[extropy-chat] Where's the New Einstein?

[Olga Bourlin]

Is he going to be one of youse guys on this list?:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/science/01eins.html?8hpib

March 1, 2005
The Next Einstein? Applicants Welcome
By DENNIS OVERBYE

e didn't look like much at first. He was too fat and his head was so big his 
mother feared it was misshapen or damaged. He didn't speak until he was well 
past 2, and even then with a strange echolalia that reinforced his parents' 
fears. He threw a small bowling ball at his little sister and chased his 
first violin teacher from the house by throwing a chair at her.

There was in short, no sign, other than the patience to build card houses 14 
stories high, that little Albert Einstein would grow up to be "the new 
Copernicus," proclaiming a new theory of nature, in which matter and energy 
swapped faces, light beams bent, the stars danced and space and time were as 
flexible and elastic as bubblegum. No clue to suggest that he would help 
send humanity lurching down the road to the atomic age, with all its promise 
and dread, with the stroke of his pen on a letter to President Franklin D. 
Roosevelt in 1939, certainly no reason to suspect that his image would be on 
T- shirts, coffee mugs, posters and dolls.

Einstein's modest beginnings are a perennial source of comfort to parents 
who would like to hope, against the odds, that their little cutie can grow 
up to be a world beater. But they haunt people like me who hanker for a 
ringside seat for the Next Great Thing and wonder whether somewhere in the 
big haystack of the world there could be a new Einstein, biding his or her 
time running gels in a biology lab, writing video game software or wiring a 
giant detector in the bowels of a particle accelerator while putting the 
finishing touches on a revolution in our perception of reality.

"Einstein changed the way physicists thought about the universe in a way the 
public could appreciate," said Dr. Michael Turner, a cosmologist from the 
University of Chicago and the director of math and physical sciences at the 
National Science Foundation.

Could it happen again? "Who or where is the next Einstein?"

No question is more likely to infuriate or simply leave a scientist 
nonplussed. And nothing, of course, would be more distracting, daunting and 
ultimately demoralizing than for some young researcher to be tagged "the new 
Einstein," so don't expect to hear any names here.

"It's probably always a stupid question," said Dr. Lawrence Krauss, a 
cosmologist at Case Western Reserve University, who nevertheless said he had 
yet to read a profile of a young scientist that does not include, at some 
level, some comparison to Einstein.

Dr. Stephen Hawking, the British cosmologist and best-selling author, who is 
often so mentioned, has said that such comparisons have less to do with his 
own achievements than the media's need for heroes.

A Rare Confluence

To ask the question whether there can be a new Einstein is to ask, as well, 
about the role of the individual in modern science. Part of the confusion is 
a disconnect between what constitutes public and scientific fame.

Einstein's iconic status resulted from a unique concurrence of scientific 
genius, historical circumstance and personal charisma, historians and 
scientists say, that is unlikely to be duplicated.

Dr. David Gross, who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics last year, said, "Of 
course there is no next Einstein; one of the great things about meeting the 
best and the brightest in physics is the realization that each is different 
and special."

Physics, many scientists like Dr. Gross say, is simply too vast and 
sprawling for one person to dominate the way Einstein did a century ago. 
Technology is the unsung hero in scientific progress, they say, the 
computers and chips that have made it possible to absorb and count every 
photon from a distant quasar, or the miles of wire and tons of sensors 
wrapping the collision points of speed-of-light subatomic particles. A 
high-energy physics paper reporting the results from some accelerator 
experiment can have 500 authors.

"Einstein solved problems that people weren't even asking or appreciating 
were problems," said Dr. Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study 
in Princeton, N.J., Einstein's stomping grounds for the last 32 years of his 
life. "It could be there are big questions nobody is asking, but there are 
so many more people in physics it's less likely big questions could go 
unasked."

But you never know.

"One thing about Einstein is he was a surprise," said Dr. Witten, chuckling.

"Who am I to say that somebody couldn't come along with a whole completely 
new way of thinking?"

In fact, physicists admit, waxing romantic in spite of themselves, science 
is full of vexing and fundamental questions, like the nature of the dark 
energy that is pushing the universe apart, or the meaning of string theory, 
the elegant but dense attempt to unify all the forces of nature by thinking 
of elementary particles as wiggling strings.

"We can frame an Einsteinian question. As you know, asking the question is 
the key," said Dr. Leon Lederman, a Nobelist and former director of the 
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. He likes to think, he added, that it 
will be solved by "a Brazilian kid in a dirt floor village."

Dr. Turner said he hoped and expected that there would continue to be 
Einsteins. One way to measure their impact, he suggested, was by how long it 
took society to digest their discoveries and move on.

By this metric, he said, Isaac Newton beats out Einstein as the greatest of 
all time (or at least since science was invented). Newton's world lasted 
more than 200 years before Einstein overthrew it.

"Einstein has lasted 100 years," he said. "The smart money says that 
something is going to happen; general relativity won't last another 200 
years."

Looking the Part

Would that make someone a candidate for a T-shirt, or an Einstein? It 
depends on what you mean by "Einstein."

Do we mean the dark-haired young firebrand at the patent office, who yanked 
the rug out from under Newton and 19th-century physics in 1905 when he 
invented relativity, supplied a convincing proof for the existence of atoms 
and shocked just about everyone by arguing that light could be composed of 
particles as well as waves?

Is it the seer who gazed serenely out at the world in 1919 from beneath 
headlines announcing that astronomers had measured the bending of light rays 
from stars during an eclipse, confirming Einstein's general theory of 
relativity, which described gravity as the warping of space-time geometry?

Einstein had spent 10 years racking his brain and borrowing the mathematical 
talents of his friends trying to extend relativity to the realm of gravity. 
When this "great adventure in thought," as the philosopher Alfred North 
Whitehead called it, safely reached shore, Einstein caught a wave that 
lifted him high above physics and science in general.

The world was exhausted morally, mentally and economically from the Great 
War, which had shattered the pretensions of Enlightenment Europe. People 
were ready for something new and Einstein gave them a whole new universe.

Moreover, the mark of this new universe - "lights all askew in the heavens," 
as this newspaper put it - was something everybody could understand. The 
stars, the most ancient of embodiments of cosmic order, had moved.

With Whitehead as his publicist, Einstein was on the road to becoming the 
Elvis of science, the frizzy-headed sage of Princeton, the world's most 
famous Jew and humanity's atomic conscience.

It helped that he wore his fame lightly, with humor and a cute accent. "He 
was a caricature of the scientist," said Dr. Krauss. "He looked right. He 
sounded right."

When physicists are asked, what they often find distinctive about Einstein 
are his high standards, an almost biological need to find order and logical 
consistency in science and in nature, the ability to ferret out and question 
the hidden assumptions underlying the mainstream consensus about reality.

Dr. Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario 
describes it as moral quality. "He simply cared far more than most of his 
colleagues that the laws of physics should explain everything in nature 
coherently and consistently," he wrote last year in Discover.

It was that drive that led him to general relativity, regarded as his 
greatest achievement. The other discoveries, in 1905, physicists and 
historians say, would have been made whether Einstein did them or not. "They 
were in the air," said Dr. Martin Rees, a cosmologist at Cambridge 
University and Britain's astronomer royal.

The quest for general relativity, on the other hand, was the result of "pure 
thought," Dr. Rees said.

Dr. Peter L. Galison, professor of the history of science and of physics at 
Harvard, described Einstein as "somebody who had a transformative effect on 
the world because of his relentless pursuit of what the right principles 
should be."

Others said they were impressed that he never swerved, despite a tempestuous 
personal and political life, from science as his main devotion. "He fixed 
his concentration on important problems, he was unvarying in that," Dr. 
Krauss said.

Another attraction of Einstein as an icon is his perceived irreverence, and 
the legend of his origin as an outsider, working in the patent office while 
he pursued the breakthroughs of 1905. (Not that he was necessarily humble 
because of that; letters from his early years show him pestering well-known 
scientists and spoiling for a fight so much that his girlfriend and future 
wife, Mileva Maric, was always counseling him to keep a cool head.)

"Part of the appeal is that he comes from nowhere and turns things upside 
down," Dr. Galison said. "That's the fantasy," he explained, saying that 
science has always represented the possibility that someone without a 
privileged background could intervene and triumph through sheer ability and 
brainpower.

There is no lack of inventive, brilliant physicists today, but none of them 
are T-shirt material, yet. In the cozy turn of the century, Dr. Galison 
said, Einstein was able to be a philosopher as well as a physicist, 
addressing deep questions like the meaning of simultaneity and often 
starting his papers by posing some philosophical quandary.

But philosophy and physics have long since gone their separate ways. Physics 
has become separated from the humanities. "Everything tells us science has 
nothing to do with the ideas of ordinary life," Dr. Galison said. "Whether 
that is good or bad, I don't know."

As a result no one has inherited Einstein's mantle as a natural philosopher, 
said Dr. Galison.

We might have to settle for a kind of Einstein by committee. The string 
theorists have donned the mantle of Einstein's quest for a unified theory of 
all the forces of nature.

In the last half-century various manifestations of modern science have made 
their way into popular culture, including chaos theory and the 
representation of information in bits and bytes, as pioneered by Dr. Claude 
Shannon, the Bell Labs engineer.

The discovery of the double helix of DNA, the hereditary molecule, which 
laid the basis for the modern genetics, is probably the most charismatic 
result of modern biology. But the world is not awash in action figures based 
on James Watson and Francis Crick, the molecule's decoders.

Meanwhile Einstein's role of symbolizing the hope that you could understand 
the universe has at least been partly filled by Dr. Hawking, whose books "A 
Brief History of Time" and "The Universe in a Nutshell" have sold millions, 
and who has even appeared on "Star Trek" and "The Simpsons."

"People know him," said Dr. Krauss, and his work on black holes has had a 
significant impact on the study of gravity and the cosmos, but he has not 
reinvented the universe.

The Next Big Idea

One reason nobody stands out is that physics has been kind of stuck for the 
last half-century.

During that time, Dr. Witten said, physicists have made significant progress 
toward a unified theory of nature, not by blazing new paths, but by 
following established principles, like the concept of symmetry - first used 
by Einstein in his relativity paper in 1905 - and extending them from 
electromagnetism to the weak and strong nuclear forces.

"It was not necessary to invent quantum field theory," said Dr. Witten, 
"just to improve it." That, he explains, is collective work.

But new ideas are surely needed.

Part of Einstein's legacy was an abyssal gap in the foundations of reality 
as conceived by science. On one side of the divide was general relativity, 
which describes stars and the universe itself. On the other side is quantum 
mechanics, which describes the paradoxical behavior of subatomic particles 
and forces.

In the former, nature is continuous and deterministic, cause follows effect; 
in the latter nature is discrete, like sand grains on the beach, and subject 
to statistical uncertainties.

Einstein to his dying day rejected quantum mechanics as ultimate truth, 
saying in a letter to Max Born in 1924, "The theory yields much but it 
hardly brings us closer to the Old One's secrets. I, in any case, am 
convinced that he does not play dice."

Science will not have a real theory of the world until these two warring 
notions are merged into a theory of quantum gravity, one that can explain 
what happens when the matter in a star goes smoosh into a dense microscopic 
dot at the center of a black hole, or when the universe appears out of 
nothing in a big bang.

String theory is one, as yet unproven, attempt at such a quantum gravity 
theory, and it has attracted an army of theorists and mathematicians.

But, Dr. Witten speculated, there could be an Einsteinian moment in another 
direction. Quantum gravity presumes, he explained, that general relativity 
breaks down at short distances. But what, he asked, if relativity also 
needed correction at long distances as a way of explaining, for example, the 
acceleration of the universe?

"Relativity field theory could be cracked at long distances," Dr. Witten 
said, adding that he saw no evidence for it. But when Einstein came along, 
there was no clear evidence that Newtonian physics was wrong, either. "I 
would think that's an opportunity for an Einstein," he said.

Another Einsteinian opportunity, Dr. Witten later added in an e-mail 
message, is the possibility that Einstein's old bugaboo quantum mechanics 
needs correcting, saying that while he saw no need himself, it was a mystery 
what quantum mechanics meant when applied to the universe as a whole.

Dr. Smolin of the Perimeter Institute said it should give physicists pause 
that their leader and idol had rejected quantum mechanics, and yet what 
everybody is trying to do now is to apply quantum mechanics to Einstein's 
theory of gravity.

"What if he were right?" asked Dr. Smolin, who said he also worried that the 
present organization of science, with its pressures for tenure and 
publications, mitigates against the appearance of outsiders like Einstein, 
who need to follow their own star for a few lonely years or decades.

But as Dr. Krauss said, it only takes one good idea to change our picture of 
reality.

Dr. Smolin said, "When somebody has a correct idea, it doesn't take long to 
have an impact."

"It's not about identifying the person who is about to be the new Einstein," 
he went on. "When there is someone who does something with the impact of 
Einstein, we'll all know."


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