Quantum
leap tossed light on a genius
February 10,
2006
Please, Mr Einstein
By Jean-Claude Carriere
Harvill Secker £12.99
There are two stories about Einstein that M Carri re could
profitably have consulted when he embarked on his
coruscating, yet gently whimsical, tour through what
Einstein has taught us about space-time. One is attributed
to Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, who brought relativity to
the English-speaking public.
He supposedly said, when asked if it was true that there
were only three people in the world who understood
relativity, "I'm just trying to think of who the third
person might be."
And the other tale, quoted in David Bodanis's E=mc2:
Biography of an Equation, tells of Einstein's Greek teacher
at secondary school who always swore that the boy would
never amount to anything as he seemed unable to master
ancient Greek. "And it is true," remarked an old family
friend.
"Right until the end of his life, Einstein was useless at
ancient Greek."
Both these stories embody the kind of humour which made
Einstein not just the greatest theoretical physicist of the
modern age, but also an icon, wild woolly hair, zany grin
and all.
The man of whom Julius Robert Oppenheimer declared in 1966
that he "was almost wholly without sophistication and
wholly without worldliness" was also the man who explained
his theory, according to recollections trotted out on his
death in 1955: "When a man sits with a pretty girl for an
hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot
stove for a minute - and it's longer than any hour. That's
relativity." Who was also, importantly, the man who put in
place the capstone for the theoretical underpinnings for
nuclear power, of all kinds.
Sadly, though, you wouldn't necessarily understand all this
on reading Please, Mr Einstein, whose slightly arch title
with its music hall resonance ("Oh! Mr Porter" was a song
of faux innocence sung by variety star Marie Lloyd) covers
yet another attempt to make Einstein available to the
general public. Or does it?
Carri re, who has an impeccable pedigree in science
publishing, having collaborated with Stephen Jay Gould,
Umberto Eco and others on Conversations About the End of
Time, uses the device of a charming young woman on a
mission to research Einstein's ideas to create a fictional
situation in which to elucidate Einstein's achievement.
The girl, aged 25, travels beyond our normal space and time
to find the ghost of Einstein in a dingy flat in a dull
street, with Sir Isaac Newton and assembled scientists from
the centuries thronging the waiting room.
It's a device that is typically French, in its suggestion
that the young woman is "on the slim side" and that "most
men find her extremely attractive", all the more relevant,
the text suggests, since Einstein "has never been
indifferent to the opposite sex - far from it". Ooh la la:
Sophie's World was never like this.
There is nowhere Carri re can go with this idea, of course,
since Einstein, a ghost, can hardly be romantically
entangled with a fictional character, and this fictional
character, moreover, has neither name nor clearly defined
role. It seems that she has just decided to pop outside of
normal reality to see if she can get a grip on all this
relativity stuff.
There are some sharp incidental pleasures and some witty
reflections to be enjoyed, probably, by those with A-level
physics (at least). Einstein was born in 1879, the same
year that Thomas Edison succeeded in making his electric
lightbulb: electric lighting was catching on and was called
a "fairy". The uncanny was in the air.
Einstein's breakthrough year, 1905, in which he published
Annus Mirabilis - five papers which fundamentally shifted
scientists' concept of the universe - is set in the context
of others, such as Max Planck and Leonard Mandel, who were
ploughing the same conceptual furrow. Cometh the man,
cometh the hour. There's an encounter with Newton,
exasperated and fearful lest his pre-eminence is unseated
by this fanciful newcomer, which makes play with the
relative merits of the four forces: strong nuclear, weak
nuclear, electromagnetic and gravitational.
Forces are often defined in purely Newtonian forms, to do
with propulsion, friction and the like. This is the very
model which Einstein transcended.
(Here's an example of how basic physics will not help.) As
Newton is known to have been a tetchy, difficult character,
this makes for better drama than declamatory exposition to
the blank fiction of the girl enquirer.
There's an entertaining history of some discarded versions
of the cosmos, such as the idea of the ether within which
light was thought to travel, like the currents of sour
cream in beetroot soup, as well as a witty explanation of
why our ordinary notions of space and time using our ideas
of "up" and "down", can't be used to understand the wider
picture of dimensions in space.
The fine rhetorical spiel at the end lays out the questions
that concern modern physicists, from dark matter to the
number of dimensions necessary to accommodate Big Bang
theories and quantum understandings.
Other aspects
of Einstein jar in this account. His Jewishness, his
pacificism, sit so ill with his support for the fledgling
state of Israel and the atomic programme, not to mention
his personal vagaries. These require more understanding of
the complexities of human existence than Carri re's
approach allows. But I guess it's all relative.
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