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There is a corollary of the uncertainty principle that says that no matter how often a book is observed, some mistakes will remain.
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Beneath all of his theories, including relativity, was a quest for invariants, certainties, and absolutes.
As with the special theory, his thinking had evolved through thought experiments.
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.
he was too much of an individualist to be comfortable with excessive state control or centralized authority. His impudent instincts, which served him so well as a young scientist, made him allergic to nationalism, militarism, and anything that smacked of a herd mentality.
Adding to his aura was his simple humanity. His inner security was tempered by the humility that comes from being awed by nature.
He could be detached and aloof from those close to him, but toward mankind in general he exuded a true kindness and gentle compassion.
It helps us remain in touch with that childlike capacity for wonder, about such ordinary things as falling apples and elevators, that characterizes Einstein and other great theoretical physicists.4
A society’s competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity.
And later, as a theorist, his success came not from the brute strength of his mental processing power but from his imagination and creativity.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
That approach required him to embrace nonconformity. “Long live impudence!” he exulted to the lover who would later become his wife. “It is my guardian angel in this world.”
His success came from questioning conventional wisdom, challenging authority, and marveling at mysteries that struck others as mundane. This led him to embrace a morality and politics based on respect for free minds, free spirits, and free individuals. Tyranny repulsed him, and he saw tolerance not simply as a sweet virtue but as a necessary condition for a creative society. “It is important to foster individuality,” he said, “for only the individual can produce the new ideas.”
“Through the reading of popular scientific books, I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression.”
“There arose in Einstein an aversion to the orthodox practice of the Jewish or any traditional religion, as well as to attendance at religious services, and this he has never lost,” his friend Philipp Frank later noted.
Einstein’s rebellion against religious dogma had a profound effect on his general outlook toward received wisdom. It inculcated an allergic reaction against all forms of dogma and authority, which was to affect both his politics and his science.
“A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.”
“When compared to six years’ schooling at a German authoritarian gymnasium,” Einstein later said, “it made me clearly realize how much superior an education based on free action and personal responsibility is to one relying on outward authority.”57
“Papa” Jost Winteler was a liberal who shared Einstein’s allergy to German militarism and to nationalism in general. His edgy honesty and political idealism helped to shape Einstein’s social philosophy. Like his mentor, Einstein would become a supporter of world federalism, internationalism, pacifism, and democratic socialism, with a strong devotion to individual liberty and freedom of expression.
Listening to him, Byland realized that Einstein’s wisecracking, sarcastic exterior was a shell around a softer inner soul.
This was reinforced by Jost Winteler, who disdained all forms of nationalism and instilled in Einstein the belief that people should consider themselves citizens of the world.
“There is nothing in me that can be described as a ‘Jewish faith,’”
His renunciation of Judaism in 1896 should, therefore, be seen not as a clean break but as part of a lifelong evolution of his feelings about his cultural identity.
traits deeply bred into his Swabian soul: his casual willingness to question authority, his sassy attitude in the face of regimentation, and his lack of reverence for received wisdom.
“You’re a very clever boy, Einstein,” Weber told him. “An extremely clever boy. But you have one great fault: you’ll never let yourself be told anything.”
What Einstein appreciated in Mozart and Bach was the clear architectural structure that made their music seem “deterministic” and, like his own favorite scientific theories, plucked from the universe rather than composed. “Beethoven created his music,” Einstein once said, but “Mozart’s music is so pure it seems to have been ever-present in the universe.”
“Blind respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.” It would prove a worthy credo, one suitable for being carved on his coat of arms if he had ever wanted such a thing.
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.
“You have to remain critically vigilant.” Question every premise, challenge conventional wisdom, and never accept the truth of something merely because everyone else views it as obvious. Resist being credulous.
It was from reading these authors that the young patent examiner began to develop his own philosophy of science. The most influential of these, Einstein later said, was the Scottish empiricist David Hume (1711–1776). In the tradition of Locke and Berkeley, Hume was skeptical about any knowledge other than what could be directly perceived by the senses. Even the apparent laws of causality were suspect to him, mere habits of the mind; a ball hitting another may behave the way that Newton’s laws predict time after time after time, yet that was not, strictly speaking, a reason to believe that it
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Hume applied his skeptical rigor to the concept of time. It made no sense, he said, to speak of time as having an absolute existence that was independent of observable objects whose movements permitted us to define time.
“From the succession of ideas and impressions we form the idea of time,” Hume wrote. “It is not possible for time alone ever to make its appearance.”
Einstein initially found it wondrous that certain truths could be discovered by reason alone. But he soon began to question Kant’s rigid distinction between analytic and synthetic truths.
Hume’s empiricism was carried a step further by Ernst Mach (1838–1916), the Austrian physicist and philosopher whose writings Einstein read at the urging of Michele Besso. He became one of the favorite authors of the Olympia Academy, and he helped to instill in Einstein the skepticism about received wisdom and accepted conventions that would become a hallmark of his creativity.
The essence of Mach’s philosophy was this, in Einstein’s words: “Concepts have meaning only if we can point to objects to which they refer and to the rules by which they are assigned to these objects.”85 In other words, for a concept to make sense you need an operational definition of it, one that describes how you would observe the concept in operation. This would bear fruit for Einstein when, a few years later, he and Besso would talk about what observation would give meaning to the apparently simple concept that two events happened “simultaneously.”
The final intellectual hero of the Olympia Academy was Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), the Jewish philosopher from Amsterdam. His influence was primarily religious: Einstein embraced his concept of an amorphous God reflected in the awe-inspiring beauty, rationality, and unity of nature’s laws. But like Spinoza, Einstein did not believe in a personal God who rewarded and punished and intervened in our daily lives.
In addition, Einstein drew from Spinoza a faith in determinism: a sense that the laws of nature, once we could fathom them, decreed immutable causes and effects, and that God did not play dice by allowing any events to be random or undetermined. “All things are determined by the necessity of divine nature,” Spinoza declared, and even when quantum mechanics seemed to show that was wrong, Einstein steadfastly believed it was right.87
He had the brashness needed to scrub away the layers of conventional wisdom that were obscuring the cracks in the foundation of physics, and his visual imagination allowed him to make conceptual leaps that eluded more traditional thinkers.
Its suggestion that light comes not just in waves but in tiny packets—quanta of light that were later dubbed “photons”—spirits us into strange scientific mists that are far murkier, indeed more spooky, than even the weirdest aspects of the theory of relativity.
In one of our planet’s little ironies, Planck and Einstein would share the fate of laying the groundwork for quantum mechanics, and then both would flinch when it became clear that it undermined the concepts of strict causality and certainty they both worshipped.
“We therefore regard—and this is the most essential point of the entire calculation—energy to be composed of a very definite number of equal finite packages.”12
In other words, Einstein argued that the particulate nature of light was a property of the light itself and not just some description of how the light interacts with matter.21
Einstein would lament, “All these fifty years of pondering have not brought me any closer to answering the question, What are light quanta?”
When we speak of “light” and the “speed of light,” we mean all electromagnetic waves, not just the ones that are visible to our eyes.
And their speed of 186,000 miles per second was a speed relative to what?
new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way,” Einstein once said. “But,” he hastened to add, “intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.”
Einstein’s inconsistent statements over the next fifty years about the influence of Michelson-Morley are useful in that they remind us of the caution needed when writing history based on dimming recollections.20
But his emphasis was primarily on the deductive approach.
This is a simple insight, but also a radical one. It means that there is no absolute time. Instead, all moving reference frames have their own relative time. Although Einstein refrained from saying that this leap was as truly “revolutionary” as the one he made about light quanta, it did in fact transform science.
Now let’s look at how Einstein articulated all of this in the famous paper that the Annalen der Physik received on June 30, 1905. For all its momentous import, it may be one of the most spunky and enjoyable papers in all of science. Most of its insights are conveyed in words and vivid thought experiments, rather than in complex equations. There is some math involved, but it is mainly what a good high school senior could comprehend. “The whole paper is a testament to the power of simple language to convey deep and powerfully disturbing ideas,” says the science writer Dennis Overbye.53
