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even now.<br />
He also gave an interview to Time, which put him on its cover, the first of five such appearances. The magazine reported that, while the world<br />
waited for his “abstruse coherent field theory” to be made public, Einstein was plodding around his country hideaway looking “haggard, nervous,<br />
irritable.” His sickly demeanor, the magazine explained, was due to stomach ailments and a constant parade of visitors. In addition, it noted, “Dr.<br />
Einstein, like so many other Jews and scholars, takes no physical exercise at all.” 18<br />
The Prussian Academy printed a thousand copies of Einstein’s paper, an unusually large number. When it was released on January 30, all were<br />
promptly sold, and the Academy went back to the printer for three thousand more. One set of pages was pasted in the window of a London<br />
department store, where crowds pushed forward to try to comprehend the complex mathematical treatise with its thirty-three arcane equations not<br />
tailored for window shoppers. Wesleyan University in Connecticut paid a significant sum for the handwritten manuscript to be deposited as a<br />
treasure in its library.<br />
American newspapers were somewhat at a loss. The New York Herald Tribune decided to print the entire paper verbatim, but it had trouble<br />
figuring out how to cable all the Greek letters and symbols over telegraph machines. So it hired some Columbia physics professors to devise a<br />
coding system and then reconstruct the paper in New York, which they did. The Tribune’ s colorful article about how they transmitted the paper was<br />
a lot more comprehensible to most readers than Einstein’s paper itself. 19<br />
The New York Times, for its part, raised the unified theory to a religious level by sending reporters that Sunday to churches around the city to<br />
report on the sermons about it. “Einstein Viewed as Near Mystic,” the headline declared. The Rev. Henry Howard was quoted as saying that<br />
Einstein’s unified theory supported St. Paul’s synthesis and the world’s “oneness.” A Christian Scientist said it provided scientific backing for Mary<br />
Baker Eddy’s theory of illusive matter. Others hailed it as “freedom advanced” and a “step to universal freedom.” 20<br />
Theologians and journalists may have been wowed, but physicists were not. Eddington, usually a fan, expressed doubts. Over the next year,<br />
Einstein kept refining his theory and insisting to friends that the equations were “beautiful.” But he admitted to his dear sister that his work had<br />
elicited “the lively mistrust and passionate rejection of my colleagues.” 21<br />
Among those who were dismayed was Wolfgang Pauli. Einstein’s new approaches “betrayed” his general theory of relativity, Pauli sharply told<br />
him, and relied on mathematical formalism that had no relation to physical realities. He accused Einstein of “having gone over to the pure<br />
mathematicians,” and he predicted that “within a year, if not before, you will have abandoned that whole distant parallelism, just as earlier you gave<br />
up the affine theory.” 22<br />
Pauli was right. Einstein gave up the theory within a year. But he did not give up the quest. Instead, he turned his attention to yet another revised<br />
approach that would make more headlines but not more headway in solving the great riddle he had set for himself. “Einstein Completes Unified<br />
Field Theory,” the New York Times reported on January 23, 1931, with little intimation that it was neither the first nor would it be the last time there<br />
would be such an announcement. And then again, on October 26 of that year: “Einstein Announces a New Field Theory.”<br />
Finally, the following January, he admitted to Pauli, “So you were right after all, you rascal.” 23<br />
And so it went, for another two decades. None of Einstein’s offerings ever resulted in a successful unified field theory. Indeed, with the<br />
discoveries of new particles and forces, physics was becoming less unified. At best, Einstein’s effort was justified by the faint praise from the<br />
French mathematician Elie Joseph Cartan in 1931: “Even if his attempt does not succeed, it will have forced us to think about the great questions<br />
at the foundation of science.” 24<br />
The Great Solvay Debates, 1927 and 1930<br />
The tenacious rearguard action that Einstein waged against the onslaught of quantum mechanics came to a climax at two memorable Solvay<br />
Conferences in Brussels. At both he played the provocateur, trying to poke holes in the prevailing new wisdom.<br />
Present at the first, in October 1927, were the three grand masters who had helped launch the new era of physics but were now skeptical of the<br />
weird realm of quantum mechanics it had spawned: Hendrik Lorentz, 74, just a few months from death, the winner of the Nobel for his work on<br />
electromagnetic radiation; Max Planck, 69, winner of the Nobel for his theory of the quantum; and Albert Einstein, 48, winner of the Nobel for<br />
discovering the law of the photoelectric effect.<br />
Of the remaining twenty-six attendees, more than half had won or would win Nobel Prizes as well. The boy wonders of the new quantum<br />
mechanics were all there, hoping to convert or conquer Einstein: Werner Heisenberg, 25; Paul Dirac, 25; Wolfgang Pauli, 27; Louis de Broglie, 35;<br />
and from America, Arthur Compton, 35. Also there was Erwin Schrödinger, 40, caught between the young Turks and the older skeptics. And, of<br />
course, there was the old Turk, Niels Bohr, 42, who had helped spawn quantum mechanics with his model of the atom and become the staunch<br />
defender of its counterintuitive ramifications. 25<br />
Lorentz had asked Einstein to present the conference’s report on the state of quantum mechanics. Einstein accepted, then balked. “After much<br />
back and forth, I have concluded that I am not competent to give such a report in a way that would match the current state of affairs,” he replied. “In<br />
part it is because I do not approve of the purely statistical method of thinking on which the new theories are based.” He then added rather<br />
plaintively, “I beg you not to be angry with me.” 26<br />
Instead, Niels Bohr gave the opening presentation. He was unsparing in his description of what quantum mechanics had wrought. Certainty and<br />
strict causality did not exist in the subatomic realm, he said. There were no deterministic laws, only probabilities and chance. It made no sense to<br />
speak of a “reality” that was independent of our observations and measurements. Depending on the type of experiment chosen, light could be<br />
waves or particles.<br />
Einstein said little at the formal sessions. “I must apologize for not having penetrated quantum mechanics deeply enough,” he admitted at the very<br />
outset. But over dinners and late-night discussions, resuming again at breakfast, he would engage Bohr and his supporters in animated discourse<br />
that was leavened by affectionate banter about dice-playing deities. “One can’t make a theory out of a lot of ‘maybes,’ ” Pauli recalls Einstein<br />
arguing. “Deep down it is wrong, even if it is empirically and logically right.” 27<br />
“The discussions were soon focused to a duel between Einstein and Bohr about whether atomic theory in its present form could be considered to<br />
be the ultimate solution,” Heisenberg recalled. 28 As Ehrenfest told his students afterward, “Oh, it was delightful.” 29<br />
Einstein kept lobbing up clever thought experiments, both in sessions and in the informal discussions, designed to prove that quantum<br />
mechanics did not give a complete description of reality. He tried to show how, through some imagined contraption, it would be possible, at least in<br />
concept, to measure all of the characteristics of a moving particle, with certainty.<br />
For example, one of Einstein’s thought experiments involved a beam of electrons that is sent through a slit in a screen, and then the positions of