The Next Einstein? Applicants Welcome

He didn't look like much at first. He was too fat and his head was so big his mother feared it was misshapen or damaged. He didn't speak until he was well past 2, and even then with a strange echolalia that reinforced his parents' fears. He threw a small bowling ball at his little sister and chased his first violin teacher from the house by throwing a chair at her.

There was in short, no sign, other than the patience to build card houses 14 stories high, that little Albert Einstein would grow up to be "the new Copernicus," proclaiming a new theory of nature, in which matter and energy swapped faces, light beams bent, the stars danced and space and time were as flexible and elastic as bubblegum. No clue to suggest that he would help send humanity lurching down the road to the atomic age, with all its promise and dread, with the stroke of his pen on a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939, certainly no reason to suspect that his image would be on T- shirts, coffee mugs, posters and dolls.

Einstein's modest beginnings are a perennial source of comfort to parents who would like to hope, against the odds, that their little cutie can grow up to be a world beater. But they haunt people like me who hanker for a ringside seat for the Next Great Thing and wonder whether somewhere in the big haystack of the world there could be a new Einstein, biding his or her time running gels in a biology lab, writing video game software or wiring a giant detector in the bowels of a particle accelerator while putting the finishing touches on a revolution in our perception of reality.

"Einstein changed the way physicists thought about the universe in a way the public could appreciate," said Dr. Michael Turner, a cosmologist from the University of Chicago and the director of math and physical sciences at the National Science Foundation.

No question is more likely to infuriate or simply leave a scientist nonplussed. And nothing, of course, would be more distracting, daunting and ultimately demoralizing than for some young researcher to be tagged "the new Einstein," so don't expect to hear any names here.

"It's probably always a stupid question," said Dr. Lawrence Krauss, a cosmologist at Case Western Reserve University, who nevertheless said he had yet to read a profile of a young scientist that does not include, at some level, some comparison to Einstein.

Dr. Stephen Hawking, the British cosmologist and best-selling author, who is often so mentioned, has said that such comparisons have less to do with his own achievements than the media's need for heroes.

To ask the question whether there can be a new Einstein is to ask, as well, about the role of the individual in modern science. Part of the confusion is a disconnect between what constitutes public and scientific fame.

Einstein's iconic status resulted from a unique concurrence of scientific genius, historical circumstance and personal charisma, historians and scientists say, that is unlikely to be duplicated.

Dr. David Gross, who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics last year, said, "Of course there is no next Einstein; one of the great things about meeting the best and the brightest in physics is the realization that each is different and special."

Physics, many scientists like Dr. Gross say, is simply too vast and sprawling for one person to dominate the way Einstein did a century ago. Technology is the unsung hero in scientific progress, they say, the computers and chips that have made it possible to absorb and count every photon from a distant quasar, or the miles of wire and tons of sensors wrapping the collision points of speed-of-light subatomic particles. A high-energy physics paper reporting the results from some accelerator experiment can have 500 authors.

"Einstein solved problems that people weren't even asking or appreciating were problems," said Dr. Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., Einstein's stomping grounds for the last 32 years of his life. "It could be there are big questions nobody is asking, but there are so many more people in physics it's less likely big questions could go unasked."

"Who am I to say that somebody couldn't come along with a whole completely new way of thinking?"

In fact, physicists admit, waxing romantic in spite of themselves, science is full of vexing and fundamental questions, like the nature of the dark energy that is pushing the universe apart, or the meaning of string theory, the elegant but dense attempt to unify all the forces of nature by thinking of elementary particles as wiggling strings.

"We can frame an Einsteinian question. As you know, asking the question is the key," said Dr. Leon Lederman, a Nobelist and former director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. He likes to think, he added, that it will be solved by "a Brazilian kid in a dirt floor village."

Dr. Turner said he hoped and expected that there would continue to be Einsteins. One way to measure their impact, he suggested, was by how long it took society to digest their discoveries and move on.

By this metric, he said, Isaac Newton beats out Einstein as the greatest of all time (or at least since science was invented). Newton's world lasted more than 200 years before Einstein overthrew it.

"Einstein has lasted 100 years," he said. "The smart money says that something is going to happen; general relativity won't last another 200 years."

Would that make someone a candidate for a T-shirt, or an Einstein? It depends on what you mean by "Einstein."

Do we mean the dark-haired young firebrand at the patent office, who yanked the rug out from under Newton and 19th-century physics in 1905 when he invented relativity, supplied a convincing proof for the existence of atoms and shocked just about everyone by arguing that light could be composed of particles as well as waves?

Is it the seer who gazed serenely out at the world in 1919 from beneath headlines announcing that astronomers had measured the bending of light rays from stars during an eclipse, confirming Einstein's general theory of relativity, which described gravity as the warping of space-time geometry?

Einstein had spent 10 years racking his brain and borrowing the mathematical talents of his friends trying to extend relativity to the realm of gravity. When this "great adventure in thought," as the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called it, safely reached shore, Einstein caught a wave that lifted him high above physics and science in general.

The world was exhausted morally, mentally and economically from the Great War, which had shattered the pretensions of Enlightenment Europe. People were ready for something new and Einstein gave them a whole new universe.

Moreover, the mark of this new universe - "lights all askew in the heavens," as this newspaper put it - was something everybody could understand. The stars, the most ancient of embodiments of cosmic order, had moved.

With Whitehead as his publicist, Einstein was on the road to becoming the Elvis of science, the frizzy-headed sage of Princeton, the world's most famous Jew and humanity's atomic conscience.

It helped that he wore his fame lightly, with humor and a cute accent. "He was a caricature of the scientist," said Dr. Krauss. "He looked right. He sounded right."

When physicists are asked, what they often find distinctive about Einstein are his high standards, an almost biological need to find order and logical consistency in science and in nature, the ability to ferret out and question the hidden assumptions underlying the mainstream consensus about reality.

Dr. Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario describes it as moral quality. "He simply cared far more than most of his colleagues that the laws of physics should explain everything in nature coherently and consistently," he wrote last year in Discover.

It was that drive that led him to general relativity, regarded as his greatest achievement. The other discoveries, in 1905, physicists and historians say, would have been made whether Einstein did them or not. "They were in the air," said Dr. Martin Rees, a cosmologist at Cambridge University and Britain's astronomer royal.

The quest for general relativity, on the other hand, was the result of "pure thought," Dr. Rees said.

Dr. Peter L. Galison, professor of the history of science and of physics at Harvard, described Einstein as "somebody who had a transformative effect on the world because of his relentless pursuit of what the right principles should be."

Others said they were impressed that he never swerved, despite a tempestuous personal and political life, from science as his main devotion. "He fixed his concentration on important problems, he was unvarying in that," Dr. Krauss said.

Another attraction of Einstein as an icon is his perceived irreverence, and the legend of his origin as an outsider, working in the patent office while he pursued the breakthroughs of 1905. (Not that he was necessarily humble because of that; letters from his early years show him pestering well-known scientists and spoiling for a fight so much that his girlfriend and future wife, Mileva Maric, was always counseling him to keep a cool head.)

"Part of the appeal is that he comes from nowhere and turns things upside down," Dr. Galison said. "That's the fantasy," he explained, saying that science has always represented the possibility that someone without a privileged background could intervene and triumph through sheer ability and brainpower.

There is no lack of inventive, brilliant physicists today, but none of them are T-shirt material, yet. In the cozy turn of the century, Dr. Galison said, Einstein was able to be a philosopher as well as a physicist, addressing deep questions like the meaning of simultaneity and often starting his papers by posing some philosophical quandary.

But philosophy and physics have long since gone their separate ways. Physics has become separated from the humanities. "Everything tells us science has nothing to do with the ideas of ordinary life," Dr. Galison said. "Whether that is good or bad, I don't know."

As a result no one has inherited Einstein's mantle as a natural philosopher, said Dr. Galison.

We might have to settle for a kind of Einstein by committee. The string theorists have donned the mantle of Einstein's quest for a unified theory of all the forces of nature.

In the last half-century various manifestations of modern science have made their way into popular culture, including chaos theory and the representation of information in bits and bytes, as pioneered by Dr. Claude Shannon, the Bell Labs engineer.

The discovery of the double helix of DNA, the hereditary molecule, which laid the basis for the modern genetics, is probably the most charismatic result of modern biology. But the world is not awash in action figures based on James Watson and Francis Crick, the molecule's decoders.

Meanwhile Einstein's role of symbolizing the hope that you could understand the universe has at least been partly filled by Dr. Hawking, whose books "A Brief History of Time" and "The Universe in a Nutshell" have sold millions, and who has even appeared on "Star Trek" and "The Simpsons."

"People know him," said Dr. Krauss, and his work on black holes has had a significant impact on the study of gravity and the cosmos, but he has not reinvented the universe.

One reason nobody stands out is that physics has been kind of stuck for the last half-century.

During that time, Dr. Witten said, physicists have made significant progress toward a unified theory of nature, not by blazing new paths, but by following established principles, like the concept of symmetry - first used by Einstein in his relativity paper in 1905 - and extending them from electromagnetism to the weak and strong nuclear forces.

"It was not necessary to invent quantum field theory," said Dr. Witten, "just to improve it." That, he explains, is collective work.

Part of Einstein's legacy was an abyssal gap in the foundations of reality as conceived by science. On one side of the divide was general relativity, which describes stars and the universe itself. On the other side is quantum mechanics, which describes the paradoxical behavior of subatomic particles and forces.

In the former, nature is continuous and deterministic, cause follows effect; in the latter nature is discrete, like sand grains on the beach, and subject to statistical uncertainties.

Einstein to his dying day rejected quantum mechanics as ultimate truth, saying in a letter to Max Born in 1924, "The theory yields much but it hardly brings us closer to the Old One's secrets. I, in any case, am convinced that he does not play dice."

Science will not have a real theory of the world until these two warring notions are merged into a theory of quantum gravity, one that can explain what happens when the matter in a star goes smoosh into a dense microscopic dot at the center of a black hole, or when the universe appears out of nothing in a big bang.

String theory is one, as yet unproven, attempt at such a quantum gravity theory, and it has attracted an army of theorists and mathematicians.

But, Dr. Witten speculated, there could be an Einsteinian moment in another direction. Quantum gravity presumes, he explained, that general relativity breaks down at short distances. But what, he asked, if relativity also needed correction at long distances as a way of explaining, for example, the acceleration of the universe?

"Relativity field theory could be cracked at long distances," Dr. Witten said, adding that he saw no evidence for it. But when Einstein came along, there was no clear evidence that Newtonian physics was wrong, either. "I would think that's an opportunity for an Einstein," he said.

Another Einsteinian opportunity, Dr. Witten later added in an e-mail message, is the possibility that Einstein's old bugaboo quantum mechanics needs correcting, saying that while he saw no need himself, it was a mystery what quantum mechanics meant when applied to the universe as a whole.

Dr. Smolin of the Perimeter Institute said it should give physicists pause that their leader and idol had rejected quantum mechanics, and yet what everybody is trying to do now is to apply quantum mechanics to Einstein's theory of gravity.

"What if he were right?" asked Dr. Smolin, who said he also worried that the present organization of science, with its pressures for tenure and publications, mitigates against the appearance of outsiders like Einstein, who need to follow their own star for a few lonely years or decades.

But as Dr. Krauss said, it only takes one good idea to change our picture of reality.

Dr. Smolin said, "When somebody has a correct idea, it doesn't take long to have an impact."

"It's not about identifying the person who is about to be the new Einstein," he went on. "When there is someone who does something with the impact of Einstein, we'll all know."

Well, I'm glad Einstein did it and didn't leave it to me.

I really don't feel like hitting the books to bone up on tensor calculus and Christoffels mathematics.

I find it amazing that experiments are still being done today that are confirming his theoretical predictions.

I like how they talk about the fact that physics has been stuck in a rut for 50 years. This has been a very negative development for humanity. New ideas in physics have changed the world in awesome new ways and that hasn't occurred lately. String Theory produces no testable predictions and does not have any practical technological consequences it's just a bunch of math so far. Who cares about dark matter, or anything outside the solar system.. I can't believe how much funding this kind of cosmological research gets as all it does it give fluff for new agers to fill their books with and tenure for professors who can spend their whole lives talking about things of no practical consequence.

Rumor has it he actually completed and published his unified field theory, but asked that it be withdrawn from publication, saying that "the world is not ready for it's terrible predictions", or some such.

I find it amazing that experiments are still being done today that are confirming his theoretical predictions.

I'm reading "God's Equation" by Amir Aczel. It offers a fresh point of view. It's a keeper.

When Einstein's general theory of relativity was brand new, the NY Times said it was bunk. I guess they thought Einstein was not politically correct.

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