Conversations With Einstein
Note to the Reader: This book is divided into two parts: a biographical essay that provides a concise overview of Einstein’s life and achievements and a fictional dialogue based on rigorous research, incorporating Einstein’s actual spoken or written words, whenever possible, along with rigorously research biographical interpretations of his various views and positions.
Learn about key figures in science, spirituality, art and literature through revealing dialogues based on established fact. Written by a fantastic collection of authors and foreword writers gathered together to delve into the lives and achievements of some of the world’s greatest historical figures, this series is perfect for anyone looking for a quick and accessible introduction to the subject.
OTHER TITLES IN THE SERIES
Published
Conversations with JFK by Michael O’Brien;
Foreword by Gore Vidal
Conversations with Oscar Wilde by Merlin Holland;
Foreword by Simon Callow
Conversations with Casanova by Derek Parker;
Foreword by Dita Von Teese
Conversations with Buddha by Joan Duncan Oliver;
Foreword by Annie Lennox
Conversations with Dickens by Paul Schlicke;
Foreword by Peter Ackroyd
Conversations with Galileo by William Shea;
Foreword by Dava Sobel
Forthcoming
Conversations with Freud by D.M. Thomas;
Foreword by Edward de Bono
Conversations with Isaac Newton by Michael White;
Foreword by Bill Bryson
To the memory of my parents, Martin and Lillian
Originally published under the title Coffee with Einstein 2008
This edition first published in the UK and USA 2020 by
Watkins, an imprint of Watkins Media Limited
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Design and typography copyright © Watkins Media Limited 2020
Text copyright © Carlos Calle 2008, 2020
Foreword copyright © Roger Penrose 2008, 2020
Carlos Calle has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the Publishers.
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ISBN: 978-1-78678-384-4
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Publisher’s note: The interviews in this book are purely fictional, while having a solid basis in biographical fact. They take place between a fictionalized Albert Einstein and an imaginary interviewer. This literary work has not been approved or endorsed by Albert Einstein’s estate.
CONTENTS
Foreword by Sir Roger Penrose
Introduction
Albert Einstein (1879–1955): His Life in Short
Now Let’s Start Talking …
Counting Atoms
The Year of Wonders
Of Time and Space: The Theory of Relativity
About Time
Masterpiece
Quantum Theory and Reality
The Equation
The Bomb
Unfinished Business
Thinking with Images
Religious Beliefs
Father and Sons
Einstein’s Women
On the Shoulders of Giants
Musician and Sailor
Notes
Further Reading
FOREWORD BY SIR ROGER PENROSE
The first third of the 20th century was quite extraordinary, in that our picture of the fundamental nature of physical reality underwent two revolutions – and Albert Einstein was a key figure in both.
One of these revolutions had to do with the very peculiar character of the smallest constituents of nature. At the beginning of the century, in order to explain the equilibrium states of matter and light, Max Planck proposed that energy could be transferred from one to the other only in little discrete bundles. No one seemed to appreciate the import of this until Einstein, five years later in 1905, realized that light, which had seemed to have been perfectly explained by Maxwell in the mid-19th century, as interweaving waves of electricity and magnetism, must now be simultaneously understood as made up, at its smallest scales, of little particles! Einstein’s picture of light, regarded as mere fancy by most of his contemporaries, was strikingly confirmed by the initially sceptical American physicist Robert Millikan by 1916. This fundamental wave/particle paradox led eventually to the quantum revolution, finally formulated a decade or so later.
Einstein is much better known, however, for his theory of relativity, which radically changed our view of space and time, and then gravitation. Actually, this revolution came in two distinct stages. In 1905, Einstein put forward his special theory, reconciling the seemingly impossible requirements of a finite speed of light, as demanded by Maxwell’s observationally well-confirmed theory, and a requirement that uniform motion should not be detectable by local measurement. Others before Einstein had been working towards his 1905 resolution of this conundrum, and had already found many essential ingredients, but Einstein’s point of view was more far-reaching, and had one particularly noteworthy conclusion: the equivalence of mass and energy, as embodied in his famous E=mc2. In 1908 the Russian Hermann Minkowski reformulated these ideas as four-dimensional space-time.
Remarkable though special relativity was, it was the natural conclusion of many independent investigations, both theoretical and experimental. Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity was, however, a bolt from the blue. Einstein had had the extraordinary insight that by bringing in gravity, the relativity principle could be extended from uniform motion to arbitrary acceleration, and Einstein saw that this led to a picture in which Minkowski’s space-time must be curved! Most physicists and astronomers found this hard to take, and confirming observations remained sparse during Einstein’s lifetime. Einstein’s general relativity is now well tested, and even serves as an invaluable probe for ascertaining mass distributions in distant reaches of the universe.
On the personal side, Einstein was effusive, and enjoyed a joke. He loved music, playing the violin, and also sailing. He felt strongly about politics, espousing pacifist views. In his later years, he cared little about his appearance, though photographs of him in earlier years tell a different story.
The world is enormously the richer for his having been here. Now let us meet him!
INTRODUCTION
Albert Einstein claimed to dislike giving interviews. “To be called to account publicly for what others have said in one’s name, when one cannot defend oneself, is indeed a sad predicament,” he wrote in a short essay. Fittingly, his formula for success in life was: “If A is success, I should say the formula is A=X+Y+Z, X being work and Y being play.”
“And what is Z?”
“Keeping your mouth shut.”
However, Einstein failed to follow his own formula. He gave countless interviews on a wide variety of subjects – as a figure in the public eye, he could not avoid this. However, he never sat down for a comprehensive, structured interview that would cover his entire scientific career, touching on the most interesting aspects of his private life. That’s the intent of my posthumous “interview”.
What
would be better than to have Einstein himself explain his theories to us? But can we understand relativity by reading an interview? Relativity is perceived as being one of the most esoteric theories, understood only by specialists. In fact, the main ideas of relativity are not difficult to grasp. Einstein said once that except for the mathematics all physical theories should be capable of being described in such a way that even a child can understand them.
Are the answers given in my “interview” really true to the essence of Einstein? For the most part, they are. I have drawn upon the views he expressed in his articles, books for the general reader, interviews with the press, and private letters to his family and friends. In some cases, I use direct quotes from these sources: these are identified in the Notes section at the back of the book.
Einstein’s personal life is also an important component of these imaginary conversations. Was he an absentminded genius who worked endless hours in his study, emerging only after he’d made a discovery? At times, engrossed in his scientific endeavours, he appeared to fit the stereotype. Once, at a ceremony in his honour, he continued to scribble equations on the back of the programme, oblivious to a speech that was praising his accomplishments. In fact, he was not really absentminded: he simply preferred work to pomp and ceremony.
However, it was not only work that drove him. We also read what Einstein had to say about his family, the women closest to him, his religious beliefs and other facets of his rich and complex life. I selected these topics to be able to present as complete a picture of his life and his science as is practicable within the compass of this book.
ALBERT EINSTEIN (1879–1955)
HIS LIFE IN SHORT
He had dashing good looks and piercing dark eyes, and he performed miracles. He turned ordinary fixed space into a twisted, curved space that shrinks or expands as you move, and ordinary time into an elastic, changing time that speeds up or slows down depending on your own motion. He created a universe using equations that flowed from his mind onto a sheet of paper, and the real universe turned out to be just like his equations told him it should be. With his mind alone, he changed our conception of the world forever.
The genius that Albert Einstein was to be is not revealed in his upbringing. He was born to Jewish parents on 14 March 1879 in the city of Ulm, in southern Germany. A year after his birth, his family moved to Munich, where he lived until he was 15. When he was two, his sister Maja was born and the family of four led a pleasant middle-class life.
Einstein’s parents thought that he was a slow developer, and before he was three they took him to see a doctor because he had not yet learned to speak. We have no record of what the doctor said, but Einstein eventually learned to speak like any other normal child. Einstein himself would later say that this delay was due to his decision to speak only in whole sentences. He would first compose a sentence in his mind, and when he thought it was acceptable, he would say it: that way, no one would think that he could not speak properly.
Einstein’s mother Pauline instilled in her children a love of music and made sure that they both learned to play an instrument. When Einstein was six, he started violin lessons, and although the lessons stopped when he was 14, love of the violin remained with him throughout his life.
Einstein’s school record is spotty. He excelled in his elementary education, consistently earning top marks at a good school, even though he had skipped first grade. However, when he reached secondary school, he became selective about what he studied, and as a result he did very well in mathematics and Latin, subjects he liked, but performed poorly in Greek, a class he detested. His Greek teacher told him that he would never amount to anything!
Einstein disliked the rigid, militaristic school system but enjoyed learning on his own. When he was about 12, he began tackling the problems in a geometry textbook. In a few months, he had not only completed them all but had even developed his own proofs for some of the theorems. Einstein said that this “holy geometry book” was what started his interest in science. At about the same time, he pleasantly surprised his engineer uncle, who had given him an algebra book, by finding solutions to even the most difficult problems.
Einstein continued with this programme of self-study, teaching himself differential and integral calculus and analytical geometry by the age of 16. Meanwhile, his dislike of regular school continued, and when his parents had to move to Italy for financial reasons, Einstein dropped out of school, joining his parents a few months later. His parents’ disappointment subsided when he promised to study for the college entrance examination on his own.
When Einstein thought he was ready, he applied to take the admission examination for the Zurich Polytechnic Institute, only to find out he was too young. After his mother convinced the university administration that her son was gifted, he was allowed to sit for the test. He failed. Although he excelled in maths and science, he did poorly in just about everything else. At the suggestion of the Institute’s director, Einstein enrolled in a Swiss secondary school for a year: a diploma from this school would guarantee admission to the Polytechnic.
The Swiss school offered a relaxed learning environment that encouraged students to think for themselves – unlike the German schools that Einstein disliked so much. The school’s director was a respected teacher and scholar. He had three daughters, and one of them, Marie Winteler, became Einstein’s first love. He was in heaven. To cap that wonderful year, Einstein obtained the necessary diploma with the top grades in the class.
Einstein entered the Zurich Polytechnic Institute in the autumn of 1896 to study physics, although he was still under the minimum required age for admission. There, he studied with world-class professors in state-of-the-art laboratories. As in secondary school, Einstein eagerly attended the classes he liked and skipped the ones he did not like, preferring to learn on his own. He excelled in the intermediate examinations at the end of the second year, finishing first in the class.
Einstein lost interest in Marie soon after starting college. During his second year, he met Mileva Maric, a physics student from Serbia. They soon fell in love and spent most of their free time together, often reading and discussing physics books.
The most exciting discovery in physics at the time was James Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism, the successful union of electricity and magnetism that explained the way that light moves through space. Einstein was extremely disappointed that the professor teaching the course in electricity and magnetism did not cover this. He not only made it clear that he disliked the course’s approach but also became argumentative and disrespectful in this and other classes.
After graduating from the Polytechnic in 1900, Einstein wanted to study for a doctorate in physics, but the professors he had antagonized prevented him from doing so. He became, instead, an examiner at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern.
Einstein’s new job isolated him from the scientific work of the universities and he was thus free to pursue his own scientific interests without the influence of peers or current fads. As before, he worked on his own, this time towards his doctorate.
During this period, Einstein’s relationship with Mileva became serious, leading to their marriage in 1903. A year earlier Mileva had given birth to their daughter Lieserl. The couple kept this out-of-wedlock pregnancy secret and it seems that the daughter was given up for adoption. Her existence was discovered only in 1987 among Einstein and Mileva’s letters to each other.
In 1904, when Einstein was about to storm the scientific world with his discoveries, his first son, Hans Albert, was born. With his mind mainly on his physics, Einstein failed to pay much attention to either wife or son, and the marriage began to sour.
The couple’s second son, Eduard, was born in 1908 and the marriage improved for a couple of years. However, Einstein did not help matters by flirting with women during his now-frequent trips to conferences and lectures. One in particular, his cousin Elsa Löwenthal, was especially close. When Einstein moved his family to Berlin, whe
re Elsa lived, to accept an attractive offer from the university, Mileva became jealous and the marital problems grew worse. The couple finally separated in 1914 and divorced in 1919. Although Einstein had not yet won a Nobel Prize, he offered to give Mileva its proceeds if ever he did. He received the Physics Prize in 1921 for his work leading to the development of quantum theory.
In 1905, the 26-year-old Einstein published five scientific papers that changed the world of science forever. Three in particular prompted the two revolutions that shaped modern physics into the form we know it today. One was the paper that started quantum theory, the physics of atoms and molecules. The other two were on the theory of relativity, the theory that changed our conception of space and time. The second of these was the E=mc2 paper, the famous equation that eventually explained how the sun burns its fuel and made possible nuclear energy and the nuclear bomb. However, in 1905, nuclear physics did not exist, much less the concepts of chain reaction and nuclear fission, both of which are essential for the bomb. Einstein came up with the equation in his effort to discover the workings of the universe: “Not a hint of possible technological applications was in sight,” he wrote in 1955.
The goal of the two remaining papers of that miraculous year was “to find the facts which would guarantee as much as possible the existence of atoms of definite finite size,” as Einstein put it. The first of these papers, “A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions,” was Einstein’s doctoral dissertation, accepted by the University of Zurich in 1906.
Soon after his successful publication of the theory of relativity, Einstein began to see its limitations and started to look into expanding it. The effort turned out to be very difficult, even for Einstein, but after a decade in development he published the new theory in 1915. The general theory of relativity, as Einstein called it, describes the physics that governs the mechanics of the universe and extends and corrects Newton’s own masterpiece, his theory of gravity.