einstein

something unusual yet useful with his money, and also because he had some odd theories of gravity that he wanted scientists to listen to, he
decided to fund an elite gathering of Europe’s top physicists. Scheduled for the end of October 1911, it eventually spawned a series of influential
meetings, known as Solvay Conferences, that were held sporadically over the ensuing years.
Twenty of Europe’s most famous scientists showed up at the Grand Hotel Metropole in Brussels. At 32, Einstein was the youngest. There was
Max Planck, Henri Poincaré, Marie Curie, Ernest Rutherford, and Wilhelm Wien. The chemist Walther Nernst organized the event and acted as
chaperone for the quirky Ernest Solvay. The kindly Hendrik Lorentz served as the chairman, as his fan Einstein put it, “with incomparable tact and
unbelievable virtuosity.” 27
The focus of the conference was “the quantum problem,” and Einstein was asked to present a paper on that topic, making him one of only eight
“particularly competent members” thus honored. He expressed some annoyance, perhaps a bit more feigned than real, about the prestigious
assignment. He dubbed the upcoming meeting “the witch’s Sabbath” and complained to Besso, “My twaddle for the Brussels conference weighs
down on me.” 28
Einstein’s talk was titled “The Present State of the Problem of Specific Heats.” Specific heat—the quantity of energy required to increase the
temperature of a specific amount of substance by a certain amount—had been a specialty of Einstein’s former professor and antagonist at the
Zurich Polytechnic, Heinrich Weber. Weber had discovered some anomalies, especially at low temperatures, in the laws that were supposed to
govern specific heat. Beginning in late 1906, Einstein had come up with what he called a “quantized” approach to the problem by surmising that the
atoms in each substance could absorb energy only in discrete packets.
In his 1911 Solvay lecture, Einstein put these issues into the larger context of the so-called quantum problem. Was it possible, he asked, to avoid
accepting the physical reality of these atomistic particles of light, which were like bullets aimed at the heart of Maxwell’s equations and, indeed, all
of classical physics?
Planck, who had pioneered the concept of the quanta, continued to insist that they came into play only when light was being emitted or absorbed.
They were not a real-world feature of light itself, he argued. Einstein, in his talk to the conference, sorrowfully demurred: “These discontinuities,
which we find so distasteful in Planck’s theory, seem really to exist in nature.” 29
Really to exist in nature. It was, for Einstein, an odd phrase. To a pure proponent of Mach, or for that matter of Hume, the whole phrase “really to
exist in nature” lacked clear meaning. In his special relativity theory, Einstein had avoided assuming the existence of such things as absolute time
and absolute distance, because it seemed meaningless to say that they “really” existed in nature when they couldn’t be observed. But henceforth,
during the more than four decades in which he would express his discomfort with quantum theory, he increasingly sounded like a scientific realist,
someone who believed that an underlying reality existed in nature that was independent of our ability to observe or measure it.
When he was finished, Einstein faced a barrage of challenges from Lorentz, Planck, Poincaré, and others. Some of what Einstein said, Lorentz
rose to point out,“seems in fact to be totally incompatible with Maxwell’s equations.”
Einstein agreed, perhaps too readily, that “the quantum hypothesis is provisional” and that it “does not seem compatible with the experimentally
verified conclusions of the wave theory.” Somehow it was necessary, he told his questioners, to accommodate both wave and particle approaches
to the understanding of light. “In addition to Maxwell’s electrodynamics, which is essential to us, we must also admit a hypothesis such as that of
quanta.” 30
It was unclear, even to Einstein, whether Planck was persuaded of the reality of quanta. “I largely succeeded in convincing Planck that my
conception is correct, after he has struggled against it for so many years,” Einstein wrote his friend Heinrich Zangger. But a week later, Einstein
gave Zangger another report: “Planck stuck stubbornly to some undoubtedly wrong preconceptions.”
As for Lorentz, Einstein remained as admiring as ever: “A living work of art! He was in my opinion the most intelligent of the theoreticians
present.” He dismissed Poincaré, who paid little attention to him, with a brusque stroke: “Poincaré was simply negative in general, and, all his
acumen notwithstanding, he showed little grasp of the situation.” 31
Overall he gave low marks to the conference, where most of the time was spent bewailing rather than resolving quantum theory’s threat to
classical mechanics. “The congress in Brussels resembled the lamentations on the ruins of Jerusalem,” he wrote Besso. “Nothing positive has
come out of it.” 32
There was one interesting sideshow for Einstein: the romance between the widowed Marie Curie and the married Paul Langevin. Dignified and
dedicated, Madame Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize; she shared the 1903 physics prize with her husband and one other scientist
for their work on radiation. Three years later, her husband was killed by a horse-drawn wagon. She was bereft, and so was her late husband’s
protégé, Langevin, who taught physics at the Sorbonne with the Curies. Langevin was trapped in a marriage with a wife who physically abused him,
and soon he and Marie Curie were having an affair in a Paris apartment. His wife had someone break into it and steal their love letters.
Just as the Solvay Conference was getting under way, with both Curie and Langevin in attendance, the purloined letters began appearing in a
Paris tabloid as a prelude to a sensational divorce case. In addition, at that very moment, it was announced that Curie had won the Nobel Prize in
chemistry, for discovering radium and polonium.* A member of the Swedish Academy wrote her to suggest that she not appear to receive it, given
the furor raised by her relationship with Langevin, but she coolly responded, “I believe there is no connection between my scientific work and the
facts of private life.” She headed to Stockholm and accepted the prize. 33
The whole furor seemed silly to Einstein. “She is an unpretentious, honest person,” he said, with “a sparkling intelligence.” He also rather bluntly
came to the conclusion, not justified, that she was not pretty enough to wreck anyone’s marriage. “Despite her passionate nature,” he said, “she is
not attractive enough to represent a danger to anyone.” 34
More gracious was the sturdy letter of support he sent her later that month:
Do not laugh at me for writing you without having anything sensible to say. But I am so enraged by the base manner in which the public is
presently daring to concern itself with you that I absolutely must give vent to this feeling. I am impelled to tell you how much I have come to
admire your intellect, your drive, and your honesty, and that I consider myself lucky to have made your personal acquaintance in Brussels.
Anyone who does not number among these reptiles is certainly happy, now as before, that we have such personages among us as you, and
Langevin too, real people with whom one feels privileged to be in contact. If the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply don’t
read that hogwash, but rather leave it to the reptile for whom it has been fabricated. 35
Enter Elsa