all-embracing principles which had sense behind them, the establishment of mere rules had little attraction. To this had to be added the fact that the Schrödinger equation did not describe the particle but only the average action of a very large number of particles. This is perhaps all we can do — said the leaders of the new school of physicists, called the 'modern' school — if it so happens that the elementary processes of nature are indeterminate and nothing exists but statistics. And why should Einstein, the supreme master of statistical thinking, balk from such a view?

But what a difference to apply statistics to the average action of billions of molecules, compared to the assumption that statistics is the primary mover, because the laws of nature are in themselves only of a statistical kind! The break between Einstein, the cosmic thinker, and modern physics, which was unwilling to consider nature in itself, without taking into account the experimenter, was now complete and the bridges were burned. Einstein became the lone wolf who continued undismayed in his speculations, in which the majority of physicists lost all interest. The question was: where to branch off from the apparently straight path which led so convincingly to his gravitational equations. He was probing and tapping every step of the way to arrive at the proper generalisation, and tried scheme after scheme. But the old magic was gone and none of the attempted schemes brought the desired solution. The 'unified field theory' on which Einstein worked for the last 30 years of his life, remained an unfulfilled dream.

Einstein today

The young physicist of today is harassed by an avalanche of essentially undigested atomic and nuclear facts. He runs from one course to the other, reading textbooks which promise him an easy introduction into the latest findings of the constantly changing experimental and theoretical scenery, and he hopes to find himself a pigeonhole in the increasingly intensified rat race in which he can only maintain himself if he shows proficiency by writing 'papers' of a highly specialised and oversophisticated type. 'Einstein' to him is a mythical figure of the past, in the same category as Planck, Laue, Maxwell, Hertz, Helmholtz and many others, whose achievements are no longer of interest because they fell in a period of science in which the principles of modern quantum mechanics had not been invented. Today's physicist hardly knows how much Einstein contributed to the foundations of that 'quantum theory' which is his only concern.

The tragic narrowness of thought is reinforced by a misnomer which greatly contributed to the severance of the present from the past. The term 'classical physics' misuses the word 'classical' by creating an entirely false association. The proper meaning of 'classical' is something first class, something hors concours, something of timeless quality, something that should be emulated. The great writers of antiquity and later periods have been called 'classical' if they convey a message which holds for all time. The works of Goethe, Lessing, Dostoevski, Shakespeare and many others belong to the 'classical literature' because people do not get tired of reading them again and again and taking their lead from them. There is no element of anything 'old fashioned' attached to them. Beethoven's classical string quartets have not become old fashioned because Bartok wrote some other quartets in a more 'modern' style. The whole concept of 'modernism' used in scientific terminology has something eminently distasteful in its application. What is referred to as 'classical physics', should properly have been called 'prequantum physics'. Since quantum physics only started about 50 years ago, everything before that time automatically becomes 'classical', which implies that people in those days lived in blissful ignorance of the fact that everything has to be 'quantised'. The mischief thus created is tremendous. The enormous revolution created by the ideas of Einstein is no longer a dazzling chapter in the evolution of physics, but the last chapter of a phase of science which is put ad acta, because it does not fit our present ideas concerning the operation of nature's laws.

Who then is Einstein today? In the groves of the professionals, a minor figure who is of little concern to 'modern physics'. But the professionals are not necessarily the decisive figures in the history of human thought. If one looks in the public libraries and asks for the books written by Einstein and about Einstein, one finds that they are in constant demand. Einstein is truly a living reality in our aggressively and egocentrically orientated 'modern' world, as a prince of the mind, who taught us the folly of dogmatism, of excessive nationalism, of wars, of cruelty and murder, putting in the other scale of the balance the constructive forces of clear thinking, of grand imagination, of love of life and justice, and the laws of humanity.

The Einstein Decade (1905-1915), pp.28-31