Free ebooks ==> www.Ebook777.com www.Ebook777.com Einstein’s Dice and Schrödinger’s Cat Free ebooks ==> www.Ebook777.com www.Ebook777.com Einstein’s Dice and Schrödinger’s Cat How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unifi ed Theory of Physics Paul Halpern, PhD A Member of the Perseus Books Group New York Free ebooks ==> www.Ebook777.com Copyright © 2015 by Paul Halpern Published by Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For infor- mation, address Basic Books, 250 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10107. Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk pur- chases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected]. Designed by Pauline Brown Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Halpern, Paul, 1961– Einstein’s dice and Schrödinger’s cat : how two great minds battled quantum randomness to create a unifi ed theory of physics / Paul Halpern, PhD. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-465-07571-3 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-465-04065-0 (e-book) 1. Quantum chaos. 2. Quantum theory—Philosophy. 3. Physics—Philosophy. 4. Unifi ed fi eld theories. 5. Einstein, Albert, 1879–1955. 6. Schrödinger, Erwin, 1887–1961. I. Title. QC174.17.C45H35 2015 530.13'3—dc23 2014041325 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 www.Ebook777.com Dedicated to the memory of Max Dresden, my PhD advisor, whose passion for the history of twentieth-century physics was truly inspiring Free ebooks ==> www.Ebook777.com Well who am I? (This question is meant in general, the “I” not referring just to the present writer.) The Image of God, gifted with power of thought to try and understand His world. However naive my attempt at this may be, I do have to value it higher than scrutinizing Nature for the purpose of inventing a device to . say, avoid splashing my spectacles in eating a grapefruit, or other very handy conveniences of life. —Erwin Schrödinger, “The New Field Theory” www.Ebook777.com Contents Acknowledgments ix introduction Allies and Adversaries 1 chapter one The Clockwork Universe 13 chapter two The Crucible of Gravity 43 chapter three Matter Waves and Quantum Jumps 75 chapter four The Quest for Unification 109 chapter five Spooky Connections and Zombie Cats 127 chapter six Luck of the Irish 159 chapter seven Physics by Public Relations 183 chapter eight The Last Waltz: Einstein’s and Schrödinger’s Final Years 203 conclusion Beyond Einstein and Schrödinger: The Ongoing Search for Unity 223 Further Reading 237 Notes 241 Index 255 vii Free ebooks ==> www.Ebook777.com www.Ebook777.com Acknowledgments would like to acknowledge the outstanding support of my family, I friends, and colleagues in helping me see this project to completion. Thanks to the faculty and staff of the University of the Sciences, in- cluding Helen Giles-Gee, Heidi Anderson, Suzanne Murphy, Elia Es- chenazi, Kevin Murphy, Brian Kirschner, and Jim Cummings, and to my colleagues in the Department of Math, Physics, and Statistics and the Department of Humanities, for supporting my research and writing. I am grateful for the camaraderie of the history of science community, including the APS Forum on the History of Physics, the Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science, and the AIP Center for History of Physics. The warm support of the Philadelphia Science Writers Associ- ation, including Greg Lester, Michal Mayer, Faye Flam, Dave Goldberg, Mark Wolverton, Brian Siano, and Neil Gussman, is most appreciated. Thanks to historians of science David C. Cassidy, Diana Buchwald, Tilman Sauer, Daniel Siegel, Catherine Westfall, Robert Crease, and Peter Pesic for useful suggestions and to Don Howard for offering helpful references. I greatly appreciate the help of Schrödinger’s family, including Leonhard, Arnulf, and Ruth Braunizer, in addressing ques- tions about his life and work. I’m grateful to musician Roland Orzabal and philosopher Hilary Putnam for kindly answering questions about their work. Thanks to science writer Michael Gross for his friendly advice on German culture and language. I appreciate the encourage- ment of David Zitarelli, Robert Jantzen, Linda Dalrymple Hender- son, Roger Stuewer, Lisa Tenzin-Dolma, Jen Govey, Cheryl Stringall, Tony Lowe, Michael LaBossiere, Peter D. Smith, Antony Ryan, David Bood, Michael Erlich, Fred Schuepfer, Pam Quick, Carolyn Brodbeck, Marlon Fuentes, Simone Zelitch, Doug Buchholz, Linda Holtzman, Mark Singer, Jeff Shuben, Jude Kuchinsky, Kris Olson, Meg and Woody Carsky-Wilson, Carie Nguyen, Lindsey Poole, Greg Smith, Joseph Ma- guire, Doug DiCarlo, Patrick Pham, and Vance Lehmkuhl. I offer my ix Free ebooks ==> www.Ebook777.com Acknowledgments sincere appreciation to Ronan and Joe Mehigan for their photographs of Schrödinger locations in Dublin. Thanks to the Princeton Univer- sity Library Manuscripts Division for permission to peruse the Albert Einstein Duplicate Archives and other research materials and to the American Philosophical Society Library for access to the Archive for the History of Quantum Physics. Many thanks to Barbara Wolff and the Albert Einstein Archives in Jerusalem for reviewing my quotes from Einstein’s correspondence to Schrödinger. Thanks to the Royal Irish Academy for information about their proceedings. I thank the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for a 2002 fellowship, during which I fi rst encountered the Einstein-Schrödinger correspondence. Thanks to my editor, T. J. Kelleher, for his outstanding guidance and useful suggestions, and to the staff of Basic Books, including Collin Tracy, Quynh Do, Betsy DeJesu, and Sue Warga, for their help. I thank my marvelous agent, Giles Anderson, for his enthusiastic support. Special thanks to my wife, Felicia; my sons, Eli and Aden; my par- ents, Bernice and Stanley Halpern; my in-laws, Arlene and Joseph Fin- ston; Richard, Anita, Jake, Emily, Alan, Beth, Tessa, and Ken Halpern; Aaron Stanbro; Lane and Jill Hurewitz; Shara Evans; and other family members for all their love, patience, advice, and support. x www.Ebook777.com INTRODUCTION Allies and Adversaries his is the tale of two brilliant physicists, the 1947 media war that Ttore apart their decades-long friendship, and the fragile nature of scientifi c collaboration and discovery. When they were pitted against each other, each scientist was a Nobel laureate, well into middle age, and certainly past the peak of his major work. Yet the international press largely had a different story to tell. It was a familiar narrative of a seasoned fi ghter still going strong versus an upstart contender hungry to seize the trophy. While Albert Einstein was extraordinarily famous, his every pronouncement covered by the media, relatively few readers were conversant with the work of Aus- trian physicist Erwin Schrödinger. Those following Einstein’s career knew that he been working for decades on a unifi ed fi eld theory. He hoped to extend the work of nineteenth-century British physicist James Clerk Maxwell in uniting the forces of nature through a simple set of equations. Maxwell had provided a unifi ed explanation for electricity and magnetism, called electromagnetic fi elds, and identifi ed them as light waves. Einstein’s own general theory of relativity described gravity as a warping of the geometry of space and time. Confi rmation of the theory had won him fame. However, he didn’t want to stop there. His dream was to incor- porate Maxwell’s results into an extended form of general relativity and thereby unite electromagnetism with gravity. Every few years, Einstein had announced a unifi ed theory to great fanfare, only to have it quietly fail and be replaced by another. Starting in the late 1920s, one of his primary goals was a deterministic alter- native to probabilistic quantum theory, as developed by Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and others. Although he realized that quantum theory was experimentally successful, he judged it incomplete. 1 Free ebooks ==> www.Ebook777.com Einstein’s Dice and Schrödinger’s Cat In his heart he felt that “God did not play dice,” as he put it, couching the issue in terms of what an ideal mechanistic creation would be like. By “God” he meant the deity described by seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza: an emblem of the best possible natural order. Spinoza had argued that God, synonymous with nature, was immutable and eternal, leaving no room for chance. Agreeing with Spinoza, Einstein sought the invariant rules governing nature’s mech- anisms. He was absolutely determined to prove that the world was absolutely determined. Exiled in Ireland in the 1940s after the Nazi annexation of Austria, Schrödinger shared Einstein’s disdain for the orthodox in- terpretation of quantum mechanics and saw him as a natural col- laborator. Einstein similarly found in Schrödinger a kindred spirit. After sharing ideas for unifi cation of the forces, Schrödinger suddenly announced success, generating a storm of attention and opening a rift between the men. You may have heard of Schrödinger’s cat—the feline thought ex- periment for which the general public knows him best. But back when this feud took place, few people outside of the physics community had heard of the cat conundrum or of him. As depicted in the press, he was just an ambitious scientist residing in Dublin who might have landed a knockout punch on the great one. The leading announcer was the Irish Press, from which the interna- tional community learned about Schrödinger’s challenge.