The Genius of the Century
Albert Einstein
Harald Fritzsch, Michael Helge, GERMANY
1905 was the year of miracles and wonders for
Albert Einstein. He changed the world with five essays. 100 years after this revolution in
physics, the "Einstein Year 2005" focuses on the man who was more than a genius
Towards the end of the 19th century physics
entered a deep crisis. Leading scientists maintained that physics had come to an end. This
scientific discipline had developed at an incredible pace from a world of macrophysics
with visible objects to a world of microphysics with events that occurred at unimaginable
speeds and in orders of magnitude that were beyond human comprehension. The door to the
age of quantum physics was about to open. But who would find the key to the new
understanding of the world? Then 1905 arrived. In that year a young man contributed five
articles in rapid succession to the journal "Annalen der Physik". His name:
Albert Einstein. He was 26 years old and employed as a technical expert at the Swiss
Patent Office in Bern. He was about to create a radically new concept of space, time,
matter and energy with the thoughts contained in these articles. 1905 was to become
Einstein’s year of miracles and wonders. Science writer Bill Bryson sums it up in his
typically witty style saying that Einstein’s first article explained the nature of
light, and it won him the Nobel Prize in 1921. The second article proved that atoms really
do exist. And the third simply changed the whole world. It was Einstein’s
revolutionary work on a new theory of space and time that later became known as "the
theory of relativity". Einstein did not like this title at first. He would have
preferred the "theory of absoluteness". However, the fact remains that the
treatise entitled "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" is seen as one of
the most outstanding scientific contributions of all times, and could well be the greatest
idea that ever occurred to any human being. The article contains no footnotes or quotes,
hardly any mathematics and no references to other works. C.P. Snow said it was as if
Einstein had reached his conclusions through pure thought, without any help and without
listening to the opinions of others.
Einstein is described as stubborn even as a
child. He was born in Ulm in 1879 but the family moved to Munich when he was six weeks
old. Albert was an unusually quiet child. He did not start speaking until he was three,
and at twelve he taught himself geometry by studying the writings of Euclid. He wanted to
solve the mysteries of the world. Despite his high aspirations his school career was by no
means brilliant, as is often the case with highly gifted children. He finally gave up
school completely and went to Italy (where his parents were living), but with the aim of
studying in Zurich. In 1900 he graduated from the Swiss Institute of Technology in Zurich
with a teaching diploma in maths. Then, while working at the patent office he married
Mileva Maric "his dearest Doxerl" who had studied together with him.
Even as a child Einstein had pondered about
what would happen if someone moved as fast as light and observed a light wave that moved
with him. He found no satisfactory answer to this question, but he never gave up thinking
about it. He was perfectly capable of giving intense thought to one particular question
for years. On his way home from the patent office he would make long detours through the
streets of Bern. Gradually, his thoughts began to develop.
He spontaneously started to question the
foundations of space and time. Then he heard about the results of an experiment by
Michelson and Morley in the USA. The aim of this experiment was to measure the speed of
light in relation to the earth, which moved at a considerable speed around the sun. It was
assumed that there would be differences in the speed of light due to changes in the motion
of the earth. But no such effect was found. The speed of light turned out to be absolutely
constant. In the end Einstein adopted the invariability of the speed of light as a
principle. According to his hypothesis, light spreads throughout space at a constant speed
"c". Although this assumption contradicted the accepted rules of mechanics, this
did not bother Einstein at all. As it turned out, he was right. The speed of light is the
highest attainable speed in our space-time continuum. Light travels at 299,792.458
kilometres per second. But by fixing the speed of light, space and time become relative.
In a moving frame of reference time passes more slowly than in one that is at rest.
Saint Augustine once wrote: "Time is
like a river full of events. Its current is strong. No sooner does something appear, it is
swept away again." However, Saint Augustine did not know that the current of time is
not constant, but dependent on the observer’s own condition of movement.
Newton had introduced space and time into
physics in a simple way. He said that time ticks regularly from moment to moment. But even
in Newton’s day there were doubts. Leibniz, for instance, thought that time was
nothing more than a language that enables us to relate events to each other. In a world
without change, that is without events, there would be no time. Einstein came close to
Leibniz’s concept without adopting it completely. But in Einstein’s new view the
flow of time was at least something dependent on the system. The slowing of time in moving
systems is determined by a factor called the gamma factor. For modest speeds this factor
is practically equal to one, and in this case Newton’s concept works well. But if the
speed is around 30,000 km/s, that is 10 percent of the speed of light, the factor changes
to about 1.005. At 99 percent of the speed of light the factor is 7. So, in this kind of
system, time passes about seven times more slowly than in a resting system. The gamma
factor increases when the speed approaches the speed of light. Once this is reached, the
gamma factor is infinite in size. For this reason it is not possible for a body with mass
to move at the speed of light or faster.
Let’s assume we are observing an
astronaut who is moving away from earth at a constant acceleration, for instance with
about the same increase in velocity as experienced when something falls freely onto the
earth’s surface. In this case the speed increase is 9.8 metres per second. Let’s
say the astronaut is moving towards the Andromeda Galaxy, which is about two million light
years away from us. After the astronaut has travelled half way to the Andromeda Galaxy he
stops accelerating and slows down his movement, so that he finally arrives in the
Andromeda region at a slow speed. It’s easy to calculate that this would take him or
her just 30 years. During this time the astronaut covers a total of two million light
years. The astronaut then turns around and arrives back on earth 30 years later.
Meanwhile, back on earth, 4 million years have passed, but the astronaut has only aged by
60 years.
In an extension of his theory of relativity
Einstein finally developed the most famous formula in physics: E=mc2. It states that
energy and mass are different forms of the same substance, and that they are equivalent to
each other. Or, to put it differently: energy is released matter, and matter is energy
waiting for its release. As c2 is an enormous figure, the formula expresses that every
thing that consists of matter contains an unimaginable amount of energy. At the time
Einstein was only thinking about the transformation of a very small part of the mass, such
as in the radioactive decay of an atomic nucleus. But now we know that the formula is much
more extensive. A proton, or the nucleus of a hydrogen atom, is completely transformed
into radioactive energy when it collides with its antiparticle, an antiproton.
Albert Einstein Superstar. In 1909 Einstein
left the patent office to begin a university career. He taught at Zurich University, at
Bern University and then in Prague. In 1912 he returned to Zurich. In 1914 the Prussian
Academy of Sciences in Berlin offered him a position coupled with a lectureship at the
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics. When he received the Nobel Prize some years later, he
was a leading figure of international renown. During the Weimar Republic Einstein, who was
an ardent pacifist with strong social views, experienced an increasing amount of
anti-Semitic hostility. While in the USA together with his second wife, Elsa Loewenthal
his books were burned in Germany and Hitler took over government in 1933. He was so
shocked at the mass crimes committed by the Nazis that he never set foot in Germany again.
He accepted an invitation from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he
remained until his death. He hardly travelled and worked on a comprehensive description of
gravitation and electromagnetism. These were difficult questions and he did not manage to
find a satisfactory solution.
On July 16, 1945 an explosion took place in
the desert of New Mexico, USA, in which a nuclear explosive charge was detonated for the
first time. A small portion of the matter was transformed into radiation. Apart from the
test bomb two additional atom bombs had been successfully produced. In August 1945 they
were detonated over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, the physicists
did not invent the nuclear explosion, they simply brought it to earth from the sun. And
Einstein himself? Alarmed by the reports he was receiving, he wrote a letter to President
Roosevelt in August 1939 expressing his concern that Germany might be able to produce atom
bombs. This letter was crucial in the founding of the "Manhattan Project" that
led to the construction of the atom bomb. This was a fatal mistake, as Einstein later
emphasized, and certainly the most tragic example of the power and powerlessness of
science. In 1950 he wrote that he had never participated in enterprises of a military
technical nature, nor had he carried out any research that had anything to do with the
production of atomic bombs. During the post-war years he was actively involved in creating
a world order that banished the nuclear threat. He also supported the creation of the
state of Israel – with his own brand of critical distance concerning the people who
were politically responsible.
Einstein’s inheritance. The equivalence
of matter and energy is still under constant observation in particle physics. But it is
still unclear where the mass of the particles really originates. The LHC particle
accelerator that will go into operation in 2007 at the European Research Centre CERN may
provide the answer to this question. It may well help us understand what Einstein’s
famous formula really means.
And Albert Einstein the human being? He was
an enthusiastic sailor and music lover, a pacifist and a non-conformist. Written on
parchment his message to future generations says that if you are not more just, more
peaceful and definitely more sensible than we are, or were, then may the devil take you.
Albert Einstein died in Princeton on April 18, 1955.
November 15, 2004
(Courtesy: Deutschland Magazine,
Embassy of Germany, Kathmandu) |
