The Genius of Einstein: The Science, His Brain, the Man

thank you, it's a pleasure to be here good evening albert

einstein

once said that there were only two things that could be infinite: the universe and human stupidity and he went on to say that he had no confidence that the universe was infinite now that we hear that you know, we We chuckle or at least smile, but what we don't do is nobody is insulted by it, nobody is offended by it and the reason, of course, is that when we hear those words correctly, we see Albert Einstein, correctly, we see that warmth. With heart, that kindly vungular sage of an earlier era, we see the wild-haired, starry-eyed

genius

, whose iconic images, from riding a bicycle to sticking out his tongue to getting lost in pensive thoughts, all of these images are stamped into our collective cultural memory and the story of Einstein, at least the version we tell when we retell the story of the boy who could barely speak until he was three, four, or five or the young student who failed in school or the brash young graduate who is sent to college. patent office, I mean, this is a matter of myth-making and then the storm of creative thought that flows forward that launches quantum mechanics, the special theory of relativity, the general theory of relativity, which completely rewrites our understanding of space and time. and matter and energy, I mean, as a physicist, I've studied these ideas intensely, I've taught them, I've spent decades with colleagues trying to push these ideas forward, and I have to tell you, they never lose their wonder, I mean.

I am as amazed today at what Einstein found as I was when I first encountered these ideas 30 or 40 years ago. So how did he get it right? Is it his personality? Is it perspiration? Is it a potent mix of

brain

physiology coupled with the particular scientific moment in which he came on the scene, that's all, I mean what was happening in Einstein's life when he was coming up with all these amazing ideas and how his discovery has held up the test of time. Well, these are some of the questions we ask ourselves. We're going to explore here tonight on tonight's show, a show that we at the world

science

festival are proud to co-present with 92nd Street Why and are honored to have tonight's discussion led by legal correspondent and NBC News Senior Investigator. former ABC News Nightline host, two-time Emmy Award winner, so join me in bringing Cynthia Mcfadden to the stage.

Nice to see you. I feel like we should reveal all the information. I come here as a journalist and someone once said she was just the little boy. on the street I wanted to be the first to run down the street and say guess what I know well tonight I don't know much I want to reveal that I had to drop out of college I had to drop out of the physical class from poets for poets, okay I couldn't stand it, so I hope to learn a lot tonight. I certainly have a lot of questions, Brian, it's always great to be with you and welcome everyone to Einstein's Genius. i want to start with a quote a quote from professor

einstein

this is what he said i want to know how god created the world i am not interested in this or that phenomenon in the spectrum of this or that element i want to know your thoughts on the rest There are details so Tonight we are going to explore Einstein's

genius

from three perspectives: who he was as a human being, what he gave scientifically to the world, and also what neuro

science

can tell us about the human

brain

.

We brought together three people who have spent a lot of time thinking about these things, you already met Brian Greene to talk about Einstein, the man I would like to introduce you to. Author, filmmaker and science professor at MIT. He has produced more than a dozen scientific documentaries and written five books. including newton and the forger and einstein in berlin, welcome to thomas levinson. It's great that you're joining us too. He is a professor of neurology and ophthalmology at the Robert Wood Johnson School of Medicine at Rutgers University. His areas of research range from abnormal eye movements to Albert's brain itself.

Einstein, so please join me in welcoming Dr. Frederick Lapore, Ph.D. Hello, let's get straight to the topic. Let's start with the year 1905. It was known as Einstein's Anna Mirabilis. His miraculous year, Brian guided us. Yes, that was an incredible period of intellectual fervor. It's hard to compare, it's hard to even imagine that kind of scientific outpouring happening, so Einstein wrote a lot of papers that year, four of them were absolutely amazing, one of them launched quantum mechanics, one of them established the existence of atoms and two that I think have captured our imagination more than any other if their articles had to do with the special theory of relativity, we'll get into that as we go, but what do I mean by having this kind of creative period? in the rest of his life at that time, well, Einstein in 1905 was in some ways really at a disadvantage and in some ways I think he himself would have said that he had this great opportunity, he was at a disadvantage because for a variety of reasons, you know , failed completely. to get the kind of university job or actually get into graduate school, since then it wasn't exactly like we do now after he finished his physics degree at Switzerland's premier technical institution, Zurich Polytechnic, it just alienated their teachers.

He didn't bother to pay attention to things that didn't interest him. All you know is the kind of student you'd expect Einstein to be, so he didn't get any help from him when he graduated and was in the desert, he taught. algebra for high school students for a while, that must have gone very well, can you imagine being, can you imagine Einstein, you know, saying that I couldn't figure out a quadratic equation under Einstein's very embarrassing expression, so he's at a disadvantage , on the other hand, he has this job at the patent office where he was looking at technical material all the time he was learning to visualize physical situations and he had um partly because he wasn't really a big family man, he spent a lot of time Even though he was married and had a young son, he had great freedom to think and I think that's one of the things you see in Einstein after he gets a job in the patent office and really starts to adjust to being some kind of adult.

He really begins to develop the characteristic that he would have for the rest of his life, which was this extraordinary ability to concentrate no matter what was happening around him. Would it be fair to say that his life was chaotic and that in his scientific life he was searching for more order, I think that is certainly true and Einstein himself wrote this in what he called his autobiographical note many years later. It is certainly true that Einstein saw in science and escape from these are his words. The purely personal there was this great territory out there.

Don't think that his life was terribly chaotic in 1905. I think he was a solid, you know, young bourgeois Swiss citizen who went to work every day. A little boy hiking in the hills with his friends. It was, you know, Einstein, the young man, it wasn't him. eccentric bohemian genius, you later found out, as Brian said, we had this image of Einstein. Einstein at 25 26 was a guy who went to work and worked on his hobby in his free time and his hobby turned out to be revolutionizing the world of physics. Hey, he loved to play the violin and Fred, one of the things you've learned from looking at his brain is that you can understand something, you can tell us what we can understand by looking at his brain, come on.

There he was a talented musician and he loved playing the violin, he loved playing duets and, again, Dean Faulk, who is the person who did the anatomy and a couple of articles that I contributed to. He has the discovery of a species of us. I'll show a picture later, but it looks like a knob, it looks like an omega sign, an elaboration of your motor cortex on the right side and for someone who is playing with their left hand we now know primarily from neuroimaging that there are many musicians who have this type of elaboration in their cortex that is seen in people who use left-handed strings, so does the command come before being a musician or does being a musician create the command?

That's a great question that we don't know that we don't I don't know, come on, you're a scientist, you're supposed to know these things well, you would have to create a serial neuroimaging, uh, for pure research purposes, you know, it starts with a six year old kid and yeah it's cool no one's done it I mean it looks like a science experiment you can do no you need the funding you need the funding I mean I hate to say he'll be out afterwards yeah you know , you say, listen, I want to present this idea. Six-year-olds with cortical protrusions become violin prodigies.

You may be able to do that or do wonders, but you develop a goatee and it can be a little of both. I mean, I think if anything has changed in my life in the conception of neuroscience it is plasticity and you can improve your wiring by learning experiences, so the question is do you spend those ten thousand hours or whatever, developing a skill with your hand? left, could you really see tangible changes on the surface of the crust? I'm sure all we know is that he had the cortical button on the right side of his brain.

Okay, now I take a deep breath and I say, Brian, explain what special relativity is. This is easy for you and hard for me, yeah, so you know it's a The funny thing is that special relativity is one of the mathematically simplest ideas, just using high school algebra, but it's one of the most conceptual breaks. deep, so it is difficult for all of us to understand these ideas so roughly around the year 1905, a few years ago. Before there was a lot of discussion and confusion related to light and its speed and the question was: could the speed of light depend on the source emitting the light and could it depend on the movement of the person receiving it? was to take this cup of coffee and throw it at you at, say, three miles per hour, actually I'm not going to do that, that's just the idea of ​​the Gdonkin experiment, as Einstein called it, so I throw it at you three miles per hour. hour and you will receive it. at that speed it's obvious that if you run towards me the cup will appear to approach you from your perspective more quickly and if you run away it will approach less quickly and that's a basic intuition about how movement works, but as it turned out with light, it seemed that that was not the case, if I shoot a laser beam at you, it will approach you at 300,000 kilometers per second regardless of whether you are sitting, running towards me or away from me at that moment. a lot of people weren't ready to accept that kind of idea, they would come up with all kinds of twisted notions to try to get around it, but einstein was the kind of thinker who would just go out and see the facts very clearly and throw away the preconceived notions and let's say, see, that's the case, the speed of light is constant and you just have to accept that the problem is that if you think about it, if the speed of light is constant, that means it's behaving strangely relative to the experience and speed, what is the speed?

It's how far something goes divided by how long it takes to get there, so it's space over time, so if velocity behaves strangely, then space and time behave strangely and Einstein tried it and He found out how strange he was behaving, that's what he especially solved. relativity raise your hand if you could repeat that I don't know if I could repeat that then it is the relationship between spaces yes exactly he discovers that there is this type of dance in which space and time participate where they go back and forth between each other to keep constant the speed of light and he makes that idea precise and mathematical, so if you want to discover and get an idea of ​​how this notion of constant speed of light affects time, we would love to use this little example here.

It is called a light clock, it is actually like a wristwatch, it ticks, ticks, it is a way of measuring elapsed time where we can see the internal mechanism of the clock. You can use any watch you want, but they are not as transparent. like this and for our purposes, you can use it to quickly arrive at Einstein's conclusion, which is that time slows down when a clock is moving. Now, if you want, I can show you that, but I'll leave it up to you if you want to see it. I say yes, okay, then part of you is not going to throw the cup at me, no, the cupcake, well, I can throw it to you, okay, not yet, okay, but, then, what we want to do now is take two of these light clocks and we want one of them to move in relation to the other so that the one on the right sets it in motion here is the thing, look at the trajectory of that ball of light, it goes on a double diagonal trajectory in comparison with the straight line up. and downward trajectory of the clock on the left side now, if the speed of light is constant and yet for it to tick on the moving clock, it has to go further because that double diagonal is longer.

Look at the time on the moving clock. clock compared to the station, if you could run it again to see it in action, look at the counter on themoving clock compared to the stationary one and you will see that time passes more slowly simply because the speed of light is constant but the ball has to go further on the moving clock to achieve the longest trajectory tick tock tick to the same speed it will tick less fast time slows down that little demonstration einstein did math again it's high school algebra and that transforms our Understanding of time before everyone thought since Newton that there is a universal clock that keeps time second after second after second and drags us all forward in time at exactly the same rate, regardless of what we do.

Regardless of how we are moving, Einstein shows that if I get up and start walking, my watch will compare to yours. , if you look at it, it will mark time more slowly, more slowly, time is not universal, time is in the eye of the beholder and it depends. about the movement of the spectator that is crazy but true this was the beginning of quantum mechanics quantum mechanics is a different story that we could get into but that reaction is perfect in 1905 he did this yes and he did the first article he wrote the first article on quantum mechanics and they are completely separate, let us be clear, it's crazy, well yeah, quantum mechanics is a completely different story and you know, in two sentences, it's a theory that applies to the microworld and it starts with the article by Einstein goes through a lot of development, but eventually a point is reached where we learn from the quantum law that no definite results can be predicted in any experiment.

You can only predict the probability of one outcome or another. An electron can be predicted to be here with a 30 percent probability and a 20 percent probability here. 50 here that is a completely different perspective of reality compared again to what Newton gave us Newton says tell me how things are and I will use my mathematics to predict what they will be like in the future and quantum theory says that is the wrong way to think. in it, all you can do is predict the probability of one outcome or another again, a set of completely crazy ideas that are confirmed by experiments and yes, you follow the intellectual trail of quantum theory and it leads you directly to Einstein's paper 1905, which is the one for which he got the Nobel Prize, so just a couple of things as grace notes to what Brian said first, the article that is there, has skipped over a little bit about the existence and dimensions of the atoms and molecules. of the 1905 articles is the most cited and the reason is that it has the most direct practical applications, it is applied to children's questions such as why the sky is blue, which Einstein actually answered in another article in 1910, but it is also used to do things like exercise. the mathematics of mixing paint, so this article is often not discussed in a way, you know, because especially because relativity and quantum mechanics are so important, uh, it was in itself, you know, this surprising result, um , but the other thing I just want to say. is that umbrian said that one of einstein's gifts as a genius was the ability to look at facts as they are and follow them where they led, even if they altered preconceived ideas that einstein himself might have had and this was true even within The quantum theory, I mean, famously, Einstein didn't really like quantum mechanics in its fully developed form, but he didn't stop doing quantum theory in 1905, he continued to make important contributions to quantum theory for another two decades and even made the first articles that really looked at the fact that in the microworld you would have an essential, irreducible element of randomness.

He posted this. This material began to be published in 1916-17 and he wrote a letter to a colleague, I think it was. max was born a close friend and a great physicist, a nobel prize winner in his own right, and he said, you know, i wouldn't want to give up causality, but there it is, um, and when you think about einstein, uh, in his, in his um, just the kind of mind he was and the kind of attributes that made him such a powerful thinker, on the one hand, is his ability to continue to see facts as they are, consider their implications and follow them wherever they want, and It is notable that This was not in some sense an infinite resource.

He was able to do it with quantum theory for a long time and he got to a point where not only because he was getting older and less flexible, although that was part of it, but because in a sense he was also prone to thinking about things that made him liked him had a taste in physics he had things he liked he had ideas that he responded to more than others and there was a point when physics moved away from the center of his affections but before he did that and even I mean even after he was still an incredibly formidable thinker but before he did that he was simply amazing I want to go back to the brain in just a second but first let's go to Berlin 1914 almost a decade After these incredible articles come out, the politics and circumstances surrounding Einstein's life in At that time, let's talk a little with Brian about how these circumstances affected his thinking and his productivity as a scientist.

Well, I think Tom can probably talk more about the surrounding influences. but berlin was the time when he kept track of the general theory of relativity spent some time in prague moved back to zurich and finally went to berlin i think it was in the spring of 1914 went to berlin and started to really think in general relativity in Zurich in 1912 and makes some progress towards the general theory of relativity, but it is in Berlin where it really begins to come together and on November 19, 1915 we are at the centenary of that momentous month. he gives four lectures at the prussian academy of sciences where week after week after week he gets closer and closer and finally on november 25th he writes the field equations of the general theory of relativity so tom set the stage for us, i mean, he's being courted to Berlin even though he's Jewish, well this is 1914, I mean one of the things Brian said at the beginning, you know, we have this image of Einstein at the end of his life and we push it back to the beginning .

We have this image of Germany in the 20th century and you know the Germany of the post-World War I period and then the Hitler period is very, very different from the last days of imperial Germany, which is what you had before. at the beginning of the war, so yes, there was anti-Semitism all over Europe, but it was, you know, gentle anti-Semitism and for Einstein it really wasn't a big deal, you know, it just didn't, it didn't really register with him. However, he was courted to go to Berlin in what was really a deal. I mean, Einstein saw it that way.

He was clearly one of the strongest, if not the most preeminent, theoretical physicists in Europe and Berlin, Germany in general. Berlin was the center of European science. It was, and certainly for physics, I mean, it was an incredible collection of people who were working in the Prussian academy in the various institutes, so Berlin said we want you to add luster to our establishment and we'll take you there without teaching responsibilities. . great salary your own institute you know support for things you would like an expedition to test your evolutionary theory of gravity um once you come and he said it's fine even though, among other things, his wife really hated the idea, uh , it was what you know, look the idea of ​​institutions courting star academics is not exactly strange, I mean, it happens occasionally nowadays, and that's really what happened and I think Einstein didn't have any thoughts of politics at that time. moment, I mean, it's hard to remember how The implausible First World War existed until you know, days before declarations of war worked, it certainly became political, oh, it became political because of the war, no not beforehand, it was and was explicitly the reaction of his German scientific colleagues to the outbreak of the world war.

The first war that triggered his political instincts was a famous manifesto from '93 in which 93 prominent German intellectuals signed this document that said that Germany is not to blame for the war we are bringing, the civilization it brings, we are not as bad as the English and French who are lying with Mongols and Slavs, I mean, uh, it was really horrible and it was once again, in retrospect, it seems oh, of course they would do that, that's how German, but for Einstein it was a complete surprise that his educated colleagues, you know, literate poetry, quotes from physics, would join this manifesto and express such nationalism when again science was his retreat from the merely personal science was something that was international or supranational, he hated it and it became political almost From the beginning.

I know the first moments of the war, so in this stew the general theory of general relativity comes out. Yes, yes, no, you exactly know that and it really was the result of almost 10 full years of struggle to try to discover the force of gravity. That's what the general theory of relativity is all about and it's funny to think about because almost none of us today could even imagine spending 10 years on a single problem. I mean, you try to go back to get your grant renewed when I haven't made any progress on this problem you set for yourself and it's not going to go particularly well.

I mean, you know, if I'm submitting a grant proposal and I get rejected, you know, and this is the kind of thing that at least today would happen, so I had an amazing ability to stay with a problem and this question of how it works Gravity, which is really the question that's driving you to get it right, is something that you spend 10 years on and finally not only come up with a beautiful answer, but it's a beautiful mathematical encapsulation of that answer, so which is the answer? Well, you know, we all know that Newton basically said that you have the sun, you have the earth and there is this force of gravity that keeps the earth in orbit, but Einstein is very aware and Newton was also aware that Newton never told no one how that force is communicated, so Einstein looks at this situation as others might have for 200 years, nothing changed again, he just looked at the same thing everyone else looked at and so what? you have the sun you have the earth what is between them space then it has to be that space in some way is what communicates the force of gravity so this little image gives an idea of ​​what it is so here is 3D space and Einstein's idea is that space is not curved, it is something flat if there is no matter or energy, but if you incorporate a body like the sun, Einstein tells us that the structure of space, in fact, space-time curves and It's that curvature that keeps objects in orbit, so look. on the moon around the earth, the earth is warping the environment and the moon is staying in orbit because space pushes it keeping it rolling along this valley in this curved environment and if you zoom out from this image you see that the Earth stays in orbit for exactly the same reason, that's what Einstein says, that's how gravity works and he didn't even have graphs, think about it, yeah, I know how he did it, how he did his public lectures, I don't know.

I know, but it's true, and the wonderful thing is that there is a mathematical version of this, which again is the part that is hardest to communicate if you don't study mathematics, but when we look at that equation, I wish we had. I don't think we have it, but you know it's this beautiful little equation r mu nu minus half g meanwhile, because a pig g over c for the fourth team is beautiful, look, come on, there you go, you can give it back to us and when we look at it , is one of the most amazing compact formulas that describes gravity in terms of deformations and curves, the geometry of space and time.

Many people consider this moment in November 1915 as the peak moment in Einstein's scientific career. How can we know? It's true, how can we know it's true? Yes, it's a good question. And for Einstein we can answer it. For more modern things, it's more difficult, but for Einstein he realizes that there are several ways you can test this. The first is in November of 1915 before you can put this off for a second, you realize that there is an enigma that I believe you just wrote a book about and the enigma has to do with the movement of the planet Mercury, so that people have known for a long time.

At a time when Mercury's orbit was not closing in on itself the way Newtonian physics said it should, it was drifting a little 43 arcseconds per century, a small change and no one could understand why some suggested that maybe there was another planet called Vulcan. that was out there driving the motion of mercury and you have a beautiful book coming out that will tell people all about this, but Einstein says that doesn't make much sense to me, let me recalculate the motion of mercury using my new equations. Sit down. He does the calculation and by his own account when he looked at the result he had heart palpitations thatThey lasted for hours because the math showed the same response that the observers had, so that was a really key moment for Einstein, in fact, there is a quota, maybe you know. what is it but it says something like something broke inside me that was the moment when he knew that he had looked at reality in a way that no one had before but a real test is not too retro it is not to retrodict it is to predict something that no one has seen before and that is where this wonderful little document appears that I think you caught our attention.

I've never seen this before. It's lovely. Can you bring it back? That note may not be there. So, I mean, do you want to? describe this, sure, this is Einstein went through this enormous struggle to get to general relativity um and uh, I'll ask Brian to tell me if this is true, but basically, uh, starting in 1913 he got help with the mathematics that They were his. A mathematician friend told him that it was too deep and too difficult for physicists. um Grossman talked about it, yeah, you're the Riemann tensor. He said physicists stay away from it exactly and that led Einstein to look at it, of course, it was perfect and they worked. he discovered this amazing theory that had um uh matter and energy warping space and time, except it wasn't that they were warping.

I knew that time warped under gravitation at that point, but I still wasn't sure about space and I knew even at that stage of the theory that if you saw gravitation as spacetime warping matter, then anything that travel through spacetime, including light itself, would have to be deflected in the presence of a large gravitational field, a large dent. in space-time and that's what he's drawing here and what this letter is about is in 1913 he realized this has a number it's the wrong number turns out he'll figure it out later um but he's sending a note to the The astronomer American solar telescope George Ellery Hale, who among other things built the largest American telescope, the largest telescopes in the world for about 30 years, but Hale was not a deep space astronomer, but a solar astronomer, and Einstein wanted to know if there was any way of all that, you could actually test this in daylight and the answer was hail, unfortunately it was reported no, but it turns out that you can take this idea further, which Einstein later did and realized which during a solar eclipse, when the moon obscures the sun, can be seen. distant stars and according to these ideas of general relativity the light from the distant star should travel in a curved path on its way to the earth being deflected by the sun and that would therefore change the apparent position of the star in the sky, so if during a solar eclipse you could take photographs of the stars in the background and compare their positions with where they appeared six months earlier, when the sun was on the other side of the earth and having no influence on the path of starlight, a small change would be evident if Einstein's ideas are correct, it is a small angular difference, but Einstein was able to calculate what it would be, so that is the proof, well, that is the proposal, so you have They had to go out and make the measurements, and the measurements were made in 1919, two teams went to Brazil and left. on the west coast of Africa and took these photographs as best they could.

There are various technical problems with the weather and so on, but finally in September 1919 the data was analyzed and the people who did the analysis were convinced that the data established Einstein's theory and they sent a telegram to Einstein and Einstein sees that the result is positive and he is with the student at the moment the telegram arrives ilsa schneider and she tells him what professor einstein would have said if the results had not agreed with the general theory of relativity einstein says that he would have felt sorry for the dear lord because the theory is correct, as he thinks, so you could say he was the most famous scientist and he is still possibly the most famous scientist, one of the most famous men who ever lived and he is not. a very high bar we should say, but yeah it's not, so I'm interested in how he saw himself at the time and I'm interested in his brain, I mean it's worth noting that Einstein actually had his own brain . they did an e-e-g ekg of his brain, they did an eeg of his brain, I mean, it's hard to translate anatomy to the guy's personality, but the guy was holy, he had it, uh, in the sense that he was very modest , that is, over and over again.

He has an incredible reputation, but he wasn't a tough negotiator when he came to the United States to work at the institute for advanced studies and you know, I think in the end if you want to bring it back to the brain, one of the, you know, was cremated and I think one of the reasons he was cremated was because he was worried that his people would want artifacts from a saint and he was right, at the time of his autopsy, forget about the brain, his ophthalmologist removed his eyes and they never saw me again. and he was his own ophthalmologist and he was right.

I'm glad we don't have that picture, yeah, yeah, I don't have a picture of that, sorry, but you know. He was a very modest guy who lived in a world of ideas and yet when he comes back to America, a lot of people talk about these next 30 years as the lost years and I'm fascinated by this man with this huge brain who has these thoughts that they are unimaginable to most of us and they are even proven some of them some of them well maybe not yet never made peace with quantum mechanics never made peace with it but but what about those years when you finally get being lord in princeton, so tell us about that, well, it became, you know, from its beginnings in the anti-war policy in Germany during the great war, so, the great war, you know, it went on to develop a very much more espacious. and I think overall it's a set of humanist policies and he was a keen observer of what was happening in Germany, you know, it included threats to himself personally, I mean, he once said he didn't know he was Jewish until his German enemies taught him that's a paraphrase, but he was pretty close to it, um, so he was keeping an eye on Hitler's rise at first, like most sensible people, um, he thought Hitler had no staying power , he said, you know, Hitler is resurrected. to power again a paraphrase about the German people's empty stomachs and you know, when things get better, it will disappear, but in 3132 it became very clear to him that Hitler was a deep and immediate danger. to germany and the jews in germany in particular and that it might not be sustainable for him to stay and at that time he already had an agreement with caltech to do a three year semester as a visiting professor and she would come to america every year and I think you know that one night in mid-1932 he was thinking that he might not return from his next visit to Caltech and it was in that circumstance that uh Flexner, the magnate, the imp, the intellectual entrepreneur who created the institute for advanced studies and decided that he would try to get the most famous name in science to put his new institute on the map and made an offer to Einstein and I think Caltech was hoping to get it and was surprised when they didn't especially know that the institute for advanced studies is now an extraordinary place with a great reputation , all these people who have been there, but then it was, it was an empty field in Princeton, in the loan district in the on the campus of the university there was nothing, I was just starting out um and I think Einstein at that time had Having been very worldly and very involved in big city affairs, I think he really appreciated the opportunity to get away from the madness of Europe and go to a place that he had his doubts about, but which was what Princeton called land of demigods. insignificant on stilts in a letter soon after, but why did Princeton end?

I guess I think he liked the peace and quiet. I think in a sense he liked the isolation. I think he was beginning to really value both the ability to focus on what he was interested in and perhaps some distance from a community of physics that was no longer interested in things that he valued and that he did well. he seemed less and less interested in his vision of the proper path for physics in the future, so it's fair to say that Brian was less productive during these years, oh yes, enormously, so I mean, between 1933 and when he died in the year 55, wrote a There are many articles, but the ones we really remember, there are only a small handful of them.

The one you mentioned earlier, his work that was aimed at trying to use the mathematics of quantum mechanics to destroy quantum mechanics in some sense, but ultimately he didn't. But it didn't turn out that way, in fact, he just revealed and emphasized one of the totally strange features of quantum mechanics called quantum entanglement, in 1935. He wrote another interesting paper in 1939, but throughout the process he was looking for a real prize which was the unified theory and this was a direct extension of everything he had achieved when he was young, so remember that in 1905 he is in the patent office, he is an outsider to the establishment and he comes up with these new ideas of special relativity that put everything upside down. and then they bring him into the system, but he's still a very independent thinker ten years later, the general theory of relativity, you know, it's an amazing discovery, but now it's right in the middle of science in the established traditional sense and it's as if at that moment, you are trying to use all the techniques and methods that served you so powerfully when you were young and you simply repeat that same approach over and over again, but the methods were no longer suitable for the next task that required the next task. other ideas and that's why he doesn't really make any progress towards the unified theory, so I want to go back to the idea of ​​genius.

Was he simply a comet that exploded after 2011 1905? I mean, was this it? because his brain, I mean, he overdid it and now he's resting, it was because, what or I mean, the human brain only has a certain capacity and he used it and then some of what? Well, I think scientists like Einstein and mathematicians in particular. They have a track record and tend to have their greatest achievements at a young age, why, um, maybe flexibility or it's hard to absorb newer ideas, we like to think that none of that is really true. Einstein Einstein begins to make interesting publications and in fact published his first articles. in 1904 and were once dismissed as completely inconsequential items, they're not, they're the pillars of some of what he's going to do next and continue to do really first-class work, you know, Nobel Prize or near-Nobel quality work.

Nobel Prize. until 1925, when he was 46 years old. Is that so? Something like that was born in 1879, yes, sir, so you have a 20-year career producing, you know, cutting-edge material again, as Brian said, just on the outside, you know his last articles were about statistics and statistics of a very profound and important way that they really were, I mean, he, he, no, he knocked right on the door of modern quantum mechanical theory with those things in 1925, it's an amazing thing, he made a prediction that really only developed in those articles that's where the Bose Einstein condensate predicts, which is this new state of matter that happens when things get really cold and you know, quantum scale objects stop behaving like quantum objects and become macroscopic objects and these They are incredibly weird and difficult ideas that involve leaps. from mathematics to imagination, to actual physical intuition, I mean, it's extraordinary stuff 20 years after he did the things we started talking about, so it's not like you know he went down after a great year that had. a career that was better than almost anyone can sustain, okay, true, but it still ends.

I guess that's the question about genius, I'm serious, it doesn't run out or you know, it's finally released. a problem that was insoluble, which is the theory of everything, I mean there are people you know Whitton in high school, you know they are still trying to solve it with unverifiable results in the environment, so it's possible that he finally bit More than I could chew. It is not a shame, but he did not know that until the day he died he was not able to achieve a unification of the strong force, the electromagnetism of the weak force and gravity was not going to happen and he was somewhat marginalized due to the history of quantum mechanics who never could accept it, he was fighting with bohr and he said and he said this is an incomplete description of reality, he just never could deal with quantum mechanics and they marginalized him, so I don't know if that's what what do you know.

You're running out of neural steam or you're picking fights you can't win, on the other hand, he becomes like this folk hero legend symbol, although he may not have been as productive and I think we all have to agree that it was. He is not as productive as he was inat the wailing wall and I despised them, I mean their private writings about it, it's just that you know, it's really these people are crazy, they're lost in time, this kind of thing, um, at the same time, He really felt a very strong sensation. that the fact that the universe was ordered and that that order was accessible to human reason was a profoundly beautiful and mysterious fact of life, right, and he was perfectly willing to talk about it in terms that were compatible with broader discussions about religion, so he used god in many different scenarios, he is the word god in the concept of a super ordering power, uh, in all kinds of ways, again it could be satirical, he didn't believe in a design, no, i didn't believe in the god of abraham isaac and jacob or jesus or anyone you know god wasn't part of einstein's lexicon except to declare that he didn't exist when a friend of his really wasn't a friend and for you i mean listen, let's be honest, many of the many However, his best-known quotes have to do with: you know God, yes, but God in that metaphorical sense or God in that sense, I think his philosophical ideas are acceptable to a wide audience.

He was a spiritual person and he believed in things that were bigger than himself, but what he believed was bigger than himself was nature and the accessibility of the organization of nature to the human intellect and, you know, that was extremely powerful. for him, it moved him, he saw himself as you know, seeking to be in one. with nature and occasionally having these spiritual or transcended experiences when he felt like he wrote that in one of his travel journals contemplating the ocean this kind of thing, but you know, trying to get it into some image of the scientist who really secretly believes in a tradition. sense, no, that's not Einstein, so let's conclude by asking the question we'll ask a moment at the end about the centenary of general relativity, but before we conclude that he was a genius, I guess we can all agree on that, yes, but because?

Do you think, Brian, let's start with you? Well, I think the obvious answer that we would all give, but maybe you'll prove me wrong in 30 seconds, is that it was this extraordinary coming together of all the things that we're talking about so clearly. There's something different about his brain, presumably that played some role because the brain is where all of this presumably happened, but it was this wonderful confluence of his own personal history of the types of open problems that were available for progress at that time, so that it was the right time to think about space, time and light.

Maxwell had given us the equations of electricity and magnetism in the 1880s. That's when Einstein is born and starts thinking about things, so he's there. at the right time he has the right physical structure and the right attitude, he has this perspective that I don't care what other people think, I'm just going to move on and understand the world, so you put those three together and at least part of the time you see what which emerges well, he certainly was an incredibly hard worker, he had the infinite capacity to push himself, although I agree that he was a bit of a lone wolf and that may have helped him in the sense that when you're in that patent office making a living looking at inventions, you can't go to the university library because the schedule was such that he basically, a lot of his thinking was his and he wasn't there at the time. in the academic establishment and if you look at those original manuscripts from 1905, they are all handwritten and there are not many references, think of an academic who submits any type of article with no references or with few references, it just does not happen that you are the referees you they would eat alive, but Einstein just the strength of his ideas and his independent thinking, without outside influences, you know, maybe that gave him the focus to come up with these ideas that Anis Mirabilis appeared in in 1905.

But one thing I would say. genius, it's not, you know everyone, it's not homogeneous, I mean, there are all kinds of geniuses, I mean, you know, there's a guy on the basketball court who has intelligence with the ball, you have social geniuses, we call them politicians, you know, okay, so I mean he was, you know? a physics genius, he was in physics a physics genius, I'm not going to tell you what I see in those photographs really explains that he was not a great mathematician, but he learned enough mathematics to take his strength, which is physics.

And put it in mathematical terms and make it demonstrable to the scientific public. Tom, finish it for us. Well, I think I agree with what both Brian and Fred have said. um, if the word genius has any meaning. Not at all, Einstein has to be on that list. um, he was a genius, uh, in his you know, the measure is his achievements, but I guess from where I said, the point I keep coming back to is that the details of the story matter, you know if Einstein was born in Germany before 1900 before 1800 it would have been before Napoleonic emancipation, you know, it would have been a Jewish child raised by a Jewish family from the towns of southern Germany, you know, it would have never come close to education.

He needed to take the first step in any scientific career, so you know, I was lost for 100 years. If Einstein had been born 30 years later, he would have been a very bright good scientist, but he would have missed some of the opportunities that he had. you know, he went through it with such enthusiasm, um and he could have gotten caught up, you know, the details of the story, uh, matter enormously for the ability of people with the capacity for genius to exercise it, you know, genius is not something internal, It is not simply something internal. characteristic of the brain, intelligence, talent and all that, combined with circumstances and circumstances are social, we have geniuses because we have societies that are pleasant to them at that moment, fascinating, well, all of you, I have learned a lot and thanks to all.

I really want to thank all of you so much for being such a great audience and it's the centenary of relativity, so what's the world of science? The science festival will have that as a theme this year, so if you enjoy this conversation, look for a variety of programs that will explore general relativity. So stay tuned. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.