Taking this description as factual, physicist Gino Segrè naturally concluded in his book Ordinary Geniuses: Max Delbruck, George Gamow, and the Origins of Genomics and Big Bang Cosmology that Einstein made the “biggest blunder” remark during one of those “World War II Princeton talks.” Albrecht Fölsing, who wrote one of the most accurate biographies of Einstein, also assumed that Gamow’s account was authentic, and he repeated the alleged “biggest blunder” citation, as did many others. Unfortunately, as I have discovered, the reality was rather different.

Stephen Brunauer was already an accomplished surface scientist when he became, as a lieutenant, head of high explosives research and development for the US Navy during World War II. At one point, he inquired with the army and the civilian divisions whether Einstein was working for them. The answer was negative from both branches. They explained to Brunauer that Einstein was a pacifist, and, furthermore, he was “not interested in anything practical.” Unwilling to accept this characterization as definitive, Brunauer visited Einstein at Princeton on May 16, 1943, and he recruited him as a consultant to the navy for a fee of $25 per day. Brunauer was also the officer who recruited Gamow on September 20, 1943. (See his letter to Gamow, figure 34.) In an article published in 1986, entitled “Einstein and the Navy: . . . ‘an unbeatable combination,’ ” Brunauer described the entire episode in detail. He mentioned that in addition to himself, a few other scientists in the division occasionally made use of Einstein’s services, including physicists Raymond Seeger, John Bardeen (who went on to win two Nobel Prizes in physics), and George Gamow, as well as chemist Henry Eyring. When explaining Gamow’s precise role, Brunauer wrote, “Gamow, in later years, gave the impression that he was the Navy’s liaison man with Einstein, that he visited every two weeks, and the professor ‘listened’ but made no contribution—all false. The greatest frequency of visits was mine, and that was about every two months.”

Figure 34

This narrative clearly sheds a somewhat different light on the Einstein-Gamow interaction. Scrutiny of the few, quite formal letters exchanged between Gamow and Einstein only enhanced my sense that the two men were not close. In one of those, Gamow asked for Einstein’s opinion on the idea that the universe as a whole might have nonzero angular momentum (a measure of rotation). To another, Gamow attached his paper on the synthesis of the elements in the big bang. Einstein replied politely to Gamow’s letters, but nowhere did he mention the cosmological constant. Perhaps the most telling piece of information in the entire correspondence, however, is a comment Gamow added to Einstein’s letter of August 4, 1946. Einstein informed Gamow that he had read the manuscript on big bang nucleosynthesis and that he was “convinced that the abundance of elements as function of atomic weight is a highly important starting point for cosmogonic speculations.” Gamow wrote across the bottom of the letter (figure 35), “Of course, the old man agrees with almost anything nowaday.”