Walter Isaacson Great Innovators e-book boxed set

by Walter Isaacson

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: AMERICA

  1. Abraham Flexner telegram to Einstein, Oct. 1933, AEA 38-049; Abraham Flexner to Einstein, Oct. 13, 1933, AEA 38-050.

  2. “Einstein Arrives; Pleads for Quiet / Whisked from Liner by Tug at Quarantine,”New York Times , Oct. 18, 1933.

  3. “Einstein Views Quarters,”New York Times , Oct. 18, 1933; Rev. John Lampe interview, in Clark, 614; “Einstein to Princeton,”Time , Oct. 30, 1933.

  4. Brian 1996, 251.

  5. “Einstein Has Musicale,”New York Times , Nov. 10, 1933. The sketches that Einstein made for Seidel are now in the Judah Magnes Museum, endowed by the president of Hebrew University with whom Einstein fought.

  6. Bucky, 150.

  7. Thomas Torrance,“Einstein and God,” Center for Theological Inquiry, Princeton, ctinquiry.org/publications/reflections_volume_1/torrance.htm. Torrance says a friend related the tale to him.

  8. Eleanor Drorbaugh interview with Jamie Sayen, in Sayen, 64, 74.

  9. Sayen, 69; Bucky, 111; Fölsing, 732.

  10. “Had Pronounced Sense of Humor,”New York Times , Dec. 22, 1936.

  11. Brian 1996, 265.

  12. Abraham Flexner to Einstein, Oct. 13, 1933, in Regis, 34.

  13. “Einstein, the Immortal, Shows Human Side,” (Newark) Sunday Ledger, Nov. 12, 1933.

  14. Abraham Flexner to Elsa Einstein, Nov. 14, 1933, AEA 38-055.

  15. Abraham Flexner to Elsa Einstein, Nov. 15, 1933, AEA 38-059. Flexner also wrote to Herbert Maass, an Institute trustee, on Nov. 14, 1933: “I am beginning to weary a little of this daily necessity of ‘sitting down’ on Einstein and his wife. They do not know America. They are the merest children, and they are extremely difficult to advise and control. You have no idea the barrage of publicity I have intercepted.” Batterson, 152.

  16. Abraham Flexner to Einstein, Nov. 15, 1933, AEA 38-061.

  17. “Fiddling for Friends,”Time , Jan. 29, 1934; “Einstein in Debut as Violinist Here,”New York Times , Jan. 18, 1934.

  18. Stephen Wise to Judge Julian Mack, Oct. 20, 1933.

  19. Col. Marvin MacIntyre report to the White House Social Bureau, Dec. 7, 1933, AEA 33-131; Abraham Flexner to Franklin Roosevelt, Nov. 3, 1933; Einstein to Eleanor Roosevelt, Nov. 21, 1933, AEA 33-129; Eleanor Roosevelt to Einstein, Dec. 4, 1933, AEA 33-130; Elsa Einstein to Eleanor Roosevelt, Jan. 16, 1934, AEA 33-132; Einstein to Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, Jan. 25, 1934, AEA 33-134; “Einstein Chats about Sea,”New York Times , Jan. 26, 1934.

  20. Einstein to Board of Trustees of the IAS, Dec. 1–31, 1933.

  21. Johanna Fantova, Journal of conversations with Einstein, Jan. 23, 1954, in Calaprice, 354.

  22. Einstein to Max Born, Mar. 22, 1934; Erwin Schrödinger to Frederick Linde-mann, Mar. 29, 1934, Jan. 22, 1935.

  23. Einstein to Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, Nov. 20, 1933, AEA 32-369. The line is usually translated as “puny demigods on stilts.” The word Einstein uses, stelzbeinig, means stiff-legged, as if the legs were wooden stilts. It has nothing to do with height. Instead, it evokes the gait of a peacock.

  24. Einstein, “The Negro Question,”Pageant , Jan. 1946. In this essay, he was juxtaposing the generally democratic social tendency of Americans to the way they treated blacks. That became more of an issue for him than it was back in 1934, as will be noted later in this book.

  25. Bucky, 45; “Einstein Farewell,”Time , Mar. 14, 1932.

  26. Vallentin, 235. See also Elsa Einstein to Hertha Einstein (wife of music historian Alfred Einstein, a distant cousin), Feb. 24, 1934, AEA 37-693: “The place is charming, altogether different from the rest of America . . . Here everything is tinged with Englishness—downright Oxford style.”

  27. “Einstein Cancels Trip Abroad,”New York Times , Apr. 2, 1934.

  28. Marianoff, 178. Other sources report that Ilse’s ashes, or at least some of them, were brought to a cemetery in Holland, to a place chosen by the widower Rudi Kayser.

  29. This entire story is from an interview given by the Blackwoods’ son James to Denis Brian on Sept. 7, 1994, and is detailed in Brian 1996, 259–263.

  30. Ibid. See also James Blackwood, “Einstein in the Rear-View Mirror,”Princeton History , Nov. 1997.

  31. “Einstein Inventor of Camera Device,”New York Times , Nov. 27, 1936.

  32. Bucky, 5. Bucky’s book is written, in part, as a running conversation, though there are sections that actually draw from other Einstein interviews and writings.

  33. Bucky, 16–21.

  34. New York Times , Aug. 4, 1935; Brian 1996, 265, 280.

  35. Vallentin, 237.

  36. Brian 1996, 268.

  37. Fölsing, 687; Brian 1996, 279.

  38. Calaprice, 251.

  39. Bucky, 25.

  40. Clark, 622.

  41. Pais 1982, 454.

  42. Jon Blackwell, “The Genius Next Door,”The Trentonian , www.capitalcentury.com/1933.html; Seelig 1956a, 193; Sayen, 78; Brian 1996, 330.

  43. Einstein to Barbara Lee Wilson, Jan. 7, 1943, AEA 42-606; Dukas and Hoff-mann, 8; “Einstein Solves Problem That Baffled Boys,”New York Times , June 11, 1937.

  44. “Einstein Gives Advice to a High School Boy,”New York Times , Apr. 14, 1935; Sayen, 76.

  45. Elsa Einstein to Leon Watters, Dec. 10, 1935, AEA 52-210.

  46. Vallentin, 238.

  47. Bucky, 13.

  48. Einstein to Hans Albert Einstein, Jan. 4, 1937, AEA 75-926.

  49. Hoffmann 1972, 231.

  50. Einstein, “Lens-like Action of a Star by Deviation of Light in the Gravitational Field,”Science (Dec. 1936); Einstein with Nathan Rosen, “On Gravitational Waves,”Journal of the Franklin Institute (Jan. 1937). The gravitational wave paper was originally submitted to Physical Review. Editors there sent it to a referee, who noted flaws. Einstein was outraged, withdrew the paper, and had it published instead by the Franklin Institute. He then realized he was wrong after all (after the anonymous referee indirectly let him know), and he and Rosen juggled many modifications, just as Elsa was dying. Daniel Kinneflick uncovered the details of this saga and provides a fascinating acount in “Einstein versus the Physical Review,”Physics Today (Sept. 2005).

  51. Einstein to Max Born, Feb. 1937, in Born 2005, 128.

  52. Einstein, “The Causes of the Formation of Meanders in the Courses of Rivers and of the So-Called Baer’s Law,” Jan. 7, 1926.

  53. “Dr. Einstein Welcomes Son to America,”New York Times , Oct. 13, 1937.

  54. Bucky, 107.

  55. Einstein to Mileva Mari, Dec. 21, 1937, AEA 75-938.

  56. Einstein to Frieda Einstein, Apr. 11, 1937, AEA 75-929.

  57. Robert Ettema and Cornelia F. Mutel, “Hans Albert Einstein in South Carolina,”Water Resources and Environmental History , June 27, 2004; “Einstein’s Son Asks Citizenship,”New York Times , Dec. 22, 1938. He applied for citizenship on Dec. 21, 1938, at the U.S. District Court in Greenville, S.C. Some biographies have him living in Greensboro, N.C., at the time, but that is incorrect.

  58. Einstein to Hans Albert and Frieda Einstein, Jan. 1939; James Shannon,“Einstein in Greenville,”The Beat (Greenville, S.C.), Nov. 17, 2001.

  59. Highfield and Carter, 242.

  60. “Hitler Is ‘Greatest’ in Princeton Poll: Freshmen Put Einstein Second and Chamberlain Third,”New York Times , Nov. 28, 1939. The story reports that this was for the second year in a row.

  61. Collier’s , Nov. 26, 1938; Einstein 1954, 191.

  62. Sayen, 344; “Einstein Fiddles,”Time , Feb. 3, 1941. Time reported of a little concert in Princeton for the American Friends Service Committee: “Einstein proved that he could play a slow melody with feeling, turn a trill with elegance, jigsaw on occasion. The audience applauded warmly. Fiddler Einstein smiled his broad and gentle smile, glanced at his watch in fourth-dimensional worriment, played his encore, peered at the watch again, retired.”

  63. Jerome, 77.

  64. Einstein to Isaac Don Levine, Dec. 10, 1934, AEA 50-928; Isaac Don Levine,
Eyewitness to History (New York: Hawthorne, 1973), 171.

  65. Sidney Hook to Einstein, Feb. 22, 1937, AEA 34-731; Einstein to Sidney Hook, Feb. 23, 1937, AEA 34-735.

  66. Sidney Hook, “My Running Debate with Einstein,”Commentary , July 1982, 39.

  CHAPTER TWENTY: QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT

  1. Hoffmann 1972, 190; Rigden, 144; Léon Rosenfeld, “Niels Bohr in the Thirties,” in Rozental 1967, 127; N. P. Landsman, “When Champions Meet: Re-thinking the Bohr–Einstein Debate,”Studies in the History and Science of Modern Physics 37 (Mar. 2006): 212.

  2. Einstein 1949b, 85.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Einstein to Max Born, Mar. 3, 1947, in Born 2005, 155 (not in AEA).

  5. Einstein to Erwin Schrödinger, June 19, 1935, AEA 22-47.

  6. New York Times , May 4 and 7, 1935; David Mermin, “My Life with Einstein,” Physics Today (Jan. 2005).

  7. Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen, “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Regarded as Complete?,” Physical Review, May 15, 1935 (received Mar. 25, 1935); www.drchinese.com/David/EPR.pdf.

  8. Another formulation of the experiment would be for one observer to measure the position of a particle while at the “same moment” another observer measures the momentum of its twin. Then they compare notes and, supposedly, know the position and momentum of both particles. See Charles Seife, “The True and the Absurd,” in Brockman, 71.

  9. Aczel 2002, 117.

  10. Whitaker, 229; Aczel 2002, 118.

  11. Niels Bohr, “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Regarded as Complete?,”Physical Review , Oct. 15, 1935 (received July 13, 1935).

  12. Greene 2004, 102. Note that Arthur Fine says that the synopsis of EPR used by Bohr “is closer to a caricature of the EPR paper than it is to a serious reconstruction.” Fine says that Bohr and other interpreters of Einstein feature a “criterion of reality” that Einstein in his own later writings on EPR does not feature, even though the EPR paper as written by Podolsky does talk about determining “an element of reality.” Brian Greene’s book is among those that do emphasize the “criterion of reality” element. See Arthur Fine, “The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Argument in Quantum Theory,”Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-epr/, and also: Fine 1996, chapter 3; Mara Beller and Arthur Fine, “Bohr’s Response to EPR,” in Jann Faye and Henry Folse, eds., Niels Bohr and Contemporary Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1994), 1–31.

  13. Arthur Fine has shown that Einstein’s own critique of quantum mechanics was not fully captured in the way that Podolsky wrote in the EPR paper, and especially in the way that Bohr and the “victors” described it. Don Howard has built on Fine’s work and emphasized the issues of “separability” and “locality.” See Howard 1990b.

  14. Einstein to Erwin Schrödinger, May 31, 1928, AEA 22-22; Fine, 18.

  15. Erwin Schrödinger to Einstein, June 7, 1935, AEA 22-45, and July 13, 1935, AEA 22-48.

  16. Einstein to Erwin Schrödinger, June 19, 1935, AEA 22-47.

  17. Erwin Schrödinger, “The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics,” third installment, Dec. 13, 1935, www.tu-harburg.de/rzt/rzt/it/QM/cat.html.

  18. More specifically, Schrödinger’s equation shows the rate of change over time of the mathematical formulation of the probabilities for the outcome of possible measurements made on a particle or system.

  19. Einstein to Erwin Schrödinger, June 19, 1935, AEA 22-47.

  20. I am grateful to Craig Copi and Douglas Stone for helping to compose this section.

  21. Einstein to Erwin Schrödinger, Aug. 8, 1935, AEA 22-49; Arthur Fine, “The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Argument in Quantum Theory,”Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-epr/. Note that Arthur Fine uncovered some of the Einstein-Schrödinger correspondence. Fine, chapter 3.

  22. Erwin Schrödinger to Einstein, Aug. 19, 1935, AEA 22-51.

  23. Erwin Schrödinger, “The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics,” Nov. 29, 1935, www.tu-harburg.de/rzt/rzt/it/QM/cat.html.

  24. Einstein to Erwin Schrödinger, Sept. 4, 1935, AEA 22-53. Schrödinger’s paper had not been published, but Schrödinger included its argument in his Aug. 19, 1935, letter to Einstein.

  25. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrodinger’s_cat.

  26. Einstein to Erwin Schrödinger, Dec. 22, 1950, AEA 22-174.

  27. David Bohm and Basil Huey, “Einstein and Non-locality in the Quantum Theory,” in Goldsmith et al., 47.

  28. John Stewart Bell, “On the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox,”Physic 1, no. 1 (1964).

  29. Bernstein 1991, 20.

  30. For an explanation of how Bohm and Bell set up their analysis, see Greene 2004, 99–115; Bernstein 1991, 76.

  31. Bernstein 1991, 76, 84.

  32. New York Times , Dec. 27, 2005.

  33. New Scientist , Jan. 11, 2006.

  34. Greene 2004, 117.

  35. In the decoherent-histories formulation of quantum mechanics, the coarse graining is such that the histories don’t interfere with one another: if A and B are mutually exclusive histories, then the probability of A or B is the sum of the probabilities of A and of B as it should be. These “decoherent” histories form a tree-like structure, with each of the alternatives at one time branching out into alternatives at the next time, and so forth. In this theory, there is much less emphasis on measurement than in the Copenhagen version. Consider a piece of mica in which there are radioactive impurities emitting alpha particles. Each emitted alpha particle leaves a track in the mica. The track is real, and it makes little difference whether a physicist or other human being or a chinchilla or a cockroach comes along to look at it. What is important is that the track is correlated with the direction of emission of the alpha particle and could be used to measure the emission. Before the emission takes place, all directions are equally probable and contribute to a branching of histories. I am grateful to Murray Gell-Mann for his help with this section. See also Gell-Mann, 135–177; Murray Gell-Mann and James Hartle, “Quantum Mechanics in the Light of Quantum Cosmology,” in W. H. Zurek, ed., Complexity, Entropy and the Physics of Information (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1990), 425–459, and “Equivalent Sets of Histories and Multiple Quasiclassical Realms,” May 1996, www.arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9404013. This view is derived from the many-worlds interpretation pioneered in 1957 by Hugh Everett.

  36. The literature on Einstein and realism is fascinating. This section relies on the works of Don Howard, Gerald Holton, Arthur I. Miller, and Jeroen van Dongen cited in the bibliography.

  Don Howard has argued that Einstein was never a true Machian nor a true realist, and that his philosophy of science did not change much over the years. “On my view, Einstein was never an ardent ‘Machian’ positivist, and he was never a scientific realist, at least not in the sense acquired by the term ‘scientific realist’ in later twentieth-century philosophical discourse. Einstein expected scientific theories to have the proper empirical credentials, but he was no positivist; and he expected scientific theories to give an account of physical reality, but he was no scientific realist. Moreover, in both respects his views remained more or less the same from the beginning to the end of his career.” Howard 2004.

  Gerald Holton, on the other side, argues that Einstein underwent “a pilgrimage from a philosophy of science in which sensationalism and empiricism were at the center, to one in which the basis was a rational realism ... For a scientist to change his philosophical beliefs so fundamentally is rare” (Holton 1973, 219, 245). See also Anton Zeilinger, “Einstein and Absolute Reality,” in Brockman, 123: “Instead of accepting only concepts that can be verified by observation, Einstein insisted on the existence of a reality prior to and independent of observation.”

  Arthur Fine’s The Shaky Game explores all sides of the issue. He develops for himself what he calls a “natural ontological attitude” that is neither realist nor antirealist, but instead “mediates between the two.” Of E
instein he says, “I think there is no backing away from the fact that Einstein’s so-called realism has a deeply empiricist core that makes it a ‘realism’ more nominal than real.” Fine, 130, 108.

  37. Einstein to Jerome Rothstein, May 22, 1950, AEA 22-54.

  38. Einstein to Donald Mackay, Apr. 26, 1948, AEA 17-9.

  39. Einstein 1949b, 11.

  40. Gerald Holton, “Mach, Einstein and the Search for Reality,” in Holton 1973, 245. Arthur I. Miller disagrees with some of Holton’s interpretation. He stresses that Einstein’s point was that for something to be real it should be measurable in principle, even if not actually measurable in real life, and he was content using thought experiments to “measure” something. Miller 1981, 186.

  41. Einstein 1949b, 81.

  42. Einstein to Max Born, comments on a paper, Mar. 18, 1948, in Born 2005, 161.

  43. Einstein, “The Fundamentals of Theoretical Physics,”Science , May 24, 1940; Einstein 1954, 334.

  44. For example, Arthur Fine argues, “Causality and observer-independence were primary features of Einstein’s realism, whereas a space/time representation was an important but secondary feature.” Fine, 103.

  45. Einstein, “Physics, Philosophy and Scientific Progress,”Journal of the International College of Surgeons 14 (1950), AEA 1-163; Fine, 98.

  46. Einstein, “Physics and Reality,”Journal of the Franklin Institute (Mar. 1936), in Einstein 1954, 292. Gerald Holton says that this is more properly translated: “The eternally incomprehensible thing about the world is its comprehensibility”; see Holton, “What Precisely Is Thinking?,” in French, 161.

  47. Einstein to Maurice Solovine, Mar. 30, 1952, in Solovine, 131 (not in AEA).

  48. Einstein to Maurice Solovine, Jan. 1, 1951, in Solovine, 119.

  49. Einstein to Max Born, Sept. 7, 1944, in Born 2005, 146, and AEA 8-207.

  50. Born 2005, 69. He put Einstein in the category of “conservative individuals who were unable to free their minds from the prevailing philosophical prejudices.”

  51. Einstein to Maurice Solovine, Apr. 10, 1938, in Solovine, 85.