Einstein's Genius Club Read Online Free PDF

an objective reality that could be observed and measured. To Einstein's horror, physics had become a matter of statistical laws rather than certainty. “God does not play dice with the world!” he exclaimed.
    Pauli and the quantum physicists had triumphed, however. At the Fifth Solvay Conference in 1927, quantum physics took on classicism from the lectern and in the corridors of discussion. Einstein, who did not present a paper, spoke against the new world of physics heralded by Niels Bohr and his young followers, among them Pauli and the German wunderkind Werner Heisenberg. Stubbornly, Einstein held out against the tidal wave of quantum physics. All indeterminacy was temporary, he insisted, a passing stage within the history of physics. Sooner or later, with more knowledge and insight, physicists would be able to lay aside uncertainty. He never gave up that belief.
    But quantum physics, argued Bohr and his quantum conscripts, was here to stay. Uncertainty was not an imposition of humanity onto nature, but a fundamental state. However distressed the Solvay participants might have been by Einstein's vehement opposition, the conference shifted the ground so vigorously that, during the three years between the Fifth and the Sixth Solvay Conference, Einstein found himself in a rearguard position. He was by far the most visible and vocal critic of quantum physics. He devoted the remainder of his life to the search for a unified theory, in hopes of proving Pauli and his quantum mechanics wrong. But in the intervening years, Einstein's position had gained no ground.Pauli and his quantum associates held sway in a world of physics that had passed Einstein by.
    Russell and Gödel were also scientific rivals. Russell's pioneering
Principia Mathematica
won him fame as a logician and was the basis of his philosophic authority and later reputation. Written with Alfred Whitehead and published in three volumes beginning in 1910, the
Principia
tackled the entire domain of mathematics. Its purpose was to demonstrate that “all pure mathematics follows from purely logical premises and uses only concepts definable in logical terms.” 9 The impulse to subsume mathematics into pure logic (called “logicism”) began with Gottfried Leibniz, who, in the seventeenth century, yearned for a universal language based on logic. Not until the late nineteenth century, however, did logicians develop the tools (in the form of definitions and methods) needed to place mathematics more or less within the realm of logic. In 1879, the German logician Gottlob Frege began his life's work on a system to formalize logic and to develop a logical foundation for mathematics. In their
Principia,
Russell and Whitehead solved inconsistencies that Frege and others could not. (Indeed, Russell had to solve his own “Russell's paradox,” which demonstrated inconsistencies in Frege's axioms, before he could complete his
Principia
.) In its three lengthy volumes, the
Principia
devised a comprehensive and very usable notation system; by demonstrating the power of logic, it inaugurated the field of metalogic; it placed logicism comfortably within the realm of traditional philosophy and even made it fashionable.
    But the underlying premise of the
Principia
—that mathematics was a complete and thus a universal language and logical system—was thoroughly demolished by the upstart Gödel. In 1931, Gödel published his infamous proof known as the “incompleteness theorem.” In it, he demonstrates that no mathematical system that depends on axioms can be thought of as complete, for in any such system, some propositions can be neither proved nor disproved. In extinguishing the dream of a consistent mathematicalsystem, Gödel became, in the eyes of many, one of the two most important logicians of the twentieth century—the other being Russell himself.
    Pauli and Gödel were simply following in the tracks of Einstein and Russell.