Einstein Defiant: Genius Versus Genius in the Quantum Revolution - Hardcover

Bolles, Edmund Blair

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0309089980 ISBN 13: 9780309089982

Publisher: Joseph Henry Press, 2004

Synopsis

"I find the idea quite intolerable that an electron exposed to radiation should choose of its own free will, not only its moment to jump off, but also its direction. In that case, I would rather be a cobbler, or even an employee in a gaming house, than a physicist." -Albert Einstein

A scandal hovers over the history of 20th century physics. Albert Einstein—the century's greatest physicist—was never able to come to terms with quantum mechanics, the century's greatest theoretical achievement. For physicists who routinely use both quantum laws and Einstein's ideas, this contradiction can be almost too embarrassing to dwell on. Yet Einstein was one of the founders of quantum physics and he spent many years preaching the quantum's importance and its revolutionary nature.

The Danish genius Neils Bohr was another founder of quantum physics. He had managed to solve one of the few physics problems that Einstein ever shied away from, linking quantum mathematics with a new model of the atom. This leap immediately yielded results that explained electron behavior and the periodic table of the elements.

Despite their mutual appreciation of the quantum's importance, these two giants of modern physics never agreed on the fundamentals of their work. In fact, they clashed repeatedly throughout the 1920s, arguing first over Einstein's theory of "light quanta"(photons), then over Niels Bohr's short-lived theory that denied the conservation of energy at the quantum level, and climactically over the new quantum mechanics that Bohr enthusiastically embraced and Einstein stubbornly defied.

This contest of visions stripped the scientific imagination naked. Einstein was a staunch realist, demanding to know the physical reasons behind physical events. At odds with this approach was Bohr's more pragmatic perspective that favored theories that worked, even if he might not have a corresponding explanation of the underlying reality. Powerful and illuminating, Einstein Defiant is the first book to capture the soul and the science that inspired this dramatic duel, revealing the personalities and the passions—and, in the end, what was at stake for the world.

About this title

About the Author

Edmund Blair Bolles has been hailed as "startlingly eloquent" (The Atlantic Monthly) with "a genius for explanation" (The Spectator), which explains why he has survived for over thirty years as a freelance writer with a special interest in the meeting point between science and human imagination. Bolles grew up in Washington, D.C. and Toledo, Ohio with a three-year detour in Paris, France. He was educated in St. Louis and Philadelphia, and spent two years in Tanzania, East Africa, as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching science, math, and agriculture. Since then he has lived in Washington State, Los Angeles, and New York. His 15 books include Galileo's Commandment: An Anthology of Great Science Writing (editor) and The Ice Finders: How a Poet, a Professor, and a Politician Discovered the Ice Age.

From the Inside Flap

"Meticulously researched, engagingly written and scientifically enlightening. The quantum revolution as viewed through the thoughts of Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and other giants of early 20th century physics. A remarkable integration of science, politics and history." -- Robert L. Wolke, Professor Emeritus of Nuclear Chemistry, University of Pittsburgh and author of What Einstein Told His Cook

"One of the nation s pre-eminent science writers has done it again. With verve and originality, Blair Bolles brings us inside Einstein s nearly perfect scientific imagination. The details are rich, the analogies enlightening, the overall effect transformative. Einstein Defiant is a masterful work." -- Robin Marantz Henig, author of Pandora s Baby and The Monk in the Garden

"A terrific inside-baseball account of the intellectual battles of the 1920s, from which arose modern quantum mechanics." -- John Derbyshire, author of Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics

Reviews

Albert Einstein sought throughout his career to understand the ways of "the Old One," his nickname for the deity. Not one to chase after theory just because the math worked, Einstein adopted an equation like E = mc2 only if he could demonstrate how it played out in the physical world. Nor did he believe that the Old One was capricious, letting a photon of light masquerade as a particle one moment, as a wave the next. Einstein always sought to explain an unambiguous, consistent reality. As author Bolles (The Ice Finders, etc.) shows, this placed him at loggerheads with Niels Bohr and his Copenhagen school of quantum physics. Bohr was the pragmatist to Einstein's purist, looking for theories that worked, whether or not they made sense. Bolles conjures up the lost world of Europe between the wars, an era when readers would snatch up newspapers with Einstein's latest paper printed on the front page. In addition to his flair for bringing to life the cultural background of Einstein and Bohr's scientific battle (with occasional slips: Schoenberg did not compose the opera Wozzeck), Bolles exhibits a marvelous facility in explaining the intricacies of relativity and the world inside the atom. Readers who can never keep the three B's—Bohr, Born and de Broglie—straight will know what their roles were in 20th-century physics by the end of the book, which is highly recommended for science buffs as well as readers of biography and cultural history.
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Bolles intertwines a rich combination of scientific explanation and literary drama, painting a picture of Einstein's persona, the European mind-set, and the soap opera of quantum physics. The focus is on Einstein's battle for causality, the idea that every event has a cause and can thus be predicted.

Editors of Scientific American

Edition details

• Publisher: Joseph Henry Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0309089980
• ISBN 13: 9780309089982
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 356