“aimed at college students” Frank L. H. Wolfs, online resource at http://teacher.nsrl.rochester.edu/phy_labs/AppendixE/AppendixE.html. It’s important to note that there is nothing exceptional about this or the science fair site above. That’s the point: these are typical accounts of scientific practice, not unique ones.
“After July 1878” A very few continued the search for Vulcan at later eclipses, but they (still) found nothing, and whatever residual interest in that line of observation remained drained away over the next decade.
“fell to a variety of other objections” In 1906 another matter theory appeared similar but not identical to the zodiacal light proposal. Several researchers pursued it, but it suffered from some of the same objections that skewered the earlier version. See Roseveare, Mercury’s Perihelion, 68–94.
“his uncomfortably necessary conclusion” This summary of matter hypotheses is drawn from Roseveare, Mercury’s Perihelion, 37–50.
“One astronomer suggested” Roseveare, Mercury’s Perihelion, 51.
“the fine-structure constant” National Institute of Standards and Technology “Reference on Constants, Units and Uncertainty,” online at http://physics.nist.gov/cgi-bin/cuu/Value?alph.
“ ‘All good theoretical physicists’ ” Richard Feynman, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, 129.
“the speed of a body might change its gravitational attraction” Roseveare, Mercury’s Perihelion, 114–46.
8. “The Happiest Thought”
“Technical Examiner Second Class” Albrecht Fölsing, Albert Einstein, 231.
“ ‘the happiest thought’ ” From notes taken at a lecture Einstein gave in Kyoto in 1922. Cited in Abraham Pais, Subtle Is the Lord, 178–79.
“and horrible man” Lenard was the most influential founder of the anti-Semitic movement against “Jewish Physics.” He joined the Nazi Party early and became a leading advocate of “German” physics under the regime.
“no formal training” Einstein received his doctorate for one of the papers he produced in 1905—but the process simply involved submitting the paper to the University of Zurich, where members of the physics department reviewed the work and confirmed that it met the level expected of PhD work in the field.
“Once Einstein represented light as quanta” Albert Einstein, “On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light,” Annalen der Physik, 17 (1905): 132–48, CPAE 2, document 14, 86–103.
“April brought Einstein’s proof” Einstein, “A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions,” Annalen der Physik, 17 (1905): 549–60, in CPAE, 2, document 15, 104–22. This is the paper that earned Einstein his PhD. The blue sky paper came in 1910: A. Einstein, “The Theory of the Opalescence of Homogeneous Fluids and Liquid Mixtures near the Critical State,” Annalen der Physik, 33 (1910): 1275–98, CPAE, 3, 231–49, document 9.
“what we know as the special theory of relativity” Einstein, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” Annalen der Physik, 17 (1905): 891–921, CPAE 2, document 23, 140–71.
“What does it mean, he asked” Einstein, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” 141.
“If Newton were right” To be precise: the speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 meters per second.
“no matter how precise the experiment” The best experimental test of the unchanging speed of light came with a series of experiments by the Americans Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley, using exceptionally precise measuring techniques developed by Michelson. These experiments confirmed that the problem raised theoretically by Maxwell’s work did in fact exist in nature, and proved to many physicists that the apparent contradiction between Maxwell and Newton had to be addressed. Einstein himself, though, either did not know of the Michelson-Morley work, or had passed over it without much attention. His impetus came almost entirely from the conflict in theory, and from other, earlier, less definitive experiments. For a detailed discussion on what Einstein knew and when he knew it, see especially Abraham Pais’s Subtle Is the Lord, Chapter Six, which includes a technical as well as historical account. In Albrecht Fölsing’s Albert Einstein, Chapter Nine contains a good summary of Einstein’s thought processes as well. It is less detailed than Pais’s, but is significantly easier to follow than Pais’s more mathematical account. See also Gerald Holton, The Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought, Chapter 8.
“Einstein’s insight” Einstein was also aware of a more subtle way to express a contradiction between the theory of light and Newtonian kinematics based on the problem of explaining how the laws governing electromagnetic radiation—light in all its forms, from radio waves to X-rays—could be shown to be the same whether or not they were being applied in a frame of reference at rest or one in motion. The solution, called the Lorentz transformations, after its most important author, Hendrik Lorentz, worked for Maxwell’s field equations, the core body of theory about light that, among other things, posited a constant speed for light, but not for Newtonian analyses of motion.
“Space and time are relative” For one of the best modern popular accounts of the relativity of time and space, see Kip Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps, 71–79. Or read Einstein’s own attempt to convey his theory to the public in his Relativity: The Special and General Theory, 21–29. The lightning and train tale, used for a long time by a lot of people, originates there.
“His editor had sought” Einstein, “On the Relativity Principle and the Conclusions Drawn from It,” Jarbuch der Radioaktivitat und Elektronik, 4 (1907) 411–62, CPAE 2, document 47, 252–311.
“his happy thought” Fölsing, Albert Einstein, 231.
“ ‘To explain the still unexplained’ ” Einstein to Conrad Habicht, Dec. 24, 1907. CPAE 5, document 69, 47.
9. “Help Me, or Else I’ll Go Crazy”
“Albert Einstein was unimpressed” Reported by Carl Seelig and quoted in Fölsing, Albert Einstein, 245.
“ ‘Gentleman, the concepts of space and time’ ” Hermann Minkowski, lecture given at the physics and mathematics section of the Naturforscher meeting held in Cologne, September 21, 1908, published as “Raum und Zeit” [Space and Time] in the Jahresberichete der Deutschen Mathematicker-Verinigun (1909), pp. 1–14, translated and widely quoted since. The version here follows the translation in Pais, Subtle Is the Lord, p. 152.
“with which to explore space-time” For a lovely introduction to thinking in four dimensions, take a look at Kip Thorne’s modern classic Black Holes and Time Warps, especially Chapter Two, “The Warping of Space and Time,” 87–120—which also contains a masterful exposition of the path to general relativity.
“ ‘superfluous erudition’ ” Fölsing, Albert Einstein, p. 245.
“ ‘ostentatious luxury’ ” Einstein to Michele Besso, May 13, 1911, CPAE 5, document 267, 187.
“For Marić, though” Dmitri Marianoff, cited in Roger Highfield and Paul Carter, The Private Lives of Albert Einstein, 117.
“His office overlooked” Frank, Einstein: His Life and Times, 143, quoted in Fölsing, Albert Einstein, 283.
“what gravity might do to light” The ideas described below come from this paper: A. Einstein, “On the Influence of Gravitation on the Propagation of Light,” CPAE 3, document 23, 379–87.
“The tick of time runs more slowly” Feynman, Six Not-So-Easy Pieces, 131–36. See also Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps, 102–3, for an equivalent but different statement of the same idea. Thorne’s treatement is easier to follow than Feynman’s, but it is a little less straightforward, as it relies on a quite subtle argument about how the two clocks are governed by two different flows of time.
“It bows to circumstance” The Pound-Rebka experiment, performed 1959, provided a test of the gravitational dilation of time in form directly analogous to the rocket-ship thought experiment. It was done using two sources of gamma rays (very high frequency light waves) placed on the basement and on the top floor
of Harvard’s Jefferson Laboratory, its physics building. As expected, the light signals from the two sources ran different rates, as calculated from Einstein’s theory.
“He told one friend” Einstein to Zannger, undated, probably June 1912, CPAE 5, document 406, 307; Einstein to M. Besso, CPAE 5, document 377, 276.
“ ‘the foundations of geometry’ ” Einstein, lecturing in Kyoto in 1922, quoted in Pais, Subtle Is the Lord, 212.
“Einstein begged” Ibid.
“no one has found an error” Robert Osserman, The Poetry of the Universe, 5.
“ ‘It is all going marvelously’ ” Einstein to Ludwig Hopf, Aug. 16, 1912, CPAE 5, document 416, 321.
“the problem of Mercury” Einstein and Michele Besso, “Manuscript on the Motion of the Perihelion of Mercury,” 1913, CPAE 4, document 14, 360–473 (German original).
“some guilty pleasures” The calculation error is described in Michel Janssen, “The Einstein-Besso Manuscript: Looking over Einstein’s Shoulder,” 9, online at http://zope.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/living_einstein/teaching/1905_S03/pdf-files/EBms.pdf.
The larger error can be found in A. Einstein and M. Besso (1913), CPAE 4, document 14, 444 (page 41 of the original, reproduced in facsimile on page 670), discussed by Janssen on page 14 of his paper.
“a rare window into the act of scientific thinking” I’m indebted to Janssen—an editor of the Einstein Papers—for this discussion of the Einstein-Besso collaboration. My account of what it reveals about how Einstein thought derives from his work, most notably his “The Einstein-Besso Manuscript: Looking over Einstein’s Shoulder.”
“Einstein never published” In 1914, another physicist, Johannes Droste, worked out the same answer and did publish that work to no apparent impact on the larger question of the validity of general relativity. Janssen, “The Einstein-Besso Manuscript: Looking over Einstein’s Shoulder,” 12.
“ ‘the merely personal’ ” Einstein, “Autobiographical Note,” in Schilpp, Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, 5.
10. “Beside Himself with Joy”
“ ‘The Berlin public’ ” Theodor Wolff, in Das Vorspiel, vol. 1, 1924, quoted in Dieter and Ruth Glatzer, Berliner Leben, 506.
“ ‘That a man can take pleasure’ ” Einstein, “The World as I See It,” originally published in 1930; reprinted in Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, 10.
“As dusk approached” The account of this first gas attack is drawn from Martin Gilbert, The First World War, 144–45.
“as General Sir John French reported” Gilbert, The First World War, 144.
“ ‘Our whole, highly praised technological progress’ ” Einstein to Heinrich Zannger, December 6, 1917, CPAE 8, document 403, 411–12.
“ ‘this huge world,’ ” Einstein, “Autobiographical Notes” in Schilpp, Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, 5.
“it became possible to contrast competing ideas” I am indebted to Albrecht Fölsing for his account of these lectures in his Albert Einstein, 357–59.
“Einstein told them to their faces” Einstein, “The Formal Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity,” Proceedings of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, II (1914): 1030–85. In CPAE 6, document 9, 30–85.
“Einstein did receive a few letters” Fölsing, Albert Einstein, 359. For what correspondence Einstein did receive, see Hendrik A. Lorentz to Einstein, between Jan. 1 and 23, 1915, and Tullia Levi-Civita to Einstien, March 28, 1915, in CPAE 8, documents 43 and 67, 49–56; 79–80.
“ ‘no one will believe you’ ” Einstein quoted in Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty That Causes Havoc, 228.
“violated a key claim of special relativity” More technically: his 1913–14 theory violated the invariance of physical law under transformation between two reference frames in relative motion.
“the beautiful and melancholy Christmas Truce” There are many accounts of the cease-fires informally agreed on Christmas Day 1914. For one very well written account of many, see Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 95–98.
“an utterly unsuccessful jaunt” Fölsing, Albert Einstein, 360–63.
“left Hilbert ready to accept” Einstein to Wander and Geertruida de Haas, August 2, 1915, CPAE 8, document 144, 116–17.
“Hilbert believed him” Hilbert ultimately produced his version of general relativity a few days before Einstein produced his ultimate version of the theory. There was a moment of coolness between the two men in December 1915, as Einstein believed Hilbert might have been trying to take some share of the credit for his discovery, but in rapid order Hilbert made it clear that he was not contesting priority, and they swiftly resumed cordial relations. The prevailing view has been that the two men came up independently and essentially simultaneously with the same, correct answer. But the discovery of an archived set of Hilbert’s proofs and a close analysis by three historians of physics has shown that Hilbert’s November version was, in fact, incomplete, and that Hilbert revised what he later published in light of Einstein’s final conclusions. See Leo Corry, Jürgen Renn, and John Stachel, “Belated Decisions in the Hilbert-Einstein Priority Dispute,” Science 278, November 14, 1997.
“ ‘a blatant contradiction’ ” Einstein to Erwin Freundlich, CPAE 8, document 123, 132–33.
“all his time to thought and calculation” Einstein to Arnold Sommerfeld, November 28, 1915, CPAE 8, document 153, 152–153.
“the first of four updates” Einstein, “On the General Theory of Relativity,” CPAE 6, document 21, 98–107.
“The next Thursday” Einstein, “On the General Theory of Relativity (Addendum)” CPAE 6, document 22, 108–10.
“ ‘The calculation for the planet Mercury’ ” Einstein, “Explanation of the Perihelion Motion of Mercury from the General Theory of Relativity,” CPAE 6, document 24, 112–16.
“genuine palpitations” Einstein to Adriaan Fokker, quoted in Pais, Subtle Is the Lord, 253.
“ ‘beside himself with joy’ ” Einstein to Paul Ehrenfest, January 17, 1916, CPAE 8, document 182, 179.
“ ‘The years of searching in the dark’ ” Einstein, The Origins of the General Theory of Relativity (Glasgow: Jackson, Wylie, 1933), quoted in Pais, Subtle Is the Lord, 257.
Postscript: “The Longing to Behold…Preexisting Harmony”
“his final theory of gravity” Einstein, “The Field Equations of Gravitation,” CPAE 6, document 25, 117–20.
“ ‘a little worn out’ ” Einstein to Michele Besso, December 10, 1915, CPAE 8, document 162, 159–60.
“Study the equations well” Einstein to Arnold Sommerfeld, December 9, 1915, CPAE 8, document 161, 159.
“how matter and energy together tell space-time” The physicist John Wheeler first popularized this framing for general relativity.
“ ‘I have forgotten how to hate’ ” Einstein to Besso, May 13, 1917, CPAE 8, document 339, 329–30.
“plan for the next available eclipse” Matthew Stanley, “An Expedition to Heal the Wounds of War: The 1919 Eclipse and Eddington as Quaker Adventurer,” Isis 94, 1 (2003): 72.
“ ‘carry out our program of photographs in faith’ ” Stanley, “An Expedition to Heal the Wounds of War,” 76. This author had a similar experience at the eclipse of 1991, while making a film for the NOVA series on PBS. Clouds covered the sun (and my cameras) at the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii fifteen minutes before totality, and I found myself bargaining with all manner of notions of the divine in the hopes that the sky would clear—which it did.
“ ‘Through cloud. Hopeful’ ” Ibid.
“ ‘ “I knew it” ’ ” Anna Oppenheim-Errara, personal communication in 1995. Anna Oppenheim met Einstein in 1911 at the first Solvay conference. She was a teenager, engaged to be married. Her father was provost at the University of Brussels, and her fiancé was a physicist. At a reception her father threw for the distinguished scientific visitors, her husband-to-be pointe
d out the rather scruffy and much younger than the average Einstein and told her to bring him an extra sandwich, for, he told her, despite appearances, he was the best of the lot.
“Eddington felt justified” Stanley, “An Expedition to Heal the Wounds of War,” 78.
“ ‘the state of mind which enables a man’ ” Einstein, speaking at the German Physical Society in 1918, quoted in Pais, Subtle Is the Lord, 26–27.
Bibliography
Any work of historical interpretation both depends on and argues with its predecessors; this book is no different. A conventional list of the books and articles cited in this book follows below, but there are a few writers I want to both acknowledge and draw special attention to as the ones I most valued, and in some cases, as those with whom this work contends.
First among not-necessarily equals: for anyone interested in Isaac Newton, there is no substitute for Richard Westfall’s Never At Rest. It is the definitive biography. It will offer the technically inclined a solid grounding in Newton’s science. It also delivers a comprehensive and wonderfully readable narrative life. Its bibliography and apparatus offer an invitation to follow any aspect of Newton’s career to whatever depth a reader may desire. I. B. Cohen and Ann Whitman’s translation of the Principia is the one to get. It is among the best designed of the editions available, which is important for a book that relies as heavily as it does on diagrams, but the real value of this edition comes from Cohen’s reader’s guide—a book of its own, more than three hundred pages of explanation and interpretation. Accept no substitutes.
The story of the nineteenth-century planet hunters is one that has attracted a wide range of professional and a smaller cadre of popular writers. Several works were invaluable in the construction of this book, both as narrative and exposition in their own right and as guides to the underlying primary sources. For the details of Le Verrier’s progress I depended most on James Lequeux’s recent, somewhat technical biography of Le Verrier. For Vulcan, both its backstory in the discovery of Neptune and its post-1859 fate, I am deeply indebted to Richard Baum and William Sheehan’s In Search of Planet Vulcan. Among that book’s many virtues is its meticulous sourcing, and I found it to be invaluable both for its clear narrative and as a gateway to the primary literature of nineteenth-century astronomy. This was in fact the book that in some sense made me want to write this one, for while it’s a meticulously researched account, I found myself regularly arguing with its interpretations…which disputations are embedded here.
The Hunt for Vulcan Page 18
