Keeping Up with Einstein

...Although he contradicted Newton in many ways, his theory of relativity absorbed Newton's laws in the sense that they became special cases of a vaster, more complex theory...

...Einstein is depicted as a genius who revolutionized physics in his youth, yet later behaved exactly like the early opponents of relativity...

...It was his conviction that quantum mechanics is "incomplete...

...Several chapters of the collection under review take a position toward this historic debate that was commonplace in 1966...

...Once, Russo tells us, when someone taxed Einstein over having lost the openmindedness of his youth, he responded: "A good joke shouldn't be repeated too often...

...It was Bohr and his disciples who had the courage this time...

...and the latest speculation—e.g., Roger Penrose's twister theory—about the possibility of going behind quantum mechanics to a deeper level of understanding...

...In Hilaire Cuny's essay, "Such as We Knew Him," quotations about Einstein's appearance rise to embarrassing heights of adulation...

...Newton, forgive me," Einstein once wrote...

...exciting new developments in cosmology that are closely tied to relativity...

...In quantum theory the causality and determinism of classical physics is replaced by a mathematical formalism in which nature makes decisions—on the basis of pure chance—whenever a particle is measured...

...Bohr replied to Einstein that same year, and in 1949 they again argued the issue in a volume of essays honoring Einstein...

...Such sentimental rhapsodizing reaches the ultimate in David Ben Gurion's tribute: "His face resembles that of God...

...I've never met anyone with a head like that...

...To me the book's most interesting chapter is "The Philosopher-Scientist" by Francois Russo...

...New laboratory results based on Bell's theorem (a theoretical result obtained by J.S...

...Every month, it seems, a new book bearing his name appears...

...My main complaint is that the writers had no opportunity to revise their essays in the light of three recent trends: a fantastic increase in the number of experiments that strongly confirm the general theory of relativity...

...Einstein was indeed isolated from the mainstream of theoretical physics in his later years, but one reason this book is dated is that since 1966 the EPR paradox has suddenly become one of the hottest topics in physics...

...At one extreme is Nigel Calder's Einstein's Universe, crammed with splashy art, up-to-the-minute information, and nimble popular expositions of difficult concepts...

...The formats vary...

...He has the Jews' beautiful eyes...

...Reviewed by Martin Gardner Staff writer, "Scientific American...

...One day, Cuny tells us, Einstein and his friend Charles Chaplin "proposed to make a huge fire with bank notes and material possessions from all over the world, and have all peoples form a circle around it to celebrate their deliverance...

...To dramatize this distrust of quantum theory, in 1935 Einstein and two associates, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, published a notorious paper titled, "Can the Description of Physical Reality by Quantum Mechanics Be Considered as Complete...

...Bell), have sharpened the EPR paradox and made it more mysterious than ever...

...He fully accepted its remarkable achievements and its internal consistency, but he was convinced that it was not the final word...

...He is the only contributor who deals in more than a cursory way with the biggest intellectual dispute in the history of modern physics—the debate between Einstein and Niels Bohr...

...There are a few amusing lapses of translation in Einstein, such as the one where Francois Le Lionnais is supposed to have written, "Contrary to what the public thinks, Einstein wasn't a great mathematician, but essentially a physician . . . ." (maybe it's a printer's error...

...If at the same time it does not seem possible to go beyond quantum theory the way Einstein hoped, we cannot fault him for not knowing of results obtained after his death...

...author, "The Relativity Explosion," "The Ambidextrous Universe" This being the hundred-year anniversary of Albert Einstein's birth in Ulm, publishers are eager to take advantage of the occasion...

...Russo puts it this way: "Einstein perhaps didn't have the intellectual courage which had allowed him, in his youth, to surmount the concepts and habits of mind then considered as indisputable...

...At the other extreme is this translation of a 1966 collection of pedestrian essays by French scientists and writers, of whom the most eminent is Count Louis De Broglie, holder of a Nobel prize for his great contributions to early quantum mechanics...

...It was stale even in Einstein's day, and is especially so now when physicists are smiling much less broadly than they used to over Einstein's animadversions about God the dice-tosser...

...The book will be of value to anyone unfamiliar with Einstein's life and work, but so much has been learned about him since 1966, and so much has happened in physics and cosmology, that today it seems quaintly dated...

...The older Einstein is portrayed as a rather sad and lonely figure, isolated from his colleagues because of his foolish opposition to the new physics...

...One wonders where Cuny picked up this preposterous anecdote...

...The essential point is that a new respect is developing for his intuition about the magical, seemingly mad events that take place on the level of particle interactions...

...The severe bone structure which softens near the mouth, just at the chin, frankly, becomes feminine in appearance...

...The "joke" is repeated too often in this book...

...Its subtle argument is too technical to explain here—even Russo does not attempt it —but it seems to show that under certain conditions the information obtained by measuring a particle in one part of the universe is instantly transmitted to a "correlated" particle that may be light years away and not in any spacetime causal relation with the measured particle...

...Surely any person interested in modern science knows how, simply by thinking deeply, the unpretentious young Einstein somehow managed a stupendous leap of creative imagination that resulted in the greatest revolution in physics since the days of Isaac Newton...

...Einstein could not believe, as he often said, that God (he meant Spinoza's pantheistic deity) plays dice with the universe...

...Five pages are devoted to the glory of his face: ". . .the kindness of his expression which envelops his whole being with a kind of radiant softness...

...The paper described a thought experiment that came to be known as the EPR paradox, after the initials of the authors...

...The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics (the approach of Bohr and his friends) has meanwhile come under heavy fire from many younger physicists who share Einstein's suspicion that something —no one knows just what—is radically wrong with it...

...His nose isn't Jewish, but large and fleshy...

...As a consequence, quantum mechanics swarms with paradoxes that wrench the mind to a far greater degree than any paradox of relativity...

...One can easily imagine Einstein making such a suggestion in jest—no scientist of his eminence had less respect for money and conspicuous waste —but Chaplin...

...On the whole, though, the English text seems adequate...

...You will find all this covered sketchily and sometimes technically in the essays of this volume, along with many of the now-familiar personal details about its subject: his poor record as a student, his years as a humble clerk in the Swiss patent office, his modesty, his humor, his Zionism, his pacifism (temporarily abandoned when he urged the American government to start work on an atom bomb), his absent-mindedness, the monkish simplicity of his life, and so on...

...How Einstein would have roared with laughter over that remark...

...In this he probably showed a weakness common to all men," writes Roger Nataf, "that of refusing to change their concepts after arriving at a certain age...

...Also included are 50 excellent photographs, from youth to old age, some not previously published...