Einstein replied, “He would have erected an enormous stake and had us all burnt for our sinful extravagance.” As Einstein later recalled,“The man never addressed another word to me.”43
Also at the end of the summer of 1909, Einstein was invited to address the annual
After his “happiest thought” at the end of 1907 about how the equivalence of gravity and acceleration might lead to a generalization of relativity theory, Einstein had put that subject aside to focus instead on what he called “the radiation problem” (i.e., quantum theory). The more he thought about his “heuristic” notion that light was made up of quanta, or indivisible packets, the more he worried that he and Planck had wrought a revolution that would destroy the classical foundations of physics, especially Maxwell’s equations. “I have come to this pessimistic view mainly as a result of endless, vain efforts to interpret . . . Planck’s constant in an intuitive way,” he wrote a fellow physicist early in 1908. “I even seriously doubt that it will be possible to maintain the general validity of Maxwell’s equations.”44 (As it turned out, his love of Maxwell’s equations was well placed. They are among the few elements of theoretical physics to remain unchanged by both the relativity and quantum revolutions that Einstein helped launch.)
When Einstein, still not officially a professor, arrived at the Salzburg conference in September 1909, he finally met Max Planck and other giants that he had known only through letters. On the afternoon of the third day, he stepped in front of more than a hundred famed scientists and delivered a speech that Wolfgang Pauli, who was to become a pioneer of quantum mechanics, later pronounced “one of the landmarks in the development of theoretical physics.”
Einstein began by explaining how the wave theory of light was no longer complete. Light (or any radiation) could also be regarded, he said, as a beam of particles or packets of energy, which he said was akin to what Newton had posited. “Light has certain basic properties that can be understood more readily from the standpoint of the Newtonian emission theory than from the standpoint of the wave theory,” he declared. “I thus believe that the next phase of theoretical physics will bring us a theory of light that can be interpreted as a kind of fusion of the wave and of the emission theories of light.”
Combining particle theory with wave theory, he warned, would bring “a profound change.” This was not a good thing, he feared. It could undermine the certainties and determinism inherent in classical physics.
For a moment, Einstein mused that perhaps such a fate could be avoided by accepting Planck’s more limited interpretation of quanta: that they were features only of how radiation was emitted and absorbed by a surface rather than a feature of the actual light wave as it propagated through space. “Would it not be possible,” he asked, “to retain at least the equations for the propagation of radiation and conceive only the processes of emission and absorption differently?” But after comparing the behavior of light to the behavior of gas molecules, as he had done in his 1905 light quanta paper, Einstein concluded that, alas, this was not possible.
As a result, Einstein said, light must be regarded as behaving like both an undulating wave and a stream of particles. “These two structural properties simultaneously displayed by radiation,” he declared at the end of his talk, “should not be considered as mutually incompatible.”45
It was the first well-conceived promulgation of the wave-particle duality of light, and it had implications as profound as Einstein’s earlier theoretical breakthroughs. “Is it possible to combine energy quanta and the wave principles of radiation?” he merrily wrote to a physicist friend. “Appearances are against it, but the Almighty—it seems—managed the trick.”46
A vibrant discussion followed Einstein’s speech, led by Planck himself. Still unwilling to embrace the physical reality underlying the mathematical constant that he had devised nine years earlier, or to accept the revolutionary ramifications envisioned by Einstein, Planck now played protector of the old order. He admitted that radiation involved discrete “quanta, which are to be conceived as atoms of action.” But he insisted that these quanta existed
Within two decades, Einstein would assume a similar role as protector of the old order. Indeed, he was already looking for ways out of the eerie dilemmas raised by quantum theory. “I am very hopeful that I will solve the radiation problem, and that I will do so without light quanta,” he wrote a young physicist he was working with.48
It was all too mystifying, at least for the time being. So as he moved up the professorial ranks in the German- speaking universities of Europe, he turned his attention back to the topic that was uniquely his own, relativity, and for a while became a refugee from the wonderland of the quanta. As he lamented to a friend, “The more successes the quantum theory enjoys, the sillier it looks.”49
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE WANDERING PROFESSOR
As a self-assured 17-year-old, Einstein had enrolled at the Zurich Polytechnic and met Mileva Mari, the woman he would marry. Now, in October 1909, at age 30, he was returning to that city to take up his post as a junior professor at the nearby University of Zurich.
Their homecoming restored, at least temporarily, some of the romance to their relationship. Mari was thrilled to be back in their original nesting ground, and by the end of their first month there she became pregnant again.
The apartment they rented was in a building where, they happily discovered, Friedrich Adler and his wife lived, and the couples became even closer friends. “They run a bohemian household,” Adler wrote his father approvingly. “The more I talk to Einstein, the more I realize that my favorable opinion of him was justified.”
The two men discussed physics and philosophy most evenings, often retreating to the attic of the three-story building so they would not be disturbed by children or spouses. Adler introduced Einstein to the work of Pierre Duhem, whose 1906 book
Adler particularly respected Einstein’s “most independent” mind. There was, he told his father, a nonconformist streak in Einstein that reflected an inner security but not an arrogance. “We find ourselves in agreement on questions that the majority of physicists would not even understand,” Adler boasted.2
