Einstein for the 21St Century

Einstein for the 21st Century Einstein for the 21st Century HIS LEGACY IN SCIENCE, ART, AND MODERN CULTURE Peter L. Galison, Gerald Holton, and Silvan S. Schweber, Editors princeton university press | princeton and oxford Copyright © 2008 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Einstein for the twenty-first century: His legacy in science, art, and modern culture / Peter L. Galison, Gerald Holton, and Silvan S. Schweber, editors. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-691-13520-5 (hardcover : acid-free paper) 1. Einstein, Albert, 1879–1955—Influence. I. Galison, Peter Louis. II. Holton, Gerald James. III. Schweber, S. S. (Silvan S.) IV. Title: Einstein for the 21st century. QC16.E5E446 2008 530.092—dc22 2007034853 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Aldus and Trajan Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ press.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 13579108642 Contents Introduction ix part 1 Solitude and World 1 Who Was Einstein? Why Is He Still So Alive? 3 Gerald Holton 2 A Short History of Einstein’s Paradise beyond the Personal 15 Lorraine Daston 3 Einstein’s Jewish Identity 27 Hanoch Gutfreund 4 Einstein and God 35 Yehuda Elkana 5 Einstein’s Unintended Legacy: The Critique of Common-Sense Realism and Post-Modern Politics 48 Yaron Ezrahi 6 Subversive Einstein 59 Susan Neiman 7 Einstein and Nuclear Weapons 72 Silvan S. Schweber part 2 Art and World 8 Einstein and 20th-Century Art: A Romance of Many Dimensions 101 Linda Dalrymple Henderson 9 Rendering Time 130 Caroline A. Jones 10 Into the Bleed: Einstein and 21st-Century Art 150 Matthew Ritchie 11 Einstein and Music 161 Leon Botstein 12 Seeing the Unseen 176 E. L. Doctorow part 3 Science and World 13 The Assassin of Relativity 185 Peter L. Galison 14 Space, Time, and Geometry: Einstein and Logical Empiricism 205 Michael L. Friedman 15 Einstein as a Student 217 Dudley Herschbach 16 Learning from Einstein: Innovation in Science 239 Jürgen Renn 17 Einstein and ¯h : Advances in Quantum Mechanics 257 Jürg Fröhlich 18 Einstein’s Unknown Contribution to Quantum Theory 270 A. Douglas Stone 19 Einstein and the Quest for a Unified Theory 287 David Gross 20 Energy in Einstein’s Universe 299 Lisa Randall Notes 311 Contributors 341 Index 349 Introduction Peter L. Galison, Gerald Holton, and Silvan S. Schweber Among the many thousands of Albert Einstein’s letters, very few show him to be really angry. However, a rather fierce one was directed at the publisher of one of his books who had had the temerity to give that volume the title Mein Weltbild. That choice, Einstein wrote, was “tasteless and misleading,” for the book (later available in English as Ideas and Opinions) was only a collection of some of his separate essays on a variety of topics, ranging from science to politics and pacifism. What Einstein had called elsewhere “the proud term Welt- bild” was the essential determinant and goal of one’s intellectual life and character, a deeply held commitment into which, as he put it, “one could place the very center of gravity of one’s emotional life”—thus providing a coherent conception that would explain “every natural process, including life itself.” The book before you, which had its origin in lectures presented at the Berlin Einstein Symposium of 2005, is a unique attempt along two lines: the “inputs” to and “outputs” from Einstein’s worldview. The first line of inquiry garners, from the results of decades of scholarly research across a wide spec- trum of fields, the variety of main elements that, in the cauldron of Einstein’s inner sanctum, formed his unified view of the world. These inputs included, by his own account, his study of the work of scientists from Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Lorentz to Boltzmann, Planck, and other contemporaries; of philosophers—he referred to Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer, Mach, among others; of literature and music—his love for Goethe, Heine, Bach, Mozart; and of social and political affairs that touched his humanity. The other kind of presentations in these chapters deals with outputs, the effects streaming from Einstein’s work and persona, from his Weltbild, into the active life of his contemporaries and ours. More than any scientist since Newton and Darwin, Einstein has continued to inspire others to draw on his legacies, again across a wide variety of fields: scientists of course, from Minkowski, von Laue, Schrödinger, Born, to some of today’s most distin- guished researchers; philosophers and theologians; writers and visual artists; and the whole range of people, from humble individuals to statesmen, touched by Einstein’s beliefs and action in social and political affairs. One may well say that Einstein’s continuing influences on our culture are of a quality and quantity not less than those on which he himself drew. Part I: Solitude and World Our guiding question for this volume is this: How is it that Einstein, a physicist of the early 20th century, remains such a figure of fascination for so many fields of work, from the sciences to the humanities? Gerald Holton’s essay opens our volume with some reflections on how Einstein saw himself at that world histor- ical moment just after the Nazis came to power: “A man, a good European, a Jew.” And as Holton swiftly adds, a scientist—these four overlapping identities return in many of the chapters that follow. As a man, Einstein saw himself as singularly isolated, never quite able, at least in his later, world-famous life, to form the human bonds he saw linking others. Perhaps that separateness, that life apart, speaks to others’ fears and romantic wishes. As a good European, he both absorbed deep currents of central European culture and furiously resisted being enlisted to nationalistic strivings. He maintained that internationalism even un- der the enormous pressure of two world wars and a cold one. Later in life he found a cultural significance in Judaism, always resisting both too literal a God or too exclusivist a national striving within Zionism. To the rest of us, Einstein became a magnet by his constant battle to navigate alone while absorbing so much from—and giving back so much to—the broader world. Lorraine Daston takes up Holton’s first announced identity: Einstein’s search for a “paradise beyond the personal.” This life-long quest for relief from the “merely personal” was, for Einstein, surely in part a psychological liberation. It was also a feature of his science and his philosophy. Schopen- hauer, one of Einstein’s favorite philosophers, emphasized over and over how important it was for true knowledge to be had through a kind of will to will- lessness, a removal of the individual’s wants. Einstein’s own physics bore the mark of this desire to find an objective world not dependent on us, neither our particular perspective (frame of reference), nor more broadly still, our con- sciousness or measurement decisions. These struggles over objectivity in quantum mechanics, and in the broader world, are with us still. By contrast, Gutfreund, Elkana, and Ezrahi reveal Einstein’s striking sub- jectivity, as in his relationship with what he called his “tribe,” in his need to speak out on the social and intellectual issues of the day, and in the influence introduction x his work and that of other 20th-century scientists have had on democratic institutions. Thus Hanoch Gutfreund traces, in terms of roots and conse- quences, Einstein’s “discovery” of being a Jew outside doctrinal orthodoxies. As in most of his other attitudes, Einstein again surprises us by his idiosyn- cratic responses, both in his analysis of the causes of rampant anti-Semitism and in his growing attachment to a special version of Zionism. On that last point, Isaiah Berlin once wrote with admiration about the fact that “Einstein lent the prestige mondial of his great name, and in fact gave his heart, to the movement which created the state of Israel.” Yehuda Elkana, drawing also on the treasure trove of Einstein’s correspon- dence and nonscientific publications, daringly entitled his essay simply Ein- stein and God. He presents, with commentary, a coherent series of Einstein’s own public remarks that document his life-long struggle to sense the tran- scendental, beckoning to him from beyond mere natural phenomena. As in some other respects, on this task, too, Einstein and Newton agreed. When Niels Bohr once famously asked Einstein to stop referring so often in the same breath to science and to God, Bohr simply revealed one of the many deep-seated thematic differences between those two great scientists. But on at least one other topic, the major scientists largely agreed. Yaron Ezrahi takes up that topic in his challenging essay on Einstein’s Unintended Legacy: the changing relevance of modern science for the culture and epistemo- logical framework of democratic politics. His analysis begins with reference to the “Newtonian moment” characterizing earlier centuries, when the authority of a largely independent, consensual polity could be said to rest in good part on the concept that authority, both in society as well as in the understanding of na- ture itself, rested “not on hypotheses but on evidence”—on the widely accessi- ble evidence considered to operate within the frame of commonsense realism. Hence one could argue, as politicians of the time did, for a mutually rein- forcing bond between the laws and worldview of their science and those of their democratic society.

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