Einstein's Creativity

I have the pleasure of introducing some one who needs no introduction. So it makes my job easy, which is good. Walter Isaacson is the President and CEO of the Aspen Institute among many other things and this is the body of work that he did in his spare time. So I hope you enjoy it. Thank you. It was a I once to wrote about Henry Kissinger and somebody introduced him by saying that he was a man who needed no introduction and he said, Henry Kissinger says, I may need no introduction but I am a man who certainly enjoys one. But that's all right Jamie. You will keep your job and stuff. It's slightly intimidating to be here first of all to go up against Jessye Norman, I was looking at the schedule, I was about to wander and over to listen to Jessye Norman and then realized I couldn't because I was giving this talk. So I thank you all for coming. I promise not to sing and she promised me today that she would not try to explain Einstein's relativity. I do also want to acknowledge one person in the audience who truly helped me on this book quite a bit and you have probably heard him recently, about Arthur I. Miller who did Einstein, Picasso, also wrote a great book on Black Holes, The Empire of the Stars. I think he is speaking tomorrow morning Maroon Bells and if you still need a ticket, even though it sold out you can talk to Jamie and she will print an extra ticket for you to go to it. I did say to Arthur a moment ago that if after explaining a couple of these theories twice you still don't get it; I am going to make him explain some of them. But the good news for those of us; Arthur is a philosopher of science and a good physicist as well. But for those of us who are geniuses in physics but feel that we want to capture the beauty and creativity of an Einstein; that was the purpose of this book. Just as I am not a great singer but I can appreciate when Jessye Norman does spirituals or for that matter Opera and just as I am not a a visual artist, but I can appreciate what Picasso does. I think those of us who are not scientists should get back in the habit, as Benjamin Franklin did in his century, or people have done in all previous centuries; is appreciate the creativity and beauty of science. People say, "Oh it's so good, you are writing about science because in this new century we are going to have to deal with so much science like stem cell research and global warming. And yes that's a reason for us to appreciate the scientific way of thinking, of testing hypothesis and that sort of thing. However I believe we should understand science, not just a little bit good at figuring out how to vote when it comes to stem cell research; but because science is a thing of beauty and the pursuit of science is a thing of creativity. And Einstein making creatively so just like a Picasso or a Joyce or a Proust or a Faulkner making creative leaps and people who are my friends would never go around admitting that they didn't know the difference between Hamlet and Macbeth. But they might brag that they know nothing about the difference between relativity theory and the uncertainty principle. And I just think we should all try to understand the beauty of science the creativity, the imagination that come with science as well as we would try to do it with Shakespeare. And we can love Hamlet without fully understanding whether Hamlet loves Ophelia; we can love Einstein without fully understanding the Tensor Calculus, that understand that underlies general relativity. And the good news for those of us who don't will never fully understand geometry and the tensor calculus that underlies relativity is for us to remember that Einstein was no Einstein when he was a kid. He was very slow in learning how to talk, so slow that they dubbed him the dopy one in the family. And they even consulted a doctor to explain why he was having such slow verbal learning abilities. But I do think that his slow verbal learning abilities made him the patron saint of distracted school kids everywhere, but it also helped him think more imaginatively. Because as he always said, "Imagination, fantasy, creativity is more important than knowledge." One of the things he said is that he developed so slowly as a child that he started wondering about things after most people had already passed on, wondering about why time moves, does it move the same for everybody? What is space? So things like that. When he was a very young kid his father gave him a compass, at age five. And he sat there for days on in; he recalled, over and over again, he would recall the tale of a compass. And watching as that needle pointed north and it would say it would make him have chills as he sat up in night wondering about the unseen forces of nature; that there were force fields in between objects, unseen forces that guide the things that cause that compass needle to twitch north. From the age five until his death bed, he is still writing field theories; trying to explain the forces of nature. Now you and I probably remember getting a compass when we were kids. And you walk outside and points north, you go, of course it points north. And about 90 seconds later you are on to something else, you see a dead squirrel. You say, oh cool, a dead squirrel. But what made Einstein special is that those things that you and I might pass over, that there is a force field making that compass needle point north, he kept focusing on that wondering about that being surprised by that, his whole life. The other things that gets him kicked out of school as a kid and had another head master amuses us by saying, this Einstein will never amount to much, is that he was always very rebellious. He questioned the authority at all times. One head master says, your undermining of authority is why I need you to leave this class. You are undermining the other people's authority you know sense of authority in me. And he said that sense of rebelliousness he was always suspicious of authority, it never left him. A foolish faith in the authority is the worst enemy of truth. Now one of the things that's not true about Einstein unfortunately is that he failed math as a kid. It kind of wanted to be true. If I can be a Google, Einstein failed math, you get 66,000 websites say things like, as everybody knows Einstein failed math as a kid, so may be there is hope for me or is that true? There is Einstein there he is grades in math, the highest possible grades and it was he was not very good in his language, his verbal ability, but he did fine in math. And it was because of that thing I talked about earlier that creative-imaginative ability to visualize things. He was able always to visualize, even mathematical equations, do what he called visual thought experiments involving them. That's what you and I call day dreaming. If you are Einstein you get to call it a thought experiment. But he would understand that a mathematical equation was just a good lord's brush stroke for painting something in reality. They was an underlying reality to a mathematical equation. Most of most of you know my daughter Betty. I was helping her a few weeks ago with her math homework. And she had an equation that she had multiplied and gotten the answer wrong. And she said; why is this wrong? I said we'll just look at the equation. It's got to swoop upward like that; it's got to move up real fast, exponentially. She said, what do you mean? I said, well an equation is simply a representation of its underlying reality. You should visualize the underlying reality when you look at an equation. And she said, oh no dad, that's not the way they teach math these days. But in some ways that's a shame because math should be taught as a creative endeavor, you know an endeavor that has a visual, imaginative component to it. Now Albert Einstein, believe it or not Linda, was actually smarter than my daughter at age 16. Yeah. And at age 16 he is wondering and visualizing Maxwell's equations. Now Maxwell's equations of course are just a set of equations that describe an electromagnetic wave or a light wave. And sort of discovered right, Clerk James Clerk Maxwell died the year Einstein was born. And Einstein, just as I think Newton does Newton is born the year Galileo dies, that always affected Einstein and he thought there was something somewhat if not spiritual at least significant in fact that he was born the Maxwell dies and he is trying the rest of his life, understand field theory, field equation including Maxwell's equations for a light wave. One of the interesting things about Maxwell's equations; especially if you are Einstein as a 16 year old and you can visualize it, is that no matter how fast you are traveling, whatever your frame of reference, Maxwell's equations say that the light wave always travels at a constant speed; about a 186,000 miles per second or so, the speed of light the constant speed of light. No matter what you are doing, no matter how you observe the light wave, whatever your moving frame of reference, Maxwell's equations say that the wave always has to travel say for itself, Einstein as a 16 year old does his thought experiment, he says well what if catch up with the wave, what if you are moving so fast that you riding right along side the light wave, wouldn't it be stationary compared to you? Couldn't you catch up with it? But Maxwell's equation don't allow for that. And so he said, for days on end I would walk around with my palm sweating, this gave me such anxiety. Now I don't know about you but it caused me to think, what was causing my palms to sweat at age 16 and it was in Maxwell's equations. But that's why he is Einstein and we are not. Basically he runs away from the rigid German schools, the school system sort of half gets kicked out as I said, the head master says that you are undermining respect for me, I would rather you leave the school, he runs away at the Christmas time, runs away to Italy and then to Switzerland and he applies for admission in what is basically the second best college in Zurich at the time. The Zurich Polytech and he doesn't get in. Now for those of us with kids applying to college have always wanted to meet the Admissions Director at the Zurich Polytech who had rejected Albert Einstein for having not done well on the verbal and languages part of the exams. But fortunately Einstein does get in his second around, goes to the Zurich Polytech, does moderately well the Zurich Polytech, but he is able to tick off all of the professors there with his disrespect for authority. Herman Minkowski, the great math teacher there Einstein doesn't like the way he teaches it, it's not it's by route. So Einstein doesn't even go to math class. He has his friend Marcel Grossmann go to math class for him and take notes for him causing Minkowski to pronounce later on that Einstein was a lazy dog. Now those of us who ever had professor say that about us and I had like one that, who just totally didn't like me, it's always good. You always have this fantasy which I never quite fulfilled, but Einstein did. Einstein comes up with the theory of relativity. It is Minkowski who has to write underlying mathematics for the special theory, the four dimensions of space time, saying he never thought Einstein would have it in him. Heinrich Weber is the physics professor there, he doesn't even teach Maxwell's equations because they're too new fangled, Einstein explains us dilemma about Maxwell's equation; Webber says well my course has really go up that far. Einstein quits calls it quits calling him herr professor and so it's calling of him herr Webber which Webber considers the sign of disrespect and basically has little bit to do with Einstein after that. Another instructor was Pernet; the lab instructor Einstein was never very good in the lab. He was never a very good experimentalist, which is why he had to become a theorist I guess. But at one point he throws away a set of instructions for doing the lab report that he was supposed to do in Pernet's class, ends up blowing up the equipment and Pernet puts him on academic probation. So anyway, thus it is, that Einstein is the only graduate of the 1900 class of the Zurich Polytech who can't any recommendations from any professors for a job. He can't at any academic job, he can't get an Assistant Professorship, doctoral fellowships, he us spamming Europe with letters, job applications, even to teach in the high school. And none of he realizes that Webber in particular is giving him bad recommendations, he can't get it. So he wanders around for two years, basically unemployed trying to find tutoring jobs and stuff. Until finally Einstein gets a job as a third class examiner in the patent office in Bern, Switzerland, the Swiss patent office. A third class examiner because the qualifications to be a second class or first class examiner including you have to have a doctorate, his doctoral dissertation have been rejected I think twice. It's a little unclear, but clearly he keeps getting his feedback that at least we know, that because the people in Zurich wouldn't give him a doctorate. So he is a third class examiner in the patent office, a window in the Post and Telegraph building on the third floor, not too far from the office there is the great Bern Clock Tower for those of you have been in Bern, beautiful 11th century clock tower, the trains actually zip by underneath the clock tower. And lest we feel sorry for Einstein, sitting there six days a week on the stool, examining patent applications, trying to write it in the spare time, I think it was probably best for him that you gave credit where it's due, it's actually in Arthur's book but certainly in a book by Peter Galison called, Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps. Looking at the patent applications that Einstein is doing, one of the things that is happening at the time that in Switzerland they have gone on to standard time zones and the Swiss you know who are kind of Swiss, they are obsessed about making to the clocks to synchronize. So there is 72 patent applications for the synchronizing of clocks in Switzerland. And here is watching the trains going in the station, and one of things about the patent applications, about the synchronizing of clocks is that you sent a signal between two very distinct clocks in order to synchronize them and the signal travels at the speed of light, whether it's a radio signal or a light signal, electric signal whatever. So there he is, thinking about all of these things as a patent examiner, he has got his friends, the Olympia Academy and other friends, they discuss philosophy, they are reading Hume, and unfortunately this this is Einstein, here this guy here, Conrad goes away oh gosh I see another physicist to help me, Lawrence Krauss, so I am going to skip all the physics here in this lecture, I usually can wink it without people who know it better can I do, so instead of shaking their head, any way Conrad goes away for a few weeks. And thus we are so lucky, we have one of the coolest letters in the history of science because Conrad doesn't write Einstein and Einstein is mad so he sends a letter to Conrad that starts, you frozen whale, you can piece of soul, you haven't written me. And so I am going to send you a letter that is simply filled with inconsequential babble. But if you write me, he says, I promise to send you four papers I have been working on in my spare time in return. This is 1905, the miracle year, May of 1905 he is sitting there in the patent office and in his spare time he is working on four papers. It's only when you get to the second paragraph of that letter, the second paragraph that you realize; okay this is not totally inconsequential babble. He says the first paper deals with the energy properties of light and is actually very revolutionary. Indeed it might have been the most revolutionary scientific paper written in 20th Century. It simply it says, to boil down to its essence, that light is not only a wave it's a particle. What he had done is that he had looked at an equation that Max Planck had done to explain radiation. Max Planck up until that very week probably the greatest scientist in all of Europe, he is about to surpassed by the a third class patent clerk, but up until that Max Planck had written the equations that explained radiation coming off from a piece of heated metal, but he needed Max Planck to put in a little mathematical contrivance to make the curve work right and was called Planck's constant, a tiny low mathematical thing. Nobody quite knew what Planck's constant was. Planck himself calls its just a mathematical contrivance, Albert Einstein sitting in his desk in the patent office able to visualize equations realizes that light is both wave and particle called quanta and that's what the mathematical contrivance sort of represent. He says the second paper deals with the true size of atoms and molecules, he says in a letter to Conrad. Back then probably a majority of scientists were not sure that atoms and molecules really existed. They thought may it was just sort of a theory, you can't really prove it. Here is a patent clerk not only saying they exists, but coming up with a way to determine their size. He realizes that even though this is somewhat controversial it's the simplest of the four papers that he has written. So he uses it for his latent attempt to get a doctoral dissertation accepted. The third paper, he says, explains Brownian motion which is like tiny little particle juggle in water, and then he says that the fourth paper is only in rough draft at this point. But it deals with a modification of the theory of time. Well, that's not inconsequential babble. Obviously it's the theory the special theory of relativity. Well, that's not inconsequential babble. Obviously it's the theory the special theory of relativity. What he doesn't tell Conrad in the letter because he hasn't thought of it yet, but he will think of it right after he sends the letter, sends off the draft of that paper and write a few weeks later, it occurs to him that if that paper is right and what he has done that year is right, there is an equivalence that exists between energy and mass. And so in the intervening few weeks when he is on vacation in Serbia he comes up with the most famous equation in all of physics, E equals MC squared; that energy has a relationship to mass that involves the square of the speed of light. Now relativity is a very simple concept. It simply says whatever you consider velocity motion, whatever frame of reference you are, you can't sort of be privileged, you can't say I am at rest and you are at motion. All laws of physics apply equally in any frame of reference that's in constant velocity. Imagine two people in the spaceship gliding by, each can bounce a ball, each can heat up a cup of tea in a microwave, each can you know, do anything they want, you can throw a ball up and down whatever. And if you are gliding along you can't sort of say, I am at rest, you are at motion. All frames of reference are equal. Even here you think, you are sitting in the Doerr-Hosier building totally at rest, you can look and see a plane up there, landing at the Aspen Airport, gliding at a constant velocity, let us say, you can say while I am rest, the plane is moving. But no, we are speeding around the sun, the sun is going around the galaxy, the galaxy is doing God knows what. Actually Arthur knows what the galaxies are doing, I have never figured out what galaxies do. And you know the person on the plane can say, no, the earth is in motion and I am still and just moving by. So that's all the principle of relatively says. The problem with the principle of relativity is it seems, if you are 16 year old doing that thought experiment about Maxwell equations, well how does that affect the speed of light? Couldn't we catch up with the speed of light? Does Maxwell's equation apply the same way to anybody in constant velocity motion? Einstein couldn't figure out, nobody could figure out, Michelson and Morley are doing all sort of experiments about how we are moving towards the sun or away from the sun, the earth is moving whatever, the speed of light is always constant, nobody can quite put it all together. Einstein tells his other friend, Michelle Basso, I can't get it, I can't get it I am giving up, he says at one point. And then that week of May that he has written Conrad the letter, Einstein does what he calls the step. Sunny day in May, he says, walking with Michelle Basso Michelle Basso was an engineer, he had gotten the job at the patent office even more of a ne'er-do-well than Einstein, he says to Basso, I have got it, I have got it. He explains it to Basso the next day. And it's simply all Einstein's great step is that what you mean by something being simultaneous. Now once again you and I, because we are not so smart unlike Einstein, we don't pause to think what is mean to be 'simultaneous', right? It's that simultaneous that just means it happens at the same time, if you are Einstein, if you are patent examiner, well, how do we know? How can we have an operational definition that defines what is simultaneous, you know David Bradley, he did the introduction to this. He did his version of this. But to define simultaneity for a patent clerk, it means well suppose two very distant events happen. And somebody is exactly half way in between those two events, the light from both events hits that person at the same time, that person would say the two events are simultaneous, right? That's a good operational definition of simultaneous. Einstein says, and this is the drawing he uses at one of our not exactly like this, but it is a drawing like this. He says imagine lightening striking both ends of a moving train. He says, suppose there is a person standing on the platform half way in between. That person sees the light from this lightening strike hitting him at the exact same time, that persons says the lightening strikes are simultaneous. But imagine there is a women on the train and she the train is a thought experiment, moving really, really fast, she's inched ahead a little bit, and the time it takes the light to get there, because the speed of light is finite even though it's fast and the time it takes to get there, she is a little bit further ahead, she sees the light from the lightening strike ahead first, she says they are not simultaneous. She says no, the one in front happened first because the light from the one in front gets to her first. You know, you can say, well you are wrong, I am at rest, I am on the platform, you are the one who is moving. Principle of relativity says there is no preferred reference frame. Neither one of them is right, neither one of them is wrong. It's simply that what simultaneous is relative depending on your state of motion. And from that Einstein easily figures out that time is relative depending on the state of motion., in fact the paper he writes 'the electro-dynamics of moving bodies', you should actually read it. It is a very readable paper unlike most science papers. And in it, he says he is trying to tell you about simultaneity and talking about how you define you know, something happening at the same time and the passage of time. He says, what do I mean about time. It means that the light when it hits from my watch, to my eye and says it's seven and the light of the train entering the station, reaching me at the same time, that sort of thing. So he says if you can't define what is simultaneous, it means all time is relative depending on your state of motion. Now, you know you are scratching your heads a little bit, don't feel bad, in fact if you have really tough questions about it, Lawrence and Arthur are there later to explain the relativity of simultaneity. But the rest of the physics community doesn't quite get it either. This is 1905; in 1906 he applies for about 12 jobs, teaching high schools, gets rejected in everyone even though he sends in that paper. He still can't get a job at a university, 1907, still didn't have a job at a university, 1908 still didn't have a job at a university. So the European physics community is slightly baffled too by these miracle year papers. One person is not baffled, a really interesting women, Mileva Maric. Mileva Maric was a Serbian physics student, a young girl trying to make it in the world of physics and mathematics growing up in Serbia, a 100 years ago. And that was kind of hard unlike being a women at Harvard today, where it's easy to do science and math. In Serbia back then it was hard, you couldn't get into and Zagreb academy. Her father was an army officer, gets her into this Zagreb academy and eventually she graduates very well in science and math from the Zagreb academy and becomes the only woman in Einstein's section at the Zurich Polytech. Now as you might suspect, by seeing them together in this picture, they fall madly in love, so madly in love that the letters some of them have been sealed up until last year. Their letters are filled with you know "Darling you turned my pillow on fire" and all sorts of passionate things, as students they go hiking around Lake Como in northern Italy. She gets pregnant. They have an illegitimate daughter, Lieserl, they girl they put her for adoption in Serbia. After they graduate they still can't get married because he don't have job. Finally the week he gets the job in the patent office in Bern, he along with the people I showed you in the picture, Conrad, Michelle, Maurice Solovine, as witnesses, they get married in the registrar's office in Bern. They have two sons, oops, they have two sons, Hans Albert and Edward and they have a very tumultuous relationship as you might think. So tumultuous that even after she helps check some of the math in the 1905 miracle year papers, helps to prepare them for publication, I don't think she gets should get credit for being a co-collaborator as some people have asserted if you look at all the papers. The concepts are basically Einstein's. But heck, she put up with Einstein during that period too. She deserves a lot of credit for that, but the marriage totally falls apart. They are fighting, that's what these letters under seal are about, custody of the kids and stuff like that. At one point he he has a contract that he offers her. It says if you want to stay married to me here is what you have to do. It's a one page contract and it's like you know, line after line you will bring my food to my office, my room; you would not interrupt when I am trying to work on the project, etc. New Yorker did a cartoon on it after my book came out, because it was in one of the reviews of the book and so it is like you know Einstein being a total jerk, fortunately after thinking about it for a day, she declines to sign the contract, they decide to get a divorce, he can't afford a divorce. And so he offers her an amazing deal in the letter. He says to her, one of these days one of those papers will win the Nobel Prize. If you give me a divorce I will give you the money. Now, she is a scientist. She takes a week, she thinks about it. She consults with Fritz Harber another scientist, she gets a lawyer and finally decides to take the bet. It's until 1922 that they announced his Nobel Prize. But she collects the money and buys three apartment buildings in Zurich. Now, don't try this at home. It doesn't always work. In the mean time Einstein has finally gotten an academic job, moved up the academic ranks. Finally at the heart of theoretical physics, the Prussian academy in the University of Berlin, they are having this chapter on my book about the real fight she is having on custody of kids, fighting over who is pay for skis and, because it was vacation. November 1915, letters flying back and forth about why I can't come visit for Christmas, why he is not going to pay the 50 Swiss Francs, the cost for the skis she brought. All these things and those very weeks, its amazing I mean his ability to compartmentalize and everything else, he has become a pacifist, he is the only person in the Prussian Academy opposing Germany's entry into World War I and believe me, that is the definition of a non conformist deciding to became war resistor and pacifist in Berlin in November 1914 and what he is doing is trying to complete and some what of a race against some body else the most elegant theory in the history of science, the General theory of Relativity. Now the general theory is called the General theory because as I said the special theory basically to simplify a bit, only applies to constant velocity motion as I said, somebody is gliding a log and you are gliding a log, all the laws of physics applied, but if you are accelerating or slamming on the brakes or rotating you kind of think well that's different. You know coffee slashes balls balance in a different way the laws of physics seem to be different. Einstein really does not like special cases, does not like theories and apply only to the special case of constant velocity motion like a good artist like a good musician like a great scientist he want to unify theory, he want the theory a general theory that applies to all cases of motion. So he is trying to generalize his theory to apply to accelerate its motion as well. Secondly his special theory of relativity had gotten rid of two great precepts of Sir Isaac Newton, very first book and the Principia, Sir Isaac Newton tells us that time marches along second by second irrespective of our observation of it. Einstein has thrown that out with his special theory so it's now time is relative depending on any motion. Like wise Sir Isaac Newton says in space is absolute, it exists in its absolute way independent of any observation of it, Einstein says no, Einstein - in his special theory says if you are speeding up things get shorter, if you try to catch up with that, light wave you remember I told you trying to do that light wave he really says yeah, no matter how fast you move Maxwell's equation say the light wave will in you frame of reference keep moving at a constant speed but time will slow down for you. That's the explanation of the sixteen year old dilemma about the light wave. So he's thrown out, two of the two great principles of Newton, but Newton has another principle that's still standing which is of course his theory of gravity, Newton's theory of gravity says that gravity is simply an attraction between two objects, the attraction that happens instantly at a distance, magically for no apparent reason. The sun instantly attracts the earth at a distance; the earth attracts the moon at a distance instantly over time. Einstein says no nothing happens instantly at a distance, nothing travels faster than the speed of light, and not even information travels faster than the speed of light, so Newton's theory of gravity some thing has to be wrong with it. Once again he approaches it visually with a thought experiment. A creative leap of the imagination not some hard crunching of data from experiments or hard crunching of the math, simply a thought experiment he does at his desk one point first in the Bern patent office and then later in Berlin And the thought experiment in its many guys wonder of which is simply this. Imagine being in an enclosed chamber if you had a bad imagination, like outside go to the elevator that Jeff Berg has built, be in an elevator sitting still in a closed elevator resting on the surface of the earth, if you are there, what do you feel attending closed chamber resting on the surface of the earth. You have a gravitational feel, so you feel your feet being pressed at the floor. Takes up a penny from your pocket and let it go it falls to the floor and it accelerated rate, right. Now imagine being in the same chamber deep in outer space or even Richard Brand said yes there yet to go, deep and out at space where there is no gravitational field but that chamber is accelerating up ward, now do the thought experiment what is it feel like to be in that chamber with no gravity but accelerating upward, your feet are pressed to the floor. You take up out of your pocket and let it go it falls to the floor and it accelerates at what rate? Einstein calls it, the principle of Equivalence. All of the local effects of gravity are equivalent to the effects of acceleration. It is actually not that hard to picture, we can picture right here, Galileo should have figure it out of the leaning tower we have all known since High School physics that the initial mass of an object being the force it takes to accelerate it, is always equivalent to the gravitational mass of the object how much it will weigh in a gravitational field. But up until Einstein, no body had fully explained why, Einstein says it's because gravity and acceleration are equivalent, it's an equivalent of the effects of gravity and acceleration. And from that he is doing what he wants to do tie in accelerated motion and his theory of Relativity put it all part of the theory of gravity and he come to up with a theory of gravity that's simply as that the gravity is the curving of space. What he mean by that, its says imagine an object and imagine two dimensions, first, for example imagine trampoline fabric in your back yard and you take a bowling ball and you roll it on, what does a bowling ball do, it curves the fabric of your trampoline, it curves the fabric, two dimensional fabric imagine you roll some billiard balls behind it what happen the billiard balls roll and then they start curving and they curve towards the bowling ball, why, not because the bowling ball is got some mysterious attraction at a distance away, Newton said that because the bowling ball has curved the fabric and that the billiard ball roll down the curve. Now you and I can actually picture that, if you are Einstein, you can picture it happening in three dimensions that in object curves all three dimensions in space and if you are truly Einstein you can imagine it happening in four dimensions, because what Einstein tells is that the three dimension in space and time combine in to a four dimensional fabric called space time. So he simply says that the gravity is the wrapping of the four dimensions of space time. I'm looking at some people in the back and they are nodding when the trampoline fabric was being curved and now they're shaking their heads, all I can tell you is don't fall bad, this is November 1915s, amazing burst of creativity as I said earlier they don't give him or they don't announces Nobel prize in 1922. So you got lot of confused people might not sure whether relativity is philosophy with all due respect to philosophers of science, or whether its concrete you know physics and stuff and in fact anti-Semitism is arising at that time because at that time world war 1 is ending and Germany is losing and the Pacifists and the Jews have been blamed and the internationalists and if you happened to be an internationalist Jewish Pacifist named Einstein, you are not in great shape young politicians like Hitler and Munich start writing about Jewish science always different from Deutsch physic real German physics that's rooted in reality and Einstein sort of feels is rise again his Semitism in Germany when he speaks the anti relativist movement coming up partly based on that. And so what Einstein does is he comes up with a way you can test he does that in all of his great papers he deduces the wonderful theory from thought experiments, his imagination but if we want to test it here is how you do it. So he says one way to test whether my theory of gravity is right, is E=mc2 energy and mass have an equivalence and gravity is the warping of space and time, then gravity will bend a light beam, and specifically he says how much in his field equations of relativity he describes how much gravity will bend the light beam. In fact he says if a light beam is passing from a distant star passing the light is passing right next to the sun, with the suns gravitational field he calculates that the light beam will be bend by approximately 1.7 arc seconds he says go look you can see that I am right. Problem with going to look and to see if he was right, you can se the stars right behind the sun, now we know that you go outside and look the sun gets in your eyes. So the after wait for the total eclipse of the sun to see if he was right, and in May 1919 is a great total eclipse of the sun just as world one is ended and a British Quaker pacifist named sir Arthur Edenton decides that science transcends politics and hatreds and bigotries and biases, he gone to send in another expedition - go personally on expedition to look at the may 1919 eclipse of the sun so he can try to prove the theory of a German Jewish pacifist. And so he sends an expedition to Brazil, he himself goes to another island of the coast of Africa known as Principe, they photograph during that three minutes or so of the total eclipse of the sun the stars and the hiding cluster behind it, to see if they seem shifted by 1.7 arc second. It takes a while to bring all the photographic plates back to England. But when they do sir Arthur Edenton called a meeting of the royal society J.J Thompson, the discoverer electron is in the chair, they point to the picture if Sir Isaac Newton in the grand hall of Piccadilly, people like Birchen Rousseau coming down from Cambridge because every body knows that this is a great meeting that's going to, just have one item on the agenda, was Einstein right. And they say - point to the portrait of Newton and say forgive us Sir Isaac Newton your universe has been over turned. That this was years ago, back really a long time ago. Back when the New York Times knew how to write good science headlines. You have to picture this. By the way, the New York Times doesn't have a science correspondent there in London, but they do have Henry Crouch and nobody here. Some of you may know who Henry Crouch was he is a great golfing correspondent of the New York Times therein England covering San Andreas, some other golf event. And so there he is he is the only correspondent they have. They send him to meeting at the Royal Academy. He has to interviews Arthur Edenton three times to get it explained to him. But then comes the headline that makes Albert Einstein the most famous celebrity scientist perhaps in history and one of the most famous people in the world. New York Times headlined, "Lights All Askew in the Heavens". I love this headline. Men of Science More or Less Agog Over Results of Eclipse Observations/ Einstein's Theory Triumphs." "Stars Not Where They Seemed or Were Calculated to Be, but Nobody Need Worry." Back then to the New York once cartoon are people trying to figure out the theory of relativity, Einstein is suddenly the most famous sort of celebrity in the world. And he does something interesting because he is invited to represent Germany in the Solvay conference; the European Physics Conference after the War. He is the only German invited and it's a bringing Germany back into the fold of scientist Einstein is planning to go. And then, he gets a call. Einstein had been raised in a secular Jewish family hadn't really thought too much of it except for a very brief period in his youth, hadn't thought too much about his religion. With the anti-Semitism arising, he said it really awakens my spirit of tribal kinship of the Jewish people. So he gets a call from Chaim Weizmann, the head of the World's Zionist Organization, saying "Come to America, raise money for refugee Jewish scholars for Hebrew university." Einstein has never been out of Europe and he does one that surprises of everybody. He says, "Yes." Decides to go on a fundraising tour across America for the World's Zionist Organization causing the other German scientists to be furious because he is skipping the Solvay conference to do so. But it's a new phase in Einstein's life. Not only becoming a celebrity, but using that celebrity for purposes political purposes. And we see often today. But you have to remember back then, the notion of celebrity the notion of publicity was abhorrent There is a beautiful letter from Maya Einstein right after that headline in the New York Times, I told you about. Maya Einstein is the sister of Albert Einstein and she is back in Zurich and she sees in the local Zurich paper the headline of Einstein. She writes him a letter saying, "I saw your name in the papers today". And you think she is going to congratulate him on his theory - it says, you must be appalled, how horrible it must be to be in the News papers. I am so sorry for you. I mean that because people did not like fame and publicity. Einstein has love/hate relationship with this fame and publicity. When he arrives with Chaim Weitzman at the battery in Manhattan and Newsreels had been touting him coming day after day, it was a big deal. 15000 people are there to meet them at the battery the great celebrity. Weizmann gets out of the boat first and they asked Weizmann what they always asked people that been with Einstein which is, "Do you understand the theory of relativity? Weizmann says, on the way over Professor Einstein explained it to me many many times. And by the time we got here, I was convinced that he understood it. They parade him up second avenue, crowds lining up, oh my I mean, I don't know about, you all but I don't know that many theoretical physicist there who get open air parades up to the lower east side. He lectures all across the Mid West Eastern United States. He goes to Princeton, lectures for four hours on relativity, one of the students tells the school newspaper there. I sat way up in the balcony but he spoke over my head; nonetheless. Those of us who live in Washington can only we can fathom this. They bring Einstein to Washington and so when he arrives, the Senate of the United States decides a debate whether relativity theory is true or not. For your science and politics and you should pick this up. Senator John Rankin of Mississippi and the opposition Boies Penrose on Pennsylvania, putting the entire theory on the congressional record arguing in favor of the theory of relativity. They bring Einstein to see President Harding, and ask Harding what they ask everybody which is Do you understand the theory of relativity? That was a long time ago, as I sat back when politicians were honest. So Harding says, "No." And Einstein says it doesn't really matter because he - Einstein doesn't understand the theory of the normalcy which was Harding's political platform. Anyway he becomes a huge celebrity they even bring him out - he arrives at the opening of city light where Charlie Chaplin a few years later. Chaplin has a wonderful line and when they are cheering because they arrive it cheer you because they understand you they cheer me because they understand me and so. But something interesting happens with Einstein he wins his Nobel prize, his quantum theory that notion that light is both wave and particle it is evolved by the mid 1920s into a quantum mechanics that has uncertainty at its core. Einstein is not comfortable with that he loves there is one pillar of Newton's universe that Einstein still loves which is what Newton calls strict causality. You know Einstein wants to restore that notion of certainty he repeatedly says you know when confronted with things like the uncertainty principle of Heisenberg and Neil Bohr's idea that they are basically probabilities not certainties underlying the subatomic level Einstein famously says repeatedly I cannot believe of batteries is fully charged okay you know I cannot believe that God would play dice with the universe. At what point Neil Bohr finally says to Einstein please quit telling God what to do. But Einstein's invocation of God and I know some of you are skipping Sam Harris in the Greenwald Pavilion after you can go hear him get balance view of this everybody thinks Einstein not every, a lot of people think Einstein's invocation of the good lord is just a figure of speech he does it often he say when I try to figure out a theory, I think how the God lord would have created the universe. In fact when he gets the telegram telling them of the eclipse observations of proving a series, he shows it to a graduate student, she says you must be thrilled, he says no I was confident, she said yeah what you thought turned out the other way, I would feel sorry for the good lord because the theory is correct. So people always thought he was just talking about the old one, the good lord just for the figure of speech But as he turns 50 1929 he start writing much more about science and faith, science and religion he says rights of bond of us by saying science without religion is blind I am sorry science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. In a dinner party in Berlin they ask him - the hostess is stunned, one time they asked whether Einstein is religious? Yes I believe in god he said I believed that there is a spirit manifest in the laws of universe. The spirit in the face in which we must be humbled and odd that to me is my sense of cosmic religion. It was not a personal god he didn't believe in a god who would intervene and change the laws of physics or nature for you if prayed hard enough and intercede into our lives. you couldn't pray hard enough and say well make it a snow day tomorrow because I haven't done my home work as is that some people miracles or evidence of gods existence, for me its the absence of miracles that are evidence of god's existence. But the evidence is in the harmonies of the creation of the universe. At one point Cardinal William O'Connell of Boston says it still smacks of atheism because its not in intercessional god that will intercede on our behalf so Rabbi Maurice Goldstein who is head of the reform Jewish movement in New York said about a wonderful telegram, that says Einstein, do you or do you not believe in god, answer in 50 words or less. So Einstein doesn't use up his 50 words he simply says I believe in Spinoza's God, a God who is manifest in the harmonies of the universe. Now that doesn't really satisfy the rabbi, it doesn't satisfy the cardinal, but I think a lot of people especially if you look at a scientist of age 50 wrestling with internal questions and which he says yes these are questions that are far too vast from my limited imagination so that's why I feel humble when I address them. We can understand that's sort of deism same deism that Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson and others get to. He also becomes very much he has been very much a pacifist but unlike other politicians might have say, he believed there should be correlation between your general theories and the actual facts and so when the facts changed and Hitler takes power in 1933 he suddenly says I am not a pacifist any more and says I am already a young man and I would join the army sometimes its necessary to resist stuff. And he meets with this friend Leo Szilard after Einstein immigrates to America and Szilard who had been a friend of him as a scientist would come up with a concept of a nuclear chain reaction at least when the tale comes up with concept of waiting for traffic light in London. So comes to America explains the Einstein the notion of a nuclear chain reaction and they realize what the consequences of that could be. So Einsteinwith Szilard, Teller and Wagner's help composed the most famous letter perhaps ever written by a scientist to a political leader. It is from Albert Einstein who was then in Peconic long island on August 1939 to F D Roosevelt the White House in Washington explaining the notion of a controlled chain reaction and saying this new phenomenon could also lead to the construction of bombs Franklin Roosevelt says this demands action, starts Manhattan project building of the bomb. One of histories ironies Einstein had been such a pacifist that J. Edgar Hoover collected dossiers boxes and boxes on him and he was denied a security clearance to actually on the Manhattan project making him even though he loved America, he became an opponent of the red scare of McCarthyism saying that it was free speech, free thoughts, free minds that led to creativity. There was a connection between free thought and creativity. That's why America was a creative place. But that's why America must always protect its free thought. Even though he didn't work on the Manhattan project, he is associated in the public mind with the bomb. We kind of see the E=mc2 on the mushroom cloud behind him when we think of the bomb and so he dedicate himself to get another cause which is the cause of nuclear arms control in a sense of world peace becomes a leader in the movement for arms control. At one point they ask him how do you think world war III would be fought? He said I don't know but I do know how world War 4 would be fought, if we don't do something, with sticks and rocks and so that becomes another of his great passions. And of course, the notion of long live impudence my guardian angel in the world his ability to defy conventional thinking and to be a non conformist continues to extend to physics because even after this more and more avenues as Quantum mechanics is right and it keeps getting you know various proof of it seem to be right. He continues to feel uncomfortable saying that the quantum mechanical explanation of the universe with probabilities that its core cannot be a complete theory and he says it will if you look at why he was against. It wasn't just he didn't like probabilities or he believed in strict causality. It's because he was a realist. He believed there was an underlying reality whether or not we could observe it and the scientist like Bohr and Max Bourn his friend and others things like when we were you young, you said if we can observe simultaneity we don't know it exist, we can observe time. You used to feel that way, you used to challenge every assumption and that's is all we are doing, we are taking a play out of your play book and he finally explained himself by saying perhaps to punish me for my contempt for authority, fate has made me an authority myself. It's a kind of interesting because I think once again at age 50, age 60, we all wonder why are we less rebellious why are we less willing to challenge the conventional thinking, why do we more often say oh no!, we tried that before it doesn't work and so on and Einstein wrestles with that in himself as well. He is offered the presidency of the state of Israel for his support for Israel. Einstein as I hope you determine by now is a very smart person so he says "No! No thanks!" I did read I was looking in the archives and that's he is - there was Ben-Gurion in that picture. Ben-Gurion who was the prime minister, offered him the presidency. There is a note from Ben-Gurion to Adeben, some of you may have known him, he was an UN ambassador here at the time. Saying to Adeben I have offered him the presidency but let me know what am I supposed to do if he accepts. So I don't think - I think they both way he was supposed to turn it down. But he did agree to write you know a speech for his Israel independence day and even to the very end of his life 1955, he has an aneurism, it bursts so it's hemmorhaging and he decides not to get an operation. His time has come to die; he was brought to the hospital. He does the things that still concern him. He signs the Bertrand Russell-Albert Einstein manifesto calling for world peace in nuclear age. He decides to write the first sentence is all I can get out of the speech for Israel independence day that he knows he will never will be able to deliver because he is dying that day and he just writes the first sentence in and he told Ben-Gurion they didn't want to write about Israel or Judaism. He wanted to make it a broader speech about the need for world peace, so the first sentence says I speak to you today not as a Jew and not only as an American citizen but as a human being and then it trails of a bit, you see puts its aside as that the pain becomes to great. But later that after noon he revives a little bit reach to his right side table again pulls off the piece of paper, this time it's not the speech, but it's a few pages of calculations, still trying to get that field equation, you know when you looked at that compass trying to figure out field equations can explain it all. Trying to get that field equations, unified field theory what ever it could be that he been working on now for 25 years so much fruitlessly. Other scientist making fun of him, but he still thought that may be he could get us closer to that field equations the unified field theory so he starts writing equations again. Line after line tightly scrolled equations I went to Hebrew University just like it actually see the actual page and touch it. And there it is the very last page he writes line after line of tightly written equations with all sorts of little mistakes that get crossed out, even arithmetic mathematical errors cross out and fixed into finally at the end he writes, one last line of equations you can see it starts to dribble off of the page until he goes to sleep for the very last time, one last line of equations that he thought would get him and the rest of us just one step closer to that spirit manifest in the laws of the universe. So that's how a very impertinent and and rebellious but unbelievably creative third class patent clerk became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos and the lock smith of the mysteries of the atom in the universe. Thank you.