Einstein’s letters illuminate a mind grappling with quantum mechanics | Science News 31/3/20 07:07

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COLUMN PHYSICS

Einstein’s letters illuminate a

mind grappling with quantum
mechanics
His correspondence also reveals that even a genius has his flaws

By Tom Siegfried MARCH 30, 2020 AT 6:00 AM

Contributing Correspondent

During the mid-1920s, Einstein struggled to unify general relativity with electromagnetism, while attempting to make sense of quantum mechanics.
PICTURELUX/THE HOLLYWOOD ARCHIVE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Back in the days before the internet — with no e-mail, no texting, no Twitter — people
wrote letters. Even famous people, like Einstein.

And famous people’s letters were most likely to have been saved — and in Einstein’s
case, published. For more than 30 years now, the Princeton University Press has been
publishing Einstein’s letters (and his papers, and talks, and whatever else he wrote). His
letters reveal nuances about his genius — and some downsides to his personality —
that seldom show in his formal papers and lectures.

This month Princeton released the latest volume of Einstein’s papers, covering the
period May 1925–June 1927, while Einstein was at the University of Berlin. It was an
especially exciting time in science, as it corresponded with the infancy of quantum
mechanics, midwifed by Werner Heisenberg in 1925 while at the University of
Göttingen in Germany. Einstein also faced new challenges to his theory of relativity

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Einstein’s letters illuminate a mind grappling with quantum mechanics | Science News 31/3/20 07:07

during this time, and his letters convey his despair at lack of progress toward his goal of
a unified theory of gravity and electricity.

During that quest, quantum mechanics arrived as an unwelcome distraction.

Heisenberg ignited a flurry of quantum activity when he devised novel mathematics for
describing the mechanics of electrons and other subatomic particles — work that
extended the earlier quantum ideas of Max Planck, Niels Bohr and Einstein himself.
Shortly thereafter, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger formulated a competing
version to Heisenberg’s (which although appearing very different conceptually, turned
out to be equivalent mathematically). Einstein liked the Schrödinger approach, but did
not think very highly of Heisenberg’s.

“Heisenberg has laid a big quantum egg,” Einstein wrote to physicist Paul Ehrenfest in
November 1925. “In Göttingen they believe it (I don’t).”

Schrödinger had applied the math of waves to electrons. But Heisenberg treated the
electron as a particle, describing its energy states with mathematical expressions
known as matrices. Matrix algebra had been studied by mathematicians for decades —
news to Heisenberg, who figured it out for himself. He then collaborated with
physicists Max Born and Pascual Jordan (who did know about matrices) to develop the
new quantum mechanics for describing the subatomic world. Making sense of that
world required physicists to relinquish ordinary notions of space and time, Heisenberg
insisted. “Atoms would certainly not exist,” he wrote to Einstein, “if our space-time
concepts were even only approximately correct for very small spaces.”

Einstein expressed interest in the Heisenberg-Born-Jordan approach and a related

formulation by British physicist Paul Dirac. But he resisted accepting the matrix math as
the correct language for describing nature.

“The Heisenberg-Dirac theories certainly drive me to admiration, but to me they don’t

smell of reality,” he wrote to physicist Arnold Sommerfeld in August 1926. To
Schrödinger, Einstein wrote that he much preferred the wave picture of the electron
that Schrödinger had developed. “I am convinced that with your formulation of the
quantum conditions you have found a decisive advance,” he wrote. “I am also
convinced just as much that the Heisenberg-Born path is misguided.”

In December 1926, Einstein wrote to Born (a close friend) that he respected the matrix
approach, but could not accept one of its revolutionary implications: that nature’s
behavior was governed by statistical laws. “The theory delivers much but it hardly
brings us closer to the Old One’s secret,” Einstein wrote (“Old One” referring to God).
“In any event, I am convinced that He is not playing dice.”

During this time, Einstein struggled with the challenge of unifying his theory of gravity
— general relativity — with the electromagnetic forces involved with electrons and
light. He believed in the “essential unity of the gravitational field and the
electromagnetic field,” while realizing the theoretical account of that unity had not
been properly framed. In a paper published in September 1925, he announced that he
had succeeded in finding “the true solution.”

Einstein soon recanted. In elaborating his equations of general relativity to include

electromagnetism, he still believed he was on the right path, but was short of the
destination. “These equations do not determine the mass and charge of electrons and

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Einstein’s letters illuminate a mind grappling with quantum mechanics | Science News 31/3/20 07:07

protons; hence they still need amendment in order to express the entire laws of
nature,” he wrote to astrophysicist Arthur Eddington in January 1926. Einstein
acknowledged questions about whether the solutions to his equations would
correspond to reality. “As long as these questions cannot be answered,” he wrote
Eddington, “one cannot know whether the general theory of relativity … fails in the face
of quantum phenomena.”

Meanwhile, his special theory of relativity, published in 1905, had been called into
question by new experiments in California. Einstein’s special theory held that light
traveled at the same velocity regardless of the motion of its source (or any observer
measuring it). If so, the “ether” in which light waves supposedly vibrated must not exist.
Otherwise the velocity of light measured on Earth would depend on the Earth’s
direction of motion through the ether. Albert Michelson and Edward Morley’s famous
experiment in Cleveland in 1887 had found no evidence of any such ether, crucial
support for Einstein’s theory. But in 1925, physicist Dayton Miller reported new
experiments contending that the ether affecting light’s velocity really did exist.

Miller had repeated Michelson and Morley’s experiment in Cleveland, finding only a
slight possible hint of an ether effect there. But then at a higher altitude — Mount
Wilson in California — Miller claimed to find substantial signs of the ether.

Miller’s results induced Edwin Slosson, director of the young publication Science
News-Letter (which later became Science News), to write Einstein in June 1925
requesting comment. Einstein replied that if subsequent work confirmed Miller’s
results, “then the special relativity theory, and with the general theory in its present
form, falls. Experiment is the supreme judge.”

But Einstein did not believe that Miller’s result would stand. In December 1925, he
wrote to his friend Michele Besso that failure to control temperatures properly
probably led to Miller’s erroneous results. “I didn’t take them seriously for a single
moment,” Einstein declared.

In January 1926, Einstein cabled a journalist saying that there was virtually no chance
that Miller’s experiments were correct; they indicated some unknown source of error
rather than a true effect. “If you, dear reader, wanted to use this interesting scientific
situation to make a bet, I recommend you bet that Miller’s experiments will prove
faulty” or having nothing to do with an ether, Einstein advised. “I myself would be quite
happy to put my money on that.”

Soon other experiments failed to confirm Miller’s (his analysis of the data contained
errors), and the special theory of relativity emerged victorious, as it remains today. As
does Einstein’s legend.

That legend is not without tarnish though, as his letters occasionally reveal indications
of misogyny. Most disconcerting to Einstein fans would be a letter from October 1925,
in which Einstein berates his ex-wife, Mileva, for threatening to embarrass him with her
memoirs. “Does it not enter your mind at all that no one would care one bit about such
scribblings if the man that they were about had not, coincidentally, accomplished
something special? If someone is a nobody, there is nothing to object to, but one
should be truly modest and keep one’s trap shut. This is my advice to you.” Einstein
then contends his remarks showed how good he was being to her — otherwise he
would not be dispensing such sound advice. “Not only children need a smack now and

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Einstein’s letters illuminate a mind grappling with quantum mechanics | Science News 31/3/20 07:07

again, but so do adults, and most especially women.”

Like most humans, Einstein was a mixed bag. His bag was filled with greatness but not
free from flaws. As we all now know because, like few other people in history, his
letters have been so carefully preserved for posterity to analyze, and admire, and
sometimes criticize.

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