SUBRAHMANYAN CHANDRASEKHAR was renowned for keeping a calm exterior, but internally: "I am almost ashamed to confess it. Years run apace, but nothing done! I wish I had been more concentrated, directed and disciplined." At the time of this lament he was twenty, and it was but one year since the sea journey where he'd peered into the catch-22 from E=mc2, which, along with other work, would ultimately lead to the understanding of black holes. He accepted a post at the University of Chicago, but his reserve meant that he and his wife settled in an observatory town over 100 miles from the main campus, largely so that they wouldn't have to embarrass Chicago faculty members by turning down invitations where alcohol or meat might be served. He diligently drove the full roundtrip journey to Chicago for his teaching when needed, even during winter storms—once for a class that had only two students. (It was worth the drive, as that entire class—Yang and Lee—went on to win the Nobel Prize.)
Forty years after his rebuff by Eddington, Chandra finally returned to the study of black holes. There are photographs of brightly dressed young physicists in the clothes of the early 1970s, sitting around a table in the Caltech cafeteria, listening to this perfectly tailored, suited man of the generation of their grandparents. He surpassed almost all of them in his agility with new applications for general relativity, and in 1983, over half a century after the sea voyage, he published one of the fundamental works on the mathematical foundations of black holes. That was the year he won the Nobel Prize, and then—following his usual habit—he shifted directions once again, expanding an elaborate exploration of Shakespeare, and of esthetics generally.
In mid-1999, NASA launched a large satellite for deep space observation, capable of capturing images from the very edge of black holes. The satellite crosses over much of the earth—the Arabian Sea, Cambridge, and Chicago included— in its mission, and it is called the CHANDRA X-RAY OBSERVATORY.
Although ERWIN FREUNDLICH missed out on the 1919 eclipse expedition, his spirits recovered when industrialists in the new Weimar Republic donated large funds to build a great astronomical tower in Potsdam. This would allow further tests of general relativity's predictions, even in periods when there was no eclipse. Zeiss supplied the equipment, and Mendelsohn, the great expressionist architect, designed the building—it's the famous Einstein Tower featured in many books on 1920s German architecture.
Through Einstein's help, Freundlich became the Einstein Tower's scientific director. The measurements he undertook, however, proved to be impossible with the technology of the time. Only in 1960, at Harvard, did another team manage to give this further confirmation of Einstein's work.
Notes
These notes are for people who want to know more. Some are serious: why Tom Stoppard has it all wrong when he uses relativity to try to back moral viewpoints in his plays; what the deep links are between relativity, thermodynamics, and the Talmud; how close Germany really came to getting radioactive weapons. Other notes are lighter, though also significant in their own way: I loved finding out that there are parts of World War I German battleships on the moon; that Maxwell didn't write Maxwell's equations; that Faraday never said, "Well, Prime Minister, someday you can tax it"; and even why Einstein never liked calling his work the theory of relativity.
Preface
"Einstein explained his theory to me every day . . .": Carl Seelig, Albert Einstein: A Documentary Biography (London: Staples Press, 1956), pp. 80-81.
George Marshall saw to it . . . : Leslie Groves, Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project (London: Andre Deutsch, 1963), pp. 199-201; Andrew Deutsch; see also Samuel Goudsmit, Alsos: The Failure in German Science (London: Sigma Books, 1947), p. 13.
1. Bern Patent Office, 1905
Letter to Professor Wilhelm Ostwald: Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Vol. I, The Early Years: 1879-1902, trans. Anna Beck; consultant Peter Havas (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 164. I've added Ostwald's address.
". . . nothing would ever become of you . . .": Ibid., p. xx.
"Your presence in the class . . .": Philipp Frank, Einstein: His Life and Times, trans. George Rosen (New York: Knopf, 1947, revised 1953), p. 17.
"displayed some quite good achievements": Albrecht Folsing, Albert Einstein: A Biography (London: Viking Penguin, 1997), pp. 115-16.
. . . jokingly called his department of theoretical physics . . . : The phrasing is recalled by a visitor, Rudolf Laden-burg; in Folsing, Albert Einstein, p. 222; see also Anton Reiser, Albert Einstein, a Biographical Portrait (New York: A. and C. Boni, 1930), p. 68.
"I like him a great deal . . .": Folsing, Albert Einstein, p. 73.
. . . feeling "the greatest excitement": Reiser, Einstein, p. 70.
"The idea is amusing . . . that I cannot know." Collected Papers, vol. 5, doc. 28. The friend was Conrad Habicht.
E=mc2 had arrived in the world: Einstein did not write E=mc2 in 1905. In the symbols he was using at the time, the equation would have come out as L=MV2. But more important, in 1905 he still only had the notion that when an object sends out energy, it will lose a small amount of mass in the process. The full understanding that the reverse happens only came later.
During World War II, when Einstein wrote out a copy of his main 1905 relativity paper to be auctioned for war bonds, he turned at one point to his secretary, Helen Dukas, as he was taking down her dictation: "Did I say that?" She told him he had. "I could have said it much more simply," he replied. (The story is in Banesh Hoffman, Einstein, Creator and Rebel (New York: Viking, 1972), p. 209.
2. E Is for Energy
One of the men who took a central role in changing this . . . : There were other researchers involved in understanding the conservation of energy, but focusing on Faraday gave me a chance to bring in the concept of a field pervading seemingly "empty" space, so central to Einstein's later work. For the other originators and their links, start with Thomas Kuhn's essay and Crosbie Smith's The Science of Energy, listed in the Guide to Further Reading for this chapter. Faraday's own views on how thoroughly energy was conserved differed from those of many subsequent researchers; see e.g., Joseph Agassi's Faraday as Natural Philosopher (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).
. . . a lecturer in Copenhagen had now found . . . : The Dane was Hans Christian Oersted, and most physics textbooks say that he "stumbled" across his results. But that's not possible: a compass needle won't be deflected if the compass is at an angle to the electric wire, or if the current in the wire is too low or too high, or if the wire is a low-resistance copper, and so on. In fact Oersted had been hunting for this link between electricity and magnetism for at least eight years. The reason that's so often missed is that his motivation hadn't come from standard scientists, but from Kant, Goethe (of the Elective Affinities), and, especially, Schelling. But Faraday recognized what Oersted had really been up to.
Note that Oersted's success doesn't mean all extrascientific motivations prove successful. An ability to objectively assess what such motivations offer is crucial. Einstein was excellent at this, at least early on in his career: his study of Hume readied him for seeing how arbitrary the woven definitions that physicists used were, and so how far they could someday be stretched; his love of Spinoza was a constant, urgent reminder of the ordered beauty waiting in our universe. Goethe, by contrast, was almost always poor at using philosophy in science, and wasted years on a theory of vision, simply because he was convinced it "should" be true. As the old saying has it, to do mathematics you need paper, a pen, and a wastebasket; to do philosophy, the paper and pen are enough.
"You know me as well or better . . .": The quote is from a letter from Faraday to Sarah Bernard, The Correspondence of Michael Faraday, vol. 1, ed. Frank A. J. L. James (London: Institute of Electrical Engineering, 1991), p. 199.
From his religious background, he imagined . . . : This is my own interpretation, building on ideas from cognitive anthropology on correlates between social behavior and ideologies. For a more conventional view, see Ca
ntor's Michael Faraday, Sandemanian and Scientist in the Guide to Further Reading.
"Why, Prime Minister, someday you can tax it.": It's a catchy story, and pleasing for engineering types, but the phrase has never been found in Faraday's letters, or in the letters of anyone who knew him, or in any newspaper accounts of the time, or in any of the biographies written by individuals who had been close to him. American writers often recount it as having been said to Gladstone, which is less than convincing, as Gladstone became prime minister forty-seven years after Faraday's discovery, at a time when electrical devices were common. The British government had long been aware that its strength had grown with industrial innovation.
"All at once he exclaimed . . .": Silvanus P. Thompson, Michael Faraday: His Life and Work (London: Cassell, 1898), p. 51
Faraday's invisible whirling lines . . . : It's the first modern occurrence of the notion of a "field." The reason this came as such a surprise in 1820s Europe was that for over a century, all respectable physicists had "known" that no such thing could exist. The medievals might have believed the heavens were full of goblins and spirits and unseeable, occult forces, but when Newton had shown how gravity could work instantaneously across empty space, without any intervening objects to carry it along, he had been "sweeping cobwebs off the sky."
Yet while others accepted that as given, Faraday researched enough to find that Newton himself had viewed the notion of entirely empty space as just a provisional step. Faraday liked quoting one of Newton's 1693 letters to the astronomically curious young theologian Bentley: ". . . that one body can act upon another at a distance, through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else . . . is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it."
Both quotes are from Maxwell's essay "On Action at a Distance," in Volume II of The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, ed. W. D. Niven. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1890), pp. 315, 316.
. . .and then Humphry Davy accused him . . . : What actually happened? It's true that Davy and the researcher William Hyde Wollaston had already started work on this topic, but Davy and Wollaston were nowhere near reaching Faraday's great result—and Faraday was not the sort to steal. To get an idea of Davy's hinted accusations, there are Faraday's distraught letters, and Wollaston's curt response, especially the letters of October 8 and November 1,1821, in James, ed. The Correspondence of Michael Faraday. A measured discussion is available in Michael Faraday: A Biography, by L. Pearce Williams (London: Chapman and Hall, 1965), pp. 152-160.
Faraday never spoke out against Davy: But he was hurt. For years Faraday had been accumulating a scrapbook on Davy: there were geological sketches as a reminder of their travels together, drafts of several of Davy's papers, which Faraday had copied out in full in his own neat hand; friendly letters Davy had sent him in the past; little sketched doodles of events in their life. The scrapbook is arranged chronologically. After September 1821, Faraday never added to it again.
Letter of May 28, 1850, from Charles Dickens: The Selected Correspondence of Michael Faraday, vol. 2:1849-1866, ed. L. Pearce Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 583.
But Faraday's vision . . . a satisfactory alternative: In Faraday's time, energy conservation was just an empirical observation. Only in 1919 did Emmy Noether give a deeper explanation of why it was so persistently noted. For good introductions to the links between symmetry and conservation laws, see The Force of Symmetry, by Vincent Icke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), especially the discussion on p. 114; or Chapter 8 of Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics, by A. Zee (Princeton. N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986).
this quiet school . . . student-centered lines: Einstein had the added advantage of lodging with Jost Winteler, the school's director, who twenty years before had completed an immensely original doctorate on the Relativitdt der Verhdltnisse, or the "situational relativity" of surface features in a language, and how those stemmed from deeper, unchanging properties of the language's sound systems. The structural overlaps with Einstein's later work in physics are profound, down even to Einstein's preference for the label Invariant Theory for what he had created— the very term Winteler had used. For background on Winteler's thesis, see pp. 143ff of Roman Jakobson's contribution to Albert Einstein, Historical and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Gerald Holton and Yehuda Elkana (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982); there's also the charming essay "My Favorite Topics" in On Language: Roman Jakobson, ed. Linda R. Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 61-66.
4. m Is for mass
[Lavoisier] . . . was the man who first showed . . . a single connected whole: The word mass is in quotes, for Lavoisier's findings were only about the conservation of matter, while in E=mc2 the "m" stands for inertial mass. This is a much more general thing, concerned not with the detailed inner properties of an object, but simply, in the tradition of Galileo and Newton, with its overall resistance to being shifted or pushed. The distinction seems fussy, but is fundamental. Astronauts find themselves weighing less when they're on the moon than they did before leaving the Earth, but that isn't because parts of them have disappeared. In the same way, as we'll see in Chapter 5, if you watch a sufficiently fast rocket, you'll see its mass increase immensely, but that happens without more atoms popping into being in its metal frame, or indeed without the atoms in its body getting pudgy at all.
What makes Lavoisier worth concentrating on is that his work on the conservation of matter ended up boosting interest in the conservation of mass, even though by today's understanding there's no reason for mass and matter to always be linked. In the late 1700s, however, no one cared that what he was "really" showing was the conservation of atoms—for no one in his time had a clear notion that atoms as physical entities existed.
the moment came . . . a truly major experiment: If one asks "Who was the first to show that the conservation of mass is true?" the answer has to be "No one, really." Lavoisier had shown in 1772 that some sort of air joined with metal when it was heated—but that was largely an extension of what de Morveau, Turgot, and others had done before him. In 1774 Lavoisier did carry out more extensive experiments with lead and tin, confirming that what carried the extra weight was air rushing into the heated containers— but this too wasn't entirely original, building on concepts he'd borrowed from the unsuspecting Englishman Priestley. Even the 1775 confirmatory experiments Lavoisier carried out with mercury, ended up being phrased in a way that atomists from Roman times would have taken for granted. Yet Lavoisier did more than grab credit for what others had done. Priestley and the others hadn't fully conceived of a conceptual system that made sense of these various experiments. Lavoisier had.
On the different attitudes brought to bear—as well as the historiographical considerations involved—see Simon Schaffer's accomplished "Measuring Virtue: Eudiometry, Enlightenment and Pneumatic Medicine," in The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century, ed. A. Cunningham and R. K. French (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 281-318.
"Everybody confirms that M. Lavoisier . . . French capital": Arthur Donovan, Antoine Lavoisier: Science, Administration, and Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 230.
"I am the anger, the just anger . . .": Louis Gottschalk, Jean Paul Marat: A Study in Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).
"Our address is . . . room at the end": Letter from Lavoisier to his wife, November 30,1793 (10 Frimaire, Year II); in Jean-Pierre Poirier, Lavoisier: Chemist, Biologist, Economist (College Park, Penn.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), p. 356.
The trial itself was on May 8: It's common to read that when Lavoisier was condemned to death, the presiding judge declared, "The Revolution has no need for savants." But it's very unlikely that the president of the court, Jean-Bap tiste Coffinhal, ever said that. The trial was not of individuals, but of t
he full group of senior members of the General Farm; Lavoisier was not singled out. Fairly detailed accounts of the proceedings survive. What infuriated the court and the jury—which included a barber, a stagecoach employee, a jeweler, and the former Marquis de Mont-fabert, now known simply as Dix-Aout (August 10)—was the way the tax farmers had used their position to extort profits. Many scientists thrived during the Revolution, or at least survived by staying relatively quiet at the various interludes when passions were highest: Carnot, Monge, Laplace, Coulomb, and others. (The phrase "no need for savants" seems to have been invented two years later in a eulogy read by Antoine Fourcroy, a one-time student of Lavoisier's who'd become caught up in Revolutionary enthusiasm and now was trying to backpedal, showing that by all means he hadn't been cowardly in standing aside when his former mentor was attacked.)
"was led to the scaffold in a pitiful state": The witness was Eugene Cheverny, in Poirier, Lavoisier, p. 381.
Breathing was more of the same: With such insights, Lavoisier also became the founder of modern biology, by opening up the basics of physiology. Human blood, for example, is mostly water, and if you try to mix oxygen into water, not a great deal will stay there. But if you scatter some finely ground-up iron filings into the water, then oxygen you pump in will stick to that iron just as it did in his lab. (Each iron fragment quickly starts rusting, and in doing so pulls in a great number of oxygen molecules, making them stick. The result is that the iron-rich water can hold on to a lot of oxygen.) This is how blood works: it's red for the same reason that the iron-rich clay soil of Georgia is red.
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