Relativity

Complaining about the educational system is a national sport among professors in the U.S., and I, like my colleagues, am often tempted to imagine a golden age of education in our country's past, or to compare our system unfavorably with foreign ones. Reality intrudes, however, when my immigrant students recount the overemphasis on rote memorization in their native countries, and the philosophy that what the teacher says is always right, even when it's wrong.

a / Albert Einstein.

Albert Einstein's education in late-nineteenth-century Germany was neither modern nor liberal. He did well in the early grades,¹ but in high school and college he began to get in trouble for what today's edspeak calls "critical thinking."

Indeed, there was much that deserved criticism in the state of physics at that time. There was a subtle contradiction between the theory of light as a wave and Galileo's principle that all motion is relative. As a teenager, Einstein began thinking about this on an intuitive basis, trying to imagine what a light beam would look like if you could ride along beside it on a motorcycle at the speed of light. Today we remember him most of all for his radical and far-reaching solution to this contradiction, his theory of relativity, but in his student years his insights were greeted with derision from his professors. One called him a "lazy dog." Einstein's distaste for authority was typified by his decision as a teenager to renounce his German citizenship and become a stateless person, based purely on his opposition to the militarism and repressiveness of German society. He spent his most productive scientific years in Switzerland and Berlin, first as a patent clerk but later as a university professor. He was an outspoken pacifist and a stubborn opponent of World War I, shielded from retribution by his eventual acquisition of Swiss citizenship.

As the epochal nature of his work became evident, some liberal Germans began to point to him as a model of the "new German," but after the Nazi coup d'etat, staged public meetings began, at which Nazi scientists criticized the work of this ethnically Jewish (but spiritually nonconformist) giant of science. When Hitler was appointed chancellor, Einstein was on a stint as a visiting professor at Caltech, and he never returned to the Nazi state. World War II convinced Einstein to soften his strict pacifist stance, and he signed a secret letter to President Roosevelt urging research into the building of a nuclear bomb, a device that could not have been imagined without his theory of relativity. He later wrote, however, that when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, it made him wish he could burn off his own fingers for having signed the letter.

b / The first nuclear explosion on our planet, Alamogordo, New Mexico, July 16, 1945.

Einstein has become a kind of scientific Santa Claus figure in popular culture, which is presumably why the public is always so titillated by his well-documented career as a skirt-chaser and unfaithful husband. Many are also surprised by his lifelong commitment to socialism. A favorite target of J. Edgar Hoover's paranoia, Einstein had his phone tapped, his garbage searched, and his mail illegally opened. A censored version of his 1800-page FBI file was obtained in 1983 under the Freedom of Information Act, and a more complete version was disclosed recently.² It includes comments solicited from anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi informants, as well as statements, from sources who turned out to be mental patients, that Einstein had invented a death ray and a robot that could control the human mind. Even today, an FBI web page³ accuses him of working for or belonging to 34 "communist-front" organizations, apparently including the American Crusade Against Lynching. At the height of the McCarthy witch hunt, Einstein bravely denounced McCarthy, and publicly urged its targets to refuse to testify before the House Unamerican Activities Committee. Belying his other-worldly and absent-minded image, his political positions seem in retrospect not to have been at all clouded by naivete or the more fuzzy-minded variety of idealism. He worked against racism in the U.S. long before the civil rights movement got under way. In an era when many leftists were only too eager to apologize for Stalinism, he opposed it consistently.

This chapter is specifically about Einstein's theory of relativity, but Einstein also began a second, parallel revolution in physics known as the quantum theory, which stated, among other things, that certain processes in nature are inescapably random. Ironically, Einstein was an outspoken doubter of the new quantum ideas that were built on his foundations, being convinced that "the Old One [God] does not play dice with the universe," but quantum and relativistic concepts are now thoroughly intertwined in physics.

1The myth that he failed his elementary-school classes comes from a misunderstanding based on a reversal of the German numerical grading scale. 2Fred Jerome, The Einstein File, St. Martin's Press, 2002 3http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/einstein.htm