The thought experiments that Einstein had lobbed like grenades into the temple of quantum mechanics had done little damage to the edifice. In fact, they helped test it and permit a better understanding of its implications. But Einstein remained a resister, and he continued to conjure up new ways to show that the uncertainties inherent in the interpretations formulated by Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and others meant that something was missing in their explanation of “reality.”
Just before he left Europe in 1933, Einstein attended a lecture by Léon Rosenfeld, a Belgian physicist with a philosophical bent. When it was over, Einstein rose from the audience to ask a question. “Suppose two particles are set in motion towards each other with the same, very large, momentum, and they interact with each other for a very short time when they pass at known positions,” he posited. When the particles have bounced far apart, an observer measures the momentum of one of them. “Then, from the conditions of the experiment, he will obviously be able to deduce the momentum of the other particle,” Einstein said. “If, however, he chooses to measure the position of the first particle, he will be able to tell where the other particle is.”
Because the two particles were far apart, Einstein was able to assert, or at least to assume, that “all physical interaction has ceased between them.” So his challenge to the Copenhagen interpreters of quantum mechanics, posed as a question to Rosenfeld, was simple: “How can the final state of the second particle be influenced by a measurement performed on the first?”1
Over the years, Einstein had increasingly come to embrace the concept of realism, the belief that there is, as he put it, “a real factual situation” that exists “independent of our observations.”2 This belief was one aspect of his discomfort with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and other tenets of quantum mechanics that assert that observations determine realities. With his question to Rosenfeld, Einstein was deploying another concept: locality.* In other words, if two particles are spatially distant from each other, anything that happens to one is independent from what happens to the other, and no signal or force or influence can move between them faster than the speed of light.
Observing or poking one particle, Einstein posited, could not instantaneously jostle or jangle another one far away. The only way an action on one system can affect a distant one is if some wave or signal or information traveled between them—a process that would have to obey the speed limit of light. That was even true of gravity. If the sun suddenly disappeared, it would not affect the earth’s orbit for about eight minutes, the amount of time it would take the change in the gravitational field to ripple to the earth at the speed of light.
As Einstein said, “There is one supposition we should, in my opinion, absolutely hold fast: the real factual situation of the system S2 is independent of what is done with the system S1, which is spatially separated from the former.”3 It was so intuitive that it seemed obvious. But as Einstein noted, it was a “supposition.” It had never been proven.
To Einstein, realism and localism were related underpinnings of physics. As he declared to his friend Max Born, coining a memorable phrase, “Physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky action at a distance.”4
Once he had settled in Princeton, Einstein began to refine this thought experiment. His sidekick, Walther Mayer, less loyal to Einstein than Einstein was to him, had drifted away from the front lines of fighting quantum mechanics, so Einstein enlisted the help of Nathan Rosen, a 26-year-old new fellow at the Institute, and Boris Podolsky, a 49-year-old physicist Einstein had met at Caltech who had since moved to the Institute.
The resulting four-page paper, published in May 1935 and known by the initials of its authors as the EPR paper, was the most important paper Einstein would write after moving to America. “Can the Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Regarded as Complete?” they asked in their title.
Rosen did a lot of the math, and Podolsky wrote the published English version. Even though they had discussed the content at length, Einstein was displeased that Podolsky had buried the clear conceptual issue under a lot of mathematical formalism. “It did not come out as well as I had originally wanted,” Einstein complained to Schrödinger right after it was published. “Rather, the essential thing was, so to speak, smothered by the formalism.”5
Einstein was also annoyed at Podolsky for leaking the contents to the New York Times before it was published. The headline read: “Einstein Attacks Quantum Theory / Scientist and Two Colleagues Find It Not ‘Complete’ Even though ‘Correct.’ ” Einstein, of course, had occasionally succumbed to giving interviews about upcoming articles, but this time he declared himself dismayed by the practice. “It is my invariable practice to discuss scientific matters only in the appropriate forum,” he wrote in a statement to the Times, “and I deprecate advance publication of any announcement in regard to such matters in the secular press.”6
Einstein and his two coauthors began by defining their realist premise: “If without in any way disturbing a system we can predict with certainty the value of a physical quantity, then there exists an element of physical reality corresponding to this physical quantity.”7 In other words, if by some process we could learn with absolute certainty the position of a particle, and we have not disturbed the particle by observing it, then we can say the particle’s position is real, that it exists in reality totally independent of our observations.
The paper went on to expand Einstein’s thought experiment about two particles that have collided (or have flown off in opposite directions from the disintegration of an atom) and therefore have properties that are correlated. We can take measurements of the first particle, the authors asserted, and from that gain knowledge about the second particle “without in any way disturbing the second particle.” By measuring the position of the first particle, we can determine precisely the position of the second particle. And we can do the same for the momentum. “In accordance with our criterion for reality, in the first case we must consider the quantity P as being an element of reality, in the second case the quantity Q is an element of reality.”
In simpler words: at any moment the second particle, which we have not observed, has a position that is real and a momentum that is real. These two properties are features of reality that quantum mechanics does not account for; thus the answer to the title’s question should be no, quantum mechanics’ description of reality is not complete.8
The only alternative, the authors argued, would be to claim that the process of measuring the first particle affects the reality of the position and momentum of the second particle. “No reasonable definition of reality could be expected to permit this,” they concluded.
Wolfgang Pauli wrote Heisenberg a long and angry letter.“Einstein has once again expressed himself publicly on quantum mechanics (together with Podolsky and Rosen—no good company, by the way),” he fumed. “As is well known, every time that happens it is a catastrophe.”9
When the EPR paper reached Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, he realized that he had once again been cast in the role, which he played so well at the Solvay Conferences, of defending quantum mechanics from yet another Einstein assault. “This onslaught came down on us as a bolt from the blue,” a colleague of Bohr’s reported. “Its effect on Bohr was remarkable.” He had often reacted to such situations by wandering around and muttering, “Einstein . . . Einstein . . . Einstein!” This time he added some collaborative doggerel as well: “Podolsky, Opodolsky, Iopodolsky, Siopodolsky . . .”10
“Everything else was abandoned,” Bohr’s colleague recalled. “We had to clear up such a misunderstanding at once.”Even with such intensity, it took Bohr more than six weeks of fretting, writing, revising, dictating, and talking aloud before he finally sent off his response to EPR.
It was longer than the original paper. In it Bohr backed away somewhat from what had been an aspect of the uncertainty principle: that the mechanical disturbance caused by the act of observation was a cause of the uncertainty. He admitted that in Einstein’s thought experiment, “there is no question of a mechanical disturbance of the system under investigation.”11
This was an important admission. Until then, the disturbance caused by a measurement had been part of Bohr’s physical explanation of quantum uncertainty. At the Solvay Conferences, he had rebutted Einstein’s ingenious thought experiments by showing that the simultaneous knowledge of, say, position and momentum was impossible at least in part because determining one attribute caused a disturbance that made it impossible to then measure the other attribute precisely.
However, using his concept of complementarity, Bohr added a significant caveat. He pointed out that the two particles were part of one whole phenomenon. Because they have interacted, the two particles are therefore “entangled.” They are part of one whole phenomenon or one whole system that has one quantum function.
In addition, the EPR paper did not, as Bohr noted, truly dispel the uncertainty principle, which says that it is not possible to know both the precise position and momentum of a particle at the same moment. Einstein is correct, that if we measure the position of particle A, we can indeed know the position of its distant twin B. Likewise, if we measure the momentum of A, we can know the momentum of B. However, even if we can imagine measuring the position and then the momentum of particle A, and thus ascribe a “reality” to those attributes in particle B, we cannot in fact measure both these attributes precisely at any one time for particle A, and thus we cannot know them both precisely for particle B. Brian Greene, discussing Bohr’s response, has put it simply: “If you don’t have both of these attributes of the right-moving particle in hand, you don’t have them for the left-moving particle either. Thus there is no conflict with the uncertainty principle.”12
Einstein continued to insist, however, that he had pinpointed an important example of the incompleteness of quantum mechanics by showing how it violated the principle of separability, which holds that two systems that are spatially separated have an independent existence. It likewise violated the related principle of locality, which says that an action on one of these systems cannot immediately affect the other. As an adherent of field theory, which defines reality using a spacetime continuum, Einstein believed that separability was a fundamental feature of nature. And as a defender of his own theory of relativity, which rid Newton’s cosmos of spooky action at a distance and decreed instead that such actions obey the speed limit of light, he believed in locality as well.13
Despite his success as a quantum pioneer, Erwin Schrödinger was among those rooting for Einstein to succeed in deflating the Copenhagen consensus. Their alliance had been forged at the Solvay Conferences, where Einstein played God’s advocate and Schrödinger looked on with a mix of curiosity and sympathy. It was a lonely struggle, Einstein lamented in a letter to Schrödinger in 1928: “The Heisenberg-Bohr tranquilizing philosophy—or religion?—is so delicately contrived that, for the time being, it provides a gentle pillow for the true believer from which he cannot very easily be aroused.”14
So it was not surprising that Schrödinger sent Einstein a congratulatory note as soon as he read the EPR paper. “You have publicly caught dogmatic quantum mechanics by its throat,” he wrote. A few weeks later, he added happily, “Like a pike in a goldfish pond it has stirred everyone up.”15
Schrödinger had just visited Princeton, and Einstein was still hoping, in vain, that Flexner might be convinced to hire him for the Institute. In his subsequent flurry of exchanges with Schrödinger, Einstein began conspiring with him on ways to poke holes in quantum mechanics.
“I do not believe in it,” Einstein declared flatly. He ridiculed as “spiritualistic” the notion that there could be “spooky action at a distance,” and he attacked the idea that there was no reality beyond our ability to observe things. “This epistemology-soaked orgy ought to burn itself out,” he said. “No doubt, however, you smile at me and think that, after all, many a young whore turns into an old praying sister, and many a young revolutionary becomes an old reactionary.”16 Schrödinger did smile, he told Einstein in his reply, because he had likewise edged from revolutionary to old reactionary.
On one issue Einstein and Schrödinger diverged. Schrödinger did not feel that the concept of locality was sacred. He even coined the term that we now use, entanglement, to describe the correlations that exist between two particles that have interacted but are now distant from each other. The quantum states of two particles that have interacted must subsequently be described together, with any changes to one particle instantly being reflected in the other, no matter how far apart they now are. “Entanglement of predictions arises from the fact that the two bodies at some earlier time formed in a true sense one system, that is were interacting, and have left behind traces on each other,” Schrödinger wrote. “If two separated bodies enter a situation in which they influence each other, and separate again, then there occurs what I have just called entanglement of our knowledge of the two bodies.”17
Einstein and Schrödinger together began exploring another way—one that did not hinge on issues of locality or separation—to raise questions about quantum mechanics. Their new approach was to look at what would occur when an event in the quantum realm, which includes subatomic particles, interacted with objects in the macro world, which includes those things we normally see in our daily lives.
In the quantum realm, there is no definite location of a particle, such as an electron, at any given moment. Instead, a mathematical function, known as a wave function, describes the probability of finding the particle in some particular place. These wave functions also describe quantum states, such as the probability that an atom will, when observed, be decayed or not. In 1925, Schrödinger had come up with his famous equation that described these waves, which spread and smear throughout space. His equation defined the probability that a particle, when observed, will be found in a particular place or state.18
According to the Copenhagen interpretation developed by Niels Bohr and his fellow pioneers of quantum mechanics, until such an observation is made, the reality of the particle’s position or state consists only of these probabilities. By measuring or observing the system, the observer causes the wave function to collapse and one distinct position or state to snap into place.
In a letter to Schrödinger, Einstein gave a vivid thought experiment showing why all this discussion of wave functions and probabilities, and of particles that have no definite positions until observed, failed his test of completeness. He imagined two boxes, one of which we know contains a ball. As we prepare to look in one of the boxes, there is a 50 percent chance of the ball being there. After we look, there is either a 100 percent or a 0 percent chance it is in there. But all along, in reality, the ball was in one of the boxes. Einstein wrote:
I describe a state of affairs as follows: the probability is ½ that the ball is in the first box. Is that a complete description? no: A complete statement is: the ball is (or is not) in the first box. That is how the characterization of the state of affairs must appear in a complete description. yes: Before I open them, the ball is by no means in one of the two boxes. Being in a definite box comes about only when I lift the covers.19
Einstein clearly preferred the former explanation, a statement of his realism. He felt that there was something incomplete about the second answer, which was the way quantum mechanics explained things.
Einstein’s argument is based on what appears to be common sense. However, sometimes what seems to make sense turns out not to be a good description of nature. Einstein realized this when he developed his relativity theory; he defied the accepted common sense of the time and forced us to change the way we think about nature. Quantum mechanics does something similar. It asserts that particles do not have a definite state except when observed, and two particles can be in an entangled state so that the observation of one determines a property of the other instantly. As soon as any observation is made, the system goes into a fixed state.20
Einstein never accepted this as a complete description of reality, and along these lines he proposed another thought experiment to Schrödinger a few weeks later, in early August 1935. It involved a situation in which quantum mechanics would assign only probabilities, even though common sense tells us that there is obviously an underlying reality that exists with certainty. Imagine a pile of gunpowder that, due to the instability of some particle, will combust at some point, Einstein said. The quantum mechanical equation for this situation “describes a sort of blend of not-yet and already-exploded systems.” But this is not “a real state of affairs,” Einstein said, “for in reality there is just no intermediary between exploded and not-exploded.”21
Schrödinger came up with a similar thought experiment—involving a soon-to-be-famous fictional feline rather than a pile of gunpowder—to show the weirdness inherent when the indeterminacy of the quantum realm interacts with our normal world of larger objects. “In a lengthy essay that I have just written, I give an example that is very similar to your exploding powder keg,” he told Einstein.22
In this essay, published that November, Schrödinger gave generous credit to Einstein and the EPR paper for “providing the impetus” for his argument. It poked at a core concept in quantum mechanics, namely that the timing of the emission of a particle from a decaying nucleus is indeterminate until it is actually observed. In the quantum world, a nucleus is in a “superposition,” meaning it exists simultaneously as being decayed and undecayed until it is observed, at which point its wave function collapses and it becomes either one or the other.
This may be conceivable for the microscopic quantum realm, but it is baffling when one imagines the intersection between the quantum realm and our observable everyday world. So, Schrödinger asked in his thought experiment, when does the system stop being in a superposition incorporating both states and snap into being one reality?
This question led to the precarious fate of an imaginary creature, which was destined to become immortal whether it was dead or alive, known as Schrödinger’s cat:
One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of the hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer which shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out.23
Einstein was thrilled. “Your cat shows that we are in complete agreement concerning our assessment of the character of the current theory,” he wrote back. “A psi-function that contains the living as well as the dead cat just cannot be taken as a description of a real state of affairs.”24
The case of Schrödinger’s cat has spawned reams of responses that continue to pour forth with varying degrees of comprehensibility. Suffice it to say that in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, a system stops being a superposition of states and snaps into a single reality when it is observed, but there is no clear rule for what constitutes such an observation. Can the cat be an observer? A flea? A computer? A mechanical recording device? There’s no set answer. However, we do know that quantum effects generally are not observed in our everyday visible world, which includes cats and even fleas. So most adherents of quantum mechanics would not argue that Schrödinger’s cat is sitting in that box somehow being both dead and alive until the lid is opened.25
Einstein never lost faith in the ability of Schrödinger’s cat and his own gunpowder thought experiments of 1935 to expose the incompleteness of quantum mechanics. Nor has he received proper historical credit for helping give birth to that poor cat. In fact, he would later mistakenly give Schrödinger credit for both of the thought experiments in a letter that exposed the animal to being blown up rather than poisoned. “Contemporary physicists somehow believe that the quantum theory provides a description of reality, and even a complete description,” Einstein wrote Schrödinger in 1950.“This interpretation is, however, refuted most elegantly by your system of radioactive atom + Geiger counter + amplifier + charge of gunpowder + cat in a box, in which the psi-function of the system contains the cat both alive and blown to bits.”26
Einstein’s so-called mistakes, such as the cosmological constant he added to his gravitational field equations, often turned out to be more intriguing than other people’s successes. The same was true of his parries against Bohr and Heisenberg. The EPR paper would not succeed in showing that quantum mechanics was wrong. But it did eventually become clear that quantum mechanics was, as Einstein argued, incompatible with our commonsense understanding of locality—our aversion to spooky action at a distance. The odd thing is that Einstein, apparently, was far more right than he hoped to be.
In the years since he came up with the EPR thought experiment, the idea of entanglement and spooky action at a distance—the quantum weirdness in which an observation of one particle can instantly affect another one far away—has increasingly become part of what experimental physicists study. In 1951, David Bohm, a brilliant assistant professor at Princeton, recast the EPR thought experiment so that it involved the opposite “spins” of two particles flying apart from an interaction.27 In 1964, John Stewart Bell, who worked at the CERN nuclear research facility near Geneva, wrote a paper that proposed a way to conduct experiments based on this approach.28
Bell was less than comfortable with quantum mechanics. “I hesitated to think it was wrong,” he once said, “but I knew that it was rotten.”29 That, plus his admiration of Einstein, caused him to express some hope that Einstein rather than Bohr might be proven right. But when the experiments were undertaken in the 1980s by the French physicist Alain Aspect and others, they provided evidence that locality was not a feature of the quantum world. “Spooky action at a distance,” or, more precisely, the potential entanglement of distant particles, was.30
Even so, Bell ended up appreciating Einstein’s efforts. “I felt that Einstein’s intellectual superiority over Bohr, in this instance, was enormous, a vast gulf between the man who saw clearly what was needed, and the obscurantist,” he said. “So for me, it is a pity that Einstein’s idea doesn’t work. The reasonable thing just doesn’t work.”31
Quantum entanglement—an idea discussed by Einstein in 1935 as a way of undermining quantum mechanics—is now one of the weirder elements of physics, because it is so counterintuitive. Every year the evidence for it mounts, and public fascination with it grows. At the end of 2005, for example, the New York Times published a survey article called “Quantum Trickery: Testing Einstein’s Strangest Theory,” by Dennis Overbye, in which Cornell physicist N. David Mermin called it “the closest thing we have to magic.”32 And in 2006, the New Scientist ran a story titled “Einstein’s ‘Spooky Action’ Seen on a Chip,” which began:
A simple semiconductor chip has been used to generate pairs of entangled photons, a vital step towards making quantum computers a reality. Famously dubbed “spooky action at a distance” by Einstein, entanglement is the mysterious phenomenon of quantum particles whereby two particles such as photons behave as one regardless of how far apart they are.33
Might this spooky action at a distance—where something that happens to a particle in one place can be instantly reflected by one that is billions of miles away—violate the speed limit of light? No, the theory of relativity still seems safe. The two particles, though distant, remain part of the same physical entity. By observing one of them, we may affect its attributes, and that is correlated to what would be observed of the second particle. But no information is transmitted, no signal sent, and there is no traditional cause-and-effect relationship. One can show by thought experiments that quantum entanglement cannot be used to send information instantaneously. “In short,” says physicist Brian Greene, “special relativity survives by the skin of its teeth.”34
During the past few decades, a number of theorists, including Murray Gell-Mann and James Hartle, have adopted a view of quantum mechanics that differs in some ways from the Copenhagen interpretation and provides an easier explanation of the EPR thought experiment. Their interpretation is based on alternative histories of the universe, coarse-grained in the sense that they follow only certain variables and ignore (or average over) the rest. These “decoherent” histories form a tree-like structure, with each of the alternatives at one time branching out into alternatives at the next time and so forth.
In the case of the EPR thought experiment, the position of one of the two particles is measured on one branch of history. Because of the common origin of the particles, the position of the other one is determined as well. On a different branch of history, the momentum of one of the particles may be measured, and the momentum of the other one is also determined. On each branch nothing occurs that violates the laws of classical physics. The information about one particle implies the corresponding information about the other one, but nothing happens to the second particle as a result of the measurement of the first one. So there is no threat to special relativity and its prohibition of instantaneous transmission of information. What is special about quantum mechanics is that the simultaneous determination of the position and the momentum of a particle is impossible, so if these two determinations occur, it must be on different branches of history.35
Einstein’s fundamental dispute with the Bohr-Heisenberg crowd over quantum mechanics was not merely about whether God rolled dice or left cats half dead. Nor was it just about causality, locality, or even completeness. It was about reality.36 Does it exist? More specifically, is it meaningful to speak about a physical reality that exists independently of whatever observations we can make? “At the heart of the problem,” Einstein said of quantum mechanics, “is not so much the question of causality but the question of realism.”37
Bohr and his adherents scoffed at the idea that it made sense to talk about what might be beneath the veil of what we can observe. All we can know are the results of our experiments and observations, not some ultimate reality that lies beyond our perceptions.
Einstein had displayed some elements of this attitude in 1905, back when he was reading Hume and Mach while rejecting such unobservable concepts as absolute space and time. “At that time my mode of thinking was much nearer positivism than it was later on,” he recalled. “My departure from positivism came only when I worked out the general theory of relativity.”38
From then on, Einstein increasingly adhered to the belief that there is an objective classical reality. And though there are some consistencies between his early and late thinking, he admitted freely that, at least in his own mind, his realism represented a move away from his earlier Machian empiricism. “This credo,” he said, “does not correspond with the point of view I held in younger years.”39 As the historian Gerald Holton notes, “For a scientist to change his philosophical beliefs so fundamentally is rare.”40
Einstein’s concept of realism had three main components:
1. His belief that a reality exists independent of our ability to observe it. As he put it in his autobiographical notes: “Physics is an attempt conceptually to grasp reality as it is thought independently of its being observed. In this sense one speaks of ‘physical reality.’ ”41
2. His belief in separability and locality. In other words, objects are located at certain points in spacetime, and this separability is part of what defines them. “If one abandons the assumption that what exists in different parts of space has its own independent, real existence, then I simply cannot see what it is that physics is supposed to describe,” he declared to Max Born.42
3. His belief in strict causality, which implies certainty and classical determinism. The idea that probabilities play a role in reality was as disconcerting to him as the idea that our observations might play a role in collapsing those probabilities. “Some physicists, among them myself, cannot believe,” he said, “that we must accept the view that events in nature are analogous to a game of chance.”43
It is possible to imagine a realism that has only two, or even just one, of these three attributes, and on occasion Einstein pondered such a possibility. Scholars have debated which of these three was most fundamental to his thinking.44 But Einstein kept coming back to the hope, and faith, that all three attributes go together. As he said in a speech to a doctors convention in Cleveland near the end of his life, “Everything should lead back to conceptual objects in the realm of space and time and to lawlike relations that obtain for these objects.”45
At the heart of this realism was an almost religious, or perhaps childlike, awe at the way all of our sense perceptions—the random sights and sounds that we experience every minute—fit into patterns, follow rules, and make sense. We take it for granted when these perceptions piece together to represent what seem to be external objects, and it does not amaze us when laws seem to govern the behavior of these objects.
But just as he felt awe when first pondering a compass as a child, Einstein was able to feel awe that there are rules ordering our perceptions, rather than pure randomness. Reverence for this astonishing and unexpected comprehensibility of the universe was the foundation for his realism as well as the defining character of what he called his religious faith.
He expressed this in a 1936 essay, “Physics and Reality,” written on the heels of his defense of realism in the debates over quantum mechanics. “The very fact that the totality of our sense experiences is such that, by means of thinking, it can be put in order, this fact is one that leaves us in awe,” he wrote. “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility . . . The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.”46
His friend Maurice Solovine, with whom he had read Hume and Mach in the days of the Olympia Academy, told Einstein that he found it “strange” that he considered the comprehensibility of the world to be “a miracle or an eternal mystery.” Einstein countered that it would be logical to assume that the opposite was the case. “Well, a priori, one should expect a chaotic world which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way,” he wrote. “There lies the weakness of positivists and professional atheists.”47 Einstein was neither.
To Einstein, this belief in the existence of an underlying reality had a religious aura to it. That dismayed Solovine, who wrote to say that he had an “aversion” to such language. Einstein disagreed. “I have no better expression than ‘religious’ for this confidence in the rational nature of reality and in its being accessible, to some degree, to human reason. When this feeling is missing, science degenerates into mindless empiricism.”48
Einstein knew that the new generation viewed him as an out-of-touch conservative clinging to the old certainties of classical physics, and that amused him. “Even the great initial success of the quantum theory does not make me believe in a fundamental dice-game,” he told his friend Max Born, “although I am well aware that our younger colleagues interpret this as a consequence of senility.”49
Born, who loved Einstein dearly, agreed with the Young Turks that Einstein had become as “conservative” as the physicists of a generation earlier who had balked at his relativity theory. “He could no longer take in certain new ideas in physics which contradicted his own firmly held philosophical convictions.”50
But Einstein preferred to think of himself not as a conservative but as (again) a rebel, a nonconformist, one with the curiosity and stubbornness to buck prevailing fads. “The necessity of conceiving of nature as an objective reality is said to be obsolete prejudice while the quantum theoreticians are vaunted,” he told Solovine in 1938. “Each period is dominated by a mood, with the result that most men fail to see the tyrant who rules over them.”51
Einstein pushed his realist approach in a textbook on the history of physics that he coauthored in 1938, The Evolution of Physics. Belief in an “objective reality,” the book argued, had led to great scientific advances throughout the ages, thus proving that it was a useful concept even if not provable. “Without the belief that it is possible to grasp reality with our theoretical constructions, without the belief in the inner harmony of our world, there could be no science,” the book declared. “This belief is and always will remain the fundamental motive for all scientific creation.”52
In addition, Einstein used the text to defend the utility of field theories amid the advances of quantum mechanics. The best way to do that was to view particles not as independent objects but as a special manifestation of the field itself:
There is no sense in regarding matter and field as two qualities quite different from each other ... Could we not reject the concept of matter and build a pure field physics? We could regard matter as the regions in space where the field is extremely strong. A thrown stone is, from this point of view, a changing field in which the states of the greatest field intensity travel through space with the velocity of the stone.53
There was a third reason that Einstein helped to write this textbook, a more personal one. He wanted to help Leopold Infeld, a Jew who had fled Poland, collaborated briefly in Cambridge with Max Born, and then moved to Princeton.54 Infeld began working on relativity with Banesh Hoffmann, and he proposed that they offer themselves to Einstein. “Let’s see if he’d like us to work with him,” Infeld suggested.
Einstein was delighted. “We did all the dirty work of calculating the equations and so on,” Hoffmann recalled. “We reported the results to Einstein and then it was like having a headquarters conference. Sometimes his ideas seemed to come from left field, to be quite extraordinary.”55 Working with Infeld and Hoffmann, Einstein in 1937 came up with elegant ways to explain more simply the motion of planets and other massive objects that produced their own curvatures of space.
But their work on unified field theory never quite gelled. At times, the situation seemed so hopeless that Infeld and Hoffmann became despondent. “But Einstein’s courage never faltered, nor did his inventiveness fail him,” Hoffmann recalled. “When excited discussion failed to break the deadlock, Einstein would quietly say in his quaint English, ‘I will a little tink.’ ” The room would become silent, and Einstein would pace slowly up and down or walk around in circles, twirling a lock of his hair around his forefinger. “There was a dreamy, far-away, yet inward look on his face. No sign of stress. No outward indication of intense concentration.” After a few minutes, he would suddenly return to the world, “a smile on his face and an answer to the problem on his lips.”56
Einstein was so pleased with Infeld’s help that he tried to get Flexner to give him a post at the Institute. But Flexner, who was annoyed that the Institute had already been forced to hire Walther Mayer, balked. Einstein even went to a fellows meeting in person, which he rarely did, to argue for a mere $600 stipend for Infeld, but to no avail.57
So Infeld came up with a plan to write a history of physics with Einstein, which was sure to be successful, and split the royalties. When he went to Einstein to pitch the idea, Infeld became incredibly tongue-tied, but he was finally able to stammer out his proposal. “This is not at all a stupid idea,” Einstein said. “Not stupid at all. We shall do it.”58
In April 1937, Richard Simon and Max Schuster, founders of the house that published this biography, drove out to Einstein’s home in Princeton to secure the rights. The gregarious Schuster tried to win Einstein over with jokes. He had discovered something faster than the speed of light, he said: “The speed with which a woman arriving in Paris goes shopping.”59 Einstein was amused, or at least so Schuster recalled. In any event, the trip was successful, and the Evolution of Physics, which is in its forty-fourth printing, not only propagandized for the role of field theories and a faith in objective reality, it also made Infeld (and Einstein) more secure financially.
No one could accuse Infeld of being ungrateful. He later called Einstein “perhaps the greatest scientist and kindest man who ever lived.” He also wrote a flattering biography of Einstein, while his mentor was still alive, that praised him for his willingness to defy conventional thinking in his quest for a unified theory. “His tenacity in sticking to a problem for years, in returning to the problem again and again—this is the characteristic feature of Einstein’s genius,” he wrote.60
Was Infeld right? Was tenacity the characteristic feature of Einstein’s genius? To some extent he had always been blessed by this trait, especially in his long and lonely quest to generalize relativity. There was also ingrained in him, since his school days, a willingness to sail against the current and defy the reigning authorities. All of this was evident in his quest for a unified theory.
But even though he liked to claim that an analysis of empirical data had played a minimal role in the construction of his great theories, he had generally been graced with an intuitive feel for the insights and principles that could be wrested from nature based on current experiments and observations. This trait was now becoming less evident.
By the late 1930s, he was becoming increasingly detached from new experimental discoveries. Instead of the unification of gravity and electromagnetism, there was greater disunity as two new forces, the weak and the strong nuclear forces, were found. “Einstein chose to ignore those new forces, although they were not any less fundamental than the two which have been known about longer,” his friend Abraham Pais recalled. “He continued the old search for a unification of gravitation and electromagnetism.”61
In addition, a menagerie of new fundamental particles were discovered beginning in the 1930s. Currently there are dozens of them, ranging from bosons such as photons and gluons to fermions such as electrons, positrons, up quarks, and down quarks. This did not seem to bode well for Einstein’s quest to unify everything. His friend Wolfgang Pauli, who joined him at the Institute in 1940, quipped about the futility of this quest. “What God has put asunder,” he said, “let no man join together.”62
Einstein found the new discoveries to be vaguely disconcerting, but he felt comfortable not putting much emphasis on them. “I can derive only small pleasure from the great discoveries, because for the time being they do not seem to facilitate for me an understanding of the foundations,” he wrote Max von Laue. “I feel like a kid who cannot get the hang of the ABCs, even though, strangely enough, I do not abandon hope. After all, one is dealing here with a sphinx, not with a willing streetwalker.”63
So Einstein beat on against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. He realized that he had the luxury to pursue his lonely course, something that would be too risky for younger physicists still trying to make their reputations.64 But as it turned out, there were usually at least two or three younger physicists, attracted by Einstein’s aura, willing to collaborate with him, even if the vast majority of the physics priest-hood considered his search for a unified field theory to be quixotic.
One of these young assistants, Ernst Straus, remembers working on an approach that Einstein pursued for almost two years. One evening, Straus found, to his dismay, that their equations led to some conclusions that clearly could not be true. The next day, he and Einstein explored the issue from all angles, but they could not avoid the disappointing result. So they went home early. Straus was dejected, and he assumed that Einstein would be even more so. To his surprise, Einstein was as eager and excited as ever the next day, and he proposed yet another approach they could take. “This was the start of an entirely new theory, also relegated to the trash heap after a half-year’s work and mourned no longer than its predecessor,” Straus recalls.65
Einstein’s quest was driven by his intuition that mathematical simplicity, an attribute he never fully defined though he felt he knew it when he saw it, was a feature of nature’s handiwork.66 Every now and then, when a particularly elegant formulation cropped up, he would exult to Straus, “This is so simple God could not have passed it up.”
Enthusiastic letters to friends continued to pour forth from Princeton about the progress of his crusade against the quantum theorists who seemed wedded to probabilities and averse to believing in an underlying reality. “I am working with my young people on an extremely interesting theory with which I hope to defeat modern proponents of mysticism and probability and their aversion to the notion of reality in the domain of physics,” he wrote Maurice Solovine in 1938.67
Likewise, headlines continued to emanate from Princeton on purported breakthroughs. “Soaring over a hitherto unscaled mathematical mountain-top, Dr. Albert Einstein, climber of cosmic Alps, reports having sighted a new pattern in the structure of space and matter,” the distinguished New York Times science reporter William Laurence reported in a page 1 article in 1935. The same writer and the same paper reported on page 1 in 1939, “Albert Einstein revealed today that after twenty years of unremitting search for a law that would explain the mechanism of the cosmos in its entirety, reaching out from the stars and galaxies in the vastness of infinite space down to the mysteries within the heart of the infinitesimal atom, he has at last arrived within sight of what he hopes may be the ‘Promised Land of Knowledge,’ holding what may be the master key to the riddle of creation.”68
The triumphs in his salad days had come partly from having an instinct that could sniff out underlying physical realities. He could intuitively sense the implications of the relativity of all motion, the constancy of the speed of light, and the equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass. From that he could build theories based on a feel for the physics. But he later became more reliant on a mathematical formalism, because it had guided him in his final sprint to complete the field equations of general relativity.
Now, in his quest for a unified theory, there seemed to be a lot of mathematical formalism but very few fundamental physical insights guiding him. “In his earlier search for the general theory, Einstein had been guided by his principle of equivalence linking gravitation with acceleration,” said Banesh Hoffmann, a Princeton collaborator. “Where were the comparable guiding principles that could lead to the construction of a unified field theory? No one knew. Not even Einstein. Thus the search was not so much a search as a groping in the gloom of a mathematical jungle inadequately lit by physical intuition.” Jeremy Bernstein later called it “like an all but random shuffling of mathematical formulas with no physics in view.”69
After a while, the optimistic headlines and letters stopped emanating from Princeton, and Einstein publicly admitted that he was, at least for the time being, stymied. “I am not as optimistic,” he told the New York Times. For years the paper had regularly headlined each of Einstein’s purported breakthroughs toward a unified theory, but now its headline read, “Einstein Baffled by Cosmos Riddle.”
Nonetheless, Einstein insisted that he still could not “accept the view that events in nature are analogous to a game of chance.” And so he pledged to continue his quest. Even if he failed, he felt that the effort would be meaningful. “It is open to every man to choose the direction of his striving,” he explained, “and every man may take comfort from the fine saying that the search for truth is more precious than its possession.”70
Around the time of Einstein’s sixtieth birthday, early in the spring of 1939, Niels Bohr came to Princeton for a two-month visit. Einstein remained somewhat aloof toward his old friend and sparring partner. They met at a few receptions, exchanged some small talk, but did not reengage in their old game of volleying thought experiments about quantum weirdness.
Einstein gave only one lecture during that period, which Bohr attended. It dealt with his latest attempts to find a unified field theory. At the end, Einstein fixed his eyes on Bohr and noted that he had long tried to explain quantum mechanics in such a fashion. But he made clear that he would prefer not to discuss the issue further. “Bohr was profoundly unhappy with this,” his assistant recalled.71
Bohr had arrived in Princeton with a piece of scientific news that was related to Einstein’s discovery of the link between energy and mass, E=mc2. In Berlin, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman had gotten some interesting experimental results by bombarding heavy uranium with neutrons. These had been sent to their former colleague, Lise Meitner, who had just been forced to flee to Sweden because she was half Jewish. She in turn shared them with her nephew Otto Frisch, and they concluded that the atom had been split, two lighter nuclei created, and a small amount of lost mass turned into energy.
After they substantiated the results, which they dubbed fission, Frisch informed his colleague Bohr, who was about to leave for America. Upon his arrival in late January 1939, Bohr described the new discovery to colleagues, and it was discussed at a weekly gathering of physicists in Princeton known as the Monday Evening Club. Within days the results had been replicated, and researchers began churning out papers on the process, including one that Bohr wrote with a young untenured physics professor, John Archibald Wheeler.
Einstein had long been skeptical about the possibility of harnessing atomic energy or unleashing the power implied by E=mc2. On a visit to Pittsburgh in 1934, he had been asked the question and replied that “splitting the atom by bombardment is something akin to shooting birds in the dark in a place where there are only a few birds.” That produced a banner headline across the front page of the Post-Gazette:“Atom Energy Hope Is Spiked by Einstein / Efforts at Loosing Vast Force Is Called Fruitless / Savant Talked Here.”72
With the news in early 1939 that it was, apparently, very possible to bombard and split an atomic nucleus, Einstein faced the question again. In an interview for his sixtieth birthday that March, he was asked whether mankind would find some use for the process. “Our results so far concerning the splitting of the atom do not justify the assumption of a practical utilization of the energies released,” he replied. This time he was cautious, however, and went on to hedge his answer slightly. “There is no physicist with soul so poor who would allow this to affect his interest in this highly important subject.”73
Over the next four months, his interest would indeed grow rapidly.