Einstein Defiant Genius Versus Genius in the Quantum Revolution (2004) / Chapter Skim
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19 The Observant Executrix
19 The Observant Executrix
Pages 195-203
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From page 195... ...
Bolshevik Russia, in the autumn of 1923, was perhaps the only place in Europe where the mass of people suffered more than in Germany, although even Russia's financial situation was more stable than Germany's. Lenin had replaced confiscation with a "new economic policy" that returned Soviet living standards to Russia's prewar levels; however,the country's only strong institutions -- the Communist Party and the Red Army -- depended exclusively on force and fear.All previously known bases of political legitimacy -- religion, family, democracy, and even money -- had been replaced by fur-hatted commissars who studied the peasants for any sign of a stray opinion.
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From page 196... ...
Immediately after the revolution, some enthusiastic socialists had gone to Moscow for a look, but Einstein was never that red and besides, those early days were far past.A tour in late 1923 by a celebrity of Einstein's stature was a real coup for communism, or it would have been if the tour were real.The news of Einstein's plans and visit, however,was a fabrication,an early illustration of German nationalism's Big Lie tactic. Several rightist Berlin papers carried reports of Einstein's scheduled visit and, as happens with successful propaganda, the news spread to other outlets.
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From page 197... ...
It was a quiet university town surrounded by canals,flatlands,and windmills.Einstein's pleasure there foreshadowed the easy way, 10 years later, he would take to Princeton, New Jersey,another university town with quiet neighbors. Leiden was 1,000 years old, and mostly those years had gone unnoticed beyond the town's borders.There had been a sudden spasm of involvement in history in the quarter-century before and after 1600, when rebels
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From page 198... ...
Einstein was eager to move on, but a paper he produced that December showed he still did not yet know how to advance. Max Born summarized the general state of theorists when he wrote Einstein, "As always, I am thinking hopelessly about the quantum theory."Yet Einstein remained as optimistic as ever, optimistic about both his own abilities and the likelihood of solution.
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From page 199... ...
That same day, frustrated colonials in distant places like Dakar, Delhi, Peking, and Cairo spoke heatedly in kitchens and cafes and demanded to know how millions of intelligent, capable people stayed under the dominion of European power.The folly of the World War had shown that the Europeans were not gods, yet the victorious nations persisted in their blasphemous arrogance. It was difficult to rank traits and determine which ones gave these occupiers their power.Was it their Christianity, their derby hats, their science?
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From page 200... ...
Where such a belief came from, how it was foreshadowed in the poetry of Dante and Chaucer -- all that is another story, but by 1600 the writings of Francis Bacon and Galileo Galilei showed that the change in the minds of a few had taken hold. Looking back on that age,Einstein once mused about Galileo's contemporary, Kepler:"How great must his faith in the existence of natural law have been to give him the strength to devote decades of hard patient work ...entirely on his own, supported by no one and understood by few." Originally this faith had been accompanied by traditional Christian beliefs, but over time faith in nature's order had proven subversive of orthodox creeds; science had come to seem anti-religious.Boston's Cardinal O'Connell would tell an audience that Einstein's theories "cloaked the ghastly apparition of atheism .
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From page 201... ...
It was a promising beginning for a people who would eventually conquer the eastern Mediterranean, but for all their learning the ancients had only what Einstein called "laws of experience." Even Ptolemy's astronomy,which was based on Euclid and remained consistently logical, did not dig down deeper for natural law; that is, it did not search for an order behind the surface behavior.The Alexandrian Greeks were a people who through genius and toil assembled bits and pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, but who never figured out that the snippets were parts of a whole.Without that extra idea, they had no reason to believe they could complete the picture. Einstein's conversations with Ehrenfest in the Leiden kitchen, however, were part of a common effort to explain quantum effects in terms of the rest of nature.
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From page 202... ...
The Roman and medieval astronomers looked for a mathematical workaround rather than a natural principle. By training and culture they sought an additional complexity in the mathematics of planetary motion,not a new simplification.Their breakthroughs tended to be mathematical rather than meaningful,as when the Alexandrian Eratosthenes suddenly conceived of a way to calculate the earth's circumference.
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From page 203... ...
So, when in the course of social events, Paul Langevin told of his student de Broglie's ideas, there was nobody ready to seize the story. The hot quantum topic that season was Bohr's BKS theory.And yet every reader knows that with modern science's relentless push toward understanding, somebody like Einstein was bound eventually to take note of de Broglie's ignored idea.
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