Einstein's Genius Club Read Online Free PDF Page B

Einstein built upon and upended Newton; Russell built upon and upended the pioneering mathematical logician Gottlob Frege. So science marches on.
SCIENCE AND SIN
    As Einstein, Russell, Pauli, and Gödel sat talking in Princeton, Robert Oppenheimer and his fellow physicists in Los Alamos were trying to build an atom bomb that could decide the course of World War II. They believed—and it is certainly argued—that Werner Heisenberg and his fellow physicists were doing the same in Germany.
    Physics was a small world. Einstein and Pauli had direct links to these projects, both personal and professional. Fearful of a German bomb, Einstein had written to President Roosevelt in 1939, urging him to begin an atomic project. Pauli had been Oppenheimer's teacher in the early 1930s and had been Heisenberg's close friend and collaborator in the 1920s when, together with Niels Bohr, they had built the foundations of quantum mechanics. In this tightly knit world, Einstein and Pauli were aware of what was at stake, if not in detail.
    When the Bomb exploded over Hiroshima, science lost its innocence, irrevocably. In return for the ultimate weapon, physicists tasted dizzying political power. Yet that power was poisoned fruit. Indispensable to their government's survival in the atomic age, physicists were enlisted as guardians of the state—guardians who were kept under strictest guard. Their knowledge was dangerous, and their loyalty was constantly questioned. Oppenheimer's security hearing of 1954 is often thought to have inaugurated the era of atomic suspicion. In fact, distrust and surveillance followed almostimmediately from Einstein's letter to Roosevelt. By the time Oppenheimer was staking out Los Alamos, spying on physicists was widespread—even obsessive. Most scrutinized of all, perhaps, was Einstein, whose FBI file eventually numbered some fifteen hundred pages. A new age of suspicion was emerging.
    The four men came to Princeton from a continent wracked by war. Each made his way to Princeton as much by luck as by any clear design. There they waited as the world changed. And change it did. In 1945, after the Bomb was dropped, Pauli, critical and prescient as always, lamented:
    The Atom Bomb is a very evil thing, also for physics, I think. The politicians, of course, are at a complete loss and talk in a demagogic way of a
secret
which, evidently, does not exist (the true secret is the nature of the nuclear forces). Although most people say that I see ghosts, I am afraid that physics gets more or less subdued by military censorship and that free research, in principle, is gone. 10
AT HOME IN PRINCETON
    If Einstein and his friends spent the war sidelined and isolated, they were not idle. Of the four, Einstein and Russell were the most outwardly political. Both had abandoned their early pacifism in the face of Hitler and the threat of Fascism. Of the four, only Einstein made any direct contribution to the war effort, working in a minor capacity for the Navy, despite his status as a security risk. Pauli offered his services, only to be told by Oppenheimer to “keep those principles of science alive which do not seem immediately relevant to the war.” 11 Pauli was too acerbic and independent to fit into regulated teamwork and had no taste for the applied science useful in military research. Gödel was unfit physically and mentally. Russell was trapped in the United States, unable to secure sea passage to England, where he hoped to contribute to the war effort.
    Thus it was Princeton, for better or worse. Einstein described the town “as a wonderful bit of earth, and a most amusing ceremonial backwater of tiny demigods on stilts.” 12 As for its intellectual life, “[a]part from the handful of really fine scholars, it is a boring and barren society that would soon make you shiver.” 13 Einstein shunned the public spotlight as much as possible. Yet he could never escape the notice of town and gown