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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802718211 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 05/26/2009 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Sales rank: | 459,648 |
| Lexile: | 1170L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
David Bodanis designed and gave the "Intellectual Tool-kit" course lectures for many years at Oxford University in England. He is the author of several books, including The Secret Family and the best-seller The Secret House. A native of Chicago, he lives in London, England.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Bern Patent Office, 1905
From THE COLLECTED PAPERS OF ALBERT EINSTEIN, VOLUME I:
13 April 1901
Professor Wilhelm Ostwald
University of Leipzig
Leipzig, Germany
Esteemed Herr Professor!
Please forgive a father who is so bold as to turn to you, esteemed Herr Professor, in the interest of his son.
I shall start by telling you that my son Albert is 22 years old, that ... he feels profoundly unhappy with his present lack of position, and his idea that he has gone off the tracks with his career & is now out of touch gets more and more entrenched each day. In addition, he is oppressed by the thought that he is a burden on us, people of modest means....
I have taken the liberty of turning [to you] with the humble request to ... write him, if possible, a few words of encouragement, so that he might recover his joy in living and working.
If, in addition, you could secure him an Assistant's position for now or the next autumn, my gratitude would know no bounds....
I am also taking the liberty of mentioning that my son does not know anything about my unusual step.
I remain, highly esteemed Herr Professor, your devoted
Hermann Einstein
No answer from Professor Ostwald was ever received.
The world of 1905seems distant to us now, but there were many similarities to life today. European newspapers complained that there were too many American tourists, while Americans were complaining that there were too many immigrants. The older generation everywhere complained that the young were disrespectful, while politicians in Europe and America worried about the disturbing turbulence in Russia. There were newfangled "aerobics" classes; there was a trend-setting vegetarian society, and calls for sexual freedom (which were rebuffed by traditionalists standing for family values), and much else.
The year 1905 was also when Einstein wrote a series of papers that changed our view of the universe forever. On the surface, he seemed to have been leading a pleasant, quiet life until then. He had often been interested in physics puzzles as a child, and was now a recent university graduate, easygoing enough to have many friends. He had married a bright fellow student, Mileva, and was earning enough money from a civil service job in the patent office to spend his evenings and Sundays in pub visits, or long walks—above all, he had a great deal of time to think.
Although his father's letter hadn't succeeded, a friend of Einstein's from the university, Marcel Grossman, had pulled the right strings to get Einstein the patent job in 1902. Grossman's help was necessary not so much because Einstein's final university grades were unusually low—through cramming with the ever-useful Grossman's notes, Einstein had just managed to reach a 4.91 average out of a possible 6, which was almost average—but because one professor, furious at Einstein for telling jokes and cutting classes, had spitefully written unacceptable references. Teachers over the years had been irritated by his lack of obedience, most notably Einstein's high school Greek grammar teacher, Joseph Degenhart, the one who has achieved immortality in the history books through insisting that "nothing would ever become of you." Later, when told it would be best if he left the school, Degenhart had explained, "Your presence in the class destroys the respect of the students."
Outwardly Einstein appeared confident, and would joke with his friends about the way everyone in authority seemed to enjoy putting him down. The year before, in 1904, he had applied for a promotion from patent clerk third class to patent clerk second class. His supervisor, Dr. Haller, had rejected him, writing in an assessment that although Einstein had "displayed some quite good achievements," he would still have to wait "until he has become fully familiar with mechanical engineering."
In reality, though, the lack of success was becoming serious. Einstein and his wife had given away their first child, a daughter born before they were married, and were now trying to raise the second on a patent clerk's salary. Einstein was twenty-six. He couldn't even afford the money for part-time help to let his wife go back to her studies. Was he really as wise as his adoring younger sister, Maja, had told him?
He managed to get a few physics articles published, but they weren't especially impressive. He was always aiming for grand linkages—his very first paper, published back in 1901, had tried to show that the forces controlling the way liquid rises up in a drinking straw were similar, fundamentally, to Newton's laws of gravitation. But he could not quite manage to get these great linkages to work, and he got almost no response from other physicists. He wrote to his sister, wondering if he'd ever make it.
Even the hours he had to keep at the patent office worked against him. By the time he got off for the day, the one science library in Bern was usually closed. How would he have a chance if he couldn't even stay up to date with the latest findings? When he did have a few free moments during the day, he would scribble on sheets he kept in one drawer of his desk—which he jokingly called his department of theoretical physics. But Haller kept a strict eye on him, and the drawer stayed closed most of the time. Einstein was slipping behind, measurably, compared to the friends he'd made at the university. He talked with his wife about quitting Bern and trying to find a job teaching high school. But even that wasn't any guarantee: he had tried it before, only four years earlier, but never managed to get a permanent post.
And then, on what Einstein later remembered as a beautiful day in the spring of 1905, he met his best friend, Michele Besso ("I like him a great deal," Einstein wrote, "because of his sharp mind and his simplicity"), for one of their long strolls on the outskirts of the city. Often they just gossiped about life at the patent office, and music, but today Einstein was uneasy. In the past few months a great deal of what he'd been thinking about had started coming together, but there was still something Einstein felt he was very near to understanding but couldn't quite see. That night Einstein still couldn't quite grasp it, but the next day he suddenly woke up, feeling "the greatest excitement."
It took just five or six weeks to write up a first draft of the article, filling thirty-some pages. It was the start of his theory of relativity. He sent the article to Annalen der Physik to be published, but a few weeks later, he realized that he had left something out. A three-page supplement was soon delivered to the same physics journal. He admitted to another friend that he was a little unsure how accurate the supplement was: "The idea is amusing and enticing, but whether the Lord is laughing at it and has played a trick on me—that I cannot know." But in the text itself he began, confidently: "The results of an electrodynamic investigation recently published by me in this journal lead to a very interesting conclusion, which will be derived here." And then, four paragraphs from the end of this supplement, he wrote it out.
E=mc² had arrived in the world.
Table of Contents
| Preface | vii | |
| Part 1 | Birth | |
| 1 | Bern Patent Office, 1905 | 3 |
| Part 2 | Ancestors of E=mc[superscript 2] | |
| 2 | E Is for Energy | 11 |
| 3 | = | 23 |
| 4 | m Is for mass | 27 |
| 5 | c Is for celeritas | 37 |
| 6 | [characters not reproducible] | 55 |
| Part 3 | The Early Years | |
| 7 | Einstein and the Equation | 73 |
| 8 | Into the Atom | 93 |
| 9 | Quiet in the Midday Snow | 100 |
| Part 4 | Adulthood | |
| 10 | Germany's Turn | 117 |
| 11 | Norway | 134 |
| 12 | America's Turn | 143 |
| 13 | 8:16 A.M.--Over Japan | 163 |
| Part 5 | Till the End of Time | |
| 14 | The Fires of the Sun | 173 |
| 15 | Creating the Earth | 184 |
| 16 | A Brahmin Lifts His Eyes Unto the Sky | 195 |
| Epilogue: What Else Einstein Did | 204 | |
| Appendix | Follow-Up of Other Key Participants | 221 |
| Notes | 237 | |
| Guide to Further Reading | 301 | |
| Acknowledgments | 319 | |
| Index | 325 |
Interviews
Exclusive Author Essay
The idea for this book dates back to when I was a schoolchild in Chicago. On a field trip, one of my classmates asked our teacher what Einstein had invented. None of the teachers knew, and that was puzzling: We all had heard that Einstein was one of the greatest minds in history. Yet what was it he had invented?
Years passed, and I studied math and physics at the University of Chicago and ultimately ended up teaching at Oxford. Yet I realized that many of my friends now were in the same position my school friends and I had been in those years before: They knew Einstein and relativity and E=mc2 were important...but they didn't know why. I realized I could write a book that would help resolve that, if I simply explained E=mc2 in terms of the people who had played a central role in that equation. Their hopes and ambitions and passions would be a "vehicle" through which I could give readers a powerful, clear explanation of Einstein's science.
To understand what the "m" is doing in the equation, I look at the life of Antoine Lavoisier, the wealthy Parisian whose life ended on the guillotine during the French Revolution; to explain the "e" in the equation, I look at Michael Faraday, a boy from the slums of London at the beginning of the 1800s who rose up to a top position at the Royal Institution (even though the mentor who brought him there ultimately turned against young Faraday at his very moment of triumph).
But the equation also applies in ordinary life, and I show E=mc2 operating in ordinary medical equipment, and even in the red-glowing exit signs in our movie theaters. Its sway stretches out into space, and in one of my favorite chapters I recount the story of Cecilia Payne, the young British woman who first understood that the sun was made out of hydrogen and that this "mass" is "pumped" through the equation to come out as the glowing "energy" that lights up our planet, and our solar system...and glows out through the galaxy, serving as a beacon to Einstein's great insight and all the individuals who were part of his great work.
--David Bodanis