Quantum_ Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality - Manjit Kumar [169]
As fate would have it, his step-daughter Margot was staying in the same hospital. She saw Einstein twice and they chatted for a few hours. Hans Albert, who had arrived in America with his family in 1937, rushed from Berkeley in California to his father's bedside. For a while Einstein seemed better and asked for his notes, unable to abandon his search for a unified field theory even at the end. Shortly after 1am on 18 April, the aneurysm burst. After saying a few words in German that the night nurse could not understand, Einstein died. Later that day he was cremated, but not before his brain was removed and his ashes scattered at an undisclosed location. 'If everyone lived a life like mine there would be no need for novels', Einstein once wrote to his sister. The year was 1899 and he was twenty.91
'Except for the fact that he was the greatest physicist since Newton,' said Banesh Hoffmann, one of Einstein's Princeton assistants, 'one might almost say that he was not so much a scientist as an artist of science.'92 Bohr paid his own heartfelt tribute. He recognised Einstein's achievements to be 'as rich and fruitful as any in the whole history of our culture', and said that 'mankind will always be indebted to Einstein for the removal of the obstacles to our outlook which were involved in the primitive notions of absolute space and time. He gave us a world picture with a unity and harmony surpassing the boldest dreams of the past.'93
The Einstein-Bohr debate did not end with Einstein's death. Bohr would argue as if his old quantum foe were still alive: 'I can still see Einstein's smile, both knowing, humane and friendly.'94 Often his first thought when thinking about some fundamental issue in physics was to wonder what Einstein would have said about it. On Saturday, 17 November 1962, Bohr gave the last of five interviews concerning his role in the development of quantum physics. After lunch on Sunday, Bohr went to take his usual nap. When he called out, his wife Margrethe rushed to the bedroom and found him unconscious. Bohr, aged 77, had suffered a fatal heart attack. The last drawing on the blackboard in his study, made the night before as he replayed the argument over once more, was of Einstein's light box.
PART IV
DOES GOD PLAY DICE?
'I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details.'
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
Chapter 14
FOR WHOM BELL'S THEOREM TOLLS
'You believe in the God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order in a world which objectively exists, and which I, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture', Einstein wrote to Born in 1944.1 'I firmly believe, but I hope that someone will discover a more realistic way, or rather a more tangible basis than it has been my lot to find. Even the great initial success of quantum theory does not make me believe in the fundamental dice game, although I am well aware that our younger colleagues interpret this as a consequence of senility. No doubt the day will come when we shall see whose instinctive attitude was the correct one.' Twenty years passed before a discovery brought that day of judgement closer.
In 1964 the radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow detected the echo of the big bang; the evolutionary biologist Bill Hamilton published his theory of the genetic evolution of social behaviour; and the theoretical physicist Murray Gell-Mann predicted the existence of a new family of fundamental particles called quarks. These were just three of the landmark scientific breakthroughs that year. Yet according to the physicist and historian of science Henry Stapp, none rivalled Bell's theorem, 'the most profound discovery of science'.2 It was ignored.
Most physicists were too busy using quantum mechanics as it continued to notch up one success after another to be bothered about