Einstein: His Life and Universe (Isaacson)

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RamistThomist

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Isaacson, Walter. Einstein: His Life and Universe. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007.

Philosophical Moments

Early on Einstein began to question Kant’s distinction between analytic and synthetic truths (83). Kant’s famous example of an analytic truth--a triangle is 180 degrees--would be false in non-Euclidian geometry or in curved space. These contents, in Einstein’s famous words, “contain nothing of the certainty, or inherent necessity, which Kant had attributed to them.”

Key Scientific Moments

Maxwell: a changing electric field could produce a changing magnetic field. That could yield another changing electric field. This “coupling was an electromagnetic wave” (91). The important concept here is the introduction of “field.”

Light quanta: In 1905 Einstein suggested that light came in tiny packets of quanta, later to be known as photons (94). Was the universe made up of tiny particles or was it an unbroken continuum? What happens when the evidence suggests both?

Special Relativity

There are several thought experiments to explain special relativity. Galileo’s is the best. Imagine you are on a moving ship. If you are inside the ship and drop a pebble, etc., it behaves the same as on land, even if the outside is gliding past you. These are two different inertial systems. These systems also add up. If the waves are coming at you at 10 mph and you get on a jet ski at 40 mph, then the waves are coming at you at 50 mph.

Einstein’s genius was in asking if light behaves the same way. Earlier thought supposed that light behaved like sound: it was a disturbance in an unseen medium, called ether. This raised problems. If light came from a distant source, then ether must pervade the entire universe, which would seem to make it an ephemeral, gossamer substance. On the other hand, “it had to be stiff enough to allow a wave to vibrate through it at enormous speed” (111).

Einstein saw this hunt for ether as showing why Newtonian models had trouble explaining electromagnetism, leading “to a fundamental dualism which in the long run was insupportable” (113).

Imagine you are chasing after a beam of light. If you caught up with it, it would appear to be frozen, yet this seems wrong. Let’s pretend you are riding on a train. Shouldn’t you see, among other things, light beams coming at you at 186,000 mps? Newtonian models said velocities add, and Maxwell’s equations provided for the speed of light, so why don’t we see light in motion?

Einstein realized that without reference points, you couldn’t see the light in motion (if you were riding beside a light beam). Einstein had to reimagine the concepts of space and time.

General Relativity

Special relativity, however, had some shortcomings.

Equivalence-principle: there is an equivalence “between all inertial effects, such as resistance to acceleration, and gravitational effects, such as weight” (190). “Both are manifestations of the same structure, an inertio-gravitational field.

If this is true, then gravity should bend a light beam.

Central idea of general relativity: “gravity arises from the curvature of space-time…Gravity is geometry” (193).

Bottom line: space and time do not have independent existences. Einstein rejected Newton’s container notion of absolute space and absolute time (223).

Cosmology

Main idea: “space has no borders because gravity bends it back on itself.” If we had an infinite universe, per Kant, then there “would be an infinite amount of gravity tugging at every direction” (252). Einstein’s solution was a finite universe without boundaries. It lacks boundaries because space curves.

Einstein and Religion

Einstein was very clear that his god is the same as Spinoza’s. That makes sense, since Spinoza’s hard determinism is probably the reason why Einstein never embraced quantum mechanics.

Einstein and Politics

The best way to describe Einstein is as a moderate Social Democrat. He liked the idea of socialism, but he balked at the dehumanizing practice of it. He would not have called himself a Communist and he was openly critical of Russia. Likewise, he was a pacifist. He was an intellectually honest pacifist. Like many pacifists, he could not pass the “What about Hitler?” test. Pacifism is morally bankrupt when it faces questions like, “If you could stop a genocide, would you?” To his credit, Einstein saw that and stopped his opposition to war.

Conclusion

While it is not mentioned in this review, Einstein never came to grips with quantum mechanics. Such a discussion is worth an article in its own right, so I will forgo it here. The book itself is excellent and a serious lay-person can easily understand its concepts.
 
Isaacson, Walter. Einstein: His Life and Universe. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007.

Philosophical Moments

Early on Einstein began to question Kant’s distinction between analytic and synthetic truths (83). Kant’s famous example of an analytic truth--a triangle is 180 degrees--would be false in non-Euclidian geometry or in curved space. These contents, in Einstein’s famous words, “contain nothing of the certainty, or inherent necessity, which Kant had attributed to them.”

Key Scientific Moments

Maxwell: a changing electric field could produce a changing magnetic field. That could yield another changing electric field. This “coupling was an electromagnetic wave” (91). The important concept here is the introduction of “field.”

Light quanta: In 1905 Einstein suggested that light came in tiny packets of quanta, later to be known as photons (94). Was the universe made up of tiny particles or was it an unbroken continuum? What happens when the evidence suggests both?

Special Relativity

There are several thought experiments to explain special relativity. Galileo’s is the best. Imagine you are on a moving ship. If you are inside the ship and drop a pebble, etc., it behaves the same as on land, even if the outside is gliding past you. These are two different inertial systems. These systems also add up. If the waves are coming at you at 10 mph and you get on a jet ski at 40 mph, then the waves are coming at you at 50 mph.

Einstein’s genius was in asking if light behaves the same way. Earlier thought supposed that light behaved like sound: it was a disturbance in an unseen medium, called ether. This raised problems. If light came from a distant source, then ether must pervade the entire universe, which would seem to make it an ephemeral, gossamer substance. On the other hand, “it had to be stiff enough to allow a wave to vibrate through it at enormous speed” (111).

Einstein saw this hunt for ether as showing why Newtonian models had trouble explaining electromagnetism, leading “to a fundamental dualism which in the long run was insupportable” (113).

Imagine you are chasing after a beam of light. If you caught up with it, it would appear to be frozen, yet this seems wrong. Let’s pretend you are riding on a train. Shouldn’t you see, among other things, light beams coming at you at 186,000 mps? Newtonian models said velocities add, and Maxwell’s equations provided for the speed of light, so why don’t we see light in motion?

Einstein realized that without reference points, you couldn’t see the light in motion (if you were riding beside a light beam). Einstein had to reimagine the concepts of space and time.

General Relativity

Special relativity, however, had some shortcomings.

Equivalence-principle: there is an equivalence “between all inertial effects, such as resistance to acceleration, and gravitational effects, such as weight” (190). “Both are manifestations of the same structure, an inertio-gravitational field.

If this is true, then gravity should bend a light beam.

Central idea of general relativity: “gravity arises from the curvature of space-time…Gravity is geometry” (193).

Bottom line: space and time do not have independent existences. Einstein rejected Newton’s container notion of absolute space and absolute time (223).

Cosmology

Main idea: “space has no borders because gravity bends it back on itself.” If we had an infinite universe, per Kant, then there “would be an infinite amount of gravity tugging at every direction” (252). Einstein’s solution was a finite universe without boundaries. It lacks boundaries because space curves.

Einstein and Religion

Einstein was very clear that his god is the same as Spinoza’s. That makes sense, since Spinoza’s hard determinism is probably the reason why Einstein never embraced quantum mechanics.

Einstein and Politics

The best way to describe Einstein is as a moderate Social Democrat. He liked the idea of socialism, but he balked at the dehumanizing practice of it. He would not have called himself a Communist and he was openly critical of Russia. Likewise, he was a pacifist. He was an intellectually honest pacifist. Like many pacifists, he could not pass the “What about Hitler?” test. Pacifism is morally bankrupt when it faces questions like, “If you could stop a genocide, would you?” To his credit, Einstein saw that and stopped his opposition to war.

Conclusion

While it is not mentioned in this review, Einstein never came to grips with quantum mechanics. Such a discussion is worth an article in its own right, so I will forgo it here. The book itself is excellent and a serious lay-person can easily understand its concepts.
Excellent review. Did you know that Enstein sent a letter to the president that convinced him, or so they say, to explore making the bomb. He regretted it the rest of his life.
Another interesting part of his life was his friendship with Kurt Godel. Godel was a Kantian/Platonist who was actually invited to discussions of the Vienna Circle. They had no idea that he was not with them philosophically. He was not one to argue outright with someone, he let his work do the arguing. So he sat there quietly and didn't say a word.
Also Godel wrote a paper for the "Library Of Living Philosophers" addition dedicated to Einstein. In it he mathematically worked out extreme solutions to general relativity in which space-time was so warped the future and the past would be happening in the same space-time. Hence the Kantian he was he concluded that time is just an intuition. This is all discussed, and more, in Palle Yargorue's, sure I did not spell that correctly, book "World Without Time".
It is an amazing book on the friendship of Einstein and Godel, both of whom were Kantian. I think I told this story somewhere else but if not here goes. Godel was not a people person and when he was getting his citizenship to the US he was asked by the judge if he thought the Constitution and Bill of Rights could protect the US from becoming a dictatorship like Nazi Germany? He said "no", based off his work on incompleteness theorems, and that he "already figured how it could happen using the very laws to do so". The Judge quickly stopped him as he started to explain. Sorry to derail this review but the friendship between the two men is an interesting one that anyone interested in Einstein should learn about.
 
Excellent review. Did you know that Enstein sent a letter to the president that convinced him, or so they say, to explore making the bomb. He regretted it the rest of his life.

Right. He goes into that. I'm not sure exactly what Einstein expected was to come out of that. If we warned the president of the potential for a bomb, and we don't want our enemies to get it, then naturally we are going to explore that potential.

Godel is fascinating. He suggested there were the equivalent of "mathematical beings" in higher dimensions.
 
The Judge quickly stopped him as he started to explain. Sorry to derail this review but the friendship between the two men is an interesting one that anyone interested in Einstein should learn about.

That's a great story and Godel was absolutely correct.
 
That's a great story and Godel was absolutely correct.
Your right. To anyone interested it goes back to his incompleteness theorems. For the Constitution and Bill Of Rights to be dictatorship proof it must have three things completnes, consistency, and richness.
It must be complete so as to not need any new axioms to work and it must be consistent (not containing contradictions) but it also has to have "richness" that is be big enough to encompass all of what is contained in the formal system being discussed.
The C and BOR is the axiomatic basis for the for our formal system of laws. Now following his theorems you could show that for a rich system of laws we have based on the axioms of the C and BOR can never be complete and consistent at the same time, his theorems. Thats why we constantly have to make new laws (non completeness) and have courts to adjudicate contradictory laws (non consistency).
Now for since our legal axioms can never be complete and consistent there is always the possibility that a dictatorship could be legally instituted.
I liken their friendship oddly to Luther and Melancthon friendship. It's similar in the sense that Luther and Enstein were the loud boisterous ones and Melancthon and Godel were the quiet ones. But unlike the two it was Luther and Godel who were the hypochondriac.
Godel also had an ontological argument for the existence of God that is interesting as well.
Back to Enstein you mentioned his opposition to quantum mechanics. He famously said that "God does not play with dice (referring to the chaos and apparent randomness of QM)". He tried for years to come up with thought experiments to disprove QM at a fundamental level. The most famous one, EPR experiment I believe, stumped quantum scientists until one of them showed that the thought experiment violated the law of special relativity itself!
Also in this view Enstein spent the last part of his life trying to come up with a unified field theory, that all the forces (gravity, electromagnetism, etc. Are unified as the same thing). The electromagnetic, weak, and strong forces had already been unified but no theory to date has been able to unify gravity and electromagnetism.
The irony here is Enstein may have been able to solve it but he changed his problem solving tactics. The early Enstein employed thought experiments to come up with his early theories. That is he imagined things like gravity being relatively the same experience as being no different than if you were in an elevator and it was drug out into space at a constant speed you would never know the difference if you're the one in the elevator. Assuming an elaborate system to have oxygen and a shuttle to pull you.
Thats how he came up with his breakthroughs, thought experiments for the ideas and then work the math out as needed (he was bad at math apparently). In his later work he changed tactics and tried to unite electromagnetism and gravity by purely mathematical means (which I guess he got a lot better at). Some people speculate that had he stuck to his earlier methods he may very well have solved one of the Holy grails of physics problems . Food for thought, the unified field theory is still unsolved.
 
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