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| AP |
| Dr. Albert Einstein in 1934 |
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Albert Einstein
With just a pen and paper, he peeked farther behind Nature's curtain than anyone had since Newton — then spent the rest of his years living it down. Now, when we think of genius, we see his face
By FRANK PELLEGRINI
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Monday, March 29, 1999
Everything's relative. Speed, mass, space and time are all subjective. Nor are age, motion or the wanderings of the planets measures that humans can agree on anymore; they can be judged only by the whim of the observer. Light has weight. Space has curves. And coiled within a pound of matter, any matter, is the explosive power of 14 million tons of TNT. We know all this, we are set adrift in this way at the end of the 20th century, because of Albert Einstein.
We tend not to blame Einstein for the bomb, any more than we blame Nobel for dynamite. It wasn't the gentle theorist but the generals of the world who forged e=mc2 into the most terrible dagger in human history, and hoisted that Damoclean blade irretrievably over our heads in 1946. By then, the world had already iconized him: the greatest seer since Newton; science's poetic soul. Genius, in person. In a few thunderclaps of elegance he contained our world and the cosmos in the same equation, and changed forever the way the rest of saw the heavens and ourselves.
The light came on in 1905. Pushed to the fringe of physics by his prickly pacifism and an academic career that seemed designed to annoy his professors, the future emblem of genius was, at the time — the very words have become an Algeresque cliché — just a Swiss patent clerk. Preternaturally confident and suitably unkempt, the 26-year-old Einstein sent three papers, papers scrawled in his spare time, to the premier journal, "Annalen der Physik," to be published "if there is room." They all made the same issue, and they did exactly what he imagined they would: change the world. One was an update of Max Planck's quantum theory of radiation; light, declared Einstein, travels as both a wave and as particles called quanta, mostly because it has to. Another concerned Brownian motion, an until-then unexplained phenomenon involving bouncing molecules. (The patent clerk explained it.) The third, wrote Einstein matter-of-factly in a letter to a friend, "modifies the theory of space and time." Its import: Everything's relative. He could have retired right then and still been the savior of science in the 20th century.
Physics is built on the basic and rather wistful hypothesis that Mother Nature doesn't know much math. Remainders and constants are men's crumbs, not hers -- to a theoretical physicist, the Ten Commandments are too numerous by nine. By 1905, Newton's three were showing cracks under the scrutiny of stronger telescopes and better astronomy; the ether, an omnipresent invisible jello, was supposed to spackle Newton's world smooth again. To Einstein, the ether was just a remainder, and he got rid of it. Nothing can move faster than light, he said, and matter and energy are equivalent: E=mc2. The physicist Louis de Broglie called Einstein's contributions that year "blazing rockets which in the dark of the night suddenly cast a brief but powerful illumination over an immense unknown region." The new view was breathtaking.
Einstein himself, though, would remain in that unknown a while longer. In 1916, he folded special relativity into general relativity: Light had mass, and space and time were simply space-time. Oh, and the universe was quite possibly shaped like a saddle. World-shaking stuff. But war, seemingly Einstein's constant companion, obscured him three more years until British astronomer Arthur Eddington got out and proved it during a solar eclipse: He spotted a star that should have been hidden behind the sun. Light had turned a corner, and so had we. No one really understood what Einstein was talking about — which is only a slight exaggeration even today — but it sure sounded great. Order in the cosmos, even if only one man could see it, was an appetizingly lofty prospect after the all-too-earthbound carnage of World War I. And this fellow Einstein, with his halo of unruly hair and Labrador eyes, was just the gentle genius we were looking for.
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