Why Does E=mc2_ - Brian Cox [16]
Albert Einstein is undoubtedly the iconic figure of modern science. His white, unkempt hair and sockless demeanor provide the contemporary shorthand for “professor”; ask a child to draw a scientist and she might well produce something that looks like the old Einstein. The ideas in this book are, however, the ideas of a young man. At the turn of the twentieth century, when Einstein was thinking about the nature of space and time, he was in his early twenties, with a young wife and family. He did not have an academic post at a university or research establishment, although he discussed physics regularly with a small group of friends, often late into the night. An unfortunate consequence of Einstein’s apparent isolation from the mainstream is the modern temptation to look upon him as a maverick who took on the scientific establishment and won; unfortunate because it provides inspiration to any number of crackpots who think they have single-handedly discovered a new theory of the universe and cannot understand why nobody will listen to them. In fact, Einstein was reasonably well connected to the scientific establishment, although it is true that he did not have an easy beginning to his academic career.
What is striking is his persistence in continuing to explore the important scientific problems of the day while being overlooked for university-level academic positions. On emerging from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich at the age of twenty-one, having qualified as a specialized teacher in science and mathematics, he took a series of temporary teaching positions that allowed him the time to work on his doctoral thesis. During 1901, while teaching at a private school in Schaffhausen in northern Switzerland, he submitted his doctoral thesis to the University of Zürich, which was rejected. Following that setback, Einstein moved to Bern and famously began his career as a technical expert, third class, in the Swiss patent office. The relative financial stability and freedom this afforded resulted in the most productive years of his life, and arguably the most productive years of any single scientist in history.
Most of this book deals with Einstein’s work leading up to and encompassing his golden year of 1905, in which he first wrote down E = mc2, was finally awarded his PhD, and completed a paper on the photoelectric effect, for which he eventually won the Nobel Prize. Remarkably, Einstein was still working at the patent office in 1906, where his reward for changing our view of the universe forever was to be promoted to technical expert, second class. He finally got a “proper” academic position in Bern in 1908. While one might be tempted to wonder what Einstein could have achieved if he had not been forced to relegate physics to a leisure pursuit during these years, he always looked back with immense fondness at his time in Bern. In his book Subtle Is the Lord, Einstein’s biographer and friend, Abraham Pais, described Einstein’s days at the patent office as “the closest he would ever come to paradise on earth,” because he had the time to think about physics.
Einstein’s inspiration on the road to E = mc2 was the mathematical beauty of Maxwell’s equations, which impressed him to such a degree that he decided to take seriously the prediction that the speed of light is a constant. Scientifically this doesn’t sound like too controversial a step: Maxwell’s equations were built on the foundation of Faraday’s experiments, and who are we to argue with the consequences? All that stands in our way is a prejudice against the notion that something can move at the same speed regardless of how fast