The Discoveries by Alan Lightman
This sort instinctively consider every intelligent young person as a danger to his frail dignity, this is how it seems to me by now. But if he has the gall to reject my doctoral thesis, then I’ll publish his rejection in cold print together with the thesis and he will have made a fool of himself. ( p. 45) Einstein to Maric
Einstein begins his article with a sweeping statement of principle. Why, Einstein asks, should there be “a profound formal difference” in the way that physicists view matter and light --- the former granular, composed of a finite number of individual atoms, and the latter continuous and infinitely divisible? (p. 46)
Einstein’s paper, like most of his work, is deceptively simple. The language is clear. His arguments are straightforward. The mathematics is not difficult. But the thinking, the intuition about nature, is profound. (p. 48)
A profound formal difference exists between the theoretical concepts that physicists have formed about gases and other ponderable bodies, and Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetic processes in so-called empty space. While we consider the state of a body to be completely determined by the positions and velocities of an indeed very large yet finite number of atoms and electrons, we make use of continuous spatial functions to determine the electromagnetic state of a volume of space, so that a finite number of quantities cannot be considered as sufficient for the complete determination of the electromagnetic state of space. According to Maxwell’s theory, energy is considered to be a continuous spatial function for all purely electromagnetic phenomena, hence also for light, whereas according to the present view of physicists, the energy of a ponderable body should be represented as a sum over the atoms and electrons. The energy of a ponderable body cannot be broken up into arbitrarily many, arbitrarily small parts, but according to Maxwell’s theory (or more generally, according to any wave theory) the energy of a light ray emitted from a point source continuously spread out over an ever-increasing volume. (p. 54)
First paragraph of Einstein’s On a heuristic point of view concerning the production and transformation of light.
In this paper, Einstein compared the formulas of entropy of light and entropy of particles and found them to be the same. He therefore concluded the particle property of light. It is amazing that he reached this conclusion from the perspective of entropy, although the popular recount of the discovery rarely mention entropy at all. This is something mysterious. Early pioneers often find their tracks through entropy. But the entropy concept does not seem to be a popular way to promote something to the public.
The person once described as looking like “a simple farm boy, with clear bright eyes, and a radiant expression” struck me as a weary old man, with a wrinkled face and a dark weight on his back. But that was not my biggest surprise. At the following reception for Heisenberg at the elegant Caltech faculty club, Richard Feynman, a professor at Caltech and a Nobel Prize winner himself, stood up and verbally attacked Heisenberg for the foolishness of his lecture, indeed mocked him to his face. Underneath Feynman’s scathing remarks, I detected not only a disagreement with Heisenberg’s new scientific work, but also contempt for the man, a deep resentment that the founder of quantum mechanics and helped the Nazis try to build an atomic bomb. (p. 201)
According to Watson’s recollections, Wilkins seemed pleased
in his belief that
In summarizing the various contributions, one could say that
A person’s academic status is closely related to the political power of his/her group.