Albert Enstine
Albert Einstein
Einstein was not comfortable with statistical reality, a shortcoming which cost him much happiness, and may have deprived the world of many discoveries.
His youthful breakthrough is well known. It consisted not only in giving the equation linking mass and energy (the famous e = mc²), but in showing the statistical nature of quantum mechanics. Few meteors have more memorably decorated the mathematical sky.
He began working in the Swiss Patent Office in 1902. In 1905, his "annus mirabilis," he submitted to Annalen der Physik fundamentally important papers on light quanta (March), molecular dimensions (April), the statistical analysis of Brownian movement (May), the special theory of relativity and the space-time continuum (June), and the famous equivalence between mass and energy (September). In 1909 he left the Patent Office for a modest academic post in Switzerland. In 1915, he published a more general theory of relativity, and in 1917 (relying on work done in 1911) a paper which predicted the amount by which light would be bent in a gravitational field. The solar eclipse of 29 May 1919, observed at the end of WW1 by a British team, showed that Einstein's prediction was closely fulfilled. That eclipse was for him what the orbit of Ceres had earlier been for Gauss. Nature had done what he had predicted it would do. He won the Nobel Prize in 1921.
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Scarcely less well known than Einstein's leadership in relativity theory is his renunciation of that leadership, due to his revulsion at the "statistical" nature of the reality which his own discoveries suggested. The Solvay Conferences had been one of his major forums. But at the 5th Conference in 1927, he read no paper, and was silent except for objecting to the statistical implications of the papers by Bohr and Heisenberg. It grieved him to find chance at the heart of nature. The dictum of his renunciation was "the good God does not play dice with the universe." In the days of his glory, like
Einstein was not comfortable with statistical reality, a shortcoming which cost him much happiness, and may have deprived the world of many discoveries.
His youthful breakthrough is well known. It consisted not only in giving the equation linking mass and energy (the famous e = mc²), but in showing the statistical nature of quantum mechanics. Few meteors have more memorably decorated the mathematical sky.
He began working in the Swiss Patent Office in 1902. In 1905, his "annus mirabilis," he submitted to Annalen der Physik fundamentally important papers on light quanta (March), molecular dimensions (April), the statistical analysis of Brownian movement (May), the special theory of relativity and the space-time continuum (June), and the famous equivalence between mass and energy (September). In 1909 he left the Patent Office for a modest academic post in Switzerland. In 1915, he published a more general theory of relativity, and in 1917 (relying on work done in 1911) a paper which predicted the amount by which light would be bent in a gravitational field. The solar eclipse of 29 May 1919, observed at the end of WW1 by a British team, showed that Einstein's prediction was closely fulfilled. That eclipse was for him what the orbit of Ceres had earlier been for Gauss. Nature had done what he had predicted it would do. He won the Nobel Prize in 1921.
[pic]
Scarcely less well known than Einstein's leadership in relativity theory is his renunciation of that leadership, due to his revulsion at the "statistical" nature of the reality which his own discoveries suggested. The Solvay Conferences had been one of his major forums. But at the 5th Conference in 1927, he read no paper, and was silent except for objecting to the statistical implications of the papers by Bohr and Heisenberg. It grieved him to find chance at the heart of nature. The dictum of his renunciation was "the good God does not play dice with the universe." In the days of his glory, like