The Johns Hopkins professor who proved Einstein wrong

As he sat writing his memoirs in Maryland in the 1970s, Walter Elsasser recalled that Erwin Schrödinger made good sandwiches. 

“I felt like a Boswell to this remarkable genius,” wrote Elsasser, who was no slouch himself when it came to brains. A European-born scientist who knew Schrödinger in Germany before moving to the United States, Elsasser developed the dominant model of how Earth’s magnetic field was generated, published research on topics as diverse as biology, radar refraction and seafloor spreading — among others — and ended his teaching career in the Old Line State. 

“We did not, however, work jointly on a scientific program,” Elsasser wrote of Schrödinger in the next line, “but simply conversed. When the evening wore on, he would say: ‘Why don’t you stay here for a little longer, let’s look what there is in the refrigerator.'”

That culinary nugget from interwar Berlin is one of dozens of scientific stories in the life recalled by Elsasser — born 120 years ago on March 20. Said by colleagues to have twice come close to a Nobel Prize — the Nobel committee declined to disclose whether he was under consideration when asked for this story — Elsasser was instead awarded the National Medal of Science by Ronald Reagan, among other honors, capping a life in which he made widely lauded scientific discoveries and got to know and work with famous figures from Einstein and Blackett to Fermi and Heisenberg. 

(Elsasser also worked in a lab with Marie Curie during his Paris years but described her in his memoir as a “somewhat shadowy, frail figure” who was given a respectful distance by the awed younger researchers around her, meaning he did not develop a close acquaintance.) 

A story that stretched from Nazi Germany to Roland Park and the Johns Hopkins University campus, Elsasser’s time on the planet whose inner workings he eventually learned to mathematically describe was marked by curiosity, a warm, calm demeanor and nearly constant movement, according to those who knew him. His life ended in Baltimore, a city run at the time by a proudly Black, Harvard-trained lawyer. But it began in a lopsided amalgamation of a country still ruled by a blue-blooded, colonialist monarch. 

The longest ovation

Walter Maurice Elsasser was born in Mannheim, in the short-lived German Empire, to a Protestant family of Jewish lineage, in 1904, at a time when the family tree was soon to matter for their safety. 

After an early education that included a teacher’s recognition of his genius, Elsasser’s start in a university setting in Heidelberg, near his home, was rocky, with the star physics lecturer striding onstage the first day of class, wearing a 10 centimeter-square swastika pinned to his suit breast. It was 1922, years before Nazism became omnipresent. 

Elsasser wrote in his autobiography, Memoirs of a Physicist in the Atomic Age, that a distinguished senior professor at that time “was most certainly not expected to brandish symbols of political extremism in class. But the students thought otherwise,” clapping and shouting in a chilling display that Elsasser — in his 70s at the time of his reminiscence in the late 20th century — called “the most dedicated and loudest ovation I ever witnessed in my life, before or after.”

So it was made clear at an early moment how important it was for Elsasser to find a place where he could practice science unthreatened. Initially, that meant going to Munich, but he was shortly disabused of the notion that Munich in the 1920s was a good place to dodge antisemitism. He had more luck in Göttingen which, a sympathetic professor in Munich had told him, was “very good, and full of Jews.” It was there that he finished his PhD, working alongside some of the most famous names in science.

(Among them, Werner Heisenberg was noted by biologist Harry Rubin in a National Academy of Sciences biography of Elsasser as having convinced the young man that physics could be fun. Before Göttingen, Elsasser “had grown up in the stolid environment of the German middle class and who could think of scientific research only as a matter of duty or personal ambition or just to make money,” Rubin wrote.) 

It was at this time that Elsasser made his first published contribution to the upper tier of global physics research. 

“Browsing in the Göttingen library in 1925 at the age of 21,” wrote Bruce Marsh, an eventual  colleague of Elsasser’s at Johns Hopkins University, in a 1993 appreciation. “Walter found a newly completed dissertation by Louis de Broglie (perhaps hastily passed over by [department head and noted physicist Max Born]) containing the suggestion that matter such as electrons might also behave as waves.” 

“Walter made the fundamental observation that the hitherto confusing and unexplained experimental results of electron interaction with metals from Bell Laboratories were in fact confirmation of de Broglie’s hypothesis. This discovery characterized Walter and established him as a scientist of world class. (Two others later received the Nobel Prize for the same observation made two years after Walter’s.)”

With his doctorate finished, Elsasser worked in two postdoctoral positions — first in Holland, then in Switzerland — before finding himself somewhat underemployed in a Berlin lab. 

After taking a short-term job at a university in Kharkiv, which was then part of the Soviet Union, he made his way to the University of Frankfurt in 1931, where he stayed for a year and a half, until a day a couple months after the Reichstag Fire, when his university ID was confiscated by a newly arrived group of brownshirts. 

Acting on the impassioned earlier advice of his psychologist, who was also of Jewish descent, he fled to Zürich, as the borders were still open and his passport still valid. Entering the physics building at the Federal Polytechnic School in Zürich, Elsasser was immediately greeted by Wofgang Pauli at the top of a grand staircase, according to his memoirs. 

“Elsasser,” the famous physicist shouted down. “You are the first to come up these stairs; I can see how in the months to come, there will be many, many more to climb up here.”

Shortly afterward, Elsasser had luck with a job application and was able to move on to Paris. 

American nomad

The Nazi machine continued taking over Europe, so it was impossible for Paris to be the end of Elsasser’s travels. Receiving a United States immigration visa in 1935, he soon married his first wife, Margaret Trahey, who was from Chicago — his  parents settled in nearby Ann Arbor — and began teaching at the California Institute of Technology, where he became an expert on the way heat is radiated in the atmosphere, before working for the U.S. Army Signal Corps, which was done in affiliation with Columbia University. He became a U.S. citizen in 1940, according to his C.V., which is among his archived papers at Johns Hopkins, his last employer.  

It was during Elsasser’s Signal Corps research, which lasted until 1947, that he pulled together in his spare time the building blocks for what would become his dynamo theory model — the now commonly accepted articulation of how Earth’s magnetic field is generated. 

The theory, as popularized and mathematically described by Elsasser in his writings throughout the 1950s, is that the heat of the liquid iron composing Earth’s outer core, combined with the coriolis effect, causes convection behaviors that are largely mathematically predictable, and that these movements act like a self-agitating dynamo, generating a magnetic field in a way roughly analogous to a spinning electrical generator. 

Elsasser’s dynamo theory was at direct odds with a theory by Einstein that said any sufficiently large rotating body would create a magnetic field like Earth’s. Einstein is said to have privately doubted Elsasser’s model as being not simple or elegant enough to describe something as beautiful as Earth’s magnetic field, but the matter was put to rest fairly quickly when the British physicist Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett conducted an experiment involving a cloud chamber and lead spheres, lending weight to Elsasser’s conclusions. 

Not content to focus narrowly on one part of science, Elsasser went into overdrive over the next two decades, teaching and researching at universities in Utah, California, and along the American east coast. Along with geographic itchy feet, the professor was wary of becoming too specialized in one field, leading him to study seemingly far-flung topics like the enormous number of possible states living cells can be in, the stress diffusion behaviors shown in plate tectonics and the boolean algebra used by computers.   

His daughter, Barbara Elsasser, who now lives in Oregon, told Baltimore Fishbowl about a time she visited her father’s office at the University of Utah when she was a child. 

“On the table that day was a big metal box,” she said. “And all the men in the department were looking in the box. I wondered what they were all looking at with such profound interest, one pointed intensity and passionate enthusiasm.” 

“The box, it turned out, was the computer designed and built by John von Neumann who had asked daddy if he could find a problem to test it. Daddy said he could.” 

Dr. Elsasser “was happy that one member of the family went into teaching, but he made an interesting and revealing comment about teaching one afternoon after lunch,” wrote Dr. Elsasser’s nephew, Andrew Dodge, a retired teacher and museum education specialist in DC, in an email to Baltimore Fishbowl. “He made the point that the first year of teaching a subject was a lot of hard work establishing yourself in the institution with your fellow colleagues and students. The second year was easy and somewhat smooth sailing, but by the third year it became a bore.”

“Looking back on this comment and his reference to himself as a ‘rolling stone’ for going from one university to another, it seems that he always needed a challenge and new experiences. This would also help to explain the diversity of his scientific pursuits from geophysics to atmospheric and radar studies during World War II, and finally his interest in the study of biology and the probability of evolutionary development.” 

This scientifically omnivorous nature meant that Dr. Elsasser was often immersed in the study of technical and philosophical problems few in his new country — let alone his family — could understand. While that made his parenting unusual and could give him an otherworldly image for those around him, it did not seem to lead to conflict, based on what Dodge and Barbara Elsasser told Baltimore Fishbowl. 

“He was always very nice and solicitous, but he was just different,” Dodge wrote. 

“On our family vacations, we visited Walter and his family in Salt Lake City in 1955 where Walter’s daughter and son and my two brothers and I went ‘camping’ in the backyard. In 1959 the families got together again in La Jolla, California. We all went to the beach together, and Walter asked if we wanted to go water skiing. This was another example of his being ‘different.’ He was being very nice and wanted us to enjoy our stay, but I doubt if Walter had ever been in a boat much less gone water skiing. My father made a joke of it to us in private, but even at my age, I saw it as the professor trying to interact as a normal person.”

“I always thought of him as being just one step below God,” Barbara Elsasser wrote. 

“We had an uninterrupted, even, warm flow between us that never faltered. There was never any discord or disagreement of any kind. At age 11 I decided not to marry and to give myself to God.” 

True to her word Barbara Elsasser lived in a Hindu Ashram for 18 years and for decades now continues to live a Hindu Monastic life at a Temple, having been initiated by Swami Aseshananda, who she calls the the most powerful spiritual force in the Western Hemisphere.

Final years spent in Baltimore 

A deep interest in spiritual life runs in the family. According to his daughter, Dr. Elsasser kept three sacred spiritual books near him throughout his lifetime: The Imitation of Christ by Thomas A Kempis, Meister Eckhart and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. 

“Those were some of the most profound books on Earth,” she said by phone.

Another family member who was the chief stone mason on the construction of the Washington National Cathedral, she says, was decreed on his death, by the Bishop, to have been saintly and was honored by being buried in  the Cathedral, near Helen Keller.

Dr. Elsasser’s interest in the “software” of life grew over time, according to those around him, as well as his own autobiography and his NAS biography, to the extent that he was dedicating about half of his research time to complex systems biology by the time he arrived in Maryland in 1967 to teach in College Park. He retired from the University of Maryland in 1974 and moved to Johns Hopkins shortly thereafter. 

“Walter was convinced that a distinguishing characteristic of organisms was that their long-term behavior was not causally determined,” wrote the biologist Rubin. “He set himself the task of finding a way around von Neumann’s completeness proof and found it in the concept that the members of any biological class are heterogeneous; that is, they share some but not all characteristics, while the members within any physical class such as electrons, photons, atoms, and molecules are rigorously identical to one another.”  

When not researching Earth sciences or biology, Dr. Elsasser often spent his time in the Mid-Atlantic with family or writing his memoirs. 

“He would visit my mother, and the rest of the family regularly as far back as I can remember into the early 1950s,” Dodge wrote. “He would come to Washington, D.C., for scientific gatherings and go to the Cosmos Club, but he always had time to visit. Walter was a quiet and reserved person who didn’t try to impress anyone. However, it was obvious even from childhood, one knew he did not live in the same world as others.”

Working at the University of Maryland, then at Johns Hopkins in the 1970s and 80s, Dr. Elsasser collaborated closely with Marsh, who described him in a video interview with Baltimore Fishbowl as a “fast friend” who lived in an apartment on West University Parkway before moving to Roland Park Place. Dr. Elsasser sometimes spent Christmas with the Marsh family at their house on Deepdene Road. 

“He was an absolute gentleman. He was one of the kindest, gentlest people,” Marsh said, mentioning that the older scientist was great with kids. 

“[My young children, William and Hannah], would come [to the Johns Hopkins Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences] with me one day per week,” Marsh stated, “I went over to see Walter’s office one time, and there was Walter, with William sitting on his lap; Walter was telling a story, and Will was reaching up under his neck, pulling on the loose skin. And Walter had him in arms, telling him the story, and WIll was just so caught up in the story — it was very nice.”

Marsh was active in pushing the Reagan administration to award the National Medal of Science to Dr. Elsasser in the 1980s — an effort that was successful — and says that while Dr. Elsasser was in many ways similar to Einstein, he didn’t follow some of the somewhat Bohemian tendencies of his more famous colleague late in life. 

“But of course, Einstein and Walter were friends — they were pretty good friends.” 

Dr. Elsasser never wrote in his biography about whether he had to do his research in proximity to any of the many former Nazi scientists who were imported to the U.S. during the Cold War via Operation Paperclip, beyond a few very oblique words in one of the earlier chapters, stating that a Göttingen friend who later worked in the German military with great reluctance eventually was brought over by the U.S. army “in that mass transplanting of a great many, carefully selected scientists and other technical specialists.” 

A visually adept man who knew German, English, French and at least some Russian (along with possibly some limited Dutch), Dr. Elsasser went out of his way in his autobiography to mention that he had little musical skill — an unusual trait among his colleagues. However, he continued to be interested in art in his later years, having seen Rembrandt’s etchings in the Netherlands as a young postdoc and being a quite capable architectural illustrator himself. 

“My mother would make periodic visits to Walter’s apartment, and he and his [second] wife Suzi would visit local art galleries,” Dodge wrote. “In the early 1980s, I went with my mother one day, and we spent most of the morning at the Baltimore Museum of Art near the Homewood campus of Johns Hopkins University.”

After he died in 1991, Dr. Elsasser’s body was cremated at Greenmount cemetery, according to official records. His ashes were then brought to the family plot at Fort Lincoln Cemetery in Prince George’s County, Dodge stated. 

Marsh writes in his remembrance that “perhaps no other scientist in this century has had as profound an effect on so many fields of science.” 

Alongside all his accomplishments as a renowned scientist, however, Elsasser’s willingness to make an abstention that resulted in considerable career damage may stand out as his most selfless trait. The physicist who would later spend so much time researching biological topics related to free will received a chance during World War II to display some of his own decision-making abilities. 

“[Walter’s work] on atmospheric and radar studies during the war was of a defensive nature and did not directly involve the destructive nature of war,” Dodge wrote. 

“Walter knew and was a colleague of Robert Oppenheimer while both were in a German university graduate program in the late 1920s. Oppenheimer recognized Walter’s scientific work and abilities, and when Oppenheimer became part of the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb, he wanted Walter to join him in this effort. Walter refused, and on that point made the comment that he did not want to get into the mass murder business.” 

Family members debate whether the two ever spoke again.