Walter Isaacson Great Innovators e-book boxed set

by Walter Isaacson

  Thus it was that Einstein became the recipient of the 1921 Nobel Prize, in the words of the official citation, “for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.” In both the citation and the letter from the Academy’s secretary officially informing Einstein, an unusual caveat was explicitly inserted. Both documents specified that the award was given “without taking into account the value that will be accorded your relativity and gravitation theories after these are confirmed in the future.”11 Einstein would not, as it turned out, ever win a Nobel for his work on relativity and gravitation, nor for anything other than the photoelectric effect.

  There was a dark irony in using the photoelectric effect as a path to get Einstein the prize. His “law” was based primarily on observations made by Philipp Lenard, who had been the most fervent campaigner to have him blackballed. In his 1905 paper, Einstein had credited Lenard’s “pioneering” work. But after the 1920 anti-Semitic rally in Berlin, they had become bitter enemies. So Lenard was doubly outraged that, despite his opposition, Einstein had won the prize and, worse yet, done so in a field that Lenard pioneered. He wrote an angry letter to the Academy, the only official protest it received, in which he said that Einstein misunderstood the true nature of light and was, in addition, a publicity-seeking Jew whose approach was alien to the true spirit of German physics.12

  Einstein was traveling by train through Japan and missed the official award ceremony on December 10. After much controversy over whether he should be considered German or Swiss, the prize was accepted by the German ambassador, but he was listed as both nationalities in the official record.

  The formal presentation speech by Arrhenius, the committee chair, was carefully crafted. “There is probably no physicist living today whose name has become so widely known as that of Albert Einstein,” he began. “Most discussion centers on his theory of relativity.” He then went on to say, almost dismissively, that “this pertains essentially to epistemology and has therefore been the subject of lively debate in philosophical circles.”

  After touching briefly on Einstein’s other work, Arrhenius explained the Academy’s position on why he had won. “Einstein’s law of the photoelectrical effect has been extremely rigorously tested by the American Millikan* and his pupils and passed the test brilliantly,” he said. “Einstein’s law has become the basis of quantitative photo-chemistry in the same way as Faraday’s law is the basis of electro-chemistry.”13

  Einstein gave his official acceptance speech the following July at a Swedish science conference with King Gustav Adolf V in attendance. He spoke not about the photoelectric effect, but about relativity, and he concluded by emphasizing the importance of his new passion, finding a unified field theory that would reconcile general relativity with electromagnetic theory and, if possible, with quantum mechanics.14

  The prize money that year amounted to 121,572 Swedish kronor, or $32,250, which was more than ten times the annual salary of the average professor at the time. As per his divorce agreement with Mari, Einstein had part of it sent directly to Zurich to reside in a trust for her and their sons, and the rest went into an American account with the interest directed for her use.

  This prompted another row. Hans Albert complained that the trust arrangement, which had previously been agreed to, made only the interest on the money accessible to the family. Once again, Zangger intervened and calmed the dispute. Einstein jokingly wrote to his sons, “You all will be so rich that some fine day I may ask you for a loan.”The money was eventually used by Mari to buy three homes with rental apartments in Zurich.15

  Newton’s Bucket and the Ether Reincarnated

  “Anything truly novel is invented only during one’s youth,” Einstein lamented to a friend after finishing his work on general relativity and cosmology. “Later one becomes more experienced, more famous—and more blockheaded.”16

  Einstein turned 40 in 1919, the year that the eclipse observations made him world-famous. For the next six years, he continued to make important contributions to quantum theory. But after that, as we shall see, he would begin to seem, if not blockheaded, at least a bit stubborn as he resisted quantum mechanics and embarked on a long, lonely, and unsuccessful effort to devise a unified theory that would subsume it into a more deterministic framework.

  Over the ensuing years, researchers would discover new forces in nature, besides electromagnetism and gravity, and also new particles. These would make Einstein’s attempts at unification all the more complex. But he would find himself less familiar with the latest data in experimental physics, and he thus would no longer have the same intuitive feel for how to wrest from nature her fundamental principles.

  If Einstein had retired after the eclipse observations and devoted himself to sailing for the remaining thirty-six years of his life, would science have suffered? Yes, for even though most of his attacks on quantum mechanics did not prove to be warranted, he did serve to strengthen the theory by coming up with a few advances and also, less intentionally, by his ingenious but futile efforts to poke holes in it.

  That raises another question: Why was Einstein so much more creative before the age of 40 than after? Partly, it is an occupational hazard of mathematicians and theoretical physicists to have their great breakthroughs before turning 40.17 “The intellect gets crippled,” Einstein explained to a friend, “but glittering renown is still draped around the calcified shell.”18

  More specifically, Einstein’s scientific successes had come in part from his rebelliousness. There was a link between his creativity and his willingness to defy authority. He had no sentimental attachment to the old order, thus was energized by upending it. His stubbornness had worked to his advantage.

  But now, just as he had traded his youthful bohemian attitudes for the comforts of a bourgeois home, he had become wedded to the faith that field theories could preserve the certainties and determinism of classical science. His stubbornness henceforth would work to his disadvantage.

  It was a fate that he had begun fearing years before, not long after he finished his famous flurry of 1905 papers. “Soon I will reach the age of stagnation and sterility when one laments the revolutionary spirit of the young,” he had worried to his colleague from the Olympia Academy, Maurice Solovine.19

  Now, many triumphs later, there were young revolutionaries who felt this fate had indeed befallen him. In one of his most revealing remarks about himself, Einstein lamented, “To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself.”20

  Thus it is not surprising that, during the 1920s, Einstein found himself scaling back on some of his bolder earlier ideas. For example, in his 1905 special relativity paper he had famously dismissed the concept of the ether as “superfluous.” But after he finished his theory of general relativity, he concluded that the gravitational potentials in that theory characterized the physical qualities of empty space and served as a medium that could transmit disturbances. He began referring to this as a new way to conceive of an ether.“I agree with you that the general relativity theory admits of an ether hypothesis,” he wrote Lorentz in 1916.21

  In a lecture in Leiden in May 1920, Einstein publicly proposed a reincarnation, though not a rebirth, of the ether. “More careful reflection teaches us, however, that the special theory of relativity does not compel us to deny ether,” he said. “We may assume the existence of an ether, only we must give up ascribing a definite state of motion to it.”

  This revised view was justified, he said, by the results of the general theory of relativity. He made clear that his new ether was different from the old one, which had been conceived as a medium that could ripple and thus explain how light waves moved through space. Instead, he was reintroducing the idea in order to explain rotation and inertia.

  Perhaps he could have saved some confusion if he had chosen a different term. But in his speech he made clear that he was reintroducing the word intentionally:

  To deny the
ether is ultimately to assume that empty space has no physical qualities whatever. The fundamental facts of mechanics do not harmonize with this view . . . Besides observable objects, another thing, which is not perceptible, must be looked upon as real, to enable acceleration or rotation to be looked upon as something real . . . The conception of the ether has again acquired an intelligible content, although this content differs widely from that of the ether of the mechanical wave theory of light ... According to the general theory of relativity, space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, there exists an ether. Space without ether is unthinkable; for in such space there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time (measuring-rods and clocks), nor therefore any spacetime intervals in the physical sense. But this ether may not be thought of as endowed with the qualities of ponderable media, as consisting of parts which may be tracked through time. The idea of motion may not be applied to it.22

  So what was this reincarnated ether, and what did it mean for Mach’s principle and for the question raised by Newton’s bucket?* Einstein had initially enthused that general relativity explained rotation as being simply a motion relative to other objects in space, just as Mach had argued. In other words, if you were inside a bucket that was dangling in empty space, with no other objects in the universe, there would be no way to tell if you were spinning or not. Einstein even wrote to Mach saying he should be pleased that his principle was supported by general relativity.

  Einstein had asserted this claim in a letter to Schwarzschild, the brilliant young scientist who had written to him from Germany’s Russian front during the war about the cosmological implications of general relativity. “Inertia is simply an interaction between masses, not an effect in which ‘space’ of itself is involved, separate from the observed mass,” Einstein had declared.23 But Schwarzschild disagreed with that assessment.

  And now, four years later, Einstein had changed his mind. In his Leiden speech, unlike in his 1916 interpretation of general relativity, Einstein accepted that his gravitational field theory implied that empty space had physical qualities. The mechanical behavior of an object hovering in empty space, like Newton’s bucket, “depends not only on relative velocities but also on its state of rotation.” And that meant “space is endowed with physical qualities.”

  As he admitted outright, this meant that he was now abandoning Mach’s principle. Among other things, Mach’s idea that inertia is caused by the presence of all of the distant bodies in the universe implied that these bodies could instantly have an effect on an object, even though they were far apart. Einstein’s theory of relativity did not accept instant actions at a distance. Even gravity did not exert its force instantly, but only through changes in the gravitational field that obeyed the speed limit of light. “Inertial resistance to acceleration in relation to distant masses supposes action at a distance,” Einstein lectured. “Be-cause the modern physicist does not accept such a thing as action at a distance, he comes back to the ether, which has to serve as medium for the effects of inertia.”24

  It is an issue that still causes dispute, but Einstein seemed to believe, at least when he gave his Leiden lecture, that according to general relativity as he now saw it, the water in Newton’s bucket would be pushed up the walls even if it were spinning in a universe devoid of any other objects. “In contradiction to what Mach would have predicted,” Brian Greene writes, “even in an otherwise empty universe, you will feel pressed against the inner wall of the spinning bucket . . . In general relativity, empty spacetime provides a benchmark for accelerated motion.”25

  The inertia pushing the water up the wall was caused by its rotation with respect to the metric field, which Einstein now reincarnated as an ether. As a result, he had to face the possibility that general relativity did not necessarily eliminate the concept of absolute motion, at least with respect to the metric of spacetime.26

  It was not exactly a retreat, nor was it a return to the nineteenth-century concept of the ether. But it was a more conservative way of looking at the universe, and it represented a break from the radicalism of Mach that Einstein had once embraced.

  This clearly made Einstein uncomfortable. The best way to eliminate the need for an ether that existed separately from matter, he concluded, would be to find his elusive unified field theory. What a glory that would be! “The contrast between ether and matter would fade away,” he said, “and, through the general theory of relativity, the whole of physics would become a complete system of thought.”27

  Niels Bohr, Lasers, and “Chance”

  By far the most important manifestation of Einstein’s midlife transition from a revolutionary to a conservative was his hardening attitude toward quantum theory, which in the mid-1920s produced a radical new system of mechanics. His qualms about this new quantum mechanics, and his search for a unifying theory that would reconcile it with relativity and restore certainty to nature, would dominate—and to some extent diminish—the second half of his scientific career.

  He had once been a fearless quantum pioneer. Together with Max Planck, he launched the revolution at the beginning of the century; unlike Planck, he had been one of the few scientists who truly believed in the physical reality of quanta—that light actually came in packets of energy. These quanta behaved at times like particles. They were indivisible units, not part of a continuum.

  In his 1909 Salzburg address, he had predicted that physics would have to reconcile itself to a duality in which light could be regarded as both wave and particle. And at the first Solvay Conference in 1911, he had declared that “these discontinuities, which we find so distasteful in Planck’s theory, seem really to exist in nature.”28

  This caused Planck, who resisted the notion that his quanta actually had a physical reality, to say of Einstein, in his recommendation that he be elected to the Prussian Academy, “His hypothesis of light quanta may have gone overboard.” Other scientists likewise resisted Einstein’s quantum hypothesis. Walther Nernst called it “probably the strangest thing ever thought up,” and Robert Millikan called it “wholly untenable,” even after confirming its predictive power in his lab.29

  A new phase of the quantum revolution was launched in 1913, when Niels Bohr came up with a revised model for the structure of the atom. Six years younger than Einstein, brilliant yet rather shy and inarticulate, Bohr was Danish and thus able to draw from the work on quantum theory being done by Germans such as Planck and Einstein and also from the work on the structure of the atom being done by the Englishmen J. J. Thomson and Ernest Rutherford. “At the time, quantum theory was a German invention which had scarcely penetrated to England at all,” recalled Arthur Eddington.30

  Bohr had gone to study with Thomson in Cambridge. But the mumbling Dane and brusque Brit had trouble communicating. So Bohr migrated up to Manchester to work with the more gregarious Rutherford, who had devised a model of the atom that featured a positively charged nucleus around which tiny negatively charged electrons orbited.31

  Bohr made a refinement based on the fact that these electrons did not collapse into the nucleus and emit a continuous spectrum of radiation, as classical physics would suggest. In Bohr’s new model, which was based on studying the hydrogen atom, an electron circled a nucleus at certain permitted orbits in states with discrete energies. The atom could absorb energy from radiation (such as light) only in increments that would kick the electron up a notch to another permitted orbit. Likewise, the atom could emit radiation only in increments that would drop the electron down to another permitted orbit.

  When an electron moved from one orbit to the next, it was a quantum leap. In other words, it was a disconnected and discontinuous shift from one level to another, with no meandering in between. Bohr went on to show how this model accounted for the lines in the spectrum of light emitted by the hydrogen atom.

  Einstein was both impressed and a little jealous when he heard of Bohr’s theory. As one scientist reported to Rut
herford, “He told me that he had once similar ideas but he did not dare to publish them.” Einstein later declared of Bohr’s discovery, “This is the highest form of musicality in the sphere of thought.”32

  Einstein used Bohr’s model as the foundation for a series of papers in 1916, the most important of which, “On the Quantum Theory of Radiation,” was also formally published in a journal in 1917.33

  Einstein began with a thought experiment in which a chamber is filled with a cloud of atoms. They are being bathed by light (or any form of electromagnetic radiation). Einstein then combined Bohr’s model of the atom with Max Planck’s theory of the quanta. If each change in an electron orbit corresponded to the absorption or emission of one light quantum, then—presto!—it resulted in a new and better way to derive Planck’s formula for explaining blackbody radiation. As Einstein boasted to Michele Besso, “A brilliant idea dawned on me about radiation absorption and emission. It will interest you. An astonishingly simple derivation, I should say the derivation of Planck’s formula. A thoroughly quantized affair.”34

  Atoms emit radiation in a spontaneous fashion, but Einstein theorized that this process could also be stimulated. A roughly simplified way to picture this is to suppose that an atom is already in a high-energy state from having absorbed a photon. If another photon with a particular wavelength is then fired into it, two photons of the same wavelength and direction can be emitted.

  What Einstein discovered was slightly more complex. Suppose there is a gas of atoms with energy being pumped into it, say by pulses of electricity or light. Many of the atoms will absorb energy and go into a higher energy state, and they will begin to emit photons. Einstein argued that the presence of this cloud of photons made it even more likely that a photon of the same wavelength and direction as the other photons in the cloud would be emitted.35 This process of stimulated emission would, almost forty years later, be the basis for the invention of the laser, an acronym for “light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation.”