Selected other titles by Edmund Blair Bolles The Ice Finders: How a Poet, a Professor, and a Politician Discovered the Ice Age A Second Way of Knowing: The Riddle of Human Perception Remembering and Forgetting: Inquiries into the Nature of Memory So Much to Say: How to Help Your Child Learn Galileo’s Commandment: An Anthology of Great Science Writing (editor) Edmund Blair Bolles Joseph Henry Press Washington, DC Joseph Henry Press • 500 Fifth Street, NW • Washington, DC 20001 The Joseph Henry Press, an imprint of the National Academies Press, was created with the goal of making books on science, technology, and health more widely available to professionals and the public. Joseph Henry was one of the founders of the National Academy of Sciences and a leader in early American science. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this volume are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Academy of Sciences or its affiliated institutions. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bolles, Edmund Blair, 1942- Einstein defiant : genius versus genius in the quantum revolution / by Edmund Blair Bolles. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-309-08998-0 (hbk.) 1. Quantum theory—History—20th century. 2. Physics—Europe—History— 20th century. 3. Einstein, Albert, 1879-1955. 4. Bohr, Niels Henrik David, 1885-1962. I. Title. QC173.98.B65 2004 530.12′09—dc22 2003023735 Copyright 2004 by Edmund Blair Bolles. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. To Kelso Walker and the rest of the crew, volunteers all. Tanzania XII: U.S. Peace Corps, 1966-1968 Bohr asked me to sit down and soon started to pace furiously around the oblong table in the center of the room. He then asked me if I could note down a few sentences as they emerged during his pacing. Bohr never had a full sentence ready. He would often dwell on one word, coax it, implore it, to find the continuation. This could go on for several minutes. At that moment the word was ‘Einstein’. There was Bohr, almost running around the table and repeating: ‘Einstein . Einstein . .’. After a little while he walked to the window, gazed out, repeating every now and then: ‘Einstein . Einstein . .’. —Abraham Pais, Niels Bohr’s Times Contents A RADICAL FACT RESISTED 1 The Opposite of an Intriguer 3 2 Not German at All 12 3 I Never Fully Understood It 26 4 Independence and Inner Freedom 35 5 A Mercy of Fate 51 6 Picturesque Phrases 57 7 Scientific Dada 68 8 Such a Devil of a Fellow 76 9 Intuition and Inspiration 86 10 Bold, Not to Say Reckless 94 11 A Completely New Lesson 102 12 Slaves to Time and Space 110 13 Where All Weaker Imaginations Wither 116 14 A Triumph of Einstein Over Bohr 127 A RADICAL THEORY CREATED 15 Something Deeply Hidden 137 16 Completely Solved 146 17 Exciting and Exacting Times 162 vii viii CONTENTS 18 Intellectual Drunkenness 184 19 The Observant Executrix 195 20 It Might Look Crazy 204 21 Taking Nothing Solemnly 211 22 How Much More Gratifying 218 A RADICAL UNDERSTANDING DEFIED 23 Sorcerer's Multiplication 229 24 Adding Two Nonsenses 236 25 Admiration and Suspicion 241 26 An Unrelenting Fanatic 248 27 The Secret of the Old One 251 28 Indeterminacy 256 29 A Very Pleasant Talk 264 30 The Dream of His Life 276 31 The Saddest Chapter 285 32 A Reality Independent of Man 291 33 A Certain Unreasonableness 299 Afterword 305 Bibliography 309 Sources 317 Index 337 Part I A Radical Fact Resisted 1 The Opposite of an Intriguer n 1918 Albert Einstein’s face did not yet capture the living union I of tragedy with genius. His hair had yet to shoot crazily from his broad, serious brow, and his eyes did not yet laugh and x-ray at the same time. He was still decades away from sticking out his tongue at a camera. Instead, photos from that period show a man not quite 40 years old who seemed firmly settled into middle age. His hair had gone gray; his eyes had lost some sparkle that had been evident in pictures taken only four years earlier. Anybody who saw him the day he rode a tram to the Reichstag probably took him to be just one more exhausted burgher looking for food in a starving city. Outside Einstein’s tram window, Berlin was cracking open like Humpty Dumpty. Until recently people had thought the Great War was going well. The Russians had surrendered and the Kaiser’s troops along the western front had again begun to advance toward Paris. “Victory all along the line” had been the watchword, and then sud- denly World War I was over. Germany cried uncle and the whole imperial system collapsed like a handsome marionette whose puppe- teer has been felled by a stroke. One flinch and down it went. There had still been some dreamers. The industrialist Walther Rathenau had wept when the war began, but now he appealed to the people to “rise in defense of their nation.” The generals knew such 3 4 EINSTEIN DEFIANT pleas were hopeless and ignored him. Germany’s navy mutinied; sol- diers on the Russian front had been radicalized by Bolshevik propa- ganda, while masses of troops on the western front began deserting. The police had disappeared from sight. Rumor alone was in charge. Max Wertheimer also rode aboard Einstein’s tram. Remarkably, he looked younger than he had back in 1914. The Kaiser’s army had forced him to shave off his great black beard and take on a soldier’s air. Wertheimer, a Czech-born Jew, was Prussian in neither outlook nor manner, but he had served Germany ably enough to win an Iron Cross. Einstein had been among the war’s strongest opponents and shocked even other pacifists with his treasonable opinions that favored Germany’s outright defeat. Yet the beardless soldier and the long-haired peacemonger were good friends, united by a common delight in ideas. Both men knew what it was like to be seized by a notion and not to rest until the puzzle was resolved. Once, in 1910, Wertheimer had been riding a train when he suddenly had a new idea. Descending at the next station, he checked into a hotel and began experimenting. A week later he emerged with the blueprint for what came to be known as Gestalt psychology. Then he boarded another train and continued his journey. That had happened a world ago, before rumor had gained com- mand, before a whisper had been force enough to remove the Kaiser from his throne. In a desperate effort to stop a revolution, the emperor’s chancellor had said in a telegram that “the Kaiser and King has re- solved to renounce the throne.” It was a lie. The Kaiser still dithered about whether to resign or stand firm, but such indecision did not matter once Berlin’s streets heard about the telegram. The Kaiser was finished. He fled his capital, lucky to have avoided the last tsar’s fate. The German throne took its great fall. The architect Walter Gropius was on furlough from the Italian front and saw a Berlin crowd insult- ing officers. This is more than just a lost war, he told himself, a world has come to an end. The city that Einstein saw rushing by his streetcar window was paying the monstrous price of having lived on a tangle of lies. Berlin still looked whole. It had seen no enemy aircraft (as London had) and felt no artillery shells (as Paris had), yet Berlin had become a desperate, THE OPPOSITE OF AN INTRIGUER 5 starving, refugee-filled city of dismay. All that had previously seemed real had proved false as a dream. And now, adding to the torment of sudden damnation, a plague was taking liar and prophet alike. Sweep- ing around the world, the flu had arrived in town, killing 300 Berlin- ers a day and turning every little November cough into a reason for terror. Einstein was bound for Berlin’s revolutionary center. When news spread about the emperor’s supposed abdication, a crowd assembled outside the Reichstag and demanded to see Germany’s leading social- ist politicians, who, just then, were surviving the Allied blockade by dining on watery soup. Eventually a politician strolled out to the Reichstag balcony and pronounced a few words, “The old and the rotten,” he shouted to the crowd that strained to catch his speech, “the monarchy has collapsed. Long live the new!” Then, getting carried away, he added, “Long live the German Republic!” There was a cheer and the politician returned to his soup. Until that moment, the plan had been to create a new, constitutional monarchy with the emperor’s grandson as the new king, but somebody had said republic and that was enough smoke and mirror for there to be no more German kings. A third man rode the tram to the Reichstag with Einstein and Wertheimer. This was Einstein’s colleague in physics, Max Born, and he had a cough. Born had been in bed when Einstein telephoned him to report the latest crisis, that revolutionary students had seized the university and were holding some professors and its rector hostage. Einstein thought he might have some influence with the students and asked for Born’s support. So faithful Max Born had left his bed and now Einstein, Born, and Wertheimer were riding toward the parlia- ment to see what they could do to rescue the hostages.