Einstein and the Paradox of the Tower

(PISA, Italia, Sunday 5 March 2000) Il Tirreno Giornale





The Great Scientist Compared the Pisan Monument 

to Nuclear Energy

As the Bell Tower did not Bear Disaster for Leaning, the 

Fission of the Atom must not Become "The Bomb"





(PISA, Italia, Sunday 5 March 2000)   

The Tower of Pisa was created to remain upright. The discovery of the fission of the 

atom was crafted to the service of the peace.  Instead, the first became known in 

all the world for its peacefgul inclination and the second came to open wide the 

road to the bomb of Hiroshima. Albert Einstein, the genius who conceived the 

Theory of Relativity, who represents better than anyone the twentieth century, 

according to American Time magazine, was to share in a unique way the Tower and 

his discovery, in an unpublished letter written to a Pisan University teacher that 

"Il Tirreno" discloses today to its readers.



This great intuition of Einstein was "provoked" by a Pisan teacher, Antonio Russi, up to a few 

years ago teaching Esthetics at the University of Pisa and at the Higher Normal School.  Between

1949 and 1951, at Princeton in the United States, where he then taught, Professor Russi had 

opportunity to know and to meet Albert Einstein many times.



"The scientist," Professor Russi remembers today, "complained of the fact that many people came 

to Princeton to photograph him exclusively because he had declared publicly, with a letter to 

the president of the United States, his availability to work on the atomic bomb for use against 

Nazi Germany".



"Einstein lamented that he was photographed for a public event and not for his scientific 

research".  Russi returned to Italy in the Spring of 1953 and sent Einstein an ancient etching 

of the Tower of Pisa, receiving in response a letter in which he compares the negative 

developments of the atomic bomb with the intentions of the creator of the Tower.  



"The artist, naturally," writes Einstein to Russi, "did not foresee that the weakness of the 

foundations would have caused the inclination of the tower and that this would have attracted 

the attention of all humanity.  Is not that perhaps true also for creations of man more 

abstract in the the sense that real social consequences correspond only in the least part to 

the intentions of the creator?"



How did Professor Russi know Einstein?

"In the immediate postwar period between 1949-51, I participated in the United States, at the 

University of Princeton in New Jersey, in "Seminars in Literary Criticism" sponsored by the 

Rockefeller Foundation Fellow: an important initiative in which  many of the greater critics of 

that time took part under the guide of Erik Auerbach, author of "Nemesis: the literary Western 

Realism" edited in 1946 and translated immediately in all the Western languages.  At the 

conference, among the Italian intellectuals there also was Guido Calogero who I have had as a 

teacher at the University and at the first Normal school, then more like a follower and friend 

of political struggle from 1939 until the end of the second world conflict and finally as a 

colleague at the University in 1946. It was then that I made contact with Einstein.



The meetings with him happened in his house at 112 Mercer Street where he lived with and was 

assisited by the tireless and bright secretary miss Helen Dukas.  These meetings have been 

engraved in my memory for the exceptional familiarity with which Einstein received his guests 

comfortably stretched out in his easy chair without shoes and with his naked feet in sandals".



Prof. Russi, you among all others came to know a moment of the life of Einstein that has 

evaded all the biographers.

"In fact among so many things that I learned in those conversations, one regarded the 

participation of Einstein as a student in Milan, for a year, at the lower technical 

institute.  This detail I have not found regarding the great physicist in any of the 

biographies.  Einstein then spoke broadly of matters of musical esthetics, making himself the 

same as an impassioned violinist with continuous references to the Italian presence in the 

period of its formation".



How did you become the media between the Tower of Pisa and Einstein?

"There was indeed a cause.  In the first meeting, when I told him that I came from Pisa, he 

answered me: "the city of the leaning Tower."  At that point I made a casual observation, that 

a defect of the yielding of the ground had become an esteem for the Tower, up to the point that 

it made her famous all over the world.  He much liked this observation, so much to appear much 

amused.  When I returned to Pisa, it was near Easter, I thought about sendiung him a gift. I 

went to Vallerini, bought an ancient etching of Pisa and sent it to him.  From there the answer,

in the very handsome letter, he responded back the discourse comparing the Tower to his 

discovery".

Translated by Gary Feuerstein, 5 March 2000, from the Il Tirreno article