The Greatness of Albert Einstein:
RUSSELL, BERTRAND
Bertrand Russell: The Greatness of Albert Einstein 'In practical affairs, his wisdom was so simple as to seem to the sophisticated like mere foolishness' EINSTEIN WAS indisputably one of the...
...If two events happen in different places, you cannot say, as was formerly supposed, that they are separated by so many miles and minutes, because different observers, all equally careful, will make different estimates of the miles and minutes, all equally legitimate...
...The theory, as everyone knows, appeared in two stages: the special theory in 1905, and the general theory in 1915...
...He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 19S0, and, two years later, published his first novel...
...Einstein expressed "surprised thankfulness" that four equal rods can make a square, since, in most of the universes that he could imagine, there would be no such things as squares...
...but that the purpose of this Amendment had been defeated by the inquisitors, since they held that refusal to answer may be taken as evidence of guilt...
...Newton wondered why apples fall...
...Having previously thought of himself as a citizen of the world, he found that the Nazis compelled him to think of himself as a Jew...
...Bertrand Arthur William Russell is the greatest living philosopher of the English-speaking world...
...All that matters to them is the statistical average of mortality...
...in the general sauve qui peut, none of the "innocent" listened to him...
...In spite of this, he was the first to open the imaginative vistas which have revolutionized science during the present century...
...The special theory was important both in science and philosophy—first, because it accounted for the result of the Michelson-Morley experiment, which had puzzled the world for thirty years...
...No advance whatever had been made in explaining gravitation during the 230 years since Newton, although the action at a distance that it seems to demand had always been repugnant...
...But while the world applauded him as a man of science, in practical affairs his wisdom was so simple and so profound as to seem to the sophisticated like mere foolishness...
...Einstein wrote a well publicized letter urging that all men in academic posts should refuse to testify before these committees or before the almost equally tyrannical boards set up by some universities...
...At the end of the First World War...
...It appears that the universe is of finite size, although unbounded...
...Insurance companies do not know and do not care which of the individuals who insured their lives will die in any given year...
...Einstein is still reckoned as a revolutionary innovator...
...In his later years, relativity was more or less eclipsed, in scientific interest, by quantum theory, but I never discovered any sign that this vexed him...
...In private, he was kindly and unassuming...
...What we know about the behavior of matter, according to this view, is like what insurance companies know about mortality...
...perhaps the greatest of our time...
...toward colleagues he was (so far as I could see) completely free from jealousy, which is more than can be said of Newton or Leibniz...
...Bertrand Russell: The Greatness of Albert Einstein 'In practical affairs, his wisdom was so simple as to seem to the sophisticated like mere foolishness' EINSTEIN WAS indisputably one of the greatest men of our time...
...He had also the faculty of not taking familiar things for granted...
...There were some very delicate experimental tests by which it could be decided whether Einstein or Newton fitted the facts more accurately...
...He had in a high degree the simplicity characteristic of the best men of science—a simplicity which comes of a single-minded desire to know and understand things that are completely impersonal...
...He was profoundly interested in world affairs...
...It has been our privilege to count him as a regular NEW LEADER contributor for three decades...
...Do not attempt to understand this unless you have studied non-Euclidean geometry...
...After the end of the Second World War...
...The sun is at the top of a hill, and a lazy planet prefers going round the hill to climbing up to the summit...
...Our present universe seems to have begun about 2 billion years ago: what, if anything, there was before that, it is impossible to conjecture...
...And the particle itself has become something quite vague, not a nice little billiard ball as it used to be...
...I will end as I began: He was a great man...
...secondly, because it explained the increase of mass with velocity, which had been observed in electrons: thirdly, because it led to the interchangeability of mass and energy, which has become an essential principle in physics...
...Einstein showed that, for reasons partly experimental and partly logical, the two must be replaced by one which he called "space-time...
...According to Einstein (to use crude language, misleading if taken literally), space-time is full of mountains and valleys, and that is why planets do not move in straight lines...
...Although it has given us new powers of manipulating matter, including the sinister powers displayed in the atom and hydrogen bombs, it has shown us that we are ignorant of many things which we thought we knew...
...He showed greatness also in his moral qualities...
...which is a sort of combination of space-distance and time-distance as previously estimated...
...In these various public activities, he has been completely self-effacing and only anxious to find ways of saving the human race from the misfortunes brought about by its own follies...
...There is a law called the "Principle of Least Action," according to which a body, in going from one place to another, chooses always the easiest route...
...Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy, along with other principles of that theory, has had very curious results...
...These are only some of the ways in which it was scientifically important...
...If Einstein's policy had been followed even in cases where it was absurd to presume guilt, academic freedom would have greatly profited...
...Although Einstein has done much important work outside the theory of relativity, it is by this theory that he is most famous—and rightly, for it is of fundamental significance both for science and for philosophy...
...The only thing that is the same for all observers is what is called "interval...
...It is primarily a theory of gravitation...
...When you think you have caught it...
...Theory shows that it must be always getting bigger, or always getting smaller: observation of distant nebulae shows that it is getting bigger...
...This is no longer the case...
...it produces a convincing alibi as a wave and not a particle...
...Einstein made gravitation part of geometry...
...This is all the more remarkable in view of the fact that he had done epoch-making work in quantum theory, which would have put him in the first rank among physicists even if he had never thought of the theory of relativity...
...Quantum theory is more revolutionary than the theory of relativity, and I do not think that its power of revolutionizing our conceptions of the physical world is yet completed...
...and to take up the cause of the Jews throughout the world...
...Einstein never accepted this view...
...Long sympathetic to the aims of the British Labor party, he was among the first Western intellectuals to expose the despotic nature of Bolshevism, as he later exposed Fascism and Nazism...
...It seems that individual occurrences in atoms do not obey strict laws, and that the observed regularities in the world are only statistical...
...he was a pacifist, but Hitler led him las he led me) to abandon this point of view...
...In fact, you know only certain equations of which the interpretation is obscure...
...when I first came in contact with him...
...This point of view was distasteful to Einstein, who struggled to remain nearer to classical physics...
...I suppose that, in the estimation of the general public...
...which may not be a straight line: It may pay you to avoid mountain-tops and deep valleys...
...Many people (including myself) have attempted popular accounts of this theory, and I will not add to their number on this occasion...
...The observations came out on Einstein's side, and almost everybody except the Nazis accepted his theory...
...The more accurately you determine the place of a particle, the less accurate will be its velocity: the more accurately you determine the velocity, the less accurate will be its position...
...He continued to believe that there are laws, though as yet they have not been ascertained, which determine the behavior of individual atoms...
...Structure is what is most significant in our knowledge of the physical world, and for ages structure bad been conceived as depending upon two different manifolds, one of space, the other of time...
...Its imaginative effects are very curious...
...Among physicists, however, he has become the leader of the Old Guard...
...It appears also that the universe is continually getting bigger...
...he joined the group of American scientists who were attempting to find a way of avoiding the disasters to mankind that are threatened as a result of the atomic bomb...
...This is due to his refusal to accept some of the innovations of quantum theory...
...His argument for this advice was that, under the Fifth Amendment, no man is obliged to answer a question if the answer will incriminate him...
...He came to philosophy through mathematics, first bursting on the intellectual firmament with Principia Mathematical which he wrote with Alfred North Whitehead just before World War I. He has spent his entire adult life as a crusader for social and moral reform, stirring many a controversy in Britain and the United States...
...The regularities to which classical physics accustomed us are, we are now told, of this merely statistical sort...
...After Congressional committees in America began their inquisitorial investigations into supposed subversive activities...
...It would be exceedingly rash for anyone who is not a professional physicist to allow himself an opinion on this matter until the physicists are all agreed, but I think it must be conceded that on this matter the bulk of competent opinion was opposed to Einstein...
...Some odd things have emerged as a consequence of the general theory of relativity...
...he said that it was due to the character of space-time...
...Philosophically, the special theory demanded a revolution in deeply rooted ways of thought, since it compelled a change in our conception of the spatio-temporal structure of the world...
...The general theory has a wider sweep than the special theory, and is scientifically more important...
...Nobody before quantum theory doubted that at any given moment a particle is at some definite place and moving with some definite velocity...
...But I will try to say a few words as to how the theory affects our view of the universe...
Vol. 38 • May 1955 • No. 22
