Einstein Defiant: Genius Versus Genius in the Quantum Revolution Edmund BlairBolles Joseph Henry Press, Washington, DC, 2004. $27.95 (348 pp.). ISBN 0-309-08998-0

Einstein’s Cosmos: How Albert Einstein’s Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space and Time MichioKaku Atlas Books / W. W. Norton, New York, 2004. $22.95 (251 pp.). ISBN 0-393-05165-X

The huge fascination with Albert Einstein’s life and work shows no sign of decrease. Einstein Defiant: Genius Versus Genius in the Quantum Revolution by Edmund Bolles and Einstein’s Cosmos: How Albert Einstein’s Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space and Time by Michio Kaku respond to the public’s thirst for more about Einstein during the centenary year of his 1905 papers. The first is written by a professional writer and excels in giving a lively picture of the person and his times; the second, by a theoretical physicist, is stronger on the physics. No mathematical formulas are used in either book, and both rely on information from previous books about Einstein.

Einstein Defiant is devoted to the period from 1918 through 1930, the golden age of theoretical physics. The story is centered on the struggle to understand the quantization of the electromagnetic field: Must light be regarded as coming in particlelike quanta, or is the wave description correct? It is a good story because it shows, at different times, both Einstein and Niels Bohr promoting erroneous ideas. Although Einstein and Bohr were the main protagonists, many other great physicists were involved: Max Planck, Arthur Compton, Satyendra Nath Bose, Louis de Broglie, Paul Dirac, and Max Born, for example.

Bolles describes the history of the ideas and the main participants in fascinating detail. He follows Einstein’s life almost week by week, with tremendous attention to his character and the personal decisions he had to make. In comparison with previous biographies on Einstein, such as Abraham Pais’s “Subtle Is the Lord …”: The Life and Science of Albert Einstein (Oxford U. Press, 1982), and books on the history of the period, Einstein Defiant gives a much more vivid picture of the drama—–not so much in physics but in terms of personalities and the cultural and political life of the era. A small example is the author’s narrative on the simultaneous release of the 1918 Nobel prize to Planck and the 1919 Nobel prize to Johannes Stark. The news was eclipsed by the results of the British expedition on the bending of light a few days earlier. The German press was devoted mainly to Einstein and Planck. Stark, however, was hardly mentioned and so became a bitter enemy of Einstein, which is ironic because from 1911 through 1913 he had been the main supporter of Einstein’s 1905 heuristic proposal of light quanta.

In another example of his colorful profile of Einstein, Bolles writes how the animosity of many entente scientists toward Germans lasted long after World War I. Einstein was the only German to be invited to several international conferences, and he maintained solidarity with his German colleagues by not going. The important role of the Netherlands and Denmark as neutral territories for researchers to communicate with German scientists is partly due to such postwar political circumstances.

The main physics story surrounding Einstein is well known. Bohr was adamant that the electromagnetic field was not quantized, which was the dominant view until the critical experiments of Compton, Hans Geiger, and Walther Bothe demolished Bohr’s arguments and confirmed Einstein’s heuristic paper of 1905. One should stress that Einstein had been almost alone in believing such “nonsense.” But a few years after 1926, Einstein in turn could not accept as final the probabilistic interpretation of the wave—particle duality, which Bohr readily accepted. Einstein’s failure to accept the new vision is no disgrace; no one understands quantum mechanics.

Although the physics described in the book is quite familiar, it is the personal detail and context that are most illuminating. The following is a brief excerpt from the book:

“Einstein and Bohr’s first meeting had something of the mutual caution you expect whenever a prophet and a poet come together. Each knew the other was doing something related to and yet profoundly unlike his own work…. And their mutual thank you letters have the tone of the obsequious headwaiter who has received an overlarge tip….”

Bolles’s book covers the Einstein—Bohr debate only until 1931. As is well known, later developments—–such as Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen’s paradox (better known as the EPR paradox) and the contributions of John Bell and Alain Aspect—–indicate even more clearly that “spooky actions at a distance,” as Einstein put it, do indeed occur, as predicted by quantum mechanics. Einstein’s guess on the future of quantum theory looks even more improbable now, an outcome described well and in detail in Kaku’s book but not mentioned by Bolles.

The Bohr—Einstein debate is the finest example of a civilized controversy. Their discussions were always restricted to physics and never became personal; Bohr and Einstein were not only giants of physics but also great human beings. In enumerating facts or explaining physics, many books are superior to Einstein Defiant, but I believe I understand Einstein and his unique personality much better after reading Bolles’s book. It illuminates a bygone era when the greatest revolution in physics took place.

Einstein’s Cosmos by Kaku is very much a physics book. The author is not a historian or a psychologist, and his book reflects his profession. He details Einstein’s private life and the political events of the day, but the main focus is physics, with connections to modern day research: strings, black holes, and so forth.

The strength of Kaku’s book is its concise style that allows the whole of Einstein’s life and work to be reviewed in a slim volume. However, the book makes no attempt to analyze Einstein’s motives, and the historical detail is garbled. For example, Yugoslavia did not exist when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was murdered, so he could not have been called “Yugoslavian.” (In Bolles’s book, the only erroneous detail I found is his assertion that Peter Debye was at the University of Zürich and Erwin Schrödinger was at ETH Zürich. The reverse was true.) The last chapter, “Einstein’s Prophetic Legacy,” makes connections between recent theoretical and experimental work in physics and Einstein’s ideas. The chapter is ideal for a physics graduate student or an intelligent layperson. It does provide a quick survey of much recent research, from Bose—Einstein condensation to superstrings. Kaku’s book also has a nice review of the waves-versus-particles controversy, including recent developments.

Both Einstein Defiant and Einstein’s Cosmos offer enjoyable reading, for different readers. One is about the story of a great man; the other, about great physics.

Gabriel Karlis University Professor Emeritus at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, and teaches physics at the University of Waterloo, also in Ontario. His research is in theoretical physics.