Einstein: His Life and Universe

person who has interpreted it into English.”

Einstein got into the act from his Havel River hideaway. Even before his little paper was published, he gave an interview about it to a British newspaper. “It has been my greatest ambition to resolve the duality of natural laws into unity,” he said. “The purpose of my work is to further this simplification, and particularly to reduce to one formula the explanation of the gravitational and electromagnetic fields. For this reason I call it a contribution to ‘a unified field theory’... Now, but only now, we know that the force that moves electrons in their ellipses about the nuclei of atoms is the same force that moves our earth in its annual course around the sun.”¹⁷ Of course, it turned out that he did not know that, nor do we know that even now.

He also gave an interview to Time, which put him on its cover, the first of five such appearances. The magazine reported that, while the world waited for his “abstruse coherent field theory” to be made public, Einstein was plodding around his country hideaway looking “haggard, nervous, irritable.” His sickly demeanor, the magazine explained, was due to stomach ailments and a constant parade of visitors. In addition, it noted, “Dr. Einstein, like so many other Jews and scholars, takes no physical exercise at all.”¹⁸

The Prussian Academy printed a thousand copies of Einstein’s paper, an unusually large number. When it was released on January 30, all were promptly sold, and the Academy went back to the printer for three thousand more. One set of pages was pasted in the window of a London department store, where crowds pushed forward to try to comprehend the complex mathematical treatise with its thirty-three arcane equations not tailored for window shoppers. Wesleyan University in Connecticut paid a significant sum for the handwritten manuscript to be deposited as a treasure in its library.

American newspapers were somewhat at a loss. The New York Herald Tribune decided to print the entire paper verbatim, but it had trouble figuring out how to cable all the Greek letters and symbols over telegraph machines. So it hired some Columbia physics professors to devise a coding system and then reconstruct the paper in New York, which they did. The Tribune’ s colorful article about how they transmitted the paper was a lot more comprehensible to most readers than Einstein’s paper itself.¹⁹

The New York Times, for its part, raised the unified theory to a religious level by sending reporters that Sunday to churches around the city to report on the sermons about it. “Einstein Viewed as Near Mystic,” the headline declared. The Rev. Henry Howard was quoted as saying that Einstein’s unified theory supported St. Paul’s synthesis and the world’s “oneness.” A Christian Scientist said it provided scientific backing for Mary Baker Eddy’s theory of illusive matter. Others hailed it as “freedom advanced” and a “step to universal freedom.”²⁰

Theologians and journalists may have been wowed, but physicists were not. Eddington, usually a fan, expressed doubts. Over the next year, Einstein kept refining his theory and insisting to friends that the equations were “beautiful.” But he admitted to his dear sister that his work had elicited “the lively mistrust and passionate rejection of my colleagues.”²¹

Among those who were dismayed was Wolfgang Pauli. Einstein’s new approaches “betrayed” his general theory of relativity, Pauli sharply told him, and relied on mathematical formalism that had no relation to physical realities. He accused Einstein of “having gone over to the pure mathematicians,” and he predicted that “within a year, if not before, you will have abandoned that whole distant parallelism, just as earlier you gave up the affine theory.”²²

Pauli was right. Einstein gave up the theory within a year. But he did not give up the quest. Instead, he turned his attention to yet another revised approach that would make more headlines but not more headway in solving the great riddle he had set for himself. “Einstein Completes Unified Field Theory,” the New York Times reported on January 23, 1931, with little intimation that it was neither the first nor would it be the last time there would be such an announcement. And then again, on October 26 of that year: “Einstein Announces a New Field Theory.”

Finally, the following January, he admitted to Pauli, “So you were right after all, you rascal.”²³

And so it went, for another two decades. None of Einstein’s offerings ever resulted in a successful unified field theory. Indeed, with the discoveries of new particles and forces, physics was becoming less unified. At best, Einstein’s effort was justified by the faint praise from the French mathematician Elie Joseph Cartan in 1931: “Even if his attempt does not succeed, it will have forced us to think about the great questions at the foundation of science.”²⁴

The Great Solvay Debates, 1927 and 1930

The tenacious rearguard action that Einstein waged against the onslaught of quantum mechanics came to a climax at two memorable Solvay Conferences in Brussels. At both he played the provocateur, trying to poke holes in the prevailing new wisdom.

Present at the first, in October 1927, were the three grand masters who had helped launch the new era of physics but were now skeptical of the weird realm of quantum mechanics it had spawned: Hendrik Lorentz, 74, just a few months from death, the winner of the Nobel for his work on electromagnetic radiation; Max Planck, 69, winner of the Nobel for his theory of the quantum; and Albert Einstein, 48, winner of the Nobel for discovering the law of the photoelectric effect.

Of the remaining twenty-six attendees, more than half had won or would win Nobel Prizes as well. The boy wonders of the new quantum mechanics were all there, hoping to convert or conquer Einstein: Werner Heisenberg, 25; Paul Dirac, 25; Wolfgang Pauli, 27; Louis de Broglie, 35; and from America, Arthur Compton, 35. Also there was Erwin Schrodinger, 40, caught between the young Turks and the older skeptics. And, of course, there was the old Turk, Niels Bohr, 42, who had helped spawn quantum mechanics with his model of the atom and become the staunch defender of its counterintuitive ramifications.²⁵

Lorentz had asked Einstein to present the conference’s report on the state of quantum mechanics. Einstein accepted, then balked. “After much back and forth, I have concluded that I am not competent to give such a report in a way that would match the current state of affairs,” he replied. “In part it is because I do not approve of the purely statistical method of thinking on which the new theories are based.” He then added rather plaintively, “I beg you not to be angry with me.”²⁶

Instead, Niels Bohr gave the opening presentation. He was unsparing in his description of what quantum mechanics had wrought. Certainty and strict causality did not exist in the subatomic realm, he said. There were no deterministic laws, only probabilities and chance. It made no sense to speak of a “reality” that was independent of our observations and measurements. Depending on the type of experiment chosen, light could be waves or particles.

Einstein said little at the formal sessions. “I must apologize for not having penetrated quantum mechanics deeply enough,” he admitted at the very outset. But over dinners and late-night discussions, resuming again at breakfast, he would engage Bohr and his supporters in animated discourse that was leavened by affectionate banter about dice-playing deities. “One can’t make a theory out of a lot of ‘maybes,’ ” Pauli recalls Einstein arguing. “Deep down it is wrong, even if it is empirically and logically right.”²⁷