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December 23, 2020 - February 6, 2022
His slow development was combined with a cheeky rebelliousness toward authority, which led one schoolmaster to send him packing and another to amuse history by declaring that he would never amount to much. These traits made Albert Einstein the patron saint of distracted school kids everywhere.
“The ordinary adult never bothers his head about the problems of space and time. These are things he has thought of as a child. But I developed so slowly that I began to wonder about space and time only when I was already grown up. Consequently, I probed more deeply into the problem than an ordinary child would have.”3
“I very rarely think in words at all,” he later told a psychologist. “A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.”4
“the young boy trembling to the invisible order behind chaotic reality.”
Throughout his life, Albert Einstein would retain the intuition and the awe of a child. He never lost his sense of wonder at the magic of nature’s phenomena—magnetic fields, gravity, inertia, acceleration, light beams—which grown-ups find so commonplace. He retained the ability to hold two thoughts in his mind simultaneously, to be puzzled when they conflicted, and to marvel when he could smell an underlying unity. “People like you and me never grow old,” he wrote a friend later in life. “We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.”
“A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.”46
Wherever he traveled in northern Italy, he was delighted by the non-Germanic grace and “delicacy” of the people. Their “naturalness” was a contrast to the “spiritually broken and mechanically obedient automatons” of Germany, his sister recalled.
take pen and paper in hand, set the inkstand precariously on the armrest, and lose himself so completely in a problem that the conversation of many voices stimulated rather than disturbed him.”52
His “enchanting tone and incomparable rhythm” awed the second violinist, who asked, “Do you count the beats?” Einstein replied, “Heavens no, it’s in my blood.”
“He was one of those split personalities who know how to protect, with a prickly exterior, the delicate realm of their intense personal life.”
Music continued to beguile Einstein. It was not so much an escape as it was a connection: to the harmony underlying the universe, to the creative genius of the great composers, and to other people who felt comfortable bonding with more than just words. He was awed, both in music and in physics, by the beauty of harmonies.
“Beethoven created his music,” Einstein once said, but “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.”
Handel had “a certain shallowness”; Mendelssohn displayed “considerable talent but an indefinable lack of depth that often leads to banality”; Wagner had a “lack of architectural structure I see as decadence”; and Strauss was “gifted but without inner truth.”17
But she had qualities that Einstein, at least during his romantic scholar years, found attractive: a passion for math and science, a brooding depth, and a beguiling soul.
Among the many surprising things about the life of Albert Einstein was the trouble he had getting an academic job. Indeed, it would be an astonishing nine years after his graduation from the Zurich Polytechnic in 1900—and four years after the miracle year in which he not only upended physics but also finally got a doctoral dissertation accepted—before he would be offered a job as a junior professor.
he rejected a friend’s offer to help him get a job at an insurance company, dismissing it as “an eight hour day of mindless drudgery.” As he told Marić, “One must avoid stultifying affairs.”
Indeed, he managed to become the only person graduating in his section of the Polytechnic who was not offered a job. “I was suddenly abandoned by everyone,”
“Isn’t this a journeyman’s or even a gypsy’s life? But I believe that we will remain cheerful in it as ever.”13
What kept him happy, in addition to Marić’s presence, were the theoretical papers he was writing on his own.
Einstein’s first published paper, but it shows him heartily embracing an important premise—one not yet fully accepted—that would be at the core of much of his work over the next five years: that molecules (and their constituent atoms) actually exist, and that many natural phenomena can be explained by analyzing how these particles interact with one another.
In his letter to Marić, Einstein had used the term “we” when discussing plans to publish the paper. In two letters written the month after it appeared, Einstein referred to “our theory of molecular forces” and “our investigation.” Thus was launched a historical debate over how much credit Marić deserves for helping Einstein devise his theories.
Einstein did not even get the courtesy of a rejection. “I leave no stone unturned and do not give up my sense of humor,” he wrote his friend Marcel Grossmann. “God created the donkey and gave him a thick skin.”
Ostwald still did not answer. However, in one of history’s nice ironies, he would become, nine years later, the first person to nominate Einstein for the Nobel Prize.
“But the valiant Swabian is not afraid,”
The snow was falling merrily, as far as the eye could see, “so that this cold, white infinity gave me the shivers and I held my sweetheart firmly in my arms under the coats and shawls covering us.” On the way down, they stomped and kicked at the snow to produce little avalanches, “so as to properly scare the world below.”33
“I will look for a position immediately, no matter how humble it is,” he told her. “My scientific goals and my personal vanity will not prevent me from accepting even the most subordinate position.”
The squabbles show that Einstein had no qualms about challenging those in power. In fact, it seemed to infuse him with glee.
“Blind respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”
Any spontaneous process tends to increase the entropy of a system.
The director, Friedrich Haller, apparently tailored the specifications so that Einstein would get the job. Candidates did not need a doctorate, but they must have mechanical training and also know physics. “Haller put this in for my sake,” Einstein told Marić.
“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. “When you pick up an application,” Haller instructed, “think that everything the inventor says is wrong.”
Poking a little fun at pompous scholarly societies, they dubbed themselves the Olympia Academy.
Einstein, even though he was the youngest, was designated the president, and Solovine prepared a certificate with a drawing of an Einstein bust in profile beneath a string of sausages. “A man perfectly and clearly erudite, imbued with exquisite, subtle and elegant knowledge, steeped in the revolutionary science of the cosmos,” the dedication declared.
“For goodness’ sake,” Einstein exclaimed. “So that was the famous caviar!” He paused for a moment, then added, “Well, if you offer gourmet food to peasants like me, you know they won’t appreciate it.”
Solovine once skipped a session scheduled for his apartment because he was enticed instead to a concert by a Czech quartet. As a peace offering he left behind, as his note written in Latin proclaimed, “hard boiled eggs and a salutation.” Einstein and Habicht, knowing how much Solovine hated tobacco, took revenge by smoking pipes and cigars in Solovine’s room and piling his furniture and dishes on the bed. “Thick smoke and a salutation,” they wrote in Latin. Solovine says he was “almost overwhelmed” by the fumes when he returned. “I thought I would suffocate. I opened the window wide and began
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In other words, Kant distinguished between two types of truths: (1) analytic propositions, which derive from logic and “reason itself” rather than from observing the world; for example, all bachelors are unmarried, two plus two equals four, and the angles of a triangle always add up to 180 degrees; and (2) synthetic propositions, which are based on experience and observations; for example, Munich is bigger than Bern, all swans are white. Synthetic propositions could be revised by new empirical evidence, but not analytic ones.
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.
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.
“It should be kept in mind,” he said, “that the optical observations refer to time averages rather than instantaneous values.” Then came what may be the most revolutionary sentence that Einstein ever wrote. It suggests that light is made up of discrete particles or packets of energy: “According to the assumption to be considered here, when a light ray is propagated from a point, the energy is not continuously distributed over an increasing space but consists of a finite number of energy quanta which are localized at points in space and which can be produced and absorbed only as complete
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Einstein declared of his paper’s premise that light consists of tiny quanta: “As far as I can see, our conception does not conflict with the properties of the photoelectric effect observed by Mr. Lenard.”
Einstein would increasingly find the eerie implications of the quantum—and of the wave-particle duality of light—to be deeply unsettling. In a letter he wrote near the end of his life to his dear friend Michele Besso, after quantum mechanics had been accepted by almost every living physicist, Einstein would lament, “All these fifty years of pondering have not brought me any closer to answering the question, What are light quanta?”
The special theory of relativity that Einstein developed in 1905 applies only to this special case (hence the name): a situation in which the observers are moving at a constant velocity relative to one another—uniformly in a straight line at a steady speed—referred to as an “inertial reference system.”
It would take Einstein a decade more, as we shall see, to come up with what he called a general theory of relativity, which incorporated accelerated motion into a theory of gravity and attempted to apply the concept of relativity to it.2
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.
Einstein’s Road to Relativity “A 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.”8
He opens each one by pointing out some oddity caused by jostling theories, rather than some unexplained set of experimental data. He then postulates grand principles while minimizing the role played by data, be it on Brownian motion or blackbody radiation or the speed of light.
he had adopted as a postulate that the velocity of light was independent of the motion of its source. And he puzzled over the apparent dilemma that an observer racing up a track toward a light would see the beam coming at him with the same velocity as when he was racing away from the light—and with the same velocity as someone standing still on the embankment would observe the same beam. “In view of this dilemma, there appears to be nothing else to do than to abandon either the principle of relativity or the simple law of the propagation of light,” Einstein wrote.41
Only five weeks elapsed between that eureka moment and the day that Einstein sent off his most famous paper, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.” It contained no citations of other literature, no mention of anyone else’s work, and no acknowledgments except for the charming one in the last sentence: “Let me note that my friend and colleague M. Besso steadfastly stood by me in my work on the problem discussed here, and that I am indebted to him for several valuable suggestions.”
“Time cannot be absolutely defined, and there is an inseparable relation between time and signal velocity.”
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.
