The Valiant Swabian

A Review by John Updike
April 2, 2007

Edited by Andrew Ross

Einstein: His Life and Universe
by Walter Isaacson

When youthful and frisky, Albert Einstein would refer to himself as "the valiant Swabian," quoting the poem by Ludwig Uhland: "But the valiant Swabian is not afraid." Albert—the name Abraham had been considered by his unreligious parents but was rejected as "too Jewish"—was born in Ulm, in March of 1879, not long after Swabia joined the new German Reich ...

Albert's teachers, though giving him generally high marks, noted his resistance to authority and Germanic discipline, even in its milder Bavarian form. As early as the age of four or five, while sick in bed, he had had a revelatory encounter with the invisible forces of nature: his father brought him a compass, and, as he later remembered it, he was so excited as he examined it that he trembled and grew cold. ...

Walter Isaacson ... relates how, in 1931, during the fifty-one-year-old scientist's second visit to America, he ... met Charlie Chaplin, who, as they arrived at the première of "City Lights," said, of the applauding public, "They cheer me because they all understand me, and they cheer you because no one understands you."

In 1905, Einstein ... produced in rapid succession five scientific papers that (a) proposed that light came not just in waves but in indivisible, discrete packets of energy or particles called ... quanta; (b) calculated how many water molecules existed in 22.4 litres (...); (c) explained Brownian motion as the jostling of motes of matter by invisible molecules; (d) expounded the special theory of relativity, ...; and (e) asserted that mass and energy were different manifestations of the same thing and that their relation could be tidily expressed in the equation E=mc² ...

In 1903, Einstein had ... not been able to secure any teaching job; his cavalier and even defiant attitude toward academic authority worked against his early signs of promise. ... Marcel Grossmann, a brilliant math student whose meticulous lecture notes helped Einstein get high grades at the Zurich Polytechnic, managed to secure him a job at the Swiss Patent Office, in Bern. ...

The general theory of relativity took longer, from 1907 to 1915, and came harder. Generalizing from the special theory's assumption of uniform velocity to cases of accelerated motion, and incorporating Newton's laws of gravity into a field theory that corrected his assumption of instant gravitational effect across any distance, led Einstein into advanced areas of mathematics where he felt at sea. ...

Paul Dirac called general relativity "probably the greatest scientific discovery ever made," and Max Born termed it "the greatest feat of human thinking about nature, the most amazing combination of philosophical penetration, physical intuition and mathematical skill." ...

Though Einstein was to reap many honors (including the 1921 Nobel, belatedly, for his early work on the photoelectrical effect) and was to serve humanity as a genial icon and fount of humanist wisdom for three more decades, he never again made a significant contribution to the ongoing life of the physical sciences. ...

God ... frequently cropped up in Einstein's utterances, although ... he firmly distanced himself from organized religion. In a collection of statements published in English as "The World As I See It," there is this on "The Religiousness of Science":

The scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. ... His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire.

In 1913, an invitation was personally delivered by two pillars of Berlin's academic establishment, Max Planck and Walther Hermann Nernst, to come to Berlin as a university professor and the director of a new physics institute, and to become, at the age of thirty-four, the youngest member of the Prussian Academy. Einstein stayed in Berlin until 1932, when the combination of rising Nazism and tempting offers from America impelled him to leave Germany, never to return. ...

But he loved America, and ... never returned to Europe, let alone to Germany, whose crimes, he wrote the chemist Otto Hahn, "are really the most abominable ever to be recorded in the history of the so-called civilized nations." To America, Isaacson says, he projected a "rumpled-genius image as famous as Chaplin['s] little tramp." ... In his own freedom of thought, the valiant Swabian demonstrated how to be free.

John Updike was born in 1932 in Reading, Pennsylvania. He excelled in school and received a tuition scholarship to Harvard University, where he majored in English. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1954. Updike and his wife spent the following year in England, where Updike studied at Oxford's Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. On returning from England, the Updikes settled in Manhattan, where John took a position as a staff writer at The New Yorker. Over the years, he has maintained a relationship with The New Yorker, where many of his poems, reviews and short stories have appeared, but he has resided in Massachusetts ever since.

In an autobiographical essay, Updike famously identified sex, art, and religion as "the three great secret things" in human experience. His writing in all genres has displayed a preoccupation with philosophical questions and he is a lifelong churchgoer and student of Christian theology. He received the National Medal of Art from President George H.W. Bush in 1989, and in 2003 was presented with the National Medal for the Humanities from President George W. Bush. He is one of a very few Americans to receive both of these honors. To date he has published over 60 books, including novels, collections of short stories, poetry, drama, essays, memoirs and literary criticism.

AR  Einstein is a wonderful inspiration — great physics and a lovable human being. Walter Isaacson seems to have done excellent work in this book. And John Updike is always not only insightful but also a pleasure to read.
 

Einstein's Mistakes

By George Johnson
Los Angeles Times, October 12, 2008

Edited by Andy Ross

Einstein's Mistakes
The Human Failings of Genius
By Hans C. Ohanian
W.W. Norton, 394 pages

Assuming that the two signals are traveling at the same speed, Einstein wrote, "is in reality neither a supposition nor a hypothesis about the physical nature of light, but a stipulation which I can make of my own free will in order to arrive at a definition of simultaneity."

"The speed of light is either constant or not, and only measurement can decide what it is," writes Hans C. Ohanian, the author of physics textbooks and a former associate editor of the American Journal of Physics.

We have all heard that math wasn't Einstein's strong point, and Ohanian ruthlessly lays out the details. A 12-page marathon calculation in Einstein's doctoral dissertation, "A New Determination of the Molecular Size," was "a comedy of errors" based on "zany" physical assumptions. "Einstein's dissertation should have been rejected."

Fumbling ever forward, Einstein went on to commit more errors in the suite of famous papers he wrote in 1905, what came to be called his miracle year. The miracle, as Ohanian tells it, is that Einstein could have been wrong on so many details while coming through, in the end, with some of the greatest insights of the century.

E=mc² was not such an important equation, and not even original. Nevertheless, in deriving the formula, Einstein left a hole in his argument "almost big enough for a truck to drive through." He proved the case for slow-moving bodies and then extrapolated to fast-moving ones. "The mistake is the sort of thing every amateur mathematician knows to watch out for," Ohanian scolds.

Sometimes, Einstein's friend Marcel Grossmann tried to help him with his figures but not always to good effect. When Einstein was trying to get his mind around curved space-time, one of Grossmann's bungled equations led him astray. Einstein didn't notice. In going through Einstein's life, some of what Ohanian marks down as errors seem more like philosophical disputes. Einstein's quest to find a unified theory and to expunge quantum craziness from physics ultimately failed. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a noble attempt.

We can imagine Einstein responding favorably. "We all must from time to time make a sacrifice at the altar of stupidity," he once wrote to his colleague Max Born, "for the entertainment of the deity and mankind." Most important, Ohanian notes, Einstein's instincts were dead on. Light is made of photons. Mass is equivalent to energy. Space-time is curved. Nothing can exceed the speed of light. Einstein, Ohanian writes, had "a mystical intuitive approach to physics."
 

AR  Einstein is still a wonderful inspiration. Ohanian has added a few touches of shadow to the portrait. Good move.
 

Einstein and the Quantum Boys

By John Derbyshire
The New Atlantis, Summer 2008

Edited by Andy Ross

Faust in Copenhagen
A Struggle for the Soul of Physics
By Gino Segrè
Viking, 384 pages

The emergence of modern quantum mechanics over the years from 1925 to 1933 is a difficult story to tell. So many different threads have to be woven together that a chronological narrative can't be given. Some more subtle organizing principle is called for. Gino Segrè has used the Copenhagen conference of April 1932 as his focus.

The Copenhagen gatherings were held annually from 1929 to the onset of the Second World War. The 1932 conference was the fourth. One participant at the 1937 Copenhagen meeting was Emilio Segrè, the author's uncle, and Gino Segrè has himself had a long career as a theoretical physicist. He is just the right person to write a book like this.

Segrè has placed at the heart of his story seven key physicists. One of them, Wolfgang Pauli, did not actually attend the 1932 meeting. Three others of Pauli's generation (ages 25 to 31) were present in Copenhagen: Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, and Max Delbrück. To balance these four young revolutionaries, Segrè includes three older (ages 46 to 53) participants among his magnificent seven: Niels Bohr, Paul Ehrenfest, and Lise Meitner.

The year 1932 was pivotal in the development of modern quantum mechanics. The theoretical foundations had been laid down, from Max Planck's great 1900 paper implying the quantization of energy through Pauli's postulating of the neutrino at the end of 1930. Now the experimentalists were beginning to take over from the theorists. Mere weeks before the 1932 conference, James Chadwick observed neutrons. In the summer of that year, Carl Anderson observed the positron, postulated by Dirac in 1928. Experimental results then came thick and fast.

The year 1932 was preceded by a long theoretical slog that culminated with a sensational burst of creativity from 1925 to 1930: Heisenberg's matrix mechanics, Schrödinger's wave mechanics, Pauli's exclusion principle, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, and Dirac's relativistic equation. It was followed by the great experiments: Anderson's positron, the splitting of the atom, Fermi's chain reaction, the Bomb.

Four of Segrè's seven key physicists were Jewish or of Jewish descent. Three of the four fled the Nazis. Pauli went to the United States, then to Switzerland. Meitner went to Sweden, then England. Bohr took the same route as Meitner somewhat later, going on to the United States, but returning to Denmark after the war.

Of the Gentiles, Dirac relocated from Cambridge to Florida in 1970, Delbrück switched to molecular biology and lived out the rest of his life in California, while Heisenberg stayed in Germany through the war and afterwards, to his death in 1976. What precisely Heisenberg was up to in the war years remains unclear.

Paul Ehrenfest shot himself in 1933, five days after attending that year's Copenhagen conference. The darkening shadows over Europe, and the decision by his beloved friend Einstein in March that year not to return to Germany, were factors in his unhappiness, but there were personal issues too.

Niels Bohr was the convener of the Copenhagen conferences and, in a way, the central figure in Segrè's book. Bohr had made his name as a physicist with five papers published between 1913 and 1915 defining what is now known as the Bohr model of the atom. He had studied under Ernest Rutherford at the University of Manchester. His five papers had resolved some conundrums raised by Rutherford's "solar system" model for the atom, by applying Planck's quantum principles to the electrons in their orbits around the nucleus.

Having achieved fame, Bohr was in want of a professorship. Denmark responded by creating its first professorship in theoretical physics and appointing him to fill the position. Bohr returned to Copenhagen in 1916.

Bohr spent the next few years in lecturing and energetic fundraising. By 1921 he had his own institute in Copenhagen. It would be a haven for many of the world's greatest physicists for the next decade and a half. The Copenhagen phase of modern physics was underway, with an assist from Bohr's Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded in 1922.

The terrific theoretical turmoil of 1925-27 brought forth a new way of thinking about the subatomic world. These were the years when it dawned on researchers that the intuitions we acquire through our interactions with reality at everyday scales of measurement are simply not appropriate to events in the realm of electrons and protons.

Segrè takes great care in explaining the era's major discoveries and navigating through its major debates. The Solvay conferences had begun in 1911. The 1927 conference was the fifth. Einstein was 48 years old. Segrè quotes him as saying to a friend: "I have thought a hundred times as much about the quantum problems as I have about the General Relativity Theory."

Einstein seems at first to have agreed with the formulation of quantum mechanics as it emerged in the Copenhagen interpretation. Then, in December 1926, Einstein made a now-famous expression of dissent in a letter to Max Born: "Quantum mechanics is very impressive. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory produces a good deal but hardly brings us closer to the secret of the Old One. I am at all events convinced that He does not play dice."

By the time of the Solvay conference ten months later, Einstein had definitely set his face against the Copenhagen interpretation. "It went against the grain of what he deeply believed to be the truth," Segrè writes.

Throughout the conference, Bohr and Einstein engaged each other in private conversations. Though Einstein could not be reconciled to the Copenhagen interpretation, he and Bohr repeatedly expressed their admiration for each other. Their differences of opinion were entirely intellectual.

It was also in this period that the deep metaphysical problems posed by quantum mechanics first came into view. Segrè: "Now, almost eighty years after Solvay, the repeatedly verified Bohr interpretation still stands, as solid as ever, but still questioned, as it should be."

Aspects of quantum mechanics — the ontological status of Schrödinger's state vector, and of the wave function's collapse when it encounters an observer — remain matters of argument today. Most working physicists accept the math as an adequate description of all their measurements without fussing over the underlying realities. Others accept the wave function but balk at the collapse, preferring a "many worlds" interpretation in which the superpositions of the wave function persist in realms inaccessible to each other, each realm presumably populated by its own observers.

Segrè writes that it "came as somewhat of a revelation to find what a key figure Bohr was" in these critical years. The Dane was an intellectual impresario, responsible for making Copenhagen "the mecca of theoretical physics." He used his influence to arrange fellowships for promising young thinkers and to help Jewish scientists escape Nazi persecution. He bent his powerful mind to working out complex problems without quitting.

Many of these physicists were young, very young, and worried that age would gutter the flames of their genius. Wolfgang Pauli had formulated the exclusion principle by the time he was 25. Werner Heisenberg was only 23 when he discovered matrix mechanics and just 25 when he developed the uncertainty principle. Paul Dirac's reconciliation of quantum mechanics and special relativity came when he was 26. All three eventually received the Nobel Prize for work they had done before the age of 30.

The revolutionary discoveries in the 1920s inspired the term Knabenphysik — boys' physics. Even for the revolutionaries, the transition from being prodigies to professors was difficult. Neither Pauli, Heisenberg, nor Dirac achieved anything nearly as important after turning thirty as they had before.

Gino Segrè has written an admirable book.
 

AR  Einstein never really "grokked" quantum mechanics, but who ever did? Richard Feynman didn't, despite his Nobel Prize for QED. No cause for shame — cause rather for me to get to work and explain my fancy new way (hatched when I was 25, although I didn't understand my own ideas until many years after 1975) to grok it!