Albert Einstein moves to Princeton University on this date

Dean Henry Burchard Fine of Princeton University and Albert Einstein in 1921

The Writer's Almanac...

It was on this day in 1933 that Albert Einstein officially moved to the United States to teach at Princeton University. He had been in California working as a visiting professor when Hitler took over as chancellor. His apartment in Berlin and his summer cottage in the country were raided, his papers confiscated, and his bank accounts closed. He returned to Europe and handed in his German passport, renouncing his citizenship. He considered offers from all over the world, including Paris, Turkey, and Oxford. Einstein eventually decided on Princeton, which offered him an attractive package teaching at its Institute for Advanced Study — but he had his hesitations about the university. For one thing, it had a clandestine quota system in place that only allowed a small percentage of the incoming class to be Jewish. The Institute's director, Abraham Flexner, was worried that Einstein would be too directly involved in Jewish refugee causes, so he micromanaged Einstein's public appearances, keeping him out of the public eye when possible. He even declined an invitation for Einstein to see President Roosevelt at the White House without telling the scientist. When Einstein found out, he personally called Eleanor Roosevelt and arranged for a visit anyway, and then complained about the incident in a letter to a rabbi friend of his, giving the return address as "Concentration Camp, Princeton." In 1938, incoming freshmen at Princeton ranked Einstein as the second-greatest living person; first place went to Adolf Hitler. 

Joliot-Curie, Marie Curie's daughter and Einstein on the steps of the Mercer St. house

Albert Einstein House [Wikipedia]

Interesting stuff about Einstein

"Einstein Quotes and Interesting Facts: Assassination Lists, Autopsied Brains and Socks"

by

James Fenner

October 2nd, 2013

Guardian Express

According to a new book, entitled Einstein and the Quantum, written by A. Douglas Stone, Albert Einstein’s contributions towards the various fields of science, and the extent of his genius, may have been significantly overlooked.

Stone, who is the chair of Yale’s Department of Applied Physics, argues, such was the magnitude of Einstein’s phenomenal works, the man could have been “… worthy of four Nobel Prizes…” In reality, the remarkable physicist was only awarded a single Nobel Prize.

Throughout his book, Stone waxes lyrical about Einstein, highlighting his many accomplishments, and talking about his advancement of numerous concepts in quantum theory, and garnering enormous recognition for his theory of relativity.

Einstein was, of course, renowned for his work as a physicist. However, he also contributed a great deal to philosophy, with most of his philosophical reflections having been driven by academic study.

A young philosopher, called Robert Thornton, after completing his Ph.D. at Minnesota, was due to begin teaching physics at the University of Puerto Rico. Before beginning his tutelage, he wanted to combine both scientific and philosophical perspectives to present a modern physics course to his students and, therefore, requested a few supportive words from Einstein. Here is what the great man had to say:

    “So many people today—and even professional scientists—seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is—in my opinion—the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.”

To celebrate the great man and his many scientific achievements, we thought we would gather a list of some of the most interesting Einstein facts and trivia, alongside some of his most memorable quotes.

The Assassination List

During 1933, Albert Einstein made a trip to the United States, before deciding not to return back to Germany, as a consequence of the Nazi uprising, spearheaded by the infamous Imagination is more important than knowledge Adolf Hitler.

Later that year, Einstein made a voyage to Belgium, at which time he was informed that his cottage had been ransacked, and his sailboat appropriated. Einstein immediately went to the German consulate in Antwerp, where he officially renounced his citizenship to Germany.

The situation in fascist Germany deteriorated rapidly, during that same year, with anti-Semitic activities becoming the norm, and the instatement of laws that barred Jewish members of German society from holding formal occupations.

Einstein was placed on an assassination target list, with a $5,000 bounty placed upon his head, whilst many of his publications had been burnt. Ruminating over the atrocities, Einstein had this to say to fellow physicist Max Born:

    “… I must confess that the degree of their brutality and cowardice came as something of a surprise.”

Autograph Business

It seemed Einstein was never entirely comfortable signing autographs. Remarkably, he elected to charge one dollar for the privilege. The proceedings from his “autograph business” would later be given to charity. According to Ronald W. Clark, who authored Einstein: The Life and Times, he also charged five dollars for the signing of memorabilia.

Einstein was known for a number of charitable acts. When en route to a series of lectures in Pasadena, California, he agreed to perform two radio broadcasts. Each speech generated $1,000, which he donated to a charitable organization that aided the impoverished people of Berlin.

Now, the man’s autographs can sell for extreme sums of money. A signed photograph of Einstein sticking his tongue out, was sold for an incredible $74,000 by RR Auction in 2009.

University Entrance Examination

The cerebral powerhouse that is Albert Einstein, upon applying for early admission to a Swiss polytechnic school, actually failed his entrance examination first time round. He managed to successfully pass the mathematics and science sections of the test – his core strengths – but failed the remainder (languages, history etc.)

At the behest of the Principal of the Polytechnic, Einstein then went on to complete his secondary schooling at the Aargau Cantonal School, based in Switzerland.
The Manhattan Project

During 1939, it had been reported that the Nazi German regime was engaged in atomic bomb research efforts. Troubled by these findings, Einstein, alongside Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd, attempted to warn the American government.

The pair drafted a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, outlining the dangers of remaining idle, and recommended that additional research be conducted to explore the uranium research, whilst bolstering America’s supply of uranium.

Many suggest that Einstein’s role was pivotal in coaxing America into an arms race against the Nazis, leading to the Manhattan Project. Led by the United States, and supported by both Canada and the United Kingdom, the Manhattan Project yielded the very first atomic bombs, costing close to $2 billion.

In issuing his requests for research development of the atomic bomb, Einstein went against his pacifist instincts. In a conversation with Linus Pauling, an esteemed American scientist, academic and fellow peace activist, Einstein looked back, retrospectively, at his involvement in the inception of the atomic bomb:

    “I made one great mistake in my life – when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atomic bombs be made; but there was some justification – the danger that the Germans would make them.”

Einstein for Israeli President
Following the death of the Zionist leader of Israel, Chaim Azriel Weizmann, in 1952, Einstein was offered the place of President of Israel. The position was offered by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.

However, Einstein rejected the offer, despite having been “deeply moved” by the extraordinary gesture:

    “All my life I have dealt with objective matters, hence I lack both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people and to exercise official function.”

The Socks

Unusually, Einstein also seemed to have an aversion to socks. Seemingly, the genius-level physicist virtually never wore socks. However, generally, Einstein was not one for formal attire.

    “When I was young, I found out that the big toe always ended up making a hole in the sock. So, I stopped wearing socks.”

Einstein’s Illegitimate Daughter

Einstein’s very first wife was Mileva Maric', both of whom attended the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich. The pair’s relationship began to flourish, and they both studied and read books together.

In 1901, however, before the couple had been wed, they took a romantic trip to Lake Como, located in Italy. It is alleged that Maric' was found to be pregnant, after the vacation had drawn to a conclusion. With the couple unmarried, and with the eminent physicist unable to provide financial support for a family, Einstein’s lover returned home to her parents.

During 1987, early communications between Einstein and Maric' were published, exposing these startling revelations. The fate of their illegitimate daughter, who was named Lieserl, remains a mystery. Reports suggest that she either died from scarlet fever, or she survived the disease and was then given up for adoption.

Later, the pair became estranged. Einstein then proposal a contractual agreement, where he outlines Maric'’s precise responsibilities, including the following:

    Clothes and laundry is kept in good order
    Three meals are made and delivered to his room
    His room is kept tidy, with his desk untouched
    Contact was to be limited, and purely social in nature

Marriage to His Cousin

Another, not to well known, fact is that Einstein married his German cousin. Elsa Einstein was Albert’s second wife. Elsa was born with the Einstein surname, which she lost when she married textile merchant Max Löwenthal.

After Elsa’s divorce from Löwenthal in 1908, she then sparked a relationship with Albert. As the pair’s mothers were sisters, Elsa and Albert were first cousins. The couple were later married in 1919, resulting in Elsa reclaiming the Einstein name.

Einstein’s Brain

Albert Einstein had some incredible moments in life. However, even in death, the man was subject to remarkable dealings (or at least his corpse was).

Einstein died of internal bleeding, which was found to be caused by an abdominal aortic aneurysm that had ruptured. One of Einstein’s final quotes was in utterance to surgeons’ recommendations on corrective surgery:

    “I want to go when I want. It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.”

A pathologist, named Thomas Stoltz Harvey, performed Einstein’s autopsy at Princeton Hospital, New Jersey. Harvey removed the brain tissue and preserved it, intact, with formalin. Before cutting the brain into 240 different sections, he took vast numbers of photographs.

A study was performed many years later by Marian C. Diamond and her colleagues, working from the University of California, which sought to measure the ratio between non-neuronal glial cells and neurons. They perceived high levels of glia for every neuronal cell.

However, after obtaining Harvey’s original images of Einstein’s brain, from the National Museum of Health and Medicine, in Maryland, further discoveries were made. Parts of Einstein’s cerebral cortex showed huge numbers of convolutions, particularly in the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with abstract thinking.

We hope you have enjoyed our list of Albert Einstein’s top quotes and facts. When exploring the life and times of the theoretical physicist, it seems his personal life and philosophical outlook were as exceptional as his scientific discoveries.

Einstein and the Quantum: The Quest of the Valiant Swabian Hardcover

by

A. Douglas Stone

ISBN-10: 0691139687
ISBN-13: 978-0691139685

Albert Einstein, Mary Baker Eddy...metaphysics

 

"On Albert Einstein’s Interest In The Metaphysics Of Mary Baker Eddy"

by

William S. Cooper

University of California, Berkeley

        In the voluminous literature on Einstein, even his religious sentiments have not escaped scrutiny.  It is known that in his youth he received Jewish training at home and Roman Catholic teaching at school, that he respected the medieval theologian Maimonides, that he believed in an impersonal God which he compared to the God of Spinoza, that he admired the Society of Friends, and that he said he never prayed in his life.  These and other aspects of his personal theology are touched upon in many sources, perhaps most exhaustively in Max Jammer’s book Einstein and Religion.[1]

        An intriguing facet of his religious outlook--one that seems to have been generally overlooked in the scholarly literature--is his apparent interest in the metaphysical system of the New England religious leader Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Christian Science movement.  My purpose in this note is to gather together some of the evidence that suggests this interest.

INDICATIONS OF HIS INTEREST

        Late in his life Einstein attended the Wednesday noonday meeting of a Christian Science church in New York City.  After the service he was greeted by George Nay, a German-speaking editor and lecturer on Christian Science.  Nay had heard of earlier visits to the church by Einstein and had been hoping to encounter him.  During their conversation Einstein said, among other things, “Do you people realize what a wonderful thing you have?”  The encounter is described by Robert Peel, author of a well known three-volume biography of Eddy, who states that he heard it directly from Nay.[2]  It is also recorded in the church archives in Boston in the form of a brief description of the encounter signed by Nay.  The conversation was witnessed by a party still living who is able to fix the date as April 28, 1954.[3]

        The church in question is Fifth Church, near Grand Central Station.  Einstein is reported to have attended the meetings of this church repeatedly, including at least some visits prior to 1952.  Church members were able to point out the seat in which he habitually sat on those occasions.[4]  He was also seen in attendance at Wednesday evening meetings of the Christian Science church in Princeton, his town of residence at the time.[5]

        He also visited Christian Science reading rooms.  Mary Spaulding, wife of the noted violinist Alfred Spaulding, was serving as attendant at the reading room on Madison Avenue near 43rd St. during one of these visits.  She recorded some complimentary remarks that he made to her about Science and Health, Eddy’s major work, including the comment  “. . . to think that a woman knew this over eighty years ago”.[6]   Spaulding’s memory could have been selective when she wrote down what he had said, but there is no reason to suppose she fabricated the entire incident.  He is reported to have visited another New York City reading room as well.[7]  In addition he made repeated use of the reading room in Princeton.  An informant relates that a librarian in the Princeton reading room told her that Dr. Einstein was one of their most frequent visitors, and that he would often spend an hour or more reading Science and Health.  In that case too, generous remarks made by him about that work were recorded by the attendant and are still available.[8]

        An artist who lived in Princeton in the late forties and early fifties recalls seeing Einstein in the Princeton reading room. She writes:[9]

On one occasion, when I was in the Reading Room and Professor Einstein was studying there, we both happened to leave at the same time.  He greeted me politely and then went over to get his overcoat.  He then walked over to the attendant, took out his pipe from the pocket and said to her, “If it wasn’t for this pipe, I would join your church.”  He smiled and walked out.

(Christian Scientists abstain from the use of tobacco.)  Caution is called for concerning this remark of Einstein’s.  It could have been intended playfully.  Also, it has to be weighed against others such as the one he made later to the Canadian astronomer A. V. Douglas: “If I were not a Jew I would be a Quaker”.[10]   But however the remark about the pipe is construed, it is a clearly recollected instance of his use of a Christian Science reading room.

        John Arthur Arnold, a reporter for the St. Louis Post Dispatch and other newspapers and later a ghost writer for Washington politicians, helped Einstein perfect the English in some of his speeches after the war.  Arnold had for personal reasons become bitter about Christian Science and had authored a pamphlet attacking organized religion in general and Christian Science in particular.  On one occasion while visiting Einstein he showed him this pamphlet.  Einstein responded that the pamphlet was most unfair and that he had a great deal of respect for Christian Science.  This surprised Arnold, who had assumed Einstein knew little or nothing about the religion.[11]

        In his biography of Eddy,  Peel characterized Einstein’s interest in Christian Science as “slight but recurrent.”[12]  Unfortunately Peel does not explain his reasons for thinking the interest to be slight.   Peel states that Einstein was introduced to Eddy’s ideas “apparently for the first time” after World War II by the famous Austrian stage and screen actress Elisabeth Bergner.  However, there are indications that Einstein’s familiarity with the  subject predated that meeting.  Paul S. Seeley related in a public lecture that “a close family friend of Mrs. Seeley and myself” (Bergner) who had known Einstein well in Europe became interested in Eddy’s ideas.  On visiting America near the end of the war she made an appointment to see Einstein at Princeton, curious to ascertain his attitude toward her new religious conviction.  She laid before him her copy of Eddy’s book Science and Health and asked in effect, “How about it?”  He immediately recognized the book and impetuously replied “Blessed art thou!”.  If accurate this account implies prior knowledge and a positive assessment.[13]    As a further clue to the timing, one report would place the beginnings of his interest as far back as the early 1930’s.[14]

        A more consequential point of early contact concerns Einstein’s son, Hans Albert, and his family.  They lived in Greenville, South Carolina, from 1938 to 1943.  According to local newspaper accounts, the senior Einstein was a frequent visitor to the town during that period.  Walter Isaacson, in his biography of Albert Einstein, writes

    . . . Hans Albert became, under the influence of his wife, a Christian Scientist.  The rejection of medical care, as sometimes entailed by that faith, had tragic results.  A few months after their arrival their 6-year old son Klaus contracted diptheria and died.  He was buried at a tiny new cemetery in Greenville. [15]

How this tragedy affected Einstein’s religious views we can only guess, except that the occasion would surely have provided both motive and opportunity for his finding out more about the faith in question from his family.  According to Isaacson, “[Einstein’s] relationship with his son became increasingly secure and even, at times, affectionate.”  Later Hans Albert became a respected professor of hydraulic engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

        Because so much time has gone by since Einstein was with us, care is needed in separating fact from legend.  In an effort to screen out the purely legendary, all evidence mentioned here has been restricted to that of eyewitnesses or parties who received their information directly from an eyewitness.  Caution is needed in dealing with recollections that are decades old.  Nevertheless it can be said that the clues that do survive, taken collectively, point to the likelihood that Einstein had more than a casual or passing curiosity about Eddy’s metaphysics.

HIS OBJECTIONS TO RELIGION

        So far as I have been able to discover, Einstein never commented in writing on Eddy’s metaphysics, and in conversation spoke about it only in generalities.[16]   That is unfortunate, for one is left wondering just what it was about her ideas that he found worthy of contemplation.  Eddy wrote much about the illusory nature of matter.   Did he see some deep connection between her ideas and his advanced physical theories?  Here the historical traces fail us.  However, it is possible to surmise at least that her system overcame some of his more basic objections to conventional religion.

        Einstein had his criticisms of traditional religious beliefs and did not hesitate to articulate them.  So when it is suggested that he might have had a sympathetic interest in a particular system of religious thought, the question naturally arises as to how he could possibly take it seriously in the light of his general religious objections.  In the case of Christian Science however the answer is simple enough.  That particular religious system is relatively free of the particular dogmas he explicitly rejected.

        Consider for instance the question of God’s existence.  Einstein never denied the existence of a deity and always protested against being regarded as an atheist.[17]   However, he did deny vigorously the existence of a personal God.  He said “I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly”.[18]   Again, he said “The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naive.”[19]   Though castigated for it by religionists of both Jewish and Christian persuasions, he steadfastly maintained this position.  He went so far as to add “The main source of the present-day conflicts between the spheres of religion and of science lies in this concept of a personal God . . .”.[20]

        In Eddy’s metaphysics God is defined in terms of abstract synonyms including ‘Truth’, ‘Mind’, and ‘Principle’.[21]   None of the synonyms is suggestive of a personal God in the sense of a deity with the characteristics of a human personality.  Moreover there are passages in her writings which explicitly reject any notion of a personal, anthropomorphic God.  She writes,  “Mortals believe in a finite personal God; while God is infinite Love, which must be unlimited”[22] ; “A personal God is based on finite premises, where thought begins wrongly to apprehend the infinite . . .”[23] ;  “We must learn that God is infinitely more than a person, or finite form, can contain”.[24]  Evidently Eddy was as averse as Einstein to a naive personification of the Deity.

       Einstein wrote, “I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures . . . ”.[25]   On another occasion he observed wryly, “I see only with deep regret that God punishes so many of his children for their numerous stupidities, for which he himself can be held responsible; in my opinion, only his nonexistence could excuse him.”.[26]  Eddy too, decades earlier, had found the idea of a punitive God incredible.  She wrote “In common justice, we must admit that God will not punish man for doing what He created man capable of doing, and knew from the outset that man would do.”[27]  And in similar vein, “It would be contrary to our highest ideas of God to suppose Him capable of first arranging law and causation so as to bring about certain evil results, and then punishing the helpless victims of His volition for doing what they could not avoid doing”.[28]   Einstein would surely have concurred.

        Einstein did not believe in petitionary prayer.  He rejected it as a relic of the primitive belief in a personal God.  He said of the traditional concept of God that “Its anthropomorphic character is shown, for instance, by the fact that men appeal to the Divine Being in prayers and plead for the fulfillment of their wishes”.[29]    In a letter to Leo Szilard he made the arresting comment, “So long as you pray to God and ask him for some benefit, you are not a religious man”.[30]   His position is not far from Eddy’s when she wrote “The mere habit of pleading with the divine Mind, as one pleads with a human being, perpetuates the belief in God as humanly circumscribed,--an error which impedes spiritual growth”.[31]   Though she placed great emphasis on prayer, Eddy held that its purpose is to improve one’s own thinking, not to change the divine Mind:  “God is not moved by the breath of praise to do more than He has already done.  . . .   Prayer cannot change the Science of being, but it tends to bring us into harmony with it.  . . .  He who is immutably right will do right without being reminded of His province”.[32]  

HIS PHILOSOPHICAL LEANINGS

        Einstein had his favorite philosophers.    Skeptics might wonder how a mind sophisticated enough to appreciate these famous thinkers could also find merit in Eddy’s writings.  But on comparing the actual positions of the writers in question, certain parallels emerge.

        Einstein expressed respect for Moses Maimonides, a leading medieval Jewish philosopher.  He praised him as “one of those few who exerted a crucial and fruitful influence on their contemporaries and thus on later generations as well”.[33]  Maimonides’ influential work Guide for the Perplexed, which was found among Einstein’s possessions, argues strongly and at length that God is incorporeal and incapable of being described in terms of ordinary material or human attributes.  Eddy was equally emphatic.  She writes, for instance, that “Christian Science strongly emphasizes the thought that God is not corporeal, but incorporeal . . .”.[34]   On a related topic, Maimonides attached much importance to the unity or indivisibility of the Deity, as did Eddy.[35]

        As a young man Einstein found time to attend a discussion group on Baruch Spinoza.  He read Spinoza’s works repeatedly and said more than once that his own ideas were close to those of Spinoza.[36]   While Eddy’s God is no carbon copy of Spinoza’s,[37]  there are some resemblances.  Both are incorporeal and impersonal.  Both are seen as undergirding the order and harmony of a lawful universe.  Both constitute a sole universal substance, one of Eddy’s defining phrases for God being in fact “all substance”.[38]    Both conceptions reject the dualism that would regard mind and matter as two real, distinct substances.

SUMMARY

        Lest the impression be left that Einstein and Eddy were in full agreement about everything, it should be added that at times Einstein expressed some notions that would be hard to reconcile with Eddy’s metaphysics.  For example, some interview material suggests that, at a younger age at least, he believed sensation to reside in matter, contrary to her teaching.[39]  His understanding of her writings could have been idiosyncratic, his agreement with them might have been only partial, and his generous comments about them in conversation have to be considered in the light of his natural politeness.    Nevertheless Eddy’s metaphysical system stands in general sympathy with his stated reservations about popular religious thought, concerns itself with the derivative character of matter, and shares some ground with some of his favorite philosophers.  At a minimum, we may conclude that for him it came closer than more traditional Judeo-Christian creeds to his expressed ideal of a ‘cosmic religion’.  To that extent at least his special interest in it is explainable, and future historians might well ponder its significance.
 Acknowledgements

 I am indebted to Prof. Max Jammer for searching the Einstein Archives in Jerusalem for relevant correspondence, to Robert Hough of Alameda, California for collecting pertinent press reports,  to Lee Johnson and Judith Huenneke for guidance to associated documents in the church archives, to Bill Sweet of Spindrift Research and Keith Simon for directing me to living witnesses, and to the witnesses themselves for their recollections.

NOTES

[1]  Max Jammer, Einstein and Religion (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999).  Prize for Outstanding Books in Theology and the Natural Sciences, Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, Berkeley, California.

[2]  Robert Peel, Spiritual Healing in a Scientific Age (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), pp. 28, 201 n. 16.

[3]  Date according to George Millar of 34 Esmond Rd, London, England (telephone interview July 2001).  Millar saw Einstein conversing with Nay and spoke with Nay immediately after their conversation.

[4] Marcyne Johnson of Tucson, Arizona, who attended the church in the period 1952-53, remembers being told at that time of frequent Wednesday visits by Einstein by at least two eyewitnesses who had vivid recollections of his attendance and where he sat (telephone interview, June 2001).  Also Rosemarie Bettinson of Bronx, N.Y., long-time clerk of the church, recalls being told by eyewitnesses of Einstein’s attendance (telephone interview, June 2001).

[5]  Virginia E. Bailey of Floral Park, N.Y., attests to having seen Einstein at Wednesday services in Princeton and in the Princeton reading room  (letter to Robert Hough, March 12, 2001).

[6]  David L. Keyston, The Healer: The Healing Work of Mary Baker Eddy, 2nd ed.  (Seattle, Wash.: Healing Unlimited, 1996), p. 189.

[7] Frederic Stoessel of Las Vegas, N. M. states that while living in New York City in about 1954 he saw Einstein chatting with the attendant of the reading room then on Central Park South, and immediately afterward confirmed with the attendant that it had indeed been Einstein (letter to Robert Hough September 1, 1999;  telephone interview August, 2001).

[8] Elizabeth Earl Jones, Reminiscences of Elizabeth Earl Jones,  c. 1986, excerpts quoted in Keyston, The Healer, p. 189.

[9] Quoted from Bailey letter (see note 5).

[10]  Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (New York: The World Publishing Company, 1971), p. 622.

[11]  As related by Arnold’s daughter Genevieve Arnold of Atlanta, Georgia (telephone interview, June 2001).

[12]  Robert Peel, Mary Baker Eddy:  The Years of Authority (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977), p. 497 n. 22.

[13] Paul Stark Seeley, “Spiritual Forces Bring Mankind’s Liberation,” public lecture printed in The Christian Science Monitor, October 20, 1965.

[14]  Harold W. Stewart of Alameda, California states that his mother was a member of the Christian Science church in Pasadena, California in the 1930’s and 40’s.  She told him of visits Einstein was reported to have made to the church.  Since Einstein’s stays in Pasadena while at Cal Tech all fell in the time period 1930-1933, the church visits presumably took place in that period (interview, August 2001; also letter to Robert Hough, November 11, 1999 ).

[15]   Isaacson, W.  Einstein:  His Life and Universe,  New York, N.Y., Simon & Schuster, 2007, p.  444.

[16]  In this connection, Prof. Max Jammer informs me that in the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem there are essentially no documents indicative of Einstein’s attitude toward Eddy or his interest in Christian Science.

[17]  Jammer, Einstein and Religion,  149-151.

[18]  Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Albert Einstein: The Human Side (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 43.

[19]  Einstein’s reply to Beatrice F., quoted in Jammer, Einstein, p. 121 .

[20]  Albert Einstein,  Out of my Later Years [essays] (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), p. 27.

[21] Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (Boston: Christian Science Publishing Society, 1913), p. 465.

[22]  Ibid., p. 312.

[23]  Eddy, The People’s Idea of God, 1909, reprinted in her Prose Works other than Science and Health (Boston: Christian Science Publishing Society, 1925), p. 3.

[24] Eddy, Miscellaneous Writings, 1897, reprinted in Prose Works, p. 16.

[25]  F. Herneck, “Albert Einstein’s gesprochenes Glaubensbekenntnis”, Naturwissenschaften , 1966, 53 : 198.   Excerpt translated in Jammer, Einstein,  p. 72.

[26]  Alice Calaprice, The Expanded Quotable Einstein (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 201.

[27]  Eddy, Science and Health, p. 357.

[28]  Ibid., p. 230.

[29]  Einstein, Later Years, p. 26

[30]   Jammer, Einstein and Religion, p. 149.

[31]   Eddy, Science and Health,  p. 2

[32]   Ibid., p. 2.

[33]  A. Einstein, “Moses Maimonides”, talk delivered in 1935, in Essays in Humanism (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950, 1985), p. 115.

[34]   Eddy, Science and Health, p. 116 (italics hers).

[35]   Ibid., pp. 132, 335, 336.

[36]  Jammer, Einstein and Religion, p. 144.

[37]  For Eddy’s statement of her differences with Spinoza see her No and Yes, 1887,  reprinted in Prose Works, p. 24.

[38]  Eddy, Science and Health, p. 587.

[39]   William Hermanns, Einstein and the Poet: In Search of the Cosmic Man.  (Brookline Village, MA: Branden Press, 1983).

Einstein, blackholes, and "firewalls"

"New York Times Wants to Fight Einstein, Einstein Declines"

by

Matthew R. Francis

August 14th, 2013

Slate

The Albert Einstein of the popular imagination can seem a bit like Scott Pilgrim, forced into battle with new theories and young physicists. Whether he's pitted against experiments finding faster-than-light neutrinos (a result that turned out to be spurious) or fighting possible alternatives to his theory of gravity, you'd be forgiven for thinking that physics is Albert Einstein vs. the World.

The wild-haired German's latest foe comes to us courtesy of a story in the New York Times by Dennis Overbye [below]. The very first sentence reads: “This time, they say, Einstein might really be wrong.” Specifically, a debate over the nature of black holes could challenge “the basis of his general theory of relativity … on which our understanding of the universe is based.”

Sounds dire, no? Poor Einstein could be refuted at last, more than 50 years after his death, his legacy shredded by the very black holes his theory predicted. But this framing presents a distorted view of the process of science.

Overbye discusses an ongoing debate between researchers in an esoteric corner of theoretical physics, dealing with the quantum character of black holes. The so-called “firewall debate” is real and potentially important for our understanding of the intersection of quantum physics and gravity. It involves questions about the destruction (or not) of information inside black holes, the creation of new particles at the surface of a black hole, and possibly the nature of space-time in the limit of very strong gravity.

In brief, the general theory of relativity predicts the existence of black holes. If a mass is dense enough, it will be surrounded by an event horizon: a barrier beyond which nothing can escape, including light. Event horizons for practical purposes define what a black hole is, since no experiment can probe inside them. From general relativity alone, an observer falling into a black hole wouldn't notice passing the event horizon. However, if you include heuristic calculations from quantum theory, the energy at the event horizon is high enough to generate pairs of particles and their antimatter partners. The effect could create a “firewall,” a violent region that would destroy anything passing through it on its way into the black hole.

Firewalls create a paradox, though. If they exist, they potentially violate the central tenet of general relativity—the equivalence principle—or they cause problems for the conservation of information, an important principle in quantum physics. It's deep stuff, even for someone like me trained in general relativity and quantum field theory; I recommend reading these explanations by Jennifer Ouellette for Scientific American and by Zeeya Merali for Nature.

However, it's important that we not overstate the potential implications. Even if general relativity is violated by firewalls, the theory still holds in a vast majority of other situations. Newtonian gravity is used for most applications in astronomy, from planet orbits to the structure of galaxies; general relativity explains why Newtonian gravity works in those contexts, so we're OK with using the simpler theory. Nobody sensible believes general relativity is the last word on gravity, if for no other reason than we lack a complete quantum theory of gravity. If firewalls point to a new theory, we'll likely still use Einstein's theory in the domains where it works, just as we use Newton's.

Newer theories supplant older ones conceptually, but every theory is provisional, constantly tested by experiments and observations. Einstein, important as he was in 20th-century physics, is not the ultimate authority even on his own theories, and refinements to his work should not be framed as proving him right or wrong. Rather than saying things like “Einstein survives to fight another day” or “[throwing] Einstein under the bus,” as Overbye does, we should frame scientific discovery as a process, not a clash between people. Black hole firewalls are part of the process, which ultimately won't be settled by debate. Let's let Einstein sit this one out.

"A Black Hole Mystery Wrapped in a Firewall Paradox"

by

Denis Overbye

August 12th, 2013

The New York Times

This time, they say, Einstein might really be wrong.

A high-octane debate has broken out among the world’s physicists about what would happen if you jumped into a black hole, a fearsome gravitational monster that can swallow matter, energy and even light. You would die, of course, but how? Crushed smaller than a dust mote by monstrous gravity, as astronomers and science fiction writers have been telling us for decades? Or flash-fried by a firewall of energy, as an alarming new calculation seems to indicate?

This dire-sounding debate has spawned a profusion of papers, blog posts and workshops over the last year. At stake is not Einstein’s reputation, which is after all secure, or even the efficacy of our iPhones, but perhaps the basis of his general theory of relativity, the theory of gravity, on which our understanding of the universe is based. Or some other fundamental long-established principle of nature might have to be abandoned, but physicists don’t agree on which one, and they have been flip-flopping and changing positions almost weekly, with no resolution in sight.

“I was a yo-yo on this,” said one of the more prolific authors in the field, Leonard Susskind of Stanford. He paused and added, “I haven’t changed my mind in a few months now.”
Raphael Bousso, a theorist at the University of California, Berkeley, said, “I’ve never been so surprised. I don’t know what to expect.”

You might wonder who cares, especially if encountering a black hole is not on your calendar. But some of the basic tenets of modern science and of Einstein’s theory are at stake in the “firewall paradox,” as it is known.

“It points to something missing in our understanding of gravity,” said Joseph Polchinski, of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif., one of the theorists who set off this confusion.

Down this rabbit hole are many of the jazzy magical mysteries of modern physics: Black holes. The shortcuts through space and time called wormholes. Quantum entanglement, also known as spooky action at a distance, in which particles separated by light-years can still instantaneously appear to remain connected. The reward for going down this hole could be a new understanding of why we think we live in a universe with space and time at all, with suitably unpredictable consequences. After all, if Einstein hadn’t been troubled a century ago by logical inconsistencies in the Newtonian universe, we might not have GPS systems, which rely on his theory of general relativity to keep time, in our pockets today.

Falling Bodies

Black holes are the most extreme predictions of Einstein’s theory, which describes how matter and energy warp the geometry of space and time the way a heavy sleeper causes a mattress to sag. Too much matter and energy in one place could cause space to sag so far that the matter inside it would disappear as if behind a magician’s cloak, collapsing endlessly to a point of infinite density known as a singularity. Einstein thought that idea was ridiculous when it was pointed out to him at the time, in 1916, but today astronomers agree that the universe is speckled with such dark monsters, including beasts lurking in the hearts of most galaxies that are millions and billions of time more massive than the Sun. Many of them resulted from the collapse of dead stars.

General relativity is based on what Einstein later called his “happiest thought,” that a freely falling person would not feel his weight. It is known simply as the equivalence principle; it says that empty space looks the same everywhere and to everyone.

One consequence of this principle is that an astronaut would not feel anything special happening when he fell through the point of no return, known as the event horizon, into a black hole. Like a bungee jumper, he would feel weightless then and all the way until he hit the bottom, which could take seconds or years depending on how big the hole was, and he would be stretched like a noodle by tidal forces and then crushed into a speck. At the event horizon there would be “no drama,” in the lexicon — at least in the physical sense, as opposed to the intellectual trauma of knowing you were not ever going home. Things or people went in, they got crushed to infinite density and disappeared. That was the traditional view of black holes.

Things got more interesting, however, in 1974 when Stephen Hawking, the British cosmologist, stunned the world by showing that when the paradoxical quantum laws that describe subatomic behavior were taken into account, black holes would leak particles and radiation, and in fact eventually explode, although for a hole the mass of a star it would take longer than the age of the universe.

This was a breakthrough in combining general relativity, the gravity that curves the cosmos, with quantum theory, which describes the microscopic quirkiness inside it, but there was a big hitch. Dr. Hawking concluded that the radiation coming from a black hole would be completely random, conveying no information about what had fallen into it. When the black hole finally exploded, all that information would be erased from the universe forever. “God not only plays dice with the universe,” Dr. Hawking said in 1976 in a riposte to Einstein’s famous doubts about the randomness of quantum theory, “he sometimes throws them where they can’t be seen.”

Particle physicists cried foul, saying that this violated a basic tenet of modern science and of quantum theory, that information is always preserved. From the material in the smoke and flames of a burning book, for example, one could figure out whether it was the Bible or the Kama Sutra; the same should be true of the fizz and pop of black holes, these physicists argued. A 30-year controversy ensued.

It was front-page news in 2004 when Dr. Hawking finally said that he had been wrong, and paid off a bet.

The Firewall Paradox

Now, however, some physicists say that Dr. Hawking might have conceded too soon. “He had good reason,” said Dr. Polchinski, “but he gave up for the wrong reason.” Nobody, he explained, had yet figured out exactly how information does get out of a black hole.

That was the task that four researchers based in Santa Barbara — Ahmed Almheiri, Donald Marolf, and James Sully, all from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Dr. Polchinski of the Kavli Institute set themselves a year ago. The team (called AMPS, after their initials) found, to their surprise, that following the known laws of physics would lead to a contradiction, the firewall paradox.

Their calculations showed that having information flowing out of a black hole was incompatible with having an otherwise smooth Einsteinian space-time at its boundary, the event horizon. In its place would be a discontinuity in the vacuum that would manifest itself as energetic particles — a “firewall” — lurking just inside the black hole.

Being incinerated as you entered a black hole would certainly contradict Einstein’s dictum of no drama. If this were true, you would in fact die long before the bungee-jumping ride ever got anywhere close to the bottom. The existence of a firewall would mean that the horizon, which according to general relativity is just empty space, is a special place, pulling the rug out from under Einstein’s principle, his theory of gravity, and modern cosmology, which is based on general relativity. This presented the scientists with what Dr. Bousso calls the "menu from hell."  If the firewall argument was right, one of three ideas that lie at the heart and soul of modern physics, had to be wrong. Either information can be lost after all; Einstein’s principle of equivalence is wrong; or quantum field theory, which describes how elementary particles and forces interact, is wrong and needs fixing. Abandoning any one of these would be revolutionary or appalling or both.

Dr. Polchinski was very surprised by the result. “It seemed like such a simple argument that it must have been considered and resolved earlier,” he said. After trying to kill it by talking to colleagues in Santa Barbara, he e-mailed Dr. Susskind of Stanford, an old hand at black holes and information, expecting that Dr. Susskind would point out the error.

“But after a week or two of disbelief,” Dr. Polchinski said, “he was as confused as we” were.

Dr. Susskind said: “The arguments are very clear. Nobody knew what to make of them.”

Quantum Vows

The firewall argument hinges on one of the weirder aspects of quantum physics, the action called entanglement. As Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen pointed out in 1935, quantum theory predicts that a pair of particles can be connected in such a way that measuring a property of one — its direction of spin, say — will immediately affect the results of measuring the other one, even if it is light-years away.

Einstein used this “spooky action at a distance” to suggest the absurdity of quantum mechanics, but such experiments are now done in labs every day. You can’t use it to send a message faster than light, because the correlation shows up only when the two experimenters get together and compare their respective results. But it plays a crucial role in quantum computing and cryptography — and, it turns out, in explaining how information encoded in the Hawking radiation gets out of a black hole.

Consider two particles (let’s call them Bob and Alice) that have been radiated by a black hole. Bob left it eons ago, as it began leaking radiation; quantum entanglement theory dictates that in order for the black hole to keep track of what information it has been transmitting, Bob out there has to be entangled with Alice, who just left.

But that scenario competes with another kind of entanglement, between particles on either side of the event horizon, the black hole’s boundary. If space is indeed smooth, as Einstein postulated, and if quantum field theory is correct, Alice must be entangled with another particle, Ted, who is just inside the black hole.

But quantum theory forbids promiscuous entanglements. In the language of quantum information, Alice can marry either Bob or Ted, but not both, even if the second marriage happens inside the black hole where most of us can’t see it.

Alice should have a consistent explanation of the universe, Dr. Polchinski explained, “just as we ourselves must, even though we are inside the cosmic horizon.”

And so smoke pours from the AMPS group’s computers and has continued to pour from the particle accelerators of the mind, fueled by coffee and blackboard chalk this last year. Firewall or not? Does information live or die? Is Einstein at last wrong? Experiments would not help, even if we had a black hole in a laboratory, because the putative firewall, if it exists, would be just inside where it can’t be seen safely.

At a firewall workshop this winter, John Preskill, a Caltech theorist who won a bet with Dr. Hawking on the randomness of information from a black hole, declared that physicists were back where they had been 40 years ago.

The Menu From Hell

Dr. Bousso said his first response to the AMPS paper was, “Come on, you gotta be kidding me.” He added, “Everybody goes through their stages of grief.”

About 40 papers have been devoted to firewalls in the last year, and more are on the way. Daniel Harlow of Princeton and Patrick Hayden of McGill University suggested that the issue might be moot; the computation necessary to verify that Alice and Bob are entangled could take longer than the age of the universe and the black hole would evaporate in the meantime, making it impossible ever to go inside and experience the contradiction.

Failing that, which of the items on Dr. Bousso’s “menu from hell” might have to go depends on who is speaking.

In some ways, it would be easiest to give up quantum field theory, which describes what empty space should look like, in the case of someone who is being accelerated, perhaps by gravity pulling him down a black hole. After all, quantum theory, with “virtual” particles flitting in and out of existence and spooky entanglements is already strange. On the other hand, as Ed Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study, who has so far watched the firewall debate from a distance, said, “Quantum field theory is how the world works.” It had a major triumph just a year ago, when the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle responsible for the mass of other subatomic particles, was discovered after a 40-year search, at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Meanwhile, physicists have more reason than ever to think that information cannot be lost. A celebrated 1997 paper by Juan M. Maldacena of the Institute for Advanced Study describes nature as a kind of hologram, in which the information about what happens inside a volume of three-dimensional space, for example, is encoded in quantum equations on its two-dimensional boundary, the way a 3-D image is encoded on the face of your bank card.

Mark Van Raamsdonk, a young theorist at the University of British Columbia, likes to use a spookier analogy to describe this, namely the chip that controls a Matrix-like video game. (Feel free to insert your own woo-woo music here.)

The discovery that the information needed to describe what happens in some volume is proportional to the area enclosing that volume is the strangest and most far-reaching consequence of Dr. Hawking’s discovery that black holes explode, and is still wreathed in mystery.

Dr. Maldacena’s universe is often portrayed like a can of soup, in which galaxies, black holes, gravity, stars and so forth, including us, are the soup inside, while the information to describe them resides, like a label, on the outside. Think of it as gravity in a can. The equations that represent the label are deterministic and there is no room in them for information to be lost, implying that information in the universe inside is also preserved.

Which leaves the firewall as the only way to stop the illegal marriage of Alice and Ted, Dr. Polchinski said — an odious solution because it contravenes the basic principle of general relativity.

He pointed out, however, that in a sense physicists had already thrown Einstein under the bus. In Dr. Maldacena’s holographic universe, considered to be the last word on quantum gravity, the dimensions of space-time do not seem to matter. “We’ve known for years that space-time is not fundamental,” Dr. Polchinski said. “General relativity is not fundamental.”

He went on, “space-time is emergent. Gravity is emergent. Maybe sometimes it doesn’t always emerge.”

Einstein’s Revenge

But if space and time and gravity are not fundamental, what is?

Recently a new way of solving the firewall conundrum and of answering that haunting question has attracted a lot of attention, although no consensus. Dr. Maldacena and Dr. Susskind have proposed that Einstein could come to his own rescue via one more far-out notion in modern physics: wormholes.

In 1935 Einstein and Rosen found that, mathematically anyway, black holes could come in pairs connected by shortcuts through space — then known as Einstein-Rosen bridges, now known as wormholes. A wormhole would not be traversable by any means we now know about, ruling out time travel and other violations of relativity, despite the dreams of science fiction writers and interstellar pioneers.

In 2010, Dr. Van Raamsdonk of British Columbia suggested that such wormholes were the geometric manifestations of quantum entanglement. After all, neither of these phenomena, which seemed to transcend local space, could be used for sending direct messages. Brian Swingle at M.I.T. had made a similar suggestion a year earlier.

In effect, what these theorists were saying was that without the phenomenon of entanglement, space-time would have no structure at all. Or as Dr. Maldacena put it, “Spooky action at a distance creates space-time.” If true, this insight would be a step toward a longtime dream of theorists of explaining how space and time emerge from some more basic property of reality, in this case, bits of quantum information. The theorist John Wheeler, of Princeton, who had coined the term “black hole,” called this concept “it from bit.”

Taking this idea seriously, Dr. Maldacena and Dr. Susskind proposed that a similar kind of wormhole arrangement existed between the black hole in the AMPS case and its Hawking radiation. Instead of a tunnel snaking through hyperspace and opening at the maw of another black hole, the wormhole would split into a zillion spaghetti-like strands ending on each of the pieces of Hawking radiation. That would mean that Bob, the Hawking particle in the cartoon version of the theory mentioned above, might be light years away from the event horizon, but he would still be connected to the interior of the black hole, as if there were a doorway in New Jersey that opened up into a basement in Manhattan.

Because of this wormhole connection, Dr. Maldacena explained, “Ted and Bob are the same.” So the result is sort of like the happy ending of one of those screwball romantic comedies that involve mistaken identity and the handsome vagabond turns out to be the prince in disguise; Alice can marry Ted who is really Bob and the bonds of matrimony extend smoothly across the edge of the black hole.

In that case, then, there is no firewall, no contradiction in the laws of physics. And Einstein survives to fight another day.

“If right, this is clearly a major insight into gravity and quantum mechanics,” an enthusiastic Dr. Susskind said. “I think of it as a very dramatic thing,” he said, noting that long after Einstein’s career was presumed to be over, at 56, “he produced these ideas” of entanglement and wormholes having no idea they were connected.

“The man keeps giving.”

But Einstein is not safe yet.

“At first whiff,” Dr. Preskill wrote in a recent blog post, the Maldacena-Susskind conjecture “may smell fresh and sweet, but it will have to ripen on the shelf for a while.” He added, “For now, wormhole lovers can relish the possibilities.”

Entangled Theories

Dr. Maldacena and Dr. Susskind admit that the wormhole hypothesis is still a work in progress. Few of their colleagues are convinced yet that it has been formulated in sufficient detail, let alone that it can solve the firewall paradox. “All I can say,” Dr. Susskind said in an e-mail on the eve of a firewall workshop next week at the Kavli Institute where wormholes and everything else will surely be scrutinized, “is that no one has a completely solid case and that certainly includes me. Time will tell.”
Dr. Polchinski said, “My current thinking is that all the arguments that we are having are the kind of arguments that you make when you don’t have a theory.” We need a more complete theory of gravity, he concluded.

“Maybe ‘space-time from entanglement’ is the right place to start,” he wrote. “I am not sure.”

Dr. Bousso, who has been e-mailing with Dr. Maldacena, is skeptical that the wormholes will eliminate firewalls. “My own view is that it’s time to move on, accept, and actually understand firewalls,” he said. After all, he added, there’s no principle of nonviolence in the universe, except for Einstein’s equivalence principle, which says the black hole’s horizon is not a special place. But maybe it is, after all.

Meanwhile, Dr. Bousso said, the present debate had raised his estimation, “by another few notches,” of the “stupendous magnitude” of Dr. Hawking’s original discovery of the information paradox.

"The firewall paradox,” he said, “tells us that the conceptual cost of getting information back out of a black hole is even more revolutionary than most of us had believed.”

Did I say that?...an Einstein quote

Linus Pauling's diary entry for November 16th, 1954.

"Einstein Likely Never Said One of His Most Oft-Quoted Phrases"

by

Rebecca J. Rosen


August 9th, 2013

The Atlantic

On the list of tales we like to tell about Albert Einstein, the story of his "biggest blunder" is near the top. It begins with a problem that was bugging Einstein: How could his theory of general relativity be true and, yet, the universe stable? If his theory was right, the universe would have collapsed -- it could not possibly remain fixed, as physicists at the time believed it was.

To make his equations work, in 1917 Einstein introduced an additional term into them, expressed by the Greek letter lambda-- the "cosmological constant." The new term represented a repulsive force that would counter gravity's attraction, leaving the universe intact.

But in the years that followed, evidence mounted that the belief in the universe's motionlessness was wrong: The universe was, in fact, expanding. Had Einstein stuck with the equation before him, he might have been the one to intuit this central feature of the cosmos, but instead he concocted a contrivance in order to preserve a false assumption. Einstein, the story goes, called it the "biggest blunder" of his entire life, and that phrase (or close variations of it) has been repeated thousands of times, in books and journal articles across the disciplines.

The only problem is: Einstein may never have uttered the phrase "biggest blunder."

Astrophysicist and author Mario Livio can find no documentation that puts those words into Einstein's mouth (or, for that matter, his pen). Instead, all references eventually lead back to one man, physicist George Gamow, who reported Einstein's use of the phrase in two sources: his posthumously published autobiography My World Line (1970) and a Scientific American article from September 1956.

This, for reasons Livio recounts in detail in his new book Brilliant Blunders, is some seriously thin sourcing. For one, Gamow, brilliant physicist though he might have been, had a bit of a reputation for, shall we say, antics. Once, for example, Gamow had teamed up with a student of his named Ralph Alpher to write a paper. "He then realized," Livio told me, "that if he were to add as a co-author another known astrophysicist, whose name was Hans Bethe, then the three names would be Alpher Bethe Gamow, like alpha beta gamma, even though Hans Bethe had nothing to do with that paper." (His first wife, Livio writes, once remarked, "In more than twenty years together, Geo has never been happier than when perpetuating a practical joke.")

Knowing this about Gamow made Livio suspicious. What are the chances that Gamow, this ham, was retelling Einstein's confession with veracity? Not good, Livio found.

Livio looked at almost every single paper that Einstein ever wrote, including making a trip to the Einstein archive in Jerusalem to look at the collection personally. "And nowhere did I ever find the phrase 'biggest blunder', " Livio told me. "I didn't find it -- anywhere."

So he turned his attention to the correspondence between Einstein and Gamow, and it is at this point that Gamow's story begins to look even worse. "When might Einstein have used this expression with Gamow?" Livio writes in the book. As Gamow tells it in his autobiography, he and Einstein were quite close, with Gamow visiting the aging scientist every other Friday as the liaison between the Navy and Einstein during World War II. "He describes what good friends they were, how Einstein would greet him in one of his soft sweaters, and so on," Livio explains.

"Well, guess what," he continues. "I discovered a small article published in some obscure journal of the Navy by somebody named Stephen Brunauer," a scientist who had recruited both Einstein and Gamow to the Navy. In that article, Brunauer wrote, "Gamow, in later years, gave the impression that he was the Navy's liaison man with Einstein, that he visited every two weeks, and the professor 'listened' but made no contribution -- all false [emphasis added]. The greatest frequency of visits was mine, and that was about every two months." Clearly, Livio says, Gamow exaggerated his relationship with the famous physicist.

The correspondence between Einstein and Gamow seems to confirm this. The letters are quite formal, not those of the sort that would pass between intimate friends. Einstein was polite but not particularly effusive. "So wait a second," Livio says doubtfully, "Einstein never used this phrase with any more intimate colleagues, but he used it with Gamow?"

"Look," Livio emphasized to me, "it is impossible -- absolutely impossible -- to prove beyond any doubt that somebody did not say something. I don't claim that I proved it. But I think that it is highly unlikely that Einstein ever used this phrase."

Moreover, this is not to say that Einstein was at ease with the cosmological constant. "I'm not saying he didn't regret it," Livio says. "He definitely regretted it. He wrote about that to a number of friends. He thought it was ugly."

But to say it was his "biggest blunder" implies a level of regret that it seems Einstein did not feel. By contrast, when he did write about the error (which, it should be noted, in more recent years, has turned out to be less clearly an error than Einstein thought, but that's a whole other story), he did so with a dispassionate tone that conveys comfort with the notion that science would overturn some of his work. In a 1932 paper with Willem de Sitter, Einstein wrote, "Historically the term containing the 'cosmological constant' ? was introduced into the field equations in order to enable us to account theoretically for the existence of a finite mean density in a static universe. It now appears that in the dynamical case this end can be reached without the introduction of ?." And that was that.

There was, however, one regret that stood out for Einstein, and it had nothing to do with the elegance of his calculations. After a visit with the scientist at Princeton on November 16, 1954, Linus Pauling wrote in his diary: "He said that he had made one great mistake -- when he signed the letter to Pres. Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made; but that there was some justification -- the danger that the Germans would make them."

Scientific mistakes, Einstein's attitude implies, resolve with time. Mistakes of conscience, on the other hand, well, those are harder to undo.

Emil Rupp, experimental physicist, undone

"The fraud who worked with Einstein"

by

Esther Inglis-Arkell

May 20th, 2013

io9

Emil Rupp spent the late 1920s and early 1930s being lauded as the most impressive experimental physicist in the world. He managed to pull off experiments that no one else could. He worked with Einstein. And he'd made it all up.

Emil Rupp was born in Germany in 1898; he had an interest in physics, which meant that he was born at the perfect place in he perfect time. Germany was a nearly holy site for physicists throughout the first part of the 20th century — people traveled there to learn, to collaborate, and to become the best in the world. By age 27, Rupp was the best in the world.

His work focused on canal rays, which were produced in little glass tubes. On one side of a tube was an anode, a positively charged electrode. At the center of the tube was a cathode, a negatively charged electrode with little holes — sometimes called canals — drilled in it. Positive ions would shoot from the anode to the cathode, and some would shoot through the holes; these would continue into a vacuum on the far side of the tube, where they emitted enough light that they could be studied with the naked eye.

Rupp was one of the researchers studying these rays, particularly their interference patterns as they came through the canals and the coherence of the beams in the vacuum. He came up with some remarkable results. Basically, his observable phenomena, from interference patterns, to wave trains (a series of waves traveling in sync), to beam coherence were larger than anyone else had every observed. By studying them, he noticed that the rays underwent two different kinds of Doppler shift. One shift was due to the acceleration of the ion in the ray. The other was thermal Doppler shift, the shift that comes about from the random jiggling of the ion.

Everyone took note of Rupp's experiments and their strong, observable results. Even Einstein noticed, and the phenomenon that Rupp observed gave him an idea for an experiment. He wanted to know if waves emitted by atoms were emitted over time, or emitted instantaneously. The large coherence and the interference patterns for the canal ray beams given by Rupp gave him hope that he could set up experiments with observable results using hydrogen atoms. What Einstein didn't know was that Rupp only got such lovely results because he was making everything, from the experiments to the data, up as he went along.

Not everyone shared Einstein's confidence. Robert Atkinson noticed that Rupp's atoms in motion seemed more easily observable than atoms at rest. Thermal motion alone should make this impossible. A hydrogen atom at rest has thermal motion because it is bumped by other hydrogen atoms. Accelerate it incredibly fast in one direction and it should bump into even more atoms, be more jittery, and less observable. When Einstein inquired about this, Rupp said that Atkinson was right, but his experiment had compensated for that — although he hadn't mentioned the problem at all before Atkinson had brought it up.

What followed would have made a decent farce. Einstein noticed a flaw in Rupp's experiment and corrected for it. Reasoning that Rupp had already seen the flaw, corrected it, and forgotten to mention it, Einstein wrote to Rupp about the correction. Rupp said yes he had corrected it, and thanked Einstein for reminding him. Rupp started on the experiments and wrote to Einstein about his results. Einstein had a problem with the results. Rupp said he'd use a 'purer canal ray' and try again. Rupp wrote again with data, which Einstein analyzed and which seemed to agree with Einstein's predictions. Einstein noticed another problem with the experiment, and puzzled about why the data had come out right when the experiment was wrong. Rupp wrote back saying that, yes, it was all very puzzling.

At length, Rupp came up with an answer that seemed plausible to Einstein, and Einstein himself presented the work that they had done together. The connection launched Rupp's career. He was given what he wanted, and pursued any experiments he wanted to pursue (though he must have been relieved to have severed the connection with Einstein after their difficult collaboration), and published several more papers — until 1935.

In 1935, he went a bit too far. People were getting new and better results with canal rays, and so Rupp wrote that he'd managed to get beams of positrons accelerated in ways that no one ever had before. At last, the physics community in general turned its eyes to him and asked, "Oh yeah? With what?" Rupp had tripped himself up in the most obvious way possible — he didn't even have access to the equipment necessary to create such beams.

At last, people started combing back over his papers, finding flaws, omissions, and sometimes outright impossibilities. Knowing the game was up, Rupp published a retraction covering five recent papers that could absolutely be proved wrong. He included a doctor's note saying he suffered from psycasthenia, a state which gives people obsessive compulsions, and that he'd written the papers in a "dreamlike state." He withdrew from scientific life, and his work was quietly buried.

Einstein walked away from the mess relatively unscathed. His notes to and from Rupp survived, and it was clear he had mainly been guilty of giving Rupp the benefit of the doubt. That guilt was shared by most of the physics community by that time, and so the matter was left in the past. There's little to read about Rupp and his 10 years of fame nowadays. Although, if he were somehow able to write his biography, it would probably make for fascinating reading.

Eric Baird wrote...

"Remembering Emil Rupp"

July 12th, 2009

In the "impossible diamond" post, when I was talking about the impression given by C20th physicists had that fraud didn't happen in their profession, I forgot about Emil Rupp. Then again, almost everyone tends to forget about Emil Rupp.

Emil Rupp (1898-1979) studied under Nobel-prizewinning experimenter Philipp Lenard, and was considered by some to be one of the most exciting experimenters of his time. He did a series of experiments related to effects like electron diffraction that caught the imaginations of a number of key theoretical physicists, and his work was sometimes credited with being one of the most important influences on the development of quantum mechanics.

Rupp's work was central to some key questions in quantum mechanics. What is reality? is light really a wave or a particle? Is it emitted continuously or instantaneously? Can a state that is said not to exist still influence the outcome of an experiment?

Ironically, it then turned out that Rupp's own experiments, which had been so influential, didn't seem to have existed either. The thing supposedly came to light when some of his colleagues visited the lab where Rupp was working and confronted Rupp – he'd been describing experiments with 500kV electrons, but wasn't in possession of an accelerator that went up to 500kV. He'd been making up his experimental results.

Why did Rupp do it? Well, like Bernie Madhoff, for a while he was getting away with it, and was having a very, very good time. He was identifying problems that the physics community wanted solving, and solving them (albeit with fake experimental writeups). He was an enabler, and people (other than the fellow experimenters that he kept leapfrogging) liked him for it. Great names in theoretical physics would seek him out and cite him. Einstein spent quality time corresponding with Rupp in 1926, working through issues with wave-particle duality, and trying to work out what should happen in certain experiments ... and trying to come up with explanations for how it was that some of Rupp's experiments had come out so well, given some of the difficulties that he should have come up against. The collaboration was reasonably well-known, and people started referring to the "Einstein-Rupp experiments".

When the game was up, Rupp found that he'd now given the physics community a new headache. He'd shown that peer review didn't work as an efficient way of identifying "friendly" fraud within the system. If you had the right background, and you worked out which results people wanted and published those results, your paper tended to pass peer review unless the referees were so convinced that you couldn't possibly have gotten those results that they called you on it. And if an experiment produced the expected result, it was difficult for a referee to insist that an experiment was too successful. Results that don't agree with current thinking can be summarily rejected by peer review on the grounds that getting a "wrong" answer amounts to apparent evidence of error, but rejecting results that give the "right" answer is more awkward.

The lesson seemed to be that if you wanted a career as a scientific fraudster, the way to succeed was to agree with whichever theories were currently in vogue. So the physics community was now facing a potential upheaval – how would they assess how many other key papers by respected researchers might have been unreliable, or even outright fakes?

Rupp solved that problem for them with another piece of documentation. He sent a retraction of his five key papers, along with a letter from his doctor stating that Rupp had been in a "dreamlike" mental state when he'd written them.

It was a tidy conclusion – Rupp exited physics without there having to be a nasty inquiry, the community got to draw a line under the affair, quickly, and thanks to Rupp's explanation, they got to write off the matter not as an extended period of fraud lasting nine or ten years, but as the unfortunate actions of a guy who was having some mental health issues. That let the community off the hook – if Rupp hadn't been completely sane at the time, then we could still tell ourselves that physics was a special "fraud-free" field of science, and that no sane physicist would ever commit fraud. So everything was okay again.

Was Rupp's doctor's letter genuine? We didn't really care. We had the result that we wanted.

Refs:

Jeroen van Dongen, "Emil Rupp, Albert Einstein and the canal ray experiments on wave-particle duality: Scientific fraud and theoretical bias", Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 37 Supplement (2007), 73-120 [arXiv:0709.3099v1]

Jeroen van Dongen, "The interpretation of the Einstein-Rupp experiments and their influence on the history of quantum mechanics", Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 37 Supplement (2007) 121-131 [arXiv:0709.3226v1]

"Emil Rupp, Albert Einstein and the canal ray experiments on wave-particle duality: Scientific fraud and theoretical bias" by Jeroen van Dongen

Emil Rupp [Wikipedia]