By George Johnson, George Johnson is the author of "Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics." His latest book, "The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments," will be published in 2008.
April
IN late 19th century Munich, the multivolume "Popular Books on Natural Science" was required bookcase furniture in middle-class German homes, and its ebullient author, Aaron Bernstein, was the Carl Sagan of his day. "Praised be this science!" he cried. "
Praised be the men who do it! And praised be the human mind, which sees more sharply than does the human eye." It seemed the perfect gift for a 10-year-old boy who (contrary to later legend) was doing quite well in school.
In the very first pages of the series, given to him by a family friend, young Albert Einstein would have read about a thought experiment in which a bullet is fired at a passing train. For the gunner standing at the side of the tracks, the bullet appears to fly straight through. But from the perspective of a passenger inside a moving railroad car, the projectile cuts across at an angle. Motion, after all, is relative.
The same is true, Bernstein went on to explain, for starlight striking Earth as it moves through its orbit — an astronomer must lead with his telescope as a duck hunter does with his gun — but with a crucial difference. Whether Earth is approaching the star or receding from it, the velocity of the light beam is the same. "Since each kind of light proves to be of exactly the same speed," Bernstein wrote, "the law of the speed of light can well be called the most general of all of nature's laws."
And so a meme was planted in Einstein's brain.Years later, he acknowledged Bernstein's books as an inspiration, but it is jarring to learn, in new biographies by Walter Isaacson and Jürgen Neffe, how specific the influence may have been. Elsewhere in the series, Bernstein asked his readers to imagine being conveyed through space by an electromagnetic wave — the seed, perhaps, of Einstein's famous fantasy of riding bareback on a light beam.
The contradictions this notion posed — what can a light wave be when you're waving along with it? — inspired his special theory of relativity.Later on, as Einstein assembled the pieces, he may have recalled another early favorite: Felix Eberty's "The Stars and the Earth," in which extraterrestrial observers viewing this planet at various distances in space see different stages of our history. Since light travels at a finite speed, looking out through a telescope is like looking back in time. As Neffe puts it, "The young Einstein had his lifelong topics handed to him on a platter." Even ideas as startling as special relativity come with a pedigree. Einstein's was the brain where certain thought beams happened to collide. Genius, if there is such a thing, lies in knowing what to do with the debris.
A great strength of both these biographies is to show, as Neffe puts it, "why Einstein had to discover the theory of relativity."
Einstein's story of his boyhood reaction to a compass ("Something deeply hidden had to be behind things") has been told many times. Just as influential may have been the dynamos and other equipment that his father and uncle were installing to bring electricity to towns in Germany.
A moving magnet generates electricity, and moving electricity generates a magnetic field — another relativistic knot whose untying led to special relativity.
Einstein's early exposure to electromagnetic gadgets made him a natural for a job in the Swiss patent office — just as industrial Europe was seeking ways to synchronize clocks for coordinating military maneuvers and making the trains run on time.
As the Harvard historian Peter Galison has written, Einstein had a front-row seat at a parade of new technologies involving space and time. Happenstance by happenstance, he was being edged into position to make his great discoveries.
There are many good biographies of this man, ranging from Ronald Clark's accessible, encyclopedic "Einstein: The Life and Times" to Abraham Pais' idiosyncratic and demanding "Subtle Is the Lord," with several stops along the way (Jeremy Bernstein, Philipp Frank, Banesh Hoffmann).
Their somewhat sanitized nature, glossing over Einstein's messy divorce and womanizing, was remedied by Dennis Overbye in "Einstein in Love." It's a welcome surprise to find there is still room for not one but two more life stories.
The take by Isaacson, known for his lives of Benjamin Franklin and Henry Kissinger, is likely to get the most attention. Occasioned by the release of more Einstein papers, his book re-creates events with a richness not possible before.
Isaacson, who cut his teeth as a political correspondent for Time magazine, does a fine job of explaining some difficult science. Neffe's book, covering almost exactly the same ground, was published first in Germany in 2005.
You would never know you were reading a translation. Converted into evocative, idiomatic English by Shelley Frisch, the book abandons the traditional chronological framework to make oblique swipes across Einstein's timeline — like those bullets flying through a train.
One chapter is on his psychological makeup, another on the scientists who influenced him, another on "The Physicist and the Women." Occasionally leaping to the present, Neffe tells the story behind the story, the literary forensics by which modern-day Einstein sleuths piece together what he knew when.
Sometimes this jumping around can be disorienting. Isaacson's traditional approach is probably better for Einstein beginners. But if you already know the story, Neffe's book might tell you something new.
As Einstein's life unfolded, special relativity led to general relativity, linking gravity and the tug of acceleration as neatly as the earlier theory had linked space and time. Because of the politicking of the Nazi physicist Philipp Lenard, Einstein was denied a Nobel Prize for this "Jewish physics."
As a compromise, he got one for explaining the photoelectric effect, his contribution to a quantum mechanics whose vision of a dice-rolling deity he came to hate and reject.In the late 1920s we find him, pushing 50, trying to overthrow quantum physics by subsuming it into an all-encompassing theory.
"The highest and ultimate aim of our science," he had read in the Bernstein books, "will always be to adopt the most straightforward possible approach for all things, to trace back all facts to one explanation." But this time his instincts led him astray."Einstein Reduces All Physics to 1 Law," proclaimed the New York Times on Jan. 25, 1929. "Hypothesis Opens Visions of Persons Being Able to Float in Air…. " But that theory crashed and burned, as did each version thereafter.
Einstein died a quarter-century later, in Princeton, N.J.; his ashes were scattered on the Delaware River, but not before a pathologist had swiped his brain. Neurological studies were inconclusive, suggesting that there was nothing organically special in there. "The relevant question," Isaacson writes, "was how his mind worked, not his brain." He was curious, tenacious, rebellious, with a passion to know — the right man, in the right place, at the right time.
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