Albert Einstein: pocket GIANTS E-Book

Dr Andrew May

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 119

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Everyone has heard of Albert Einstein and everyone knows that he was a genius. Yet only a few people understand his work. In fact, he was just one of many brilliant scientists grappling with the deepest problems of theoretical physics during the first half of the twentieth century. He may not have been the most important or influential of them – the point is arguable – but there is no doubt he was the most revolutionary. Almost single-handed, he transformed the way the world thinks about light, matter, space and time. In the sixty years since his death Einstein has become a legend. The profound obscurity of his theories has contributed to this, as has his archetypal "mad scientist" appearance. His philosophical and political utterances – both real and imagined – are regularly used to clinch arguments online or in the pub. So how can a modern reader separate myth from reality? This short book attempts to do just that!

Leseprobe

Contents

Title

Introduction: A Giant of Science

1  The Making of a Genius

2  A Patent Clerk with Big Ideas

3  The Relativity Revolution

4  Taking on Newton

5  An Unlikely Celebrity

6  The Grand Old Man of Science

7  Einstein’s Legacy

Timeline

Further Reading

Web Links

Copyright

Introduction

A Giant of Science

‘… elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction.’

Einstein1

Few people will be surprised to see Albert Einstein featuring in this series of pocket GIANTS: ‘You don’t have to be Einstein to work that one out.’ His name has become a byword for genius, even amongst those who have only the vaguest idea of who he was or what he did. He may have been the greatest scientist of the twentieth century: the point is debatable. What is beyond dispute, however, is that Einstein was the most famous scientist of that century – and probably the most instantly recognisable scientist of all time.

What did Einstein do to gain his reputation as a great scientist? How and why did he become such an international celebrity? It might be imagined that the answer to the second question follows automatically from the first, but the truth is not so straightforward. The popular fascination with Einstein becomes harder, not easier, to understand in light of the highly abstract and specialised nature of his scientific work.

First and foremost, Albert Einstein was a thinker. As he himself said: ‘What is essential for a man like me is what he thinks and how he thinks, not what he does or experiences.’2 In Einstein’s case the ‘how’ was particularly important. He consciously employed a form of reasoning known as deduction, which was common in philosophy but disparaged by most scientists. The idea is to start with an initial proposition and carry it through to its logical conclusion. The strength of the approach lies in the fact that the outcome is necessarily true – not just ‘likely’ – if the starting premise is true. Its weakness – and the reason other scientists shied away from it – is that a false premise will inevitably lead to a false conclusion. Einstein, however, was confident he could select a valid starting point through pure intuition:

The intuitive grasp of the essentials of a large complex of facts leads the scientist to the postulation of a hypothetical basic law or laws. From these laws, he derives his conclusions.3

The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition.4

Einstein’s genius lay in his ability to start in the right place and think his way through to a logical conclusion no matter how counter-intuitive it might appear. The only experiments he conducted were ‘thought experiments’ – mental images of what and how things must happen if certain fundamental postulates were correct. Virtually all the work for which he is remembered used this approach. The result was not just a revolution in science but a series of revolutions. Almost single-handedly, Einstein transformed the way the world now thinks about light, matter, space and time.

One discovery more than any other is associated with Einstein: his theory of relativity. In spite of the name, this is not so much concerned with what is relative as with the invariants of nature – things that are the same everywhere. There are really two distinct theories, special relativity and general relativity, which will be discussed in detail in Chapters 4 and 5.

Both theories started with a simple proposition, which Einstein took as self-evident. In the case of special relativity it was the idea that the laws of physics must be identical in any inertial frame of reference – in other words, any co-ordinate system that is stationary or moving at a constant velocity. This was not a new idea, but Einstein was the first person bold enough, and clear-thinking enough, to follow the argument through to its logical conclusion. It all happened in a flash of insight in the spring of 1905, soon after his 26th birthday: ‘I suddenly comprehended it … Five weeks after my recognition of this, the present theory of special relativity was completed.’5

General relativity likewise started with a simple – if somewhat less intuitive – proposition: that a local frame of reference falling freely under gravity behaves exactly as if it were an inertial frame (for a full explanation of what this means, see Chapter 5). This idea, which Einstein later referred to as the luckiest thought of his life, occurred to him in 1907. To work out all of its consequences took not five weeks, as with special relativity, but eight years. At the end of that time, Einstein had created his own theory of gravity, usurping that of Newton which had held sway for more than two centuries.

Einstein’s theories of relativity are remarkable achievements, both for the extent to which they redefined our basic notions of space and time, and for the unconventional approach he used in formulating them. According to Otto Frisch, one of the outstanding physicists of the following generation, the basic concept of relativity would probably never have occurred to anyone else at the time:

Nothing but the extraordinary power and concentration of Einstein would have been enough. The clue that led to special relativity was one of the great breakthroughs comparable with the achievements of Galileo and Newton – something that only happens once in a few hundred years.6

The same is true of general relativity. As the American physicist Kip Thorne put it: ‘Without Einstein, the general relativistic laws of gravity might not have been discovered until several decades later.’7

It is easy to understand why Einstein is held in such high regard by scientists. The work he did was of fundamental importance, and he succeeded in solving problems that left his peers baffled. But why should that make him a household name? Why is Einstein the one scientist everyone has heard of? The answer is a complex mixture of factors: partly his personality and physical appearance, partly his activities and pronouncements on non-scientific matters, partly the fact of his being in the right place at the right time.

Einstein’s fame has very little to do with the specific details of his scientific work. When he first came to public attention, in the 1920s, an understanding of his theories was not seen as a prerequisite for talking about them. Just the opposite in fact – their very obscurity was part of their appeal. Journalists gleefully reported that no more than a dozen8 – or sometimes a mere three9 – people in the world were capable of understanding Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

Far from being an obstacle, the sheer incomprehensibility of Einstein’s work was entirely in tune with the spirit of the 1920s. Relativity, with its disturbingly counter-intuitive consequences, was seen as part of the emerging avant-garde movement, on a par with atonal music and surrealist art. The abstract painter Piet Mondrian described his underlying principle as ‘force is geometry’10 – which could equally well serve as a succinct summary of general relativity. Marcel Proust, who wrote the famously non-linear novel In Search of Lost Time, wrote of Einstein: ‘It seems we have analogous ways of deforming time.’11

Einstein was, in his own way, just as much a rebel against convention as the artists of the avant-garde. He traced his rebellious streak to a particular phase of his childhood, when he had become disillusioned with the teachings of the Bible:

Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies: it was a crushing impression. Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience.12

In his personal appearance, too, Einstein was more reminiscent of a Bohemian artist than a professional scientist. His long, unruly hair and crumpled clothes made him stand out from the dapper, smartly dressed crowd of the interwar years. As Einstein’s biographer Walter Isaacson put it: ‘His baggy, comfortable clothes became a symbol of his lack of pretence … He was able to make his rumpled-genius image as famous as Chaplin did the little tramp.’13

By all accounts, Einstein was a striking person to meet face-to-face. A vivid description was provided by the British author C.P. Snow, who encountered Einstein for the first time in 1937:

At close quarters, Einstein’s head was as I had imagined it: magnificent, with a great humanizing touch of the comic. Great furrowed forehead; aureole of white hair; enormous bulging chocolate eyes … What did surprise me was his physique. He had come in from sailing and was wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. It was a massive body, very heavily muscled: he was running to fat around the midriff and in the upper arms, rather like a footballer in middle age.14

If Einstein’s appearance was unlike that of many of his peers, so was his attitude to the subject matter he dealt with: ‘When I am judging a theory I ask myself whether, if I were God, I would have arranged the world in such a way.’15 Einstein’s correspondence was often sprinkled with references to God – by which, as he clarified on a number of occasions,16 he meant a rational but impersonal force of nature rather than a sentient creator:

Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not.17

I want to know God’s thoughts – the rest are mere details.18

God does not play dice.19

Einstein’s fondness for talking about God, coupled with his unorthodox deductive methods, led many of his contemporaries to view relativity as a work of philosophy rather than science. When he received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1922 it was for his work on quantum theory, not relativity. The latter was seen, according to the chairman of the Nobel Committee, as something that ‘pertains essentially to epistemology and has therefore been the subject of lively debate in philosophical circles’.20

This was a fundamental misunderstanding. Relativity is not simply a philosophical conjecture. It is a rigorous scientific theory with observable, real-world consequences which are not predicted by rival theories. The satellite navigation technology that we use every day in our cars and mobile phones simply would not work unless it took proper account of both special and general relativity.21

Intellectuals often shun the limelight, but not Einstein. He relished all the media attention he could get – not because he wanted everyone to know about his scientific work, but because it enabled him to give voice to his strongly held political views. He was a lifelong pacifist, a campaigner for social justice and a proponent of Jewish independence. His worldwide fame gave him a platform from which to promote these causes to the widest possible audience.

Einstein’s fame brought him into contact with some of the greatest figures of the twentieth century. He talked politics with Sigmund Freud, Bertrand Russell and Albert Schweitzer. He corresponded with the Queen of Belgium, beginning his letters ‘Dear Queen’ rather than ‘Your Majesty’.22 He met Franz Kafka, Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin – and possibly even Marilyn Monroe, who kept a signed photograph of Einstein with her until her death.

For many people Einstein is the ultimate stereotype of a ‘mad scientist’, and in some ways this picture is correct. There are numerous anecdotes showing him to have been absent-minded and otherworldly throughout his life. On one occasion he is said to have phoned his wife with the succinct query, ‘Where am I and where am I meant to be?’23 On another occasion, perhaps less believably, a college secretary is supposed to have received a phone call asking for Einstein’s address. When she explained that she wasn’t allowed to give it out, the reply came: ‘Please don’t tell anybody, but I am Dr Einstein. I’m on my way home and I’ve forgotten where my house is.’24

Einstein’s office in Berlin was a picture of organised chaos:

His desk was piled high with books and papers, the overloaded shelves dusty with neglect, and the floor visible only in places where gaps remained between piles of books and papers. Yet he always knew exactly where a particular paper or book was kept.25

When he moved to America, he was asked what office equipment he would need. Einstein’s answer was: ‘A desk or table, a chair, paper and pencils … and a large wastebasket, so I can throw away all my mistakes.’26 In time the office acquired pictures of the people he most admired: three physicists – Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell – as well as Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian civil rights campaigner.

While his public persona conformed to a neat stereotype, Einstein’s private life was more complicated. Many of its details only became public with the release of his private correspondence during the 1980s and 1990s. Prior to this it was known, for example, that he had an extended romance with fellow student Mileva Marić before marrying her in 1903. It was not known, however, that the romance had produced an illegitimate child – a daughter who must have died in infancy or been sent for adoption under a different name, leaving just a few tantalising imprints on the historical record.

Similarly, biographers had always known that Mileva left Einstein in 1914, returning to their previous home in Switzerland while Einstein remained in Berlin. What became clear after the full correspondence came to light is that, shortly before Mileva’s departure, her husband had presented her with a long list of conditions beginning, ‘You will make sure that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order’ and ending ‘You will undertake not to belittle me in front of our children’.27

As one of Einstein’s biographers, Walter Isaacson, puts it, ‘Einstein was human, and thus both good and flawed, and the greatest of his failings came in the realm of the personal.’28 As a young man in his 20s, a colleague had noted that he ‘had no understanding of how to relate to people’.29 Later, a friend described Einstein’s interpersonal relationships in the following way:

He had a shy attitude toward everybody. He was gentle, considerate of others, and the opposite of pompous. But I never heard even a close friend call him by his first name. When someone did treat him with undue familiarity, he would shrink back.30