7. Ibid., 113.
8. For detailed discussions of the proofs, the nonmathematical reader is referred elsewhere. Several able mathematicians have rendered Gödel as accessible as he can be to the nonmathematician. First and foremost are Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, whose Gödel's Proof (dedicated to Bertrand Russell!), written five years before Gödel's death, first made Gödel possible for those with limited (though still hearty) mathematics. Since then, Gödel and incompleteness have entered the lay world via the bestselling Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Richard Hofstadter. A recent twist is Palle Yourgrau's A World Without Time, pairing Gödel and Einstein. Hofstadter is a cognitive scientist and Yourgrau a philosopher. Mathematicians continue to proffer “accessible” translations of the theorems. Two recent forays—delightful even for the mathematically challenged—are John L. Casti and Werner DePauli's Gödel: A Life of Logic and Rebecca Goldstein's Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel. Still, these treatments—simplified and made remarkably palatable to the nonmathematician—require patience and fortitude. More challenging, but widely acclaimed for its clarity and accuracy and for its critique of popular invocation and misuses of Gödel, is the late Torkel Franzen's Gödel's Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse, cited above.
9. Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, 1872–1921 (New York: Free Press, 1996), 118.
10. Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical Development (New York: Rout-ledge, 1995; first published in 1959), 57.
11. Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (London: Routledge, 1998), 150.
12. The Principia was destined to become a landmark of modern mathematics. Still, Cambridge University Press shied away from publishing on such a daunting subject, fearing a loss of revenue. Russell and Whitehead were forced to ante up fifty pounds each for publication costs. Autobiography, 155.
13. Rebecca Goldstein, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel (New York: Norton, 2006), 111–113.
14. Monk, Spirit of Solitude, 153–54.
15. Ibid., 154.
16. Dawson, 72.
17. Ibid., 77.
18. Bertrand Russell, Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997; first published 1912), 3.
19. On Planck and black-body radiation, see Helge Kragh, Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 58–64.
20. David Lindlay, The End of Physics: The Myth of a Unified Theory (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 11.
21. Republic, trans. Cornford, 1941, 527 (Stephanus numbers used).
22. Insights of Genius (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 180–82.
23. See Thomas S. Kuhn's Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity 1984–1912 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). Referenced in David C. Cassidy, Einstein and Our World (New York: Humanity Books, 2004), 53–54.
24. Albert Einstein, “Concerning an Heuristic Point of View Toward the Emission and Transformation of Light,” Ann. Phys. 17, 132, 1905; Translation into English, American Journal of Physics, vol. 33, no. 5, May 1965.
25. Throughout this section, I am indebted to the following: John Gribbin, Q Is for Quantum: An Encyclopedia of Particle Physics (New York: The Free Press, 1998); J. P. McEvoy, Introducing Quantum Theory (Cam-bridge, UK: Icon Books, 1999); Tony Rothman, Instant Physics (New York: Fawcett, 1995); David C. Cassidy, Einstein and our World (New York: Humanity Books, 2004); Michio Kaku, Einstein's Cosmos (New York: Atlas Books, 2004); Helge Kragh, Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); and Richard P. Feynman, Six Easy Pieces (New York: Basic Books, 1995; first published in 1963).
26. See “J. J. and the Cavendish,” by Sir G. P. Thomson, at History of the Department, Department of Physics, University of Cambridge, at http://www.phy.cam.ac.uk/cavendish/history/years/jjandcav.php.
27. De Broglie's Nobel speech is quoted in the Mactutor History of Mathematics biography of de Broglie by J. J. O'Connor and E. F. Robertson, http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Broglie.html.
28. At Heisenberg's doctoral oral examination were his adviser, Arthur Sommerfeld, and Wilhelm Wein, an experimental physicist whose lab course Heisenberg took with ill-concealed disdain. So impoverished was Heisenberg's knowledge of the experimental side he could not answer Wein's question about a simple storage battery. The incensed Wein wanted to fail Heisenberg. Only Sommerfeld's support salvaged a pass—with the grade of III, to Pauli's grade of I, a summa cum laude. Humiliated, Heisenberg set off for Max Born's laboratory wondering whether the job offer still stood. It did. Born himself was more theorist than experimentalist. See David C. Cassidy, Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1992), 151–53.
29. Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 38.
30. See “The Double-Slit Experiment” and “The Most Beautiful Experiment,” Physics Web, September 2003. Young's experiment actually ranked fifth in the contest; its application to electrons came in first. http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/15/9/2002.
31. Richard P. Feynman, Six Easy Pieces (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 132.
32. Niels Bohr, “The Bohr-Einstein Dialogue,” in Niels Bohr: A Centenary Volume, ed. A. P. French and P. J. Kennedy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 124.
33. Fölsing, 693.
34. Michio Kaku, Einstein's Cosmos (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), 176.
35. Kaku calls these particles a “motley collection,” compiled over the course of nearly 150 years, from the discovery of the cathode ray, which turned out to be the electron, to the “tau neutrino,” discovered in 2000. Every few years, it seemed, another particle found its way into Greek nomenclature, to perhaps some consternation. Kaku quotes Oppenheimer: “The Nobel Prize in Physics should be given to the physicist who does not discover a new particle that year” (Kaku, 225).
36. The Born-Einstein Letters, 88.
37. Ibid., 146.
38. Ibid., 152, 161, 163.
39. Ibid., 165, 170, 171–72.
40. Ibid., 216.
41. Kaku, 232.
42. Etienne Klein and Marc Lachieze-Rey, The Quest for Unity, trans. Axel Reisinger (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 41.
43. Abraham Pais, Subtle Is the Lord (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 235.
44. “Autobiographical Notes,” in Albert Einstein: Philosopher Scientist, The Library of Living Philosophers, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (New York: Tutor Publishing, 1949), 88–89.
45. Pais, 152.
46. Einstein-Besso Correspondence, 138. Translation by Burton Feldman and Katherine Williams.
47. Fölsing, 556.
48. Ideas and Opinions, 274.
49. Ibid., 233.
50. Quoted in Fölsing, 561, from a letter to Cornelius Lanczos dated January 24, 1938. Ernst Mach (1838–1916) was an influential and rigorous empiricist whose influence Einstein always acknowledged.
51. Einstein and the History of General Relativity, ed. Don Howard and John Stachel (Boston: Birkhauser, 1989), 315.
52. Note that in The Evolution of Physics, 257–58, Einstein commented on the relationship between matter and the energy of the field.
53. Pais, 141.
54. Ideas and Opinions, 230 (italics added).
55. Max Born and Albert Einstein, The Born-Einstein Letters, trans. Irene Born (New York: Macmillan, 2005), 82.
56. Ibid., 85.
57. Klein, 70.
58. Greene, 12.
59. Burton Feldman, The Nobel Prize, (New York: Arcade, 2000), 164.
60. Klein, 116.
61. Pais, 343.
62. Ibid., 343–50.
63. Ibid., 347.
64. Ibid., 350.
65. Enz, ed., Pauli: Writings, 116.
66. See Stanley Jaki, A Mind's Matter (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerd-mans, 2002), 1–5.
67. Harald Atmanspacher and Hans Primas, “Pauli's Ideas on Mind and Matter in the Context of Contemporary Science” in The Journal of Consciousness Studies, 13, 3, 5–50, 2006.
68. Russell, Human Knowledge, 422.
69. “Remarks on Bertrand Russell's Theory of Knowledge,” reprinted in Ideas and Opinions, 21.
70. Ibid., 24–25.
71. Collected Papers, vol. 11, 30.
72. Fölsing, 559. To Fölsing, Einstein's search for a unified theory was tainted and doomed by the belief that “mathematical criteria were ‘the only reliable source of truth.’” See 561 and 559ff.
73. Russell, “Einstein and the Theory of Relativity,” Collected Papers, vol. 11, 581–82.
74. From Scientific American, April 1950.
PART 4
1. Paul Lawrence Rose, Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 284.
2. Thomas Powers, Heisenberg's War (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2000), 344.
3. David Cassidy, Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1992), 30.
4. Ibid., 85.
5. Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 93.
6. Mark Walker, Nazi Science: Myth, Truth and the German Atomic Bomb (New York: Plenum Press, 1995), 77.
7. Ibid., 83.
8. Ibid., 84.
9. Rainer Karlsch, Hitlers Bombe (München: Deutsche Verlas-Anstalt, 2005).
10. Rose, 260.
11. Ibid., 269.
12. Ibid., 238.
13. Ibid., 239.
14. Ibid., 248, 258.
15. Walker, 230.
16. Peter Goodchild, J. Robert Oppenheimer: Shatter of Worlds (New York: Fromm Intl., 1985), 61.
17. Jane S. Wilson and Charlotte Serber, Standing By and Making Do (Los Alamos, NM: Los Alamos Historical Society, 1988), 4.
18. Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 523.
19. Ibid., 524.
20. Ibid.
21. S.S. Schweber, In the Shadow of the Bomb (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 70.
22. Rhodes, 444.
23. Ibid., 445.
24. Ibid., 449.
25. Ibid., 605.
26. Ibid., 571.
27. Paul Johnson, Modern Times (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 205.
28. Schweber, 110.
29. Ibid., 123–24.
30. Ibid., 127.
31. Peter Michelmore, The Swift Years: The Robert Oppenheimer Story (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1969), 223.
32. Fred Jerome, The Einstein File (New York: St. Martins, 2002), 5–6.
33. Ibid., 39–40.
34. Schweber, 17.
EPILOGUE
1. Abraham Pais, Subtle Is the Lord (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 467.
2. Gerald Holton and Yehuda Elkaka, eds., Albert Einstein: Historical Cultural Perspectives: The Centennial Symposium in Jerusalem (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 398.
3. Pais, 341.
4. John A. Wheeler, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics (New York: Norton, 1998), 237–38.
5. Pais, 14–15.
6. David Brewster, Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1965), 143.
7. Burton Feldman, The Nobel Prize (New York: Arcade, 2000), 140.
8. S. S. Schweber, In the Shadow of the Bomb (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 65.
9. David Lindley, The End of Physics: The Myth of a Unified Theory (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 11. In Brian Greene's aptly titled The Elegant Universe (London: Vintage, 2005), the war between the experimentalists and theorists is dismissed in favor of the as-yet unproven string theories: “String theorists have no desire for a solo trek to the upper reaches of Mount Nature; the would far prefer to share the burden and the excitement with experimental colleagues. It is merely a technological mismatch in our current situation—a historical asynchrony—that the theoretical ropes and crampons for the final push to the top have at least been partially fashioned, while the experimental ones do not yet exist. But this does not mean that string theory is fundamentally divorced from experiment. Rather, string theorists have high hopes of ‘kicking down a theoretical stone’ from the ultra-high-energy mountaintop to experimentalists working at a lower base camp” (210). Let it not be said that physics is a classless society.
10. See, for instance, Michio Kaku's Einstein's Cosmos (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 230–33.
11. Charles P. Enz, No Time to Be Brief: A Scientific Biography of Wolfgang Pauli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 389.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS IS NOT THE BOOK Burton Feldman would have written. He died in early 2003, just after finishing a first draft. That, along with extensive notes, is what he left us. His wife and my dear friend, Peggy, believed with all her heart that the book should be published. She was too ill to take on the task of completing it, and so she turned to me. Nothing would have given her more joy than to have seen this book in print.
I first met Burton and Peggy as a young teenager. They became my lifelong friends. For a time, Burton was also my teacher at the University of Denver. I have fond memories of Burton in the classroom. Never have I met so natural a teacher—undidactic, passionate, humorous, sometimes contentious, and always able to listen. His brilliance never excluded, never belittled, never competed. On the contrary, it was impossible to feel anything but intelligent and worthy when in Burton's presence. With this book I feel blessed, as if Burton had given me yet another gift, one through which I could imagine the two of us in conversation again.
No one knew better than Burton how profoundly any piece of writing changes through the arduous and essential process of revision. The book's central premises and core research are his alone. Only Burton, a polymath with an abiding faith in history, could have imagined so much from the scantily recorded, unrecoverable conversations of four men whom chance and World War II delivered to the insular town of Princeton. I have conjectured and completed where it seemed necessary. For any errors or omissions, I am entirely responsible.
The list of acknowledgments must be incomplete. Certainly, Burton consulted with colleagues and resources unknown to me. I have tried to include within the bibliography every possible source referenced in the research notes, as well as those I have used in completing the book. Burton would have wished to thank the staff of Penrose Library at the University of Denver. Robert Richardson, Nancy Hightower, Helene Orr, Maria “Mimi” Katzenback, Gerald Chapman, Tug Yourgrau, and David Markson were friends and colleagues to whom Burton turned for inspiration and critical acumen. Burton's sister, Eleanor Feldman Werlin, was a source of love and support. Dr. Maureen Onat and Mary Ann Coats cared for Peggy and became part of Burton's extended family in the last years of his life. Esther Oliveri carefully prepared the initial bibliography from Burton's library. Tad Spencer did much early editing and assembling of material. Elizabeth Richardson and Tad were there for Burton and Peggy and have also been there for me. I am grateful to them both.
I am indebted to friends and colleagues who have been generous with moral support and with advice in matters scientific and editorial, especially Ellen Katz, John Fitzgerald, Diane Marks, Paulette Toth, Zulema Seligsohn, and Thea Stone. Family, friends, and colleagues at New York Institute of Technology bore my frequent inattentiveness with grace and patience. I owe much to the library staff of NYIT for their 24/7 reference portal and to the New York Public Library for use of the Wertheim Study. Darcy Falken-hagen was a stalwart believer at an early, critical stage. James Jayo's steady hand helped shepherd the book through production. Above all, I thank Richard Seaver for his thoughtful editing, generosity, and guidance. His affection for Burton and Peggy has sustained this project in ways beyond measure.
Katherine Williams
INDEX
; absolute idealism, 68
Adler, Friedrich, 30
aging, scientific discovery and, ix–x, 7–16, 193–195
alchemy, 7
analytic philosophy, xii, 71, 118
“Annus mirabilis” papers, 31–33
antimatter, 117
anti-Semitism, 99, 108–109, 118, 121, 170, 212
“Appeal to Europeans, An” (Nicolai), 38, 39, 52
“Appeal to the Cultured World” (Fulda), 38
Aristotle, 128, 135
arts, 11–12
Atom and Archetype (Pauli and Jung), 109
atomic bomb, x, 16–17, 171
effect of, on science, 188–190
Germany's quest for, 165–167, 171–174
Los Alamos project, xv, 16–17, 174–180, 183–185, 188, 189
atomic structure, 32–33, 135–138
Autobiography (Russell), 60–61, 76
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 11
Barnes, Albert, 78
Beck, Otto, 38
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 11
Ben-Gurion, David, 46
Bergmann, Gustav, 87
Berlin, 36–37, 42–43, 50, 165–167
Bertram, Franca, 110
Besso, Michele, 24–25, 30, 150–151
beta-decay, xvii, 106–107
Bethe, Hans, 95, 98, 185
Black, Dora, 64–65, 65–66
black-body radiation, xvii, 132–134
Bohr, Niels, xiv, 13–16, 93, 97, 100–106, 128, 137–139, 167
Copenhagen interpretation and, xvii, 14, 101–104, 139–143, 147
Einstein and, 145–146
Heisenberg and, 4
Los Alamos project, 175–180
during World War II, 174–175
Born, Max, xiv, 10, 49, 95, 100–101, 103, 128, 145–146, 155, 157, 196
Born's probability interpretation, xvii
Bose-Einstein statistics, xvii, 143
bosons, xvii, xx
Boyle, Robert, 130
Brahe, Tycho, 34–35
Braque, Georges, 11
bright-line spectra, xvii
Brod, Max, 34–35, 42
Broglie, Louis de, xiv, 135, 139
Brownian motion, xvii, 32
Einstein's Genius Club Page 24