E=mc2 (32 page)

"the happiest thought of my life": From an unpublished manuscript Einstein wrote for
Nature
in 1920.

"Do not worry . . .":
Albert Einstein, the Human Side,
Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffmann (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 8.

"Attention was called . . .": Arthur Eddington,
Space, Time and Gravitation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), p. 114.

"Dear Russell . . .": The telegram from the mathematician J. E. Littlewood appears on p. i n of
The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell,
vol. II (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1968).

"There was a dramatic quality . . .": The visitor was Russell's collaborator Alfred North Whitehead:
Science in the Modern World
(London, 1926), p. 13.

"This is the most important result . . .": Albrecht Folsing,
Albert Einstein: A Biography
(London: Penguin, 1997), P. 444.

Henry Crouch . . . golfing specialist: Meyer Berger,
The Story of The New York Times, 1851-1951
(New York: Simon &Schuster, 1951), pp. 251-52.

. . . but English anti-Semites . . . : The quote is from
The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Vol. X: Essays in Biography
(London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press, for the Royal Economic Society, 1972), p. 382. The occasion was Keynes's visit to Berlin in June 1926, where he lectured at the University; he met Einstein at a dinner afterwards. "It is not agreeable," Keynes remarked, "to see a civilization so under the ugly thumbs of its impure Jews."

". . . village of puny demi-gods upon stilts": The comment was to his long-time correspondent, Queen Elizabeth of Belgium. See
The Quotable Einstein,
p. 25.

"Had I known . . .": Antonina Vallentin,
The Drama of Albert Einstein
(New York: Doubleday, 1954), p. 278.

Then, as the years went on . . . : To some extent, what happened to Einstein is a common effect. Great artists and composers often do their top work as they get old, but scientists don't. Partly this could be because it's intellectually too difficult to hold complex ideas in one's head. Even in drama, the play
Oedipus at Colonus,
which Sophocles wrote when very old, has a crudeness of construction that would be not useful in a physical theory. But Beethoven wrote complex works into his fifties, and
The Tempest
was written in Shakespeare's late forties. There's something more going on in science—and for Einstein, the slippage was more extreme than almost anyone else's. It's a lengthy topic-there are important insights from Macauly and even Spielberg, which we'll explore on the Web site.

[A] . . . young assistant once asked him . . . :
Einstein, A Centenary Volume,
ed. A. P. French (London: Heinemann, 1979), p. 32. The assistant was Ernst Strauss, who worked with Einstein from 1944 to 1948. The same volume, p. 211, has Einstein's account of how very different it had been when he was younger and could "scent out the paths that led to the depths, and to disregard everything else, all the many things that clutter up the mind, and divert it from the essential."

"Discovery in the grand manner . . .": Banesh Hoffmann,
Albert Einstein, Creator and Rebel
(New York: Viking, 1972), p. 222.

Appendix. Follow-up of Other Key Participants

"If I were King . . .": Du Châtelet's preface to her translation of Mandeville's "The Fable of the Bees"; in Esther Ehrman,
Mme du Châtelet
(Berg Publishers, 1986), p. 61.

"The gift of leading a harmonious life . . .":
Albert Einstein/Michele Besso, Correspondence 1903-1955,
trans. Pierre Spezialli (Paris: Hermann, 1972), p. 537.

"I had then to start. . .": Richard Rhodes,
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), p. 356.

"A real genius . . .": Rhodes,
The Making of the Atomic Bomb,
p. 448.

"The radioactivity was minuscule . . .": Emilio Segre,
A Mind Always in Motion
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 215.

. . . deHevesy went back to the jar . . . :
Adventures in Radioisotope Research: The Collected Papers of George Hevesy,
vol. 1 (London: Pergamon Press, 1962), pp. 27, 28.

"Why, fellows, you don't want . . .": Nuel Phar Davis,
Lawrence and Oppenheimer
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), p. 351.

"Microphones installed?": Jeremy Bernstein, ed.,
Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall
(Woodbury, N.Y.: American Institute of Physics, 1996), p. 75. See also the introduction by Sir Charles Frank to
Operation Epsilon: The Farm Hall Transcripts
(Bristol: Institute of Physics, 1993) for various practicalities of the recording, including his aplomb when questioned about "some unexplained wires in the back of a cupboard."

"We have tried to make a machine . . .": Bernstein,
Hitler's Uranium Club,
p. 211.

Berlin Auer company: Samuel Goudsmit,
Alsos: The Failure in German Science
(Woodbury, N.Y., 1996), pp.
56-65.

"there was literally no time for research":
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: An Autobiography and Other Recollections, ed.
Katherine Haramundanis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed. 1947), p. 225.

"Icelandic was a minor challenge": George Greenstein, "The Ladies of Observatory Hill," in
Portraits of Discovery
(New York: Wiley, 1998), p. 17.

"Fred won't resign . . .": Fred Hoyle,
Home Is Where the Wind Blows: Chapters from a Cosmologist's Life
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 374.

"I am almost ashamed . . .": Kameshwar Wali,
Chandra: A Biography of S. Chandrasekhar
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 95.

Guide to Further Reading

Faraday and Energy

The best way to get to know Michael Faraday as a person is to skim through his collected letters, either the version edited by L. P. Williams et al.,
The Selected Correspondence of Michael Faraday 2
vols. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971), or the more comprehensive
The Correspondence of Michael Faraday,
ed. Frank A. J. L. James (London: Institution of Electrical Engineers, ongoing from 1991). There's the teenager racing along the London streets in a rainstorm one night, exulting in the gush of water on his body; later there's the earnest young assistant, furious at Humphry Davy's wife for treating him as a servant on a trip to the Continent; finally, decades after, we see the grand old man of British science, distraught at realizing his memory is fading ever faster, and that the concentration he'd once been able to bring to bear on any subject is now gone.

There's a good look at the way religion entered into his life and approach, in Geoffrey Cantor's
Michael Faraday, Sandemanian and Scientist: A Study of Science and Religion in the Nineteenth Century
(London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991) while
Michael Faraday: His Life and Work,
by Silvanus P. Thompson (London: Cassell, 1898), is my favorite overall biography, catching the tone of the times in a way later writers find difficult. The more recent
Faraday Rediscovered: Essays on the Life and Work of Michael Faraday,
ed. David Gooding and Frank A. J. L. James (London: Macmillan, 1985; New York: American Institute of Physics, 1989) corrects a number of Thompson's errors, and also is a good introduction to the major scientific discoveries. One of the most exciting chapters annotates an almost minute-by-minute account, based on Faraday's notebooks, of that crucial September 1821 experiment.

Humphry Davy: Science and Power,
by David M. Knight (Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1992) is crisply analytic on Faraday's troubled mentor, and on the indispensable role the poets Wordsworth and Coleridge played in shuttling Kant's ideas to Davy and then to Faraday. He also shows the way British scientists were often disposed to believe in mysterious powers—as with Faraday's God-granted unities— to distinguish themselves from the extreme materialists in France, whose research was held to have helped justify the Terror in the French Revolution. For a more flowing account of Faraday and Davy, try
The Mercurial Chemist,
by Anne Treneer (London: Methuen, 1963).

Faraday was far from being the only individual active in developing the conservation of energy. Thomas Kuhn has a famous essay about it, "Energy Conservation as an Example of Simultaneous Discovery," in his
The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). Kuhn doesn't just vaguely note that conservation was "in the air," but shows the role of the era's many new-fangled industrial machines as a source of metaphors, as well as the importance of the many newly practical technologies for converting between types of energy.
The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain,
by Cros-bie Smith (London: Athlone Press, 1998) takes a different approach, looking, for example, at the minutiae of Scottish theology and its patronage networks, and how the less stratified social structure there naturally brought engineers, professors, and theologians into a powerfully cross-fertilizing contact.

The extrascientific motivations of the seminal Hans Christian Oersted are explored in R. C. Stauffer, "Speculation and Experiment in the Background of Oersted's Discovery of Electromagnetism,"
Isis, 48
(1957), and, if you can bear wading through hundreds of pages of treacle, there are Oersted's own writings. Gerald Holton's essay "The Two Maps" (in his
The Advancement of Science, and Its Burdens
[Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986, 1998], pp. 197-208) is excellent on the significance of Oersted's being misunderstood.

For a closer look at the science of energy as it has ramified today, the oddly indirect operational definition that has been so useful is made clear in Chapter 3 ("The Great Conservation Principles") of
The Character of Physical Law
(London: Penguin UK, 1992), a transcript of BBC-recorded Cornell lectures by the ever-ebullient Richard Feynman. The notion of entropy is analyzed—with steadily increasing order—in Peter Atkins's estimable
The Second Law: Energy, Chaos, and Form
(New York: Scientific American Books, 1984,1994), a text excellent at showing the reasoning that led to seeing a further level of structure in energy's operations. (The chapter where he shows how the life we're used to is just a brief stopping point in the full temperature scale of the universe is a masterpiece.) For if we can understand the disorder we call heat, then we should be able to understand the opposite of disorder, which could be called "information." Neil Gershenfeld's
The Physics of Information Technology
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000) is at a more advanced level than Atkins, but strongly recommended for anyone interested in exploring this furthermost ramification of the Victorian energy concepts.

Lavoisier and Mass

Lavoisier found a graceful biographer in Arthur Donovan, with his
Antoine Lavoisier: Science, Administration, and Revolution
(Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1993). Jean-Pierre Poirier wrote a more comprehensive book,
Lavoisier: Chemist, Biologist, Economist
(English translation) (College Park, Penn.: University
of
Pennsylvania, 1996), but it's harder to read straight through. For more than thirty years, Robert Darn-ton has been probing life under polite society's surface in France around the period when Lavoisier worked, and his
Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968) is excellent for background, especially on the popular attitudes that proved to be fatal for Lavoisier later on. For Marat I'd
go
back to the brief account
Jean Paul Marat: A Study in Radicalism
(orig. 1927, reissued Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967) by the then young Louis Gottschalk. Readers near a large library, and with even a little French, will be gripped by the firsthand accounts of the imprisonment and trial, in Adrien Delahante,
Une famille de finance au XVIIIe siecle, 2
vols (Paris, 1881).

Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield's
The Architecture of Matter
(London: Hutchinson, 1962) is especially thoughtful in disentangling some of the attitudes of Lavoisier's time, while the classic
The Origins of Modern Science 1300-1800,
by Herbert Butterfield (orig. London, 1949) take a more no-nonsense frontal approach. A more physics-oriented history, bringing the story into the twentieth century, is Max Jammer's
Concepts of Mass in Classical and Modern Physics
(New York: Dover, 1997), which includes such nutritious tidbits as the plausibilities behind the suggestion that the word
mass
originated in the Hebrew word
matzoh;
also the links between mass conservation, and the vision of
quantitas mataeriae, or
"quantity of matter," which Aquinas's followers had used to resolve the problems of what actually happens during transubstantiation in the Catholic mass.

Of the recent approaches, Frederic Holmes is always fresh, as in "The Boundaries of Lavoisier's Chemical Revolution," in
Revue d'Histoire des Sciences, 48
(1995), pp. 9-48. Maurice Crosland's chapter "Chemistry and the Chemical Revolution" in
The Ferment of Knowledge,
George S. Rousseau, ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980) is good on what Lavoisier was likely
to
be thinking during his metal experiments. Try also Perrin's essay "The Chemical Revolution: Shifts in Guiding Assumptions," pp. 53-81 in
The Chemical Revolution: Essays in Reinterpretation
(special issue
of Osiris,
2nd series, 1988).

The question of what mass "really" is brings us to the concept from modern physics of the Higgs field, for which
Lucifer's Legacy—The Meaning of Asymmetry,
by Frank Close (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) is one excellent start, while Gerard 't Hooft's
In Search of the Ultimate Building Blocks
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) gives even wider background, deftly tracking the story through the author's own schooling and professional puzzlements (though modesty—plus the annoying lack of efficient time-travel—forbade his mentioning the story's culmination, for now, in his own Nobel Prize).

"c"

Galileo lived in a time when science hadn't fully separated out from philosophy or literature, which means that today's nonspecialist can have the treat of entering into his major works directly: great chunks of his
Two New Sciences
are immensely attractive to read. I. B. Cohen's old article "Roemer and the First Determination of the Velocity of Light,"
Isis,
31,1940, pp. 327-79, expands the story of what Cassini had to put up with, while a skillful update, including points on the caution against straying from hard empiricism that Cassini had to follow due to working in a Catholic country in the century of Galileo's persecution, is in "The Galilean satellites of Jupiter from Galileo to Cassini, Romer, and Bradley," by Suzanne Debarbat and Curtis Wilson in
The General History of Astronomy, Vol. 2, Planetary Astronomy from the Renaissance to the Rise of Astrophysics, Part A: Tycho Brahe to Newton,
eds. Rene Taton and Curtis Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 144-157. Timothy Ferris's
Coming of Age in the Milky Way
(New York: William Morrow, 1988) puts that within an even wider setting; his book is the ideal introduction to the history of astronomy.

Maxwell found a suitably wry biographer in Martin Goldman,
The Demon in the Aether: The Story of James Clerk Maxwell
(Edinburgh: Paul Harris Publishing; with Adam Hilger, Bristol, 1983). To go with that I'd recommend Chapter 11 ("Gentleman of Energy: the Natural Philosophy of James Clerk Maxwell") in Crosbie Smith's
Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain
(London: Athlone Press, 1998) as a place to start. As with Ferris, excellent explanations are mixed with pleasing anecdotes; we even find Maxwell's reflections (heartening to any Oxford author) on his education in Cambridge:

Like a plucked and skinny goose . . . I

Asked myself with voice unsteady,

If of all the stuff I read, I

Ever made the slightest use.

Where Maxwell's science comes alive to the general reader is in many of his introductions and commentaries on the major works. Excellent samples are "A Historical Survey of Theories on Action at a Distance," and "Experiment on Lines of Force," conveniently available in
Physical Thought: An Anthology,
ed. Shmuel Sambursky (London: Hutchinson, 1974). The 1890 edition of Maxwell's papers is superseded by
The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell,
ed. P. M. Harman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 1995). For overviews, Harman's classic
Energy, Force, and Matter
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982) might be compared with Robert D. Purring-ton's even more finely honed
Physics in the Nineteenth Century
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997).

Innovation in Maxwell's Electromagnetic Theory,
by Daniel Siegel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), takes a very detailed, at times polemical, look at the process of Maxwell's creativity, including revealing contrasts with the overtheoretical French tradition; Christine M. Crow's
Paul Valery and Maxwell's Demon: Natural Order and Human Possibility
(Hull, England: University of Hull Publications, 1972) brings out rich insights from a different examination of the French tradition. Richard Feynman would have had little use for Valery or most historians, which is a pity, but for exploring the actual science of light, his writing (and research) has had few peers: along with the physics texts in the next entry,
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter,
by Richard Feynman (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985) is a fine start.

Du Châtelet and "Squared"

Du Châtelet hasn't been favored by her English language biographers, but readers with some French are in for a treat. Elisabeth Badinter had the excellent idea of doing a comparative biography of Emilie du Châtelet and Madame d'Épinay, and her
Émilie, Émilie: l'ambition feminine au XVIIIe siècle
(Paris: Flamarrion, 1983) is a fast-paced, well thought out pairing of psychological portraits.

Les Lettres de la Marquise du Châtelet, 2
vols. (Geneva, 1958), ed. T. Besterman shows du Châtelet at ease, often being funny in the way clever screenwriters are funny—but then she'll shift, almost from one sentence to the next, to a genuine puzzlement about how an observation she's just made would apply to the nature of free will, or affect the foundations of physics.

Voltaire en son temps: avec Mme du Châtelet 1754-1748
(Paris: Albin Michel, 1978) by Rene Vaillot is more pedantic, but pulls out worthwhile nuggets, such as the tableau of du Châtelet, over morning coffee, impressing a visitor by reading out a letter from Christian Wolff about possible giant inhabitants on the planet Jupiter. The letter was in Latin, and the idea, once developed in conversation with Voltaire, is clearly at the heart of his (highly recommended) short story "Micromegas." Its theme of an innocently wise giant's perspective—whose soul, one suspects, is what Voltaire once hoped for himself—is one that has swirled through texts over the centuries, from the Bible to Hollywood's
The Day the Earth Stood Still to
Ted Hughes's "The Iron Man."

For a straightforward biography
Voltaire in Love,
by Nancy Mitford (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1957) is, as one would expect, not especially accurate in biographical details, clueless about the science, bitchy in tone, and a cracking good read. Fontanelle's
On the Plurality of Inhabited Worlds
(London: Nonesuch Press, 1929), translated by John Glanville, is wonderful on giving a sense of the enthusiasm du Châtelet might have experienced gazing up at night.