Elsa Einstein This is Me

 Web References

1. 1. www.nybooks.com

   www.nybooks.com/articles/20279 - [Cached]

   Published on: 5/26/2007   Last Visited: 5/26/2007

   In later years this circle of women came to include also his beloved sister Maja who, along with one of Elsa's daughters, left her husband to live out her life with Einstein. But this household of women was not enough for him, for it seems Elsa did not interfere with his having many friendships- erotic or not-with women in Berlin.
   
   Perhaps the stories of Einstein and others point to a kind of man who is most comfortable and engaged when in the company of women. Reading about his relations with them, we can ask whether there is an erotic component to some kinds of scientific and mathematical creativity.
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   The discrepancies in the myth of Einstein are important, not so much for their own sake but because they point to contradictions in the perception of his scientific legacy held by laypeople and scientists alike. Corresponding to the apparent contradictions between the character of the young and the old Einstein, and between the detached sage and the man deeply involved with women, we can find in much of the recent writing two scientists called Einstein.
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   The problem of synchronizing clocks in distant places, leading to a definition of simultaneous time, is central to Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity.
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   Einstein's later work, beginning in the early 1920s, was very different.
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   But in Einstein's later work we see something much more extreme than the usual falling off.
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   The key issue in the assessment of Einstein's later years is his conviction that quantum mechanics could not be correct. Although in 1905 he had been the first to identify the need for a new quantum physics, he dissented strongly from the view that our understanding of quantum phenomena was put in final form by the invention of quantum mechanics in 1926 and 1927. In particular, he argued that quantum mechanics, while making predictions that agreed with experiments, could only provide an incomplete and approximate description of phenomena at the level of the atom. His objection was partly based on the fact that quantum mechanics gives only statistical predictions for many experiments, and partly on the fact that it gives no physical picture of precisely what occurs in individual atomic processes. For him then, quantum mechanics was at best a provisional step on the way to the right theory of atomic physics. A major motivation for his search for a unified field theory was his belief that it might lead to that correct theory. He was not alone; among the inventors of quantum physics, Louis de Broglie, Erwin Schrödinger, and others shared his skepticism about the theory.
   
   As Freeman Dyson has described in these pages, Einstein was a leader of a generation of revolutionaries, every one of whom "had a crazy theory that he thought would be the key to understanding everything."[2] Like some of his fellow European refugees, such as Kurt Gödel, Einstein represented an older, philosophical approach to science that was based on attempts to think radically about the foundations of reality such as the nature of space, time, and causality. As Freeman Dyson has described in these pages, Einstein was a leader of a generation of revolutionaries, every one of whom "had a crazy theory that he thought would be the key to understanding everything."[2] Like some of his fellow European refugees, such as Kurt Gödel, Einstein represented an older, philosophical approach to science that was based on attempts to think radically about the foundations of reality such as the nature of space, time, and causality.
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   But for Einstein and others, who did not accept quantum mechanics, the revolution was not yet over. By the time Einstein moved to Princeton in 1933, he had already parted ways with most of his colleagues. As a result, although all the subsequent developments of twentieth-century physics were entirely based on Einstein's early work, it can also be said that Einstein left very little legacy from his work at Princeton within the scientific community. His later views were for the most part not taken seriously, and those who followed him and worked with him during that period did not flourish. Indeed, his most important contribution of all, general relativity-which he had developed between 1909 and 1915, following his early work on special relativity-was mostly ignored from the 1930s to the 1960s as physics focused on the rapidly expanding sphere of applications of the quantum theory.
   
   By the time Newton died the Royal Society was filled with Newtonians. But after Einstein's death in 1955, to be an Einsteinian was to be in a decidedly marginalized position in the physics world, if by Einsteinian one meant someone who agreed with Einstein's strongest convictions and consequently approached physics in the same style he did. The big question that any assessment of Einstein's later period then hinges on is whether Einstein's later views were correct or not. The least that can be said is that there is an entire field now devoted to questions raised by the counterintuitive aspects of quantum mechanics called the foundations of quantum mechanics. Most experts agree that the questions raised by Einstein have not been resolved, and a fair fraction of them suspect that in the end Einstein's view that quantum mechanics is just a step on the way to the right theory will turn out to have been correct.
   
   Nonetheless, for most of Einstein's biographers, who have been either nonphysicists or, like Pais, particle physicists firmly in the dominant quantum theory camp, the question is closed. To them one of very greatest scientists in history was completely wrong about the truth of a theory whose development he initiated. Isaacson asks, "So what made Einstein cede the revolutionary road to younger radicals and spin into a defensive crouch?"
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   The simple truth is that Einstein ceded nothing because he had well-thought-out and principled objections to the quantum theory.
   
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   Paradoxically, it appears that the myth of Einstein may have diminished the influence he might have had.
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   Einstein had to threaten to resign from the institute to get access to his mail.
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   During his years as a professor and director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute at the University of Berlin up to 1933, Einstein was a formidable obstacle to those who sought to establish quantum mechanics as the unquestioned paradigm for the new physics. This was so because his arguments were the hardest to answer and because of his unquestioned status as the dominant intellectual figure of twentieth-century science, holder of a prestigious chair in what was at the time the capital of science.
   
   But once Einstein moved to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton he was no longer seen as a leading figure among scientists. His dissent from quantum mechanics and his entire philosophical approach to scientific research was an embarrassment to his younger American colleagues. While they may have been happy to have the old master as a trophy of America's and their own dominance, they were not very interested in what Einstein might have to teach them about how to do science. And indeed, Einstein showed little interest in the discoveries they were most excited about, perhaps because they were expressed in the language of quantum mechanics, which he did not believe. The solution was to elevate Einstein to the status of a sage, a Yoda of Princeton, after which it would not be necessary to take him seriously. Indeed, apart from two or three assistants and some fellow refugees, few others in Princeton-even those who worked on relativity or quantum theory-ever had serious talks with him.
   
   Einstein knew what was going on.
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   Indeed, Einstein also had something to gain by the propagation of a myth. Knowing that he had done the greatest science of the last two centuries, and aware of being the lifelong European Bohemian rebel that he was, can we imagine him descending into the pit of American academic politics and contending for a legacy measured in chairs held by students and collaborators? This indifference, however, infuriated some of the followers of relativity theory. The great astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar told me that he held a lifelong grudge against Einstein for having, in his view, abandoned relativity theory and those who studied it, resulting in the subject and its followers being pushed to the fringes of physics for decades. Einstein was mainly interested in being left alone, to live his own kind of life, have his affairs and entanglements, and pursue his lifelong search for truth-a search that began and ended outside the academic establishment and indeed never fit comfortably within it.
   
   But Einstein was famous, as no scientist has been before or since, so his every move was under scrutiny. And, in view of the tragedies that had driven him to give up his European home and move to America, we can imagine he felt compelled to continue to use his fame to speak out for principles and causes he believed in. But he was in a new