Why are there posters of Einstein in dorm rooms?

When I was in high school, I was totally convinced that I was going to be a scientist of some kind. My mom and stepfather had long careers in academic medicine and science policy; my stepmother had a doctorate in astrophysics; she met my dad doing math-intensive high finance. A couple of things happened when I got to college, though; I hit a wall with the math, and I couldn't quite hack the computer programming (no pun intended). Then I discovered the social sciences and art and music and all that, and wound up taking the humanities fork, with no regrets.

I've never lost my jones for math and physics, though. I'm looking forward to the Large Hadron Collider being fired up next year the way normal male Americans look forward to the NBA playoffs. I like to be an informed fan, and since Einstein is the Michael Jordan of scientists, I've been trying to figure out what it is exactly that the guy figured out, and why it's so important. Beyond the physics, I wanted to know what put Einstein into the pop pantheon alongside Bob Marley and John Lennon. You never see dorm room posters of Henry Clerk Maxwell or Neils Bohr. The only other scientist who comes remotely close in terms of pop stature is Darwin, and that's mostly in the form of legged fish on car bumpers.

So here's what I found out about Einstein's physics, his politics, and how his public image has taken on a life of its own. Enjoy, and feel free to skip around.

First, a little biographical background. Einstein was born 1879 in Ulm, Germany. At his birth, his mother was reputedly frightened that her infant's head was so large and oddly shaped. Though the size of his head appeared to be less remarkable as he grew older, it's evident in photographs of Einstein that it was disproportionately large for his body throughout his life. Together with his large, widely-spaced eyes, Einstein had an unusually childlike appearance. I think a large part of his physical charisma is the paradox of his infantlike physiognomy beneath his white hair and moustache, deep facial lines, old-man sweater, etc.

Einstein's parents famously worried about his intellectual development as a child. He didn't start speaking until he was three, and he wasn't completely fluent until nine. A picture emerges of an eccentric and inward kid, with a lot of attention devoted to his own imagination and thoughts, and not much attention left over for everything else. I don't believe in genius or talent, and I don't think Einstein had a 'superior' brain. Einstein's hypertrophied spatial reasoning and mental imaging abilities came at considerable expense to his social skills and his personal happiness. I see him as representing an unusually wide skew along an axis that every person is located on.

When Einstein was five, his father showed him a small pocket compass. He was elated to discover that something in 'empty' space acted on the needle. Einstein would later describe his first brush with the Earth's magnetic field as one of the most revelatory events of his life. As a kid, Einstein built models and mechanical devices for fun and showed mathematical ability early on. His family was Jewish, but not observant, and he went to a Catholic elementary school. I'm guessing that the contradictions he experienced there were the source for his later outspoken secular humanism. He then attended the Luitpold Gymnasium (not the exercise kind, picture a regimented boarding school) where he got a relatively progressive secondary education. In 1891, he taught himself Euclidean geometry from a school booklet (for fun, whee!) and began to study calculus. The teenage Einstein sounds like the consummate math nerd, the Trench Coat Mafia kind, antisocial and hostile to authority. He only completed one term before dropping out in the spring of 1895 to rejoin his family, who by then had moved to Italy.

The same year he dropped out of high school, at age sixteen, Einstein performed a famous thought experiment by trying to visualize what it would be like to ride alongside a light beam. He was trying to wrap his head around a baffling problem. There's a set of equations, discovered in the nineteenth century, that describe electricity and magnetism extremely accurately. That's nice for us, but the equations also suggest that the speed of the light (670 million or so miles per hour in a vacuum) would be the same, regardless of an observer's velocity. In other words, if you're zipping along at ninety-nine percent of the speed of light, and you turn on your headlights, the beams will race away in front of you at exactly the same speed as they would if you were sitting still. Scientists in 1895 were making the first really accurate measurement of the speed of light under various conditions, and they were hoping to prove this prediction wrong. Much to their horror, every experiment proved the equations right: the speed of light is the same, no matter how fast the observer is moving relative to the light ray. Einstein's daydream was a step towards building a new mathematical model of the universe that would make sense out of light's totally invariant speed.

Like a lot of scientists, Einstein was a musical person. He frequently used musical terms to express physics concepts. At the insistence of his mother, he took classical violin lessons as a kid, and like most people, disliked them and eventually discontinued them. Like dishearteningly few people, Einstein returned to music in adulthood, and was a dedicated amateur classical violinist. He once said:

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.

Einstein eventually attended university, where he studied math and science in the hopes of getting a science teaching gig. But while he did manage to graduate, his antagonistic relationship with his professors didn't help with recommendations or offers. Instead, the father of a classmate helped him get an unglamorous office job as an assistant examiner at the Swiss patent office in 1902. His main responsibility was to evaluate patent applications relating to electromagnetic devices. It was a good day job for him; the pace was undemanding and it gave him the opportunity to ponder his favorite subject, the electromagnetic force, at length.

So here's the science part, with its attendant heavy philosophical implications

Before we go any further, let's ponder the electromagnetic force for a minute. Here's a fun Java applet that lets you play with a simulated electromagnetic field. The field is an invisible entity that encompasses and pervades all of space. It exerts a force on particles that possess electric charge, and is in turn changed by the presence and motion of those particles. We take the field's physiciality for granted in modern life, but I want to dwell on it because it's actually the craziest idea you've ever heard. Saturating and pervading all of space, including your body, is this invisible, intangible, odorless thing, the manipulation of whose tiny and intricate vibrations make possible our vision, video games, iPods, surgical lasers, MRI machines, cell phones and pretty much every other thing we experience aside from Earth's gravity. The field concept is not an easy or intuitive one, and even though I'm here in the year 2007 surrounded by metal detectors and such, it's still difficult for me to get a handle on it. It's not at all natural or easy to conceptualize an invisible and intangible thing all around and through me that can push things around, heat things, make things light up, transmit information and so on. If I wasn't intimately familiar with evidence of the field's existence, it would sound like a paranoid delusion. The math isn't much help in making fields more accessible to our common sense, because it requires frightening calculus and the ability to imagine higher dimensions. Thinking too hard about it makes most people, myself included, physically vertiginous. It's humbling to consider Einstein beginning to grapple with electromagnetism for fun while he worked his slacker job in the earliest years of the twentieth century.

Nearly all of the interactions between atoms comprising our habitat and ourselves can be traced to the electromagnetic force acting on the charged protons and electrons inside them. The reason there are macroscopic objects at all is that electromagnetic forces are holding their constituent particles together. Gravity feels strong when you're walking up the stairs, but it's stupendously weaker than electromagnetism. Consider that a tiny refrigerator magnet's pull can hold a paperclip up, thus overcoming the gravitational pull of the entire planet. Consider also that the Sun's gravitational effect on you personally is too miniscule to even be noticeable (you don't feel any lighter at noon and heavier at midnight), but the Sun's electromagnetic radiation can blind you in a matter of seconds from ninety-three million miles away. In a way, the pervasiveness and ubiquity of electromagnetic phenomena kept our ancestors from even realizing there was something there to understand, much less be able to understand it.

During 1905, in his spare time away from the patent office, Einstein wrote four short articles for publication in Annalen Der Physik, then the leading journal in the field. He wrote them without much scientific literature to refer to or many fellow scientists with whom he could discuss the theories. People call them the Annus Mirabilis papers, from Latin for 'miracle year.' The first was titled "On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light." (Heuristic means hands-on or practical.) It was a response to Max Planck's hypothesis that energy comes bundled in tiny little discrete chunks or particles called quanta (singular quantum.) Einstein's key contribution was his assertion that energy quantization is a general, intrinsic property of light (and all other electromagnetic energy). Einstein showed how these little chunks of energy are mathematically related to the energy's frequency. This later developed into the photon concept, from which a very great deal followed. So that's the first paper.

Einstein's second article in 1905, named "On the Motion—Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat—of Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid", covered his study of Brownian motion, the random jostling of dust motes in the air, or the swirling of milk in coffee. Einstein used mathematical analysis of Brownian motion to provide empirical evidence for the existence of atoms. Before this paper, atoms were recognized as a useful concept, but physicists and chemists debated whether they were real things or just mathematical abstractions. Einstein's statistical discussion of atomic behavior gave experimentalists a way to count atoms by looking through an ordinary microscope. (How, exactly, I don't know.) Once the physicists were sure that atoms existed, they began investigating happenings at much smaller scales, leading eventually to an understanding of how the sun works, nuclear weapons and much else. So that's the second paper.

The third paper that year was called "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", and it introduced the special theory of relativity, of which you have heard but whose content is likely mysterious to you. This is not because you weren't paying attention in high school or lack science ability. Relativity is actually extremely tripped out. Remember how the velocity of light is supposed to be the same, regardless of how fast you're moving when you measure it? Einstein interpreted this wildly counterintuitive fact as evidence that everything is moving through space and time at the speed of light, all the time. More accurately, everything in the universe is always moving along the three spatial dimensions and the fourth dimension of time at the velocity of light. No joke. Always. Whatever your velocity through space is, your velocity through time is the difference between it and the velocity of light. So for a photon zipping along through space at the speed of light, time isn't passing at all. Really.

So if every time you change velocity in space, you change your velocity in time, why haven't you noticed? It's mostly an accident of scale. You and most of the things you encounter in the world move through space a lot slower than 670 million miles an hour, and by cosmic scales you can only change your velocity by miniscule amounts, so your movement through time is barely affected. It's like the way the curvature of the earth appears to be zero when we're standing on it, because it's so much bigger than we are. We would have found out the earth was round much sooner if it was only thirty miles wide. Tiny though it is for our poky selves, time dilation caused by changes in velocity is a real fact of the universe, one supported by copious evidence, and one with real consequences for higher speeds and longer distances. For example, global positioning systems have to account for time dilation between the different satellites as they hurtle around their orbits.

Heavy, right? It gets better (or worse, depending on your taste for this kind of thing.) Brian Greene asks us to picture the universe as 'the spacetime loaf'. Imagine a loaf of bread arranged along the time axis, where each slice is a freezeframe snapshot of everything in space at a particular moment in time. If you and someone else are moving relative to one another, you slice the spacetime loaf at different angles (see BG's book for the reasoning.) For a human, speeds are slooooow on the cosmic scale, so the difference in angle between my spacetime slices and yours are imperceptibly tiny. But what a photon or a person on a far-distant planet considers to be the state of the universe 'now' is going to be very different. Quoting BG, italics his:

If you buy the notion that reality consists of the things in your freeze-frame mental image right now, and if you agree that your 'now' is no more valid than the 'now' of someone located far away in space who can move freely, then reality encompasses all of the events in spacetime. The total loaf exists. Just as we envision all of space as really being out there, as really existing, we should also envision all of time as really being out there, as really existing too. Past, present and future certainly appear to be distinct entities. But as Einstein once said, "For we convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however persistent."

My first exposure to this idea was from Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-five. The Tralfamadorans explain to Billy Pilgrim that humans perceive time "passing" the way we'd perceive a landscape passing if we could only see it through a long cardboard tube while being carried along on rails.

In this way of thinking, events, regardless of when they happen from any particular perspective, just are. They all exist. They eternally occupy their particular point in spacetime. There is no flow... It is tough to accept this description, since our worldview so forcefully distinguishes between past, present and future. But if we stare intently at this familiar temporal scheme and confront it with the cold hard facts of modern physics, its only place of refuge seems to lie within the human mind.

I'm a little disturbed by BG's confrontational tone - "confront", "cold hard facts", "place of refuge" - but we'll bracket that and move on.

The feeling that time flows is deeply ingrained in our experiences and thoroughly pervades our thinking and language... But don't confuse language with reality. Human language is far better at capturing human experience than at expressing deep physical laws.

Does time have an arrow discernable somewhere in the universe outside our collective imaginations? Intuition says yes, since spilled milk doesn't unspill, but the basic physics equations don't specify a direction for time or depend on any asymmetry to it. Post-Einstein, you can treat time as just another direction, like left-right, up-down, forwards-backwards. Equations describing the moon's orbit or electrons in a molecule have time-reversal symmetry. In theory, you could manipulate the particles into unspilling your milk; it would just be very very difficult, and it's vanishingly unlikely to ever just happen by itself.

For some reason, we know not why, the universe was extremely simple and orderly at the moment of the Big Bang. It's been getting more complex and disorderly since then - as the particles jostle about, there are statistically just a lot more possible disordered states for them to be in than ordered ones. So maybe time's arrow is just our interpretation of the strong overall tendency towards entropy in the world around us, not a fundamental fact of the universe. From the Wikipedia article on time says:

Psychological time is, in part, the cataloguing of ever increasing items of memory from continuous changes in perception. In other words, things we remember make up the past, while the future consists of those events that cannot be remembered. The ancient method of comparing unique events to generalized repeating events such as the apparent movement of the sun, moon, and stars provided a convenient grid work to accomplish this. The consistent increase in memory volume creates one mental arrow of time. Another arises because one has the sense that one's perception is a continuous movement from the unknown (Future) to the known (Past). Anticipating the unknown forms the psychological future which always seems to be something one is moving towards, but, like a projection in a mirror, it makes what is actually already a part of memory, such as desires, dreams, and hopes, seem ahead of the observer.

Okay. So that's Einstein's third paper of 1905. Still with me? Einstein was on a roll that year. His fourth paper was called "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?" From relativity's axioms, Einstein showed how one can deduce the famous equation showing the equivalence between matter and energy. To get the energy equivalence (E) of some amount of mass (m), you multiply the mass by the velocity of light, and then you multiply it by the velocity of light again. This is the famous E=mc² relationship. In English, a very small amount of mass converts to a very large amount of energy. What's the big deal about E=mc²? For one thing, this equation was used in the development of the atomic bomb. By measuring the mass of different atomic nuclei and subtracting from that number the total mass of the protons and neutrons as they would weigh separately, the guys at Los Alamos could obtain an estimate of the binding energy available within an atomic nucleus. Then they estimated the energy released in the nuclear reaction, by comparing the binding energy of the nuclei that enter and exit the reaction. Einstein had some conflicted emotions about his contribution to nuclear physics; we'll get to it later.

If Einstein had been hit by a train in 1906, we'd still be absorbing his output, but there's more big stuff coming. In 1909, he presented a paper called "The Development of Our Views on the Composition and Essence of Radiation." In this and an earlier 1909 paper, Einstein showed that the energy quanta introduced by Max Planck also carry a well-defined momentum and act in many respects as if they were independent, point-like particles. This paper marks the introduction of the modern photon concept (although the term itself was coined much later). Being able to mathematically describe and predict the behavior of photons has made possible such modern conveniences as computers, TV and supermarket scanners. The behavior of photons suggests more deep weirdness going on behind the world we experience. Einstein showed that light, like all other forms of mass-energy, must simultaneously behave like a wave and a particle, a revolutionary idea at the time and still a major head-scratcher.

In November 1915, Einstein presented a series of lectures before the Prussian Academy of Sciences on a new theory of gravity, known as general relativity. In general relativity, gravity is no longer a force, as it is in Newton's law of gravity. Instead, gravity is the warping of spacetime by matter and energy. Empty space itself is the thing being warped in general relativity, measurably and visibly warped if there's enough matter or energy in play. In Hubble Space Telescope photos, distant galaxies can appear to be stretched like silly putty if there's a big enough object between us and them, because the light gets severely lensed as it passes through the warped region of space.

Einstein's science career was a lot like Paul McCartney's. His career from 1905 to 1917 was like McCartney's run from Please Please Me through Abbey Road. Einstein's career after he moved to New Jersey was more like McCartney from Wings through the present: he was a significant figure on the landscape, but he didn't produce any new ideas that anyone cared about. Mathematicians and scientists, like rock stars, are famous for burning out young. Einstein the scientist burned bright and fast, and like McCartney, then coasted amiably along to old age.

Einstein's politics

Einstein's authority 'problems' as a kid turned into a principled opposition to fascism and violence as an adult. He was an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association beginning in 1934, and was an admirer of Ethical Culture. On the much-contested subject of Einstein's religious views, here's what the man himself had to say:

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

He published a paper in Nature in 1940 entitled Science and Religion:

A person who is religiously enlightened appears to me to be one who has, to the best of his ability, liberated himself from the fetters of his selfish desires and is preoccupied with thoughts, feelings and aspirations to which he clings because of their super-personal value ... regardless of whether any attempt is made to unite this content with a Divine Being, for otherwise it would not be possible to count Buddha and Spinoza as religious personalities. Accordingly a religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt of the significance of those super-personal objects and goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation...In this sense religion is the age-old endeavor of mankind to become clearly and completely conscious of these values and goals, and constantly to strengthen their effects.

The religious and atheistic alike claim him as a hero, but I think if he had to pick a side, he would have come down closer to Darwin and Dawkins:

If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds without a peculiar religious feeling of his own. But it is different from the religion of the naive man.

For the latter God is a being from whose care one hopes to benefit and whose punishment one fears; a sublimation of a feeling similar to that of a child for its father, a being to whom one stands to some extent in a personal relation, however deeply it may be tinged with awe.

But the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The future, to him, is every whit as necessary and determined as the past. There is nothing divine about morality, it is a purely human affair. His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.

I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.

In 1933, the Nazis passed "The Law of the Restoration of the Civil Service," which forced all Jewish university professors out of their jobs. Throughout the 1930s, Nobel laureates Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark led a campaign to label Einstein's work as "Jewish physics", as opposed to "German" or "Aryan". With the assistance of the SS, the Deutsche Physik supporters worked to publish pamphlets and textbooks denigrating Einstein's theories and attempted to politically blacklist German physicists who taught them, notably Werner Heisenberg.

In 1939, under the encouragement of Szilárd, Einstein sent a letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt urging the study of nuclear fission for military purposes, under fears that the Nazi government would be first to develop nuclear weapons. The letter prompted an investigation that eventually led to the Manhattan Project. Einstein himself didn't end up working on the bomb, and, according to Linus Pauling, he later regretted having written his letter. Einstein considered himself a pacifist and humanitarian, and in later years, a committed democratic socialist.

I believe Gandhi's views were the most enlightened of all the political men of our time. We should strive to do things in his spirit: not to use violence for fighting for our cause, but by non-participation of anything you believe is evil.

Einstein was a member of several civil rights groups, including the Princeton chapter of the NAACP. With Paul Robeson, he was a co-chair of the American Crusade to End Lynching. When the eightysomething year old WEB DuBois was frivolously charged with being a communist spy, Einstein volunteered as a character witness in the case, which led to the charges being dismissed. Perhaps the biggest compliment America ever paid Einstein was the size of his FBI file: fourteen hundred pages on his activities and movements. The FBI recommended that Einstein be barred from immigrating to the United States under the Alien Exclusion Act, alleging that he "believes in, advises, advocates, or teaches a doctrine which, in a legal sense, as held by the courts in other cases, 'would allow anarchy to stalk in unmolested' and result in 'government in name only.'"

While Einstein was a supporter of Zionism in the cultural sense, he often expressed reservations about its nationalistic side. During a speech at the Commodore Hotel in New York, he told the crowd:

My awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain.

Einstein in pop culture

Anytime I did something dumb in grade school, my friend Daniel would say "Nice going, Einstein." Since then I've said it myself more times than I can count. Einstein serves a handy shorthand for the natural genius, the superhuman intellect. He offers the hope that any lazy and undisciplined student might secretly be a genius, one in a zillion. The Baby Einstein products and their ilk are all predicated on this born genius fantasy. To be fair, there's a kernel of wisdom to Baby Einstein. Naturally inquisitive people like young Einstein aren't necessarily well-served by the way our society requires us to learn. Sitting at desks in big groups just does not work for all kids. My suspicion is that kids learn as much in spite of their time in school as because of it. More accurately, kids learn a lot from school, but they don't necessarily learn math and science, they just learn how to pretend to be attentive while managing a crushing level of boredom.

Einstein donated his brain to science, and there has been a whole ghoulish cottage industry around its study that makes me reluctant to learn more. Steven Pinker's theory on E's brain is that it showed rapid prenatal development of areas of the brain responsible for spatial and analytical reasoning which, in competing for "brain real estate", temporarily robbed resources from functions of the brain responsible for speech development. Pinker and others have extended this speculation to explain the asynchronous development of other famously gifted late-talkers, including mathematician Julia Robinson, pianists Arthur Rubinstein and Clara Schumann, and physicists Richard Feynman and Edward Teller. These people were also said to have shared several of Einstein's childhood peculiarities, like monumental tantrums, rugged individualism and highly selective interests. Whether or not this is true, it fits well with my larger hypothesis that a genius is basically an obsessive-compulsive who's lucky enough to be obsessed with something constructive.

By the way, I didn't have a poster of Einstein in my dorm room, but I was too chicken to advertise my deeper sympathies back then. As an adult I'm proud to have an Einstein action figure sitting on the shelf, above my computer, next to my clock.

© ethan hein 2007 | back to memebase | back to top