It has been a hundred years since Albert Einstein rewrote the laws of physics and crossed scientific greatness into human immortality. Einstein was also a rarity in the sense that he experienced deification within his own lifetime, and there is no change in status a century later
THERE are geniuses, and then there is Einstein. In the universe of human intellectual endeavour, he occupies the most exclusive orbit of all, keeping highly select company with just the handful of names who have shown us fundamental truths about our world. In this prized echelon, far above the fray of mere geniuses, sit Galileo and Newton, and arguably also Aristotle as the father of scholarship, and Ibne Sina as his logical successor. Einstein completes the group.
Einstein also appears to be its most remarkable member — the youngest, yet just as hallowed and immortal as the others. Indeed, unique among this group, and therefore unique in human history, Einstein is the one thinker who experienced intellectual immortality and deification within his own lifetime.
The year 2005 is an appropriate time to consider Einstein and his work. Exactly one hundred years ago, he was toiling away as an unknown office clerk in a patent office of the Swiss government in Bern. It was a tedious job in which he was charged with assigning the propriety of inventions working as an anonymous cog in the Swiss government bureaucracy. How a trained physicist and one of humanity’s brightest minds came to be in this irrelevant position is a saga in itself. But it turned out to be a good thing in the sense that the patent office did not generate enough work to occupy Einstein fully, and his mind kept wandering towards his true love, physics.
One day, in what must have been to him nothing more than a daydream, he asked himself a simple question. As he thought about the nature of the physical world, Einstein wondered what it would be like to travel alongside a beam of light. It was an uncomplicated question, innocently curious and straightforward, yet it was destined to become the foundation of a new physics, a new truth, and a new way of looking at the universe.
Late in life, Einstein once famously remarked that in order “to punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself”. It is a fabulous summary of his life and career.
Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, in a small German town called Ulm, not far from the modern border with Austria. His parents were middle-class Jews holding a secular outlook. It is popularly believed that he was a poor student, but it is a myth; school records show excellent performance in mathematics and science, although the young Einstein did struggle in subjects he found boring, such as classical Greek. He was often dreamy and distracted, however, and these characteristics led some of his teachers to dismiss him as dull and unmotivated.
Endowed with the most gifted of minds, as a young student Einstein bristled at the rigid thinking and rote teaching then in vogue in the schools and academies of Europe. Despite a series of setbacks, including domestic stress over his father’s failed businesses and the reluctance of his high school teachers to recommend him for advanced study, Einstein found his way into the well-regarded Swiss Polytechnic Institute in Zurich.
Though his crusade against authoritarian teaching by unimaginative professors continued at the Polytechnic, he did eventually graduate, earning degrees in mathematics and physics in 1900. Thereafter his luck soured.
As his reputation for being an academic rebel caught up with him, he was ostracized from official academia. Prospects dried up as teaching positions in universities and institutes, the natural progression for any bright young science graduate, were denied him. Wandering miserable and penniless for nearly two years, the job at the patent office in Bern came as a huge relief. It was clearly a menial vocation for someone aspiring to be a theoretical physicist, yet from this insignificant position Einstein would rewrite the history of ideas.
The year 1905 is often described as Einstein’s annus mirabilis, his wonderful year. It is, in fact, a truly wonderful year for all humanity. That year, in the prestigious physics journal Annalen der Physik, Einstein published not just one but three immortal scientific articles. Two of these — one explaining the photo-electric effect (generation of electricity from light striking metal) and another explaining Brownian motion (random movement of small particles suspended in a liquid) — were worthy of a Nobel Prize by themselves. (The Nobel committee later agreed, awarding Einstein the prize for the paper on the photo-electric effect.)
But it was the third paper in that series, technically titled ‘On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies’, that launched what was later to be Einstein’s legacy of surpassing scientific greatness. This paper deals with the relationship of moving bodies to one another, expounding the famous theory of special relativity with breathtaking insight.
Starting with the laws of motion of Isaac Newton and the field equations of James Clerk Maxwell, Einstein crafted an elegant theory of light and motion from which bold new truths emerged. One of his conclusions was that the velocity of light represents a universal speed limit throughout our universe — nothing can travel faster than light, not even the most powerful rocket imaginable. It is a physical impossibility.
Another major conclusion was that the flow of time is not absolute: To a stationary observer, time on a speeding rocket passes slowly compared to the observer’s own frame of reference on Earth. This is best explained by the famous twin-brothers thought experiment. Imagine two twins, one of whom stays on Earth while the other boards a fast-moving spaceship. After travelling at astronomically high speeds (approaching the speed of light), the spaceship returns to Earth and the twins meet up again. According to the theory of special relativity, when the brothers compare notes they will find that time has moved far slower for the astronaut than for the Earth-dweller. The traveller will have aged less, and a smaller length of time would have elapsed on his spaceship clock, compared to clocks on Earth.
Why? Because time slows down, or dilates, at fantastically high speeds. Most interestingly, the effect is seen by stationary observers, but to the traveller inside the moving spaceship, time is passing normally. It is only when he meets up with his twin back on Earth that the traveller notices the difference. Indeed, the mathematical structure of the special theory enshrined time as the fourth dimension of our physical world, in addition to the three familiar dimensions of length, breadth and height.
One of the implications of the special theory was that matter and energy were interchangeable. Given the right conditions, the theory held that matter could be converted into energy and vice versa, according to the mathematical relationship E=mc2 (where E is energy, m is mass, and c, the velocity of light) — possibly the most famous of all physical equations.
Because the velocity of light squared is an enormous number, it is obvious that great amounts of energy are stored in a small amount of matter. This novel insight of Einstein’s was destined to be of unimaginable practical significance, as it provides the theoretical basis for the atomic bomb.
Subtle yet monumental, the publication of the special theory of relativity in September 1905 was nevertheless met with deafening silence. The scientific community was simply overwhelmed. Within a year, however, the leading physicists of the day had come to acknowledge that, arising from the mind of an obscure government clerk in Switzerland, an earthquake had ripped through their intellectual world. Newtonian physics was overthrown, as everyone sat up and took notice of this legendary thinker in their midst from the stroke of whose pen the very laws of physics were being rewritten.
For part of the work he published in 1905, Einstein was awarded a PhD from the University of Zurich. Not long afterwards, he was appointed to that institution as a professor of physics, his first formal academic post. He was now properly within the fold of the physics community. He began appearing at professional meetings and conferences, becoming widely recognized and respected in the scientific world. It was only a matter of time before the most elite institutions came calling.
In those days, the centre of world physics was in Germany, and the intellectual centre of Germany was in Berlin. In 1914, Einstein accepted an offer to become professor of physics at the University of Berlin. The department was headed by Max Planck, founder of that other great theory of twentieth-century physics, quantum mechanics. By all measures, Einstein had finally arrived.
With the triumph of special relativity, and with the newfound security of a professorship in Berlin, Einstein declared his ambition to tackle a far bigger prize. Centuries earlier, gravity had amazed and confused Galileo and Newton, and in perhaps his greatest achievement, Newton had described it in mathematical terms. Einstein now set his mind to go beyond the Newtonian concept and understand gravity in the most fundamental way possible.
Again, an innocently simple question founded in childlike curiosity was his starting point. Einstein asked himself what it would be like to fall from the roof of a house. He realized that during the course of the fall he would not feel his own weight. This led him to postulate that gravity was indistinguishable from acceleration. This insight became the foundation for the general theory of relativity, Einstein’s magnum opus, which interprets gravity as curvature in the fabric of space-time. Embedded in this theory are huge implications for the nature of our universe, including such ideas as black holes and the Big Bang.
The general theory would become the vehicle behind Einstein’s everlasting fame. A popular experimental verification of one of its predictions catapulted him into the kind of stardom reserved only for entertainment mega-stars or statesmen of great consequence. One of the suggestions from the general theory was that a strong enough gravitational field would actually bend a ray of light. That someone could make so fantastic a prediction based on pure abstract thought captivated the popular imagination.
Arthur Eddington, a British astronomer, decided that this hypothesis could be experimentally tested in a solar eclipse, during which the effect of the sun’s massive gravitational field on starlight could be measured. He organized an expedition to take measurements during the next solar eclipse, due on May 29, 1919. The world waited on tenterhooks.
Eddington and his team travelled to a remote island off the West African coast and set up camp. At the crucial moment, overcast skies threatened to ruin the campaign, but the clouds separated at the right time and a series of photographs were exposed. When the plates were finally developed and the data analyzed, Einstein’s prediction stood proudly confirmed. A storm erupted in the international scientific community and rapidly spilled over into mainstream life. Headlines flashed in newspapers throughout the world. Einstein’s endearing figure, slightly portly and distracted, with an unruly head of hair and a look of quiet bemusement, became the image of the moment. Overnight, he had become an icon.
The general theory of relativity represents Einstein’s ultimate scientific achievement, yet his legacy goes well beyond. It is a measure of his greatness that he used his iconic status in the service of world peace and human betterment. His celebrity coincided with the rise of Nazi Germany and the outbreak of the Second World War, representing some of the most volatile times the world has ever seen. Einstein took the opportunity to champion unpopular humanitarian causes and urged common sense to prevail from the global platform his fame had made possible.
By 1933, with war clouds darkening Europe, Einstein had to flee Germany. Hitler’s anti-semitic policies had led to the collapse of German science, and would soon lead to the collapse of the German nation itself. Besieged by offers from around the world, Einstein finally decided to settle in the United States, accepting a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in which he was free to do whatever he pleased.
He turned his attention to Grand Unification, the scientific quest to synthesize all of nature’s forces into a single theoretical framework, but the target remained elusive. The problem remains an unsolved enduring puzzle to this very day.
One hundred years on, Einstein is celebrated as someone who led the most remarkable of lives. The force of his intellect revealed the secrets of nature, while his solid heart and ample moral courage became an inspiration for all humanity. Through it all, he remained humble and self-effacing. His thinking embodied wonderment. He once said that there are only two ways to lead your life — one is to believe that nothing is a miracle, the other is to believe that everything is. Einstein was certainly of the latter persuasion.
As he aged into a heroic sage in the idyllic setting of Princeton, people sought him out for answers to everything, from physics and politics, to religion and philosophy. There is a moving story of how one day a little boy caught up with Dr Einstein during one of his carefree walks through the picturesque streets of Princeton. “Did you go to the bathroom today?” the boy asked, at which Einstein laughed heartily. The boy’s mother, shocked and bewildered, admonished her son, but Einstein stopped her. “I am glad,” he said, “to finally be asked a question I can answer.”
THERE are geniuses, and then there is Einstein. In the universe of human intellectual endeavour, he occupies the most exclusive orbit of all, keeping highly select company with just the handful of names who have shown us fundamental truths about our world. In this prized echelon, far above the fray of mere geniuses, sit Galileo and Newton, and arguably also Aristotle as the father of scholarship, and Ibne Sina as his logical successor. Einstein completes the group.
As his reputation for being an academic rebel caught up with him, he was ostracized from official academia. Prospects dried up as teaching positions in universities and institutes, the natural progression for any bright young science graduate, were denied him. Wandering miserable and penniless for nearly two years, the job at the patent office in Bern came as a huge relief. It was clearly a menial vocation for someone aspiring to be a theoretical physicist, yet from this insignificant position Einstein would rewrite the history of ideas.
