“So you're studying at Princeton. Would you like to meet Einstein?” That question, during a brief two-body collision at a cocktail party, a collision that was over before I could think of an appropriate response, led—over a year later—to one of the more memorable half hours of my life. It was an elastic collision, we drifted apart, and I thought it had simply been a casual remark until a few days later when the mail brought me a carbon copy [sic] of a letter (dated “25.XII.52”) from the speaker, Dr. Tilly Edinger, to Albert Einstein. Accompanying the letter to Einstein was a card that Dr. Edinger advised me to send around to Einstein's home on Mercer Street to request a meeting. (What is perhaps most truly astonishing in connection with this event is that not only do I still have that carbon copy—and the eventual letter from Mercer Street that invited me to Einstein's home—but that I was able to find both documents in my attic!)
REFERENCES
1.
Emily A.
Buchholtz
and Ernst-August
Seyfarth
, “The Study of ‘Fossil Brains’: Tilly Edinger (1897–1967) and the Beginnings of Paleoneurology
,” BioScience
51
, 674
–682
(2001
), andEmily A.
Buchholtz
and Ernst-August
Seyfarth
, “The Gospel of the Fossil Brain: Tilly Edinger and the Science of Paleoneurology
,” Brain Res. Bull.
48
(4
), 351
–361
(1999
).2.
Robert H. Dicke was a great physicist, an experimentalist and a theoretician, a deep thinker whom I did not really get to know until after my time at Princeton. We graduate students always addressed him as “Dr. Dicke” and referred to him among ourselves—respectfully—as “RHD.” It was a very long time (long after Princeton) before I called him “Bob.” One of his talents that is not widely known in the physics community, though well known and much appreciated among his students, was his ability to get rid of “60-cycle hum.” Every Dicke student ended up building at least one lock-in amplifier. Today's students may not realize that in those days electronics meant vacuum tubes, and vacuum tubes do not work without heated filaments. Unless one resorted to the inelegant brute-force approach of using a car battery, every electronic chassis had many wires carrying hefty 60 Hz currents (we said “60 cycles per second” in those days), and the combined workings of Ampere's and Faraday's laws could be disastrous. Dr. Dicke had a magical way of walking into a lab, looking, thinking a bit, and then solving the problem by suggesting: “Why not move that clip lead from here over to there?”
3.
It was a good question in 1859 when Darwin made a try at an early but serious back-of-the-envelope estimate (“to gain some notion, however imperfect, of the lapse of years”), an attempt to calculate the time required for the “denudation of the Weald.” (Charles Darwin, On The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection [John Murray, London, 1859], 1st ed., pp. 285–287; facsimile reproduction by Harvard University Press, 1964.) It was a good question in 1954, and it's still a good question, one that any intelligent person will ask. Darwin unfortunately dropped this calculation from his book when he revised it in 1861, perhaps because he was embarrassed at how uncertain his estimate necessarily was.
4.
David Bohm, Quantum Theory (Prentice-Hall, New York, 1951), Chap. 22. Bohm's book was much used by Princeton graduate students at that time; Einstein may have known that. Bohm, and his book, were highly thought of in the Princeton physics department, even though Bohm himself had by that time gone to Brazil. He had pleaded the Fifth Amendment before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1949 and for this offense had been suspended by Princeton University and forbidden to set foot on campus. Brought to court on charges of contempt, he was eventually acquitted on all counts. Princeton, however, did not renew his contract. See, for instance, F. David Peat, Infinite Potential—The Life and Times of David Bohm (Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1997), Chap. 6. I was unaware of all this at the time I was choosing a graduate school in 1951–52. Had I known, would it have influenced my choice? I have no idea.
5.
A.
Einstein
, B.
Podolsky
, and N.
Rosen
, “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?
” Phys. Rev.
47
, 777
–780
(1935
).6.
Martin J. Klein, Paul Ehrenfest, Vol. 1, The Making of a Theoretical Physicist (North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1970), pp. 43–44. Ehrenfest was not referring to any specific opportunity he had missed. Rather, this was one of a number of observations he had made in a notebook in 1912, thoughts on the importance of recording questions, primarily for his own clarification but also to have them “ready for asking the right people, in case one comes across them.”
7.
Robert H.
Romer
, “John S. Bell (1928–1990), the man who proved Einstein was right
,” Am. J. Phys.
59
(4
), 299
–300
(1991
).My editorial was not an obituary of Bell but rather some thoughts about Bell and Einstein, provoked by an obituary of Bell that had appeared elsewhere:
John
Gribbin
, “The man who proved Einstein was wrong
,” New Sci.
128
(1744
), 43
–45
(1990
). In spite of what one might infer from the title of my editorial, my point was not that Einstein was right in believing to the end, apparently, that some form of hidden-variables theory would work, but that he was right to continue worrying about the logical foundations of quantum mechanics and, by his skepticism, inspiring others to worry as well. Indeed Bell himself had written that Einstein's doubts helped to motivate him in his own work that led to “Bell's theorem” and to experimental tests.
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© 2005 American Association of Physics Teachers.
2005
American Association of Physics Teachers
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