C. Paul Robinson
Einstein and his Legacy
June / July 2005
Volume 3 Number 3
This year, around the world, scientists and governments are all celebrating the 100th anniversary of the incredibly creative year that Albert Einstein had in 1905. During that "miracle year" he published five scientific papers, each one making path-breaking changes in our views of physics and the universe we inhabit. The United Nations has designated 2005 "The World Year of Physics" to commemorate Einstein's accomplishments and his life.
Doubtless Einstein's papers are still viewed as enormous accomplishments of the human mind, and he blazed his own trail in scientific thinking, unlike what physicists of his time were doing or what in fact most physicists do today. As a man raised in the era of horses, buggies and trains, he tended to focus intently on everyday observations, then kept trying to dissect deeper and deeper his understanding until he could find satisfactory explanations and capture them in mathematical descriptions and equations.
Few realize just how original and unique his creations were: it is important to note that all of his landmark papers of 1905 were published without citations or footnotes. There had in fact been no prior work of this type to cite! Each of Einstein's very fundamental thoughts gave novel insights into problems where no one else had dug so deeply before. Yet, as characterized much of his work, he began by trying to understand everyday events, quickly jumping into the deep mysteries that surround all areas of our lives, and trying to find simplifying observations that could explain them, and in the process he found they could predict many other phenomena as well.
For example, his Special Theory of Relativity began with the observation that when one is sitting on a train, the sudden movement of an adjacent train or your own train does not allow one to immediately determine which one of the trains is in fact moving. We can only tell that there is relative motion. Einstein dug deeply into that mystery to decide that much of the phenomenology we see arises because of the limitations of our powers of observation. He went on to require that all reference frames (or observation points) must somehow yield equal results, and that the laws of physics should be expected to operate in the same way within any frames of reference. As he wrote equations to describe various phenomena and then examined how they would have to be changed to give the same results (i.e., be invariant) regardless of where an observer was located, and whether the observer was moving or not; he wrote universally true theories that predicted many additional phenomena of the world and universe we live in.
Rather than an experimental physicist, who devises laboratory experiments to test his theories, Einstein was satisfied with performing experiments within his own mind—€”a technique called "gedanken" experiments (a German word meaning "thought" experiments"). Noting that in all previous work the velocity of light appeared to be the fastest velocity ever observed and was likely a limiting velocity for any physical thing, he began to imagine what it would be like to run so fast that you could run along side a light beam. By imagining how it would be to approach the velocity of light and requiring that the observations he would make must be equivalent to those that someone moving along with the light beam would make as they looked back at him, he developed the equations that related space, time, and matter (and even energy). He had to conclude that these quantities must not be absolute quantities, but must appear to vary as one approaches velocities close to that of light beams. [For example, he predicted that clocks must appear to slow down as their velocities approach the speed of light, an observation later found to be true]. These "thought experiments" led to a wealth of predictions, that questioned many fundamental concepts of the physics of his day.
Among the most important constraints he made on his work was that he must ensure that the laws of physics remain invariant even as one approaches the velocity of light. This simple but very profound journey in thought—€”solely within his own mind—€”led to the prediction that energy and mass must in fact be related phenomena, and that the mass of a body must somehow be a measure of its energy content [and, of course, vice versa]. Working out the details, he in fact predicted that the relationship between mass and energy was simple and profound, namely energy equals mass times the velocity of light-squared, or E=mc2 .
In Einstein's day, that nature allows such a simple relationship to connect between what were always regarded as fundamental physical quantities, was a most surprising prediction, but it has of course been demonstrated many, many times in subsequent experiments performed over the past hundred years. Most compelling was the fact that when the first atomic bombs were developed, a very small of amount of mass could lead to such enormous energy releases—€”all in perfect agreement with Einstein's prediction, although at the time neither he nor anyone had the slightest idea as to how one could convert matter into energy so readily.
Einstein himself spent the rest of his life trying to understand and perfect the subject of his fifth paper of 1905: a General Theory of Relativity that could relate gravity to the other forces that connect space, energy, and matter together. He had an almost child-like belief that there might be a single, coherent law that would provide a complete understanding of the physical universe—€”from the smallest to the largest. Many other physicists since have picked up that quest. Contemporary physics can better relate the connectivity between three of the forces: electromagnetic forces (that bind atoms together), strong forces (or nuclear forces that bind nuclei together) and the so-called weak forces (that are shown to govern the radioactive decay of nuclei). But we similarly have not yet been able to connect the fundamental gravitational forces into the mix. There is today a larger community of scientists around the world seeking to solve this riddle, why not use the powers of your own mind to join in?
Thus, I would like to suggest that the best commemoration we can make for this 100th anniversary of Einstein's "miracle year" is to give recognition to the enormous powers inherent within the human mind, which Einstein demonstrated for all of us. Within our own minds and powers of thought lie similarly significant and important revelations, yet we must learn how to give them birth. If Einstein could concentrate so intensely and so elegantly within his own mind, and could "see" so clearly the profound truths unseen by anyone before, what greater revelations await us?
Paul Robinson is the former president of the Sandia Corporation and director of Sandia National Laboratories. Ambassador Robinson was head of the U.S. delegation to the U.S./U.S.S.R. Nuclear Testing Talks in Geneva, 1988-90. He spent most of his early career at Los Alamos National Laboratory where he led the nuclear weapons programs. He received his Ph.D. in physics from Florida State University.
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