"Einstein: His Life and Universe"

[fiefoe]

Second biography by Walter Isaacson I've read. It's solid but I don't like the dutiful cradle-to-coffin coverage.

• Both during his thirty years as a revolutionary and his subsequent thirty years as a resister, Einstein remained consistent in his willingness to be a serenely amused loner who was comfortable not conforming. Independent in his thinking, he was driven by an imagination that broke from the confines of conventional wisdom. He was that odd breed, a reverential rebel, and he was guided by a faith, which he wore lightly and with a twinkle in his eye, in a God who would not play dice by allowing things to happen by chance.
• But throughout his life, Einstein had a mild form of echolalia, causing him to repeat phrases to himself, two or three times, especially if they amused him. And he generally preferred to think in pictures, most notably in famous thought experiments, such as imagining watching lightning strikes from a moving train or experiencing gravity while inside a falling elevator.
• Alas, Einstein’s childhood offers history many savory ironies, but this is not one of them... “I never failed in mathematics,” he replied, correctly. “Before I was fifteen I had mastered differential and integral calculus.”
• As Einstein later explained, “When a person can take pleasure in marching in step to a piece of music it is enough to make me despise him. He has been given his big brain only by mistake.”
• During most of Einstein’s school years, the Einstein brothers’ company had been a success. In 1885, it had two hundred employees and provided the first electrical lights for Munich’s Oktoberfest.
• Einstein also read, in his spare time, Henri Poincaré, the great French polymath who would come tantalizingly close to discovering the core concepts of special relativity...a famous proclamation. “Absolute space, absolute time, even Euclidean geometry, are not conditions to be imposed on mechanics,”
• “At the worst he used to say, ‘There you are, stuck like the donkey on the mountain,’ and he would point with his bow to the place where I had to come in.”
• “Mozart’s music is so pure it seems to have been ever-present in the universe.” He contrasted Beethoven with Bach: “I feel uncomfortable listening to Beethoven. I think he is too personal, almost naked. Give me Bach, rather, and then more Bach.”
• Friends were surprised that a sensuous and handsome man such as Einstein, who could have almost any woman fall for him, would find himself with a short and plain Serbian who had a limp and exuded an air of melancholy.
• He was rejected for having sweaty feet (“hyperidrosis ped”), flat feet (“pes planus”), and varicose veins (“varicosis”). The Swiss Army was, apparently, quite discriminating,
• But (Besso) missed his train, then failed to get there the next day, and finally arrived on the third day—“but to his horror realizes that he has forgotten what he’s supposed to do.” So he sent a postcard back to the office asking them to resend his instructions.
• Only after this scientific exultation came a brief reference to their expected child, whom Einstein referred to as a boy: “How are you darling? How’s the boy?” He went on to display an odd notion of what parenting would be like: “Can you imagine how pleasant it will be when we’re able to work again, completely undisturbed, and with no one around to tell us what to do!”
• Having a child out of wedlock was rebellious, given their upbringings, but not uncommon. The official statistics for Zurich in 1901 show that 12 percent of births were illegitimate. Residents who were Austro-Hungarian, moreover, were much more likely to get pregnant while unmarried.
• Thus it was that Mileva Mari found herself resigned to giving up her dream of being a scientific scholar. She visited her home in Serbia—alone—and told her parents about her academic failure and her pregnancy.
• The problem for Boltzmann was that mechanical processes, such as molecules bumping around, could each be reversed, according to Newton. So a spontaneous decrease in entropy would, at least in theory, be possible... Boltzmann responded by revising the Second Law so that it was not absolute but merely a statistical near-certainty.
• They were not married, and an aspiring Swiss civil servant could not be seen cohabitating in such a way. Instead, after a few months, Mari moved back to Zurich to wait for him to get a job and, as promised, marry her. She did not bring Lieserl with her. <> Einstein and his daughter apparently never laid eyes on each other.
• Such a solemn air of silence has descended between us that I almost feel as if I am committing a sacrilege when I break it now with some inconsequential babble... <> So, what are you up to, you frozen whale, you smoked, dried, canned piece of soul ...?
• the photoelectric effect. If light came in discrete quanta, then the energy of each one was determined simply by the frequency of the light multiplied by Planck’s constant. If we assume, Einstein suggested, “that a light quantum transfers its entire energy to a single electron,” then it follows that light of a higher frequency would cause the electrons to emit with more energy. On the other hand, increasing the intensity of the light (but not the frequency) would simply mean that more electrons would be emitted, but the energy of each would be the same.
• (Planck) wrote. “Many of my colleagues saw in this something bordering on a tragedy.” <> Ironically, similar words would later be used to describe Einstein. He became increasingly “aloof and skeptical” about the quantum discoveries he pioneered, Born said of Einstein. “Many of us regard this as a tragedy.”
• “The physical phenomena observed in liquids have thus far not served for the determination of molecular sizes.” In this dissertation (after a few math and data corrections were later made), Einstein was the first person able to get a respectable result using liquids... Either way, his thesis actually became one of his most cited and practically useful papers, with applications in such diverse fields as cement mixing, dairy production, and aerosol products.
• A little mathematical plotting and charting reveals an interesting thing about such a random walk: statistically, the drunk’s distance from the lamp will be proportional to the square root of the number of seconds that have elapsed.
• In doing so, Einstein explained a phenomenon, known as Brownian motion, that had been puzzling scientists for almost eighty years: why small particles suspended in a liquid such as water are observed to jiggle around. And as a byproduct, he pretty much settled once and for all that atoms and molecules actually existed as physical objects.
• As lagniappe, Einstein’s paper also provided yet another way to determine Avogadro’s number. “It bristles with new ideas,” Abraham Pais said of the paper. “The final conclusion, that Avogadro’s number can essentially be determined from observations with an ordinary microscope, never fails to cause a moment of astonishment even if one has read the paper before and therefore knows the punch line.”
• That raised some big questions: What was the medium that was propagating these waves? And their speed of 186,000 miles per second was a speed relative to what? <> The answer, it seemed, was that light waves are a disturbance of an unseen medium, which was called the ether, and that their speed is relative to this ether. In other words, the ether was for light waves something akin to what air was for sound waves... If light was indeed a wave rippling through the ether, then you should see the waves going by you at a faster speed if you were moving through the ether toward the light source.
• One experiment, which Einstein later called “of fundamental importance in the special theory of relativity,”6 was by the French physicist Hippolyte Fizeau, who sought to measure the speed of light in a moving medium. He split a light beam with a half-silvered angled mirror that sent one part of the beam through water in the direction of the water’s flow and the other part against the flow. The two parts of the beam were then reunited. If one route took longer, then the crests and troughs of its waves would be out of sync with the waves of the other beam. The experimenters could tell if this happened by looking at the interference pattern that resulted when the waves were rejoined.
• If the velocity of a light wave depended on the velocity of the source that emitted it, then the light wave must somehow encode within it this information. But experiments and Maxwell’s equations indicated that was not the case... “I came to the conviction that all light should be defined by frequency and intensity alone, completely independently of whether it comes from a moving or from a stationary light source,”
• “An analysis of the concept of time was my solution,” Einstein said. “Time cannot be absolutely defined, and there is an inseparable relation between time and signal velocity.” <> More specifically, the key insight was that two events that appear to be simultaneous to one observer will not appear to be simultaneous to another observer who is moving rapidly.
• “We thus arrive at the important result: Events that are simultaneous with reference to the embankment are not simultaneous with respect to the train,” said Einstein. The principle of relativity says that there is no way to decree that the embankment is “at rest” and the train “in motion.” We can say only that they are in motion relative to each other... There is no way to say that any two events are “absolutely” or “really” simultaneous.
• Both Mach and Poincaré were, it thus seems, useful in providing a foundation for Einstein’s great breakthrough. But he owed even more, he later said, to the skepticism he learned from the Scottish philosopher David Hume regarding mental constructs that were divorced from purely factual observations.
• finding ways to make them more accurate and coordinate them with clocks in other cities became a Swiss passion. <> In addition, Einstein’s chief duty at the patent office, in partnership with Besso, was evaluating electromechanical devices. This included a flood of applications for ways to synchronize clocks by using electric signals.
• Einstein goes on to propound the other postulate upon which his theory was premised: the constancy of the speed of light “independent of the state of motion of the emitting body.” Then, with the casual stroke of a pen, and the marvelously insouciant word “superfluous,” the rebellious patent examiner dismissed two generations’ worth of accrued scientific dogma: “The introduction of a ‘light ether’ will prove to be superfluous, inasmuch as the view to be developed here will not require a ‘space at absolute rest.’ ”
• Energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light. The speed of light, of course, is huge. Squared it is almost inconceivably bigger. That is why a tiny amount of matter, if converted completely into energy, has an enormous punch. A kilogram of mass would convert into approximately 25 billion kilowatt hours of electricity. More vividly: the energy in the mass of one raisin could supply most of New York City’s energy needs for a day.
• Einstein called this “the equivalence principle.”22 The local effects of gravity and of acceleration are equivalent. This became a foundation for his attempt to generalize his theory of relativity so that it was not restricted just to systems that moved with a uniform velocity. The basic insight that he would develop over the next eight years was that “the effects we ascribe to gravity and the effects we ascribe to acceleration are both produced by one and the same structure.”
• Decades later, still rankling at Mari’s behavior, he wrote to Anna’s daughter asserting, with a brutal bluntness, that his wife’s jealousy had been a pathological flaw typical of a woman of such “uncommon ugliness.”
• “With that kind of fame, he does not have much time left for his wife,” she told her friend Helene Savi. “You wrote that I must be jealous of science. But what can you do? One gets the pearl, the other the box.”
• Being a Jew was a disadvantage; being a nonbeliever who claimed no religion was a disqualifier. The empire required that all of its servants, including professors, be a member of some religion.
• She was bereft, and so was her late husband’s protégé, Langevin, who taught physics at the Sorbonne with the Curies. Langevin was trapped in a marriage with a wife who physically abused him, and soon he and Marie Curie were having an affair in a Paris apartment. His wife had someone break into it and steal their love letters.<> Just as the Solvay Conference was getting under way, with both Curie and Langevin in attendance, the purloined letters began appearing in a Paris tabloid as a prelude to a sensational divorce case.
• “The Germans are gambling on me as they would on a prize-winning hen,” he told a friend as they were leaving a party, “but I don’t know if I can still lay eggs.”
• His wife, Clara, would end up committing suicide the following year after a fight over Haber’s participation in the war. But for the time being, she was Mileva Mari’s only friend in Berlin, and Fritz Haber became the intermediary as the Einsteins’ battles broke into the open.
• Just as inertial mass and gravitational mass are equivalent, so too there is an equivalence, he realized, between all inertial effects, such as resistance to acceleration, and gravitational effects, such as weight. His insight was that they are both manifestations of the same structure, which we now sometimes call the inertio-gravitational field.
• coming up with a field theory of gravity that would help him generalize relativity. It was a task that would take him almost four more years, culminating in an eruption of genius in November 1915.
• Yet the termination of the eclipse mission had a silver lining. Einstein’s Entwurf equations were not correct. The degree to which gravity would deflect light, according to Einstein’s theory at the time, was the same as that predicted by Newton’s emission theory of light. But, as Einstein would discover a year later, the correct prediction would end up being twice that. If Freundlich had succeeded in 1914, Einstein might have been publicly proven wrong.
• And it is likewise unclear what psychological game she was playing with his mind, or her own mind, when she wrote him a detailed letter saying that the Ilse-or-Elsa question had suddenly become a real one for Einstein. The letter is so striking and curious it bears being quoted at length:... Yesterday, the question was suddenly raised about whether Albert wished to marry Mama or me. This question, initially posed half in jest, became within a few minutes a serious matter which must now be considered and discussed fully and completely. Albert himself is refusing to take any decision, he is prepared to marry either me or Mama... Was it true? Was it half-true? Was the truth relative to the observer? The only evidence we have of Einstein’s mother-daughter dithering is this one letter.
• One thing made Schwarzschild’s work very difficult. He had volunteered for the German military during the war, and when he read Einstein’s papers he was stationed in Russia, projecting the trajectory of artillery shells. Nevertheless, he was also able to find time to calculate what the gravitational field would be, according to Einstein’s theory, around an object in space.
• In both cases, something unusual seemed possible, indeed inevitable. If all the mass of a star (or any object) was compressed into a tiny enough space—defined by what became known as the Schwarzschild radius—then all of the calculations seemed to break down. At the center, spacetime would infinitely curve in on itself... nothing within the Schwarzschild radius would be able to escape the gravitational pull, not even light or any other form of radiation. Time would also be part of the warpage as well, dilated to zero.
• As scientists would discover after Einstein’s death, Schwarzschild’s odd theory was right. Stars could collapse and create such a phenomenon, and in fact they often did. In the 1960s, physicists such as Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, John Wheeler, Freeman Dyson, and Kip Thorne showed that this was indeed a feature of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, one that was very real. Wheeler dubbed them “black holes,”
• “Black holes are not rare, and they are not an accidental embellishment of our universe,” says Dyson. “They are the only places in the universe where Einstein’s theory of relativity shows its full power and glory. Here, and nowhere else, space and time lose their individuality and merge together in a sharply curved four-dimensional structure precisely delineated by Einstein’s equations.”
• During this period he generalized relativity, found the field equations for gravity, found a physical explanation for light quanta, hinted at how the quanta involved probability rather than certainty,† and came up with a concept for the structure of the universe as a whole. From the smallest thing conceivable, the quantum, to the largest, the cosmos itself, Einstein had proven a master.
• Soon many of the greatest physicists and thinkers began writing their own books explaining the theory, including Eddington, von Laue, Freundlich, Lorentz, Planck, Born, Pauli, and even the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell. In all, more than six hundred books and articles on relativity were published in the first six years after the eclipse observations.
• “The boiling-point of water is too low,” Einstein declared. “You must use a substance with a higher boiling-point such as butter or fat.” From then on, Mrs. Frank referred to the necessity of frying liver as “Einstein’s theory.”
• in the spring of 1921 for an event that was unique in the history of science, and indeed remarkable for any realm: a grand two-month processional through the eastern and midwestern United States that evoked the sort of mass frenzy and press adulation that would thrill a touring rock star. The world had never before seen, and perhaps never will again, such a scientific celebrity superstar, one who also happened to be a gentle icon of humanist values and a living patron saint for Jews.
• They included more than 125 complex equations that he scribbled on the blackboard while speaking in German. As one student admitted to a reporter, “I sat in the balcony, but he talked right over my head anyway.”
• Einstein simply refused to accept it. He knew that his theory was correct. And so he calmly responded, “Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not.”... Alluding to his frustration with the uncertainties of quantum mechanics, Einstein nodded to the quote and lamented to Weyl, “Who knows, perhaps He is a little malicious.”
• Einstein seemed to like Princeton. “Young and fresh,” he called it. “A pipe as yet unsmoked.”
• Some charged that this slight was due to the influence of a rival Zionist group in America led by Louis Brandeis, a graduate of Harvard Law School, who had become the first Jewish Supreme Court justice.
• But Einstein’s deepening love for his Jewish heritage did not instill any new appreciation for the Jewish religion. “Dull-minded tribal companions are praying, faces turned to the wall, rocking their bodies forward and back,” he recorded in his diary. “A pitiful sight of men with a past but without a future.
• Carl Wilhelm Oseen, who joined the committee in 1922. He was a colleague and friend of Gullstrand, which helped him gently overcome some of the ophthalmologist’s ill-conceived but stubborn objections. And he realized that the whole issue of relativity theory was so encrusted with controversy that it would be better to try a different tack. So Oseen pushed hard to give the prize to Einstein for “the discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.”
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.”
• Louis de Broglie, who carried the title of prince by virtue of being related to the deposed French royal family, studied history in hopes of being a civil servant. But after college, he became fascinated by physics. His doctoral dissertation in 1924 helped transform the field. If a wave can behave like a particle, he asked, shouldn’t a particle also behave like a wave?
• “A new fashion has arisen in physics,” Einstein complained, which declares that certain things cannot be observed and therefore should not be ascribed reality. <> “But the fashion you speak of,” Frank protested, “was invented by you in 1905!” <> Replied Einstein: “A good joke should not be repeated too often.”
• One set of pages was pasted in the window of a London department store, where crowds pushed forward to try to comprehend the complex mathematical treatise with its thirty-three arcane equations not tailored for window shoppers. Wesleyan University in Connecticut paid a significant sum for the handwritten manuscript to be deposited as a treasure in its library. <> American newspapers were somewhat at a loss. The New York Herald Tribune decided to print the entire paper verbatim, but it had trouble figuring out how to cable all the Greek letters and symbols over telegraph machines. So it hired some Columbia physics professors to devise a coding system and then reconstruct the paper in New York, which they did.
• after a sleepless night, Bohr was able to hoist Einstein by his own petard. The thought experiment had not taken into account Einstein’s own beautiful discovery, the theory of relativity. According to that theory, clocks in stronger gravitational fields run more slowly than those in weaker gravity. Einstein forgot this, but Bohr remembered. During the release of the photon, the mass of the box decreases. Because the box is on a spring scale (in order to be weighed), the box will rise a small amount in the earth’s gravity. That small amount is precisely the amount needed to restore the energy-time uncertainty relation.
  after a sleepless night, Bohr was able to hoist Einstein by his own petard. The thought experiment had not taken into account Einstein’s own beautiful discovery, the theory of relativity. According to that theory, clocks in stronger gravitational fields run more slowly than those in weaker gravity. Einstein forgot this, but Bohr remembered. During the release of the photon, the mass of the box decreases. Because the box is on a spring scale (in order to be weighed), the box will rise a small amount in the earth’s gravity. That small amount is precisely the amount needed to restore the energy-time uncertainty relation.
• Later his comments became more complex, such as when he analyzed his father’s famous lament that fate had punished him for his contempt for authority by making him an authority himself. Eduard wrote, “This means psychoanalytically that, because you didn’t want to bend in front of your own father and instead fought with him, you had to become an authority in order to step into his place.”
• The First World War had shocked people by being so astonishingly brutal and apparently unnecessary. Among those who shared Einstein’s pacifism were Upton Sinclair, Sigmund Freud, John Dewey, and H. G. Wells.
• It was a concept he drew also from his reading of Schopenhauer, to whom he attributed, in his 1930 “What I Believe” credo, a maxim along those lines: I do not at all believe in free will in the philosophical sense. Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity. Schopenhauer’s saying, “A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills,”19 has been a real inspiration to me since my youth; it has been a continual consolation in the face of life’s hardships, my own and others’, and an unfailing wellspring of tolerance.
• That was especially true in Princeton, which was a conservative town, and at its university, which harbored a surprising number of students who shared the amorphous anti-Semitic attitude found among some in their social class. A survey of incoming freshmen in 1938 produced a result that is now astonishing, and should have been back then as well: Adolf Hitler polled highest as the “greatest living person.” Albert Einstein was second.
• create a nuclear chain reaction, an idea he had conceived while waiting at a stop-light in London a few years earlier. When he heard of the discovery of fission using uranium, Szilárd realized that element might be used to produce this potentially explosive chain reaction... they began to worry that the Germans might try to buy up the uranium supplies of the Congo, which was then a colony of Belgium. But how, they asked themselves, could two Hungarian refugees in America find a way to warn the Belgians? Then Szilárd recalled that Einstein happened to be friends with that country’s queen mother.
• More amazingly, when Szilárd sent back the typed version of the letter, he suggested that they use as their intermediary Charles Lindbergh
• Sachs could be loquacious,.., and he tended to tell the president parables. This time it was a tale about an inventor who told Napoleon that he would build him a new type of ship that could travel using steam rather than sails. Napoleon dismissed him as crazy. Sachs then revealed that the visitor was Robert Fulton
• Bohr, who was half Jewish, was secretly in the United States. When the Nazis overran Denmark, he had made a daring escape by sailing with his son in a small boat to Sweden. From there he had been flown to Britain, given a fake passport with the name Nicholas Baker, then sent to America to join the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos.
• What is most notable, in retrospect, about Einstein’s FBI file is not all the odd tips it contained, but the one relevant piece of information that was completely missing. Einstein did in fact consort with a Soviet spy, unwittingly. But the FBI remained clueless about it.
• When Oppenheimer first visited the Institute in 1935, he called it a “madhouse” with “solipsistic luminaries shining in separate and hapless desolation.”
• On the drive, he and a third friend tried to distract Gödel and dissuade him from mentioning this perceived flaw, but to no avail. When the judge asked him about the Constitution, Gödel launched into his proof that its internal inconsistency made a dictatorship possible.
• For his part, Einstein remained focused on his own white whale, which he pursued not with the demonic drive of Ahab but the dutiful serenity of Ishmael.
• he confessed to Schrödinger a few months later. “We have squandered a lot of time on this, and the result looks like a gift from the devil’s grandmother.”
• He seemed to sense that this final transition he was going through was at once natural and somewhat spiritual. “The strange thing about growing old is that the intimate identification with the here and now is slowly lost,” he wrote his friend the queen mother of Belgium. “One feels transposed into infinity, more or less alone.”
• “God’s own country becomes stranger and stranger,” Einstein wrote Hans Albert that Christmas, “but somehow they manage to return to normality. Everything—even lunacy—is mass produced here. But everything goes out of fashion very quickly.”