05/16/2007
Einstein Ironies
By my count, this is my 400th column for StocksandNews and the 8th anniversary of the birth of Dr. Bortrum. Last week, I noted that our Editor, Brian Trumbore, had given me the book “Einstein. His Life and Universe” by Walter Isaacson. The book is number 1 this week on the New York Times nonfiction best seller list. With all my unread journals and magazines piled up, I thought it would be months before I got around to reading the book. I also thought that I was fairly well versed concerning Einstein’s life and his scientific achievements. However, after posting last week’s column, I picked up the book, couldn’t put it down and have just finished reading it from cover to cover. Isaacson has done a masterful job weaving a tapestry of Einstein, the brilliant scientist, the rebel and the conservative, the pacifist and his role in promoting the atomic bomb, a gentle man who formed lifelong friendships but a less than admirable family man.
What kept me engrossed in the book were the details of the interactions of Einstein with other superstars in the world of physics. Einstein being my scientific idol, I’ll devote this 400th column to a few of the more or less ironic stories based on these interactions. Take, for example, the work for which he won the Nobel Prize, his explanation of the photoelectric effect published in his “miracle year” of 1905. In the photoelectric effect, when a metal surface is illuminated by light, electrons are emitted.
Two individuals played key roles in Einstein’s photoelectric work. In 1900, Max Planck solved the problem of how a hot body radiates heat. Instead of emitting heat continuously, Planck concluded that the radiation from the hot metal occurs in bursts, or “quanta”, of energy. In one of physics’ simplest, most important equations, he found the energy in one of these quanta to be E = hν, where the Greek symbol nu is the frequency of the radiation and h is a constant known as Planck’s constant. Planck considered these bursts or quanta to be a feature of the emission of light/heat from the hot body, not a feature of light itself. Planck was rewarded for this work in 1918 with a Nobel Prize.
The second individual was another German scientist, Philipp Lenard. In 1902, he published a definitive paper on the photoelectric effect and found that electrons were being emitted in unexpected ways. Lenard was also interested in other forms of radiation such as cosmic rays and cathode rays and received the 1905 Nobel Prize in physics. That same year, Einstein took Lenard’s photoelectric results and Planck’s quanta and put them together in a leap forward that won for Einstein his Nobel Prize in 1921.
Einstein said that the light that hit the metal was in the form of quanta that behaved like a particle and that the energy in the quanta got transferred to the electron, popping it off the surface of the metal. Einstein said essentially that Planck’s quanta should be taken seriously and that light behaves both as a particle and as a wave. It wasn’t until 1926 that Planck’s “quanta” would be called “photons”. Planck himself thought Einstein’s idea was a stretch and insisted that his quanta only referred to bursts formed during emission or absorption of the light. Ironically, Planck had in essence invented quantum mechanics but it was Einstein who insisted that these quanta were light itself, not just a feature of light’s generation or demise.
Einstein, in his paper, had suitably referenced the work of Lenard on the photoelectric effect. But Lenard himself was a real piece of work. He was very disturbed about the implications of Einstein’s papers on the photoelectric effect and also his other papers of 1905 that included the special theory of relativity, which upset the world of physics established by Isaac Newton. Einstein’s work did away with the “ether”, which was believed to pervade space and provide the medium for propagation of light waves, just as water and air provide the media for ocean and sound waves. Lenard was also quite anti-semitic and he railed against “Jewish” science. When Einstein finally got his Nobel Prize in 1921 for the photoelectric work, Lenard sent a letter of protest to the Nobel committee. In 1933, Adolf Hitler made Lenard the chief of Aryan science, a post Lenard held until the end of World War II.
The end of World War I, in 1918, found the world numb from the horrendous casualties suffered in that conflict. People desperately needed something to uplift their spirits. Although Einstein had by that time had revolutionized the world of physics, he was still relatively unknown to the general public. Then came the solar eclipse of 1919 and the British astronomers Frank Dyson and Arthur Eddington. They showed that light from a star was bent by the gravity of a star, our Sun. This confirmed a prediction of Einstein’s theory of gravity and suddenly Einstein was the equivalent of a rock star. He began to travel extensively and drew large crowds of admirers everywhere he went. People without the foggiest idea of what he was talking about would come to hear him lecturing on relativity.
After one of these lectures in Prague, a young fellow approached Einstein with a manuscript. The fellow told Einstein that he had calculated that, based on Einstein’s E = mc squared, it should be possible to use the energy released to make a “frightening explosive”. Einstein responded by calling the idea “foolish”. Ironically, in 1922, Einstein went to Japan and actually passed through the city of Hiroshima, the city that would be devastated by that “foolish” idea!
Einstein was wrong about another thing his relativity theories predicted. In 1916, the director of the Potsdam Observatory, Karl Schwarzschild, was with the German army on the Russian front directing artillery shells. While not shelling, he read some of Einstein’s papers and made some calculations of what Einstein’s theories predicted if the mass of a star was compressed into a very small space. He found that if the mass was compressed into a small enough space, nothing within what would later be called the Scharzschild radius could escape, not even light. He wrote Einstein about his calculations but Einstein didn’t believe that anything real could be involved. Scharzschild died at the front at age 42 from an autoimmune disease contracted there just a few weeks after the letter to Einstein. He, and Einstein, never got to know that black holes are quite real and we have one in the center of our own Milky Way galaxy.
A running theme throughout the book by Isaacson is that Einstein owed much of his success to his rebellious nature in that he did not hesitate to question authority. Later in his life, Einstein said, “To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself.” As he would continue to argue with Max Planck about light behaving as a both a particle and a wave, the quantum mechanics they had both spawned drew in a younger crowd of rebels. Quantum mechanics increasingly talked about probabilities, not certainties. We can’t follow an electron in its orbit around a nucleus – we can only sort of smear it out in a manner that tells us the probability that it will be in a certain place. Einstein was not at all happy and spent his later years trying to come up with a theory to unite his tidy world of the universe with the uncertain world of the tiny and quantum mechanics. His famous remark about God not playing dice would be answered by Niels Bohr, “Don’t tell God what to do!”
Einstein died of a burst aneurysm in 1955 at age 76. The night he died he was still writing down complex equations trying to succeed in his futile quest.
Allen F. Bortrum
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