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The science and life of alberteinsteinDr J. C. Polkinghorne F.R.S. aa Bedminster, BristolPublished online: 20 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Dr J. C. Polkinghorne F.R.S. (1983) The science and life of albert einstein,Contemporary Physics, 24:3, 302-305, DOI: 10.1080/00107518308210685

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302 Essay Reviews

Communications satellites are predictably dealt with by authors from various national organizations. The United States is, of course, prominent in the field but its past dominance begins to be challenged by the European Space Agency, and by Italian, Japanese and Franco-German projects among others. No longer do the United States and the Soviet Union monopolize the launch capability either. Such is the density of equatorial geosynchronous satellites in orbit now and forecast for the future, that longitudinal location in the flight-path corridor is allocated to each spacecraft. At lower orbital levels come the remote sensing (of the terrestrial surface and its atmosphere) satellites and papers dealing with these activities in the active and passive microwave modes are included. One very readable paper, easily understood even by the non-specialist, describes a range of advanced, remote-sensing microwave sensors.

In the medical field a most interesting Soviet paper describes and analyses the physiological effect of prolonged periods spent in space, unique because the endurance record of 185 days is held by the Russians Popov and Ryumin aboard Salyut 6-Soyuz. This record is about to be broken as I write. There are papers dealing with the search for and communication with extraterrestrial intelligence and with exobiology-the search and research for extraterrestrial life of any kind. As a group, these carefully prepared papers of which one is an annotated bibliography, most closely approach the material from which science fiction is made.

A paper on the discovery of the magnetosphere (Van Allen belts) by its discoverer is written mainly in the first person and makes enjoyable reading.

All the included papers are descriptive, rather fewer are explanatory and only one (on aerodynamic flight control) gives significant mathematical support to its subject. Space technology writings lean heavily upon acronyms, abbreviations and initial letters, so, in the absence ofa list ofthese devices (which would have improved the book) I would advise any reader to jot down the meaning of each at its first full mention so that reference can be made as reading progresses. It saves a lot of tedious searching. A further omission is that of any form of index. Each paper ends with an adequate bibliography but this is no substitute for a general index. A third shortcoming is the incomplete list of contents. Of 558 pages containing 37 papers, only 363 pages containing 25 papers are listed which leaves the reference reader in the wilderness for a large part of the book; no index either, you see.

My overall view of this volume is that i t makes a uniquely concentrated and significant contribution to the space literature. However, at its price of $90, I doubt that it will find its way to many personal bookshelves. I might add that my review copy now occupies pole position in the space and astronomy section on my own shelves.

The Science and Life of Albert Einstein By The Revd Dr J. C . POLKINGHORNE, F.R.S. Bedminster, Bristol

A Review of ‘Subtle is the Lord’. The Science and Life of Albert Einstein. By A. PAIS. (Oxford University Press, 1982.) [Pp. xv+551.] E15.00.

The one scientist of whdm everyone has heard, and whose photograph everyone would recognize, is Albert Einstein. Those impressive features, at once both soulful and

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Essay Reviews 303

sensual, are the public’s ikon of the dedicated scientist. Nor, of course, is their subject less revered among professionals, for Einstein is unquestionably one of the truly great figures in the history of physics, worthy of a place beside Newton in the scientific pantheon. One cannot give higher praise to Professor Pais’ book than to say that it is worthy of the man of whom he writes.

It is a tale of dramatic interest. There is the miraculous year of 1905 in which the technical assistant third class in the Patent Office in Bern wrote definitive papers on three fundamental topics in physics: the theory of Brownian motion, which thereby gave the first visible proof of the reality of molecules; the foundations of special relativity; and the explanation of the photoelectric effect which, against all conceived ideas, asserted the reality of light quanta. The latter Pais regards as Einstein’s one truly revolutionary contribution. I can understand that judgement for, great as Einstein’s other achievements were, they were in the nature of a great final flowering of the classical tradition in physics, whilst his work on light quanta was one of the first steps along the road to quantum theory, a new pathway in physics which Einstein himself regarded with increasing distaste in later life. It is part of the paradox of this greatest physicist of our century that, in his later attitude to quantum theory, and in his lonely, formal, and unsuccessful, attempts to find an acceptable unified theory of elec- tromagnetism and gravitation, he spent the last thirty years of his life at odds with his colleagues and opposed to what almost all physicists would now recognize to have been the fruitful way ahead.

The discovery of special relativity is an extraordinarily complex story, with Lorentz and Poincare so near and yet so far from final success. Hindsight casts for us so bright a light upon the scene that it requires someone with the scholarship and imagination of Pais to be able to help us enter into the labyrinthine gropings after the truth and to understand why, even after 1905, Lorentz could never totally relinquish the idea of the aether, nor Poincare properly understand special relativity. Pais’ power to recreate the scientific atmosphere in which past discoveries were made is frequently illustrated in this book and it makes the story he tells very exciting reading.

The Michelson-Morley experiment seems to have played little, if any, role in Einstein’s thinking leading to special relativity. Commenting on this Pais writes

Einstein was driven to the special theory of relativity mostly by aesthetic arguments, that is, arguments of simplicity. This same magnificent obsession would stay with him for the rest of his life. It was to lead him to his greatest achievement, general relativity, and to his noblest failure, unified field theory (p. 140).

As a young man Einstein had read Kant, who believed that he could deduce the axioms of Euclidean geometry as a priori conditions necessary for the observation of an external world. One might have thought that the sequel showed thedangers ofKantian pretensions, but Einstein in his scientific life came to place increasing reliance on the power of unaided reason to discern the basis of physical theory. In 1921 when Miller reported a non-zero aether drift Einstein was unperturbed. ‘Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not’ was his retort. Although not a conventionally religious man, Einstein had a deep trust in the rationality of the world which he liked (rightly, I think) to express in religious terms. In his early, most fruitful, years we see this trust in the simplicity of the world in fertile interaction with Einstein’s intuitive understanding of

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physical phenomena. In later life he came to place an undue reliance on formalism alone. In 1917 he had written to Felix Klein

It does seem to me that you highly overrate the value of formal points of view. These may be valuable when an alreadyfound truth needs to be formulated in final form, but fail almost always as heuristic aids.

It was advice which he could later have heeded himself. I t is significant that he wrote those words to Klein soon after his greatest triumph in

the creation ofphysical formalism, the theory ofgeneral relativity, the modern theory of gravitation. It had been a hard search, and Pais conveys its frustrations and successes with great skill and interest. The quest had begun in 1907 when Einstein had what he described as ‘the happiest thought of my life’. He had realized that the equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass implied that a gravitational field had only a relative significance; it would vanish for a freely falling observer. It was a long haul from here to general relativity, in the course of which Einstein found Riemann’s differential geometry to hand as the ideal mathematical tool for his purpose. In the end the climax came in the heady month of November 1915, where Pais gives us an almost day by day account of developments. The culmination was the realization on 18 November that the new theory accounted for the hitherto unexplained discrepancy in the perihelion of Mercury. Einstein said that ‘For a few days I was beside myselfwith joyous excitement’ and Pais regards this discovery as ‘by far the strongest emotional experience in Einstein’s scientific life’ (p. 255). More excitement was to come when in 1919 the eclipse expeditions verified the prediction of the bending of starlight by the Sun. This was the moment when Einstein’s reputation burst upon the general public and he became in their eyes the embodiment of the scientific Hero. Pais wittily compares the process to the canonization of a saint by the Catholic Church.

It was a strange, if not totally unwelcome, fate to befall a man who throughout his life displayed a great deal of detachment from the common man science. In his sixties Einstein looked back on his scientific career as a flight from the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ to the ‘it’. Pais believes that it is no accident that Einstein’s most marvellously creative year was when he was living the isolated life of a Patent Office assistant.

Something of this isolation characterizes Einstein’s attitude to quantum theory. He was always on the other side from most of his colleagues. In the years from 1905 to the early’20s he was a largely lone figure striving to take seriously the reality oflight quanta in the face of Maxwell’s wave theory. Einstein’s boldness and foresight at this time can be seen from the fact that already in 1909 he was talking in terms which we would now recognize as being the first intimations of complementarity. Then all changed. Compton established beyond question the existence of photons. Hard on that the new quantum theory sprang from the labours of a largely new generation of theoretical physicists. Einstein, in his work on radiative processes, had been the first to appreciate the element ofchance that quantum theory had introduced into physics. He did not like it. We enter the period in which he repudiated the idea of a ‘dice playing’ God and held the firm conviction that quantum theory was incomplete. In his debates with Bohr, and in his work with Podolsky and Rosen, Einstein played the role of a magnificent devil’s advocate against the prevailing Copenhagen quantum orthodoxy. The intellectual motivation for his attitude was his unfaltering belief, not so much in causality, as in objective reality. One may sympathise with the rejection ofcopenhagen positivism, but may also feel that in this case Einstein gave insufficient credit to the Lord for the subtlety of the nature of reality.

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It was Einstein’s hope that the results of quantum theory would emerge as consequences of an over-determined unified theory of electromagnetism and gravi- tation. In the pursuit ofthis end he was content to be guided by formalism and to ignore the undoubted presence ofother forces, weak and nuclear, in the physical world. I t was to prove a will-o’-the-wisp search, characterized at one stage by Pauli (not a man to mince words) as a quest in which Einstein’s

never failing inventiveness as well as his tenacious energy in the pursuit generates in recent years, on the average, one theory per annum.. . I t is psychologically interesting that for some time the current theory is usually considered by its author to be the ‘definitive solution’.

Be that as it may, Einstein was a very great physicist and Pais has written an excellent book about him, characterized by insight, clarity, and affection.

Superconductivity in Ternary Compounds

By M. ISHIKAWA

Institute for Solid State Physics, University of Tokyo

A Review of Superconductivity in Ternary Compounds 1. Structurul, Electronic and Lattice Properties. Edited by 0. Fischer and M. B. Maple. (Springer-Verlag, 1982.) [Pp. xvi + 283.1 DM 7540; $31.50.

This is the first volume of two books which review recent developments in the study primarily of the molybdenum chalcogenides MMo,X, (M = simple metals such as Cu. Sn and Pb or lanthanides; X = chalcogens such as S and Se) and briefly the tetraborides RT4B, (R=lanthanides and T= transition metals such as Rh, Ir and Ru). During the last few years these ternary compounds have attracted many researchers+hemists, crystallographers as well as physicists-because of their rather unusual physical properties of practical as well as fundamental importance. Some chalcogenides possess a high superconducting critical temperature, up to 15 K, and critical magnetic fields as high as 50 T. Rare-earth compounds ofboth types have provided a unique opportunity to study the interplay between superconductivity and long-range magnetic order owing to the regular sublattice of magnetic rare-earth ions in these compounds.

The book consists of eight chapters (by specialists in the field on the crystallograp- hic properties, metallurgy of bulk and thin film samples and phononic and electronic structures mainly of the chalcogenides. Only one third of the third chapter is devoted to a discussion of the tetraborides. The first chapter, by the editors, a long list of achievements in the field, may be intended as an introduction for the two volumes.

The next two chapters are devoted to crystallography and crystal chemistry: the second chapter (by Chevrel and Sergent) gives a brief resume of the preparation techniques for chalcogenides and detailed descriptions of their crystal structures.

Most of the figures are very interesting to look at, especially the drawings for (ideal) crystals viewed as a special combination of the building blocks. The crystallographic data compiled in the tables would be particularly useful. The third chapter (by Yvon), discusses relative structural stabilities and some physical properties of chalcogenides and four polytypes oftetraborides. This is done by comparing bond distances and bond

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