Einstein's Genius Club (28 page)

Even without Einstein's help, the Americans built the bomb and won the war. But an unexpected result was that a new and lasting conflict broke out around science and within it. Since they alone understood how to build such destructive weapons, physicists became indispensable to their governments as never before. The possession of such incalculably dangerous knowledge made them suspect—top security risks—to the authorities, who now could not do without them, but in many ways did not quite know what to do with them. For the scientists, there was an added sting of self-suspicion: After the bombs had burned away Japanese cities and their people, science itself became suspect to many of its creators, innocent no longer. Modern physics had earned a new and bitter pathos of its own. As early as 1945, Oppenheimer put it eloquently:

We have made a thing, a most terrible weapon, that altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world. We have made a thing that by all the standards of the world we grew up in is an evil thing. And… we have raised again the question of whether science is good for men.
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Until the destruction of Hiroshima, the atom bomb was a project under the tightest wraps. The atom bomb was a weapon that would bring a truly “total” war and threaten the very existence of humanity anywhere on the globe. In the short run, the weapon gave the United States an advantage over rivals such Germany and the USSR.

By 1945, the United States had poured four billion dollars into the atom bomb project, an astonishing sum for that time. The project involved thousands of technicians, vast tracts in Tennessee and Washington, and Los Alamos in New Mexico. It was kept so secret that not even Vice President Harry S. Truman was told about it until he took the oath as president after Roosevelt died. The entire project was set up under control of the Army, with then Brigadier General Leslie Groves in charge. Army security did the
obvious things: It surrounded Los Alamos with barbed wire, had sentries patrol the outskirts, set up censorship of mail. But all this was futile unless the physicists were themselves loyal and remained so. How much could these scientists be trusted? Neither security officials nor the scientists were prepared for the complexities involved.

The most valuable physicists were very much a foreign colony of savants. Fermi came from Italy; Wigner, von Neumann, and Teller from Hungary; Bethe from Germany, and Rudolf Peierls from Germany by way of England; Chadwick from England; Bohr from Denmark; Frisch from Austria by way of Denmark; Stanislaw Ulam from Poland; Vera Kistiakowsky from Russia. Their political views could be as puzzling to American security as their accents.

General Groves worried about having to deal with prima donnas, but except for Teller, there were few of those. Nor were there many troublesome political radicals. The Europeans had a closer experience with the extremist left and right and were apt to be politically conservative in the United States—Hungarians like Wigner or von Neumann, for example. Fermi left Italy because its anti-Semitism threatened his Jewish wife; in the United States, he did not bother much with politics. But two important scientists stood on the left. One was Klaus Fuchs, a German émigré to Britain, thereafter assigned to Los Alamos, with access to all secrets. The other was Robert Oppenheimer. The irony was that the Army and the FBI never suspected Fuchs of being a spy, though he passed secrets to the USSR from 1942 to 1949 and gave the Soviets all they needed to know about American know-how and progress; but they continually suspected and hounded Oppenheimer, who in fact did not pass any secrets. A further irony is that without Oppenheimer as director of Los Alamos, it is entirely possible that the atom bomb would never have been built, at least not so soon.

T
HE PATHOS OF SCIENCE LIES IN ITS DOUBLE NATURE
: The scientist is at once free and strictly confined, individual but ultimately subsumed. This double role begins when the apprentice scientist starts the long and exacting effort to master the findings of that formidable (and always growing) army of predecessors. The energy of the young scientist, the intense interest, busy labor, and excitement of possible discovery naturally block off presentiments of eventually being an old lion in winter—and fortunately so, for the sake of science. Trying to make any sort of advance is strenuous enough without also contemplating being ultimately dislodged. Physics sees itself as a self-erasing discipline, concerned only with the leading edge of research.

Those no longer on the leading edge—whether a few years behind, or centuries—no longer have an independent existence, as, say, Shakespeare and Rembrandt continue to have. Einstein was at the leading edge until 1926, but thereafter became like those he himself had once helped supplant. One might say that scientists have two careers, the living one of progress and discovery, and the posthumous one—and in certain ways, the posthumous career can begin before death occurs.

Needless to say, science never advances very neatly. The time-lines of discovery move at very different speeds, and often in odd directions. While Einstein brought relativity to consummation in 1905, clarity about the atom progressed in fits and starts. The electron was discovered inside the atom in 1897; radioactive matter in 1896; the quantum in 1900. In 1911, Rutherford found the atomic nucleus; in 1913, Bohr showed that the stability of the atom required a quantum explanation. Quantum mechanics arrived in 1925. The physics of the nucleus began to catch up only in the 1930s.

One scientist can be trumped very quickly by a new advance—consider Schrödinger, who thought his wave equation of 1926 had rid physics of the plague of quantum mechanics, only to find he had been co-opted within a year. Newton was dead two centuries before his theory was supplanted. Some discoveries are tied not to an individual, but to a team, or are a mosaic of findings, supplanted bit by bit. Older scientists begin to harvest the limitations science set on them when they entered the fray, as if a custodianship.

Every advance costs an earlier achievement's demotion or displacement. Einstein revered Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Lorentz, and Planck even as his findings dislodged each of them. He turned Newtonian gravitation into a special case of general relativity; used the Maxwellian field concept to supplant Newtonian mechanics; used Maxwell to radically revise older views of space and time, including Maxwell's own; routed the ether principle, which Lorentz clung to; transformed Planck's quantum concept from a “black body” concept into the vast new subject of quantum theory. (The reader can choose other verbs.) If he had succeeded as hoped with unification, the list would be much longer, beginning with a fundamental revision of what electromagnetism and quantum theory mean.

As the cutting edge advances, those once in the forefront of research are left behind. This can scarcely be lamented, since science would otherwise not keep advancing. Even a Newton or an Einstein will be dislodged. Homer, Bach, Botticelli—never. Science
in this sense is one of the strangest human enterprises, imposing a limitation known nowhere else in thought or art.

None of this was lost on Einstein. His sharp and humorous sense of how he came to be regarded as a “petrified object” was part of his realism about what would happen to his—and everyone else's—place in science. If physics cannot be based on the field concept, he wrote to his old friend Besso in 1954, then “
nothing
remains of my entire castle in the air, gravitation theory included, [and of] the rest of modern physics.”
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Even if the field theory holds, it will be modified.

There are countless studies of genius and creativity, but the decline of great scientists is a largely uncharted subject. Some preliminary sifting is needed. If one asks why Einstein ceased being the Einstein who revolutionized physics, a few explanations have become familiar. First and expectedly, his gifts are said to have faded as he grew older. As this happened, the young man's strengths became the older man's handicaps. In the Swiss patent office and in Berlin, he was a loner, unusually stubborn, fiercely independent, self-isolated—all this was an instinctual wisdom about how to protect and fulfill his great gifts. But later, the stubbornness hardened into an obstinate clinging to fixed ideas; the self-isolation ignored new findings that could challenge his preconceptions; he became inflexible as his younger self never was. In this view, too, he was the victim of his own early success. General relativity—that single-handed triumph against all odds and cautious advice—made him overconfident that the same method could handle the new problem. His triumphant experience “seared” him, said Abraham Pais, a colleague of Einstein at Princeton. It kept him persisting, decade after decade, despite setbacks that should have warned him off.

Yet one may wonder. A quite different picture of the older Einstein also exists. Mathematical ability proverbially weakens early, but the aging Einstein kept his prowess. Peter G. Bergmann, one of his younger mathematical assistants in the 1930s, recalled:

[What] impressed me—and remember that I was very young and Einstein in his fifties—was his tremendous creativeness… his sheer inventiveness of new approaches, of new mathematical tricks.
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Mathematics is not, however, the indispensable gift for a theoretical physicist—rather, physical intuition: the inner sense, judgment, hunch, perceptive inspiration, or however one names the inner gyroscopic instinct insisting that Nature supports this idea but not that one—and, of course, turns out to be right. In 1918, when (as noted earlier) Einstein rejected Hermann Weyl's unifying of gravity and electromagnetism as not corresponding to reality, Weyl made a telling remark: “The criticism,” he replied to Einstein, “very much disturbs me, of course, since experience has shown that one can rely on your intuition.”
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Everyone thought the same, and rightly so: Everything Einstein had done since the age of twenty-six demonstrated it. It is why he could often proceed without benefit of laboratory experiments, using only his “thought experiments.”

Did this supreme gift desert him in his later years? The American relativist John Wheeler of Princeton, who knew Einstein well from the 1930s, emphatically thinks not. In 1954, Wheeler hypothesized a “geon”—“a gravitating body made entirely of electromagnetic fields”—and sent his paper to Einstein for comment. Einstein, then seventy-five, thought about it awhile and said he doubted that a geon was stable; it took the much younger Wheeler several years to realize that Einstein was right.
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Einstein's intuition, Wheeler said, was as “amazing” as always.

But even if all Einstein's powers did flag suddenly and disastrously, this explanation is still too limited. The outcome of any scientific career depends as much on what others accomplish: New discoveries can throw logs across the path, raise perplexities, find powerful new explanations. Einstein hugely admired Lorentz, and Lorentz was hardly bereft of his great powers in 1905, mainly because
the young Einstein dismissed the ether to which Lorentz was so committed. Einstein revered Newton even more, but he wrote:

Newton, forgive me: you found the only way which in your age was just about possible for a man with the highest powers of thought and creativity. The concepts which you created are guiding our thinking in physics even today, although we now know they will have to be replaced by others farther removed from the sphere of immediate experience, if we aim at a profounder understanding of relationships.
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What Newton did, what Einstein did after him, was possible only because science is a collective and cumulative enterprise.

The eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope proclaimed: “God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.” Newton preferred a more sober view. In 1675, he wrote to Hooke:

You defer too much to my ability in searching into this subject. What Descartes did was a good step. You have added much…. If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
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Science, said Robert Oppenheimer, is cumulative in “a quite special sense.” Its findings are defined in terms of the objects and laws and ideas that were the science of its predecessors. What Galileo or Faraday did is, for working physicists, not history to be learned, but tools to be used: the physicist's very language, subject, definitions, rules, instruments, and foundations.

Einstein used these tools freely in search of his quest for unity. Still, he never believed that Nature can be made to yield her secrets given enough brute force (say, accelerators) and ingenuity. Einstein spoke instead, in a Goethean vein, of the “implacable smile of Nature,” at once benign and mocking towards human efforts to fathom her mysteries. It may be that these efforts will always fall short, since Nature stands beyond. To those with eyes to see, the
implacable smile foretells ultimate failure; any lifting of the veil is triumph enough. The smile, however, also bespeaks a benign posture, evidenced in what Einstein said was the ultimate mystery: that the universe is intelligible, and we can partake of that knowledge—and of that nobility. As he once said, “Nature conceals her secret through her essential nobility, not out of cunning.”
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