Einstein's Genius Club (33 page)

7.
Ibid., 113.

8.
For detailed discussions of the proofs, the nonmathematical reader is referred elsewhere. Several able mathematicians have rendered Gödel as accessible as he can be to the nonmathematician. First and foremost are Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, whose
Gödel's Proof
(dedicated to Bertrand Russell!), written five years before Gödel's death, first made Gödel possible for those with limited (though still hearty) mathematics. Since then, Gödel and incompleteness have entered the lay world via the bestselling
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
by Richard Hofstadter. A recent twist is Palle Yourgrau's
A World Without Time,
pairing Gödel and Einstein. Hofstadter is a cognitive scientist and Yourgrau a philosopher. Mathematicians continue to proffer “accessible” translations of the theorems. Two recent forays—delightful even for the mathematically challenged—are John L. Casti and Werner DePauli's
Gödel: A Life of Logic
and Rebecca Goldstein's
Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel
. Still, these treatments—simplified and made remarkably palatable to the nonmathematician—require patience and fortitude. More challenging, but widely acclaimed for its clarity and accuracy and for its critique of popular invocation and misuses of Gödel, is the late Torkel Franzen's
Gödel's Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse,
cited above.

9.
Ray Monk,
Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, 1872–1921
(New York: Free Press, 1996), 118.

10.
Bertrand Russell,
My Philosophical Development
(New York: Rout-ledge, 1995; first published in 1959), 57.

11.
Bertrand Russell,
The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell
(London: Routledge, 1998), 150.

12.
The
Principia
was destined to become a landmark of modern mathematics. Still, Cambridge University Press shied away from publishing on such a daunting subject, fearing a loss of revenue. Russell and Whitehead were forced to ante up fifty pounds each for publication costs.
Autobiography,
155.

13.
Rebecca Goldstein,
Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel
(New York: Norton, 2006), 111–113.

14.
Monk,
Spirit of Solitude,
153–54.

15.
Ibid., 154.

16.
Dawson, 72.

17.
Ibid., 77.

18.
Bertrand Russell,
Problems of Philosophy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997; first published 1912), 3.

19.
On Planck and black-body radiation, see Helge Kragh,
Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 58–64.

20.
David Lindlay,
The End of Physics: The Myth of a Unified Theory
(New York: Basic Books, 1993), 11.

21.
Republic,
trans. Cornford, 1941, 527 (Stephanus numbers used).

22.
Insights of Genius
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 180–82.

23.
See Thomas S. Kuhn's
Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity 1984–1912
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). Referenced in David C. Cassidy,
Einstein and Our World
(New York: Humanity Books, 2004), 53–54.

24.
Albert Einstein, “Concerning an Heuristic Point of View Toward the Emission and Transformation of Light,”
Ann. Phys
. 17, 132, 1905; Translation into English,
American Journal of Physics,
vol. 33, no. 5, May 1965.

25.
Throughout this section, I am indebted to the following: John Gribbin,
Q Is for Quantum: An Encyclopedia of Particle Physics
(New York: The Free Press, 1998); J. P. McEvoy,
Introducing Quantum Theory
(Cam-bridge, UK: Icon Books, 1999); Tony Rothman,
Instant Physics
(New York:
Fawcett, 1995); David C. Cassidy,
Einstein and our World
(New York: Humanity Books, 2004); Michio Kaku,
Einstein's Cosmos
(New York: Atlas Books, 2004); Helge Kragh,
Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); and Richard P. Feynman,
Six Easy Pieces
(New York: Basic Books, 1995; first published in 1963).

26.
See “J. J. and the Cavendish,” by Sir G. P. Thomson, at History of the Department, Department of Physics, University of Cambridge, at
http://www.phy.cam.ac.uk/cavendish/history/years/jjandcav.php
.

27.
De Broglie's Nobel speech is quoted in the Mactutor History of Mathematics biography of de Broglie by J. J. O'Connor and E. F. Robertson,
http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Broglie.html
.

28.
At Heisenberg's doctoral oral examination were his adviser, Arthur Sommerfeld, and Wilhelm Wein, an experimental physicist whose lab course Heisenberg took with ill-concealed disdain. So impoverished was Heisenberg's knowledge of the experimental side he could not answer Wein's question about a simple storage battery. The incensed Wein wanted to fail Heisenberg. Only Sommerfeld's support salvaged a pass—with the grade of III, to Pauli's grade of I, a summa cum laude. Humiliated, Heisenberg set off for Max Born's laboratory wondering whether the job offer still stood. It did. Born himself was more theorist than experimentalist. See David C. Cassidy,
Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg
(New York: W. H. Freeman, 1992), 151–53.

29.
Werner Heisenberg,
Physics and Beyond
(New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 38.

30.
See “The Double-Slit Experiment” and “The Most Beautiful Experiment,”
Physics Web,
September 2003. Young's experiment actually ranked fifth in the contest; its application to electrons came in first.
http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/15/9/2002
.

31.
Richard P. Feynman,
Six Easy Pieces
(New York: Basic Books, 1995), 132.

32.
Niels Bohr, “The Bohr-Einstein Dialogue,” in
Niels Bohr: A Centenary Volume,
ed. A. P. French and P. J. Kennedy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 124.

33.
Fölsing, 693.

34.
Michio Kaku,
Einstein's Cosmos
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), 176.

35.
Kaku calls these particles a “motley collection,” compiled over the course of nearly 150 years, from the discovery of the cathode ray, which turned out to be the electron, to the “tau neutrino,” discovered in 2000. Every few years, it seemed, another particle found its way into Greek nomenclature, to perhaps some consternation. Kaku quotes Oppenheimer: “The Nobel Prize in Physics should be given to the physicist who does
not
discover a new particle that year” (Kaku, 225).

36.
The Born-Einstein Letters,
88.

37.
Ibid., 146.

38.
Ibid., 152, 161, 163.

39.
Ibid., 165, 170, 171–72.

40.
Ibid., 216.

41.
Kaku, 232.

42.
Etienne Klein and Marc Lachieze-Rey,
The Quest for Unity,
trans. Axel Reisinger (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 41.

43.
Abraham Pais,
Subtle Is the Lord
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 235.

44.
“Autobiographical Notes,” in
Albert Einstein: Philosopher Scientist, The Library of Living Philosophers,
ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (New York: Tutor Publishing, 1949), 88–89.

45.
Pais, 152.

46.
Einstein-Besso Correspondence,
138. Translation by Burton Feldman and Katherine Williams.

47.
Fölsing, 556.

48.
Ideas and Opinions,
274.

49.
Ibid., 233.

50.
Quoted in Fölsing, 561, from a letter to Cornelius Lanczos dated January 24, 1938. Ernst Mach (1838–1916) was an influential and rigorous empiricist whose influence Einstein always acknowledged.

51.
Einstein and the History of General Relativity,
ed. Don Howard and John Stachel (Boston: Birkhauser, 1989), 315.

52.
Note that in
The Evolution of Physics,
257–58, Einstein commented on the relationship between matter and the energy of the field.

53.
Pais, 141.

54.
Ideas and Opinions,
230 (italics added).

55.
Max Born and Albert Einstein,
The Born-Einstein Letters,
trans. Irene Born (New York: Macmillan, 2005), 82.

56.
Ibid., 85.

57.
Klein, 70.

58.
Greene, 12.

59.
Burton Feldman,
The Nobel Prize,
(New York: Arcade, 2000), 164.

60.
Klein, 116.

61.
Pais, 343.

62.
Ibid., 343–50.

63.
Ibid., 347.

64.
Ibid., 350.

65.
Enz, ed.,
Pauli: Writings,
116.

66.
See Stanley Jaki,
A Mind's Matter
(Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerd-mans, 2002), 1–5.

67.
Harald Atmanspacher and Hans Primas, “Pauli's Ideas on Mind and Matter in the Context of Contemporary Science” in
The Journal of Consciousness Studies,
13, 3, 5–50, 2006.

68.
Russell,
Human Knowledge,
422.

69.
“Remarks on Bertrand Russell's Theory of Knowledge,” reprinted in
Ideas and Opinions,
21.

70.
Ibid., 24–25.

71.
Collected Papers,
vol. 11, 30.

72.
Fölsing, 559. To Fölsing, Einstein's search for a unified theory was tainted and doomed by the belief that “mathematical criteria were ‘the only reliable source of truth.'” See 561 and 559ff.

73.
Russell, “Einstein and the Theory of Relativity,”
Collected Papers,
vol. 11, 581–82.

74.
From
Scientific American,
April 1950.

1.
Paul Lawrence Rose,
Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 284.

2.
Thomas Powers,
Heisenberg's War
(Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2000), 344.

3.
David Cassidy,
Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg
(New York: W. H. Freeman, 1992), 30.

4.
Ibid., 85.

5.
Werner Heisenberg,
Physics and Beyond,
trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 93.

6.
Mark Walker,
Nazi Science: Myth, Truth and the German Atomic Bomb
(New York: Plenum Press, 1995), 77.

7.
Ibid., 83.

8.
Ibid., 84.

9.
Rainer Karlsch,
Hitlers Bombe
(München: Deutsche Verlas-Anstalt, 2005).

10.
Rose, 260.

11.
Ibid., 269.

12.
Ibid., 238.

13.
Ibid., 239.

14.
Ibid., 248, 258.

15.
Walker, 230.

16.
Peter Goodchild,
J. Robert Oppenheimer: Shatter of Worlds
(New York: Fromm Intl., 1985), 61.

17.
Jane S. Wilson and Charlotte Serber,
Standing By and Making Do
(Los Alamos, NM: Los Alamos Historical Society, 1988), 4.

18.
Richard Rhodes,
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 523.

19.
Ibid., 524.

20.
Ibid.

21.
S.S. Schweber,
In the Shadow of the Bomb
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 70.

22.
Rhodes, 444.

23.
Ibid., 445.

24.
Ibid., 449.

25.
Ibid., 605.

26.
Ibid., 571.

27.
Paul Johnson,
Modern Times
(New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 205.

28.
Schweber, 110.

29.
Ibid., 123–24.

30.
Ibid., 127.

31.
Peter Michelmore,
The Swift Years: The Robert Oppenheimer Story
(New York: Dodd, Mead, 1969), 223.

32.
Fred Jerome,
The Einstein File
(New York: St. Martins, 2002), 5–6.

33.
Ibid., 39–40.

34.
Schweber, 17.

1.
Abraham Pais,
Subtle Is the Lord
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 467.

2.
Gerald Holton and Yehuda Elkaka, eds.,
Albert Einstein: Historical Cultural Perspectives: The Centennial Symposium in Jerusalem
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 398.

3.
Pais, 341.

4.
John A. Wheeler,
Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics
(New York: Norton, 1998), 237–38.

5.
Pais, 14–15.

6.
David Brewster,
Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton
(New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1965), 143.

7.
Burton Feldman,
The Nobel Prize
(New York: Arcade, 2000), 140.

8.
S. S. Schweber,
In the Shadow of the Bomb
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 65.

9.
David Lindley,
The End of Physics: The Myth of a Unified Theory
(New York: Basic Books, 1993), 11. In Brian Greene's aptly titled
The Elegant Universe
(London: Vintage, 2005), the war between the experimentalists and theorists is dismissed in favor of the as-yet unproven string theories: “String theorists have no desire for a solo trek to the upper reaches of Mount Nature; the would far prefer to share the burden and the excitement with experimental colleagues. It is merely a technological mismatch in our current situation—a historical asynchrony—that the theoretical ropes and crampons for the final push to the top have at least been partially fashioned, while the experimental ones do not yet exist. But this does
not
mean that string theory is fundamentally divorced from experiment. Rather, string theorists have high hopes of ‘kicking down a
theoretical
stone' from the ultra-high-energy mountaintop to experimentalists working at a lower base camp” (210). Let it not be said that physics is a classless society.