Daily Book Excerpt: Biography
Next biography on this shelf is Einstein: The Life and Times
There were people entering late and settling down in one of the boxes in the first tier. One of them, sitting at the front, even looked like Professor Einstein. People around us began to whisper; my father was looking up at the box as if he were indeed now transfixed by light; then he murmured to me that the man in the box was, to be sure, Professor Einstein. There was the dark halo of hair; the humorous look that seemed to be going far outwards and inwards all at once. This was the only time that I saw Einstein in the flesh. From the front of the box he bowed slightly to the audience; he seemed to be acknowledging their whisperings. The speaker on the platform had paused; Einstein waved at him as if he were encouraging him to continue. The whispering in the hall subsided. (This was on 27 August 1920; I have checked the date; do you think it makes it more telling if I can say ‘I have checked the date’?) Einstein sat back in his box. The speaker went on. He was suggesting what a dangerous and terrible thing it was to have no objectivity. Einstein was nodding and smiling; he leaned back and spoke to one of the people behind him; this person laughed. The man on the stage paused again; he seemed both at a loss and furious. I thought suddenly – But what of the crowd, those waiters, the people who jeered at the soldiers! Einstein leaned forward and clapped, sardonically, at the speaker; it was as if the performance might be over. Then my father whispered ‘Oh don’t overdo it!’ I remember this whisper quite clearly: I thought I understood it. I put my head in my hands. Several images had come into my mind all at once: there was my mother walking like a bird amongst the dead or dying bodies as if on a battlefield; there was the girl curled up with her hands to her middle (I read later that she had died); then there was a photograph I had come across recently when I had been looking through some of my mother’s papers, which was of the body of Rosa Luxemburg when she had been dragged from the canal some months after she had been killed. Her face was like that of a wooden doll, half eaten by worms. So I felt I understood when my father whispered ‘Oh don’t overdo it!’ When the small furious man on the platform began speaking again his beard pointed and waggled up and down like a machine gun. Professor Einstein seemed only to have his halo of hair to protect him.
— Hopeful Monsters, by Nicholas Mosley
My copy of Ronald W. Clark’s biography of Albert Einstein is so clogged up with my own notes that it is barely readable now. I do remember tearing through the book, back when I lived in Chicago. How I managed to find the time, what with dealing with my frenzied social life involving men climbing through my bedroom window, and intermittent haiku fits, not to mention falling in love with such intensity that I actually had to MOVE from Chicago for GOOD when the affair ended, as well as my busy life as an actress, I will never know. But that is the time in my life when I read it. I guess I am good at multi-tasking. I put notes in the margins, question marks, things to research further, words I didn’t understand with question marks next to them (and then: later, when I had looked the word up in the dictionary, I would go back to that exact page and provide the definition), asterisks marking something I found relevant, huge brackets … It’s a crazy manuscript. I don’t know if I could read it now with all of my own notes cluttering the page. But I was turned on by the book.
I am interested in Einstein for the science. I obviously don’t think I am alone in that. You don’t get to be Time magazine’s Person of the Century for your pacifist views or your Zionism. The science is the thing. (For me, anyway). My interest in science, particularly physics, goes way way back, and while I do not understand much of the math, I enjoy wrestling with the concepts, and trying to understand the math. There are tons of writers out there who have taken on these topics in an engaging way, and they manage to make the math comprehensible (to someone like me who actually got an F in Introductory Physics in high school). I am not interested in physics for its philosophical ramifications, although I do believe that those are unavoidable. That’s why Einstein’s work was such a big deal, overturning centuries of how we look at the world and our place in it. He was like Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, those first guys to actually see our planet in its entirety with their very own eyes. You don’t come back from that unchanged. However: the New Age co-option of many elements of quantum physics is not really my bag. I love writers like Madeleine L’Engle, who was obviously fascinated by many of these concepts, and then created entire books where such concepts were actually imagined, like A Wrinkle in Time, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet and many others. I’m not a big sci-fi reader, so I know there are many more writers out there who explore these concepts. They are fascinating concepts: the implications are endless. “What would happen if ….” My friend David is well-versed in all of this, and his ongoing study of what the hell is going on in the world in quantum physics is one of our favorite topics. He knows way more than I do, and has given me some great book suggestions as well.
But I would rather wrestle not just with the philosophical implications, but the actual Theory itself. I want to understand where Einstein’s thinking came from, the larger context of his day, what other scientists were working on, and what exactly he was overturning. (I took a great class in college called The History of Science, and I think my interest in science stemmed from that course.)
My Science bookshelf is small. I wouldn’t count my interest in science as an obsession, just a passing interest and fascination, so the number of books reflect that. The good thing about these books is that one leads to the other leads to the other. I found In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat, a book I adore, through a reference in one of Madeleine L’Engle’s nonfiction books. The other thing about my “science bookshelf” is that I dip into these books constantly. There are other books I own that I go years without touching. But these books I refer to all the time.
All of this is to say that while I did indeed read every word of Ronald W. Clark’s book (and, granted, it was eons ago), anything that doesn’t have to do with science, and his development of the theories, Special and General, didn’t make much of an impression. I know the details. His problems in Germany, the attacks he and other Jewish scientists received for “Jewish physics”, his sudden fame – the popular imagination grasping hold of his ideas in the theory (confirmed by the expedition to watch the eclipse in 1919) – his fame, his Zionism, his letter about the atomic bomb … I don’t know anything about his marriages, nor do I care. I am interested in his work with Hebrew University, but I honestly don’t care much about that either. What I am interested in is the dude sitting in Patent Office, glad that he had so much free time to think about physics, and working on his idea that mass equals energy. That gravity can curve light. Space and time are equivalent, a continuum. The speed of light is the only constant, but as you approach that speed limit, mass and time change. What on EARTH could this mean??? For us, and how we look at ourselves? So our perception of reality is based on the subjective fact of where we are standing in relation to another object. Move, and the perception changes. People had a hard time accepting these concepts, and I suppose they still do. I still hear defensive people say stuff like, “The truth is NOT relative.” Angry that they even have to defend what to them is a self-evident fact. People get angry at the very thought of “relativity”. Still! But these people are idiots, and they are usually protecting something, a fundamentalist view of the world, or a social-conservative’s chip-on-the-shoulder about modern day secular life and all its “nuance” (a hated word in such circles), and I try not to worry about what idiots think. They’re in the same camp with the Germans who warned of the dangers of “Jewish physics” and how it threatened the natural order, the moral order, etc. What is really interesting is those who are dissatisfied with Einstein’s work, and who felt the need to push it to its most logical (to them) conclusions. The scientists who came after. But that’s another story. Those battles – between physicists spanning the 20th century – are some of the most essential and interesting battles in the intellectual sphere. I NEVER get sick of reading about these giant brains duking it out, even if I can’t understand a word of what they are talking about.
There are numerous anecdotes of Einstein working away at a problem or a conundrum with an obsessive single-minded concentration that others found remarkable, even strange. He couldn’t put aside problems for later, even if he was at a crowded dinner party. He would mull over them for hours, and hours, distracted, lost to the world, never losing focus, never tiring. It would blow other people away, even people who were academics and scientists themselves. Did he never need to take a break, refresh himself? NOT when he was confronted with a problem he wanted to solve, or a theory he wanted to create. He had the capacity for unbelievable focus, superhuman almost.
I love the stories. I love the stories about the lone wolf against the establishment (although that has been over-stated in the case of Einstein: There was definitely a sense in the zeitgeist at the time that things were breaking apart, old ways of understanding life were being questioned – in all areas: art, literature, politics …) Great upheaval. But Einstein was not “establishment”, and that is one of the things most unique about him. He was not a particularly brilliant student, he worked in a Patent Office, he wasn’t a lecturer in physics, he wasn’t part of the cool club. But that freed him in many ways. He was unburdened by the pressure of groupthink, he was free from the insistence of consensus thought. There are numerous examples throughout history of young physicists bursting onto the scene with a new idea that shakes up the establishment. It seems to be that physics, at least breakthroughs in physics, come from the very young. Discoveries and breakthroughs lessen as people grow older. Perhaps you get engrained in your own way of thinking. You stop questioning and you want to just prove what you already know. Einstein went through that himself, with his resistance to quantum mechanics. The details are lost to me, as I said, it’s been years, but through my reading on quantum physics I know the battles, I know the arguments, “God does not play dice”, I know all of that. But flipping through the book made me want to read it again. It’s been too long since I grapped with these theories. I enjoy having my mind blown.
Ronald W. Clark has clear enthusiasm for his topic, and is able to describe complex mathematics in a way that a bozo like myself can start to grasp it. So I’ll post an excerpt from Einstein’s first stab at the theory, in 1905. This has to do with influences on him, other experiments going on at the time, but also, how much farther he went than anyone else.
I guess I just wish I could have an hour or so of actually being inside Einstein’s brain. I would love to actually experience what the world looked like to him.
Excerpt from Einstein: The Life and Times
If there are any missing acknowledgments in Einstein’s work, they belong not to Michelson-Morley, to Lorentz, Fitzgerald, or Poincaré but to August Föppl, a German administrator and teacher whose Introduction to Maxwell’s Theory of Electricity was almost certainly studied by Einstein. The famous relativity paper has similarities in style and argument with Föppl’s treatment of “relative and absolute motion in space”; and Föppl himself writes of “a deep-going revision of that conception of space which has been impressed upon human thinking in its previous period of development” as presenting “perhaps the most important problem of science of our time.”
Thus Föppl, like the Lorentz equations, can justifiably be considered as another of the useful instruments lying to hand which Einstein was able to utilize. As The Times was later to say of Einstein’s General Theory, there is no need to defend his originality. “The genius of Einstein consists in taking up the uninterpreted experiments and scattered suggestions of his predecessors, and welding them into a comprehensive scheme that wins universal admiration by its simplicity and beauty.”
The “comprehensive scheme” of 1905 had shown that space and time, previously thought to be absolute, in fact depended on relative motion. Yet these are but two of three yardsticks used to measure the nature of the physical world. The third is mass. Was this, also, linked in some hitherto unexpected way with the speed of light? Einstein considered the question. In view of the apocalyptic consequences, his thoughts, thrown off in a letter to Habitcht, apparently in the summer of 1905, have all the casualness of a bomb tossed into the marketplace. After suggesting that Habicht might like to join him in the Patent Office, he adds:
You don’t need to bother about valuable time, there is not always a subtle theme to meditate upon. At least, not an exciting one. There is, of course, the theme of spectral lines, but I do not think that a simple connection of these phenomena with those already explored exists; so that for the moment the thing does seem to show very much promise. However, a result of the electrodynamic work has come to my mind. The relativity principle in connection with the Maxwell equations demands that the mass is a direct measure for the energy contained in the bodies; light transfers mass. A remarkable decrease of the mass must result in radium. This thought is amusing and infectious but I cannot possibly know whether the good Lord does not laugh at it and has led me up the garden path.
During the next few weeks Einstein obviously thought more about the amusing and infectious idea. The result was a brief paper which appeared in the Annalen der Physik in the autumn of 1905 almost as a footnote to his earlier paper. “The results of the previous investigation lead to a very interesting conclusion, which is here to be deduced,” he began. The deduction, carried through little more than a page and a half, went on with the following historic words:
If a body gives off the energy L in the form of radiation, its mass diminishes by L/c2. The fact that the energy withdrawn from the body becomes energy of radiation evidently makes no difference, so that we are led to the more general conclusion that
The mass of a body is a measure of its energy content; if the energy changes toL, the mass changes in the same sense by L/9 X 1020, the energy being measured in ergs, and the mass in grams.
Einstein concluded with the comment that the theory might be put to the test by the use of such materials as radium salts whose energy content was very variable, and that radiation appeared to convey inertia between emitting and absorbing bodies. Yet the immediately important conclusion was that mass did in fact increase with relative speed. There had already been laboratory examples of this awkward process. During the last decade of the century, both J.J. Thomson in Cambridge and subsequently W. Kaufmann in Göttingen had investigated the ways in which fast cathode rays, the streams of electrons whose existence had been postulated by Lorentz and confirmed by Thomson, could be electromagnetically deflected; both had found that mass of the particle appeared to depend on velocity. Some years later F. Hasenöhrl had shown that light radiation enclosed in a vessel increased that vessel’s resistance to acceleration – and that its mass was altered in the process. Finally, in 1900, Poincaré had suggested that this inertia or resistance to acceleration was a property of all energy and not merely of electromagnetic energy.
Now Einstein had leapfrogged ahead, ignoring the separate experimental results which had been puzzling individual workers and coming up with a simple overall explanation which, almost staring them in the face, had appeared too simple to be true. All mass was merely congealed energy; all energy merely liberated matter. Thus the photons, or light quanta, of the photoelectric effect were just particles which had shed their mass and were traveling with the speed of light in the form of energy; while energy below the speed of light had been transformed by its slowing down, a transformation which had had the effect of congealing it into matter. There had been a whiff of this very idea from Newton, who in his Opticks had asked: “Are not gross Bodies and Light convertible into one another, and may not Bodies receive much of their Activity from the Particles of Light which enter their composition?” The apparent rightness of this was underlined by his comment, a few lines lower, that “the changing of Bodies into Light, and Light into Bodies, is very conformable to the Course of Nature, which seems delighted with Transmutations.”
The nub of this revelation – which involved two separate things, the difference between the mass of a body at rest and its mass in motion, and the transformation of a material body into energy – linked the previously separate concepts of conservation of energy and conservation of matter, and was embodied in two equations. One showed that the mass of a body moving at any particular velocity was its mass at rest divided by √1 − v2/c2. This quickly provides a clue to man’s long ignorance of the difference between the mass of a body at rest and in movement; for the difference will be very small indeed until the velocity concerned leaves the speeds of ordinary life and begins to approach the velocity of light. As with space and time, the changes are too small to be noted by man’s inadequate sense. The second equation follows on from the fact that the motion whose increase raises the mass of a body is a form of energy. This is the famous E = mc2, which states, in the shorthand of science, that the energy contained in matter is equal in ergs to its mass in grams multiplied by the square of the velocity of light in centimeters per second. Here again, one needed no mathematical expertise to see the essence of the argument: the velocity of light being what it is, a very small amount of mass is equivalent to a vast amount of energy.
Einstein’s “follow-through” from his Special Theory of Relativity thus explained how electrons weighed more when moving than when at rest, since this was the natural result of their speed. It helped to explain how materials such as radium, whose radioactivity still puzzled the men experimenting with them, were able to eject particles at great speeds and to go on doing so for long periods, since creation of the comparatively large amounts of energy involved could be attained by the loss of a minute amount of mass. It helped to explain, furthermore, the ability of the sun – and of the stars – to continue radiating a large amount of light and heat by losing only a small amount of mass.
Forty years later, the facts of nature as revealed by Einstein’s equation were to be demonstrated in another way. For by then it had been discovered that if the nucleus of a heavy atom could be split into two parts, the mass of its two fragments would be less than that of the original nucleus. This difference in mass would have been transformed into energy; its amount would be minute, but the energy released would be this minute mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light – the energy which, released from vast numbers of nuclei by the fission process, destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The chances of splitting the atom appeared insoluble in 1905. But the equation was there. And for writers and cranks, for visionaries and men who lived on the borderland of the mind, a new pipedream became possible. A few scientists thought along similar lines, and in 1921 Hans Thirring commented: ” … it takes one’s breath away to think of what might happen in a town, if the dormant energy of a single brick were to be set free, say in the form of an explosion. It would suffice to raze a city with a million inhabitants to the ground.” Most of his professional colleagues did not speculate thus far. Rutherford maintained almost to the end of his life in 1937 that the use of the energy locked within the atom was “moonshine”. And when a young man approached Einstein in Prague in 1921, wanting to produce a weapon from nuclear energy based on E = mc2, he was told to calm himself. “You haven’t lost anything if I don’t discuss your work with you in detail,” Einstein said. “It’s foolishness is evident at first glance. You cannot learn anything more from a longer discussion.”
The demonstration of Einstein’s mass-energy equation in the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has naturally given this by-product of his Special Theory a popular predominance over all others. But it should be emphasized that nuclear fission, whose utilization made nuclear weapons possible, was “discovered” by other men moving along very different paths of research. Fission illustrated – dramatically in the case of the atomic bombs – Einstein’s mass-energy equation rather than being based on it.
But the atomic bomb came forty years after Einstein had cut at the foundation of classical physics, and the effects of relativity during these four decades were to be all-pervasive. So much so that while the immense effects of evolution and communism, those two other revolutionary ideas of the last hundred years, are as toughly debated as they are freely admitted, a different attitude exists about relativity. So much has it been assimilated into human knowledge that it is sometimes overlooked altogether.
Yet there are three ways in which man’s relationship with his physical world has been changed by relativity. The first, and possibly the least important, is that it has helped him to understand some phenomena which would otherwise have been incomprehensible. The behavior of nuclear particles discovered during the last half-century is only the most obvious example. “We use it,” Oppenheimer has said of Special Relativity, “literally in almost every branch of nuclear physics and many branches of atomic physics, and in all branches of physics dealing with the fundamental particles. It has been checked and cross-checked and counter-checked in the most numerous ways and it is a very rich part of our heritage.”
In addition to supplying this very practical tool, relativity has enabled man to give more accurate, more descriptive accounts of the world of which he is a part. As Philipp Frank has pointed out, the plain statement that a table is three feet long is not only incomplete but meaningless when compared with the statement that it is three feet long relative to the room in which it stands. “Relativism,” he says, “means the introduction of a richer language which allows us to meet adequately the requirements of the enriched experience. We are now able to cover these new facts by plain and direct words and to come one step nearer to what one may call the ‘plain truth about the universe.'”
It is this “plain truth about the universe” which suggests the third and most important change that relativity has produced. Its epistemological implications are still hotly debated. Nevertheless, it is indisputable that while the theory has enabled man to describe his position in the universe with greater accuracy it has also thrown into higher relief the limitations of his own personal experience. “Physical science,” Sir James Jeans has emphasized,
does not of course suggest that we must abandon the intuitive concepts of space and time which we derive from individual experience. These may mean nothing to nature, but they still mean a good deal to us. Whatever conclusions the mathematicians may reach, it is certain that our newspapers, our historians and story-tellers will still place their truths and fictions in a framework of space and time; they will continue to say – this event happened at such an instant in the course of the ever-flowing stream of time, this other event at another instant lower down the stream, and so on.
Such a scheme is perfectly satisfactory for any single individual, or for any group of individuals whose experiences keep them fairly close together in space and time – and, compared with the vast ranges of nature, all the inhabitants of the earth form such a group. The theory of relativity merely suggests that such a scheme is private to single individuals or to small colonies of individuals; it is a parochial method of measuring, and so is not suited for nature as a whole. It can represent all the facts and phenomena of nature, but only by attaching a subjective taint to them all; it does not represent nature so much as what the inhabitants of one rocket, or of one planet, or better still an individual pair of human eyes, see of nature. Nothing in our experiences or experiments justifies us in extending either this or any other parochial scheme to the whole of nature, on the supposition that it represents any sort of objective reality.
Relativity has thus helped human beings to appreciate their place in the physical world just as T.H. Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature gave them a context in the biological world. It is significant that one of the most hardheaded remarks on relativity made after Einstein’s death should come from a religious journal. His theory has shown, remarked The Tablet, that “space and time for the physicist are defined by the operations used to measure them, and that any theory in which they appear must implicitly take these operations into account. Thus modern science looks at nature from the viewpoint of a man, not from that of an angel.”
