Einstein: His Life and Universe

Engelbert L. Schucking

Citation: Physics Today 60, 11, 59 (2007); doi: 10.1063/1.2812127

View online: https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2812127
View Table of Contents: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/toc/pto/60/11
Published by the American Institute of Physics

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energy approach parameterizes the
breaking in a general way using the
“soft-breaking” Lagrangian. One can
also study from a theoretical point of
view how the supersymmetry might be
broken and then predict patterns of the
low-energy parameters that would
allow recognition of a particular form of
breaking. The books present good sur-
veys of work on supersymmetry break-
ing and prepare readers to work on
such questions. If supersymmetry were
an unbroken theory, it would have no
unpredicted parameters. All the pa-
rameters arise from the supersymmetry
breaking, and measuring them will
help researchers understand the break-
ing. The texts also contain major treat-
ments of cosmology and important
questions of physics beyond the stan-
dard model, including inflation, axions,
the origin of the matter asymmetry in
the universe, supersymmetry in the
early universe, and connections to the
string-theory moduli fields.
Binétruy has worked successfully at
making his book pedagogically useful.
He provides a roadmap of three paths
through the book: one for researchers
who want a theoretical introduction,
the second for high-energy experimen-
talists, and the third for astrophysicists
or cosmologists. The author often in-
cludes extra steps in derivations, which
are helpful to a beginner or a reader
coming from another field. He also pro-
vides useful hints to solving the exer-
cises and includes a self-contained
summary of basic notions of quantum
field theory. His presentation of the
general form of the supersymmetry
soft-breaking Lagrangian is very peda-
gogical and physical. His 55 pages on
string theory provide a good physical
picture of compactifying to four di-
mensions and of phenomenological
aspects of superstring models.
Dine’s Supersymmetry and String
Theory has more material on theoreti-
cal and nonperturbative aspects of
the low-energy theory, with studies
of anomalies, instantons, the strong
CP-violation problem, monopoles,
solitons, and alternative theories. His
170-page introduction to string theory
covers a broad range of topics. Dine’s
book will be particularly attractive to
theorists who want to be well informed
about most of the theoretical issues
related to physics beyond the standard
model. A website to accompany the
book (http://scipp.ucsc.edu/~dine/
book/book.html) is under develop-
ment, already has a useful set of er-
rata, and is expected to have updates
November 2007 Physics Today 59
and solutions of selected problems.
If nature is described by a super- Einstein
symmetric theory, windows are opened His Life and Universe
on early-universe cosmology and on Walter Isaacson
physics at the Planck scale. Then we Simon & Schuster, New York, 2007.
may be able to formulate a unified the- $32.00 (675 pp.).
ory incorporating those fundamental ISBN 978-0-7432-6473-0
areas, and we will be able to relate data When Walter Isaacson was managing
from colliders to those topics, in both editor of Time magazine in 1999, he can-
directions. The books by Binétruy and onized Albert Einstein as Time’s “Person
Dine indeed describe the state of the art of the Century”; the runners-up were
and science today. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Mahatma
Gordon Kane Gandhi. Since then, much biographical
University of Michigan material about the physicist has become
Ann Arbor accessible, and Isaacson makes good
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 use of it in Einstein:
His Life and Uni-
verse. The author
elaborates on two
particularly inter-
esting episodes in
the historical record
about Einstein’s role
in the atomic-bomb
project: his attempts
to warn Roosevelt
of the Nazi nuclear threat and his later
efforts to alert politicians about the con-
sequences of building the bomb.
Before Einstein sent his first letter to
Roosevelt alerting the president to the
specter of a German bomb, he wrote to
Charles Lindbergh in 1939, asking him
to be the conduit to Roosevelt. The orig-
inator of that Schnapsidee (crazy idea)
was the allegedly politically savvy Leo
Szilard. Neither Szilard nor Einstein
was aware that the famous aviator was
Roosevelt’s political enemy and had just
been given a medal by Nazi leader Her-
mann Goering. Lindbergh did not re-
spond. It was only after listening to
Lindbergh in a nationwide radio ad-
dress—with anti-Semitic undertones
and pro-German sympathies, warning
of involvement in European wars—that
it dawned on the Jewish refugees that
this was not their man. They then
See www.pt.ims.ca/12312-29
turned to Roosevelt’s friend, economist
Alexander Sachs, who eventually deliv-
ered the historic letter.
In December 1944 Einstein learned
from his friend Otto Stern that a US
atomic bomb would probably become a
reality in the war. They felt that the pol-
icymakers had to be made aware of the
immense consequences of that devel-
opment. Hoping that Niels Bohr would
support his appeal, Einstein wrote to
him: “The politicians do not appreciate
the possibilities and consequently do
not know the extent of the menace”
(page 483). Later, in 1957, Bohr stated,
“It was terrible that no one over there,”
in the UK and the US, “had worked on
the solution of the problems that would
arise when it became possible to release
nuclear energy; they were completely
unprepared.” (See “Memories of Niels
Bohr,” by J. Rud Nielson, in PHYSICS
TODAY, October 1963, page 22). But in
late December 1944, Bohr had rushed
to Princeton, New Jersey, and assured
Einstein that responsible statesmen
were aware of the bomb, as well as
“the unique opportunity for furthering
a harmonious relationship between
nations” (page 483), and he had per-
suaded Einstein to do nothing. A chance
for Einstein to change history may
have been lost. Bohr’s own attempts
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to enlighten Winston Churchill and
Roosevelt about the complementarity
of the bomb—that it could be used for
both war and peace—had been a disas-
ter and led the two leaders to issue a
joint order to their intelligence agencies
to watch Bohr as a security risk.
In April 1945 Szilard again per-
suaded Einstein to write to Roosevelt.
But his letter arrived too late: The pres-
ident had died.
Isaacson’s book is a sympathetic bi-
ography of Einstein as a mensch firmly
embedded in the fabric of spacetime. It
is well written and carefully researched
with extensive notes. Although it per-
haps presents the most readable ac-
count of Einstein’s life, it fails to do as
well in presenting Einstein’s physics. In
that area the book has to compete with
Abraham Pais’s magisterial Einstein
biography ”Subtle Is the Lord. . .”: The
Science and the Life of Albert Einstein,
originally published in 1982 by Oxford
University Press. Isaacson tries to de-
scribe Einstein’s ideas selectively with-
out sketching in a background of the
contemporaneous physics. The result is
that his representations are vague. The
following is his flippant description of
Erwin Schrödinger’s great work: “But
the world apparently already had
enough Austrian philosophers, and he
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couldn’t find work in that field. So he
stuck with physics and, inspired by Ein-
stein’s praise of de Broglie, came up
with a theory called ‘wave mechanics.’
It led to a set of equations that governed
de Broglie’s wavelike behavior of elec-
trons, which Schrödinger (giving half
credit where he thought it was due)
called ‘Einstein–de Broglie waves’”
(page 330).
Isaacson rarely mentions quantita-
tive confirmation of Einstein’s physics,
except for general relativity. The au-
thor’s shunning of mathematical for-
mulas, except E = mc2 and a wrongly
copied gravitational field equation,
leaves the discussion of the physics
mystifying and incoherent. It does not
help that Isaacson says a tensor is “sort
of a vector on steroids”(page 194). The
author’s intense focus on relativity and
E = mc2 in discussing Einstein’s physics
is particularly interesting. In Einstein:
The First Hundred Years (Pergamon
Press, 1980), an article titled “Assessing
Einstein’s Impact on Today’s Science by
Citation Analysis,” by Tony Cawkell
and Eugene Garfield, examined the
11 papers in the exact sciences from
physics to physiology published before
1912 that were the most cited between
1961 and 1975. The four listed papers
written by Einstein—the only author
who had more than one paper cited—
were his 1905 dissertation, published as
“A New Determination of Molecular
Dimensions,” in 1906; his 1905 paper
on Brownian motion; his 1911 correc-
tion of the 1906 paper; and his 1910 the-
ory of critical opalescence. His papers
on light quanta, special relativity, and
L/V2 = mass (later written as E = mc2)
are nowhere on the list.
Isaacson includes a few errors and
misprints. For example, he mixes up
Marcel Grossmann and Hermann
Minkowski (page 33) and misspells
Henry Siedentopf’s name (page 106)
and kosmologische Glied (page 255). In
addition, contrary to what Isaacson
writes, Armand Fizeau’s measurement
of the entrainment coefficient is not a
null experiment (page 112); time dila-
tion has an impact on our everyday life
because it is responsible for cosmic rays
near sea level and a functioning global
positioning system (page 130); clocks
run slower not in intense gravitational
fields but in higher gravitational poten-
tials (pages 148 and 349); the “fabric of
spacetime” has to be credited to
Minkowski (page 232); and Bohr es-
caped three years after, not during, the
Nazi takeover of Denmark (page 482).
Despite the above errors, Einstein is
a thoughtful, well-researched story
www.physicstoday.org
about the physicist’s life. But the won-
derful book by Pais, which was repub-
lished by Oxford University Press in
2005, with a preface by Roger Penrose,
is still the best introduction to Einstein’s
physics.
Engelbert L. Schucking
New York University
Molecular Theory
of Solutions
Arieh Ben-Naim
Oxford U. Press, New York, 2006.
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November 2007 Physics Today 61
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