Einstein Changed Concept Of Universe

Press, Volume XCI, Issue 27638, 20 April 1955, Page 16

Einstein Changed Concept Of Universe

Einstein was born in a Jewish family in Germany on March 14, 1879. His father did not prosper in business. He moved first to Switzerland and then to Italy in search of better luck. When the boy was left behind at school in Germany he ran away. Later he finished his degree course with difficulty in Switzerland. He had no university prospects, and had to take a job as a minor official in the Swiss Patent Office. He did his own thinking in the evenings, and he was still working in the Swiss Patent Office when he published his first ■ great papers in 1905. Einstein Equals Relativity In these, in one year, the young man of 26 made outstanding advances in three separate branches of physics. To most people now, Einstein’s name stands simply for Relativity. And certainly the most adventurous of the papers of 1905 was the first statement of the theory of Special Relativity. But the theory of Relativity would have been read with less attention if Einstein’s other work from 1905 had not marked him equally as a leader in framing the concepts of the new quantum physics. The “Observer,” in a recent article, says all his work in this annus mirabilis, his wonderful year, has the same stamp of simple intellectual grandeur: it looks into the heart of physics. The heart of physics at that time had developed a murmur, which was small bnt nagging. The triumphant laws in which Newton had given order to nature for more than 206 years could still be tested and found right, almost everywhere. But only almost everywhere: elsewhere, there was the small murmur of exceptions. The planet Mercury was not keeping time; the speed of light refused to behave as classical physics expected; and the newly discovered electrons seemed to change their mass with their speed. Physicists were trying to meet these minor irregularities with .minor adjustments. Einstein from the outset ooked for no ingenious gloss on the laws of physics and for no small errors of formulation. He looked at the unwritten assumptions on which the laws had been built, deliberately, by Newton. Put in scientific terms, the assumptions were that space and time are given to us absolutely and are the same for every observer. Put more generally, the assumptions postulated a sharp division between the observer and the natural world. Classical physics raw nature as a chain or network of events which unrolls itself in imperturbable, sequence, and of which s}>e observer is a witness but not a link. The observer is a god, altogether outside the machine of the physical world. Was it Practical? What Einstein asked about this majestic view was not whether it was true, in some abstract sense, but whether it was practical. Did science in fact record impersonal events? Could it distil the actual event from our observation of it? Once the question was asked, the answer was plainly, No. Physics does not consist of events; it consists of observations. And between the event and those who observe it there must pass a signal—a ray of light perhaps, a wave or an impulse—which simply cannot be taken out of the observation. Event, signal and observation: that is the relationship which Einstein saw as the fundamental unit in physics. Relativity is the understanding of the world not as events but as relations. Einstein put this practical view into his equations: and in time physicists were astonished to find that it exBlained the erratic behaviour of lercury and predicted the bending of light. His first papers established a link between energy and mass. These are the deep and challenging ideas with which Einstein revolutionised both large-scale and quantum (the mathematics of the atom and its parts) physics. He enlarged them to include gravitation in the theory of General Relativity in 1915, and was still working on a unified field theory at his death. It will be plain why the influence of his ideas has been so much wider than science. For they are universal ideas; they reach below mathematics

and physics, to the basic conception of the relationship between man and nature.

Relativity Theory It is impossible for lay readers to grasp what the theory of relativity implies, or what its significance is. Put as simply as possible, it Regards time as the fourth dimension, thus making all physical phenomena (from our point of view as three-dimensional beings) relative, not absolute. It explains mass, gravity, inertia, space, and time.

It is mathematical in origin although most of its proofs and demonstrations come from astronomy and astrophysics. When the First World War broke out in 1914, Einstein had been a young giant and an enfant terrible among physicists for some years, and was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Research Institute for Physics in Berlin. The German Government was anxious to find intellectual support for its imperial ambitions, and put great pressure on its leading men. Ninety-three of them signed a manifesto of support. Einstein did not sign and, with two 'others issued a counter-manifesto against militarism. Einstein had in fact chosen Swiss nationality as a young man because he disliked German regimentation; and he chose later to become German again as a gesture of support to the Weimar Republic. Dealing with the matter in a sarcastic letter to a London paper he said: “By the employment of the theory of relativity to suite the taste of the reader lam described in Germany today as a German scientist, while in England I am set down as a Swiss Jew. If at any time I were to be regarded as a black sheep, these descriptions would be exchanged: I would be for the Germans a Swiss Jew and for the English a German scientist.” Nazi Persecution . Einstein’s fame and acclaim in Berlin were immense; but the Weimar Republic exposed him to attack on two flanks. To the rising Nazis he and his theories were un-German and to the men across the Rhine he was a German scientist of whom too much fuss was made. In 1919, the eclipse expeditions had confirmed to the world what no-one had guessed before his theories were published—that 1 light bends towards the sun. Einstein was in the United States when Hitler came into >power in 1933. He had intended to return to Germany, but as a protest against the Nazi persecution of the Jews he declared that he would never set foot in the country while such conditions prevailed. A few days later his house was raided “in search of arms.” He resigned from the Prussian Academy of Science and decided to renounce German nationality. The Prussian Academy stated that it had ‘‘no reason to regret the resignation.” The German police laid an embargo on his money, declaring that it was “doubtless intended to serve for the preparation of treason and sedition.”

Einstein was offered university chairs by France and Spain. He was already a student (that is, a Fellow) of Christ Church, Oxford, a paid post. He accepted the chair of mathematical physics at the College de France. It was alleged that he had taken part in the preparation of the “Brown Book on the Hitlerite Terror.” This he denied, but as the result of reports that his life was threatened by the Nazis he was guarded while living in Belgium and during visits to England—in the latter by students. In a letter to a Belgian anti-militarist in September, 1933, he expressed the view that pacifists in France and Belgium were no longer justified in refusing military service as a means of preventing war in view of Germany’s “public preparation for war.” Speaking at a meeting in London in October, 1933, in aid of refugee academic and professional workers, he pleaded for the defence of intellectual and individual freedom “against the powers that threaten to suppress them.” Next month all the property of the scientist and his wife in Germany was confiscated and later he was deprived of his German citizenship for “harming German interests” and ‘‘disloyal behaviour.” His daughters’ estate was also confiscated in 1935. While in New York, he appeared as a

violinist at a concert ip aid of some of his scientific friends in Berlin. Decision on A-bomb ! Since his arrival in America, Binstem worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton/ : He had been a lifelong pacifist. Yet he broke with this as with other doctrines when it no longer fitted the facts of the world. On 'August 2, 1939, he wrote to tell President Roosevelt that recent work in atomic physics, which had been disclosed to him privately, made it probable that an atomic bomb could be constructed; and that since this work had been begun in Germany, the Germans might make such a bomb. The marvellous youth who at 26 had for the first time equated mass with energy, now at 60 saw that equation threaten the world. * It was the final irony to Einstein, who felt human brotherhood like a passion: To him Hiroshima and Nagasaki were , another step, and a precipitous one, in men’s moral decadence. In the last few years, Einstein’s gentleness has often turned to anger. His words have reached both sides of the Iron Curtain and he has spared noone. He had said things to Americans which norone else dared say. Shortly after the Oppenheimer inquiry, Einstein said publicly that if he had his time again he would have chosen to be a plumber rather than a scientist. He had also advised scientists not to testify before investigating committees and was perhaps the biggest thorn in the side of McCarthyism when it was at its height. No action was ever taken against him. Einstein’s appearance, his halo of wildly waving white hair, his deep-set dark eyes under bushy brows and his sturdy stocky body were familiar to everyone. He hated formal clothes and dressed in loosely-fitting garments. Unless he was watched he went out of doors in carpet slippers. He never wore a hat.

He worked in a small study writing on a pad on his knee and rising frequently to pace the room in thought. He used to wander about the streets of Princeton lost in a maze of abstraction with a beaming smile for those who accosted him. His shyness and his hatred of publicity were proverbial. He was a good violinist and pianist but he did not read much general literature. His chief recreations were sailing and walking. Many of his characteristics classed as eccentricities were merely a conscious attempt to simplify his own life.

Einstein married twice. He had two sons and two daughters, one of whom died in 1936.

Einstein received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 and gave all the prize money to charity. He himself did not know how many honorary degrees he had received or to how many learned societies he had belonged. With characteristic modesty he listed among all his various medals and decorations only the Copley Medal of the Royal Society received in 1925, and the Franklin Institute Medal awarded 10 years later. The man, who “changed the concept of the universe” had, as Edwin Miller has remarked, the look of a man at peace with himself. And to quote another biographer, “he fulfilled one’s expectation of a genius.”