Einstein: His Life and Universe

(1820; reprinted, New York: Dover, 1951). This famous statement of determinism comes in the preface of a work devoted to probability theory. The fuller line is that in ultimate reality we have determinism, but in practice we have probabilities. The achievement of full knowledge is not reachable, he says, so we need probabilities.

3

. Einstein, Letter to the Royal Society on Newton’s bicentennial, Mar. 1927.

4

. Einstein 1949b, 19.

5

. For the influence of Faraday’s induction theories on Einstein, see Miller 1981, chapter 3.

6

. Einstein and Infeld, 244; Overbye, 40; Bernstein 1996a, 49.

7

. Einstein to Conrad Habicht, May 18 or 25, 1905.

8

. Sent on Mar. 17, 1905, and published in

Annalen der Physik

17 (1905). I want to thank Yale professor Douglas Stone for help with this section.

9

. Max Born, obituary for Max Planck, Royal Society of London, 1948.

10

. John Heilbron,

The Dilemmas of an Upright Man

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Lucid explanations of Einstein’s quantum paper, from which this section is drawn, include Gribbin and Gribbin; Bernstein 1996a, 2006; Overbye, 118–121; Stachel 1998; Rigden; A. Douglas Stone, “Genius and Genius

²

: Planck, Einstein and the Birth of Quantum Theory,” Aspen Center for Physics, unpublished lecture, July 20, 2005.

11

. Planck’s approach was probably a bit more complex and involved assuming a group of oscillators and positing a total energy that is an integer multiple of a quantum unit. Bernstein 2006, 157–161.

12

. Max Planck, speech to the Berlin Physical Society, Dec. 14, 1900. See Light-man 2005, 3.

13

. Einstein 1949b, 46. Miller 1984, 112; Miller 1999, 50; Rynasiewicz and Renn, 5.

14

. Einstein, “On the General Molecular Theory of Heat,” Mar. 27, 1904.

15

. Einstein to Conrad Habicht, Apr. 15, 1904. Jeremy Bernstein discussed the connections between the 1904 and 1905 papers in an e-mail, July 29, 2005.

16

. Einstein, “On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light,” Mar. 17, 1905.

17

. “We are startled, wondering what happened to the waves of light of the 19th century theory and marveling at how Einstein could see the signature of atomic discreteness in the bland formulae of thermodynamics,” says the science historian John D. Norton. “Einstein takes what looks like a dreary fragment of the thermodynamics of heat radiation, an empirically based expression for the entropy of a volume of high-frequency heat radiation. In a few deft inferences he converts this expression into a simple, probabilistic formula whose unavoidable interpretation is that the energy of radiation is spatially localized in finitely many, independent points.” Norton 2006c, 73. See also Lightman 2005, 48.

18

. Einstein’s paper in 1906 noted clearly that Planck had not grasped the full implications of the quantum theory. Apparently, Besso encouraged Einstein not to make this criticism of Planck too explicit. As Besso wrote much later, “In helping you edit your publications on the quanta, I deprived you of a part of your glory, but, on the other hand, I made a friend for you in Planck.” Michele Besso to Einstein, Jan. 17, 1928. See Rynasiewicz and Renn, 29; Bernstein 1991, 155.

19

. Holton and Brush, 395.