Einstein:
His Life and Universe
by Walter Isaacson
Einstein:
His Life and Universe
by Walter Isaacson
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/05/03/180155.aspx
Author-journalist Walter Isaacson is CEO of the Aspen Institute
One interesting thing about Einstein is why he failed so miserably in the last part of his life... One of his collaborators at Princeton, Banesh Hoffmann, said that they had no ground lines. Einstein had been able to visualize everything up until then, but in the end they were just doing pure mathematical formalism. Which is the problem with string theory now. It’s absolutely the most elegant thing you can imagine, but it’s just mathematical formalism. It doesn’t have a ground line to say here’s where it connects with reality. I’m not a string theorist, but even string theorists will tell you they haven’t yet found a way to say “here, let’s test it,” or “let’s visualize it, what’s the underlying physical reality to string theory.”
And that’s where Einstein fails on the unified field theory. He doesn’t have that imaginative image: “Oh, light’s a particle” ... “Oh, if you’re synchronizing clocks, it’s relative when you’re moving” ... “Oh, acceleration and gravity are equivalent if you’re in an enclosed chamber.” All these are totally cool ideas that my 16-year-old daughter can perfectly understand. “Oh, yeah, you’re in an enclosed chamber, you’re accelerating upward, it feels just like gravity.” From that springs the equivalence principle.
I would be much interested in this biography of Einstein. Have you read it?
Yoda of the universeEinstein had little faith in quantum physics and was out of step with most leading physicists. He would, I think, have hated string theory, which, with its 16 dimensions, cannot be verified. It exists only in its equations.
by Meir Ronnen
Aug. 9, 2007
