Quantum_ Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality - Manjit Kumar [18]
Part of the problem was that Planck thought he could get rid of the quantum. He only realised the far-reaching consequences of what he had done much later. His deep conservative instincts compelled him to try for the best part of a decade to incorporate the quantum into the existing framework of physics. He knew that some of his colleagues saw this as bordering on a tragedy. 'But I feel differently about it', Planck wrote.64 'I now know for a fact that the elementary quantum of action [h] played a far more significant part in physics that I had originally been inclined to suspect.'
Years after Planck's death in 1947, at the age of 89, his former student and colleague James Franck recalled watching his hopeless struggle 'to avoid quantum theory, [to see] whether he could not at least make the influence of quantum theory as little as it could possibly be'.65 It was clear to Franck that Planck 'was a revolutionary against his own will' who 'finally came to the conclusion, "It doesn't help. We have to live with quantum theory. And believe me, it will expand."'66 It was a fitting epitaph for a reluctant revolutionary.
Physicists did have to learn to 'live with' the quantum. The first to do so was not one of Planck's distinguished peers, but a young man living in Bern, Switzerland. He alone realised the radical nature of the quantum. He was not a professional physicist, but a junior civil servant whom Planck credited with the discovery that energy itself is quantised. His name was Albert Einstein.
Chapter 2
THE PATENT SLAVE
Bern, Switzerland, Friday, 17 March 1905. It was nearly eight o'clock in the morning as the young man dressed in the unusual plaid suit hurried to work clutching an envelope. To a passer-by, Albert Einstein appeared to have forgotten that he was wearing a pair of wornout green slippers with embroidered flowers.1 At the same time six days a week, he left his wife and baby son, Hans Albert, behind in their small two-room apartment in the middle of Bern's picturesque Old Town quarter, and walked to the rather grand sandstone building ten minutes away. With its famous clock tower, the Zytloggeturm, and arcades lining both sides of the cobbled street, Kramgasse was one of the most beautiful streets in the Swiss capital. Lost in thought, Einstein hardly noticed his surroundings as he made his way to the administrative headquarters of the Federal Post and Telephone Service. Once inside he headed straight for the stairs and the third floor that housed the Federal Office of Intellectual Property, better known as the Swiss Patent Office. Here he and the dozen other technical experts, men in more sober dark suits, laboured at their desks for eight hours a day sorting out the barely viable from the fatally flawed.
Three days earlier, Einstein had celebrated his 26th birthday. He had been a 'patent slave', as he called it, for nearly three years.2 For him the job brought to an end 'the annoying business of starving'.3 The work itself he enjoyed for its variety, the 'many-sided thinking' it encouraged and the relaxed atmosphere of the office. It was an environment Einstein later referred to as his 'worldly monastery'. Although the post of technical expert, third class, was a humble one, it was well-paid and allowed him time enough to pursue his own research. Despite the watchful eye of his boss, the formidable Herr Haller, Einstein spent so much time between examining patents secretly doing his own calculations that his desk had become his 'office for theoretical physics'.4
'It was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere, upon which one could have built', was how Einstein recalled feeling after reading