This article about Einstein was in today's Chicago Tribune.
THE EINSTEIN CENTURY
Miracle Year It Still Staggers The Mind:
5 papers in 6 months that would unlock some of the mystery of the universe and change our lives forever.
By Ronald Kotulak Tribune science reporter Published March 27, 2005
After meticulously measuring the Earth's spin for 11 years, two satellites recently confirmed something straight out of weird science--the warping of space and time. The Earth's rotation drags space and time with it, like molasses pulled around by a spinning bowling ball. Satellites embedded in that whirling space are swept along at a slightly faster rate. But the same stretching of space causes time to travel farther, making it slow down a smidgen. It was just as Albert Einstein had predicted--space and time are inseparable and fluid, and they get pulled out of shape near a big rotating body like the Earth--though decades would pass before science developed the tools to prove him right. The research, published last fall, is the latest confirmation of one of the far-out predictions made by Einstein, who began turning the scientific world on its head with an incredible outpouring of five revolutionary theories in only six months in 1905--his annus miraculus, or miracle year. In a dazzling display of brilliance that began 100 years ago this month, Einstein provided answers to five basic questions that revealed the true nature of the universe. They established the foundation of the modern world's wonders, including the key to understanding chemistry and the taming of the atom. Across the Earth, 2005 will be celebrated as the World Year of Physics in honor of Einstein's revolution and the 50th anniversary of his death. Einstein's breakthrough year--and his theory of general relativity, which followed in 1915--raised the bar for physicists, challenging them to stretch their brains beyond the seemingly obvious. He set them on a quest he never accomplished himself, but which has become the biggest goal in physics--a theory of everything. Many have taken up the challenge, laboring over such exotic concepts as superstring theory, which contends that the universe is constructed out of incredibly small vibrating strings of energy and that it has perhaps 11 or so dimensions, not the four we are familiar with--perpendicular, horizontal, depth and time. They are also concocting thought experiments to visualize what was there before the Big Bang and what will happen when our universe, which is expanding at an ever-accelerating rate, disappears. Will another universe form from the ashes, then another, and so on indefinitely? These are the kinds of questions Einstein would relish. "
Einstein became famous not because he had fuzzy hair and was a likable guy, but because he really did have a tremendous influence on what we've been doing for the last 100 years," said University of Chicago theoretical physicist Sean Carroll.
Genius still mystifyingThe world has come to understand and embrace Einstein's theories, but it is his genius that still mystifies. How could anyone's imagination be so powerful as to penetrate to the heart of the universe and see what makes it tick? In science, the road to discovery is paved with the right questions, and Einstein had an almost childlike inquisitiveness that led him to ask questions no one had bothered asking before. "
I soon learned to scent out that which was able to lead to fundamentals and to turn aside from everything else, from the multitude of things which clutter up the mind and divert it from the essential," he wrote. Einstein wondered, for example, what would happen to him on a train traveling at nearly the speed of light. Would time slow down? If he could travel as fast as a light beam, would he see frozen time? Scientists actually performed these experiments within the last decade, not with a train but with a plane and a supercomputer. An atomic clock on a fast jet ticks a bit slower than one on the ground, they found. Time also stands still, their computer models told them, for someone falling into a black hole where space and time cease to exist. And there you have Einstein's famous theory of special relativity, one of the breakthroughs of 1905. More focused than his later general theory of relativity, it says that time and space are squeezable--they can shrink or stretch depending on your point of view. Space and time are not the separate, immutable dimensions that scientists had believed for more than 200 years, ever since Isaac Newton laid down his laws of the universe. Einstein said time came into being at the very moment space made its appearance. Changes in one affect the other. He knew relativity was a brain-twister, so he tried to explain the concept in a more down-to-earth way: "
Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity." Throughout his career, Einstein approached the toughest questions by simplifying them with pictures in his mind, a process he called a thought experiment. "
He said, `I keep asking questions that only children ask,'" said Gerald Holton, a Harvard University physicist who archived Einstein's extensive collection of papers.
"`They learn how to stop asking them in their schooling. I continue to ask them.'"
Overturned Newton's World
There have been other great minds that advanced our knowledge of the physical world. But Einstein and Newton stand as giants ripping down the curtain of superstition and ignorance that had kept people in the dark. Both scientists overturned their known worlds with publications that blazed like comets across the sky. In 1687 Newton's "
The Principia" appeared, sweeping away the limitations and forbidden regions that had hobbled scientific knowledge. "
In precise,
mathematical terms, Newton surveyed all phenomena of the known physical world, from pendulums to springs to comets to the grand trajectories of planets," Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Alan Lightman wrote recently in Scientific American. Newton said the mysteries of the world were not supernatural but could be explained by observation and measurement and that a link could be established between cause and effect. He helped usher in the Age of Enlightenment with his three laws of motion and a theory of gravity, and then he invented calculus to express the theories. The Newtonian world worked well for two centuries, and his laws of motion still get astronauts safely to the moon. But inconsistencies began to appear with the development of more-precise measuring tools. Newton's laws of motion could not exactly account for the motion of Mars, for instance, and new measurements of the speed of light, electricity and magnetism showed that the rigid universe Newton had built, where time moved at the same rate forever, was no longer tenable. The natural world seemed to go beyond what could be understood with Newton's ironclad laws. The universe is not absolute; it is relative. It is a strange world that transcends what people experience with their senses. Time can flow at different rates depending on the position of the observer. And light can exist as a wave and a particle. The particle nature of light opened the realm of quantum physics, which explains the behavior of the supersmall. Whereas Newton showed that the natural world was understandable, Einstein revealed how it could be understood at its most fundamental level. "
Einstein, with his extraordinary and seemingly absurd postulates of special relativity, demonstrated that the great truths of nature cannot be arrived at merely by close observation of the external world," Lightman said. "
Rather, scientists must sometimes begin within their own minds, inventing hypotheses and logical systems that only later can be tested against experiment." Einstein addressed his monumental break with Newton in his autobiography: "
Newton, forgive me; you found the only way which, in your age, was just about possible for a man of highest thought and creative power. The concepts, which you created, are even today still guiding our thinking in physics, although we now know that they will have to be replaced by others farther removed from the sphere of immediate experience." If Einstein upset Newton, scientists like Niels Bohr later upset Einstein by introducing quantum mechanics. That new science said the subatomic world, where elementary particles are much smaller than atoms, exists as a cloud of probabilities rather than the sure thing that both Newton and Einstein envisioned. Einstein viewed the universe as something that was beautiful, simple and knowable, and he never warmed up to the quantum world's fuzziness. Clerk was failed student Unlike Newton, who was acknowledged to be a genius for most of his life, Einstein in 1905 was a failed thesis student struggling to support his young family as a patent office clerk in Switzerland. He was born 26 years earlier in Ulm, Germany, the son of a Jewish salesman who frequently moved his family as he changed jobs. Although not a slow learner as a child, Einstein's difficulties expressing himself exasperated his teachers, who predicted a future as a simple laborer. He found Germany's rigid educational system stifling and learned to teach himself. He was known as a rebellious student, so much so that none of his physics and math professors recommended him for a job. But he had been deep in thought for years, troubled by the inconsistencies his physics teachers believed and taught. "
He comes to physics at a time when there are great physicists around," Holton said. "
He himself is a nobody, an unknown patent clerk in Bern. Therefore he has no investment in any of the previous ideas of physics. He hasn't bought into the world picture that all the others had been brought up in and have made their career in." He had nothing to lose and everything to gain by taking the kind of questions seriously that others would not dare to ask. "
The year started off inauspiciously." Einstein wrote to a friend that he was going to send him some papers of "
inconsequential babble." They turned out, of course, to be groundbreaking theories that are still rumbling through the world of physics. "
The thing about 1905 that's so striking is that these are five very different papers on very different areas," Carroll said. "
Each one of them overturned a pre-existing set of prejudices. He had the ability to see past the mistakes other people were making and come up with startling new insights. It's something that the great physicists have happen to them once or twice in their lifetime, and he had it five times in one year." The first paper in March was an answer to the question of why a light beam caused a piece of metal charged with static electricity to emit electrons. We now know it as the photoelectric effect used in electric eyes. Scientists had thought light could move only as a wave. Einstein said light could also act as a particle (now known as the photon) and that it was the particle form that knocks electrons from metals. He received the 1921 Nobel Prize for this work. His second paper in April was his fourth attempt to write a dissertation that would be accepted for his doctorate in physics. It got him the doctorate, but it was more important for the simple question it asked and answered: How can you measure sugar molecules dissolved in a cup of tea? His formula for measuring the size of sugar molecules in a liquid was applicable to all molecules. Einstein's third paper in May addressed the question of why tiny particles suspended in a liquid move in jerky motions. It was, he said, because the atoms and molecules that make up the liquid are in constant motion and jostle the particles. This paper along with the one in April provided powerful support for the fledgling idea that matter was made of atoms. His fourth theory in June on special relativity came out of his thought experiment indicating that a ground-based observer would see time slowing down on a fast-moving train, but someone on the train would not notice a change. Einstein's fifth paper in September was a derivative of his special relativity theory showing how matter and energy are interchangeable. It gave birth to the most famous mathematical formula, E=mc (energy equals mass times the speed of light squared). That theory led to the unleashing of nuclear power, and it also produced the atomic bomb, which still haunts civilization. Having fled Germany with the rise of Adolf Hitler, Einstein wrote an influential letter in 1939 to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, urging American development of the bomb before the Nazis got it. Yet the ultimate outcome saddened Einstein, a lifelong pacifist. "
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought," he said, "
but World War IV will be fought by sticks and stones."
Wondered at God's thoughts
Einstein was not a particularly spiritual man, but he believed in some kind of cosmic religion that he equated to the wonderful workings of nature. "I
want to know how God created this world. ... I
want to know God's thoughts; the rest are details," he wrote. He was always trying to unify everything in the universe, but he himself was a loner: "I
have never belonged wholeheartedly to a country, a state, nor to a circle of friends, nor even to my own family." The universe was his home, and he knew it better than anyone else, even Newton. That became astonishingly clear in 1915 when he outdid his work of 1905. His general theory of relativity appeared, and it explained gravity so well that it has become the accepted standard. It came from what Einstein called "
the happiest thought of my life." In his thought experiment, he envisioned a man falling from a roof. It dawned on Einstein that the man could not feel gravity. The man couldn't tell if he was being pulled or pushed, and Einstein realized this meant that gravity and acceleration are the same. Newton had said gravity is a force exerted by one body on another. The flaw in his theory was that it could not explain how such a force could travel instantly over the vast distances between galaxies. Gravity would have to travel faster than the speed of light, and nothing could do that. Einstein concluded that gravity was not a force, like the other forces of nature that moved through space. Instead, it was a condition of space itself. Big objects cause space to curve around them, in a sense bending space like a sharp curve in a highway or like water flowing around a submerged rock in a stream. Light approaching a big object would have to bend at the curve. And an object approaching a star would fall into the curvature, thereby altering its course. The closer it came, the sharper the curve and the greater the tendency to go into orbit around the star. "
I often say without fear of being contradicted that general relativity is the most beautiful theory ever devised in the history of physics," said Carroll, who recently completed a textbook on general relativity. "
For one thing, it is very simple," he said. "
There's only one equation involved in it. You'd never guess it ahead of time, unless you were Einstein, but then once you see it you go, Oh yes, that has to be right. It's this pristine edifice that everyone falls in love with." The theory of general relativity did not attract much attention until Einstein and some others realized that it was testable. The theory predicted something unheard of before: that a beam of light would bend passing a massive object. In 1919 a team of British astronomers led by Sir Arthur Eddington measured the light from a distant star as it passed close to the sun during a solar eclipse. The beam bent inward toward the sun's gravitational field, dramatically confirming the curvature of space. The startling news was first reported to a stunned crowd at a meeting of the Royal Society. The next day's headline in the Times of London read: "
Revolution in Science. Newton Ideas Overthrown." Einstein instantly became science's first superstar. General relativity also predicted the exact motion of Mars, which Newton's theory failed to do. And last year there was a replay of the historic light-bending experiment, when radio signals from the Cassini spacecraft on its way to Saturn were bent by the sun to the precise degree general relativity predicted. One of the most dramatic consequences of the theory was the warping of space and time. That prediction got its first preliminary verification last October when scientists, headed by Erricos C. Pavlis of the University of Maryland, showed that the Earth's rotation stretched space and slowed time.
Made some mistakes
Despite his great accomplishments, Einstein could make mistakes. General relativity actually predicted an expanding universe, which Einstein and almost everyone else said was impossible because they thought the universe was frozen in place. So he invented the cosmological constant, a formula designed to keep the universe static. It postulated that "
empty" space had density and pressure, which kept the galaxies in place. When Edwin Hubble in 1929 proved that the universe was indeed expanding, Einstein sheepishly called the cosmological constant his "
greatest blunder." Ironically, his "
blunder" may turn out to be more right than wrong. Cosmologists say the cosmological constant implies that empty space has energy--possibly the dark energy driving the accelerated expansion of the universe. Einstein also dug in his heels when he didn't quite agree with bold new scientific concepts, even after most other leading physicists accepted them. His stubborn resistance to quantum mechanics eventually alienated him from other famous scientists who had been his friends. John Moffat, 72, a theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute and the University of Waterloo, Canada, and one of the last people to correspond with Einstein, recalls an encounter Moffat had with Bohr, one of the great pioneers of quantum mechanics. Bohr and Einstein were close friends in the 1920s but had a falling out over quantum theory. Bohr loved the idea that in the subatomic world the behavior of particles could only be averaged out. Things happen by chance, and it is impossible to know exactly what an individual particle is doing at a given time. Einstein couldn't fit quantum physics into his unending quest to unify all the forces of nature and couldn't accept its loose ends, famously saying: "
God does not play dice with the world." Moffat and Bohr had a long talk in Copenhagen in 1953 in which Bohr expressed his displeasure with Einstein's intransigence. "
He said I was wasting my time corresponding with Einstein because his work was a waste. He said that Einstein `was an alchemist,'" Moffat said. A similar scolding occurred later that year when Moffat met in Dublin, Ireland, with the noted physicist Erwin Schrodinger. Schrodinger had worked out his own unified theory, which Einstein shot down with a critical rebuttal. Moffat said he was working on Einstein's theory. "
I told him what I was doing," Moffat said. "
He said, `
You're doing what Albert's doing.' He was in bed, sick with bronchitis. He started shouting at me. He said, `Einstein was a fool.' It was all very intimidating."
Person of the century
Despite his run-ins with other scientists and some wrong turns, nobody has outshone Einstein. In 2000, Time magazine enshrined him as the person of the century. General relativity gave astronomers a tool to pry into the universe's history and put together the story of its birth from the Big Bang. It was the only theory capable of tying together space, time, motion, light, mass and energy to make a working model of the universe. "
It was really Einstein's theory that made contemporary cosmology possible," Carroll said. "
A hundred years ago basically we knew nothing correct about the universe on very large scales. And now we've come very close to really completely understanding the observable parts of the universe, all on the basis of general relativity." Einstein's legacy became the foundation for modern theoretical physics, what Holton calls "
this enormous, Faustian drive" to develop a theory of everything. One proposed solution says that energy and matter are not the ultimate constituents of the universe, not even superstrings. General relativity and quantum physics imply that a universe can be spontaneously created out of nothing. "
This mind-set of looking for the holy grail that would make one view of the world, that every little thing of the world, every little thing from the falling of an apple to the rotation of the moon--but also the way electrons go and galaxies move, the way starlight gets bent--all of this should come out of one theory," Holton said. It was Einstein's dream, and he stubbornly pursued it, asking for pencil and paper to work out formulas on the day before he died, April 18, 1955. Einstein's brain was preserved after an autopsy, and several people tried to look inside for clues to his genius. But the magic was gone. His brain cells looked like the dead cells of any other brain.
Amazing. I liked the last line "
His brain cells looked like the dead cells of any other brain."
Something for my internet filing cabinet.
