Leopold Infeld

• 1. Introduction

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  Leopold Infeld, born on the 20th of August 1898 in Kraków, spent years working alongside Albert Einstein himself, yet he died without a Nobel Prize to his name. He co-wrote a book with Einstein. He helped formulate equations describing how stars move. He signed one of the most important peace documents of the atomic age. And yet, in 1950, he left Canada under a cloud of accusation, stripped of his citizenship and denounced as a traitor. How does a man who sat beside Einstein at Princeton end up losing everything he had built in the West? And what drove him back to a country still recovering from the catastrophe of the Second World War?

• 2. Kraków to Cambridge

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  Infeld grew up in Kraków when it was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a city that would rejoin an independent Poland only in 1918. He studied physics at the Jagiellonian University, then made his way to Berlin in 1920. Getting into the University of Berlin was not straightforward; he sought out Albert Einstein's help to gain admission. He earned his doctorate in 1921. By 1930 he was working as an assistant and docent at the University of Lwów, a post he held until 1933. That year he left for England and won a Rockefeller fellowship at Cambridge University, which he held from 1933 to 1934. The death of his second wife, Halina, marked a turning point that pushed him further west, toward the United States and Canada.

• 3. Princeton and The Collaboration

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  From 1936 to 1938, Infeld worked with Einstein directly at Princeton University. The two men produced work that stood on its own terms. Together they formulated the equation describing star movements, a contribution to the general theory of relativity. At the same time they were writing a book together, The Evolution of Physics, which brought the ideas of modern physics to a general audience. Infeld's interest was always in the theory of relativity rather than nuclear physics, a distinction that would later become critical to his reputation. After leaving Princeton, he took up a professorship at the University of Toronto in 1939, where he remained for over a decade.

• 4. Peace Activism and the Trap of Suspicion

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  After nuclear weapons were used for the first time in 1945, Infeld joined Einstein in speaking out for peace. In the political climate that followed, peace activism looked, to some, like a communist loyalty test. Infeld was accused of having communist sympathies, accusations he and those who knew him regarded as unjust. The fear running through the Canadian government and press was specific: if he returned to communist Poland, he might hand over nuclear weapons secrets. What made this fear especially absurd was that Infeld's actual field of research, the theory of relativity, had no direct link to nuclear weapons work. In the United States the stakes were even starker. Despite having worked with Einstein, Infeld faced the possibility of being charged with espionage, and the fate of the Rosenbergs showed what that could mean.

• 5. The Return to Poland

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  In 1950, Infeld and his family left Canada and returned to Poland. He felt a responsibility to help Polish science recover from the destruction the Second World War had caused. When he requested a leave of absence from the University of Toronto, the university denied it, and Infeld resigned his professorship. Back in Warsaw he became a professor at the University of Warsaw, a post he would hold for the rest of his life. Between 1955 and 1957 he served as president of the Polish Physical Society. In 1964 he was one of the signatories of the Letter of 34, addressed to Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz, calling for freedom of culture in Poland. The University of Toronto eventually reconsidered its treatment of him, granting him the posthumous title of professor emeritus in 1995, nearly three decades after his death.

• 6. The Russell-Einstein Manifesto

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  In 1955, Infeld was one of eleven scientists and intellectuals who signed the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, a public call for world leaders to seek peaceful resolutions to conflicts in the nuclear age. The document carried the weight of some of the most recognised names in science. Infeld holds a specific distinction among that group: he is the only signatory who never received a Nobel Prize. His contributions to physics also carry his name in two ways. The Born-Infeld model, developed together with Max Born, bears both their names. The Infeld-Hull Factorization Method describes general sets of solutions to the Schrödinger equation, a tool in quantum mechanics that sits at some distance from his core work in relativity.

• 7. Writing and Legacy

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  Infeld wrote two books that have nothing to do with physics equations. Quest is his autobiography, a record of his own account of the life described here. Whom the Gods Love: The Story of Évariste Galois is a biography of the French mathematician who died young. On the 12th of April 1939, in New Jersey, he married a mathematician who took the name Helen Infeld. Their two children, Joan M. and Eric, were both born in Toronto during the years he held his professorship there. Infeld died on the 15th of January 1968, working until the end at the University of Warsaw. The citizenship that Canada stripped from him was never restored in his lifetime, but the posthumous emeritus title from the University of Toronto acknowledged, at least formally, what the accusations of 1950 had obscured.