Einstein's Genius Club Read Online Free PDF Page A

that varies from person to person and is expressible in a myriad of forms. But science is a collective enterprise. It progresses and builds, dependent on a process of incremental contribution. Even revolutions in science—Thomas Kuhn's paradigm shifts—require structures to build upon (or tear down). 7
    Scientists thus often live to see their greatest work superseded, modified, or refuted. None escapes the relentless march: Immortal Newton was displaced by Einstein, and Einstein fully expected that his work would be corrected or surpassed. In 1949, he wrote to a friend:
    You imagine that I look back on my life's work with calm satisfaction. But from nearby it looks quite different. There is not a single concept of which I am convinced that it will stand firm, and I feel uncertain whether I am in general on the right track. 8
    Einstein's humble reflection reveals from within what can be called “the pathos of science.” Neither artists nor philosophers are prey to this pathos: Nothing can “improve” upon Socrates’
Oedipus Rex
or Mozart's
Don Giovanni
or Plato's
Republic,
though these works are subject to the vicissitudes of changing tastes and interpretations. Indeed, poets are especially caught up in intimations of immortality, as distinct from mere fame. Milton invokes the “Heavenly Muse” to ensure that his
Paradise Lost
would “soar / Aboveth’ Aonian mount, while it pursues / Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.”
    Scientists, on the other hand, create only to be superseded. The greatest scientific achievements will be scrutinized and, eventually, proven inadequate. After two thousand years, Euclid's geometry was shown to be limited and was augmented by the non-Euclidean geometry of Carl Friedrich Gauss. Within twenty years, a fellow German, Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann, improved on Gauss—and Riemann's geometry helped lead Einstein to his general theory of relativity.
    Science is a community of interlocked, perpetual, cumulative effort. No one can be successful except by working within its common premises and rules of procedure and proof—however “revolutionary” the work. But the cumulative nature of science also means that each individual effort will be supplanted. Discoveries keep occurring—and every discovery means that some previous finding becomes modified or discarded. Thus, most productive scientists become half-forgotten figures in the public mind, existing in textbooks as abbreviations, symbols, and identifiers: Boyle's law, the joule, the fermi, Planck's constant. The incessant construction of science provides new and exalted triumphs (Einstein, after all, can build on Newton), but also ensures one's own “defeat” or limitation—sometimes within a few years.
    The four men in Einstein's study provided striking examples of this “pathos of science.” Here were two aging scientists paired with upstart revisionists: Einstein and Pauli, Russell and Gödel. At stake were none other than the fundamental structures of modern physics and logic.
    Wolfgang Pauli was only sixteen when Einstein's general theory of relativity turned physics upside down. Within four short years, Pauli was to write a definitive explanation of relativity for the
Encyclopädie der Mathematischen Wissenschaften
—an account so clear that forty years later, Niels Bohr lauded it as “stillone of the most valuable expositions” of Einstein's theory. Five years later, Pauli presented his “exclusion theory,” the first in a number of successive discoveries by Pauli and Werner Heisenberg that defined the nascent field of quantum mechanics.
    Behind it all was Einstein, who, using Planck's concepts, “launched” quantum physics in 1905. But Einstein's quantum physics was built on classical physics. No “uncertainty” there. The new quantum mechanics, formulated by Bohr, Heisenberg, and Pauli, no longer postulated