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For those who blundered their way through trigonometry and calculus in high school and college, sheer mathematical genius is almost unfathomable. But Albert Einstein’s brand of genius --- that rare mix of brilliance, creativity and perseverance --- was arguably as important as any given intelligence quotient (IQ).
Yet the most fascinating aspect of London-based journalist David Bodanis’ biography “Einstein’s Greatest Mistake” (just released in the U.S.) is in revealing just how much of Einstein’s early success was related to his own dogged perseverance.
Luckily, Einstein persevered in the face of a highly-structured turn of the 20th century academic system that valued learning by rote and repetition. If he had lacked confidence or the curiosity he exhibited when trying to understand the cosmos, then his genius may have never had an outlet. But the fact that the German-born theoretical physicist is still the subject of such fascination and relevance more than a century after he first put forth his Special Theory of Relativity is testament to how rare he actually was.
Bodanis does recount the details of Einstein’s inspiration and work on the General Theory of Relativity in clear terms and with more historical context than what is usually found in textbooks. For instance, the book excels in the explanations of how mass and gravity distort spacetime as well as how gravity can bend light if photons pass close enough to a massive body like our own Sun.
During a 1919 solar eclipse, an observing term confirmed that the Sun did bend incoming starlight by 1.4 arcseconds, a little less than the 1.7 arcseconds Einstein had predicted. But this confirmation was heralded as the most important result in gravitational theory since the days of Sir Isaac Newton.
By the mid-1930s, however, Einstein was one of the most famous people on the planet and began attracting women and Hollywood celebrities like a powerful magnet collects iron filings. That’s incongruous with our contemporary view of Einstein as the quintessential disheveled academic.
But as Bodanis notes time and again throughout his text, Einstein was just as fallible in affairs of the heart and interpersonal relationships as the guy next door. While certainly haunted by failures in his romantic relationships, he was also troubled by scientific problems. For one, how did a static cosmos avoid a gravitational intergalactic cul-de-sac of galaxies plowing into each other? In his view, that would surely cause a runaway collapse of spacetime. Thus, Einstein introduced lambda, a mathematical term representing a “cosmological constant” that he imbued with a cosmic repulsive force. Such a force would counter the effects of such a potential runaway collapse.
Years later, however, when the Hubble expansion of the universe was observationally confirmed, Einstein thought the introduction of lambda into his equations was surely his biggest blunder.
But, in fact, with the discovery of “dark energy” in the 1990s, his “cosmological constant” was resurrected. Theorists successfully plugged lambda into their own equations as a repulsive term to explain dark energy’s apparent accelerating expansion of the cosmos, which kicked in some 7 billion years ago. This dark energy acceleration is quite apart from the Hubble expansion that has been ongoing since the Big Bang origin of the cosmos, at least 13.8 billion years ago.
Thus, Einstein’s greatest mistake in Bodanis’ eyes was not lambda, but in something altogether different. That is, in not fully embracing German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty Principle.” The essence of the principle is that the position and velocity of a subatomic object cannot both be measured, exactly, at the same time, due to the “wave-particle” duality of quantum physics. In other words, objects at the quantum level can exhibit both the properties of a wave and a particle. Thus, measurement of one property inherently interferes with the measurement of another. Yet, all these years later, we are still waiting for a theory of gravity that unifies quantum physics with Einstein’s Relativity theory.
As for Einstein’s personal affinity with the cosmos at large?
Bodanis notes he may have been affected by time spent at a mountain outside Zurich where he and friends watched for the appearance of the evening’s first stars.
But this is really conjecture. What’s really lacking in Bodanis’ book is what only Einstein himself could know --- or not know --- about what drove him to try and understand the physics that define the universe. Aptitude and genius aside --- what drives one to a particular life of study or pursuit may remain as inexplicable as the grand cosmological questions that continue to shadow us.
As Bodanis writes: “Einstein himself pondered how much of the universe’s vastness can be perceived by the human mind.” In 1914, in writing to a friend, Einstein noted: “Nature is only showing us the tail of the lion. But I have no doubt that the lion belongs to it, even though, because of its colossal size, it cannot directly reveal itself to the beholder.”
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