Einstein's Genius Club Read online

  EINSTEIN'S GENIUS CLUB

  ALSO BY BURTON FELDMAN

  The Nobel Prize:

  A History of Genius, Controversy, and Prestige

  EINSTEIN'S GENIUS CLUB

  THE TRUE STORY OF A GROUP OF SCIENTISTS

  WHO CHANGED THE WORLD

  BURTON FELDMAN

  INTRODUCTION BY KATHERINE WILLIAMS

  ARCADE PUBLISHING • NEW YORK

  Copyright © 2007, 2011 by Burton Feldman and Katherine Williams

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-61145-342-3

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Peggy Feldman

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Glossary

  PART 1: THE PATHOS OF SCIENCE

  Princeton, Winter 1943–44

  Aging Genius

  Science and Sin

  At Home in Princeton

  PART 2: FOUR LIVES

  Einstein

  Russell: Aristocrat in Turmoil

  Gödel: Ghost of Genius

  Pauli: The Devil's Advocate

  PART 3: THE UNIVERSE

  The Logic of Paradox

  The Mechanical World

  Relativity of Time and Space

  On the Quantum Path

  The Copenhagen Interpretation

  Einstein and Unified Theory: Chasing the Rainbow

  The Persistence of Nature

  PART 4: BEYOND PATHOS: OPPENHEIMER,

  HEISENBERG, AND THE WAR

  Wartime Berlin, Winter 1943–44

  Heisenberg

  Wartime Los Alamos, Winter 1943–44

  Oppenheimer

  Dangerous Knowledge: The New Security Order

  Epilogue: The Projects of Science

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  GIVEN THE DAZZLING HISTORY of twentieth-century scientific discovery, the story of Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Kurt Gödel, and Wolfgang Pauli in conversation might seem trivial. Nothing really emerged from their meetings, as far as we can tell—neither momentous discovery nor earth-shattering weaponry.

  Yet their confluence in the small town of Princeton, New Jersey, during the winter of 1943–44 is fascinating to ponder. They were giants divided by a generation. Einstein was schooled in classical physics; Russell began his career at the very dawn of mathematical logic. By the 1920s, when Pauli and Gödel came of age, certainties had dissolved. For Pauli, especially, the new quantum physics opened up endless possibilities for insight and production.

  In this generational battle, Einstein fought desperately against the quantum mechanics so ably theorized by Pauli and his quantum brethren. Unable to refute the new physics, Einstein retreated into what now seems a doomed search for a unified theory. To his contemporaries, it seemed daft, even obstructionist. His failed search illustrates the pathos of science. For scientists, as for athletes, age does not correlate with creativity. The poet may begin a long career with an apprenticeship of pastoral poetry, progressing finally to the noble epic, a trajectory known as Virgil's wheel. But science and mathematics are notoriously the provinces of youth.

  As Einstein fought his battle in the world of physics, history was busy transforming how physics worked. World War II turned theoretical physics into a race for the ultimate weapon. Robert Oppenheimer, once a student of Pauli, headed the project in America. Werner Heisenberg, Pauli's friend and partner in the founding of quantum mechanics, was integral to Germany's effort. Inevitably, the bomb conferred on physics both prestige and peril. It took a soldier to coin the phrase “military-industrial complex.” Well before Eisenhower's words of warning, physicists understood their plight. The war, said the scientist and novelist C. P. Snow in a speech on morality and science, turned physicists into “soldiers-not-in-uniform.”

  The pretext for this book is the gathering of four great minds in an academic backwater during a war that would change science forever. “I used to go to [Einstein's] house once a week to discuss with him and Gödel and Pauli,” wrote Russell in his Autobiography. That these meetings occurred is generally accepted by the biographers of Einstein, Russell, and Pauli. However, as with all things human, there is disagreement, and to ignore contrary evidence would be unseemly, not to mention unscholarly. Thus, against Russell's recollection of those meetings at 112 Mercer Street, we must cast some doubt—that is, uncertainty of a mundane, rather than quantum, sort. Russell himself, speaking on the BBC in 1965, reported that in Princeton, Einstein “arranged to have a little meeting at his house once a week at which there would be some one or two eminent physicists and myself.” No mention was made of Gödel. Only in his Autobiography does Russell assert that he, Einstein, Pauli, and Gödel met regularly.

  In 1971, Kurt Gödel learned of Russell's claim and drafted (but never sent) a rebuttal of sorts to a friend: “[t]he passage gives the wrong impression that I had many discussions with Russell, which was by no means the case (I remember only one)….” More pointed was Gödel's acerbic retort to Russell's assertion in the same passage that “Gödel turned out to be an unadulterated Platonist….” Gödel responded, “[My] platonism is no more ‘unadulterated’ than Russell's own in 1921.” As we shall see, Russell and Gödel enjoyed a tangled relationship—one that might have encouraged exaggeration about the question of their meeting from either man. It is possible, even likely, that Gödel turned up at Einstein's rather less than Russell's remark suggests, and equally possible that he showed up more than once.

  Who was in attendance and when will forever be a matter of conjecture, as must our thoughts on what might have been said, beyond Russell's few (easily assailable) memories. More fascinating is the context—cultural, theoretical, biographical, and historical—of those meetings. The crosscurrents that made up this context are the subject of this book.

  Finally, as must be obvious, the perspective of this book is not that of a scientist. Some might argue that the history of science is better left to scientists. For better or for worse, however, nonscientists are enthralled by that richly creative, densely coded world—beyond our grasp as laypersons, yet so enveloping of our lives.

  To elucidate major characters and relevant concepts, we provide below brief biographical sketches and a glossary of terms. Terminology in boldface is cross-referenced in the Glossary.

  ALBERT EINSTEIN (1879–1955)

  With the publication of his theory of general relativity, Einstein, already well known among physicists, became world famous. No more ubiquitous a face has ever represented science in the popular imagination. Almost instantly, Einstein turned his fame into a platform for political and humanitarian causes: internationalism, support for Israel, antifascism, civil rights, socialism. At the end of his life, with Russell, he made a final
plea for world peace.

  Best known among Einstein's works are the two relativity theories: the special theory of relativity (1905), which introduced the notion of spacetime, and the general theory of relativity (1916), which explained gravitation. In his “miracle year” of 1905, Einstein wrote a total of four papers, including that proposing special relativity. Ironically, it was not for either theory of relativity, but for the first of his 1905 papers that Einstein won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics. That paper, on the photoelectric effect, was an inaugural step in the development of quantum mechanics, much to Einstein's chagrin. He spent most of his later years in a failed search for a unified theory based not on quantum mechanics, but on relativity.

  BERTRAND RUSSELL (1872–1970)

  Best known for his political activism, Bertrand Russell played a major role in the development of twentieth-century analytical philosophy. At Cambridge, he majored in mathematics and scored well enough on the feared “tripos” exams to be ranked among the first division “wranglers.” That Russell was able to bridge such utterly disparate worlds speaks as much to the restlessness of his intellect as to its power.

  Russell's startling discovery in 1901 of a paradox that would bear his name, Russell's paradox (the conundrum posed by imagining a set of all sets that are not members of themselves), launched him into a decade's worth of work. In 1903, he published The Principles of Mathematics, precursor to the much longer Principia Mathematica, written with Alfred North Whitehead and published in three parts from 1910 to 1913. This latter work broke philosophical ground by promoting mathematical logic, or logicism, and by introducing a theory of types and a powerful notation system. For the first time, mathematically based logic made its way into the mainstream of philosophy, long dominated by metaphysics and epistemology.

  Political activism characterized the latter decades of Russell's life. Few left-wing causes escaped his energetic support: pacifism, Bolshevism, antifascism, anti-Stalinism, nuclear disarmament, de-colonization, the International War Crimes Tribunal. On the brink of war over the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy and Khrushchev each received a telegram. (Kennedy's reaction, in private, was to call Russell a “son of a bitch.”) Even into his nineties, Russell did not flag. A letter transcribed and mailed on February 3, 1970, a day after Russell died, sent his greetings to representatives of South Vietnam's Provisional Revolutionary Government. A lifetime of writing on philosophy and politics won Russell the 1950 Nobel Prize in Literature.

  KURT GÖDEL (1906–1978)

  As a logician, Gödel has no modern rival. Not since Aristotle, some say, have one man's theories so utterly transformed the field of logic. He was a quiet, remote, unworldly mathematician, given to eccentricities and belief in ghosts. With Einstein, he would make his daily trek to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Their friendship was famous. In Gödel, Einstein found his intellectual equal.

  As a graduate student at the University of Vienna, Gödel sat in on meetings of the Vienna Circle, a highly influential group of philosophers dedicated to empiricism (the idea that knowledge is derived through experience) and logical analysis (held to be the proper method for solving problems in philosophy). Yet in 1931, Gödel proposed his incompleteness theorems, ending once and for all attempts to find a complete and consistent set of axioms for all of mathematics. Russell's logicism and the Vienna Circle's logical analysis were dealt a fatal blow, insofar as they sought complete consistency within a system of logic.

  Although Gödel contributed to mathematical and logical thought throughout his life, the incompleteness theorems and their metalogical system of notation known as Gödel numbering were his crowning achievements. Gödel left Vienna for Princeton in 1940 and never returned, gaining a professorship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in 1946 and publishing a tantalizing demonstration of time travel based on general relativity in 1949. He died in 1978 of starvation, so overcome by paranoia that he believed his food was being poisoned.

  WOLFGANG PAULI (1900–1957)

  Few outside the world of physics know of Wolfgang Pauli. His fame rests on two discoveries: the exclusion principle and the neutrino. The former is an esoteric explanation of how electrons behave in the atom. The latter is a bit more fathomable among laypeople—the neutrino being first of many particles found to exist within the atom, beyond the electron, proton, and neutron.

  Within the world of physics, however, Pauli is legendary. His exclusion principle is indispensable to our understanding of matter. In 1930, he postulated the existence of the neutrino, the confirmation of which came a year before Pauli's death. Equally important, though, was his centrality to quantum theory. In the 1920s, as the world entered a depression and headed toward world war, Pauli helped foment a revolution that overturned classical physics. Among his fellow revolutionaries were Niels Bohr (the “father” of quantum theory), Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger (of “Schrödinger's cat” fame), Paul Dirac, Max Born, and Louis de Broglie.

  So integral was Pauli to the development of quantum theory and quantum mechanics that he became known as the repository of “conscience” within the movement. Personable, brash, painfully critical, intellectually honest, he was an inveterate collaborator and an indefatigable letter writer. He won the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physics for the exclusion principle. Having left Europe for the duration of the war, he returned to Switzerland in 1946 and headed the physics program at Zurich Polytechnic School (ETH) until his death.

  J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER (1904–1967)

  Erudite and precocious, Oppenheimer left Harvard in 1925 with a degree in chemistry and sufficient background in physics to join the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. At twenty-three, he was awarded a doctorate from the University of Göttingen, where he worked with such giants in quantum mechanics as Wolfgang Pauli and Max Born. Having gained respect from his European colleagues, he accepted a position at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1929.

  Oppenheimer made no great discovery in physics. As an intellectual and administrative leader, he was second to none. Over the next decade, he mentored dozens of graduate students, dabbled in leftist politics, and favorably impressed the great Ernest Lawrence, who ran the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory. As the American bomb effort began taking shape, Oppenheimer rose from adviser to director of Los Alamos, the secret and central laboratory where the greatest minds in physics concocted the atomic bomb. At the first successful test of an atomic weapon, he later said, words from the Bhagavad Gita echoed in his mind: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

  During and after the war, he was targeted by government security forces for his leftist politics. His support of an international approach to the uses of atomic fission and his opposition to the hydrogen bomb led to investigations by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and in 1954, his security clearance was revoked. He continued to lecture and work on the fringes of power. From 1946 to 1965, he was director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He won the Fermi Prize for Physics in 1963. He died in 1967, having never regained his security clearance.

  WERNER HEISENBERG (1901–1976)

  Unlike his friend Pauli and his mentor Niels Bohr, Heisenberg tended to think in flashes of brilliance. In 1925, he took on the murky question of quantum mechanics. If we cannot see within an atom, he reasoned, let us use what we can observe, namely, how atoms emit and absorb light. From that thought came quantum mechanics. To calculate the movements of particles, Heisenberg stumbled into what became matrix mechanics. Meanwhile, Erwin Schrödinger countered with a less abstract explanation likening electrons to waves (wave mechanics). To reconcile the seemingly bizarre quantum world with the more familiar classical physics, Heisenberg came up with the uncertainty principle: It is possible to measure the location of an electron and the momentum of an electron, but never both simultaneously. For his work on quantum mechanics, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1932.

  Heisenberg was a fervent nationalist. When the Nazis came to power, he continued his atomi
c work, participating at the highest levels in the German effort to harness fission. He traveled often to conferences and, on one famous occasion, to visit his old friend and teacher Bohr. That conversation became the subject of Michael Frayn's drama Copenhagen. At the end of the war, Heisenberg was interned along with nine other German scientists at Farm Hill in England, where from July through December 1945 their conversations were secretly recorded by British agents. From the end of the war until his death, Heisenberg labored to rebuild atomic physics in Germany.

  GLOSSARY

  Beta-decay: radioactive decay, or the emission of a beta particle or electron from an atom

  Black-body radiation: thermal radiation (that is, heat radiating) from a closed system heated to a particular temperature

  Born's probability interpretation: a reconciliation of wave mechanics with quantum mechanics that explains waves as containing the probable location of an electron

  Bose-Einstein statistics: first proposed by S. N. Bose and championed by Einstein, these statistics explain the behavior of bosons.

  Bosons: one of two general classes of elementary particles (along with fermions) determined by how they spin

  Bright-line spectra: the unique spectral lines formed when an element is heated and its atoms emit light; every atom has its own signature of bright lines.

  Brownian motion: in fluids, the seemingly random movements of tiny particles as they are struck by the molecules of the fluid; Einstein applied statistical mechanics to explain the movements.

  Copenhagen interpretation: under Niels Bohr, the most persuasive, complete framework for understanding quantum mechanics