Next year will be the 100th birthday of E=mc2.
I tripped over another article about Einstein this morning (thank you, Arts and Letters Daily, couldn’t live without you!!) – and wanted to pass it on.
The article begins:
Everybody has a good day from time to time, but what happened to Albert Einstein in 1905, when he was just 26 years old, was extraordinary: He wrote five powerful papers in one year any one of which would have been worthy of the Nobel Prize, laying the foundation for the modern pharmaceutical industry, quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. He even came up that year with the beguilingly simple formula E=mc2 that has done so much to transform our century.
26 years old? Jeez. When I was 26, I was hovering over random jukeboxes in Wrigleyville, drinking beer, and flirting with blurpy Chicago boys like a manic Lorelei.
I love this section on what happened to Einstein, while working in that patent office – the job that gave him the necessary time and leisure to reflect and question:
Two beliefs kept Einstein motivated in those years at the patent office. The first was that there were great truths waiting to be discovered. He felt, as he once put it, like a little boy standing in a big, dark room lined with books with titles that were hard to distinguish but with enough concentration and humility, a few of the waiting pages could be read.
His second motivating belief was that the universe was simple, and the same for everyone. If I, standing still, view a light beam as moving at a certain rate of speed, I have no right to say that this is the “true” rate, and that what you, running along beside the beam, might measure about its speed is wrong. Rather, there had to be a way to make any two such views be seen as just one aspect of a deeper, common truth. From that reasoning and with just a few lines of high school algebra much of relativity, as well as the formula E=mc2, could be deduced.
“great truths waiting to be discovered”
How utterly exciting.
I am 26 years old and I wonder at times, what has my contribution been??? I have done a lot, experienced many experiences, but can I say I made a definite impact on tomorrow? Not really. To come up with an idea, so new, so simple, as e=mc^2, at the age of 26 is absolutely amazing.
I am certainly not looking to change the world in the way Einstein did. But I can only hope that someday I will be able to make my contribution to tomorrow… But what will that contribution be?
red, have you read “Einstein’s Dreams” by Alan Lightman? It’s a work of fiction, but it’s very interesting – describing some of the things that Lightman believes may have haunted Einstein while he was working on those papers.
at one point in the book, Einstein explains his drive to a colleague as “I want to get close to what the Old One is thinking” (or words to that effect).
very interesting book, and it’s also good reading if you only have a few minutes to dive into it at a time – each chapter is more or less freestanding, yet part of a whole.
Ricki:
Oh, I love that you mentioned that book! I have indeed read it – only a long long time ago. There were a couple of those dreams, described by Lightman, which – I guess you could say – cracked open little doors of understanding in my brain, about the nature of time, and the things Einstein was curious about.
I should read it again, huh? In honor of this anniversary.
Concerning Einstein’s young age, it actually turns out that most great physicists and mathematicians do their most important work when they are very young, usually in their twenties. When I was in college, I knew a physics professor who explained it this way (and this is a loose paraphrase): “Young physicists are too stupid to know that their crazy ideas won’t work, and occasionally one of them has a crazy idea that is actually true. Older physicists don’t do much important work because they are smart enough to know that their crazy ideas won’t work, so they don’t pursue them.”
Bryan – I had heard something like that – that after a certain point, that “A-ha!!” moment may be much more elusive, because of preconceived notions, or pessimism, or whatever.
I’ve also heard that often breakthroughs such as Einstein’s are made by outsiders. People who aren’t career-scientists, and so – they aren’t bogged down with other people’s less imaginative ideas.
So interesting!
I think that in general, fields that are pretty abstract are the ones in which people do their best work while young, while those that are more experience-driven are those in which age can be a help rather than a hindrence. (If I were hiring a structural engineer to design a bridge, I think I’d want someone who had knocked around a bit.) This also may explain why college students often have such a strong attraction to theoretical systems in politics and philosophy…to the extent that things are pure explicit, deductive reason, youthfulness and inexperience don’t count against you.
David – interesting, I hear what you’re saying.
So basically – these are fields where asking a child’s level of question (ie: “Why is the sky blue?”) is appropriate and necessary – as opposed to silly or naive. Naivete is an ASSET.
If you feel you’re too sophisticated to wonder about why the sky is blue, then perhaps quantum physics is not your field.
I suppose, too, these abstract fields require people to have a little less certainty. Know-it-all boneheads abound in ANY field – but then you get the genius like Einstein, who was willing to say: “I have no idea why time feels different in this situation, and in that situation … WHY??”
The pedant in me feels it necessary to point out that Einstein never accepted quantum physics which led to his famous quote, “God does not play dice with the universe.” Of course he was an older physicist by that point and not so willing to think the universe wasn’t so simple after all.
Right – so perhaps by that point, certain ideas had calcified. The breakthrough had already happened, and a huge one it was – but he couldn’t follow into the so-called randomness of quantum theory.
Oh, and Scott – I wasn’t saying Einstein was in the field of quantum physics, although I can see why you would think that. To me, quantum physics is one of the prime examples of an abstract field … where imagination and openness count just as much (even more, maybe??) as actual knowledge.
Yes, it’s true. And amazing: Many of the crop of pioneering atomic physicists around the turn of the last century and the first decades after also did their most significant work at a very young age, some even younger than Einstein.
Speaking of Einstein, Gary Larson of ‘Far Side’ fame did a funny cartoon once captioned ‘Einstein proves time really does equal money’, or something like that, which showed a blackboard full of equations ending with “T = $”.
“The first was that there were great truths waiting to be discovered.”
And this reminds me of a time in college when in an advanced class a math professor asked some of us students if we thought mathematics was discovered or invented.
?
eh –
I always thought of math as … a device, a way to explain the physical universe. I would say it was invented.
But then again, I have NO IDEA.
What do you think??
I think that the ability to work at a child’s level of questioning is valuable in *any* field, not just the highly abstract ones. What I’m trying to get at is the idea of “tacit knowledge”…things that you know, but can’t clearly articulate in either words or equations.
Einstein did accept quantum physics – not just because he discovered it, but because of its explanatory power. What he did not accept was the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics and the widespread belief that the probabilistic explanation is the ultimate explanation of reality. Bohr (a proponent and co-author of the Copenhagen interpretation) is alleged to have said “Albert, don’t tell God what to do” in response to the dice quote. Neither attitude denies quantum physics, the attitudes only differ on the philosophical interpretation of the math.
Personally, I think math is mostly discovered and is based heavily on our human brain structure. Specific details and notations are invented, and it’s hard to untangle the two sometimes.
As for the age thing, there’s no reason why a radical thinker wouldn’t keep being radical into his 30s or 40s. One factor nobody’s talked about is the availability of holes in the current scientific framework that someone can be radical about. Yes, the younger guys charge ahead to the unknown, but there are only a few avenues for radical re-invention available to any generation. You have all the tools you need to explore those holes as a young Ph.D. or post-doc, so that’s why the magic age of 26 – 28 is the tipping point for most. Either you have “it” coming out of the grad school starting gate, or you don’t.
After Einstein settled the questions of “do atoms exist?” (yes) and “is light a particle or a wave?” (also, yes), there was not much left to do in physics at that time that was radical. What was left was painful mathematical slogging into particulars and arguments over the philosophical implications of the great discoveries that had just been made. Not much room for radical thought, even to those so inclined. It goes back to the Dirac quote I mentioned before: “It was very easy in those days for any second-rate physicist to do first-rate work. There has not been such a glorious time since then. It is very difficult now for a first rate physicist to do second-rate work”.
As ever, John – very interesting. The article I linked to does refer to your point, that … the field was much more wide-open and undiscovered at the time of Einstein’s breakthrough:
“It also helped that he was struggling with these problems at a very propitious time. Stephen Jay Gould has pointed out that the reason it’s so hard to hit .400 in major league baseball today is that the whole level of play has been raised. In the 1920s and 1930s there were many weak teams, against which it was easy for top hitters to pump up their averages. Today though, there are fewer consistently weak teams. Batters have a higher standard against which to try to stand out.
Einstein was like one of those old-time batters. Today there are thousands of physicists in the world, but when Einstein was at the patent office there were scarcely any perhaps six full-time physicists in Switzerland and at most a few hundred in other major countries. He could take the time he needed for quiet mulling without too much worry that anyone would catch up to him.”
Oh, and I love the “Albert, don’t tell God what to do” quote. Classic!!
You’re going to love wandering around in the Einstein’s vault, red. Take your time. It’s all relative.
http://www.alberteinstein.info/
Sheila,
As a mathematician, I agree with math is “invented”. Its something that can occasionally be used to model some real-world phenomena, but really, its a game we play. We start with some rules and see what we can get out of those rules.