His Life and Universe

By Walter Isaacson

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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. 

Einstein’s nonconformist streak was evident in his personality and politics as well. Although he subscribed to socialist ideals, 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. And until Hitler caused him to revise his geopolitical equations, he was an instinctive pacifist who celebrated resistance to war. 

(Isaacson 2007, 4)

“I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.”

Einstein’s developmental problems have probably been exaggerated, perhaps even by himself, for we have some letters from his adoring grandparents saying that he was just as clever and endearing as every grandchild is. 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. “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.”

(Isaacson 2007, 9)

“When the animal that we are hunting cannot be caught, we call it X temporarily and continue to hunt until it is bagged.”

As for math, far from being a failure, he was “far above the school requirements.” By age 12, his sister recalled, “he already had a predilection for solving complicated problems in applied arithmetic,” and he decided to see if he could jump ahead by learning geometry and algebra on his own. His parents bought him the textbooks in advance so that he could master them over summer vacation. Not only did he learn the proofs in the books, he tackled the new theories by trying to prove them on his own. “Play and playmates were forgotten,” she noted. “For days on end he sat alone, immersed in the search for a collusion, not giving up before he had found it.”

His uncle Jakob Einstein, the engineer, introduced him to the joys of algebra. “It’s a merry science,” he explained. “When the animal that we are hunting cannot be caught, we call it X temporarily and continue to hunt until it is bagged.” He went on to give the boy even more difficult challenges, Maja recalled, “with good-natured doubts about his ability to solve them.” When Einstein triumphed, as he invariably did, he “was overcome with great happiness and was already then aware of the direction in which his talents were leading him.” 

Among the concepts that Uncle Jakob threw at him was the Pythagorean theorem (the square of the lengths of the legs of a right triangle add up to the square of the length of the hypotenuse). “After much effort I succeeded in ‘proving’ this theorem on the basis of the similarity of triangles,” Einstein recalled. Once again he was thinking in pictures. “It seemed to me ‘evident’ that the relations of the sides of the right-angled triangles would have to be completely determined by one of the acute angles.” 

(Isaacson 2007, 17)

When his frustration finally overwhelmed his admiration, Professor Weber’s pronouncement on Einstein echoed that of the irritated teacher at the Munich gymnasium a few years earlier. “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.”

There was some truth to that assessment. But Einstein was to show that, in the jangled world of physics at the turn of the century, this insouciant ability to tune out the conventional wisdom was not the worst fault to have.

(Isaacson 2007, 34)

It had been almost four years since Einstein had renounced his German citizenship, and ever since then he had been stateless. Each month, he put aside some money toward the fee he would need to pay to become a Swiss citizen, a status he deeply desired. One reason was that he admired the Swiss system, its democracy, and its gentle respect for individuals and their privacy. “I like the Swiss because, by and large, they are more humane than the other people among whom I have lived,” he later said. There were also practical reasons; in order to work as a civil servant or a teacher in a state school, he would have to be a Swiss citizen.

The Zurich authorities examined him rather thoroughly, and they even sent to Milan for a report on his parents. By February 1901, they were satisfied, and he was made a citizen. He would retain that designation his entire life, even as he accepted citizenships in Germany (again), Austria, and the United States. Indeed, he was so eager to be a Swiss citizen that he put aside his animilitary sentiments and presented himself, as required, for military service. He was rejected for having sweaty feet (“hyperhidrosis ped”), flat feet (“pes planus”), and varicose veins (“varicosis”). The Swiss Army was, apparently, quite discriminating, and so his military service book was stamped “unfit.”

(Isaacson 2007, 58)

Indeed, there is no absolute right. All that can be said is that each is moving relative to the other. And of course, both are moving very rapidly relative to other planets, stars, and galaxies.

Relativity is a simple concept. It asserts that the fundamental laws of physics are the same whatever your state of motion. 

For the special case of observers moving at a constant velocity, this concept is pretty easy to accept. Imagine a man in an armchair at home and a woman in an airplane gliding very smoothly above. Each can pour a cup of coffee, bounce a ball, shine a flashlight, or heat a muffin in a microwave and have the same laws of physics apply.

In fact, there is no way to determine which of them is “in motion” and which is “at rest.” The man in the armchair could consider himself at rest and the plane in motion. And the woman in the plane could consider herself at rest and the earth as gliding past. There is no experiment that can prove who is right. 

Indeed, there is no absolute right. All that can be said is that each is moving relative to the other. And of course, both are moving very rapidly relative to other planets, stars, and galaxies.*

*Footnote: A person “at rest” in an armchair is actually spinning with the earth’s rotation at 1,040 miles per hour and orbiting with the earth around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour. When I refer to these observers being at a constant velocity, I am ignoring the change in velocity that arises from being on a rating and orbiting planet, which would not affect most common experiments. (See Miller 1999, 25.)

The special theory of relativity that Einstein developed in 1905 applies only 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’s harder to make the more general case that a person who is accelerating or turning or rotating or slamming on the brakes or moving in an arbitrary manner is not in some from of absolute motion, because coffee sloshes and balls roll away in a different manner than for people on a smoothly gliding train, plane, or planet. 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. 

The story of relativity best begins in 1632, when Galileo articulated the principle that the laws of motion and mechanics (the laws of electromagnetism had not yet been discovered) were the same in all constant-velocity reference frames. In his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Galileo wanted to defend Copernicus’s idea that the earth does not rest motionless at the center of the universe with everything else revolving around it. Skeptics contended that it the earth was moving, as Copernicus said, we’d feel it. Galileo refused this with a brilliantly clear thought experiment about being inside the cabin of a smoothly sailing ship:

Shut yourself up with some friend in the main cabin below decks on some large ship, and have with you there some flies, butterflies, and other small flying animals. Have a large bowl of water with some fish in it; hang up a bottle that empties drop by drop into a wide vessel beneath it. With the ship standing still, observe carefully how the little animals fly with equal speed to all sides of the cabin. The fish swim indifferently in all directions; the drops fall into the vessel beneath; and, in throwing something to your friend, you need throw it no more strongly in one direction than another, the distances being equal; jumping with your feet together, the pass equal spaces in every direction. When you have observed all these things carefully, have the ship proceed with any speed you like, so long as the motion is uniform and not fluctuating this way and that. You will discover not the least change in all the effects named, nor could you tell from any of them whether the ship was moving or standing still.

There is no better description of relativity, or at least of how that principle applies to systems that are moving at a constant velocity relative to each other. 

(Isaacson 2007, 107-109)

“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.  So there is no “real” or “right” answer. There is no way to say that any two events are “absolutely” or “really” simultaneous.

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. “This was a change in the very foundation of physics, an expected and very radical change that required all the courage of a young and revolutionary genius,” noted Werneer Heisenberg, who later contributed to a similar feat with his principle of quantum uncertainty.

(Isaacson 2007, 124)

It is very important to note, however, that the theory of relativity does not mean that “everything is relative.” It does not mean that everything is subjective. 

Another consequence of special relativity is that a person standing on the platform will observe that time goes more slowly on a train speeding past. Imagine that on the train there is a “clock” made up of a mirror on the floor and one on the ceiling and a beam of light that bounces up and down between them. From the perspective of a woman on the train, the light goes straight up and then straight down. But from the perspective of a man standing on the platform, it appears that the light is starting at the bottom but moving on a diagonal to get to the ceiling mirror, which has zipped ahead a tiny bit, then bouncing down on a diagonal back to the mirror on the floor, which has in turn zipped ahead a tiny bit. For both observers, the speed of the light is the same (that is Einstein’s great given). The man on the track observes the distance the light has to travel as being longer than the woman on the train observes it to be. Thus, from the perspective of the man on the track, time is going by more slowly inside the speeding train. 

Another way to picture this is to use Galileo’s ship. Imagine a light beam being shot down from the top of the mast to the deck. To an observer on the ship, the light beam will travel the exact length of the mast. To an observer on land, however, the light beam will travel the length of the mast plus the distance (it’s a fast ship) that the ship has traveled forward during the time it took the light to get from the top to the bottom of the mast. To both observers, the speed of light is the same. To the observer on land, it traveled farther before it reached the deck. In other words, the exact same event (a light beam sent from the top of the mast hitting the deck) took longer when viewed by a person on land than by a person on the ship. 

This phenomenon, called time dilation, leads to what is known as the twin paradox. If a man stays on the platform while his twin sister takes off in a spaceship that travels long distances at nearly the speed of light, when she returns she would be younger than he is. But because motion is relative, this seems to present a paradox. The sister on the spaceship might think it’s her brother on earth who is doing the fast traveling, and when they are rejoined she would expect to observe that it was he who did not age much. 

Could they each come back younger than the other one? Of course not. The phenomenon does not work in both directions. Because the spaceship does not travel at a constant velocity, but instead must turn around, it’s the twin on the spaceship, not the one on earth, who would age more slowly. 

The phenomenon of time dilation has been experimentally confirmed, even by using test clocks on commercial planes. But in our normal life, it has no real impact, because our motion relative to any other observer is never anything near the speed of light. In fact, if you spent almost your entire life on an airplane, you would have aged merely 0.00005 second or so less than your twin on earth when you returned, an effect that would likely be counteracted by a lifetime spent eating airline food.

Special relativity has many other curious manifestations. Think again about that light clock on the train. What happens as the train approaches the speed of light relative to an observer on the platform? It would take almost forever for a light beam in the train to bounce from the floor to the moving ceiling and back to the moving floor. Thus time on the train would almost stand still from the perspective of a n observer on the platform. 

As an object approaches the speed of light, its apparent mass also increases. Newton’s law that force equals mass times acceleration still holds, but as the apparent mass increases, more and more force will produce less and less acceleration. There is no way to apply enough force to push even a pebble faster than the speed of light. That’s the ultimate speed limit of the universe, and no particle or piece of information can go faster than that, according to Einstein’s theory.

With all this talk of distance and duration being relative depending on the observer’s motion, some may be tempted to ask: So which observer is “right”? Whose watch shows the “actual” time elapsed? Which length of the rod is “real”? Whose notion of simultaneity is “correct”?

According to the special theory of relativity, all inertial reference frames are equally valid. It is not a question of whether rods actually shrink or time really slows down; all we know is that observers in different states of motion will measure things differently. And now that we have dispensed with the ether as “superfluous,” there is no designated “rest” frame of reference that has preference over any other.

One of Einstein’s clearest explanations of what he had wrought was in a letter to his Olympia Academy colleague Solovine:

The theory of relativity can be outlined in a few words. In contrast to the fact, known since ancient times, that movement is perceivable only as relative movement, physics was based on the notion of absolute movement. The study of light waves had assumed that one state of movement, that of the light-carrying ether, is distinct from all others. All movements of bodies were supposed to be relative to the light-carrying ether, which was the incarnation of absolute rest. But after efforts to discover the privileged state of movement of this hypothetical ether through experiments had failed, it seemed that the problem should be restated. That is what the theory of relativity did. It assumed that there are no privileged physical states of movement and asked what consequences could be drawn from this. 

Einstein’s insight, as he explained it to Colovine, was that we must discard concepts that “have no link with experience,” such as “absolute simultaneity” and “absolute speed.” 

It is very important to note, however, that the theory of relativity does not mean that “everything is relative.” It does not mean that everything is subjective. 

Instead, it means that measurements of time, including duration and simultaneity, can be relative, depending on the motion of the observer. So can the measurements of space, such as distance and length. But there is a union of the two, which we call spacetime, and that remains invariant in all inertial frames. Likewise, there are things such as the speed of light that remain invariant. 

In fact, Einstein briefly considered calling his creation Invariance Theory, but the name never took hold. Max Planck used the term Relativtherorie in 1906, and by 1907 Einstein, in an exchange with his friend Paul Ehrenfest, was calling it Relativitatstheorie. 

(Isaacson 2007, 130-132)

He dubbed the new element the “cosmological term” or the “cosmological constant” (kosmologische Gleid was the phrase he used). Later, when it was discovered that the universe was in fact expanding, Einstein would call it his “biggest blunder.” But even today, in light of evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, it is considered a useful concept, indeed a necessary one after all.

During five months in 1905, Einstein had upended physics by conceiving light quanta, special relativity, and statistical methods for showing the existence of atoms. Now he had just completed a more prolonged creative slog, from the fall of 1915 to the spring of 1917, which Dennis Overbye has called “arguably the most prodigious effort of sustained brilliance on the part of one man in the history of physics.” His first burst of creativity as a patent clerk had appeared to involve remarkably little anguish. But this later one was an arduous and intense effort, one that left him exhausted and wracked with stomach pains. 

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. 

(Isaacson 2007, 255)

To test this, astronomers would have to plot precisely the position of a star in normal conditions. Then they would wait until the alignments were such that the path of light from that star passed right next to the sun. Did the star’s position seem to shift?

There was one exciting challenge. This observation required a total eclipse, so that the stars would be visible and could be photographed. Fortunately, nature happened to make the size of the sun and moon just properly proportional so that every few years there are full eclipses observable at times and places that make them ideally suited for such an experiment. 

(Isaacson 2007, 256)

In the current celebrity-soaked age, it is hard to recall the extent to which, a century ago, proper people recoiled from publicity  and disdained those who garnered it. Especially in the realm of science, focusing on the personal seemed discordant. When Einstein’s friend Max Born published a book on relativity right after the eclipse observations, he included, in his first edition, a frontispiece picture of Einstein and a short biography of him. Max von Laue and other friends of both men were appalled. Such things did not belong in a scientific book, even a popular one, von Laue wrote Born. Chastened, Born left these elements out of the next edition. 

As a result, Born was dismayed when it was announced in 1920 that Einstein had cooperated on a forthcoming biography by a Jewish journalist, Alexander Moszkowiski, who had mainly written humor and occult books. The book advertised itself, in the title, as being based on conversationswith Einstein, and in fact it was. During the war, the gregarious Moszkowiski had befriended Einstein, been solicitous of his needs, and brought him into a semiliterery circle that hung around at a Berlin Cafe. 

(Isaacson 2007, 269-270)

“That value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think”

While in Boston, Einstein was subjected to a pop quiz known as the Edison test. The inventor Thomas Edison was a practical man, getting crankier with age (he was then 74), who disparaged American colleges as too theoretical and felt the same about Einstein. He had devised a test he gave job applicants that, depending on the position being sought, included about 150 factual quotations. How is leather tanned? What country consumes the most tea? What was Gutenberg’s type made of?*

*FOOT NOTE: Governor Channing Cox had been thrust a version of the test earlier that week, and his first three responses were: Where does shellac come from? “From a can.” What is a monsoon? “A funny-sounding word.” Where do we get prunes? “Breakfast.”

The Times called it “the ever-present Edison questionnaire controversy,” and of course Einstein ran into it. A reporter asked him a question from the test. “What is the speed of sound?” If anyone understood the probation of sound waves, it was Einstein. But he admitted that he did not “carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books.” Then he made a larger point designed to disparage Edison’s view of education. “That value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think,” he said.

(Isaacson 2007, 299)

On one of the many occasions when Einstein declared that God would not play dice, it was Bohr who countered with the famous rejoinder: Einstein, stop telling God what to do!

Their dispute went to the fundamental heart of the design of the cosmos: Was there an objective reality that existed whether or not we could ever observe it? Were there laws that restored strict causality to phenomena that seemed inherently random? Was everything in the universe predetermined?

For the rest of their lives, Bohr would sputter and fret at his repeated failures to convert Einstein to quantum mechanics. Einstein, Einstein, Einstein, he would mutter after each infuriating encounter. But it was a discussion that was conducted with deep affection and even great humor. On one of the many occasions when Einstein declared that God would not play dice, it was Bohr who countered with the famous rejoinder: Einstein, stop telling God what to do!

(Isaacson 2007, 326)

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. The Tribune’s colorful article about how they transmitted the paper was a lot more comprehensible to most readers than Einstein’s paper itself. 

The New York Times, for its part, raised the unified theory to a religious level by sending reporters that Sunday to churches around the city to report on the sermons about it. “Einstein Viewed as Near Mystic,” the headline declared. The Rev. Henry Howard was quoted as saying that Einstein’s unified theory supported St. Paul’s synthesis and the world’s “oneness.” A Christian Scientist said it provided scientific backing for Mary Baker Eddy’s theory of illusive matter. Others hailed it as “freedom advanced” and a “step to universal freedom.” 

(Isaacson 2007, 343)

“No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.”

To what extent are you influenced by Christianity? “As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene.”

You accept the historical existence of Jesus? “Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.”

Do you believe in God? “I’m not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.” 

(Isaacson 2007, 386)

“I am compelled to act as if free will existed, because if I wish to live in a civilized society I must act responsible.”

In Einstein’s philosophy, the way to resolve this issue was to look upon free will as something that was useful, indeed necessary, for a civilized society, because it caused people to take responsibility for their own actions. Acting as if people were responsible for their actions would, psychologically and practically, prompt them to act in a more responsible manner. “I am compelled to act as if free will existed,” he explained, “because if I wish to live in a civilized society I must act responsible.” He could even hold people responsible for their good or evil, since that was both a pragmatic and sensible approach to life, while still believing intellectually that everyone’s actions were predetermined. “I know that philosophically a murderer is not responsible for his crime,” he said, “but I prefer not to take tea with him.” 

(Isaacson 2007, 392-393)

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References

Isaacson, Walter. 2007. Einstein: His Life and Universe. N.p.: Simon & Schuster.

ISBN 978-0-7432-6473-0