Einstein’s Greatest Mistake
David Bodanis proves that even geniuses can get things wrong
Bestselling science writer David Bodanis came to Second Home to speak with Rohan Silva about his new book Einstein’s Greatest Mistake- a brisk, accessible biography of Albert Einstein that reveals the genius and hubris of the titan of modern science. Following on from his highly acclaimed and widely appreciated titles, E=mc2 and Electric Universe, this fascinating new story encompasses Einstein’s theory of relativity as well as exploring the numerous facets of the great man’s life, and holds many lessons for those keen to learn from the mistakes of a genius.
David Bodanis: I was always interested in Albert Einstein. From the time I was a little kid, the idea that a guy with hair like that could be so famous and appreciated, I thought that was awesome. Although there’s a little bit of hair that remains, when I was younger I had some similarities with Einstein in the hair category. I thought, ‘Okay, we’re getting there, it’s a step’.
I even went to university and I studied physics including with some people who had studied with Einstein. How cool is that? One of the advantages of being ancient is you get to know these people. Sadly, one of the people who came to visit was the last person who supported Einstein when Einstein was fighting the whole world against quantum mechanics, and one by one Einstein supporters were falling away.
I met this old guy who had been one of the last ones on his side, and then he described that poignancy when he had to say, ‘No, I think you’re deluded, you’re sticking a little bit too firmly to your beliefs, it’s not right’, and Einstein said, ‘But I was so right before, I was so right’. People really did scorn him, people had said, ‘Your ideas are wrong’, he briefly changed his ideas, but then his original ideas were shown to be true. That happened over and over and over.
So finally, at the big moment of his life when quantum mechanics came in, and he said it can’t be like that, ‘How could it be like that?’, this famous line: ‘God does not play dice with the universe, everything is improbability’. His good friend Niels Bohr from the Copenhagen Institute would say, ‘Einstein, stop telling God what to do, how do you know?’.
“How could somebody so incredibly terrific end up for the last 30 years of his life, with his brain still firing 100%, so isolated from everybody else? How could that happen, and how could we all avoid that?”
So anyway, he was a real mensch and he had good hair and he had that terrible isolation and loneliness when he was older. I felt sorry for him. You almost want to give him a good cuddle. So I wrote the book to explain how he ended up like that — how somebody so incredibly terrific ended up for the last 30 years of his life, with his brain still firing 100%, in his casual moments he came up with magnificent ideas but isolated from everybody else, how could that happen, and how could we avoid that?
Let’s start with the theory of relativity. What was that breakthrough and why was there a challenge to it?
David Bodanis: Einstein was so good, most of us would think, ‘You know what? If I come up with the theory of relativity, that’s pretty good’. Einstein came up with two theories of relativity, this is awesome. His mother was very, very proud. She was not pleased with who he married. I’ll skip the first theory of relativity for now — the second theory of relativity was called general relativity.
So the first thing he did — special relativity in 1905 — was really good. Einstein was about 26, but a couple of people were just at his heels. There was a Frenchman, [Henri] Poincaré, a Dutchman, [Hendrik] Lorentz, if Einstein hadn’t done it, they would have been there in about three or four years.
Ten years later when Einstein was in his mid-30s in Berlin — right in the middle of World War I — he was incredibly unhappy. He had divorced his first wife and the lady that he was picking up with turned out to be a little bit more boring than he had thought. So he was dissatisfied, but that gave him a lot of time for working. He came up with what’s called general relativity. If Einstein hadn’t done it, it might never have been done until today. The details are complicated, but if you accept a certain simplification, I can explain it pretty simply.
How does gravity work? Here’s one way of explaining it: suppose you have like a really flat sheet, like a trampoline, like a rubbery trampoline or something, and it’s just flat. Then you have something small like a ball bearing. You just flick it with your finger and it’ll just go across the sheet, or if you flick it at different angles it’ll just go in straight lines.
Now, suppose at one point you put a rock in that rubber sheet and it kind of sags down in the middle. If you shoot that little ball bearing off to the side, it’ll just go in a straight line. But if you shoot it near the rock it’ll whip around it, right?
Now, the ball bearing has very low intelligence — it’s similar to possibly certain Republican presidential candidate, but with better behaviour. It doesn’t know, it’s just ineluctably following that curve. We, from the outside, will think, ‘Oh, there’s got to be some strange force making a curve around, maybe gravity’, the ball bearing has no idea.
“Einstein came up with the notion that whenever there’s things in space — like a planet or a sun or something — they sag down space around it.”
Einstein came up with the notion that whenever there’s things in space — like a planet or a sun or something — they sag down space around it. It’s like when you have too much (sic) carbs and pasta — things sag out. So planets and stuff try to move in straight lines, but they end up whipping around these gaps in space. The same thing happens the other way.
If you see that space is curved down — it’s sagging somewhere — even if you are blind and you couldn’t see it, you would work out, ‘Aha, there has to be a big chunk of mass there somewhere’. So we summarise them in this little equation that curved geometry will make things move around, and things moving around are moving around because of curve geometry. That sounds really weird, how can there be curves and gaps in empty space? I’ll give you an analogy where something strange can happen that we’re familiar with even on Earth.
Suppose I tell you that two people are walking parallel to each other and they make sure they’re parallel, but eventually they’re going to hit. You would think, ‘How could that happen?’, but if you think about it, two people start out on the equator and they start walking up to the North Pole, right? We just start walking north, we go through Scotland it’s going to freeze over and stuff, and we just keep on walking, and we stay parallel. We’re both going due north, and gradually we’ll get closer and closer and closer. Now, if you look at the Earth it makes sense. The geometry of the Earth pushes us closer, but we’re trying to stay parallel, and some force is bringing it — I wouldn’t mind this nice conversation, but some force is bringing us closer. We’ll feel, ‘Wow, in that case the force came entirely because of the geometry. The curved geometry just squeezed us closer and closer together’. Same thing in outer space. It was a wonderful idea.
“Curved geometry happens when there’s things there pushing spaced out, and pushed out heavy objects in space curves the geometry. Geometry equals things, things equal geometry. It’s an incredible idea.”
Curved geometry happens when there’s things there pushing spaced out, and pushed out heavy objects in space curves the geometry. Geometry equals things, things equal geometry. It’s an incredible idea. When Einstein came up with it in December of 1915 he was really, really happy. When he’d come up with special relativity 10 years before, when he was living with his first wife, he ended up drunk under the table. We know this because he and his wife signed a postcard to their friend saying, ‘Drunk under the table’, which is a cool sort of return address.
In 1915 he was all alone, but he wrote to some friends that he’d been thinking that the universe was like a hidden lion — you couldn’t see it, you could just detect a bit of the fur, a bit of the tail, and now he had seen the real thing. How cool is that? You can see why he became cocky and proud.
So, what happened? What was wrong? He realised about two years later that had a strange implication. It implied that the universe was expanding. He’s like, ‘That’s interesting’.
People have often talked about how equations can be smarter than you. You can write an equation; it can come up with fresh stuff. These are the famous emergent properties. Many of our high-tech companies began with one thing and lo and behold something different came out of them, the famous pivots and stuff.
So he concluded in 1917 that his equations seemed to predict the universe was expanding. So he asked his astronomer friends, ‘Is the universe expanding?’, they said, ‘You got it wrong, Albert’. He actually had – it seemed that it was wrong. This beautiful equation, which he thought was almost like the writings of God or the old one as he called it, Einstein wasn’t just a traditional religious believer, but he really wasn’t an atheist either. He thought atheists were kind of a little bit too sure.
“Einstein thought his equation revealed the Divine hand, that it predicted the universe is expanding and all the astronomers told him it wasn’t. So he had to change it.”
He thought his equation revealed the Divine hand, that it predicted the universe is expanding and all the astronomers told him it wasn’t. So he [took a] deep breath, he had to change it, he had to put in some breaks on the equation and extra terms. And instead of this lovely, ‘Geometry leads to things, and things to geometry. Geometry tells things how to move and things tell geometry how to curve’, he had to put in all these ugly extra terms. It was like you get a beautiful Lamborghini — every teenage boy’s dream — and you have to put big bags of rocks attached to it, and training wheels, and little flippers [and] it’s really ugly.
Anyways, he was like that, but he said, ‘If that’s what experimentalists say, I’ve got to go along with it’. 10 years later they found out the universe really is expanding. I sense that he was so relieved — he was really happy about it.
There was a famous experiment once where people showed playing cards of different colours. I’m going to mention this experiment because it shows the relief that Einstein felt and why you can be locked into bad views. In normal playing cards the Ace of Spades is black and Hearts are red, [but] somebody made a deck of playing cards at Harvard in 1953 where they reversed the colours. The Ace of Spades was red and Hearts were black.
It turned out if they flipped [through the cards] really quickly, people didn’t notice it — there’s a blur of playing cards, you felt fine — [but] if you showed [them] really slowly you instantly recognise the colours are reversed, they felt fine. [But] if they showed it in an intermediate speed, people felt… They didn’t know what had happened. They would say things like, ‘Oh, something disagreed with me at lunch, I have to leave’, or they’d say, ‘I’m feeling really dizzy’, or they’d say, ‘Oh I’m kind of tired, I just have to leave this room’. They didn’t know why, but they felt uncomfortable.
“Once Einstein accepted that, ‘Oh, maybe the universe is not expanding, I have to have this ugly equation’, he didn’t want to hear any anything about it. Then when they finally said that the universe was indeed expanding and his beautiful, simple, original equation was true, he was in a very comfortable zone.”
Once Einstein accepted that, ‘Oh, maybe the universe is not expanding, I have to have this ugly equation’, he didn’t want to hear any anything about it. Then when they finally said that the universe was indeed expanding and his beautiful, simple, original equation was true, he was in a very comfortable zone.
Now, after that, strange things started happening. All these interesting breakthroughs were happening in quantum mechanics — the uncertainty principle of Heisenberg and stuff — and people were saying to Einstein, ‘Come join us in quantum mechanics, you can use your mind to do wonderful things’. He’d already worked in the field a bit. But if he did that, he would have to accept that his comfortable zone where the Ace of Spades is black and Hearts are red and stuff — his universe where everything was simple and crisp and exact, where you can look at God or the old one and see it clearly — he would have to accept that that wasn’t true. He’d have to cross through the zone of uncertainty before he got to the other side and he wouldn’t do that.
Einstein resisted. At one point Heisenberg came up to him and said, ‘Professor Einstein, I was so enamoured by your work. When you did relativity you just looked at things on the outside that you measure, that’s what I did with the atom for uncertainty. I’m so proud to thank you’. Einstein said, ‘That’s not what I meant. I never meant it like that’. It’s in Heisenberg’s memoirs.
He tried to fight back — he tried to come up with devices that disproved uncertainty. One time in 1931 at this big conference in Brussels, there was Niels Bohr and Heisenberg on this side of the table, and there was Einstein all alone on the other, and he kept on coming up with ideas that would disprove uncertainty that would show that if you go way down in the quantum world everything is exact and clear — just the way Einstein wanted them to be.
Heisenberg and Bohr, the next day, and a few other people would disprove them. But one night, Einstein came up with an idea for a special box and in that box, things would happen which would disprove uncertainty.
Heisenberg couldn’t see any problem with that, Einstein’s father had been an electrical contractor, he had been a patent officer — he was good with his hands — he came up with a really nice ingenious thing. Photons go in and out, you measure the weight of it, there’s no uncertainty.
In the morning, Niels Bohr couldn’t see what the problem was, he’d spent all night thinking about. Then he realized, he said, ‘Einstein, there’s one thing you didn’t take into account in this box’. Einstein said, ‘What is it?’, he said, ‘You didn’t take into account the theory of relativity. There’ll be an uncertainty of the height of the box, and the gravitational field changes, and it changes the time measurement’, and Einstein said, ‘You’re right’, and that was the last time I’ve ever seen a photograph of him being genuinely happy.
From then on, for the next 25 years, his mind was still flying. He came up with quantum entanglement and gravitational lensing, he was terrific, but he couldn’t cross that little barrier of the uncertain card colours, he just stayed in his safe world. It’s a tragedy.
Let’s talk about the psychology of Albert Einstein. Steven Gimbel wrote a book on Einstein’s Jewish science. How important was religion to Einstein, how much did that inform his worldview?
David Bodanis: Religion helped Einstein in many, many ways — one was just being an outsider. His family was sort of assimilated German Jews and they weren’t entirely accepted. Thorstein Veblin was a Norwegian economist in America — late 1800s, early 1900s — he wrote a wonderful essay on what it takes to be really, really creative in a field. He said it helps if you’re brought up in a family that teaches you one thing kind of dogmatically. Outsiders, minorities in England or America, Jews in Germany, if you’re a total outsider you don’t have any education. If you’re a total insider it’s tempting to complacently just accept what’s there.
It helps to have a little bit of a problem, minor prejudice against you, not major — that blocks everything — but not total acceptance. So Einstein just was a little bit critical when he was taught at university that this is the way things are. He would say, ‘Maybe. Let’s look at it afresh’.
There are certain asymmetries, for example in Maxwell’s equation, that people would say, ‘It doesn’t mean anything’, he’d say, ‘Maybe. Let’s look at it afresh’. So that was one thing: the outsider.
Another thing that helped a lot was that although Einstein himself didn’t study the Talmud a lot — which is a book of commentary on the Bible — he had a strong Jewish education until he was about 12 or 13, and of course he read widely in Jewish matters. Those of you who perhaps didn’t study the Talmud this morning might be pleased to know that a page of the Talmud looks like this. In one corner here they’ll have a little bit from the Bible. Around that will be commentaries that some people wrote about it, say, 800 years later, around that there’ll be commentaries that people wrote about those commentaries later. And it was on and on and on, and was closed with Rashi in the 12th century.
So Einstein grew up with those notions, and his principles behind relativity are higher-level principles. It was incredibly useful in the patent office where Einstein worked in his 20s. If people would come in with something, say, ‘There’s all these gears and mechanisms and it’ll do such and such’, Einstein would ask them, ‘Does it create perpetual motion?’, which he knew was impossible, and they’d say, ‘Oh yeah, it creates perpetual motion’, he said, ‘Then it can’t work’. He would use a higher-level principle — ‘If it violates the laws of thermodynamics, I don’t care what the gears and stuff are, it doesn’t work’.
So Einstein got that very much from his religious background and from his technical training. His work is repeatedly judging things. Relativity isn’t a detailed law, it’s an approach to things.
Why did Einstein find it so difficult to grapple with uncertainty? At face value that would seem to map on quite well to the Talmudic view that it’s not quite possible to see the full truth.
David Bodanis: I suppose you could say the Talmudic goal is like — they say, you know, two Jews, three political parties. So all the people writing and disagreeing, often in a kind of jokey way, in the Talmud or other writings like that, they have a shared goal. For them, it’s a different goal than science. It’s not to understand the physical universe, it’s to understand the theological universe and what it means for human beings. But they all share this extremely exact goal.
So none of them would say, ‘We can settle this disagreement because God didn’t mean anything clear’. It’s like, ‘I have these arguments, and then you can have counter arguments, but we’re all trying to see what the intention [was] and how things should be done’.
How much did Einstein’s refusals to get quantum physics and accept it damage him reputationally in the field of physics?
David Bodanis: That ended it for him. The shame is that in 1905 he came up with some of the fundamental ideas in early quantum mechanics. Trick question: what year did Einstein get the Nobel Prize of 1921? Answer: not 1921 — they gave to him in 1922 because they couldn’t agree that he really deserved it. He didn’t get the Nobel Prize for relativity — he got it for certain effects that are central to quantum mechanics.
So he’d been in there right at the beginning, and he knew that there was certain uncertainty — by the way, as an example of how good Einstein was, in 1916 he was really tired after coming up with general relativity, and in just a few weeks while he was resting at one point, he came up the idea for the laser. No one on Earth could build one for another 40/50 years, how cool is that? It’s like his 11th best discovery!
“In 1916 Einstein was really tired after coming up with general relativity, and in just a few weeks while he was resting at one point, he came up the idea for the laser.”
So it diminished him in the world of science, how did he personally react to the academic physics community heading in a different direction than the one he wanted to go in?
David Bodanis: That was one of the things I was fascinated by in the research. On the surface he always said, ‘They can do this. History will prove them wrong’. Remember, if he had taken a deep breath and waited 10 years after this beautiful equation of 1915, he would have been proven right.
If he had said, ‘No, I don’t care if astronomers think the universe is static and stars just float there and don’t move, if they think that, they’re wrong. My equations predict the universe is expanding’, if he’d stuck to his guns, 10 years later — when they found the universe was expanding — they would have said, ‘Wow, just from equations in your head and that horrible bachelor flat in Berlin, you came up with mathematical equations that show the universe is expanding? How cool is that?’.
Often, later in life, he’d say, ‘Maybe we’ll have to wait 100 years. People will say that, yes, there’s certain quantum effects, but they’re just the surface manifestations of the deeper order, which is what I’m aiming for, which is what I believe in’. So that’s what he said most of the time. There were few times, though, where he gave a hint, saying, ‘Maybe I’m wrong, and if I’m wrong I’ve really wasted a lot of time’. I don’t know how he felt at the very end.
It is striking how his opposition to uncertainty and aspects of quantum physics was really based on his gut.
David Bodanis: An analogy of that is if you’ve ever been with somebody who’s better at argumentation than you, and they win, but that you’re right. For example, some people feel that lawyers shouldn’t defend guilty parties — horrible criminals, who they know they’ve done a horrible thing. It’s like intellectual judo, though, they’ll put one foot here, they’ll twist, they’ll turn, and you’ll lose the argument, but you’re convinced it’s still the wrong thing. Many of us have really powerful intuitions – in psychology, in recent years, people say that facts bounce off intuitions, but often people will take in the facts but they feel the intuitions, even if you can’t express it clearly, can be true.
Bertrand Russell was a magnificent logician and his daughter was once asked, ‘What was it like arguing with him?’. She laughed, said, ‘You couldn’t argue with my father. His mind was like a razor wire trap. He would always win’. The thing is he was often wrong, but he would persuasively read the arguments. When you’re against people like that, sometimes you just can’t articulate it well, but you’re convinced you’re right. That’s how Einstein felt.
As you were writing this book, was there any part of you thinking, ‘Maybe he will turn out to be right. Maybe not enough time has gone by yet and the Copenhagen interpretation was kind of a compromise’? There’s still various gaps in quantum physics he could yet be right [about]. It could yet turn out to be far from his greatest mistake — could be your greatest mistake.
David Bodanis: To be in the same category, there, would be really good, I’m very happy with that [laughs]. Isaac Asimov, when he was young and studying science, he said he wanted to create a system like Asimov’s universe. Then, like, Asimov’s law would be good enough, then he was like, ‘How about Asimov’s lemma?’, and then Asimov’s hypothesis, and then Asimov’s conjecture. So if I can be like, ‘Bondanis’s mistake’, below Einstein’, it would still be good.
As I was writing the book, I kind of forgot what I knew about physics at one point, and I was going for Einstein, ‘Yeah, I’ll be proven right’, but it turns out that the 1950s and especially in the 1960s, there were some experiments that seemed to show conclusively that this — sometimes called the hidden variable theory — does not hold up.
So there seems to be really rich reasons for thinking that the fundamental level, there is probability and uncertainty, not random chaos, but that things are because they’re bounded with within limits — our cell phones work with quantum mechanics, the internet works with quantum mechanics, but at the core level it’s different than things [that] are around us.
If Einstein had listened to the external world and what the observable universe seemed to be suggesting, he would have, as he ended up doing, made changes to the general theory of relativity — because all the observational evidence was the universe was static. But that was his mistake, that he did listen to the external world.
David Bodanis: In a sense, he listened, but I suppose the thing about science, when it works, is that it will correct itself slowly and pathetically, and people will argue and hide evidence, and they’ll use their great CV and tenure to get in the way. Max Planck was famous for saying, ‘You never out-argue your opponents, but you can outlive them. You can be around after they die’. So although Einstein did make that shift, he then shifted back. To spend about eight years — from 1909 to 1915 — really working on this issue and really trying to get it right while all sorts of other things are going on around you, that takes enormous dedication. It’s sort of like if somebody finds that a certain approach takes him to the Oval Offie or to Number 10, or even to rising up in the civil service, it’s really hard to change that approach.
One question I have regarding Einstein is that obviously his famous equation that everyone knows is E=MC2, that led to developments in nuclear weaponry. I was wondering what you discovered about his own personal views as to whether he felt any guilt about this discovery?
David Bodanis: Did Einstein feel any guilt about the atomic bomb, given that E=MC2 was a key part of it? He wasn’t allowed to work on the atomic bomb project in America. He was living in America at the time, but the FBI considered him a security risk. Plus, he knew by then he was getting a little bit slower with some of the quick calculations. So he was vaguely aware that there were some projects going on, but he didn’t know the details. In 1945 when the first bomb was dropped over the basically civilian city of Hiroshima in Japan, when the news came through he was vacationing on Long Island.
“Einstein’s secretary, Helen Dukas, woke him up and said, ‘Professor Einstein, an atomic bomb with this new energy form has killed a vast number of people’. And Einstein said, ‘If I had known, I wouldn’t have lifted a finger’.”
His secretary, Helen Dukas, woke him up and said, ‘Professor Einstein, an atomic bomb with this new energy form has killed a vast number of people’. And Einstein said, she recorded it, ‘If I had known, I wouldn’t have lifted a finger’. He used to say, way back in World War I, that our modern technology is like giving machine guns to savages or to insane people.
So Einstein had been a pacifist in the 1930s with the rise of Hitler. As Hitler got stronger, he stopped being a pacifist. He probably would have supported making an atomic bomb against Germany, at least in a defensive way to keep Germany from winning the war. But he certainly wouldn’t have used it in the final stages of the time in Japan. If he would have used it, he would have used it against troop emplacements or as a demonstration first, not against a city. So he was against that.
One thing that might slightly absolve him is that to make the atomic bomb you needed two things. One was that you had to know that it could happen, and E=MC2 shows that it could happen. I could elaborate on that later. But you also need the practical engineering, just the detail — purifying uranium and stuff like that. That process by itself, he wasn’t involved in and it was actually ongoing itself.
His simple E=MC2 showed people that a little bit of mass could explode into a huge amount of energy. In E=MC2, as I know you were fascinated by after our discussion of the Talmud, C2 squared is just a large number, it’s a conversion factor, like between pounds and dollars, between Fahrenheit and Centigrade. It turns out that if C2 was like the number three, it would mean a little bit of mass, multiply it by three, you get a little bit more energy. In fact, C2 is an enormous number — quintillions and stuff. So that means a little bit of mass. This ring, which I’m not going to take off, if it was turned entirely into energy, this mass would be multiplied by the conversion factor into a huge amount of energy. It would be the end, not just of tech city in East London, but much of the South of England would be beneath the North Sea. It’s an incredible idea. So that shows people that you could make a bomb if you found the right thing that could destroy itself.
“Einstein once compared his vision of the universe to a library. He said that he felt like a little boy going to a big study, at night, it’s dark, and there’s all these books on the shelves, and in those books are the secrets of the universe — the real truths about how things are — they’ve actually been written down in advance, they’re there waiting for us, but we can’t see them.”
Einstein himself once compared his vision of the universe to a library. He said that he felt like a little boy going to a big study, at night, it’s dark, and there’s all these books on the shelves, and in those books are the secrets of the universe — the real truths about how things are — they’ve actually been written down in advance, they’re there waiting for us, but we can’t see them.
I love the idea that it is out there waiting and our goal is to try to find them. Of course, people who are pessimistic will say yeah they’re out there waiting and they’re really awful. Einstein, I think, was more positive.
What was he like as a man?
David Bodanis: I was surprised at how many affairs he had. You look at Einstein — you look like a schlump! Yeah, he’s a great genius, but, eh! It turns out when he was a young man, he was hot, he was dishy, he had these central lips. He was described once as having the beauty that destroys women’s minds.
So in the 1920s when he was married to his second wife, he had a million affairs. His housekeeper was interviewed and she said, ‘Oh, the professor was always so nice with those ladies who came over. They were joking and laughing and they go out boating – sometimes they go out boating without Mrs Einstein — but there we were’.
So that really surprised me — he was a real guy, and he was genuinely polite. He was also fair, but he did break up with his first wife. There was bitterness and stuff, but he did say to her, ‘Look, when I win the Nobel Prize, I’ll give you the money’.
“I was surprised at how many affairs he had. You look at Einstein — you look like a schlump! Yeah, he’s a great genius, but, eh! It turns out when he was a young man, he was hot, he was dishy”
She said despite all their arguments and bitchiness — they did the equivalent of like drawing lines down the middle of the apartment — she accepted that A) He was going to win the Nobel Prize, and B) That of course he would keep his word and give her the money, which he did.
Did he struggle with his fame?
David Bodanis: There was lots of media intrusion. It’s hard. Somebody said you’re never a real hero to your valet, to the person who dresses you in the morning and who sees you. However, Einstein was photographed a real lot — wherever he went there were cameras, there were people around. When he did become famous, he became famous for several reasons. One of the main ones is that he had changed the world, but his fame came in 1919.
There had been a terrible war for four years, there had been these terrible deaths with the what’s called the Spanish flu, and then a British astronomer looked in the skies, studying eclipses, and came up with a conclusion that this German-Swiss scientist was right. There was harmony across the ages.
Imagine there’d been a terrible war between, say, Russia and England, and then right afterwards when everything’s almost devastated, a Russian and an English guy together do something magnificent. Plus, there is this notion, a little bit like Charles Lindbergh, that he had gone up into the sky and seen something wonderful, and yet was willing to come back down to earth.
There’s a big difference between a priest and a prophet. A priest is somebody down here who has this special power — they can open a tap from up above, and the Divine force goes through them. We have many priests. Bankers are a little bit like that. A prophet is somebody different. A prophet is somebody who goes to a special place and sees and interacts with it there, and then comes back and speaks to us. Nelson Mandela was a prophet like that, Martin Luther King was like that.
Whether this is their reality, in those cases it sort of was, but that’s how we think about them. They usually come back and they have two looks on their face: one, they look really wise, they’ve seen something we haven’t; and two, they often look kind of sad, either that they’re foreseeing their death or they’ve seen something sad, but they choose to come back and help us. It’s really quite wonderful.
It sounds like Einstein made his greatest achievements in the relatively early stages of his life. I’m just wondering, besides trying to refute quantum mechanics, what else was he working on after he came up with the theory of general relativity? You mentioned he was quite isolated, do you mean that solely in an academic sense, or also in a social sense?
David Bodanis: That’s a great question, I’ll try to unpick different parts of it. So he was at his super peak intellectually from about age 25 to 45, so about 1905 to about 1925. But even into the mid-1930s he came up with great stuff. He came up with the notion of quantum computers when he was in his 50s. It’s really not of computers, but of quantum entanglement. So he was still intellectually very good.
But in 1933 as a Jewish professor, he had to leave Germany. His books were actually burnt in public and the population encouraged it. Worse, the population in the university towns, the students encouraged it also, which was not really very pleasant. So he got to Princeton in America and he was working on an attempt to find that there really were crisp, clear rules interrelating everything. E=MC2 he related mass and energy. The thing of general relativity, he related geometry and things. He thought he’d go further — what if he could really tie everything into a grand, unified theory? It turned out he had no chance of success. He wasn’t working with top physicists anymore. It would be like somebody leaving this beautiful building and going to the quiet office, not just for a few months, which you might need, but for 20 years. You can’t do things that isolated.
“Also his mathematical tools were out of date. When he was younger he had developed good mathematical tools, which were sort of fresh. When he was older, he just kept on using the old stuff. So that was sad.”
Also his mathematical tools were out of date. When he was younger he had developed good mathematical tools, which were sort of fresh. When he was older, he just kept on using the old stuff. So that was sad.
In his personal life, as often happens as people get older, his best friends began to die off or they were living on different continents. He’d been incredibly close with his little sister, Maja. She kept a memoir of what it was like growing up with him. Famously, at one point when he was seven, he threw a bowling ball at her head, and she wrote in a memoir, ‘This shows it takes a thick skull to be the sister of a world-famous physicist’. They had a lovely teasing humour and they stayed friends for 50 years.
When he was first teaching at university in his 20s, nobody came to his classes. They were at 6:30 in the morning on a Thursday morning up a hill. But his sister started coming. She studied languages, she was very good at Latin and French and Spanish, but she was not an expert on relativity. But she stayed there every time just so there’d be somebody in the class.
They were really good friends. She came to America, she had been sort of divorced, and when she was old in the 1940s and stuff, she had a stroke. So she couldn’t speak properly and she couldn’t read, but she was all aware intellectually.
Every day, as an old man, Einstein would walk back from the university campus at Princeton, trudging along through the icy cold wind, and he’d get down and go to her room where she was, he’d settle down, ‘Maja, let’s talk’, and he’d read her book. They loved reading Dostoyevsky, they liked Ellery Queen mystery novels also. He just read and he would talk to her even if she couldn’t answer.
When she died, he was terribly sad. I think this was around 1950. He was terribly sad. He just sat on the back porch and he said to other people, ‘You don’t know what it feels like’.
Did he have any sense of what the universe was expanding from?
David Bodanis: It turns out [that] Einstein’s life covered a really interesting time. When he began, many people thought that there was just one island universe — what we call the Milky Way — it was just the floating island of stars, and beyond it was just nothing. There was just blackness beyond. A few people thought, ‘Just by symmetry or lack of hubris, if we’re in a floating galaxy, why should we be so special? There could be other floating galaxies somewhere else’. In the course of his lifetime, people began to notice that. In fact, there’s a wonderful woman — who I talk about a little bit in the book — who managed to use the fact of there being other floating galaxies far away, to sort of measure sizes and begin to see that, ‘Wow the galaxies are separating from each other, and the further the galaxies are, the faster they’re separating’. So that was happening in his lifetime.
Why it happened, Einstein himself didn’t have the ability to work out. But one of the guys who tried to tell him that the universe was expanding — that he didn’t listen to until 1929 — was a Belgian priest who is also a really good mathematician named Georges Lemaître.
“What if there was a day without a yesterday? What if, instead of the universe expanding, space and time expanding, what if space and time are shrinking and going back and going back?”
He came up with the notion around 1931, though he had ideas before, he said, ‘What if there was a day without a yesterday? If the universe is expanding, what about going the other way? So what if, instead of the universe expanding, space and time expanding, what if space and time are shrinking and going back and going back? It must have come from something. If you see fragments flying through the air, you might think that a few seconds ago somebody exploded a grenade’.
So Lemaître began to do the mathematics of that, and he came up with the notion of a day without a yesterday. Isn’t that a wonderful thing? A day without it yesterday. And the mathematics held up that it could have been — everything is now at a certain temperature, you squeeze it in more and more, the temperature goes up and gets more dense, and then because time is — this is just going to sound like mysticism, but the mathematics holds up — because time is getting more dense, there comes a point where there’s no previous time. It isn’t like everything was sitting around and then, ‘Boom!’, something exploded. It’s more like you’re going around on the surface of the Earth and you reach the North Pole. If you go on the other way, you’re just coming back down, but it isn’t like there’s a point above it and stuff, which is a really weird notion…
A lot of people said to Lemaître, ‘You’re just imagining it, how could that be?’. Lo and behold, in the 1960s, people discovered the afterglow of that Big Bang, this famous background radiation.
Do you have a final anecdote for us?
David Bodanis: Yes, but it’s not about Einstein, it’s about Andrei Sakharov, the great Russian physicist who got the Nobel Prize. He had many sufferings in his life, surviving World War II in Russia, and then being a dissident under communism and stuff.
He and his wife had always loyally been together, and one time he looked at his wife’s eyes — they’d been married for 30/40 years — and he said, ‘Darling, do you know what I love most of all?’, she said, ‘What, Andre?’ — and she thought he would say, ‘That little, girlish lilt you still have in your voice’, or, ‘The colour of your eyes’ — and he looked at her and he said, ‘Darling, cosmic background radiation of 3.4 degrees Kelvin’.
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