Einstein's Genius Club (29 page)

For Einstein, the defeat that science visits on its practitioners seemed as impersonal as the order of the universe. Most scientists probably agree, in principle. But the daily life of science is simply not geared to Einstein's exalted attitude. Intense competitiveness spurs the scientist to produce that extra surge of energy, labor, and intense concentration needed. It can spill over into unseemly scuffles for fame and prizes. Few work on the rarefied mountain-tops of theory as Einstein did, commanding the grand view—the field is parceled instead into specialties and subspecialties, with teams of researchers instead of the lonely pioneer. By 1929, Dirac had made one extraordinary discovery after another; that year, he nonetheless wrote to Niels Bohr that quantum mechanics “will ultimately be replaced by something better, (and this applies to all physical theories).”
⁸

The pathos of science does not always abide in the future. Often it doesn't wait, but invades the present as pressure, anxiety, doubt, or envy. Rivals may snatch away priority; someone else's research can devastatingly derail years of effort; or the supplanting future can appear in the here and now in the shape of an Einstein or Feynman, discouragingly quick, fertile, original; or invincibly sure-handed like Fermi or Rutherford. When the young Pauli and Heisenberg became Max Born's assistants at Göttingen, the older Born had such a presentiment. He said he couldn't match their genius.

If science is present-oriented, it also requires sustenance. It is vulnerable to the demands of its benefactors, whether the emergent German state on the cusp of World War I or the triumphant postnuclear United States.

Finally, the pathos can be shattering. Paul Ehrenfest, Einstein's beloved friend, committed suicide because he felt unable to keep up with the flood of new data and conundrums. His sense of being supplanted knotted unbearably and was—said Einstein—why he killed himself.

Einstein was also supplanted, but he was not shattered. In his old age, he became the ever more kindly, grandfatherly figure. He never considered his failing quest to be a tragedy. If many of his colleagues did, it was because he rejected quantum mechanics, the most vital new branch of physics. His last thirty years provoked steady and often unbridled opposition from cherished friends. Shortly before he died, Einstein wrote to Niels Bohr about banning nuclear weapons, but he couldn't resist teasing his old friend: “Don't frown like that,” Einstein's letter began, “this is not about quantum mechanics.” Einstein must have known that his personal quest for a unified theory had failed. In the end, belief trumped established science and yet left room for humor.

David Lindley, in his critical study
The End of Physics,
suggests that we have reached the end of what can be verified:

What restrains the theorist from becoming wholly carried away by the attractions of some mathematical theory is the need to make predictions with it and to test them against the hard realities of the real world. But as, during this century, experiments in fundamental physics have become harder to do, more costly, and more consuming of time and manpower, this restraining empirical influence has been weakened.

Lindley believes that Einstein's general theory of relativity inaugurated a tendency to view “experimental verification [as] something of an afterthought.”
⁹
Even its most fervent proponents acknowledge that superstring, the most encompassing of the string theories, is nearly impossible to test, even indirectly.
¹⁰
The same was said of early atomic theories; but by the time Russell visited Einstein
and his friends in 1943, experiment was catching up to quantum physics. Einstein and Russell would spend the rest of their lives trying to wrest the atom from the industries of war.

What did the four great men speak of when they met at 112 Mercer Street? We will never know, of course. But speculation as to the topics is quite possible. They probably spoke little of the war: As Russell said, they were all in accord politically. Russell and Einstein disagreed over German war reparations, Einstein unable to forgive his former homeland. The doings of Los Alamos were sufficiently shrouded to have afforded little meat, although Pauli and Einstein were aware of the goings-on. Einstein and Pauli had just collaborated on a paper that touched on unified field theory and, despite their differences over quantum mechanics, found common ground—even suggesting, according to Pauli's biographer Charles Enz, an idea strikingly similar to the strings of string theory.
¹¹
Gödel was writing his critique of Russell's mathematical logic for the
Living Philosophers
volume, but it is unlikely, given Gödel's taciturn nature and Russell's distance from his early work, that much was said of it.

Russell, however, may have listened attentively and probed deeply. His
Human Knowledge
was in the planning stages; its subject, the nature of scientific knowledge. In it, Russell would begin modestly and conclude even more modestly. “To discover the minimum principles required to justify scientific inferences is one of the main purposes of this book,” he wrote in the Introduction. Having attempted to do so, he concludes, “[A]ll human knowledge is uncertain, inexact, and partial. To this doctrine we have not found any limitation whatever.”

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