Einstein Defiant: Genius Versus Genius in the Quantum Revolution by Edmund Blair Bolles (PDF)

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“I find the idea quite intolerable that an electron exposed to radiation should choose of its own free will, not only its moment to jump off, but also its direction. In that case, I would rather be a cobbler, or even an employee in a gaming house, than a physicist.” -Albert Einstein

A scandal hovers over the history of 20th century physics. Albert Einstein—the century’s greatest physicist—was never able to come to terms with quantum mechanics, the century’s greatest theoretical achievement. For physicists who routinely use both quantum laws and Einstein’s ideas, this contradiction can be almost too embarrassing to dwell on. Yet Einstein was one of the founders of quantum physics and he spent many years preaching the quantum’s importance and its revolutionary nature.

The Danish genius Neils Bohr was another founder of quantum physics. He had managed to solve one of the few physics problems that Einstein ever shied away from, linking quantum mathematics with a new model of the atom. This leap immediately yielded results that explained electron behavior and the periodic table of the elements.

Despite their mutual appreciation of the quantum’s importance, these two giants of modern physics never agreed on the fundamentals of their work. In fact, they clashed repeatedly throughout the 1920s, arguing first over Einstein’s theory of “light quanta”(photons), then over Niels Bohr’s short-lived theory that denied the conservation of energy at the quantum level, and climactically over the new quantum mechanics that Bohr enthusiastically embraced and Einstein stubbornly defied.

This contest of visions stripped the scientific imagination naked. Einstein was a staunch realist, demanding to know the physical reasons behind physical events. At odds with this approach was Bohr’s more pragmatic perspective that favored theories that worked, even if he might not have a corresponding explanation of the underlying reality. Powerful and illuminating, Einstein Defiant is the first book to capture the soul and the science that inspired this dramatic duel, revealing the personalities and the passions—and, in the end, what was at stake for the world.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: From Publishers Weekly Albert Einstein sought throughout his career to understand the ways of “the Old One,” his nickname for the deity. Not one to chase after theory just because the math worked, Einstein adopted an equation like E = mc2 only if he could demonstrate how it played out in the physical world. Nor did he believe that the Old One was capricious, letting a photon of light masquerade as a particle one moment, as a wave the next. Einstein always sought to explain an unambiguous, consistent reality. As author Bolles (The Ice Finders, etc.) shows, this placed him at loggerheads with Niels Bohr and his Copenhagen school of quantum physics. Bohr was the pragmatist to Einstein’s purist, looking for theories that worked, whether or not they made sense. Bolles conjures up the lost world of Europe between the wars, an era when readers would snatch up newspapers with Einstein’s latest paper printed on the front page. In addition to his flair for bringing to life the cultural background of Einstein and Bohr’s scientific battle (with occasional slips: Schoenberg did not compose the opera Wozzeck), Bolles exhibits a marvelous facility in explaining the intricacies of relativity and the world inside the atom. Readers who can never keep the three B’s—Bohr, Born and de Broglie—straight will know what their roles were in 20th-century physics by the end of the book, which is highly recommended for science buffs as well as readers of biography and cultural history. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Scientific American Bolles intertwines a rich combination of scientific explanation and literary drama, painting a picture of Einstein’s persona, the European mind-set, and the soap opera of quantum physics. The focus is on Einstein’s battle for causality, the idea that every event has a cause and can thus be predicted. Editors of Scientific American Review “…if you’re an Einstein fan and/or a mathematician, you’ll find [this book] interesting.” — Mensa Bulletin, July 2004″…presents the science and the human element behind the Albert Einstein-Niels Bohr debate…” — Dallas Morning News, August 2, 2004″A captivating, meticulous account of the history of scientific discovery, theory, extrapolation, and the intellectual human beings [involved].” — Talk About Network / MBR: The Science Shelf, June 2, 2004″Bolles exhibits a flair for explaining the relevant material and bringing it to life.” — Science Books & Films, September/October 2004″Bolle’s book is colorful, readable, and well explains Einstein’s reservations about quantum mechanics.” — Library Journal, March 1, 2004″Relativity and quantum theory are presented in a manner that enlightens the reader without intimidating the nonspecialist.” — 20th-Century-History-Books.com”Well researched… [Einstein Defiant] is written for the interested layman, and isn’t so technical that you can’t follow it.” — Books-on-Line”[A] well-written book… Bolles does a good job of telling the story… He gives some interesting insights.” — Choice, October 2004″[Bolles’] prose is clear, engaging, and often lyrical… Skim Einstein Defiant, and find a story like you’ve never read before.” — frontwheeldrive.com, September 2004 From the Inside Flap “Meticulously researched, engagingly written and scientifically enlightening. The quantum revolution as viewed through the thoughts of Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and other giants of early 20th century physics. A remarkable integration of science, politics and history.” — Robert L. Wolke, Professor Emeritus of Nuclear Chemistry, University of Pittsburgh and author of What Einstein Told His Cook “One of the nation’s pre-eminent science writers has done it again. With verve and originality, Blair Bolles brings us inside Einstein’s ‘nearly perfect scientific imagination.’ The details are rich, the analogies enlightening, the overall effect transformative. Einstein Defiant is a masterful work.” — Robin Marantz Henig, author of Pandora’s Baby and The Monk in the Garden “A terrific inside-baseball account of the intellectual battles of the 1920s, from which arose modern quantum mechanics.” — John Derbyshire, author of Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics About the Author Edmund Blair Bolles has been hailed as “startlingly eloquent” (The Atlantic Monthly) with “a genius for explanation” (The Spectator), which explains why he has survived for over thirty years as a freelance writer with a special interest in the meeting point between science and human imagination. Bolles grew up in Washington, D.C. and Toledo, Ohio with a three-year detour in Paris, France. He was educated in St. Louis and Philadelphia, and spent two years in Tanzania, East Africa, as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching science, math, and agriculture. Since then he has lived in Washington State, Los Angeles, and New York. His 15 books include Galileo’s Commandment: An Anthology of Great Science Writing (editor) and The Ice Finders: How a Poet, a Professor, and a Politician Discovered the Ice Age. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Einstein’s futile opposition to quantum mechanicsAmongst the books on the genesis of quantum mechanics this is a lopsided example. The naïve reader gets the impression that the first theory to explain the atomic structure was Schrödinger’s wave mechanics in 1926.Ten pages later in the book, the author mentions en passant that 8 months before , Heisenberg had developed a “quantum mechanics”. Indeed, Werner Heisenberg in June 1925 on the island of Helgoland made the decisive breakthrough by realizing that it is relevant in which order measurements of position and of momentum of a particle are performed, i.e. that these two observables do not commute, pq is not equal to qp. Back in Göttingen, Heisenberg published his work, and Max Born saw that Heisenberg’s scheme was matrix multiplication. Then Born, Heisenberg and Pacual Jordan wrote the basic paper, the Triumvirate’s paper on quantum mechanics. Paul A.M. Dirac obtained a copy of Heisenberg’s manuscript from his thesis advisor Fowler, and Erwin Schrödinger, based on de Broglie’s wave theory , came 8 months later with his wave mechanics. The author has difficulties with understanding matrix multiplication and prefers Schrödinger’s theory. But he does not quote that Schrödinger was concerned about priority. In his second communication, Schrödinger quoted Heisenberg’s paper and the Triumvirate’s paper with a very tortured explanation:At this point, I should not like by remaining silent to ignore the fact that an effort iscurrently under way on the part of Heisenberg, Born, and Jordan, and several otheroutstanding researchers [he means Dirac] to eliminate the quantum difficulty whichcan already point to such noteworthy successes, that it will be difficult to doubt thatit contains at least a partial truth. In this trend, the Heisenberg effort is exceptionallyclose…. His method is so toto genere different that I have not heretofore succeeded infinding the connecting link…. The strength of the Heisenberg program lies in the factthat it promises to yield the line intensities, a question from which we have previouslyheld ourselves quite apart. The strength of the present attempt lies in the leadingphysical viewpoint which bridges the macroscopic and the microscopic mechanicalevents.With this explanation, Schrödinger recognized the precedence of Heisenberg. And the Nobel committee decided to give a full prize for 1932 to Heisenberg “for the creation of quantum mechanics” and to split the prize for 1933 between Dirac and Schrödinger “for the discovery of new, productive forms of atomic theory,” i.e., alternative forms of quantummechanics. The ranking of the relative importance of the contributions of the three scientists can be inferred, for example, from Wolfgang Pauli’s proposal to the Nobel committee. He deemed first that Heisenberg’s paper preceded Schrödinger’s, and second that Heisenberg’s creation was the more original. Heisenberg’s second great achievement was the establishment of the uncertainty principle, and the recognition of its importance. The uncertainty principle was invented by Heisenberg in February 1927 in Copenhagen when Bohr was on extended skiing holidays. Bohr then worked out a philosophical corollary to the uncertainty principle: complementarity. At the Solvay conference in Brussels 1927, Bohr as the senior of the Copenhagen delegation defended Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle against the attacks of Einstein, but the mathematics was Heisenberg’s.The Copenhagen interpretation comes from 1955, when Heisenberg was invited by Bohr to speak at his 70th birthday. Here, Heisenberg dismisses other interpretations, like David Bohm’s version. The controversy about the concept of reality in quantum mechanics was superficially a conflict between Einstein and Bohr, but basically between Einstein’s concept of the 19th century and Heisenberg’s new insight in the atomic world.In the meantime, the conflict was settled by the work of the Irish theorist John Bell at CERN, Geneva, who deduced a criterion by which quantum mechanics can be tested against alternative theories: the Bell inequalities. After the experiments conducted by Alain Aspect and others at Orsay near Paris (1982), quantum mechanics prevails, and Einstein was found to be wrong.Of course, Einstein could not know that, but the author in 2004 could have known.

⭐I like this book because it reminds the world that Einstein could not bring himself to accept the still prevailing Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. With the advent of Bell’s theorem and subsequent experiments confirming quantum mechanics, most physicists considered and still do consider the case closed. They think Einstein was just wrong, as one of the reviewers of this book commented here. However there remains one very large loophole that will never be closed by any experiment in interpreting the Bell results, and this is the possibility that the universe is both local and perfectly deterministic. The popular phrase is super-deterministic. This idea that quantum mechanics might be evidence of an underlying deterministic classical theory at very small distances like the Planck scale has been championed recently by Gerard ‘t Hooft. His stature in physics and his full endorsement of Einstein’s position should end all claims that Bell’s theorem proves Einstein wrong. If you read ‘t Hooft’s arguments they are perfectly lucid, reasonable, and logically sound. Nobody can really object to them except to say that they don’t think the universe is likely to be like that. Given the current somewhat depressed state of fundamental physics, there is a rising tide of the belief that we need to get to the bottom of quantum mechanics. The days of shut up and calculate and don’t ask questions seem to be coming to an end. We are entering an age where questions about the deeper origins of quantum mechanics need to be asked, and this book is a beautiful rare reference to the opinions of Einstein who saw clearly that this day would come someday.

⭐I found this book to be a little too slow in developing the theme but it is well researched. In the first part, the author tries to describe the post-war Germany and give the reader a sense of the social setting of the time. This is interesting, but I feel that it sometimes also overshadows the main theme — which should be about the quantum revolution. Had the author been a little more judicious in weighing the materials, it could have been a more absorbing book.Also, the last famous Einstein-Bohr debate (regarding the “black body emission on a scale” experiment, in which Bohr defended Heisenberg Principle by using Eisten’s own General Relativity) is, in my opinion, one of the most profound and fascinating examples of “thought (or theoretical) experiments” in the history of Physics (others include Einstein’s chasing a light beam and Galileo’s free fall of two objects with different weights), yet it only appears in the second-to-last chapter and does not get the detailed analysis that it deserves (the author does describe it in detail and has some, but in my opinion not sufficient, commentary).Despite these flaws, I enjoyed the book and it is well grounded on thorough research.Edit: I just finished reading the book the second time (October 2014). I stand by what I said above, but I just noticed one small flaw in the story: the author said Einstein’s friend Beso helped him land a job at the Swiss Patent Office. This is not correct, it was his other friend, Marcel Grossmann who helped him with this. Granted, this is a rather trivial detail, but the book is anecdote-laden which is part of the interesting aspect of it. If the author gets this wrong (which by all means is a well-known fact in almost all of Einstein’s biographies, however trivial it may be), it makes one wonder what else he got wrong?

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